See also William Morris Speech in 1888 here :
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/whigs-democrats-and-socialists-by.html
The book, an English translation of which is here republished, was
first issued in Germany in 1845. The author, at that time, was young,
twenty-four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with
its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed. It was
translated into English, in 1885, by an American lady, Mrs. F. Kelley
Wischnewetzky, and published in the following year in New York. The American
edition being as good as exhausted, and having never been extensively circulated
on this side of the Atlantic, the present English copyright edition is brought
out with the full consent of all parties interested.
For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix were written in English by the author. The first had little to do with the book itself; it discussed the American Working-Class Movement of the day, and is, therefore, here omitted as irrelevant; the second — the original preface — is largely made use of in the present introductory remarks.
The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which capitalistic production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin; and, again, the commission agent who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or Christian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months, finds out that in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native country. The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of saving time and trouble. And it is the same with the relation between the manufacturer and his “hands.”
The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new industrial epoch. The repeal of the Corn Laws[1] and the financial reforms subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce all the elbow-room they had asked for. The discovery of the Californian and Australian gold-fields followed in rapid succession. The colonial markets developed at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing English manufactured goods. In India millions of hand-weavers were finally crushed out by the Lancashire power-loom. China was more and more being opened up. Above all, the United States — then, commercially speaking, a mere colonial market, but by far the biggest of them all — underwent an economic development astounding even for that rapidly progressive country. And, finally, the new means of communication introduced at the close of the preceding period — railways and ocean steamers — were now worked out on an international scale; they realised actually what had hitherto existed only potentially, a world-market. This world-market, at first, was composed of a number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries grouped around one manufacturing centre — England which consumed the greater part of their surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return with the greater part of their requirements in manufactured articles. No wonder England’s industrial progress was colossal and unparalleled, and such that the status of 1844 now appears to us as comparatively primitive and insignificant. And in proportion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moralised. The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill [2] was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed — at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case — to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages. And thus it renders more and more evident the great central fact that the cause of the miserable condition of the working-class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in the capitalistic system itself. The wage-worker sells to the capitalist his labour-power for a certain daily sum. After a few hours’ work he has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance of his contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete his working-day; and the value he produces during these additional hours of surplus labour is surplus value, which costs the capitalist nothing, but yet goes into his pocket. That is the basis of the system which tends more and more to split up civilised society into a few Rothschilds and Vanderbilts, the owners of all the means of production and subsistence, on the one hand, and an immense number of wage-workers, the owners of nothing but their labour-power, on the other. And that this result is caused, not by this or that secondary grievance, but by the system itself — this fact has been brought out in bold relief by the development of Capitalism in England since 1847.
Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox, and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous. Drainage has been introduced or improved, wide avenues have been opened out athwart many of the worst “slums” I had to describe. “Little Ireland” [3] had disappeared, and the “Seven Dials” [4] are next on the list for sweeping away. But what of that? Whole districts which in 1844 I could describe as almost idyllic have now, with the growth of the towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort, and misery. Only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longer tolerated. The bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art of hiding the distress of the working-class. But that, in regard to their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place is amply proved by the Report of the Royal Commission “on the Housing of the Poor,” 1885. And this is the case, too, in other respects. Police regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but they can only hedge in the distress of the workers, they cannot remove it.
But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it. France, Germany, and especially America, are the formidable competitors who, at this moment — as foreseen by me in 1844 — are more and more breaking up England’s industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid rate than the latter; and, curious enough, they have at this moment arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in 1844. With regard to America, the parallel is indeed most striking. True, the external surroundings in which the working-class is placed in America are very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and the results, if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same order. Hence we find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-day, for a legal limitation of the working-time, especially of women and children in factories; we find the truck-system in full blossom, and the cottage-system, in rural districts, made use of by the “bosses” as a means of domination over the workers. When I received, in 1886, the American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district, I seemed but to read my own description of the North of England colliers’ strike of 1844. The same cheating of the workpeople by false measure; the same truck-system the same attempt to break the miners’ resistance by the capitalists’ last, but crushing, resource, — the eviction of the men out of their dwellings, the cottages owned by the companies.
