'A Way of Struggle': Reformations and Affirmations of E. P. Thompson's Class Analysis inthe Light of Postmodern Theories of LanguageAuthor(s): Marc W. SteinbergSource: The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 471-492Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/591141 .Accessed: 16/05/2011 04:35

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Marc W. Steinberg

'A way of struggle': reformations and affirmations of E. P. Thompson's class analysis in the light of postmodern theories of languagel

ABSTRACT

This paper is an analysis of the role of language in historical class formation in light of the recent developments in postmodern social theory and historiography. Revisionists from within this perspective have questioned if not abandoned E. P. Thompson's class struggle analysis, arguing that he fails to account for the con- stitutive character of language in the construction of collective identities. They oppose his account of the making of the English working class with alternative histories emphasizing populist and other non-class identities. Drawing on the Bakhtin Circle of literary studies, and returning to Thompson's own writings, I argue that we can incorporate language into class struggle analysis as a critical mediating force. I maintain that class struggle occurs largely within a hegemonic discursive formation, and that class consciousness and identity thus in part are formed through counter-hegemonic strategies of resistance to ideological domi- nation. To illustrate this theory I analyse the role of language in the class struggles of the silk weavers of the Spitalfields district in London in the 1820s. I analyse how the silk weavers articulated a class consciousness through their counter-hegem- onic struggles with the large capitalists and the language of political economy.

KEYWORDS: Class struggle; language; marxism; postmodernism; dialogism; hegemony

'E. P. Thompson,' reflects Anthony Giddens, 'could be described as the sociologists' historian' (1987: 203). These words are no small tribute to a feisty critic who often chided sociology as hide-bound with structuralism and an errant teleological functionalism. Yet, Giddens's words ring true, for what is now depicted as historical sociology has evolved in an almost con- tinual dialogue with Thompson's corpus. His most indelible stamp has been on the analysis of the 'happening' of class and class consciousness and the determinative role of experience in this process (Savage and Miles 1994: i7; Katznelson 1986; Kaye 1984; Smith, D. 1991; Trimberger 1984).

The power of words is a theme that threads itself throughout much of Thompson's writing. It is tucked amid more general discussions of the great

P=nt. Jnl. of .Sosiology Voltlme llo. 48 Isstle no. 3 Septenlber 1997 ISSN ()0()7-1.31.5 t L<lldoll School of Ecollolllics 1997

472 Marc W. Steinberg

whir of class conflict, experience and consciousness, or the historical transformation of plebeian and working-class cultures. The rhetoric of law, for example, was a catch-basin of power, containing both the potential for mystification and disruption. For a historian and social critic focused on the dialectic of the cultural and material, and of the human activit,v that ani- mated this relationship, language could hardly be inconsequential.

Recent postmodern writing in both sociolog,v and history focuses con- siderable attention on the role of language in social change, often in an attempt to debunk what is deemed the reductionist materialism of Thomp- son and other British cultural marxists (Smart 1992). These postmodern- ists argue that meaning is created not in the crucible of experience, but within language, that struggle centres around the construction of mobile identities, not enduring motives predicated on shared material interests, and that the historical process itself is not so much a tale of collective human agency but of discursive formations.

In this paper I review the postmodernist challenge to Thompson's his- torical materialism, focusing on the relationship between language and the class process. I acknowledge the legitimate issues concerning the construc- tion of subjectivit,v raised by the postmodernists, but insist that they can be accommodated within a cultural marxism. I do so by a re-reading of Thompson's perspective on language and the incorporation of the insights of the Bakhtin Circle of literary theorists. I argue, following Thompson, that language is central to class struggle, and drawing from the Bakhtin Circle, discuss how this process occurs within a hegemonic language.

The analysis below had four parts. First, I briefly review critical readings of Thompson, including post-materialist responses to his corpus in the work of William H. SewellJr. (199Oa, 1993), PatrickJoyce (1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995) andJames Vernon (1993, 1994). While noting their important contributions in emphasizing the importance of language in class dynamics, I argue that these critics partly misread Thompson's cul- tural materialism. Additionally, I summarize the re-evaluation of Thomp- son by MayEield and Thorne which finds commonalties between his work and post-structuralists. Their revisionist reading acutely and subtlety recognizes the role of language in Thompson's work, though somewhat at the expense of understanding it within a wider historical materialist vision. Second, I reconstruct the role of language in Thompson's corpus. Third, I draw links between Thompson's cultural marxism and the theory of language developed by the Bakhtin Circle, demonstrating how the latter provides a formal analysis of language compatible with the former. Finally, I illustrate this perspective through an analysis of the language used by one particular artisanal group, the silk weavers of London's Spital- fields district, during their struggles in the 1820s. I show through this analysis both how the wedding of Thompson and the Bakhtin Circle pro- vides us with a stronger vantage on the role of language in the historical process of class and how the post-materialist revisionists miss the mark in their alternatives.

