by Frank McLynn
It is now that the beauty of the Skocpol model of revolution can be appreciated. In the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions, as we have seen, three overarching factors obtained. A powerful peasantry was the key social class; there was acute intra-elite conflict; and the nation-state was defensive, vulnerable, paranoid and under acute strain because of the competition of more powerful nations. None of this was the case in Britain after 1640. The road to parliamentary democracy was thus clearly open, since the survival of the peasantry into the modern era is a virtual guarantee of social turmoil and eventual dictatorship. The more heterogeneous the society (with the survival of peasants, rural elites and feudal residues from earlier eras) and the more resistance there is to capitalism and modernisation, the more likely is revolution. The timing of industrialisation and the social structure at the time of the transition from primitive society seem to be the key factors that determine the emergence of communism and fascism.74 The survival of a peasant economy into a modern industrial society without a revolution is a virtual guarantee of fascism. The other salient factor in all this is urbanisation. Since the seventeenth century Britain has been a predominatly urban society. Although the literary conceit of ‘city bad, countryside good’ and the disdain for the ‘city slicker’ is a notion that goes back to the Romans – and from its association with Cato the Elder is sometimes called Catonism – the glorification of traditional or peasant society is bound to produce an ideology of conservatism.75 In its harmless manifestations, as in the American Midwest, it produces extremes of support for the Republican Party, but in less advanced societies it is apt to produce the great despots: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. To sum up, then, Britain got rid of its worst social tensions before the tsunami of the Industrial Revolution hit her. Yet instead of the expected process whereby the bourgeoisie displaced the landed aristocracy as the hegemonic class, what happened was a symbiosis of the two lasting roughly 200 years from 1640 to 1832. This was bad news for the proletariat since, from its point of view, the civil war of the 1640s happened too soon, and the working-class movement was premature because, of necessity, it was formed in the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century before proper revolutionary consciousness had dawned.76 Historians have proposed that two main consequences flowed from this. The alliance of aristocracy and bourgeoisie meant, by definition, that there was no middle-class revolution. When the working class began to organise itself seriously in the early nineteenth century, there was thus no model of bourgeois revolutionaries that proletarians could follow. There was no preceding ideological clash which could have sharpened the working class’s own critique of society. The result was a climate of compromise in which the proletariat was forever on the defensive and reactive.77 Naturally, this theory has been criticised on the obvious ground that it assumes the proletariat needed a pre-existing code of bourgeois ideology and practice before it could itself function effectively, yet the experience of the German socialist parties in the nineteenth century, similarly placed but much more vigorous and incisive, proves that it was not necessarily so.78 The second deduction from the early onset of the Industrial Revolution is that it left the working class fragmented, unable to draw on either the support of an international proletariat or solidarity within the entire British proletariat itself. Industries were isolated, with little interconnection. Miners knew little of textile workers, coal heavers were ignorant of weavers. The consequent divisions by skill, locality and trade died very hard. Indeed, some sociologists have gone so far as to suggest that this workplace isolation and lack of more general solidarity is the true explanation for the phenomenon of working-class conservatism, so notable a feature of the British political scene, and usually attributed to deference.79
The second theory of the avoidance of revolution stresses the importance of the British Empire. The possession of empire automatically excluded Britain from that class of nations identified by Skocpol as under severe strain from conflicts with much more powerful international competitors. There are several aspects to this. It was a staple of J. A. Hobhouse’s critique of economic imperialism that it was motivated mainly by the export of surplus capital. The dispersal of economic surpluses throughout the ‘Empire on which the sun never sets’ generated the idea that other surpluses too were being exported, the main candidate for consideration being sexuality, since it was a commonplace that, especially in India, men could enjoy a climate of sexual licence unthinkable in Britain.80 The number, level, degree and ferocity of Britain’s colonial wars also soaked up a great mass of proletarian energy which at home might have been expended on revolutionary designs.81 Trotsky remarked that the British ruling classes were able to avoid war at home more easily the more successful they were in increasing their own power overseas through imperial exploitation. Instancing the British record in India, Egypt, South Africa and Ireland, he scoffed at the idea that this was a nation averse to violent change: ‘the greater success with which Britain applied force to other peoples, the greater was the degree of gradualness she was able to realise within her own borders.’82 Distraction from notions like the class struggle was another motif. Disraeli thought that the great benefit of empire was that it enabled Britain to transcend European limitations and all the baleful European ideologies such as socialism and communism: ‘The abstention of England from any unnecessary interference in the affairs of Europe is the consequence, not of her decline of power but of her increased strength. England is no longer a mere European power; she is the metropolis of a great metropolitan Empire … she is really more an Asiatic power than a European.’83 All the evidence suggests that the tactic of diversion was largely successful: the British working class was turned away from ideas of class struggle by a patriotic nationalism deriving from pride in empire.84 Lenin hypothesised that the Empire was the great barrier to revolution in England, since the super-profits generated in the colonies enabled the elite in effect to bribe the upper strata of the working class to break class ranks; this was his famous ‘aristocracy of labour’ argument.85 At the same time he was aware of the immense complications caused for the proletariat by the existence of empire, if only because the workers themselves (or at any rate some of them) were now benefiting from ‘surplus labour’:
Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, can bring about the social revolution. However, as a result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletarian party member finds himself in a position where it is not his labour, but the labour of the practically enslaved natives in the colonies, that maintains the whole of society … In certain countries this provides the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism. Of course this may be only a temporary phenomenon, but the evil must nonetheless be clearly realised and its causes understood.86
The final two explanations for avoidance of revolution relate to the period after 1760. Some have sought the answer in religion, specifically Methodism. The followers of John Wesley, it is alleged, played a vital role in taming the British proletariat: by repressing discontent or diverting it into politically harmless conduits; by allowing ordinary folk to subscribe to equality and reform without becoming revolutionaries; but mainly by giving working-class people a new sense of identity and hence self-confidence. Methodism, in short, produced a conformist and reformist working-class elite and thus headed off revolution. Given that the bourgeoisie was until 1832 in alliance with the aristocracy, Methodism provided the only sliver of middle-class leadership, without which the working class was sunk in endless night. This is the famous ‘Halévy thesis’ often thought discredited but as often revived and given a new coat of paint.87 The strange thing about the French historian Elie Halévy was that he seemed to have worked entirely independently of the great German sociologist Max Weber, whose work linking Protestantism and capitalism was so influential; it has been speculated that this was because Halévy, as a French historian, worked entirely within a very different French intellectual tradition hailing from the ni
neteenth century and typified by Taine and Guizot.88 Supporters of the thesis argue that Methodism was able to suggest a way to accommodate the change from traditional to modern modalities without revolution or violence, and may even have transformed British culture so as to produce the atypical Victorian society, whose nature so fascinates historians and social critics.89 Unquestionably Wesleyanism itself prescribed strict respect for hierarchy and authority, as well as condemning political dissent and social unrest. It implicitly rejected class conflict and all dialectical notions by preaching an avoidance of either/or and instead recommending pragamatism and compromise. Further than this one cannot go, for the thesis is beset with problems and riddled with objections from a number of quarters. The most basic is that the Halévy thesis is a circular argument. Halévy claims that Methodism found a fertile seedbed in the English character, which he described as serious, reserved, melancholic and puritanical, as against the hedonistic, extroverted and irreligious French, but then claims that the Victorian mindset (serious, reserved, melancholic and puritanical) was produced by Methodism.90 More generally, critics allege that Halévy assumed that the primary meaning of religion was social, and discounted the variety of meanings Methodism might have had both for an individual proletarian or even a putative working-class elite; religion, on this view, has a personal meaning for people, whatever their social position. Most Methodists were moderate radicals but did not carry their views over into political activism; most of all they were socially deviant, not politically; moral regeneration not political revolution was their aim.91
More seriously, Halévy seems to have assumed that Methodism was monolithic, whereas in fact there were many strands and offshoots encompassing a range of doctrine. The Kilhamites, for example, expelled in 1796, did advocate violent revolution.92 Moreover, what has been termed ‘popular religion’ (i.e. anything other than Catholicism or Anglicanism – the Baptists, Methodists, Plymouth Brethren and other sects) had a variety of manifestations, most of them a long way from Wesley’s tenets. Some stress the importance of radical evangelical cottage religions, with female preachers as a core element.93 In sum, there were many creeds just as important as Methodism in the era when radicalism and religion advanced together. Not surprisingly, the Halévy thesis has particularly exercised Marxists. E. P. Thompson, the best-known exponent of the New Left, influential from the 1960s to the 1980s, particularly excoriated Methodism as a detestable doctrine, plugging the oldest Christian pro-Establishment idea of all: accept your miserable lot in this life in exchange for glory in the next. Even more despicably, it did not pre-empt radical action but followed parasitically in its wake. He described it as ‘a chiliasm of despair … psychic exploitation … the desolate inner landscape of utilitarianism’.94 As for the Halévy thesis itself, this was mere broad-brush a priori; not enough was known about the minutiae of Methodism to make the thesis plausible and ‘we should know more about, not the years of revivalism but the months, not the counties, but the towns and villages’.95 However, it is worth pointing out that, whereas mainstream historians tend to accept Halévy’s hypothesis in its entirety, even some Marxists give it grudging acceptance.96 Yet by and large the Marxist view is sceptical. It seems unlikely that Methodism, on its own, really could have done all its proponents claim for it and set such a block on the development of the working-class world. It was too patchy in membership, too vulnerable to lukewarm supporters who drifted away and too multi-faceted and eclectic in its political interpretations for that to be feasible. Most fundamentally, there were not enough committed Methodists – an estimated 90,000 in England in 1800 – to be able to wield the influence claimed.97 Probably the most that can be said is that Methodism heightened elements in English culture that were already there. If it had an influence, this was largely confined to its leaders, for there is no evidence of a groundswell of moderation among ordinary workers. It did increase social mobility – this has been termed the ‘Methodist escalator’,98 but that is a different matter. The alleged effects of Methodism can be independently attributed to other and larger factors, and Methodism could not have averted revolution if these other factors, favourable to stifling revolutionary influences, had not been present. The doctrines of John Wesley, then, can be seen as icing on a non-revolutionary cake.
