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The second major theme of The Poverty of Theory is no longer procedural—what is the nature of historiography?—but substantive: what is the part of conscious human choice, value, action in history? Readers of William Morris or The Making of the English Working Class will be aware that this is the key organizing theme of Thompson’s entire work. The passion he has brought to it over twenty-five years transpires from every page of what now takes its place as his most extended theoretical statement of the problem. His argument essentially runs as follows. Althusser’s cardinal sin is his repeated assertion that ‘history is a process without a subject’,¹ in which individual men and women are ‘supports of relations of production’.² Although presented as the last word in contemporary Marxism, ‘this is a very ancient mode of thought: process is fate’.³ Today, far from being a proposition of historical materialism, it is in tune with the most reified and decadent bourgeois ideology, which must be resisted by every committed socialist. For, on the contrary, both the genuine heritage of Marx’s theory and the actual findings of historical research teach us that men and women are the ‘ever-baffled and ever-resurgent agents of an unmastered history’.⁴ No one saw this or expressed it better than Morris, when he wrote: ‘I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name’.⁵ History is not a process without a subject: it is ‘unmastered human practice’,⁶ in which each hour is ‘a moment of becoming, of alternative possibilities, of ascendant and descendant forces, of opposing (class) definitions and exertions, of “double-tongued” signs.’⁷ The crucial medium in which men and women convert objective determinations into subjective initiatives is through their experience—the junction between ‘being and consciousness’, by which ‘structure is transmuted into process, and the subject re-enters into history’.⁸ It is through such experience, for example, that they make themselves into social classes-groups conscious of antagonistic values and interests, and struggling to realize them. ‘Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think and to value in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-making, although under conditions which are “given”.’⁹ Engels’s famous ‘parallelogram of forces’—in which ‘individual wills do not attain what they want’ and yet ‘each contributes to the resultant and is to this degree involved in it’,¹⁰ dismantled and dismissed by Althusser, can be reinstated once a substitution is made of class for individual volition: ‘if the historical resultant is then seen as the outcome of a collision of contradictory class interests and forces, then we may see how human agency gives rise to an involuntary result and how we may say, at one and the same time, that “we make our own history” and “history makes itself”.’¹¹ The real lesson of historical materialism is ‘the crucial ambivalence of our human presence in our own history, part-subjects, part-objects, the voluntary agents of our own involuntary determinations’.¹²

The pivot of Thompson’s construction, it will be seen, is the notion of agency—a dominant in his vocabulary since his earliest writings. Attractively, often movingly, as it is employed in The Poverty of Theory, it can come to seem virtually self-explanatory. But in fact it demands very careful and discriminating scrutiny. For its apparent simplicity is deceptive. Let us recall first of all that the term ‘agent’ reveals a curious ambiguity in ordinary usage, possessing two opposite connotations. It signifies at once active initiator and passive instrument. The word is intended by Thompson exclusively in the first sense: but phrases like ‘agents of a foreign power’ and ‘agents for a merchant bank’ remind us of the currency of the second sense. Ironically, Thompson without noticing uses it himself in just this way at a number of points in The Poverty of Theory, disparaging what he calls various ‘import agencies’ for foreign doctrines¹³ (among them, New Left Review). The same capsizal of meaning, of course, occurs in the related term ‘subject’, signifying simultaneously ‘sovereignty’ and ‘subordination’: a striking coincidence. In the case of agency, however, we have a familiar way of distinguishing between the two senses of the word. Where necessary, speech customarily refers to ‘free agents’ to make it clear that the former rather than the latter is intended. Is this what Thompson means by agency? The answer is of some interest. A very large philosophical issue is clearly at stake here. Yet throughout his long essay, the problem breaks surface only once, in a fleeting parenthesis. ‘Whatever we may conclude, in the endlessly receding argument of pre-determination and free will’, he notes at one point, ‘it is profoundly important that we should think ourselves to be “free” (which Althusser will not allow us to think)’.¹⁴ The avowal here approaches a pure pragmatism, akin to Nietzsche’s doctrine of the ‘useful illusion’.¹⁵ In the midst of so many lengthy and unconditional arguments against Althusser, a short clause suddenly opens the gate to ultimate disarmament before him (what if truth belied comfort?). Then the dense press of refutation resumes its course again. We have been reminded, however, of a subterranean uncertainty beneath the confident ground on which agency is generally pitched in The Poverty of Theory.

Does Thompson’s momentary equivocation disable his overall case? It need not. For the notion of agency can be retained, even on rigorously determinist premises, if we mean by it conscious, goal-directed activity. Sebastiano Timpanaro has proposed a definition close to this in his work On Materialism, from a standpoint faithful to the most stoical injunctions of the late Engels.¹⁶ The problem of the ultimate sources of action can then be bracketed in a rational historical inquiry, for a study of its ends. But if agency is construed as conscious, goal-directed activity, everything turns on the nature of the ‘goals’. For it is obvious that all historical subjects engage in actions all of the time, of which they are ‘agents’ in this strict sense. So long as it remains at this level of indeterminacy, the notion is an analytic void. To render it operative, at least three qualitatively different types of goal have to be clearly distinguished. Throughout history to date, the overwhelming majority of people for the overwhelmingly major part of their lives have pursued ‘private’ goals: cultivation of a plot, choice of a marriage, exercise of a skill, maintenance of a home, bestowal of a name. These personal projects are inscribed within existing social relations, and typically reproduce them. Yet they remain profoundly intentional enterprises, which have consumed the greater part of human energy and persistence throughout recorded time. The historian of any small community plunges directly into the milieu of this universal agency: Leroy Ladurie’s study of a 14th century Albigensian village, Montaillou, is an archetypal instance. There have also, of course, been collective or individual projects whose goals were ‘public’ in character: quantitatively far fewer, involving lesser numbers in more fitful endeavours, but normally more interesting and important for the historian. Will and action here acquire an independent historical significance as causal sequences in their own right, rather than as molecular samples of social relations. The difference is typically inscribed in historical records themselves: to take two late medieval documents, say, between the Paston Letters and Froissart’s Chronicles. Religious movements, political struggles, military conflicts, diplomatic transactions, commercial explorations, cultural creations, have been among the staple types of such public agendas. However, these too in their overwhelming majority have not aimed to transform social relations as such—to create new societies or master old ones: for the most part they were much more limited in their (voluntary) scope. The goals pursued have been characteristically inserted within a known structural framework, taken for granted by the actors. The foundation of the Benedictine Order in the Dark Ages, the building of Notre Dame, the Habsburg-Valois wars in Italy, the Treaty of Westphalia or Utrecht, the competition between Hats and Caps in parliamentary Sweden, Commodore Perry’s voyage to Japan—most familiar historical events or processes of this kind, whatever their misery or grandeur, have been marked by the pursuit of local objectives within an accepted order over-arching them. Large-scale military conquests themselves, which might appear an exception, have generally sought no more than to impose a new political and economic authority in otherwise unaltered lands: the Mongol Empire, the greatest of all, is a classic example. The consequences of foreign annexation could, of course, be far more drastic, in ways unimagined by the conquerors (the demographic collapse of the Mexican population after Cortes). But this is equally true of any of the forms of historical initiative just described. By definition, it is intentional reach rather than involuntary result that distinguishes one form of agency from another.

