Exactly 360 years ago today, on 30th January 1649(*), Charles Stuart, Kind of England, was publicly beheaded in Whitehall for high treason to his country. This marked an epoch in the history of Britain, and for that matter of Europe – although kings had of course been murdered, imprisoned and deposed before, never had a sovereign been openly tried by a court appointed by representatives of (some of) his subjects, and sentenced to death according to the law of the land.
Charles and his supporters were utterly bewildered. At the beginning of the trial and even on the scaffold the King denied that the court had any authority to try him – he simply did not understand where such authority could come from. “A sovereign and a subject”, he said, ” are plain different things”. His insistence on hisfeudal world-view is almost tragic, for a new world had dawned. The full significance of the event lies in the fact that unlike the French National Assembly a century and a half later, Parliament did not abolish the monarchy and then commit the former King to trial as a common citizen – they acknowledged Charles’ title and indicted him as King, in order to emphasise that in future no-one, whatever his or her position, could be above the law. Feudalism and feudal privilege were thus dealt their quietus in the person of their representative, and the subsequent abolition of the monarchy, on 17th March, was merely a formality.
It is right, therefore, to call the execution of Charles Stuart a revolutionary act, and a foundation stone of our democratic rights. However, we republicans are prone to exaggerate the modernity of the Parliament of the 1640s and the Commonwealth. It was the 17th Century, after all – there was no example of any bourgeois democracy in the world, no example of a democratic movement apart from elements within the German and Dutch uprisings of the previous century, and no example of sovereign elected institutions unless you could read Livy (for the Roman oligarchic version) or Aristotle (for the Greek version that depended on slavery). The Parliament that put Charles on trial wasn’t elected on anything like a democratic franchise, and some of its members had been arbitrarily excluded by the army. It had far more legitimacy than the King, but by no means did it represent the people!
The fact that there was no popular democratic theory makes the emergence of democratic currents within the English Revolution all the more remarkable. The best-known such current is the Levellers, an organised party that demanded a parliamentary republic with much wider suffrage (not though, in the case of their “mainstream”, for women, servants, apprentices or people dependent on poor relief) regular parliaments, absolute rule of the elected Parliament subject to the rule of law and certain absolute rights (freedom of religion and freedom from conscription). To their left were groups like the Diggers (or “True Levellers” as they called themselves), who fought for a truly egalitarian society and agrarian communism in the countryside. The Levellers organised soldiers’ committees in the army and drew up a proposed constitution for an English Commonwealth, which was debated in the democratically elected Army Council at Putney, against the elitist constitution proposed by the Generals and their supporters in Parliament.
The Diggers were before their time in social philosophy and unable to formulate a programme for the whole of society because the material basis for a socialist society did not yet exist. The Levellers were defeated because they could not keep their radical coalition of urban artisans and traders, yeoman farmers and soldiers from a similar class background together, while the wealthy, who had been split between Parliament and King, reunited in defence of their property. Two Levellers were shot by Cromwell in Oxford and three in nearby Burford (hence Levellers’ Day in that picturesque Tory village). Most of the Levellers’ basic programme was actually achieved in the course of the nineteenth century, by people a lot less “radical” in their methods and rhetoric than the Levellers were (though, of course, under pressure from the growing trade union movement and at times in fear of revolutionary action from mass movements like the Chartists).
This doesn’t mean, however, that the Levellers and their demands were not revolutionary in their time. Theirs was a world dominated by the remnants of feudalism and emerging mercantile capital, in which the “middling sort” – artisans, traders, yeoman farmers – constituted a revolutionary class against the big landowners and established merchants whose power and wealth depended at least partly on privilege as well as mere possession of capital. Even when making limited demands, the Levellers based their philosophy on universal equality (“The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he”, sald Rainborough at the Putney Debates – and Cromwell’s son-in-law Ireton taxed him with wanting to share out property equally). In the nineteenth century, by contrast, Britain became a capitalist society in which the main cleavage was between the owners of capital and the providers of labour. In the Levellers’ time, the wealthy were sure that the implementation of the Leveller programme would fatally undermine their position. Two centuries later that was no longer the case. Universal suffrage no longer automaticall had socialistic implications, although it still represented huge progress and, of course, a sine qua non of labour and socialist political representation.
The pioneer socialist William Morris noted “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes about it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name”. Even within fundamentally similar societies the content of a political programme can change while its form remains the same – in the 1840s, when both state bureaucracy and civil society were much less developed than they are now, the Chartists’ demands were revolutionary and it would have taken a revolution to achieve them, but most of them have long since been incorporated into our political constitution without any fundamental disturbance, though again it required the existence of a militant labour movement to bring this about.
