the making of the english working class by ep thompson

“It,” the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematically-so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production. This was not Marx’s meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much latter-day “Marxist” writing. There is today an ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing.

Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never just the same way. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born-or enter involuntarily. And class happens when some men, 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. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and laborers. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure. More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. I do not see class as a “structure,” nor even as a “category,” but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.

I emphasize that it is an historical phenomenon. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they a make up the working classes.īy class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. “Working classes” is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It was present at its own making.Ĭlass, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. Making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. THIS BOOK HAS a clumsy title, but it is one which meets its purpose.

The making of the english working class by ep thompson