Past Class Struggles (1919)

From the February 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

The change from the Feudal system to the Commercial or Capitalist regime was the instance of political struggles which brought about the English Revolution, the French Revolution, and the German Empire. The development of commercialism was also accompanied by risings of the peasantry. We will consider first of all the most important of these risings in the order of their occurrence. 

After the Roman Empire spread and.absorbed the greater part of the known world, it became more and more unwieldy. The increasing wealth of its constituent parts bred a tendency towards local government and a revolt against the exactions of the Papal Court. The rising bourgeoisie of the towns found themselves heavily drained by taxation to support a power that was becoming a hindrance instead of an aid to them. The religion of the Roman Empire, with its numerous holidays, feastings, and taxations for religious purposes, stood in the way of the full and free exploitation of the labouring class by the fore-runners of the factory lords. Their opposition consequently expressed itself in a rebellion against some of the tenets in the creed of the times.

All social movements except that of the modern proletariat, have had the glamour of religion cast over them, and the exploiters of the peasantry and sweaters of the town labourers were not behindhand in finding their religious apologist.. In this capacity they were well served by the time-serving Martin Luther. Before Luther came to the fore, however, the commercial class had made considerable progress in England; we will, therefore, proceed to outline the conditions that led up to the English Peasants’ Revolt, which arose as a consequence of the emergence of Capitalism.

When the Normans under William landed in England they found the manorial system of land tenure in vogue. Three quarters of the people lived on agriculture; the rest were townsfolk, gentry, and Churchmen. There were 9,250 villages or manors, three-fifths of each being waste, i.e., untilled common land, one-fifth pasture, and one-fifth arable. After the Conquest each manor was held by a lord or baron owing allegiance to the king. Nominally all the land of England belonged to the Crown. In actual fact, however, the baron had control of his particular property. Nearly half the population were villeins .or peasant proprietors, tilling land in separate plots with rights to the use of the common land, and obliged to till the land of the lord of the manor in return for his military protection.

The commencement of the Crusades in the 13th century brought about a change in the relations of lords and peasants. Foreign trade and the taste for finery were developed through intercourse with the East, while the expenses of the crusading expeditions accentuated the need for money on the part of the lords. They consequently introduced the system of commuting rents in kind and labour rents, for money rents, the latter becoming general by the time of the Great Plague

In 1348 the Black Death swept over England, carrying away one-third of the population. There consequently arose a great shortage of labour and the labourers found themselves in the “Golden Age” of the wage slave. Wages rose to a very high level. This state of affairs did not suit the landowners, so, with the help of their friends, the legal fraternity, various measures were tried, among them, the “Statute of Labourers,” to keep down wages. Heavy penalties were to be inflicted on those who demanded higher wages than before the Plague. All their efforts were useless, and finally they hit upon the plan of driving the peasants back into villeinage. They tried to enforce the exaction of the old labour rents, in spite of the fact that the peasants had either purchased their holdings or had had the rents commuted into money rents, while the free labourers had either purchased their freedom or been granted manumission. Incontestable documentary evidence (which in most cases did not exist) was demanded to excuse the peasants from labour rents. The revolt of the peasantry all over England, consequent upon these conditions, was precipitated by the harsh method of collecting the poll tax.

Luxurious living and disastrous military undertakings had brought the treasury of the proprietary classes low. “The French war ran its disastrous course: one English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a second sunk by a storm and a campaign in the heart of France ended, like its predecessors, in disappointment and ruin. It was to defray the cost of these failures that the parliament granted a fresh subsidy, to be raised by means of a poll tax on every person in the realm. To such a tax the poorest contributed as large a sum as the wealthiest, and the injustice of such an exaction set England on fire from sea to sea.”—“A Short History of the English People,” J. R. Green, Vol. 1, p. 236.

For a long time previous to this the Lollards, the poor priests who were disseminating the teachings of Wycliff against the established religion, had taken up the cause of the peasants. They tramped through the country spreading rebellious views among the labourers. “The storm which no politician of the time anticipated, burst on June 10th, 1381. The uprising of the upland folk was simultaneous. It extended from the coast of France to Scarborough, all through the Eastern towns. . . . On the West it extended from Hampshire to to Lancashire.”—“Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” p. 256.

