I recall reading EP Thompson's 'making of the English Working Class' when I was doing my A level in History back in 1978. It was romantic tosh. I came from a very poor country whose working class had been prevented from rising up by paternalistic labour laws and the politicization of the Trade Unions. I knew that economic development is largely a case of the smarter and more innovative people in a particular class, mobilizing the resources of that class such that they themselves rise above it. What follows is 'Tardean mimetics'. People imitate what smarter people of their own sort have done. Immigrants turn up and they too adopt suitable 'mimetic targets'. The working class rises through work iff work becomes more productive. Marxist fools like Thompson though everything was about exploitation. We must rescue workers from exploitation by preventing capitalists from giving them jobs. What about the dead? We can't rescue them from exploitation. But, Thompson said, we could rescue them from 'condescension'. Apparently, there were all these snooty dons who would make rude remarks about Luddites and jeer at the handloom-weaver. This was very naughty of them. We should say nice things about poor people who died long ago. That's the whole point of teaching a useless subject at Uni.
Kenan Malik evidently agrees. He has an article in the Guardian praising Thompson.
It is not often that, as a teenager, you get captured by a 900-page tome (unless it has “Harry Potter” in the title). Even less when it is a dense book of history, telling in meticulous detail stories of 18th-century weavers and colliers, shoemakers and shipwrights.
Thompson misses out everything that was interesting about them- viz. that some of them stopped being weavers or colliers and became entrepreneurs. Thompson prefers a story of abject victimhood.
Yet I can even now picture myself first stumbling across EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in a bookshop. I had no idea about its cultural significance or its place in historiographic debates.
It came out in 1963 when being Leftie was cool. By the mid-Seventies, when Kenan read it, the thing was passe- it was the sort of book which Citizen Smith of the Tooting Liberation Front might have on his bookshelf. The other thing is that economic history had made great strides in the intervening period. Something like 'endogenous growth theory' was already in the air. Part of the reason for this was that people could see what was happening in the Asian 'Tiger' economies.
I would not have known what “historiography” meant, or even that such a thing existed. But I can still sense the thrill in opening the book and reading in the first paragraph: “The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.” I did not know it was possible to write about history in that way.
It is a nonsensical way of speaking only comprehensible if you are steeped in vulgar Marxian jargon. Still, lots of stupid academics were writing in a pseudo-Hegelian manner back then. The fact is, it only makes sense to speak of a 'class' if there is a collective action problem which people with a particular trait in common can collectively solve- e.g. workers gaining counter-vailing power over the employer's cartel. Thus to speak of the righteous proletariat of Camelfukeristan, who have taken power from the evil Capitalists who don't use their camels for sex but try to make money from them, is to babble absurd bollocks.
I still have that old, battered, pencil-marked Pelican edition with George Walker’s engraving of a Yorkshire miner on the cover; a book into which I continue to dip, for the sheer pleasure of Thompson’s prose and because every reading provides a fresh insight.
I suppose Thompson wrote well enough. But something more is required from a historian.
Were Thompson still alive, he would have been 100 on Saturday. The occasion was marked by a small conference, in Halifax, a town in which Thompson lived for many years, while teaching in Leeds and writing his book. But beyond that, there has been little fanfare.
Because my generation were steered away from that fool by our History teachers. Kenan studied Science.
Still in print more than 60 years after it was first published, The Making of the English Working Class has acquired an almost mythic status. Thompson himself, though, has faded from our cultural horizon. The historian Robert Colls noted a decade ago that when, in 2013, Jeremy Paxman asked, in the semi-finals of University Challenge, who wrote The Making of the English Working Class?, “nobody knew”.
Nobody reads Hobsbawm or Thompson though both are popular in India.
Thompson’s most influential work was written at the high tide of working-class influence in British politics.
No. That was in 1945 when Labour won the election. But it screwed up economically. It turned out that the working class would even vote for a belted Earl, like Douglas-Home (who had lost his seat in 1945) rather than a party which wanted to Nationalize everything and force the British public to queue up for a butter substitute made from monkey-nuts. A sex-scandal cost the Tories a lot of votes and Wilson, who was a University don not a cloth capped Trade Unionist, squeaked in by four seats.
Today, the old industrial working class, about the making of which Thompson wrote, has largely been unmade,
Thompson did not write about the mill-workers of the second half of the nineteenth century. But that was a story of 'craft unions' insisting on preserving 'wage differentials'. This was the huge headache Labour faced in the Sixties and Seventies. Finally, the voter decided the Trade Union leaders could go fuck themselves.
politically marginalised and stripped of its social power.
Kenan can remember a time when working class people would force the Queen, Gor bless 'er, to eat jellied eels and dance the hokey cokey.
