Newport Rising? (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Last month’s Socialist Standard contained a listing for an event taking place as part of the Newport Rising festival. It’s held every year to commemorate the Chartist uprising of 1839, a large-scale rebellion by workers against their exclusion from the political process and a demand for the right to vote and to have their voices heard. This event was the Newport Radical Bookfair at the Riverfront Theatre and Arts Centre, where the Socialist Party had booked a stall. Unfortunately, just a matter of days before it took place, we were informed by the organiser that our booking had been revoked owing to a ban imposed on stalls for political organisations. We were told that this was due to the event being held in a publicly managed establishment. However, when we enquired further, we were given a different reason, which was that Newport Rising was a registered charity and to allow political organisations to have stalls at its bookfair would compromise its charitable status. When we pointed out that we had been allowed a stall at last year’s event, we were told that ‘it shouldn’t have happened’.

Party members nevertheless attended the bookfair as individuals and, when they did, they found several stalls of a political nature: one, for example, run by the Socialist Medical Association, which is affiliated to the Labour Party; and another seemingly promoting ‘trans’ ideas but offering a selection of anarchist leaflets and pamphlets, one of which contained the following statement: ‘For far too long the masters have convinced us that violence is exclusively their domain, and we have cowered and accepted this as truth. It’s about fuckin’ time we fight back, and I’ll sing the praises of anyone who kills a cop or a military jarhead. Those who end the lives of oppressors should be held in the highest regard as liberators’. So much for the exclusion of politics. We intend to pursue this further with the Newport Rising charity and, if necessary, with the Charity Commission.

Despite this our members who were present on the day were able to hand out some of our leaflets to those entering and leaving the bookfair and to participants on the traditional Torchlit March through the city in the evening which is the culminating event of the celebration of the Chartist uprising of 186 years ago. The text of the leaflet we gave out is reproduced below.

Labour has failed: Give Socialism a chance

 The Chartists recognised the importance of political power and universal suffrage to enact social change. They rightly saw the vote as the way to political control. Once the workers had the vote, they reasoned, they could use it to send delegates to parliament who would pass laws to improve their social and economic situation. But they soon found, as everyone has found since, that the vote alone cannot alter the capitalist system. It can’t change the way the capitalist economic system works, based as it is on minority class ownership of resources and wealth and production for profit.

The last 150 years  

For over 150 years now, a majority of the electorate in Britain has been made up of workers in the sense of those who, excluded from ownership of the means to produce wealth, are forced by economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer for a wage or salary in order to live. From time to time, as at present, voters have elected Labour governments but, when in office, those governments have always accepted capitalism, at best trying to reform it in various ways. The theory of some who supported Labour was that a series of successive Labour governments would gradually transform capitalism into a more equal society. But this has not happened and Labour is now an avowedly capitalist party, in fact proclaiming itself a ‘party of business’.

The Corbyn/Sultana party 

Understandably, many who have supported Labour up to now no longer have any faith in it and a new left-wing party is apparently being set up, with Jeremy Corbyn as figurehead. But if ever it was in government, it would face the same problem as Labour – that of needing to administer a system that exists not to satisfy human needs but to generate profit for the tiny minority. The plain fact is that capitalism just cannot be made to work in any other way than according to its own economic laws that impose themselves on those who run governments as well as on those who run businesses. It is a profit-making system that can only run in the interests of the profit-takers and never in the interests of workers whose labour is the source of profits. No government can overcome these laws and all governments have to apply them or risk provoking economic chaos.

The task now 

What is needed is an understanding that capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority. That understood, it follows that the only political party worth supporting is one based not on a strategy of trying to tinker with capitalism’s effects but on a commitment to abolish it altogether and replace it, in one go, by a society of the common ownership and democratic control of resources with production directly to meet people’s needs and not for profit. In a word, socialism.

Once a majority want this, they can use the vote to win political control with a view to carrying out this revolution in the basis of society. The urgent task of socialists is to convince more people that that there is a viable alternative to capitalism – socialism as described above. Hence the need to work to educate and mobilise public support for it. This is the policy we in the Socialist Party have been pursuing since our foundation in 1904.

