I've been traveling most of the day so I have to keep this post short. Much shorter than usual. Edward Palmer Thompson – who died in 1993 at the age of 69, was a British writer who wrote this extraordinary book – The making of the British working class ——This is a long social history, published in 1963, and considered a must-read for young leftists at that time. I read this book in the early 1970s as part of my rite of passage into left-wing intellectual thought, and although I prefer books of less than 800 pages (-:), I found it fascinating. When I read it recently I was reminded of it when I came across an article in the British Observer (February 4, 2024) – A legendary historian tells us about contempt for today's working class ——Kenan Malik.
I have the original Pelican paperback – here's the cover:
EP Thompson's book is a classic social history that traces the development of the British working class in the early industrial era.
For traditional Marxists, this is somewhat of a confrontation because they are accustomed to a deterministic historical narrative (historical materialism) in which the working class is shaped into servitude by capital.
EP Thompson believes that, in fact, the working class has the power to build its own future.
He considers the transition from feudalism to capitalism – which involved a structural shift from agricultural to industrial wealth, and from the transparent expropriation of surplus value through feudal arrangements determined by estate politics to the opaqueness hidden through specific property transformation of surplus value expropriation. Capitalist forms of wages—in which workers appear to be paid hourly wages during the working day—create a distinct working-class identity.
His rejection of a deterministic view of historical change was based on his in-depth analysis of Britain's working-class communities – their daily lives and the ways in which they resisted the rule of capital.
I remember reading a very interesting article written by an American sociologist – donald francis roy – titled “Efficiency and Repair: Informal Intergroup Relations in a Piece-rate Machine Shop” – it is an ethnographic work based on his research in an engineering factory during his time on the shop floor.
Published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1955 (Issue 60, pp. 255-66), it describes how workers banded together to “fix” piecemeal wages in their favor while management Time and motion engineers were hired to set wages without management's knowledge. They think this maximizes profits and keeps workers toiling within an inch of their tolerance.
Workers demonstrated agency through practices as diverse as “bricks,” “quotas,” and other technologies.
When engineers evaluate assembly line tasks, workers know they can tell they are working at full capacity and rates are set accordingly.
Then, when things are actually produced, workers can make a good living by reducing the effort they put in because they have “fixed” the piece rate.
The agency is at work.
Famous American sociologist— Michael Burawoy – wrote reviews of several works of Donald Roy, noting that he had learned about “his career… [been] … As part of his fieldwork, he worked in 24 different “bottom” jobs in about 20 industries, saying:
Roy was not looking for a ghetto grad student for fieldwork, but an experienced blue-collar worker—a real blue-collar worker, not a Marxist pretender…
(Reference: Michael Burawoy (2001) Donald Roy: Sociologists and job rigidity, Contemporary Sociology, 30(5), 453–458).
The key is Roy's work, and later that of Bloy, who conducted similar fieldwork at the same factory where Roy had worked some thirty years earlier (and in Bloy's famous book Reached its peak—— Manufacturing Consent —must read)—completely consistent with EP Thompson’s observations about agency in The Making of the British Working Class.
EP Thompson also examines how cultural practices containing specific linguistic idioms and shared rituals inherently define the working class and separate them from management.
As in Roy's work, resistance based on class struggle is central to EP Thompson's understanding of working-class dynamics.
A sense of struggle gives the working class identity and meaning and gains its unity.
He believed it was crucial to try to see the working class from the inside.
He wrote:
I am seeking to bring the poor sock maker, the Luddite farmer, the “obsolete” handloom weaver, the “utopian” craftsman, and even Joanna Southcott's bewildered followers from the vastness of posterity. Saved from condescension. Their crafts and traditions may have died out. Their hostility to the new industrialism may be backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may just be illusions. Their rebel plots may have been foolhardy. But they lived through periods of great social upheaval, and we did not. Their desires are reasonable based on their own experience. And if they are victims of history, they remain condemned as victims in their own lives.
