John Belchem, The
Politics of Chartism
History Sixth,
October 1987
CHARTISM is often dismissed as a knife and fork
question, an economic agitation which attracted the volatile crowd only at times
of cyclical depression and unemployment. But the Chartist challenge was
political, not economic. The Chartists did not agitate for measures of immediate
economic relief: they campaigned for parliamentary reform. Around the six points
of the Charter, a traditionally phrased programme of radical reform, they
developed the first working‑class 'party' in history, an organization
which retained considerable support in the localities through the provision of
cultural, educational and recreational facilities. A political movement with a
democratic counter‑culture, Chartism cannot be understood simply by
reference to the vicissitudes of the trade cycle, by the study of economic
statistics and charts of social tension. 1
Why did popular protest take such a political
form in the age of the Chartists? The politicization of discontent, to use the
sociological jargon, can be traced back to the lengthy wars against
revolutionary and Napoleonic France when the popular struggle for democratic
control of the state began in earnest. It was not the abstract language of
Jacobinism but the harsh economic realities of war‑time living which
provided the hard‑pressed workers with their political education. The
victims of inflation and regressive taxation, they were the people who paid for
'the Thing', the system of political corruption and financial plunder which
flourished during the war, widening the gap between the rich and the poor,
between the parasitic plunderers and the hard‑working plundered, the
tax‑gorgers and the tax‑payers, the politically privileged and the
politically powerless. Exploited by the 'funding system', the unrepresented
workers were denied economic security by those who monopolized the political
machine: during the war parliament finally abandoned its traditional paternalist
responsibilities and adopted the new political economy of laissez‑faire.
Workers' combinations were condemned, minimum wage petitions were rejected, and
the wage‑fixing and apprenticeship clauses of the Statute of Artificers,
the keystone of the old Elizabethan labour code, were symbolically repealed,
leaving the workers defenceless against the ravages of inflation and unregulated
competition at the workplace. Abandoned by paternalism, the aggrieved workers
turned to radical politics and the campaign for democratic control of the state,
without which it seemed there was no hope of economic protection and
amelioration.
In the industrial districts of the midlands and
the north, Luddism was the crucial point of transition in this process of
politicization. Rebellious in defence of custom, the Luddites engaged in
machine‑breaking and other forms of direct action to enforce the
traditional work practices enshrined in the old paternalist legislation which
the employers flouted and parliament ignored. A conventional exercise in
'collective bargaining by riot', Luddism exemplified the backward-looking
mentalité of traditional popular
protest which sought the redress of grievances through the restoration of the
hallowed (doubtless mythical) ways of the past. By the display of ritualized and
disciplined violence, the protesters trusted to recall the magistrates and
masters to their paternalist responsibilities, their duty to uphold the 'moral
economy' of just wages, fair prices and customary work practices. A functional
form of protest in eighteenth-century England, 'collective bargaining by
riot' proved a disastrous experience in the Napoleonic war years when parliament
repudiated paternalism and committed the full physical power of the state - a greater military force than Wellington had under his command in the
Iberian campaign - to crush the Luddites. Defeated and disabused, workers
in the Luddite counties turned to radicalism, to the forward-looking
struggle for democratic control of the state and the economy.
The radical mass platform which emerged at the
end of the war, amidst the hardship and privation of the transition to peace
without plenty, marked a significant advance in the pattern of popular protest.
