The Making of the English Working Class: Marxist masterpiece

Edward Palmer Thompson, the greatest Marxist historian of the English speaking world, died in August of 1993. Best known for his masterpiece The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson launched a current in Marxist history which restored the exploited and oppressed to their rightful place as makers of history. This emphasis on working class self activity was not merely an academic project; it emerged as part of Thompson's political commitment to freeing Marxism from the terrible distortions of Stalinism, a commitment which originated in the battles of 1956 within the official Communist movement.

No reader of Thompson's greatest work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), can fail to be struck by its author's passionate insistence that in making history working people also make themselves. This theme, working class agency and self activity, sharply distinguished the Making from so much of what had passed for Marxist historical analysis during the period in which Stalinism dominated the left internationally.⁵ Indeed, in the famous preface to that work, Thompson spelt out the unique character of his approach to the issues of class and class struggle, implicitly contrasting it with the mechanical materialism of Stalinist historiography.

He had chosen the 'clumsy' notion of the making of the English working class, Thompson explained, in order to depict 'an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning'. Class, he insisted, is not a structure or a category; it is 'something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships'. And these relationships are 'always embodied in real people in a real context'.⁶ Against approaches to history which stress 'great figures' or great material changes--the opening of trade routes, the building of cotton mills--Thompson sought to emphasise the activity of ordinary labouring people as a central factor in the historical process. In doing so he hoped to affirm the fundamental dignity of the masses who make (and have made) history. 'I am seeking', he wrote in a memorable passage, 'to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obselete" handloom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.'⁷ These people mattered, Thompson insisted, because the English working class had been made not just by patterns of capital accumulation and market competition, but also by the ideas, aspirations and struggles of workers striving to influence the conditions of their lives.

In its effort to restore meaning to the activity of the common people, the Making regularly takes aim at the reifying tendencies of mainstream historical analysis. When history is presented as a series of interlocking events each of which is fully determined by the other, 'we arrive at a post facto determinism,' Thompson writes. 'The dimension of human agency is lost and the context of class relations is forgotten.' And, as so often, he gives us a beautifully illustrated example of how events are saturated with the social relations of class:

The raw fact--a bad harvest--may seem to be beyond human election. But the way that fact worked its way out was in terms of a particular complex of human relationships: law, ownership, power. When we encounter some sonorous phrase such as 'the strong ebb and flow of the trade cycle' we must be put on our guard. For behind this trade cycle there is a structure of social relations, fostering some sorts of expropriation (rent, interest, and profit) and outlawing others (theft, feudal dues), legitimising some types of conflict (competition, armed warfare) and inhibiting others (trades unionism, bread riots, popular political organisation)...⁸

It is the recognition that these issues--law, ownership and power--were always contested and never merely given that distinguishes the Making as a piece of Marxist history. Thompson refuses to fall for the myth of the working class as essentially passive, as simply reacting to external events which determined its fate. Even when discussing the role of religion--in this case Methodism--in blunting and diverting class struggle, he is careful not to portray working people as mere playthings of religious leaders. 'No ideology is wholly absorbed by its adherents: it breaks down in practice in a thousand ways under the criticism of impulse and experience: the working-class community injected into the chapels its own values of mutual aid, neighbourliness and solidarity', he notes.⁹

Thompson's emphasis on the ideas, aspirations, traditions and experiences of working people has been depicted by some critics as a sort of soggy sentimentalism which glorifies the existing state of consciousness of the working class. There is a potential danger here. But the Making does not succumb to it. While paying detailed attention to the ideologicial and political traditions of the English working class, Thompson does not flinch from underlining the shortcomings of many of these. In particular, he discusses the limits of the constitutionalism of the radical movement, its insistence that English law is dedicated to the provision of liberties to all subjects and that those who violate these are acting against the constitution. And he underlines the defects of a petty bourgeois radicalism, quite common in the emerging working class movement, which, rather than attacking capitalist ownership, projected the ideal of a community of small independent owners/producers exchanging equitably and living in harmony. On both these points, he indicts the ambiguous radicalism of William Cobbett, whose writings played an enormous role in the working class movement of the early 19th century. Cobbett, argues Thompson, failed as an ideologist of working class mobilisation because 'he reduced economic analysis to a polemic against the parasitism of certain vested interests. He could not allow a critique which centred on ownership.'¹⁰ Indeed, the heroes in Thompson's account are those plebian radicals, often members of the revolutionary underground, who did push towards 'a critique centred on ownership,' a socialist critique which moved towards the idea of common ownership of the means of production.¹¹

It is worth underlining this last point. The Making of the English Working Class rehabilitates a revolutionary underground of working class radicals, stretching from the 1790s into the Chartist period, whose adherents were dedicated to an insurrection against the British state. This feature of the Making, which enraged many of its earliest reviewers, has been forgotten by those critics who condemn its alleged populism and romanticism. Throughout the work, Thompson identifies himself with the plebian radicals of the revolutionary underground. In doing so, he challenged the dominant tradition in British labour history--one which stressed gradualism and constitutionalism. Thompson insists that the revolutionaries were not mad plotters and idle cranks. On the contrary, he argues that at a number of points between the 1790s and 1832--most notably in the autumn of 1831--a mass revolutionary sentiment was percolating within the English working class.¹² The Making stands out, therefore, not only because it focuses centrally on the self activity of the working class, but also because it demonstrates that revolutionary ideas and organisation played a vital role in the emergence of the British working class movement.