What followed is illuminatingly summarised by Gibbins in his “Industrial History of England,’ p. 78:

   Almost simultaneously the peasants showed their combined strength, and a large body of them under Wat Tyler marched upon London. It is well known how they met the young King Richard II. at Mile End, and demanded of him the petition which shows the real meaning of the movement: “We will that you free us for ever, us and our lands,” they asked, "and that we be never named or held as villeins." "I grant it," said the King, with regal diplomacy, and they believed him. But they very soon learned how vain a thing it is to put one's trust in princes for after the peasant armies in the various parts of England had quieted down, and the Essex men among others claimed the fulfillment of his royal promise, Richard openly broke faith. "Villeins you were," said the King, "and villeins you are. In bondage shall you abide, and that not your old bondage, but a worse!"

After the promises of reform the peasants dispersed to their homes, satisfied that their demands were going to receive attention. This was what the ruling powers were waiting for. They proceeded to exact vengeance for their temporary humiliation.

The promises exacted by force were broken as soon as that force had disappeared. Wherever the peasants demanded the fulfillment of the pledges they were met with threats and hangings. A large army was put into the field by the ruling classes and the revolt was punished by the hanging of Ball, Straw, and thousands of their followers.

I would recommend a study of the result of this rising to the “Economic power” theorists. While the peasantry were organised into a fighting force they held the key to the situation and could dictate terms. But they had to depend for their living upon tilling the soil, and had therefore to disperse to their homes after being a short time under arms. As soon as they dispersed their power was gone, and they could be massacred at the leisure of the masters. The ruling classes through history have laid to heart this fact, and have always endeavoured to keep an organised force at their disposal to put down discontent. It must also be borne in mind that the military power has undergone a tremendous development since the time of the Peasant’s Revolt. The day of mob marches on London has long since gone by. The only way for the working class to become the ruling power is to gain control of the permanent fighting machine so that they can use it for their own ends.

The suppression of the Peasants’ Revolt did not result in a return to villeinage. Other economic forces were operating to nullify the effect of the Plague. The labourers were again brought to heel by the introduction and rapid growth of sheep farming on a large scale (which necessitated the employment of a comparatively small amount of labour) and the rapid increase of the labouring population consequent upon the higher wages and resulting plenitude of the means of life.

The discoveries in the 15th century of Columbus, Cabot, and Vasco da Gama, together with, the Crusades and, later, the buccaneering exploits of the English sailors, gave a tremendous impetus to foreign trade. Sheep farming had become the mainstay of the English trade, and the profits made out of this lucrative industry set the land-owners thinking out schemes for its expansion. They set about doing three things. They evicted as many as possible of their smaller tenants; they raised the rents of their larger tenants so that ordinary farming could hardly be made to pay; and finally they commenced enclosing the common lands. The condition of the people about that time was further adversely affected by the debasing of the coinage and the resultant rise in prices.

It may be interesting to remind the reader at this juncture that at one time, as we have already shown, three-fifths of the land of England was the common property of the whole people. As the population of England now, with the exception of a comparatively small class, is landless, it therefore appears that the ruling class have, in actual fact, robbed the working people of three-fifths of England since the Norman Conquest. 

Gilmac.

Why We Commemorate The Commune. (1909)

From the March 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

M. Yves Guyot, in the first number of that most amusing journal, the Anti-Socialist, says that “Socialists celebrate, without much conviction, the anniversary of the Commune which, in 1871, added the horrors of fire and shooting to those of the siege of Paris. As a matter of fact, however, they have forsaken the so-called revolutionary methods.” The wish is probably father to the thought. Or perhaps M. Guyot is misled by the clamour of the middle-class place-seekers, who try to use the working-class movement as a means of inducing the ruling clique to admit them to the feast. The would-be leaders of the workers are usually ready to sell out or become reasonable "when the ruling class shows a disposition to purchase them. But with the rank and file this cannot be—and that is why the real and the sound movement, the movement that counts, is that of the rank and file, and is neither more advanced nor more backward than this is. Socialism is a class movement, a mass advance, and not a movement of demagogues. And there is a steady growth of Socialist knowledge and determination among the workers, who, far from abandoning the revolutionary method, become more truly revolutionary in the scientific sense of the word. They are gaining in consciousness of their class interest, and learning, slowly it is true, how fundamental is the truth that for their emancipation they must rely upon themselves alone.