Few regard class as a fertile concept in historical thinking,
Nope. It is fertile if there is a collective action problem with clear eligibility criteria for inclusion in the class.
fewer still as a foundation for progressive politics.
If by 'progressive' you mean stupid virtue signalling- sure.
Yet the very shifts that have led to the contemporary neglect of Thompson also make his arguments significant.
There was no shift. Thompson was writing for Commie nutters. No such beasts can now be found.
At the heart of Thompson’s book is a reimagining of class and class consciousness.
No. At its heart is sentimentality. He could as easily have gassed on about the suffering of ponies employed in the collieries or the unspeakable sexual humiliation endured by Welsh sheep.
Class, he wrote, was “not a thing”, or a “structure”, but a “historical phenomenon”
everything is a historical phenomenon unless it is shite you pulled out of your arse.
through which the dispossessed “as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs”.
The dispossessed try to get the fuck away from places where they are as poor as shit. That's why Kenan's parents left India. There is little point in a bunch of people who keep getting robbed and raped articulating the identity of their interests as raped and robbed people. It would be better to pretend to be well hard. Alternatively, why not emigrate to a place where you are not known to be an easy target?
Thompson was arguing against both the conservative view of class relations as describing “the harmonious coexistence of groups performing different ‘social roles’” and a form of economic determinism that imagines, as he put it later in an interview, that “some kind of raw material like peasants ‘flocking to factories’” could be “processed into so many yards of class-conscious proletarians”.
There has to be a degree of harmonious coexistence at a place of work otherwise it goes bankrupt sooner rather than later. As for people 'flocking to factories', they face a collective action problem and are easily identifiable as a class. A Trade Union organizer is likely to approach them. However, the employers may forestall Unionization by rewarding loyalty in various ways.
For Thompson, the working class “made itself as much as it was made”.
In England, sure- because the industrial revolution was an example of endogenous growth.
This idea of agency, of people, even in the most inauspicious circumstances, possessing the capacity to act on the world was central to his life work.
People can act on the world. They are much like cats in this respect. That is why making miaowing noises is central to my life work.
His book is not only a magnificent work of historical excavation but also a sumptuous tribute to the human spirit
Sadly, he died before he could pay a sumptuous tribute to the feline spirit. Did you know that many Victorian cats were forced to catch mice in the houses of wealthy Capitalists? Yet, to this day, there are Professors of History who are condescending to cats and who try to stroke them and give them tasty treats instead of expressing empathy for the great sufferings and yet greater fortitude displayed by proletarian felines over the the centuries. Who built the pyramids? It wasn't the Jews as I can personally testify because when I was President of the LSE India Society I arranged a joint function with the Jewish Society hoping that their atavistic instinct would assert itself and they'd build us a nice pyramid. Sadly, they simply scoffed down the samosas and left after expressing disappointment that no beer or wine had been provided. By contrast, my neighbour's cat, which was supposedly lost, turned up in Paris. It had built a glass pyramid at the Louvre. I confess, I was already drunk by the time I got there and had to try to sober up by drinking a few glasses of Pernod. Still, I had no difficulty recognizing the cat in question even though it said miaou rather than miaow. I should explain, everything has subtitles when I'm in France though, admittedly, the same thing happens when I get drunk in Kilburn.
Thompson was a Marxist, a member of the Communist party who left in disgust in 1956, after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution, and helped found the New Left.
Useless shitheads. Perry Anderson was a leading light. I suppose Ralph Miliband wasn't wholly useless. But his sons were.
His Marxism was, however, leavened by two other traditions, that of radical Protestantism, from the 17th-century Levellers and Diggers
Why not John Ball and the Lollards?
to the later dissenters such as Quakers and Baptists, and of Romanticism, most powerfully articulated by William Blake, the subject of Thompson’s final, posthumously published, book. This dissenting, romantic Marxism is deeply imprinted in Thompson’s historical scholarship, his polemical debates and his political activism.
Guys who made money generations ago might still paint a romantic picture of their impoverished ancestors.
The most celebrated line from The Making of the English Working Class is Thompson’s avowal “to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan” from the “enormous condescension of posterity”.
after which we can rescue the poor sexually molested sheep from the jeers of posterity. England began its rise by exporting wool. Yet no one sheds a tear for the hundreds of thousands of working class English sheep who were brutally sodomized by capitalistic shepherds. Indeed, I recall Lord Meghnad Desai telling me with tears in his eyes that every time he sees the Speaker of the House of Lords take his seat on the 'Woolsack' that chamber is filled with the spectral bleating of buggered sheep. Well, maybe it wasn't Meghnad Desai. But the fellow was certainly as drunk as a Lord.