So while people disparage “Luddites”, for example, as being somehow backward and ignorant, for EP Thompson they are united in their resistance to capitalists destroying their working practices and embedded cultural practices and rituals intention of.
The problem is not technology, but capitalist hegemony.
Luddites expressed their agency and showed that they were an important force in defining their collective existence.
For EP Thompson, workers' “desires are justified by their own experience” and to understand working class dynamics we must start from this point rather than wax lyrical from the ivory tower.
Furthermore, and important to the rest of this article, is his eccentric concept of “class.”
While Marxists believe that class is structural – such as who owns or does not own the material means of production – EP Thompson believes that class is a “relationship”, i.e. there are commonalities between people based on culture etc.
Thus, while “class experience” is clearly “determined by the relations of production into which people are born or unconsciously enter”, people's feelings about “class consciousness” embody the “way in which these experiences are culturally processed”. : reflected in traditions, value systems, ideas and institutional forms”.
Thus, class develops with the development of consciousness.
It’s a difficult concept to distinguish, but it’s important to his work.
EP Thompson was a true communist – he quit the party in protest of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and throughout his career demonstrated a staunch opposition to the coercive Marxism practiced by Stalinism.
He also realized that the British Labor Party had been betrayed by the early to mid-1970s, a shift I have written extensively about.
All these factors and more make his work fascinating.
So I was interested in what Kenan Malik had to say in his retelling of EP Thompson's 1963 epic.
His article commemorates EP Thompson's 100th birthday.
Although classes are EP Thompson's core organizing concept, Malik claims:
Today the old industrial working class about which Thompson wrote has been largely destroyed, politically marginalized and socially disempowered. Few regard class as a fertile concept in historical thinking, let alone as a basis for progressive politics.
EP Thompson would argue with that.
I guess I'm among the “few” people who believe that economic class remains the only basis for progressive politics.
What else would we support without it?
Would we suggest that women on low-wage, harsh factory floors have closer relationships with the female managers who occasionally hang out in the factory than with the male workers around them?
Such questions remain relevant.
Sure enough, the working class has evolved as the tertiary sector emerged and service jobs replaced manufacturing jobs.
While it may be difficult to understand how surplus value is created in the modern office space, simply recalling the form of the wage, Marx wanted us to understand, is a key structure in advancing our understanding of why workers are “free” to work. Work for who they want, but don't have the freedom not to work, unlike those on the other side of a wage negotiation.
Kenan Malik is right:
Thompson's compassion for those forced to struggle in harsh social circumstances also holds lessons for us. Today, the problem is not posterity but the great condescension of the present: contempt for the working class, hostility to the interests of “panhandlers”, ridicule of those forced to use food banks, indifference to injustice. It also manifests itself in disdain for the so-called bigotry and conservatism of the working class, or for those who voted wrong or were disillusioned with the left.
Recall how London progressives who want Britain to retain the most advanced form of neoliberal structure, the European Union, talk about poor workers in the North who voted to leave the EU based on their direct experience with neoliberalism.
Brexiteers have been called ignorant, fools, unable to make decisions by all kinds of people and they need the “South” to tell them what is best for them.
If you read or reread EP Thompson’s epic study, I think it will be obvious to you how relevant it is to today’s struggles.
Workers may now wear clean clothes and work in clean spaces rather than walking down the narrow streets of northern English towns to factories, but they still perform the same role – producing more than their own livelihood requires. Working harder, longer, however, people want to freely define this.
To understand why this is the case, you have to start with Marx and his concept of class.
One can enrich and deepen this concept by reading the ethnographic work of twentieth-century social historians such as EP Thompson, who really delved into the definition of the working class.
It is as relevant today as ever.
in conclusion
I recommend everyone to read these ethnographic studies – they broadened my knowledge considerably and are a really interesting take on the bargain.
I am currently reading a book by Carlos Garcia – Fiat Socialism and will be writing some reviews soon.
That's enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2024 William Mitchell. all rights reserved.