Finally, there are those collective projects which have sought to render their initiators authors of their collective mode of existence as a whole, in a conscious programme aimed at creating or remodelling whole social structures. There are isolated premonitions of this phenomenon, in political colonization, religious heterodoxy or literary utopia, in earlier centuries: but essentially this kind of agency is very recent indeed. On a major scale, the very notion of it scarcely predates the Enlightenment. The American and French Revolutions are the first historical figurations of collective agency in this, decisive sense. Originating as largely spontaneous explosions and ending with politico-juridical reconstructions, however, they still remain at a great distance from the manifestation of a full popular agency desiring and creating new social conditions of life for itself. It is the modern labour movement that has really given birth to this quite new conception of historical change; and it is with the advent of what its founders called scientific socialism that, in effect, for the first time collective projects of social transformation were married to systematic efforts to understand the processes of past and present, to produce a premeditated future. The Russian Revolution is in this respect the inaugural incarnation of a new kind of history, founded on an unprecedented form of agency. Notoriously, the results of the great cycle of upheavals it initiated have to date been far from those expected at their outset. But the alteration of the potential of historical action, in the course of the 20th century, remains irreversible.

Now the effect of Thompson’s appeals to agency in his critique of Althusser is to permit a slide from sense one through sense two to sense three. Their rhetorical impact relies on the persuasive everyday evidence that people go about their lives making all sorts of choices, enacting values and pursuing ends, some of them realized, others not, others realized in ways not wanted. This kind of agency (choice of husband or lover, in Thompson’s witty parable of the woman worker)¹⁷ is then elided with the limited collective project, which is less frequent (the strike in her workshop), and that can then be tacitly equated with the form of agency indicated by Morris’s dictum, which clearly refers to overall social transformations (its context is the Peasants’ Revolt), which are very rare indeed as willed processes in history. The reductive phrase ‘ever-baffled, ever—resurgent human agents’ provides the timeless linkage. The conceptual error involved is to amalgamate those actions which are indeed conscious volitions at a personal or local level, but whose social incidence is profoundly involuntary (relation of marriage-age, say, to population growth), with those actions which are conscious volitions at the level of their own social incidence, under the single rubric of ‘agency’. The paradoxical result of Thompson’s critique of Althusser is thus actually to reproduce the fundamental failing of the latter, by a polemical inversion. For the two antagonistic formulae of a ‘natural-human process without a subject’ and ‘ever-baffled, ever-resurgent agents of an unmastered practice’ are both claims of an essentially apodictic and speculative character—eternal axioms that in no way help us to trace the actual, variable roles of different types of deliberate venture, personal or collective, in history. A historical, as opposed to an axiomatic, approach to the problem would seek to trace the curve of such enterprises, which has risen sharply—in terms of mass of participation and scale of objective—in the last two centuries, from previously low levels. Even so, however, it is important to recall that there are huge areas of existence which remain largely outside any form of concerted agency at all. Demographic patterns, to take the previous example, have traditionally fallen outside the domain of any conscious social choice. If they are now beginning for the first time to be the object of attempts at deliberate intervention, initial experiments in population control still remain largely ineffective, as in India or China (as well as authoritarian), while inducements to population growth, as in the DDR or France, have so far yielded little results. Another zone of primordial human practice that remains even more unwilled is, of course, language: although even here the 20th century has seen partial exceptions, such as the revival of Hebrew in Israel. The area of self-determination, to use a more precise term than ‘agency’, has been widening in the past 150 years. But it is still very much less than its opposite. The whole purpose of historical materialism, after all, has precisely been to give men and women the means with which to exercise a real popular self-determination for the first time in history. This is, exactly, the objective of a socialist revolution, whose aim is to inaugurate the transition from what Marx called the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

The lack of any echo of this basic theme of Marxism in Thompson’s essay on Althusser is very surprising. All the more so, perhaps, because it does find a place in the lengthy text addressed to Kolakowski, written earlier and now published in the same volume. There, Thompson singles out ‘the human potential to act as rational and moral agents’ as ‘a concept coincident with that of the passage from the kingdom of necessity to that of freedom’.¹⁸ Under communism, ‘things are thrown from the saddle and cease to ride mankind. Men struggle free from their own machinery and subdue it to human needs and definitions. Man ceases to live in a defensive posture, warding off the assault of “circumstances”, his furthest triumph in social engineering a system of checks and balances and countervailing powers against his own evil will. He commences to live from his own resources of creative possibility, liberated from the determinism of “process” within class-divided societies’.¹⁹ From this account, however, Thompson draws an unexpected conclusion. ‘Should this kingdom of freedom be attained, the argument entails no guarantee whatsoever that men will choose wisely nor be good.’²⁰ This contingency soon assumes a very tangible and immediate form. For ‘it might be possible, hideously inapposite as the metaphor appears, that the “socialist” countries have already shuffled across Marx’s frontier into the “kingdom of freedom”. That is, whereas in previous history social being appeared, in the last analysis, to determine social consciousness, because the logic of process supervened over human intentions; in socialist societies there may be no such determining logic of process, and social consciousness may determine social being.’²¹ Thompson then goes on to speculate as follows: ‘Methods of historical analysis to which one had become habituated would cease to have the same validity in investigating socialist evolution. On the one hand, it opens up the perspective of a long protraction of tyranny. So long as any ruling group, perhaps fortuitously established in power at the moment of revolution, can reproduce itself and control or manufacture social consciousness there will be no inherent logic of process within the system which, as social being, will work powerfully enough to bring its overthrow.’²² But at the same time, ‘over and above any challenge emerging from “social being”, the ruling group has most to fear from the challenge of rational “social consciousness”. It is exactly rationality and an open, evaluative moral process which “ought” to be the logic of socialist process, expressed in democratic forms of self-management and in democratic institutions’.²³ The flight of this whole argument, hypothetically advanced as it is, must take aback anyone familiar with the theory of historical materialism or the reality of the USSR and associated countries. For the realm of necessity is founded, for Marx, on scarcity: the leap into freedom evoked in Capital only becomes possible with the advent of generalized abundance. While the ruling stratum in the USSR, far from enjoying a paramount mastery over the laws of historical development in the Soviet Union, has notoriously stumbled through a long series of unpredicted social crises and uncontrolled economic processes, from sudden grain shortages to wild epidemics of terror to creeping paralyses of productivity—all of them blind motions of a society dark to all its members.

