Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E.P. Thompson and His Critics

Ellen Meiksins Wood

The Politics of Theoryand the Concept of Class:

E.P. Thompsonand His Critics

There is no mark more distinctive of Western Marxisms, nor more re-vealing as to their profoundly anti-democratic premises. Whether Frank-furt School or Althusser, they are marked by their very heavy emphasisupon the ineluctable weight of ideological modes of domination -domination which destroys every space for the initiative or creativity ofthe mass of the people - a domination from which only the enlightenedminority of intellectuals can struggle free .... it is a sad premise fromwhich socialist theory should start (all men and women, except for us, areoriginally stupid) and one which is bound to lead on to pessimistic orauthoritarian conclusions.

E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory

E.P. Thompson has always worked from the premise that theory hasimplications for practice. The definition of class which begins hisground-breaking study, The Making of the English Working Class, withits emphasis on class as an active process and an historical relationship,was certainly formulated to vindicate class against social scientists andhistorians who deny its existence; but it was also intended to counterboth intellectual traditions and political practices that suppress humanagency and in particular deny the self-activity of the working class in themaking of history. By placing class struggle at the centre of theory andpractice, Thompson intended to rescue "history from below" not onlyas an intellectual enterprise but as a political project against both theoppressions of class domination and the programme of "socialism fromabove" in its various incarnations from Fabianism to Stalinism. 1 His

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Studies in Political Economy

recent attacks on Althusserian Marxism have been directed equallyagainst what he perceives to be its theoretical deformations and againstthe political practice he finds inscribed in them.

Thompson's critics have returned the compliment. In his concept ofclass and the historical project that rests upon it, they have often founda unity of theory and practice in which a romantic "populist socialism"is grounded in a theoretical - or, rather, an a-theoretical - foundationof "indiscriminate empiricism, "2 "subjectivism," and "voluntarism."What follows is an attempt to evaluate these claims by exploringThompson's theory of class, identifying the targets at which it is aimed,and, finally, interpreting the political message it contains. The object isto say something about Thompson in particular, but also, in the pro-cess, to raise some more general questions about current debates inMarxist theory and about the political choices implicit in them.

The case against Thompson's conception of class has recently beenput in an especially effective way by Stuart Hall:

If class consciousness is itself an historical process, and cannot be simplyderived from the economic position of class agents (a really non-reductiveMarxism), then the whole problem of Marxist politics is caught in therelated, but not necessarily corresponding connections between c1ass-in-itself and c1ass-for-itself. To resolve both into the catch-all category of"experience" is to imply - despite all the complexities of any particularanalysis - that "the class" is always really in its place, at the ready, andcan be summoned up "for socialism." Something very like this is ofteninscribed in, for example, History Workshop's notion of "people's his-tory" - as if, simply to tell the story of past oppressions and struggles isto find the promise of socialism already there, fully constituted, onlywaiting to "speak out." It is also, often, implied in Thompson's eloquentinvocations of the traditions of the "free-born Englishmen" and of "thecommon people", which live on in popular tradition if only they can befree from their bourgeois constituents. But the whole record of socialism,up to and especially in the present moment, is against this too-simple"populism." A non-reductive Marxist theory must entail facing up to allthat is involved in saying that socialism has to be constructed by a realpolitical practice, not merely "rediscovered" in a recuperative historicalreflection. 3

Here, in a concise and relatively sympathetic statement, are sum-marized the most important (though not, as we shall see, necessarilymutually consistent) criticisms often levelled against Thompson. It is es-pecially important to come to terms with the argument in the form ad-vanced here by Stuart Hall because it attacks the problem at preciselythe crucial point: the immediate practical, political consequences ofThompson's theoretical stance.

Thompson has often been accused of submerging the objective deter-minants or structural conditions of class in an essentially subjective andhistorically contingent notion of "experience." It is said that he definesclass in terms of class consciousness and culture instead of acknowledg-

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Ellen Meiksins Wood/Thompson and Critics

ing the fundamental materialist principle that "classes are constitutedby modes of production" which objectively distribute people in classes. 4

He therefore denies that classes can be structurally defined with someprecision "by reference to production relations;"! Some critics suggestthat, as a consequence, for Thompson there is no class where there is noclass consciousness. Stuart Hall, however, apparently takes a contraryview of what follows from Thompson's conception of class experience;and whatever the inadequacies of Hall's account, it is at least moreconsistent with Thompson's historical practice. The suggestion is thatby absorbing or elevating the structural conditions of class "into thelevel of 'experience'>" - that is, by collapsing objective determinantsinto subjective experiences, consciousness, and culture - Thompson ineffect discovers class everywhere, complete and "at the ready" in allmanifestations of popular culture. According to this argument, to theextent that Thompson effectively treats all experiences lived by subor-dinate classes equally and without distinction as class experiences, andmore particularly, all their protests and resistances equally as class strug-gles, he succumbs to a kind of "too-simple populism," a romantic faithin the revolutionary potential of popular culture, and underestimatesthe necessity of an organized and arduous political practice inconstructing the struggle for socialism.

There is, however, another side to the question. It is, after all, notThompson - indeed, least of all Thompson - who regards the forma-tion of classes as unproblematic, a mechanical reflex of objective struc-tures. To say that "class consciousness is itself an historical process, andcannot be simply derived from the economic position of class agents" isprecisely to deny that '''the class' is always really in its place." Theconclusion that class is always there, at the ready, might be said toaccord much better with the premise that classes are given directly byobjective relations of production than with the principle upon whichThompson's historical work is actually predicated: that classes must bemade or formed, and that they are made and formed in the process ofconflict and struggle. In fact, it is precisely this principle andThompson's insistence on exploring the historical process of class-formation which have opened him to the charges of subjectivism andempiricism or the accusation that he confuses class with class-conscious-ness. In this respect, what Stuart Hall apparently takes to beThompson's subordination of structural conditions to historical exper-ience proceeds exactly from his refusal to take for granted that class isalways in place and at the ready.

There exist, as Stuart Hall suggests, historians who treat "people'shistory" and the romantic evocation of artisanal traditions as if theywere substitutes for political struggle and the building of socialism. Andthese historians may have found in the concept of "experience" a kindof theoretical warrant for their project. The conceptual and political

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wooliness Hall describes may even have been encouraged by EdwardThompson, especially to the extent that he tends to hide the theoreticalsharpness of his own work in an effort to dissociate himself from the"theoreticism" of his adversaries. On the whole, however, in thesematters Thompson has often been as ill-served by his staunchest friendsas by his harshest critics.

The Structural Definition of ClassThe question then is whether Thompson's historical recovery of classactually does dissolve the structural determinants of class in a welter ofhistorically specific and subjective experiences, "resolving the two dif-ferent principles of class-in-itself and class-for-itself" into "the catch-allcategory of experience" - either in the sense that class has no objectivereality for him apart from class consciousness or in the sense that he isunable to distinguish between popular experience and revolutionaryclass consciousness.

A recent critic has accused Thompson of mistakenly believing that,because "production relations do not mechanically determine classconsciousness," "class may not be defined purely in terms ofproduction relations. "7 In opposition to Thompson, Gerald Cohenargues that class may be defined "structurally," "with more or less (ifnot, perhaps, 'mathematical') precision by reference to production rela-tions. "8Thompson, he suggests, rejects the structural definition of classand defines class "by reference to" class consciousness and cultureinstead of production relations. "The result," argues Perry Anderson,concurring with Cohen's judgment, "is a definition of class that is fartoo voluntarist and subjectivist. ... "9

It is possible to argue that Thompson tells us too little about the rela-tions of production and that he fails to define them with enough speci-ficity. He may indeed take too much for granted. To accuse him,however, of defining class "by reference to" or "in terms of" class con-sciousness instead of production relations is quite simply to miss thepoint. For Thompson, it is not a question of defining classes "by refer-ence to" class consciousness instead of production relations, but ratherof investigating the processes by which the relations of productionactually give rise to classjormations and the "disposition to behave as aclass." In this respect, it is not at all clear that Thompson's conceptionof class is incompatible with, for example, the following statement byPerry Anderson, although Anderson intends it as a rejoinder toThompson, an attack on his excessively voluntarist and subjectivistdefinition of class, and an expansion of Cohen's argument:

It is, and must be, the dominant mode of production that confers funda-mental unity on a social formation, allocating their objective positions tothe classes within it, and distributing the agents within each class. The

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result is, typically, an objective process of class struggle ... class struggleis not a causal prius in the sustentation of order, for classes areconstituted by modes of production, and not vice versa. 10

Now unless the proposition that' 'classes are constituted by modes ofproduction" is taken to mean - as in Perry Anderson's case it surelydoes not - that modes of production immediately constitute activeclass formations or that the process of class formation is unproblematicand mechanical, Thompson (no doubt with some stylistic reservations)might readily accept it. The danger is that we may ask too much of theformula "modes of production constitute classes," with its deceptiveprecision. We may beg the critical questions about class and concep-tualize out of existence the most essential and difficult problems bymeans of a conceptual slippage. The proposition that "classes are con-stituted by modes of production" can swallow up the question of howclassjormations are constituted by modes of production and how, once"agents" are objectively "distributed" within each class, these object-ively constituted classes give rise to actual (and changing) class forma-tions.

Thompson's historical project presupposes that relations of produc-tion distribute people into class situations, that these situations entailessential objective antagonisms and conflicts of interest, and that theytherefore create conditions of struggle. Class formations and the dis-covery of class consciousness grow out of the process of struggle, aspeople "experience" and "handle" their class situations. It is in thissense that class struggle precedes class. To say that exploitation is"experienced in class ways and only thence give(s) rise to class forma-tions" is to say precisely that the conditions of exploitation, the rela-tions of production, are objectively there to be experienced. II Neverthe-less, objective determinations do not impose themselves on blank andpassive raw material but on active and conscious historical beings. Classformations emerge and develop "as men and women live theirproductive relations and experience their determinate situations, within'the ensemble of the social relations,' with their inherited culture andexpectations, and as they handle these experiences in cultural ways." 12

This certainly means that no structural definition of class can by itselfresolve the problem of class formation and that "no model can give uswhat ought to be the 'true' class formation for a certain 'stage' of pro-cess." 13 At the same time, if class formations are generated by "living"and "experiencing," within a complex totality of social relations andhistorical legacies, they presuppose what is lived and experienced:productive relations and the determinate situations "into which men areborn - or enter involuntarily." 14 In order to experience things in "classways" people must be objectively distributed into class situations; butthis is the beginning, not the end, of class-formation. It is not a small -or theoretically trivial - point to distinguish between the constitution

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of classes by modes of production and the process of class-formation.Nor is it unimportant to suggest that, however completely we maysucceed in deductively situating people on a chart of class locations, theproblematic question of class formation will remain and may yieldanswers that are both theoretically and politically more significant.

In effect, Thompson is being accused of voluntarism and subjectivismnot because he neglects the objective, structural determinations of class,but on the contrary, because he refuses to relegate the process of classformation - which is his central concern - to a sphere of mere contin-gency and subjectivity set apart from the sphere of objective materialdetermination, as his critics appear to do. He does not proceed from atheoretical dualism which opposes structure to history and identifies the"structural" explanation of class with the charting of objective, staticclass locations while reserving the process of class formation for anapparently lesser form of historical and empirical explanation. Instead,Thompson - taking seriously the principles of historical materialismand its conception of materially structured historical processes - treatsthe process of class formation as an historical process shaped by the"logic" of material determinations.

Thompson could, in fact, turn the tables on his critics. One of hismajor objects in refusing to define class as a "structure" or "thing," ashe points out in The Making of the English Working Class, has been tovindicate the concept of class against those - especially bourgeois socialscientists - who deny its existence except as "a pejorative theoreticalconstruct, imposed upon the evidence." 15 He has countered suchdenials by insisting upon class as a relationship and a process, to be ob-served over time as a pattern in social relations, institutions, and values.

