Histories of a Radical Book

E. P. Thompson and The Making of the English Working Class

Antoinette Burton, Stephanie Fortado, Antoinette Burton, Stephanie Fortado

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789204728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

For better or worse, E.P. Thompson's monumental book The Making of the English Working Class has played an essential role in shaping the intellectual lives of generations of readers since its original publication in 1963. This collected volume explores the complex impact of Thompson's book, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.

Chapter 1

Making and Unmaking the Working Class

E. P. Thompson and the “New Labor History” in the United States

James R. Barrett

The Indian historian Rajnarayan Chandavarkar recalled a most unusual salute to a most unusual book. “In the late 1970s, when E. P. Thompson was elected President of the Indian History Congress, and rode into session on the back of an elephant, this was a tribute primarily to The Making,” a book the Canadian historian Bryan Palmer calls “arguably the most influential book in the modern historiography of working-class studies.”¹ At the time of Thompson’s death, E. J. Hobsbawm noted that he was cited more than any other historian in the twentieth century.² For more than a generation, The Making has shaped historical writing throughout the world,³ including in societies very different from Thompson’s own.⁴ Perhaps the greatest paradox, however, is that although Thompson’s work defined the “working class” for a generation, it also helped to deconstruct the very notion of class itself, and nowhere was this more true than in the United States.

Socialist Humanism and Radical History in the United States

It is impossible to understand Thompson’s book and why it appeared when it did without considering the political and intellectual context that he reacted against—on the one hand, a determinist form of European Marxism and on the other, the structuralist form of contemporary sociology, wherein class became a quantifiable category via modernization theory.⁵ Likewise, the peculiar trajectory of the postwar American Left helps to explain the warm embrace of The Making. The ideological fit between Thompson’s Socialist Humanism and “looser” conceptions of class formation and those of a new generation of left intellectuals was strongest in the United States in the late 1960s and the 1970s, when the new labor history was gestating.⁶

One way to gauge the book’s effect is to contrast its distance from an earlier generation of American radical historians. The main contribution of the older group, which coalesced around the journal Studies on the Left, was the notion of a “corporate liberal” consensus that held sway through much of the twentieth century.⁷ This group went through graduate school in the late 1950s and early 1960s and had connections with the Old Left but was “notable for its heterodoxy,” in part at least because of the catastrophic decline of the postwar Left and the weak tradition of Marxist scholarship in the United States.⁸ Most viewed history—and American politics—from the top down and analyzed corporate executives and foreign policy makers, but their work also included Eugene Genovese’s studies of the Southern planter elite. When they considered workers at all, it was largely in negative terms. The failure of immigrant workers to develop a class conscious labor movement bred disorganization and social pathologies ranging from insanity to crime and alcoholism. They were, Gabriel Kolko concluded, “lumpen people in a lumpen society.” This group’s most important conclusion, historian Jon Weiner notes, “was that virtually all popular and protest movements had been incorporated within the expanding capitalist system, instead of undermining it.”⁹

By the late 1960s, a very different orientation and group of historians emerged. With the publication of Radical America beginning in 1967, the political and historiographical tables were turned. The journal championed agency, spontaneity, and working-class and slave self-activity. “The Marxism Radical America adopted was the unorthodox variant developed by E. P. Thompson,” Peter Novick writes, “a Marxism that valued working-class culture and consciousness and strove to integrate class analysis with the cultural concerns growing out of black nationalism, feminism, and youth culture.”¹⁰ Novick misses the decisive influence of the West Indian scholar C. L. R. James who brought a popular culture angle and an insistence on the centrality of race, but there is no mistaking Thompson’s impact.¹¹ Radical America published socialist feminist writing from factories and community organizations as well as studies of women’s, working-class, and black history. The Radical History Review was also deeply influenced by the new labor history and carried the banner of radical history throughout the late 1970s and 1980s.

This younger group tapped into the insights of two older scholars who were influenced by and shared some experiences with Thompson. David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman both had backgrounds in the Old Left, though Gutman had exited from the movement while he was still young. After a decade in industrial work, Montgomery left the Communist Party in the mid-1950s, around the same time as Thompson: both had come to believe that the organization was increasingly irrelevant to radical politics. Montgomery’s work reflected his industrial experiences, focusing on gritty studies of the workplace, strike activity, and working-class politics. Gutman’s background in the radical Jewish culture of New York shaped his sensitivity to local working-class cultures. Both scholars sought to connect their research and that of their students with the labor movement.¹²

The “New Labor Historians” and The Making of the English Working Class

It is difficult to over-state the hunger for an approach that at once promised common people a place in the historical narrative and provided a model that captured the complexity of their experience. In Thompson, these historians found a theory of class formation more compatible with their own loose understandings of the term and one that focused on everyday lives. “The Making of the English Working Class resonated perfectly with the hopes of a generation of radical scholars that common people could make their own history,” Alan Dawley argued. “In the United States the book was quickly assimilated to a radical populism which aimed at doing history ‘from the bottom up’ to show that the poor … made history on their own terms.”¹³ Leaving aside the legacy of the Cold War, these labor historians were working against an entrenched Whig tradition that focused on labor institutions, emphasizing the virtue of the business union model while rejecting any notion of “social unionism.” They also faced the Studies group’s emphasis on the decisive power and influence of American capital—whether in the persons of paternalist slave masters or cosmopolitan “corporate liberals.” There was little role for common workers, slave or free, in either story.