How could Thompson have arrived at such a perverse construction? The answer lies in a twofold error. Firstly, he has implicitly identified historical agency with the expression of will or aspiration. Indeed, throughout The Poverty of Theory, the terms in which he conceives it tend to be existential in range—‘choice’, ‘value’, ‘decision’. What is missing from them is any due complementary emphasis on the cognitive dimensions of agency. The sovereign practice of the associated producers envisaged by Marx as the attainment of communism was not only a product of will, but equally and indivisibly of knowledge. For any materialist study of the variable forms of social agency in history, this component of it is central. ‘Mastery’ of society in the mere sense of an instrumental political voluntarism has nothing new about it: it has been the ambition and activity of princes since the dawn of the division of labour. The very existence of the State, as a centralized apparatus of coercion and administration, guarantees the presence of this kind of power in every class society. From the earliest times, and in the most diverse social formations, it produced its own manuals—the Mirror of Kings, compilations of tactical adages and prescriptions for successful exercise of rule which can be found from ancient Egypt to mediaeval Tibet, and which flourished above all in the Islamic world. Modern political thought in the West owes its origins to these brittle guide-books of domination: what else is the form of Machiavelli’s Prince? The limitations of this secular literature are those of its historical understanding: unable to grasp, often even to glimpse, the social mechanisms underlying political stability or change, it was confined to myopic maxims for regal conduct, sententious or cynical as the culture prompted. The conservative type of agency it codified survives to this day, but with an increasingly significant alteration. With the onset of industrial capitalism in the 19th century, the greatest statesmen of reaction were characteristically those who proved able to steer major transformations 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 seen from the comment which follows: ‘Such imperative presentation of knowledge effects is not allowed for in Althusser’s epistemology’.³⁵ The paradigm that is presumed here is, in fact, much more central to Thompson’s work as a whole than the previous type. The emphasis of Thompson’s ‘experience’ is in general closer to that of Erlebnis then Erfahrung—moral-existential more than practical-experimental. But the same problem recurs in this register as well. What ensures that a particular experience of distress or disaster will inspire a particular (cognitively or morally appropriate) conclusion? Did the famine of the 1840s lead the Irish peasantry to think in new ways about the market? Few countries in the West have remained so immune to the socialist critique of it, even in the most timorous social-democratic form, as the Republic founded on that class. Did the imprisonment of a generation of East European Communists before the War make them champions of a humane justice and legality after it? The longest single ordeal in a White gaol was endured by a prisoner whose name, an international legend of heroism in the 30s, became a byword for sadism in the 50s: Matyas Rakosi. Experience as such is a concept tous azimuts, which can point in any direction. The self-same events can be lived through by agents who draw diametrically opposite conclusions from them. Another of the transformative upheavals cited by Thompson is war, which provides some of the most spectacular illustrations of this polyvalence. Just as few collective experiences were probably as intense as religion to the majority of producers at particular times in their lives (very unevenly) in pre-industrial epochs, so in modern times few popular experiences have been as strong and as widespread to many millions as national sentiment—materially rooted in locality, language, customs. What did this experience tell the exploited masses of Europe in 1914? That it was right and natural, even if unfortunate, that they should fight each other on an unprecedented scale. Did the four years of bitter massacre which followed undo this illusion, teaching them to reflect in new ways on the nation? In some cases—most of the Russian working class and peasantry, much of the Italian and a minority of the German working class—it did: the Third International grew precisely out of this matrix. In other cases, it did not: the traditional patriotism of the English and French masses was tempered by a certain post-war pacifism, but not fundamentally modified. In yet other cases, nationalism on the contrary underwent a hellish exacerbation: among the German and Italian petty-bourgeoisie, the Austrian peasantry, the Hungarian lumpenproletariat, defeat tightened the springs of revenge into fascism. The mass experience of death and destruction itself brought with it no necessary illumination. A forest of interpretations grew over the deserted battlefields.

In other words, the tacit first version of experience to be found in The Poverty of Theory—a set of mental and emotional responses as it were ‘given with’ a set of lived events to which they correspond³⁶—cannot be sustained. However, as we have seen, Thompson also sketches a second definition, which seems to allow for divergences and variations of response much better. Here, experience itself remains an objective sector of ‘social being’, which is then processed or handled by the subject to yield a particular ‘social consciousness’. The possibility of different ways of ‘handling’ the same experience is epistemologically secured. This schema represents, in fact, the more recurrent and important of the two accounts advanced by Thompson, although there is a significant degree of oscillation between them. To see it worked through on a grand scale, we must turn to The Making of the English Working Class. In doing so, we will immediately rejoin the problem of historical agency at the deepest levels of Thompson’s intellectual engagement with it. This great work opens with the famous declaration: ‘The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making’.³⁷ For this making was an active process, ‘which owes as much to agency as to conditioning’.³⁸ The early English proletariat was not the mere product of the advent of the factory system. On the contrary, ‘the working class made itself as much as it was made’.³⁹ The fundamental form this agency took was the conversion of a collective experience into a social consciousness which thereby defined and created the class itself. ‘Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the 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 in which the experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class consciousness does not … class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.’⁴⁰ The process of this formative definition is studied in three consecutive movements. The first part of the book reconstructs the political and cultural traditions of English radicalism in the 18th century: religious dissent, popular tumult, and constitutional conviction—the latter eventually culminating in Paine’s rupture with constitutionalism, followed by the brief episode of English Jacobinism in the 1790s. The second part deals with the catastrophic social experience of the Industrial Revolution, as it was lived by successive groups of primary producers—field labourers, artisans, weavers—and discusses the standard of living, proselytization, work discipline and community institutions of the working people in these grim years. The third part traces the growth of working class consciousness in successive political and industrial struggles against the new order during and after the Napoleonic epoch—the parliamentary campaigns in London, the outbreak of Luddism in the North and Midlands, the national radicalism led by Cobbett and Hunt, the massacre at Peterloo, the spread of Owenism. By the time of the crisis of 1832, Thompson concludes, ‘the working class presence was the most significant factor in British political life’.⁴¹ By now, indeed, ‘there is a sense in which the working class is no longer in the making, but has been made’.⁴²

It will soon enough be twenty years since The Making of the English Working Class was published. Yet there has been surprisingly little historiographic discussion of the book on the Left; its extraordinary power seems to have inhibited the ordinary flow of critical reflection and assimilation which normally attends work of such magnitude. There are two main avenues along which a contemporary revaluation of The Making of the English Working Class could proceed. The first is a detailed empirical review of the evidence that has since come to light on the early years of the English proletariat, to see how far the panorama presented by Thompson needs local or general retouching. There is, of course, neither space nor competence for that here. The second is a closer look at the logical structure of the argument in this classic of English Marxist history. A few remarks will be attempted on this. From the brief summary given above, it will be seen that three fundamental theses sustain the architecture of The Making of the English Working Class. The first we shall call the claim of co-determination: that is, the thesis that the English working class ‘made itself as much as it was made’, in a causal parity of ‘agency and conditioning’.⁴³ The second is the criterion of consciousness as the touchstone of class: namely, the contention that ‘class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences, feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs’.⁴⁴ The formulation here is closely echoed in The Poverty of Theory: ‘Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, think and value in class ways’.⁴⁵ Classes exist in and through the process of collective self-identification that is class consciousness: ‘Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition’.⁴⁶ The third thesis might be termed the implication of closure: in other words, the assertion that the identity of the English working-class was in some sense completed by the early 1830s, such that we can speak of it as ‘no longer in the making’ but ‘made’. The title of the work lends a decisive force of suggestion to this notion. Let us consider each of these themes.