'A way of struggle' 473

THE POST-MATERIALIST REVISIONISTS AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN

The questioning of cultural marxism has largely emerged from the lin- guistic turn in historical studies. The critique of Thompson first was broached by StedmanJones (1983) in his revisionist account of Chartism. Stedman Jones argued that Thompson did not recognize the mediating role that language played between consciousness and experience. He main- tained that the political language of English radicals in the early nineteenth century crucially intervened between the experience of domination and exploitation and working-class consciousness and action. This radical politi- cal critique of the corrupt ruling order, not working-class experience, was the foundation for a shared consciousness. Stedman Jones set the tone in arguing for the causal importance of political language, though the foun- dations of his analysis are arguably more idealist than postmodernist.2

Since StedmanJones' work debates on class formation and language have centred on the relationship between class experience and class conscious- ness, the gendering of these, what constitutes a 'class' language, and the degree to which we can speak of the rise of a national working class. Much recent writing demonstrates how a gendered reading of class language reveals the mutual determinations of gender and class. Feminist scholars sympathetic to Thompson's project have filled in the gender lacuna in Thompson's work and reframed the analysis of class formation in the process. Sociologists and historians including Baron, Clark, Davidoff, Hall, and Rose have drawn on the analytic tools of the linguistic turn to demon- strate how class experience was always constructed through gendered and ethnic meanings (Baron 1991; Clark 1990,1992,1995; Davidoff 1990; David- off and Hall 1987; Gray 1993; Hall, C. 1992; Malone 1996; McClelland 1989; Rose 1986, 1992, 1993a, b; Scott 1988; Tabili 1994; Taylor 1983; Thompson, D. 1993; Valenze 1995). Their studies explore how among diverse groups of working people male dominance in cultural production produced a mas- culine vision of working-class life and struggle - variously sublimating, ignoring and hegemonically constructing women's experiences.

Much of the scrutiny and critique of Thompson's work that draws from postmodern theory centres on the constitutive nature of language in the development of working peoples' class consciousness. This rethinking of class formation has broad parallels to recent work in theories of new social movements and radical politics that eschew class-based analyses in favour of a focus on a post-marxist radicalism and the social construction of collec- tive identities (Boggs 1986; Gamson 1995; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 1988; Melucci 1988, 1989, 1995; Mouffe 1988; Seidman 1994; for a critical overview see Larrain 1994). Often heavily predicated in post-structuralist or deconstructionist thinking, many such perspectives find the origins for both the formation and instability of collective identity at least partly within the internal dynamics of language.

Drawing in various ways from postmodern theory many of these re-evalu- ations question Thompson's link between experience and consciousness.

474 Marc W. Steinberg

Critics argue that class was only one of many discursively structured collective identities or that within the interplay of language we cannot find any substantive expression of class at all.3 Three recent recent examples are found in the work of William H. SewellJr., PatrickJoyce, andJames Vernon. Joyce, in Visions of the Peoplt, Democratic Subjects and other recent essays, and Vernon in Politics and the People essentially walk away from a class analysis altogether. 'Language mattered in its own right' Joyce declares in his re- examination of nineteenth-century workers (1991: 333). He argues that language is the touchstone for identity and conflict: 'Meaning makes sub- jects and notsubjectmeanings' he maintains (1994: 13; 1992: 201). Forboth Joyce and Vernon the consciousness of nineteenth-century working people was constructed mostly through varieties of populist and constitutionalist language that were dominant throughout much of the century. These lan- guages, fashioned as inclusive melodramatic political narratives, were 'extra-economic in character' and transcended class location (Joyce 1991: 1S17; 1994: 154-6; Vernon 1993: 334-6; 1994: 90-3). Such populisms tended to encompass diverse class groups through a vision of national iden- tity, rather than construct economic divisions. As Vernon argues,

the politics of identity are most easily traced in the history of politics as traditionally conceived, for unless political constituencies are con- structed upon fixed, unified and centered subjectivities they can have no sense of collective agency. (1994: 90)

Through these populisms workers portrayed themselves as a 'righteous and dispossessed "people" rather than a working class' (Joyce 1991: 329) . Melo- dramatic political language provided vocabularies of justice, the legitimacy for claims making and empowered identities as citizens (Joyce 1994: 161, 163, 180-1; Vernon 1993: 225, 320-1). Class was simply one of many iden- tities available within generally more inclusive languages demarcating the deserving people, and class language played a minor part in identity con- struction (1991: 12; Vernon 1993: 248-9, 310-11, 330).

Joyce's definition of class consciously breaks with Thompson's analytic focus on class struggle. He identifies class language (and thus the identity and consciousness annunciated through it) as that which speaks directly to collective perceptions of economic exploitation in proletarianization (Joyce 1991: 10-11). His rule of interpretation is relatively unproblematic: without a critique of 'economic' control in the workplace class language has no moorings, and therefore workers rarely exhibited class consciousness (Joyce 1991: 94, 100; 1990: 188). Vernon largely eschews class attributions to working people's language, maintaining that it resists such simple label- ing through use (1993: 330-31). When portraying labour issues populist languages focused upon reciprocal rights and duties of trade members, the respectability of independent production and the security of the hearth, and the moral limits of the market (1991: 57, 90-2, 99, 108-9).

William Sewell Jr. adopts a more sympathetic middle ground to the ten- sions between postmodernism and cultural marxism. As part of a larger

'A way of struggle' 475

project to construct a post-materialist history he casts doubt on Thompson's cultural marxism. In recent essays (199Oa, 1993) Sewell argues that the r n . nompsonlan emphasis on culture and experience suffers from the same type of reduction which it sought to overcome. Reviewing the role of experience in The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson 1966), he suggests that it does not mediate between social being and social con- sciousness because all of social life is collapsed within its terms. As such, experience essentially operates as part of the material base, forming con- sciousness which is reduced to an epiphenomenal superstructure. Con- sciousness, despite Thompson's claims, therefore is reactive and derivative in his analysis; there is little agency involved (199Oa: 57, 59-60, 63).

