The Origins of Sectarianism

[p021] The Origins of Sectarianism Peter Cadogan ‘The error of Marx and Engels in regard to the historical dates flowed on the one hand from an underestimation of future possibilities latent in capitalism, and on the other an overestimation of the revolutionary maturity of the proletariat’ (L. D. Trotsky, The Communist Manifesto Today (1937) ). SUICIDE by sectarianism is history’s verdict on Left movements in Britain. The National Charter Associa- 146 tion, the Social Democratic Federation, the Independ- ent Labour Party and the Communist Party: each has been its own executioner. All have shone brilliantly. enlightened the Labour movement—and gone out. It would be very foolish for us to suppose that this is a historical phenomenon only, in the sense that it is a characteristic of a phase now ended. The danger remains. While we now have a better opportunity than ever before of altering this tradition through under-

[p022] RN NA Sk a thea li Nh Tet Ta ORIGINS OF SECTARIANISM standing it, we shall not be in a position to assume that the lessons have been learnt until the socialist revolution in Britain is an accomplished fact. it is necessary to start at the beginning and dis- tinguish between sectarianism and its antecedent, Utopianism. Sectarianism, in the sense in which that word is being used here, may only be said to exist when socialist theory and policy have become possible by virtue of the birth of scientific socialism. Sectarian- ism as a compound of mistaken ideas and policies pre- supposes the pessibility of correct ideas and policies. Scientific socialism dates from the period 1847-50. In 1847 the League of the Just was reorganized and called the Communist League. It was on behalf of the League that Marx and Engels wrote the Conmununist Manifesto, published in January 1848. The publication of an English translation took place in November 1850 in George Julian Harney’s Red Republican. Scientific socialism was born. Hitherto it had not been possible for men to grasp the significance of their times. They were therefore fundamentally helpless in face of the task of the transformation of society as a whole. They were not unaware of this, and sought instead to trans- form isclated parts of society. Thus the Utopianism of Winstanley, Owen and Fourier, whose colonies, based on property relations of a new type, anticipated part of the content of communism. In the 1847-50 period the theoretical and political possibilities were changed by the birth of scientific socialism; Utopianism thereafter became sectarianism. Sectarianism may be defined as ideas and practices produced through a breakdown of the scientific method and therefore not related to the real state of affairs, with the result that they increasingly prove unaccept- able to the working class. These sectarian ideas may in themselves seem militant, advanced and revolution- ary, but they show that communication has broken down between those who imagine themselves to be the vanguard of the working class and the working class itself. It is the working class that is historically decisive. Sectarian socialists identify themselves with the working class even when they have lost touch with it and, by so doing, presume themselves to be historically decisive. This illusion persists to the point of the sect’s extinction. it is important that we should see sectarianism as the characteristic of an epoch, not just as something ve have known in our own lifetime, when the effects of the October Revolution and, more particularly, the later influence of Stalinism have given it a temporary and quite distinctive character. So long as there has been a working-class movement, sectarianism has been part of it. We must go back to the foundation of the movement to examine its very first manifestations. There we can find the essential clues to everything that follows. THE FIRST WORKERS’ PARTIES In 1832 the first Reform Bill was passed. giving the vote to the middle class. The working class, so strong in support of the campaign for the Bill, got nothing. Disillusionment was intense and, as a result, the idea of an independent mass organization of the working class was conceived. In 1836 William Lovett founded the London Working Men’s Association. Its member- ship was limited to the working class; middle-class Supporters were eligible for honorary membership only. . Then George Julian Harney founded the East London Democratic Association, later known simply as the Democratic Association, with a membership of 3.000 (compared with the 200 of the London Working Men’s Association) and all the makings of a mass following. Whereas the London Working Men’s