Cultural Materialism On Raymond Williams - Monoskop

Culture and Society ot "Culture and the State" 291
Earlier, however, this "working-class 'alternative'" had enjoyed a
real existence, one that overlapped both with Chartism and with
Owenism, and that found its characteristic means of expression in
the unstamped press. It would be unwarranted to characterize this
alternative either in terms of the working-class economism and constitutionalism
that succeeded it, or in terms of the eighteenth-century
radicalism from which it emerged. In particular, there was and
could have been no apolitical trade unionism at this time; the repression
of the 1790s alone, by penalizing conspiracies among workmen
and movements for parliamentary reform simultaneously and
by means of the same statutes, had effectively coupled together economic
and political radicalism: "The aristocracy were interested in
repressing Jacobin 'conspiracies' of the people, the manufacturers
were interested in defeating 'conspiracies' to increase wages: the
Combination Acts served both purposes." 38 The "working-class 'alternative'"
in any case denoted a shift within this coupling—a shift, in
Claeys's words, "from moral economy to socialism," which helps
give the Chartist decades their specificity.
Radicalism at the end of the eighteenth century, prior to the systematic
repression of British Jacobinism, primarily entailed a drive to
reform a visibly corrupt Parliament and extend the franchise. It envisaged
no specific economic program. 39 The point of no return to
this political universe was reached when early "socialism discarded
the notion that there should be any connection between the right of
the franchise and the ownership of property"; rejecting such a connection
became practically obligatory among those who were so
painstakingly denied the franchise in 1832. Ownership of property
was now "perceived as itself a fateful source of social and political
corruption, blinding the possessors to the suffering of the dispossessed,
and with the increasing inequality of wealth gradually
threatening the entire society with cataclysm." 40
The year 1832 signified a new and glaring contrast, between "the
political" (the narrow caste in power, which had proved itself capable
of controlling access to its ranks) and "the social" (the rising demands
of the unenfranchised majority, and the notion of popular
participation in general). "The political" came to coincide with individualism
and competition, "the social" to connote the problem of
poverty, working-class movements of all kinds, and the condition of