 Ond oedod y 16 o'r awgust 1819, 10 o'r 1nwyr o'r cyffredinol a oedd ydym mhawr eu hunain yn 60 a ddweud 60,000 oes mhawr gyntaf. Dyna yn St Peter's Ffiaill ar y dyfodd diwrnod hwnnw, arrangements prayau Mateysbroud. Gunchinges y ystod oedd Henry Hunt yn radigol neu ddweud gan llawer iawn o irmwynt, unig cynhwys mwyllfa, chwaut gyffredinol o'r ffordd llei ar gyfer allan. Mae cymryd a gynedol am mwy f tuckeda ar y bodi symud o'i wneud i ddweud lle i ddweud sydd wedi wneud yr ydych chi'n gwneud er mwynol os ystod o'r awdraed o'r maen i ddechrau'r cylliddiadau sy'n cyfrifio yna i ddweudio'r awdraed. Dwi ddim yn dderbygiad nodd y penderfyrdd. Pan wedi yn rhan o anfair ddechrau i'n cyfrifio uneddy i'i unrhyw in the reactionary press and they wanted to demonstrate now this was a meeting of the people calling for democratic rights under the kind of express advice we say of some of their radical leaders. But as Hunt began to speak the local magistrates representatives of the rotten establishment at that time read the riot act no one could hear and called on the Manchester and Salford ymynry, essentially a drunken rabble of merchants, shopkeepers, manufacturers and other sort of sorted reactionaries who immediately proceeded to charge on horseback directly into the mass crowd and stabbing and slashing with their sabres sought not only to apprehend Hunt but also to cause the greatest possible harm to what they saw as a danger to their way of life. Later the mounted hussars of the British army were called in to assist the ymynry to basically finish the job but even some of them were shocked and appalled by the carnage that they saw, even some of them actually tried to restrain the ymynry as they slashed about. As a matter of fact because of the panic many people were unable to escape, became trapped in alleyways, became trampled and as they were trapped the ymynry continued to slash about, hack about. It was quite clear that what we were seeing was an act of class murder and class hate on the part of these ymynry, these thugs. After only minutes really, minutes of panic St Peter's Fields was cleared except for the bodies and dying and injured laid about the fields. By the end of that one, I hesitate to say, battle massacre 11 people including a two year old child were killed. By the end of the day the death toll was raised to 18 and hundreds of people, perhaps as many as 600 people had been injured in these events. It became immortalised as the Peterloo massacre so named after the Battle of Waterloo which saw the defeat of Napoleon in 1850. Now today, 200 years on, thereabouts, we commemorate this event not just because it was a despicable act of murder, which it was, because it's not the first nor was it the last act of such murder committed by the British state. Not that much, 100 years ago in Amritsa you saw an even more despicable massacre. In 1972 you may have seen in the news the bloody Sunday massacre was carried out again by British forces. It's not simply that we commemorate this horrendous act of murder, it's also that this event marks a watershed, if you like, or a turning, a very important turning point in the history of the class struggle in Britain. It marks the beginning of a process of organisation of political consciousness and of struggle on the part of the working class, a new class in society at that time, perhaps before anywhere else, which began a process which culminated in things like the revolutionary Chartist movement, which had a direct influence on the ideas of Marx and Engels and on our ideas today, and also led to the creation of the Labour Party, the political wing of the workers movement in this country. So it's on this aspect of Peterloo that I also want to dwell, because it's still to this day contains many important lessons for us, not least because we, as British Marxists, actually sometimes neglect this period in history. Not least because in our own country our own ruling class has sought to kill it with silence. I don't remember learning anything remotely about this entire period at school. So it's time we educate ourselves on the revolutionary lessons of Peterloo. So I'll jump right into it. I don't think we can understand Peterloo without also looking at its historical context, and the broader context, which I don't have time to go into detail on, but it's important to know, is one of the proletarianisation of the English and British masses. People formerly living in the countryside, living on the land, one way or another, being wrenched from their land, those of you who are present in the discussion on the condition of the working class in England will be familiar with this as Tash touched on it, was either by force pushed from the land or simply by the force of poverty drawn into what William Blake described as the dark satanic mills, in particular in Lancashire and Manchester, the new cotton mills, the most modern representative of the factory system at that time. Now the conditions, I don't have time to go into detail and Tash already did an excellent job of describing these conditions, but the expressions satanic mills gives a very good account of that. We are talking about the weekend hadn't even been invented, hadn't been won by the working class at this point. We were talking about in some cases as much as 24 hour working, night shifts, child labour, women being forced to give birth in the workplace, being given four days to return, a situation in which hungry families were treated essentially like beasts of burden or as simply appendages of the machine as Marx describes in capital. In fact there's a line in capital where he's describing this period of the kind of the 18th century, the late 18th century where you had the unrestrained domination and exploitation of capital over labour. Marx writes in capital about this period, this is when capital celebrated its orgies and you can see that this is an orgy of exploitation and oppression carried out against the working class. Now into this context the French Revolution exploded like a gigantic bombshell. It's interesting that when we analyse the French Revolution we correctly talk about it as a struggle of the kind of revolutionary bourgeoisie against absolutism, the end of the last vestiges of feudalism in order to pave the way for future capitalist development. However there is another side to this, that in Britain you'd already had a bourgeois revolution. In Britain capitalism was very much in the saddle and it already started to completely revolutionise the way of life in the industrial revolution. However the demands of liberty, equality, fraternity, the demands of bourgeois democracy had an enormous impact on the equivalent of the Sankulots in Britain which was the new working class and the rapidly impoverished weavers and semi-proletarian elements who were being ground down into the proletariat. And for price precisely this reason, the Napoleonic Wars, the intervention of Britain into the wars in Europe, its opposition to Napoleon, it wasn't just British capitalism looking out for its own interests, trying to play the balance of powers in Europe, it was also exporting its own class struggle abroad. It saw the crushing of whatever remained of the French Revolution as a means of suppressing class struggle domestically and we can see the evidence of that in a series of acts which were carried out. This is one interesting thing when we talk about bourgeois democracy, when the bourgeoisie have actually achieved political power it's not necessarily in their interest to extend it. And today when liberals and even Tories talk about English liberty and things like that, the natural constitutionalism and democracy of the British people, we don't need to look that far back to see not a trace of that for British workers, for British men and women who were actually producing the wealth of Britain at that time. Some of the acts carried out by the government in the 1790s in response to the panic caused by the events in France. They suspended habeas corpus, habeas corpus is the right, it literally translates as have the body brought into court, it means the right to have one's arrest reviewed. Effectively gave the state authority the right to arrest someone indefinitely without any charge whatsoever. In addition to that they introduced the Treasable Practices Act which defined treason as speaking and writing, so basically you said anything remotely against the government you could be immediately arrested. Seditious Meetings Act banned any public meeting of more than 50 persons and said that any such meeting had to be authorised by a magistrate. And we got a glimpse of what kind of attitudes the magistrates had at the beginning of this introduction. We also had a great deal of taxes on printed matter, basically designed to make newspapers and increasingly radical pamphlets and newspapers prohibitively expensive for working people. And of course the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 which didn't just make trade unionism illegal, that was illegal anyway, striking was already illegal. It made any national political or industrial organisation on the part of working people illegal. Now the effect that this had was effectively an extended counter-revolution in Britain during this period. The historian A. L. Morton describes it as saying that industrial areas of the country were treated like a conquered country in the hands of an army of occupation. The British state effectively treated the north of England and other parts like the south of Wales, Scotland in the same way that it treated the Irish. Effectively we could see this kind of this class exploitation in its rawrish form. Now in these conditions you had the remarkable development, the natural development of trade unions existing in complete illegality. It actually reminds me of the development of the early Social, Democratic and Revolutionary movement in Tsarist Russia in fact actually. Workers in order to organise had to operate completely in secret, they had to take oaths, they had to threaten each other with having their bowels ripped out if they broke the oath, because if they were to break the oath and turn informer the entire enterprise would be torn down by the network of spies, informants, secret police that permeated particularly places like Manchester. This is where the reaction was thickest because that's why the workers were most densely organised. You can actually see the vestiges of this in the modern trade union movement. A lot of trade unions today instead of calling them branches will call their branches lodges or even chapels. For example the NUJ has chapels and the reason for this is in the early days of trade unionism workers were forced to meet either in the cellar of a pub or in some kind of lodge claiming it's some kind of meeting of a friendly society or just a knitting circle effectively. In these conditions of secrecy that's where the origins of the trade union movement can be traced and we still see that today. We also had in 1811 starting in Nottingham actually the Luddite struggle. Now Luddism deserves a discussion all of its own but it deserves an honourable mention here because often today the connotations used around Luddism is that it's some kind of backward revolt against technology in and of itself. It's a reactionary movement trying to prevent progress. Now that's a bourgeois distortion. In reality Luddism was a revolutionary movement attacking the frames that had put them out of jobs, not because they were against technology but because they were against the social forces, against the capital that was throwing them out. They were attacking the frames as an attack against the bosses and again these forces unsurprisingly had to operate completely in secret. But what that did do was that laid down a certain amount of organisation and communication that was up to this point absent in the workers movement. We have to remember that this time the working class was still very young and it had no national organisation whatsoever. What we're talking about really is the first working class on earth empirically trying to discover the best way to organise, the best way to struggle against capital and that's what's so fascinating about this period in this country in particular. But during this period of the Napoleonic wars precisely because of this repression the class struggle was relatively at an end. It was very difficult for the workers to come out and struggle otherwise they would be immediately arrested. However in 1815 with the end of the Napoleonic wars not only do you have the British victory against Napoleon but at the same time you have the onset of an economic crisis and with it a huge upswing in the class struggle and it's this context into which Peterloo falls. Often when we discuss Peterloo we discuss it as a singular event. Actually it was the culminating point of what was effectively a pre-revolutionary situation perhaps even a revolutionary situation brewing in Britain. I want to touch on that as briefly as I can. So with 1815 and the crisis that ensued you had the coming into being of the Corn Laws. Now the purpose of the Corn Laws was to ban the import of grain in order to artificially maintain scarcity and a higher price. The reason for that was to protect the landowners the grain producers to make sure they could still make a profit. But in a period when you had a driving down of wages a huge crack down on the workers movement some of you may already be aware that the last period of the last ten years has been the worst period for wage growth in Britain since the Napoleonic wars. Hopefully that gives you a bit more of a concrete idea of how bad a period it has been. But in addition to this huge pressure on wages you also had the price of the most basic food stuff in the country being artificially held high. In other words the workers were getting attacked from both directions. They were getting attacked by the so-called liberal manufacturers, they didn't take that name until later on, and the Tory landowners. You see here already the alliance of capital and the formerly aristocratic landowning and speculating owners. These laws were passed in a parliament which the idea that this parliament could be described as democratic is utterly laughable. This was a situation in which less than 3% of the population had the vote. You had to be a wealthy landowner but a wealthy landowner in order to elect someone to parliament. And you had a system of effectively what they were called Rotten borers. So huge relatively speaking industrial towns that had grown up in the industrial revolution places like Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester didn't have a single member of parliament. Meanwhile a place called Old Sarum in Wiltshire, I've never been, it must be nice, they elected two MPs and had a population of one. How they managed that, I'm not entirely sure. But this was the state of English liberty and the mother of parliament. It was ironic, I don't have time to go into this, but what's ironic is in 1789 the French revolutionaries actually saw the British parliament as their model. I don't think they fully understood what they were looking at. Of course they went far far beyond it, which is what made those ideas so dangerous. So in this situation you have a completely undemocratic, what you have effectively is the dictatorship of capital. Undisguised, lauding over the workers and trying to crush, squeeze out of them as much surplus value as possible, the true naked face of capitalism. And the workers coming up against this grasped some of the democratic demands of the French revolution also which had become very popular sorry in Britain through the work of Thomas Payne, the rights of man. But it's important to mention that when workers on mass were starting to become radical democrats and take up these ideas, they weren't taking them up in an abstract way. Oh, it would be nice to have the vote because everyone should have the vote because that is an abstract right. They were seeing that as what once we called a knife and fork question. They were seeing the winning of political power, the winning of the vote for the mass of people in the country as a means for improving their life, as a means for confronting the social questions. Already you started to see a proletarian element being introduced to what was, of course, an entirely middle class movement up until that point. And in this scenario you have a dramatic upswing in, I would say, even insurrectionary struggles. So first of all you had the March of the Blancoteers in 1817. This was an attempt by about 5,000 people to march from Manchester through Birmingham where they'd pick up more and more support down to London. It was a bit like the Jarrow march really and they were going to present a petition in the hope that by the time they reached London they'd have 100,000 people and that would mark the beginning of an insurrection. On their way, I don't think they even got as far as Macclesfield Bay. I'm not sure if you know where Macclesfield is, but basically most of them got about as far as Stockport, a few miles south of Manchester, and then the military succeeded in either arresting them. They arrested so many of them they didn't have room in the jails. They had to actually release a few of them or by scattering them into the winds. In other words, you see an attempt to spark some kind of mass revolutionary movement on the part of workers in Manchester being suppressed by the forces of the state. You also had full on, tragically unsuccessful, but full on insurrectionary attempts at a place called Pentridge and Folly Hall. Unfortunately, again, the lack of a national organisation which at this time there was no national workers organisation anywhere on earth. It's important to remember that what we're talking about is trying to find an entire new way of organising. But often in the case of Pentridge it was basically a heroic but tragically doomed to fail attempt. It was an attempt of hundreds of people to gain arms and march into Nottingham and spark a national insurrection. Again, it reminds me a bit of the Neurodenics in Russia, again fighting Tsarism. They talked about the propaganda of the deed, that if we tried, everyone else would join us. And there is a lot of this kind of heroism that we see in the early proletarian movement in England. Both of those movements were unsuccessful. The first one, the leader was executed, he was hanged. But the people who hanged him had to hang him behind a barricade because they were worried that the people of London, I think is where he was executed, would storm the platform and actually liberate him. This was the kind of situation that the British ruling class found itself in, one of actually a constant threat of insurrection. In fact, actually, the folly hall conspirators were acquitted by the Germany, the jury. The jury refused to acquit them. This was the kind of mood that existed in society at the time of Peterloo. Again, in 1818 you had a strike of the Manchester cotton spinners and that is extremely significant. You had had strikes before but what was interesting about the Manchester cotton spinning mills at that time was that they were not actually the most militant side of the working class. The reason, actually, I think is very easy for us to understand. The hours and conditions that they were working were absolutely inhuman. It was actually very difficult for them to organise for that reason. But also, as I already said, the web of secret police, spies and reaction was that it's thickest in Manchester because they saw there the greatest threat. That meant that its entry onto the scene was a bit delayed but it made a very big impression when it came about. The Manchester spinners strike in 1818 brought Manchester a standstill and the workers even tried, so let me see if I can get the name. They tried to set up a general union of trades, which is an extremely important development because here you have the natural search for unity and solidarity on the part of the working class expressing itself in an organised way. Again, it wasn't a question of intellectuals coming up with a blueprint of how to organise the workers movement and saying what you need is a general union of trades. What this was a direct consequence of the class struggle itself becoming kind of embedded in the consciousness of workers. This had a huge impact actually on what Mark said about the importance and also the development of class consciousness. Thanks. We come in this context to Peterloo itself. I've already gone through the actual events of Peterloo. One thing I didn't mention, which is again extremely important and I would say indicative of the revolutionary situation that Britain was in at that time was the role of women in that movement. You had the founding for the first time of female reform societies. I think the Blackburn female reform society was the first one followed by Manchester and they played a big role in the processions that came to Peterloo and women actually constituted, they still constituted a minority but we're talking of thousands of people who had constantly been marginalised from society and from politics even more than the male workers and actually Trotsky defined a revolution as the forcible entry of the masses into control of their destiny and you can't have the forcible entry of the masses into anything unless it brings into the struggle and into the movement the most oppressed layers and of course especially the women and we saw this with Peterloo. That's another reason why the repression of Peterloo was so vicious that the Yeomanry who incidentally were only set up after the March of the Blancoteers they were set up as effectively almost like a temporary paramilitary reactionary organisation recruited from the most reactionary layers in order to be a hammer to hit the workers with but what this constitutes is the first ever real, I would say, political movement of the working class and this was already recognised by the ruling class themselves it was recognised by the ruling class much more than the leaders of the workers at that time because you might think living today where we have universal suffrage for what it's worth that this is something the bourgeoisie could afford to give to the workers it wouldn't necessarily threaten their rule but this is not how they felt at the time because they understood that the conditions of the workers were such that to quote Lord Eldon at the time he said I believe universal suffrage would be fatal to all purposes for which government exists and for which aristocracies and all other things exist and that is utterly incompatible with the very existence of civilisation I can see that civilisation rests on the security of property now any of you who were in the discussion on the ideas of Engels will remember that he said that the state is in the last analysis armed bodies of men in defence of private property and that's exactly what we saw at Peterloo and that's exactly what we saw in the mother of all parliaments but one of the very important aspects of this working class movement is that Peterloo was not simply an assembly it was not just a demonstration by its very nature in order for it to take place it had to be a strike it took place on a Monday in Manchester thousands of the people there many of the people there were weavers who come from other towns in Lancashire but thousands of the people there were cotton spinners from the mills in Manchester who basically went on strike who did not turn up to work in order to take part in that movement which of course provoked the ire of the Manchester manufacturers now so what came if this was a revolutionary movement why did it not succeed in even winning the vote actually let alone overthrowing capitalism and part of this was because of the earlyness really this was the first movement of its kind and it was characterised in the aftermath of Peterloo you had actually an even bigger wave of revulsion after Peterloo it didn't all calm down Hunt who was arrested but on his way to trial he came down to London on a procession he was a fan of grand processions and so on he was a little bit of a vain individual but whatever when he came into London he was met by a crowd of 300,000 people to put that into context the population of Manchester was less than 300,000 people at that time this was in London obviously the major capital but we're talking about a serious mass movement and one of the major problems was as I already mentioned in relation to the earlier struggles a lack of national organisation any national organisation would have been viciously oppressed and the closest thing that workers had to organisations were illegal trade unions and the Luddite kind of groups but that lack of national organisation meant that insurrectionary attempts could not be planned on a national basis but it was enough to heroic grouplets and individuals to simply go out and do it and show everyone how it's done that meant that the British ruling class who were organised and this actually reminds me a little bit of the discussion we had on the miners' strike who were centralised, who were prepared to go to any lengths to basically separate and cut off the movement but in addition to that there is a question of leadership this is something that's been raised in other discussions that we've had today at that time although the working class was moving beginning to become a class not only in but also for itself in the sense that it became conscious not only of the fact that it existed as a class not only the fact that it is oppressed and exploited by capitalism but also starting to conceive of a way that it can organise to take control of its destiny and also take control of society an enormously progressive thing but of course it was only just beginning to do this and the leadership of this movement fell to individuals who though courageous, certainly a lot more courageous than the so-called liberals that exist today but the radical kind of democrats who the leadership of this movement fell to were still tied by their own essentially middle class petty bourgeois viewpoint individuals like Henry Hunt and William Cobbett who kind of sustained themselves in their kind of careers on selling things like Henry Hunt came up with a special drink made out of corn so you could avoid taxes on things like coffee they were effectively businessmen, I don't think they were corrupt but the nature of the movement was so kind of young basically and amorphous that these individuals were not capable of expressing of effectively leading this movement they often kind of fell into squabbles individually between themselves you had a serious problem of prestige politics and so this gigantic opportunity which sadly I suppose we can say with 2020 historical hindsight was left to wither on the vine and you saw after that the attempts, the kind of desperate heroic but again tragically misguided attempts of the Cato Street conspiracy again a tiny group of individuals who thought that if they succeeded in trapping and effectively assassinating the entire cabinet that the country would rise up unfortunately the Cato Street venue where they thought the cabinet were going to dinner was itself a lie put in the press in order to draw them out because they already had a spy in their ranks and so they were easily arrested, executed and with that this revolutionary phase in the class struggle draws temporarily to a close the state in response to things like Peterloo and Cato Street implemented the infamous six acts which included again suspending a habeas corpus that was in 1817, apologies but then in 1819 they prohibited all kinds of drilling something I forgot to mention was prior to Peterloo many of the workers actually practised marching and formation drilling not with weapons but with effectively sticks out on the moors as a form of organisation they said it was to show that they were not just a mob but an orderly kind of organised movement also that would have been very handy for the planning of an insurrection it's ambiguous whether that's exactly what they were planning but it showed again this natural urge, this desire on the part of workers to come together and organise that was banned because again the ruling class realised exactly what that meant justices as in judges can now search any premise without warrant it prohibited any meeting over 50 so it's reintroduced what was introduced in the 1790s again increased the stamp duty on newspapers to try and tear these revolutionary papers and pamphlets out the hands of the workers and extended the powers of the authorities for things like sedition now the historian E.P. Thompson describes this period as the most sustained wave of prosecutions in the whole of British history in other words once the insurrectionary movement had died down a little bit had failed the most radical elements had desperately thrown themselves at the authorities effectively in this kind of propaganda of the deed the state then unleashed a wave of arrests and prosecutions to try and put a lid on it and temporarily they succeeded one thing that we learned from a revolutionary movement the workers can't simply be out permanently eventually people get tired following the blows of reaction people basically go back to work, go home, put their heads down but one thing we've seen now the analogy you might have encountered this analogy elsewhere the working class is a bit like the character in the Greek myth Anteas who fought Hercules and every time he was thrown down to the earth by Hercules he got up even stronger because he took his strength from his mother the earth and the working class is a bit like that the capitalism as of necessity creates and reproduces the working class makes it bigger and bigger it forces it by its exploitation to organize it pushes it in a revolutionary direction but every time it succeeds in smashing it back down to the ground like we saw in Peterloo using the most violent reactionary violent methods the working class will come back even stronger and we see this come back in full flush in the Chartis movement the heroic revolutionary Chartis movement of 1936 kind of its earliest beginnings up to 1848 sorry 1836 to 1848 now again internationalism and the effect of revolutionary events elsewhere comes into it in 1830 there was a revolution in France another revolution they're quite good at having those where they got rid of the the Bourbon monarchy that had been restored after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo that again another political movement overthrowing tyranny, overthrowing the monarchy it kind of had the effect of reigniting the class struggle and the political struggle in Britain and it's important to mention that in that so-called quiet period in the 20s it's not that the class struggle simply ceased it was again driven underground and driven in a more industrial direction I read a quote from a worker in Oldham I think who was recorded as saying when all's quiet that's when the seeds are growing and you could see that happening in the British Labour movement because when it came back in the form of Chartism swung back in a political direction we saw it in its full might really now all read again in 1831 you had the beginning of a revolutionary situation in Britain one that we're not told about one that was revolutionary in every sense you actually had in Mertha Tidville if that's pronounced correctly, apologies to any Welsh comrades you had the red flag being raised and actually the red flag had not been a symbol of the working class in Britain until that point they took it directly from the French Revolution thank you you see the red flag being raised you have a crowd of 10,000 people being confronted by soldiers and 80 people being shot dead in other words we're talking about pitched battles as early as 1831 you have strikes breaking out in Durham broken up by the cavalry again anyone who was present in the discussion on the minor strike will be very familiar with those kind of scenes the difference is these cavalry weren't wielding truncheons they were wielding sabers