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

Class Classic Continued, Part 2 - Dickensian!

 “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.

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. 

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.

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

Actually Save the Children!

 “Cults and Cultists”

A morbid, bizarre and stressed society produces cults in the hundreds. One of the strengths of You Tube, podcasts, some films and documentaries is their ability to expose these swarmy things to daylight.  These sad, grifter, Elmer Gantry organizations are based in the U.S., but there are many others all over the world.  Most borrow from some religion, then turn the volume up to 11.

Not around after the revolution...

Whether it is Hasidic Jews in New York or the most brutal and weird of all, Scientology; Hindu versions like the Rajneeshees and Bikram Yoga; multi-level marketing organizations like Amway, Herbalife or LulaRoe, which function as commercial money cults; the apocalyptic Jehovah’s Witnesses; Christian cults like the Children of God, The Family and the Remnant Church; Nuevo-Buddhist sex cults like NXIVM and even the fundamentalist child-abusers in the Mormon FLDS – there is no end to it.

They all share a somewhat different organizational style than so-called mainstream religions, though the thought patterns of faith, magical thinking and being disconnected from reality are similar. You may leave the Catholic or Baptist faith, but you are probably not shunned or sued because of it.  Though leaving mainstream Mormonism or Islam can be dicey, as they straddle the continuum in some places. Of course, if you are around fundamentalist Islamic or Hindu groups outside the U.S. like Daesh, Al Qaeda, the Taliban or the RSS, having another religion or no religion at all can get you killed.

I’ve watched a whole host of these documentaries, de-programming podcasts, streaming series and the like.  These U.S. cults all share a number of characteristics.  Terrible attitudes towards children and women; a central ‘guru’ figure; isolation from the world; complete shunning; financial exploitation, ultra-high internal controls.  Now why would a leftist be interested in the issue, other than exploring the pathological versions of idealist thinking and terrible organization that capital produces?  I’ll get to that.

Save us!

The Cults

First off is Scientology.  It is centered in a personality cult around one dead man, L. Ron Hubbard. It imprisons its own members for so-called offenses, ‘shuns’ anyone who leaves - even family members - and spies on dissidents.  They milk members for massive amounts of money to build hollow temples to their ideas.  They sue those who go public and use the legal system to intimidate the IRS, the FBI and any newspaper willing to expose their functioning.  Children of Scientologists are brainwashed from birth.  Their ideology is ultimately really bad science-fiction - written, logically, by a science fiction writer. Lying, like every other cult, is allowed in order to protect the leaders or organization - sort of like the CIA.  Almost no one from Scientology ever goes to prison, no matter how many crimes, negligent homicides, data theft or tax evasions they commit.  Only 11 at this count.

Or NXIVM? It was run by a single guru, Keith Raniere.  He was surrounded by mostly upper-middle class women and Hollywood stars, some of whom are initiated into a ‘branding’ society dedicated to his sexual pleasure, enabled by a lead woman.  They hold expensive business training seminars which were really part of a MLM pyramid scheme. These were attended by many famous business executives.  They isolate their members from family, take all their earnings or accounts and have the members live in a dormitory.  Members, like other groups, are manipulated by emotional grooming and toxic positivity. Their ideology is some version of ‘evolutionary Buddhism,’ claiming they are indulging in 'rational inquiry.'.  This guru went to prison after trying to escape to Mexico, but still runs the group from inside.  This bunch reminds me of Jeffrey Epstein and his procurer Ghislaine Maxwell.

The FLDS collects every bit of money members earn, puts them to work in their Utah, Arizona and Texas establishments and doles out young girls to aging leaders and other men as part of their polygamy beliefs.  If they leave FLDS, they are shunned by family and friends and isolated from the whole group.  Members are barred from exposure to the rest of the world. The grorup even sent away young men who were interfering with the allocation of wives.   Mormonism is like a weird Americanized Christianity, partially based on the teaching that the prophets in the Bible had multiple wives.  Warren Jeffs, the head of this cult, was eventually sent to prison where he still controls affairs.