The peculiar interest of the first is that we are presented with a practical test of the theoretical declarations of The Poverty of Theory. The ‘proportions’ of agency and necessity are specified, in a particular historical process—the formation of the English working class. Thompson judges them equal. The clarity and seriousness with which he poses the problem is beyond praise: it has no precedent in Marxist or other historiography. At the end of his study, however, if we are to be faithful to the issue he has raised at the outset, we must ask ourselves a number of questions. The first is this. Has Thompson demonstrated that the English working class made itself as much as it was made—not in a false, scientistic sense, but in terms of plausible balance of evidence? Few of the professional historians who have reviewed The Making of the English Working Class have tarried over this issue, although it looms over the whole book: no doubt it has generally appeared too ‘meta-historical’ for them. But is it incapable of empirical control or arbitration? To ask this is to realize that The Making of the English Working Class does not, contrary to appearances, give us the means by which we could settle the question. For if the claim for co-determination of agency and necessity was to be substantiated, we would need to have at a minimum a conjoint exploration of the objective assemblage and transformation of a labour-force by the Industrial Revolution, and of the subjective germination of a class culture in response to it. That alone could furnish the initial—not conclusive—elements for a judgement of their relative historical weight. The former, however, is essentially missing from The Making of the English Working Class. The second part of the book, where one would expect to find it, in fact concentrates largely on the immediate experience of the producers rather than on the mode of production itself. The advent of industrial capitalism in England is a dreadful backcloth to the book rather than a direct object of analysis in its own right. The result is a disconcerting lack of objective coordinates as the narrative of class formation unfolds.⁴⁷ It comes as something of a shock to realize, at the end of 900 pages, that one has never learnt such an elementary fact as the approximate size of the English working class, or its proportion within the population as a whole, at any date in the history of its ‘making’.

A lacuna like this cannot be dismissed by mere disdainful reference to ‘the endless stupidities of quantitative measurement of classes’, if only because Thompson does provide one or two numerical estimates of specific occupational categories himself.⁴⁸ More generally, what the omission symbolizes is the absence from The Making of the English Working Class of any real treatment of the whole historical process whereby heterogeneous groups of artisans, small holders, agricultural labourers, domestic workers and casual poor were gradually assembled, distributed and reduced to the condition of labour subsumed to capital, first in the formal dependence of the wage-contract, ultimately in the real dependence of integration into mechanized means of production. The jagged temporal rhythms and breaks, and the uneven spatial distributions and displacements, of capital accumulation between 1790 and 1830 inevitably marked the composition and character of the nascent English proletariat. Yet they find no place in this account of its formation. Towards the end of the book, Thompson remarks that: ‘the British working class of 1832’ was ‘perhaps a unique formation’, because ‘the slow, piecemeal accretions of capital accumulation had meant that the preliminaries to the Industrial Revolution stretched backwards for hundreds of years. From Tudor times onwards this artisan culture had grown more complex with each phase of technical and social change. Delaney, Dekker and Nashe: Winstanley and Lilburne: Bunyan and Defoe—all had at times addressed themselves to it. Enriched by the experiences of the 17th century, carrying through the 18th century the intellectual and libertarian traditions we have described, forming their own traditions of mutuality in the friendly society and trades club, these men did not pass, in one generation, from the peasantry to the new industrial town. They suffered the experience of the Industrial Revolution as articulate, free-born Englishmen … This was, perhaps, the most distinguished popular culture England has known’.⁴⁹ Exceptionally, here, the objective pattern of capital accumulation is formally accorded an original primacy of determination. But the secular scale on which it is evoked—back to Tudor times—allows the brief period under study to appear in the guise of a codicil. The real centre of gravity of the passage is the survival and continuity of so many popular values and traditions of resistance—of which the slow tempo of capitalist development in England is little more than the enabling condition. Yet the speed and extent of industrialization should surely be woven into the very texture of any materialist study of a working class. If it is not taken as ‘external’ to the making of the Russian or Italian proletariat—as any glance at the labour history of Petrograd or Turin suffices to remind us—why should it be to the English proletariat? Thompson rightly emphasizes that ‘factory hands, so far from being the “eldest children of the industrial revolution”, were late arrivals’⁵⁰ in England, and that out-workers anticipated many of their ideas and forms of organization. But does this justify a survey of the making of the English working class which omits any direct account of them altogether? Cotton, iron and coal together form virtually the sum of the first phase of industrialization in Britain: yet the direct labour-force of not one of them is treated in The Making of the English Working Class.⁵¹ In the absence of any objective framework laying down the overall pattern of capital accumulation in these years, there is little way of assessing the relative importance of one area of subjective experience within the English working class against another. Proportions are wanting. Selectivity of focus is combined with sweep of conclusion, typically with such passion and skill that the former can easily be forgotten by the reader.

Nor is it only a question of the weighting of different groups of producers within the developing process of the Industrial Revolution. The inter-relations are obviously of even greater importance. Thompson devotes a number of very perceptive pages to the different popular cultures of London and of the North, what he calls the dialectic of ‘intellect and enthusiasm’, commenting that ‘each tradition seems enfeebled without the complement of the other’.⁵² This division, which extends down to the SDF and the ILP and beyond, has surely been a key trait of the English labour movement. But it is not adequately anchored in The Making of the English Working Class, for all its consequences as the narrative develops, because there is no spatial map of British capitalism that would reveal its measure of importance. In effect, the cold economic fact that London remained throughout the 19th century largely a rentier, commercial and bureaucratic capital, dominated by court and city-closer in some ways to Vienna or Madrid than to Paris, Berlin or Saint Petersburg—was to be a major obstacle to the emergence of a politically aggressive labour movement in England. A capital without heavy industry helped to separate a factory proletariat from an instinct for power. Once artisan radicalism broke down, with the decline of the skilled trades on which it was based, the inherent weaknesses of the division between metropolitan and provincial traditions, founded on such separate types of accumulation, became evident.⁵³ The growing influence of Benthamism in the work of Place and his associates after 1815, described by Thompson, foreshadowed much later developments. It might be said that London ended by bureaucratizing Northern moderation into a municipal-national system, in the age of Morrison.

