Bohemian Tangents

When the American Congress set out their political principles in the Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776, their ideas were taken straight from the English Levellers a century and a quarter before. John Lilburne, considered by most as the premier Leveller,  invoked pure natural rights when he stated that men were

by nature all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty.

This natural law dictated that no man had

any authority, dominion or magisterial power, one over or above another, neither have they, or can they exercise any, but merely by institution, or donation, that is to say, by mutual agreement or consent, given, derived, or assumed, by mutual consent and agreement.

Leveller Richard Overton:

By natural birth, all men are equal and alike born to the like propriety and freedom.

and:

To every individual in nature, is given an individual propriety by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any … for every one as he is himself hath a self-propriety, else could not be himself, and on this no second may presume without consent.

Declaration of Independence author, Thomas Jefferson once quoted Leveller Richard Rumbold: ‘The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately.’

The Levellers were an informal alliance of pamphleteers, merchants, apprentices, and army agitators who emerged during the upsurge of political and religious freethinking unleashed by the conflict between Parliament and England’s King Charles I in the 1640s. The most prominent Levellers were John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, John Wildman, Edward Sexby and Colonel Thomas Rainborough.

Lilburne considered the term, ‘Leveller’, pejorative and initially called his supporters “Levellers so-called” and preferred “Agitators”.  The term suggested that the “Levellers” aimed to bring all down to the lowest common level. The leaders vehemently denied the charge of “levelling”, but adopted the name because it was how they were known to the majority of people. After their arrest and imprisonment in 1649, four of the “Leveller” leaders – Walwyn, Overton, Lilburne and Thomas Prince – signed a manifesto in which they called themselves Levellers.

To understand the rise of the radical movement of the Levellers, the reign of England’s absolutist monarch, King Charles I, must be examined. Charles was both despotic and inept as a ruler and this combination resulted in The English Civil War, sometimes called The English Revolution, as he was found guilty of treason and executed by decapitation in January 1649, guilty of abusing power by virtue of claiming authority directly from God rather than the laws of the land. Charles believed in the divine right of kings and thought he could govern according to his own conscience. Many of his subjects opposed his policies, in particular the levying of taxes without parliamentary consent, and perceived his actions as those of a tyrant.

The Levellers’ origin as a mass activist-orientated political movement is inextricably linked to John Lilburne not only philosophically but practically. The movement can be seen as coming into being, at least in part, as a reaction to his conflict with the Long Parliament. On leaving the army John Lilburne had continued his involvement in politics, campaigning on the issue of religious toleration. Publishing and distributing several pamphlets critical of Parliament and Parliamentarians on this issue, he was arraigned before the House of Commons on July 19th 1645. Refusing to comply with Parliament’s wishes he was jailed for three months.

In July 1646, the House of Lords put him on trial for publishing literature critical of the Earl of Manchester. Refusing to recognise the Lords’ right to try him, Lilburne defended himself candidly: he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, barred from holding civil or military office and fined two thousand pounds. This harsh sentence inspired an unprecedented level of political action in defence of Lilburne, including mass marches, a petition signed by over two thousand citizens of London and a massive lobby of Parliament, putting into place a political organisation which would emerge as the Leveller party.

The whole basis of the nature of government, sovereignty and its derivation from, and relationship with, the people, had also come sharply into focus because of the civil war and its implications. This focus was in many ways a natural extention of the debate on the organisation and constitution of the Church and religious freedom which dominated the lead-up to the English Civil War.

In Walwyn’s Englands Lamentable Slaverie, published in October 1645, the Levellers’ stance on Parliamentary authority and its relationship with the people was defined for the first time:

… parliamentary authority is a power intrusted by the people (that chose them) for their good saftie and freedom; and therefore a Parliament cannot justlie do anything to make the people less safe or lesse free then they found them.

In the week or so before Lilburne was tried by the House of Lords, Richard Overton and William Walwyn, and possibly the republican parliamentarian Henry Marten, had written and published in early July 1646 A Remonstrance of many thousand citizens, a tract which can be seen as the entry into British politics of the Leveller party. A Remonstrance restated the sovereignty of the people, called for the dissolution of the House of Commons, the abolition of the upper house, equality before the law, called for religious freedom and the end of the Merchant Adventurers Company’s foreign trade monopoly.