The cuddly, white-haired guru of the Rajneeshees is from India, Bhagwan Rajneesh.  He had 17 Rolls Royce motor cars and intended to create and build a communal ‘heaven on earth’ in Oregon, on a very large compound and ranch.  His main administrator was a woman also from India.  She enforced discipline, manipulating voting rolls, made threats and brought out guns against those who opposed the group.  They milked Hollywood stars and upper-class people for vast amounts of money and built their holy town with free labor. One of the draws of the ‘town’ was sexual freedom. The Hindu guru had to flee back to India when some of these actions came out.

Gwen Shamblin Presiding

The Remnant Church was started by a big-haired fake blonde from Memphis, Gwen Shamblin.  She believed in Bible literalism and controlled the church’s membership down to the ‘T,’ ran God’s own weight-loss program (yes!) and became a multi-millionairess. Towards the end, Shamblin encouraged members to give up their worldly wealth to ‘God’ (which was the Remnant Church) – something she was not doing. Then problems erupted.  These included the death of a child who was mistreated according to church doctrine; women who left opposed her doctrine that the husband is king; the Church interfered with an experienced doctor’s medical advice; and finally lies about her inheritance.  ‘God’ finally did have his say, as a plane she and her minions used to go to a Trump rally crashed and they all died.

Or the Jehovah’s Witnesses?  Those nice people selling their sad literature from a rack on the street or knocking on your door?  They are an apocalypse cult that isolates their children from other children and perpetuates child abuse by condemning everyone to a hell or death for every little ‘sin.’ All in continual preparation for the Book of Daniel's Revelation prediction that 144,000 of the elect are going to ascend into Heaven, and the rest will be part of the lucky few left alive on earth after the genocidal slaughter of Armageddon. They have a closet full of rules on dress, sexuality, food and holidays.  Mostly – don’t!  Totally dominated by a Governing Body of ‘elders’ - tired old white men who ignore child sexual abuse.  Reserve your seat now!

The Christian Children of God or The Family?  Children are isolated from the rest of the world, taught that nearly everything is a sin, that the man is the leader, that if they leave, they will be permanently shunned by everyone, even their own parents and siblings. They are barely educated in incompetent 'homeschools.' If they get abused by a leader it is some kind of ‘gods will.’  Sometimes they live in isolated compounds, which compounds the picture.

The Hasidim (Satmar sect) also practice shunning, isolation, male chauvinism, collection of assets, labor assignments, forced marriage, weird clothing and sexual repression.  Girls especially try to run from this group, which is controlled by a group of elderly rabbis.  And don’t get me started on the Christian Scientists, who sometimes kill their own children by refusing them medical aid, because God will ‘naturally’ heal their troubles.  Another group of organized child abusers and wellness nuts. What the hell is wrong with all these people?!

Pedophile priests?

So?  

No doubt a few of these issues are common to other non-political organizations, especially sexual abuse of women or children as we’ve seen in the U.S. military, the Southern Baptists, the Boy Scouts and the ‘grand-daddy’ of them all, the Catholic Church.  It all fits in with capitalist backwardness and the decaying culture we live in. Male chauvinism and toxic masculinity is part of the gender structure of U.S. society. The prosperity gospel fits in with the meritocratic myth of the ‘select’ getting rich.  Being ungrounded in understanding economics, science and material reality is convenient to the ruling class and these groups are a result.

Magical thinking befuddles workers and makes them useless to pro-labor social movements – but not to the fundie churches, Trumpists, the Republican Party and fascistic organizations, which have aspects of cults, but not the full meaning. QAnon has heavy participation by evangelicals - supposedly interested in 'saving the children.'  The patriarchal ‘family’ and the treatment of children is one of the links to cults.