Newport Radical Book Fair (2024)

Party News from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month marked 185 years since the historic Chartist uprising in South Wales. It was celebrated by the Newport Rising Festival, a series of commemorative events in and around the city. One of these was the Newport Radical Book Festival held at the Corn Exchange and advertised as ‘a free entry book fair featuring radical publishers, campaign groups, and activists running stalls selling new and used books, posters, stickers, pamphlets, zines and merchandise, plus workshops and talks’.

The South Wales Branch of the Socialist Party had a stall there run by a group of branch members. Among publishers, groups and other organisations in the hall were Resistance Books, Eco-Socialists, Stand up to Racism, the Bristol Radical History Group and the Carmilla Distro Anarchist Queer Collective. In engaging with visitors and other stall holders, we found more than a little interest and sympathy among them when we put to them our view of how capitalism fails the vast majority of people and the need to replace it by a society of free access to all goods and services. Visitors took away with them a significant amount of the literature we had brought with us, with Socialist or Your Money Back, our book of collected articles from the Socialist Standard, particularly popular. We were offering copies of this handsome volume left over from when it was published at the time of the Party’s 100th anniversary free of charge, but several visitors insisted on offering payment – £10 in one case, which we managed to bid down to £5, and £20 in another case with the ‘purchaser’ insisting on the ‘donation’.

This Saturday event was for us an alternative to the weekend street stall the branch normally runs in Cardiff city centre. But the difference here was palpable. At the street stall, we are the ones doing the approaching trying to get members of the public interested in our ideas and our wares and all too often meeting with apathy. At the Newport Radical Book Festival we found, quite differently and refreshingly, that a fair number of those attending were already broadly sympathetic to what we had to say and were prepared to enter into discussion and exchange ideas with us. So a day well spent.

South Wales Branch

Bronterre O’Brien (2008)

Book Review from the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bronterre O’Brien and the Chartist Uprisings of 1839 by David Black. (Radical History Network, 2007)

James O’Brien contributed articles to the Poor Man’s Guardian under the pseudonym “Bronterre” and eventually adopted it as his middle name. O’Brien soon became the Poor Man’s Guardian editor as it campaigned for universal suffrage at the time of the 1832 Reform Act. This Act however merely redistributed the vote amongst the ruling class, leading to the drawing-up of the People’s Charter in response (“essentially a program for universal male suffrage,” according to Black) in 1838 by the suppressed its leader, John Frost, was sentenced to death (later commuted to transportation for life) and O’Brien was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for making seditious speeches.

Black’s short tract on this particular episode reads like a Trotskyist analysis of the event as a failure of leadership (in Trotskyist literature working class setbacks are always the result of a betrayal of leadership). Thus Black argues: “if the Rising in Monmouth had not been led by John Frost it might well have succeeded.” Succeeded in doing what? Taking and holding Monmouth? Creating a revolutionary situation? Such fantasies were dismissed by O’Brien who had withdrawn from active involvement by this stage. According to Black:

“He explained later that he could not conscientiously take part in secret projects which could only at best produce partial outbreaks, which would easily be crushed and would lead to increased persecution of the Chartists.”

The Chartist campaign lasted another 10 years before collapsing in failure.

Lew Higgins

Blogger's Note:

David Black replied to Lew's review.

The First Mass Movement in History (2012)

From the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Chartists struggled for political democracy in nineteenth-century Britain, but did they need a “revolutionary leadership” any more than we need one today?

The Chartist movement, which lasted from 1836 to the 1850s, has been described as the first mass workers movement in history. In some ways it was. Chartism was a movement composed mainly of the working class that demanded the enactment of the People’s Charter, which would grant the vote to working class men.

