#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) France, UCL AL #321 - Story, 1723: The Black Act, the bloody genesis of British capitalism (ca, de, it, fr, pt)[machine translation]

 The Black Act of 1723 is a body of legislation of incredible violence,

tailor-made by the English bourgeoisie to criminalize any obstacle to its
appropriation of previously communal property, the increase of its hold on social
life, the progressive privatization of any production. Combined with the movement
of closure of agrarian and village spaces (enclosure), and with rural
concentration, it initiated a reign of the law which was to form the grim bases
of nascent capitalism, a model still active today, now globalized. ---- With the
XVIII th century fledgling English, see also the day of new social and political
paradigms. Three civil wars (1642-1651) opposed - to sketch it quickly - the
supporters of a divine and absolutist royalty, rather Catholic, to those of a
parliamentary government. Called Tories, the first will have to give in to the
parliamentary whigs, whose military champion Oliver Cromwell, a real Protestant
fanatic, will take advantage of the war to attach Ireland to the Crown. This fall
the rest of the head of Charles I er when it beheaded in 1649.

Far from representing democratic progress, the triumph of the Whig party -
liberal, bourgeois, predominantly Protestant, and aggressive mercantilism -
rather marks the triumph of a new ideological model and the conscious and
definitive break with the feudal model of old regime. The Whigs are therefore in
power, and keep the monarchy distant. Owner class, the landed gentry forms the
basis of the party. The idea that the land is no longer just a symbol and a rent,
but also a source of profit, is natural to the gentry.

Villainous land consolidation
For several centuries now, it has been trying to get English open field
agriculture to be more and more fenced with hedges and walls, on the pretext of
improving agricultural yields, crop rotations, or even facilitate journeys or
reduce property disputes ...

Enclosing the land is still bringing them all under a single owner, and moving
from a food crop to a culture of financial income: sheep, wheat, barley. Finally,
it means recovering the land devolved to the commons to increase the areas that
can be exploited by a single land owner. But at the end of the 17th century , the
beginning of the 18th century , enclosure is far from being the rule of English
rurality, and the disparity is great from the north to the south of the country.

There are in fact opposed to it a right and a customary use, on which the peasant
world forms its collective: not only the rights of hunting, fishing, gleaning,
collecting peat, construction ... allow a life not too miserable, but they still
structure a rural society with its solidarities, a diversity of levels of
property and freedoms where serfdom is not the rule.

Shot of an open field mansion without an enclosure, the outbuildings (here, to
the northeast) are subject to rotation like the other plots.
Enclosure is therefore a movement to rationalize, as we would say today, the
agricultural landscape. It is also preparing the massification necessary for the
next industrial stages of nascent capitalism, barely fifty years later. Once
enclosed and assembled, the immense territory of a single lord can be adorned
with a "leisure" park . He hunts there and is entertained in a wooded garden
which is fashionable at this time.

The old commons are cut out as pasture for the sheep, and the land goes to
farmers paying rent, while the "freed" peasants , that is to say properly
licensed, are barred from the right "to access common land. , and[to]their
collective user rights."[1]An anonymous refrain of the time says it well: " The
law locks up the man or the woman, Who in common, steals the goose, But leaves
free the greatest felon, Who in the goose, steals the Common" .

The dispossessed will swell the ranks of illegal squatters, or the destitute who
go into exile in the cities. Strong of a great legal disorder, the gentry will
brutally destroy the communal rights and, by royalty or wage labor, make
precarious the peasants and peasants who remain in the fields.

Forest war
But, in the aftermath of the civil wars, England "presents the unhealthy
characteristics of a banana republic". Nepotism, prebends and privileges,
plutocracy, chaotic legislative system. A financial scandal breaks out - the
bubble (already !) Of the South Seas - which propels Sir Robert Walpole, formerly
treasurer of the kingdom, to the top of the Whig hierarchy in complete disarray.
With a terrible ambition, cruel, charming, peerless orator, supported by a strong
base in the earthly gentry, he manages to bring together the royal power and that
of the lower house ( House of Commons ). Historically, he inaugurates the office
of Prime Minister.

He will play a central role - of judge and executioner - in the play which is
being played at the same time in the south of the Kingdom, and whose consequences
will help establish the liberal base of the modern world. In October 1721, in
Hampshire, sixteen poachers, faces blackened with charcoal, attacked Farnham
Court, owned by the Bishop of Winchester, wounded a forest ranger, killed two
deer, and carried away three. Four of them are arrested, two of which will be
placed in the pillory. Those we will call the "blacks of Waltham », Do not stop
there. They go back to the bishop, take eleven deer this time, kill others. The
bishop leaves the reins to a villainous gamekeeper, a certain Heron, who
increases the fees, presses the peasants and peasants. Speculating on timber in
high demand, they punish peasant cutting, yet guaranteed by customary law.

Sir Robert Walpole, First Lord Treasurer, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Leader of
the Lower House.
Over two years of clandestine struggle, the Waltham Blacks will go after the
bishop's land, decimate his herd, burn his houses and destroy his wood. Imitated
the following year by the "Windsor Blacks", it is clear that a class logic is at
work. Blacks are supported and protected by the peasant community, and
retaliation is targeted as a result of abuse by a "forest bureaucracy ...
distinct interest group" and lords in the region. The Windsor group, for example,
targets not so much the royal estate of Windsor, but here also specific owners.