I have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to date, or to point out in detail all the changes that have taken place since 1844. And for two reasons: Firstly, to do this properly, the size of the book must be about doubled; and, secondly, the first volume of “Das Kapital,” by Karl Marx, an English translation of which is before the public, contains a very ample description of the state of the British working-class, as it was about 1865, that is to say, at the time when British industrial prosperity reached its culminating point. I should, then, have been obliged again to go over the ground already covered by Marx’s celebrated work.
It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint of this book — philosophical, economical, political — does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844. My, book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and as the human embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches of our fish-ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of Modern Socialism from one of its ancestors, German philosophy. Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that Communism is not a mere party doctrine of the working-class, but a theory compassing the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class, from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract, but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. So long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working-class, so long the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the working-class alone. The French bourgeois of 1789, too, declared the emancipation of the bourgeoisie to be the emancipation of the whole human race; but the nobility and clergy would not see it; the proposition — though for the time being, with respect to feudalism, an abstract historical truth — soon became a mere sentimentalism, and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary struggle. And to-day, the very people who, from the “impartiality” of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes — these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers — wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The recurring period of the great industrial crisis is stated in the text as five years. This was the period apparently indicated by the course of events from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history from 1842 to 1868 has shown that the real period is one of ten years; that the intermediate revulsions were secondary, and tended more and more to disappear. Since 1868 the state of things has changed again, of which more anon.
I have taken care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies, amongst others that of an imminent social revolution in England, which my youthful ardour induced me to venture upon. The wonder is, not that a good many of them proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved right, and that the critical state of English trade, to be brought on by Continental and especially American competition, which I then foresaw — though in too short a period — has now actually come to pass. In this respect I can, and am bound to, bring the book up to date, by placing here an article which I published in the London Commonweal of March 1, 1885, under the heading: “England in 1845 and in 1885” It gives at the same time a short outline of the history of the English working-class during these forty years, and is as follows:
“Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis,
solvable to all appearances by force only. The immense and rapid development of
manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the increase
of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was violently interrupted by a
general commercial crash, followed, after a long period of chronic depression,
by a few short years of prosperity, and always ending in feverish
over-production and consequent renewed collapse. The capitalist class clamoured
for Free Trade in corn, and threatened to enforce it by sending the starving
population of the towns back to the country districts whence they came, to
invade them, as John Bright said, not as paupers begging for bread, but as an
army quartered upon the enemy. The working masses of the towns demanded their
share of political power — the People’s Charter; they were supported by the
majority of the small trading class, and the only difference between the two was
whether the Charter should be carried by physical or by moral force. Then came
the commercial crash of 1847 and the Irish famine, and with both the prospect of
revolution.
“The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle-class.
The Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen frightened the
small middle-class of England and disorganised the narrower, but more
matter-of-fact movement of the English working-class. At the very moment when
Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed
internally before even it collapsed externally on the 10th of April, 1848[5] . The action of the working-class was
thrust into the background. The capitalist class triumphed along the whole
line.
“The Reform Bill of 1831[6] had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over
the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the
manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those
sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with
the landed interest — bankers, stock-jobbers, fund-holders, etc. Free Trade
meant the re-adjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial
policy of England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing
capitalists — the class which now represented the nation. And they set about
this task with a will. Every obstacle to industrial production was mercilessly
removed. The tariff and the whole system of taxation were revolutionised.
Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that end of the utmost
importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening of all raw produce,
and especially of the means of living of the working-class; the reduction of the
cost of raw material, and the keeping down — if not as yet the bringing down
of wages. England was to become the ‘workshop of the world'; all other
countries were to become for England what Ireland already was — markets for her
manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food.
England, the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an
ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her,
the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect!
“The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of
this their great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for
traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their more
narrow-minded compeers on the Continent.. Chartism was dying out. The revival of
commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of 1847 had spent itself, was
put down altogether to the credit of Free Trade. Both these circumstances had
turned the English working-class, politically, into the tail of the ‘great
Liberal Party,’ the party led by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained,
had to be perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist
opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the
one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that
the middle-class can never obtain full social and political power over the
nation except by the help of the working-class. Thus a gradual change came over
the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all
manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into
acts regulating almost all trades was tolerated. Trades’ Unions, hitherto
considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as
perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound
economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had
been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally
very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own
time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a
disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were
repealed. And, practically, that horrid ‘People’s Charter’ actually became the
political programme of the very manufacturers who had opposed it to the last.