Unlike Joyce, however, Sewell wishes to preserve a notion of class con- sciousness. To do so he gleans an understanding of the instability of lan- guage from deconstructionist analysis, while insisting that the production of meaning is social action with extra-linguistic foundations. Language use shapes power, control of resources, and the social structuring of action but is itself shaped by these (199Ob: 82; 1993: 33; 1994: 35-6). Meaning pro- duction is therefore at once both material and symbolic. Class conscious- ness and identity are conceptualized and actualized in 'a vocabulary and conceptual framework' (199Ob: 54). Akin toJoyce and Vernon, Sewell sug- gests that working-class language is only one of many languages through which workers construct concepts of identity, social order and change, and may be more or less salient to particular groups in the uneven development of capitalism (see also 1988). Such language is a product of and diffused by class movements, and is a political force sui generis. Workers produce it through a refashioning of existing languages, and thus to understand its construction and potential saliency we need to understand the tensions within the languages that give rise to it (1990: 72-3).

In the era of Thompson's The Making of the ECnglish Working Class (1966) Sewell sees a dual transformation of existing language producing the class- consciousness language of working people. First, the traditional language of trade and community solidarity transmuted into a language of trade brotherhood. Simultaneously, an individualist and democratic language derivative of the languages of bourgeois rights and the Lockean notion of private property was appropriated for a collectivist language of struggle. Within Sewell's revised history these transformations were relatively sudden, born of the betrayal of bourgeoisie during the Reform agitations (1990: 70-2) . This working-class radical language endured beyond this con-

juncture, but it did not remain the paramount language through which workers constructed their common consciousness. As I shall demonstrate in the analysis below Sewell astutely recognizes the appropriation of bour- geois language, though I offer a different understanding of these dynam- iCS.

Where Joyce, Vernon and Sewell seriously question the materialist premises of Thompson's work, Mayfield and Thorne (1992, 1993) offer a refreshing and challenging re-evaluation of his materialism in light of the

476 Marc W. Steinberg

deconstructionists Derrida and de Mann. As opposed to the others, MayEield and Thorne claim Thompson took seriously the problem of lan- guage by insisting that it cannot be reduced to a passive superstructural transmitter between the objective forces of social relations and the con- sciousness of working people (1992: 182-3; 1993: 225). In arguing that workers created political agency through language Thompson shows links to deconstructionism by demonstrating the essential mutabilit,v of all lan- guage and taking it seriously in its own right. By refusing to privilege some- thing reified as the economic over something equally reified as the political Thompson made a central role for language as a constitutive force of action, identit,v and consciousness.

MayEield and Thorne offer a more nuanced and perceptive analysis of Thompson's culturalist perspective. Unlike the previous critics, who mis- perceive a metaphysical dualit,v in his notion of the cultural, MayEield and Thorne are true to Thompson's understanding of it as a material process (see also Wood 1982, 1990).4 They misconstrue Thompson in arguing that he grants

language the power to predicate meaning and hold this power respons- ible for the non-correspondence between perception and realit,v, between the conscious subject and its objective being, between name and 'thing named'. (MayEield and Thorne 1992: 185)

It is not the essential conventionality of language per se that renders action mediated by language, nor that language necessarily refers back to 'the embodiment of the "spirits of the past", as the unavoidable grounds for action' (op. cit.: 18). This formulation still privileges language in some sense as the guide to something outside itself. Rather, Thompson would argue that it is struggle which serves as the guide, and that the essential ambiguity of political language arises out of the friction of hegemony and resistance, human and not detached and reified linguistic processes. It is in processes of class struggle where the play of language becomes most acute, as the materialist analysis of the Bakhtin Circle, to which I will turn later, well describes. To draw the links between Thompson and the Bakhtin Circle I first reconstruct Thompson's understanding of language.

THOMPSON AND THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE

E. P. Thompson's engagement with theory was often founded in feisty con- tests over current politics, and he warned his readers about detaching the forrner from the latter (1978 [1965]: 257). His most sustained forays into theoretical issues in historical materialism concern the cultural processes of class formation. In reflections on experience, consciousness and culture he provided a provisional foundation for linguistic analysis, one often neglected and misinterpreted by postmodern critics.

'A way of struggle' 477

Thompson built his understanding of the process of class struggle and formation upon several dialectic tensions. The intersection of determi- nation and self-activity, for example, is the crucible of experience, and it is in class experienced as a field of force that class formation emerges (1960b: 12; 1978a: 157; 1978b: 8, 103, 164). Lived experience is in turn 'in internal friction with imposed consciousness', as people both draw upon and struggle with the weight of their traditions and the forces of hegemony to make collective sense of their world (1981: 406).

Thompson envisioned class as 'an ever-changing and never-static process in our political and cultural life in which human agency is entailed at every level' (1960b: 24). At every point class consciousness operates in tension with intraclass fissures; it is the pressures exerted by struggle which arise in the continually closer engagement of classes within existing institutions that create the tendencies for a shared oppositional culture (1960b: 26; 1958: 57; 1960a: 6; 1978: 149-50).

