Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking
history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise
of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging
was not simply a form of punishing transgressors.
Rather it evidently served the most sinister purpose—for a prvileged
ruling class—of forcing the poor population of London to accept the
criminalization of customary rights and the new forms of private
property. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with
the changing property laws, such that all the working-class men and
women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's Triple
Tree.
Reviewed by Trevor Bark, in Capital and Class, No. 92, Summer 2007.
Coming
as it does at a time of international and domestic conflict and
disputes over law – over competing definitions of ‘justice ‘ and ‘right’
– the reprinting by Verso of this exemplary work of historical
materialism in the British Marxist Historian tradition is most welcome.
Peter Linebaugh, a student and comrade of E.P. Thompson, has revisited
here the political and economic transformations that were necessary to
change feudalism into capitalism, which were not simply a question of
regime or law and enforcement substitution, since these alterations
happened on a piecemeal basis over centuries. The main story in the
‘history from below’ approach is the protest and resistance that the
proto working class was engaged in during its struggles for survival.The
book begins with an exploration of ‘the relationship between the
organised death of living labour (capital punishment) and the oppression
of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital)’. This is not
merely a sartorial literary flourish: it describes state terror at
crucial times of economic change. A hanging at Tyburn in 18th century
London was never only punishment, just as lethal injection in the 21st
century USA is an active part of the war between classes.
The
life histories of the 1,142 men and women who were hanged on the gallows
at Tyburn form the basis of this book. A handful were selected to be
hung every 6 weeks – a legal massacre - because they had been found
guilty of breaking the ‘death statutes’ written by the ruling and
propertied classes. Their lives and class experience are portrayed here
through the exploration of the wage form, working practices, and the new
international division of labour.
It portrays the interrelations
between different peoples; Afro-Americans, Irish, Jewish and other -
whose class consciousness was informed by slavery and imperialism (e.g.
by the plantations in the West Indies) and who were active in resistance
in London and beyond. London’s black population alone was approximately
6/7% of the general population in 1780. Britain’s empire was formed by
its predominant maritime operations, and the empire and capitalism grew
through super-exploitation, as sailors came from all over the world and
helped to form London into the world’s leading cosmopolitan city. This
in turn formed its nemesis, the proletariat.
Highwaymen formed a
part of this class composition; and these former artisans driven into
highway robbery by hard times provide an example of a major theoretical
innovation famously provided by Thompson et al (1975), and that is the
‘social crime’ thesis. Here we see these former butchers using knowledge
from their trade - the provisioning routes into London, often across
commons - which would be the location where they relieved merchants and
gentlemen farmers of their money.
A further crucial point is that
the social protest aspect of this kind of action is sometimes blurred,
with the activity being regarded as straight-forward crime, since others
apart from the rich maybe involved, such as passengers and coach
drivers. However, Thompson et al (1975) responded to this when they
argued that there is not ‘nice social crime here and nasty crime over
there’. A focus on legality merely leads to a cul-de-sac. Instead it is
the social relations in action that are important as they develop, and
therefore social crime is always ‘becoming’. Instead, it is possible to
speculate that contemporary carjacking is analogous to highway robbery.
The
sources Linebaugh uses bring his subjects alive, and this is
instructive for the present period. Gangsta rap uses images of the
state’s power to punish with prison and execution, just as the 18th
century picaresque proletariat celebrated drink, glorious robberies and
robbers, and cursed the police.
Albion’s Fatal Tree (E.P.
Thompson et al, 1975, now out of print, regrettably) recorded how those
criminalised could not be separated from the other ordinary men and
women who formed the working masses as a whole, so that they were not
marginal to the class experience of dramatic economic change. The
imposition of the wage form was enabled through the enclosure of land
and the ending of customary appropriation by the masses, which ended
people’s ability to rely on the land for subsistence. The
criminalisation of custom on the land was accomplished by a redefinition
of crime in the workplace, as the new capitalism sought to end a feudal
tradition of artisans’ and others’ rights to a proportion of their
labour. Old social relations were displaced and new ones introduced; and
descriptions included in ‘The London Hanged’ are of watchmaking,
shoemaking, hatting, tailoring and service.
Quakers were once
thought odd for insisting on a fixed price at market and the
‘non-negotiable price’ gradually became normalised. Shops too, gradually
replaced markets, although throughout the 19th century informal
marketing was still the norm in at least London as Costermongers (fruit
and vegetable sellers) traded through its streets. London’s extensive
dockyards and their labourers are examined in detail in the book; the
class struggle over the wage form here lasted for decades, and was not
decisively won until 1801, when the final right to customary
appropriation of chips – ‘spare’ wood used as furniture, energy,
housing, and for sale - was finally replaced by a wage allowance. Wages
previously might be paid six-monthly, if they were paid at all.
The
criminalised population was not different - in fact it was the general
population, and the criminalisation represented expropriation and
exploitation by the ruling class. The technical recomposition of the
work process through fortification, Benthams’ ‘panopticon’, new laws,
new policing practices; and, ultimately, by the criminal sanction all
disciplined the proto working class to the factory.
The means by
which it protested included the Gordon riots - ‘for the first time an
international proletariat directly attacked the imperial ruling class at
its major institutions’ (P. 330) - and other disturbances. Many other
methods were used too, and Linebaugh cogently argues that theft is
essential to understanding class conflict and Empire, in the sense of
Negri’s use of the word, as a strategy that recouped unpaid wages,
compensated for minimal pay, protested against mistreatment and
re-established some dignity.
The British Marxist Historians work
as a whole, of which ‘The London Hanged’ is a part, enables readers to
develop an historical understanding of the way the informal economy was
built. History has not only happened; it is also a recurring tragedy and
a possible future. Vast areas of the globe have never experienced full
employment; instead, semi-proletarianisation is the historical norm
alongside other informal economic practices, and an observation of the
planet’s slums currently only confirm this.
For activists this
book is instructive because it remembers the social conditions that led
to class consciousness supporting welfare organisation, a central
feature of 19th century class formation, which maybe applicable in
contemporary times. The growing trend for capital punishment around the
world started during the capitalist crisis of the mid-1970s; and capital
means, at the very least, discipline and punishment for the lost souls
and others yet to depart.
Bibliography
Thompson, E. P. et al, Albion’s Fatal Tree, Allen Lane, 1975.
Negri, A. and Hardt, M., Empire, 2000.
