The London Democratic Association advocated the overthrow of the English ruling classes by means of revolution. They rejected outright any limiting of the Chartist movement to pacifist — or “moral force” — principles. The LDA Objects declared: “We frankly state, that we consider the everlasting preaching of “moral force”, as opposed to “physical force” to be downright humbug; for ourselves we shall be well understood in saying, that we are prepared to adopt all just means within our power for achieving the salvation of our country, so far as we can affect that object. We are resolved to be no longer slaves! We are determined to free our fatherland, peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must!”
Liberal historians, such as Mark Hovell, portrayed the LDA as no more than a “violently revolutionary clique”, formed to rival Lovett’s moderate London Working Men’s Association. Others have described it as the London representation of the ambitions of Feargus O’Connor to take over the leadership of Chartism. This is history as pejorative, and reduces the LDA’s belief in the necessity of revolution to a reaction to inadequate strategy by the LWMA, or reckless romanticism on the part of Julian Harney.
In fact, the LDA had able leaders and thinkers, whose belief in revolution came from a grasp of the society in which they lived; their organisation was based on a body of thought which challenges opponents of revolution both then and now.
In The Holy Family (1844) Marx outlined a trend towards a “real humanism” in the “logical basis of communism”, stemming from Locke through the “socialist tendencies” within French materialism, to the Babouvists and returning to the “mother country” with the emergence of “English communism”. In Marx’s view this was founded by Robert Owen. The Young Hegelians [of the 1840s] were, according to Engels, ignorant of the English Chartists: “no one in Germany had any idea [of] the vehemence of this agitation”. Yet the LDA arrived at more radical conclusions than Owen in their quest for a society of: “Social, Political and Universal Equality”.
Among the LDA’s influences was Thomas Spence, who advocated a revolutionary self-governing New Republic based on “convention of Parochial Delegates”. Spence’s critique was a plebeian theory of liberation in the late 18th-early 19th century. By 1812 Spence was extending his vision beyond agrarian radicalism to include the new industrial proletariat, “Shipping, Collieries, Mines and many other Great Concerns (which cannot be divided) can yet be enjoyed…in Partnership”. Allen Davenport, a founder of the London Democratic Association following the “Spencean system”, incorporated Owen’s co-operative ideas for industry writing that the: “discovery of steam power has completely changed the aspect of human affairs, and caused such a stupendous revolution in the production and distribution of wealth,… honest and industrious people in this country are wasting away through want of common necessaries of life, and die, annually by sheer starvation; yet people persist in calling this murderous state of things civilisation”.
Davenport saw the Aristocracy’s subjugation of the agricultural labourer, was now coupled with the “monopoly of capital”: “monopoly of machinery is degrading, and starving the ingenious mechanic out of existence.”
Babeuf, Harney
and Social Equality
Harney also looked to the notion of freedom embodied in the French Revolution’s conceptions of reason and the state of nature: “Kings, aristocrats, and tyrants of every description… are slaves in rebellion against the sovereign of the earth, which is the people, and against the legislator of the universe, which is Nature”. He saw the accumulation of private property as an infraction on this state of nature, and believed the earth should be the common property of all.
While also being a Spencean, Harney steeped himself in the French Revolution, adopted Marat as his nom de plume and called his paper Friend of the People. Much of his knowledge of the revolution was drawn from Bronterre O’Brien’s translation of Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy For Equality in 1838. The first words uttered on the LDA Address are those of Buonarroti, “Let each of us depend upon institutions and laws, and let no human being hold another in subjugation”. The quotation was also inscribed on the LDA membership cards.
O’Brien’s was the chief channel through which such ideas reached working people. French communism entered into the armoury of the early revolutionary democrats. Buonarroti’s work introduced the designations “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”, and we find them used in the Objects of the LDA.
