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Catalyst
vo lu m e 1 no . 1 s p ri ng 20 1 7 a journal of t h e o ry & s t r at e gy

VIVEK CHIBBER M I K E D AV I S CEDRIC JOHNSON

Rescuing Class from The Great God Trump and The Panthers Can’t
the Cultural Turn the W hite Working Class Save Us Now

NIVEDITA MAJUMDAR JOSHUA MURRAY & CHARLES POST

Silencing MICHAEL SCHWARTZ Slavery and the New
the Subaltern Collateral Damage History of Capitalism
editors Catalyst
Robert Brenner A Journal of Theory & Strategy
Vivek Chibber is published quarterly by
Jacobin Foundation.
a dv i so ry e d i to r
Mike Davis

c r e at i v e d i r e c t o r annual subscriptions
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dedIcated to the memory of our dear frIeNd and comrade

E L L E N WO O D

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 Catalyst spring 2017

Catalyst
vo lu m e 1 no .1 sprin g 201 7 a jo u rn al o f t h e o ry & strategy

editorial

Introducing Catalyst 3

VIVEK CHIBBER

1
Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn 27

CEDRIC JOHNSON
The Panthers C
 an’t Save Us Now 57

N I V E D I TA M A J U M DA R
Silencing the Subaltern:
Resistance and Gender in Postcolonial Theory 87

M I C H A E L S C H WA R T Z & J O S H U A M U R R AY
Collateral Damage:
How Capital’s War on Labor Killed Detroit 117

M I K E D AV I S
The Great God Trump & the White Working Class 151

r e v i e w e s s ay

CHARLES POST
Slavery and the New H
 istory of Capitalism 173
contributors

VIVEK CHIBBER
is a professor of sociology at New York University and the
co-editor of Catalyst. His latest book is Postcolonial Theory
and the Specter of Capital, published in 2013.

M I K E D AV I S
is the author of several books,
including Planet of Slums and City of Quartz.

CEDRIC JOHNSON
is the author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the
Making of African American Politics and editor of The Neoliberal Deluge:
Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism and the Remaking of New Orleans.
He is also a representative for U IC United Faculty Local 645 6.

N I V E D I TA M A J U M D A R
is an associate professor of English at John Jay College.
She is the secretary of the Professional Staff Congress,
the CUNY faculty and staff union.

J O S H U A M U R R AY
is an assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University.
His work examines how globalization has created
a transnational capitalist class and its influence on US politics.

CHARLES POST
is a longtime socialist activist who teaches
at the City University of New York.

M I C H A E L S C H WA R T Z is distinguished
teaching professor, emeritus at Stony Brook University.
 Catalyst s p r i n g 2e 0d1i 7t o r i a l

I NTRODUC I NG

Catalyst

T he first issue of Catalyst appears at a profoundly contradictory political

conjuncture. It is the moment of the greatest promise for the working
class and popular forces since the 1960s, but also one of significant danger.
The capitalist system long ago lost the capacity to realize its ostensible historic
comparative advantage and justification — to drive unceasing capital accumu-
lation, which makes for self-sustaining economic growth and creates the
potential for rising living standards. In response, the world’s political and
economic elites, miniscule in size, have refocused their efforts, at the levels of
both the corporation and government, away from investment and growth and
toward upward redistribution of the economic product. This has left the top 1
percent of the U S owning 40 percent of U S wealth, the top 1 percent of the
world’s population owning half the world’s wealth, and the bottom half of the
world’s population owning the same amount as the world’s richest eight people.
To maintain social cohesion, neoliberal elites no longer attempt to co-opt or
buy off significant parts of the population, but instead prepare for the expected
outbreaks of popular opposition by building up their coercive apparatus —
from the massive surveillance of the population to the militarization of the police
to the brutal suppression of small and not-all-that-threatening manifestations
of resistance.
 Catalyst spring 2017

The consequence is that today’s world working class, defined loosely and
in its multiple aspects, is little attracted to the neoliberal worldview that consti-
tutes the unanimous and unquestioned ideology of the world’s elites and their
captive media, an ideology that does nothing for it. It is, on the contrary, open to
a gamut of oppositional political perspectives that could set it in motion against
its neoliberal, globalizing tormentors. Starting from the Great Recession of 2007
to 2009, we have witnessed an impressive series of militant, radical political
explosions against the established order across much of the globe: the Arab
Spring, the Wisconsin public-sector strikes, Occupy Wall Street, the occupa-
tions of the squares in Greece, Spain, and Turkey, and the French mass strikes
and demonstrations of winter and spring 2016.
But the fact remains that, up to now, in most of the world, right-wing
nationalist-cum-populist forces have been able to capitalize on the profound
distress and disaffection of working people far more effectively than has the
4
radical left. They have done so by bringing behind them various native working-
class constituencies that once constituted the main social base of the center-left
parties but have long been ignored by them — notably factory workers and
miners hard hit by economic stagnation, technological advance, and globaliza-
tion. Especially in the wake of the Great Recession, which has brought a plunge
in popular living standards of an extent unparalleled since the Great Depression,
these nationalist forces have exploited the suffering of broad layers of the popula-
tion so as to achieve epoch-making victories in the vanguard countries of global
finance, austerity, and upward redistribution of income — Brexit in the United
Kingdom and, of course, Donald Trump in the United States.
Until now, radical left-wing forces have expressed at best befuddlement
and at worst indifference to the indispensable task of challenging the far right
for the allegiance of economically depressed, profoundly alienated working-
class whites. The adoption of multiculturalism and inclusiveness by neoliberal
parties like the Democrats, combined with their to refusal to recognize class
and class exploitation, has disoriented not only many of those parties’ follow-
ers but also forces far to the left, who have prioritized their critique of the very
real and continuing advantages of white people without placing that critique
in the context of the disastrous, decades-long decline of living standards and
downward mobility for all workers, including white workers. The simple fact
is that these working people have been ravaged by capitalism in its neoliberal
form. They will follow a self-styled, anti-neoliberal populist far right that will do
 Catalyst spring 2017

little or nothing for them, unless the Left can offer a more viable version of that
anti-neoliberal struggle.
There is no reason to believe that, in the foreseeable future, the dominant
political elites can secure much in the way of political stability, and every reason
to expect opposition on the part of wide swaths of the population. The question
is whether a still embryonic radical left can develop the capacity to exploit the
implicit and explicit opportunities that are certain to present themselves in the
coming period.
It is Catalyst’s purpose to provoke and contribute to a collaborative effort to
understand today’s political world in order to assist the struggles to change it.
To that end, its fundamental task is to promote wide-ranging discussion and to
organize debate on the urgent questions facing the working class, the emergent
mass movements, and radical and socialist political organizations. What follows
is an initial, very partial attempt to lay out for our readers how we understand
5
today’s political landscape, a number of its salient features, the openings that
are presenting themselves to the movements and the Left, and the problems
the Left confronts.

Not Your Parents’ Capitalism

The necessary point of departure for grasping today’s politics is the epoch-
making decline of the economy over the last forty years or so. This process
has transformed beyond recognition the capitalist class across the globe, in its
multiple forms and sections, as well as the constraints under which it operates
and the politico-economic perspectives it advances. It has imposed on working
people, their mass movements, and political organizations around the world
the need to thoroughly rethink their strategies for resistance, a project that has
barely begun.
Since 1973, the economies of the advanced capitalist countries have
performed ever more poorly. The growth of G DP , investment, productivity,
employment, real wages, and real consumption have all experienced an historic
deceleration, which has proceeded without interruption, decade by decade,
business cycle by business cycle, to the present day. The source of this loss of
dynamism has been the deep fall, and failure to recover, of the economy-wide
rate of profit, a process that took place mainly from the late 1960s to the early-
1980s and derived largely from the relentless buildup of overcapacity across the
 Catalyst spring 2017

global manufacturing sector. This increasing overcapacity resulted from a process

of economic development that has made mincemeat of orthodox economics’
understanding of world trade. Instead of deepening the world division of labor
along Smithian lines by way of ever greater specialization and complementar-
ity, the most dynamic entrants into the global economy have brought growing
redundancy and intensified competition.
The manufacturers of successive newly emerging economic powers have
used the latest technology, generally borrowed from the economic leader(s), in
combination with relatively low wages, to make export goods that were already
being produced for the world market, but at a lower price: Germany and Japan in
the 1960s and 1970s; the East Asian newly industrializing countries (N IC s) and
Southeast Asian tigers in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; and finally the Chinese
behemoth in the 1990s and 2000s, with its devastating “China price.” The result
has been too much supply compared to demand in one industry after another,
6
forcing down prices and thus profit rates in an unending cycle that has ultimately
engulfed its leading progenitors themselves in overcapacity, above all China.
The decline in the rate of profit resulting from intensifying overcapacity has
brought about a fall in the surpluses available to corporations, while worsening
the prospects to invest them. The result has been an historic weakening of capi-
tal accumulation (the growth of investment). The reduction in the rate of return
has also provoked an ongoing assault on workers’ wages, benefits, and working
conditions, which, by redistributing income upward from labor to capital, has
subsidized profits and prevented an even greater decline of profitability. This
combination of weak investment and falling wages has made for an ongoing,
worsening crisis of aggregate demand, which is the immediate cause of the long
slowdown and hangs like a dark cloud over the global economy. Put another
way, the very processes by which the profit rate was stabilized prevented that
stabilization from increasing the economy’s vitality.
The long-term weakening of aggregate demand brought a tendency toward
deeper and longer-lasting cyclical downturns and shallower cyclical expansions
and would, sooner or later, have detonated serious recession or even depression
had it not been for the historic growth of both public and private borrowing,
nurtured directly or indirectly by governments. The turn to Keynesian deficits
and easy credit on an ever larger scale was thus a novel and defining feature of the
post–World War II era; they did make for a certain stability, which would have
been impossible in their absence. However, they also perpetuated the economy’s
 Catalyst spring 2017