The denial of class, especially where there is no historical clarity toforce its reality upon our attention, cannot be answered simply byreciting the "structural" definition of class. This is, in fact, no betterthan the reduction of class to a theoretical construct imposed on theevidence. What is needed is a way of demonstrating how the struc-turation of society "in class ways" actually affects social relations andhistorical processes. The point, then, is to have a conception of classthat invites us to discover how objective class situations actually shapesocial reality, and not simply to state and restate the tautological prop-osition that "class = relation to the means of production." The conceptof class as relationship and process stresses that objective relations tothe means of production are significant insofar as they establish antago-nisms and generate conflicts and struggles; that these conflicts andstruggles shape social experience "in class ways," even when they do notexpress themselves in class consciousness and clearly visible formations;and that over time we can discern how these relationships impose theirlogic, their pattern, on social processes. Purely "structural" concep-tions of class do not require us to look for the ways in which classactually imposes its logic, since classes are simply there by definition.

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Thompson has nevertheless been attacked on the grounds that, byfailing to define class in purely "structural" terms, he has rendered theconcept inapplicable to all historical cases in which no class conscious-ness can be discerned. 16Yet, the emphasis on class as relationship andprocess is especially important precisely in dealing with cases where nowell-defined expressions of class consciousness are available to provideuncontestable evidence of class. This applies in particular to socialformations before the advent of industrial capitalism, which innineteenth century England for the time in history producedunambiguously-visible class formations, compelling observers to takenote of class and provide conceptual instruments to apprehend it.Indeed, Thompson is arguably the one Marxist who, instead of evadingthe issue, has tried to give an account of class which can be applied insuch ambiguous cases. His purpose here has not been to deny theexistence of class in the absence of class consciousness but, on thecontrary, to answer such denials by showing how class determinantsshape social processes, how people behave "in class ways, " even before- and as a pre-condition to - the "mature" formations of class withtheir consciously class-defined institutions and values.!? Thus, forexample, the formula "class struggle without class," which Thompsontentatively proposes to describe English society in the eighteenthcentury, is intended precisely to convey the effects of class-structuredsocial relations upon agents without class consciousness and as a pre-condition to conscious class formations. Class struggle thereforeprecedes class, both in the sense that class formations presuppose anexperience of conflict and struggle arising out of production relations,and in the sense that there are conflicts and struggles structured "in classways" even in social formations which do not yet have class-consciousclass formations.

To argue that a purely structural definition is required to rescue theuniversal applicability of "class" is to suggest that in the absence ofclass consciousness classes exist only as "objective relations to themeans of production," with no practical consequences for the dynamicsof social process. So perhaps it is not Thompson but his critics who ef-fectively reduce class to class consciousness. Thompson, in contrast,seems to be arguing that the' 'objective relations of production" alwaysmatter, whether or not they are expressed in a well-defined conscious-ness of class - though they matter in different ways in differenthistorical contexts and only produce class formations as a result ofhistorical processes. The point is to have a conception of class that turnsour attention to precisely how, and in what different modes, objectiveclass situations matter.

Thompson, then, does indeed say that classes arise or "happen"because people "in determinative productive relations," who conse-quently share a common experience, identify their common interestsand come to think and value "in class ways;"18 but we are not entitled

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to conclude from this that classes do not, in any meaningful sense, existfor him as objective realities before the advent of class consciousness.On the contrary, class consciousness depends upon the determinativeforce of objective class situations. If Thompson effectively distinguishesbetween class situations and class formations, it is perhaps because,unlike those who equate class with production relations, he finds itnecessary to distinguish between the conditions of class and class itself.And if he stresses this distinction, it is in order to focus attention on thecomplex and often contradictory historical processes by which, indeterminate historical conditions, the former give rise to the latter. Asfor purely "structural" definitions of class, since they cannot definecompleted class formations, either they are intended simply to denotethe same determining pressures ~xerted by objective class distributionson variable historical processes - so that the difference betweenThompson and his critics is largely a question of emphasis - or suchdefinitions refer to nothing significant at all.

