Here we present the first of the texts which accompany our lecture series on the history of the workers movement. The series will be ten lectures long, and each one will be accompanied by an article outlining the basic themes covered. This first piece looks at the Industrial Revolution and the formation of the working class.

Everyone is welcome to attend whether they are interested in the politics of Konflikt or just want to chat about history. Lectures will be given not only in Bulgarian but also in English, not on the same days of course. You can attend either in person at the Konflikt offices in Varna at ul. “Dragoman” 3. If you can’t make it in person, we will also be putting them up on YouTube so anyone can watch.

The first session will take place in 18th of January. The period covered will be from the Industrial Revolution to the uprisings of 1848. The political focus will be on the formation of the working class, and what class means. An introductory article discussing the period will be published a week before the meetings, allowing people to do a bit of studying so they are familiar with the topic beforehand. Don’t worry. There won’t be a test.

Join us at 19.00 on Wednesday 21st of January, or in English at 16.00 on Sunday 18th of January.

The rate of change

In today’s world there seems to be a conviction that things are changing at a faster rate than ever before. The birth of computing and communication technology is at the heart of this. In 1943, Thomas Watson, chairman of American computer giant IBM, made an oft quoted comment that “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” He dramatically underestimated the numbers. IBM actually sold eighteen computers that year. Today less than a century later about 60% of the world’s population owns a smart phone. Bulgaria is, of course, higher than the world average at 78%. Nearly four in five of us today have more computer power in our pockets than these first computers that Thomas Watson thought IBM could sell five of in the world. The world today is changing very fast. 

It’s not just a quality of the moment though. Things have been changing at this explosive rate since the Industrial Revolution, which happened a little over 250 years ago. There are many things that seem rather boring and old fashioned to us today, but in their time we’re massively revolutionary. The railway was 200 years old last year. Although the first train had been invented about twenty years earlier, the first passenger service using a steam locomotive was introduced in 1825. Today trains seem rather old fashioned with most people preferring to make journeys, even long ones by car. In its time though it was world changing. 

In a way it was the railways that invented the notion of standardised time itself. Before the invention of the railway, cities operated their own time based upon observations of the sun. It was the railways and the need to fix timetables that actually created the idea of a ‘national time’. It created a change in the way people ate. For the first time, fresh goods like meat, fish, and dairy products could reach the cities fresh. It changed the way that we built cities. ‘The suburbs’ were a direct result of the steam engine. The fact that people could live further from their work completely changed the make up of cities. Tourism was a creation of the train. The idea of going on a day trip of short holiday by the sea was something that was made accessible to ordinary people. National daily newspapers also date from the same era. The train was transformational. 

Of course, it wasn’t only the train that changed people’s lives. The automatic washing machine (1937), and the contraceptive pill (1960) changed women’s lives in ways that it’s hard to imagine now. It would be possible to go through myriads of separate inventions and the profound changes in the way we live. 

Urban living itself was a creation of the Industrial Revolution. In 1800 at the beginning of its expansion on a world stage only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. Of course there had been cities around for a long time. The first cities were built around 6,000 years ago. Only a tiny fraction of humanity lived in them though. With the Industrial Revolution there is an explosion in the size of cities. By the 1960s a quarter of the world’s population lived in urban areas. By 2008, we had become an urban species with most of humanity living in cities. The rate of change has been massive for the last two hundred and fifty years. If it seems to be fast to us today, that is merely because we are living through it, and not looking at it in a history book. 

Before the Industrial Revolution 

The world before the Industrial Revolution was a very different one to that of today. Of course, we all know that Bulgaria didn’t exist as a country in those days. It was part of an Ottoman Empire that still covered the entirety of the Balkans up to the current boarders of Croatia, and stretched from near the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf. Bulgaria wasn’t the only modern country that didn’t exist. Italy didn’t exist, but rather was made up of areas dominated by the Spanish and Austrian empires along with some minor kingdoms and a much larger Papal State. 

Germany was still a patchwork of small countries, city states, and bishoprics. Even America was not an independent state, but a colony of the English crown. 