weakness by preventing high cost–low profit producers from being sufficiently

shaken out and superseded by more productive and dynamic ones. The result
was that increases in Keynesian subsidies to demand delivered ever smaller
increases in supply. Greater stability was thus purchased at the price of declining
performance. During the first half of the 1990s, this process reached an initial
point of culmination, with the world economy performing worse than in any
other five-year period since 1950. Keynesianism had failed, and a subsequent
brief experiment with revitalizing the economy by way of balanced budgets in
both the United States and Europe only exacerbated its languor.
From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the U S Federal Reserve tried to
unleash the economy by turning to ultra-low interest rates to drive up the
prices of financial assets — equities and house values. It did so to enhance
the on-paper wealth of corporations and households and increase their credit
worthiness in the eyes of the banks, thereby enabling them to borrow more
7
and spend more, thus inflating demand. This two-stage essay in asset-price
Keynesianism, or “bubblenomics,” succeeded in blowing up equity prices (1995
to 2000) and then housing prices (2001 to 2007). The consecutive bubbles made
possible successive booms — first in investment spending, then in consump-
tion expenditures — conveying the impression that the economy had somehow
regained its vitality.
That impression was, if anything, even more vivid in the developing world,
which enjoyed an unprecedented if brief acceleration of economic expansion,
driven largely by China’s rise to the status of workshop of the world. China
based its ascent heavily on record exports to the United States, which were
fueled by the phenomenal bubble-based explosion of debt-driven consumption
there. China’s world-shaking export growth facilitated, in turn, China’s massive
imports of raw materials and semi-finished goods from places like Brazil, South
Africa, and other parts of Africa, as well as East and Southeast Asia. Economists
even at the staid Bank of International Settlements cautiously concluded that
the less developed countries might be, for the first time, closing the chasm
between themselves and the advanced capitalist countries (ACC s) that had been
expanding for half a millennium. At the same time, the astounding growth of the
Chinese industrial working class seemed to compensate for the working class’s
shrinkage in the Global North, and the vertiginous rise in the annual number of
strikes seemed to signal a shift in the primary locus of class struggle on a global
scale to the Middle Kingdom.
 Catalyst spring 2017

Nevertheless, it was mostly an illusion. The successive U S bubble-based

expansions failed to bring increases in earnings and incomes (i.e., profits or
wages) that could support the accompanying record increases in stock prices
and housing prices. So when the housing-price bubble burst in 2006 and 2007,
household wealth evaporated, new borrowings were replaced by rising debt obli-
gations and payments, and spending collapsed. Aggregate demand crumpled,
plunging the US economy — and a world economy that was unalterably depen-
dent upon the US market — into the Great Recession. The worst slump since
the 1930s exacerbated the long downturn in the capitalist core that had begun in
1973 and delivered to the developing economies an enormous setback, leaving
their futures very much in doubt.
The ensuing recovery has been unworthy of the name, far and away the
weakest since the Great Depression. During the US business cycle that began
in 2008, the average annual increases of G DP , capital investment, and labor
8
productivity have been less than half the average increases during the long
downturn from 1973 to 2007 and barely one-quarter the average increases during
the postwar boom between 1948 and 1973. The growth of jobs during the same
interval has left the workforce participation rate as a percentage of the active
population aged 18 to 65 at 59 percent, far below its level of 63 percent in 2007
or the average of 61.7 percent between 1990 and 2007. Real median household
income is still not back to its 2007 level, which was itself markedly lower than
its peak in 1999 and 2000. Fully 95 percent of households are still bringing in
incomes below those of 2007.
Capitalism at the height of the postwar boom, in the mid- to late 1960s,
promised an ever more prosperous future for an ever greater part of the world’s
population. Much of the world’s population was still largely excluded from the
benefits of the system, prominently including African Americans and other
minorities in the United States, along with much of the citizenry of the less
developed world. But few even of capitalism’s most radical Marxist critics could
convince themselves to argue for capitalism’s abolition on the grounds that it
was unable to underwrite self-sustaining growth and rising living standards. To
found their critiques, they had basically to fall back on the alienation at capital-
ism’s core, along with such secondary traits as consumerism, suburbanization,
and repressive de-sublimation.
Today, all that has proved chimerical. In the wake of four decades of
continuous economic decline and falling living standards, capitalism’s Golden
 Catalyst spring 2017

Age promises have been brutally traduced. The call for capitalism’s elimina-
tion, which not so long ago could be dismissed as unrealistic and utopian, must
today be the point of departure for any realistic Left, and reconceptualizing the
socialist goal in a form that speaks to today’s transformed social economy and
enhanced technological potentials must be the highest priority.

W hat Is Neoliberalism?

The capitalist system’s incapacity to provide more than the semblance of a

growing pie has impelled a near-unanimity of the world’s economic and politi-
cal rulers (the top 1 percent by income or above) and their parasitic hangers-on
(a periphery of, at best, 10 percent) to make the radical political departure now
known as neoliberalism. At the start of the 1970s, US corporations and the state
launched an all-out counteroffensive aiming to revitalize the economy by stok-
9
ing demand in Keynesian fashion and by cutting costs to revive manufacturing
competitiveness. But this only worsened the overcapacity that had brought
down profitability in the first place. In the ensuing years, the improved cost
competitiveness of East Asian producers allowed them to appropriate ever
greater shares of the world market in manufactured goods, leading to a stark
reduction in opportunities for profitable investment in the United States
except at the highest end, a tendency that was exacerbated by the rise of
global value chains that broke industrial production down into its component
parts and distributed it to the locations where it could be done most cheaply.
The consequence has been that capitalist classes and their governments,
not just in the United States but in the A C C s more generally, have largely
ceased attempting to stimulate a new wave of investment and growth,
whether through Keynesian deficits, industrial policy, or rebuilding infra-
structure in the form of schools, hospitals, highways, bridges, and the like.
They no longer believe in the possibility of securing a large-scale revival of
profitable production by any means. Instead they have turned to a far-reaching
program of politically founded upward redistribution, underwritten by both
financial and nonfinancial corporations and the government, which has had
the stunning effect of enabling them, in recent decades, to appropriate an
overwhelming proportion of the increases in income annually produced by
the economy while expropriating ever more of the already existing wealth of
the working class.
 Catalyst spring 2017

In retrospect, the shift to neoliberalism has had two fundamental aspects —

austerity on the one hand and politically driven direct upward redistribution on
the other. The essence of neoliberal austerity is to free up entry to the market to
every economic agent and to subject them to the bracing cold bath of unmiti-
gated competition, imposing survival of the fittest as first principle, the ostensible
benefit being lower prices for every commodity, above all labor power.
Marketization has weakened, if not eliminated, all protections from the adverse
impacts of competition, such as trade unions, the welfare state, employment
regulation, and consumer protection. It has also meant lower barriers to inter-
national trade and investment as well as the de facto elimination of antitrust laws,
not to mention government macroeconomic policies that enable inflation.
Neoliberalism has demanded, too, increasing the numbers and quality
of players in every market. This has meant extending access to those previ-
ously excluded by their geographic or national position (i.e., globalization). It
10
has also meant including those previously excluded by discrimination along
racial, ethnic, and gender lines, implicitly to bring the representation of every
group in all income levels and occupations into line with their proportion of the
population (i.e., multiculturalism). Marketization has meanwhile returned to the
private sector activities that had long ago been taken over by the state, such as
healthcare, education, and infrastructure.
The publicists for neoliberalism like to speak of increasing freedom and
promoting equality of opportunity. They seek to equalize the legal position of
the players in the market, without mention of equalizing the initial assets they
possess (that would defeat the whole purpose). The beneficiaries of increased
liberty have thus been entirely predictable. Those entering the market with the
most assets, in terms of capital (means of production), technological capacity,
innovative potential, and knowledge, have appropriated ever more income. Put
another way, ever greater income and wealth go to those economic activities
that are most difficult to enter, where competition is least intense because of
the levels of innovative capacity, technology, means of production, and human
capital required. Oligopolists like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are
emblematic in this regard. Correspondingly, ever less income and wealth go
to those activities that are easiest to enter, where competition is most intense,
above all the sale of unskilled labor power. While neoliberal multiculturalism
may thus call in theory for equalizing representation of blacks, Latinos, and
 Catalyst spring 2017