Asso- ciation was an organization of labour aristocrats who pinned their faith on influencing radical MPs, the Democratic Association thought in terms of direct working-class pressure, the general strike and insurrec- tion if necessary. The Charter’s six points for the reform of Parliament were the agreed platform of a united front. Votes for all; secret ballot; payment of MPs etc.: these were supported by a host of local working-class radical associations rallied by the Chartist paper the Northern Star and the tireless activity cf roving political mission- aries. The forms and the tempo of the struggle changed constantly. The headquarters of the movement went from London to Birmingham, to Manchester and back to London. The National Charter Association was created in 1840 between the first and second petitions. In the struggle with the Anti-Corn Law League and the Sturgeite radicals the Chartists fought to maintain the independent working-class leadership of the move- ment for reform. Feargus O’Connor founded his ill- starred Land Association to turn back the clock of the industrial revolution and Harney in 1846, by means of the Fraternal Democrats, launched working-class internationalism. Socialism made its appearance and was formally adopted by the Chartists in 1850. Political ferment in Britain has never since approached the in- tensity of these years. Attendance at meetings was commenly numbered in thousands and tens of thou- sands. The great Chartist demonstration of 1848 was fixed for April 10. It was to take place on Kennington Common, London. The demonstration was intended as a major challenge to the government and it was inter- preted by the latter as nothing less than a plan for revolution. We must remember that this was the year in which revolution had swept across the whole of Europe. The Duke of Wellington, in command of the forces against the Chartists, had at his disposal 150,000 special constables, 9,000 soldiers and four batteries of field artillery. Barricaded buildings were defended by armed government servants. Coercion won. The procession never marched on Westminster as originally planned. Two years later Harney looked back: Every hour the strength of our adversary, and our own weakness, became more and more apparent .. . There was no longer any mistake that. if we meant to proceed with the procession, it would be a fight from the moment we left Kennington Common in the direction of the Houses of Parliament, for which the people were not prepared.! It is at this point that historians have traditionally written off the Chartist movement—just when the most intensive historical study is required. A. R. Schoyen in his recent book Chartist Challenge has provided 1 Letter in Northern Star, February 2, 18450. > A. R. Schoyen, Chartist Challenge (Heinemann, 2Ss.). 147 eM a RAR NR nda ta Sh ab Se oa an RR a

[p023] LABOUR REVIEW that study. There was no immediate decline in Churtist strength: in fact in some places Chartism now pro- ceeded to fortify itself by association with — Lrish nationalism. froops were sent to Dudley and Barnsley and the government passed uw new gagging Act, the Crown and Government Security Act, tnat made sedition u transportable offence. As on previous occasions, however, splits appeared among the Chartist leaders. The traditional ground of difference was between the physical force and moral force parties. This had deepened over the years into a complex series of differences between those who would associate with middle-class radicals, and even depend upon them, and those who would not. Since Chartism as a movement had no political theory of its own this was inevitable. But in 1848 u new and historically more important division appeared at the Chartist. National Assembly convened on May Day. A group of delegates, described by Feargus O’Connor as ‘socialists first and Chartists second’, proposed the removal of O’Connor from the leadership and the reforming of the movement as a socialist confederation including Ireland. The socialists were defeated by u three to one vote. On May 28. 1848, in Bradford, 2,000 operatives armed with clubs defeated an even larger number of police and ‘specials’. For the government Grey, the Home Secretary, decided to use the new special powers. From June 4, meetings in London were broken up, street fighting took place and Chartist leaders were arrested and imprisoned. In July Jones. Vernon and others were tried in an atmosphere of political hysteria. Harney wrote of the trials: ‘If men are to be indicted as Chariists and convicted as communists, they may begin to ask themselves why they should stop short at advocating political reform.’