‘The Abolition of the Property Qualification’ and ‘Vote by Ballot’ are now the
law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884[7] make a near approach to ‘universal suffrage,’ at least
such as it now exists in Germany; the Redistribution Bill now before Parliament
creates ‘equal electoral districts’ — on the whole not more unequal than those
of Germany; ‘payment of members,’ and shorter, if not actually ‘annual
Parliaments,’ are visibly looming in the distance — and yet there are people who
say that Chartism is dead.
“The Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its
predecessors, has had strange bedfellows and successors. The very people who put
it down have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary executors. Louis
Napoleon had to create an independent and united Italy, Bismarck had to
revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian independence, and the English
manufacturers had to enact the People’s Charter.
“For England, the effects of this domination of the
manufacturing capitalists were at first startling. Trade revived and extended to
a degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous
astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing compared with
the immense mass of productions of the twenty years from 1850 to 1870, with the
overwhelming figures of exports and imports, of wealth accumulated in the hands
of capitalists and of human working power concentrated in the large towns. The
progress was indeed interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in 1857
as well as in 1866; but these revulsions were now considered as natural,
inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to, and which always
set themselves right in the end.
“And the condition of the working-class during this period?
There was temporary improvement even for the great mass. But this improvement
always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of the
unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of hands by new machinery, by
the immigration of the agricultural population, now, too, more and more
superseded by machines.
“A permanent improvement can be recognised for two ‘protected’
sections only of the working-class. Firstly, the factory hands. The fixing by
Act of Parliament of their working-day within relatively rational limits has
restored their physical constitution and endowed them with a moral superiority,
enhanced by their local concentration. They are undoubtedly better off than
before 1848. The best proof is that, out of ten strikes they make, nine are
provoked by the manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of
securing a reduced production. You can never get the masters to agree to work
‘short time,’ let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the
work-people to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man.
“Secondly, the great Trades’ Unions. They are the organisations
of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men predominates, or is
alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and children nor of
machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The engineers, the
carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of them a power, to that
extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers’ labourers, they
can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery. That their condition
has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of
this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their
employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good
terms. They form an aristocracy among the working-class; they have succeeded in
enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it
as final. They are the model working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and
they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible
capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.
“But as to the great mass of working-people, the state of
misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower.
The East End of London is an ever-spreading pool of stagnant misery and
desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral,
when in work. And so in all other large towns — abstraction made of the
privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller towns and in the
agricultural districts. The law which reduces the value of labour-power
to the value of the necessary means of subsistence, and the other law which
reduces its average price, as a rule, to the minimum of those means of
subsistence, these laws act upon them with the irresistible force of an
automatic engine which crushes them between its wheels.
“This, then, was the position created by the Free Trade policy
of 1847, and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing capitalists. But
then a change came. The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by a slight and
short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not, indeed, pass
through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have
had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of
industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for
prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull
depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have
been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?
“The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that
England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world.
And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure
delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be
established wherever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries
besides England — France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia — have coals.
And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into Irish
pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists.
They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the
rest of the world; and the consequence is that the manufacturing monopoly
enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up.
“But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the pivot of the
present social system of England. Even while that monopoly lasted, the markets
could not keep pace with the increasing productivity of English manufacturers;
the decennial crises were the consequence. And new markets are getting scarcer
every day, so much so that even the Negroes of the Congo are now to be forced
into the civilisation attendant upon Manchester calicos, Staffordshire pottery,
and Birmingham hardware. How will it be when Continental, and especially
American, goods flow in in ever-increasing quantities — when the predominating
share, still held by British manufacturers, will become reduced from year to
year? Answer, Free Trade, thou universal panacea.