Thus, the Levellers in the mid-1640s as a political movement came into being which eventually would become in effect the third party after the Presbyterian and Independents. Other leading figures, apart from John Lilburne and William Walwyn, were Richard Overton, John Wildman, Thomas Prince, Samuel Chidley and William Larner. Both Overton and Larner were veteran pamphleteers and printers, having already come into conflict with the authorities over religious toleration and censorship; Thomas Prince was a merchant who had served in the civil war and was co-treasurer, with Chidley, of the Leveller party; John Wildman, a university graduate and with a legal education, liased closely with the military Levellers, writing or helping to write several of their key documents, including The Case of the Armie Truly Stated.

By the end of the first civil war in 1646 their ideas had come to dominate the thinking of soldiers and officers in the all-powerful New Model Army, and the Levellers briefly held the balance of political power. Their manifesto, Agreement of the People, which is first proposal in history for a written constitution based on natural rights.

They held (in the words of Richard Overton) that ‘by natural birth all men are equally and alike borne to like propriety, liberty and freedom’, and that government should be a contract between equal citizens. They called for a secular republic, with separation of legislative and executive powers and abolition of the House of Lords; equality before the law; the right to vote for all except beggars and servants; free trade; abolition of censorship, freedom of speech and complete religious toleration.

In March 1647 the Army’s rank-and-file began to elect agitators to voice their demands for radical political reform. Cromwell, Ireton and Fairfax, the army’s high command, were deeply alarmed, but needed the Army’s co-operation to maintain control over Parliament and the country. The result was one of the most remarkable contests of the civil war, as ordinary soldiers sat down with generals in a church in Putney to deliberate the rights and wrongs of revolution. At this meeting Leveller Colonel Thomas Rainborough argued the case for universal suffrage as the only way of ensuring the consent of the governed:

I think the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.

Over the next year the outbreak of the second phase of the Civil War and the despatch of part of the Army to fight in Ireland helped the generals to re-established their authority, and by 1649 Leveller influence in the New Model was waning. An attempted mutiny by radical regiments in Berkshire was crushed at Burford church, and three Leveller soldiers – Corporals Church and Perkins and Cornet Thompson – shot by Cromwell’s men.

Lilburne, Walwyn, Prince, and Overton were imprisoned in the Tower of London by the Council of State. It was while the leaders of the Levellers were being held in the Tower that they wrote an outline of the reforms the Levellers wanted, in a pamphlet entitled “An Agreement Of The Free People Of England” (written on May 1, 1649). It includes reforms that have since been made law in England, such as the right to silence and others that have not been, such as an elected judiciary. John Lilburne was tried for high treason, convinced the jury of his innocence and was acquitted – only to be re-tried by Parliament a year later, convicted and sent into lifelong exile in the Netherlands.

But Leveller ideas lived on in the profoundly influential ‘natural right’ theories of John Locke, in Rousseau’s social contract, and in the hearts of libertarians and socialists alike, all those pursuing their own brand of liberty.

Sources:

http://www.immaculateheartacademy.org/outside2/socialstudies/kuhns/The%20Levellers.htm

The Myth of Universal Human Rights by David N. Stamos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers

http://clichesofpolitics.com/Levellers.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England

http://links.org.au/node/1290

 

 

 

 

The definition of socialism in Webster’s Third International Dictionary is: any of various theories or social and political movements advocating or aiming at collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and control of the distribution of goods.

In today’s vernacular, “socialism” is an epithet used both by conservatives and American pro-capitalist libertarians as part of spin to paint government as a “nanny state” for lazy and/or poor people “who want the government to give them stuff or take care of them”. The fact that crony capitalists control government and use lobbyists to write pro-crony-capitalist regulations rarely gets to reply to this spin. Over time words are used in different ways by different groups of people with certain political or ideological motives to recruit people to join their movements. This basic fact worsens any potential “objective” or non-partisan grasp of history. This is not saying that a total grasp or knowledge of real history is possible, but rather, the flagrant distortion of history by way of a few ideologically motivated cherry-picked historical highlights amounts to “anti-history”, if I’m permitted to coin that as a term.