This, indeed, is one of the great lessons of the Commune of Paris, and its annual celebration helps to bring vividly home to the Socialist worker the deep meaning of the class struggle and the ruthlessness of the master class when its interests are threatened. It is by no means the only valuable lesson afforded by that historic tragedy, but it is one that will repay a moment’s attention. On the heads of the Communards mountains of calumny have been heaped. The hireling literature of the bourgeoisie has attempted to bury the Commune under falsehoods, suppression of facts, and misrepresentation. The capitalist squint is manifest all through, and the workers are assiduously trained by preceptors in the hire of the masters to look at all things with their masters’ squint. That which is just and legitimate when done by the master class in defence of their interests is the blackest of crime when done by the workers in defence of theirs. That which is heroism and gallant conduct on the part of the capitalist class becomes murder and abominable misdeeds when resorted to by the workers in their own defence. Therefore, while so many of our fellows are taught to look upon the Communards as the worst of criminals, it is our duty to vindicate the memory of those brave men.

The history of the Commune, as recounted by many bourgeois historians, presents a glaring example of that falsification of history of which the capitalist class is guilty; of the shameless slandering of heroic workers, in spite of existing trustworthy documents and evidence, and of the reliable histories which have been written. There is no need to repeat the story, to refute one by one the lies of prostitute historians—Lissagaray and others have done that —but it is worth while emphasising here the fact of the class calumny. Thus a writer in the Times “Historian’s History of the World” recklessly accuses the Commune of having committed monstrous crimes, and goes on to say, “For more than two months the Commune ruled supreme over one of the greatest capitals of the world, and to this day the collectivists, the anarchists, the unruly, and the lawless of every country on the globe celebrate that brief triumph as the most splendid manifestation of the power of the people that the world has ever seen.” And against the fact that while supreme the Commune ruled well and peacefully, and kept Paris remarkably free from disorder or crime, this person, Rambaud by name, says, “In reality a few audacious men, both within and without the committee, such as Rossel, Flourens, the ‘generals’ Duval and Bergeret, Raoul Rigault and Delescluze, arrogated to themselves the greater part of the power and abused it shamefully . . . So long as the Commune lasted the conditions under which men governed, tyrannised, fought, killed, and themselves found death were those of pure anarchy." Such specimens of class misrepresentation are by no means rare in this “history,” yet in spite of class bias, they are compelled to admit in speaking of the “ re-conquest ” of Paris after the Commune, that “From the beginning it was evident that the conquerors would lie implacable. Hardly had the army entered the city than the executions began. . . At the barracks people were shot down by the dozen. Whole districts were depopulated by flight, arrests, and executions. . . Meanwhile long processions of prisoners (forty thousand had been taken) were journeying with parched throats, blistered feet, and fettered hands along the mad from Paris to Versailles, and as they passed through the boulevards of Louis XIV.’s town, they were greeted with yells and sometimes with blows. They were crowded hastily into improvised prisons, one of which was merely a large court-yard where thousands of poor wretches lived for weeks with no lodging but the muddy ground, . . and whence they were dispatched with a bullet in the head when desperation led them to rebel. . . The punishment inflicted on the insurgents was so ruthless that it seemed to be a counter- manifestation of French hatred for Frenchmen in civic disturbance rather than a judicial penalty applied to a heinous offence. The number of Parisians killed by French soldiers in the last week in May 1871 was probably twenty thousand, though the partisans of the Commune declared that thirty-six thousand men and women were shot in the streets, or after summary court-martial.”

It is a bourgeois refinement to represent the capitalist hatred of the workers as “French hatred for Frenchmen in civic disturbance.” No struggle is so bitter as the class struggle, for on their supremacy in this depends the capitalists’ power, wealth, influence, indeed, everything that springs from their ability to exploit the workers; and they will in this struggle go to lengths of savageness which make ordinary warfare pale its ineffectual fires. After the Commune slaughter gave place to wholesale deportation to New Caledonia only when the heaps of dead threatened the conquerors with pestilence. Such was the punishment of the Commune for its “crimes,” of which the greatest was its weak sentimentalism and mistaken moderation in face of the tiger that was attacking it.