Some of this behavior also happens in leftist organizations.  There have been occurrences of financial theft or soaking members for excessive cash. A few groups have had occasions of sexual abuse and exploitation by leaders upon members. There have been threats if someone leaves the group, while a few organizations have powerful sugar-daddies.  There are also the hidden and un-elected status of exalted leaders, a standard in organizations that do not allow voting at any level, usually Stalinists of some kind.  Some groups never read anything outside the group’s publications or their assigned reading, much like religious cults. There is even one ultra-Maoist Party, the RCP, that encourages an unthinking approach to their leader maximus, intentionally creating a cult around him. The idea that ‘Marxist-Leninist’ organizations are like a military unit is part of this.  Take orders and shut up!  But they are overall far from the functioning of an actual cult.

But if you see any of this happening, you will know … ‘you’re in some kind of a cult!’

Sources:  “The Weigh Down: The Millionaire Preacher With a Weight-Loss Cult;” “Wild Wild Country,” “Scientology and the Aftermath,” “Escaping the NXIVM Cult;” “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator;” “Escaping Jehovah’s Witnesses,” “Mormon Polygamy: Leaving the Cult;” “Unorthodox,” “The Family,” “The Children of God,” “On Becoming a God in Central Florida,” "LuLaRich."

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews:  “The Cult of the Constitution,” “Covideo Nation,” “After the Fact?”  “Marxist Criticism of the Bible,” “White Knight,” “One Night in Miami,” “Rise of the Nones,” “Religulous,” “The Jesus Comics,” “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Spiritual Snake Oil” or the word “Christianity.”  

The Cultural Marxist

January 29, 2022

Class Classic, Part 1 - The Reign of Paine

“The Making of the English Working Class”by E.P. Thompson, 1963 Part 1 Sketch: (pgs. 1 to 205)

This long, classic book by E.P. Thompson is 939 pages, with a 1968 postscript. I’m going to review the book in bits.  The book is so long and most leftists, including myself, have never had the time to read such a tome.  It holds lessons for today, so this is not just some excavation of musty information.  There are many parallels to present society.  Thompson was a member of the British CP until he left after the USSR ordered the invasion of Hungary, along with Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin.

Thompson’s main point is that workers create themselves as a self-conscious class - it is not just the automatic activity and influence of history, society or economics.  His book covers both the creation of the working class in England and its rise to class consciousness - two distinct processes.  This book is how it happened in Britain, from the early beginnings of ‘reformism’ in the 1700s, which began a struggle against the landed gentry, the monarchy, the state church and the police state.  This is how a class ‘in itself’ slowly became a class ‘for itself.’ 

Thompson employs a vast amount of original research, a wealth of personal names, a credenza of cities, a mass of organizations, a large quantity of quotes, a plethora of literary references, to write this history.  He names the leaders of the various factions, especially the most leftward and consistent – Hardy, Thelwall, Binns, Spence or writers like Blake and Shelley.

But perhaps we now need a supplement – “The Unmaking of the British Working Class”? 

In the 1700s conservative institutions like the Methodist Church trained working-class people in reading, speaking, organization, planning, raising funds, travel, publication, communication and rules. This was very unlike the official Anglican Church of England. The Methodists provided a training ground for future groups, though the Methodist’s official theology and leadership was loyalist and reactionary.  In the later 1700s artisanal and proletarian inspiration came from Tom Paine’s omnipresent and cheap publication “The Rights of Man.”  Paine at the time was living in England. Later it was the Jacobins and the example of the French Revolution. Associations in England formed bonds with the French revolutionaries and defended France.  Later some even hoped that French revolutionary troops would invade England and overthrow its ruling class!

Apocalyptic and millenarian thinking was also common in this period, accompanying the high social turmoil.  The “Book of Revelation” from the Bible was especially quoted.  Thompson also mentions cultural forces – the tavern, the church, social and town life. Many radicals met in taverns, as they were free.  These were even christened ‘tavern societies.’  While the more proper reformers had staid and organized meetings, the more proletarian ones drank, ate and had loud, combative discussions.

