Life of Cobbett (2007)

Book Review from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett’. By Richard Ingrams. (Harper Perennial £8.99)

As a former editor of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams knows a thing or two about being sued for libel and so is well-placed to write a biography of William Cobbett. Cobbett (1763–1835) was a journalist and political agitator. His first brush with the law came when, after a spell in the army, he tried to expose corruption among the officers in his regiment. In response, he was effectively threatened with being tried for treason and so fled to France and then the US. The Establishment were able to use comparable threats against Cobbett and others many times in order to persecute and clamp down on ‘radicals’.

After returning to Britain, Cobbett became an advocate of political, especially parliamentary, reform, a cause he pushed in his remarkable paper the Political Register. In 1810 he was charged with criminal libel following articles he had printed about an alleged army mutiny. It’s astonishing to learn that it was no defence to such a charge to show the truth of what had been written. Cobbett was sentenced to two years in prison.

In 1817 he upped sticks to America again, following the suspension of habeas corpus and worries for his safety. He came back after two years and in 1820 stood as a parliamentary candidate for Coventry in the general election that followed the death of George III. He lost, unsurprisingly given the smear campaign against him and the physical intimidation of potential voters for him.

Cobbett had started his working life as an unpaid labourer on his father’s farm. In 1830 widespread rural hunger led to rick-burning and other actions, in the so-called Swing riots. Cobbett was accused of stirring up the unrest and charged with seditious libel, but this time the jury could not agree and he was acquitted. He was elected MP for Oldham in 1832, after the passage of the Reform Act, but was able to achieve little in this role.

Richard Ingrams brings out many other aspects of Cobbett’s life: his enormous popularity, his love of the countryside, his detestation of Thomas Malthus and William Wilberforce. He has produced a very readable biography that fills in much of the political background and also has the merit of including many quotations from Cobbett’s own writings.

Paul Bennett

Notes by the Way: The Little Corporal: Then and Now (1941)

The Notes by the Way Column from the March 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Little Corporal: Then and Now

One of the curious by-products of the rise of Hitler has been the revision of formerly accepted views of his predecessor, Napoleon. Typical of this swing-over are the following: —

On August 12th, 1940, the Daily Telegraph published an article by Mr. E. C. Bentley entitled “Hitler’s Mirror can reflect no Napoleon”; with the sub-heading “The Corsican, for instance, was a gifted and constructive despot: To his vassal states he brought order, not a gang wielding whips of persecution.”

Then on December 15th, 1940, 100 years after the ceremonial burial of Napoleon’s ashes brought home from St. Helena, The Times wrote similarly, saying: ”English historians have assessed scarcely less highly than French the value of Napoleon’s contribution to the structure of European civilisation.” The Times finds the following distinction between Buonaparte and Hitler: —

“The difference is that, whereas the opinions that Napoleon’s arms carried across the Continent were in their origin noble, and only became debased by the manner of their propagation ; we fight to-day against opinions that are evil in their very conception.”

If this is true it prompts the two-fold reflection that the British ruling class contemporary with the French Revolution and Napoleon held very different views, and that quite a number of their successors who witnessed the progress of Nazi brutality in our time were convinced that there was a lot of merit in Nazism.

On February 13th, 1941, the Manchester Guardian also explained that “in a great many cases his [Napoleon’s] own ideas were, of course, more enlightened and more just than the arrangements in force in old Europe.”

Now contrast these views with the abuse heaped on “Boney” by all and sundry when he was rampaging across Europe and Russia and threatening invasion of England. Not much then about his “enlightened” views.

Mr. Seymour Cocks, M.P., speaking in the House of Commons on December 19th, 1940, recalled the words applied to Napoleon by the Allied Powers which defeated the French armies over 100 years ago—”having broken every pledge and treaty, had placed himself outside the bounds of civil and social relations and, as the general enemy and disturber of the peace of the world, was abandoned to public justice.” Mr. Cocks wants the British and Allied Governments now to issue a similar declaration about Hitler.

William Cobbett, in his letter written in 1803 urging the Government to issue an appeal to the British public to resist Napoleon’s invasion, used words curiously like those now applied to the Nazis : 

“Now, like gaunt and hungry wolves, they are looking towards the rich pastures of Britain; already we hear their threatening howl, and if, like sheep, we stand bleating for mercy, neither our innocence nor our timidity will save us from being torn to pieces and devoured. The robberies, the barbarities, the brutalities they have committed in other countries, though, at the thought of them the heart sinks, will be mere trifles to what they will commit here … no man, woman, or child would escape violence of some kind or other. . . .”

If the capitalist historians could wash off all those blemishes from Napoleon it looks as if the principal qualification required of them is a capacity to wield a whitewash brush. What will they be doing with Hitler 20 years ahead ?

Merchant of Death

In years past the Communists have been among those who have expressed their horror at the spectacle of munition firms making profit by supplying weapons and materials of war to both sides engaged in a war. Now it seems that circumstances alter cases. The Russian Government is interested in the profits to be made out off international trade, including trade in essential war materials, and when the Russian Government cynically supplies such materials to those whom it denounces as the enemies of the working class and of democracy its apologists can see nothing wrong. A case in point is a letter written to the Manchester Guardian by Mr. Albert Inkpin, Secretary of the Russia To-day Society. Here is what Mr. Inkpin says:—

“Germany is importing oil products, raw materials, and grain from the U.S.S.R. Commenting on the recent new agreement, the official Soviet newspaper, “Izvestia,” states the willingness of the Soviet Union to trade “with other States, both belligerent and non-belligerent,” thus showing its readiness to trade also with Britain.” (Manchester Guardian, January 21st, 1941.)

A somewhat similar line is taken by Mr. Pat Sloan, though he was dealing with the fact that while the Italian Government was destroying Abyssinian troops and civilians by aerial bombardment the Russian Government went on supplying Italy with the necessary oil fuel for their aeroplanes. (It will be recalled that at the time the Communists were very indignant at the suggestion that this was happening.) This is Mr. Sloan’s statement, in a letter to Reynolds News (February 16th, 1941): —

“According to your book review, “Nazi Ways in Russia,” Arthur Koestler has written a novel the U.S.S.R. in which an “Old Revolutionary” goes anti-Soviet because the U.S.S.R. sold oil to Italy during the Abyssinian war and trades with Germany to-day.

As one who was in U.S.S.R. during the Abyssinian war, I may say that the Soviet people were proud that their Government was the first to apply sanctions against Italy, and that it proposed the application of further sanctions. I never met a single individual who advocated unilateral sanctions without the cooperation of the other States.

I may also say that nobody I ever met in the U.S.S.R. objected to trading with Britain so soon as the British Government adopted a reasonable attitude to the U.S.S.R.”

Now it is quite true that the Russian Government offered to support international action to stop oil supplies reaching Italy, but how does the refusal of other states to take action relieve the Russian Government of its responsibility in the matter ? Take the parallel case of the munition firms, they use precisely the same argument and excuse. British and American munition firms have repeatedly excused their action in selling arms (in peace-time) to all and sundry on the ground that if they did not get the trade somebody else would. The one difference between the Russian Government and the munition makers is not in their action but in their professions. The “merchants of death” admitted that they were concerned with trade and profit; the Russian Government affects to be guided by loftier motives.

There was a time when the Communists were demanding a world boycott of the Fascist countries and condemning the international trade union movement for its failure to make such a boycott effective, but we have not heard what reply, if any, the Communists and the Russian Government have given to the appeal made by the Greek trade unions (reported in The Times, November 2nd, 1940) asking workers in Russia and other countries to insist that their governments forbid exports of raw materials to Italy.