Thompson always insisted that the process of class could only be known historically by watching the sparks and fissures of these dialectical processes, and mostly particularly by understanding the cultural ways through which people handled them (1978 [1965]: 289) . He rarely provided an elaborated definition or schematic discussion of culture, though in his recent Customs in Common Thompson defined culture as

a pool of diverse resources . . . an arena of conflictual elements which requires some compelling pressure - as, for example, nationalism or prevalent religious orthodoxy or class consciousness - to take form as a 'system'. (1991: 6)

Among the most central aspects of class cultures - bourgeois or working- class - was the moral language they used to set the boundaries of the accept- able, expected andjustifiable. As Thompson observed in Whigs and Hunters, the articulation of moral language was necessarily an entanglement in power which could be enabling or stultifying (1975: 267). Thompson's scat- tered observations both on the making and remaking of the working class over the course of the last 200 years suggested that in moral language he found the systemi7ation of oppositional culture central to class struggle and formation. As he observed of the English radical tradition, 'From the Chartist camp meeting to the dockers' picket line, it has expressed itself most naturally in the language of moral revolt' (1960a: 9).

In The Making (1966) and his many other historical writings Thompson sketches the development of this language of moral revolt from the late eighteenth century to Chartism. Moving beyond the moral economy of the plebeian culture, he suggests that the moral battle of these years was against industrialization, and more particularly 'that one way of reading the working-class movement during the Industrial Revolution is as a movement of resistance to the annunciation of economic man' (1978 [1965]: 294; see also 1960b: 25). In part, the working classes reacted against the develop- ment of a political and moral language underwritten by the linguistic

478 Marc W. Steinberg

capital of Smithian political economy (1957: 112; 1960b: 272-3; 1991: 269). This flexible yet powerful ideology allowed for the construction of a hegem- onic politics to which the oppositional culture capitulated after the collapse of Chartism (1991: 280; 1960b: 25; 1968: 937).

As the process of class can never be reduced to the imperiousness of econ- omic forces, neither can the history of this hegemony be distilled down to ineluctable rise of the language of political economy. Thompson insisted that hegemony was never total and that the common sense of shared experi- ence could rudely interrupt the pontifications of a dominant ideology (1991: 11; 1978: 164). Workers fought back, often through a system of poaching the past to construct their oppositional morality. In those years of capitalist rationalization part of this poaching was in the moral language of protectionism: 'when people search for legitimations for protest, they often turn back to the paternalist regulations of a more authoritarian society, and select from these parts most calculated to defend their present interests' (1991: 10). Another important aspect of this poaching was in the language of the free-born Englishman, appropriated from the consti- tutional rhetoric of the ruled and turned as a weapon against them (1966: 88; 1975: 265; 1978b: 158). But he also knew that shared meanings were forged in common experiences and struggle, and that classes could as well be divided by the cacophony of culture.5

Thompson thus regarded language as integral to class struggle and the dialectic of social change. In the materialist intertwining of the economic, political and cultural, languages mediate between the 'raw material of life- experience' and the larger ways of life developed as class cultures. He rejected, however, the reduction of consciousness to a matter of language, arguing that to see the essence of social life as essentially one of communi- cation is to ignore the many-faceted realities of power (1961: 35).

A reading of Thompson's extended work thus shows that he had both a theoretical and historical analysis of the role of language in the materialist dialectic of change. Contrary to the contentions of some postmodern revisionists he specifically understood language as a mediating force in the political process of class. Language indeed is caught in the dialectic of change, determined by the weight of the past, yet open to the agency of people. This is close to the reading of Mayfield and Thorne. Thompson also clearly anticipated Sewell's analysis of the appropriation of languages for the construction of a radical politics. Moreover, he discussed the politics of co-optation through the language of reform in a variety of early pieces, partly belyingJoyce's critique. What is lacking in these analyses is a more complete theoretical foundation for the analysis, which we can find in Bakhtinian dialogism.

THE BAKHTIN CIRCLE, CULTURAL STUDIES AND THOMPSON

Recent dialogic theory of language predicated on the Bakhtinian Circle of literary analysis, combined with the analysis of hegemony, sheds light on

'A way of struggle' 479

how class struggle occurs within languages of domination, much as Thompson hinted. 'Language and power,' notes Robert Stam, 'intersect wherever the question of language becomes involved in asymmetrical power arrangements' (1988: 123). Class, gender, sexual and racial struggles are such major intersections. Language is involved in struggle as a mediat- ing force, characterized as the process of 'speech communication' (as the Bakhtinians sometimes termed it). Unlike the conception of language as text found in much postmodernism, the Bakhtinians start with the propo- sition that it is a process of social interaction: 'Language lives only in the dialogic interaction of those who make use of it. . . ' observed Bakhtin (1984: 183; Medvedev and Bakhtin 1978: 8; Zavala 1989: 51, 56). Identities and consciousness are thus formed in the confluence of interactive voices (Evans 1990: 514). As opposed to the postmodern perspective people create meanings, not meanings people; though the critical proviso is that people are never outside of this process of speech communication and its mean- ings (Bernard-Donals 1994: 103; Bakhtin 1986: 63).

Groups establish partisan meaning in language when they struggle over it in the course of social relationships. Akin to Thompson's understanding of class culture, dialogic theory sees the production of meanings as an ongoing process. Temporal outcomes are the result of the meanings and usages of language that actors can bring to the situation and the power they can exercise to establish these as the standards for the dialogue (Bakhtin 1981, 1984; Holquist 1990; Volosinov 1983, 1986).