The peculiar complexion of the world’s largest city in the epoch of the Industrial Revolution was, of course, intimately related not only to its court and parliamentary establishments, but also and above all to its imperial functions. Here too, however, it is difficult to feel that Thompson gives the kind of attention and weight to the objective coordinates of his subject that the title of his work leads one to expect. This is perhaps most obvious at the political level itself, where there is little sustained acknowledgement of the international dimensions of English working-class history. In the first part of his study, Thompson emphasizes that despite the ideological strength of the complex of beliefs summed up in the notion of the ‘Free-Born Englishman’, radical demands remained imprisoned within the terms of an imaginary constitutionalism down to the 1790s. The decisive break, which shifted the parameters of radical politics, came with the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man, which for the first time rejected the constitutional monarchy and attacked the Bill of Rights. He also notes the unremarkable tenor of Paine’s own life and thought as a customs official in England, down to the early 1770s, and the sudden change precipitated by his emigration to America. Likewise, the circumstance that The Rights of Man was written in response to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution is of course registered. But nowhere does the combined shock of the American and French Revolutions, of which Paine’s work is the direct political product in England, find any space in The Making of the English Working Class commensurate with its real historical importance. The fact is that the whole ideological universe of the West was transformed by these two great upheavals. The pattern of their international impact is the theme of a work like Palmer’s major study, The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Their significance—especially that of the French Revolution—is incomparably greater for the political formation of the English working class than, say, popular attitudes towards crime. Yet the latter receives careful treatment, while the former is relegated off-stage. Despite their central importance over two decades, the reader learns little or nothing of the complicated attitudes and debates within English radicalism over events in France. An apparent procedural bias excludes them: since social revolutions abroad cannot be entered as self-activity of the working class in England, they fall outside the historical accounting given of these years.

Their sequel is also largely omitted from the later parts of the book. For while Thompson invokes in principle the coincidence of industrial revolution and political counter-revolution during the Napoleonic Wars, with its simultaneous ‘intensification of two intolerable forms of relationship: those of economic exploitation and of political repression’,⁵⁴ in practice the impact of two decades of war on English popular culture is virtually ignored. Like the pattern of capital accumulation itself, the reality of military conflict figures only gesturally in the narrative. One inevitable result is a minimization of the nationalist mobilization of the whole English population by the ruling class, in its tremendous struggle for supremacy with France. Yet no full picture of English popular culture after 1815 can be gained without due notice of the depth of the ideological capture of the ‘nation’ for conservative ends in Britain. The result is a serious over-simplification of the legacy of the wars. Thus in a memorable conclusion to the second part of the book, Thompson writes of ‘the loss of any felt cohesion in the community, save that which the working people, in antagonism to their labour and to their masters, built for themselves’.⁵⁵ Eloquence here is not necessarily accuracy, however. The sense of national community, systematically orchestrated and instilled by the State, may well have been a greater reality in the Napoleonic epoch than at any time in the previous century. By overlooking it, Thompson can argue that whereas in 1792 the ruling class had governed by means of consent and deference, ‘in 1816 the English people were held down by force’.⁵⁶ Hated though the Liverpool government was by wide sectors of the masses, this judgement must be deemed an exaggeration. An army of 25,000—the total troop-force available for domestic repression—was scarcely sufficient to pin down a society of 12,000,000.⁵⁷ The power of the English ancien régime rested on a combination of culture and coercion, after no less than before the Wars. The prime weapon in its ideological arsenal, after twenty years of victorious fighting against the French Revolution and its successor regimes, was a counter-revolutionary nationalism. The structural importance of the latter, general and durable, was certainly greater than that of the more local and limited phenomenon of Methodism, however hysterical its manifestations—to which Thompson devotes one of the most unforgettable chapters of his book. England was, in fact, probably the first country in Europe in which nation overtook religion as the dominant form of ideological discourse—a change already, of course, under way in the 18th century. It would be difficult to guess this from The Making of the English Working Class, where few or none of the ideological bonds subordinating the immediate producers—not to their employers (Methodism or Utilitarianism are certainly present)—but to their rulers materialize.

How far do these omissions affect Thompson’s achievement? After all, no book can say everything. In face of the profusion of riches in The Making of the English Working Class, is it reasonable to ask for anything more? By ordinary standards, no. But the theme of the work is no ordinary historical one either, as we have seen. The pertinence of the gaps suggested above—the spearhead sectors of the Industrial Revolution, the commercial-rentier configuration of London, the impact of the American and French Revolutions, the galvanization of wartime chauvinism—is that they render a judgement of the issue posed at the beginning of the book unnegotiable. In the absence of any direct treatment of these massive moulds of the early history of the English working class, we have no way of adjudicating the part of collective self-determination in its making. The parity between agency and conditioning asserted at the outset remains a postulate that is never really tested through the relevant range of evidence for both sides of the process. For all their power, the descriptions of mass immiseration and alienation etched in the second part of the book are in no sense equivalent to a survey of the objective determinants of the formation of the English working class. It is not the structural transformations—economic, political and demographic—which Thompson invokes at the head of this part of the book which are the objects of his inquiry, but rather their precipitates in the subjective experience of those who lived through these ‘terrible years’. The result is to resolve the complex manifold of objective-subjective determinations whose totalization actually generated the English working class into a simple dialectic between suffering and resistance whose whole movement is internal to the subjectivity of the class. This is the force of the celebrated ending of the book. ‘Such men met Utilitarianism in their daily lives, and they sought to throw it back, not blindly, but with intelligence and moral passion … These years appear at times to display, not a revolutionary challenge, but a resistance movement, in which both the Romantics and the Radical Craftsmen opposed the annunciation of Acquisitive Man’.⁵⁸ Inscribed in the moving clauses of its conclusion, the claim of parity between agency and necessity recurs, but within the form of the work it is not justiciable.

We may now look at the second major theme of The Making of the English Working Class, that ‘class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs’.⁵⁹ We have called this the criterion of consciousness, because the effect of Thompson’s definition is to make the existence of a class depend on the presence of collective expression (feeling/articulation) of common interests in opposition to those of an antagonistic class (or classes). In The Poverty of Theory, as we have seen, Thompson restates this position even more sharply and unequivocally: ‘Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think, and to value in class ways’.⁶⁰ Class consciousness here becomes the very hallmark of class formation. How plausible is this definition, empirically? The answer is surely that it is impossible to reconcile with the plain record of historical evidence. Classes have frequently existed whose members did not ‘identify their antagonistic interests’ in any process of common clarification or struggle. Indeed it is probable that for most of historical time this was the rule rather than the exception. The very term class, in the modern sense, is after all a coinage of the 19th century. Did Athenian slaves in ancient Greece, or caste-ridden villagers in mediaeval India, or Meiji workers in modern Japan ‘come to struggle, think in class ways’? There is every evidence to the contrary. Yet did they thereby cease to compose classes? Thompson’s error is to make an abusive generalization from the English experience he has studied himself: the remarkable class-consciousness of the first industrial working class in world history is projected universally onto classes as such. The result is a definition of class that is far too voluntarist and subjectivist—closer to an ethical-rhetorical parti pris than to a conclusion from empirical investigation. In his fundamental work Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen has rightly criticized the logic of Thompson’s description of class, vindicating the traditional Marxist thesis that ‘a person’s class is established by nothing but his objective place in the network of ownership relations … His consciousness, culture and politics do not enter the definition of his class position. Indeed these exclusions are required to protect the substantive character of the Marxian thesis that class position strongly conditions consciousness, culture and politics.’⁶¹ Cohen’s own account of the structural position of the proletarian in a capitalist economy, and of the gamut of possible relations of production that generate classes, is of exemplary clarity and subtlety. The concept of class as an objective relation to means of production, independent of will or attitude, is unlikely to need further reinstatement.