A Labour Peer on Profit

Writing to the Picture Post (January 11th, 1941), Lord Strabolgi, a Labour Peer, put in its briefest form the attitude of mind of the Labour Party as a whole on the subject of Capitalism and Socialism. He wrote: —

“I agree with Douglas Jay that monopolies should be broken ; but we are not ripe for the complete abolition of the profit motive.”

It is true enough that the majority of the workers are not yet ripe for Socialism, but whose fault is that ? What has the Labour Party been doing to make them ripe ?

Graziani Flatters Them

When Marshal Graziani, Italian Commander-in-Chief in Libya, retired with his defeated army from a village near Cyrene, he is reported to have told the village priest that the Italian settlers had nothing to fear : —

“The British are gentlemen. . . . They will treat you kindly and leave you to work in peace. . . .” (Daily Herald, February 7th, 1941.)

This was all right but we cannot help feeling that Graziani’s final words betray a slightly wrong idea if they are intended to apply to the British “gentry” as a whole. What he told the priest was: “If you want anything, ask them for it.”

Graziani cannot have seen the stony glare that some of the very best people in this country can put on when their workers ask them for another few bob a week.

“The Niceties of Civilization”

Fears have been expressed that tribesmen in Abyssinia may exact a savage revenge on the Italian settlers in Abyssinia when Italian control of the country breaks down. The tribesmen have bitter memories of the way the Italian invaders, armed with all the latest weapons of the modern arsenal, treated them five years ago. But what exactly did the Daily Mail Services Correspondent have in mind when he wrote (February 5th, 1941) that some of the tribesmen have “little regard for the niceties of civilisation” ? Niceties is hardly the word we would apply to modern war between “civilised” countries.

What is “Economic Democracy”?

The Labour Party has always fought shy of committing itself to any explicit proposal for the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by Socialism. That is why in the last 20 years Labour speakers and writers have made so much use of the term “economic democracy” as a description of their aim. It appeared to say a great deal but was capable of any number of interpretations.

Now comes Mr. J. A. Cecil Wright, M.P., writing to The Times (February 5th, 1941) to say that he, too, is all in favour of it. But before jumping to the conclusion that Mr. Wright is declaring for Socialism read the following: —

“If we are going to retain a capitalist system, and I hope we shall, because with safeguards it is the fullest system of life in an industrialised world (in fact it is economic democracy), then we must see to it that the essential ingredients of capitalism and democracy are there . . . .”

Edgar Hardcastle

Victorian values or socialist freedom? (1983)

From the June 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Impotent and desperate in the face of the bleak, chaotic mess of Britain in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher grasped at the social values of the last century—the “values” of naked capitalism. It is a sick morality of a rotten system, dressed up as a glorious past and served on a plate to the impoverished: yesterday's ideological garbage recycled for modern consumption.

Let us sift the ideological muck-heap in the Thatcher mind and see what kind of values our rulers would like us to live by:

  We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself (sic). We were taught self-reliance. We were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to godliness. You were taught self-respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. (Interview with Peter Allen. LBC, 15 April. 1983)

Thatcher's tutor evidently has much to answer for. In what ways do these values help to perpetuate the capitalist system?

“Work jolly hard"
Plenty of jolly hard work for the propertyless nine-tenths of the population means plenty of jolly big profits for the jolly old parasites who monopolise the means of producing and distributing wealth. The work ethic is inculcated into the majority of people because labour power is the only commodity of any value that they have to exchange. But the rich and powerful minority who control the means of life are not in their positions because they worked hard. The richest one per cent of the British population, who own between them more of the accumulated wealth than the poorest 80 per cent, live in luxury because the propertyless majority "work jolly hard to keep them".

"Prove yourself’
How are children born into poverty, brought up in slums, educated in comprehensive schools and often destined to years on the dole queue, supposed to “prove” themselves? Capitalism is unable to provide the majority with any genuine incentive to rise above the mediocrity of daily existence. Those young workers who are persuaded by the advertised illusions of the system and try “to go for the top" are usually forced in the end to submit to the norms of traditional poverty. Capitalism is packed with junkies, alcoholics, broken gamblers, prisoners and cynics who tried to “prove themselves” and failed. For many unemployed kids, “proving yourself' means beating up blacks in empty streets — or doing it the legal way, and pulling triggers in the service of someone else’s interests.

“Live within your income”
For millions of people it is simply not possible to live within the pittance they receive. Ten thousand pensioners died of hypothermia last December alone: could The First Lady of the Treasury teach those careless spenders how to keep alive within their incomes? Let Thatcher and the capitalists try “living” on the basic supplementary benefit, a disability allowance or £70 a week with three children to feed and clothe. For the majority of British workers, whose annual incomes would not buy a decent new car for a member of the parasite class, existence is some way short of living.

“Cleanliness and godliness”
It’s easy to be clean when there are servants to do it for you. But what hypocrisy it is for a class which pollutes the air we breathe with its industrial waste, because it is presently cheaper to have a dirty urban environment than a clean one, to deliver lectures about cleanliness. What is “clean” about war, which throws grown men into the filth of bloody combat so that the perfumed gentlemen of leisure can expand their economic power? Thatcher may have clean fingernails, but she has blood on her hands.

“Self Respect”
Capitalism teaches its wage slaves to respect others: teachers, experts, leaders, generals. priests, politicians — even invisible gods. The self-respecting slave is a rebel; he or she will be branded by Thatcher and her cronies as subversive, wreckers and revolutionaries. Capitalism demands deference, because only those willing to remain on their knees can be deceived into believing that the ruling class is mighty.

“Give a hand to your neighbour”
Is that why armies and weapons of mass destruction are pointed at our global neighbours? The politics of international militarism has nothing to do with loving thy neighbour and everything to do with the competitive jungle of the profit system where all who are not part of “the group” must be seen as economic rivals.

“Tremendous pride in your country”
All very well for those who have a country; but having means possession, and most workers in Britain own about as much of “our country” as they do of any other: none at all. Why be proud of mansions that you have built, but cannot afford to live in; cars you have made, but cannot afford to drive; newspapers you have printed, but have no control over; food you have manufactured but cannot afford to buy? As Marx and Engels wrote, when accused of desiring to abolish countries and nationality: “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got” (The Communist Manifesto). Workers are taught to have “tremendous pride in your country” because, without a massive campaign of patriotic indoctrination, men and women would recognise their common interests.

The London Standard's front page headline about Thatcher’s LBC interview stated “THE GOOD OLD DAYS". The days in question were those between 1837 and 1902: Victorian Britain. It was an age in which there was a consolidation of power by the ever-confident industrial capitalist class; an age of massive economic development; an age when the British ruling class had an Empire and the City of London was seen, in more than one sense, as the Capital city of the world. Historical distortion has created more than a few myths about those “good old days”. There was little crime, we are told; everyone knew their place and the masters looked after the employees well; public charity provided for people's needs, for the Christian rich could not allow the poor to suffer without aid; morals were good and pure, and thoughts of sex were neatly repressed until god had given the legally sanctified green light. Let Thatcher continue the fairy story:

  Many of the good things, the improvements that were made, were made voluntarily in those times. For example, people built hospitals, there were voluntary hospitals. Many of the Church schools were built during that time. You don't hear so much about those things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.

