From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Three-"Chartism" (Young Spartacus-April 1976)

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.

As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Three-"Chartism" (Young Spartacus-April 1976)

By Joseph Seymour

EDITOR'S NOTE: In this series Young Spartacus has made available for our readers a presentation on the origins of Marxism given by Joseph Seymour, a Central Committee member of the Spartacist League, at the Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley during January. The talk, "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," at­tempts to debunk the academic/New Left emphasis on Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian phi­losophy. Comrade Seymour demonstrates the decisive influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two preceding generations of revolutionary militants who struggled to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revo­lution with an egalitarian collectivist social order.

We have serialized the presentation in three parts. The first part discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its insurrectionary and most radical wing maintained by the revolu­tionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti. The second installment analyzed the Carbonari conspiracy, the French revolution of 1830 and the continuity of insurrectionary communism; Blanquism. Like the first two parts, this concluding section on British Chartism follows this verbal presentation with only minimum editorial alterations.
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In the literature on the origins of Marxism the element which I believe is most unappreciated, most misun­derstood and most neglected is the shaping impact of the British working-class movement. For it was not the French but the British working class which had forged the most class-conscious and mass revolutionary organizations.

Without his assimilation of the Brit­ish experience, through his close col­laboration with the leaders of Chartism and Engels, Marx could not have learned what is essential in Marxism: the centrality of the mass organizations of the proletariat, the importance of the industrial revolution, the significance of the industrial proletariat. Simply on the basis of the German and French experience Marx could not have trans­cended a more sober version of Blanquism.

In British Chartism, and only in Chartism, there was a mass, national organization of the proletariat with a revolutionary thrust. At that time the French proletariat remained insuffi­ciently differentiated from the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement as a whole. While less self­consciously world historic than French communism, British Chartism never­theless was far more class conscious, far more proletarian and far more massive in character. In this sense, Chartism was a more advanced polit­ical movement.

The bourgeois-democratic revolution eclipsed

The British revolutionary movement partially parallels but also sharply contrasts with the French. I will em­phasize the contrasts, for they provide the complement which represents the
synthesis of 1840's Marxism.

In the early nineteenth century France was not a feudal society, al­though a feudal order did control the state apparatus. The French plebeian masses and revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie tended to be organized from the top down by a bourgeoisie prepared to engage in insurrection against the feudal state apparatus, provided they could control the struggle.

But in Britain, since the bourgeois-democratic revolution had occurred early on, there was at this time no feudal order. Rather, the state appa­ratus was controlled by a landed capital­ist class which came into conflict with the rising industrial and commercial class. Given the existence of a sem­blance of representative government, the tendencies toward bourgeois-democratic revolution after the seven­teenth century were muted, except for the one brief crisis in the years 1831-32. From its inception the British bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement was plebeian. Whereas in France one had a tendency for generals without armies, in Britain the tendency was for armies without generals.

In the early nineteenth century the British working-class movement was characterized by geographical disper­sion and a lack of a centralized na­tional organization. But there was a richness, solidity and depth in local organizations which manifested a com­plete interpenetration of economic and political tasks. In this period the "trade union" was as much an instrument for insurrectionary action as for elemen­tary wage struggles. And in Luddism it was both. The British working class could go from straight trade unionism to cooperativism to democratic agi­tation to insurrection within the same organizational framework. There was no conception that the organizations of the working class had two purposes— one aimed at the state, the other at the employer. That's a post-1848 phenomenon.

In Britain, unlike France, the revo­lutionary plebeian masses were dis­persed. Since the French bourgeoisie had not yet shed its revolutionary role, Paris was a revolutionary city, as well as a manufacturing city, in a sense that London was not. The British pre-industrial proletariat to a great extent constituted the rural weavers all across northern England—the Lyons silk-weavers writ large. So London was con­servative, while the centers of revolu­tion were the small impoverished weav­ing villages, the mining towns in Wales and Scotland, and the early manufac­turing centers like Manchester.

Owenism and the 1832 crisis

During the 1820's the British trade unionists en masse embraced Owenism. A pacifist socialist doctrine, Owenism played in the British context the same role as Saint Simonism in France.
Yet in many respects Owenism was its polar opposite. Saint Simonism was technocratic state socialism which ap­pealed to the democratic intelligentsia. Owenism represented cooperativism which appealed to artisans who were being ruined by the industrial revolu­tion. But this combination of cooperativism and trade unionism was the ideological form and movement by which the British proletariat in its mass came to socialist consciousness.

In 1831-32, partly under the in­fluence of the French revolution of 1830, the British liberal bourgeoisie, with its base in the industrial and com­mercial classes, was prepared to threaten insurrection to achieve parliamentary reform and topple the parasitic state apparatus. In contrast to France, the workers movement was sufficiently developed that although it, of course, allied with the British liberal bourgeoi­sie, it did so through its own independent class organizations. All the Owenite socialist trade unionists formed the National Union of the Working Classes as primarily an organization for agita­tion in favor of universal suffrage. So, the alliance with the bourgeoisie main­tained a clear class line.

The period 1831-32 was the only point in modern British history when a bourgeois-democratic revolution might have been possible. Had the Duke of Wellington prevailed, Britain probably would have been shaken by a revolution on an even more radical scale than the 1848 French revolution. But the British landed class lost its nerve and capitulated; they extended the fran­chise, eliminated the rotten boroughs and gave power to the Whigs, the party of the industrial and commercial classes.

So the bourgeoisie betrayed their proletarian allies, just as the French bourgeoisie led by Lafayette had done in 1830. The franchise which they ac­cepted extended the electorate to little more than ten percent, totally excluding the mass of the proletariat.

This was a great betrayal and was generally recognized as such at the time. In fact, the most advanced ele­ments in the British movement com­pared the Whigs to the Lafayetteists in France. This was a great blow to the working-class movement. It took about five years for the British work­ing class to regroup, recover and again agitate for universal suffrage.

The movement against the new poor law

The new regime, while liberal in its slight expansion of the franchise and freedoms of expression, pursued directly anti-proletarian laissez faire economic policies. The first measure of the government as a result of the Reform Act was to smash the trade unions and to revoke the "poor laws." Administered by the Anglican Church, "poor law" relief was a form of wel­fare for those who could not support themselves, an institution going back to Tudor times.

The origin of Chartism as a revo­lutionary movement lies in the mass
agitation against the new "poor law" legislation, which required recipients
to live sexually segregated in virtue prisons—an 1834 version of force sterilization. The attitude of the British working masses was defiance: "If the government attempts this, we will fight to the death." The mass movement against the "poor law" swept the nor them weaving villages, not when the "poor law" was passed, but a few years later, when Britain entered a severe depression and the masses were appealing for welfare relief.

The early leader of the movement against the new laws, interesting! was not an Owenite but a traditional Methodist minister named J.R. Steven He opposed the elimination of the "po< laws" not in the name of progress b from the traditions of Tory radicalisr "How can you do this to the people England? These laws have stood fi 300 years!" Listen to a typical fire-breathing speech by J.R. Stevens 1839:

"Men of Norwich, fight with your swords, fight with your pistols, fight with your daggers. Women, fight with your nails and teeth [a traditional!! male chauvinist was he, indeed!]. Hu bands and wives, brothers and sister we will war to the knife, so help r God."

—quoted in Mark Hovell,The Chartist Movement

J.R. Stevens was arrested, yet the anti-"poor law" agitation was successful. The regime retreated and never instituted the new "poor law,” although the legislation was not formal repealed.

Contradictions of Chartism

In 1839 the anti-"poor law" move­ment intersected another, very dif­ferent political movement. The London labor aristocracy, which had formed the leadership of the National Union of the Working Classes, reconstituted itself as the London Workingmen's Associa­tion to propagandize for universal suf­frage. While based on a six-point democratic Charter, the London Work­ingmen's Association restricted its membership to workers. When the vio­lently insurrectionary but defensive "poor law" mass movement was de­flected into this movement for uni­versal suffrage and democratic elec­toral reforms, this intersection pro­duced Chartism.

Chartism embodied a tension which paralleled Blanquism, although in an inverse fashion. Blanquism was based on a communist program, while re­maining within the political compass of the bourgeois-democratic revolu­tion. Chartism based itself on a bourgeois-democratic program, while representing a purely proletarian, in­surrectionary movement.

The stated program of Chartism was not different from English bourgeois radicalism. But its working-class forms of organization, its ulterior so­cialist program and the violent tone of its propaganda repelled the liberal bourgeoisie. Here is an example of typical Chartist propaganda:

"But though the employment of physical force is as remote as possible from our wishes, the time may come, may perhaps be near, in which the defense of all that is dear to us will compel us to have recourse to it. If our rights as citizens and as men are threatened to be eternally withdrawn from us, if the burden of the nations are always to be disproportionally thrown upon the working classes while property is suffered to remain untaxed, if we are evermore forbidden to purchase our bread in the cheapest market, if a knot of poor law commissioners is always to treat poverty as a crime and to cut asunder the marriage tie, if our ad­dresses to the legislature continue to be visited with contempt and the hope of redress becomes extinguished in our bosoms, then, sir, we honestly tell you we do not mean to submit. On the heads of our oppressors be the guilt and the consequences."

—quoted in Dorothy Thompson, The Early Chartists

Although Chartism had a straight­forward democratic program, which even sections of the liberal bourgeoi­sie could accept, they were not pre­pared to associate with this kind of propaganda and movement. This was the fundamental contradiction in Chartism: it was a working-class movement with an insurrectionary thrust and an ulterior "levelling11 pro­gram, taut with a strictly bourgeois-democratic formal program.

The revolutionary climax: 1839-42

Within Chartism there were four main tendencies. The extreme left were London-based Jacobin communists, led by Bronterre O'Brien, who had trans­lated Buonarroti's work on Babeuf, George Julian Harney and Dr. John Taylor, who had fought with Byron in Greece. They were intensely inter­nationalist and steeped in the French revolutionary tradition. They were re­inforced by a group of emigres from the Polish national revolution of 1830, who throughout this period played the role of a revolutionizing and inter­nationalizing factor.

The Chartist masses in the weaving villages of the north were originally organized by Tory radicals like J.R. Stevens. However, this constituency was captured by an Irish nationalist demagogue, named-Feargus O'Connor, who eventually went insane and who displayed • irrationality even in this period.

The right wing of the Chartist move­ment was based on the London labor aristocracy, which produced quality consumer goods for the wealthy bour­geois market. This wing of the move­ment was led by William Lovett, who was the original leader of Chartism.
Chartism also had a radical bour­geois appendage, standing outside the workers movement, led by a funny-money crank named Thomas Atwood. He was a banker who argued, "We'll eradicate poverty, unemployment, everything. All we have to do is print more money."

In 1839 the Chartists led a mass campaign to petition parliament. The Chartists convened a series of demo­cratic mass meetings and elected the General Convention of the Industrious Classes, which was the first national, inclusive body with all tendencies, with the proletariat represented more or less in proportion to their strength at the base level.

As it became more and more certain that the petition was going to be re­jected, as the hour approached, the Convention faced the question, "What to do next?" The Jacobin communists like Harney and O'Brien began making speeches in favor of insurrection. In response, the bourgeois component split from the Convention.

Significantly, Lovett and the labor aristocracy remained in the Convention to the end. In fact, when Dr. John Tay­lor, Lovett's main factional opponent, was arrested for agitation, Lovett took the lead in defending him, thereby provoking his own arrest. This strik­ingly demonstrates the intense class solidarity of Chartism.

A revolutionary crisis had opened. But this crisis was defused by the absence of leadership in the Conven­tion as well as by the competent leadership of the liberal government.

The Convention vacillated. First they voted to call a general strike if the petition was rejected. The very next day, however, they voted to re­scind the call for a general strike. Then they voted to undertake a series of economic measures, such as boy­cotting taxed goods and withholding certain tax payments. But since their constituency was largely unemployed and appealing for welfare under the poor laws, such measures could not be effective. These were weapons suitable to bourgeois radicals, but not to the workers movement.

After the rejection of the petition, the enormous mobilizations and ex­pectations raised by the Convention dissipated in a series of isolated skirmishes and uncoordinated attempts at insurrection. The Jacobin Chartists with the Polish exiled revolutionaries evidently plotted an insurrection but were incapable of mustering the forces and support.

I believe that in 1839 there was the possibility of an uprising like the
Lyons silk weavers' insurrection, but raised to the tenth power. If the gov­ernment had committed an atrocity, mass violence would certainly have erupted. Of course, there was no pos­sibility of a proletarian revolution in 1839. But there could have been amass proletarian upheaval.

Now, working-class history all too often is discussed in terms of "maturity" and "immaturity." Such terms have an organic, unconscious connotation-the workers movement simply develops automatically. This abstracts from the crucial mechanisms through which historical experiences are transmitted from one proletarian generation to the next.

But in dealing with Chartism in 1839 I believe that the failure of the movement genuinely reflects the "im­maturity" of the British working-class movement. Chartism at this time rep­resented the first mass, national work­ing-class movement encompassing all the proletarian tendencies. In the ab­sence of an evolved leadership, and the kinds of historical experiences to produce that leadership, the Chartist* movement could not have generated simply through factional struggle a more competent and capable leadership. Chartism foundered through the several-sided "immaturity" of the working class, not a crisis of leader­ship in the sense that this is applicable to the present working-class movement.

Revolutionary continuity

In 1842 Chartism passed through another revolutionary climax, which I cannot delve into during this talk. After 1842 the main leadership of Chartism around O'Connor, an unstable and irrational man, attempted to turn the movement into cooperativism. His so-called Chartist land plan involved purchasing land and swindling; finally, O'Connor went bankrupt.

But the left wing of Chartism led by Julian Harney reacted to the de­feat in 1842 by turning in a very different direction, a response which contains useful lessons for us today.

Harney realized that after the defeats of 1839 and 1842, the latter quite bloody, the British workers movement was in a depression. Yet Chartism retained its mass following and very considerable organizational resources.
Harney realized that revolutionary upheavals were imminent throughout Europe. Moreover, London was a major center for French, German, Italian and Polish revolutionary exiles. So, Harney devoted his main energies inthe!840's toward these circles and toward revo­lution in Metternichean Europe, turning his great Chartist newspaper, The Northern Star, into the most inter­nationalist working-class press of its day.

I'll conclude this presentation with an anecdote. But the anecdote illus­trates the theme of this entire series of talks: that Marxism originated not as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy, but required an assimilation of the experiences and programs of the previous generations of revolutionary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolu­tion with a collectivist social order.

Friedrich Engels at the age of 23 was sent from the University of Berlin to Manchester to learn business at one of his father's factories. Being a Utopian socialist Engels first associated himself with the Owenites and contributed to the Owenite press, the New Moral World.

Soon Engels visited Julian Harney in London. Engels explained German True Socialism and described the Hegelian Left, but Harney compre­hended very little. Then Engels de­clared that history had already demon­strated that the bourgeoisie was no longer progressive, that the working class was progressive, and that once the bourgeoisie could be convinced of this they would relinquish power to the proletariat.

Harney, with ten years as a working-class agitator and numerous imprison­ments, looked up at him. And he said, "Nonsense.' We're going to have to throw them out.1" The educators too must be educated.