The dialogic perspective underscores that inter-class dialogue often involves clashes of meanings. Indeed, according to Bakhtin 'The word in language is half someone else's' (1981: 293). Bakhtin sought to emphasize that words form a contested terrain of meaning. Adherents such as V. N. Volosinov (1983) argued this was never more so then in the exercise of class power and resistance. An important facet of contention between classes is thus the attempt by each to have their own voice as the author of accepted social meaning. 'Every discourse' observed Bakhtin, 'has its own selfish and biased proprietor; there are no words with meanings shared by all, no words "belonging to no one" ' (1981: 401). No class can claim sole proprietorship; the inherent multivocality of language creates the condition for ongoing conflict (tIolquist 1990: 24; Volosinov 1983: 145). Class groups can develop different meanings and inflections for language in situ because of their dis- tinctive structural positions and shared experiences (Hirschkop 1986: 98; Hirschkop and Shepard 1989: 16). Again we find echoes of Thompson's analysis of culture; the meanings class actors render through struggle are similar though they are never just the same.

While there is considerable flux and contention within language, from the dialogic perspective there is always a dominant way of saying and meaning, characterized as speech genres (Bakhtin 1984: 202; 1986: 65; Clark and Holquist 1984: 218-9). A genre contains the typical stylizations, sets of vocabularies, meanings and rules for using them through which dia- logue is conducted (Briggs and Baumann 1992: 148; Gardiner 1992: 74, 81;

480 Marc W. Steinberg

Hirschkop and Shepard 1989: 21;Jameson 1981: 87). Within any period and patterned social context some genres predominate, providing the dominant legitimated ways of interpreting the world. Within genres groups seek to normalize and naturalize power-laden meanings and valuations. Clashes of meaning generally take place within a genre, such as the popular constitutionalism that is central toJoyce's and Vernon's reading of working peoples' narratives (Hall, S. 1993: 18).

In this sense the speech genre is the site of what cultural marxists term hegemony, though marxists generally describe it organizing social life beyond the sphere of language. Merging these complementary analyses we can argue that successful hegemony involves the dominant class's capacity to limit dialogue and its clash of meanings in its interactions with subordi- nates. Limiting what can be said, and how the said can be understood, creates critical boundaries in the way subordinates see their place in a system of power and act within it (McNally 1995). Bakhtinians argue that to the extent language is stylized in speech genres such hegemony can be achieved. Genres produce stylizations which seek to naturalize meanings, objectivizing the monologic word (Bakhtin 1984, p. 189; 1981, p. 29()). Bakhtin was careful to insist that genres were not ossified systems, but were continually reborn and renewed with changing contexts and interlocutors: 'A genre lives in the present,' he observed, 'but always remembers its past . . . ' ( 1984, p. 106) .

Language and experience are thus dialectically tied; the former does not simply dictate the latter's message (Baron 1991: 31). While dominant groups limit and channel moral conceptions, the dialogic nature of lan- guage also contains the potential for subversion. Within genres subordi- nated groups can construct notions of their collective social worth, a sense of binding ties born of shared experiences, and a moral foundation for col- lective resistance. Through these appropriations they can build opposi- tional languages for struggle.6 Moreover multiple clashes can occur within genres: processes of class, gender and ethnicity constantly interact in the production of meanings.

Starting from these within the spaces provided by the polyphony of genres, working-class groups can attempt to subvert the legitimacy of bour- geois meanings and simultaneously fashion an oppositional consciousness. It is the process of counter-hegemony that makes the resultant discourses representational of class identity and consciousness, not the words or symbols used (Hunt 1990). Parallel to both Sewell's and Thompson's his- torical analyses, dialogic theory sees the development of oppositional class language made largely from the appropriated language of capitalist oppres- sors. If we are to take the linguistic turn seriously, then the focus of our analyses should be on the workingwlass use and appropriation of bourgeois language.

The dialogic approach thus suggests that the litmus test of postmodern critics of Thompson rests on an idealized and reified understanding of lan- guage.7 The hunt for an independent working-class discourse that verifies

'A way of struggle' 481

a class consciousness and identity is a mission to find a homology between representation and social life which is unlikely to exist. The real struggle is within the dominant genres. In the analysis below I explore the dynamics of this process in the case of the silk weavers.

THE CASE OF THE SPITALFIELDS WEAVERSX

The Spitalfields region of East London encompassed five parishes, and by the 1820s included some 1>14,000 weavers nested in distinct enclaves. Weaving was domestic outwork, traditionally the ken of the small master, and on average a male journeyman controlling the labour of his wife and children tried to find a living through working several looms. Over the decades male journeymen had woven a dense web of community and trade ties that were the foundation for their material existence and community status. Through a well developed moral economy they articulated a lan- guage that provided notions of the economic and political rights indicative of the contemporary archetype of the honourable artisan. The weavers socially negotiated this status by highlighting the skill of the apex of the trade and carefully cultivating reciprocity with the small merchants and tradesmen that ruled the parish. Because of their relative quiescence during the stirrings of popular radicalism in these early decades, voices of wealth and power also validated the silk weavers' respectability.

The political and legal foundation of the weavers' respectability were the famed Spitalfields Acts. Originating in an Act of 1773, the Acts mandated negotiation between masters and journeymen to establish fixed piece rates and binding arbitration adjudicated by local magistrates to settle disputes. They also forbade district masters from employing external labour, and limited masters to two apprentices. The Acts prohibited the importation of foreign-made silks, protecting Spitalfields from French, Italian and Asian competition.

The conduct of trade under the Acts sanctified the weavers' moral economy of economic and social entitlement as honourable artisans. The language of the law thus aided in constructing civic entitlements as a pur- chase of the weavers' labour. It was also a basis for developing a moral vision of class rights. The weavers never questioned the fundamental legitimacy of private property nor the operation of markets. Rather, through their moral economy and the language of the law they bridled the capitalist's authority in trade relations.9 Additionally, such language gave credence to the male weavers' proclaimed right of state protection to secure employ- ment, the means by which they could provide for their families and thus maintain their patriarchal authority and civic status.

