Working-Class Ideology

From John Boughton, “Working-Class Consciousness in Bolton, 1837-1842”, BA Dissertation, University of Manchester, 1981

To Mark Hovell, "the real sincerity of Chartism had always been its cry of want, its expression of deep felt but inarticulate economic and social distress."  Whilst there is an element of truth in this in so far as working-class protest naturally derived from a profound dissatisfaction with the poverty and inequality of contemporary society, Chartism was in no sense a blind reaction or unreasoning reflex. It had its roots in a long heritage of working class radicalism - a combative counter-culture which refused to accept the truths and inevitabilities so loudly proclaimed by apologists of aristocratic privilege or ideologists of economic exploitation, but which instead asserted the dignity and rights of all men irrespective of station. Behind Chartism lay a radical analysis and critique of society, more or less cogent and coherent in the hands of its many spokesmen, which informed many workers with a deep consciousness of their degradation and rightful expectations. 

The purpose of this chapter is not to offer an exhaustive analysis of working class ideology at this time, rather it derives from a study of the ideas and views expressed either by Bolton Chartists or spoken directly by regional or national leaders to a Bolton audience. From the plethora of grievances that working class radicals could raise and from the wide range of arguments they employed, this is a selection of the principal themes that emerge from the sources, their respective weighting being determined by their role in those sources.  

The vote was the key that would open the way to a fairer, more equitable society. Working class representation in parliament would end the present abuses of power which fortified the rich in their oppression of the poor and would secure for the labourer a secure and respected place in society: 

The labourer is no longer content to live as a mere passive serf...He feels that the welfare of the people can only be promoted and secured under the laws, so potent in their influence over the happiness of the community, are made by all and for the interest of all. 

Though since Paine (and the Enlightenment), it had become common to demand the vote as a natural vote pertaining to all mankind, many radicals nevertheless still felt the need to justify their representation on a variety of other grounds.  A frequent argument was that the people had once possessed the land. Their subsequent dispossession was the basis of the wealth of their present oppressors and a compelling argument for representation as a means of redress. As one handloom weaver graphically expressed it:  

The land was the property of the poor; nobody was born with pockets or sovereigns and what the government got was from the vitals of the poor. 

Leach, a Chartist lecturer, claimed that “the whole of the land belonged to the peop1e and at one time had been so considered by the common law of the country."    

Another argument hinged on the old radical war-cry, "No Taxation without Representation." Through the heavy burden of indirect taxation on articles of consumption, the working class provided the bulk of government revenues. As Peter Dewhurst, an active local Chartist, said "every man who was taxed had a right to be represented."  Kenyon, a shopkeeper Chartist, simply claimed the vote as one of those "political privileges which are the birthright of every man" without enlarging upon his premises.   Dr. Fletcher, a Bury Chartist active in 1839, thought universal suffrage a part of the Constitution which had been lost.  

A powerful justification, and one which met upper class theories making the possession of the franchise a consequence of property ownership head-on, was that which stressed the rights of labour. John Warden, the most articulate leader of Bolton Chartism, asked the upper classes: 

to bestow upon the men who produce all your wealth...who provide for wants in peace and who protect you in the hour of danger...the power of exercising those privileges which none have a right to deprive them of and which all ought to possess. 

Leach more pointedly asserted that: 

the labourer was the only person in the community who gave a value to anything and hence he laid down the great principle that labour ought to be protected, and. that common justice, common sense and natural right alike declared that labour ought to be more secure than property itself. 

Working-class theories justifying an extended franchise were not a consistent whole. Arguments stressing historical precedent seemingly contradicted those based on man's inalienable rights. The labour theory of value could be confined to narrowly political ends and used merely as a supplement to other points: thus Warden, in the speech at his trial noted earlier, could claim that his principles were the same as had motivated, amongst others, Hampden, Burke, Pitt and Grey (!) and that they contributed "to the protection of property, to the preservation of social harmony.”  Partly no doubt this was to win the sympathy of a middle class jury but it represents too the confusion of aims and ideals that weakened Chartism as a force for social change. Nevertheless, the various arguments were a useful and necessary psychological support to the working classes in their struggle against state power. 

