“The Making of the English Working Class”by E.P. Thompson, 1963 Part 5 Sketch: (pgs. 781 to 939 w/ Afterword)
Thompson comes to the culmination of working class
consciousness, which he dates in May 1832, during the passing of the Reform Bill
by the House of Lords in a situation of revolutionary crisis throughout England. To Thompson, this consciousness consists of 1, an awareness of the identity of interests
of every working class strata, 2, subsequent class opposition to the
landlords and capitalists and 3, a vision of a new cooperative society. The Reform Bill events occurred during or prior to the European
revolutions of 1830, 1832, 1848, 1870, 1917, 1919, the formation of the British
Labour Party, the 1926 English General Strike or the creation of the NHS in
1948. He thinks it continued into the
1960s when he published this book.
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| Education has its Benefits |
Thompson looks into the intellectual culture of popular
Radicalism at this time, which was mostly made up of auto-didacts. In 1825 the Combination Acts were repealed
and an open ferment of ideas percolated through society - reading aloud to the
illiterate, study groups, ballads, theater performances, cartoons, satire and
parody, articles, books, discussions and speeches. Jargon had to be explained or avoided, as
technical phrases like “universal suffrage” might mean to the uninitiated “that
all must suffer if any suffer.” Or
calling for a “provisional government” might mean “a government that provides
provisions.” (We still have this problem
today on the left … archaic language, symbols or odd historical usages that do
not communicate.) 2 of 3 working people
might be able to read a bit at this point. Through these methods radical ideas
permeated into the smallest rural village.
The Government raised the price of transfer stamps through
the 1891 Stamp Act in order to inhibit the mailing or approval of radical
publications, so an underground movement of ‘unstamped’ publications was
created. Punishment under the “Vagrant
Act” led to instances like this, where 2 workers were tied to the ‘whipping
post’ for distributing unstamped Radical publications. (Sound familiar?) Eventually parody and
satire were legalized in 1820 when the Government’s Crown prosecutors failed to
prove its case in a jury trial. A
chuckling crowd of ‘mechaniks’ might congregate around a London print shop
showing the latest lampoon of the ruling elite by Cruikshank. This period
resulted in ‘freedom of the press’ becoming widespread throughout England, at
least in practice, a direct result of the labor ferment in the country.
Thompson identifies two Radical publics in 1832 – the
working class one and the middle class one.
At all times they fought for dominance and this situation still exists. Thompson
goes into a long analysis of Cobbett, whose journalism and speeches had a major
impact on workers for years, but who never actually came up with a consistent
theory. He really harked back to a time
of small producers, of sturdy, individual ‘free-born Englishmen,’ of rural life. Yet Thompson considers him a representative
of the working classes. Cobbett spoke
directly to the working class, sometimes using his own experience. He avoided flowery language, impressive
diction and high-flown illusions, perhaps an early example for Orwell. This is unlike more academic Radical writers
like Hazlitt, who peppered his writings with literary references, really
directing his blows in the language of the middle and upper classes.
Yet auto-didacticism has its limits, as it sometimes, in
Thompson’s words, allows for ‘wide swings
of opinion, given its partial nature.’ Some autodidacts are only able to grasp part of
a situation due to their spotty understanding and lack of consistency, and can go
completely off-road in their pursuit of 'the truth.'
5
INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS
Thompson identifies 5 currents that eventually came
together to form a working class consciousness, a class 'for itself.' These were based on the material effects of the industrial revolution that were occurring at the same time, which created a working class 'in itself.'
1, the afore-mentioned Corbett; 2, Paine-Carlile tradition; 3,
Utilitarianism; 4, trade unionism; 5; Owenism.
Carlile, one of the leading London activists, put his
emphasis on the French Revolutionary past, invoking the ‘Bastilles’, excoriating clerics and Kings,
celebrating individualist, libertarian rebellion, scorning organization,
pushing ‘cheap’ government. His
narrative was somewhat out of step in a time of creeping industrialization that
was changing the cultural landscape.
Thompson considers him a ‘petit-bourgeois individualist.’ Carlile ran one of the largest speech venues
in London, the Rotunda, which became
a center of Radicalism. In a way, this
libertarianism can be seen as a crude, initial stage of rebellion and
understanding.
Utilitarianism focuses on what is ‘useful.’ Their leading journal was London’s “The Gorgon,” edited by J Wade, influenced by the middle-class reformer Place. They understood that focusing on ‘the good ‘ol days’ - when Radicalism thundered against the evil Norman Conquest and mythologized ‘free-born Englishmen’ via Alfred - were archaic references. Wade published practical information on present working class trades, embracing Ricardo’s 1821‘labor theory of value’, seeing there was a ‘productive’ class and a parasitic one. Wade was also influenced by middle-class political economy like the myth of ‘supply and demand.’ The Utilitarians never went so far as to see the difference between the use value of a thing and the exchange value of a thing.
