Category: Working Class History

Review: Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks

In a previous post about the publication of the new Penguin edition of Caliban Shrieks by Jack Hilton, I ran George Orwell’s Adelphi review in 1935, which described it as ‘witty and unusual’ presentation of ‘a genuinely working-class outlook… exceedingly rare and correspondingly important. As promised, here is my own review of the book .

Caliban Shrieks by Jack Hilton, with hew introductions by Andrew McMillan and Jack Chadwick.

Penguin, March 2024

Reviewed by David Black

Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks, now back in print after 90 years, is a forgotten ‘modernist’ classic. Breaking the mold of the ‘working class novel’ (such as Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, published in 1933), Hilton’s narrative cracks along without any dialogue between characters and with no character development apart from the protagonist’s own and his circumstances. As George Orwell put it, the book ‘deals with its subject from the inside, and consequently it gives one, instead of a catalogue of facts relating to poverty, a vivid notion of what it feels like to be poor.’

The story begins in Oldham, Lancashire, where Hilton was born in 1900. As a victim of bullying in childhood, Hilton identifies with Shakespeare’s Caliban: an outcast treated as  ‘A freckled whelp hag-born – not honour’d with a human shape.’

‘From about five I began to have contact with my species, and the thing I remember most was the cruelty of it,’ he writes. He is aware from any early age that his class is being miseducated and prepared for a war by those who wouldn’t have to fight it. Schoolteachers especially:

‘What impartiality we got for history! Stories about little drummer boys’ valour, the minstrel boy and hearts of oak. The horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, the glory of Nelson and Drake’s game of tiddlywinks – or was it bowls? ‘

Being too young for the army (as a 14 year-old apprentice at the start of the First World War), Hilton’s Caliban  does a run of factory jobs. Of the ‘blasted reality in a cotton mill’, he writes:

‘Four walls, caged captivity, hellish noise, wheels going round, motion, speed, punches up the posterior to acclimatise you (golly, Mr Millowner’s daughter, marry me quick before I lose heart!)…What a price to pay for prestige; cotton the world and ruin the child! I was unbritish, got rebellious and, after a leathering from the jobber, ultimately fired as hopeless, much to my future benefit.’

In a subsequent job, as a washer turner on piece-work, Caliban learns the tricks of the trade:

‘Many were the times I took my gross of washers to the store room, had them booked and stole back with them under my bib. Such were the results of my earlier christian training.’

With the new war economy, workers become more ‘valued’ as national assets and thus less easy to sack:

‘As this dawned on me, my suppressed hatred of the browbeating foreman class, from whom I had received so much callousness, took concrete expression; I belted the old foreman…’

Caliban gets away with it and ‘escapes’ the factory by getting a job on the railway. This comes with the condition attached that he can only leave by joining the army, which he does in 1918. His reasons for doing so are attributed to a general ‘collapse of the youthful mind’ in the face of ‘jingo ditties’ and ‘Hang the Kaiser’ exhortations:

‘It had to be done, there was no escape…Played to the station, at the district barracks first barrage from a peppery colonel, given a regiment, a night at home, introduction to a tart, off the following day for training.’

Caliban describes his induction, training and embarkation in preparation for the ‘madhouse lunacy’ of trench warfare:

‘What honour had we on March 21st 1918? Five hours of fog, gas, cannonade, then attacked by mass hordes of beastly blondes. Dug in, yes, but not invincible, put on the run by overwhelming odds. Yes, British pluck on the run, demoralised, licked to a frazzle, from orderly retreat to a panic; yes, a panic born out of the hellish attack, too much for any human endurance. Civilisation, religion, what beastly tricks you get up to. Bow your heads in shame.’

Back from War, which he doen’t dwell on further, Caliban educates himself. Firstly by attending political debates:

‘Gallantry and British patriotism versus cowardice and conscientious objectionism seemed to be the two combating groups. Peculiarly, I was a freak in their midst, a silver-badger supporting with vote and energy labour pacifism. Oh yes, there was a reason; as a kid I’d had many pastings for carrying the coloured favours of socialism, Dad happened to be one, so I could not go over to the blue bloods. Nevertheless politics were to be the school whereby I grew a little out of my ignorance.’

Caliban’s intellectual curiousity even extends to an interest in the dismal pseudo-science of eugenics. But on reading further Caliban reflects that he shares too many of the traits in homo sapien types which the eugenicists, in their quest for ‘purity’, want to get rid of (by stopping them from breeding at the very least). Therefore, Caliban knows that by eugenic standards he can never be part of the ‘intelligentsia of culture… the super select race of oligarchic proportions’ (also, with an interest in sex and marriage, he is disinclined to comply by committing voluntary euthanasia or getting a vasectomy).

Having itchy feet in depression-hit Lancashire, Caliban hits the road and heads south. On his travels he gets to see those grand old British institutions associated with the tramping profession: the Sally-Army sixpence-a-night flophouse, the workhouse (a.k.a. the ‘spike’), the flea-ridden boarding house, and the unwelcoming rectory run by the Tory god-botherer who thinks bread, margarine and stewed tea are a just reward for a day’s work. On life ‘underneath the arches’ of London he writes:

‘London, the Embankment, the Charing Cross and Waterloo of life’s incompatibles… The home away from home, the killer of egoism, the gathering of affinities. .. All ‘stoney’, all on the level, all can prate about their pasts, few so foolish as to speculate as to their future success. Out of gaols, out of spike; out of works, out of respects, but all accepting this long promenade’s hospitality in preference to that of the one big union – the workhouse.’

Returning to Lancashire, Caliban, teams up with like-minded friends and turns to organising:

‘We lounge and walk, often look for work we now know intuitively is non-existent. We get somehow or other drawn to what is known as ‘working for a cause’. The cause of the unemployed, the cause of ourselves, the neglected and the despised, the unwashed, exploited by all political parties – yes, all I say, bar no one. They all take advantage of our misery.’

Caliban never gets to encounter any member of ruling class up-close, but he knows the mediating social strata (petit-bourgeois), those bastard descendents of Ariel who weave the spells of ideology and subservience to authority.

‘Civil certainly, but what’s it all mean? Understrapper servility, holy-Michael piety, meekness, watch your step, every step, a life sentence to orthodoxy. Stupid pawns, robots, unimportant pigmies, bowing, scraping, never getting within a thousand miles of the oligarchy you serve.’

Caliban finds escape In the Rochdale Public Library:

‘Great pages of philosophy, science, history, and antiquity, written by men of all times, could be got from the libraries and by this method, at least, minds could be in communion with those whose environments were opposite. It is from these I got a rough cynical bite into the trousers seat of banality. I had suffered much  from my lack of erudition, had often been made the butt of the petty supercilious wits. I was unabashed, undaunted and condemned everyone.’

Caliban’s efforts to organise unemployed workers are stymied by politicians (opportunist Labourites, the centrists of the Independent Labour Party  – ‘Inflated Little Pawns’ he calls them – fanatical and disruptive ‘Third Period’ Stalinists and undercover police.

‘The police showed plenty of tact, but the hungry groups of famished men acted like the beasts that poverty makes them. Here and there, there were small riots, disturbances were common. Even our group of half-inchers, more like fogged idealists, got in a scrape. Of course we were guilty: vile language was used, windows were broken, stones were thrown, assaults were committed. A mob was unleashed: it was angry, it was hungry, it had been underfed. Arrests were made. The evidence and the breaches of the law justified them. BUT the enforcement of the law does not remove the cause, it merely deals with effects.’

And so Caliban is remanded in Strangeways prison. There is a lot described in Caliban Shrieks which has fortunately passed into history, such as the work house and the means-test for the unemployed. One institution that is still with us, however, is the prison system (in 1934 the UK prison population was about 15,000; In 2024 it is over 100,000. What else is new?). Hilton’s account of his imprisonment is, as Orwell put it, ‘delivered with an extraordinary absence of malice’.

Jack Chadwick explains in his introduction that ‘Upon release he was bound over, barred from speaking for his cause for three years. Pen and pad became the only outlet for the voice he’d learned to wield just as well as any rosette-wearing Prospero.’

Shakespeare’s Caliban curses his exile by Prospero (‘In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’th’island.’) ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you. For learning me your language!’ The ‘hard rock’ in Hilton’s tale is the class structure he can’t escape from.

As for the language of the 20th century Caliban, as Jack Chadwick puts, ‘Really, our Caliban had taught himself the language of the masters, at a time when the Prosperos of the industrial world had run out of profitable uses for their servants.’

Chadwick, a 28-year-old bartender and aspiring writer, discovered Caliban Shrieks while visiting Salford’s Working Class Movement Library. Chadwick tracked down Hilton’s lost heirs and secured the rights, on condition he’d get the writings republished. Chadwick got a deal with Penguin, which has just published it. It has been hailed by the New Yorker as a ;lost literary masterpiece;, whilst the Guardian, striking a typically snotty pose, judges that whatever its merits, it was ‘the eccentric form and chaotic style that doomed it.’
Chadwick’s assessment is more tantalising:

“Caliban Shrieks has this unique quality that I hadn’t come across before and I found it so compelling,” Chadwick told the Independent. “It’s so raw, it feels like it’s coming to you from across the pub table.”

 

Loren Goldner on Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York.

Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York. How a Great City Lost its Soul

(HarperCollins, 2017)

Reviewed by Loren Goldner

(This article is from Revolt Against Plenty, 2020. Republished with permission),

Jeremiah Moss came as a young man to New York City in 1993, in search of the Bohemia of which he had dreamed, growing up in a small, sleepy town in New England. Though he came at the first opportunity, by his own admission, he arrived too late. By the early 1990’s, Bohemia, such as it has existed since perhaps Walt Whitman held forth at Pabst’s Brewery in the 1850’s, was comatose, destroyed by various social and economic forces, large and small, but above all by the transformation of the city into a theme park that systematically eradicated the haunts of writers, artists, gays and a host of other sub-cultures which had previously survived there, catch as catch can, on the affordable margins. In a word, Bohemia was eradicated by gentrification.