Most countries were of course ruled by kings while there were literally a handful of republics on the map, perhaps the Swiss Confederation and the Dutch Republic being the most prominent, it was an age of rule by monarchs. Another exception was perhaps Britain. Of course, they had a king. They still do today, Parliament was considered to be the ruling power though, and the King was a ‘constitutional monarch’. It was far from a modern democracy though. In England and Wales in 1760 around 214,000 men, and it was only men, had the right to vote out of a population of around eight million. It’s about 3% of the population. 

The overwhelming majority of the population lived in villages. If we stick with Britain for the moment, because that is where the Industrial Revolution is about to happen, We see that 20% of people lived in the cities, meaning that 80% of the population lived in the countryside and worked primarily as farmers. For comparison today around 1% of the UK population works in agriculture. Across Europe as a whole 4% of the working population is in agriculture. In countries like Bulgaria it’s higher, around 16% of the population works in farming. While it might seem high compared to other European countries compared to Britain before the Industrial Revolution it is extremely low. We all live today in a world created by this revolution. 

The map of the world in those days was still full of big blank spaces that had things like ‘here be monsters’ written in them. The middle of Africa was a big white blank. It’s at about the time of the Industrial Revolution that Captain Cook was mapping out the coastlines of Australia and new Zealand. Nobody knew what was in the middle. The world in many ways was much smaller. In other ways though it was much bigger. It took at least 10 days to travel from London to Glasgow by land. Nowadays the train journey takes five and a half hours. 

So as we approached the Industrial Revolution, the world that humans lived in was a very different place. It’s clear from this that this was a society unlike the one we live in today. Capitalism is not an eternal system that has existed for all time. Rather it is a historically rather new system whose roots go back approximately 250 years. Rather than something eternal it’s actually something relatively new. 

What was the Industrial Revolution?

In some ways we can look at the Industrial Revolution as a period of technological development that happened in the north west corner of Europe starting about 1760. There’s no clear starting date. It’s not like the French Revolution where we can look at the storming of the Bastille and think ‘oh July 4th 1789, that’s when it happened’. With the Industrial Revolution it is not so clear. However, 1760 is a date that is reasonably generally accepted for when it begins in England, and it’s considered to have spread to have spread to continental Europe and to the United States by 1840. 

What we call feudalism wasn’t a time without any change at all. Technological levels were not the same at the start of the 18th century as they were at the time of the Roman Empire.  The rate of change was just slower. In the period immediately prior to the Industrial Revolution, Britain had experienced what has been called ‘the second agricultural revolution’ or ‘the British agricultural revolution’. This was, like the Industrial Revolution not a single event, but a series of innovations that caused an unprecedented increase in the size of population. British population doubled in around one century. In today’s world this doesn’t seem such a dramatic increase. World population now doubles in the period of about 50 years. At the time though it was unimaginable. Population levels had remained relatively stable for centuries. 

This increase in population was caused by a massive increase in food production. There was also a massive increase in the size of farm holdings. In what is called ‘the enclosures’, big farmers increased the size of their farms by enclosing what was previously common land. This had the result of pushing huge amounts of small farmers and the rural poor off their land swelling the size of the urban population, just at the time when the factory system was expanding and needed human fodder to feed its growth. 

This creates a new social class what is called the working class. Of course there had always been workers. There had always been the people who owned property and the people who did the work. What is new in the Industrial Revolution is the creation of a huge new class of workers concentrated in specific locations. Manchester was the heart of the Industrial Revolution. In the 18th century its population increased seven fold. Over the 19th century it increased nine fold. It became the world’s first industrial city. 

On a human level it was a catastrophe. Its size is swollen by vast numbers of dispossessed peasants who had lost their land in the enclosures, and a stream of refugees from the famine which devastated Ireland causing it to lose 50% of its population to starvation and emigration. Many of them flocked to Manchester to feed the newly established factories. The results were massive overcrowding, the development of huge slum districts, and terrible urban poverty and living conditions. Karl Marx’s friend Fredrick Engels who lived there during the period described it as “hell on earth”. To give an example of just how bad conditions were, average life expectancy for workers in Manchester during the Industrial Revolution fell to under 20, still though the dispossessed rural population of Britain and the starving poor of Ireland desperate for work arrived in huge numbers and the factory system continued to expand. 

