ABSTRACT
For Lenin, imperialism, the existence of a labour aristocracy and the apparent stability of advanced capitalist countries were inseparably linked. It was, he claimed, only the development of a new form of empire-that based on foreign investment-which made it possible for the bourgeoisie to buy off and neutralize a key section of the working class. If this argument is correct, the period of English history that should bear it out most conclusively is the mid-nineteenth century. It is at this particular point that one gets a massive switch to capital export, a general increase in wage differentials and the rapid disintegration of a previously powerful working-class movement. What this chapter will be trying to do is establish a connection: to show-as far as can be done locally-that these developments were indeed part of an overall politicoeconomic process of social restabilization. Oldham provides clear examples of all the developments mentioned. It possessed an engineering industry which supplied machines for many foreign textile industries and which had expanded to employ over 20 per cent of the town’s male labour force by 1861. Over the same period (and not unconnected with this development of engineering) there was a marked increase in economic polarization within the working population. As a combined result of increasing wage differentials and a sharp rise in the number of low-paid jobs (see figure 5, page 76), the real earnings of the bottom half of the labour force actually fell slightly between 1839 and 1859 at a time when those higher up the scale enjoyed quite a sharp rise.3 And finally, and as noted in an earlier chapter, there was a significant increase in social segregation between skilled and unskilled and English and Irish, all coinciding with the collapse of a previously strong working-class movement.