These “eternal . . . perennial values” are the ones Thatcher holds dear. Let us examine them not as professed ideals, but within the context of their practical, historical implementation and in the light of what we know about history. The "good old days” of Victorian capitalism were days of unrestrained ruling class oppression and widespread working class deprivation. This "golden age" of the capitalists, which was a bleak nightmare for the workers, is recent enough for there to be abundant evidence of what Victorian values meant.

Giving testimony before a Royal Commission on the condition of workers in Manchester in the late 1830s, Dr. Hawkins stated that

  I believe that most travellers are struck by the lowness of stature, the leanness and the paleness which present themselves so commonly to the eye at Manchester, and above all, among the factory classes . . .

Class exploitation was not discriminatory on the basis of sex, as may be seen from the Factory Inspector's Report of 1844:

  Among the female operatives there are some women who, for many weeks in succession, except for a few days, are employed from 6 a.m. till midnight, with less than two hours for meals, so that on five days of the week they have only six hours left out of twenty-four. for going to and from their homes and resting in bed.

Indeed, far from preserving the institutions of the family, K.A.Gerlach has written that working conditions in Lancashire "often caused husbands to take over the duties of the household, and wife and children were the breadwinners at the factory”.

The same process of turning humans into the appendages of machines whose sole function was the production of surplus value, was going on in many parts of Europe in the last century. Villermé, in France, described “the good old days" in terms that reflected the harsh reality rather than idealised memory:

  One should see them coming into the town every morning and leaving it every evening. Among them are large numbers of women, pale, starving, walking barefoot through the mud . . . and young children, in greater numbers than the women, just as dirty, just as haggard, covered in rags, which are thick with the oil splashed over them as they toiled by the looms.

Children of ten and under were sent down the mines to pick and haul coal. It was on the exploitation and dehumanisation of defenceless children that the economic success of "the good old days" was based. William Cobbett, a capitalist reformer, stated poignantly in the House of Commons that

  . . . at one time he had thought that the navy was the great support of England, at another time her maritime commerce, at another her bank. Now it was to be admitted that our great stay and bulwark was to be found in the labour of thirty thousand little girls, or rather, one eighth of that number. Yes, because it was asserted that if those little girls worked two hours a day less our manufacturing superiority would depart from us.

On the sweated labour of helpless infants the British capitalists consolidated their unearned privilege. Many of those who are sitting in comfort today do so only because of the wealth inherited from the legalised exploitation of those children.

The Victorian wage slaves passed what parts of "the good old days” were their own in dwellings generally unfit for human habitation. Lord Shaftesbury described Frying Pan Alley in Holborn, London:

  In the first house that I turned into there was a single room; the window was very small and the light came in through the door. The young woman there said, "Look there at that great hole; the landlord will not mend it. I have every night to sit and watch, or my husband sits up to watch, because that hole us over a common sewer and the rats come up. twenty at a time, and if we did not watch for them they would eat the baby up.”

Irish immigrant workers were usually forced by their poverty to live in even worse conditions than the slums reserved for the native English wage slaves; in his brilliant account of working class life in Victorian Britain, Frederick Engels refers to such housing conditions:

  It often happens that a whole Irish family is crowded into one bed; often a heap of filthy straw or quilts of old sacking cover all in an indiscriminate heap, where all alike are degraded by want, stolidity and wretchedness. Often the inspectors found, in a single house, two families in two rooms. All slept in one, and used the other as a kitchen and dining room in common. Often more than one family lived in a single damp cellar, in whose pestilent atmosphere twelve to sixteen persons were crowded together (The Condition of the Working Class in England).

Like the housing, “the clothing of the working people, in the majority of eases, is in a very bad condition . . . The Irish have introduced . . . the custom, previously unknown in Britain, of going barefoot. In every manufacturing town there is now to be seen a multitude of people, especially women and children, going about barefoot, and their example is gradually being adopted by the poorer English.” (Engels, pp. 99-100)

Worked like horses, inhabiting slums, clothed in rags, the urban majority in "the good old days" of Thatcherite values could only afford access to food that was cheap, unhealthy and unvaried. Then, as now,

  those who sold and produced cheap food had increasingly taken the opportunity to make larger profits by adding other substances. Milk and beer were watered down, boiled potatoes mixed with flour and baked into bread, chestnut or ash leaves added to tea, sand to sugar and so on. Pure cheap food was a rarity in the leading towns by the 1850s because so much was adulterated in ways like these (D.T.J. Arkell, Britain Transformed).

Many thousands of workers perished, victims of the so-called free market. In the age of Victorian values, what options were open to those who could not earn a wage or could not keep themselves on the wage they earned? For many workers, begging in the streets was the only chance of an income:

  Such a man usually goes about with his family, singing a pleading song in the streets or appealing, in a speech, to the benevolence of the passers-by . . . Or the family takes up its position in a busy street, and without uttering a word, lets the mere sight of its helplessness plead for it (Engels. P-119).

And was it from the fat wallets of the Christian ruling class that the destitute beggars received their pennies? After all, Thatcher did say on LBC that "part of the sense of duty was if you were getting on better, you turned yourself to help others." Alas, the Victorian capitalists did not exhibit the benevolent values attributed to them by their admirer; they employed police to kick the beggars off the streets, just as the Indian capitalists do with their beggars today. Dr. Parkinson, the Canon of Manchester in the 1840s, testified that

  The poor give one another more than the rich give the poor . . . the total sum which the poor yearly bestow upon one another surpasses that which the rich contribute in the same time (Quoted in Engels, p. 154). 

Violent crime was widespread in Victorian cities. Thousands of women and teenage girls were compelled by economic hardship to walk the streets and sell their bodies to those rich enough to buy their sexual services. The pretence of universal moral decency did not extend to the lives of the wage slaves. The only values the capitalists required from the working class were the surplus values which were the hallmarks of legalised robbery. Victorian values meant excluding a majority of the population from any claim to human dignity — an exclusion which allowed the rich to have “good old days” while the poor suffered, largely in pathetic silence.

Victorian values meant that if workers needed medical attention, education, disability or old-age support, or any other basic social services, they had only three ways of obtaining them. The first was by paying — which most workers could not do. Many a Victorian parent had to watch their children die of illnesses that could be cured simply because they were too poor to pay the market price for health care. Secondly, they could depend on “self-help” schemes, which ultimately amounted to a system of welfare where the less poor wage slaves subsidised the poorer ones. In the nineteenth century, trade union Friendly Societies helped to redistribute wealth within the working class. But workers' subsidies could only aid a fraction of the destitute in Victorian Britain. When Margaret Thatcher proposes “self-help” she is saying that workers' destitution should be a problem to be solved voluntarily by workers taking charitable collections. Perhaps she forgets that the class which she represents are the biggest recipients of charity in the history of humanity: the profits of labour don't add up to pennies, but to many billions of pounds.

The third option for the Victorian worker was to appeal to the exploiting class for charity. Some conscience-stricken capitalists did offer a fraction of their money to the poor, either through benevolent trusts or the Church. “Giving to the poor" was not such a generous act; after all, they were only throwing back crumbs from the cake which the workers had made. Providing charitable services to "educate” workers and keep them fit had a very useful economic purpose: by teaching skills to young wage slaves and ensuring that the wealth producing class was in a good state of repair the capitalists were investing in their own increased profits. Literate and numerate wage slaves produced more profits than ignorant ones; the fitter they are, the more you can work them; the better their housing the more rest they will get and the more efficiently they will work the next day; the more consumption goods they can be presented with the more incentive there will be to work hard. Furthermore, charitable crumb-throwing helped to defuse the threat of political discontent. The workers who benefited from the charity of their bosses were taught to be eternally grateful. The exploiters felt that they were living morally; the exploited were taught to admire such morality.