The trade union forces were represented by leaders like
Henson, Doughtery and Gast. Gast was a long-time
London shipwright who eventually led the London Trades Council and established
a Trade Union newspaper. The trade
unionists opposed the Utilitarian idea that unemployment was ‘natural’ due to a
surplus population – Malthus’ theory.
Instead of seeing the key issue related to unemployment was between a man
and woman and contraception, the unionists saw it as a conflict between
workers and employers. They, through Hodgeskins, also embraced the labor theory
of value. However, capitalists were
included in the productive class if they actually worked, as the unionists
still had no consistent social theory.
Eventually they concluded that every labor organization should be in one
national union coalition, a great step forward.
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| A Cooperative Community |
OWENISM
The most well-known current was Owenism, based on a
politically clueless, kind and philanthropic Scottish mill owner, Robert
Owen. He wanted to ‘re-moralize’ lazy and
careless Scottish workers into collective producers. He developed a theory and
plan of a cooperative society, in which cooperative living, villages, farms, trading,
work, mutual aid, capital and exchange were the basis of society, uniting all
classes in a heaven-on-earth. Many of his practical projects were put into
effect all over England, perhaps 500 projects involving 20,000 people. As part
of this, bazaars where workers traded goods to each other through barter came
into existence across the country.
Thompson calls him “politically vacant” and a bit utopian,
as he ignored England’s classes, repressive state and the issue of large property
in his appeals. Owen was no “Leveler”,
as he believed this cooperative society would painlessly produce ‘new wealth,
not expropriate old wealth. In a way,
the U.S. counter-culture of the 1960s-1970s worked quite the same stream, as does
the exclusive promotion of cooperatives by Marxists like Richard Wolff.
Owen was against religion, pecuniary marriage, celibacy and supported the unity of physical and intellectual labor. He believed that
machinery should not compete with labor but cooperate with it – quite a
different approach from the capitalist method.
The labor leaders feared Owen’s plan would turn villages
into workhouses for the poor, but gradually the labor movement adopted the
view of organizing society on a cooperative basis as a real goal. Instead of looking nostalgically to the past - as even many U.S. social-democrats still do,
re-running the New Deal of 1933-1939 - Owenism gave to the labor movement a
picture of a different future.
During this period of labor ferment, millenarian and messianic instability continued among more backward rural laborers and workers. A crippled shoemaker, Zion Ward, took up Southcott’s mantle, claiming to be Christ, while denouncing the official Church. Another, T.N. Tom, claimed God would take his vengeance on the rich and society. 12 of his armed followers were killed in a forest battle with police when they tried to arrest him.
The
Revolutionary Crisis of 1832
Thompson considers 1832, like 1819, to be another point of
potential revolution, as the Reform Bill was being heard in Parliament. The ‘bunker’ reactionaries were against any
concessions – Wellington, the Bishops, many Peers, the King. It would give the
right to vote in England and Wales to male householders who paid £10 rent, to small
landowners, to tenant farmers and to shopkeepers. Note it excluded men without property, all
women and also all of Scotland and Ireland, which were still colonies or being
treated as such. The Bill was roundly
opposed by the working-class movement of the day, as it was not even for full
male suffrage. But the middle-class
preferred this ‘half a loaf’ as Cobbett called it, which actually looked more like
crumbs.
Huge demonstrations of 100K workers happened in London and
Birmingham for a better bill. In Leeds
the suggestion was made in a mass rally that the banks be attacked, that the
Political Unions should arm themselves and that no one should pay taxes. The
poorest, most desperate sectors of the working class rioted in Derby,
Nottingham and Bristol. The proletarian Poor People’s Guardian published a guide
to street fighting. The middle-class reformers waved the threat of revolution
in the face of the reactionary elite, who finally, after 11 days of debate in
the House of Lords, passed the measure. Compromise saved the system. This was the intention of the middle-class
‘reformers’ (we can now put them in quote marks) - to bind the population to
the State and property via this compromise.
This seems somewhat similar to Obama telling Wall Street’s
executives in 2009 that he was the only thing between them and “the pitchforks.”
Similarly we did not get any kind of
real Wall Street ‘reform’ bill except the toothless Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill. The
trillions pumped into the coffers of the banks by the government only confirmed
the fact that the Kings of Finance in the U.S. were still in control.