“I am not the first to point this out. Already in 1883, at the
Southport meeting of the British Association,[8] Mr. Inglis Palgrave, the President of the Economic
section, stated plainly that ‘the days of great trade profits in England were
over, and there was a pause in the progress of several great branches of
industrial labour. The country might almost be said to be entering the
non-progressive state.’
“But what is to be the consequence? Capitalist
production cannot stop. It must go on increasing and expanding, or it
must die. Even now the mere reduction of England’s lion’s share in the supply of
the world’s markets means stagnation, distress, excess of capital here, excess
of unemployed workpeople there. What will it be when the increase of yearly
production is brought to a complete stop?
“Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles, for
capitalistic production. Its very basis is the necessity of constant expansion,
and this constant expansion now becomes impossible. It ends in a deadlock. Every
year England is brought nearer face to face with the question: either the
country must go to pieces, or capitalist production must. Which is it to be?
“And the working-class? If even under the unparalleled
commercial and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1868, they have had to undergo
such misery; if even then the great bulk of them experienced at best but a
temporary improvement of their condition, while only a small, privileged,
‘protected’ minority was permanently benefited, what will it be when this
dazzling period is brought finally to a close; when the present dreary
stagnation shall not only become intensified, but this, its intensified
condition, shall become the permanent and normal state of English trade?
“The truth is this: during the period of England’s industrial
monopoly the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the
benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parcelled out
amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass
had, at least, a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why, since
the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no Socialism in England. With the
breakdown of that monopoly, the English working-class will lose that privileged
position; it will find itself generally — the privileged and leading minority
not excepted on a level with its fellow-workers abroad. And that is the reason
why there will be Socialism again in England.”
To this statement of the case, as that case appeared to me In 1885, I have but little to add. Needless to say that to-day there is indeed “Socialism again in England,” and plenty of it — Socialism — Socialism of all shades: Socialism conscious and unconscious, Socialism prosaic and poetic, Socialism of the working-class and of the middle-class, for, verily, that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses. That shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of “society,” middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we Socialists of a past generation always held that public opinion. At the same time we have no reason to grumble at the symptom itself.
What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even more than the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally, that is the revival of the East End of London. That immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid despair, has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the “New Unionism,” that is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of “unskilled” workers. This organisation may to a great extent adopt the form of the old Unions of “skilled” workers but it is essentially different in character. The old Unions preserve the traditions of the time when they were, founded, and look upon the wages system as a once-for-all established, final fact, which they at best can modify in the interest of their members. The new Unions were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were Socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working-class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited “respectable” bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated “old” Unionists. And thus we see now these new Unions taking the lead of the working-class movement generally, and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud “old” Unions.
Undoubtedly, the East Enders have committed colossal blunders; so have their predecessors, and so do the doctrinaire Socialists who pooh-pooh them. A large class, like a great nation, never learns better or quicker than by undergoing the consequences of its own mistakes. And for all the faults committed in past, present and future, the revival of the East End of London remains one of the greatest and most fruitful facts of this fin de siècle, and glad and proud I am to have lived to see it.[9]
Notes
1. Corn
Laws: High grain tariffs adopted by the British Parliament in 1815 in the
interest of the landlords. The laws prohibited the importation of grain if its
price within the country was less than 80 shillings a quarter. An extremely
heavy burden on the poor, the Corn Laws were a disadvantage also to the
industrial bourgeoisie since they made labour-power clearer, shrank the home
market and hampered the development of foreign trade. They were repealed in
1846.
2.Ten-Hours’
Bill: Adopted by the British Parliament on June 8, 1847. It applied only to
juveniles 13-18 years old and to women workers.
3. Little
Ireland: A working-class district in Manchester during the forties of the
past century.
4. Seven
Dials: A working-class district in the centre of London.
5. The Chartist
Convent called for April 10, 1848 a mass meeting in London and a demonstration
of the workers for the purpose of submitting a new petition to Parliament.
Should the latter refuse to endorse the People’s. Charter, a demand raised in
the petition, the Convent intended to start an uprising. However, as a result of
the measures taken by the Government — it had inundated the capital with police,
troops and armed bourgeois. detachments — as well as the unpreparedness of the
Chartists for decisive action and the irresolution of their leaders, the
demonstration was a failure. The petition which the Chartist leader O'Connor had
ordered transported to Parliament was not even discussed by the House of
Commons.