Political agitation replaced the direct action of the past, a change promoted
and encouraged by radical journalists and orators. Samuel Bamford, the Middleton
silk weaver, recorded the impact of William Cobbett's popular journalism, his 'Twopenny
Trash':
'...he
directed his readers to the true cause of their sufferings - misgovernment; and to its proper corrective
- parliamentary reform. Riots
soon became scarce, and from that time they have never obtained their ancient
vogue with the labourers of this country.'2
Educated by Cobbett, the workers were enrolled in
political agitation by 'Orator' Hunt, the flamboyant champion of the mass
platform. Here the people demanded their democratic constitutional rights in an
open constitutional manner, a format which dominated popular protest until the
final collapse of the Chartist challenge.3
Chartism derived its political emphasis from the
post-war radical movement, the first mass expression of the politicization
of discontent. A legacy of the post-war years, the preoccupation with
politics was strengthened rather than challenged by the new economic theories of
the 1820s. According to the Owenite and other anticapitalist labour economists
it was not political corruption but the economic system which impoverished the
workers: it was not taxation which caused their distress but the denial of their
right to the whole produce of their labour. Unlike Marx, however, these
proponents of the labour theory of value did not trace exploitation to the
process of production itself: their economic analysis concentrated on the
inequalities within the systems of currency, distribution and exchange. But, as
the radicals were quick to point out, these very inequalities stemmed from a
political source, the political monopoly which enabled idle and unproductive
middlemen and capitalists to manipulate and control the framework of economic
transactions. 'The process is this', the Poor Man's Guardian explained:
'The
landlords and capitalists make the law, the law makes the institutions,
the institutions place the producers in such a position that they must either
starve or sell their produce for a fraction of its value, that is to say, give
up the major portion of it to the landlords and capitalists. Thus are the
producers robbed, and thus do the rich acquire their riches. '4
The radicals, then, persisted in explaining the
essential division in society, and hence the process of exploitation, in
political terms. Just as the war-inflated 'funding system' had been built
on the base of political monopoly so it was political power that underpinned the
capitalist system and denied the worker his natural rights, the full fruits of
his labour. The 'new ideology' of the 1820s simply extended the ranks of radical
demonology: alongside the fundholders, sinecurists, pensioners and other
tax‑gorgers, there now sat the capitalists, parasitic middlemen whose
privileged and tyrannical position of unequal exchange stemmed from the monopoly
of political and legal power possessed by the propertied governing classes.
Whether directed against the tax-eaters and/or the capitalists, the
radical demand was always the same: an end to the system which left labour
unprotected and at the mercy of those who monopolized the state and the law.
Reinforced by the 'new ideology' of the 1820s,
political radicalism acquired unprecedented relevance and force in the 1830s
when parliament and the state were reformed at the expense of the politically
excluded.5 Regional rental variations notwithstanding, the uniform £10
franchise of the 1832 Reform Act left the working class alone as the
unrepresented people, separated from the middle class, the 'shopocrats', who
acquired the vote and joined the ranks of the politically privileged. Excluded
from parliament, the working class regarded themselves as the particular victims
of ‘class legislation'. Viewed from their perspective, the ,reforms' of the
1830s were a comprehensive assault on their rights and expectations: to the
voteless, indeed, it seemed that the state, having shed its old inefficiency and
corruption, was taking on the form of an interventionist and exploitative
dictatorship. Reform of national and municipal government along propertied lines
removed old areas of popular political influence; the amendment of the Poor Law,
the new 'Starvation Law', took away time-honoured social and welfare
rights; the new factory legislation undermined the efforts and programme of the
working‑class short‑time movement; trade unions were under constant
attack in parliament and the courts; and police forces, those ,plagues of blue
locusts', were extended throughout the land, enforcing the new discipline upon
the ‑traditional leisure activities of the working class.
Chartism, the creed of the excluded, attracted a
vast working-class audience to the radical political platform in the late
1830s. There was nothing specifically working-class about the Charter
itself, a programme of parliamentary reform endorsed by middle-class
liberals and Radical MPs. The Chartist platform, however, was closely identified
with an alternative political economy of artisan ideals, of economic regulation
and control widely at odds with the laissez-faire prescriptions of the
middle-class parliamentary reformers. Labour, the Chartists protested, 'is
not possessed of the same legal protection which is given to those lifeless
effects, the houses, ships and machinery which labour have alone created ... if
labour has no protection, wages cannot be upheld nor in the slightest degree
regulated, until every workman of twenty-one years of age, and of sane
mind is, on the same political level as the employer'.6 Through democratic
reform of the state, the Chartists sought to protect 'the real property of
society', the skill, status and labour of the artisans, mechanics and labourers.
Strongest at times of cyclical distress, Chartism
offered the workers protection against longer‑term adverse economic
developments, the structural changes of the 'first industrial revolution'.