women, the fact that members of these groups tend on average to enter the
market with the lowest levels of capital, education, skill, and capacity to innovate
ensures the very opposite.
Neoliberalism’s second aspect has probably been even more consequential
in terms of effecting the upward redistribution of income and wealth, but it
has gone unheralded by pro-capitalist publicists for the straightforward reason
that it goes directly against supposed neoliberal values and capitalist principles.
This has taken place by way of governments and corporations handing over to
a tiny number of favored individuals exclusive access to politically constituted
economic opportunities yielding fabulous sums of money. The chief beneficia-
ries are the allied political party leaders and top corporate managers who have
been mainly responsible for the installation of the neoliberal political economy
across the capitalist world, relieving them of the need to engage in the messy
and uncertain processes of producing for profit in competitive markets or of
11
high-risk investing in the financial markets.
In recent decades, the mechanisms of politically constituted rip-off have
included granting massive tax cuts to the rich and the corporations; facilitating
investment in government debt on the part of the rich at ultra-high interest
rates; privatizing public assets at far below market value; paying obscenely
high wages to CEO s; and central banks using low interest rates to drive up the
value of stocks and bonds, which are owned almost exclusively by the very rich.
Perhaps the most egregious politically driven rip-off has occurred by way of the
ascent of the financial sector, where the privatization of acrophobia-inducing
profits for a thin layer of top managers has been made possible by governments’
socialization of trillion-dollar losses.
The entirely political nature of the powers and privileges that have been
handed over to top corporate managers and their politician allies at the core
of neoliberalism could hardly be clearer in what might be seen as the reductio
ad absurdum of the whole process — the politically driven suspension of law
enforcement with respect to the financial magnates. The US government (and
others) have increasingly accommodated the open criminality of the banks, as
demonstrated by the declining number of arrests made over time compared to
the rising amount of loot appropriated. The savings-and-loan scandals of the
1980s and early 1990s saw hundreds of arrests of relatively small-time crooks
who stole what now would be considered peanuts. There were around two
 Catalyst spring 2017

dozen arrests from the much more impressive circle of criminal manager-entre-
preneurs, who ripped off hundreds of millions of dollars from tech giants such
as Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing in the New Economy scandals of
the late 1990s and early 2000s. Arrests so far have totaled zero for the very top
bankers at the world’s largest international banks, who have masterminded and
profited from the outright larceny that brought their institutions one hundred
billion dollars or more through the LIBOR , foreign exchange, drug-lord money-
laundering scandals of the last decade or so. It is no exaggeration to say that
these magnates are literally above the law, and the Obama administration
explicitly acknowledged them as such, in statements by former U S attorney
general Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, then head of the criminal division at
the Justice Department.
A parallel process of ever increasing corruption and acceptance thereof
could be charted for many of the world’s leading politicians by laying bare the
12
close correlation among the level of income or payoff, the amount of power
and prestige of the politician, and the degree of adoration by the media. The
list would feature not only such notables as the Clintons, the Blairs, and
Silvio Berlusconi, but their ostensibly more traditional European counter-
parts Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder in Germany and Jacques Chirac and
Nicolas Sarkozy in France, whose terms in office featured secret slush funds,
the embezzlement of taxpayer money, and lucrative favors for highly placed
friends. These egregious figures have constituted the vanguard of neoliberal-
ization on a world scale, and they have elicited round after round of ever louder
applause from a tiny number of giant media corporations — their partners
in crime, whose oligopolies they nurtured. As flabbergasting as was Hillary
Clinton’s gall in taking a total of $21.5 million from leading Wall Street banks
for ninety-two speeches over a two-year period between 2013 and 2015, even
more astounding was the ingratiation with which this revelation was greeted
by the sycophantic media. Only Bernie Sanders’s awkward appearance on the
scene spoiled the celebration.
The Republicans and Ronald Reagan had led the initial political break-
through to neoliberalism in 1980 and 1981, suddenly introducing, with the
Democrats’ full approval, measures that directly distributed income to corpo-
rate leaders and the rich by political means that came to distinguish the new
regime. The result was to drive an historic shift in income distribution to the
top 1 percent that would persist up to the present. But the problem for the
 Catalyst spring 2017

Republicans was that, since the beneficiaries of this largesse were so few, their
signature policies promised little gain for the white workers they were attempt-
ing to bring behind them — workers who, not coincidentally, were being
subjected to the most devastating reductions in their living standards since the
Great Depression, thanks to rising Social Security taxes and decreasing social
services, as well as falling real wages and rising unemployment. The answer
that the G OP hit upon, seemingly too superficial for words, was to build on
their covert, if patently obvious, racist commitment to favor whites, the silent
majority, over blacks by turning to “social issues,” from crime to opposing gay
rights and abortion and so on. Still the Republicans’ resulting dependence on
their voting base to act politically against its material interests for the duration
was an unstable solution.
Bill Clinton famously took up the baton of neoliberalism from his Republican
forebears and consolidated the project they had initiated, a necessary departure
13
for the Democrats if they were to continue to compete successfully in terms of
fundraising. In particular, Clinton won over an impressive phalanx of top bank-
ers by putting into place a series of major pieces of legislation favoring finance
that were to shape the economy for the next decade and beyond. But this shift
toward Wall Street left the Democrats’ working-class and black constituencies
in the lurch. To compensate and distract, the Democrats turned to propagating
multiculturalism, hoping in particular to attract and nurture an expanding base
of supporters ever higher on the income scale. But as with the Republicans,
the shift to neoliberalism left their traditional lower class supporters behind, a
problematic strategy beyond the short run.
The fast-emerging outcome was that the Democratic and Republican
neoliberal fraternal twins came to look ever more like identical ones in terms of
the issue of class. In particular, the Democrats came to represent the wealthy
virtually to the same degree as did the Republicans. What differentiated them
was political-cultural identifications — multiculturalism for the Democrats and
“social issues” for the Republicans. But political parties that catered in material
terms only to the very well off could hardly stabilize their own political positions.
In this, as in so many other respects, a dozen years of bubblenomics provided a
temporary escape from reality, allowing the two parties to postpone confronting
the problem of speaking to the material interests of the very large lower-class
voting constituencies that were crucial for both. But they could not put it off
for very long.
 Catalyst spring 2017

For the time being, the turn to neoliberalism could hardly have been a more
resounding success for the tiny corporate and political elite at the top of the
scale of income and wealth. It brought, especially by way of its distinctive forms
of politically constituted plunder, an otherwise inconceivable — and historic
— redistribution of income upward to the top 1 percent, from 10 percent in
1980 to 23.5 percent in 2007, a level previously reached only at the end of the
roaring 1920s on the eve of the stock-market crash. The top 1 percent appropri-
ated no less than 95 percent of the total increase in income between the Great
Recession and 2013. As the other side of the coin, the real wages of produc-
tion and non-supervisory workers, composing the bottom 80 percent, did not
increase between 1972 and 2012 (falling, in fact, by just under 10 percent). This
meant that the US working class could not get a raise above its starting salary
for forty years.

14
From Consent to Coercion: A Crisis of Legitimacy

With their failure to propel growth, their imposition of ever more extreme
austerity on working people, and their blatant rip-off of the bottom 90 percent
in the interest of the top 1 percent, neoliberal elites have largely forfeited
the political legitimacy enjoyed by the capitalist ruling class of the preceding
epoch, which won its leadership position in the first instance by accumulat-
ing capital and inciting growth, bringing about fast rising employment and
real wages. With their politico-ideological hegemony in doubt, today’s official
ruling parties, from right to left, have begun preparations to use fraud and
force in the event of resistance. One should avoid exaggerating the degree to
which this trend toward repression has already been realized in the capital-
ist core, where basic freedoms are still largely intact (although these have
always been restricted, at best, for African Americans). So far, in that part of
the world, it has been mainly a question of locating and monitoring poten-
tial oppositionists, such as with the US government’s extraordinary program
to surveil literally the whole population, revealed by Edward Snowden; the
attempt to intimidate, while preparing to repress, radical activists, as with
the militarization of police departments the world over; and the use of politi-
cal repression sooner rather than later to put down militant movements of
opposition, such as the dispersal of Occupy.
 Catalyst spring 2017

The fact remains that we are already witnessing major episodes of much
more serious repression, involving states of emergency, suspension of liber-
ties, and the disestablishment of formal democracy. These have so far been
confined largely to the periphery — for example in the states of emergency
accompanying politico-military coups in Egypt and Turkey (although France,
too, remains in its own state of emergency more than a year after the terror
attacks in Paris). Yet where large-scale explosions of resistance from below have
not only disrupted public order but also threatened to extract major gains from
the corporations, the core has been hardly immune from political repression.
During the first half of 2016, the François Hollande government was unable to
push through a new law to deregulate the French labor market in the face of a
huge, militant mass movement bringing together allied contingents of work-
ers, school kids, and urban middle-class youth, a movement that enjoyed the
overwhelming support of the general public. But Hollande nonetheless forced
15
its passage entirely undemocratically, essentially by fiat, using a provision of
the constitution specifically enacted for just this sort of occasion. In a some-
what different register, Germany and its north European partner states have
inflicted a kind of a mass torture on the Greek population, imposing extreme
measures of austerity that are explicitly intended to bring about pauperization
and demonstrating the lengths to which these states will go to crush resistance
and make an example of resisters. It would be foolish to believe that this could
not happen elsewhere in the capitalist core.

