4. Breaking the yoke¶
Core Argument¶
Following the 1832 “Great Betrayal”, which excluded the working class from the franchise, the London Working Men’s Association was founded in 1836 and drew up the People’s Charter. Its six demands—universal male suffrage, the ballot, no property qualification for MPs, payment of MPs, equal constituencies, and annual parliaments—became the programme of the first independent working-class political action in history. A Convention was elected to present a petition to Parliament in 1839, but sharp divisions immediately emerged between “moral force” supporters, drawn from the middle class and artisans who sought alliance with the bourgeoisie, and “physical force” supporters, rooted among factory workers who were prepared to take up arms. The petition, bearing 1,280,000 signatures, was rejected. A planned general strike—the “sacred month”—was abandoned, leading to mass arrests. The Newport Rising of November 1839, an armed insurrection led by John Frost, ended in a bloodbath with thirty dead; Frost and others were transported.
The National Charter Association, formed in 1840, became the first working-class political party. A second petition in 1842 gathered over three million signatures; its rejection sparked the “Plug Plot” general strike, in which strikers removed boiler plugs to halt production. This was the first modern general strike, linking economic demands to the Charter. The Chartist conference endorsed the strike and called for its continuation until the Charter became law. Women workers played a prominent role: the first female Charter Association was established in Birmingham in 1838 with 1,300 members, and over one hundred women’s associations were formed. Yet the strike lacked clear leadership and objectives, with confusion over whether to demand the Charter or restore 1840 wage rates. Government repression followed: 1,500 arrests and 200 transported. The defeat was blamed on political immaturity and the absence of defined aims. Many activists turned to trade unionism; the Miners Association of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in 1842, and the National Association of United Trades (1845) became the first union body to propose a working-class party based on trade unions.
Chartism’s final struggle came in 1848, inspired by the European revolutions. A mass demonstration of 150,000 in London was met with armed force; mass arrests followed, and the movement entered terminal decline. The bourgeoisie granted concessions—the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Ten Hour Bill—as a response to revolutionary pressure. Marx and Engels acknowledged that they had mistaken capitalism’s birth-pains for its death-agony: an error of timing, not of method.