And unlike many previous and premature obituaries for Bohemia, in Moss’s view, what distinguished the 1990s and thereafter from the demise of earlier generations of “garrets and pretenders” was conscious policy from City Hall, working with the banks and big real estate, aimed at destroying the “ecology” that had sustained Bohemia for well over a century, a policy enforced, when necessary, by those “husky workers in blue”, the New York Police Department (NYPD). This policy was conceived and carried out by a series of mayors from Ed Koch in the 1970’s through such luminaries as “Mayor Mussolini” (and now top Trump advisor) Rudy Giuliani, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg, up to and including the current, hapless liberal Bill De Blasio, who came in talking about the city’s soaring income  gap and promptly forgot such rhetoric once in power.

As Moss tells it, New York Bohemia did not die, it was murdered. This murder was complemented by the arrival, for the first time, of legions of young people from suburbia and the hinterland, no longer aspiring writers with unsold manuscripts, but a new generation of men and women, MBA’s, lawyers, fledgling bankers, stock brokers and CPAs, happy to dance on the grave of Bohemia (if they even knew it had existed or what it was) in blind weekend drunks, vomiting on the doorsteps of Moss’s and others’ remaining rent-stabilized apartments, shouting obscenities at the owners of older cafes, (whose coffee did not compare, in their view, with Starbucks) and generally acting like the philistine, boorish, well-heeled “frat bros” and riffraff that they were and are.

“I moved to New York,” writes Moss, “hoping to avoid such people for the rest of my life.” Moss is, moreover, quite aware that this gangrenous affliction is no mere New York phenomenon, but has its global counterparts throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America as well. But he has 400 pages of material on the one city he knows best, and leaves the critique of the gentrification of Paris, Berlin, Seoul or Sao Paolo to others. On Paris, Guy Debord had already written: “Paris no longer exists. The destruction of Paris is only an exemplary illustration of the mortal disease which is currently carrying off all the great cities, and this disease is itself merely one symptom of the material decadence of a society.”

One dimension that Moss does not discuss is the change in capital accumulation, beginning in the 1970’s, in which capital could increasingly no longer be profitably invested in “advanced” countries (advanced above all in social decay) in industry,  agriculture, or extraction (mining, etc.) but rather in unproductive sectors such as “services”, the military and real estate, the latter a purely parasitic activity that creates no wealth but merely appropriates wealth produced elsewhere (in this case, construction)  for income or resale. Thus it is not merely writers, artists, dancers and musicians who are seen off, but increasingly the urban working class, whose neighborhoods, not without tension, co-existed with Bohemia, and whose factories have closed down or relocated to the Dominican Republic or Sri Lanka or Myanmar.

It is often forgotten that as late as 1945, New York was the number one manufacturing city in the U.S.  Over the decades since the Second World War, New York was de-industrialized as surely as Detroit or Chicago, led in this case by the departure of the “needle trades” or the “schmatta” (clothing) industry, and the militant unions that emerged in them, first to the “open shop” American South and then overseas to Central America and beyond. They were replaced by miles of chains (Rite-Aid, Starbucks, Walgreen’s etc.) and hundreds of self-service bank branches, decimating the once tight-knit working-class communities they displaced.

This was part of America’s transformation into a “post-industrial” society, where the percentage of men and women producing “value” (in Ricardo’s or Marx’s sense) constantly declined in favor of those consuming it, probably 70-80% of the workforce today.  And nowhere was the concentration of the unproductive “creative classes” (to use the economically illiterate Richard Florida’s early and now discredited term) greater than in New York City.

It is, however,  not our purpose to linger over such lacunae in Moss’s generally outstanding book, but merely to pose a somewhat different backdrop to our review. Moss’s rich detail is like a banquet table sagging under a huge feast, from which we hope to extract a few choice morsels, urging others to further partake; a mere review can hardly do this book justice.

Moss makes no pretence of pseudo-objectivity; he is patently “shaking a fist” at the people and institutions that have ruined a once great city. His New York is one of “dark moods”. Gentrification evolved over several decades into what Moss calls “hyper-gentrification”, embodied in “luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture.”

Gentrification is quite distinct from the older pattern of one poor group pushing out another, such as the immigrant Chinese takeover of most of Little Italy; gentrification is about class and power, as when an influx of techies and yuppies pushes out poor blacks and Latinos with few or no options for where to go.

While for now “the city’s soul still haunts pockets of the outer boroughs,”  Moss’s book is “not a Baedeker to those pockets. It is a journey among the ruins, a dyspeptic trip though the parts of town hardest hit during the Bloomberg years.”

Moss highlights, for starters, the East Village, which today is full of “hedge fund managers, millionaire celebrities, and marauding dude-bros” but they had been preceded long before by “Jewish lefties, Italian agitators, theatre people, avant-gardists, anarchists, mobsters, as well as the very poor…Emma Goldman, who hung out at Justus Schwab’s Saloon on East First Street” found there “a Mecca for French Communards, Spanish and Italian refugees, Russian politicals, and German socialists and anarchists…”

Moss describes the old/new dialectic that has emerged instead, as the gentrifiers see it: “…the stuff of old New York is smelly and bothersome, and probably should vanish. The new stuff, the extruded-plastic simulation that has nothing to do with New York, is so desirable you can never have too much…” Moss calls the litany of new stuff “a meme, a self-replicating thought virus”: “Old New York is bad…New corporate chains are good. Tenements are bad. Luxury condos are good. Preservation is bad. Gentrification is good.”

The new luxury apartment building, Red Square, whose very name embodies the cynical victory cry of yuppiedom over the radicalism of the old neighborhood. It was built in 1989 on Houston St., ”the dividing line between the East Village and the Lower East  Side…one of the first modern luxury buildings in the neighborhood, and probably the first to thoroughly exploit the poverty and socialist history in its marketing materials…(Red Square) created an image that would appeal to the rich by selling them on the grit, poverty and risk of the Lower East Side…designed to appeal to a narrow audience of people with resources who wanted to live in a hip, extreme and even dangerous neighborhood…Sweatshop workers, Latinos, musicians and poets become animatronic characters in a theme park designed for world-conquering Mr. Wall Street  and his Dutch model girlfriend.”

For Moss, “Red Square was revolutionary in the way it marketed the authentic culture of the Lower East Side—socialism, bohemianism, the working class—in order to sell it to an invading culture that would then destroy it.”

Here we have the cynical post-modern penchant for “quotation”, in this case in architecture and urbanism.  One poet, Taylor Mead, lived around the corner from Houston,  on Ludlow Street, for thirty-four years, “…until he was displaced from his rent-stabilized apartment at age eighty-eight by…(a )…real estate tycoon…(enduring)…construction noise and poor conditions, for as long as he could…Mead eventually surrendered  his apartment, accepting a buyout and leaving New York with the hope of returning one day. He never did. Within a few weeks of moving out, he was dead from a massive stroke.”

The fight over the Bowery Bar in 1994-95, which had taken over the site of an old gas station, is another chapter in Moss’s account. Its opening was resisted by activists and artists, “in the courts and in the streets”. A central figure was Carl Hultberg, living in a “rent-controlled apartment he’d taken over from his grandfather, jazz historian Rudi Blesh”, who’d moved there in 1944. In an email to Moss, Hultberg wrote that the nightclub developers Eric Goode and Serge Becker “in a few short months…had transformed our once sleepy Bohemian district into an open sewer of American crap culture.”

The building had been sold to Mark Scharfman, “a man who’d made New prototypical heartless landlord. Goode and Becker transformed it “into the ultra-exclusive boutique hotel Lafayette House.” “The match struck by Bowery Bar in 1994,” writes Moss, “had met gasoline. In the 2000s, the Bowery went supernova.”

As if on cue, artists of the Establishment arrived. As one landlord-artist Gamely put it, “…now that the neighborhood is nice enough for galleries, there aren’t many artists left.” Luxury hotels proliferated.

“From the beginning,” says Moss, “the locals hated the Cooper Square Hotel, viewing it as “an arrogant, entitled, fuck-you middle finger to the neighborhood.” Despite further protests, “all that righteous anger could not bring the tower down, even when the developers’ bank claimed they defaulted on $52 million in loans and filed a lawsuit to foreclose.”

It was taken over by a hotelier with sites in Hollywood, Miami Beach and New York’s Meatpacking District, and “renamed the Standard East Village, with a new restaurant aptly called ‘Narcissa’…”

This ongoing “quotation” of the earlier life of the East Village was shameless, an expression of contemporary capitalism’s own cultural emptiness.

Moss cites Neil Smith, the late CUNY professor of anthropology and geography, for an historical overview of gentrification: “The class remake of the city was minor, small scale, and symbolic in the beginning, but today we are seeing a total class retake of the central city .Almost without exception, the new housing, new restaurants, new artistic venues, new entertainment locales-not to mention new jobs on Wall Street—are all aimed at a social class quite different from those who populated the Lower East Side or the West Side, Harlem, or neighborhood Brooklyn in the 1960’s. Bloomberg’s rezoning of, at latest count, 104 neighborhoods has been the central weapon in this assault.”

Moss takes a fourth wave from London urbanist Loretta Lees, hyper- gentrification, who described it as “the consolidation of a powerful national shift favoring the interests of the wealthiest households, combined with a bold effort to dismantle the last of the social welfare programs associated with the 1960’s.”

For Moss, hyper-gentrification is “the return of the white-flight suburbanites’ grandchildren and their appetite for a ‘geography of nowhere’…in which monotonous chain stores nullify the streets,”

Neil Smith’s term “the revanchist city” ultimately traces back to the French bourgeoisie after the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871. A century later, Giuliani’s New York took revenge on “people of color, the poor and working class, immigrants, feminists, homosexuals, socialists, bohemians.”

Moss’s vanishing New York is, then, “the twentieth century city, the metropolis born from a confluence of restless, desperate people who arrived as underdogs and became the city’s life force…”the people who don’t mince words and occasionally say “fuck you, you fuckin’ fuck” in a moment of proletarian poetry.

Thus we have glimpses of Moss’s exceptionally rich material, hopefully giving the flavor he maintains relentlessly for 400 pages. It is to be hoped that the book will be read far and wide, and beyond spurring the rage felt by this reviewer at the victory (to date) by the massive assault of big capital and finance on a once working-class town without equal, will also inspire the  activism initiated by anti-gentrification groups such as Take Back the Bronx and the Crown Heights Tenants Union listed in an appendix.