Today socialists and trade unionists can follow in the footsteps of the Levellers – and the Parlaimentarians who called Charles Stuart to account – not by congratulating ourselves that we live in a society where their demands have been made reality, but by formulating a programme that will provide a rough equivalent in our own society of the revolutionary mobilising impact the Agreement of the People had in theirs. We may not achieve it, but we will not have to wait another 360 years. Human beings now have exponentially more knowledge and mastery of nature than our ancestors did in 1649. With its unprecedented power to destroy both human beings and the environment in which we live, and its unprecedented capacity for mass communication of ideas – good, bad indifferent and some purely evil – modern industrial capitalist society has to choose between the two options Rosa Luxemburg identified nearly a century ago – socialism or barbarism. The human race has the ability to shape its own destiny in this world. Our activity, our articulations of hope and determination to build a better world for our descendants to live in, can move society in the right direction.
(*) In the 17th Century Britain used a different calendar from the Gregorian calendar of Catholic Europe, and celebrated the New Year in March: so to most of the rest of Europe the execution took place on 9th February 1649, while in Britain it was 30th January 1648. Subsequent calendar reform kept the original dating but changed the date of the New Year, so in modern parlance the date is 30th January 1649. In any case, Janus, Roman god of doorways and changes, seems a more suitable patron for a revolutionary event than the month of fevers.
Thankfully, the war in Gaza is over – for now. Since both sides have declared “unilateral” ceasefires and there is no actual agreement, the situation is unstable, but there is actually some hope, and at least people aren’t facing the imminent danger of violent death.
This is probably a good time to write something calm about my own view of the situation. Socialists have a duty to take action against unnecessary war; but protests against the policies of the Israeli government are often seen as anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic – and there is no doubt that there are anti-Semites out there who want to take advantage of them. For this reason we must be vary careful to make two things clear: that we are protesting only against Israeli government policies, not against Israel per se; and that we do not consider Israel in some way exceptionally bad. I’m always uncomfortable when people chant slogans like “Israel is a terror state”, because this implies that there is something in the nature of Israel which makes it “terrorist”. This idea must be rejected. If Israel’s military has committed terrorist acts, then so has the military of Britain, the USA, Russia, Indonesia and in fact virtually every state in the world at on time or another.
Having said that, we can get on to opposing the specific war. The response of the Israeli government to Hamas terrorism was grossly disproportionate; civilians were targetted and infrastructure destroyed; people who had nothing to do with Hamas were maimed and killed. Israeli people cannot be expected to endure rocket attacks by terrorists who want to destroy their country, but the very worst way to fight terrorism is by bombing someone else’s country indiscriminately. Apart from the terrible death and destruction, this merely makes people so desperate and hopeless that a few of them join the terrorists. And although it’s a cliche, I really don’t see any moral difference between killing civilians with a Qassam rocket and killing civilians with a Merkava tank. The government of Israel has sunk to Hamas’ level, and it has done so with an arsenal far bigger and more destructive than any terrorist group’s.
There is also the underlying issue of the continued occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza by the Israel Defence Forces. I am, as the above should make clear, one of those ho always insists that Israel is a country like any other, the Israeli people have an unquestionable right to their own state and to deny that the Israeli people should have the same rights as any other nation is wrong and dangerous. But the Palestinian people have the same rights. Their right to their own state is being denied by military occupation, and this is the major problem in Israel-Palestine. I know that Hamas denies the right of Israel to exist; I know that the surrounding Arab states have a history of denying Israel’s right to exist; but the Israeli govermnet has the power to bring a Palestinian state into beng by withdrawing its forces from the West Bank and ending the blockade of Gaza, and it should do so. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
The Israeli people are understandably concerned about security, but so are the Palestinian people, and with more immediate day-to-day reason. Here, the geography of Israel-Palestine plays a major role in the insecurity and instability of the situation. It’s surprising that people often discuss the situation without realising how small the area they’re discussing is. From the Mediterranean at Tel Aviv to the nearest town in the West Bank is nine miles. The Gaza Strip is only five miles wide. Israelis and Palestinians live cheek-by-jowl, and while there is hostility people living in such close proximity understandably have a tendency to look over their shoulder. In such a situation, as long as there is not a sustainable peace, not just between Israel and Palestine but across the region, there will be permanent hostility and occasional wars. Terrorism, extremism, war, occupation and blockade are all major obstacles to reaching a sustainable peace. More than this, occupation and blockade are unjust and undemocratic. The government of Israel must withdraw from the West Bank and lift the blockade of Gaza, as much for its own good as for that of the Palestinian people.
Socialists have, as I said, a duty to oppose unnecessary war. We also have a duty of international solidarity with all peoples against those who oppress and misgovern them. The peoples of Palestine, Israel and the neighbouring countries, their labour movements and their peace movements, are the only hope for peace in the region. A quotation my friend Sacha has highlighted says it all: “The despots of all countries are our enemies; the workers of all countries are our friends”.
See here: http://occupiedoxford.wordpress.com.
That takes me back a bit…running down St. Giles with a long chain wrapped round me. On the negative side, it was heavy and uncomfortable and the rattling could be heard a mile off, but on the positive side I was probably impervious to bullets. The Uni management’s incompetent barrister. Sleeping in the Uni fundraising office and not showering for several days. Everyone going for a fry-up at St. Giles Cafe at 8am when we finally left (it was a lot cheaper then!)
Happy days…!