The untenability of Thompson’s definition of class in The Making of the English Working Class, if taken literally, can be seen from the later development of his own writing. As the field of his historical research has moved back into 18th century England, a period in which class consciousness among the primary producers is obviously far less visible, his positions have undergone an interesting change. In a brilliant recent essay on ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society’, Thompson advances a set of new propositions. He now concedes that ‘class, as it eventuated within 19th century industrial capitalist societies, and as it then left its imprint upon the heuristic category of class, has in fact no claim to universality. Class in that sense is no more than a special case of the historical formations which arise out of class struggle.’⁶² For in the 19th century, ‘class in its modern usage became available to the cognitive system of the people then living at the time … Hence the concept not only enables us to organize and analyze the evidence; it is also, in a new sense, present in the evidence itself. We can observe, in industrial Britain or France or Germany, class institutions, class parties, class cultures’.⁶³ Prior to the 19th century, however, historians are still obliged to use the concept of class, not because of its perfection as a notion, but because ‘no alternative category is available to analyze a manifest and universal historical process’—namely ‘class struggle’.⁶⁴ These arguments lead to the concise conclusion: ‘Class struggle is the prior, as well as the more universal, concept’—for ‘people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process’.⁶⁵ Hence the paradox that across England in the 18th century lay a ‘societal field of force’ of class struggle between ‘the crowd at one pole, the aristocracy and gentry at the other’,⁶⁶ yet without the former truly constituting a class.

Does this comprehensive redefinition solve the difficulties of Thompson’s view of class? At first sight, it appears a major step beyond the formulations of The Making of the English Working Class. On closer inspection, however, the same theoretical inspiration can be seen, and with it some of the same logical and empirical problems recur. What Thompson has in effect done is to retain the equation: class = class consciousness, but to postulate behind it—at once conceptually and historically—an anterior stage of class struggle, when groups conflict without achieving that collective self-awareness that defines class itself. But why in that case use the term ‘class’ for such ‘struggle’ at all? The answer appears to be an essentially pragmatic one—no better word has so far turned up. A liberal historian would no doubt retort that ‘social conflict’ is therefore preferable, precisely because it begs no questions. It is not easy to see what reply Thompson could make, for the whole thrust of his argument is still to detach class from its objective anchorage in determinate relations of production, and identify it with subjective consciousness or culture. Once this is done, the absence of a class ‘culture’ automatically puts in question the very existence of class itself—as in 18th century England. In perverse logic, it is then possible to suggest that there was ‘class struggle without class’—in the title of the essay. To which there are two straightforward answers. Firstly, the ruling class— the ‘aristocracy and gentry’ as he here rightly designates it—was certainly possessed of the necessary sense of identity and combativity to constitute a class, even on Thompson’s own criteria, which would leave us with the curiosity of ‘class struggle with a single class’—a koan of one hand clapping. Secondly, absence of class consciousness in the 19th century sense in no way means that the plebs of the 18th century was therefore an a-class phenomenon. It was not, of course, a homogeneous social bloc, but a changeable coalition composed of different categories of urban or rural wage-earners, small producers, petty traders, and unemployed, whose frontiers would vary according to the successive conjunctures that crystallized it—very much as Thompson so ably describes. Each of these categories, however, can be rationally ordered in a materialist class analysis, by their respective structural positions within the several modes of production of Hanoverian society. To disaggregate the social or political affrays of the time into their component class units, in other words, is not to do violence to their intelligibility but to help to elucidate it. No economism need be implied in such a procedure, which does not render study of the process of congregation that formed 18th century crowds (dissident-radical or clerical-monarchist, spontaneous or manipulated, as the case might be) unnecessary, but rather more precise and pointed. Thompson’s dictum that ‘we know about class because people have repeatedly behaved in class ways’⁶⁷ disallows its presence where behaviour appears so coalescent and contradictory as to be ‘unclasslike’. Whether the accent is put on behaviour or consciousness⁶⁸—struggling or valuing—such definitions of class remain fatally circular. It is better to say, with Marx, that social classes may not become conscious of themselves, may fail to act or behave in common, but they still remain-materially, historically—classes.

The third major claim contained in The Making of the English Working Class brings us back to the 19th century. The title of the book promises to trace a process with a finite end: the English working class, as such inexistent in the 1790s, is made by the mid-1830s, when its presence is the most significant factor in national politics, felt in ‘every county in England, and in most fields of life’.⁶⁹ The term making here has an unmistakable force: it suggests that the character of the English working class was in its most essential traits formed by the time of the Reform Bill. What are the arguments Thompson adduces for this periodization? The first and most salient is that the English proletariat had achieved a new consciousness of its own unity by the 1830s. An identity of interest was felt by workers across the most diverse occupations, where before traditional divisions of trade or region had prevailed. First expressed in the growing ‘ethos of mutuality’ of local friendly societies, it emerged on a national scale with the General Unionism of 1830-1834. Politically, the course of the whole parliamentary crisis of 1831-1832 revealed the stamp of its initiative and independence. Thus it was a peculiarity of English development that ‘where we would expect to find a growing middle-class reform movement, with a working-class tail, only later succeeded by an independent agitation of the working class, in fact this process was reversed’.⁷⁰ Thereafter, middle-class reformers succeeded in utilizing popular agitation to force from the landowning classes an enfranchisement that was carefully demarcated to exclude the masses who had rendered it possible. In these years, too, ‘something was lost’ in the failure of the tradition of working-class Radicalism to achieve a junction with the Romantic critique of utilitarianism that was contemporary with it. Yet it is the collective achievement of this time that is finally remarkable. ‘The working people should not be seen only as the lost myriads of eternity. They had also nourished, for fifty years, and with incomparable fortitude, the Liberty Tree. We may thank them for these years of heroic culture’.⁷¹