Engels actually at this point Engels later on I think in his book on the condition of the working class in England says that strikes for this reason they're schools of war for the working class they're actually testing the organisation and the fighting units effectively of the workers against the forces put up against them by the ruling class it was not a metaphor we are literally talking about class war here now E.P. Thompson again says and I think he's correct that in many ways 1819 and Peterloo was a rehearsal for the struggles of 1831 it was a kind of 1831 in many respects was simply a repetition of what we'd seen in 1818, 1819 but on a much larger scale having crucially learned some of the lessons and what we have in 1832 is a panicked ruling class delivering the so-called Great Reform Act giving the vote to still a small minority the population as a means of trying to head off this movement grant just a tiny piece of reform but at the same time not give the workers anything at all and that became known as the Great Betrayal because what it effectively did was it gave only landowners with land worth an annual value of £10 the right to vote so it still left I think it was six out of seven people in England and I think Britain as well were without a vote, it was a complete betrayal but what it did do was it succeeded fusing the middle class kind of the lesser landowners with the greater landowners in Parliament so Parliament continued to be corrupt but what happened was that kind of alliance between the radical petty bourgeoisie and the workers that we saw at Peterloo and that proved to be an aspect of its weakness but an unavoidable one I would say at that stage that was broken because the middle class became increasingly terrified seeing the red flag being hoisted by workers who were having pitched battles with cavalry and Durham and so on is a pretty scary sight even the lesser bourgeoisie let alone the big manufacturers and they ran directly into the arms of reaction and embraced this act but what it meant effectively was that powerful connection between the middle class and the working class was finally severed and this gives us the context from which Chartism was born Marx described Chartism as the first working class political party ever in history it would have come under the influence by certain sections of the middle class but it was a working class movement and it was a national organisation the first of its kind which Marx took a direct inspiration from now to go ahead actually one thing I found researching this was prior to the beginning of the Chartist movement you actually start to see a link between trade unionism and socialism the word socialism has been used by people like Robert Owen and it's been connected with the growing syndicalism and there were many some quite successful attempts to found national unions it's impossible to underestimate how important the achievement of a national trade union movement was now Robert Owen actually participated in the founding of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in 1833 this is after he tried to found communist colonies in America he'd come back after that I failed and actually moved in a much better direction about socialism this union was founded with a clause in its constitution saying the great and ultimate object of the union must be to establish the paramount rights of industry and humanity by bringing out a different order of things in which the really useful and intelligent part of society only shall have the direction of its affairs now that you might say is perhaps a bit vaguely worded but it's moving towards socialism I would say that the builders union in 1833 the same year put it much much better the unions will not only strike for less work and more wages but they will ultimately abolish wages become their own masters and work for each other labour and capital will no longer be separate but they will be indisolubly joined together in the hands of the workmen and work women I might point out that Karl Marx was 15 years old at this time he was a genius but I very much doubt he brought up these ideas at that point in his life these were ideas that were being thrust out by the workers movement itself these were conclusions so when people talk about talking about socialism for example and transforming society ending capitalism replacing socialism they talk about that's too theoretical it's too abstract obviously we have to explain it in concrete ways but these supposedly abstract principles were worked out by bitter very concrete struggle in the mine fields and manufacturing mills of Manchester, Durham and so on actually workers at this time were talking about replacing the houses of parliament with something called the house of trades elected by workshops and mills we're talking about workers democracy ideas of workers power in Britain being improvised and turned into a theoretical movement if you like that we call socialism now to go on to charters because I'm already running out of time this deserves a special mention for the reasons I've already explained in relation to what Marx had to say about it and I think he was absolutely correct now the origin of charters comes from the foundation of the London Working Men's Association those of you who are familiar with the history of the first international might notice a similar ring to the International Working Men's Association that was founded in June 1836 and along with some kind of bourgeois radicals like Francis Place drew up something called the People's Charter now again you can see the link between Peterloo and Charterism very very clearly because actually the six points of the People's Charter were taken almost word for word from some of the demands that were being raised at the time of Peterloo the main demand of Peterloo was universal male suffrage but there were other demands that I'll read now which became enshrined in the People's Charter first of all a vote for every man 21 years of age of sound mind and not undergoing punishment for crime the ballot as in a secret ballot you didn't have that in those days to protect the elector in exercise of his vote no property qualification for members of parliament enabling constituencies to return the man of their choice be he rich or poor the payment of members thus enabling an honest tradesman working man or other person to serve the constituency is quite ironic looking at that now when