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

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not quite sure how to respond to such a general request, Josh.

Historians come in two varieties, the trendy and those who care little
or nothing for trends.  The former fuels academe by engaging in quests
to find new theoretical breakthroughs that will give us essential new
ways to make our understanding of the past more objective and
"scientific."  The latter are content to stick with what was trendy when
they were in graduate school, or they simply suspect the emphasis on
theory.

Since the post World War II boom in higher education, history was
deemphasized in favor of the social sciences and I suspect that the
willingness of historians to embrace the succession of new tools from
the social sciences afterwards was an attempt to show that history, too,
could be of as much service to the pursuit of "scientific" understanding
as sociology, political science, economics, etc.  Of course, the nuts
and bolts of grants, endowments and publishing shape this, not some
abstract pursuit of truth for its own sake.

With full apologies in advance for touching raw nerves on this, the
social sciences just aren't sciences for a variety of very real (if
traditional) reason.  The politics of explaining why the social world is
what it is often blurs into a justification for the status quo.  Most of
the social science contribution to the shaping of historical scholarship
as been in the form of generating a succession of fashionable new
theoretical approaches the have distracted from the very modest but
essential goal of finding out what went on and why.

As a result, the vast amount of material published in some areas simply
papers our ignorance of what was really happening there.  I think that
on race and race relations, for example, there is an official version of
what was supposed to be going on based on what the ruling class wanted
to go on at the time.  The assumption is that everyday life mirrored
those kinds of hard and fast ideas of race.  The fact is that people
pegged officially as "white" or "Indian" or "Negro" may have regularly
intermingled anyway at a level that was below or beyond the official
radar.  At the time of the great Indian removals of the 1830s, for
example, most of the individuals moved west were biologically (and
culturally) a mixed population.  Ball play of all sorts seems to me to
have developed racial lines only as it became a more formalized and
publicly prominent kind of ritual.  I think it is clear from this
juxtaposition that large numbers of Americans accommodated the
strictures on race in public without really swallowing their
assumptions.

E.P. Thompson simply rooted our understanding of class in the
self-perceptions of the people we write about.  He did not so through a
theoretical insight but by demonstrating the extent to which we could
intellectually recapture that self-perception through its direct and
reflected imprint on the written record.  His work did as much as any
other single book to reintroduce class and the question of class into
Anglo-American historical scholarship, which had every vested interest
ultimately in just missing his point.

Being in the academy, btw, requires a certain Zen-like acceptance of our
institutional circumstances.  The structures and priorities of
universities are such that they are not just pursuing knowledge for its
own sake and will never be the innovative cutting edge of anything that
threatens itself or the economic and social realities in which it is
rooted.  While many "radicals" in the academy acknowledge this in
theory, they act as if they buy into the idea that universities can
socially engineer what happens beyond (and why they become
self-righteous shills for the insurance companies and institutional
managers that want to reduce potential liabilities by banning offensive
language and ideas).  Many also seem to believe in an elusive
intellectual alchemy by which their disciplines would transform the
leaden realities of ordered hierarchy into new golden opportunities to
remake the world.

None of this is going to happen.  If a more scientific understanding of
society might be possible, it won't be attained under this arrangement
or under this class system.  Indeed, to the extent that such insights
would begin to emerge, the intellectual antibodies of the system would
cluster and dissolve it into something entirely harmless.

In a practical sense, then, the best way to learn any kind of history is
to find something that raises an interesting question and then doing the
spadework to get at the answer.  Let the theory stay on the shelf until
what you're looking at begins to suggest its own answers.  I think this
is exactly what E.P. Thompson demonstrated even on this broad concept of
class formation.

Solidarity!
Mark L.





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