What is striking about Victorian Britain is not how different it was from now, but how similar it is. It is true that some of the worst features of working class poverty then are less widespread in Britain today, although they still prevail throughout much of the world, often in worse forms than those which existed in Victorian Britain. On a world capitalist basis, poverty is as great now as it was in the 1880s, and in many ways it is worse. But even in the more “affluent” areas of world capitalism workers are still deprived, are still often compelled to beg and steal and sell their bodies, are still forced to seek charity. Since the passing of the Victorian period the capitalist class has tended to organise public charity or "welfare" via its executive committee, the state. The social services which are now provided by the state are partly in existence because their absence would lead to working class political discontent but, principally, the function of the “welfare state” is to ensure the smooth flow of capitalist production. The Labour Party and other legislative reform bodies exist to convince the capitalists that it is in their interest to pay more tax into the state in order to redistribute poverty. The only grounds on which the reformists are able to justify increased state welfare expenditure is by equating "humane” policies with profitability. Frequently such an equation cannot be made, and that is why governments — including Labour governments, professedly committed to helping the poor — often cut back on state welfare spending, leading to tragic social consequences which are all too evident at present.

In supporting state-administered capitalism, the Left is not being particularly radical; it is certainly not working for socialism. The statists are simply responding to the old Victorian values of nineteenth century capitalism with new policies for running the same iniquitous system. The welfare state has been, and inevitably will be, totally unable to eradicate the poverty and inequality which is inherent in the profit system.

Neither Victorian values nor state "welfare" can make a system of exploitation run in a way that will be pleasant for the exploited majority. Margaret Thatcher, the mouthpiece of conservatism who cannot get to sleep at night without dreaming of “the good old days" when the old and unemployed were confined to workhouses, employees worked like horses and obeyed like slaves, and the rich need only pay to keep the paupers at the request of their consciences rather than the Inland Revenue, is the dreamer of a class which has lived on beyond the appropriate time for its death. Thatcher's vision is one of naked self-interest for the ruling class. Socialists will not waste our time criticising this vision on moral grounds: we urge the workers of the world to apply the principle of naked self- interest to themselves, as a class. There were no "good old days" for our class; for the wage slaves, the good times are yet to come. Only when the wages system has been abolished, along with the pernicious values on which it rests, will men. women and children be able to value one another as part of a united human family in which equality and freedom are the principles of social existence.

Steve Coleman

Marx: According to Humpty-Dumpty (1934)

Book Review from the June 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

“What Marx Really Meant.” By G. D. H. Cole. (Gollancz, 5s. net.)

“It's a stupid name enough!” Humpty-Dumpty interrupted impatiently, “ What does it mean?" “Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully. . . . "When I use a word," Humpty-Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “ it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

Mr. G. D. H. Cole has the same impudent disregard for the ordinary meaning of words. The title of a book is usually expected to give some indication of the contents. When, therefore, a book has the title “What Marx Really Meant,” it is reasonable to assume that it will contain an account of Marx's theories. When the authority is G. D. H. Cole, however, one may wonder what are his qualifications to act as an interpreter of Marx, for he is not a Marxian, and has never given any evidence of beginning to understand Marx (even Mr. E. H. Carr, a non-Marxist, in his recently published biography of Marx, groups Cole among the pseudo-Marxians), but this does not alter one's anticipations regarding the subject-matter of a book with the title “What Marx Really Meant." In other words, the plain man will give words their plain meaning and expect to find in a book with this title a plain statement of what Marx meant. He will be sadly disappointed. There is no connection between the contents and the title. The title is a sheer catchpenny label for a book which has as little connection with Marx as it has with common-sense political understanding. The book is undiluted Cole, with Marx's name dragged in to catch the unwary.

Even Mr. Cole cannot live up to the impertinence of the title, and early explains that his book is “not meant either as an exposition or as a criticism of Marx's doctrines," but is intended “to disentangle from Marx's teaching, from what is dead or no longer appropriate what remains alive and capable of that process of growth and adaptation which is the prerogative of living things.” If that was his object, he ought to have called his book, “What Cole happens to mean—at the moment.”

He betrays a certain amount of nervousness at setting himself up as an authority on Marx, and at dragging Marx into the hotch-potch of his ideas. After asking his readers to make “due allowance for (his) shortcomings as a guide,” he attempts to forestall criticism with the following statement: —

   “Some Marxists will say that what I have been stating is not Marxism at all, but a radically different doctrine. Even if that were so, it would not matter, provided that mine was the better doctrine for to-day. But I think what I have written is in essence Marxist, in that sense in which Marxism is to-day a living force, and not the opium of the Socialist orthodox.” 

As a piece of impudent writing, this would be hard to beat.

Before dealing more in detail with the book, one other instance should be noted. Marx put forward a theory to explain the evolution of society. To that theory he gave a name, the Materialist Conception of History. He did so intentionally. He used the term materialist because that is what he meant, and Marxians have always referred to that theory by that name. Now along comes this writer of detective stories, and announces: “I shall write ‘realist' in place of 'materialist,’ for I can see no point at all in that form of servility which clings obstinately to a name.” It will easily be appreciated that after being connected with thirty different political organisations, Mr. Cole is not likely to cling obstinately to anything.

The book is a difficult one to review on account of the author’s method. He has jumbled up together his interpretation of certain of Marx's doctrines with a statement of his own political views. His aim seems to be to support those views by relating them to Marxian principles—or what he conceives; to be Marxian principles. Where he is expounding Marx he reveals such a complete lack of understanding of everything Marx wrote, that the doubt at once arises whether, notwithstanding the fact that he wrote an introduction to the Everyman edition of “Capital,” he has ever seriously read much more than the “Communist Manifesto.” It is inevitable, therefore, that what he claims to be A reading of the “signs of our times by a method which is largely that of Marx,” bears absolutely no relation to Marxian thought. No Marxian could be guilty of the errors of analysis contained in this book, while the recommendations of policy in it are, in the main, contrary to the whole of Marx's teaching.

As an example of the kind of statement in this book that raises a doubt as to whether the author is really acquainted with Marx's writings, the following may be quoted: —

  It is sometimes suggested that Marx did believe the coming of Socialism to be inevitable, and held that men could, by their conduct, only advance or delay its coming, or cause it to come in a more or less satisfactory form. It is quite possible that Marx did hold this.

If Mr. Cole knows what he is writing about, why this indefiniteness? Marx, of course, made specific statements which gave dear expression to his view. In the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels wrote:—

   The bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

This passage was reproduced as a footnote to “Capital,” to which, as mentioned above, Mr. Cole wrote an introduction. (For footnote, see Everyman edition, p. 847.)

It is undoubtedly true that, as Mr. Cole states, Marx, if he had been alive and writing to-day, would not have written "exactly as he wrote in 1848, or 1859, or 1867, or 1883.” but that is no justification for claiming for non-Marxian ideas the support of Marx's name. Despite Mr. Cole's disclaimers, to suppose that Marx would have propounded the theories foisted off on him by Mr. Cole is “the rankest injustice to Marx.” Mr. Cole uses the following specious arguments for putting forward his own ideas as being related to those of Marx:—

  If the structure of classes has changed since Marx’s day, as I have tried to show that it has, the theory which Marx formulated as appropriate to the class conditions of his day can no longer be adequate to meet the needs of the present time, at all events until it has been modified and adapted in conformity with these changes. Every Marxist is compelled by his Marxism to be a “revisionist ”. . .  no Marxist can escape revisionism without denying the dialectical principle.

