E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left by Winslow Carl; Thompson E. P. P.;

Author:Winslow, Carl; Thompson, E. P. P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2014-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Thus the Marxist concept of class (to which I am personally committed) is an historical concept, which bears in mind the interaction of objective and subjective determinants.

Interaction of Classes

MOREOVER, WE MUST BEAR in mind that the historical concept of class entails the notion of a relationship with another class or classes; what becomes apparent are not only common interests as within one class but common interests as against another class. And this process of definition is not just a series of spontaneous explosions at the point of production (though this is an important part of it); it is a complex, contradictory, ever-changing and never-static process in our political and cultural life in which human agency is entailed at every level.

Perhaps this would seem less abstract if we took some examples from our own history. The 1830s and 1840s are often thought of as the “classic” period of early working-class consciousness—the confrontation of the “two nations.” In 1808 a magistrate was writing: “The instant we get near the borders of the manufacturing parts of Lancashire we meet a fresh race of beings, both in point of manners, employments and subordination.” It seemed, to conservative and radical alike, as if the new instruments of production had created a new people with a revolutionary potential. The notion is repeatedly found in Engels’ early Condition of the Working Class where he refers to the proletariat as having been engendered by the new manufacture and speaks of the “factory hands” as “the eldest children of the industrial revolution,” who “have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement.” Hence one fixed notion of the working class entered the socialist tradition which is still influential today—the notion that the origin and growth of working-class consciousness was a function of the growth of large-scale factory production whose inevitable tendency must be to engender a revolutionary consciousness.

But if we look inside the portmanteau phrase, “working class,” it falls into a great number of constituent parts. We find not only a factory proletariat (itself subdivided among overlookers, skilled workers, women and juveniles) but a far greater number of artisans and outworkers; as well as miners, agricultural labourers, seamen, migrant Irish workers, and so on. Moreover we often find (notably in Chartist times) that the most revolutionary “shock troops” of the working class were not factory proletarians at all but were the depressed handworkers; while in many towns, including large industrial towns, the actual nucleus of the labour movement was made up largely of artisans—shoemakers, saddlers and harnessmakers, building workers, booksellers, small tradesmen, and the like. Further, so far from being vacillating “petit-bourgeois” elements, these were often (as George Rudé finds them to be in his study of The Crowd in the French Revolution) among the most consistent and self-sacrificing participants in the working-class movement. The vast area of radical London in the mid-nineteenth century drew its strength from no major heavy industries (the dockers and engineers only made their impact later in the

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