The new approach provided a sweeping reinterpretation of what Thompson termed the historical “presence” of common people. Montgomery demonstrated the impact of workers on the broader history of industrialization, liberalism, and the evolution of the American state and imperialism. Though most remembered for his workplace studies, which might seem distant from The Making’s narrative, he was greatly influenced both by Thompson’s notion of the pervasive influence of class and by his insistence on workers’ agency. Where Thompson had focused on a literate and articulate group of artisan radicals, the key group in Montgomery’s “project” of class consciousness was the “militant minority”—a group of syndicalists, socialists, and progressive unionists who sought to bring their workmates together into an aggressive labor movement. Focusing mainly on male workers, Montgomery probed the gendered character of skilled work cultures, considered both race and ethnicity as vital to understanding the evolution of working-class identity, and absorbed, fitfully, the efforts of feminists and others who were attempting to deconstruct the archetypical worker as a white, skilled male.¹⁴

Looking at Montgomery, Gutman, and the younger group that followed in their wake establishes the profound influence of Thompson and The Making on a generation of scholars who transformed our understanding of US social history. At first, the new field was shaped primarily by reactions to older approaches, notably the large body of work associated with the labor economists John R. Commons and Selig Perlman.¹⁵ Both Montgomery’s Beyond Equality, which placed workers at the center of Civil War and Reconstruction politics, and some of Gutman’s pioneering studies of local working-class cultures, had already appeared before the authors became aware of The Making.¹⁶

Yet in each case Thompson’s book transformed the author’s understanding of the field. Gutman’s collaborator Ira Berlin writes that it stimulated Gutman to conceptualize his local studies in terms of class formation. “Thompson’s understanding of class … and of class consciousness as the cultural articulation of those experiences, was also Gutman’s,” Berlin wrote, “[and his] … overarching commitment to empirical research [was] also Thompson’s … it was not so much the emphasis on culture that drew him to Thompson as it was Thompson’s … outright celebration of human agency.” Gutman brilliantly captured the need of industrialists to transform not only the technology and methods of production, but also the culture and work habits of the people involved.¹⁷ Thompson had shown that this was an uneven, complex, and contentious process in England; Gutman showed that it was far more complex in the United States because of migration, race, and ethnicity.

The Making’s deepest and most enduring mark on the American narrative concerned the eighteenth-century plebian Atlantic world. While Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh followed Thompson in their brilliant evocation of the remarkably diverse and insurrectionary early modern maritime world, Al Young established the agency of artisans, the crowd, and the working poor in the context of the American Revolution.¹⁸

It is not surprising then that the earliest Thompsonesque studies focused on a comparable period in the United States, and for a while it seemed that he provided an admirable model for the history of early industrialization. A generation of young Yankee farmwomen constituted America’s first factory proletariat in New England’s textile towns, facing the sort of rigors of industrial work Thompson had described. They mixed with British and native-born skilled workers as well as a population of laboring poor, including free and enslaved blacks, to constitute the original American working-class population. By the 1830s, a labor movement and a class culture and politics resembling the one in Thompson’s narrative emerged in numerous cities—trades unions, cooperatives, Working Men’s institutes, political parties, newspapers, and a small group of organic intellectuals advocating a new perspective on political economy that emphasized a labor theory of value.¹⁹ As Thompson’s artisans had done with the rights of the freeborn Englishmen, they reworked the ideology of the early republic, creating a “labor republicanism” and demanding not only better wages, but also shorter hours, universal free education, and other reforms aimed at making the United States a more egalitarian society.²⁰

The process was perhaps most advanced in Philadelphia, where the General Trades Union (GTU) drew in more than fifty organizations representing laborers and factory operatives as well as artisans from diverse backgrounds—more than ten thousand workers in all. When the unskilled coal heavers walked off the job over long hours, artisans stopped work too, declaring, “We are all day laborers.” In 1835 a huge general strike for shorter hours commenced, involving as many as twenty thousand—far beyond the boundaries of the expansive GTU.²¹ The moment of class formation, it seemed, had arrived, and at about the same moment as the Chartist revolt, Thompson’s point of class maturation in England. Yet within a few years this promising movement had been destroyed and workers were bitterly divided along ethnic, racial, and religious lines.

Making and Unmaking the Working Class

One paradox in The Making towers over others and has particular relevance for the study of the United States, where other forms of constructed identity have tended to displace class as a key analytical category over the past generation. “[I]t is ironical that while Thompson was perhaps best known, and most widely admired, for having demonstrated how the history of a class may be written,” Chandavarkar writes, “his method and style of argument may have contributed substantially to the deconstruction and dissolution of the very concept of class.”²² Thompson’s emphasis on the diversity of working-class experience, his insistence on the rootedness of class in particular sites and cultures, his “loosening” of our understanding of class—shifti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Radical Book History: E. P. Thompson and The Making of the English Working Class
• Chapter 1: Making and Unmaking the Working Class: E. P. Thompson and the “New Labor History” in the United States
• Chapter 2: History from Down Under: E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Australia
• Chapter 3: The Ecology of Class: Revolution, Weaponized Nature, and the Making of Campesino Consciousness
• Chapter 4: Worst Conceivable Form: Race, Global Capital, and The Making of the English Working Class
• Chapter 5: Race, Antiracism, and the Place of Blackness in the Making and Remaking of the English Working Class
• Chapter 6: E. P. Thompson and the Kitchen Sink or Feeling from Below, c. 1963
• Chapter 7: South African Remains: E. P. Thompson, Biko, and the Limits of The Making of the English Working Class
• Chapter 8: Talking History: E. P. Thompson, C. L. R. James, and the Afterlives of Internationalism
• Index