Reverence for the English ‘Constitution” of 1688 kept many English radicals from going beyond it.  While allowing a certain amount of freedom to the ‘free-born Englishman” it propped up the state church, property rights, the monarchy and the land-owning aristocracy, as well as opposing universal suffrage. Paine was the first to undermine this Constitution, saying Constitutions were moldy parchments based on the dead hand of the past.  This should sound familiar to present day left radicals in the U.S., who face liberals and mild reformists who cherish every bit of our own moldy and anti-democratic parchment … adopted in 1788, 244 years ago.   

Food and price riots were frequent, organized by the poverty-stricken ‘lower orders of society.’  But the Right also organized attacks of thugs against reformers – organized by the church, businessmen and fearful Tories.  ‘Mobs’ and riots occurred on a frequent basis in England towards the end of the century, especially as the economy tanked due to the newly-declared war against France. The Rightists figured that a huge percentage of the population were criminals, calling them thieves, traitors and terrorists, and applied those names to the radicals too.

Paine denounced appeals to the British Parliament as pernicious and a waste of time.  What about the U.S.’s own modern Congress?  Liberals and even some ‘radicals’ never cease in expecting Congress to deliver significant reforms.  Paine made the demand for a people’s Convention of citizens, not continuing appeals to the sclerotic British Parliament.  He was essentially calling for a rudimentary dual power.  Except for actual socialists and communists you won’t hear anyone calling for something like that today.  Our own 'gentlemen' reformers do not know how to go beyond a terminal and corrupt bourgeois democracy.

Thompson points out that agitation in Britain among the poor artisans and workers between 1792-1796 was near insurrectionary… not a mere reflection of the French Revolution, but caused by British conditions.  Paine’s agitation and propaganda had combined political suffrage and economic demands, which did the deed, as laborers for the first time saw their economic issues and solutions highlighted. His writings were sold cheaply everywhere.

A patriotic war fever against France accompanied war preparations.  Paine was banned, burnt in effigy and attacked from the royalist Right and conservative ‘reformers’ still aligned with the 1688 Constitution.  He fled the country to France.  Prominent radicals were jailed or attacked by royalist mobs, yet there was much opposition to the war and impressment.  Later, thousands of sailors revolted and blocked the Thames in 1797 with their ships.  There was an armed Irish revolt in 1799 against Whitehall, so the national question was at all times present, though Thompson doesn’t frame it as such.  Many plebeian Irish were part of the subversive organizations in England.

The above-ground groups had minutes, meetings, membership lists, dues, communications and publications. They were a mixture of artisans, laborers, small shopkeepers and a few professionals – who had the beginnings of class understanding.  A proposal for a national Convention joining all reformers, including Scots and Irish, was the last straw for the ‘Church and King” set, for the ruling class politicians Pitt and Burke. Prosecutions, jailings and executions followed, which broke the back of the legal reform societies. Though it did not amount to a ‘White’ terror, as the British jury system prevented every prominent and not so prominent activist from being jailed or killed, but Thompson still styles it a ‘counter-revolution.’ During this period there were also underground insurrectionary groups like the “United Englishmen.”

Thompson dates this period as the beginning of the formation of the British working class in both fact and theory, being proletarianized while being imbued with a class understanding.  Landlords, the aristocracy, merchants and capitalists in their majority had all united against the plebeian masses in repressing their nation-wide organizing.  This was unlike what happened in France. The beginnings of class and socialist ideas began to percolate – about nationalization of the land to oppose the landowners; ‘class versus class’ views; economic, not just ‘rights’ demands; and notions about relieving the special burdens imposed on working-class women.   

In the 1800s, after the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815 at Waterloo, nearly all ‘mobs’ were from the left, reflecting the ‘turn’.