Social Democracy’s Collapse into Neoliberalism

The world’s social-democratic and liberal-left parties rose to great heights

during the long postwar expansion. Nevertheless, their prospects even then
were profoundly constrained by the political priorities of the party politicians
and trade-union leaders who headed up large apparatuses of well-paid officials.
The latter saw their fundamental interest as nurturing the parties and unions that
constituted their material support — that provided their salaries, established
their career paths, and constituted their whole way of life. These leaders’ overrid-
ing commitment to protecting their organizations from threats both from above
and from below led them to adopt a political strategy that sought to increase
wages, benefits, and social welfare gains gradually, so they could accommodate
 Catalyst spring 2017

the economic and political needs of capital while minimally satisfying their
members. This meant putting capitalist profits first as the precondition for
capital accumulation and the growth of employment and wages, while avoiding
at all costs direct confrontations with employers and the state. Such confron-
tations could easily endanger their party and trade-union organizations. This
strategic perspective implied, as a tactical matter, state-regulated collective
bargaining, corporatist forms of state regulation of capital-labor relations, and
the electoral road, supplemented from time to time by strictly routine, limited
strike action — rather than ever broader forms of mobilization of the trade
union and party memberships. Their dependence upon these methods is what
makes the social democrats and trade unionists reformists — not the fight for
reforms, which is incumbent on all organizations that presume to represent
working people.
This strategy worked reasonably well during the long upturn, when high
16
profits and rapid capital accumulation allowed social-democratic organizations,
along with the trade unions, to secure steady material improvements for their
memberships and the citizenry. But when profitability began to fall from the
mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, social-democratic leaders and trade-union officials
were progressively disarmed or disarmed themselves. At first they obliged their
followers to accept restraints on wages and benefits, as well as to moderate their
fight to defend the welfare state, in hopes that this would allow their employers
to restore their rates of profit, regain previous levels of investment and growth,
and, on that basis, once again provide steady improvements in living standards.
But as it became ever clearer that granting concessions would not actually incite
employers to raise their rates of capital accumulation, that the economy would
continue to stagnate, and that austerity was a permanent fact of life, party lead-
ers, along with their trade-union counterparts, found themselves pretty much
sidelined, waiting for the economy to recover its dynamism.
When ruling classes just about everywhere embraced neoliberalism, social-
democratic and allied trade-union leaders had no choice. Having long ago
abandoned militant class struggle, they had no viable path to winning economic
gains for their followers, but the extreme political position adopted by the lead-
ing capitalist parties did offer them a way forward. They could set themselves
up as a kind of lesser evil, in effect joining their adversaries in implementing
neoliberal policies while holding out the hope of offering minimal concessions
to working people that their adversaries would not grant.
 Catalyst spring 2017

Over the past thirty or more years, formerly social-democratic parties

around the world have functioned as the left wing of neoliberalism, taking part,
with their center-right rivals, in an electoral revolving door. Democratic and
social-democratic parties often took the decisive steps if not to originate the
neoliberal thrust, as in Australia or New Zealand, at least to make it irrevo-
cable and further consolidate the shift in that direction. Witness Bill Clinton
in the United States, Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, Gerhard Schröeder in
Germany. The trend has only deepened since the Great Recession, highlighted
by Hollande’s abrupt shift to the right after winning election on a program of
breaking with neoliberalism. Most of the rest of Europe has followed the same
path, as has the Democratic Party in the United States, where Barack Obama,
though embracing neoliberalism even more fully than Bill Clinton and George
W. Bush, won two elections thanks to the Republicans’ plunging even further
to the right.
17
Social-democratic organizations’ universal defection to the ranks of
neoliberalism has deprived working people of any mass political party that even
remotely pretends to represent them, leaving them without a political voice. The
outcome is an enormous political vacuum, completely unprecedented since at
least the start of the twentieth century. The question is whether any new political
formation on the left can organize a credible alternative that can stem the plunge
of popular living standards, offer an anticapitalist point of departure, and begin
to craft a convincing version of socialism for our time. Such a formation must
do so against the opposition of the neoliberalized social democratic parties and
mostly without the support, at least for the time being, of trade-union organiza-
tions implicitly or explicitly tied to those parties. Nevertheless, they will have
plenty of openings to do so.

Evolution of Resistance: A Learning Process?

The great housing and credit market crash of 2007 and 2008 and the ensuing
Great Recession thrust working people across the world into a new ice age to
which they have barely begun to acclimatize. Tens of millions lost their jobs and
were obliged, if they were lucky enough, to accept much worse ones. Almost as
many lost their homes and thus a great part of their accumulated wealth. Their
power to borrow and to consume plummeted; “food insecurity,” the risk of
starvation, threatened shockingly large numbers of families.
 Catalyst spring 2017

But the coup de grace was delivered by governments. In an astoundingly

skewed but entirely predictable response to the collapse, the two US neoliberal
parties led a coordinated and expensive bailout of the global financial sector,
preserving the banks that had inflated and burst the stock market and hous-
ing price bubbles, along with the wealth of the 1 percent. They saw no moral
hazard in privatizing the gains and socializing the losses of the financial sector.
Equally predictably, they declined to bail out the underwater mortgages of
ordinary citizens, moralizing against their profligacy, even though such a bail-
out would have been far cheaper and much better for the economy. Flaunting
their hypocrisy, neoliberal rulers in much of the advanced capitalist world,
notably across most of Europe, took the opportunity to try once and for all to
destroy the remaining institutions protecting workers, their living standards,
and their leverage in the labor market, namely the trade unions and the welfare
state. Bailouts for the capitalist class, brutal austerity for the working class was
18
the rule virtually everywhere, backed by both neoliberal parties.
At the start, governments, led by the United States, did implement a
short and shallow burst of Keynesian deficit spending/subsidy to demand,
which did at least prevent total depression. Soon, however, neoliberals on
both sides of the Atlantic returned to their touchstones — austerity and politi-
cally driven rip-offs. Rather than stimulate consumption and investment to
catalyze capital accumulation, they turned to ultra-cheap credit to increase
returns on investment in stocks and bonds, the benefits of which the top 1
percent monopolized. The wave of popular revulsion that resulted engulfed
ever broader sections of the citizenry and has driven a long wave of punctuated
political resistance, on both the right and the left.

Revolt of the Right

Symptomatically, it was the political right which initiated popular opposition

in the United States. Massive protest from below, emanating largely from an
outraged Republican base, greeted Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Troubled
Asset Relief Program bank bailout bill and forced its defeat when it was first
brought before Congress. It took the congressional Democrats, led by New York
senator Chuck Schumer, a leading apostle of Wall Street (despite his liberal bona
fides), to save Paulson’s bacon and that of the banks.
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
proceedings to depose and execute Charles Stuart, their lawful King of
England."
The officers now decided to gain the approval of the ministers—
Presbyterian—in London, or at least persuade them to remain neutral.
Hugh Peters was selected for the purpose, and he went among them, but
all his efforts were fruitless. They declared unanimously for the release of
the King. He then invited several of them, Calamy, Whitaker, Sedgwick,
etc., to a conference with some of the officers; but instead of attending,
the ministers assembled in Sion College and drew up "A serious and
faithful representation of the judgment of the ministers of the Gospel
within the province of London," dated 18th January, 1648-9. In this they
protested against the coercive measures adopted toward the Parliament,
and bade them beware of proceeding to extremities. "Examine your
consciences, if any number of persons of different principles from
yourselves had invaded the rights of Parliament, imprisoned the King, and
carried him about from place to place, and attempted the dissolution of
the whole government, whether you would not have charged them with
the highest crimes."
This was subscribed by forty-seven ministers.
A second paper, "A vindication of the London ministers from the unjust
aspersions ... as if they had promoted the bringing of the King to capital
punishment," appeared shortly after, signed by fifty-seven ministers.
Even the Independent preachers shrank from approving the proceedings
of the council of officers in the trial of the King, with the exception of Hugh
Peters and John Goodwin. Some of the Independent ministers in the
country joined the Presbyterians in protesting against them.
But it was all in vain. The King was tried and sentenced to death, and
executed on 30th January, 1649. Rumour had it that the masked
executioner was none other than Peters himself. This he denied, asserting
that on the day of the King's death he was ill in bed. He had certainly been
about and preaching not many days before.
Who the executioner was, was never discovered, and Peters was not
charged as such when tried for his life in 1660.
In Epulæ Thyestæ, printed in 1649, Peters is accused of having been the
executioner of King Charles:—

There's Peters, the Denyer, (nay 'tis sad)

He that, disguised, cut off his Master's head;
That godly pigeon of Apostacy
Does buz about his Ante-Monarchy,
His scaffold Doctrines.