The Commune is by no means the only example of the vindictive ruthlessness of the ruling class and the folly of washy sentiment on the part of the workers, but it is nearer to us because it illustrates clearly that the working class in revolt within the capitalist system almost instinctively turn towards industrial democracy. Of the bitterness of class struggles, and their ruthless prosecution by ruling classes, history abounds in examples, from the massacre of the soldier-helots of Sparta to the street slaughters of our own times. And in every social revolt calumny has been the accompaniment of the massacre of those who revolted. The peasants in Germany, driven to revolt by misery and ill-treatment, were accused of every known crime, yet the “Cambridge Modern History” tells us that “The worst of their deeds was the ‘massacre of Weinsberg,’ . . (1534) for which the ruffian Jacklein Rohrbach was mainly responsible. In an attempt to join hands with the Swabian peasants, a contingent of the Franconian army commanded by Metzler attacked Weinsburg, a town not far from Heilbronn held by Count Ludwig von Helfenstein. Helfenstein had distinguished himself by his defence of Stuttgart against Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, and by his rigorous measures against such rebels as fell into his power. When a handful of peasants appeared before Weinsberg and demanded admission the Count made a sortie and cut them all down. This roused their comrades to fury: Weinsberg was stormed by Rohrbach, and no quarter was given until Metzler arrived and stopped the slaughter. He granted Rohrbach, however, custody of the prisoners, consisting of Helfenstein and seventeen other knights; and against Metzler's orders and without his knowledge the Count and his fellow prisoners were made to run the gauntlet of the peasants' daggers before the eyes of the Countess.” The author further adds “These bloody reprisals were not typical of the revolt.” On the other hand we are told in the same chapter that “the suppression of the movement was marked by appalling atrocities . . the Bavarian chancellor reports that Duke Anthony of Lorraine alone had already destroyed twenty thousand peasants in Elsass; and for the whole of Germany a moderate estimate puts the number of victims at a hundred thousand. The only consideration that restrained the victors appears to have been the fear that, unless they held their hand, they would have no one left to render them service. ‘If all the peasants are killed,’ wrote Margrave George to his brother Casimir, 'where shall we get other peasants to make provision for us ?’ Casimir stood in need of exhortation ; at Kutzingen, near Wurzburg, he put out the eyes of fifty-nine townsfolk, and forebade the rest to offer them medical or other assistance.” The writer justly adds “When the massacre of eighteen knights at Weinsberg is adduced as proof that the peasants were savages, one may well ask what stage of civilisation had been reached by German princes.”

The peasants’ revolt in England is another case in point. The poll tax and the attempt to re-enforce feudal services roused revolt all over England. The men of Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire, though they attacked the houses of the more obnoxious nobles, and ransacked the prisons, did not plunder or steal, but simply asked for their freedom. This Richard II. promised, and set thirty clerks to write out charters, upon receipt of which the peasants began to disperse. The next day Wat Tyler, their leader, was murdered by the Mayor of London; and when the peasants had returned home their charters were annulled and the King marched through Essex and Kent at the head of a large army and put hundreds of peasants to death.

Another instance was Kett’s rebellion in the reign of Edward VI. Twenty thousand men defeated the royal troops at Norwich and demanded redress of grievances. Kett proclaimed a rude communism, and admittedly kept perfect order in his camp and consented to no violence. His humanity, however, cost him dearly. The Earl of Warwick at the head of an army of foreign mercenaries defeated the peasants, and then proceeded with a cold-blooded massacre which ceased only because Warwick feared that the “gentlemen would have to be plowmen themselves, and harrow their own lands.”

There is, indeed, no lack of modern instances pointing the same moral and emphasising the fact that the savage crushing of the Commune, far from being an isolated case, is but the expression of the real feeling of the ruling class for those beneath. The worker who in the face of these lessons becomes the dupe of the sentimental humbug and humanitarian professions that cloak capitalist interests, is guilty of treachery to his fellows. The lesson most be taken to heart that on his own class alone can the worker rely, for the capitalist must ever remain the bitterest enemy of the working-class movement; and bourgeois honour, justice and humanity are but empty words to lure the worker astray. In all war sentiment is weakness, and nowhere more so than in the class war, and for the workers to be the dupes of bourgeois sentiment in the inevitable struggle with the capitalist interest, is to place themselves entirely at the mercy of the enemy.

It is not, perhaps, pleasant to find things so. It would doubtless be more agreeable if the tiger would peaceably lie down with the lamb, and fools may abuse us for pointing out that this cannot be. Well, let those who nurse such illusions ignore the facts if they will — the facts will not ignore them, and will find them unprepared. Let those who will not face reality soothe themselves with falsehood—though they shut their eyes the truth remains. The very harshness of reality makes him worthy the name of man but the more determined that it shall alter, and he finds that he must know rightly the nature of the society about him before he can take any effective step toward the change on which so much human well-being depends Moreover, in emphasising a harsh truth—a truth to which so many wilfully blind themselves we are but doing our bare duty by our fellows, for it is on the knowledge of things such as these that the speedy emancipation of humanity from slavery and the possibility of real human brotherhood depends; and that, indeed, is one of our reasons for commemorating the Paris Commune of '71.