Economic historians have rejected the traditional cataclysmic interpretation of
the British industrial revolution: there was no sudden and dramatic transition
to 'machinofacture', to highly mechanised factory-based mass production
industry; economic growth was slow-moving and broad-based, a secular
process of 'combined and uneven development'. Attention has shifted to
what has been called ' 'the other Industrial Revolution', an 'Industrial
Revolution' which included domestic industry and artisan workshops much more
than it did the factory system; an Industrial Revolution which relied on tools,
small machines and skilled labour much more than it did on steam engines and
automatic processes.'7 Within this form of industrialization, the maintenance of
artisan ideals was the essential concern of the workers, the main reason for
demanding the Chartist programme.
This is not to suggest that the language of
labour and popular radicalism was the preserve of a skilled elite. There was no
structural divide within the working class separating the artisans from the
labourers. Both groups depended for their existence upon the sale of their
labour power. Confronted by the increasing capitalization of the trades, the
artisans were unable to establish themselves as independent small masters: the
imposition of money-wage discipline confirmed their formal subordination
as wage earning proletarians. But although they were denied any rights over the
product of their labour, these skilled workers still retained considerable
control over the production process itself. In the absence of 'machinofacture',
of mechanised modern industry, it was the workers who determined the speed,
intensity and rhythm of work, an autonomy they fought hard to preserve against
the new time and labour discipline favoured by political economists, preachers
and employers. By resisting the intensification of labour, the introduction of
unskilled labour or deskilling machinery, the 'honourable' artisans struggled to
uphold the ideal of independence to which all workers aspired - the
ability to eschew subservience at work and secure a customary and comfortable
standard of living without recourse to charity or the Poor Law. These workshop
conflicts over the 'frontier of control', previously small scale local affairs,
assumed national political importance in the age of the Chartists, a time of
general crisis in the social relations of production, when employers enforced
their control over the production process, using the powers of the state and the
law courts when necessary to crush workers' opposition.
As sweating, dilution, machinery and other forms of 'unfair' competition spread through the economy, insecure workers turned to Chartism to defend their skill, status and labour. There was nothing antiquated or anti-industrial about these workers: they were the products, not the victims, of 'combined and uneven development'. Handloom weavers and other outworkers were notorious for their Chartism: a vast labour force brought into being by the industrial revolution, they were unable to protect themselves against overstocking, intensified competition and mechanization. The artisans who turned to Chartism came from trades like shoe-making, tailoring and furniture-making where the workers lost control over recruitment, standards and quality as employers began to exploit the new mass markets for their products. The prominence of outworkers and artisans, then, does not suggest that Chartism derived its strength only from archaic areas of industrial and economic decline, an influential misinterpretation which can no longer be sustained in the light of the latest economic history and of recent research into the events of 1839 and 1842. The colliers and iron workers who marched on Newport in their thousands in November 1839, the most famous Chartist excursion into physical force, came from a new and rapidly expanding industrial region where wages were comparatively high. A class society from birth, industrial South Wales was characterized by social segregation: nothing was provided for the alienated workers except employment.8 The 'Plug Plot' disturbances of 1842 were transformed from a wages dispute into a general political strike for the Charter by rank and file delegates representing some of the most modern sectors of the economy. It was a conference of the five metal trades - mechanics, engineers, millwrights, smiths and moulders - which called for the cessation of labour until the Charter became the law of the land, a resolution promptly endorsed by the cotton factory workers, apparent beneficiaries of industrial change and the factory system, the spinners, engineers and others were by no means aristocrats of labour, aloof from inter‑trade cooperation and radical politics: the Charter promised protection to those whose earnings, status and employment were at this stage still far from secure. 10
Factory workers, outworkers, artisans, workers in
all forms of industrial organization, were attracted to the Chartist programme
of political power and economic amelioration - nearly two hundred trades
are listed in Dorothy Thompson's definitive study of the movement. 11 Chartism
indeed was a labour movement closely connected with trade unionism. In London
and other large urban areas, trade societies and organization were often the
basis for local branches of the National Charter Association, the first working
class 'party', through which the Chartists maintained their political challenge
during the 1840s.
At the branch level, the National Charter
Association was the corner-stone of a democratic counter-culture of
Chartist schools, chapels, cooperative stores, burial clubs and
temperance societies. Through its ,movement culture' of education, leisure and
recreation, Chartism offered its adherents an alternative and satisfactory way
of life within early industrial capitalist society. 12 A means of preparing the
people for the triumph of democracy, this cultural provision helped to hold the
movement together during the lean periods, preserving the structure and
organization in readiness for the return of excitement and the next great
national agitation. It was this counter-culture, then, which gave Chartism
its remarkable staying power throughout the provinces, its ability to reactivate
the mass platform at the first suggestion of cyclical depression or social
tension.
