Jeff Slee reviews The General Strike of 1842, by Mick Jenkins, published by Lawrence & Wishart.

This is an unusual book review, because this book in question was published in 1980. It is now out of print, but it can be bought online.

I have written this review because, although I have a fair knowledge of British working class history, I only recently found out we had a General Strike in August 1842. It was probably the first ever General Strike anywhere in the world, and the most massive industrial action in this country in the 19^th century. This book is an inspiring and eye-opening account of it.

The 1842 General Strike is little covered in most of the standard histories of the British working class, such as GDH Cole’s and Raymond Postgate’s The Common People (first published in 1938) and Henry Pelling’s History of British Trade Unionism (first published in 1963).  Engels, who came to England in December 1842 – after the strike – was mistaken when he wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) that the General Strike was largely instigated by the “rich manufacturing bourgeoisie”, as part of its opposition to the landowning aristocracy and in particular its aim of abolishing the Corn Laws which, as Wikipedia says, “protected landowners’ interests by levying taxes on imported wheat, thus raising the price of bread at a time when factory-owners were trying to cut wages.”

Yet, as Mick Jenkins’s book shows, the strike was an important event in the history of our class.

The Working Class in 1842

In 1842, the industrial revolution was still ongoing. The working class was growing in numbers, in self-organisation and in experience. Cotton, the biggest industry, employed about 350,000 workers – mainly around Manchester, the centre of the industrial revolution. Other industries – coal, engineering, wool –  employed about half a million workers across the UK. Workers had already held localised strikes against pay cuts, protests where they destroyed machinery that was replacing jobs (the Luddites) and created early trade union organisations. 

Working class radicals were also campaigning for universal male suffrage, and a large demonstration for this had been violently dispersed by the army in St Peter’s Square Manchester in 1819 – the Peterloo Massacre (covered in The Peterloo Massacre by Joyce Marlow, Harper and Collins, 1971, and in the 2018 film by Mike Leigh). The Reform Act of 1832 had extended the right to vote to property owners, including the bosses of the new industrial companies, but less than one in five men – and no women – had the right to vote. The People’s Charter was launched in 1838 and soon became the main political demand of working class militants.

The Strike

The strike started in Manchester and the towns around it, against wage cuts and against unemployment.  As well as these aims, the strike also, as Mick Jenkins clearly explains, had a very clear political aim – universal suffrage so that Parliament would include workers’ representatives.

 It rapidly spread to include half a million workers, perhaps half the UK’s industrial workforce: cotton workers of course; coal miners from Scotland and the North East to South Wales; pottery workers in Staffordshire; engineering workers in London and elsewhere; and woollen weavers in Somerset and Norfolk.

The strike was led by skilled workers – mechanics, toolmakers, etc., who were self-educated and literate. Many of the strike leaders were also leading figures in the Chartist movement, though other Chartist leaders such as Feargus O’ Connor were less keen on uniting the industrial and political struggles.

The strike was organised through strike committees which held mass meetings; maintained discipline and order; collected and distributed food; issued permits to work where they decided this was necessary; and built support for the strikers amongst shopkeepers and others in their towns.

Mick Jenkins’ narrative draws on an impressive range of contemporary sources, including the Northern Star, the widely read Chartist newspaper; the Manchester Guardian, then as now the paper of the liberal bourgeoisie; records of the trials of the strike leaders; government documents; and ministers’ letters.

The Significance of the Strike

In his introduction to the book, John Foster (then and now one of Britain’s leading Marxist historians) explains the significance of the strike for the way the British trade union movement developed. In Britain in 1842, wage workers formed the majority, unlike the rest of Europe which was still largely agricultural and feudal. Governments both Whig and Tory, the bourgeoisie, the landowners, all feared that universal male suffrage would lead to the transfer of state power to workers’ representatives – a political revolution. As John Foster wrote, the strike’s “unification of wage demands with the demand for universal suffrage raised working class struggle to the level of class struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society.”

While the army and the newly-created police force were. used against the strikers, it was not they but hunger, and concessions on wages by employers, that eventually forced the strikers back to work.

After the strike, the state hled what John Foster describes as a “monster show trial” of the strike and Chartist leaders for 1843. The intention was to give them the harshest punishments for defying the state. But between the strike and the trial, government policy shifted from repression to conciliation. At the trial, none of the 31 defendants found guilty were sentenced. The government acknowledged the hardships suffered by industrial workers, and some concessions were made to alleviate the worst poverty and hunger, and to tolerate and incorporate trade unionism – but for skilled workers only. In return for which, the leaders of the Chartists, and the leaders who emerged in the trade unions after 1842, accepted the separation of economic and political demands, the authority of the bourgeois state, and accepted that agitation for better pay and conditions should be done within the capitalist system. In one word, reformism.

Jeff Slee is a retired rail worker and former RMT National Executive Committee member.