of State by calculated exploitation of social or economic forces beyond the purview of the traditional optic of politics. Cavour, Bismarck and Ito were the supreme exemplars of this major enlargement of the pattern of conscious superordination. But their lucidity remained operational rather than structural. None possessed any general vision of historical development, and the work of each ended in ulterior debacle, consummated by 20th century successors—Mussolini, Hitler and the Showa adventurers—who mistook their legacy as a lesson in the efficacy of a voluntarism without restraint. The cult of political will without social sight ended in near class suicide for German, Italian and Japanese capital in the Second World War. The record of this dementia is a reminder of how far a monopoly of political power is from a mastery of historical process. The same holds true for the Soviet or Chinese bureaucracies today, whose capacity to understand their own societies is inherently limited by the ideological necessities of their own usurpation and privilege. Indeed, it is safe to say that no social formation short of full socialist democracy is likely to generate accurate knowledge of its own deepest laws of motion.
In itself, however, even common aspiration fused with real cognition, in a post-revolutionary workers’ democracy, would not suffice to cross the frontiers of necessity. Thompson’s second mistake is to forget the irreducible material compulsions of scarcity. The USSR today, even delivered from bureaucratic misrule, would still remain at a vast distance from the perspective evoked by Thompson, of a ‘primacy of social consciousness over social being’—a future first formulated in these terms sixty years ago by Lukács during the Hungarian Commune. Poverty and shortage still haunt Russian society, rural as well as urban, in an economy whose productivity of labour remains half that of West Germany. An inexplicable failure to register this familiar fact leads Thompson not only to attribute an imaginary liberty of manoeuvre to the Soviet leadership, but also to deprive its emergence of any rational historical causality. Thus he can tentatively wonder whether it or similar groups were not ‘perhaps fortuitously established in power at the time of the revolution’;24 whereas in fact, as every serious Marxist study of the fate of the Russian Revolution has shown, it was the cruel inner environment of pervasive scarcity, allied with the external emergency of imperialist military encirclement, that produced the bureaucratization of party and state in the USSR. Trotsky’s original analysis of this process remains unsurpassed to this day. The realm of necessity, far from having vanished in the Communist countries, still continues both to reproduce bureaucracy and to manacle it. Thompson’s one conjectural admission of historical variation to his account of agency appears to confirm a tendency to make light of its objective circumscriptions.
We can explore this possibility further by turning back to The Poverty of Theory and looking at the central category which it deploys in support of its treatment of agency—the concept of ‘experience’. Thompson tells us that it is ‘through the missing term “experience” that structure is transmuted into process, and the subject re-enters into history’.25 Repeatedly invoked as a veritable limbeck of social life, what is experience? Two somewhat different answers are given. Thompson initially writes that ‘it comprises the mental and emotional response, whether of an individual or a social group, to many inter-related events or to many repetitions of the same kind of event’.26 Later, however, he suggests another definition: ‘Experience is a necessary middle term between social being and social consciousness’. Thus if ‘experience has, in the last instance, been generated in “material life”, has been structured in class ways, and hence “social being” has determined “social consciousness”’, at the same time ‘for any living generation, in any “now”, the ways in which they “handle” experience defies prediction and escapes from any narrow definition of determination’.27 The first of these formulations situates experience squarely ‘within’ consciousness, as a subjective reaction—‘mental and emotional response’—to objective events. The second and third intercalate it ‘between’ being and consciousness, and introduce a further concept: instead of experience being a set of mental and emotional responses to events, it is itself ‘handled’ to yield the responses of (in particular) class and culture. The sense of a second order of subjectivity, so to speak, is reinforced by the unusual pleonasm to which Thompson has recourse in developing his account: ‘People do not only experience their own experience as ideas, within thought and its procedures, or as proletarian instinct. They also experience their own experience as feeling’.28
What do these oscillations and uncertainties of usage signify? Essentially, they are reminders of the ambiguity of the term ‘experience’ in ordinary language itself.29 On the one hand, the word denotes an occurrence or episode as it is lived by the participants, the subjective texture of objective actions, ‘the passing through any event or course of events by which one is affected’.30 On the other, it indicates a subsequent process of learning from such occurrences, a subjective alteration capable of modifying ensuing objective actions; hence, as the dictionary puts it, ‘practical acquaintance with any matter gained by trial; long and varied observation, personal or general; wisdom derived from the changes or trials of life’.31 These two distinct senses can be called here neutral and positive. The adjective ‘experienced’, of course, refers only to the latter. Now if we look at Thompson’s usage of the term in his critique of Althusser, we can see that much of the time he is unconsciously transferring the virtues and powers of the (more restricted) second type to the (more general) first type of experience. The efficacy of the one is fused with the universality of the other, to suggest an alternative way of reading history as a whole. The generic category that results inevitably conflates very different problems. Thompson’s most specific illustration of the force of the concept occurs at the very outset of his contest with Althusser. He writes: ‘Experience is valid and effective but within determined limits: the farmer “knows” his seasons, the sailor “knows” his seas, but both may remain mystified about kingship and cosmology.’32 Now, if followed through in one direction, this remark leads towards the kind of conclusion that The Poverty of Theory otherwise overlooks: that effective agency/knowledge has been hierarchically limited throughout human history, its reach typically not pertaining in any way to social relations as such. In other words, it permits at least a suggestion of the asymmetries, the disparities, between determination and self-determination in past epochs. But, of course, to register this point alone is not enough. For the problem posed by Thompson’s argument is not just that of the spatial reach of a given experience, but of its relevant type. Farming and sailing, in the example he gives, are experimental practices, controlled by observable results. They certainly generate real knowledge. But they cannot be taken thereby as emblematic of experience in general. If we substitute, say, for Thompson’s pair the ‘parishioner’ knows his ‘prayers’, the ‘priest’ his ‘flock’, what conclusion would we arrive at? Is religious experience ‘valid and effective within determined limits’? Obviously not. One can scarcely suspect Thompson of concessions on this score. Indeed at one point he goes to the opposite extreme, committing himself to the boldly unhistorical view that ‘the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks’—‘to any rational mind’.33 We need not subscribe to this kind of rationalism to judge that religious experience, while subjectively very intense and real, while enormously effective in moving great masses of men and women down the ages to routine duties and exceptional enterprises alike, is not ‘valid’ as knowledge, and never was.
How then do we distinguish valid from invalid experience? Thompson nowhere gives us any indications. Yet the problem is clearly a central one for his whole case in The Poverty of Theory. The examples just discussed are all regularly codified practices. But experience, of course, takes many other forms, and Thompson elsewhere alludes to some of them. A few pages later, he writes: ‘Experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve: their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned: in prison they meditate in new ways about the law.’34 The sense of ‘experience’ in this passage is clearly that of the lesson that unheralded processes—vicissitudes or calamities—can teach those who live through them. Thompson clearly assumes that the lessons taught will be correct ones, as can be