But there was an element of kindness in Hugh Peters that induced him to
do gracious acts even to those whom he hated. Whitelocke assures us that
"at a conference between him (Peters) and the King, the King desired one
of his own chaplains might be permitted to come to him" on the occasion
of his execution; he had refused the ministrations of the Presbyterian
divines, "and thereupon the Bishop of London was ordered to go to his
Majesty."
On a former occasion a message from the Queen was allowed to be
transmitted to the King through the instrumentality of Peters.
In his letter to his daughter Peters says: "I had access to the King—he
used me civilly, I, in requital, offered my poor thoughts three times for his
safety." It was an impertinence in the man to approach the King, when he
had stirred up the army to demand his death, and had raced about London
endeavouring to get the approval of the sentence from the ministers.
Although we cannot believe that Hugh Peters was the executioner of
Charles, yet he cannot be acquitted of being a regicide, on the same
principle as the trumpeter in the fable was condemned to be hanged. His
plea that he had not drawn a sword in the battle was not held to justify
him—he had sounded the charge and summoned to the battle.
Peters was one of the Triers appointed by Cromwell to test the parochial
clergy, and to eject from their livings such as did not approve themselves
to their judgment as fitting pastors to the flock either by their morals or
theological opinions.
Every parishioner who bore a grudge against his pastor was invited to lay
his grievances before the Grand Committee. Lord Clarendon says:
"Petitions presented by many parishioners against their pastors, with
articles of their misdemeanours and behaviours ... were read with great
delight and promptly referred to the Committee about Religion." The
matter of these accusations was for the most part, as Clarendon informs
us, "bowing at the name of Jesus, and obliging the communicants to the
altar, i.e. to the rails which enclosed the Communion table, to receive the
sacrament." What the Puritans desired was that the minister should walk
about the church distributing to the people in the pews. The observance of
all holy days except Sundays had already been forbidden. A priest who
said service on Christmas Day or Good Friday was certain of deprivation.
But the great question put to each rector or vicar was, "whether he had
any experience of a work of grace" in his heart, and the answer to this
determined whether he should be allowed to hold his cure or be thrust
out, apart from all question of moral fitness. That there were a host of
lukewarm, indifferent men in the ministry, caring little for religion and
knowing little, without fixed convictions, cannot be wondered at, after the
swaying of the pendulum of belief during the last reigns, and these would
be precisely the men who would be able volubly to assert their experience
of divine grace, and abandon doctrines they never sincerely held and
ceremonies about which they cared nothing. There were vicars of Bray
everywhere.
Butler hits off the work of the Triers in Hudibras:—

Whose business is, by cunning sight,

To cast a figure for men's light;
To find in lines of Beard and Face
The Physiognomy of Grace;
And by the Sound and Twang of Nose,
If all the sound within disclose;
Free from a crack or flaw of sinning,
As men try pipkins by the ringing.

Peters was next appointed a commissioner for the amending of the laws,
though he had no knowledge of law. He said himself, in his Legacy: "When
I was a trier of others, I went to hear and gain experience, rather than to
judge; when I was called to mend laws, I rather was there to pray than to
mend laws." Whitelocke says: "I was often advised with by some of this
committee, and none of them was more active in this business than Mr.
Hugh Peters, the minister, who understood little of the law, but was very
opinionative, and would frequently mention some proceedings of law in
Holland, wherein he was altogether mistaken."
Peters was chaplain to the Protector, and certainly in one way or another
made a good deal of money. Dr. Barwick in his Life says:[5] "The wild
prophecies uttered by his (Hugh Peters') impure mouth were still received
by the people with the same veneration as if they had been oracles;
though he was known to be infamous for more than one kind of
wickedness. A fact which Milton himself did not dare to deny when he
purposely wrote his Apology, for this very end, to defend even by name, as
far as possible, the very blackest of the conspirators, and Hugh Peters
among the chief of them, who were by name accused of manifest
impieties by their adversaries." Bishop Burnet says as well: "He was a very
vicious man."
Peters by his wife—his second wife, Deliverance, the widow of a Mr.
Sheffield—became the father of the Elizabeth Peters to whom he
addressed his Dying Father's Last Legacy.
The Dutch having been disconcerted by the defeats of their fleets by
Admiral Blake, and the messengers they had sent to England having failed
to satisfy Cromwell, in the beginning of the year 1653 they commissioned
Colonel Doleman and others to learn the sentiments of the leading men in
Parliament, and to gain over to the cause of peace Hugh Peters, as
Cromwell's influential chaplain. Peters had always entertained a tenderness
for the Dutch, and he interceded on their behalf, and the Dutch gave him
£300,000 wherewith to bribe and purchase the amity of Parliament and
the Protector. That a good share of this gold adhered to Peters' fingers we
may be pretty confident; and indeed it was intended that it should do so.
The attempt, however, did not succeed, and when the negotiations were
broken off, the Dutch fitted out another fleet under Van Tromp, De Witt,
and De Ruyter, and appointed four other deputies to go upon another
embassy to England. These men arrived on July 2nd, 1658, and "all joined
in one petition for a common audience, praying thrice humbly that they
should have a favourable answer, and beseeching the God of Peace to co-
operate."[6]
These ambassadors, like the foregoing, sought out Peters and engaged his
services. After several interviews, peace was at last concluded 2nd May,
1654. In the Justification of the War, by Stubbe, is an engraving that
represents the four deputies presenting their humble petition to Peters.
In 1655 feeling in England was greatly stirred by the account that reached
the country of the persecution of the Waldenses in the valleys of
Piedmont. Cromwell at once ordered a collection for the sufferers to be
made throughout the kingdom, and it amounted to upwards of £38,000. In
this Peters took an active part. Ludlow says: "He was a diligent and
earnest solicitor for the distressed Protestants of the valleys of Piedmont."
Soon after the affair of the persecuted Waldenses was concluded the
Protector formed an alliance, offensive and defensive, with the French, in
which it was agreed that Dunkirk should be delivered up to him. In
consequence of this agreement six thousand men were sent over to join
the French army, and Peters received a commission to attend them thither.
The town of Dunkirk, in consequence of this league, was taken from the
Spaniards, and on the 26th of June, 1658, was delivered to Colonel
Lockart, Cromwell's ambassador at the French Court.
Lockart wrote the following letter to Secretary Thurloe:—

"Dunkirk, July
8-18th, 1658.

"May it please your Lordship,

"I could not suffer my worthy friend, Mr. Peters, to come away from
Dunkirk without a testimony of the great benefits we have all received
from him in this place, where he hath laid himself forth in great
charity and goodness in sermons, prayers, and exhortations, in visiting
and relieving the sick and wounded; and, in all these, profitably
applying the singular talent God hath bestowed upon him to the chief
ends, proper for an auditory. For he hath not only showed the soldiers
their duty to God, and pressed it home upon them, I hope with good
advantage, but hath likewise acquainted them with their obligations of
obedience to his Highness's government and affection to his person.
He hath laboured amongst us here with such goodwill, and seems to
enlarge his heart towards us, and care of us for many other things,
the effects whereof I design to leave upon that Providence which has
brought us hither.... Mr. Peters hath taken leave at least three or four
 times, but still something falls out which hinders his return to
England. He hath been twice at Bergh, and hath spoke with the
Cardinal (Mazarin) three or four times; I kept myself by, and had a
care that he did not importune him with too long speeches. He
returns, loaden with an account of all things here, and hath
undertaken every man's business. I must give him that testimony, that
he gave us three or four very honest sermons; and if it were possible
to get him to mind preaching, and to forbear the troubling himself
with other things, he would certainly prove a very fit minister for
soldiers. I hope he cometh well satisfied from this place. He hath
often insinuated to me his desire to stay here, if he had a call. Some
of the officers also have been with me to that purpose; but I have
shifted him so handsomely as, I hope, he will not be displeased. For I
have told him that the greatest service he can do us is to go to
England and carry on his propositions, and to own us in all other
interests, which he hath undertaken with much zeal."

