The 14th March marks a number of interesting events concerning people whose lives, in one way or another, caused a bit of a stir.
Karl Marx, philosopher, historian, political economist and theorist, sociologist and revolutionary socialist, died in London 128 years ago today 14th March 1883. He apparently developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for 15 months. The illness brought on a bronchitis and pleurisy which killed him. He had lived in Germany, France, Belgium and England and, although born in Prussia, he died a stateless person. He was buried by friends and family in Highgate Cemetery, London three days later.
Having been expelled from Germany and France, he moved to Belgium, where, together with Friedrich Engels (whom he had met 4 years earlier in Paris) he put together The Communist Manifesto, first published in London on 21st February 1848, in German as "Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei"
It outlined the ten short term demands of the party:
1- Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2- A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3- Abolition of all right of inheritance
4- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5- Centralisation or credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6- Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7- Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8- Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9- Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10- Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Marx held that the implementation of these policies would be a precursor to a stateless and classless society.
All of this pretty explosive stuff. If one looks at it carefully there are things which even the conservative party have considered such as equal liability of all to labour, and (remember Norman Tebbit's 'On yer bike') a more equitable distribution of the population over the country. Note also the matter of national credit. In 1848 all of this probably seemed like science fiction, which brings us from a death to a birth.
On the 14th March 1879, four years before the death of Marx, Albert Einstein was born.
He was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, in the German Empire. He is regarded as the father of modern physics. In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". His most popular formula however is E= mc2. He considered a lot of other things to be relative, his citizenship for one. From 1896 to 1901 he was considered stateless, from 1901 to 1911 Swiss, from 1911-12 Austrian, from 1914-1933 German. Stateless again until 1940 when he became a citizen of the United States.
He escaped from Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in the U.S. On the eve of WWII he helped alert President Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic weapon, and recommended that the United States begin similar research. He promoted quite a large explosion, but later, together with Bertrand Russell, he signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which highlighted the danger of Nuclear Weapons. Yet another explosive manifesto issued in London of the 9th July 1955.
London seems to be quite the venue for publishing manifestos.
My last explosion involves the men who were convicted in 1975 of bombing the Mulberry Bush and Tavern in the Town Public Houses in Birmingham on the 21st November 1974.
On the 14 March 1991, after 16 years imprisonment, their third appeal was successful and they were freed.
Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker
(in no particular order.)
There is no specific manifesto to turn to, but the collapse of the case, and others like it, caused the Home Secretary to set up a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in 1991. The commission's report, in 1993, lead to the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 and the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 1997. I guess the report could be considered a manifesto of sorts.
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