It is sheer sophistry to pretend that the dialectical principle which requires that things should not be treated and considered as though they were static, and insists that everything is in process of development, necessarily implies that ideas originated, say, seventy years ago, must be inapplicable to-day. In that case the dialectic view would itself be obsolete! Even if the dialectical principle did require a modification, it would not follow that revision should properly take place on the Labour Party lines followed by Mr. Cole. Further, the major premise of his argument is false. If he had properly appreciated what Marx meant by capitalists and proletariat, and by the class struggle between them, he would not have been deceived into believing that "the structure of classes has changed since Marx's day.” Far from changing, that structure stands to-day even more clearly discernible and defined than when Marx wrote. There can be no doubt now that in capitalist society there are but two classes, one dependent upon the possession of property, the other property-less and dependent upon .the sale of its labour power. Like all "intellectuals,” Mr. Cole tries to blur the clear-cut distinction between the two classes. For him the proletariat consists “in the advanced parliamentary countries of Western Europe . . . of a central mass of manual workers and their families, shading off at one end into the unemployables, and at the other into the 'black coats' of the middle class.'' In the world of Mr. Cole there appear to be a large number of classes, for he writes of “the middle classes, that is, the classes between the governing groups of the bourgeoisie and the wage-earners,” who “have increased markedly as a percentage of the entire population,” and who have “assumed the new character given to them by the increased wealth of modern Societies." Patronising snobbery prevents Mr. Cole plunging himself and his fellow “intellectuals" down among the “manual workers," so he puts forward concepts of middle classes which have no basis in reality. Unless the existence of only two classes is denied, the whole case of the “intellectuals" falls to the ground and they cease, as a group, to have any special political significance. Mr. Cole claims that an alliance “of the proletariat and new petit bourgeoisie against the large capitalists and the reactionary petit bourgeois groups . . . is the only possible way of achieving Socialism by peaceful and constitutional means, and probably the only way of averting the spread of Fascist dictatorships." The fact is, however, that whenever the proletariat (by which is meant what Marx meant, namely, all those who are dependent upon the sale of their labour power), want to achieve Socialism they can do so by the use of their own unaided power, and without the advice or leadership of " intellectuals."

How far Mr. Cole is from understanding Marx’s analysis of Capitalism is revealed in his remarks about Russia, of which the following are samples. He writes: "The U.S.S.R. . . . has already thrown Capitalism over . . . under the new Russian system it is utterly impossible for the characteristic dilemma of Capitalism ever to arise . . the Russian system does ensure that as much as they can possibly produce will find a market, so that over-production and under-consumption and also unemployment, save as a temporary consequence of friction in the process of industrial change, simply cannot arise." (Pages 61 and 70.) It is difficult to say whether that displays the greater ignorance of Marx or of conditions in Russia. Capitalism in the sense in which Marx understood it, as a system of society based on the exploitation of a class of property-less wage labourers exists to-day in Russia, just as much as in England. Unemployment has certainly not been banished. The Russians have also been faced with the problem of over-production. Like other capitalist producers, they have had to curtail production because they could not sell various products in the world market at a profit during the depression.

It may be wondered how people like Mr. Cole contrive to achieve their reputations as authorities on Marx, in face of their patent ignorance. It is to a large extent the result of mutual back-scratching. For example, that other self-constituted authority on Marx, Professor H. J. Laski reviewed Mr. Cole's book in the Manchester Guardian, and praised it as providing "a really admirable summary of the Marxian theory of value." Unwary readers may be impressed by Professor Laski’s judgment, but others will know that this Professor of Political Science does not understand Marx’s economic theories, and has confessed as much. When he wrote his "Communism" (see review in Socialist Standard, July, 1927), so little was he able to deal with this aspect that he borrowed his  "criticism" of the Labour Theory of Value from a book called "Karl Marx's Capital," written by Professor Lindsay, and Lindsay knows no more about the subject than Laski or Cole.

That is by the way. Here it is impossible to examine in detail Cole's summary of the theory. Whether the Marxian Theory of Value is right or wrong, nobody who had mastered even the first few chapters of "Capital" could ever believe he was representing Marx's ideas in writing: "Marx's 'value' or ‘exchange value' is, then . . . purely and simply objectified use value. It is the real amount of objective utility which a commodity possesses as a result of the labour bestowed upon it." What this all means only Cole and, presumably, Laski, know. Fortunately it is not Marxian.

It is to be hoped that nobody will be enticed into buying or reading the book in the belief that it is a statement of Marxist principles. It is nothing of the kind. It is a vastly irritating sermon on Labourism by a man who, incidentally, has now discovered that his fellow "intellectuals" were wrong when, a short time ago, they proclaimed that Capitalism was in ruins and unable to stand the burden of paying for further reforms or an extension of social services. At any rate, he writes that "the history of the past few years has very plainly illustrated the toughness and resisting power of Capitalism . . . even in face of prolonged world depression; and who is bold enough to say that the present depression, deep and long as it has been, will not pass and be succeeded by a phase of capitalist revival?"

Another author, with whom Mr. Cole claims some acquaintance, is Wm. Cobbett, for he wrote an introduction to Cobbett's "Grammar." Cobbett has a passage which can be fittingly applied to this book:—"the pompous tone, the self-conceit that is manifest from the beginning to the end, forbid us to give (the author) credit for sincerity when he confesses his deficiencies, and tell us that the confession is one of those clumsy traps so often used with the hope of catching unmerited applause."

There is some advice in Mr. Cole's book which we can heartily endorse, contained in the last paragraph: —

Having presented in this book my conception of what Marxism really means, I can only ask the reader, if he is in any doubt, to go and study for himself what Marx wrote, and not merely what others have written about him.

In conclusion there is one thing that should be made dear. The S.P.G.B. has been described by Cole as a "body of rigid Marxians." (Enc. Brit., Vol. 32, Page 507.) It might have been thought, therefore, that the author of a book supposed to deal with Marx would be particularly careful to ensure that it was sent to us for review. This book has not been sent to us. We wasted 5s. on buying it.

B. S.

Captain Swing (1984)

From the June 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Walking through the Hampshire countryside on a pleasant sunny morning, it is difficult to realise that in the 19th century this was the scene of a violent uprising, one that was to terrify the Establishment and bring down savage reprisals. This is a soft countryside, composed of a hundred shades of green — a land of chalk hills and water meadows, of extensive heathlands and wooded creeks.

This was the world of Jane Austen, who was born and lived much of her life at Steventon, near Basingstoke, and who died in Winchester. The pleasant world she portrayed was Hampshire, where graceful houses and gardens were set in rolling parklands, a world of culture and delicate customs. But it was also a place of grinding poverty, of labourers who worked long hours for eight shillings (40 pence) a week and vicious game laws bordering on the insane. Hampshire contained the appalling Andover Union, perhaps the nastiest workhouse in the country. Dotted about the countryside stood the gibbets, one of which—the Coombe gibbet—still stands at a popular picnic spot on the Downs overlooking the Kennet valley. And at Portsmouth, near the spot where today holiday makers embark for the Isle of Wight, the prison hulks were moored — old, decaying wooden ships used as makeshift prisons. This was the backcloth against which the tragedy of the Swing Riots was played.