End of Part 1 – Stay Tuned!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Citizen Tom Paine” (Fast); “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “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); “1916 Rebellion Walking Tour,” “A Full Life: James Connolly,” “The Immortal Irishman,” “The Football Factory” (King); "The North Water." 

And I got it at the UGA Library!

Red Frog

January 25, 2022

College Library Browsing #5

 “Marx” by Terry Eagleton, 1997

One High-Marxist Brit here.  Eagleton is a multiple professor and especial political expert in literary theory and fussy Roman Catholicism.   Eagleton grew up working class, in an Irish Republican family and later was a member of several British Trotskyist groups.  This book was bound in an intense black hardcover, lodged in the forgotten stacks of a University Library.  His most famous book is “Literary Theory:  An Introduction,” where he approaches literary formalism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-modernism from a political and Marxist point of view.  What does he have to say to a ‘Jimmy Higgins’ in this book, which is the British version of saying a regular Leftist activist?   Well...

Eagleton at Rest

Eagleton’s book is probably known as a monograph in England.  In this small volume he goes over some of Marx’s greatest hits, highlighting some famous quotes, incessant dialectic pairings and the wonderful grounded language that Marx, the ‘economist,’ sometimes used to describe just about everything.  At one odd point Eagleton claims that it was Engels that came up with dialectical materialism, but then admits perhaps Marx was on board too.   Perhaps! 

Eagleton explains Marx’s takes on philosophy, anthropology, history and politics.  Here is a sample salient point from each. 

1. He discusses the idea that Marx’s anti-philosophy was still a philosophy of sorts.  It was an ‘anti-philosophy’ because if theoretical problems are actually rooted in social contradictions, they cannot be solved except by addressing those real contradictions in the real world.  Just as combatting religious, metaphysical or magical ideas is not done purely through logic, reason and facts, as liberals or pure atheists would have us believe.  Society has to change for ideas to adjust.  Under communism according to Marx the main contradictions of life would actually disappear and this would ‘self-abolish’ radical political theory too.  Ultimately ‘philosophy’ is grounded in history, not inside our heads.  

2. Marx saw humans as social animals, with change being the essence of humanity's life.  Marx understood both individualism and social being – ‘species-being’ – were absolutely linked, not diametrically opposed.  Mental and manual labor, city and country, animal and human, body and mind, head and heart – are also false dualisms.  Eagleton quotes from Marx’s early works, which some may find ‘romantic’ but others absolutely true as pictures of alienation: 

“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become the treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume – your capital”

Money is “…the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples…”

3. Marx did not discover the notion of social class, he focused on how class was related to a ‘mode of production’ of human life and necessities.  Tribal life, slave agricultural  societies, tribute societies, feudalism, capitalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat … and socialism lurking in the wings.  The last stage of socialism is where class disappears. Producing the basic human needs of life is what makes up the bedrock of history, not great men or women, not war, not various superficial identities, inventions, ideas, not even gods.  Eagleton discusses whether Marx felt socialism was inevitable.  He concludes no. Socialism can come about as capital socializes labor, develops technology and centralizes economies world-wide – which it has already done.   Marx describes this period thusly, when the ruling class and capitalist property become archaic:  

“Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.  The death knell of capitalist private property sounds.  The expropriators are expropriated.”  (Communist Manifesto). 

4.   Marx is a practical political thinker, even though he sometimes seems too abstract.  He concluded that the proletariat was the ‘last class’ because they had the power to abolish classes.  Social inequality is eliminated in socialism, but not between individuals, who remain of differing skills, energy levels and intelligences.  Under communism, abundance and time will finally render inequality moot, and individualism will flower under the strength of mutual bonds, economic sufficiency and democracy. Marx did not spend much time looking into this future, as he knew the actual class struggle determines how the future looks.                                                      

More is contained in the book than just what is in these notes, of course.  No review can incorporate everything, which is why you should come down and buy some books during this cold winter.  May Day has many books on ‘theory’ by various authors.  We have anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, council communist, environmentalist, guerillaist, humanist, left communist, Leninist, liberal, left liberal, Maoist, Marxist, Schactmanite, Social Democratic, Stalinist and Trotskyist writers and theorists.   Did I miss anybody?

