5. The “Pompous Trades”

The collapse of Chartism opened up new problems for the British working class. For more than a decade, a significant layer of workers had broken with the parties of property and privilege, the Tories and Whigs, and had taken the revolutionary step in creating the first independent workers’ party in history. The demise of the Chartist movement marked a decisive break in this development. For the next twenty-five years, the labour movement was dominated by a radically different outlook, that of the “pompous trades and proud mechanics”, to use the words of Feargus O’Connor. “Defence not Defiance” became the motto of the skilled craft unions that now sprung up. But a defence, not of the workers as a whole, but of vested sectional interests, combined with a conscious policy of working within the parameters of the capitalist system. This was in stark contrast to the Owenite unions of the 1830s.

This abandonment of revolutionary trade unionism was no mere aberration or accident. The basis for this profound change was rooted in the spectacular development and growth of British capitalism and its all-embracing domination of the world market. The nineteenth century was the British Century, in the same way as the twentieth was the American. By the end of the Forties, the triumph of free trade pursued by the British ruling class permitted an unlimited expansion of its commerce, wealth and power. With its world-class navy, Britain ruled the waves unhindered and unchallenged. The rate of profit of British industry in these years was not of the level of five or ten per cent, but thousands of percent. During the 1850s and 1860s, Britain constructed the vast majority of the world’s railways, which served to create an ever-expanding market for its heavy industry. The governments of Peel and Gladstone championed a vigorous imperialist foreign and trade policy, where “trade followed the flag”. As a consequence, British exports went to every corner of the globe. It was the “Golden Age” of British capitalism. It was her epoch of wealth, glory and Empire. The poet Byron aptly described Britain’s aggressive imperialism with the words:

How all the nations deem her their worst foe,
That worse than worst of foes, the once adored
False friend, who held out freedom to mankind,
And now would chain them, to the very mind.

Ever since the introduction of the Corn Laws in 1815, repeal had long been the hue and cry of the manufacturers. Of course, this had nothing to do with the plight of the working class, and everything to do with the size of their wallets. They wanted to cut the price of corn, so as to cut the price of bread, and thus reduce wage costs.

“Well, we admit”, stated a Free Trader, “that competition among the workers, which will certainly not have diminished under free trade, will very soon bring wages into harmony with the low price of commodities”.^[1]

The Anti-Corn Law League, led by William Cobden and John Bright, was launched for this purpose, but suitably cloaked, as always, in the phraseology of the “national interest”. But the working class, as Marx explained, had interest in neither free trade nor protectionism, which were head and tail of the same coin. In fact, Marx described the Anti-Corn Law League’s leaders as the “worst enemies” of the working class. The Liberal Cobden related on one occasion that he would sooner live under the dictatorial rule of the Bey of Algiers than under the rule of the trade unions. However, the worker has no such choice. The working class has a perpetual “Bey of Algiers” hanging over them in the form of the money-grabbing employer. This tyranny cannot be undermined or alleviated other than by trade union organisation and defence.

“If the landlords were to sell our bones,” said a worker at a Free Trade meeting, “you manufacturers would be the first to buy them in order to put them through a steam-mill and make flour of them.”

The Great Exhibition of 1851 epitomised Britain’s colossal industrial superiority. The ruling class exuded confidence in itself and in its system. From the middle of the century onwards, Britain had become the classical “workshop of the world”. The urban population had swollen beyond all recognition, with only about 18 per cent of the population still engaged in agriculture. Britain’s advanced technique made her the industrial school for Europe and America. However, the laws of uneven and combined development would give great advantage to both American and Europe, which were rapidly catching up. Britain’s competitors did not have to go through the exact same steps of capitalist development. They could simply assimilate the best that she could offer, then refine and develop it still further. Nevertheless, being at the height of her economic, political and military power, in the language of coal, pig iron, steel, railways and steam power, British capitalism towered like a colossus over her contemporary rivals.

Britain’s industrial monopoly, together with her Empire, produced super profits for the ruling class, which were then used, like crumbs off the rich man’s table, to grant concessions to the upper layers of the working class. This encouraged a tactic of “divide and rule”, which had been perfected by British imperialism abroad, and was now used to sow divisions at home within the working class. These concessions were to include the introduction of the Ten Hour Act in 1847 – “the first great victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of capital”, wrote Marx – which enormously benefited the workers, especially the skilled artisans. However, this policy in turn served to cultivate an “aristocracy of labour”, standing apart from the great mass of unskilled workers. This privileged layer, which earned reasonably good wages compared to the general population, developed a more conservative disposition that fitted well with its newfound social position. In the realm of politics, these privileged workers tended to support alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie and spurned suggestions of class struggle or class independence. This “aristocracy of labour” was cosseted in narrow, newly established craft unions, very different from the radical trade unions of the earlier period.

Both Marx and Engels, who lived in England, recognised this conservative characteristic of these “aristocratic” layers. In a letter to Marx in 1858, Engels observed:

“The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justified.” He also noted in parentheses, “With the break-down of that [England’s industrial] monopoly, the English working class will lose that privileged position…”

1. Quoted in Lenin On Britain, p.20, Progress Publishers 1973

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