This letter lets us see what were some of Peters' weaknesses. He was
vastly loquacious, so that Colonel Lockart had to see to it that he did not
"importune the Cardinal with too long speeches," and he was conceited,
self-opinionated, and meddlesome, interfering in matters beyond his
province, so that the Colonel was heartily glad to be rid of him from
Dunkirk.
That there was humour in Hugh Peters, not unfrequently running into
profanity, would appear from a work, "The Tales and Jests of Mr. Hugh
Peters, collected into one volume; published by one that hath formerly
been conversant with the Author in his lifetime; dedicated to Mr. John
Goodwin and Mr. Philip Nye." London, 1660.
These appeared in the same year under a different title—"Hugh Peters, his
figaries, or his merry tales and witty jests both in city, town, and country."
It was reprinted by James Caulfield in 1807.
A few of these will suffice.
Peters had preached for two hours; the sands in the hour-glass had run
out. He observed it, and turning it over, said to his hearers: "Come, let us
have another glass!"
Once he preached: "Beware, young men, of the three W's—Wine, Women,
and Tobacco. Now Tobacco, you will say, does not begin with a W. But
what is Tobacco but a weed?"
Another of his jests in the pulpit was, "England will never prosper till one
hundred and fifty are taken away." The explanation is L L L—Lords,
Lawyers, and Levites.
Preaching on the devils entering into the swine (S. Mark v. 23), he said
that the miracle illustrated three English proverbs:—
1. That the devil will rather play at small game than sit out.
2. That those must needs go forward whom the devil drives.
3. That at last he brought his hogs to a fair market.
It was a favourite saying of Peters that in Christendom there were neither
scholars enough, gentlemen enough, nor Jews enough; for, said he, if
there were more scholars there would not be so many pluralists in the
Church; if there were more gentry, so many born would not be reckoned
among them; if there were more Jews, so many Christians would not
practise usury.
One rainy day Oliver Cromwell offered Peters his greatcoat. "No, thank
you," replied his chaplain; "I would not be in your coat for a thousand
pounds."
Discoursing one day on the advantage Christians had in having the Gospel
preached to them—"Verily," said he, "the Word hath a free passage
amongst you, for it goes in at one ear and out at the other."
Preaching on the subject of duties, he said:—
"Observe the three fools in the Gospel, who, being bid to the wedding
supper, every one had his excuse—
"1. He that had hired a farm and must go see it. Had he not been a fool,
he would have seen it before hiring it.
"2. He that had bought a yoke of oxen and must go try them. He also was
a fool, because he did not try them before he bought them.
"3. He that married a wife, and without complement said he could not
come. He too was a fool, for he showed that one woman drew him away,
more than a whole yoke of oxen did the former."
Peters, invited to dinner at a friend's house, knowing him to be very
wealthy and his wife very fat, said at table to his host, "Truly, sir, you have
the world and the flesh, but pray God you get not the devil in the end."
The copy of the Tales and Jests of Hugh Peters in the British Museum has
notes to some of them, showing that the writer regarded a certain number
as genuine anecdotes of Peters. Most of the others are either older stories,
or else have little or no wit in them.
The above anecdotes are some of those thus noted.
That Hugh Peters was a wag Pepys lets us know, for he speaks of a
Scottish chaplain at Whitehall, after the Restoration, a Dr. Creighton,
whose humour reminded the diarist of Peters: "the most comical man that
ever I heard; just such a man as Hugh Peters."
At the Restoration he was executed as a regicide. He was not directly
implicated in the King's death, and all that he could be accused of was
using words incentive to regicide. That he had been the executioner was
not charged against him. There was no evidence. The accusations Hugh
Peters had to meet were that he had encouraged the soldiers to cry out
for the blood of the King, whom he had likened to Barabbas; that he had
preached against him; that he had accused the Levites, Lords, and
Lawyers—the three L's, or the Hundred and Fifty, in allusion to the
numerical value of the numbers—as men who should be swept out of the
Commonwealth; that he had declared the King to be a tyrant, and that the
office of King was useless and dangerous.
Peters pleaded that he had been living fourteen years out of England, and
that when he came home he found that the Civil War had already begun;
that he had not been at Edgehill or Naseby; that he had looked after three
things only—the introduction into the country of what he considered to be
sound religion, the maintenance of learning, and the relief of the poor. He
further stated that on coming to England he had considered it his duty to
side with the Parliament, and that he had acted without malice, avarice, or
ambition.
The jury, with very little consultation, returned a verdict of guilty, and he
was sentenced to death.
On the 16th October Coke, the solicitor for the people of England who had
acted against the King at his trial, and Hugh Peters, who had stood and
preached that no mercy should be shown him, were to die.
On the hurdle which carried Coke was placed the head of Harrison, who
had been executed the day before—a piece of needless brutality, which
the people who lined the streets indignantly resented. On the scaffold
Coke declared that for the part he had borne in the trial of Charles I he in
no way repented of what he had done. Hugh Peters was made to witness
all the horrible details of Coke's execution, the hanging, the
disembowelling. He sat within the rails which surrounded the scaffold.
According to Ludlow: "When this victim (Coke) was cut down and brought
to be quartered, one Colonel Turner called to the sheriff's men to bring Mr.
Peters to see what was doing; which being done, the executioner came to
him, and rubbing his bloody hands together, asked him how he liked that
work. He told him he was not at all terrified, and that he might do his
worst, and when he was on the ladder he said to the sheriff, 'Sir, you have
butchered one of the servants of God before my eyes, and have forced me
to see it, in order to terrify and discourage me; but God has permitted it
for my support and encouragement.'"
A man upbraided Peters with the King's death. "Friend," said Peters, "you
do not well to trample upon a dying man: you are greatly mistaken; I had
nothing to do in the death of the King."
As he was going to the gallows, he looked about him and espied a man
with whom he was acquainted, and to him he gave a piece of money,
having first bent it; and he desired the man to carry that piece of gold to
his daughter as a token, and to assure her that his heart was full of
comfort, and that before that piece would reach her hand he would be
with God in glory. Then the old preacher, who had lived in storms and
whirlwinds, died with a quiet smile on his countenance.
That a considerable portion of the community regarded the execution of
the regicides as a crime, and those who suffered as martyrs, would appear
from the pains taken to vilify their memory when dead, and attempts
made to justify their execution.
The authorities for the life of Hugh Peters are mainly: Memoirs of Edmund
Ludlow, 1771; B. Whitelocke's Memorials of English Affairs, 1732;
Rushworth's Collections, 1692; Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Time,
1724; John Thurloe's Collection of State Papers, 1742; J. B. Felt's
Ecclesiastical History of New England, 1855; Benjamin Brooke's Puritans,
1813, Vol. III; The Trial of Charles I and of Some of the Regicides, in
Murray's Family Library, 1832; the Rev. Samuel Peters' A History of the
Rev. Hugh Peters, New York, 1807; An Historical and Critical Account of
Hugh Peters (with portrait), London, 1751, reprinted 1818; Felt (Joseph
B.), Memoir, a Defence of Hugh Peters, Boston, 1857; Colomb (Colonel),
The Prince of Army Chaplains, London, 1899; also Gardiner's (S. R.)
History of the Commonwealth, and the Dictionary of National Biography,
passim.
 JAMES POLKINGHORNE, THE
WRESTLER
James Polkinghorne, the noted champion wrestler of Cornwall, was the
son of James Polkinghorne, who died at Creed, 18th March, 1836. The
wrestler James was born at S. Keverne in 1788, but there is no entry of his
baptism in the parish register.
Cornish wrestling was very different from that in Devon—it was less brutal,
as no kicking was allowed. The Devon wrestlers wore boots soaked in
bullock's blood and indurated at the fire, and with these hacked the shins
of their opponents, who wore as a protection skillibegs, or bands of hay
twisted and wrapped round their legs below the knee.
I have so fully described the wrestling in my Devonshire Characters and
Strange Events, that it is unnecessary here to go over the same ground
more than cannot be helped.
There was a Cornish jingle that ran as follows:—
Chacewater boobies up in a tree,
Looking as whish'd as ever could be,
Truro men, strong as oak,
Knock 'em down at every stroke—

that had reference to the wrestling matches.

In 1816 Polkinghorne, who had become the innkeeper of the "Red Lion," S.
Columb Major, wrestled with Flower, a Devonshire man of gigantic stature, and
threw him. Then Jackman, another Devonian, challenged Polkinghorne, and he
was cast over the head of the Cornishman, describing the "flying mare." But the
most notable contest in which Polkinghorne was engaged was with Abraham
Cann, the Devonshire champion. The match was for £200 a side, for the best of
three back-falls; and it took place on October 23rd, 1826, on Tamar Green,
Morice Town, Plymouth, in the presence of seventeen thousand spectators. I
have quoted the account already in my Devonshire Characters, but cannot omit
it here.
 JAMES POLKINHORN, THE FAMOUS CORNISH WRESTLER
From a drawing as he appeared in the Ring at Devonport on Monday, 23 October, 1826, when
he threw Abm. Cann, the Champion of Devonshire, for a stake of 200 sovereigns