The driving force of the Industrial Revolution was textile production. Manchester became know as ‘Cottonopolis’. The first cotton mill in Manchester was built at the start of the 1780s. It was a large five story building about 60 metres long. It was powered by steam and used five tons of coal a day. It employed over 1,000 workers with a high percentage of them being women and children. The factory operated a two 12 hour shift system and worked six days a week. Arkwright, the owner, died in 1792 at the age of 59. He left a fortune of around half a million pounds (the equivalent of €72 million today). At the time workers were paid at most £0.60 a week. That was skilled adult male workers though. Women received at most £0.25 a week, and children even less. By 1800 there were 42 such mills in Manchester. By 1816 there were 86. In 1853 there were 108 of them. The world’s first intercity railway, between Manchester and the port of Liverpool was built in 1830. In the 1880s it was decided that Manchester itself needed a port. The fact that it was 60km from the sea wasn’t a problem. At the cost of £15 million (around €2,400,000,000 today) a canal was built to facilitate exports to the growing world market. 

Two new classes

This complete change in the productive system brought into existence two new classes. The first was the modern capitalist class, the bourgeoisie. These were people like Richard Arkwright, the owners of the new factories. The second was the class of the workers in these factories, the proletariat. It is this division of society into bosses and workers that still characterises the world today. There are those who live from making profits from the labour of others, and those who have to work to live. 

Of course, the economic interests of these two classes were directly opposed. The interests of the bosses was to make as much profit as possible. To do this it is necessary to get workers to do more work for less money. The economic interests of  bosses is in the workers doing more work, and earning less money. The workers interests, exactly as they are today, were exactly the opposite. Workers interests are in earning more money, and doing less work. This is the basis of what is called class struggle. Today, with the spread of the Industrial Revolution across the entire globe, the overwhelming majority of people are working class. It’s not just workers in factories. Nurses in hospitals, teachers in schools, delivery workers bringing take away food. All are people who have to work for a living, and economically have the same immediate economic interests, to be paid more money for their labour. 

Of course the old classes still remained. In feudal times there had been a hierarchy of power with monarchs at the top, and below them the great lords, the aristocracy, the small farmers and down to the lowest landless labourers. It was still these old classes who ran society. The new class of factory owners now found that it was the class that had all of the money, and was making the new world work, but it had little political power. Something had to change. 

Bourgeois Revolution

If it was the Industrial Revolution in England that established the economic basis of the new world, then it was the French Revolution that established its political basis. In many ways the modern nation state is the legacy of 1789. Before the French Revolution, there weren’t really nation states in the way that we understand them today. The empires and kingdoms of the old world were more like the private holdings of individual families than modern nations composed of citizens with rights. Rather in those times the important rights within society were the ‘divine rights of kings’ given to them by god. This is a far cry from today’s system where we have citizens of a country who all have ‘equal rights under the law’. Today, just as we all live in the world created by the Industrial Revolution in England, we equally live in the world created by the French Revolution. 

What was the root cause of this revolution was the fact that the class which was the rising economic power in society had little political power. Louis XVI was an absolute monarch. Perhaps though before we look at the events in France, we should consider why the revolution didn’t happen in England. After all it was England that was the most advanced country in the world at the time. It was England which was at the very heart of the massive changes that were spreading from there to the entire world. 

