[Marxism] Re Problems with The Making of the English Working Class

[Ilyenkova@xxxxxxx]

Mark Lause wrote:
>Thompson argued that class has to do with how people process their
EXPERIENCED social realities.  Labeling that as "idealism" rather makes
me think, with Karl, that I am not a Marxist.<

If this was all he was about in *Making* who could have a problem with it?
Who would argue that concern for how people mediate their identities (or
process, if you prefer) is historical idealism? Consider again the *class 
happens..."
quote:

"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
productive 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." (E.P. Thompson)

Your response to E. P. Thompson's work is the dominant one among labor
historians. So, on the numbers alone, I may very well be off base.

In my reading, Thompson comes very close to reducing class to a matter of
consciousness. He leaves himself an escape clause with the reference to
*determined by the productive relations,* but the main point of the 'class 
happens'
paragraph is to break the link between the mode of production and class. In 
doing
so he existentializes class (like shit, it happens), and reduces
class-consciousness to a psychological process.

In contrast, Rediker and Linebaugh's transAtlantic proletariat-in-formation
circulate their experiences collectively; but they do so within floating
factories that circulate the human and material commodities of primitive
accumulation. They resist the imposition of capitalist labor discipline and 
aquiesce in
it depending on circumstance. But the birth process of the capitalist mode of
production as a global system is the determinate context for any possible
agency: It dragoons their bodies and forces their labor; they fight back as they
can. They mutiny sometimes and run up the Jolly Roger. Structure and agency;
social being and consciousness; and yes, base and superstructure, in dialectical
tension.

Ilyenkova
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