"Tamar Green, Devonport, was chosen for the purpose, and the West was alive
with speculation when it was known that the backers meant business. On the
evening before the contest the town was inundated, and the resources of its
hotels and inns were taxed to the utmost. Truculent and redoubtable gladiators
flocked to the scene—kickers from Dartmoor, the recruiting-ground of the
Devonshire system, and bearlike huggers from the land of Tre, Pol, and Pen—a
wonderful company of tried and stalwart experts. Ten thousand persons bought
tickets at a premium for seats, and the hills around swarmed with spectators.
The excitement was at the highest possible pitch, and overwhelming volumes of
cheering relieved the tension as the rivals entered the ring—Polkinghorne in his
stockings, and Cann with a monstrous pair of shoes whose toes had been baked
into flints. As the men peeled for action such a shout ascended as awed the
nerves of all present. Polkinghorne had been discounted as fat and unwieldy,
but the Devonians were dismayed to find that, great as was his girth, his arms
were longer, and his shoulders immensely powerful. Three stone lighter in
weight, Cann displayed a more sinewy form, and his figure was knit for
strength, and as statuesquely proportioned. His grip, like Polkinghorne's, was
well known. No man had ever shaken it off when once he had clinched; and
each enjoyed a reputation for presence of mind and resource in extremity
beyond those of other masters of the art. The match was for the best of three
back-falls, the men to catch what hold they could; and two experts from each
county were selected as sticklers. The feeling was in favour of Cann at the
outset, but it receded as the Cornishman impressed the multitude with his
muscular superiority. Repeatedly shifting their positions, the combatants sought
their favourite 'holds.' As soon as Cann caught his adversary by the collar, after
a contending display of shifty and evasive form, Polkinghorne released himself
by a feint; and, amid 'terrible shouts from the Cornishmen,' he drove his foe to
his knees.
"Nothing daunted, the Devonian accepted the Cornish hug, and the efforts of
the rivals were superb. Cann depended on his science to save him, but
Polkinghorne gathered his head under his arm, and lifting him from the ground,
threw him clean over his shoulder, and planted him on his back. The very earth
groaned with the uproar that followed; the Cornishmen jumped by hundreds
into the ring; there they embraced their champion till he begged to be released;
and, amid cheers and execrations, the fall was announced to have complied
with the conditions. Bets to the amount of hundreds of pounds were decided by
this event.
"Polkinghorne now went to work with caution, and Cann was conscious that he
had an awkward customer to tackle. After heavy kicking and attempted
hugging, the Cornishman tried once more to lift his opponent; but Cann caught
his opponent's leg in his descent, and threw him to the ground first. In the
ensuing rounds both men played for wind. Polkinghorne was the more
distressed, his knees quite raw with punishment, and the betting veered in
Cann's favour. Then the play changed, and Cann was apparently at the mercy of
his foe, when he upset Polkinghorne's balance by a consummate effort, and
threw him on his back by sheer strength—the first that the sticklers allowed
him. Cann next kicked tremendously; but although the Cornishman suffered
severely, he remained 'dead game,' and twice saved himself by falling on his
chest.
"Disputes now disturbed the umpires, and their number was reduced to two. In
the eighth round Polkinghorne's strength began to fail, and a dispute was
improvised which occasioned another hour's delay. With wind regained and
strength revived, the tenth round was contested with absolute fury; and, taking
kicking with fine contempt, Polkinghorne gripped Cann with leonine majesty,
lifted him from the earth in his arms, turned him over his head, and dashed him
to the ground with stunning force. As the Cornishman dropped on his knee the
fall was disputed, and the turn was disallowed. Polkinghorne then left the ring
amid a mighty clamour, and by reason of his default the stakes were awarded to
Cann. The victor emerged from the terrific hug of his opponent with a mass of
bruises, which proved that kicking was only one degree more effective than
hugging.
"A more unsatisfactory issue could hardly have been conceived, and the rival
backers forthwith endeavoured to arrange another encounter. Polkinghorne
refused to meet Cann, however, unless he discarded his shoes."[7]
Various devices were attempted to bring them together again, but they failed.
Each had a wholesome dread of the other.
An account of the contest was written as a ballad and was entitled "A New Song
on the Wrestling Match between Cann and Polkinghorne," that was to be sung
to the tune "The Night I Married Susy," or else to "The Coronation."
Full accounts are to be found in The Sporting Magazine, London, LXVII, 165-6;
LXIX, 55-6, 215, 314-16, 344. In the Annual Register, chronicle 1826, 157-8.
Polkinghorne died at S. Columb, on September 15th, 1854, at the age of
seventy-six, twenty-eight years after his match with Cann. He was buried on
September 17th.
 HENRY TRENGROUSE, INVENTOR
Helston is a quaint old town, once of far more importance than at present. It
possessed an old castle, that has now disappeared. It was one of the six
stannary towns, and prior to 1832 returned two members to Parliament. It still
glories in its "Furry Day," when the whole town goes mad, dancing, in spite of
Methodism. It has on some of its old house-gables pixy seats, and it had a
grammar school that has had notable masters, as Derwent Coleridge, and
notable scholars, as Henry Trengrouse. It is the key and capital to that
wonderful district, rich in geological and botanic and antiquarian interest, the
Lizard.
The great natural curiosity of Helston is Loe Pool, formed by the Comber, a
small river, penned back by Loe Bar, a pebble-and-sand ridge thrown up by the
sea. The sheet of water lying between wooded hills abounds in trout, and white
swans float dreamily over the still water. The banks are rich with fern, and
yellow, white, and pink mesembryanthemum. Formerly the pool rose till it
overflowed the lower parts of the town; now a culvert has been driven through
the rocks to let off the water as soon as it has attained a certain height.
Henry Trengrouse was born at Helston, 18th March, 1772, the son of Nicholas
Trengrouse (1739-1814), and of Mary, his wife, who was a Williams.
The family had been long among the freeholders of Helston, and possessed as
well a small estate, Priske, in the parish of Mullion; but the family name is taken
from Tref-an-grouse, the House by the Cross, in the same parish.
Henry was educated in Helston Grammar School, and became, by trade, a
cabinet-maker.
On 29th December, 1807, when he was aged thirty-five, a rumour spread
through the little town that a large frigate, H.M.S. Anson, had been driven
ashore on Loe Bar, about three miles distant. Mr. Trengrouse and many others
hastened to the coast and reached the bar.
The Anson, forty-four guns, under the command of Captain Lydiard, had left
Falmouth on Christmas Eve for her station off Brest as a look-out ship for the
Channel Fleet.
A gale from the W.S.W. sprang up, and after being buffeted about till the 28th,
with the wind increasing, the captain determined to run to port. The first land
they made was the Land's End, which they mistook for the Lizard, and only
discovered their mistake when the cry of "Breakers ahead!" was heard from the
man on the look-out. They were now embayed, and in face of the terrible storm
it was impossible to work off, so both cables were let go. The Anson rode to
these till the early morning of the 29th, when they parted, and the captain, in
order to save as many lives as possible, decided to beach her on the sand off
Loe Pool. A tremendous sea was running, and as she took the beach only sixty
yards from the bar, she was dashed broadside on, and happily for the poor
fellows on board, heeled landwards. Seas mountains high rolled over her,
sweeping everything before them. Then her masts went by the board, her main
mast forming a floating raft from the ship almost to the shore, and over this
scrambled through the maddened waves most of those who were saved.

