in the 1830s if it later underwent this ‘astonishing transformation’—one whose main outlines have now lasted nearly a century? The answer is surely that the connotations of the term are wrong. In the first place, the English working class was not ‘made’ by the 1830s in the simple sociological sense that it was still far from being predominantly a labour-force operating genuinely industrial means of production, whether in factories or other technical complexes. ‘Machinofacture’, in fact, was much slower to spread even in the Victorian economy than has traditionally been thought.75 Its gradual advent, however, betokened a radical long-term recomposition of the class, profoundly altering its structures at every level, as the figure of the collective labourer in an integrated work-process was generalized. The protracted hiatus in the development of the labour movement between the 1840s and the 1880s may be partly explained by the length and hesitancy of the transition between workshop and factory as modal types of industrial organization in England. At all events, it is discontinuity, not continuity, that is the keynote of 19th century working-class history. The sociological evolution from artisanate to proletariat, an objective transformation induced by the process of capital accumulation, was accompanied by so deep a dislocation of political, ideological and cultural traditions that the new patterns which emerged in the 1880s have been dubbed by Gareth Stedman Jones, in an outstanding essay, an effective ‘re-making’ of the English working class.76
The most important change was, of course, at the political level itself. The main ideological influences and spokesmen in the world of the early English working class were themselves external to it. Paine, Cobbett and Owen—customs officer, journalist, manufacturer—were all from propertied backgrounds. The English working class in this period produced no Weitling or Proudhon. Of these three, Owen alone anticipated the characteristic outlook of the modern proletariat with his cooperative socialism, but the impact of his ideas was the most transient. As Thompson remarks: ‘The main tradition of 19th century working-class Radicalism took its cast from Paine. There were times, at the Owenite and Chartist climaxes, when other traditions became dominant. But after each relapse, the substratum of Painite assumptions remained intact. The aristocracy were the main target … but, however hard trade unionists might fight against their employers—industrial capital was assumed to be the fruit of enterprise and beyond the reach of political intrusion. Until the 1880s, it was, by and large, within this framework that working-class Radicalism remained transfixed’.77 This judgement needs some nuancing, since by the trough of the 1860s the positive heritage of Painism was largely in abeyance. For The Making of the English Working Class also correctly stresses its anti-constitutionalism, republicanism and internationalism, together with the associated Jacobin virtues of egalité, and notes that later labour traditions in England typically lacked precisely these qualities.78 The main tradition of late 19th and 20th century Labourism took its cast from anti-capitalist ideas beyond those of Paine, yet remained ‘transfixed’ in a parliamentarist framework in regression behind him. The class Thompson describes was revolutionary in temper and ideology, but not socialist. After the mid-century metamorphosis, as sections of it became socialist, it ceased to be revolutionary. Therein lies the whole tragedy of English labour history to date, as Tom Nairn was perfectly right to call it.
Thus if we take what are probably the two most fundamental dimensions of any working class—its objective composition as a social force and its subjective outlook as a political force—we are obliged to conclude that the English proletariat was in no way essentially made by 1832: or if it was, its first ‘incarnation’ was to be strangely, systematically inverted by its second. Thompson, of course, is not unaware of the problem. It is not addressed in The Making of the English Working Class itself, but he has subsequently spoken of the work of class unification that produced Chartism, in a sense the culmination of the period of ‘making’, as having been undone in a later phase.79 But if the same class could be made by the 30s, unmade after the 40s, and remade during the 80s, how ultimately satisfactory is the whole vocabulary of making itself? In a different context, Thompson has indirectly pinpointed some of its difficulties himself. Writing his essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, he was concerned not so much to vindicate the insurgent agency of the early working class, as to reject what he judged to be the shallow and dismissive treatment of the moderate reformism of the later working class by Tom Nairn and myself. In doing so, he advanced two arguments which are of great interest for the light they shed on The Making of the English Working Class itself. Firstly, he argued that in our account of English history, ‘class is clothed throughout in anthropomorphic imagery. Classes have attributes of personal identity, with volition, conscious goals, and moral qualities’.80 Conceding that this was ‘in part a matter of metaphor’, he went on: ‘But one must never forget that it remains a metaphorical description of a more complex process, which happens without volition or identity’.81 To illustrate this criticism, Thompson then selected precisely the watershed we have been discussing—what we had called the ‘profound caesura in English working-class history’ from the 1850s through to the 1870s. Rebuking this phrase, he argued that the period between Chartism and the New Unionism was in fact characterized by new sociological divisions within the working class, a psychological adjustment to the factory system, and the building up of the typical institutions of the Labour movement—trade unions, trades councils, cooperatives. ‘The workers, having failed to overthrow capitalist society, proceeded to warren it from end to end … It was part of the logic of this new direction that each advance within the framework of capitalism simultaneously involved the working class far more deeply in the status quo. As they improved their position by organization within the workshop, so they became more reluctant to engage in quixotic outbreaks which might jeopardize gains accumulated at such cost’.82 From this description, he drew the following conclusion: ‘This is the direction that was taken, and, beneath all differences in ideological expression, much the same kind of imbrication in the status quo will be found in all advanced capitalist nations. We need not necessarily agree with Wright Mills that this indicates that the working class can be a revolutionary class only in its formative years; but we must, I think, recognize that once a certain climacteric moment is passed, the opportunity for a certain kind of revolutionary movement passes irrevocably—not so much because of “exhaustion” but because more limited, reformist pressures, from secure organizational bases, bring evident returns.’83
Now what is surely striking about this argument is that it runs against the whole grain of The Making of the English Working Class. The emphases are suddenly reversed here. Less a celebration of agency than a dwelling on necessity; rather than a projection of identity, an emphasis on mutability of class; no longer a national process, but an international pattern. The polemical thrust points in an unwonted direction. For if it is misleading to ascribe ‘volition and identity’ to classes, how can we speak of the working class ‘making itself’—a verb that seems to combine the two errors in a single phrase? Where The Making of the English Working Class claimed that this making ‘owed as much to agency as to conditioning’, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ warns its readers: ‘Let us look at history as history—men placed in actual contexts which they have not chosen, and confronted by indivertible forces, with an overwhelming immediacy of relations and duties and with only a scanty opportunity for inserting their own agency’.84 Co-determination has dwindled to a much more modest claim here. The differing polemical contexts, of course, explain much of the contrast. In The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson sought to uphold the creative activity and autonomy of English Radicalism against economic historians or sociologists bent on reducing the early working class to a passive object of industrialization. In ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, he is concerned to defend the record of Left Labourism, by appealing for greater understanding of the ungovernable weight of circumstances compressing its capacity for action. The political intention is honourable in both cases. But when allowance has been made for it, the theoretical discrepancy remains insurmountable. The part of agency in history cannot be adjusted ad hoc to fit particular forensic purposes. There is no reason to think that the line from Lansbury to Benn has confronted forces that were more indivertible than those which loomed over Jacobin or Luddite. The contrary would be more plausible.
The
