Peterloo Massacre, Manchester, 16 August 1819. 15th Hussars charging unarmed crowd gathered near St Peter's Church to hear speeches supporting Reform of Parliament and repeal of Corn Laws. 6 killed, about 70 wounded treated in local infirmaries. Wood engraving. n 2019 Jeremy Corbyn, running for the highest office in the UK from the left of the Labour Party, used the compelling slogan, “For the many, not the few”.
Although capital was consolidating its power over land, labour and life via the state, and its military, Shelley had a sense that the 60 000 gathered in Peterloo were an intimation of a new and more democratic — democratic in the expansive sense of the term — future.
That state has always functioned in service of a form of extractive capital that makes alliances with different elites to create a society that serves the few and not the many, with, of course, the few and the many both being originally formed in terms of racially designated categories. The fundamental logic of the form of racial capitalism developed in South Africa was that of cheap migrant African labour sustained by the unpaid work of African women in rural areas. Although this continues — for instance on the Marikana platinum mines where striking workers were massacred in 2012 — South Africa is now an overwhelmingly urban society devastated by mass structural unemployment, especially among the youth. Most young people have never worked in a formal job.
It was a moment when the many were able to shape their lives within emancipatory politics. However, due to the nature of the transition, and the various compromises that were made along the way, a new deal emerged. A deal between white and black elites to continue the capitalist system while renegotiating the racial distribution of its spoils.
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