The trap that closed on the agricultural labourer in the early 19th century had many teeth. The rapid inflation following the end of the Napoleonic wars, combined with an equally rapid fall in corn prices, brought agricultural wages down to as low as five shillings (25 pence) a week. Large areas of chalk downland went out of cultivation and a run of wet summers caused crop failures and cattle disease. The resulting mass unemployment brought many families to the edge of starvation.

Traditionally the country people had right of access to common land on which to pasture animals, gather wood and fuel, and other rights. The enclosures that had been progressing for many years accelerated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and vast areas of common land were enclosed and sold off to the local gentry at absurdly low prices. The cottage garden with its hollyhocks and honeysuckle round the door was largely a myth. The real cottager, the agricultural labourer, had little scope for such niceties, for their plots were used for growing food and keeping pigs or chickens. But even these were often filched away.

To add to the problems came mechanisation, principally Meikles Threshing Machine, which abolished hand flail threshing — the main source of winter employment. To people already close to starvation, this replacement of labour by new machines was a disaster. A bitter hatred of the machines developed. They were seen as the main cause of poverty, and were the main targets in the uprising.

Often the peasants’ only way of adding to their food supply was by poaching. But the game laws reserved the right to shoot to the rich, and protected this right by severe penalties. Conviction for poaching could mean seven years transportation, while sheep stealing could mean the death sentence. But such was the plight of the rural population that many were prepared to risk even these penalties.

Wessex had long been one of the most highly developed and prosperous parts of England. Winchester was once the capital, but the Industrial Revolution had passed the Southern Counties by. Their ancient industries were left high and dry, and Winchester and Salisbury declined from major cities into unimportant market towns. This is why their ancient buildings have survived for, as their old centres slipped into decay and squalor, they were not swept away and rebuilt. Now restored, they are major tourist attractions, but to the displaced farm labourers, it meant that there were no growing industrial areas to which they could escape. In country areas near to the new conurbations farm wages were to some extent protected by mills and factories. There was in fact a scheme to resettle the farm labourers in the North-West, where wages were higher, but there was no such outlet for the agricultural workers of the South.

The final insult was the adoption of the pernicious Speenhamland system. Speenhamland is a part of Newbury in Berkshire, astride the London road. On 6 May 1795 a meeting of the Berkshire magistrates was held at the George and Pelican, an inn now demolished. They worked out a system of poor relief that was to be taken up right across England (except in Northumberland). Instead of fixing minimum wages, it was decided to make up incomes to an agreed level by payment from parish rates. Needless to say this was abused by employers and landlords, who reduced wages and raised rents, knowing that the cuts would be made up from public funds. Worse than that, the Speenhamland system placed people at the mercy of overseers and subjected them to the indignity of a means test.

So by 1830 the position of the farm labourer was desperate. There was little hope of relief from the authorities. In the pre-Reform Parliament, power both national and local lay in the hands of the landowners and gentry, the very people who stood to gain most from the poverty of the agricultural workforce. Rotten boroughs like Old Sarum (a ruined castle on a hill near Salisbury) returned two MPs. One can still see the tree in the fields below, where a handful of people “elected” the members.

The rural population had been docile, but in November 1830 they exploded into violence. The uprising took the authorities, who had been lulled into a false sense of security, by surprise. The workers’ initial demands were very limited. “All we ask is that our wages may be advanced to such a degree as will enable us to provide for ourselves and our families without being driven to the overseer”. But within a week the whole situation changed. Beginning in Kent, the protests ran like wildfire through Surrey and Sussex into Hampshire and Wiltshire. The violence, once started, accelerated as the pent-up resentment of years burst out. Threatening letters were received by landowners and magistrates, signed by a mysterious “Captain Swing”, or sometimes just “Swing”. Terse and to the point, they condemned the use of machines and threatened violence. Arson, rioting and machine smashing were common, farm houses were broken into and farmers threatened.

At Fordingbridge on the River Test, mobs armed with sledgehammers and crowbars destroyed a sacking mill and the hated threshing machine factory. At Andover an iron foundry was destroyed, and at Wilton in Wiltshire a woollen mill and a clothing factory went the same way. When troops arrested a rioter in Andover and conveyed him to prison, the mob smashed their way in and released him. In West Hampshire operations were directed by an ostler named James Thomas Cooper who styled himself Captain Hunt, and rode a white horse that he had commandeered. Like a latterday Wat Tyler, Cooper led 2,000 rebels into Ringwood to a pitched battle and into Southampton to set fire to a large sawmill. At Selbourne and Headley the workhouses were attacked and destroyed. As the rioting progressed the ranks of the farm labourers were swelled by craftsmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, bricklayers and millworkers, and even small farmers. Right across the South ricks were fired and machines smashed and toll gates — an inevitable target because they effectively stopped the poor from using main roads — were torn down.

When “Captain Hunt” led a mob up the Avon towards Salisbury, smashing machines and firing ricks, farmers besieged insurance offices with claims for fire damage, forcing the companies to default. But along with the destruction went efforts to force agreements raising wages and cutting rents and tithes. Those landowners who resisted had their houses burned down. Others gave money and food to placate a threatening crowd. The Hampshire Chronicle reported that a march on Winchester had been averted by the Mayor, who convened a meeting of farmers and labourers which agreed a wage of twelve shillings (60 pence) a week. Similar agreements were signed all over the area. When a Wiltshire MP, John Bennett, offered to pay £500 (a phenomenal sum to people earning eight shillings a week) to anyone who informed against ten rioters, nobody responded. Instead they stoned the MP and smashed his threshing machines. When the revolt was crushed the agreements were, of course, repudiated.

As December advanced the impetus of the riots slackened and there came savage reprisals. The authorities were in a jittery state, obsessed with fears of revolution. They looked apprehensively across the Channel to France, as they had been doing for 40 years, where in July yet another revolution had toppled Charles the Tenth and driven him into exile. Queen Adelaide’s talk of “playing the part of Marie Antoinette in the coming revolution” was pure nonsense but it reflected the state of hysteria that gripped the upper class. Riots, often serious, were common in Georgian England, often whipped up by the party in opposition in order to embarrass the government. Rumours would run through London and the big cities and bring the mobs onto the streets. But the town rioters had safety in numbers and when it was all over they could fade back into the slums. The agricultural workers had no such anonymity; they were known and could be identified. Mass arrests took place across the whole area and the jails were full to overflowing. Special Commissioners were appointed to try prisoners while Lord Melbourne issued a circular to all magistrates instructing them to “seize suspected persons and deal with them in any way thought fit — with no subsequent enquiries”.

The First Commission of Assize opened in Winchester on 18 December and later passed on to Salisbury. The accused did not stand a chance; they were poor and illiterate with no knowledge of the law. One jury was discharged because of their sympathy towards the accused and their reluctance to convict. These “trials” ran on through December into January. One hundred and one defendants were sentenced to death, 117 to transportation and 68 to various prison sentences. Public opinion was outraged by the death sentences, newspapers condemned them and protests and petitions poured in from all sides. The government bowed to the pressure, and only six were executed, including “Captain Hunt” who, as one of the most prominent rebels, did not stand any chance of a reprieve. Most of the others were transported — a particularly cruel penalty as not only was the convict imprisoned, torn from his family and sent across the world, but his dependants were left to fend for themselves, which usually meant starvation. The revolt was at an end and the notorious convict ships, the Eliza, Proteus and Eleanor assembled off Portsmouth to ferry their participants across the world.