* This was in fact what happened. At the same time, developments in France showed that parliamentary reform was not all the Chartists had supposed it to be. Across the Channel universal suffrage had produced a Chamber of bankers, land- lords, army officers and other men of property. ©’Connor stuck to his ideal of a large class of ‘small and well-remunerated capitalists’, while Harvey de- clared ‘that Capital, the offspring of Labour, shall be its servant and not its master’.* He saw through the radical design ‘to make use of the proletarians to establish bourgeois supremacy’ and added: ‘From the ranks of the proletarians must come the saviours of industry.’ Harney then proceeded to build the Fraternal Demo- crats as the socialist faction within Chartism. At a banquet in February 1849 he was joined by Bronterre O’Brien and by Owenites who had previously stood apart from politics. In June 1849 he launched his Democratic Review, a threepenny forty-page monthly, as a forum of socialist thought. He claimed a circula- tion of between 2,000 and 3,000, a significant propor- tion of active Chartists. By this time the revolution in Europe was going down to defeat and English ‘progressive’ middle-class opinion veered round from support of the counter- revolution to enthusiasm for the cause of the revolution 3 Northern Star, July 15, 1848. 4 Ybid. February 26, 1848. \ Dernocratic Review, February 1850, p. 350. 148 December 19S itself. This was not only a question of idealism: there were some good business reasons too. The prospect of an independent. free-trade Hungary was more pleasing to Manchester than that of a protectionist Austria. But the middle-class supporters of the Hungarian cause would go no further than propose a bankers’ boycott of the Austrian and Russian oppressors of Hungary. Hurney attended their meetings to make a powerful case for the support of Hungary by military interven- tion and so once more clarified the difference between working-class and middle-class radicalism. This led te ancther violent struggle among Chartist leaders. Resig- nations early in 1850 prompted a recall of the Chartist Metropolitan Conference. The new provisional execu- tive which this conference elected contained a five to four majority of the socialist Fraternal Democrats. One of them was Harney himself. A national election of the Chartist leadership was planned to take place two months later, and the social- ists, or ‘Red Republicans’, stumped the country. Harney resigned from the Northern Star and broke with O'Connor. The national election re-elected the pro- visional executive committee. The Chartist movement had emerged as Britain’s first avowedly social-democratic party—that is, a party which aimed at the achievement of sccial measures through political means. A ‘declaration of social rights’ immediately adopted by the national executive called for the national- ization of the land, mines and fisheries, the extension of State credit to all, a ‘just and wise system of currency and exchange’, national secular education and humane provi- sion for the destitute.6 This was in the spring of 1850. In June of that year Harney published the Red Republican as the organ of the new Chartism; and it was this paper that printed the Conumunist Manifesto in English for the first time in November of the same year. Ernest Jones finished his two-year prison sentence in July 1850. He emerged as a socialist revolutionary to find that the flag of Chartism had changed from green to red. The English Left wing, committed to working-class socialism, stood on the threshold of a new political epoch. It is in the story of the years 1850-52 and not in the defeat of 1848 that the real tragedy of Chartism is to be found. The years 1850-52 witness the emergence of sectarianism in England. THE REAL TRAGEDY OF CHARTISM Chartist leadership had survived the revolutionizing of its political character. The movement in 1850 had lost ground but was still very much in being. “When trade is good, political agitation is a farce.’ So wrote Harney in September 1848. He knew that the ‘flush of prosperity’ of 1849 would make mass agitation im- possible. The Chartists understood the trade cycle and the tide of politics. They had weathered critical periods before. They were prepared to work and wait. What was principally wanted was a ‘few determined men to make a start’, and they were forthcoming. By 1850 the three wings of the working-class move- ment, political, trade union and co-operative, with which we are so familiar today, had just emerged. They were still experimental. There was no generally accepted definition of their function and interrelation. 6 Schoyen, op. cit. p. 197.

[p024] ORIGINS OF SECTARIANISM It scon became apparent that among the Chartists there were two quite different and incompatible views of this tripartite character. Harney was of the opinion that an independent working-class party should be the means of uniting the various forces of the Labour movement without asking the different parts to surrender their identity. In August 1850 Harney wrote: ‘Men of the Trades! On you mainly depends whether the political serfdom and social slavery of your order is to continue.’ In the Red Republican he devoted much space to strike news, but always with the ultimate reminder that ‘trades organizations may mitigate but they cannot uproot existing evils. For the working classes, there is but one way of fighting their wrongs, that of obtaining mastery of the State.’? ; Harney took a similar view of the co-operative movement. Ernest Jones, however, held views directly contrary to those of Harney. Now, it being an established and admitted fact, a fact that its cleverest advocates have not been able to refute, that Trades Unions are a perfect fallacy, and that no co- Operative movement can raise the working class under our present system, and since it therefore follows that the people exhaust their strength, and play into the hands of their enemies by running after such delusions. I ask, ‘Is the best policy to let them do so?” No! common. sens2 says. “It is the duty of every right-thinking and honest man to warn the victim running blindfold to destruction.’8 Later in the same article, writing about the attitude of the ruling class. Jones adds: Strikes and co-operations they can meet; because you have not the money for it—they have: but political combina- tions they cannot resist, because they have not the numbers for it. and you have. It will take millions upon millions to wage a social war with them—a few thousands can carry a political movement through its widest ramifications. And again: “We therefore say, at this, the critical time: All Trades-unions are lamentable fallacies. whether they embrace 1.000 or 1,000,000. All co- operative efforts are waste, misdirections of time, means and energy under our present governmental system .. .? Economic reasons account for the end of Chartism as a mass movement. It is commonplace to recall the Great Exhibition of 1851 as an indication of the new prosperity. But sectarianism accounts for the destruc- tion of that Chartist nucleus which could and should have survived. This will be self-evident if we consider what happened when the two approaches, Harney’s and Jones’s, struggled for the leadership in 1852. In December 1850 Harney changed the name of the Red Republican to Friend of the People. In July 1851 the paper ceased publication for the time being, partly because of the illness of its editor. Then Jones pro- posed to launch a new organ. the People’s Paper, and asked for full support for it. In view of the division indicated above it is hardly surprising that the support 7 Quoted, ibid. p. 207. * No‘es to the People, vol. ii. pp. 860-2, February 1852. This and most of the subsequent quotations are to be found in the excellent collection of documents brought together by John Saville in his Ernest Jones, Chartist (1952). % Notes to the Peeple, vol. ii. p. 976. March 1882. was not forthcoming. In February 1852 Harney pub- lished a new Friend of the People, and in it he wrote: Chartists are numerous, but the Chartist body is no more . .. Surviving driblets of the once vast stream only serve to show the extent of the drought ... My belief is that for Chartism there is no future existence save in a new birth. Any attempt to galvanize the dry bones of a worn-out past must, as in the case of such attempts already tried, prove to be labour in vain. The ‘new birth’ was to be a united front of old Chartists, radicals who supported the Six Points of the Charter, trade unionists and co-operators, a new “National Party’. The following month, April 1852, there took place the final break between Harney and Jones over the purchase of the Northern Star from its publisher, MacGowan. It was offered to Jones, who declined it; he was still working on his projected People’s Paper. It was then offered to Harney—who took it, to Jones’s intense annoyance. ‘He must well know two such papers cannot at present exist together,’ wrote Jones. The disagreement over the paper has hitherto been taken as the cause of the breach between the two leaders, but it will be apparent from the above that this was incidental to the deep underlying political difference. The first number of Jones’s People’s Paper appeared on May 8, 1852. In it he asked for support for a Chartist conference that he was calling in Manchester. The duty of that Convention is simple. It has two chief points to attend to—proselytism and organization. That it will keep the movement intact, that it will repudiate ali neutralizing and dividing propositions, there can be no doubt... A good, acting, working machinery, that is all now needed! And this, the Convention must set in action. The democratic mind is in the country—the plan and details of Chartist organization are perfect, the machinery is complete, and the machinery for it to work up is plentiful, it needs but the first motive