The Peterloo Massacre took place in central Manchester on Monday 16th August 1819. 60,000 people gathered to call for the right to vote(then very restricted). Soldiers were sent in to disperse the protest and 18 people were killed and hundreds injured as a result.
Mike Leigh made a well received film on Peterloo in 2018 and speaking at a film festival in Malta on 29th June he argued that Peterloo protesters would be ‘horrified and mystified’ by those who didn’t vote. Given the countries around the world where a democratic vote does not exist or is constrained he has a point.
I will certainly be voting on July 4th (for socialism as usual) but it would be an odd historian of Chartism who swerved a chance to vote.
The Chartists and the Suffragettes did campaign for the vote for working men and women and eventually by 1928 the fight was won.
Even so there were and other traditions. Owenite Socialism in the 1830s and 1840s had an element of opting out of market capitalism altogether and the Co-Operative movement from 1844 sought a kind of parallel stream. It later became allied with the Labour Party dating depending on your perspective from 1900, 1906 or 1918.
By that time minority traditions of extra-Parliamentary and anti-Parliamentary socialism and anarchism had emerged. William Morris was associated for a period with some aspects of this in the 1880s. Here the view was that achieving change through Parliament was impossible and hence the vote was not central.
These arguments and debates continue today but as above I still remain with Mike Leigh on the vote, however little real choice it often offers- see Paul Foot’s newly republished The Vote.
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