Re: [Marxism] problems with 'the making of the english working class'

[Josh Saxe <joshsaxe@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Mark-
It sounds like you have a lot of good insights, would you mind
expanding the below into a (much) longer email?  I am new to labor
history, Thompson was actually the first book I read with the goal in
mind of learning about the field, I am a first year masters degree
student.
-Josh


On Sat, 2 Oct 2004 17:15:59 -0400, Mark Lause <mlause@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Monday-morning quarterbacking of successful and unsuccessful strikes,
> institutions and movements is valuable, but it's also very limited and
> limiting.  There are deeper, more general historic reasons why workers'
> efforts fail and how they fail, and modern labor history is usually
> trying to get a handle on these kinds of things.
>
> IMHO, you are mistaken about Thompson's book on a number of levels,
> which appeared in the middle 1960s.  While it carried concern about
> labor history far into the mainstream of historical scholarship, I don't
> think he diverted labor history from what it was doing, because there
> was very little real labor history being done at the time.  At that
> time, the handful of historians who actually launched what has become a
> specialized field could have fit into an elevator.  So, I don't think
> Thompson misled either labor history as a field or the handful of people
> who were in the process of launching it.
>
> My own sense is quite the contrary, that--especially in the U.S.--what
> has become a significant (though not large) specialization in labor
> history has never fully appreciated Thompson's insights into class and
> class formation.
>
> Solidarity!
> Mark L.
>
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