The grandeur of these concluding pages has been unanimously acknowledged. In a sense, it is their very power that forces on us their major problem. For as Tom Nairn wrote fifteen years ago, in what remains the most serious reflection on the book to date, one of the most central facts about the English working class is that ‘its development as a class is divided into two great phases, and there appears at first sight to be hardly any connection between them.’ For ‘the early history of the English working class is a history of revolt, covering more than half a century, from the period of the French Revolution to the climax of Chartism in the 1840s’.⁷² Yet ‘what became of this revolt? The great English working class, this titanic social force which seemed to be unchained by the rapid development of English capitalism in the first half of the century, did not finally emerge to dominate and remake English society. It could not break the mould and fashion another. Instead, after the 1840s it quickly turned into an apparently docile class. It embraced one species of moderate reformism after another, and has remained wedded to the narrowest and greyest of bourgeois ideologies in its principal movements’.⁷³ Discounting the undoubted element of exaggeration in the final clause, which overstates the degree of later Fabian domination, the general truth of this description is hard to deny. Victor Kiernan has recently pronounced the same verdict: ‘with Chartism by 1850 virtually at an end, the failure of the new working class to enter and remould the national life left it shut up in the “labourism”, the self-absorption and political apathy, from which it has never really recovered.’⁷⁴ The question it immediately poses is: how could the English working class have been ‘made’ 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 variance of the evaluations in the two texts, however, goes further. For in the latter, Thompson in effect sketches a general theory of the evolution of the working class, good for all industrialized countries. A ‘certain kind of revolutionary movement’ is characteristic of the early years of a working class: but a ‘climacteric moment’ once passed, it disappears, and a more ‘limited, reformist’ phase sets in. This schema bears some resemblance to a widespread view within conventional sociology that the working class is rebellious in its youth because it has not yet accepted the irreversible advent of industrialism, unwillingly adjusts to the reality of the capitalist order in middle-age, and becomes reconciled to it through new levels of consumption towards retirement—before passing away altogether in a post-industrial society. The large difference, of course, is that Thompson—while willing to concede the possibility of a ‘break-up of the old class institutions and value-system’, and ‘far-reaching changes in the sociological composition of the groups making up the historical class’⁸⁵—holds firmly to the hope of a transition to socialism, if necessary after such a transmutation. There is nothing discreditable about these hypotheses. But what leaps to the eye is that this type of perspective is quite incongruent with that of The Making of the English Working Class. For if such a universal sequence is ordained, what remains of the claim for particular invention in the case of England? Collective agency must inevitably seem to shrink in scope, once ‘much the same’ kind of outcome ultimately results from its exercise in ‘all advanced capitalist countries’. We are led to wonder: could the English working class not have made itself? The reductio ad absurdum involved in such a question casts a sharp final shadow over the claim for co-determination. The role of agency in history, just because it is so unremittingly pursued in The Making of the English Working Class, remains the more unmistakably elusive at the end of it.

Thompson’s major substantive work of history is concerned with the making of classes themselves. We can trace the recurrence of the same intellectual movement, and its limits, when he turns to the question of the making of history by classes, in The Poverty of Theory. There he cites Engels’s famous paradigm of the historical process: ‘History makes itself in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite parallelogram of forces which give rise to one resultant—the historical event. This again may be viewed as the product of a power which, taken as a whole, works unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something no one willed.’⁸⁶ Thompson concedes part of the force of Althusser’s criticism of this construction. In particular, ‘Engels has not offered a solution to the problem, but re-stated it in new terms. He has commenced with the proposition that economic presuppositions are ‘finally decisive’, and this is where he concludes. On the way he has gathered in an infinitude of “individual wills” whose agency, in the result, is cancelled out’.⁸⁷ But Thompson nevertheless sharply diverges from Althusser in his overall assessment of the passage, considering that ‘Engels has proposed a very critical problem (agency and process) and that, despite deficiencies, the general tendency of his meditation is helpful’.⁸⁸ He argues, in effect, that with an amendment Engel’s formula can be retained. All is well if we substitute class wills for individual wills. Thus ‘the historical “resultant” cannot usefully be conceived as the involuntary product of the sum of an infinity of mutually-contradictory individual volitions’, for ‘these “individual wills”, however “particular” their “conditions of life”, have been conditioned in class ways; and if the historical resultant is then seen as the outcome of a collision of contradictory class interests and forces, then we may see how human agency gives rise to an involuntary result—“the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary”—and how we may say, at one and the same time, that “we make our own history” and “history makes itself’.’⁸⁹

Does this emendation resolve the aporia of Engels’s solution? Thompson, of course, is right to emphasize that ‘individual wills are not de-structured atoms in collision but act with, upon and against each other as grouped wills’. But what he has forgotten is that he himself redefines class in such a way as in effect to make it dependent on a sum of individual wills. For ‘classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think and to value in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-making, although under conditions which are “given”’.⁹⁰ In other words, the same regression towards infinity occurs within Thompson’s construction as in Engels’s: the only difference is that whereas for Engels the immediate building-blocks of history are individual men and women, for Thompson they are classes that are themselves built in turn by individual men and women. The convergence of end-results can be seen in Thompson’s dictum elsewhere: ‘agency lies, not in class but in men’.⁹¹ The central theoretical difficulty in either case remains intact. It concerns not the appropriate type—personal or collective—but the pertinent place of will in history. For the intractable question posed by any construction like that of Thompson is this: if fundamental historical processes, the structure and evolution of whole societies, are the involuntary resultant of a duality or plurality of voluntary class forces clashing with each other, what explains their ordered nature? Why should the intersection of rival collective wills not produce the random chaos of an arbitrary, destructured log-jam? Two of the greatest works of modern social thought have addressed themselves to precisely this problem—Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Parsons’s statement of the problem remains unsurpassed in clarity and cogency. How could the utilitarian model of conflicting rational interests ever found a coherent social order?⁹² What prevented it from dissolving into a relentless war of all against all? Himself deeply committed to a ‘voluntarist theory of action’, Parsons sought to provide a superior answer to the conundrum of how a multitude of individual ‘unit-acts’ could ultimately constitute a ‘social system’. His solution, as is well known, was to postulate common norms and values as the integrative framework of any society, informing individual acts and annealing divisive interests to ensure a stable and cohesive social whole. The idealist stamp of this escape from the Hobbesian problem of order, unable to explain either the generation or conflict of values themselves, has been criticized many times and need not detain us here. What is of greater interest is the close parallelism of problem and divergence of solution in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Sartre’s basic question was how historical processes could be rationally intelligible if they were composed of a multiplicity of individual ‘projects’ colliding, clashing and thwarting each other to produce the deadened and alienated inverse of human agency—the practico-inert in all its myriad figures. His aim was to explore how the ‘different practices which can be found and located at a given moment of the historical temporalization finally appear as partially totalizing and as connected and merged in their very oppositions and diversities by an intelligible totalization from which there is no appeal’.⁹³ Thereby he hoped to establish the nature of history as a ‘totalization without a totalizer’, and of its ‘motive forces and its non-circular direction’.⁹⁴ Unlike Parsons, Sartre as a Marxist naturally refused to invoke ‘hyper-organicist’ values as a totalizing principle of social or historical ensembles. He also proceeded beyond individual ‘praxes’ to the level of class practices and projects as such, while attempting to preserve the epistemological continuity between the two in a way that is not dissimilar to that of Thompson. In fact, it might be said that Thompson’s conclusion (substitute class for individual wills, which themselves compose classes) rehearses Sartre’s point of departure. For what it lacks is Sartre’s tormented awareness of the logic and empirical difficulties of constructing an ordered set of social structures from a multiplicity of antagonistic unit-acts. The remarkable unpublished second volume of the Critique is precisely devoted to the question: how can ‘a plurality of epicentres of action have a single intelligibility’, such that class struggles can be described as contradictions—in other words ‘particularizations of a unitary totalization beyond them’?⁹⁵ The bulk of the work is taken up with an intricate series of analyses of social and political conflicts rending Soviet society after the Russian Revolution—within the Bolshevik Party itself, between proletariat and bureaucracy, between working class and peasantry—designed to show the history of the USSR up to the death of Stalin as the unitary process of a single ‘enveloping totalization’. The series of concrete investigations finally moves to a theoretical meditation on the personality and role of Stalin himself, of great brilliance—and then abruptly breaks off, the rest of the manuscript swerving away into an ontological discourse of impenetrable abstraction and obscurity, concerned with quite other questions. The reason for this final loss of direction, which perhaps prevented publication of the study, is clear enough. For all the ambition and ingenuity of his exploration of the successive contradictions of Soviet society, Sartre was unable actually to demonstrate how the ravaging struggles of the time generated an ultimate structural unity. In the absence of any extended principle of explanation, the needle of his account swings back to the shortest and simplest answer: Soviet society was held together by the dictatorial force wielded by Stalin, a monocentric sovereignty imposing a repressive unification of all the conflicting praxes within it. Hence the logic of the Critique’s terminus in the figure of the despot himself. The effective upshot is thus paradoxically a totalization with a totalizer—undermining that very complexity of the historical process which it was Sartre’s express purpose to establish. Nowhere spelt out as such, the unhappy silence that suddenly falls across the work bespeaks Sartre’s unease with the conclusion his argument had arrived at. He had lucidly emphasized, indeed, at the outset that the case of a dictatorial society was easier for his task—the more demanding test for Marxist theory being posed by bourgeois democracies, whose class struggles were not compacted together by a police regime.⁹⁶ But much as Engels had done before him, in confining himself to the USSR he thereby ended by finding in the historical ‘resultant’ what he had put into it in the first place. The general tendency of his response to the problem of order, however, can be discerned in this specialized exploration of it. Confronted with the direct question as to what prevented history from being ‘an arbitrary chaos of inter-blocking projects’ within his conceptual framework, his essential answer was: power.⁹⁷ In lieu of Parsons’s consensus of moral values, Sartre’s centre of integration was the command of a coercive State.