you see the salaries of MPs and the rampant corruption but it wasn't meant to achieve that equal constituencies securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors instead of the rotten borers that I told you about and annual parliaments which is a very interesting demand presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation and it states that since members when elected for a year only would not be able to defy and betray their constituents as now as we can see nothing's changed and that continue that one annual parliaments demand is the one demand that has yet to be granted by British bourgeois democracy and of course never will be unless and until the workers take power so the charters on the basis of this petition went around, first of all they turned this charter into a petition went around the country physically getting signatures on this petition and assembled and what did they call their assembly when they met in London they called it a convention they took that word directly from the French Revolution and the Jacobin Convention of 1793 the most radical part the most radical period and force in the whole of the French Revolution so they were very much taking their lead from Jacobinism but perhaps they didn't realise they had gone much much further than that because of the proletarian content now the petition managed to get over one million two hundred thousand I think it was one million two hundred thousand one million two hundred and eighty thousand signatures which considering the population of Britain at that time is an immense amount they presented it to parliaments and to Kelsapries it was voted down not unanimously not overwhelmingly by 235 votes to 46 votes because of course the MPs in the House of Parliament realised what it would mean giving universal suffrage to the working men of places like Manchester would basically be inviting them to take power they saw it exactly for what it was now at this time the rejection of the petition had an interesting effect within charters and actually within the kind of Peterloo movement if you can call it if you can put it all under the umbrella of Peterloo within the workers movement really for as long as it's existed in Britain you have had kind of two broad wings at the time of chartersm it was called the moral force and the physical force the moral force men were people who said that the only kind of methods that should be used was to apply the force of argument of reason of public opinion of that kind of pressure, moral pressure on the governments of grant reforms the physical force men were the ones who said we should go further we should go further to insurrection and there was kind of a bit of an awkward balance between these two wings in the charters movement which was summed up in a slogan peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must and the kind of peaceably if we may and forcibly if we must would kind of balance depending on events the rejection of the petition gave a bit more force to the physical force men and as a result they started openly talking about a general strike not just a general strike in Manchester to a standstill or London to a standstill but a national general strike which they called a sacred month or national holiday a month long general strike in those conditions would probably have been the end of the regime whether it had been the end of British capitalism or not is obviously speculation unfortunately the leadership of the trice movement at that point abandoned the plan for a sacred month they didn't think they could pull it off now I would say they would prove wrong later in 1842 when you had the plug plot general strike which emerged spontaneously effectively it was called the plug plot because the workers in the factories would literally pull out the plugs of the steam boilers obviously it was steam powered at this time thus making the engines impossible to run and so bringing work to a close and they'd then take the plug and walk down to the next mill and do exactly the same thing that's why it became called the plug plot this spread not just in Lancashire but to other parts of the north it became a truly national general strike the first one in history certainly the first one that I'm aware of and it emerged effectively spontaneously now I don't think it would have even emerged spontaneously if it wasn't for the kind of the first skeleton of national organisation that the charters movement had given to the workers but this was a movement that had arisen effectively spontaneously from the base and required further leadership following the defeat of the strike sadly before the defeat of the strike there was an insurrectionary attempt in Newport which I should have mentioned earlier, apologies in 1839 a charters leader John Frost in response to the arrest of another charters leader Henry Vincent assembled I think as many, yes, 20,000 men coal miners from the pits of south Wales armed them some with guns, some with pikes some with just the tools of the trade and tried to break him out of the prison they were met by riflemen of the British army and they were defeated about 30 of them were shot on the spot the rest who didn't succeed in getting away were arrested and eventually hanged again we see the heroism but it's a sort of tragic heroism in this movement that currently you see people who are far sighted enough to realise that the only way you can overthrow this tyrannical capitalist regime is through insurrection but this is what led Marx to explain that insurrection is an art something that can simply be summoned up or played at and if the strike movement which emerged in 1842 had been combined with an organised insurrectionary movement then that movement may well have been successful the problem is the organised planning for the sacred month had been abandoned the plug plot arrived without anyone actually expecting it to arise and so these kind of these revolutionaries thought well this is our last chance this is just like 1819 we've got to go for it now or we're going to lose it and this movement was not really matched with other insurrections elsewhere in the country again partly due to the lack of communication that you get at that time in history obviously didn't have mobile phones but also that lack of an organisation that was only just starting to develop but still I think we need to emphasise the heroism that we see in these kind of heroic years