When Red Led British

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The People's Charter was drawn up by the London Working Men's Association in 1838. Its six points were: * Universal manhood suffrage * Parliament to be elected annually * MPs to be paid, so that even the poorest could afford to be elected to parliament * elections to take place by secret ballot, to end bribery and intimidation * equal electoral districts * abolition of the property qualification for In 1842 the Chartists assembled a petition of 3.3 million signatures supporting their demands, and workers took to the streets in support.

There was a general strike. The failure of this movement to secure thesi sweeping reforms led to the increasing division of the Chartist movement between the 'moral force' wing and advocates of 'physical force' Here David Harris examines the revolutionary politics which RY UNREASONABLE!!! dre a sfered for trade union organisation Abore - meeting to petition King Massive Charțist demonstration, 1848 parliamentary candidates. THERE was a time when Marxists, or to be more precise, people who worked with Frederick Engels and Karl Marx and were associated with them as members of the first significant international workers' association, the Society of Fraternal Democrats, stood at the head of the workers' movement in Britain..

Four out of the five members of the Chartist Executive in 1847 and 1848 were members of the society; by 1848 leaders of the Chartist organisation in London and in towns throughout England and Scotland were members; its members were prominent in the National Association of United Trades and had no difficulty in winning majority of the votes given in parliamentary elections in the public show of hands, in which working people could participate. (The actual parliamentary seats were decided, of course, in a ballot where very few could vote).

In the 1847 General Election, for instance, Ernest Jones was the Chartist candidate at Halifax against the Chancellor of the Exchequer. At the nomination (Northern Star Aug.7th 1847), 'there could not have been less than twenty-five thousand persons' present, and when the show of hands was called for by the returning officer: 'For Sir Charles Wood not a hundred were held up, for Mr. Ernest Jones, nearly the whole of that magnificent meeting.

Among other Fraternal Democrats who also received a majority in the show of hands were Julian Harney, the Society's secretary for Britain and editor of the main Chartist organ the Northern Star, standing against the Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston at Tiverton, John West at Stockport, John M'Crae at Greenock, Samuel Kydd at Greenwich and William Dixon at Wigan.

The movement made no secret of its connection with karees on Tolpuddle Martyrs. 1834 Marx and Engels. Engels was a correspondent of the Northern Star. The enthusiastic reception given to Marx when he spoke at a meeting of the Fraternal Democrats on November 29 1847 was reported in the Northern Star. The Northern Star, June 24 1848, described Marx as 'one of the ablest of the defenders of Labour's rights in Europe' Leading Fraternal Democrats, including Carl Schapper, the Society's secretary for Germany, and Joseph Moll, a member for Germany of its committee, were the leading members of the League of Communists for which Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. 'If one may resort to a risky comparison, Trotsky wrote in 1925 in Where is Britain Going?, 'one may say that the Chartist movement is like a prelude which gives in an undeveloped form the musical theme of the whole opera If we are to ensure, as far as it is possible to do so,, that the 'opera' • is successful "production'; if Marxists today are to stand like the Fraternal Democrats at the head of the movement and enjoy a similar mass support; if we are to see soon 30 or 40 Marxist Labour Party MPs; if Marxists are to win the fight for the leadership of the Labour Party and the unions, which requires the setting up of a daily paper _ then we need to study closely the Chartist prelude, to revive the Chartist spirit.

The Fraternal Democrats stressed that the struggle of the working class is international. As Harney put it (Northern Star, 26 Feb. 1848), the proletarians had to refuse to follow "at the tail of the bourgeoisie' but rather 'to put forth the gigantic energies of our own order, to take fully and entirely that which is our own' , to achieve which however 'with the certainty of success, we must unite the Proletarians of all lands.' The enemy of the working class was not foreigners but its own ruling class. When attempts were made to rouse anti-French feeling the Fraternal Democrats declared Nortbers Star, 8 Jan.1848): 'Working men of Great Britain and Ireland your country is already invaded and subjugated by enemies within... You will not dislodge these enemies by increasing the physical force power of your rulers.' The enemy of both the French and British working men was the 'triumphant moneyocracy' in their own countries.