The vote had been extended to a wider section of the propertied in 1832 amidst widespread fears of unrest. Propertied political radicals, who had previously courted working-class support to advance the extension of the suffrage to them, declined to endorse further extension; supported the Poor Law of 1834, which instituted the workhouse; backed vicious anti-trades union prosecutions; and refused to repeal the newspaper ‘tax on knowledge’. Unsurprisingly, a surge of working class consciousness and independent political organization was the result.

Within this new movement were strands of thought associated with individuals such as James ‘Bronterre’O’Brien, George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones that stressed the need for the Charter ‘and something more’, which anticipatedthe later development of revolutionary socialism.

Working class consciousness and the democratic-socialism (at this time meaning variants of Owenite socialism) of many of the supporters of Chartism were only elements of a diverse movement. Rather than an early mass workers movement it is more plausible to see Chartism as a popular movement in which these elements were significant developments. Hence the survival of older radical forms such as the prominence of the ‘gentleman leader’in the movement, exhorting the working class from the orator’s platform, and utilising the threat of force as the dominant strategy. Prominent in this respect was Feargus O’Connor, a radical Irish aristocrat, whose oratory and newspaper, the Northern Star, dominated early Chartism and defined the mainstream of the Chartist movement.

There were others in the movement who, although often desiring the ‘something more’that they anticipated would result from the Charter, wished to moderate the element of social threat. These ‘moral force’Chartists were exemplified by the London Working Men’s Association which was influential in the early stages of the movement, and drew up the People’s Charter with the assistance of the wealthy political radical Francis Place. By taking a moderate approach they hoped to draw in the support of propertied political radicals who wished to advance the suffrage for their own ends such as abolition of the Corn Laws and free trade. The Birmingham Political Union, for example, was an important body in the early stages of Chartism, through which it hoped to advance the currency crank ideas of its leading member, the wealthy capitalist Thomas Attwood. This section dropped out of the movement, however, (along with most of the other early propertied supporters) when the gravity of the movement shifted towards the industrial centres, and the working class presence and the tone of social threat increased.

The increasingly resolute working class presence on the national political scene was expressed at the other extremity of Chartism by those on the ‘physical force’wing of the movement who wished to fan the flames of insurrection. Their approach was characterized by the deployment of extreme and provocative language to threaten the propertied into granting the Charter, backed up with secret organization and insurrectionary zeal. Exhortations for the people to arm were commonplace and intimidating torch-light processions took place in some localities (until they were banned). It is debatable to what extent many on this side of the movement really believed in the possibility of successful armed insurrection, but by 1839 this section was increasing in influence.

The insurrectionary element in the Chartist movement has fascinated left-wing historians who see in it a frustrated revolutionary potential from which a modern vanguard can learn lessons. Adding to this literature is a new history of the Chartist insurrectionaries of 1839 by David Black and Chris Ford (1839 –The Chartist Insurrection, London, Unkant Publishing, 2012, £10.99). It is a compelling read, telling the story of Chartism through the experiences of George Julian Harney and other ‘firebrand’Chartist leaders such as Dr. John Taylor and examining the ill-fated Newport Rising of 1839. The authors provide a vivid account of the revolutionary potential that had built up in Britain by the late 1830s, culminating in the aborted rising at Newport in which several Chartists were killed.

A successful rising in south Wales may well, as the authors claim, have resulted in a chain of risings. Their claim that it would have achieved “world historic importance”is questionable though. It may have extracted compromises on focal points of working class struggle such as the Ten Hour day, the poor law, bread prices and land monopoly. It may even have achieved further extension of the suffrage. But Black and Ford accentuate the existence of working class insurrectionaries in south Wales and elsewhere and not the rising’s shambolic failure in the face of a state resolutely set against the prospect of armed revolt by the Chartists. Indeed, the perceived threat of insurrection set the propertied against the Chartists in a way which the threat posed by their radical political demands did not. It was the overt social threat of: ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must’, that meant the Chartists had to be defeated by the government on behalf of the propertied, even if ultimately its political demands could be conceded.