There is some similarity in the manner the Babeuvists sought to use the “celebrated Constitution of 1793” and the LDA’s view of the People’s Charter as a means to their [social] ends. The Babeuvists’ phrase “Liberty, Equality, and general happiness” was echoed in the LDA’s “destruction of inequality, and the establishment of general happiness”.
Ian Birchall downplays Babeuf’s influence on O’Brien in The Spectre of Babeuf. He bases this challenge on O’Brien’s admiration of Robespierre, something which led O’Brien to differ fundamentally from Babeuf on the question of private property. Birchall argues that “O’Brien can scarcely be seen as a follower of Babeuf”. But what of Harney?
At the Festival of Nations held in London in 1845, Harney spoke in praise of Robespierre, before invoking Babeuf as one of his successors who advocated “a veritable republic… in which, private property and money, the foundation and root of all wrong and evil, should cease to be”. Birchall fails to make a distinction between Harney and O’Brien, and to analyse the different phases of O’Brien’s thought. Harney adapted Robespierre and the Constitution of 1793 for the class struggle of the English proletariat of 1839. The theme of the 1793 constitution was a repeated reference of revolutionaries in the 19th century — in the same way that Marxists made the Russian Revolution a point of reference in 20th century.
A constant revolution
The experience of the Babeuvists in the French Revolution taught Harney there could be no social equality with the privileged classes in “possession of property”, subjecting the proletariat to “social slavery”. The French middle-class had engaged in revolution out of selfish ambition, debasing equalitarian principles of the revolution once in power. Bourgeois “liberty” was the freedom of the bourgeoisie to be the new ruling class, and to use the proletarian masses to obtain their ends which they then suppressed as true representatives of those ideals. The comparison with the English middle-class in the aftermath of the Reform Act of 1832 was obvious. The LDA thus agreed with the Babouvists proclamation that the French Revolution is “but the precursor of another revolution, far greater, far more solemn, which will be the last”. Harney believed Chartist England could set Europe aflame again.
The Industrial Revolution was forcing a redefinition of radical idea. The fight could not be narrowed to one with “Old Corruption”, as radicals called the aristocratic system. A new objective stage in history called up “new passions and new forces”.
When the LDA drew up their Objects they set out “to obtain an effectual Reform of the Commons House of Parliament; the basis of which shall be Universal Suffrage, Equal Representation, Annual Parliaments, No Property Qualification, and Payment of all Members”. These points were identical to the People’s Charter. To the modern reader these demands may seem moderate, but at the time they struck fear into the heart of the ruling class.
After the 1832 Reform Act the proletariat, which first fought alongside the middle class for parliamentary reform, found itself shouldered out. It was a “great betrayal”. All social classes began to look at electoral and Parliamentary reform differently.
If the Chartists had won their Charter they would have turned the system upside down, establishing something very different from the bureaucratic parliamentary democracy of the 21st century. MPs would be fully accountable delegates, subject to regular elections. As Allen Davenport wrote “It is time the working classes should decide on these important questions”.
Through Universal Suffrage these Chartists wanted not only an equality of classes in access to Parliament, but the dissolution of the class division itself. The British ruling class remained conscious of the threat. Thus when Parliament thought it safe to return to electoral reform in 1866, they still feared a proletarian electorate returning delegates mandated to enforce their interests and undermining the entire system.
The Interests of the Proletarian Classes
The LDA Objects declared the “desire to unite the unrepresented of all classes into one common bond of fraternity, for the attainment of Universal Suffrage, this Association being convinced, that, until the Proletarian classes are fully and faithfully represented, justice in legislation will never be rendered unto them”. The rebellion against the new Poor Law (1834) shaped Chartism into a militant mass movement. The LDA wanted “total unqualified repeal” and “such improvements as the circumstances of the country may require” in the new conditions of industrial capitalism.
Long before the struggle for a ten-hour working day was viewed by Marx as the “Magna Carta” of the English proletariat, agitation for shorter work hours struck at the barbaric heart of the Industrial Revolution. Following the emasculating of proposed protective legislation in the 1833 Factory Bill, fresh agitation took place in 1838 and 1839.