The fickle changing of words’ meanings means that whoever is defining a given word gets to define history from their point of view. It is easy to use an essentially empty historical canvass to paint one’s historically revised cartoon version which one uses to market one’s partisan political worldview to one’s target audience.

Historian Albert S. Lindemann gives a broad historical view of socialism. Even though the word, socialism, is only about 180 years old and significant social movements only about 130, it is possible to trace an enduring quest for community and cooperation, and, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a growing belief in the possibility of constructing a rational and natural social order. Socialists have always exhibited a fundamental concern for cooperation and social justice, with particular emphasis on the needs and rights of the community over the egotistical urges of the individual. Its straightforward etymology bears out its first wide usage as the opposite to individualism, to stress humans’ social nature, their socialism, at a time when the individualistic strivings unleashed by the nascent capitalistic system seemed to be destroying much of what was humane and beautiful in European civilization.

Thus, socialists have tended to stress that human beings are properly gregarious rather than self-sufficient, that they should concern themselves with the welfare of the fellow human beings, especially those weaker or less fortunate. On a loftier level, socialists have stressed that men and women achieve their most highly developed humanity only in society in cooperative rather than competitive effort with others. This commitment to cooperation rather than competition, to fellowship, solidarity, and sympathy, rather than self-seeking, is the most fundamental and abiding characteristic of the socialistic tradition.

Such attitudes were obviously not completely new in the early 19th century. The socialist impulse has deep roots in history. Since antiquity social inequality and heedless individualism have found eloquent critics. Christ himself was a poor carpenter whose utterances were full of condemnation of the rich and the proud; he could be termed a “proletarian” revolutionary (from a Marxist viewpoint). The Christian tradition has unmistakable socialistic elements, and throughout the history of Christianity various sects have tried to live with “all things common”.

By contrast, modern socialism differs from the ancient socialistic tendencies. Modern socialists have usually been secular, basing their theories on human rationality, on specifically human feelings of solidarity, and on natural law, as distinguished from such mystical concepts as divine inspiration, brotherhood in Christ, or divine law. This is not to ignore that many socialists, even those who became militantly anti-Christian, emerged from a Christian background, retained certain Christian habits and sentiments, and even praised the corporatist habits of premodern Christian society. A number of socialists argued that socialism socialism was kind of a “true” religion, abandoned by the official churches, and indeed many socialists remained Christians. Yet on balance modern socialism has been an enemy of organized religion and of theological approaches to social problems.

A second important difference is socialism’s relationship to modernization or the so-called Dual Revolution, the industrial revolution and the wave of political revolutions that swept Europe in the latter part of the 18th century, transforming European life. These revolutions stimulated hopes for a fundamentally different world, based on rational human design rather than on tradition or inscrutable forces, and on material plenty rather than want. However, the initial impact of the Dual Revolution appeared remote from these hopes. The growing conservatism of the French Revolution as well as the shocking social conditions of early industrialization outraged those with a vision of a new, ideal order.

A variety of people were repelled by the effects of revolutionary change. Particularly numerous at first were those who considered political upheaval and industrialization to be unmitigated disasters, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The socialists by and large held a more positive view. Believing in the feasibility of using new industrial techniques and political institutions for a richer, more harmonious life, they rejected the notion of a return to a traditional, agrarian past—although most of them hoped somehow to retain the noncompetitive qualities of the past.

Liberalism (classical liberalism) was another ideology to emerge with modern times, and in a number of ways its concerns and character were similar to, or overlapped, those of socialism. It could easily be argued that socialism, while sharply opposing itself to liberalism, evolved out of liberal tenets and remained marked throughout its history by that origin. Yet it is important for our concerns to make as clear as possible the underlying concerns of liberals that distinguished them from socialists. (Note that Lindemann is striving to be historically objective here).