And I got it at the UGA Library! 

Red Frog

January 22, 2022

Ship of Tools

 “The North Water” Limited Series, directed by Andrew Haigh, 2021

This is a tale of early capitalist England in the 1850s.  Still a time of primitive accumulation, when murder, fraud and secrecy could lead to a great initial fortune. When colonial occupation and whaling were worth many pounds of sterling.  When the Irish were suspect and class a very heavy thing.

Filmed in Norway, far north of the whaling town of Svalbard, it is about an ill-fated whaling ship out of Hull, England traveling to the Arctic for seal pelts and whale oil in 1859.  The ship is called ‘The Volunteer’ but the men aboard are only ‘volunteers’ in the lying sense, as they are desperate, ill-used and ill-paid.  Ice flows, pack ice, barren rock outcrops, vast stretches of frozen, snowy land, crevasses, glaciers, a giant whale, helpless seals, the totemic polar bear and Inuit hunters populate this North.  Blisteringly cold winds, shabby tents, hunger and possible frostbite haunt the crew. 

The whaling ship’s captain has been secretly ordered to sail as far north as possible and scuttle the ship between ice flows for the insurance money.  The first mate is an accomplice but no one else knows – neither the ship’s doctor Sumner, who was cashiered out of the military by a double-dealing superior officer; nor the brutal harpoonist Drax, who leads the hunts.  They find out soon enough. 

The show might remind watchers of Shackleton’s trip to the Antarctic or bits of the Revenant; Call of the Wild, Titanic or Billy Budd, but it’s really a case study in capitalism, writ small on a cramped, wooden sailing ship.  Drax is an unrestrained sociopathic killer and Sumner the Laudanum-addicted ‘intellectual’ he eventually hunts.  The captain works with both Drax and his first mate to cover up a rape and murder.  A stolen diamond ring from India plays the role of greed and an incentive to murder.  They join a ship of proletarian men, all to be possibly sacrificed to the god of profit by a silver-tongued, silver-haired gent in a frock coat living in a large row house in Hull.  Of course! 

A northern fijord in Norway

The rich and the bosses are dealt hard times in films lately.  If these movie portrayals are any indication, their number is coming up soon.  After all, the CIA and the U.S. military don’t control all the movies made in the world.

The brutality contrasts with the quiet and somewhat happy hunting life of the local Inuit, who help the Europeans, then are punished for that.  A Christian reverend has found himself a ‘cause’ – to ‘civilize’ the Inuit.  He has built a wooden hut in the middle of nowhere to do so. These money-grubbing English, with their industrial scale whaling and seal-clubbing, their punitive religion, their violence, seem to be the least civilized – except in technology. 

There is a great scene of a pagan May Day in Hull; a not so great pub fight in a Shetland port, a polar bear playing the role of a protector.  A bloody seal hunt and the butchering of a whale is so real it makes you wonder if they really did kill those animals in the process of filming. I understand it was CGI.  Haigh framed the seal hunt as part of history, but commercial seal hunting is still carried out en mass in places like Canada.  Sumner, the addicted ‘intellectual,’ is constantly reminded of his questionable status as an Irishman.  The film was actually made only 22 miles from the North Pole due to global warming, as they had to continue northwards to find a suitable frozen environment. This is a howling trip to the North that you will not forget.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box in upper left to investigate our 15 year archive:  “The North is not the Mid-West!” “Northland,” “Life Under the Jolly Roger,” “Seaspiracy,” “All is Lost,” “Kolyma Tales,” “Polar Star.”

The Cultural Marxist / January 18, 2022