The study of class, class interest and the class struggle are no longer a fashionable topic in academic circles. In his readable but poorly researched book Intellectual Life of the Working Classes (Yale 2002), the historian Jonathan Rose searched a database of academic books published in Britain between 1991 and 2000. He got 13,820 hits for “woman”, 4539 for “gender” 1826 for “race”, 710 for “post-colonial” and a mere 136 for “working class” (p.464). The trend has continued. A decade later, by 2010 the database for academic books published on the “working class”’ was less than a couple of dozen entries.
Of course, the “working-class” investigated by Professor Rose and other academics is shallow and narrowly defined. Academic definitions of working-class only include so-called blue collar workers like miners and dockers. The use of the term “working class” by academics is very restrictive and allows politicians to state that the working class is either disappearing or does not exist at all.
When Socialists use the word ‘class’ it is used precisely in relationship to the ownership or non-ownership of the means of production and distribution. Rather than forming a minority in capitalism, the working class forms a majority even though many workers refuse to accept that they belong to it, instead, identifying with the so-called “professional” or “middle-class”– managers, doctors, judges, politicians, etc. However, their relationship with their employer is exactly the same as the miner or shopworker – they work for a wage on which they are dependent. At a general level a world working class confronts a world capitalist class over the ownership and use of the earth’s resources and means to secure a living.
Nevertheless, there can be no other scientific use of class in the analysis of capitalism than the one advocated by Socialists. The concept of class only has significance in the relationship of one class to another class and the relationship of both these classes to the ownership or non-ownership of raw resources, factories, machinery, transport and so on. And it is the Marxian meaning of class related to the means of production and distribution which has been under constant and sustained reactionary criticism for the best part of four decades.
The reaction against the Marxian theory of class is quite understandable. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the 1990’s was a decade where interest in Marx, class, class interest and the class struggle waned. Many who claimed to be “Marxists” found secure employment under the umbrella of Blair’s New Labour government and think tanks where poverty was replaced by “social exclusion” and the working class was re-written as “the underclass”.
The former-Soviet Union was fallaciously highlighted as a failure of “Socialism in practice” and used as a stick by which to beat any alternative proposition to the market and the profit system and even though Socialism has never been
established it was deemed to have failed.
A class conscious Socialist majority has never politically established the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
This did not stop the enemies of Socialism pronouncing it dead and buried. “There is no alternative to the market” (Tina) Socialists were repeatedly told by capitalism’s supporters. And there was a concerted effort to “Get Marx” and deracinate, once and for all, his Socialist ideas from political discourse. After all, hadn’t we been told that human social development had reached “the end of history”, terminating in the capitalism enshrined in the United States of America?
Already in the early 1980’s reactionary albeit influential historians like Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her The Idea of Poverty, England in the Industrial Age (New York, 1983) tried to displace the concept of class from the explanatory centre of nineteenth-century British social history. According to The Guardian (14th February 2009), Himmelfarb wanted a conservative morality to accompany a free market capitalism around the Daily Mail values of, thrift, self-help, self-discipline, cleanliness, chastity, fidelity and charity. She wanted a return to “Victorian values” – including the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor – as an antidote to the “grievous moral disorder” she thought was caused by the politics of the 1960s. Former Prime-Minister, Gordon Brown, who shared her view of the need for a “moral compass“, wrote the introduction to her book The Roads to Modernity (2007) and invited her to lead a seminar at No 11 Downing Street when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Other reactionary historians have taken a similar view to class as Professor Himmelfarb. The historian, William Reddy argued that it is “quite possible to account for the whole of English social history down through 1850 without invoking class interest” (Money and Liberty in Modern Europe; A Critique of Historical Understanding, (Cambridge, 1987, p. 195). And in 1990 Ross McKibbon wrote his woeful Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain? (The ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880 – 1950, Oxford, pp. 32 -36, written as though the Socialist Party of Great Britain had never existed). While the conservative historian, Professor John Vincent wrote: “History is about winners, not losers…History is deeply male…History is about the rich and famous, not the poor” (Intelligent Person’s Guide to History 1995, pp. 12, 15 quoted in Richard J. Evans: In Defence of History p. 212 2000).
The main target of these academics was the radical historiography begun by E.P. Thompson in 1963 with the publication of his influential book The Making of the English Working Class now approaching its 50th anniversary.
Thompson stated that he chose the title “Making of the English Working Class” in order to demonstrate “an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning” (Preface, p.9). He did not see class as an abstract “structure” or “category” but as “something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships”. And those relationships were “always embodied in real people in a real context” (loc cit p.9).
Thompson rejected the history of Kings and Queens and the deliberations of Statesmen on the one-hand, and the mutilation of Marx’s concept of class and the vulgarised mis-use of Marx’s materialist conception of history found in left-wing academic circles, on the other. Instead he emphasized the class struggle of real living workers as a central force in the historical process of revolutionary change as opposed to some metaphysical abstraction moving through history.
Thompson set out to rescue from historical obscurity the early working class as makers of history. He wrote: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger (a person who knits on a stocking-frame), the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” handloom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity” (p.13). In trying to save individuals and groups of individual workers from “the enormous condensation of posterity”, he lost sight of important materialist considerations at the heart of Marx’s political concept of class; particularly the conflict in capitalism between the forces of production and the social relations of production which generates the class struggle and produces socialist ideas.
There are a number of important problems with Thompson’s book. In particular his refusal to engage with Marx’s materialist treatment of class to be found in The Communist Manifesto and later in the three volumes of Capital. For Marx, the very peculiar material process of exploitation under capitalism affects both class consciousness and the political class struggle but this insight was ignored by Thompson and not picked up in an uncritical review of the Thompson’s book in the Socialist Standard (December 1968, p. 196). Nevertheless, The Making of the English Working Class has the merit to focus attention on the working class, its formation and development in history and still deserves to be read some 50 years later in preference to the cultural historians which later came to dominate historical writing in university history departments.
Thompson’s book was attacked immediately on publication by reactionary historians for moving attention away from traditional and conservative historical writing to one of class, class interest and class struggle. The criticism of “working-class history” has continued down to this day, principally because the use of the word class is viewed as divisive and a disturbance to what Thompson called: “the harmonious coexistence of groups performing different social roles” (loc cit p 10-11). 50 years later class should have become history. But it isn’t. However, to end on a positive note, a classless society is only a revolution away.