The authors seem disappointed at what they see as the paucity of revolutionary leadership within the Chartist movement. The proposed general strike in support of the Charter is regarded as a failed revolutionary opportunity because Feargus O’Connor refused to see it as a chance for the “revolutionary seizure of power.”Black and Ford argue that “the strike had an inexorable revolutionary logic: with no strike fund to draw on, the people would have to violate bourgeois property rights in order to eat” (pp.88-9). But most Chartists did not want a revolutionary seizure of power; they wanted an extension of the vote backed by the threat that if it was not granted then ‘force’might follow. Chartist leaders such as O’Connor did not want a showdown with the state via a general strike because he knew that the likely consequence would be defeat.

John Frost, the leader of the Newport Rising, is likewise characterized as a somewhat reticent and indecisive insurrectionary leader, not because he fell short as a revolutionary leader of proletarian revolution but because he did not see himself in these terms to begin with. He did not anticipate having to actually use force but believed, in line with the mainstream of the Chartist movement, that the threat of force would be sufficient to achieve Chartist objectives. He found himself a ‘gentleman leader’in a situation that escalated way out of his control. The Chartists at Newport, however sincere, walked into a confrontation that led to deaths and a subsequent display of the strength by state in which hundreds of arrests of Chartists were made across the country and John Frost, a broken man, was transported to Tasmania (a sentence of death having been commuted).

The authors suggest that Chartism was neither the tail end of radicalism nor the forerunner of socialism. But it contained plenty of the old in with the new. In their words, “In 1839 the ideas of Thomas Paine stood in dialogue with the socialistic ideas of Thomas Spence, Robert Owen, Bronterre O’Brien and Gracchus Babeuf” (p.199). Chartism was: “a conscious attempt by working-class insurgents to resolve …[capitalist] crisis by breaking the power of ‘Old Corruption’” (p.198). This is followed by the claim that “the movement undoubtedly did have revolutionary and socialist tendencies which persisted and developed” (p.199). It is clear that the intellectual inheritance of Chartism was a mixed bag of traditional radicalism and new Socialism. In trying to tell the story of insurrectionary Chartism, however, Black and Ford want to highlight a working class consciousness that is ripe for insurrectionary revolution. In so doing, although the story they tell was part of the Chartist movement, they highlight some voices in the movement at the expense of others.

Labour MP, John McDonnell, in the foreword to the book suggests that Black and Ford reveal that the threat to the British political establishment, even of revolution, in Britain in 1839 was closer than is often realized. This is indeed the main achievement of the book. But McDonnell also claims that the authors reveal a history that is suggestive of a possible “alternative revolutionary route” (p.xi) that could have been taken by British labour. This is to see a nascent revolutionary potential for seizing political power in the movement for democratic reform. Democratic reform, however, was expected, by those struggling to bring it about, to involve a significant shift in political power in favour of the working class and harmful to the propertied. Such a shift was anticipated, by supporters and opponents of the Charter alike, to result in measures beneficial to the working class. If revolution was on the agenda it was intended to achieve democratic reform from which the working class would benefit, not to advance a ‘proletarian’vanguard.

Black and Ford conclude that we should salute the Chartist insurrectionaries and seek to understand why they did not succeed in 1839. It is suggested that a major reason for their failure was weak revolutionary leadership. But, today, we have few positive lessons to learn from the bloody failure of past insurrections; less still do we need revolutionary leadership. Rather than inspiring an investigation into how such struggles can be harnessed by an enlightened cadre, it is the limitations of insurrection as a strategy for social change that strikes us. Armed insurrection was not necessary or even useful to the cause of democratic reform in Britain.

We should, of course, salute the Chartists but from a different perspective. They made bold and courageous sacrifices in the face of the determined opposition of the British state on behalf of their propertied opponents. And it is thanks to the struggles of the Chartists and of those who came after them that insurrection is more than ever a moribund revolutionary strategy. Since the late nineteenth-century the working class has possessed the political means to effect social and economic change. It is high time that we, the working class, had the confidence and knowledge to use those means for ourselves.

CSK