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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT A LEGENDARY HISTORIAN TELLS US ABOUT THE CONTEMPT FOR TODAY’S
WORKING CLASS  
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Kenan Malik
February 4, 2024
The Guardian
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_ A century after his birth, EP Thompson’s empathy with those
facing scorn and condescension is more relevant than ever. The first
paragraph starts: “The working class did not rise like the sun at an
appointed time. It was present at its own making.” _

EP Thompson: the idea of people possessing the capacity to act upon
the world was central to his life work., (Photograph: Mirrorpix // The
Guardian)

 

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_ 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
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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_
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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
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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
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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 inauspicious 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
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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
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“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 ]_

* E.P. Thompson
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* E. P. Thompson
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* Working Class
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* Working Class Studies
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* English working class
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* England
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* Great Britain
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* Marxism
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* class struggle
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* History
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* Labor Historians
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* radical historians
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* Communist Party Great Britain
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