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The Pre Industrial Working Class

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In this present article I wish to consider a particular episode in the early contemporary activity of the pre-industrial working-class, or at least a precise and common aspect of it: the quintessential purposed land-riot. In modern divided economic conflict its role is now less decisively familiar – for good practical reasons. For semi-feudal rural societies in past decades we can still observe the logic being referred to. Chiefly among them the phenomenon of pulling down established / newly-established dividing fences and burning hedgerows as a defeated act by already unresolved working-class / peasant militancy. In formal results these are still relatively clear in general massed terms: (i) mass-confrontation followed by (ii) mass-expulsion and (iii) mass-defeat, was, and remains, the norm of implicit results. The hypothesis remains rightly justified in the case of the early industrial land-action, if not exact. Yet the effective return of the ‘land - question’ to several different sorts of conservative movements of agricultural labourers in several developing or even well-advanced capitalist countries and with it the straightforward organising action - predominantly accepted in Latin America, still moreso in Eastern Europe -, in recent years ensures the technique deserves a degree of historical thought and comment. There exists today obviously some about under-bearing for the interest; as has been qualified in other features as a debate. Such conjecture rests on the
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