Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Class Classic, Part 1 - The Reign of Paine

“The Making of the English Working Class”by E.P. Thompson, 1963 Part 1 Sketch: (pgs. 1 to 205)

This long, classic book by E.P. Thompson is 939 pages, with a 1968 postscript. I’m going to review the book in bits.  The book is so long and most leftists, including myself, have never had the time to read such a tome.  It holds lessons for today, so this is not just some excavation of musty information.  There are many parallels to present society.  Thompson was a member of the British CP until he left after the USSR ordered the invasion of Hungary, along with Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin.

Thompson’s main point is that workers create themselves as a self-conscious class - it is not just the automatic activity and influence of history, society or economics.  His book covers both the creation of the working class in England and its rise to class consciousness - two distinct processes.  This book is how it happened in Britain, from the early beginnings of ‘reformism’ in the 1700s, which began a struggle against the landed gentry, the monarchy, the state church and the police state.  This is how a class ‘in itself’ slowly became a class ‘for itself.’ 

Thompson employs a vast amount of original research, a wealth of personal names, a credenza of cities, a mass of organizations, a large quantity of quotes, a plethora of literary references, to write this history.  He names the leaders of the various factions, especially the most leftward and consistent – Hardy, Thelwall, Binns, Spence or writers like Blake and Shelley.

But perhaps we now need a supplement – “The Unmaking of the British Working Class”? 

In the 1700s conservative institutions like the Methodist Church trained working-class people in reading, speaking, organization, planning, raising funds, travel, publication, communication and rules. This was very unlike the official Anglican Church of England. The Methodists provided a training ground for future groups, though the Methodist’s official theology and leadership was loyalist and reactionary.  In the later 1700s artisanal and proletarian inspiration came from Tom Paine’s omnipresent and cheap publication “The Rights of Man.”  Paine at the time was living in England. Later it was the Jacobins and the example of the French Revolution. Associations in England formed bonds with the French revolutionaries and defended France.  Later some even hoped that French revolutionary troops would invade England and overthrow its ruling class!

Apocalyptic and millenarian thinking was also common in this period, accompanying the high social turmoil.  The “Book of Revelation” from the Bible was especially quoted.  Thompson also mentions cultural forces – the tavern, the church, social and town life. Many radicals met in taverns, as they were free.  These were even christened ‘tavern societies.’  While the more proper reformers had staid and organized meetings, the more proletarian ones drank, ate and had loud, combative discussions.

Reverence for the English ‘Constitution” of 1688 kept many English radicals from going beyond it.  While allowing a certain amount of freedom to the ‘free-born Englishman” it propped up the state church, property rights, the monarchy and the land-owning aristocracy, as well as opposing universal suffrage. Paine was the first to undermine this Constitution, saying Constitutions were moldy parchments based on the dead hand of the past.  This should sound familiar to present day left radicals in the U.S., who face liberals and mild reformists who cherish every bit of our own moldy and anti-democratic parchment … adopted in 1788, 244 years ago.   

Food and price riots were frequent, organized by the poverty-stricken ‘lower orders of society.’  But the Right also organized attacks of thugs against reformers – organized by the church, businessmen and fearful Tories.  ‘Mobs’ and riots occurred on a frequent basis in England towards the end of the century, especially as the economy tanked due to the newly-declared war against France. The Rightists figured that a huge percentage of the population were criminals, calling them thieves, traitors and terrorists, and applied those names to the radicals too.

Paine denounced appeals to the British Parliament as pernicious and a waste of time.  What about the U.S.’s own modern Congress?  Liberals and even some ‘radicals’ never cease in expecting Congress to deliver significant reforms.  Paine made the demand for a people’s Convention of citizens, not continuing appeals to the sclerotic British Parliament.  He was essentially calling for a rudimentary dual power.  Except for actual socialists and communists you won’t hear anyone calling for something like that today.  Our own 'gentlemen' reformers do not know how to go beyond a terminal and corrupt bourgeois democracy.

Thompson points out that agitation in Britain among the poor artisans and workers between 1792-1796 was near insurrectionary… not a mere reflection of the French Revolution, but caused by British conditions.  Paine’s agitation and propaganda had combined political suffrage and economic demands, which did the deed, as laborers for the first time saw their economic issues and solutions highlighted. His writings were sold cheaply everywhere.

A patriotic war fever against France accompanied war preparations.  Paine was banned, burnt in effigy and attacked from the royalist Right and conservative ‘reformers’ still aligned with the 1688 Constitution.  He fled the country to France.  Prominent radicals were jailed or attacked by royalist mobs, yet there was much opposition to the war and impressment.  Later, thousands of sailors revolted and blocked the Thames in 1797 with their ships.  There was an armed Irish revolt in 1799 against Whitehall, so the national question was at all times present, though Thompson doesn’t frame it as such.  Many plebeian Irish were part of the subversive organizations in England.


The above-ground groups had minutes, meetings, membership lists, dues, communications and publications. They were a mixture of artisans, laborers, small shopkeepers and a few professionals – who had the beginnings of class understanding.  A proposal for a national Convention joining all reformers, including Scots and Irish, was the last straw for the ‘Church and King” set, for the ruling class politicians Pitt and Burke. Prosecutions, jailings and executions followed, which broke the back of the legal reform societies. Though it did not amount to a ‘White’ terror, as the British jury system prevented every prominent and not so prominent activist from being jailed or killed, but Thompson still styles it a ‘counter-revolution.’ During this period there were also underground insurrectionary groups like the “United Englishmen.”

Thompson dates this period as the beginning of the formation of the British working class in both fact and theory, being proletarianized while being imbued with a class understanding.  Landlords, the aristocracy, merchants and capitalists in their majority had all united against the plebeian masses in repressing their nation-wide organizing.  This was unlike what happened in France. The beginnings of class and socialist ideas began to percolate – about nationalization of the land to oppose the landowners; ‘class versus class’ views; economic, not just ‘rights’ demands; and notions about relieving the special burdens imposed on working-class women.   

In the 1800s, after the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815 at Waterloo, nearly all ‘mobs’ were from the left, reflecting the ‘turn’.

End of Part 1 – Stay Tuned!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Citizen Tom Paine” (Fast); “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “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); “1916 Rebellion Walking Tour,” “A Full Life: James Connolly,” “The Immortal Irishman,” “The Football Factory” (King); "The North Water." 

And I got it at the UGA Library!

Red Frog

January 25, 2022

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