A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (43 page)

The history taught in British schools often treats Chartism as a minor movement, damned by its eventual failure. But it was the biggest mass movement in Britain in the 19th century. Three times it threw the ruling class into a panic. In 1838-39 hundreds of thousands of workers attended mass meetings at which the points of the Chartist programme were presented and debated; tens of thousands began to drill in expectation of a popular rising; the government was worried enough to send the military to the industrial areas; and there was an attempted armed rising in Newport, south Wales.
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Then in 1842 the first general strike in history occurred in Lancashire as workers marched from factory to factory, putting out furnaces and spreading their action.
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Finally, in 1848, roused to new action by industrial depression in Britain, famine in Ireland and a wave of revolutions in Europe, masses of workers prepared again for confrontation. Their hopes were disappointed. The state stood firm, the lower middle class rallied behind it, the Chartist leaders vacillated, and the anger which had led 100,000 to gather in Kennington, south London, dissipated—but not before the government had turned half of London into an armed camp.
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Like every living movement, Chartism comprised a mixture of different groups holding different ideas. Its formal programme—the points of the Charter—was one of far-reaching democratic reform based on universal male suffrage and annual parliaments rather than on a socialist reorganisation of the economy. Its leaders were divided between adherents of ‘moral force’, who believed in winning over the existing rulers, and the adherents of ‘physical force’, who believed in overthrowing them. Even the physical force party had no real idea of how to achieve its goal. Yet in the dozen odd years of its existence Chartism showed something quite dramatic. The bourgeoisie had not yet finished fighting its own battles to clear away the debris of feudalism in much of Europe. But it was already creating alongside it a new exploited class capable of turning the revolutionary language of the French Revolution against the bourgeoisie itself.

This was as important for world history as the French Revolution and the industrial revolution had been. The success of Britain’s capitalists in industrialising was encouraging others elsewhere to try to emulate them. There were already a few factories in France and parts of southern Germany before 1789. Now islands of industry were emerging not only in these countries, but in northern Italy, Catalonia, Bohemia, the northern United States, and even in the Russian Urals and on the Nile. Everywhere there was the smoke of the new factories there were also outbursts of spontaneous anger and defiance from those who laboured in them. In 1830 the Parisian masses took to the streets for the first time since 1795. The advisers of the Bourbon king, Charles X, saw only one way to halt the revolution—to persuade the king to go straight into exile and to wheel on in his place a relative, the ‘bourgeois monarch’ Louis Philippe of Orleans. The manoeuvre succeeded, but the display of lower class power was enough to inspire a flurry of risings in other parts of Europe—all unsuccessful apart from the one which separated Belgium from Holland to form an independent state under British protection.

The French poet and historian Lamartine commented, ‘The proletarian question is the one that will cause a terrible explosion in present day society if society and governments fail to fathom and resolve it’.
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His prophesy was proven correct 18 years later when the whole of Europe was shaken by revolution and Lamartine himself enjoyed a brief moment of glory.

‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism’, begins the introduction to one of the most influential pamphlets ever. Two Germans exiled in Paris completed it at the end of 1847. It predicted imminent revolution, and scarcely was the ink dry on the first printed copies than revolution had broken out. But this, alone, does not explain the enormous impact of a work that was soon to be translated into every European language. What enthralled readers then—and still does today—was its ability in a mere 40 or so pages to locate the emergence of the new industrial capitalist society in the overall scheme of human history. It endeavoured to show that it was as transitory as the forms of society which preceded it, and to explain the immense class conflicts which were besetting it even where it had not yet fully disposed of the old feudal order.

The authors, Frederick Engels and Karl Marx, were men of enormous ability. But it was not simply personal genius which ensured they made such an enormous impact—any more than it was the personal genius of Plato or Aristotle, of Confucius or Buddha, of Saul of Tarsus or the prophet Mohammed, of Voltaire or Rousseau, that ensured their place in history. They lived at a place and in a time when all the contradictions of a period came together, and they had at their disposal something the others did not: access to intellectual traditions and scientific advances which enabled them not merely to feel but also to explain these contradictions.

They were both from middle class families in the Prussian Rhineland. Marx’s father was a well-to-do government official, of Protestant religion but Jewish upbringing and ancestry. Engels’ father was a prosperous manufacturer with factories in the Rhineland and in Manchester. In the Rhineland of the 1830s and 1840s such backgrounds did not necessarily lead to conformity. Capitalism was more developed there than anywhere else in Germany, and the French occupation of only a few years before had swept away the residues of feudal society. But these were still dominant in the Prussian monarchy which ruled the region. Even among the older middle class there was a desire for ‘reforms’ which would free them from this burden, and among the younger generation this translated into a spirit of radicalism.

Germany as a whole, like most of the rest of Europe, had gone through a period of intellectual reaction in the first decades of the century. The country’s most famous philosopher, Hegel, now wrapped his old belief in the progress of the human spirit through history in mystical, religious clothing and extolled the virtues of the Prussian state (or at least its ‘estates’-based constitution of the 1820s). But among the generation who entered the universities in the 1830s and early 1840s there was a turning back to the ideas of the Enlightenment and even the early years of the French Revolution. ‘Young Hegelians’ such as Bruno Bauer turned Hegel’s notion that everything changes through contradiction into a liberal criticism of existing German society. David Strauss extended Voltaire’s attack on the Old Testament into a questioning of the New Testament. Ludwig Feuerbach took up the materialist philosophy expounded 80 years before by d’Holbach and Helvetius. Karl Grün won a wide following for his ‘true socialist’ call for enlightened men of all classes to work together to bring about a better society than either feudalism or capitalism.