F. C. Watts

Revolting peasants of 1381 (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the midst of the most apparently solid and unchanging social structures, the cry for change is ever present. Six hundred years ago this month, in a feudal English society which gave legal and moral backing to the omnipotence of a mighty king and his ruling class of baronial landlords, a movement of resistance emerged to take on the established relationships of power. The existence of such a movement proves the essential contention of Marxist historical materialism: where there is a division between those who own and control the means of wealth production and distribution and those who do not there must be a class struggle.

To the contemporary observer, feudal society seemed to be rigidly unshakeable by popular dissent. The king had the right to own all land. The aristocracy were permitted to control areas of this land in return for feudal obligations, such as the payment of money or produce, the provision of peasants to fight in the king’s wars and the maintenance of the church and the law. The church, in return for the control of extensive lands, provided the king and the landlords with an efficient propaganda machine which morally, justified their class privilege in terms, that the most humble could comprehend. To oppose the church was heresy and the punishment for heretics was to be burnt alive. To deny that the ruling class were the divinely appointed masters of society was heresy. With such constraints upon them most people conformed.

Most people were peasants, dependent for their livelihoods upon the permission of a manorial lord to work on the land he controlled. Production was not primarily for the market as it is now, and neither was it simply for subsistence. The peasant had to work not only so that he and his family could have a pittance to ensure their survival, but also so that the barons, the bishops and the monarch could live in parasitic luxury. The peasant bore the burden of all the classes above him in the well-known feudal social pyramid. If he was a serf he was legally bound to work his master’s land for a certain number of days each week, leaving his spare time to work on the common land to provide for his own needs. There was a thin line between slavery and serfdom; at least a slave-owner had to feed, clothe and shelter his possession, whereas the so-called free peasant was often left to starve after he had satisfied his master’s needs.

Like capitalism today, one of feudalism’s main stabilising factors was the belief of most people that it would never change. Just as today there are workers who cannot conceive of a society in which they are not employed for wages, so under feudalism the vast majority of peasants believed that God had created the social structure for evermore. But the material contradictions thrown up by social formations have a habit of driving people to desire change. Resistance to the status quo is never the result of abstract ideals being conceived of by thousands of people, but arises from ideas which are the direct result of day to day experience.

Six hundred years ago the experiences of the peasants led to a mass movement of resistance to the poverty of their condition. The main immediate cause of the Revolt was the fall in the peasant population following the bubonic plagues of 1349, 1361, 1369 and 1375 which resulted in a serious shortage of—and therefore greater demand for—labour. Following the government’s Statute of Labourers, there was a widespread attempt by landlords to increase rents and feudal duties in order to compensate for their loss of tenants. If these did not serve to economically cripple the peasants, the successive government poll taxes to pay for the king’s wars were the final straw. In 1380 a tax of one shilling a head to pay for the king’s war with France led to rebellion. In May 1381 the rising began in Essex and soon spread to Kent, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire .

The Peasants’ Revolt was more than a spontaneous outburst. Throughout the fourteenth century popular criticism of the feudal state was emerging. Geoffrey Chaucer’s cutting literary condemnation of the abuse of clerical power in The Canterbury Tales was part of a general disillusionment with the clergy’s claim to privilege. John Wycliffe and his Lollard supporters had burned for their questioning of church theory. The years leading to the Revolt produced some of the best versions of the Robin Hood folk legend about the robbery of the rich by the poor in order to get back some of the wealth which had been stolen from them. One ballad, of Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley is one of the most readable stories of class war—concerning three outlaws who take on the entire population of Carlisle—which this writer has had the pleasure to read. Social dissent was even spreading to the universities. John Bromyard, a Dominican friar and Chancellor of Cambridge University wrote that

The poor for their good works are not rewarded, but are so oppressed by the rich and powerful that however true a case a poor man may have against a rich man in this world, it will nonetheless happen to him as it did the lamb at the hands of the wolf . . . the poor man, indeed, if he steals the rich man’s food is hung. The rich man is not punished at all for seizing the goods of the poor, even when he is worthy of the gallows.

