5 - Migration in Europe, 1800–1950

Summary

Karl Marx was not alone in spotting that large-scale migration in Europe signified a momentous social transformation, though he was the first to draw from this process a general revolutionary theory. He dated the disintegration of the old order to the last third of the fifteenth century and the first few decades of the sixteenth. Then, peasant proprietorship collapsed and the glue that held early modern Europe together – the seigniories, monasteries and baronies – was dissolved. His language becomes quite extravagant in describing this period. This was the moment when ‘great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled onto the labour-market’ (Marx 1976: 876). Again, ‘The process of forcible expropriation of the people received a new and terrible impulse from the Reformation. … The dissolution of the monasteries, etc. hurled their inmates into the proletariat’ (p. 881). Finally, quoting W. T. Thornton, Marx concludes that ‘the English working class was precipitated without any transitional state from its golden age to its iron age’ (p. 879).

With the collapse of the socialist experiments of the twentieth century it has now become de rigueur to ignore Marx's writings. However, where he is wrong he is gloriously wrong – in a way that permits counter-arguments to be made and new insights to develop. Because Marx saw the migratory process as sudden and violent, he inferred that a new, reactive and unwavering form of working-class consciousness would emanate in the towns and factories to challenge the emerging capitalist order.