In my Solidarity 751 article I aimed to show that activists of Chartism and its predecessor struggles were strongly geared towards collective class-struggle self-education. In Solidarity 760 I discussed how the activities of James (Bronterre) O'Brien related to this impulse.
Chartism was the world's first national-level working-class mass movement, in the world's first heavily industrialised country. It aimed to transform the parliamentary electoral system in Britain so fundamentally that workers could use it to meet their real needs, thereby destroying the dominance exercised by landowners and the capitalist owners of large-scale industry.
O'Brien was a central activist of this movement. Of such leaders, he alone tried consistently to put forward a theoretical model of what Chartism was about. This model centred on a distinction between "direct slavery", as in the Greco-Roman ancient world, and its continuation, "indirect slavery", of which contemporary waged labour was the key example.
Karl Marx wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party in German in late January 1848, for publication by the Communist League, a group made up mostly of artisans expelled by continental governments for their political activities. These groups assumed, rightly, that revolutions were about to break out in their home countries, that these revolutions would introduce bourgeois democratic electoral systems of the same broad type as the one in Britain, and that they themselves would shortly return to join in struggles to make this happen.
In this context Marx set out through the Manifesto to convince activists like these that they should try to do in their own countries what the Chartists were trying to do in Britain. He argued that:"the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy". This would involve them, first, in creating mass pressure to make whatever electoral systems emerged as democratic as possible. Secondly they should try to make the biggest gains they could in any elections that took place. And thirdly they should use any power gained in this way to put through pro-working class measures.
But Marx went further than this, predicting that: "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, ie the proletariat organised as the ruling class..." In the beginning this will entail:
"… despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures ... which appear economically insufficient and untenable but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of revolutionising the mode of production..."
In other words, he connected a political approach derived from Chartism to a longer term strategy aimed at socio-economic as well as political revolution.
In 1838 the then prominent Chartist orator Joseph Rayner Stephens, at a mass meeting on Kersal Moor near Salford, memorably said that Chartism was "a knife and fork question". These words were powerful because many of Stephens's hearers had become factory workers in England to escape starvation in Ireland, and now faced it again here because of factory lay-offs. Much the same threat hung over many workers when Marx wrote the Manifesto ten years later. In this, however, he set out to integrate the fully justified Chartist focus on consumption with a longer-term conception of how "proletarians" could take control of production.
Also in the Manifesto he wrote:
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
What does this formulation imply?
Marx of course knew that even in Britain the "proletarians", ie the industrial workers, did not form a majority of the working class as a whole, because this also included large numbers of agricultural labourers, domestic servants and declassed artisans in fields like tailoring and shoemaking. Because he knew this he looked upon industrial workers dynamically - that is, not statically as a sociological group but as the only people with the capacity to bring about fundamental societal change. He thought they could and would do this by leading wider and wider circles of workers more generally in action which neither the the landed class nor the capitalists would be able to control.
Marx expressed this idea in the Manifesto, but he had developed it earlier in the 1840s in disputes with other German intellectuals who, like him, had undergone a training in academic philosophy.
A philosophical tradition existed in Germany which did not exist here. In this tradition, academic philosophers regularly investigated the history and social role of religion. Marx was trained to PhD level in this tradition. Drawing on this training he then took part in a number of often heated exchanges with others from the same background. Through doing so, and in opposition to most of them, he worked out his own highly distinctive conception of ideological struggle, which already included a belief about how working-class activists and traditional intellectuals like himself should interact.
This found expression in, among other writings, Marx's Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, published in Paris early in 1844. Here, focusing on the situation and prospects in Germany, he described the emergence of:
"... a class with radical chains, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetrated on it ... a sphere which does not partially oppose the consequences but totally opposes the premises of the German political system; a sphere, finally, that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, thereby emancipating them; a sphere, in short, that is the complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat".
He went on from this to say that: "As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy" - in other words he visualised a form of interaction between people who, like him, had undergone a formal education in academic philosophy, with industrial workers, in which the workers actively appropriate to themselves a capacity for philosophical thinking. He adds that: "... once the lightning of thought has deeply struck this unsophisticated soil of the people, the Germans will emancipate themselves..."
When Marx wrote this he already knew a certain amount about Chartism from articles about Britain that Frederick Engels wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung paper that Marx was editing. Then in June 1844 weavers in Silesia rose up in revolt. Marx wrote an article about this, which began by referring to a song that was popular amongst the weavers at the start of this uprising, which he described as "a bold call to action", pointing out that in it: "there is not even a mention of hearth and home , factory or district, but in [it] the proletariat at once, in a striking, sharp, unrestrained and powerful manner, proclaims its opposition to the society of private property". Further:
"The Silesian uprising begins precisely with what the French and English workers end, with consciousness of the nature of the proletariat. The action itself bears the stamp of this superior character. Not only machines, these rivals of the workers, are destroyed, but also ledgers, the titles to property. And while all other movements were aimed primarily only against the owner of the individual enterprise, the visible enemy, this movement is at the same time directed against the banker, the hidden enemy".
Between 1844 and January 1848 Marx visited England, and through Engels met and discussed with Chartist activists, including George Julian Harney. During the same period he also met and exchanged ideas with workers in Paris and in Brussels.
The Manifesto made several predictions about the likely course of events, many of which did not come true in the timescale it implies. Marx and Engels addressed this in their 1872 preface to a new German edition, saying that although "conditions may have changed in the twenty-five years since the Manifesto was written, yet the general principles expounded in the document are on the whole as correct to-day as ever". They did not spell out in this preface what they thought those general principles were, but the philosophical model sketched out above must surely have been one of them.
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