Class Classic Continued, Part 3 - "Not Riot, but Revolution."

 “The Making of the English Working Class”by E.P. Thompson, 1963 Part 3 Sketch: (pgs. 347 to 514)

This far in, I realized this book is really about the historical period in which the English working class was ‘made,’ not its whole history.  This is when it was created by industrial capital, then made conscious by the class conflict that arose.  According to Thompson this seems to be the period of the early to middle 1800s.  As he puts it, this was the period of “the passing of Old England” and the rise of something new.

In these pages he continues a detailed investigation of the material conditions of the English working classes from 1800 to 1845, in the throes of the ‘industrial revolution.’  He focuses on food, housing and health, life spans and child labor.  The section is conducted as a debate with pro-capitalist historians and economists, who attempt to cover up the condition of the working classes.  ‘Averages’ play a role, as the upper classes may live longer, but the lower classes had almost no improvement in their life-spans, or a drop in life span.  The worst were figures from Liverpool which were divided by class strata.  The average death age of the ‘gentry’ – 35 years; the average for tradesmen – 22; the average for laborers – 15.  Again, there are parallels with our oh-so-advanced capitalism where working class people overall, and especially people of color, die 10-20 years ‘on average’ before the wealthy and upper-middle classes.

Workers had a poor diet, just as they do now, but it actually degraded in this period until the 1840s.  Potatoes replaced wheat bread, weak tea replaced beer in the home, vegetables were unheard of, meat only occasionally and then that of the worst quality.  Most upper class people – owners, professionals – moved out of the cities to country houses, due to the polluted water, epidemics, garbage and sewage in the cities.  20% died of consumption, second was asthma.  Half of all working class children were dead by 5.

It was actually better for children to work at home with their families in some kind of piece-work situation, because conditions in the factories were far more dire, run by the long pace of machines and overseers.  At this point, families needed children to work to survive.  Parliamentary commissions looked into conditions in the factories and towns, but did nothing, just as the English government had 5 commissions of inquiry during the worst year of the Irish famine – and did nothing.  This might remind us of our own Congressional inquiries, which are mostly for show.

Thompson notes that the landlords and paternalistic Tories, poetic nature-loving Romantics and a few Methodist preachers also raged against the factory system, just as did the Jacobins from the Left – but for different reasons.  The Tories were not its direct beneficiaries, which sometimes accounts for strange bedfellows, even today. Only a few Tories and some primitive Methodist sects blocked with radicals, Owenites or Chartists against child labor and industrial poverty.  More regularly, the owners recruited ‘candy men’ – semi-lumpens - to oppose workers in the streets.  This is a familiar pattern too, especially in the recruiting of fascist gangs in the U.S.

Victorian Child Labor

Thompson concludes, along with the poet William Blake, that the advent of the industrial revolution made conditions worse for the working classes, by nearly every measure.

RELIGION

A key aspect of the development of the English working classes were their slow rejection of the worst tenants of religion, or of religion all together during this period.  The Methodist Church under Jabez Bunting continued its slavish devotion to the Crown and order, even being against children learning to write.  The Methodists, borrowing a bit from Luther, promoted the ‘Protestant work ethic’ and subservience to the owners among workers, a Utilitarian doctrine which was also taken up by the commercial bourgeoisie.  The Methodists favored a ‘moral machinery’ to back up the real ones.  The task was to transform the free-living artisan, former peasant or laborer into a diligent factory operative.  As Thompson puts it, “the worker, crucified on the cross of work.”

The Wesleyans demanded that working-class children be ‘broken’ early; games and sport not allowed; children were sinners; Sunday schools taught the Bible, but not literacy.  This oppressive ‘religious terrorism’ by "tottering intellects" saw fit to threaten them with hell and damnation instead.  In parallel, religious frenzies developed in the society at large, led by a raving Methodist, Johanna Southcott, who called Bonaparte ‘the Beast’ and preached a vague apocalypse.  Thompson points out that this kind of emotional disequilibrium broke out in the population especially AFTER political defeats.

Presently the huge drop in religious affiliation, the politicization of reactionary U.S. Evangelical and Southern Baptist congregations and the revulsion against it, all indicates that the U.S. working class is leaving religion behind.  This can only be a good thing for the labor movement and socialistic approaches.

WOMEN & FRIENDLY SOCIETIES

Women began to organize on their own during this period. In 1835 a strike of 1,500 female card-setters broke out.  Working women formed “Female Reform Societies” which backed up the men, developed mutual aid, but were run by themselves.  They did not go as far as demanding the vote however.  Mill girls had been ripped from the home, and developed a nostalgia for the domestic life of the cottage and hearth.  But at the same time they were able to earn their own living and developed a new sense of independence and public presence.