It is then a "King John" who appears in Hampshire, at the head of a band of
Blacks preoccupied with balancing the debts when the gentry refuses to pay the
artisans, farmers, exploited ... And then d Still others, individually or in
small groups, go blacking out, in an attempt to maintain rights widely and
cynically deprived of land through privatization. The deer for a gentleman's
hunt, or the deer slaughtered by the peasants: the symbol is central. By favoring
"the deer economy over those of the inhabitants" , the landowners want to assert
a stake, not of "available land, but[of]who used it.".

So the gentry feels humiliated and isolated in the face of the phenomenon of
blacking. It is the authority of a whole system which is abused by peasant
bandits and peasants. In London, Walpole finally heard his base. Events in the
south would undoubtedly have calmed down on their own had it not been for the
subject of poached deer to be brought up by the local gentry. The opportunity is
perfect for the minister to consolidate not only a political base, but also to
anchor more deeply the model of a new system.

On the one hand, he agitated a Jacobite conspiracy (supporters of a return of the
Stuart dynasty to the throne) which allowed him to suspend parliamentary activity
for a year (1722) and to have the troop stationed in the heart of London. On the
other hand, he wants to give pledges to the Whigs, victims of attacks by peasants
with blackened faces.

The Black act
The system Walpole and its political sensitivity want to establish is that of
private property and its value, which, for the spirit of the XVIII th century, is
not straightforward. Popular practice and imagination are still food, collective
and "shared", relationships are personalized and customary law. The standard of
the time is there.

On the pretext of fighting against the insolent excesses of blacking, Walpole
will launch the preparation of a law going in the exact opposite direction. It
will tackle the existing standard. "What should now be punished was not an
offense against people ... but an offense against property." As the property is
one thing, legislation can now take "the appearance of impartiality" of
neutrality. This in turn helps establish a superstructure ensuring that a class
is justified in controlling the life of an entire society.

The gentry feels humiliated and isolated in the face of the phenomenon of
blacking. It is the authority of a whole system which is abused by peasant
bandits and peasants.
So everything goes. Almost all the crimes of poachers become punishable by
capital punishment. Kill a deer, death. Cattle theft, death. Demolition of
sluices and pond causeways, death by hanging. Cutting down young trees, death.
Extortion and blackmail (recovery of stolen goods and money), death. It is a step
back two hundred years. Many of these offenses were punishable only by fines or
time in jail. The gentry did not ask for so much. But she rubs her hands with it.

The reign of law is a reign of terror
The very suspicion becomes a crime: to intrude "armed and disguised" (blackened
face) in a park is still worth death. Support criminals, death, always. Three
hundred and fifty misdemeanors and crimes are punishable by capital punishment.

This "reign of law" is a reign of terror with a twofold objective: to force a
paradigm shift, to control the population. In this England where people no longer
torture and where people are no longer worried about their religious opinions,
where disgrace is no longer worth the scaffold, it is the attack on property that
makes it rise.

Adopted in 1723, without discussion, by a majority Whig Parliament, the Black Act
is first and foremost the product and expression of a class, of the mentality of
this "strange junta" of merchants, landowners, business intermediaries and
speculators. , enriched former soldiers, presenting themselves as the only
bulwark on the return of the Stuarts and the Catholics.

Widely fantasized, the hypothesis of a Jacobites-Blacks collusion nevertheless
allows the Whigs to regularly enrich the Black Act with new crimes and to extend
its application outside of cases of poaching and the rural sphere, and to
integrate into it. "Crimes against public order, against the administration of
criminal justice, against property ... This law in itself therefore constituted a
complete and extremely severe penal code."[2]Initially planned for a period of
three years, the corpus is renewed and enriched regularly. It will take exactly
one hundred years to repeal it definitively.

Paradoxes of law
If the law is always been an arena and media reporting, which the XVIII th
century English between scientism and Enlightenment brings the capitalist
paradigm is a depersonalization of social relations, as a collective atomization
in the name of an alleged objectivity: that of an autonomous, impartial and
logical right, applying to categories of crimes and more to people as such.

On this basis, he posits the interests of the possessing aristocracy as having
universal value. We still live in this model. Paradox: with the objectification
of the law, it is a little arbitrariness which loses, was it at the cost of the
destruction of the commons, and of a lame law. Because by shifting the
dominant-dominated playing field into a new, capitalist framework, and even if
our feeling of injustice is "naturally" anchored in the notion of commons, the
generalized privatization of society produces an ideology of law. that the two
classes will be able to invoke for their own interests. Between 1750 and 1850,
around 16% of legal disputes relating to land rights were carried out by
plaintiffs from the working classes.

Criminalization of contestation, repressive outbidding, heavier penalties, ad hoc
laws , parallel codes, securing property owners, everything in the era of the
Forest War is reminiscent of ours, and the justified recourse of the Blacks to
sabotage and direct action when the legal arena is dysfunctional, would amply
justify that our time with widely violated rights, take the seed of these elders,
and imitate them.

Cuervo (UCL Aix-en-Provence)

To validate

[1] Edward P. Thomson, La Guerre des forêt , La Découverte, 2017. Unless
otherwise indicated, all quotes are taken from this book.

[2] Sir Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and Its
Administration from 1750 , London, 1948.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?1723-Le-Black-Act-genese-sanglante-du-capitalisme-britannique
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