Who were the "enemies" in the radical analysis? One of the chief enemies remained that network of parasitism and patronage that William Cobbett had labelled "Old Corruption". This was an unholy alliance between the hierarchies of (established) Church and State who conspired together to keep the people subordinate through their use of force (the standing army, later the police) and the ideological apparatus of the Church, and to keep them poor through their extravagant expenditure of the people's money extorted through the taxation system. 

Thus Isaac Barrow, a leading light of the Bolton National Charter Association, almost lovingly calculated from statistics of government expenditure, local taxation, and the costs of the "state churches" that a sum "amounting in whole to £95,430,287 was taken from the productive classes and given to those who render them little or no service." Dr, Fletcher's condemnation of Old Corruption is a representative example of the distaste it invoked, but he believed that with universal suffrage: 

pensions and places, the expenses of the civil list, of a standing army and of all the other extravagances of a corrupt government would soon terminate. 

This was a critique virtually identical to that of the post-war radicals. To an observer, it might appear slightly archaic and, for a town such as Bolton dominated by capitalist industry, rather irrelevant, yet it remained copular with the working-class radicals. Even Bronterre O’Brien, often held to represent a more "advanced" analysis of society, could in 1839 still indulge his rhetoric against those "robbers, the fund-holders, parsons and shopkeepers".  Hetherington continued to inveigh against the "false consciousness" of religion, and Benbow still denounced the corrupt selfishness of the aristocracy.  

There is also evidence of a more "modern" idiom in the occasional attacks on capital and the capitalists. O'Connor, speaking at Bolton in February, 1838, claimed that he had stood alone "fighting the battle of labour against capital". He also offered a conspiracy theory of contemporary politics that appeared not unjustified in the light of recent events: 

The affair of the Glasgow spinners was merely a trial to see how the capitalists could put down the whole system of unions and in this the Whigs and Tories were united.

At the same time, the object of the Poor Law Commissioners in enforcing the New Poor Law was to bring the people to that state of things that would ultimately render them the abject and helpless slaves of the great capitalists and Whig political economists. 

And Leach, in a speech seeking to win trade union support for Chartism, strove to show the inadequacy of trade unionism "to protest successfully the property of the working man from the power of the unjust and greedy capitalist." 

The cotton manufacturers were singled out for a particular hatred because of their economic preeminence and well-known advocacy of the rigours of laissez-faire. In Bolton, of course, a large part of the workforce would have experienced directly a conflict of interests with these men as their employees. 

On the face of it, these attacks represent an economic analysis more suited to the current realities of the capitalist economy than the stale invective against "parasites" and "pensioners". But the quasi–socialist rhetoric is misleading for in nearly all cases it was the political divisions in society that were held to be primary.  O’Connor’s purpose was not to abolish economic oppression as such but to "advocate...equal laws for rich and poor". Bairstow, another Chartist lecturer, specifically pointed to the deep inequalities of wealth which still existed in a country with the industrial capacity of Britain.  Yet he blamed this solely on class legislation which gave “to the wealthy millocrat as well as the aristocrat the power of oppressing and plundering the people".  The terminology is suggestive for the cotton manufacturer (the "millocrat" or "cotton lord") was perceived as a member of a new aristocracy founded upon juridical privilege, net as a representative of a new economic order with its own objective rationale and power. 

In the radical idiom, the cry against "capitalism" was not yet an attack on a system because the system was not yet understood as a whole. It remained an attack on some of the symptoms of the system (such as inequalities of wealth and the power of the wealthy), but these symptoms had already been "explained" as the consequence of political inequality and the critique of capitalism was subsumed in this analysis. Patricia Hollis has claimed there was a battle between "old" and "new" analyses in the 1830's - the former continuing to stress corruption and privilege, the latter (developed notably by Hetherington, Carpenter and, most fully, O'Brien) arguing that exploitation and expropriation could occur through the economic process itself.  In Bolton, at least, the "battle" was rather one-sided - a walk-over for the old analysis. Chartism did not develop an economic critique of society, rather the "capitalists" were added to the Chartists' "Chamber of Horrors" alongside those old villains, the "parasites" and "pensioners". In so far as the working class did appreciate economic class conflict, they did so experientially rather than ideologically. But though this perception informed their consciousness and practice, they were unable to theorise their resentments into a more subversive form. 