What he meant was that from our vantage point, a movement such as the Luddites, textile workers who, in the early 19th century, opposed the introduction of new machinery, and destroyed them, might seem backward and irrational, their very name a byword for senseless opposition to technological innovation. Yet theirs was not, in Thompson’s eyes, “blind opposition to machinery,” but rather a fight against the “‘freedom’ of the capitalist to destroy the customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by… beating-down wages”.
The reason we all turned against Thompson was because he was implicitly defending 'featherbedding' and 'Dad's lads' type practices perpetrated by the craft unions. By the mid Seventies, the UK could not produce a decent car and its shipbuilding industry was in terminal decline. First Japan, then South Korea overtook Britain. Working class voters had had enough of the 'labour aristocracy'. Rupert Murdoch became a hero because he broke the power of the Print workers. The Sun newspaper decided how the male working class would vote. To become PM, Tony Blair had to suck up to Murdoch.
All these themes are perhaps even more relevant today than they were when Thompson wrote his book.
No. Britain simply doesn't have the industrial base to sustain an industrial proletariat. Elasticity of demand is rising even in 'non-tradeables' because technology is making everything tradeable.
His understanding of class not as a thing but as a relationship, and one not given but forged out of struggle, is as meaningful to this post-industrial age as it was in the analysis of the coming of industrialisation.
No. There is no 'collective action problem'. There is only the opportunity to get together and do stupid shit. During the industrial revolution, things like getting rid of the Corn Laws- i.e. cheapening food- did affect relative competitiveness.
Thompson’s empathy with those forced to struggle on an inhospitable social terrain has lessons for us, too.
Write worthless shite about the suffering of long dead donkeys.
Today, the issue is the enormous condescension not of posterity but of the present: the contempt for working-class people,
by working-class people iff those working-class people are indeed contemptible
the hostility to benefit “scroungers”,
scrounger is a working class word. Kenan is drawing attention to the contempt workers feel for idlers.
the derision of those forced to use food banks, the indifference to injustice. It is visible also in the scorn for the supposed bigotry and conservatism of the working class or in the disdain of those who voted the wrong way or have become disillusioned with the left.
What about the scorn and derision faced by people with tiny todgers?
Thompson’s insistence that “their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experiences” is as necessary to acknowledge now as it was then.
My aspiration to be seen as a super-stud should be acknowledged by all and sundry.
There are, as critics have pointed out, holes in Thompson’s narrative. Women are largely absent in The Making of the Working Class,
what about homosexual sheep?
as is the wider world, especially the impact of slavery and colonialism on class consciousness, which is odd given the influence of working-class radicals on the abolition movement.
there were radicals who were quite poor, but they weren't 'working-class' because they earned money as 'brain-workers' or skilled artisans.
There are times, too, when Thompson’s Romanticism shades uncomfortably close to a despair about modernity.
Young peeps be wearing mini-skirts and doing the twist. Karl Marx would not have approved.
Nevertheless, for all the criticisms, The Making of the English Working Class is not only a magnificent work of historical excavation
it is a polemic as well as a protest against 'Economistic' Marxism and the idea that what working people really really want is money, sex and beach holidays in Franco's Spain.
but also a sumptuous tribute to the human spirit, to the capacity of people to transcend their circumstances and collectively to envision a better world.
This failed to happen in England. People could work hard and their family's could rise up into the ranks of the gentry but this had always been the case. It was pointless envisioning a world where avenues of advancement or the reward for thrift and enterprise were programmatically eliminated. The plain fact is, England was vulnerable to invasion. It could either get rich enough to defend itself with a mighty Navy or else it would be ruled by Frogs or some other breed of unclean Continentals.
“The art of the possible,” as Thompson wrote, “can only be restrained from engrossing the whole universe if the impossible can find ways of breaking back into politics, again and again.”
Any nation can do stupid shit. England itself made some bad decisions. But ordinary people had enough to lose to prevent them following political Pied Pipers off a cliff edge of reason.
Thompson, through his father, had a special connection to Bengal. One might say that the Subaltern school took inspiration from this book of his. But the Subaltern School was stupid and ignorant. Genuine subalterns were rising up and becoming Chief Ministers- or even the President of the Republic- while stupid Indian Professors were babbling nonsense on campuses in Europe and America.
Was there an Indian working class similar to the British working class? Yes. It was the Parsis who were landless labourers and artisans who came to Bombay to build ships and engage in petty commerce. They rose and rose. Still, it must be said one of the first Communist MPs to be elected in this country was a Parsi. Many may now be very rich, but they have an egalitarian spirit and a great work ethic. That's what I call working class. Sadly, not even the Tatas can preserve our great tradition of steel making. We may soon be the only G20 country unable to produce steel from raw materials. That's the sort of thing we should be worrying about rather than empathizing with Luddites, or Lollards or medieval sheep callously abandoned to the bestial lust of proto-capitalist shepherds.
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