The last great struggle of Chartism took place in 1848, the year of the revolutionary movements across Europe, from which it took tremendous inspiration. “We are sleeping on a volcano”, stated the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville. Within a matter of weeks the French monarchy was overthrown by insurrection and the Republic declared. One by one the monarchies of Europe were overthrown by popular insurrections and the proletarian “mob”. A revolutionary wave was sweeping throughout Europe, casting an ice-cold chill down the spine of the British bourgeoisie. It can be said that 1848 was the most revolutionary year of the nineteenth century.
Feeling revolutionary change in the air, Julian Harney wrote in his Red Republican: “Every proletarian who does not see and feel that he belongs to an enslaved and degraded class is a fool.” Ernest Jones, Chartist leader, orator and writer, wrote,
“an amalgamation of classes is impossible… these two portions of the community must be separated distinctly, decidedly and openly from each other, CLASS AGAINST CLASS. All other mode of procedure is mere moonshine.”
O’Connor even went so far as to draft a constitution of the British Republic, with himself as President! Mass Chartist meetings were being organised in Macclesfield, Leeds, Oldham, Sheffield and elsewhere. A Chartist Convention was called in April, and nearly two million signatures were collected for another petition, although a number proved bogus. Despite inadequate preparation from the Chartist leadership and government decisiveness, some 150,000 or so turned out for a demonstration in London. But the capital itself had been turned into an armed encampment. Mass arrests quickly followed, including that of Ernest Jones. A number of those arrested were to perish in the hellish conditions of prison. From that moment, the great Chartist movement entered into a terminal decline, from which it never recovered. It was, however, a truly heroic movement that changed the course of working-class history.
With the demise of Chartism and the defeat of the revolutions in Europe, capitalism began a long period of assent. The productive forces developed at break-neck speed as markets were opened up and new areas of exploitation were discovered. Capitalism had brought into being a world market, the hallmark of “globalisation”. This development produced a prolonged period of relative social stability, where the relations between the classes were softened. Marx and Engels, who had originally hoped the German bourgeois revolution of 1848 would become a prelude to a proletarian revolution, had miscalculated the tempo of events. In hindsight, they had underestimated the future possibilities latent in capitalism, which at this time were far from exhausted. They had also overestimated the revolutionary maturity of the working class. In essence, Marx and Engels had mistaken the birth-pains of capitalism for the death-agony of capitalism. While they made a mistake, this was an error of timing and not of method.
Their whole revolutionary outlook, summed up in their Communist Manifesto, written in early 1848, was the most far-sighted of documents. Despite the sneering of their bourgeois critics, Marx and Engels saw into the future far further than any of their contemporaries. The Manifesto remains a profound piece of writing, in an amazingly small amount of words, which provides a brilliant analysis of capitalism and the historic role of the working class. “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies”, thunders the opening words of the Manifesto. It continues in its profound analysis: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.” It would be true to say that the Communist Manifesto is even more relevant today than when it first appeared in 1848. It is not an abstract commentary, but a call to action, not a textbook but a programme for the launching of a revolutionary party of the working class. “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
The bourgeoisie was forced to grant concessions to the working class in response to the revolutionary wave in Europe. They had little choice: either grant reforms from above or be faced with possible revolutionary overthrow from below. As a consequence, the Corn Laws were repealed, the Ten Hour Bill was passed, and new factory legislation enacted. These measures were a by-product of the revolutionary struggles of the European masses, from which the British working class benefited. However, it would be wrong to reduce such events simply to foreign influence. The revolutionary fires of Chartism had also had their effect on the psychology of the ruling class.
“The working class of Great Britain for years fought ardently and even violently for the People’s Charter…” stated Engels, “it was defeated but the struggle had made such an impression upon the victorious middle class that this class, since then, was only too glad to buy prolonged armistice at the price of ever-repeated concessions to the working people.”
The British ruling class, unlike its European counterpart, managed to escape the upheaval of revolution. The support for Chartism gradually waned. The economic revival and the greater prosperity that accompanied the boom put the last nail, at least temporarily, in the coffin of this great proletarian movement – the first in history, but certainly not the last.
“The era of Chartism is immortal in that over the course of a decade it gives us in condensed and diagrammatic form the whole gamut of proletarian struggle – from petitions in parliament to armed insurrection”, remarked Trotsky in 1925.
“All the fundamental problems of the class movement of the proletariat – the inter-relation between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary activity, the role of universal suffrage, trade unions and co-operation, the significance of the general strike and its relation to armed insurrection, even the inter-relation between the proletariat and the peasantry – were not only crystallised out of the progress of the Chartist mass movement but found in it their principled answer. Theoretically this answer was far from always irreproachable in its basis, the conclusions were not always fully drawn and in all the movement as a whole and its theoretical expression there was much that was immature and unfinished. Nonetheless the revolutionary slogans and methods of Chartism are even today, if critically dissected, infinitely higher than the sickly sweet eclecticism of the MacDonalds and the economic obtuseness of the Webbs. To use a hazardous comparison then, it can be said that the Chartist movement resembles a prelude which contains in an undeveloped form the musical theme of the whole opera. In this sense the British working class can and must see in Chartism not only its past but also its future. As the Chartists tossed the sentimental preachers of “moral force’ aside and gathered the masses behind the banner of revolution so the British proletariat is faced with ejecting reformists, democrats and pacifists from its midst and rallying to the banner of a revolutionary overturn. Chartism did not win a victory not because its methods were incorrect but because it appeared too soon. It was only an historical anticipation… Chartism is not at all liquidated. History is liquidating Liberalism and prepares to liquidate the pseudo-Labour pacifism precisely so as to give a second birth to Chartism on new, immeasurably broader historical foundations. That is where you have the real national tradition of the British labour movement!”[12]
The defeat of Chartism, however, marked the opening up of a new “Golden Age” of British capitalism, epitomised by the Great Exhibition of 1851. The repeal of the Corn Laws ushered in the period of free trade, where laissez-faire became the dominant outlook of the British bourgeois.
“The manufacturing industry of England may be fairly computed as four times greater than that of all the other continents taken collectively, and sixteen such continents as Europe could manufacture so much cotton as England does…” stated a Conservative publicist.[13]
At this time, the enormous development of British industry was bringing about a division in outlook between the skilled and unskilled workers, and systematically cultivated by the ruling class. Whereas Chartism represented a movement of the whole class, the developments after 1850 epitomised the struggle of sectional interests – primarily the skilled workers. The objective of the trade union movement became, as Engels explained, “not to alter the system, but rather to perpetuate it by rendering it more tolerable. Rather than continue the glorious traditions of the Chartists, the “labour leaders’ preferred to deal with their aristocratic friends and be “respectable”.”