Underneath the security of the Acts, however, class tensions increasingly rent and cracked their foundation. By the early 1820s large West End manu- facturers had rested control of a significant portion of the trade, dominat- ing the labour market by coordinating the production of several hundred

482 Marc W. Steinberg looms each, and in 1823 petitioned Parliament to rid themselves of the Acts. This capitalist assault was conducted predominantly through the language of political economy. By this period political economy had assumed the role of a hegemonic language in the discussion of economy and polity, and the pragmatic ruling Tories argued issues of power and action through its rep- resentations (Hilton 1977). Bourgeois usage mixed political economy with other languages, such as evangelical Protestantism, to structure a larger cul- tural hegemony (Claeys 1989: 144). As Corrigan and Sayer argue, the the- orization of labour as another form of property and factor in production normalized a world view upon which the cultural revolution of capitalist state formation depended (1985: 115-7). In presenting their case the new breed of master manufacturers and their sympas;hizers depicted a world in which the privileges of citizenship were partly realized by individual freedom in the market. They claimed that the operation of the Acts was an sarbitrary, injurious, and impolitic enactment which prevents them, while they continue to reside within certain districts, from employing any portion of their capital in such other parts of the kingdom as may be deemed most beneficial; thereby depriving them...of the fair exercise of their privileges as free subjects . . .' (Hansard Ss, n.s.,1823, IX, c. 148-9). Freedom and security both for manufacturer and worker were defined as the natural rights of individuals to exercise control over their property in the market. Free-trade advocates argued that the Acts actu- ally shackled the weavers from obtaining the full benefits of their labour. To legislate the weavers' wages was 'barbarous, oppressive and unjust, for the weaver has the same natural right to the value of his labour, as the Nobleman has to the rents of his estates, the fundholder to his dividends . . . ('Verax' 1822: 76). Ultimately, an advocate of repeal intoned, capital must be set free if the well-being of the workers was to be secured The great objects of the manufacturer are or ought to be, to extend the market for his commodities and increase the amount and productive- ness of his capital; and the real interests of the labourer are secured exactly in proportion as these objects are accomplished'. (Obser7vations 1822: 23)

In this way the interests of capital were defined as the general interests of the trade. Through the language of political econouly the free-trade advocates sys- temically redefined the moral bases of trade relations. Collective interests were transformed into individual rights. Work no longer was a means against want, but a commodity for sale in an open market. Trade member- ship, which had demarcated a complex of rights and responsibilities in the community, was levelled to a position in the vast operation of the capitalist economy. This market model had contradictory implications for the patri- archal authority of the male weaver. On the one hand it affirmed a world of masculine control, given that the market was composed of the owners

'A way of struggle' 483

and disposers of property. On the other, however, it denied the male weavers the reasonable security provided by the Acts that they could obtain a living household income by orchestrating domestic life.

While the silk weavers had never rejected capitalism as an economic system, neither had they accepted political economy's vision of the world as marketplace. They saw in this new dominant genre the whole cloth of exploitation woven from the warp of class interest and the weft of immoral- ity. Relations between manufacturers conspicuously lacked the moral restraints upon which the weavers understood trade affairs to be based. The state, which through the Acts benevolently protected labour, now stood dis- tantly to the side. As Corrigan and Sayer maintain, 'State intervention . . . enabled, accomplished, stabilized and regulated into dominance that market on which laissez-faire theory depends' (1985: 118).

The struggle over repeal continued for better than a year, but in the end they were no match for the large manufacturers and free traders. By 1825 the Acts were curious artifacts on ageing parchrnent. Through the end of the decade the weavers pursued both the renewal of trade protection and a living wage through a wide repertoire of collective actions. Their struggles necessitated a response to the language of political economy that justified their ruin. They reacted with counter-hegemonic articulations, partly reaffirming and partly revamping their language of collective identity and consciousness. Akin to Thompson's general argument, the closer they were drawn into conflict the more the weavers struggled with the moral logic and language of power. Conforming to the dialogic model, they sought to undermine the hegemony of political economy by appropriating key com- ponents of the language and inflecting them with oppositional meanings. That they engaged issues of morality and polity did not make these struggles any less central to their collective identities as workers, nor does it dimin- ish the cogency of viewing their battles as class conflict.

I turn to a few key examples of the weavers' counter-hegemonic language to demonstrate how they constructed their class identity and consciousness, which I also explore elsewhere (Steinberg 1994, 1995a,b, 1996b). My analy- sis focuses on instances that demonstrate a firm understanding of exploi- tation and oppression, underscoring the weavers' perceptions that a combination of capitalists and state authorities was directly responsible for their increasing misery. As Thompson argued, by looking within the struggle, we can view the cultural processes of class in motion.