impulse to secure success .. . All this was written when the mass movement was on its last legs and the very existence of Chartism was at stake! Then followed the inevitable authoritarian note: ‘To elect an Executive, an Executive of three [!], is one of the propositions submitted by the Manchester Council, and it is one of the most important propositions issued. On the officering of an army depends its efficiency in the field. The Manchester Conference duly took place and set up a rival Chartist executive of three—Jones, Gammage and Finlen. But only six localities were re- presented and the actions of the Conference were repudiated by thirteen out of sixteen West Riding localities which affirmed support of the old national executive. At this point Harney was relying on William Newton, organizer of the new and influential Amalga- mated Society of Engineers. With his help, Harney saw renewed hope for the proposed Labour party. Then in July the General Election took place. Harney mistakenly accepted the invitation of the Bradford non-electors at the last minute, arrived in Bradford just in time to go to the hustings, made no speeches—and was defeated at the show of hands.'° 149

[p025] LABOUR REVIEW Defeat at the show of hands was a great humiliation for Harney. Four years earlier he had challenged Lord Palmerston at the Tiverton election and defeated him overwhelmingly at the show of hands! It was a very chastened Palmerston who called for a poll and won the election on the strength of the 264 people present who were actually entitled to the vote. Times had changed. Politically the situation was bad and getting worse. At an extraordinarily difficult moment, with the movement split by sectarianism. Harney, demoralized by a crushing electoral defeat. gave up. The final scene is described by Schoyen: After an inconclusive contest at a public meeting between the new movers’ and Jones—who accused them of being part of a middle-class plot working through Newton to destroy Chartism—the meeting which Newton had called for took place in Finsbury. Harney appeared with Hunt and Le Blond and, in a coldly favourable speech, killed what he had struggled so long for. The movement to create a new National Party was premature, he said; a popular agitation was not possible for the moment. Newton had taken the initiative in the matter, and he should take the next steps. He himself, concluded Harney, would be willing to follow the young men, though he would not take a part in the movement.!! Harney was now 35, but it was the end. Chartism survived as an increasingly pathetic Jonesian sect until 1858. The People’s Paper ended its eight-year life on September 4, 1858, and the last Chartist conference took place in February of that year. A new paper started by Ernest Jones, the Cabinet Newspaper, lasted until 1860. THE VIEWS OF MARX AND ENGELS The men who must bear the final responsibility for this first manifestation of sectarianism in England were the founders of scientific socialism itself, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. There can be no doubt that they were behind Jones and against Harney. In the correspondence of Marx and Engels we find the following opinions expressed: Yesterday Jones gave a really splendid lecture directed against the co-operative movement, and making a frontal attack on his own public (Marx to Engels, May 5, 1851). By the way, if you would write and sign an article for Jones. He is making very good progress with his paper, he is learning. He is not like Harney. Consequently the Notes to the People is gaining ground while the Friend of the People is collapsing (Marx to Engels, July 31, 1851). Jones is quite right, now that O’Connor has definitely gone mad, to exert himself to the utmost. Now is his chance, and if citizen Hiphiphurra [i.e., Harney] falls away in addition, the thing is safe for him. From all 3 see, the Chartists are so completely disorganized and scattered, and at the same time so short of useful people, that they must either fall completely to pieces and de- generate into cliques, in which they will for practical pur- poses become simply the tail of the financial reformers, or they must be reconstituted on an entirely new basis 10 Before the open ballot took place it was customary to call for a show of hands. The Chartists exploited this situation to the full. Workers who had no vote would nevertheless put up a candidate, wage a great campaign in his favour and, at the show of hands, ‘elect’ him by a big majority. The subsequent bailot based upon property qualifications then served to expose the undemocratic character of the election. 11 Schoyen, op. cit. p. 227. 150 December 1958 by a fellow who knows his business. Jones is quite on the right lines for this, and we may well say that he would never have got on the right road without our teaching, for he would never have discovered how the only basis on which the Chartist Party can be reconstituted, namely the instinctive hatred of the workers for the industrial bour- geoisie, can not only be preserved but enlarged, developed and based on enlightening propaganda, while on the other hand one must still be progressive opposing reactionary desires and prejudices among the workers (Engels to Marx, March 18, 1852). By chance a few numbers of E. Jones's Notes to the People (1851, 1852) have come into my hands again: these, so far as the main points of the economic articles are con- cerned, were written under my immediate guidance and partly also with my direct co-operation (Marx to Engels. Novem- ber 4, 1864).!2 However, the primary cause of the breach between Harney and Marx and Engels was not a matter of dom- estic politics. It concerned international affairs. Engels first met Harney in 1843, was associated with him in the Fraternal Democrats and was a principal contributor to Harney’s Press. Marx arrived in England in August 1849 and Engels returned later the same year. Revolu- tionary refugees were arriving in England from ail over Europe. Mazzini, Kossuth, Louis Blanc, Ledru- Rollin, Germans and Poles—all in flight before the success of counter-revolution. Harney joined with Marx and Engels in an attempt to unite all the refugee socialist leaders in a World League of Revolutionary Socialists. They were un- successful. Insuperable difficulties emerged. The revo- lutions of 1848 were not socialist, although socialists took a leading part in them. Their general character was that of bourgeois republicanism. In defeat and in exile there was no political and ideological bond be- tween the é'grés—nothing to unify them. In London they formed various rival groupings amongst them- selves. Marx and Engels saw quite clearly that the revolu- tion would only come as the ‘result of a long struggle. consummated by a new generation of men’, and they regarded the internecine squabbles of the é:migrés with contempt. Harney, however, would not give up. He insisted on maintaining contact with all shades of cpinion and, editorially, gave space accordingly. Engels expressed his views very explicitly: One realizes more and more that the emigration is an institution in which everyone must necessarily become a fool, a donkey and a scurvy knave unless he withdraws from it completely and contents himself with being an independent writer who doesn’t bother his head in the least about the so-called revolutionary party.!3 Matters came to a head over the celebration in Feb- ruary 1851 of the anniversary of the 1848 revolution in France. Louis Blane and Ledru-Rollin were organ- izing rival banquets and Harney threw in his lot with Louis Blanc. Marx described the situation in a letter to Engels on February 23: He [Harney] has by no means been content to take part at the meeting of these people. No. He has made their banquet of the February 24, which without him would have been a complete failure, into a London event. Already '2 Quoted, Saville, op. cit. pp. 234-43. 1S Quoted. F. Mehring. Karl Marx (1948). p. 208.

[p026] ORIGINS OF a thousand tickets have been sold . .. Harney has sold the biggest part of the tickets, as Jones told me the day before yesterday. O'Connor, Reynolds and hundreds of Chartists are taking part. Harney has drummed them to- gether. He is on his way all day carrying out the orders of Louis Blanc, as Jones told me also... Jones declared to me that in view of my explanations he would probably . . . not be present at the banquet. What makes his decision uncertain is very rational. If he doesn’t come he loses his popularity as, thanks to Dear [Harney] this banquet has become a Chartist matter . . . Jones dis- approves of Dear’s behaviour... He attempted to excuse it by saying that if the Chartists did not take part in either of the two banquets, they would be accused of political apathy or of antipathy against the foreign revo- lutionaries. I answered him, then Harney should have held a Chartist meeting in celebration of the lousy February 24 instead of making himself into a pedestal for a dwarf and half a dozen camels. . .!4 However, Harney then proceeded to speak also at the Rollin banquet. At a subsequent meeting in High- bury Barn attended by thousands of ér/igrés and addressed by Blanc and Schapper, two of Marx’s sup- porters were ejected and beaten up. Harney, it appears, made no move to stop this and Marx broke off rela- tions with him. It was at this point that Marx and Engels withdrew from British party politics and undertook the study of the laws of motion of capitalism in order to provide more of the theory without which the Labour move- ment would always be tethered to reaction. Writing to Engels in February 1851 of their with- drawal from party politics except for slight remaining connexions with the Chartists, especially Jones. Marx said: I am very well pleased with the genuine and public isola- tion in which we two are now situated. This isolation corresponds exactly to our position and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, of patience, for the sake of appearances, with shilly-shallying, the duty of publicly sharing with these donkeys the ridicule incurred by the party—all this has now ended. The last sentence is a reference to relations with other émigrés, the ‘little great men’ as Marx called them. Thus the views of Marx and Engels on the internal crisis of Chartism in 1852 were much _in- fluenced by the pre-existing breach with Harney over an entirely different matter. THE ‘LABOUR PARLIAMENT?’ In 1854 Jones called a ‘Labour Parliament’ with terms of reference as sectarian and as hopeless as those of the Manchester Conference of 1852. It met in the People’s Institute, Manchester, from March 6 to March 18. The ‘Parliament’ was to set up a new organization called the Mass Movement. The consti- tuticn proposed for the Mass Movement, published in full in John Saville’s book. Ernest Jones. Chartist, must be one of the most fantastic exercises in sectar- janism ever committed to paper. There were to be five departments set up to direct the Mass Movement: The Secretary of Agriculture is to superintend the purchase and management of landed estates. and all connected with the same. The Secretary of Manufacture is to exercise like !4 Quoted, Schoyen, op. cit. p. 218, SECTARIANISM functions, in reference to all the factories, workshops etc., established by the Movement. The Secretary of Distribution shall regulate the exchange and conveyance of goods to the co-operative stores and markets, with ell the duties in coi- lexion with the same. The Secretary for Regulation of the Price of Labour is to collect, arrange and publish all the details for the price of wages already specifizd. The Secretary of the Board of Assistance shall manage the entire department connected with strikes, lock-outs and disputes between employed and employer, and all questions of labour legislation between the same. While all this was being written Chartism was near its last gasp. The constitution further stated: ‘No strikes and lock-outs to be supported in the future. the participants of which shall not, before such strike or lock-out takes place, have joined the Mass Move- ment,’ On the opening day of the ‘Parliament’, Karl Marx, Louis Blanc and others were elected honorary dele- gates. Marx wrote in reply: I regret deeply to be unable, for the moment at least, to leave London, and thus to be prevented from expressing verbally my feelings of pride and gratitude on receiving the invitation to sit as Honorary Delegate at the Labour Parliament. The mere assembling of such a Parliament marks a new epoch in the history of the world. The news of this great fact will arouse the hopes of the working classes throughout Europe and America.!5 Marx wrote to Engels the same day, March 9, and mentioned the ‘Labour Parliament’. There is nothing to suggest that he did not attach some significance to it. From this it is quite apparent that he was wholly out of touch with the situation, while the fact of his giving Jones support as in 1851-52 only made matters worse. It was not that Marx had any illusions about Jones as a man. He wrote to Engels on September 2, 1852: ‘Jones is a thoroughly egotistical fellow .. . Still, since his paper is the only Chartist organ, I shall not sever connexions with him, but let him pilot his ship alone for a few weeks,’ Then on February 13, 1855, Marx made this ex- tremely interesting political characterization: In spite of the force, endurance and energy which one is bound to admit he possesses, Jones spoils everything by his urge for publicity, his tactless fumbling after pretexts for agitation and restless desire to move faster than the times. When he. can’t make a real agitation, he seeks the appearance of agitation, improvises movements on top of movements (which of course leave everything where it was) and periodically deceives himself into a false exalta- tion. I've warned him, but in vain. Marx maintained contact with Jones until February 1859. The full force of the tragedy of Marx-Jones sectarianism became apparent in the years that followed 1852. Both the prophet and the disciple slowly changed their attitude towards the trade unions and the co- operative movement, finally taking up positions approx- imating to those of Harney in 1851-52. The change was evident in Jones as early as 1853. In September of that year a strike broke out in the Preston textile mills and the employers turned it into a lock-out. The struggle lasted for seven months and Jones in the People’s ~ Paper of November 5 gave it his enthusiastic support: ‘Send your delegates far and near !8 Quoted. Saville. op. cit, p. 274. 151

[p027] LABOUR REVIEW —let town call upon town—trade on trade—let one cry eche and re-echo throughout the island from factory to factory and from shop to shop. Frighten them with the symptoms of your union... . In 1859 there was a major strike in the London building trades—again turned into a lock-out by the employers. It was out of this dispute that the London Trades Council and the Amalgamated Society of Car- penters and Joiners developed. Jones wrote in his Cabinet Newspaper on August 6: The rich have their accumulated capital, and having once agreed to raise the price of their goods, can afford to wait till necessity forces their customers to pay that price. The poor, singly, would never be heard. They would perish in detail while others of their own class took their places. Combination is the only means for preventing this. By combination only can the evil of one set of working men cutting the ground from under the other be avoided, and therefore it is as legitimate as it is necessary that a Trades Union should be in existence... Marx, in the resolution he drafted for the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association held Document