The Swing Riots happened four years before the first agricultural workers’ union branch was formed in Tolpuddle. Certainly they were influenced by an earlier radicalism, as personified by William Cob- bett, the author of Rural Rides, who had defended the agricultural workers and attacked the grim conditions under which they lived. He had stated that it was “better to poach than to starve”. His publication, Cobbett's Weekly Political Register, was read by the more articulate labourers to their illiterate comrades at gatherings in pubs.

In the 1830s the condition of the agricultural workers reached its lowest ebb. Although they were to remain at the bottom of the pile throughout the 19th century, things were never to be quite as bad again. The Reform Bill broke the monopoly of the landed gentry in Parliament. Not that the hard faced industrialists and ship owners had any more regard for the welfare of the farm worker than had their landed oppressors, but from time to time it suited their purpose to support them. The criminal laws, “Britain’s Bloody Code”, were slowly reformed, transportation was abolished, the revolting prison hulks disappeared and the death penalty was removed from over 200 offences. Poaching became a less serious crime, while the coming of the railways and spread of newspapers reduced rural isolation. The growth of seaside towns on the South coast and the establishment of small scale industries opened up alternative employment, but for many young farm workers the army was seen to be the only way out. Right up to the First World War the Shires provided the bulk of the infantry — a fact illustrated by the long lists of names on war memorials in village churches.

So the last “Peasant Revolt” failed. Like its predecessor in 1381, the Swing Riots were doomed from the start. The odds against were too great but in neither instance did the rebels realise the fear that they engendered, or just how powerful they were. Illiterate and unsophisticated, they could never grasp the extent of the forces ranged against them, or understand the system that was crushing them. No 19th century uprising came from greater provocation or was more savagely suppressed.

Les Dale

A bourgeoisie in waiting (1983)

From the November 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

For Marx, the Britain he had come to live in was a capitalist country governed by a landed oligarchy in the interest of its capitalist class. Men drawn from the ranks of the landowning class occupied the top posts in the state—in the government, in the civil service, in the army and navy, in the church, in the universities—but, in order to retain these privileges for their class, they had to pursue policies that served the interests of those known as the "industrial and commercial classes".

This situation had been established, said Marx, in 1688 in what the Whigs called the Glorious Revolution, when a section of the landowning class allied itself with the middle class to expel King James II and to replace him, by Act of Parliament, with William of Orange, so establishing a constitutional monarchy in England. The industrial revolution had brought to the fore a new, more aggressive section of the middle class—the industrial capitalists—who were no longer satisfied with the 1688 settlement and who wanted the middle class to become the politically ruling, as well as the economically dominant, class in Britain:

A new bourgeoisie of colossal proportions arose; while the old bourgeoisie struggled with the French revolution, the new one conquered the world market. It became so omnipotent that, even before it gained direct political power as a result of the Reform Bill, it forced its opponents to legislate in its interests and in accordance with its requirements. It captured direct representation in Parliament and used this to destroy the last remnants of real power left to the landed proprietors. (Review of Guizot's Book, 1850, Exile. p.255).

Even the Tories, the political descendants of that section of the landowning class which had not supported the 1688 revolution, had to pursue pro-middle class politics when in office, as Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850) had done when he was briefly Prime Minister in 1834-5 and for a longer period 1841-6. Commenting on Peel's career after his death in a riding accident in 1850, Marx and Engels wrote:

the statesmanship of this son of the bourgeoisie who rose to be leader of the aristocracy consisted in the view that there is today only one real aristocracy: the bourgeoisie. In the light of this belief he continually used his leadership of the landed aristocracy to wring concession from it for the bourgeoisie. This became evident in the question of Catholic emancipation and the reform of the police, by means of which he increased the bourgeoisie's political power; in the Bank Acts of 1818 and 1844, which strengthened the financial aristocracy; in the tariff reform of 1842 and the free trade legislation of 1846, with which the aristocracy was nothing short of sacrificed to the industrial bourgeoisie (Review, May-October 1850, Revs; pp. 305-6)

The Repeal of the Corn Laws led to a split in the Tory party, the majority under Lord Derby (1799-1869) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) disowning Peel. Peel's followers—known as "Peelites"—recognised, like the Whigs, that aristocratic government could only continue in Britain by pursuing policies in the interest of the capitalist middle class. In doing so, they were following in the footsteps of an earlier group of Tories, associated with the name of Canning (1770-1827) and including Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), who had come to the same conclusion and had gone over to the Whigs at the time of the 1832 Reform Act, a pro-middle class measure which the die-hard Tories did not want to concede.

Marx referred to the Tories, Whigs and Peelites as "three factions of the Aristocracy".(1) When in power, they had no alternative but to govern in the interest of the capitalist middle class:

every Government, whether Whig, Tory or Coalition, can only keep itself in office, and the bourgeoisie out of office, by doing for them their preliminary work. Go through the records of British legislation since 1825, and you will find that the bourgeoisie is only resisted politically by concession after concession financially. What the Oligarchy fail to comprehend is the simple fact that political power is but the offspring of commercial power and that the class to which they are compelled to yield the latter, will necessarily conquer the former also (NYDT, 6 5 1853, Vol 12, p. 70). 

There was in fact a Tory government in office in 1825 but, for Marx, it was the Whigs who made a special policy, almost a profession, of governing in the interest of the middle class:

the Whigs are the aristocratic representatives of the Bourgeoisie, of the industrial and commercial middle class. Under the condition that the Bourgeoisie should abandon to them, to an oligarchy of aristocratic families, the monopoly of office, they make to the middle class, and assist it in conquering, all those concessions, which in the course of social and political development have shown themselves to have become unavoidable and undelayable. (NYDT, 21 8 1852, Vol 11, p. 330)

Marx had a special dislike for the Whigs. This was partly derived from a reading of the radical journalist and pamphleteer, William Cobbett (1762-1835), whom Marx admired, describing him as "the most able representative, or rather, the creator of old English Radicalism" and as the first person who "stripped the parasitic Whig Oligarchy of their sham liberalism". It was in fact from him that Marx borrowed the term "the Oligarchy" to refer to the governing caste in Britain. But another factor in Marx's special dislike of the Whigs must have been a feeling of disgust at the way in which they seemed to have no other aim than to preserve their position as an exclusive governing caste. Certainly in Marx's attacks on the Whig leaders of the 1850s, Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell (1792-1878), there is an element of moral indignation at their complete lack of political principle.

British politics in the 1850s was a period of waiting. With the implementation of Free Trade, the capitalist middle class had triumphed economically. It was only a matter of time, as everyone knew, before they would also triumph politically, substituting middle class government for the "outdated, superannuated, obsolete compromise", as Marx once put it, whereby an aristocracy governed in the interest of the capitalist class. Because of the divisions—even the break-up—of the aristocratic parties there was no stable majority in the House of Commons to pass the necessary pro-middle class reforms in the army, the civil service, the law, the universities, the Church. For this to happen a second Reform Act, extending the franchise so as to weaken aristocratic influence in the House of Commons, was necessary; but the aristocratic parties which together controlled both Houses of Parliament were unable to agree on the terms of such an Act. Reform Bills, proposed by the Whig government in 1852, by the Whig-Peelite Coalition in 1853-4, and by the Tory government in 1859, all failed. The result was that the political situation remained blocked. Artificially prolonged in this way, aristocratic government of a modern capitalist country became more and more obviously inefficient.

