Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes

Source: William Benbow, GRAND NATIONAL HOLIDAY, AND CONGRESS OF THE PRODUCTIVE CLASSES (1832), published by The Journeyman Press, London, 1977. Transcribed: by Rob Lucas Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes is a classic pamphlet of the British left. It was self-published by William Benbow - a publicist and pamphleteer who worked in a coffee house at 205 Fleet Street, London, after apparently having an early career as an unconventional preacher in Manchester. Benbow was an advocate of armed revolutionary insurrection as a means of accomplishing his “national holiday”, and was eventually arrested on 4th August 1839, to be jailed for sixteen months on charges of sedition. Maximilien Rubel, in his “Autopraxis historique du prolétariat”, sees a brilliant but naive prefiguration of various Marxist themes in Benbow’s pamphlet, largely in his emphasis upon the working class as an active social subject. Benbow also writes of a necessary “unity of thought and action”, but here the emphasis is on the unity of the working class in theory and practice, rather than a unity of theory and practice as such.