Revolutionaries (19 page)

¹³
Orwell in Spain
, pp. 28, 251, 269–70.

¹⁴
Ken Loach,
Land and Freedom
, 1995.

The Marx Memorial Lecture, which I have the honour to give this year, commemorates the death of Karl Marx. This is why it is held on 15 March. However, we are this year celebrating not only the 85th anniversary of Marx's death, but the 150th of his birth, and we are still within a few months of the centenary of the publication of the first volume of
Capital
, his most important theoretical work, and of the 50th anniversary of the great October revolution, the most far-reaching practical result of his labours. There is thus no shortage of anniversaries in tidy round figures, all connected with Karl Marx, which we can celebrate simultaneously on this occasion. And yet there is perhaps an even more suitable reason why tonight is a good night to remind ourselves of the life and work of the great man – the man whose name is now so familiar to all that he no longer has to be described, even on the commemorative plaque which the Greater London Council has at last put up on the house in Soho where he lived in poverty and where now the customers of a well-known restaurant dine in affluence.

It is a reason which Marx, with his sense of the irony of history, would have appreciated. As we gather here tonight, banks and stock exchanges are closed, financiers are gathering in Washington to register the breakdown of the system of international
trade and payments in the capitalist world; to stave off, if they can, the fall of the almighty dollar. It is not impossible that this date will go down in the history books like the date 24 October 1929, which marks the end of the period of capitalist stabilization in the 1920s. It is certain that the events of the past week prove more vividly than any argument the essential instability of capitalism; its failure so far to overcome the internal contradictions of this system on a world scale. The man who devoted his life to demonstrating the internal contradictions of capitalism, would appreciate the irony of the accident that the crisis of the dollar should come to a head precisely on the anniversary of his death.

My subject for tonight, which was fixed long before this, is Marx and British labour; that is to say what Marx thought about the British labour movement and what that movement owes to Marx. He did not, at least in his later years, think much of British labour, and his influence on the movement, though significant, has been less than he or later marxists would have wished. Hence the subject does not lend itself to the usual rhetoric, not that a historian is specially qualified to practise it. It is an occasion for realistic analysis, and I shall try to be realistic.

What was Marx's opinion of the British working class and its labour movement?

Between the time that he became a communist and his death, British labour passed through two phases: the revolutionary phase of the Chartist period and the phase of modest reformism which succeeded it in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. In the first phase the British labour movement led the world in mass organization, in political class-consciousness, in the development of anti-capitalist ideologies such as the early forms of socialism, and in militancy. In the second phase it still led the world in a special form of organization, namely trade unionism and probably also in the narrower form of class consciousness which simply consists in recognizing the working class as a
separate class, whose members have different (but not necessarily opposed) interests to other classes. However, it had abandoned the effort and perhaps even the hope of overthrowing capitalism, and accepted not only the existence of this system, seeking merely to improve the condition of its members within it, but also, and increasingly, it accepted – with certain specific exceptions – the bourgeois-liberal theories about how much improvement could be achieved. It was no longer revolutionary, and socialism virtually disappeared from it.

No doubt this retreat took longer than we sometimes think: Chartism did not die in 1848 but remained active and important for several years thereafter. No doubt, looking at the mid-Victorian decades with the wisdom of hindsight, we can observe that the retreat concealed elements of a new advance. Thanks to the experience of those decades the revived labour movement of the 1890s and of our own century would be much more firmly and permanently organized and would consist of a real ‘movement' rather than a succession of waves of militancy. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that it was a retreat; and in any case Marx did not survive long enough to see the subsequent revival.

Marx and Engels had high hopes of the British labour movement in the 1840s. More than this, their hopes of European revolution depended to a great extent on changes in the most advanced capitalist country, and the only one with a conscious movement of the proletariat on a mass scale. This did not occur. Britain remained relatively unaffected by the revolution of 1848. However, for some time after this Marx and Engels continued to hope for a revival of both the British and the continental movements. By the early 1850s it became clear that a new era of capitalist expansion had opened, which made this much less likely, and when even the next of the great world slumps – that of 1857 – did not in fact lead to a revival of Chartism, it became clear that they could no longer expect very much from the British labour movement. Nor in fact did they expect very
much from it, for the remainder of Marx's lifetime, and their references to it express a growing disappointment. Marx and Engels were not, of course, the only ones to express this disappointment. If they deplored the ‘lack of mettle of the old Chartists' in the movement of the 1860s, so did non-marxist survivors of the heroic period, like Thomas Cooper.

Two observations are perhaps worth making in passing at this point. The first is that this ‘apparent bourgeois infection of the British workers',
¹
this ‘embourgeoisement of the English proletariat'
²
will remind many of us of what has been happening to the British labour movement in an even more headlong period of capitalist expansion and prosperity through which we have been living. Marx and Engels were, of course, careful to avoid the superficiality of the academic sociologists of the present, who think that ‘embourgeoisement' means that workers are turning into modest copies of the middle class, a sort of mini-bourgeoisie. They were not, and he knew they were not. Nor did Marx believe for a moment that the expansion and prosperity from which many workers undoubtedly benefited, had created an ‘affluent society' from which poverty had been banished, or was likely to be.