Riotous living was sometimes the balm for a crushed life, yet disciplined tradesmen in “Friendly Societies” numbered 1M in 1815.  They collected dues, took attendance, raised money for the sickness of members (an early form of socialized medicine!) and promoted a collective and organized approach to the vicissitudes of early capitalism. The mutuality of these associations spread collective habits, practices, institutions and mutual aid.  Some even said:  “Not Riot, but Revolution!”

According to Thompson, by 1840 Methodism had lost its hold on the working class districts to free thought, socialistic Owenism, liberal Christianity and democratic Chartism.  The workers were well-educated in the Bible, and could use quotations to their advantage in the face of the reactionary Methodist preachers. This is similar to how intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens or your average atheist podcaster on You Tube uses knowledge of the cruelties and contradictions in the Bible to refute ‘the holy.’  Engels also noted in 1844 that workers in Lancashire ignored religion.   

Irish 'Expropriate' in Birmingham, U.K.

The IRISH

The role of the Irish is similar to U.S. issues with Spanish-speaking migrants or people of color, but it had a different ‘complexion’ in England.  At least 400K of the workers in England were Irish, forming the laborer strata or ‘caste’, doing the heavy, physical work.  Cruel Crown repression in Ireland and the “Act of Union” led hundreds of thousands, including evicted peasants, to emigrate to England.  The Irish were “the cheapest labor in Western Europe” at the time, mostly living in the ports and large cities.

Their conditions were the worst – living in hovels, beds of straw, eating 1 meal a day, perhaps meat 3 times a year on special holidays, living off potatoes and perhaps a bit of milk. The owners loved them for their intense ability to do physical labor, something the English workers were not quite up to. (Sound familiar?)  According to Thompson, they also brought a leavening to the quieter English working class, as they were trained in military confrontation.  They fought police who entered their zones to collect rent, debts or taxes, as their neighborhoods were the poorest in the cities.  They didn’t shirk from physical actions and demonstrations, but instead excelled at them.

Instead of segregation, religious hatred or ethnic hostility, the English labor movement and the Irish nationalist movement had worked together for years.  The Irish were ‘citizens’ of a sort, so could not be baited as ‘illegals.’  English radicals backed the “Catholic Emancipation” bill in Parliament, as part of the pursuit of freedom of religion. The Irish joined cooperative groups and radical organizations in great numbers when they could. To Thompson, the Irish and English workers each provided an aspect of working-class resistance – the emotional, physical and verbal Irish and the organized, theoretical and committed English workers.

What stopped the Irish nationalists and English Jacobins from uniting in a revolutionary combination were the conservative wings in each group – the Irish equivocator Daniel O’Connell and the moralistic Chartists.  Yet this unity is unlike the U.S. presently, where the working class is still in general unable to cooperate, partly due to the effects of institutional racism and poverty.

The PARLIAMENTARY OPPOSITION

The liberal Whig faction in Parliament led by Fox that supported the franchise for all men retired during the repression concurrent with the Napoleonic wars, the suspension of habeas corpus, the breaking up of correspondent societies and the outlawing of Jacobin groupings by Pitt and the dominant faction in the Government.  Thompson tracks the anti-war sentiment among the population for wars that went on for more than 20 years.  Anti-war sentiment is another indicator of proletarian opposition to the maneuvering of the capitalist class, but internationally. It had obvious domestic and economic impacts in this period, and even today.  In urban areas, anti-volunteer attitudes reigned against joining the military.

After a short break in the wars, which allowed liberals to win some elections, the wars continued and Napoleon, the ‘revolutionary,’ declared himself ‘Emperor.’ Both helped break English Jacobinism. An obvious, 1938 parallel suggests itself…which I won’t go into here.  And another parallel, as war is always a useful tonic for a capitalist class in distress.

Thompson follows with a very detailed description of further electoral battles between Whig reformers and Tories, or battles between Reform independents versus both Parties, the latter representing the corrupt landed aristocracy and/or the commercial classes. Thompson shows how plebeians, workers and trades’ organizations and canvassing by “obscurities, nobodies, common tailors and barbers...” influenced the mild liberal reformers of the day.  In 1807 electoral victories in the London Westminster riding (a free-hold franchise) by two “Jacobins” against the other two Parties was a herald of things to come. It is obvious here, much to the chagrin of our anarcho-syndicalists and labor union ‘economists,’ that political participation and consciousness is another indicator of the maturity of a class – not something to be skipped.

Thompson notes that the Westminster Committee that engineered these victories became more conservative as time went on, dependent on higher reaches of the workforce – gentry, shopkeepers and independent artisans. London reformism was given a public outlet, but in the Midlands and north of England it was still driven underground, which resulted in two different kinds of movements.  This reminds one of geographic unevenness in many countries, even in the U.S.

(To be continued…)

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” (Parts 1 and 2);“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.”

Red Frog / February 5, 2022