was central to his life work. © Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images
What a legendary historian tells us about the contempt for today’s working class
Opinion by Kenan Malik • 8h
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. Yet I can even now picture myself first stumbling across:
EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class Audio Book – in a bookshop.
I had no idea about its cultural significance or its place in historiographic debates. 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.
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.
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.
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”.
Thompson’s most influential work was written at the high tide of working-class influence in British politics. Today, the old industrial working class, about the making of which Thompson wrote, has largely been unmade, politically marginalised and stripped of its social power. Few regard class as a fertile concept in historical thinking, fewer still as a foundation for progressive politics. Yet the very shifts that have led to the contemporary neglect of Thompson also make his arguments significant.
At the heart of Thompson’s book is a reimagining of class and class consciousness.
Class, he wrote, was “not a thing”, or a “structure”, but a “historical phenomenon” 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”.
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”. For Thompson, the working class “made itself as much as it was made”. This idea of agency, of people, even in the most auspicious circumstances, possessing the capacity to act on the world was central to his life work.
His book is not only a magnificent work of historical excavation but also a sumptuous tribute to the human spirit. 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.
His Marxism was, however, leavened by two other traditions, that of radical Protestantism, from the 17th-century Levellers and Diggers 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.
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”. 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”.
All these themes are perhaps even more relevant today than they were when Thompson wrote his book. 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.
Thompson’s empathy with those forced to struggle on an inhospitable social terrain has lessons for us, too. Today, the issue is the enormous condescension not of posterity but of the present: the contempt for working-class people, the hostility to benefit “scroungers”, 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. Thompson’s insistence that “their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experiences” is as necessary to acknowledge now as it was then.
There are, as critics have pointed out, holes in Thompson’s narrative.
Women are largely absent in The Making of the Working Class, 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 are times, too, when Thompson’s Romanticism shades uncomfortably close to a despair about modernity.
Nevertheless, for all the criticisms:
The Making of the English Working Class is not only a magnificent work of historical excavation 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. “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.”
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
17 Religious Facts People Get Wrong All The Time (msn.com)
“Modern Day Holy War” By @NicoleNogrady OUT NOW!
Put on the Armor of God
in Ephesians 6-13 Believe in Word of God and Sin No More! Repent! Confession is a Cleansing for the Soul and an Exorcism from a Catholic Priest to protect you from Satan and his Demons as long as you live by the Ten Commandments
Modern Day Holy War
must have been Spirit lead.#NicoleNogrady Excellent song and video!
I really love it TY 4 all
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Love this song and hopefully it will help wake more people up!!
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Excellent! One video and song capture the secret war being thrust upon us.
If we share, share, share , maybe this will wake some more people up.
My “weapon of choice” is Prayer. If you want to fight the battle to save America, join me
in this manner. “If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven,
and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
– 2 Chronicles 7:14 (KJ2000)
Good vs evil. If you aren’t on God’s side, you are doomed.
Repent, sin no more and believe in the light!
@NicoleNogrady If I see you at TP USA this weekend, I’d love to give you this book.
There’s a place in Phoenix called Canaan in the desert that is run by Lutheran nuns.
It has the stations of the cross and prayer benches. They also have a chapel where
you can go and pray. It’s about 15-20 minutes from the convention center.
Very beautiful and wonderful song, and if Trump is in it, you can always know that the United States will always stay with Jesus Christ, He’s gotten back to the constitution which is written for God, and We came here to set up a government that’s ALWAYS supposed to put Jesus First, and Then Everything else will fall into place, because He’s told us that He would always take Care of his People, so who do You think GOD IS TALKING ABOUT? WOULD IT BE THE SCUM COMMIE DEMONRATS? OR THE CHRISTIANS OF THIS GREAT COUNTRY, ALIEN YOURSELVES WITH THE ONE TRUE GOD, BECAUSE IN THE END THERE IS NOTHING THAT HE CAN’T DO. SO PRAY FOR THE UNITED STATES TO GET BACK THE GLORY WE ONCE HAD, BUT WE’VE GOT TO GET BACK TO THE SAVING GRACE OF OUR LORD, JESUS CHRIST!
There is no life without GOD
It’s right on target . We have an illegitimate criminal and his family inserted in the WH. They have no morals or values and no respect for decency in using each other for sex.
Bwt the father showering with daughter like it’s normal molesting her and Jill allows it
and it’s a mental illness and incest is against the law. This family thinks it’s normal!
Pretending to be RC yet he allows the FBI to spy on RC and try to get priests to target the people going to confession! Stupidity on how that is an abomination probably suggested by Obama a Christian hater who pretends to be Christian ! This family has the values of a backwoods family who wallow in gross sexual activity with family members and drugs !
Some may ask What does Notre Dame burning have to do with a holy war? Or contrails?
So called holy war is when jewish satanic American Ziofascists with hands of new Roman fake-protestant-so-called-Christians are actually sponsoring and conducting genocides of orthodox real-Christians all across Asia ?
Reject Zionism Evangelicals
Ο Καιρός Γαρ εγγύςFBI director warns antisemitism in US reaching ‘historic levels’ (bbc.com)
The True face of LGBTQ! Bunch of freaks in this world!! It is evil and not compatible with a decent society nor true Christianity! This is a taste of what God destroyed Sodom for. Mr @realDonaldTrump we must not condone such immorality and those in Colorado are guilty of RICO law violations. http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/202…
Here’s another one for inspiration!!
https://www.worshiptogether.com/songs/courageo…Very awesome song and sadly so true. Hopefully there will be many many people who hear this and listen to the words and will spread the song https://youtu.be/9d4ui9q7eDM?si… Leftards rail against Christians for wanting a world with more babies in it.
Leftards silent on the sexual abuse of children by the rich and powerful elites. ABSOLUTELY
Beautiful and I do believe this might be the end of times.
I pray every day for our country and President Trump!
Absolutely true!
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High Noon at 70: the politically loaded anti-western adored by US presidents.
The bulk of High Noon, then, is Kane meandering around town, searching for enough men to form the 12-14 person posse necessary to stamp out the threat. His most obvious right hand is his young deputy Harvey (Lloyd Bridges), a temperamental hothead who’s still bitter about Kane passing him over as his successor.
All the drunks and scalawags at the saloon are either too inebriated or cowardly to volunteer, or they’re holding some grudge against Kane from his tenure.
The congregants at church are more sympathetic to Kane’s cause, but some wonder
why they’re being asked to do the job of lawmen or why Kane doesn’t just leave town as planned. If Miller’s beef is with Kane, then his departure would save them all from danger, right?