Indeed, some of the most eloquent passages in
Capital I
(cap. 23 section 5) deal precisely with the poverty of those years of capitalist triumph in Britain, as illustrated by the parliamentary inquiries of that time. Nevertheless, he recognized the adaptation of the labour movement to the bourgeois system; but he regarded it as a historical phase, and indeed, as we know, it was a temporary phase. A socialist labour movement in Britain had disappeared; but it was to reappear.

The second observation, which also has its relevance for the present, is that the mid-Victorian decades did not lead Marx to
turn himself into a Fabian or a Bernsteinian revisionist (which is the same thing as a Fabian in marxist costume). They led him to alter his strategic and tactical perspectives. They may have led him to become pessimistic about the short-term prospects of the working-class movement in western Europe, especially after 1871. But they neither led him to abandon the belief that the emancipation of the human race was possible nor that it would be based on the movement of the proletariat. He was and continued to be a revolutionary socialist. Not because he overlooked the contrary tendencies or underestimated their force. He had no illusions whatever about the British labour movement of the 1860s and 1870s – but because he did not regard them as historically decisive.

How did Marx explain this change in the character of the British labour movement? In general, by the new lease of life which the economic expansion after 1851 gave to capitalism – that is to say by the full development of the capitalist world market in those decades – but more specifically by the world domination or world monopoly of British capitalism. This thesis first appears in the correspondence of Marx and Engels around 1858 – after the failure of the hopes they had placed in the 1857 slump – and is repeated at intervals thereafter, mostly, it should be noted, in letters by Engels. Consequently, Engels also expected the end of this world monopoly to bring about a radicalization of the British labour movement, and in the 1880s Engels did indeed repeatedly observe that both these things were happening or could be expected to happen.

The best-known passage is probably that in the introduction to the first English translation of
Capital I
(written in 1886), but his correspondence in those years returns to this argument time and again, sometimes in order to explain why the revived socialist movement in Britain was not yet making enough progress, more often in a spirit of optimism; for Engels was
perhaps more sanguine in his political expectations than Marx, and perhaps also a shade more inclined to see economic changes as inevitably bringing about political results than his comrade. He was, of course, right in principle. The so-called Great Depression of 1873–96, did mark the end of the British world monopoly and also the rebirth of a socialist labour movement. On the other hand he evidently underestimated both the capacity of capitalism as a whole to continue its expansion, and the capacity of British capitalism to safeguard itself against the social and political consequences of its relative decline by imperialism abroad and a new type of domestic policy.

Marx himself spent less time – at least after the 1850s – in discussing these broad economic perspectives and more time in considering the political implications of the increasing feebleness of British labour. His basic view was that:

England, as the metropolis of world capital, as the country which has hitherto ruled the world market, is for the time being the most important country for working-class revolution; moreover, it is the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have developed to a certain degree of maturity. Hence the most important task of the International is to accelerate the social revolution in England.
³

But if the British working class had the material requisites for revolution,
⁴
it lacked the willingness to make a revolution, that is to say to use its political power to take over power, as it might have done at any time after the parliamentary reform of 1867. Perhaps we should add in passing that this peaceful road to socialism, on the possibility of which for Britain Marx and
Engels insisted at various times after 1870,
⁵
was not an alternative to revolution, but simply a means of ‘removing legally such laws and institutions as stand in the way of working-class development' in bourgeois-democratic countries; a possibility which evidently did not exist in non-democratic constitutions. It would not remove the obstacles which stood in the way of the working class but which did not happen to take the form of laws and institutions, e.g. the economic power of the bourgeoisie; and it might easily turn into violent revolution in consequence of the insurrection of those with a vested interest in the old
status quo
; the point was that if this happened the bourgeoisie would be rebels against a legal government, as (to quote Marx's own examples) the south was against the north in the American Civil War, the counter-revolutionaries were in the French revolution and – we might add – in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9. Marx's argument was not concerned with any ideal choice between violence and non-violence, or gradualism and revolution, but with the realistic use of such possibilities as were open to the labour movement in any given situation. Of these, in a bourgeois democracy, Parliament was clearly a central one.

Yet the British working class was plainly not ready to make use of any of these possibilities, even the formation of an independent labour party or independent political behaviour by such individual workers who happened to get elected to Parliament. Without waiting for the long-term tendencies of historical development to change the situation, there were several things to do: and one of the great merits of Marx's writings is to show that communists can and must avoid both the error of waiting for history to happen, and the error of opting for unhistorical methods such as Bakuninite anarchism and pointless acts of terrorism.

In the first place, it was essential to educate the working class to political consciousness ‘by a continuous agitation against the hostile attitude shown towards the workers in politics by the ruling classes',
⁶
i.e. by producing situations which demonstrated this hostility. This might, of course, imply organizing confrontations with the ruling class, which would lead it to drop its appearance of sympathy. Thus Marx welcomed the police brutality during the Reform demonstrations of 1866: ruling-class violence could provide ‘a revolutionary education'. So long, of course, as it isolated the police, and not those who fought them. Marx and Engels were scathing about the Fenian terrorist actions in Clerkenwell, which had the opposite effect.

In the second place, it was essential to ally with all sections of non-reformist workers. That is why, as he wrote to Bolte (23 November 1871) he worked with the followers of Bronterre O'Brien, relics of the old socialism of Chartist days, on the Council of the International:

In spite of the crack-brained ideas, they constitute a counterweight to the trade unionists. They are more revolutionary . . . less nationalist and quite immune to any form of bourgeois corruption. But for that, we should have thrown them out a long time ago.