E. P. Thompson believed that the English working class was in the making by the 1830s, embedded by the 1890s, central by the 1940s and at the post-industrial crossroads by the 1960s. The fashion ever since has been to describe the Thompson et al. E. P. Thompson, "Notes on Exterminism", in M. Evangelista (ed. [11], Thompson's most influential work was and remains The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 while he was working at the University of Leeds. Stedman-Jones, G, 1983, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982.
Ibid, pp377, 376-77, 378. group, which by 1968 had embraced Tariq Ali and various Trotskyists, as the second. It cannot be repaired. The massive book, over 800 pages, was a watershed in the foundation of the field of social history. The working class as a historical agent could produce historical materialism and the dialectical method as a way of overcoming the stranglehold of bourgeois thinking over society. Working-class consciousness was not the mechanical product of a set of structural circumstances created by industrial capitalism. The words of texts may not employ the ‘correct’ theoretical terminology, but the dialectic of historical relationships taken in their totality shows the operation of class consciousness. This theme, working class agency and self activity, sharply distinguished the Making from so much of what had passed for Marxist historical analysis during the period in which Stalinism dominated the left internationally.5 Indeed, in the famous preface to that work, Thompson spelt out the unique character of his approach to the issues of class and class struggle, implicitly contrasting it with the mechanical materialism of Stalinist historiography. [39] Sheila Rowbotham, also a feminist historian and a friend of E.P. Note the irony in Thompson talking of a people being drugged when what characterises his historical writing is the insistence that the common people are never fully absorbed into the ideological universe of their rulers. During the 1970s Thompson became increasingly preoccupied with the growth of the 'secret state' in Britain and its invasions of civil liberties. That there may often have been a political strategy behind the deployment of the term ‘people’ does not occur to Joyce. Class consciousness is not a thing; it is not a measurement of the number of workers who hold a correct doctrine, as defined by an historian of ideas. He is also the author of the Counterfire book, The Limits of Keynesianism (2018). More than this, however, his insistence on working class self activity put him at odds not only with the academic establishment, but also with the elitist traditions of the intellectual left--one of the many things for which he deserves to be remembered.21. Thompson had briefly collaborated with the two in the early stages of the NLR. '26, This argument carried an enormous hostage to fortune. McWilliam, Rohan, "Back to the future: E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and the remaking of nineteenth-century British history". Programme on the Study of Capitalism, Harvard, Terry L. Chapman, "Crime in eighteenth century England: E.P. He contrasted Thompson’s high-note of the early 1830s with the character of Chartism, and judged the struggles of the period extremely wanting in terms of class consciousness. Effectively, if they fell short of Marxist analysis, then they could not represent a truly proletarian class consciousness. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Joyce, P, 1991, Visions of the People. And because he was a Leavisite as much as he was a Marxist, he stitched his arguments, as far as he could, into the words of the people and their very English writers. The Use of Argument in Rhetoric . He had a particularly important part in opening a dialogue between the west European peace movement and dissidents in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for which he was denounced as a tool of American imperialism by the Soviet authorities. England's lower classes were kept undertake controlled by large-scale execution, transportation to the colonies, and imprisonment in horrible hulks of old warships. But this does not prevent bourgeois historical thought from periodically reasserting itself.
E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), p9. Much of Thompson's work in the 15 year period after the appearance of the Making took the form of a defence of the practice of historical materialism against abstract and schematising tendencies within Marxism. This approach turns class consciousness into a pre-existing ideal rather than something created by historical struggle.
However, the thoughts of the ruling class are ruling thoughts, and society in all its aspects only exists by continuing reproduction. And his gestures towards such an analysis can only be described as feeble. Understandably, he expressed annoyance with Marxists who considered such questions irrelevant. '40 There is much to reach back for in the writings of E P Thompson, and much that deserves to be affirmed and renewed.