The British forces charge crowds during bread riots in Manchester, England, in 1819. The event became known as the Peterloo massacre, when the troops were ordered to disperse the crowd.
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Manchester, England – In the center of this industrial city in northern England, a memorial commemorates demonstrators killed here during a demonstration for workers’ rights in 1819, in what became the massacre of Peterloo. The British cavalry accused workers who had gathered to demand a political representation, killing at least 18 people and injuring hundreds.
On the monument to the killed, arrows point to the outside in Pennsylvania, where unarmed strikers were killed at the Lattimer mine in 1897, and to South Africa, where peaceful demonstrators were killed during an anti-apartheid rally in Sharkeville in 1960.
What connects these places is a shared story of the difficulties of workers and uprisings of people in the world. The monument is not the only thing that puts Manchester at the center of this long tradition.
Nowadays, politicians from the whole political spectrum, from the United States to the United Kingdom and many countries of the world, rushing to appeal to workers, but discussions on the political power of the working class first acquired importance in 19th century. It is there that, during the industrial revolution, a new urban working class was formed and met to demand rights and representation. It was nowhere to be obvious to Manchester.
People and cars from horses are visible in Manchester around 1880.
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The first industrial city in the world
Manchester was the first modern industrial city in the world, and its urban working class – and the appalling conditions in which they lived – inspired the theories of German philosophers Friedrich Engels, who lives in the city for two decades, and his friend and collaborator Karl Marx.
Engels wrote on the emergence of this group of workers in its 1845 book, The state of the working class in England. In this document, he describes “Manchester’s dwellings of working men” as being so terrible that “only a physically degenerated race, deprived of all humanity … could feel comfortable and at home”.
“Manchester becomes a symbol for the workers’ classes” in the 1800s, explains Charlotte Wildman, historian of the University of Manchester.
The political importance of the city continues to repercussions in the world today.
Manchester’s rapid industrialization and the start of workers’ movements
At the beginning of the 19th century, Manchester became the center of world cotton trade. The demand for cotton products as part of the trafficking of transatlantic slaves played a key role in the rapid industrialization of the city. Agricultural workers from all over Great Britain have moved there to work.
Cotton Mills on Union Street in Manchester in 1850.
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“There was really nowhere to live,” says Wildman. “There were high levels of poverty, illness and disease.”
At the same time, the industrial revolution made certain people rich. The huge gap of wealth has fueled resentment and requests for better conditions.
“This very visible feeling of the rich and the poor gives this new urban working class a clear identity and a feeling of oppression,” explains Wildman.
The workers were not allowed to vote. People in power were reluctant to give men who work the vote because they did not trust them, she said.
“They were trying to keep the men whom they considered undesirable, in particular the kind of men whom they considered to be criminals or without fic,” she said. Women of all class were not even considered deserving of the franchise.
But the movements of the working class began to come together throughout the 19th century, gradually winning certain rights for these new urban workers – although the universal suffrage for men in the United Kingdom only occurred at the First World War, in February 1918. The 1918 representation of the House of People gave certain women the right to vote for the first time – but only the more than 30 people who were sold to an owner. Women did not obtain universal suffrage before 1928.
Marx and Engels in Manchester
The German philosopher Friedrich Engels around 1860.
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The 19th century thinkers flocked for Manchester to colline the working class, including Engels and Marx.
Engels moved to Manchester in 1842, at 22, to manage his father’s cotton plant on the outskirts of the city. “Engels lived in Manchester for 22 years and Marx visited him there for months at once,” said Manchester writer John Schofield.
The father of Engels had sent him to work in the family factory there “to get rid of his extreme political opinions,” said local historian Ed Gurgrt, who makes walking of the former German philosophers in the city. “His father said that an appropriate job in Manchester’s family business would bring him all politics and become a good citizen.”
In fact, the city had the opposite effect on it.
“Friedrich Engels entered a very feverish situation in Manchester in 1842,” said Schofield.
There had just been a riot of miquettes in the city and the troubles and protests continued throughout the 1840s. Engels even thought that they could lead to the revolution in the city.
Engels and Marx would work together at an office in the Chetham library in the city, writing on workers and the class struggle.
The German philosopher Karl Marx around 1866.
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The small wooden desk in the library reading room is “one of the most important offices in world history,” says Schofield. Drafts of Communist manifesto And Das kapital (Capital)) were written at this office, he said, with Marx seated at one end and Engels to the other.
The historian Wildman says that the sufferings that the philosophers have seen directly at their door have helped to shape their ideas.
“Marx and Engels literally looked out through the Chetham library window where they wrote and saw this enormous poverty and the suffering,” she said.
Although Gels continued to think that a revolution could occur in Manchester, in the end, this has never done so. But what was happening in the city was linked and inspired other movements that occurred in the middle of the 19th century in Europe.
“There were waves of rebellions throughout Europe in the middle of the 19th century,” said Wildman. “People were taking similar processes and the desire to have better stallions.”
Politicians also started to be careful.
“What Engels and Marx have done is to transform the working class into a political product,” said local historian Glant. “For the first time, there was a class analysis of the society that people had not really thought in the past.”
The global struggle for workers’ rights from Manchester in Pennsylvania
In the Museum of the History of the People of Manchester, dedicated to the history of the working class, the oldest union banner in the world is hung alongside posters connecting the difficulties of international workers from the 19th century to the present day.
What started in Manchester with a massacre of peasants from 1819 gave birth to the first movements of world workers, unions and an idea of ​​equality that fueled social justice and work movements in the world.
The museum has traced a history of international solidarity with workers who started in Manchester and who have repercussions with political discourse since.
