“The Making of the English Working Class”by E.P. Thompson, 1963 Part 2 Sketch: (pgs. 206 to 346)
This is the period of Charles Dickens, who mostly wrote about the early to middle 1800s, dying in 1870. His father was forced into a debtor’s prison in 1824. As a child he left school and worked 10 hours a day near Charing Cross as a warehouse bootblack. His story is the story of this period, and his stories, such as the 1843 holiday novella, “A Christmas Carol,’ about the infernal money-grubbing of the business class, reflects the period. Hence the moniker ‘Dickensian’ to the situation of workers, even in present-day Bangladesh, India, Mexico or Nigeria. However, to my reading, none of the momentous social struggles in Britain seem to have found themselves in his books.
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| Peterloo massacre, directed against the weavers. |
At this point (1815) the lessons of organization and politics had filtered through the British laboring classes, in the face of wholesale repression by the united upper classes and their Church and State. The early to mid-1800s saw the development of proletarian Luddism, democratic Chartism, union organizing, the Peterloo massacre, the Pentridge Rising, Owenite (early utopian socialist) propaganda, the Ten Hour movement for a shorter work day and the revolutionary crisis of 1831-32.
Thompson points out that the
‘industrial revolution’ was a catastrophe for the working classes. Revisionist historians and economists asserted in the 1950s
that it was a great improvement for all due to technological developments and
alleged increasing ‘average’ material wages. Does this techno-positivism sound familiar? In 1954, F.A. Hayek and other
conservatives convened a conference that ignored the whole change of
property relations in the countryside, the enclosure movement, considering it irrelevant. Evidently to them privatization was just part of the wall paper.
Thompson challenges the more conservative statisticians and
empiricists who looked at the early to mid-1800s. He excerpts a long letter by a cotton spinner
which details the exploitation and oppression this large group of employees
felt. Cotton was, after all, the biggest
sector of the new industrialism. The
spinner accuses the ‘masters’ of an ‘abominable combination’ against labor, who
run ‘dreadful monopolies.’ Thompson
points out that the laboring classes fought over many more things than ‘bread
and butter’ issues… overwork, unions, food quality, child labor, political rights and land theft. Thompson details how enclosure
of the common lands by the State and owners deprived the majority of
cottage-dwellers and poor peasants of sustenance, benefitting small
landholders and large ones.
Statistics
and Lies
Much of this section is about how conservative statistics
are faulty. Thompson argues statistics
based on ‘per capita’ and ‘average’ wages ignore actual conditions for various
working strata. Servants in large households might have been better off in this
period, or top tradesmen for a while, but many other sectors were not. (Perhaps
why the early 1900s Downton Abbey is
such a hit…those servants living off the rentier teat seem not so ill-treated.) Tradesmen with out-of-date skills were being
displaced by tradesmen with newer skills, or by a flood of cheaper
‘dishonorable’ labor. Some became ‘garret masters,’ who made items themselves,
or with family help, then sold them on the street. Others became ‘outworkers’ -
piece-workers in their own rooms, still an integral part of the developing factory
system.
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| Dickensian slums in Sheffield |
This points to the greatest problem - chronic casual work,
semi-employment and under-employment. So an ‘average’ wage becomes a misplaced indicator. Mayhew, the most accurate of the social investigators during this
time, estimated that of 4.5M workers, 1.5M were employed on a somewhat regular
basis, 1.5M were under-employed and 1.5M unemployed – only occasionally filling
in for the other groups. The latter was filled with street vendors, paupers,
con artists and thieves. For those theorists
who think that hipster travesty concepts like ‘gig’ work, ‘side hustles’ "main hustles" and temp work is some feature of only
modern capital – it is not.
Thompson called this period the “collapse of the artisan.” Unions,
societies and ‘combinations’ related to these skilled workers were outlawed in
1834, which weakened the tailors, shoemakers and weavers, among others. During this period wages were forced down to
the point where poverty and even starvation were common in some areas. Poor relief administered by local parishes was
a baseline for some. In 1837 there were 197K people in workhouses,
which were purposely kept horrible to dissuade people from using them. Poverty was said by the lazy rich to stimulate industrious
behavior!
Detail
of Labor Types
Thompson looks at field laborers, who were former
peasants displaced from their land or cottage dwellers that used common land
for survival. Some of his info comes
from William Cobbett, the most diligent investigator of field conditions. These workers were dependent on ‘seasonal’
labor with smallholders or large landowners too, so few were permanent. Conditions led to the breaking of threshing
machines, a rural version of the later factory phenomenon. But Thompson notes that the most resistance
to enclosures oddly came from urban workers and rural artisans who had risen in
station, but nostalgically sought to return to the fields. These Chartist weavers wanted to divide up the
land of the estates among the population, creating small farms once again. In purely rural areas according to Thomson,
the opposition was more muted due to the role of smallholders, the hated
“tithe-consuming clergy” and oppressive governmental magistrates.
Artisans represent the largest group
of urban and even semi-rural workers, but their many and various economic
situations were complicated to the extreme, similar to the multiple layers and
strata of the modern working classes. After
awhile the artisans actually sought ‘collective independence’ due to their deep
experience of organizing and solidarity.
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| A Chartist rally |
In 1925 a massive strike wave that had been percolating among
artisans occurred, led by weavers of all kinds – cotton, wool, linen, worsted
and silk. The weavers numbered as many as 840K – a third of the UK workforce after
rural hands and servants. The core was
around Manchester, which is where the 1819 Peterloo massacre took place, mostly targeted at them. Even with the invention of a primitive power
loom in 1813, it took years to slowly replace weavers. Thompson thinks that
their decline was not primarily from the loom until about 1835-1840, due to
the profitable ‘counter-revolution’ led by the State.
Chartism, based on a People’s Charter for democratic rights, was
strongest among this group, centered in the midlands of England.
As an aside, Thompson notes Engels was a bit too optimistic
about the conditions faced by artisans in his 1845 book “The Condition of the Working Class in England.” While doing better during the Napoleonic ‘war years,’
living in tidy cottages with ale, tea and bread, their conditions turned
downward after 1815. These artisans resisted
going into the factories, mainly filled by women and children, until there was
no other choice.
Of more unskilled laborers, little is known, as they
were less politically active at this point, not listed in organizations or
official trades and more transitory and temporary. During this period muscle labor was primary
among dockers, coal miners, builders, bricklayers and cartage. For intsance seamen or dockers
might be hired by a port ‘publican,’ but they’d have to spend 50% of their pay
in the public house… for drink, food or lodging. Which is an example of how many financial
twists were involved in survival for laborers.
During this period a struggle for a ‘minimum wage,’ a
shorter work day or a tax on power looms went on for many years, and was met by
familiar cries defending ‘free labor’ from the owners and Parliament. Yes, free to starve or become exhausted! Sort of like the present U.S.'s own “right to work” laws; the concept of being ‘exempt’ from overtime pay; actual employees called independent contractors or low taxes on the rich and corporations. Reading this, you realize not a goddamn thing
has changed in the class struggle.
(More to come...Part III)
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Making
of the English Working Class” (P1);“Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “Chavs – the Demonization of the
Working Class,” “Class Against Class – the Miner’s Strike” (Matgamna); “Left
Confusion on Brexit,” “The City” (Norfield); “Pride,” “Mr. Turner” (Leigh);
“Coming Up For Air”(Orwell); “Monsters of the Market” (McNally); “The Football
Factory” (King); "The North Water,” “The Young Karl Marx,” “The Civil War
in the United States.”
Red Frog
February 1, 2022
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