The logic of this approach meant that the middle classes were not perceived as a social grouping with economic interests opposed to those of the working class, but rather as a political unit (defined by the franchise qualifications of the 1832 Reform Act) which could act in a hostile way but was not constrained to do so. The frequent attacks made by working-class radicals on the middle class in our period occurred because the middle classes were felt to have let down the working classes who had supported them in the reform agitation of the early 1830's. Warden described this feeling of betrayal: 

Need we wonder that a broad moral line of demarcation has been drawn between the middle and working classes... when we see those, who, when out of power, were the greatest declaimers against exclusive privilege, turning round...and dashing from under them the ladder by which they ascended to political eminence? 

This sense of let-down was felt all the more because of the widespread assumption that middle- and working-class interests were essentially the same. Even the militant radical, William Benbow, expressed this viewpoint in his lecture on the Grand National Holiday (general strike):

It was an evil day when the middle and labouring classes became dissevered...Their interest out to be considered as they were in reality, identical. It was the only hope that either had against the rapaciousness and exclusivity of the aristocracy. 

The belief in an identity of interests applied particularly to the lower middle classes, the shopkeepers (who did in fact have an interest in the prosperity of their working class customers); the idea that the interests of the capitalist mill-owners were identical to those of their operatives was, in practice, less plausible. But the idea that the middle classes as a whole had aided and abetted the oppressions of the real enemies of the people by their support of the repressive post-1832 governments was commonly held. This position was expressed very well in a letter from John Warden replying to an attack by the Bolton Free Press on "Marat" O'Brien which is worth quoting in some detail. 

Mr. O'Brien is charged with fomenting disunion between middle and working classes by holding up the former to the hatred of the latter. Mr. O'Brien does not denounce the capitalists as capitalists but as supporters of class legislation. None can regret more than I the lamentable hostility which now exists between the classes but I am compelled to say that the middle classes have evinced the most heartless disregard for the sufferings of their less fortunate fellow men, and that they, and they alone, are responsible for all the evils of society.

Mr. O'Brien believes...that the interests of the producers and the non-producers are hostile, and the non-producers, by their actions, give force and credibility to his statements.

In conclusion, allow me to state for myself and the Chartists of Bolton generally, that they bear no hostility to the middle classes except in so far as the middle classes are opposed to their just claims. 

The catch-all category of condemnation in Chartist ideology was "class legislation" which was held responsible for all the country's problems. George Lloyd, after Warden the most significant figure in Bolton Chartism, believed that "bad legislation is the cause of all the evils which now so seriously affect society and which more particularly press upon the labouring classes". And at a meeting in February, 1842, the Chartist missionary, Griffin, inveighed against:  

 competition, overspeculation, the New Poor Law, the laws of primogeniture, the Rural Police law, the tithe and Church rate system, the Corn Laws and many others, all the effect of class legislation. 

There was also a feeling that matters were getting steadily worse since 1832. Radicals could reel off a long list of measures which exemplified the bad faith and evil intent of successive governments, Whig and Tory, since then including the Irish Coercion Act, the Tolpuddle and Glasgow cases, the rural police and, most hated of all, the New Poor Law. These various acts were conceived of as a concerted attack on the constitutional and human rights of the working class and it was now felt by many that matters were now coming to a head where it would be decided if the working classes were to permanently subjugated to the political and economic interests of the ruling class, or whether they would rise and assert their basic dignity and worth. George Lloyd, speaking shortly after the introduction of the Home Office controlled police force into Bolton in September, 1839, articulated this widespread feeling: 

We have now come to a crisis...a system of centralisation was now stalking the land and even a decent and respectable person could not walk through the streets without the interference of a policeman. 

The hatred of the new police, which may seem exaggerated to us, must be understood in the context of a radical belief in a programmatic government attempt to permanently subdue the working classes, of which this was the culmination. It is important to note too the way in which these political actions were linked to the economic conditions of the working class. The Chartists' address to the trades in July, 1839, perceived the rural police as a means of suppressing trades unions, O'Connor believed the Poor Law Amendment Act to be an attempt to secure a cheap and acquiescent workforce. Attempts to divorce the economic from the political and treat them as separate or even competing grievances are analytically specious at any time but in the context of the 1830's and 1840's they are particularly misplaced.