An Exercise In Historical Materialism- E. P. Thompson’s “The Making Of The English Working Class”- A Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson.

Book Review

The Making Of The English Working Class, E.P. Thompson, Vintage Books, New York, 1966

One of the working premises of historical materialism, simply and hopefully not too simply put, is that it is necessary to see historical phenomena not merely in immediate observable isolation but also in reference to the past events that formed the “pre-history” of the event observed, the current strands that make up the phenomena, and some future projections of what those events mean as the next stage begins to unfold. The making, and unmaking of classes, especially of the modern industrial working class where there is enough written material to make some reasonably judgments is particularly suited to an analysis using the methodology of historical materialism. And old-time British Marxist (and former British Communist Party member) did just that feat in bringing the social, political, economic, and, hell, even military strands that helped form the English working class, a class that proved to be the key catalyst and fore-running model for the industrial revolution in the West. Building off the work of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s co-thinker, and others in the 19th century and early 20th century Thompson has looked to the other, more then current sources (1960s) to fill out a broader interpretation that Engels was able to provide.

Of course no subject as large as the making of a class in modern society is capable of being contained even in the eight hundred pages of Thompson’s work, a work that moreover concentrates on the late 18th century emergence of a genuine radical tradition in England and works it way through to the great Reform Bill of 1832. Nevertheless starting with the democratic plebeian response in England to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 Thompson brings to life the first stirrings of what Marx’s (and later Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky) termed the transformation of a variated, somewhat undifferentiated mass coming from many quarters of earlier rural society (farm hands, artisans, casual city laborers, lumpen elements, religious sects, etc), a class in itself, into a class for itself. A class with some class consciousness of “the other” to put it in neat sociological terms.

The key name to remember here is Thomas Paine who had his fingerprints over all kinds of plebeian political movements in Europe and America. The formation of pro-Jacobin clubs in England (the corresponding societies, of course, led by London’s) , their ups and downs, especially once one got outside of the major cities and at those time when the English government was actively confronting various stages of that French revolution militarily forms the first part of the book. A modern radical plebeian tradition is firmly entrenched, if sometimes of necessity forced underground, from that period.

In the second part of the book Thompson deals with the various social, political, economic and cultural trends from the late 18th century on which form the objective basis for the creation of a distinct working class as a result of the upheavals in the nature of work. What we call the Industrial Revolution with the coming of harnessing of steam power. One key point here is the role of Methodism (Wesleyism) and other fringe religious sects in gaining adherents who would be disciplined enough for the work, and sober enough too.

Naturally Thompson also takes up the intertwined issues of the great increase in capitalist farming for the market in the war years that left many “masterless” men (women and children too) available to form the factory labor pool. And from the other end the demise of small specialty shop-ownership and craft artisanship in the face of mass production, usually cheaper mass production, under the emerging factory system is given full coverage by Thompson. I might add that he also makes a useful corrective about the Luddite movement that raged for a short period in reaction to that factory system. It was not merely a machine-smashing retrograde reaction to downward mobility by those previously respected skilled artisans and displaced farm hands but a fight to maintain quality in the face of “shoddy” as well.

The final part of the book finds Thompson patching together the various post-Napoleonic movements toward working class organization once the “victory” of the factory system was apparent, particularly the struggles for trade union recognition and simple democratic rights like freedom of expression and of the press. The various responses by reformers, and so-called reformers, like the famous socialist-industrialist Robert Owens, also are given full play. The most important aspect addressed by Thompson in the period though was the on-going (and now neglected, or “hidden”) struggle between what we would today describe as “direct action” reformers (hell, revolutionaries) and “gradualists” (hell, reformers), most associated with the name of Corbett, who would leave the capitalist/monarchist system intact. Some things never change.

In any case this review is just a snapshot of all the important scholarship that E.P. Thompson provided under one cover. And since it has been some years since this work was first introduced in the 1960s I am sure that some young communist or other social activist could do some useful work bringing it even further up to date with the material uncovered since Thompson’s time.