Althusser, it will be recalled, in criticizing Engels’s paradigm extended his attack to Sartre’s attempt to rework the problem on a much vaster scale in the Critique, linking the two directly: ‘It is only possible to bar Sartre from his path by closing the one Engels opened for him’.⁹⁸ But the radical rejection in For Marx and Reading Capital of any form of volition, individual or collective, as an epistemological starting-point did not at the same stroke lift the issue of social order. Althusser subsequently found himself confronted with it too, and it is of interest that his initial answer to the question was in effect a hybrid of the positions of Parsons and of Sartre. His vocabulary for posing the problem was, of course, significantly different. Citing Marx’s dictum that ‘a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year’, he asked: ‘how is the reproduction of the relations of production secured?’⁹⁹ His reply was that the ongoing reproduction of any social formation was essentially assured by the combined operation of the coercive and cultural machinery of the State (the latter interpreted in senso latu). ‘For the most part it is secured by the exercise of State power in the State Apparatuses, on the one hand the (Repressive) State Apparatus, on the other hand the Ideological State Apparatuses’.¹⁰⁰ The former are directed by ‘the leadership of the representatives of the classes in power executing the politics of the class struggle of the classes in power’, while the latter effect a ‘massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class’ in the oppressed classes.¹⁰¹ Ironically, these formulations veer close to the voluntarist schema of historical explanation that Althusser had sought to renounce. Perhaps sensing this, in a postscript he stipulated two qualifications: the ‘total process’ of reproduction was ‘realized’ within the processes of production and circulation, through a ‘class struggle’ counterposing ruling to ruled classes.¹⁰² Some years later, he proffered a further amendment: ‘The class struggle does not go on in the air, or on something like a football pitch. It is rooted in the mode of production and exploitation in a given class society.’¹⁰³ Thus ‘the material basis’ of the class struggle was ‘the unity of the relations of production and the productive forces under the relations of a given mode of production, in a concrete historical social formation’.¹⁰⁴ Here the emphasis reverts sharply back towards the ‘base’, in the traditional Marxist topography, which possesses and enforces its own ‘unity’.

What view should be taken of these successive adjustments? The logic of historical materialism precludes either the Parsonian or the Sartrean solutions. To contend that social formations typically derive their unity from the diffusion of values, or the exercise of violence, across a plurality of individual or group wills is to reject the Marxist insistence on the ultimate primacy of economic determinations in history. In fact, Marx and Engels directly polemicized in their own time with 19th century versions of precisely these two positions—in the work of Hegel and of Dühring, respectively. The problem of social order is irresoluble so long as the answer to it is sought at the level of intention (or valuation), however complex or entangled the skein of volition, however class-defined the struggle of wills, however alienated the final resultant from all of the imputed actors. It is, and must be, the dominant mode of production that confers fundamental unity on a social formation, allocating their objective positions to the classes within it, and distributing the agents within each class. The result is, typically, an objective process of class struggle. To stabilize and regulate this conflict, the complementary modalities of political power, which include repression and ideology, exercised inside and outside the State, are thereafter indispensable. But class struggle itself is not a causal prius in the sustentation of order, for classes are constituted by modes of production, and not vice versa. The one mode of production of which this will not be true is communism—which, precisely, will abolish classes.

At the same time, of course, the question of order is not exhaustive of the nature of the historical process. Upheaval and disorder equally require explanation. The temptation is to say that these form the peculiar province of the class struggle that is set in motion by the mode of production. This, however, would be facile. For among the most fundamental of all mechanisms of social change, according to historical materialism, are the systemic contradictions between forces and relations of production, not just social conflicts between classes generated by antagonistic relations of production alone. The former overlap with the latter, because one of the major forces of production is always labour, which simultaneously figures as a class specified by the relations of production. But they do not coincide. Crises within modes of production are not identical with confrontations between classes. The two may or may not fuse, according to the historical occasion. The onset of major economic crises, whether under feudalism or capitalism, has typically taken all social classes unawares, deriving from structural depths below those of direct conflict between them. The resolution of such crises, on the other hand, has no less typically been the outcome of prolonged war between classes. In general, revolutionary transformations—from one mode of production to another—are indeed the privileged terrain of class struggle. Here too, however, it is essential to remember the great distance between the relatively blind clashes of the immemorial past, and the recent—very uneven and imperfect—conversion of them into conscious contests in the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus in both reproduction and transformation—maintenance and subversion—of social order, mode of production and class struggle are always at work. But the second must be activated by the first for it to achieve its determinate effects, which on either ground will find their maximum point of concentration in the political structure of the State.