BPC Books 2024: Dialectical Butterflies, King Mob, Helen Macfarlane

20 March 2024 –

BPC Publications (London) announces release of two titles this week in the WisEbooks Series, compiled by, and featuring, Dave Wise and Stuart Wise, founders of King Mob.

Dialectical Butterflies

Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Greenwash and Rewilding the Commons – an Illustrated Dérive

Dave and Stuart Wise

This is published as an ebook because its 80 colour photographs would be too costly to print.

Amazon Link

Beautifully illustrated, Dialectical Butterflies is a psychogeographical exercise in butterfly preservation as part of the environmentalist, anti-capitalist struggle against ecocide, The lifelong fascination of David Wise and his late twin, Stuart, with the ecology of butterflies goes back to their involvement in the mid-1960s surrealist-inspired radical arts scene in Newcastle. From their contact with the Situationist International the Wise brothers adopted the concept of ‘recuperation’ which they see exemplified in today’s ‘greenwashing’ PR exercises. Their latter-day rewilding campaign is effectively a post-situationist Longue Dérive through the relatively forsaken terrains of derelict industrial sites and zones of autonomy in northern England; as well as the contested public space of Wormwood Scrubs in London.

_________________________________________

 

Lost Texts Around King Mob 1968-72, published as an ebook in January 2024, is now by popular demand available as a paperback.

King Mob was initially a coming together in London of members of the English section of the Situationist InternationaI and like-minded individuals from Newcastle associated with the anti-art magazine, Icteric, and the Black Hand Gang.

Following Guy Debord’s expulsion of the English members of the SI in December 1967, the King Mob Echo was co-founded in April 1968 by former SI member, Chris Gray and ‘friends from the north’, Dave and Stuart Wise.

The material in this collection by King Mob writers and their associates still has a power to provocatively invigorate and open up new directions of thought and action emanating from a subversive critique of culture. For the most part, these documents have been forgotten and therefore never archived in the libraries of art history and the ‘popsicle academy’ of media/music studies. Indeed, they had to be rescued from what Marx called “the gnawing criticism of the mice”.

Contents

  • Dave Wise and Stuart Wise (King Mob), Introduction: By way of an explanation…
  • Ronald Hunt (Newcastle-based art historian), The Arts in Our Time: A Working Definition; The Great Communications Breakdown, (1968)
  • Dave Wise and Stuart Wise, Culture and Revolution (1968)
  • John Barker (Angry Brigade) Art+Politics = Revolution (1968)
  • Fred Vermorel, (music writer who collaborated with Malcolm McClaren in formulating Punk Rock), The Rewards of Punishment and On Whom Can the Workers Count? (1970)
  • Chris Gray (Situationist) and Dave Wise, Balls! (1970)
  • Phil Meyler (Dublin associate of King Mob), The Gurriers (1968) and Notes from the Survivors of the Late King Red (1972)

The book is dedicated to Stuart Wise, 1943-2021

_________________________________________

Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen Macfarlane 1818-60  – Chartist Journalist, Feminist Revolutionary and Translator of the Communist Manifesto
By David Black

Paperback (110 pages) – March 2024

Amazon Link

From Everyone has a favourite Chartist by Stephen Roberts, Chartism and the Chartists 2016

The Marxist historian David Black certainly has a favourite Chartist who he can’t shake off. That Chartist is Helen Macfarlane, who contributed to the Chartist press for just one year, 1850. Black has just released a collection of Helen Macfarlane’s journalism (Helen Macfarlane: Red Republican, 2014). This isn’t his first book about this undeniably interesting figure. And it won’t be his last. A full-length biography is under way. What we have for now, though, is an anthology of Macfarlane’s writings for Julian Harney’s journals, the Democratic Review (April-September 1850) and the Red Republican (June-November 1850). Reprints of these journals appeared in the 1960s, but aren’t that easy to find these days. So Black has done those who want to read Macfarlane’s contributions a favour. And they are so much easier to read than the original columns (Black thanks Keith Fisher who undertook the laborious task of typing them out). Be in no doubt, Black is a fan … ‘her words jumped off the page at me’, he writes, ‘no one had ever before written like this in the English language’

So who was Helen Macfarlane? She was undeniably a remarkable woman. Born into a well-to-do Glasgow family of calico-printers, she became a governess after the family business was ruined in 1842. She appears to have been radicalized whilst living in Vienna in 1848 &, back to London, came into the orbit of Marx. She translated the Communist Manifesto & sent her own political writings to Harney for publication. Black is certainly right about the quality of her work. What Macfarlane wrote is a cut above a lot of the material that appeared in late Chartist journals. Read ‘Fine Words (Household or Otherwise) Butter No Parsnips’ (reptd. here pp. 53-8) and you’ll see what I mean…

This is a fascinating story & certainly whets the appetite for the full-length biography Black promises.

AND HERE IT IS

Amazon Link

Red Antigone is also available as an Ebook – March 2024

The first title issued in the Red Antigone Series, this is the first biography of Helen Macfarlane, Scottish-born feminist philosopher and shooting star of late-Chartist journalism.

Born into a family of gentrified Highland lairds who moved to Glasgow and became rich capitalists, Helen Macfarlane was a child of the Scottish Enlightenment. Educated by the males in her family, she went further than any of them in her radicalism. Key sections of the Communist Manifesto, which she translated, explained for her how capitalist development led to disruption, such as the bankruptcy of the Macfarlane calico business, and unemployment and poverty for masses of workers. Red Antigone is also the saga of her ‘clan’ – of found and lost riches, and risky adventure, and tragedy – and its, at times, conflictual relationship with her revolutionary politics.  Alone amongst British radicals, her interpretation of ‘continental socialism’ was based as much on her understanding of Hegel as on her involvement in the 1848 Revolutions. Marx praised her as an ‘original’ and a ‘rara avis’.

___________________________________________

The second title in the Red Antigone Series, is:

Red Chartist

The Complete Annotated Works ofHelen Macfarlane and her Translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto

(as published in the Chartist periodicals, The Democrat Review of British and Foreign Politics, History and Literature, the Red Republican, the Friend of the People, and Reynolds News.)

Amazon Link. This title is a paperback, NOT available as an ebook. The content can found, however, in the following book published by Unkant in 2014, now re-issued by BPC as an ebook print replica.

Red Republican

The Complete Annotated Works ofHelen Macfarlane and her Translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto by KarlMarx

Amazon Link

__________________________________________

1839: The Chartist Insurrection

David Black and Chris Ford (with a foreword by John McDonnell MP), originally published as a paperback by the late and lamented Unkant Publishing, London in 2012, has now been re-issued by BPC Publishing as a KDP Ebook.

REVIEWS of 1839

Ben Watson, blurb-on-the back:

‘In retrieving the suppressed history of the Chartist Insurrection, David Black and Chris Ford have produced a revolutionary handbook.’

Dan La Botz, New Politics

Black and Ford have written a fast-paced, narrative history of the 1839 Insurrection, filled with thumbnail sketches of the Chartist movement’s major figures, descriptions of the most important Chartist organizations and their politics in brief, excerpts from contemporary speeches, and parliamentary debates, and wonderful descriptions of the movement’s rise, growth, and spread throughout Britain. All of this is based on the most masterful command of the sources: newspapers, parliamentary records, memoirs, private papers, and all of the secondary literature. They tell their story in the most straightforward way but at a breathtaking clip that contributes to the sense of the excitement of the movement and its culmination in the insurrection.”

Stephen Roberts, People’s Charter

I read this book in one sitting as I sheltered from the pouring rain at Bodnant Gardens in North Wales. Based on a wide range of secondary sources and easy to read, it provided a welcome way of spending a few hours whilst waiting for the weather to clear (it didn’t!). The authors tell the story of a year when they assert the conditions for a working class revolution existed. Their account, almost entirely based on such secondary sources as the studies of the Newport Rising by David Jones and Ivor Wilks (but noticeably omitting recent books by Malcolm Chase and Paul Pickering) cannot be said to add to the scholarship, but is full of vigour and engagement. Black and Ford see Chartism in 1839 as ‘a mass working class democratic movement with revolutionary and socialist tendencies’. So this is very much a political account from an avowedly Marxist stance. For the authors a hero of the Chartist story emerges … George Julian Harney. And rightly so: Harney should be a hero to us all.”

R. Reddebrek, Goodreads

A very detailed and readable account of the early Chartist movement, its origins the personalities that came to dominate it and the events that spurred it on to physical force demonstrations culminating in the attempted insurrection in Southern Wales. It also comes with two appendixes that add further context to the time and give a voice to some of the Chartist leaders.

Sharon Borthwick, Unkant Blog, June 26, 2012

This was an exciting time… Dave Black and Chris Ford bring this time alive with this thoroughly researched book which includes many first hand accounts of meetings, battles and the colourful protagonists, many of who fully supported ‘ulterior measures’ in other words arming themselves, should parliament reject the petition for universal male suffrage which really they knew was a foregone conclusion…

This is a period soaked both in romance and horror and our heroes are both romantic and practical. The young George Julian Harney is just 21 when he joins the National Union of the Working Classes. He has been schooled on The Pilgrims Progress, Robinson Crusoe, The Castle of Otranto and the Sorrows of Young Werther. He sports a Jacobean red cap, which he likes to pass onto the heads of pretty young women who favour him with their singing binnies. He was a dogged agitator who travelled extensively to spread the Chartist message…

The momentum is all towards the final battles of 1839 when thousands are amassing in Wales and the North. Harney is finally furious with London as in the North strikes had begun, Manchester succeeding in closing 12 mills, the colliers of Northumberland downing tools. In Newport 6,000 men marched on Westgate but their leader has fled.

Some have lost their lives and many are imprisoned. Dr William Price escapes to Paris where he hangs out with the poet Heinrich Heine. We get glimpses of other characters. We don’t know much about him but that there was a £100 reward on his head, but we are glad that Dai the Tinker has escaped.

