The 1848 Repeal of the Corn Laws is then a victory for the industrial bourgeoisie not just over the landlord class but also over the merchant class and financial oligarchy that had previously formed a symbiotic relation with it. The industrial bourgeoisie could not have achieved it without the support of the industrial proletariat. This struggle is an almost direct parallel to the struggle over Brexit. The forces of reaction sought to defend the barriers imposed by the borders of the nation state. In 1848, the Tory Party, the party of the landed aristocracy, split. The Conservative Party was created out of it, as a section of the party aligned itself with the interests of the industrial capital, and its need for free trade. But, that division continued within the party. The true party of industrial capitalism, and free trade was the Liberal Party, in which were joined not only the progressive bourgeoisie but also the more advanced sections of the working-class. Its notable that Engels advised Eleanor Marx, and those around her to steer clear of the sects such as Keir Hardie's ILP, and Hyndman's SDF, and instead to focus their attention on where the actual working-class was, in the Liberal Clubs
As Engels notes, the industrial bourgeoisie could not have achieved its victory without the support of the workers.
“these circumstances had turned the English working class, politically, into the tail of the ‘great Liberal Party’, the party led by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working class.”
The industrial bourgeoisie was numerically small, and dependent on the numbers of the workers, but that could only be effective when the workers themselves had the vote. By the latter part of the 19th century, the concentration and centralisation of capital meant that the relative size of the industrial bourgeoisie was even smaller. When socialised capital, in the form of the joint stock company, and cooperative, expropriates the private industrial capitalists, their social function comes to an end. They were reduced to being owners of fictitious capital, shares and bonds, and becoming mere coupon clippers, living off the interest on these assets.
The Conservative Party became again a Tory Party, promoting the defence of Empire and Protectionism, whereas the Liberal Party continued to represent the interests of industrial capital and free trade, a division represented in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressle. But, the situation of a Liberal Party whose avowed purpose was to promote the interests of industrial capital, an industrial capital control over which was still exercised by shareholders rather than by the associated producers, and whose structure and control reflected that fact, whilst depending on the votes of millions of newly enfranchised, male, industrial workers, was clearly unsustainable.
No comments:
Post a Comment