William Langland’s Piers Plowman, while not a radical poem, served nonetheless to describe the intolerable conditions of

. . . the poor in the cottage
Charged with a crew of children and
with a landlord’s rent.
What they win by their spinning to
make their porridge with
Milk and meal, to satisfy the babes—
The babes that continually cry for
food—
This they must spend on the rent of
their houses . . .

Accompanying the immediate factors leading to the Revolt were dreams of a communistic future. Indeed, these were Utopian in vision and often based upon such notions as a popular monarchy or a religious brotherhood. Perhaps the greatest of the fourteenth century cries for Utopia was the anonymously written and extremely popular poem, The Land Of Cokaygne. Ignored by most modern literary critics as a harmless anticlerical satire, Cokaygne was a wonderful vision of a communist Utopia:

In Cokaygne we drink and eat
Freely without care or sweat
The food is choice and clear the wine
At fourses and at supper time,
I say again, and I dare swear,
No land is like it anywhere,
Under heaven no land like this,
Of such joy and endless bliss.

In Cokaygne,

All is day, there is no night,
There is no quarrelling nor strife,
There is no death, but endless life;
There no lack of food or cloth,
There no man or woman wroth.

The most amusing feature of the poem is

That geese fly roasted on the spit,
As God’s my witness, to that spot,
Crying out, “Geese, all hot, all hot!”
Every goose in garlic drest,
Of all food the seemliest.

Many of the peasants, artisans, merchants and lower clergy who participated in the Revolt of 1381 ultimately sought a society of human equality. When they reached London they showed that they meant business by executing the chief government Ministers, including the Chancellor and the Treasurer. On June 14 at Mile End in London, the peasants’ leader, Wat Tyler, demanded of King Richard II that

The property and goods of the holy Church should be taken and divided according to the needs of the people in each parish . . . and that there be no more villeins in England, but all to be free and of one condition. (As noted at the time by the historian, Froissart.)

The devious king conceded the demands, but within a day Tyler was murdered and the concessions were withdrawn. G. Kriehn’s definitive Studies in the Sources of the Social Revolt of 1381 (American Historical Review 1902) shows how the trickery of the king and the murder of Wat Tyler were intentional state policies designed to break up the peasants’ movement and defend the status quo. The day after the Mile End meeting (June 15) the peasants gathered at Smithfield to present an even more radical set of demands. But by the end of June 1381 the Revolt was suppressed and the concessions all withdrawn. The peasants had shown their political muscle, but they were unable to strip the king, and his tenants-in-chief, the barons, of their right of ownership. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the new merchant class was able to enact some of the peasants’ demands (such as the dispossession of church lands), but the great demand for a society of equality has yet to be fulfilled.

In the most famous chronicle of the Peasants’ Revolt we are told of

A crazy priest in the county of Kent, called John Ball, who for his absurd preaching had thrice been confined in prison . . . was accustomed to assemble a crowd round him in the market place and preach to them. On such occasions he would say, “My good friends, matters cannot go well in England until all things be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they behave to us! For what reason do they hold us in bondage? . . .And what can they show, or what reason can they give, why they should be more masters than ourselves? They are clothed in velvet and rich stuffs, ornamented with ermine and other furs, while we are forced to wear poor clothing. They have wines, spices and fine bread, while we have only rye, and the refuse of the straw; and when we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, while we must brave the wind and rain in our labours in the field; and it is by our labours that they have wherewith to support their pomp. We are called slaves, and if we do not perform our service we are beaten, and we have no sovereign to whom we can complain or would be willing to hear us. Let us go to the King and remonstrate with him, he is young and from him we may obtain a favourable answer, and if not we must ourselves seek to amend our conditions”. (Froissart, Chronicles of France, England and Spain)

It is exactly six hundred years since our ancestors went to their rulers and pleaded for justice. The reformist Left of today are still doing the same thing. (Incredibly enough, in Socialist Worker (4/4/81) we are told that the Peasants’ Revolt “inspires all progressive people today”.) But six hundred years after the Revolt is it not time to learn an important lesson? We, the “crazy” workers who are called impossibilists for our “absurd preaching”, are still surrounded by a society of acute class inequality in which the oppressed and impoverished believe that history has come to an end and capitalism is here to stay. For six hundred years we have sought favourable answers from those whose interests are not ours; it is now time for us to seek to change our condition and build for ourselves and our children an obtainable Cokaygne.

Steve Coleman