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Transition in Social Foundations for Collective Action

Communities in the Southeast Lancashire Textile Region in the 1820s and 1830s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Craig Calhoun
Craig Calhoun*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Extract

During the 1820s and early 1830s, two largely different populations of working people lived alongside each other in the region surrounding Manchester. Today, they represent, in an important and clear contrast, the social foundations which have supported distinctive directions of popular protest and collective action. The theory of working-class radicalism, as developed by Marx and others, has tended to confound the two. The necessary radicalism and fundamental opposition to the growth of capitalist industry of more traditional communities of craft workers was wedded to the concentrated numbers of new industrial workers and the clarity of their exploitation by capitalists. This marriage took place in theory, but not in concrete social movements. The working class emerged as a foundation for basically reformist collective actions, while the radical and reactionary populist craftsmen lost the war of the industrial revolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , Fall 1980 , pp. 419 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1980

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