England had already had its political convulsions earlier. It had experienced a civil war between Parliament and the King in the 1640s, which had ended with the King being publicly beheaded, and the parliamentary leader, Oliver Cromwell being installed as ‘Lord Protector’. England ceased to be a monarchy, and until Cromwell’s death in 1658 was a Commonwealth’ or a type of republic. Following this the monarchy was restored, but the returning Stuart dynasty didn’t last for long. 1688 was the year of what is commonly called in English history the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Im reality it wasn’t a revolution, and it wasn’t particularly ‘glorious’. Essentially, what it was was the replacement of one king by another, who happened to be both his son-in-law and his nephew. As part of the deal though, the English monarchy agreed to the same largely ceremonial role that it has today, and power was invested in Parliament. The kings and queens smiled and waved at their subjects, and the men with the money got on with running the country. This wasn’t the case in France. 

French society at the time was made up of three ‘estates’. The first estate was considered to be the clergy, and the second the nobility. Between them these two estates composed 2% of society. The third estate was made up of everybody else. It’s possible to talk about the causes of the French Revolution as lying in the successive failure of harvests in the 1870s, and the debt of the French Crown due to its involvement in foreign wars, the American war of independence, the seven years war, which in a war was the first truly global conflict, and preceding that the war of Austria succession. To put it basically the French state had no money. The most important cause though is that the bourgeoisie had the money, but not the power. 

The people who had the money were parts of the ‘third estate’ that 98% of society. The first two estates were except from taxes, as the French put it at the time “The nobles fight; the clergy pray, and the people pay”. What the new bourgeois objected to was having to pay while having no political say about what went on. The King was forced to summon an assembly of all three estates in an effort to raise money, and for him that was the beginning of the end. 

France went through a decade of a revolutionary whirlwind. From the first meeting of the three estates to the proclamation of a republic took three years. Four months later the French King, like the English one before him, lost his head. These events caused massive changes within society. The idea of modern political democracy emerges in this period. France found itself at war  with the major powers of Europe, Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia as well as several other smaller countries. Other kings start to worry when you cut off Kings heads. The revolution continued until the seizure of power in a coup by a Corsican military officer, Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, but the wars continued until 1815

What of the working class?

Urban workers in France, particularly in Paris, supported the revolution enthusiastically. The ‘sans-culottes’, literally those without the fashionable knee-breaches that the aristocracy wore, working people wore long trousers instead,  were the driving force of the revolution. Like the bourgeois, they hated the aristocracy and the Ancien régime. In this they were united. The different classes though had different economic interests. The sans-culottes were a sort of intermediate strata including both workers and the small bourgeoise. They and the big owners were both for the end of the monarchy, social equality, and popular democracy. However, when the sans-culottes started to raise demands of economic equality, the owners were terrified. It ended in blood, in 1794 the leaders of the radical movement were executed on the guillotine. They had tried to push the revolution too far, and paid for it with their heads. 

On the other side of the channel, workers in England were also beginning to assert themselves as a class. Luddism was a movement that swept across the northern industrial regions of England. It was named after a mythical figure, Ned Ludd, who allegedly smashed two spinning machines, and the practice of workers breaking the new machines became a massive movement across the entire region. In the end it took the Duke of Wellington, who was the leading British general of the time and would later defeat Napoleon in the final battle at Waterloo, and 12,000 British troops to suppress it. 

The next stage of the English movement was more clearly political. It again ended in blood. A massive demonstration demanding reform of Parliament attended by 60,000 people in Manchester was attacked by the army leaving 18 dead and 700 injured. It took place at St. Peter’s Field, and is commonly referred to in English history as Peterloo, bringing back the memory of the battle of Waterloo a few years earlier. 

In 1832, the English government passed what is know as the ‘Great Reform Act’. It increased the number of people who could vote, but it was still limited to men with property. The electorate approximately doubled, but it was still only about 20% of adult men. Women of course couldn’t vote. Working people still didn’t have to vote. The response of the workers was a document called the ‘People’s Charter’, and a mass movement called ‘Chartism’. Millions of people signed the Charter, and demonstrations of hundreds of thousands were held to demand universal suffrage for men. 

In Part One we have discussed how  two revolutions, one economic and one political,  changed the world and created the modern working class, and how this working class began to assert its owns interests against those of the capitalist class. In Part Two we will discuss the development of this movement. What happened to the Chartists, how revolution spread across Europe in 1848, and the early forms of working class political organisation.