As I have noted the large manufacturers sought to undermine the weavers' conceptions of collective rights, and the weavers in turn chal- lenged many of the manufacturers' central representations. Contesting the notion that labour was simply a commodity whose value was determined by market forces, weavers sought to refashion the meanings behind terms such as property and protection for their own collective interests. Appropriating political economy, they argued labour was a form of property, and property within the dictates of political economy decidedly deserved protection. As they emphasized during the anti-repeal campaign,

484 Marc W. Steinberg

[I]s not all acquired property protected by law, and is not thatjust? Why then should it not be just to protect natural property which is labour. Labour is the only property a poor man has, which is the root and riches of the great and mighty, who are able to protect themselves, while the poor have neither the means nor the power of self-defense without the assistance of the law. (Anon. 1823: 60)

During their protracted struggles weavers and their allies also contested the inevitability of unrestricted profit as part of a natural system of market law, though they did not deny the right of a manufacturer to earn a living through trade. Weavers countered, following Adam Smith, that labour was the fount of all wealth, and that by this nature it deserved a respectable reward. The natural law of production, according to one advocate, demanded not competition, but mutuality

It is indeed part of the original curse, that man should live by his labour . . . But there is no law of nature that requires any man should labour for another; for nature has bestowed all her gifts in common, and the appro- priation can only be maintained by compact or mutual agreement. ('Coventry Freeman' 1824: 5-6)

Supporters of the Acts also elaborated meanings of freedom contrary to the negative and individuated rights constructed in political economy. They proffered that the harmony of civil society was necessarily created by state regulation, and that the freedom proposed by the language of political economy violated the very tenets of national order. By drawing on a Lockean notion of a social compact the negative rights championed by political economy were called into question. 'For what is the end of all government? is it not to balance the inequities of society? and if that is not accomplished they are so far from useless,' declared 'Coventry Freeman' (op. cit.: 8). And in a rhetorical flourish he denounced the conception of freedom within political economy which was, 'nothing more nor less, in application to the productive classes, than freedom for the powerful to oppress and defraud the weak' (op. cit.: 5).

The weavers continued their dialogic struggle against the language of political economy even as vast numbers of them sank into the abyss of unemployment and grinding poverty. This ever-closer engagement that nurtured a class conscious language can be glimpsed in the proceedings of a meeting of thousands of silk weavers and family members convened in February of 1828 to inaugurate a new campaign to petition to Parliament. The chair of the meeting opened with such a signal shot when he sought to transpose meanings to articulate the interests of his constituency

They found, generally, in all situations where capital was employed, the individuals so employing it sought the Legislature to protect that capital. If he understood the business which had called them together, it was for the protection of capital; that capital which was the most valued in all states - it was labour. ( Trades ' Free Press, 23 February 1828)

'A way of struggle' 485

Similar metonomic strategies were employed throughout the meeting's report and petition. Again asserting that 'the artisan's power of labour is his only property' the weavers claimed it a fundamental injustice that the 'properw of all other classes should be protected, whilst the artisans and labourers alone are left a prey to be plundered by needy, rapacious, and unprincipled employers' (Report/Petition 1828: 7).

Echoing past critiques, they ridiculed the free traders' notion of 'freedom', finding in it the chains of their impoverishment

the greatest freedom of interchange can only be secured by suitable and adequate regulations . . . [T]he present incongruous application of the principle of freedom, so far from tending to promote the prosperity of the country in the aggregate - on the contrary tends to impoverish it, and to widen those already too wide extremes, which exist in the con- dition of the different classes of society - by increasing the riches of a portion of the wealthy, and the poverty of the industrious classes, in a greater proportion than the advantages which it gives to those who benefit by its operation. (op. cit.: 21)

As previously, the weavers articulated a role for government based upon the notion of a social contract designed to balance the conflicting interests of civil society. The justifications for this principle of governance were culled from none other than such authorities as Locke and the Utilitarians as dis- cussed in the extract below from the Encyclopedia Britannica!

The end of government has been described in a great variety of expres- sions. By Locke it was said to be 'the public good;' others have described it as being 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number', we must understand what is included in the happiness of the individuals of whom it is composed. The lot of every human being is determined by his pains or pleasures, and his happiness corresponds with the degree in which his pleasures are great and his pains are small.

The end to be obtained through government as the means is to prevent any man from having less than his share. The means of insuring labour must be provided for as the foundation of all . . . The greatest poss- ible happiness of society (which is thegreat end of government) is therefore attained by insuringto every man thegreatest possible quantity of the produce of his labour. (Report 1828: 12-13) 10

The great tenets of liberalism were thus deployed to defend the interests of labour against those of capital.

To counter what they viewed as the dismal misconceptions of Ricardo the silk weavers articulated a labour theory of value. This appropriation of Smith, common among many other trade leaders, provided the substantive justification for regulation. The Report proclaimed that 'All property is pro- duced by labour- there can be no title to property like that of producing it' (op. cit.: 2S7). The basics of this social economy were outlined in a series of simple propositions predicated in a labour theory of value. Linking the

486 Marc W. Steinberg

labour theory of value to national prosperity, the weavers countered the nostrums of free traders by arguing that regulation ultimately secured the highest level of economic prosperity.

An equitable reward for labour is best adapted, and is indeed indis- pensable to secure the greatest quantity of wealth in any country, and to promote the legitimate interests of all classes of society.... Because it is labour which gives value to land and raw material for manufactures. 'The labour of the country is the wealth of the country' (Adam Smith) . . . (op. cit.: 14)

In dialogic fashion the silk weavers had plumbed the great strictures of political economy and liberalism and used them to expose the common sense language of the powerful as class-interested. Rather than opposing the manufacturers and free traders with an avowedly socialist language, the weavers and their advocates created a counter-hegemonic strategy that was consonant with their principles of collectivism. By burrowing into the lan- guage of power they at once exposed the partiality of its core and asserted their alternative vision for their world. For male weavers this linguistic strat- egy also had the virtue of implicitly affirming their patriarchal authority, as they could depict themselves as the primary producers and were legally the sole property holders. Shorn of the economic uncertainty of the free market that threatened the surety of patriarchal household control, the lan- guage of capitalist hegemony was readily amenable for the articulation of male domestic authority (see Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Rose 1992).