The LDA promoted an “abridgement of the hours of labour in factories and workshops, and the total abolition of child labour”. And went further: “Even in the present artificial state of society, no adult person should be required to work more than eight hours per day, especially while so many thousands are without any employment at all”. In linking the creation of jobs in times of high unemployment to a shorter working day, the LDA anticipated a socialist demand in the following century.
The LDA did not speak the language of inter-class “fraternity” but pledged to support “by all available means, every rational opposition made by working men against the combination and tyranny of capitalists, whenever the latter shall seek to reduce the wages of labour, extend the hours of toil, or institute proceedings against the labourer.” In this they were the opposite of the LWMA, who in their desire for friendship with the middle-class Radicals betrayed struggles such as the Glasgow spinners strike (1837).
Alongside freedom of association the LDA championed the freedom of the press, calling for the repeal of the laws “which prevent the free circulation of thought, through the medium of untaxed and honest press”.
The LDA also strove for a proper system of education through “public instruction, and the diffusion of sound political knowledge”, though as Harney said, the “ruling class will never grant the working class that kind of education by which they will learn their political rights”.
SOCIAL CLASSES AND REVOLUTION
The LDA was the first organisation of English workers to define itself by the term “proletarian”, among the first to consider distinct working class interests. In their evaluation of other social classes they judged them not only by their exploitative position but also in relation to the object of social equality. Class was viewed as the embodiment of an artificial division in a society, of inequality and oppression.
The LDA’s definition of the proletariat was written by Harney: “Proletarians (so called from the Latin word proles) means the multitude who, possessing no fortune or property, have only their offspring (proles) to offer as guarantee for their attachment to the state”. This was taken from O’Brien, who wrote of the working classes “bequeathed to us by the ancient world under the name of Proletarians”. As early as 1831 O’Brien had been arguing that “labour is held in servile subjection by a tyrant called Capital”.
The LDA did not however agree with O’Brien’s analysis of the position of the middle class in England. EP Thompson noted that historians “would not accept O’Brien’s over crude assimilation of the post-Reform Whig administration to the interests of the middle-class”.
The LDA in 1839, pointed out that “the middle class are still not the most powerful in the state. The Aristocracy are still able to maintain a system from which they alone derive the benefits… The middle class have failed in their favourite question, repeal of the Corn Laws and now are raising Household Suffrage and Triennial Parliaments”.
But the LDA was fiercely against any alliance with the middle class on the lines of 1832. They had learned already the lesson European revolutionary movements had to learn through the defeats of 1848.
The London Democrat: “[the] middle class have taken no part in the struggle for the People’s Charter and show no sympathy for the workers’ miseries. Miseries engendered by the present anti-social system, for which they are using every means and straining every nerve to maintain”.
From the experience of the Great French Revolution the author, “CR”, drew the lessons:
“Had the working classes of France in the first French Revolution relied on themselves alone and refused co-operation of the few treacherous Aristocrats…. and rejected the interference of the basest and most perfidious of men, in the Gironde faction…. their Revolution would have triumphed. The failure of the revolution is to be attributed to the middle classes of France, who desirous of overthrowing the Aristocracy, in order that they might be able to appropriate the wealth and property of the Aristocracy, and the Church, to their own purposes joined in effecting the Revolution”.
The Democratic Association did not have the categories of bourgeois or proletarian revolution as clearly defined as they would be in the Communist Manifesto, but rather sketched out a constant revolution being carried through to its absolute of “Universal Equality” and a truly natural and human society. They judged the middle-classes in relation to this objective, and concluded that their role was to be as counter-revolutionary exploiters vying for positions of privilege.
The LDA declared that in “the spirit of pure democracy, we hold out the hand of fellowship to all who will sincerely co-operate with us to achieve the objects we have in view”. That opportunity arose with the rise of Chartism in 1839.