Tag: Marx

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)

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)

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

‘Another Language’ – How Walt Whitman’s Poetry Came to England

(January 2022)

How Walt Whitman’s Poetry Came to England

By David Black

Suddenly, out of its stale and drowsy air, the air of slaves,
Like lightning Europe le’pt forth,
Sombre, superb and terrible,
As Ahimoth, brother of Death.
God, ‘twas delicious!
That brief, tight, glorious grip
Upon the throats of kings.

Something entirely missed by biographers of Walt Whitman (1819-92) and poetry scholars generally is how his poetry found its first readership in England. His poem, ‘Resurgemus’, appeared in the 3 August 1850 edition of the Red Republican, a weekly paper of the English Chartists edited in London by George Julian Harney (1817-97).

Harney was a close associate of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95), who as political exiles had moved from Germany to London and Manchester respectively. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto , first published in German in 1848, was translated by Helen Macfarlane (1818-1861), whose own writings for Harney’s paper were influenced by the German Idealism of GWF Hegel (1770-1831), the Unitarianism of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

The Red Republican was denounced by leading ‘opinion formers’ such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and the Times newspaper for its articulation of ‘dangerous’ ideas. The first-ever reaction by the Victorian ruling class to what became known as ‘Marxism’ is to be found in a Times leader of 2 September 1851 entitled ‘Literature For The Poor’. 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’.

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 Leader, the weekly paper of Christian-socialism and ‘moderate’ Chartism, founded in 1850 by George Henry Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt, referred to the writers of Harney’s paper as ‘violent’ and ‘audacious’. Helen Macfarlane, writing under the pseudonym,‘Howard Morton’, responded in a Red Republican article,

‘It has lately been said by the Leader that the writers in the Red Republican are “violent, audacious and wrathfully earnest”… I should think we are. Just about as much in earnest as our precursor, “the Sansculotte Jesus” was when He scourged the usurers and money-lenders, and thimble-rigging stockbrokers of Jerusalem out of that temple they “had made a den of thieves”’.

How then did Whitman’s poetry come to make its first European appearance in Harney’s Red Republican? In 1848, Whitman moved to New Orleans to edit the Crescent newspaper. As there was considerable interest there in the politics of France, Whitman took a deep interest in the Revolution that began in Paris in  February 1848 with the overthrow of King Louis Phillipe. The revolutionary tide swept across Europe, overthrowing the despotic monarchies of Austria, Italy, and various German states. But by 1850 the old orders had been restored. According to Jennifer J. Stein,

‘Although the revolutions were fairly quickly squelched, Whitman had gained a taste of the revolutionary spirit. His development from newspaper journalist to democracy-proclaiming poet occurred most dramatically in the years between the mid 1840s and mid 1850s, and although some point to Whitman’s work against slavery as his motivation for becoming freedom’s poetic leader, others point to the revolutions of Europe as his inspiration. In direct response to the revolutions, Whitman wrote “Resurgemus,” a poem printed in the New York Daily Tribune on 21 June 1850… The nature imagery used throughout “Resurgemus” is an important artistic step for Whitman, since he clearly uses it to link the replenishing power of nature to the rejuvenation of revolution and liberation. This poem was among those chosen for inclusion in the first (1855) Leaves of Grass, and it continued to resurface in various forms throughout his later editions.’

‘Resurgemus’, like the Communist Manifesto and the writings of Helen Macfarlane, represented what the Times called ‘another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw’. The New York Tribune was read in London by George Julian Harney, who lifted Whitman’s Resurgemus from its pages and republished it in the Red Republican on 3 August 1850.

Mike Sanders points out that Harney had a ‘continuing desire to raise the literary standard of Chartist poetic production’. To achieve this, Harney rejected a lot of poetry submissions from readers; his reasoning being that bad poetry couldn’t express good politics: ‘Put simply, Chartists argued that the capacity of the working classes both to recognise and produce good poetry demonstrated their fitness for the franchise’. Clearly, Harney regarded Resurgemus as exemplary.

RESURGEMUS.

Suddenly, out of its stale and drowsy air, the air of slaves,
Like lightning Europe le’pt forth,
Sombre, superb and terrible,
As Ahimoth, brother of Death.
God, ‘twas delicious!
That brief, tight, glorious grip
Upon the throats of kings.

Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh. ¶
You liars paid to defile the People,
Mark you now:
Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts,
For court thieving in its manifold mean forms,
Worming from his simplicity the poor man’s wages;
For many a promise sworn by royal lips
And broken, and laughed at in the breaking;
Then, in their power, not for all these,
Did a blow fall in personal revenge,
Or a hair draggle in blood:
The People scorned the ferocity of kings.
But the sweetness of mercy brewed bitter destruction,
And frightened rulers come back:
Each comes in state, with his train,
Hangman, priest, and tax-gatherer,
Soldier, lawyer, and sycophant;
An appalling procession of locusts,
And the king struts grandly again.
Yet behind all, lo, a Shape
Vague as the night, draped interminably,
Head, front and form, in scarlet folds;
Whose face and eyes none may see,
Out of its robes only this,
The red robes, lifted by the arm,
One finger pointed high over the top,
Like the head of a snake appears.
Meanwhile, corpses lie in new-made graves,
Bloody corpses of young men;
The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily,
The bullets of tyrants are flying,
The creatures of power laugh aloud:
And all these things bear fruits, and they are good.
Those corpses of young men,
Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets,
Those hearts pierced by the grey lead,
Cold and motionless as they seem,
Live elsewhere with undying vitality;
They live in other young men, O, kings,
They live in brothers, again ready to defy you;
They were purified by death,
They were taught and exalted.
Not a grave of those slaughtered ones,
But is growing its seed of freedom,
In its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds shall carry afar and resow,
And the rain nourish.
Not a disembodied spirit
Can the weapon of tyrants let loose,
But it shall stalk invisibly over the earth,
Whispering, counseling, cautioning.
Liberty, let others despair of thee,
But I will never despair of thee:
Is the house shut? Is the master away?
Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching,
He will surely return; his messengers come anon.

WALTER WHITMAN.

References

‘The Revolutions of 1848’, Jennifer J. Stein, in J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

Mike Sanders, ‘The Poetry of Chartism, Aesthetics, Politics’, History (CUP: 2009), p77.

David Black,  Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. Lexington Books: Lanham, Maryland (2004).

Helen Macfarlane: Red Republican. Essays, articles and her translation of the Communist Manifesto. Edited and annotated by David Black. Unkant Publishers, London 2014.

A.R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney.
Heinemann: London (1958).