The details of the Reform Bill are even worse. The sponsors found out through surveys that
barely 1 in 50 workers paid £10 rent and qualified to vote. In the town of Holbeck of 11,000, only 150
would get the vote. In Leeds, (pop. 124,000) 355 workers could vote. And so on.
The middle-class Whig ‘reformers’ had their way, as one of them put it –
“the high and middling orders are the natural representatives of the human
race.”
The
MIDDLE-CLASS VICTORY
As noted by the Irish editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian, James O’Brien, the idea that the middle-class
‘Radicals’ cared about the proletariat was dashed, based on this and their later
support for the Irish Coercion Bill, opposition to the 10 Hour Bill, attack on
the trade unions and support for a backward revision of the Poor Laws. Another examples is that in 1834
Dorchester laborers were sent to Australia as punishment for a strike by this ‘reform’ Parliament. Deporting ‘criminals’
to Australia or Tasmania was delicately called ‘transportation,’ based on an
old Elizabethan law. Instead, O’Brien
advocated a peaceful political revolution, expropriation of the rich and the
promulgation of Owenite communities. Yet
Thompson gives him a bit of a hard time for sectarianism towards possible future
allies in the middle classes.
The Reform Bill was denounced by labor as ‘the shopocrat
franchise’ or a ‘rag merchant monarchy.’
180k gathered on Newell Hill in Birmingham for a festival and protest,
which is estimated by Thompson as including people from half of the city and
surrounding areas. This ‘crumby’ Bill led
directly to Chartist activity from 1838 to 1857, which called for votes for all
men; secret ballot; no property qualifications for members of Parliament; paid
leave to vote; equal voting districts; annual elections. In other words, an actual representative,
though still bourgeois, democracy.
In this period ‘the vote’ meant far more than what it means
today, almost 200 years of manipulation and shenanigans later. It meant that workers could be taken
seriously, had some avenue for power and social control. But like today, there was also a reaction to
this real lack of a franchise in 1832, which resulted in purely labor syndicalism
and a rejection of politics by some Radicals.
Thompson ends the book with a 1968 Afterword regarding
criticisms of the book, some his own.
They are: He did not have enough
new research about living standards. He was too hard on the Methodists. He ignored for the most part coal miners,
factory workers, transport, iron and building trades. He had little focus on the right-wing nuttery
found among working people during this same period. He exaggerated underground activity or crowd
sizes. Thompson deals with all these
objections in a detailed way, some of which he agrees with.
APPLICABLE?
The inference I draw from this whole book is … has the existing U.S. working class achieved consciousness as a class for itself? I think not, certainly not now and even in the early part of the 20th century. The three characteristics that Thompson chose – 1, an awareness of the identity of interests of every working class strata, 2, subsequent class opposition to the landlords and capitalists and 3, a vision of a new cooperative society - have not been achieved.
Re 1, many still don’t know they are in the working class, though that
understanding is changing. The lowest
strata of the working class made up of people of color, Latinos and light-skinned
working poor (our modern Irish or Scots) – are still looked down upon by some workers,
especially white collars. Additionally, unionization rates are weak. Re 2,
a good number of working class people look up to the rich, thinking they too
will be rich someday, or that they need their leadership. They don’t have a
material grasp of what a ‘ruling class’ is, or what rich class actually is. The Democrats and Republican are clearly run
by capitalists, with legislators that are mostly millionaires, but many still
vote for those parties. Class understandings is obscured by pure identity
understandings cultivated by capital. 3, there is almost no vision of a new society, at best just an
amelioration – ‘capitalism with a human face’ as I put it. Single Payer might be the closest thing to the
British NHS, but even that a distant goal.
There is definitely mass hostility to government, an explosion in libertarianism, opposition to
various failed ‘pillars’ of society, to Wall Street, to billionaires and
corporations, along with diffuse anti-war sentiment. But this has not congealed
into a left-wing movement of any size or organization. That is one reason among many why this book
is valuable, as a way to track the growth in class consciousness in the U.S. or
other countries – or its opposite, its deterioration.
P.S. - An analysis of Thompson's later work from a dialectical materialist point of view. Much of the debate after the book was about Thompson becoming someone who thought 'culture' made a class, not its material role in production:
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using titles or words like
this: “The Making of the English Working Class” (Parts 1,2,3 and 4);“Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “Chavs – the
Demonization of the Working Class,” “Class Against Class – the Miner’s Strike”
(Matgamna); “Left Confusion on Brexit,” “The City” (Norfield); “Pride,” “Mr.
Turner” (Leigh); “Coming Up For Air”(Orwell); “Monsters of the Market”
(McNally); “The Football Factory” (King); "The North Water,” “The Young
Karl Marx,” “The Peaky Blinders.”
Red Frog
February 12, 2022
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