HENRY TRENGROUSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE ROCKET APPARATUS FOR SAVING LIFE AT SEA
From an oil painting by Opie the younger, reproduced by permission of Mr. H. Trengrouse
It was a terrible sight to witness for the hundreds of spectators who had by this
time collected on the beach, but it was almost impossible for them to render
any assistance.
At last, when all hands seemed to have left the ship, two stout-hearted
Methodist local preachers—Mr. Tobias Roberts, of Helston, and Mr. Foxwell, of
Mullion—made an attempt to reach her, so as to see if any one remained on
board. They succeeded, and were soon followed by others, who found several
people, including two women and as many children. The women and some of
the men were safely conveyed ashore, but the children were drowned. There
were altogether upwards of a hundred drowned, including the captain, who
stood by the frigate to the last. The exact number was never known, as many of
the soldiers deserted on reaching the shore.
The survivors salved a good deal from the wreck, amongst which were watches,
jewellery, and many articles of considerable value. They were placed all
together in a bedroom of the old inn at Porthleven, with a soldier with drawn
sword on guard. One of the beams that bent under such an unusual weight may
be seen bowed to this day. A local militia sergeant was soon afterwards sent to
Helston in charge of a wagon-load of these valuable goods, and when half-way
to his destination was accosted by a Jew, who offered him £50 in exchange for
his load. "Here is my answer," said the sergeant, presenting a loaded pistol at
his head, and the fellow hurriedly took his departure.
Much indignation was raised at the time by the way in which the victims of the
disaster were buried. They were bundled in heaps into large pits dug in the cliff
above, without any burial service being performed over them. It was customary
everywhere at that time for all bodies washed ashore to be interred by the
finder at the nearest convenient spot. But as a result of the indecent methods of
burial of the Anson victims, an Act of Parliament was framed by Mr. Davies
Gilbert, and passed on 18th June, 1808, providing "suitable interment in
churchyards and parochial burying-grounds" for all bodies cast up by the sea.
The Anson was a sixty-four gun frigate cut down to a forty-four, and had seen
much service. Among many fights, she figured in Lord Rodney's action on 12th
April, 1782, formed part of the fleet which repulsed the French squadron in an
attempt to land in Ireland in 1796, helped in the seizure of the French West
Indies in 1803, and in 1807 took part in the capture of Curaçao from the Dutch.
It was not long after her return from this latter place that she left Falmouth for
the cruise on which she met her fate.[8]
In 1902 the hull of the Anson, after having been submerged for ninety-five
years, came to light again. She was found by Captain Anderson of the West of
England Salvage Company, whose attention had been directed to the wreck by a
Porthleven fisherman. Unfortunately at the time the weather was so stormy that
Captain Anderson could not proceed with any efforts of salvage, and with the
exception of one visit of inspection the interesting relic was left untouched. But
in April, 1903, with a bright sky and a light breeze from the north-east, he
proceeded to the spot and inspected the remains. The hull of the vessel was not
intact, and several guns were lying alongside. One of these, about 10 ft. 6 in.
long, Captain Anderson secured and hoisted on to the deck of the Green Castle
by means of a winch, and afterwards conveyed it to Penzance. It was much
encrusted. Amongst the mass of débris also raised were several cannon-balls.
But to return to Henry Trengrouse, who had stood on the beach watching the
wreck, the rescue of some and the perishing of others.
Drenched with rain and spray, and sick at heart, Henry Trengrouse returned to
his home, and was confined to his bed for nearly a week, having contracted a
severe cold. The terrible scene had made an indelible impression on his mind,
and he could not, even if he had wished it, drive the thought away. Night and
day he mused on the means whereby some assistance could be given to the
shipwrecked, some communication be established between the vessel and the
shore.
He was a great friend of Samuel Drew, whose life was devoted to metaphysics,
and it was perhaps the contrast in the two minds that made them friends—one
an idealist, the other practical.
Trengrouse had a small competence, besides his trade, and he devoted every
penny that he could spare to experiments, first in the construction of a lifeboat,
but without satisfactory results.
The King's birthday was celebrated at Helston with fireworks on the green; and
as Henry Trengrouse looked up at the streak of fire rushing into the darkness
above and scattering a shower of stars, it occurred to him, Why should not a
rocket, instead of wasting itself in an exhibition of fireworks, do service and
become a means of carrying a rope to a vessel among the breakers? When a
communication has been established between the wreck and the shore, above
the waves, it may become an aerial passage along which those in distress may
pass to safety.
Something of the same idea had already occurred to Lieutenant John Bell in
1791, but his proposal was that a shot with a chain attached to it should be
discharged from a mortar. Captain George William Manby had his attention
drawn to this in February, 1807, and in August of the same year exhibited some
experiments with his improved life-preserving mortar to the members of the
Suffolk House Humane Society. By the discharge of the mortar a barbed shot
was to be flung on to the wreck, with a line attached to the shot. By means of
this line a hawser could be drawn from the shore to the ship, and along it would
be run a cradle in which the shipwrecked persons could be drawn to land.
Manby's mortar was soon abandoned as cumbrous and dangerous; men were
killed during tests; notwithstanding which he was awarded, £2000. The great
merit of Trengrouse's invention was that the rocket was much lighter than a
shot from a mortar, and was, moreover, more portable, and there was a special
line manufactured for it that would not kink, nor would it snap, because the
velocity of the rocket increased gradually, whereas that from a discharge of a
mortar was sudden and so great that the cord was frequently ruptured.
The distinctive feature of Trengrouse's apparatus consisted of "a section of a
cylinder, which is fitted to the barrel of a musket by a bayonet socket; a rocket
with a line attached to its stick is so placed on it that its priming receives fire
immediately from the barrel";[9] whereas a metal mortar could not be conveyed
to the cliff or shore opposite the scene of disaster without being drawn in a
conveyance by horses, and where there was no road with the utmost difficulty
dragged over hedges and ploughed fields by men. Not only so, but a shot
discharged by Captain Manby's mortar was liable to endanger life. Wrecks
generally happened in the dark, and then the shot would not be visible to those
on the wreck. But Trengrouse's rocket would indicate its track by the trail of fire
by which it was impelled, and could be fired from either the ship or the shore.
Trengrouse expended £3000 on his experiments, and sacrificed to this one
object—that of saving life—his capital, his business, and his health. He cut off
the entail on Priske, which had belonged to the family for several generations,
and sold it to enable him to pursue his experiments. There was much that was
pathetic in his life: there were the long and frequent journeys to London from
Helston, four days by coach, sometimes in mid-winter and in snowstorms, with
the object of inducing successive Governments to adopt the rocket apparatus,
meeting only with discouragement. Nor was this all. After all his own means had
been exhausted, he received a legacy of £500 under a brother's will, and this
sum he at once devoted to further endeavours with H.M. Government for the
general adoption of his rocket apparatus.
The Russian ambassador now stepped forward and invited Trengrouse to S.
Petersburg, where he assured him that, instead of rebuffs, he would experience
only the consideration due to him for his inventions. But Trengrouse's reply was,
"My country first"; and that country allowed him, after the signal services he
had rendered to humanity—to die penniless.
His original design was to supply every ship with a rocket apparatus; as vessels
were almost invariably wrecked before the wind, the line might the more easily
be fired from a ship than from the shore.
Trengrouse once met Sir William Congreve, who also claimed to be the inventor
of the war-rocket; and Trengrouse said to him in the course of their discussion,
"As far as I can see, Sir William, your rocket is designed to destroy life; mine is
to save life; and I do claim to be the first that ever thought of utilizing a rocket
for the saving of human lives."[10]
Trengrouse moreover invented the cork jacket or "life preserver." This was a
success, and has never been improved on. It has been the means of saving
many hundreds of lives. He also built a model of a lifeboat, that could not be
sunk, and was equal to the present lifeboats of the Royal Lifeboat Association in
all respects except the "self-righting" principle. It was not until February 28th,
1818, after many journeys to London, and much ignorant and prejudiced
objection that he had to contend against, such as is found so usual among
Government officials, that Trengrouse was able to exhibit his apparatus before
Admiral Sir Charles Rowley. A committee was appointed, and on March 5th it
reported favourably on the scheme.
In the same year the Committee of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House reported
in high terms on the invention, and recommended that "no vessel should be
without it."
Thereupon Government began to move slowly; in the House the matter was
discussed and haggled over. One speaker exclaimed: "You are guilty of sinful
negligence in this matter, for while you are parleying over this invention and this
important subject, thousands of our fellow-men are losing their lives."
 THE WRECK OF THE "ANSON"
From a sketch by H. Trengrouse

At last Government ordered twenty sets of the life-preserving rockets, but

afterwards resolved on making the apparatus itself, and paid Trengrouse the
sum of £50, the supposed amount of profit he would have made on the order.
Fifty pounds was all his ungrateful country could afford to give him. In 1821,
however, the Society of Arts pronounced favourably on his apparatus, and
presented Trengrouse with their silver medal and a grant of thirty guineas.
Through the Russian ambassador, the then Czar sent him a diamond ring, in
consideration of the great advantage his apparatus had proved in shipwrecks on
the Baltic and the Black Sea. Even this he was constrained to pledge, that he
might devote the money to his darling project.
With these acknowledgments of his services he had to rest contented; but ever
the news of lives having been saved through his invention was a solace to an
even and contented mind.
Henry Trengrouse died at Helston on February 19th, 1854.
As he lay on his death-bed with his face to the wall, he turned about, and with
one of his bright, hopeful smiles said to his son, "If you live to be as old as I
am, you will find my rocket apparatus all along our shores." They were his last
words; in a few minutes he had passed away.
The rocket apparatus is along the shores at 300 stations, but not, as he had
hoped, on board the vessels. He had despaired of obtaining that, yet that is
what he aimed at principally.
In April, 1905, owing to the loss of the Kyber on the Land's End coast, questions
were asked in the House of Commons relative to wireless telegraphy between
the lighthouses and the coast. On that occasion one of the most valuable
suggestions was made by a shipping expert, who considered that the Board of
Trade should make it compulsory that a light rocket apparatus should be carried
by all vessels, so that, when in distress, if near the coast, the crew could send a
rocket ashore. This marine engineer said: "On shore the rockets must be fired
by practised men, such as coastguards, because they have to strike a small
object; but on a vessel they have only to hit the land, and if people are about,
the line will quickly be seized and made fast. At present, too, horses and
wagons have to be used, and sometimes it is difficult to find a road leading
down to the spot from which help must be rendered. Probably for twenty
pounds an appliance could be kept on board a vessel which would send a line
ashore in less time and with more certainty than at present. When a vessel is
being blown ashore, I have seen rockets fired from the land return like a
boomerang to the cliff on account of the strength of the gale. In my judgment,
mariners should assist in their own salvation."
On this Mr. H. Trengrouse, grandson of the inventor, wrote to the Cornishman,
24th April, 1905:—
"Your suggestion in the Cornishman of the 15th instant ... that all vessels should
be compelled by the Board of Trade to carry this apparatus, is very practical,
and should, and I trust may, be soon adopted.
"It may interest your readers to learn that the inventor, my grandfather, the late
Mr. Henry Trengrouse, of Helston, urged this upon successive Governments
without any encouragement whatever, and I on two occasions have also
suggested it to the principals of the Marine Department of the Board of Trade,
who have informed me of a strong opinion always entertained, that on the
occasion of wreck, there would probably not be any one on board possessing
sufficient knowledge of the use of the apparatus to render it of any value; which
seems very strange indeed, and might be readily obviated by, at least, the
captain and officers of vessels being instructed in its use—surely simple enough.
My grandfather devoted much time to make it so; and the advantage of an
appliance for use on board is so palpable, and the loss of life during many years
by its absence so considerable, that it is extremely gratifying to observe a
renewed and increasing interest in the subject, which I hope, Sir, as you state,
being so important, may now be kept to the fore.
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