Chartist – The Barbarism of Pure Culture

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

By David Black

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

‘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 Satirist***22 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.”

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/

John McDonnell MP on ‘1839: The Chartist Insurrection'(towards a new edition)

Decade after decade of Labour movement historiography have 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.

1839: The Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford (with a foreword by John McDonnell MP) was published in 2012, during a time of intensifying social crisis. Ben Watson’s blurb on the back cover captured our intention to write an account of a rebellion from long ago which would inform and inspire readers in the present: ‘In retrieving the suppressed history of the Chartist Insurrection, David Black and Chris Ford have produced a revolutionary handbook.’

During the aftermath of the 2008 Crash the slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’, echoed around the world and frightened the rich and powerful. In the Middle East the Arab Spring overthew, or seriously threatened, well-entrenched dictatorships, and throughout Western Europe, anti-capitalist populism was gaining ground. In Greece, the Left, united in the Syriza Coalition, were heading for state power.

In Britain in 2012, David Cameron’s Conservative government was imposing drastic austerity measures. The apparent cancelation of the future along with the immiseration of the present faced no serious challenge from the leadership of the Labour Party, whose dearth of ideas, vision, energy and courage was evident to a new generation of malcontents, especially those radicalised by the massive student protests of 2011. This alienation from Labour’s deadbeat centrism formed the impetus for the unexpected revival of the party’s Left under Jeremy Corbyn. Following the rout of Labour under Ed Miliband in the 2014 General Election, John McDonnell became shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn’s new leadership.

Participants in contemporary political events often turn to examining past events for enlightenment. Other ignore or distort them. As Paul Mattick once put it, ‘What one generation learns, a later generation forgets.’ Fifty years after the Chartist uprising of 1839, Sidney and Beatrice Webb of the Fabian Society published a ‘lessons from history’ handbook for a new party of moderate progress within the limits of the law, entitled The History of Trade Unionism. Looking back at the Chartist movement, the Webbs wrote:

‘A general despair of constitutional reform led to the growing supremacy of the “Physical Force” section of the Chartists, and to the insurrectionism of 1839-42. Made respectable by sincerity, devotion, and even heroism in the rank and file, it was disgraced by the fustian of many of its orators and the political and economic quackery of its pretentious and incompetent leaders whose jealousies and intrigues, by successively excluding all the nobler elements, finally brought it to nought.’

The Webbs’ version of the ‘Whig Theory of History’ set the ‘standard’ for writing about Chartism by ‘Labour Historians’ in the 20th century. In contrast, we argue that the ‘excluding all the nobler elements’ was rather their own self-exclusion from the practical problem of a working class that was unfranchised, over-taxed, starved into workhouses, and exploited by landowning aristocrats and industrial capitalists. In researching how the working class radicals and their allies acted after the betrayal of their estwhile Liberal allies we found that many of physical-force leaders had a grasp of intellectual ideas which they attempted to put into practice for the edification of the masses. The Jacobin-inspired propensity for ‘physical force’ – to the point of armed stuggle – was by no means restricted to a few ‘extremists’ and enemies of liberal ‘progress’. George Julian Harney, one the ‘physical force’ leaders in 1839, recalled in later life:

‘When I look back upon the past, when I remember the wrongs and sufferings of the working classes, far from being able to reproach myself with “violence”, I am astonished at my moderation; considering as I do that the wrongs referred to would have satisfied a degree of “violence” far beyond anything my recollection enables me to charge for my own account.’

Unkant Publishing went out of business in 2016, 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. Over the summer I’ll be posting a few sample chapters. This post features the Foreword contributed by Labour Member of Parliament, John McDonnell MP, who was to become Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Foreword by John McDonnell MP to 1839: The Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford, Unkant Publishing (London:2012)

There is a school of Labour movement historiography that emulates the old Whig theory of British constitutional history. Just as the Whig Theory of History views a succession of constitutional changes over centuries simply as a series of small steps in a linear progression to the perfection of the liberal democratic state (claimed by some as the “end of history”), there have been fellow travellers in Labour History writing, who have seen the individual struggles of groups of peasants and working people over recent centuries as merely the stepping stones on the path to the ultimate goal of the founding of the Labour Party, the TUC and the modern day trade unions.