Speaking in London on 28 March, 1848 (Northern Star April 1, 1848), Ernest Jones observed that at certain moments 'Physical force comes like an electric shock ... it requires no telling. I would not give a straw for a movement created solely by a few leaders - it must be indigenous, racey, of the people's hearts; but it is the duty of all good men to prepare the soil for its reception — to lay the wires so that when the electric fire flashes from heaven, it may not be lost in an unmeaning tumult, but, guided by the links of organisation, strike home to its goal....Now, then, it is the time to prepare, it is too late in the eleventh hour when oligarchy may have surrounded us on all sides, and organisation be rendered impossible.' The way in which the electric fire could flash from heaven but fail to strike home to its goal because the wires had not been adequately laid beyore hand and leadership was EH inadequate, was demonstrated by the great strike of 1842 against wage reductions and for the People's Charter.

This eruption, which approached General Strike nronnrtinna was described PAVE in the Manchester Guardian of Aug. 13 1842 as 'really an insurrection' and later by Harney (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, July 5 1948) as 'that great turn-out, that strike of the factory proletarians which for a moment truly threatened the downfall of all England's social institutions' Too Alar in tne socialst viganiser of Feb.4, 1982, John O'Mahony noted that, 'Since 1917, soviets -workers' councils elected from factories and districts - have been thrown up in a large number of countries in conditions of large-scale working class struggle.' He described how a soviet was set up in Russia in Petrograd in 1905.

More than sixty years before, in the 1842 strike, this form of struggle was adopted in Britain.

Although workers in other parts of Britain, notably miners in Staffordshire and Scotland, were already out, the strike can be said to have begun on August 8 in the Manchester area and already on August y a meeting was held of delegates trom all the power-loom factories in Manchester.

On the 12th a meeting of 200 delegates 'representing the various trades and mill hands of Manchester and its vicinity, as well as various parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire' Northern Star, Aug. 13, 1842) called for the strike to be extended and main— tained until the Charter was granted.

The following day these delegates issued a call for an enlarged 'Great Delegate Conference' to meet on the 15th.

The assembled delegates described themselves in an address issued on August 16 (Times, August 18, 1842) as the true and bona fide representatives of the districte, people of these At the same time a conference of Chartist party, the National Charter Association, the delegates to which had been elected at mass meetings in various parts of Britain, also met in Manchester on the 16th:

Significantly, as the 'turn —outs from Saddleworth, Oldham, Ashton, etc., mustering from 5,000 to 6,000' entered Huddersfield on the 13th 'stopping the mills and turning out the hands' , they 'advised the Huddersfield men to call a public meeting for 4 o'clock on Monday morning ... and at the meeting to select a delegate, and send him to meet the 'national delegates' at Manchester on Tuesday next' (Times, August 16, 1842).

A leading article in the Times, Augüst 18, 1842, observed: 'The march of the rioters from mill to mill, and from town to town, was for several days almost like an unobstructed truimph.' Nevertheless, the march of the 'rioters' was stopped. How they were stopped was reported in the same issue of the Times.

When between 5,000 and 10,000 workers marched from Leek into Bursiem in the Potteries on August 16 they were met by 'about 36 of the troop of Dragoons' whose 'commanding officer gave the order to charge and fire. The men in front of the mob stood firm, one more prominent than the rest. This man was aimed at as their leader, and Dragoon with his carbine shot him through the head, and his brains were literally blown out, with a hole as large as an egg, in a mass.

Similarly the army fired on and killed workers in other towns. There were also mass arrests.

There were signs however that the army could not be completely relied on. A correspondent in Manchester reported in the Northern Star, August 20, 1842, about the situation in Preston, where the military had fired on the people on August 13, killing two and wounding others: 'A report has reached us that fourteen of the Rifle Brigade have been brought into the town prisoners,

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Socialist Organiser no.100 September 16 1982 Page 11