James Heartfield, Spiked Online, June 2012

David Black and Chris Ford’s account of the Chartist uprising of 1839 is also written in part to save these agitators from the condescending judgement of an Althusserian, in this case Gareth Stedman-Jones, whose ‘fear of agency’ cannot recognise Chartism’s self-conscious attempt to overthrow ‘old Corruption’. 1839: The Chartist Insurrection is altogether a more rewarding read than Rancière’s for its unapologetic focus on people who are making their own history. Black and Ford make the case that the earlier 1839 uprising came closer to overthrowing the existing order than the later challenge of 1848. They situate the movement in the disappointment of the Reform Act of 1832 that gave the vote to middle- class property owners, but not to the working men who protested alongside them.

Black and Ford make a good case that, though the technology they worked with was not for the most part industrial, the core of the Chartist movement was much more than an outgrowth of radicalism. Of course, it was true that their Charter was a series of democratic demands – adult male suffrage, annual elections, paid Members of Parliament. On the other hand, popular among them was Gracchus Babeuf’s argument that the democratic revolutions in America and France left ‘the institutions of property’ intact as ‘germs of the social evil to ripen in the womb of time’. The common ambition among the Welsh miners that the owners be made to work their own mines tells us that their struggle for democracy was indeed mixed up with a class struggle between owners and hands.

As the authors show, the movement argued hard about how far it should go if its great petition, the Charter, on presentation to parliament, should be refused – as it was. The Chartist Convention, a national organisation with elected delegates, debated the use of ‘Ulterior Measures’ in that case.

George Julian Harney – anticipating modern Sinn Fein’s slogan ‘an armalite in one hand and a ballot paper in the other’ by 150 years – called on his audience to carry ‘a musket in one hand and a petition in the other’. Threatened with prosecution, many in the audience testified that he had in fact said ‘a biscuit in one hand…’. Arguing for the Ulterior Measures, Feargus O’Connor promised that ‘it would be a war of capital against labour, and capitalists would soon find out that labour was the only real capital in the world’.

Still, Black and Ford do not flatter the Chartists unduly, nor make them into cartoon heroes. All the weaknesses of the organisation are confronted here. Throughout the summer of 1839, there were a number of protests in towns across the north of England, notably Newcastle, and in Wales and Scotland, while many smaller groups took up the call to arm themselves. The planned general strike, or sacred month, though, was poorly executed and patchily observed. In some confusion and disarray, the Convention voted to dissolve itself after a number of setbacks.

As it turned out, the leaders’ retreat only opened the floodgates of a movement that was determined to fight on. Black and Ford tell the story of General Napier, who led the militia against the Chartists, though he was himself sympathetic to their cause, if not their methods. On 6 August 1839, Napier wrote: ‘The plot thickens. Meetings increase and are so violent, and arms so abound, I know not what to think. The Duke of Portland tells me that there is no doubt of an intended general rising.’ But Napier’s judgement is compelling: ‘Fools! We have the physical force, not they.’

Black and Ford tell a heartwrenching story of attempted insurrections in Bradford, Newcastle and, most pointedly, in Newport in south Wales, where the movement came to a head. The insurrection was led by the tragic figure of John Frost, who himself was hoping to dampen the movement down, explaining at his trial that ‘so far from leading the working men of south Wales, it was they who led me, they asked me to go with them, and I was not disposed to throw them aside’. Though the Chartists did succeed in taking the streets and the Westgate, their superior numbers were not enough to beat the special constabulary’s better organisation.

All over England, there were risings that failed to meet up, followed by suppression of the movement and a witch-hunt of the organisers. Some escaped, like Devyr, while John Frost was caught and tried – and would have been hanged but that the sentence was commuted to transportation (itself a sign that the authorities feared worse if they killed him). George Julian Harney concluded that ‘organisation is the next thing to be looked into.’

Adam Buick, Socialist Standard, September 2012

The insurrectionary element in the Chartist movement has fascinated left-wing historians who see in it a frustrated revolutionary potential from which a modern vanguard can learn lessons.

Adding to this literature is a new history of the Chartist insurrectionaries of 1839 by David Black and Chris Ford (1839 –The Chartist Insurrection, London, Unkant Publishing, 2012, £10.99). It is a compelling read, telling the story of Chartism through the experiences of George Julian Harney and other ‘firebrand’ Chartist leaders such as Dr. John Taylor and examining the ill-fated Newport Rising of 1839. The authors provide a vivid account of the revolutionary potential that had built up in Britain by the late 1830s, culminating in the aborted rising at Newport in which several Chartists were killed.,

The authors seem disappointed at what they see as the paucity of revolutionary leadership within the Chartist movement. The proposed general strike in support of the Charter is regarded as a failed revolutionary opportunity because Feargus O’Connor refused to see it as a chance for the “revolutionary seizure of power.” Black and Ford argue that “the strike had an inexorable revolutionary logic: with no strike fund to draw on, the people would have to violate bourgeois property rights in order to eat” (pp.88-9). But most Chartists did not want a revolutionary seizure of power; they wanted an extension of the vote backed by the threat that if it was not granted then ‘force’might follow. Chartist leaders such as O’Connor did not want a showdown with the state via a general strike because he knew that the likely consequence would be defeat.,,

The authors suggest that Chartism was neither the tail end of radicalism nor the forerunner of socialism. But it contained plenty of the old in with the new. In their words, “In 1839 the ideas of Thomas Paine stood in dialogue with the socialistic ideas of Thomas Spence, Robert Owen,“`

Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (New Edition) 

Buy paperback from Amazon

Buy Ebook from Amazon

A short ‘video of the book’ on Youtube

____________________________________________

LSD UNDERGROUND: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love by David Black PAPERBACK – 21 Mar. 2022

 

Buy paperback from Amazon

 

Ebook from Amazon

 

 

___________________________________________

 

 

 

Helen Macfarlane,1850 – Reflections on the Socialist ‘Nazarean’

‘The Masses’ December 1913

Helen Macfarlane (1818-60) entered the world of radical journalism in April 1850, only to abruptly leave it in December of that same year, having translated Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, which was serialised in George Julian Harney’s weekly Chartist paper, the Red Republican. Macfarlane may be regarded as an interesting footnote to the history of Chartism and Marxism, but a footnote nonetheless. However, when I first came across her essays and articles of 1850 – thirteen of them, which no historian had ever bothered to evaluate—her words jumped off the page at me; it struck me that no one had ever before written like this in the English language. In short, Macfarlane was the shooting star of late-Chartist journalism. Karl Marx, who was not easily impressed by anyone, described Helen Macfarlane  as a “rara avis,” possessed of “original ideas.”

The following text is an extract from a three-part essay published in 1850 in the Democrat Review. I represents the first – and arguably last – Hegelian engagement of nascent Marxism with Christianity.

From the Democratic Review, June 1850

Apropos of Certain Passages in No.1 of Thomas Carlyle’s Latter‑day Pamphlets by Helen Macfarlane
What a noble idea is this theoretical and practical freedom of man, his infinite possibilities—which lies at the bottom of the Christian myths and sagas, and has now assumed the form of Democracy! A noble idea, but—good heavens! What a miserable, contemptible reality.

All sects hedge me in with limitations. I cannot move a step in any direction without running against some creed, or catechism, or formula, which rises up like a wall between the unhappy sectarians and the rest of the universe; beyond which it is forbidden to look on pain of damnation, or worse. No sect has ever yet raised its voice against the iniquitous inequality obtaining between the different ranks of society, whereby the accident of birth alone determines whether a human being shall have the culture necessary to develop his moral and intellectual powers — the culture without which he cannot obtain dominion over his animal wants and appetites, but must remain — like a beast — under the sway of instinct. No sect, whether established or dissenting, has ever protested against the social arrangements, in virtue of which the existence of such human brutes as that poor boy lately discovered in the diocese of the Bishop of London, is permitted — I almost said — no — but encouraged, and indeed made inevitable.

Yet such a state of society is as much opposed to the Christian idea of universal fraternity as the Hindoo institution of caste. With us the poor are the Chandalas, the unclean outcasts of society, which ignores their very existence, unless it be to punish them for crimes, the commission of which society ought to have prevented by providing all its members — first, with the means of comfortable subsistence; and secondly, with the means of moral and intellectual cultivation. Hypocritical teachers of Paganism in the guise of Christianity!

Have done with this preaching and prating about things which you scarcely even profess, and undoubtedly do not practice. You talk of the “visible church of Christ”, but you do all in your power to make it an extremely invisible church. Some of you talk much about certain persons whom you call the “Fathers of the Church”, but if these venerable fathers could become cognisant of your proceedings, they certainly would refuse to acknowledge you for sons. For it impossible to find any two things more opposed than the doctrines concerning justice and brotherly love taught by the ‘Fathers’, and the system pursued by you. If these worthy men were to rise from the dead, they would be found in our ranks; they would be Democrats, Demagogues, Socialists, Communists, Jacobins, Enemies of Order, of society, and of you.

St. Ambrose says, in express terms, that “property is usurpation”. St. Gregory the Great regards landed proprietors as so many assassins:

Let them know that the earth, from which they were created, is the common property of all men; and that, therefore, the fruits of the earth belong indiscriminately to All. Those who make private property of the gift of God, pretend in vain to be innocent! For, in thus retaining the subsistence of the poor, they are the Murderers of those who die every day for want of it.

What an incendiary vagabond is this ‘Venerable Father!’ St. John, called from his eloquence, Chrysostomus, or Goldenmouth, says,

Behold the idea we ought to have concerning rich and avaricious men. They are robbers who beset highways, strip travellers, and then hoard up the property of others, in the houses which are their dens.

St. Augustine doing dialectics

St. Augustine says on the subject of inheritance,

Beware of making parental affection a pretext for the augmentation of your possessions — I keep my wealth for my children — vain excuse! Your father kept it for you, you keep it for your children, and they will keep it for theirs, and so on. But in this way no one would observe the law of God!

St. Basil the great, in his Treatise di Avarit. 21, p. 328, Paris ed. 1638, asks,

Who is the robber? It is he who appropriates to himself the things which belong to All. Art thou not a robber, thou who takest for thyself the goods thou has received from God for the purpose of distributing them to others? If he who steals a garment be called a robber, ought not the possessor of garments, who refrains from clothing the naked, to be called by the same name? The bread thou hast stored belongs to him who is hungry; the garment thou keepest in reserve belongs to him who is naked; the sandals thou hast lying by belong to him who goes barefoot; and the money thou hast hoarded — as if buried in the earth — belongs to him who has none.

Louis Blanc is a very tame and moderate person, I think, compared with the Communists I have just quoted. How comes it that you, soi-disant preachers of the gospel of Christ, never take these or similar extracts from the “Fathers of the Christian church”, as texts for your homilies? I have frequently heard you quote from St. Augustine on predestination and grace, but you preserve a mysterious silence regarding St. Augustine on property. It is because you neither teach the Christian idea, nor do you live in it; because you are a set of pitiable imposters. You do not even make a profession of those precepts of Fraternity taught by the Nazarean, and said by him to contain the true spirit of his religion. You wisely keep silence on such points, else—out of your own lying mouths—would you be convicted.

You leave an immense and ever-increasing mass of destitution and ignorance, and crime, lying untouched at your own doors; you enter no protest against the system of civilisation—rotten to its very core—which has produced, and which fosters, this hideous state of things; but you fly to the uttermost parts of the earth—to China or Timbuctoo—in search of objects for the exercise of your boundless and overflowing Christian charity; and some among you have been found impudent enough to raise objections when others have proposed doing somewhat to enlighten the ignorance of which I speak. Pah! one’s very soul is sickened by such atrocious humbug.

Is the democratic idea expressed with greater fidelity in any other phases of the civilisation now extant?

In class legislation? In the exorbitant price of Law, whereby what is called Justice is placed beyond the reach of any save the Rich? In the Knowledge Tax? [The ‘Knowledge Tax’ was the Newspaper Stamp Duty, which was finally abolished in 1855.]

In the scanty measure of sectarian education dealt out to us by priests? In our system of indirect taxation, whereby the public burdens fall heaviest on the class which is least able to support them?

In the law of primogeniture, whereby one member of a family is ‘made a gentleman’, and the rest left beggars, to be kept by the producers — as state priests, bureaucrats, soldiers, pensioners — whose name is legion?

In a caste of hereditary legislators? In the position of women, who are regarded by the law not as persons but as things, and placed in the same category as children and the insane?

Society, as at present constituted, is directly opposed to the democratic idea; and must, therefore, be remodelled. To ask, my proletarian brothers, is one thing, but to get is another thing — a hopeless thing, I should say, from a government which does nothing unless compelled by the pressure from without, and which — instead of being its proper place — at the head of advancing society, disgracefully lags in the rear.

From Helen MacFarlane: Red Republican: Essays, Articles and Her Translation of the Communist Manifesto

(Note to publishers; The above volume was published by the late, lamented Unkant Publishing in 2014. The introducton contained biographical information. Since then I have continued to research Helen Macfarlane and have discovered a mass of startling and dramatic details concerning her life and time – enough to warrant a new edition, with an extended introduction.)

The Communist Manifesto and the Strange Case of the Frightful Hobgoblin

David Black

21 July 2023

Terry Eagleton, writes in his review of Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva (London Review of Books, 29 June 2023): “The Communist Manifesto is rife with arresting imagery from the moment of its celebrated opening: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe.’” In Marx’s writings, “the categories that spring to his mind are comedy, tragedy, farce, bathos, epic, parody, spectacle and so on. If drama is latently political, politics is inescapably theatrical.”

In response, David Ireland writes in a letter to the LRB:

 “Helen Macfarlane, the Scottish Chartist who in 1850 issued the first English language translation of the Manifesto, is widely derided for her rendering of ‘ein Gespenst’ [a spectre’] as ‘a frightful hobgoblin.’ It was at least a variation on the spectre.”

As the author of a prospective biography of Helen Macfarlane – described by Karl Marx as a “rara avis” with uniquely “original ideas” -, I question the derision. Today ‘hobgoblin’ is associated with the comedy cartoon figure on the label of Hobgoblin beer; or by the minor Marvel Comics super-villain. In 1850, however, ‘hobgoblin’ had other associations and was well-established literary currency.

According to historian, Peter Linebaugh:

‘“Hob” was the name of a country labourer, ‘goblin’ a mischievous sprite. Thus communism manifested itself in the Manifesto in the discourse of the agrarian commons; the substrate of the language revealing the imprint of the clouted shoon in the sixteenth century who fought to have all things in common. The trajectory from commons to communism can be cast as passage from past to future’.

Fascinating as Linebaugh’s idea of hobgoblins as belonging to the historical imaginary of the daily world of peasant communing is, it is hard to validate according to the historical sources.

Although Macfarlane renders Gespenst as ‘hobgoblin’ in the opening lines, she uses ‘bugbear’ for the same word a few lines later, referring to “silly fables about ‘the bugbear of Communism’”. In Scottish folklore, according to the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue, the ‘Bogle’ is ‘A supernatural being of an ugly or terrifying aspect; a bugbear’.

That ‘Hobgoblin’ is interchangeable with ‘bugbear’ is indicated in a 1593 statement from a government informer about 1593 concerning playwright Christopher Marlowe, shortly before he was stabbed to death in a Deptford ale-house: ‘into every Company he [Marlowe] Cometh he persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both god and his ministers’.

As this statement was only discovered in the early 20th century there is no way Helen Macfarlane would have known about it. But clearly her translation of hobgoblin and bugbear as the spectre of communism expresses a same ‘spirit’ as Marlowe on atheism.

In 1684 John Bunyan’s ‘Who Would True Valour See’, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, has ‘Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend/Can daunt his Spirit/He knows, he at the end/Shall Life Inherit’. In Jeremy Bentham’s chapter in the Book of Fallacies (published in 1824), entitled ‘The Hobgoblin Argument, or, No Innovation’:

‘The hobgoblin, the eventual appearance of which is denounced by this argument, is anarchy, which tremendous spectre has for its forerunner innovation… Of a similar nature and productive of similar effects is the political device here exposed to view…’

In the 1846 essay, ‘Self-Reliance’, by the American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson  the device reappears:

‘In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines’. 

As Helen Macfarlane quotes Emerson in her own writings, it is likely, if not evident, that Emerson’s use of ‘hobgoblin’ influenced her translation of the Communist Manifesto.

(Red Republican: the Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane, edited and introduced by David Black, was published by Unkant in 2014)

The ‘Sapient Mr Boz’: Charles Dickens versus the Red Republicans

David Black

21 July 2023

On 30 March 1850, Charles Dickens, having established himself as Britain’s most popular novelist, launched Household Words: A Weekly Journal. In an editorial, headed ‘A Preliminary Word’, he promised his readers that: ‘No mere utilitarian spirit, no iron binding of the mind to grim realities, will give a harsh tone to our Household Words‘.

At this time there was, however, one potential rival he hoped his paper would ‘displace’:

‘Some tillers of the field into which we now come, have been before us, and some are here whose high usefulness we readily acknowledge, and whose company it is an honour to join. But, there are others here –  Bastards of the Mountain, bedraggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest passions of the lowest natures –  whose existence is a national reproach. And these, we should consider it our highest service to displace.’

Although he didn’t care to name it, there is no doubt that he was referring to the Red Republican, a Chartist weekly, edited by George Julian Harney. Dickens’ attack did not go unnoticed by the Red’s most prolific contributor: Helen Macfarlane, Scottish anti-slavery campaigner, feminist, socialist Christian, Hegelian philosopher and friend of Karl Marx.

What Helen Macfarlane thought of Dickens’s fiction is not known, but she certainly didn’t like his politics (or lack of) as can be seem from the following.

 ‘The Red Flag in 1850’, Red Republican, 13 July 1850:

We, the English Socialist-democrats, may be “the ragged fringe on the Red Republican cap, the bastard of the Mountain” as the sapient Mr. Boz has been pleased to denominate us, but we are something more than that. Chartism and Red Republicanism must henceforward be considered as synonymous terms… And what is Chartism? … it would appear that Chartism is something very much resembling the hope and aspiration of a majority of the working men of England’.

‘Fine Words (Household or Otherwise) Butter No Parsnips’, Red Republican, 20 July 1850):

The above moral reflection occurred to me on reading an article in the last monthly edition of Dickens’ Household Words, wherein two poor little starving children, who stole a loaf of bread, and were sentenced by a Bow-street magistrate, (“a Daniel come to judgment”) to be whipped for this “awful crime against society, property, and order”. Further, the writer relates divers particulars concerning the ragged schools in Westminster, tending to show that persons belonging to the offscourings of society—persons who, from their infancy, had been brought up in every kind of vice, are reclaimable with a little trouble, but that the first condition of that reformation is to give them the means of earning their living in an honest way. In the cases mentioned by this writer [Dickens], this was done by sending the subjects of the experiment to Australia, where, by last accounts, they “were doing well”.

I daresay they “were doing well”, in a country where the poor are not altogether thrust from the banquet of life by the rich; where the land, the common gift of God to all mankind, is not altogether monopolized by one land-owning class; where the honest man who only has his strength and skill to aid him in the struggle for existence, does not altogether become the prey of bourgeois profit-mongers, whose grand problem is—to get a maximum of work done for a minimum of wages. No doubt, any one, willing to work, would “do well” in a place like this. The remedy proposed by the above writer for the state of things he describes is—National Education! “If a son asks bread from any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?”A spelling-book as a cure for hunger, was an amount of humanabsurdity, which evidently had not crossed the imagination of the Nazarean Teacher. Words are the panacea of the Whig Quacks and rosewater political sentimentalists of the Boz school. Education will do much, and a fit subject for its beneficent influences would have been the brutal, well-fed Dogberry who sentenced these starving children to be whipped; but Education will not satisfy the animal wants of man; the rule of three will not feed the hungry, or the Penny Magazine clothe the naked. How are the people of this country to be fed? That is the question. Not, how are the starving, homeless, hopeless wretches, dying by inches of cold and hunger, to be taught “reading, writing and arithmetic”. Your lessons in morality will do much for men who must either starve or steal, for women who must go on the streets and drive a hideous traffic in their own bodies, to get a meal for their starving children! Rose-coloured political sentimentalists!…

Transport the lazy drones who eat up the honey; transport the landowners and the thimble-riggers of the Stock Exchange, and there would be bread enough and room enough then, for all “our surplus population”. How are the people of this country to be fed? That is the problem for solution. The Protectionists did not solve it. The Free-traders are not solving it. Rosewater, self-sawdering, sentimental Whigs talk of National Education. Meanwhile, the producers die of inches of hunger—pauperism, and its attendant—crime—are on the increase. The condition of “moral England, the envy of surrounding nations”, is in a fair way of becoming very unenviable under the Upas-tree of a “glorious British Constitution and time-honoured Institutions of our ancestors”. It is well Time honours them, for I think nobody else does, and time must be in his dotage if he does anything of the kind.

In our own times, when charity has become an industry and, all too often, a racket serving the interests of the rich and powerful, Helen Macfarlane’s contempt for it still hits the spot:

‘The Democratic and Social Republic’, Red Republican, 12 October 1850)

We feel humiliated and pained when a beggar stretches out his hand to us for “charity”—that insult and indignity offered to human nature; that word invented by tyrants and slavedrivers—an infamous word, which we desire to see erased from the language of every civilised people… We believe, that unless God be a fiction, justice a chimera, truth a lie—it is possible to find social arrangements in virtue of which all the inhabitants of a given country could obtain a fair share, not only of the necessities, but of the comforts and luxuries of life—in exchange for the honest labour oftheir own hands… That is our dream, that is our Utopia; it is the democratic and social republic.’

A Sign in The Times

Dickens’s anathema against the Red Republican was echoed in a Times leader of 2 September 1851 entitled ‘Literature For The Poor’. Like Dickens, the Times chose not to name the paper – ‘we are not anxious to give it circulation by naming its writers or the works to which it is composed’ – but did extract some of Helen Macfarlane’s translation of the Communist Manifesto, as serialized in the paper. The selection included this passage as an example of outrageous cheek:

‘Your Middle-class gentry are not satisfied with having the wives and daughters of their Wages-slaves at their disposal, –  not to mention the innumerable public prostitutes –  but they take a particular pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Middle-class marriage is in reality a community of wives’.

The Times found in the Communist Manifesto an alarming appeal to those people in the lower orders who form a sort of secret society, which is ‘close to our own’ but speaks ‘another language’:

‘… only now and then when some startling fact is bought before us do we entertain even the suspicion that there is a society close to our own, and with which we are in the habits of daily intercourse, of which we are as completely ignorant as if it dwelt in another land, of another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw’.

(In 2014, I edited Red Republican: The Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane, for Unkant (Britain’s most radical publisher of that time, which unfortunately went out of business a couple of years later). It needs to be republished in a new edition.)

Reification 2.0: Lukács on Journalism as Prostitution

By David Black

100 years of ‘History and Class Consciousness’

History and Class Consciousness, by the Hungarian communist philosopher, Georg Lukács, was published in 1923. The book drew a hostile reaction from the ideologists of the 1920s Comintern. That it did is ironic, given today  Lukács is blamed by the Far Right for originating ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘critical race theory’ and other alleged wokenesses. Certainly Lukács’s book influenced the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, and other cultural folk-devils, but I am unaware of any conspiracy theorist who appears to have understood a word of it.

 Lukács highlighted a central insight by Marx which appeared to have been forgotten by most post-Marx Marxism: that advanced capitalism doesn’t just ‘rob’ the worker through extracting quantities of surplus-value; it also appropriates living labour in a qualitative inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’.  Marx refers to this development as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’

Lukács takes up Marx’s theory of ‘metabolism’, which addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. Lukács analyzes how in capitalism, work, as a social-metabolic process, is reified and fragmented in a way that makes people incapable of recognizing the world beyond their own particular tasks as being of their own making. People are rendered passive and contemplative, no matter how ‘busy’ they are. The expert (or ‘virtuoso’) ‘lapses into a contemplative attitude vis-à-vis the workings of his own objectified and reified faculties’:

‘This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their “owner” and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s “lack of convictions”, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.’

As Guy Debord puts it in Comments of the Society of the Spectacle (1988): ‘For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations…’ Debord adds that these journalists are often in the precarious position of having to serve a range of interests they depend on for remuneration and the flow of information they rely on: that of the newspaper proprietor, broadcaster, political party, corporation, church, university, security agency, etc:

‘It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several; and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.’

The ‘lack of conviction’ can acquire the optics of loss of conviction, as evidenced by lurches in political loyalties from Left to Right or (less often, it has to be said) vice-versa. This unedifying move is tempting for the hack who is running out of things to say and stories to tell, because switching sides opens up a whole new spectrum to roam in.

Reification Analytica

In a recent essay, Christian Fuchs argues that Lukács’s critique of ideology and reified consciousness ‘remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data.. [It] allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification.’

Big date analytics embodies the latest tendency towards quantification of everything in society. Algorithms and mathematical analysis are applied to the data that is scraped and hoovered-up from the internet. By identifying patterns, relations and correlations it can predict human behaviour for purposes of surveillance, management and control. Fuchs quotes the former editor of the Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, as a representative of the uncritical fetishism of developments in big data. Anderson claims the new developments will bring about the ‘end of theory’: ‘With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves […] [When] faced with massive data, this [traditional] approach to science – hypothesize, model, test – is becoming obsolete.’

What applies to scientific research may also apply to journalism and may constitute the same dangers. Fuchs argues that the positivism about quantitative methodology disregards ‘ethics, morals, critique, theory, emotions, affects, motivations, worldviews, interpretations, political assessments, power, social struggles, or contradictions’. As the social sciences and humanities are colonised by computer science and business studies, critical theory and critical thinking generally are effectively rooted out.

On the other hand…

Whilst recognising that the new technologies are deeply embedded into the structure of capitalist domination, Fuchs sees alternative potentials and forces at work in the realm of digital technologies:

‘Lukács opposed deterministic analyses, which implies that although exploitation and domination are ubiquitous in capitalism, there is always the possibility for critical consciousness and critical action (praxis)… modern technology has created new potentials for co-operation and socialisation.’

The logic of the corporate digital giants is the subjection of the atomised individual to privacy violations, intransparent algorithms, targeted advertising and the like as a design principle. Socialist design would make social media truly social: based on collective production, co-operation and creative commons. It would protect privacy and promote transparency and the openness of algorithms as design principles.

 (Christian Fuchs’s essay, ‘History and Class Consciousness 2.0: Georg Lukács in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Big Data’, is published in the journal Communication and  Society, 2020)

Insurrections: Theirs and Ours, Then and Now (1839 and All That)

By David Black

William Morris, Forest – Lion

Rise like Lions after slumber — In unvanquishable number — Shake your chains to earth like dew — Which in sleep had fallen on you — Ye are many – they are few. (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819)

On 6 January 2021, Donald Trump’s conspiracy to overturn his election defeat made insurrection respectable again – at least among his armed-and-dangerous GOP supporters. The ongoing assaults on liberal democracy – which are by no means restricted to the USA — pose a dilemma for the Left. The alternative, as propounded by the liberal media, is resurgent neoliberalism, even though its representatives seem prepared to dismantle everything liberal democracy is supposed to stand for: freedom of speech, union rights, control of price-fixing monopolies, protection of the environment, social services, etc.

Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the idea of insurrection from a Left perspective.

The Coming Insurrection, a celebrated tome written by a French collective, pronounced in 2007, ‘Everyone agrees that things can only get worse.’ The ‘Everyone’ certainly now includes the prevailing political parties, who now have only feeblest notion of what might be ‘better’ as opposed to worse. The abjectivity is universal in Western Europe, especially in Britain.  An article by Jörg Schindler in Der Spiegel, 18 April, reports:

‘Food shortages, moldy apartments, a lack of medical workers: The United Kingdom is facing a perfect storm of struggle, and millions are sliding into poverty. There is little to suggest that improvement will come anytime soon.’

Schindler quotes a striking nurse he met in Oxford:

‘”There’s something rotten here,” she says. “Nothing is as it used to be.” The longer she speaks, the more it seems she’s actually talking about the entire country. seeking its salvation in the very financial industry that collapsed so spectacularly 15 years ago, creating a situation in which billions were squandered…. And now, it seems as though it has dialed 999 and is waiting in vain for the paramedics to show up.’

The Financial Times of 28 June reported a poll by the New Britain Project which shows that nearly three-fifths of voters say ‘nothing in Britain works anymore’ and four-fifths don’t believe politicians have the ability to solve the UK’s biggest issues.

Kier Starmer’s mantra of ‘stability, order and security’ is chanted over the bonfire of the ‘pledges’ he made to get elected as party leader. In the most glaring example, Starmer, having promised to renationalise the failing, corrupt water utilities that are polluting our rivers and coastline, he has backtracked and promised the ‘market’ that the looters will remain in control.

The call of The Coming Insurrection, which seemed extreme back in 2007, now looks quite reasonable:

‘It’s useless to wait—for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.’

In the post-2008 Crash period, with the rise of Left populism internationally, the word ‘insurrection’ was in the air; which was why we, in 2012, called our book, 1839: The Chartist Insurrection, Our focus was expressed in Ben Watson’s, blurb: ‘In retrieving the suppressed history of the Chartist Insurrection, David Black and Chris Ford have produced a revolutionary handbook.’

Member of Parliament, John McDonnell, wrote in the Foreword to 1839:

‘Labour movement historiography has overlaid the Chartist story with the concept of an overwhelmingly, conservative British working class and a solely reformist British Labour Movement. The message has been consistently drilled into us that revolution was and is futile. This book offers another perspective. Revolution in Britain in 1839 was closer than we have been previously taught.’

The Chartist National Convention of 1839 discussed various means for furthering the struggle for democracy, one of which was the ‘old constitutional right’ of ‘free men’ to bear arms  ‘to defend the laws and constitutional privileges their ancestors bequeathed to them’. Their reasoning was that the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 wouldn’t have happened if the pro-democracy demonstrators had been armed. Of course 200 years later, peaceful protestors are no longer cut to pieces by sabre-wielding gentry-on- horseback. Also, Britain does not a gun-culture. For all intents and purposes, fire arms struggle can be ruled out.