As their name suggests, liberals were characteristically concerned with the concept of liberty or liberation (liber is Latin for “free”). They saw liberty as an all-embracing force for good in the world, a force that would ensure progress, happiness, and an almost unlimited perfection of the human personality. In more concrete terms, they looked to a free market (as opposed to one rigidly controlled or directed by the state); freedom of assembly, speech, and press; freely elected representative institutions—all in the context of a popularly established rule of law. The free competition of individuals was desirable to them. It represented the best way of unleashing human potential, and they accepted that such competition would lead to a degree of social and economic inequality. When they praised “equality” what they meant was equality of opportunity and equality before the law—lack of special legal privilege—not social inequality, particularly not if such equality had collectivist implications, or somehow limited individual freedom.

Liberals were committed to the institution of private property, to them a fundamental guarantee of freedom and a reward for superior individual achievement. One of the main functions that liberals saw for the state—whose power, they believed, should be carefully limited in most respects because of the dangers it posed to liberty—was the protection of property. Liberals tended to consider the failure to accumulate property as a personal inadequacy, and they viewed poverty in general as due to personal laziness or incompetence, rather than to lowly origin or overpowering impersonal forces.

Socialists too were fascinated by the notion of liberation, believing as they did in a freely developing human perfectibility, and most of them favored free institutions and freedom of speech and assembly. The key difference came in the socialists’ rejection rejection of individual competitiveness. To them it appeared destructive, and they similarly considered that private property preserved unfair and harmful social distinctions.

To understand the ways that socialism and liberalism overlapped it is further useful to distinguish the two main tendencies in the latter; that is, between what we can call the “whig” and the “democratic radical”. The whig-liberal tendency was to be hostile to popular rule, which the whig feared would degenerate into rule by the mob. The whig was attracted to elitist oligarchic rule and was devoted to the preservation of powerful institutions (law courts, representative bodies, professional organizations) as well as large property holdings, which he believed would protect liberty by standing in the way of a centralization or usurpation of power, either by a despot or the masses. Obviously the whig conception of liberty had much to do with the idea of privilege.

The democratic-radical tendency within liberalism (in France “jacobin” and in England simply “radical”), on the other hand, accepted popular rule with liberty—indeed as its most reliable guarantee—and was concerned to fashion political institutions that would reflect the direct will of the masses (and not of privileged elites, as the whigs would have it). But the democratic radical still retained a belief in competitive individualism, did not oppose moderate holdings of private property and rejected collectivism. He was sympathetic to the plight of the working poor and generally opposed great differences in social status or wealth, but his remedy for poverty remained hard work and individual enterprise. He was willing to see that state intervene to preserve what he deemed to be fair competition, but he was reticent to see that state take up the task of enforcing social solidarity and fellowship or socializing wealth. Still, it was at the democratic-radical pole of liberalism that it began in important ways to merge into socialism, and many socialists began as democratic radicals.

It is axiomatic for students of European history to know that ideologies do not exist as purely abstract statements; they are linked to or express interests. It is further plausible that class background tends to influence political persuasion, that the poor tend to be attracted to ideologies that in some way favor them, and the rich look to ideologies that defend their wealth and justify their position in society. But these correlations are anything but simple, and much recent scholarship—particularly that devoted to history from the bottom up—has been concerned to question easy assumptions about social class and political preference.

Nevertheless, history notes that socialism’s following came primarily from the lower ranks of society, where it was gradually perceived that strength lay in numbers, in solidarity, and that only through cooperative or collective action could economic and social oppression be remedied. Perhaps more important, most people who became wage-earning workers came from pre-industrial backgrounds, where individualism was not a virtue. Thus they were inclined to reject competitive individualism and its associated liberal ideology and to embrace ideologies that emphasized cooperation and economic control.

This is not to imply that all wage earners, or even a majority of them, became socialists at any time in any country, since they obviously did not, nor is it meant to ignore the role of wealthy and leisured individuals of the bourgeosie, or middle class, were attracted more to liberalism that to socialism. They were normally employers rather than employees, exploiters rather than exploited, and they tended to benefit most from political liberalization and a free-market economy.

Throughout the 19th century democratic radicalism, as defined above, attracted a larger number of workers than did socialism. That statement would seem to contradict what has just been said. But democratic radicalism can be considered traditionally, to be the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, lower middle class, or small property owner (to use terms that are loosely synonymous and that can include the small business person, shopkeeper, peasant proprietor, white-collar worker, and independent artisan). The attractions of this ideology for workers in the 19th century can then be attributed to the petty-bourgeois nature of much of the working class at that time. A majority of workers for most of the 19th century in Europe owned, or aspired to own, small amounts of property—their own shops, machinery, and tools. They were not yet proletarianized, were not yet completely without ownership of the means of production, and still believed it possible to prevent the domination of wage-labor and factory production.

Anarchism also often attracted the petty-bourgeois worker. This ideology is even more difficult that the others to categorize with any precision, since it has many branches and since anarchists have taken a certain pleasure in defying attempts to impose on them the tyranny of a definition. Our first resort, as before, must be to look at the etymology of the word: an-archos in Greek means “no leader,” or, more loosely, “without authority.” The heart of the anarchists’ concern has been to oppose authority, again out of a longing for liberation.

In practice, the authority of the state, although only one of the many varieties of authority repugnant to anarchists, has been the object of their most concentrated hatred. This has been the case because they have seen in the state the origin and bulwark of a panorama of social ills, mostly related to the existence of a society of exploitation and social inequality. The state protects large accumulations of private property and the unjustly acquired goods of the exploiting classes. Anarchists therefore maintain that only with the abolition of the state and its means of repression (police, army, bureaucracy, law courts) will an end come to exploitation and to gross inequality in the distribution of wealth and property.

Anarchists have been frequent opponents of socialists, particularly of those authoritarian collectivists who believe in the central and necessary role of the state in building socialism. But their quarrels have been more like family quarrels, whereas their hostility to the ruling orders, in particular to wealthy bourgeois liberals, has been more fundamental and intense. For this reason anarchism is considered by the author, Lindemann, a variety of socialism, generically defined. This is consistent with the preference of most anarchists, many of whom call themselves “libertarian socialists” or “communists”.

The term “communism” was coined somewhat earlier than “socialism”, but in the course of the 19th century it was used, first and foremost, to describe a thoroughgoing egalitarianism and collectivism (and thus was ostensibly embraced by the most desperately poor and exploited workers). Secondly—with much less consistency and consensus—it implied a taste for violence. Marx chose to call himself a communist in the late 1840’s in order to differentiate his hard-headed, “scientific”, theories from the pipe dreams of what he called “utopian socialism”. This term fell into relative disuse in the late 19th century, when it was used mostly by certain anarchists, but during the 1st World War Lenin revived it in order to distinguish his brand of elitist Marxism from what he considered the sell-out Marxism of the leaders of the main socialist parties of the time. Both Marx and Lenin also used the term “communist” on a more speculative level to describe the ultimate society, which would come after an initial imperfect “socialist” society.

Aside from nationalism, which did not concern itself directly with the social question, socialism, liberalism, and conservatism may be considered the main ideologies of the 19th century. They are best understood not in isolation but in relationship to one another. Indeed, one of the easiest and least equivocal ways of defining them is in their vision of the “enemy”. Liberals in the early 19th century first distinguished themselves by their attacks on conservatives, on the latter’s political and social pre-eminence, based on an “unfair” and irrational privilege. Later, liberals would begin to focus more on the challenge to individual freedom that they believed was posed by socialists. Similarly, as we have noted, socialism first appeared as an attack on liberal individualism, especially insofar as it was used to defend the emerging capitalist system. Above all, socialism was a critical response to early industrial capitalism, to an unregulated market economy in which the means of production were privately owned and propertyless workers were forced to sell their labor power to capitalists for often meager wages. Ironically, the actual practice of socialism on the state level was begun by Otto von Bismarck who invented the modern welfare (nanny) state in 1871 to gain the support of the working class to lure them away from the “socialists”.

More historical explorations are coming. Stay tuned.

Sources: A History of European Socialism by Albert S. Lindemann

Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck