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

[Ilyenkova@xxxxxxx]

Josh wrote:
>The Making (of the English Working class) has moved labor history/cultural
history,
as far as I can tell, in a direction in which culture, identity, etc, are the
central preoccupation, but not so much the causes of victories and defeats
and the social forces that overshadow history in general.
Well, those are my thoughts, it will be interesting to hear back from people!<


Exactly Josh. That move is reflected in your own list of *problems* (i.e.)
notions of masculinity within this culture
and race and imperialism etc. And you're right that in Thompson's preface he
moves towards an idealist conception of history. The crux of this is expressed
quite clearly in the following:

"Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or
shared) feel and articulate their identity of their interests as between
themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and
usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the 
produ
ctive relations into which men are born - or enter involuntarily.
Class-consciousness is the way these experiences are handled in cultural terms: 
embodied
in traditions, value systems, ideas and institutional forms."
Yes,  *Making* was Thompson's own payback to a rigidly determinist and
materialist orthodoxy in Marxist labor history. Perhaps he can be forgiven for
bending the stick way to far in the other direction. After all, as you note, his
ability to make the role of ideas in expressing class-consciousness (i.e.)
Jacobinism, makes for exciting and refreshing reading. The setback Thompson 
dealt
to what used to be called The New Labor History may lie more in what others did
with his antideterminist stick than with the work itself. Herbert Gutman went
over the top with *agency* to the point of confessing more of a debt to
Sartre than Marx (see Visions of history/by MAHRO-the Radical Historians
Organization; ed. by Henry Abelove for the contentious exchange between Mike 
Merril and
Herbert Gutman). It was a short hop to Roediger's Wages of Whiteness,
Ignatieff's How the Irish Became White and the move towards Discourse Theory and
Cultural Studies was off and running. Actually, I think this is water under the
bridge now thanks to a combination of the intrinsic infertility of discourse
theory and to the works of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh which situate the
formation of the working class of the British Isles in the material reality of
the transatlantic maritime economy of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, rather
than in Thompson's more parochial literate English artisanate (see esp
Rediker and Linebaugh's, The many-headed Hydra:sailors,slaves, commoners, and 
the
hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic).
Ilyenkova







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