Not so, other ulterior measures. The Chartists discussed and sometimes implemented several measures that today are worth conserving as tactics: withdrawal of money from ‘hostile’ banks; a month-long general strike; torchlight processions; refusal to pay rents, rates, and taxes; boycott of anti-Chartist newspapers; protection of persecuted activists; secret organisation of prohibited political activities, contestation of public spaces, and more. Some of the Chartists’ ulterior measures could rethought for our time. The Citizen’s Advice Bureau, which is hardly revolutionary, offers the following:

‘If you are a domestic (non-business customer), water companies can’t, by law, disconnect or restrict your water supply if you owe them money.’

In 1839, the Chartist masses were fighting for democratic representation as a means to address economic and social grievances. Today it is evident that means and ends cannot be separated.

 Unkant Publishing went out of business in 2015, leaving the book ‘homeless’ and out-of-print (although it can still be obtained from some online booksellers). One of the aims of this blog is to help the book find a new publisher.

Review

James Heartfield, Spiked Online

David Black and Chris Ford’s account of the Chartist uprising of 1839 is also written in part to save these agitators from the condescending judgement of an Althusserian, in this case Gareth Stedman-Jones, whose ‘fear of agency’ cannot recognise Chartism’s self-conscious attempt to overthrow ‘old Corruption’. 1839: The Chartist Insurrection is altogether a more rewarding read than Rancière’s for its unapologetic focus on people who are making their own history. Black and Ford make the case that the earlier 1839 uprising came closer to overthrowing the existing order than the later challenge of 1848. They situate the movement in the disappointment of the Reform Act of 1832 that gave the vote to middle- class property owners, but not to the working men who protested alongside them.

Black and Ford make a good case that, though the technology they worked with was not for the most part industrial, the core of the Chartist movement was much more than an outgrowth of radicalism. Of course, it was true that their Charter was a series of democratic demands – adult male suffrage, annual elections, paid Members of Parliament. On the other hand, popular among them was Gracchus Babeuf’s argument that the democratic revolutions in America and France left ‘the institutions of property’ intact as ‘germs of the social evil to ripen in the womb of time’. The common ambition among the Welsh miners that the owners be made to work their own mines tells us that their struggle for democracy was indeed mixed up with a class struggle between owners and hands.

As the authors show, the movement argued hard about how far it should go if its great petition, the Charter, on presentation to parliament, should be refused – as it was. The Chartist Convention, a national organisation with elected delegates, debated the use of ‘Ulterior Measures’ in that case.

George Julian Harney – anticipating modern Sinn Fein’s slogan ‘an armalite in one hand and a ballot paper in the other’ by 150 years – called on his audience to carry ‘a musket in one hand and a petition in the other’. Threatened with prosecution, many in the audience testified that he had in fact said ‘a biscuit in one hand…’. Arguing for the Ulterior Measures, Feargus O’Connor promised that ‘it would be a war of capital against labour, and capitalists would soon find out that labour was the only real capital in the world’.

Still, Black and Ford do not flatter the Chartists unduly, nor make them into cartoon heroes. All the weaknesses of the organisation are confronted here. Throughout the summer of 1839, there were a number of protests in towns across the north of England, notably Newcastle, and in Wales and Scotland, while many smaller groups took up the call to arm themselves. The planned general strike, or sacred month, though, was poorly executed and patchily observed. In some confusion and disarray, the Convention voted to dissolve itself after a number of setbacks.

As it turned out, the leaders’ retreat only opened the floodgates of a movement that was determined to fight on. Black and Ford tell the story of General Napier, who led the militia against the Chartists, though he was himself sympathetic to their cause, if not their methods. On 6 August 1839, Napier wrote: ‘The plot thickens. Meetings increase and are so violent, and arms so abound, I know not what to think. The Duke of Portland tells me that there is no doubt of an intended general rising.’ But Napier’s judgement is compelling: ‘Fools! We have the physical force, not they.’

Black and Ford tell a heartwrenching story of attempted insurrections in Bradford, Newcastle and, most pointedly, in Newport in south Wales, where the movement came to a head. The insurrection was led by the tragic figure of John Frost, who himself was hoping to dampen the movement down, explaining at his trial that ‘so far from leading the working men of south Wales, it was they who led me, they asked me to go with them, and I was not disposed to throw them aside’. Though the Chartists did succeed in taking the streets and the Westgate, their superior numbers were not enough to beat the special constabulary’s better organisation.

All over England, there were risings that failed to meet up, followed by suppression of the movement and a witch-hunt of the organisers. Some escaped, like Devyr, while John Frost was caught and tried – and would have been hanged but that the sentence was commuted to transportation (itself a sign that the authorities feared worse if they killed him). George Julian Harney concluded that ‘organisation is the next thing to be looked into.’

June 2012

 

Whatever Happened to Left Populism and ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’?

David Black

June 26 2023

Project of an orbital colony Stanford torus, painted by Donald E. Davis. Public domain image.

The Limits of Politics in the Anthropocene

In recent years Left Populism has lost momentum; seemingly eclipsed by the paranoid nativism of the Far Right, or recuperated by zombified social democracy. ‘We’ may still be the ‘99 per cent’, but the implied one per cent are still in charge, and, according to Greta Thunberg, the planet is burning amid ‘fairy tales of eternal growth’. So, whatever happened?

The rise of Left Populism took place in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. Those years saw the emergence of the Occupy! movement in the USA, which powered up the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the Indignados movement in Spain which did likewise for the Podemos party. In Greece, the populist upsurge led to the formation of the Syriza coalition, which became the government in 2015. Populism had traction all over Europe, including Britain – where it took the form of a revival of the Labour Party Left, led by Jeremy Corbyn – and in various parts of South America.

According to Pablo Iglesias, general secretary of the Podemos party, ‘the key to success is to establish a certain identity between your analysis and what the majority feels’. One of the key sources of populist synthesis was the book On Populist Reason (2005) by Argentine political theorist, Ernst Laclau. Populism, according to Laclau, is ‘the political act par excellence’ which constructs the concept of the ‘people’. Politics is not reducible to traditional Leftist representations of classes or social forces, e.g., workers, peasants, racial or sexual minorities. Rather, the political is about discourse — language.

Swedish Marxist, Carl Cassegard, says Laclau’s book is

‘a theoretization of populism as a way in which the political is constituted as an least seemingly autonomous realm, independent of social forces in an almost quasi-transcendental way.’

Outside of the world of political discourse there is nothing to constitute a changeable process of social reality. In terms of Ferdinand Saussure’s linguistics theory, the relation is between the signifier (the political stirrings of the ‘plebs’ and the ‘underdogs’ against the unaccountable alien power of the ‘elite’) and the thing signified (the ‘power of the people’). Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Laclau denotes the idea of the ‘people’ as the imaginary subject’s unattainable object of desire. Laclau’s concept of the ‘people’ is also homologous with the noumenal world in which Kant confines freedom and morality—for Kant there is nothing outside of the categories of the understanding that can constitute any sort of transcendence. Hegel describes Kant’s noumenal thing-in-itself as a bit like Hamlet’s father’s ghost: you can’t grasp it or make even make ‘sense’ of it, yet it is real in that it exercises moral power over Hamlet’s actions.

The New Left Utopians

Theorists of 21st century Populism believe they are on the ‘right side of history’ because of the possibilities afforded by technology. Aaron Bastani’s book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (Verso: 2019), was widely reviewed in mainstream media. During the Lockdown, millions of white-collar workers found that the abundance of technology in their homes made the daily commute and the management office both seem anachronistic. Andy Kessler, in the Wall Street Journal (17 May 2021) saw a connection between this phenomenon and Bastani’s book:

 ‘At first I thought it was a joke. I still do… Cue rainbow-belching unicorns, The Atlantic wrote that “the vision is compelling.” The New York Times helped promote it. And it sure feels like the Biden administration is trying to implement it. Naturally, it’s complete baloney.’

Like other hostiles, Kessler didn’t get to Bastani’s main pitch, which was an attempt to rebrand Marxism by re-interpreting Marx’s insights in the light of 21st century technology. Here, Bastani is in the company of Paul Mason (in Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future), Ash Sarkar (his colleague at Novara Media) and various ‘technological utopians’ and ‘left accelerationists’. They all draw their theoretical framework from the concept of the ‘General Intellect’ which Marx sets out in a text  known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in his Grundrisse (which lay unpublished for 100 years). Marx conducts a thought experiment. Assuming a society consisting only of workers and capitalists, market competition compels capitalists to introduce new machines and thus acquire extra surplus. The capitalist innovators in productive technology increase their profits and drive their slower-moving competitors out of business. However, unless the scale of production expands more rapidly than the rate of increase in productivity, less workers will be employed. The increasing investment in fixed capital is accompanied by the lessening of value produced by workers in society as a whole.  

‘General Intellect’ denotes the accumulated knowledge of this society. The intellect becomes generalised to such an extent that the dominance of mental over mental labour – what Alfred Sohn-Rethel terms the ‘autonomous intellect’, based on the Kantian transcendental subject – reaches the point where the division itself is universally seen as anachronistic. So, as the development of social collaboration and free knowledge destabilizes the market mechanism and the system of private property, the capitalist mode of production breaks down. Marx writes:

‘Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky high.’ (145)

The idea of the General Intellect has resonated in some unexpected places. Samuel McIlhagga in Foreign Policy (May 28, 2023) writes: ‘Marx shares an optimism with Silicon Valley about the potential for rapid technological change but is also far more skeptical about the short-term uncontrolled effects machines will have on human beings.’ The problem McIlhagga sees with Marxists of the Boomer and Millennial generations is that they have relied too much of Marx’s Capital:

‘It’s not that Marx can’t help the new post-COVID-19 generation understand its own forms of accelerating social, economic, and natural dislocation. But Generation Z would be wise to trade Marx’s Das Kapital for his long-neglected Grundrisse.’