Class struggle thus occurred within a hegemonic language rather than between opposed languages. Seen relationally, and in the context of their struggle, we understand the weavers use of many of the terms of classical liberalism and political economy as part of the process of class conflict.

CONCLUSION

Several years prior to the publication of The Making of the English Working Class E. P. Thompson reflected that

working-class history is not the record of a coherent 'way of life'; it has always been a way of struggle, between competing moralities . . . This way of struggle, against class rule from above, and between competing moralities within the working class, has never been a blind spontaneous reflex to objective economic conditions. It has been a conscious struggle of ideas and values all the way. (1959: 57)

For Thompson a critical piece of this way of struggle, the vehicle through which morality was paraded in the streets of history, was language. Though he never systematically theorized the place of language in struggle his many historical observations, coupled with his cultural materialism, leave little doubt about its role.

'A way of struggle' 487

Recent reflections on Thompson's work, while rightly highlighting the importance of language in struggle, errantly critique his understanding of linguistic processes. Where his critics find reductionism or neglect Thomp- son in fact argues for relative autonomy and scrutiny. Where they see a static picture of class languages in his work, Thompson sketches a moving, chang- ing panorama. In fact, the postmodern reformation too frequently involves the decoupling of language from this way of struggle.

In the dialogic theory we find theoretical insights congruent with Thompson's analyses. Focused on the struggles within speech communi- cation, this perspective highlights the processes of counter-hegemony that are the entanglements of group struggle. It elaborates an understanding of the class bases of power in and through language that adds a theoretical sturdiness to Thompson's historical analysis, while providing a fresh vantage for sympathetic critique.

In the analysis of the silk weavers' case we see how a dialogic perspective sharpens our understanding of the role of language in class struggle. They were confronted with the onslaught of capitalist degradation after a half century of relative protection. To counter the hegemony of political economy through which large manufacturers and government officials sought to restructure their world, the weavers appropriated pieces of bour- geois language and retooled it as a weapon of the weak. In this process they were true Bakhtinian practitioners; they saw the words in use were half theirs. That they were able to fight this battle of meanings was because the totality of their experience outstripped the ability of any set of languages to wholly define their world. The fracturing of the male artisan's honorable status, his waning authority in the household, and everyone's hunger and destitution knocked loudly on the portals of meaning and demanded expla- nation.

The weavers' in response articulated a clear sense of class identity and consciousness. They were active in the making their own language, even if it is not just what others today would be pleased to label as the insignia of class. Sifting through those words today we can see that Thompson was surely correct when, in reclaiming the voices of the weavers and the poor stockingers, he submerged into the din of history and heard the making of class.

(Date accepted: October 1996) Marc W Steinberg Dcpartment of Sociology

Smith College, MA

NOTES

1. My thanks to Anna Clark, Robert British Studies, Session on 'Constructing Hall, Susan Kent, Carolyn Malone, and Labor: Language Class and Gender in the Charles Tilly for their comments. A Making of the Victorian Working Class', previous version of this paper was delivered New York City, 8 April 1994. Direct all cor- at the Middle Atlantic Conference on respondence to Department of Sociology,

488 Marc W. Steinberg

Northampton, MA 10163, USA, or e-mail at mwsteinb 4)sophia.smith.edu I have con- sidered some of the issues in this paper from the historiographic side in Steinberg (1996a) .

2. In factJoan Scott (1987) has criti- cized Stedman Jones for falling short of a poststructuralist perspective. For signifi- cant critiques from cultural marxism's sympathizers see see Epstein (1986), Gray (1986), MayEield and Thorne (1992), and Wood (1986).

3. For an early version of this criticism see Hirst, who notes that 'Thompson assumes an evident unity in "experience". But what is at stake is what counts as experi- ence in different discourses and practices' (1985: 75).

4. As Thompson himself noted about his reading of materialism, 'I am calling in question . . . the notion that it is possible to describe a mode of production in "econ- omic" terms; leaving aside as secondary (less "real") the norms, the culture, the critical concepts around which this mode of production is organized' (1977: 262). See also his comments in the MAltHO interview with Merrill (1976: 23) .

5. In a discussion of the peace move- ment he championed in his later years Thompson noted that 'every social move- ment which (as a social historian) I have ever studied...is made up of a plurality of voices and influences, some of which are directly contradictory' (1984: 80) .

6. While in this discussion my focus is on class a dialogic analysis is equally amen- able to the analysis of other divisions of power. For discussions of dialogics and feminist analysis for example see Diaz- Diocartez (1989), Herndel (1991), Hitch- cock (1994), Hohne and Wussow (1994) and Thomson (1989) .

7. As Savage and Miles note in a paral- lel critique that postmodernism can lead to a 'form of linguistic determinism, in which the historical impact of any non-linguistic realm is obscured, denied or declared unknowable' (1994: 17; see also Kirk 1994: 236) . For parallel accounts of the dynamics of symbolic class struggle see Epstein (1994). For a non-marxist account of the class struggle between working people and the bourgeoisie within political liberalism see Asheraft (1993) .

8. For specific references to primary and secondary sources upon which this research is based readers may turn to Stein- berg (1995b,1996a) or contact the author.

9. For an analysis of the language of the law and its uses by early modern workers see Somers (1992, 1994).

10. This extract and others from Locke and other classical liberal sources exem- plify Richard Ashcraft's (1993) non- marxist though similar argument that class conflict was conducted within the lan- guage of liberal politics.

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