Chartism

Now let me, let me give you something from London, from history, that shows you, okay, a receipt that is in the room in London with 13 clerks in it.

It's April 1848, a movement called the Chartists.

They want six things, mainly the vote for every man and a secret va- ballot, okay? Can't believe they didn't have that in England, but they didn't.

So they gather signatures in a petition, and they haul it to Parliament in cabs, and their man stands up and announced 5,700,000 names, and Parliament didn't argue it.

A lot of them had been active in...

the Chartist movement in the UK.

And so one of the reasons why you get very early pickup of male suffrage in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia and what became Tasmania was partly a response to the Eureka Stockade and partly because there were so many well-educated Chartists who were pushing for suffrage.

And so not the upper houses, but the lower houses, you had almost universal male suffrage quite early on.

Yeah, yeah.

And, um, this was kind of the beginning of, uh, the Mosley family's involvement with, uh, affairs, uh, revolving around, uh, the security of the British Isles, and this endured for centuries.

And in 18-- One of the reasons why the left hated Oswald Mosley so much, during 18-- during the Chartist riots in 1848, um, his great-grandfather and his great-grandfather's brother, they'd organized, uh, these strike-breaking attacks, like on the Chartists and on like the 1848 revolutionaries.

You know, like the Mosley family, they, th- like literally, like way went back centuries of them, like crushing like left-wing radicals.

You know, this became like their role, you know.

And frankly, a man like that, like such as the caricature is painted, like wouldn't have been attracted to fascism in the first place, I, I don't think.

Like it wouldn't, it, it wouldn't track with anything.

Um, but, uh, the, uh, like I mentioned, uh, a minute ago, the, um, the, uh, the Chartists and the Peterloo Massacre, the Chartist Riots and the Peterloo Massacre, these were and are kind of held out as like the great sins of like the Mosley family.

Um, the Peterloo Massacre on, uh, August 16th, 1819, um, there was, uh, this mass demonstration, uh, demanding parliamentary representation.

Such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.

The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France respectively oppose the Chartists and the Reformists.

Section four.

Position of the Communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties.

Section two has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England and the agrarian reformers in America.

The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class, but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.

In France, the Communists ally themselves with the social democrats against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the Great Revolution.

Yeah.

There was a hilarious thing, I found it to be hilarious anyway, in the thing that Ingalls wrote in that Chartist newspaper about this uprising, and the, the quote wasn't really strictly related, so I did not put it in the episode.

But it was just a little aside, aside comment in his description of these riots.

And he wrote, quote, "From all of this, however, it appears that the poet king, Ludwig, King of Bavaria, is the author of three volumes of unreadable poems of a traveler's guide to one of his public buildings, et cetera, et cetera, has been in a very awkward position during these outbreaks." And I just loved the kind of, let's take an opportunity to say that Ludwig is not a very good poet.