Those elements or key events in Labour movement history that have not conformed to the theory of the ineluctable, evolution of the movement into a party committed to peaceful, constitutional reform have been either written out of history altogether or relegated to mere historical footnotes. Often they are portrayed as deviations at best irrelevant to or, worse still, hindering the progress of effective working class political representation.

Those historical actors or movements that in Britain explored or attempted out on other routes to political change are generally considered condescendingly as primitives or patronisingly as naïve as soon as they ventured down the path of physical force or large scale resistance associated with Revolution rather than Reform.

Consequently in most histories of the British Labour movement the story of the Chartists has focussed on the large scale mobilisations of petitioners, the development of mass-circulation radical newspapers for working people and the promulgation of the tactic of the general strike, “the sacred month or big holiday.”

The Newport Uprising and other attempts to use physical as against moral force have been, if not hidden from history, then at least pretty heavily disguised.

With its meticulous attention to detailed sources, its comprehensive scope and its exacting research, this book doesn’t just address the neglect of this important and interesting episode in Labour movement history but more importantly it also challenges us to think again about the revolutionary potential of the British Labour movement.

Black and Ford evidence in a way others have failed to do, the scale of the threat to the British establishment in 1839. Less than two centuries after an unlikely coalition of small landholders, Puritans, Ranters and Diggers had severed the head of an English king, this equally broad new alliance of Free Traders, Republicans, early Trade Unionists, proto socialists and working people oppressed by poverty and the Poor Law raised again the standard of rebellion.

Just as in 1648 the intransigence of Charles 1^st forces his opponents to explore other means to bring about change, as the events of the year 1839 unfold, the failure of the nineteenth century state to budge on any of the basic demands of the Chartists produces a mounting frustration that inevitably leads to the exploration of other means of forcing change. The seemingly endless and at times frustratingly, meandering debates of the Chartist Convention on the options for action reflect the class forces, differing life experiences and different ideological stances represented within the early Chartist coalition. This work depicts so well the debates and debaters, warts and all.

Of course, as this book demonstrates, contingency always plays a part in any historical sequence of events. We witness the political manoeuvrings of the different factions within the Convention, the role of its leaders, with their strengths and weaknesses; the determination of some and the loss of nerve and lack of judgement of others.

However the discussions on strategy prefigure many of the future debates and controversies in the Labour movement both here and across Europe. The use of the general strike in the form of the “sacred month” foreshadows the advocacy by Rosa Luxembourg of the general strike weapon and her emphasis on the spontaneity of mass action, which has an echo of the swift mobilisations of mass protests by the Chartists. The divisions in the Convention between those adhering to moral force and those advocating physical force, if only in extremis, are repeated time and again in many major class struggles over the following century from Czarist Russia to Paris 1968.

In most accounts of the course of the Chartists campaigns it seems preposterous to compare the uprisings of 1839 with the revolutions that were to follow in many European states, Russia and China over the next century. Thanks in part to the spin within the contemporary media and the received wisdom replicated in subsequent historical accounts, the Chartist revolutionaries are looked upon largely as incompetent blunderers or fantasists.

Certainly, it is evident that many of the Convention leaders, such as John Frost of Newport, were out of their depth when it came to organising a revolution and many were orators rather than street fighters. However this book makes clear that all the evidence points to an extremely fragile British state that was unprepared for a rebellion on any serious scale and indeed was stretched to its near limits in containing protest let alone armed insurrection.

At the same time despite the exaggerated claims of some of the Chartist leaders and Convention representatives of the level of support for armed revolt in their areas, it is obvious from this research that there was sufficient combustible material amongst the working class in 1839, particularly in the industrial areas of Wales and the North, to catch the fire of revolt.

Black and Ford describe how this spark failed to light the fire of revolution but also show how close an alternative revolutionary route nearly opened up for the forward march of Labour in Britain. Decade after decade of Labour movement historiography have 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. There is nothing inherently conservative in the British working class as generation after generation have mobilised to prove. What may be missing however is the learning of the lessons of each revolt and each mobilisation for change. By challenging the prevailing hegemony relating to the events and significance of 1839, this book assists us greatly in understanding the potential for future challenges to the system.

John McDonnell MP