of the English proletariat the British proletariat because it's something that's often completely masked when even the leaders of the labour movement talk about it you have the plug plot in 1842 to the rejection of the second petition what's interesting about the second petition is not just that they claimed it got 3 million signatures on it that they had to try and disassemble they had to try and take down the doors of the houses of parliament to get the petition physically into the building it was that big not just the size of it was impressive but it started to contain proletarian social demands it didn't just call for the vote it didn't just call for the six things I've read out just now it called for things like complete religious and political reform the 10 hour day which is an entirely proletarian social demand and home rule for Ireland again emphasising this link between the struggle of the Irish with the English proletariat something again that Marx drew out explicitly and also the natural internationalism which is again obscured when we talk about the history of the class struggle in Britain often that internationalist element that we see with the relationship to France that we see with the relationship to Ireland is ignored now this immense mass movement did not achieve universal suffrage as we know universal suffrage for all men wasn't achieved until 1918 the same time that universal suffrage for property owning women was achieved but what it did do was it terrified the ruling class into starting to try and grant reforms after the abolition of the after the repeal sorry the Corn Laws we entered into this period of British dominance basically and out of these kind of fat super profits the British capitalism and British imperialism was started to draw they started to grant concession to the workers on the basis of their terror that if they were to try and act like they did in Peterloo again then they would really lose everything and so we start to see this period in British history we see the 10 hour act being brought in in 1847 a serious victory for the working class went directly from charterism and revolutionary methods this again don't have time to go into it but this shows this link this important link that we have between reform and revolution the reason that we as Marxist criticise reformists is not because they believe in reforms it's because they don't carry out reforms and actually what we see not just from this period but actually other periods in history that only when the working class is organised to actually take control of the wealth of society to expropriate the ruling class that's when they're prepared to make all sorts of concessions and it's something we should bear in mind now actually Marx and Engels had personal content contact sorry with leading charters they felt that Ernest Jones who they considered to be the most outstanding representative of charterism they actually took a lot from him and obviously Marxism is a theory that developed on its own if you like but when it came to the tactics the strategy of the class struggle when it came to concretising this idea of the ruling class gaining class consciousness being a class in and for itself it was charterism that they looked to and we can't under emphasise in my opinion the importance of actually analysing seeing concrete living movements of workers and drawing theoretical lessons from that not the other way round the former was precisely Marx's method and so he described charterism at the organised party of the proletariat and he also actually started contributing to a paper set up by Ernest Jones in 1851 called Notes to the People he wrote all the economic articles we see this an organic link really between charterism and Marxism and the reason I say this is because I believe that we as Marxists should proudly lay claim to the heritage of charterism and the importance of that is what I'll conclude on because the kind of significance of Peterloo is that with it we kind of see the working class setting itself on the path towards an independent class policy and organisation we saw this in charterism and we see the culmination in a way of that with the creation of a national political organisation in the form of the Labour Party however what we also see from this history this kind of brief history of the first half of the 19th century is something that Trotsky, the Russian Revolutionary Trotsky said something very interesting about the British proletariat, he said that in its whole history it's always had two souls in its chest or it's presented two faces to historical events perhaps you can put it another way that with charterism with Peterloo you see the true face of the British proletariat the insurrectionary heroism the creative organisation that they improvised from nothing in completely underground conditions the revolutionary face of the British proletariat and in the often middle class much more liberal leadership that you get from people like Henry Hunt although I think that Henry Hunt as an individual was still a courageous person but all the way to the kind of the modern so-called leaders of the proletariat like Neil Kinnock that we talked about in the minor strike discussion these people represent what Trotsky might call the other face what I would say the backside of the British proletariat you've always had the contradiction between these elements and the Labour Party look at the Labour Party the Labour Party has always had Marxist in it the Labour Party was in part Marxist played a role in the foundation of the Labour Party Engels himself had a role in talking to people like Eleanor Marx about the kind of the origins of the Labour Party there is a link there and the Labour Party also has never been without liberals and even in its earliest stages it was completely tied to liberalism even today I would say probably the most dominant part of the Labour Party leadership particularly in the parliamentary Labour Party are at heart liberals rather than socialists and within this constant clash the Labour Party has existed for over 100 years what we should see our role as Marxist and as members of the Labour Party is to restore that true face of the British proletariat to restore that tradition of charism which does exist throughout the British Labour movement to consider ourselves as the inheritors to pick up that tradition and to carry it to victory and on that I'll finish, thank you