“We make a nation of helots, and have no free citizens”, wrote Adam Ferguson in his description of England in 1765. The Industrial Revolution was the furnace in which this class of modern wage-slaves was forged. First to enter the road of capitalist development, Britain was thrust into the privileged position of the leading world power. For the next century and a half, the ruling class of these small islands maintained its world hegemony through its domination of the world market and its Empire. Thanks to this, the British bourgeoisie became the richest, strongest and most far-sighted ruling class in the world. From this position they exuded colossal confidence in their future mission, which they mapped out not in years, but in decades and centuries. “Not for nothing”, noted Leon Trotsky, “has it been said of the British imperialists that they do their thinking in terms of centuries and continents.”[1]
The British proletariat was created under the hammer blow of events. As this new oppressed class emerged from the womb of capitalism, it was accompanied by violent birth-pains that scarred its consciousness.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalist economic relations caused the wholesale destruction of the English peasantry and the break-up of the old guild system that had previously assured a certain degree of social stability. The overwhelming mass of peasantry was ruined by the Enclosure Acts introduced by the powerful landowners, and disappeared in a social revolution that created a proletariat ready for the service of the owners of capital, in agriculture and the new industries.
In the decade following 1717 there were only fifteen Acts of Enclosure, whilst in the two decades from 1797 to 1820, the period of the Napoleonic Wars, there were 1,727 of such Acts. These enclosures threw hundreds of thousands off the land, and created a wretched swarm of landless and propertyless men, women and children – a reserve army of wage-earners “freed” completely from any connection with the soil – made ready for industrial exploitation.
The mass exodus from the villages into the towns, an essential ingredient in the development of capitalism, provided a plentiful supply of cheap labour-power for the new class of profit-seeking entrepreneurs. Under the incessant blows of capitalist development, the traditional relationship between masters and journeymen began to break down, as artisans lost their independence and were absorbed into the new class of proletarians.
As the contemporary Sir John Clapham wrote, this proletarianisation was “a kind of hell into which peasants may fall if things are not bettered.” And, of course, nothing was bettered, as everything became worse. The coming of modern capitalism, accompanied by machine production, uprooted the old basis of rural life and ushered in a new shocking world of “nature, red in tooth and claw”. For the toiling masses, it was an alien world, brutalised, and turned upside down, a world bled dry of all compassion.
The radical newspaper Black Dwarf described the awful plight of the new working class:
Locked up in factories eight stories high, he has no relaxation till the ponderous engine stops and then he goes home to get refreshed for the next day; no time for sweet association with his family; they are all alike fatigued and exhausted.[2]
Marx wrote that capitalism came into being “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”[3] Crushed between hammer and anvil, the infant proletariat, only recently torn from its roots in the countryside, was hurled into the inhuman conditions of the factory system. Their original peasant outlook was ruthlessly burned out by their radically different collective experience at the point of production. From the very beginning, in a battle for survival, the working class was transformed from a passive exploited mass, into a class increasingly conscious of itself. In the words of Marx, the new proletariat was being changed from a “class in-itself” into a “class for-itself”. Collective consciousness, the hallmark of the proletariat as a class, was being shaped under the hammer blows of everyday life, in the factories, workshops and deep in the bowels of the earth.
The British working class was forced to organise for its own self-defence and self-preservation. Capital is a concentrated social power, while the workers own nothing but their individual labour power. Therefore, the agreement between worker and employer – Labour and Capital – can never be based on equal terms. Under the capitalist system the workers’ strength is continually undermined by competition among themselves. The capitalists deliberately promoted this competition between workers as a means of depressing wage levels and to tilt the balance of forces more in their favour. The only real power the proletariat possesses is its collective strength, and this can only be effectively expressed through combination and organisation. In that sense, the creation of trade unions was the first conscious step of collective organisation, and represented the birth of the organised labour movement. In the cotton districts, factory hands formed the nucleus of the Labour movement. With their newly found collective identity, they formed the vanguard of early trade unionism.
From the very beginning, the working class bore all the marks and scars of a slave class. However, compared to the old slavery, the worker seems to be free because he is not sold once and for all, but piecemeal by the hour, day or week. But he is still forced to sell himself, “being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class”, to quote Engels. Yet, deep in the very being of the working class, deep in its collective soul, was also being born the instinctive will to fight for its own social emancipation. The working class, given its social position in collective labour, is a revolutionary class. It is propelled by the very conditions of life to strive to put itself at the head of society, not to secure a privileged position for itself, but to carry through the abolition of all classes.