Marx, then, did not have a particularly exciting period of British politics to comment on during his period of journalistic activity in the 1850s. But he did clearly identify the general tendency: inefficiency of aristocratic government, break-up of the old parties, preparation by the capitalist middle class to assume full political power. Inevitably, he made errors of judgement such as not foreseeing the formation of a Whig-Peelite coalition after the 1852 elections and declaring in 1858 that the Whigs and Tories were amalgamating into a single party of the landed aristocracy, but his general analysis has been confirmed by later historians.

Marx in Britain, 1849
When Marx came to Britain in August 1849 there was a Whig government, under Lord John Russell, in office. Lord Palmerston was Foreign Secretary. In December 1851, however, Palmerston publicly expressed approval for Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état in France and was forced to resign. In February of the following year he engineered the defeat of the Russell government over its militia bill. A minority Tory government under Lord Derby, with Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer, took over. In July Parliament was dissolved and a general election called. It was just at this that Marx himself began to write for the NYDT and he used this opportunity to introduce his American readers to the various political parties in Britain: first the three aristocratic parties (the Tories, the Whigs and the Peelites) and, then, the parties of the capitalist middle class (the Radicals, led by Bright and Cobden, also called the Manchester School, Free Traders and Financial Reformers) and of the working class (the Chartists, whose militant wing was now led by Ernest Jones).

The result of the general election was indecisive. Nobody appeared to have won, though the Tories had a majority of the Peelites, or "Liberal Conservatives", were counted with them. In any event, as was the custom, the previous government under Lord Derby continued in office until defeated in Parliament. This came in December when one of the provisions of Disraeli's budget was rejected by the House of Commons.

The new government which emerged was a coalition between the Whigs and Peelites. The Prime Minister was Lord Aberdeen (1784-1860), a Peelite. Another Peelite, W. E. Gladstone (1809-1898) was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Palmerston became Home Secretary, while Lord John Russell was temporarily Foreign Secretary until Lord Clarendon took over in February 1853. The only other Minister who needs to be mentioned is Sir Charles Wood, the President of the Board of Control, in effect the Minister for Indian Affairs, whose proposals for a new Charter for the East India Company were extensively commented on by Marx in the NYDT. The government also had the support of the Radicals and the so-called Irish Brigade, who both supplied nominees to fill some junior Ministerial posts. The Irish Brigade—a party Marx had not mentioned in his pre-election articles in the NYDT—were a group of anti-Tory Irish MPs who represented, essentially, the Irish Catholic middle class which had won a share of political power with the success in 1828 of Daniel O'Connell's (1775-1847) campaign for Catholic Emancipation, as the removal of political discrimination against Catholics was called. O'Connell had in fact been the leader of this parliamentary group until his death in 1847.

The coalition government, however, was unable to deliver the goods to these minority parties in return for their support: a Reform Bill to extend the franchise had to be withdrawn in 1854 because of opposition in Parliament and a Tenant's Rights Bill, aiming to give Irish peasants a minimum of protection against their landlords, was thrown out the same year be the House of Lords. The main concern of the government became foreign rather than home affairs, as a result of the revival of the "Eastern Question" as the problems caused by the decline and weakness of the Ottoman Empire were called, as was reflected in Marx's articles.

In 1853 Tsar Nicholas I revived a Russian claim to be the protector of the Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire (which at this time included what is now Bulgaria as well as parts of modern Rumania and Yugoslavia). The Sultan refused, but under pressure from the Western Powers did agree to discuss the matter. In October Russian troops entered the Danubian Provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. The Sultan replied by declaring war. In March 1854 Britain and France joined the war on the Turkish side. Their aim was not to overthrow the Tsarist Empire but the lesser one of preventing the Black Sea and the Dardanelles coming under the control of the Russian navy. To achieve this it was decided to attack and destroy the Russian naval base and fort at Sebastopol in the Crimean peninsula. The siege of Sebastopol was conducted with such incompetence and lack of organisation that demands for an inquiry into the conduct of the war were raised. The Free Trade Radicals around Bright and Cobden opposed the war as costly and unnecessary. Marx, who was very much opposed to Russian expansionism and so a supporter of the war, severely criticised them for this in the articles he wrote for the NYDT.

In February 1855 the Aberdeen government was defeated in the House of Commons on a motion to set up a Committee of Inquiry and resigned. A two-week governmental crisis followed in which both Lord John Russell, the Whig leader, and Lord Derby, the Tory leader, failed to form a government. In the end Lord Palmerston himself became, for the first time, Prime Minister. It was this mismanagement of the Crimean War and the resulting political crisis which provided Marx with material for a series of articles in the NOZ in which he argues that the British "constitution"(2), the compromise whereby the capitalist class let the aristocrats occupy the top posts in the State on condition that they pursued pro-capitalist policies, was collapsing.

Sebastopol was finally captured in September 1855 and, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris signed in March 1856, both Russia and Turkey were forbidden to maintain a navy in the Black Sea. Russian expansionism had been temporarily stopped. But another war was brewing. In October 1856 the Chinese authorities in Canton boarded the Arrow, a Chinese-owned but British registered ship. Britain demanded an apology and compensation. The Chinese authorities refused and Britain, aided by France, used this as an excuse for commencing the Second Opium War. Cobden again took up an anti-war position and in March 1857 he proposed a motion in the House of Commons—which was carried—criticising the Palmerston government over this attack. Instead of resigning, Palmerston called an immediate general election which he made a vote of confidence in himself and his government. His critics were routed. Cobden lost his seat in the West Riding of Yorkshire and a Tory was even elected in Manchester, the citadel of the Free Traders.

Palmerston remained the Prime Minister, but his second Ministry was to last for less than a year. The war against China was continued and a mutiny of native soldiers in the British Army in India developed into a full-scale revolt. In January 1858 Orsini, an Italian nationalist, tried to assassinate Napoleon III. When it came out that the plot had been planned in London. Palmerston quickly introduced a Conspiracy to Murder Bill, aimed at curbing the activities of foreign refugees in Britain. When in February an unacceptable amendment to this Bill was carried in the House of Commons Palmerston resigned. Once again, a minority Tory government took over, with Lord Derby as Prime Minister and Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer. This government fell the following year when its Reform Bill—a complicated measure giving more than one vote to certain people as well as extending the franchise a little—was defeated.

In the general election which followed, the Liberals—as the Whigs, Peelites and Radicals were now in the process of becoming—emerged as the largest party. Palmerston, now in his seventy-fifth year, again became Prime Minister. Gladstone, who had resigned from one of Palmerston's previous ministries in 1855, now agreed to serve under him, so putting himself in a strong position to emerge as the future leader of the Liberal Party. Cobden refused the post of President of the Board of Trade (which was nevertheless accepted by another Radical Free Trader, Milner-Gibson (1806-1884), but he did negotiate on behalf of the government the 1860 Anglo-French Commercial Treaty which considerably liberalised trade between the two countries.

The 1859 Palmerston administration can be seen as the first Liberal government, but even it was unable to pass a second Reform Bill in 1860. Palmerston's personal opposition to such a measure delayed any further moves in this direction until after his death at the end of 1865.

Adam Buick

FOOTNOTES:

1. NYDT 22/7/1853, Vol 12, p.188. Marx also consciously tried to imitate Cobbett's style as in the article "The House of Lords and the Duke of York's Monument" that appeared in the People's Paper on 19 April 1856 (see Marx's letter to Engels, 26 April 1856).

2. Britain had, and has, no written Constitution, at least not in a single document. The British "Constitution" was, and still is, a collection of different statutes and customs governing political practice.