I found this interesting article at http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/history/chartism2.html (a beaut site, btw):
"Annual Register (1839), 1, p.304
Apart from the political demands of the Chartists, the movement is characterised by other noteworthy conceptions. The hostility of the Chartists is directed less against the privileged condition of society, which up to the present was the particular object of democratic indignation, than against capitalists in general. The movement is, in fact, an insurrection which is expressly directed against the middle classes. A change in the system of government is demanded by the Chartists not the purpose of receiving more power and privileges but - as far as their aim permits of any definition - for the purpose of producing a hitherto non-existent condition of society, in which wage labour and capital do not exist at all."
I mention this because it has long seemed to me that to demand the substance implicit in the formalism of liberalism is ultimately to demand a socialism of sorts. Given that the formal Chartist demands amounted to extended suffrage, political relevance for the unpropertied, and the secret ballot (a modest liberal programme by today's standards), it is interesting that the Register should interpret them as above. No sooner had the Whigs prevailed over the Tories (the parliamentary manifestation of the Bourgeoisie unseating the aristocracy), but a new class got busy on the next revolution - there were more boojies than aristocrats, and, to the degree that explained the boojie triumph, so too did it matter that there were more proles than boojies (Marx, emboldened by a sense of political flux that is not quite so apparent today, wrote something like this in *The German Ideology* not long after this).
Some interesting lessons to come out of this are that:
(a) the Chartists were ever internally divided, a fact a cool government were quick to exploit; (b) Chartist demands were too drastic for the institutional settings of the time; and ... (c) as prosperity increased, so did Chartist popularity decline; so ...
(d) as a coherent political entity, they eventually subsided ... but the trades Unions and Independent Labour Party (not to mention a certain International Working Men's Association) to which erstwhile Chartists gave rise eventually, albeit *incrementally*, got most of their programme up within a few decades, because ...
(e) their demands, drastic as they were, were logically in line with the legitimating premises of the bourgeois revolution; (f) The Corn Laws that brought them into being were about a protectionism that suited the rural bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat and the urban bourgeoisie - along the lines of an 18th Brumaire sorta treatment, the proletariat was united by an obviously common interest, and the bourgeoisie was split on that interest; (g) their programme recognised that the welfare of British workers depended significantly on foreign policy, and their offshoot, Linton and Mazzini's 'People's International League', aimed at democratic internationalism, was formed because workers saw that only generalised democratic control could address the uneven development and imperialist competition that threatened to bring crisis and, ultimately, a Great War.
In an age when flux and impending crisis permeate the public sensibility again; when we're losing political and material agency; when a marked extension and expansion of intellectual property protection attends a marked decline in both proletarian welfare and the profitability of petit bourgeois enterprises; and when poor nations are going backwards, proletarian labour nailed to its locale while finance is completely freed from its; and while trading blocs are being formed that cannot help but come to loggerheads over trade walls in general, and access to energy and 'intellectual property' in particular - well, perhaps the time is right for the sort of revolution-via-reform movement Chris Burford so stubbornly commends to us.
Forward to a publicly crisis-predicting, incrementalist, radical-democratic, neo-Chartist movement then?
Er, back to the marking ...
Cheers, Rob.