The Productive Forces of Capital

The idea of the General Intellect and capitalist breakdown did not make it into Marx’s Capital Volume 1 or into the never completed volumes II and III. The reason for this, according to Kohei Saito in his book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, is because there was a decisive shift in Marx’s conception of history, which occurred sometime between 1863 and 1866. This is shown in a draft from that period, entitled ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’. Here, the ‘two sides’ of production – relations and forces of production are subsumed as the ‘productive forces of capital’. This is closely tied to two other concepts: ‘cooperation’ and ‘real subsumption of labour under capital’. What it shows is not how capitalism breaks down — to our benefit – but how breaks loose — to our cost.

Industry, in the shift from manufacture to machinofacture, introduces new technology and develops new ways of organising distribution and production. This revolutionising of relations between workers and capitalists is theorised as the shift from ‘formal subsumption’ of labour to ‘real subsumption’. Real subsumption  reduces the price of labour power by increasing productivity. The independent labour of the individual is nullified. The capitalist, who now commands the means of production (objectified labour), employs living labour in an inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’. Marx refers to this inversion as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’. Cooperation, in revolutionising and extending the division of labour, is enforced across whole industries and society as a whole:

‘To the extent that the worker creates wealth, living labour becomes a power of capital; similarly, all development of the productive forces of labour is development of the productive forces of capital’.

Marx’s theory of ‘Metabolism’ addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to productivist capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. The ‘automation utopians’ avoid the problem of productivism and technological determinism by focussing on populist electoral politics, and constructing a new ‘political subjectivity’ of forces for social change.

Saito warns that this concentration on the purely political concedes to capital the option of reacting to metabolic rifts by means of metabolic shifts, such as introducing geo-engineering ‘in the name of stewardship of the earth… to manage the entire ecological system at the cost of enslaving people – especially in the Global South through the metabolic shift – to heteronomous regulation by technologies’. Capital is able to deal with problems by simply shifting them elsewhere. It can do so spatially, by transferring the metabolic robbery system to places in world beyond democratic oversight; and temporally, by leaving the problems and the human costs to be solved and paid for by succeeding generations.Saito writes: ‘…politics alone is not able to change society because the extension of democracy to the economic realm will face an insurmountable limit when it comes to challenging and undermining the power of capital.’ Populist electoralism has a tendency to be hijacked by the right or recuperated by the centre. Cassegard writes:

‘Populism isn’t necessarily radical. Examples of the extension and unification of equivalential chains in the name of the people abound in institutionalized politics. That, after all, is how most mainstream political parties in modern liberal democracies work.’ 

Getting Real

Bastani highlights a quote from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, which envisions the ‘higher phase of communist society’ as  where

‘labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want … and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly… From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’

Ecosocialists have expressed reservations about this statement because it appears to be ‘productivist’; i.e. an argument for the exploitation of natural resources as if they were infinite. Bastani doesn’t regard this as too much of a problem as he thinks that high-tech can make production more eco-friendly if it is organised rationally and democratically:

 ‘So as information, labour, energy and resources become permanently cheaper – and work and the limits of the old world are left behind – it turns out we don’t just satisfy all of our needs, but dissolve any boundary between the useful and the beautiful. Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism.’

Saito, addressing the concerns about ‘productivism’,  suggests that development of productive forces Marx envisages in the Critique is not equivalent to merely quantitative increases in production of the same commodities as under capitalism. For Saito, communism would have a ‘stationary state’ economy for satisfying real human needs, and would actually make it less productive, where necessary:

’This reorganization of the labour process may decrease productivity by abolishing the excessive division of labour and making labour more democratic and attractive, but it nonetheless counts as the “development” of productive forces of social labour because it ensures the free and autonomous activity of individual workers.’

Saito gives five reasons why de-growth communism would increase the chance of repairing the metabolic rift.

Firstly, whereas capital, in its drive for unlimited growth and profit, is bound to make and sell non-essential and harmful products, the abolition of the law of value would allow the reallocation of resources to essentials such as care and real luxuries such a art, sport and travel.

Secondly, unnecessary labour, especially energy and resource-consuming ‘bullshit jobs’ would be eliminated..

Thirdly, de-growth communism would transform the remaining realm of necessity to make the content of work more attractive.

Fourthly, the abolition of market competition for profits would de-accelerate the economy and ease pressure on the biosphere. 

Finally, ‘Through collective decision-making processes, workers have more room to reflect upon the necessity of their products, egalitarian relations of class, gender and race, and environmental impacts.’

Saito’s case for a de-growth Marx is at the same time an argument for humanist communism. Anti-humanism, faced with the Anthropocene, takes such forms as technological determinism, deep-green catastrophism, Bible-prophesies and ‘hidden hand’ of libertarian economics. But an existential problem does not have a political/ideological solution. Political promises are usually lies; and ideologies serve to rationalise capital’s personification of things and reification of persons. We need materialism, not as a secular religion of pseudo-scientific  rationalism, but as a method for dealing with material problems.

References

Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso: 2019

Carl Cassegard, ‘Laclau and the return of the people’ (https://carlcassegard.blogspot.com/2014/06/laclau-and-return-of-people.html)

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. Translated by Karel Ludenhoff • Introduction by Peter Hudis • Foreword by Peter Linebaugh. PM Press/Spectre: 2022

‘Brutal and Bent’ – Satirizing the Police in 1839

oday the London Metropolitan Police has reputation for institutional corruption and abuse of powers. I was ever thus. As William Lovett put it in 1839, “the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors.”

An extract from the book, 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford.

Illustration from 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford. A cartoon Penny Satirist22 Aug 1840 on government plan to establish county police forces. Shows police raiding a pub, stealing chickens and pigs, and demanding to see a man’s passport.

The dialogue reads (picture on the left):

First  Policeman: I can see a light inside. I swear.

Second Policeman: I can see summut moving

Third Policeman – I can hear someone moving – Let us demand an entrance – And know whether spalpeens have got their licence – And if they won’t let us in by fair means, we’ll break open the door – And swear they interrupted us in the execution of our duty – the beak will be sure to believe us.

Fourth Policeman – Here Larry, take hold of this here porker. I’ve knocked him on the head to prevent him squeaking – Oh, but we’ll bag the pigs and the fowls – And then in the mornin’ we’ll pretend to look after the thieves.

(picture on the right:

Holloa! Where are you going to this time o’ night?

I be going home Sir. From my labour.

I dare say that’s a lie. Show us y’er passport!

Passport? What be that, Sir?

Ho, ho! Then you haven’t got one, eh? – Then I’m sure you’re out for no good –so you are my prisoner  – Come along.

The County Police Act 1839, also known as the Rural Police Act, enabled Justices of the Peace in England and Wales to establish police forces in their counties.  The move to expand the police was not welcomed by everyone. Radicals, who had experienced the brutality of the London Metropolitan Police during the Chartists agitation of 1839, saw the new police forces as a threat to free speech and right of assembly.

Richard Doyle’s depiction shows police and dragoons attacking a Chartist rally in Birmingham’s Bull Ring on July 4th 1839. A large squad of London Metropolitan Police (wearing‘Peeler’ tophats and swallow-tailed uniforms) had been sent to Birmingham for ‘special duties’.  [Image: Library of Congress]

Today the London Metropolitan Police has reputation for institutional corruption and abuse of powers. I was ever thus. As William Lovett put it in 1839, “the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors.”

William Lovett

As described in our book, 1839:

As the House of Commons in London was about to debate the Chartist petition for Universal Male Suffrage, the Chartist National Convention – reconvened in Birmingham .

Days later, on 4 July, Birmingham magistrate Dr. Boothe rode into the Bull Ring, a triangular commercial area of the town centre, where an illegal meeting was taking place. His mission was to “ascertain the state of the town,” which he soon did when the large crowd greeted him with shouts of “Spy” and threw stones at him. Rashly, the police tried to snatch the speaker by wading into the crowd and wielding their batons, until they were beaten back by the angry crowd. Dr. Boothe rode off and soon returned with a company of cavalry. He placed himself under the Nelson Monument and read the Riot Act. The dragoons drew their sabres and moved into the Bull Ring. The crowd withdrew but remained on the streets until after midnight, some armed with clubs and iron railings torn from churches, chanting “Fall Tyrants Fall!”

Reporter John Hampden wrote in The Planet:

“Wanton outrages were perpetrated by the police sent down by Lord J. Russell, at the instigation of the Birmingham magistrates, not only upon the Chartists assembled in the Bull Ring, but also upon harmless and unoffending people in the streets… who ought to have been protected, instead of being maltreated. Arms-breaking and head-breaking, however, seem to have been practiced by way of diversion; it was, no doubt, fine fun to see a fellow go off with a fractured limb, and an exceedingly good joke to hear a woman beaten by the police ruffians, cry out against the brutality… it mattered little whether they were man, woman or child… Are not these circumstances calculated to rouse up all that is manly – all that is English – in our countrymen and produce a universal shout of execration against such tyranny and injustice?”

The Convention met the next day in Lawrence Street and, on London delegate William Lovett’s initiative, issued a proclamation condemning the magistrates and police for the previous night’s action. Although all delegates were prepared to sign the proclamation, Lovett, in an act of heroic proportions, insisted that he alone would sign because, he declared, “the Convention cannot  spare victims.” The proclamation was placarded all over Birmingham, and the authorities responded by arresting Lovett as signatory, and Birmingham delegate John Collins as publisher, of the document. At the court hearing, the Birmingham Recorder asked Lovett, “Were you aware that certain members of the police force were wounded dangerously by weapons?” Lovett replied,

“I heard that several of them were wounded, and at the same time thought that the people were justified in repelling such despotic and bloodthirsty power by any and every means at their disposal, because I believe that the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors; for if the people submit to one injustice after another, which self-constituted authorities impose upon them, they may be eventually ground to dust, without the means of any resistance.”

Collins pointed out that one of the magistrates facing him was in fact Mr. Muntz, a leader of the Birmingham Political Union. Muntz, a moderate, ‘Moral Force’ Chartist, had been elected to the Convention in August 1838, but had never taken his seat.

Bail was granted to both accused.

From: 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford (Unkant, London: 2012)

https://blackd.substack.com/