The final explanation for the enigma of ‘the dog that barked in the night’ is the failure of Marxism to take hold in Britain – yet another example of ‘English exceptionalism’, since the doctrine made great strides in Europe until the mid-twentieth century. On paper Britain from 1848 to 1919 had all the objective conditions propitious for socialism: 15 per cent of the working class were members of a trade union in 1901, and the figure rose to 25.8 per cent by 1914.99 Yet British trade unions never evolved in sensibility beyond what Lenin contemptuously called ‘economism’ or ‘trade union consciousness’. Since 1848 was the date when Marxism first made a significant impact in Europe but 1919 was probably the last date at which revolution could realistically have been attempted in Britain, there was thus a very narrow ‘window’ in which the revolutionary moment could appear. These were precisely the high days of Victorian and Edwardian triumphalism when no overwhelming grievances united the working class against civil society.100 One convincing study finds a threefold explanation for the failure of Marxism to inspire a revolutionary proletariat: the fragmented nature of the workforce; the presence of a rich, varied but apolitical culture; and the integration of workers into the institutions of the State.101 Only the last really calls for comment. As trade unions and cooperative societies acquired funds and assets, they necessarily depended on the stability of the capitalist system and its institutions, since no one had devised a way of inventing a non-capitalist bank.102 In other respects the failure of Marxism to make a showing in Great Britain is to a remarkable extent explicable in terms of the arguments already considered. Tensions within the working class, with acute factionalism between (and sometimes within) industries, and numerous coteries jostling for supremacy in the trade union movement, increased rather than diminished. Religion played an important role, not only because some leaders of the infant Labour Party, such as Arthur Henderson, really were Methodists but because Catholics joined the new party in large numbers; the negative attitude of the Catholic Church has already been noted, especially in reference to the General Strike. The fact that women were always in the majority of churchgoers was also not unconnected with their non-radical attitudes.103 The already-mentioned importance of sport in British life was particularly important in the years 1848–1919, with working-class culture having regressed since the days of the Chartists into an inward-looking ethos obsessed with sport, gambling and the music hall.104 There was one give-away remark from a socialist thinker when he declared that socialism implied democracy just as cricket implied batting.105 So: the working class was highly dispersed by occupation, with a low level of communitarian solidarity, seam-burstingly pluralistic in its pursuit of a number of different competing activities and implicitly accepting of the ‘play the game’ ideology which saw the State not as the instrument of the class enemy but as a benign ringmaster. One commentator says that the mentality and temperament of the typical worker at the weekend was not far from that on the Conservative back benches.106 Meanwhile the elite had become ever more sophisticated in its methods of social control, clever enough to emphasise fairness rather than coercion, playing up the way the empire distinguished Britain from the rest of Europe and binding the working class to imperial pride with themes of silken sentimentality. How much more astute the elite was in its ability to play the social balancing game was indicated by Bertrand Russell the philosopher when he wrote to Elie Halévy: ‘I wish the [House of] Lords would reject the Trade Disputes Bill: that might give a real chance of getting them abolished, as it would rouse fury. But I fear they have too much sense.’107 Finally, and not insignificantly, Marx himself (and Engels later) believed socialism could be reached by parliamentary means in Britain, so even committed Marxists di
d not feel the revolutionary pressure of their continental counterparts.108
