Colin Skelly, "James O'Brien: a Moral Force Chartist?".
Paper presented at the New Socialist Approaches to History seminar, Institute of Historical Research, January 26th 2004
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O’Brien is the figure in the Chartist movement whose radical career can be supposed to represent the emergence of a historical materialist critique of nineteenth-century social conflict and to have developed proto-socialist solutions for this conflict. Certainly, from the perspective of later socialists looking for progenitors of their creed, O’Brien appears to fit with reasonable ease into a teleology of the development of socialist consciousness. O’Brien, especially during his editorship of the Poor Man’s Guardian between 1832 and 1835 promoted an influential analysis that saw class interests at the heart of political struggle. Arriving in London from Ireland in 1830, O‘Brien rapidly became acquainted with radicalism of various hues during the excitement of the Reform Bill agitation. Like other radicals O‘Brien drew on a variety of influences. He knew and learnt from Henry Hunt, William Cobbett and, crucially, Robert Owen and the London Owenites, especially Henry Hetherington. Accordingly, O’Brien saw social distress as rooted in the unequal relationship between labour and capital and it was this relationship that O‘Brien spent his political life trying to equalise.
However, though O’Brien went beyond the traditional radical programme locating inequality in the political sphere it was to a limited degree. To see O’Brien, as a pioneer of the welfare state or later socialist creeds is to take this important radical out of his own context and to fit him into a ‘rise of labour’ teleology. O’Brien was a radical of high intellectual ability, having been trained as lawyer in Dublin and London, but he was always a pragmatic politician of the working classes rather than a lasting contributor to socialist analysis. O’Brien sought not just social-welfare but, through political reform, to make a Britain where inequality could not be a social feature ‘by establishing the democratic principle in every department of society’. His ideas fed into the new avowedly socialist politics of the late-nineteenth century but were distinct from it.