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From International Socialism, No.21, Summer 1965, p.29.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Before the Socialists — Studies in Labour and Politics 1861 to 1881
Royden Harrison
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 55s.
About the time he was rationalising an incomes policy in the pages of Tribune in company with Michael Barratt Brown, Royden Harrison did a much less dubious service for the Labour movement when he brought out this important book. It is important because it dispels: a lot of myths, recently put out by less well-informed, frequently self-appointed labour historians, on the nature of the British working-class movement in the last century. Notably in his chapter on The Tenth April of Spencer Walpole: the Problem of Revolution in relation to Reform 1865-67, Mr Harrison demonstrates the essentially revolutionary attitudes and activities of the rank and file of the working-class movement, while also recognising and analysing the degenerated trade-union and political leadership.
He shows more clearly than anyone else has done why this leadership tended to support the Confederates in the Civil War while emphasising too the fact that the rank and file opposed exploitation at home and abroad by their solidarity with the North. This is closely tied up with an analysis, in the introductory chapter, of the way in which the employers, Liberal or Tory, consciously used the elite of the British working class, the ‘labour aristocracy’ described elsewhere in great detail by E.J. Hobsbawn, as a buffer against the rank and file and so gave a deceptive strength to reformism within the labour movement. At the same time, he does not make the mistake, made by so many superficial bourgeois historians, of labelling this period 1861-1881 as a backward one for the British working class. This was in fact the time when the rank-and-file militants, always far to the left of their leaders and the intellectual fringe, not only continued to push the Government on the issue of Reform (for example the mass meeting of workers in Hyde Park on 6 May 1867) but also advanced towards the creation of an independent working-class party and a theory of action, in socialism, despite many sidetrackings into Reform League and Positivist theory. It was a period, above all, which kills the platitudes about the essentially non-revolutionary nature of the British working class, and which gave Marx evidence for his optimistic analyses of the future of British Labour. Though Harrison draws mainly Left Reformist conclusions from his impressive evidence, the lessons for the revolutionary are there too. A violent demonstration of 150,000 workers in Hyde Park, with the House of Commons quaking in its shoes, may not be on the cards at the moment, but it is helpful to know that it can happen. A must, this book, for all comrades interested in the history of Labour and its relevance for today.
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