The Chartists

The English suffrage reform in 1832 was driven by the mobilization of workers in the 10s and 20s. But only the middle class got the right to vote. For the workers, the change of regime resulted in stricter police surveillance, abolished social insurance and forced labour.

The Chartist movement began as a mobilization against the workhouses, a kind of prison where the unemployed were imprisoned. Many of these were stormed and demolished. But the workers also felt that they needed some unification. When the London Working Men’s Association proposed a call (or Charter) for universal suffrage in 1838, it was adopted as a program by local workers’ organizations throughout the UK.

Despite an overarching programs, chartism remained entrenched in local culture. At the center of the movement, the industrial area between Birmingham and Manchester, the whole community was chartist. There were chartist pubs, chartist churches, the women organized chartist parties, the local politicians were chartists, and in 1844 chartists organized the first consumer shops in Rochdale. The unifying activities were the collection of names for the Charter, speaker tours where popular speakers performed, and the Chartist magazine Northern Star. Attempts were also made to organize people’s parliament days, but since it was expensive to participate in them, they mainly engaged the intellectual middle class who could not lead the movement locally, which is why they did not lead to anything.

In July 1842, local chartists organized a general strike in northern and central England. The strike spread through demonstrations from city to city. This was the peak that the movement would never exceed. The petition was handed over to an uninterested parliament the same year and no new initiatives were ever taken. During the boom after 1848, the business community also began to buy out the more well-educated workers with higher wages, which is why the movement broke down.

Chartism developed the four-legged tactics that would dominate labor movements until the First World War:
- Obstruction of oppressive institutions, through strikes
- Alternatives, in the form of non-oppressive cooperative consumption and production
- Infiltration into hostile structures, through participation in municipal elections and attempts (unsuccessful, however) to participate in national ones
- Popular culture and public as coordinating, through newspapers, demonstrations and mass meetings.

Reading
Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists, Pantheon Books 1984
John Foster: Class struggles and the industrial revolution, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1974