At times of mass agitation, Chartist
demonstrations were great working-class carnivals, displaying a rich
including the spinners, the skilled male elite in the predominantly female
factory workforce.9 The repertoire of rituals, symbols and iconography, a proud
inheritance carried on from the post-war years. Continuing the strategy
established by Hunt, the Chartists hoped to mobilize the masses and overawe the
government 'peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must'. An escalating exercise in
mass pressure from without, Chartist agitation drew in the crowds, attracted by
the emotive rhetoric of popular constitutionalism with its celebration of the
myth and folklore of English libertarian history, the glorious struggles against
absolutism and the ultimate right of physical resistance. But for all their
numbers, the Chartists failed to coerce the government. There was a fundamental
weakness in popular radical strategy: the stress on legitimacy, the invocation
of historical, constitutional and legal rights, proved self-defeating. At
times of crisis, following the rejection of the people's prayers, petitions and
remonstrances, Chartists had to decide whether the social compact had been
broken, whether the time had come when they should exercise the sovereign right
of physical resistance as sanctioned by history, Blackstone and other
constitutional authorities. It was this question of timing, this issue of
judgement, rather than any absolute commitment to 'moral force' or 'physical
force', which divided the Chartists at the crucial moments of confrontation.
While they agonized over their constitutional right they lost their physical
might: as they hesitated and deliberated, mass support dwindled, excitement was
squandered, and the initiative passed back to the authorities. When this pattern
was repeated yet again in 1848, the strategy of 'forcible intimidation' was
totally discredited and bankrupt. Compelled to adopt new techniques of
agitation, the vestigial Chartists finally questioned their traditional
political language and programme. 13
Before the enforced revision of 1848, there were already indications of a major change in the structure and functions of working-class collective endeavour. The political language of oppression and exploitation ' so forceful and relevant in the 1830s, lost its power and appeal in the 1840s when the Peelite state introduced reforms which clearly benefited the working class. The outright challenge for democratic control of the state was gradually abandoned as workers looked to parliament instead simply to provide proper legal protection for their collective self-help endeavours, the type of mutual assistance which had flourished within Chartist counter-culture. As independent and formal organizations, however, these co-operative stores, friendly societies and other institutions acquired an exclusive character and became the preserve of the male skilled workers, the aristocracy of labour. With its political language and programme, Chartism had been democratic and inclusive: the working-class institutions of mid-Victorian England, by contrast, were concerned only to protect the vested interests of their paid-up members from whose ranks women and the unskilled were generally excluded. The demise of Chartism, the end of democratic political protest, therefore marked a depressing turning-point in labour history.
Notes
1 These statistics, including W.W. Rostow's famous chart of 'social tension', can be conveniently consulted in R. Brown and C. Daniels (eds) The Chartists, 1984, pp. 8-16.
2 Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, Fitzroy edn, 1967, p. 13.
3 John Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt Henry Hunt and English Working Class Radicalism, Oxford, 1985. Chap. 2.
4 Poor Man's Guardian, 21 June 1834.
5 See the very important essay by Gareth Stedman Jones 'The Language of Chartism' in J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds) The Chartist Experience. Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830‑1860,1982, pp. 3-58.
6 'Address of the Executive Committee of the National Charter Association, 17 August 1842'.
M. Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1985, p. 11.
Ivor Wilks, South Wales and the Rising of 1839. Class Struggle as Armed Struggle, 1984; and David J.V. Jones, The Last Rising
the Newport Insurrection of 1839, Oxford, 1985.
9 Mick Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842, 1980.
10 Robert Sykes, 'Early Chartism and Trade Unionism in South East Lancashire' in Epstein and Thompson, pp. 152-193.
Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists, 1984. Part 2.
See, for example, J. Epstein 'Some Organisational and Cultural Aspects of the Chartist Movement in Nottingham' in Epstein and Thompson, pp. 221-268.
13 John Belchem, '1848: Feargus O'Connor and the Collapse of the Mass Platform' in Epstein and Thompson, pp. 269-310.