6. The first
electoral reform bill was introduced in Parliament in March 1831 and adopted in
June 1832. It put an end to the political monopoly of the landed aristocracy,
bankers and usurers. In consequence of the treachery of the bourgeois Radicals,
who made use of the mass labour movement for the universal franchise merely to
promote their own interests, the law of 1832 fixed high property qualifications
in the towns (10 pounds) and counties (50 pounds), thus first opening the doors
of Parliament only to representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. The
proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie remained disfranchised.
7. In spite of the
mass movement of the workers for universal suffrage the second electoral reform
law, owing to the treachery of the opportunist trade-union leaders, granted the
franchise only to house-owners, householders and tenants of flats who paid an
annual rent of no less than £10. Thus, only the labour aristocracy was
enfranchised; the mass of urban workers, the small farmers and the rural
proletariat did not receive the right to vote under this measure, which was
adopted on August 15, 1867. A third .election reform, carried out in 1884 under
mass pressure in the rural areas, merely extended the 1867 law to rural
districts without satisfying the demands of the farm workers. About two million
men and all women were still barred from the polls after the third reform.
8. The British
Association for the Advancement of Science: A society founded in Britain at
the beginning of the nineteenth century and still existing. The transactions of
its annual sessions are published in the form of reports. In the nineteenth
century it counted no few progressive figures but at present its position is
reactionary in both politics and science.
9. In his Preface to
the second German edition of The Condition of the Working-Class in England
Engels quoted a passage from the above English Preface and then added the
following in conclusion:
“Since I wrote the above, six months ago, the English
working-class movement has again made a big step forward. The parliamentary
elections which took place the other day have given formal notice to both
official parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, that both of them would
thereafter have to reckon with a third party, the workers’ party. This workers’
party is only just being formed; its elements are still occupied with casting
off traditional prejudices of every sort — bourgeois, old trade-unionist and
even doctrinaire-socialist — so that they may finally be able to get together on
a basis common to all of them. And yet the instinct to unite which they followed
was already so great that it produced election results hitherto unheard-of in
England. In London two workers stood for election, and openly as Socialists at
that; the Liberals did not dare to put up their own men against them and the two
Socialists won by overwhelming and unexpected majorities. In Middlesbrough a
workers’ candidate contested a seat with a Liberal and a Conservative and was
elected In spite of the two; on the other hand, the new workers’ candidates who
bad made compacts with the Liberals failed hopelessly of election, with the
exception of a single one. Among the former so-called workers’ representatives,
that is, those people who are forgiven their being members of the working-class
because they themselves would like to drawn their quality of being workers in
the ocean of their liberalism, Henry Broadhurst, the most important
representative of the old unionism, was completely snowed under because he came
out against the eight-hour day. In two Glasgow, one Salford and several other
constituencies, independent workers’ candidates ran against candidates of both
the old parties. They were beaten, but so were the Liberal candidates. In short,
in a number of big city and industrial election districts the workers have
definitely severed all ties with the two old parties and thus achieved direct or
indirect successes, beyond anything witnessed in any previous election. And
boundless is the joy thereof among the working people. For the first time they
have seen and felt what they can achieve by using their suffrage in the interest
of their class. The spell which the superstitious belief in the ‘great Liberal
Party’ cast over the English workers for almost 40 years is broken. They have
seen by dint of striking examples that they, the workers, are the decisive power
in England if they only want to and know what they want; and the elections of
1892 marked the beginning of such knowing and wanting. The Continental workers’
movement will take care of the rest. By their further successes the Germans and
the French, who are already so numerously represented in their Parliaments and
local councils, will keep the spirit of emulation of the English going at a
quite adequate pace. And if in the not very distant future it appears that this
new Parliament cannot get anywhere with Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Gladstone cannot
get anywhere with this Parliament, the English workers’ party will surely be
sufficiently constituted to put an early end to the seesaw of the two old
parties, who have been succeeding each other in office and by this very means
perpetuating the rule of the bourgeoisie.”
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