Marx and Engels were an integral part of this generation as it tried to come to terms with a society caught between past and present. They studied Hegel, took up the arguments of Feuerbach, delved into the ideas of Helvetius and d’Holbach, and followed up Strauss’s criticism of religion. But they did more than that. They also confronted the new industrial capitalism which was making its first, limited inroads. Engels was sent by his father to help manage his Manchester factory and experienced at first hand the clash between the bright future promised by liberal ideals in Germany and the harsh reality of life for workers in Britain’s industrial revolution—chronicling these in his
The Condition of the Working Class in England
. He also came across workers who were fighting back against this reality. Arriving in Manchester in the aftermath of the general strike of 1842, he joined the Chartist movement.
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This in turn led him into contact with the ‘Utopian Socialist’ criticisms of capitalism contained in the writings of Robert Owen, and to a critical study of the ‘political economy’ used to justify the existing system.
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After finishing his doctorate on Greek atomist philosophy, Marx was appointed editor of a recently formed liberal paper, the
Rheinische Zeitung
, at the age of 24. This led to clashes with the Prussian censor—the paper was banned after six months—and brought Marx face to face for the first time, he later explained, with ‘material questions’. He wrote about the attempts by the nobility to treat the peasants’ tradition of gathering wood from the forest as ‘theft’, and began to consider what property was and where it came from. He was exiled to Paris where a critical reading of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right
, with its defence of monarchic coercion as the only way to bind together an atomised society, convinced him that a merely liberal constitution could not produce real freedom for people. He began a serious study of the political economists, especially Smith and Ricardo, and wrote his conclusions about the nature of capitalism in an unpublished manuscript.
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Alienation

Marx noted that the system as described by Smith, Ricardo and their followers made the lives of people dependent upon the operations of the market. But the market itself was nothing other than the interaction of the products of people’s labour. In other words, people had become prisoners of their own past activity. Feuerbach had described the way people worshipped gods they themselves had created as ‘alienation’. Marx now applied the same term to the capitalist market:

Marx’s conclusion was that workers could only overcome this inhumanity by collectively taking control of the process of production, by ‘communism’. Human liberation did not lie, as the liberal democrats said, in a mere political revolution to overthrow the remnants of feudalism, but in social revolution to establish a ‘communist’ society.

Marx and Engels worked together to give practical content to their newly formed ideas through participation in the groups of exiled German socialists in Paris and Brussels. This culminated in them joining an organisation of exiled artisans, the League of the Just, which was soon to be renamed the Communist League—and to commission them to write
The Communist Manifesto
.

In the meantime, they developed their ideas. In the book
The Holy Family
and an unpublished manuscript,
The German Ideology,
they criticised the left Hegelians—and with them the notion inherited from the Enlightenment that society could be changed merely by the struggle of reason against superstition. They used Feuerbach’s materialism to do this, but in the process went beyond Feuerbach. He had seen religion as an ‘alienated’ expression of humanity. But he had not asked why such alienation occurred. Marx and Engels traced this alienation to the efforts of successive generations of human beings to wrest a livelihood from nature and the way this led to differing relations between people. Feuerbach’s materialism, they insisted, had neglected the role of human beings in changing the external world as well as being changed by it. This ‘dialectical’ interaction, they argued, permitted a materialist interpretation of history. They combined it with their critique of political economy to provide an overall view of history and society in
The Communist Manifesto
.

This is not the place to go into the details of that view—especially since this whole book is an attempt to interpret history on the basis of it. But certain important points do need spelling out.

The new world system

Marx’s ideas are often dismissed as out of date because they were written a century and a half ago—especially by those who base themselves on a simplistic reading of Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
, published more than 40 years before Marx was born. Yet, written at a time when industrial capitalism was confined to a small area of the western fringe of Eurasia, the
Manifesto
presents a prophetic vision of capitalism filling the world—of what today is called ‘globalisation’:

If such passages are to be criticised, it cannot be because they are out of date, but rather because the processes Marx described were only in an embryonic condition when he wrote. Today’s world is much more like Marx’s picture than was the world of 1847.

Marx and Engels took up the theme of alienation and presented it in much simpler language:

This damns bourgeois society itself:

Marx and Engels only had space to give a cursory overview of the crisis and the long term destiny of capitalism in the
Manifesto
. Much of the rest of Marx’s life was devoted—through a scrupulous reading of the texts of bourgeois political economy and an intense empirical study of the world’s first industrial capitalism, that of Britain—to elaborating how the logic of capitalism, of a world built upon the accumulation and circulation of alienated labour, worked itself out.
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Marx and Engels noted an important contrast between capitalism and previous forms of class society. Previous ruling classes looked to enforce conservatism to bolster their rule. But however much capitalists looked to this as a political and ideological option, the economic momentum of their own society continually undercut it:

Workers and the new system

The
Manifesto
stressed something else about capitalism, and about the working class arising out of it: