"While the Tories, the Whigs, the Peelites — in fact, all the parties we have hitherto commented upon — belong more or less to the past, the Free Traders (the men of the Manchester School, the Parliamentary and Financial Reformers) are the official representatives of modern English society, the representatives of that England which rules the market of the world. They represent the party of the self-conscious Bourgeoisie, of industrial capital striving to make available its social power as a political power as well, and to eradicate the last arrogant remnants of feudal society. This party is led on by the most active and most energetic portion of the English Bourgeoisie — the manufacturers. What they demand is the complete and undisguised ascendancy of the Bourgeoisie, the open, official subjection of society at large under the laws of modern, Bourgeois production, and under the rule of those men who are the directors of that production. By Free Trade they mean the unfettered movement of capital, freed from all political, national and religious shackles. The soil is to be a marketable commodity’ and the exploitation of the soil is to be carried on according to the common commercial laws. There are to be manufacturers of food as well as manufacturers of twist and cottons, but no longer any lords of the land. There are, in short, not to be tolerated any political or social restrictions, regulations or monopolies, unless they proceed from “the eternal laws of political economy,” that is, from the conditions under which Capital produces and distributes. The struggle of this party against the old English institutions, products of a superannuated, an evanescent stage of social development, is resumed in the watchword:
Produce as cheap as you can, and do away with all the faux frais of production
And this watchword is addressed not only to the private individual
, but to the nation at large principally.
Royalty, with its “barbarous splendors,” its court, its civil list and its flunkeys — what else does it belong to but to the faux frais of production?
The nation can produce and exchange without royalty; away with the crown
. The sinecures of the nobility, the House of Lords?
faux frais of production.
The large standing army?
faux frais of production.
The Colonies?
faux frais of production.
The State Church, with its riches, the spoils of plunder or of mendicity?
faux frais of production.
Let parsons compete freely with each other, and everyone pay them according to his own wants.
The whole circumstantial routine of English Law,
with its Court of Chancery?
faux frais of production.
National wars?
faux frais of production.
England can exploit foreign nations more cheaply while at peace with them.
You see, to these champions of the British Bourgeoisie, to the men of the Manchester School, every institution of Old England appears in the light of a piece of machinery as costly as it is useless, and which fulfils no other purpose than to prevent the nation from producing the greatest possible quantity at the least possible expense, and to exchange its products in freedom.
Necessarily, their last word is the Bourgeois Republic, in which free competition rules supreme in all spheres of life;
in which there remains altogether that minimum only of government which is indispensable for the administration, internally and externally, of the common class interest and business of the Bourgeoisie;
and where this minimum of government is as soberly, as economically organized as possible.
Such a party, in other countries, would be called democratic.
But it is necessarily revolutionary, and the complete annihilation of Old England as an aristocratic country is the end which it follows up with more or less consciousness.
Its nearest object, however, is the attainment of a Parliamentary reform
which should transfer to its hands the legislative power necessary for such a revolution.
But the British Bourgeois are not excitable Frenchmen.
When they intend to carry a Parliamentary reform they will not make a Revolution of February.
On the contrary. Having obtained, in 1846, a grand victory over the landed aristocracy by the repeal of the Corn Laws, they were satisfied with following up the material advantages of this victory, while they neglected to draw the necessary political and economical conclusions from it, and thus enabled the Whigs to reinstate themselves into their hereditary monopoly of government.
During all the time, from 1846 to 1852, they exposed themselves to ridicule by their battle-cry: Broad principles and practical (read small) measures.
And why all this?
Because in every violent movement they are obliged to appeal to the working class.
And if the aristocracy is their vanishing opponent the working class is their arising enemy.
They prefer to compromise with the vanishing opponent rather than to strengthen the arising enemy, to whom the future belongs, by concessions of a more than apparent importance.
Therefore, they strive to avoid every forcible collision’ with the aristocracy; but historical necessity and the Tories press them onwards.
They cannot avoid fulfilling their mission, battering to pieces Old England, the England of the Past; and the very moment when they will have conquered exclusive political dominion, when political dominion and economical supremacy will be united in the same hands, when, therefore, the struggle against capital will no longer be distinct from the struggle against the existing Government — from that very moment will date the social revolution of England."