The Making of the English Working ClassThe proposition that Thompson neglects objective determinations infavour of subjective factors has been put to a practical test by PerryAnderson in a particularly trenchant criticism of his major historicalwork, The Making of the English Working Class. Anderson argues that,in this work, the objective conditions of capital accumulation andindustrialization are treated as secondary and external to the making ofthe English proletariat:

It is not the structural transformations - economic, political and demo-graphic ... which are the objects of his inquiry, but rather their precipi-tates in the subjective experience of those who lived through these"terrible years." The result is to resolve the complex manifold ofobjective-subjective determinations whose totalization actually generatedthe English working class into a simple dialectic between suffering andresistance whose whole movement is internal to the subjectivity of theclass. 19

Indeed, suggests Anderson, the advent of industrial capitalism becomesmerely a moment in a long and largely "subjective" process, going backto Tudor times, in which the formation of the English working class ap-pears as a gradual development in a continuous tradition of popular cul-ture.20 There is, according to Anderson,

no real treatment of the whole historical process whereby heterogeneousgroups of artisans, small holders, agricultural labourers, domestic work-ers and casual poor were gradually assembled, distributed and reduced tothe condition of labour subsumed to capital, first in the formaldependence of the wage-contract, ultimately in the real dependence ofintegration into mechanized means of production.P

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Thompson therefore provides us with no means of testing his proposi-tion that "the English working class made itself as much as it wasmade," since he gives us no measure of the proportional relation be-tween "agency" and "necessity." What would be required is at least a"conjoint exploration of the objective assemblage and transformationof a labour-force by the Industrial Revolution, and of the subjectivegermination of a class culture in response to it.,,22 By concentrating onthe "immediate experience of the producers rather than on the mode ofproduction itself," Thompson gives us only the subjective elements ofthe equation.P

Anderson correctly isolates two of the most characteristic and prob-lematic themes in Thompson's argument: his stress on the continuity ofpopular traditions cutting across the "catastrophic" break of theIndustrial Revolution; and his insistence on historically situating thecritical moments in the formation of the English working class in such away that the moment of fruition comes in the period 1790-1832, that is,before the real transformation of production and the labour force byindustrial capitalism was very far advanced and with no account of thetremendous changes in the working class thereafter. 24

Difficulties certainly do arise here, as Anderson suggests. The em-phasis on the continuity of popular traditions - older traditions notspecifically proletarian but artisanal and "democratic" - may at firstglance make it hard to perceive what is new about the working class of1790-1832, what is specifically proletarian, or unique to industrial capi-talism, in this class formation. What, exactly, has been "made," andwhat role has the advent of the new order of industrial capitalism playedin the making? The temporal parameters may also present problems. Toend the process of "making" in 1832, when industrial transformationwas far from complete, may seem to imply that the developments inclass consciousness, institutions, and values outlined by Thompsonoccurred independently of "objective" transformations in the mode ofproduction.

There are undoubtedly many historiographical issues to be contestedhere about the nature and development of the English working class.But the immediate question is whether Thompson's insistence on thecontinuity of popular traditions and his apparently idiosyncratic period-ization of working class formation reflect a preoccupation with subject-ive factors at the expense of objective determinations. Is it Thompson'sintention to set "subjective" developments (the evolution of popularculture) against "objective" factors (the processes of capitalaccumulation and industrialization)?

The first striking point about Thompson's argument is that, for all hisinsistence on the continuity of popular culture, he considers his argu-ment not as a denial but as a reaffirmation of the view that the periodof the Industrial Revolution represents a signficant, indeed "cata-

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strophic," historical milestone, marked by the emergence of a classsufficiently new to appear as a "fresh race of beings." In other words,his object is not to assert the subjective continuity of working classculture against the radical objective transformations of capitalist devel-opment but, on the contrary, to reveal and explain the changes withinthe continuities.

In part, Thompson's emphases are shaped to fit the specific terms ofthe debates in which he is engaged - debates about the effects of theIndustrial Revolution such as the "standard of living" argument,controversies between "catastrophic" and "anti-catastrophic" or"empiricist" analyses, and so on. He is, among other things, respond-ing to a variety of recent historical - and ideological - orthodoxieswhich question the importance of dislocations and disruptions entailedby industrial capitalism, or, if they admit to the existence of hardshipswithin the generally progressive and improving tendencies of"industrialization," attribute them to causes external to the system ofproduction - for example, to "trade cycles." Such arguments aresometimes accompanied by denials that the working class - as distinctfrom several working classes - existed at all. An emphasis on thediversity of working class experience, on the differences between the"pre-industrial" experience of domestic workers or artisans and that offactory hands fully absorbed into the new industrial order, can be par-ticularly serviceable to capitalist ideology. It is, for example, especiallyuseful in arguments which confine the hardships and dislocationsengendered by industrial capitalism to "pre-industrial" or traditionalworkers. In these interpretations, the degradation of such workersbecomes simply the inevitable and impersonal consequence of "dis-placement by mechanical processes," "progress," and improved indus-trial methods, while the modern worker moves steadily onward andupward.

Thompson vindicates the "catastrophic" view, as well as the notionof the working class, by confronting the evidence adduced by theircritics. One of his tasks is to explain why, although by certain statisticalyardsticks there may have been a slight improvement in average materialstandards in the period 1790-1840, this slight improvement was exper-ienced by workers as a "catastrophe," which they-handled by creatingnew class formations, "strongly based and self-conscious institutions -trade unions, friendly societies, educational and religious movements,political organizations, periodicals" together with "working-class intel-lectual traditions, working-class community patterns, and a working-class structure of feeling." 25 These institutions and forms of conscious-ness are tangible testimony to the existence of a new working class for-mation, despite the apparent diversity of experience; and their expres-sions in popular unrest bear witness against the "optimistic" view of theIndustrial Revolution. Thompson, however, then faces the problem of

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accounting for the fact that this class formation is already visibly inplace when the new system of production is still undeveloped; that largenumbers of the workers who constitute this class formation, and indeedinitiate its characteristic institutions, do not apparently belong to a"fresh race of beings" produced by industrialization, but are stillengaged in ostensibly "pre-industrial" forms of domestic and artisanallabour; and that factory hands probably did not (except in cottondistricts) form the "nucleus of the Labour movement" before the late1840s.26 In light of these facts, it would on the face of it be difficult tomaintain that the new working class was simply created by the newforms of production characteristic of industrial capitalism. To accountfor the incontestable presence of class formations that unite new andtraditional forms of labour - artisans, domestic workers, factory hands- it becomes necessary to identify a unifying experience, one which alsoexplains why the "catastrophic" impact of the Industrial Revolutionwas experienced in sectors apparently still untouched by the transforma-tion of industrial production.

Here Thompson's critics might argue - as Anderson's criticism sug-gests - that Thompson relies too much on "subjective" experiences,suffering, and the continuity of popular culture to override the objectivediversity of artisans and factory hands without giving an account of theprocesses that actually, objectively, united them into a single class.Indeed, these critics might argue that for Thompson no objective unityis necessary to identify the working class, as long as it can be defined interms of a unity in consciousness. It can, however, be argued that suchcriticisms concede too much to Thompson's anti-Marxist opponents.For example, the "optimistic" and "empiricist" arguments rely at leastimplicitly on setting up an opposition between "facts" and "values,"between their own "objective" standards and merely "subjective"standards having to do with the "quality of life." This opposition canbe used to obscure the real issues by relegating problems of exploitation,relations of production, and class struggle - which are the focus ofThompson's argument - to the sphere of subjectivity, while identifyingobjectivity with "hard," "impersonal" factors: trade cycles, tech-nology, wage and price indices. Thompson, while certainly concernedwith the "quality of life," defines its conditions not simply in subjectiveterms but in terms of the objective realities of capitalist production rela-tions and their expressions in the organization of life. Thus, the singlemost important objective condition experienced in common by variouskinds of workers during the period in question was the intensification ofexploitation; and Thompson devotes the second and central section ofThe Making of the English Working Class, introduced by a chapterentitled "Exploitation," to a description of its effects. 27 He is concernednot simply with its effects in "suffering" but in the distribution andorganization of work (as well as leisure), most especially its con-

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sequences for work discipline and the intensity of labour, for example inthe extension of hours of work, increasing specialization, the break-upof the family economy, and so on.28 He also considers how the exploit-ive relationship was expressed in "corresponding forms of ownershipand State power," in legal and political forms, and how the intensifi-cation of exploitation was compounded by counter-revolutionarypolitical repression.i? These are factors which certainly cannot, from aMarxist point of view, be dismissed as "subjective;" and Thompson setsthem against the "hard facts" of the "empiricist" argument, not assubjectivity against objectivity, but as the real objective determinationswhich underlie the "facts:"

By what social alchemy did inventions for saving labour become agents ofimmiseration? The raw fact - a bad harvest - may seem to be beyondhuman election. But the way that fact worked its way out was in terms ofa particular complex of human relationship: law, ownership, power.When we encounter some sonorous phrase such as "the strong ebb andflow of the trade cycle" we must be put on our guard. For behind thistrade cycle there is a structure of social relations, fostering some sorts ofexpropriation (rent, interest, profit) and outlawing some others (theft,feudal dues), legitimizing some types of conflict (competition, armedwarfare) and inhibiting others (trade unionism, bread riots, popularpolitical organization) .... 30

The underlying objective determinations affecting the developmentsof 1790-1832 were, then, the working out of capitalist modes of expro-priation, the intensification of exploitation this implied, and the struc-ture of social relations, legal forms, and political powers that sustainedit. The significant point is that these factors affected both "traditional"and new forms of labour; and their common "experience," with thestruggles it entailed - in a period of transition which produced amoment of particular transparency in relationships of exploitation, aclarity heightened by political repression - underlay the process of classformation.

The particular significance and subtlety of Thompson's argument liesprecisely in its demonstration that the apparent continuity of "pre-industrial" forms can be deceptive. He argues that domestic andartisanal production were themselves transformed - even when theywere not displaced - by the same objective process and the same modeof exploitation that created the factory system. Indeed, it was often inoutwork industries that the new relationship of exploitation was mosttransparent. This is, for example, how he answers arguments which at-tribute the hardships of "industrialization" simply to "displacement bymechanical processes":

it will not do to explain away the plight of weavers or of "slop" workersas "instances of the decline of old crafts which were displaced by a mech-anical process;" nor can we even accept the statement, in its pejorative

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context, that "it was not among the factory employees but among thedomestic workers, whose traditions and methods were those of theeighteenth century, that earnings were at their lowest." The suggestion towhich these statements lead us is that these conditions can somehow besegregated in our minds from the true improving impulse of the IndustrialRevolution - they belong to an "older," pre-industrial order, whereasthe authentic features of the new capitalist order may be seen where thereare steam, factory operatives, and meat-eating engineers. But thenumbers employed in the outwork industries multiplied enormouslybetween 1780-1830; and very often steam and the factory were themultipliers. It was the mills which spun the yarn and the foundries whichmade the nail-rod upon which the outworkers were employed. Ideologymay wish to exalt one and decry the other, but facts must lead us to saythat each was a complementary component of a single process ....Moreover, the degradation of the outworkers was very rarely as simple asthe phrase "displaced by a mechanical process" suggests; it wasaccomplished by methods of exploitation similar to those in the dishon-ourable trades and it often preceded machine competition .... Indeed,we may say that large-scale sweated outwork was as intrinsic to thisrevolution as was factory production and steam.I'

In effect, Thompson undermines the ideological foundations of hisadversaries simply by displacing the focus of analysis from "industriali-zation" to capitalismP In other words, he shifts our attention frompurely "technological" factors, as well as from trade cycles and marketrelations - the typical refuges of capitalist ideology - to the relationsof production and class exploitation. From this (Marxist) standpoint,Thompson is able to account for the historical presence of working classformations in the early stages of industrialization, on the grounds thatthe essential capitalist relations of production and exploitation werealready in place - and indeed were the preconditions for industrializa-tion itself.

For a variety of reasons, then, Thompson cannot accept the simpleproposition that the factory system produced, out of whole cloth, a newworking class, nor the suggestion that the objective "assemblage, dis-tribution, and transformation" of the labour force had to precede theemergence of a class consciousness and culture "in response" to it. Hecannot accept that the making of the working class out of "hetero-geneous groups" had to await the completion of the process in whichthey were "assembled, distributed, and reduced to the condition oflabour subsumed to capital, first in the formal dependence of the wage-contract, ultimately in the real dependence of integration into mech-anized means of production." For one thing, if the relations of produc-tion and exploitation are the critical objective factors in constituting amode of production, and if they provide the impulse for the transforma-tion of labour processes, then the "formal subjection" of labour tocapital assumes a special significance and primacy, The "formalsubjection" represents the establishment of the capitalist relationshipbetween appropriator and producer and the pre-condition to, indeed the

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motivating force for, the subsequent "real" transformation ofproduction often called "industrialization." It acts as a determinativeforce upon various kinds of workers, and as a unifying experienceamong them, even before the process of "real subjection" incorporatesthem all and "assembles" them in factories.

In a very important sense, then, it is indeed "experience" and notsimply an objective "assemblage" that unites these heterogeneousgroups into a class - though "experience" in this context refers to theeffects of objective determinations, the relations of production andclass exploitation. In fact, the connection between relations of produc-tion and class formation can probably never be conceived in any otherway, since people are never actually assembled directly in class forma-tions in the process of production. Even when the "assemblage andtransformation" of the labour force is complete, people are at best as-sembled only in productive units, factories, and so on. Their assemblagein class formations which transcend such individual units is a process ofa different kind, one which depends upon their consciousness of, andpropensity to act upon, a common experience and common interests.(More on this later.)

Thompson is perhaps being criticized for concentrating on the formalsubjection at the expense of the real. There are indeed weaknesses in hisarguments arising from his focus on the determinative and unifyingforce of capitalist exploitation and its effects on "pre-industrial" work-ers, and his relative neglect of the specificity of "industrialization" andmachine production, the further "catastrophe" occasioned by the com-pletion of "real subjection." Perry Anderson, for example, refers to theprofound changes in working class industrial and political organizationand class consciousness after the 184Os,when the transformation wasmore or less complete - changes which, he suggests, Thompson'sargument cannot explain." But this is not the same thing as saying thatThompson concentrates on subjective rather than objectivedeterminations - unless it is from the standpoint of "optimistic" and"empiricist" orthodoxies or capitalist ideology, in which the verypremises of Marxist theory, with its focus on relations of productionand class exploitation, can be dismissed altogether as "subjectivist."

There are other more general theoretical and political reasons fordenying that the making of the English working class was the"spontaneous generation of the factory system." The basic theoreticaland methodological principle of Thompson's whole historical project isthat objective determinations - the transformation of production rela-tions and working conditions - never impose themselves on "somenondescript undifferentiated raw material of humanity" but on histor-ical beings, the bearers of historical legacies, traditions, and values. 34

This means, among other things, that there are necessarily continuitiescutting across all historical transformations, even the most radical, and

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indeed that radical transformations can be revealed and substantiatedprecisely - only? - by tracing them within continuities. Again, his ownemphasis on the continuity of popular culture is intended not to denybut to identify and stress the transformations it undergoes.

This much is perhaps characteristic of any truly historical account;but there is more to Thompson's argument than this. It is essential to hishistorical materialism to recognize that "objective" and "subjective"are not dualistically separated entities (which lend themselves easily tothe measurement of "necessity" and "agency"), related to one anotheronly externally and mechanically, "the one sequential upon the other"as objective stimulus and subjective response." It is necessary somehowto incorporate in social analysis the role of conscious and active his-torical beings, who are "subject" and "object" at once, both agentsand material forces in objective processes.

Finally, Thompson's mode of analysis makes it possible to acknow-ledge the active role of the working class, with its culture and values, in"making" itself. This role may be obscured by formulations whichspeak, on the one hand, of "the objective assemblage and transforma-tion of labour force by the Industrial Revolution," and on the other -sequentially - "the subjective germination of a class culture in responseto it." The acknowledgement of working class self-activity is central notonly to Thompson's historical project but to his political one.

Class as Relationship and ProcessThompson's concern, then, is to render class visible in history and tomake its objective determinations manifest as historical forces, as realeffects in the world and not just as theoretical constructs that refer to noactual social force or process. This means that he must locate the es-sence of class not simply in "structural positions" but in relationships- the relationships of exploitation, conflict, and struggle which providethe impulse to processes of class formation. Yet this very emphasis isoften singled out as evidence of his voluntarism and subjectivism, hisneglect of objective determinations. Clearly, his preference for treatingclass as relationship and process - rather than, for example, as a struc-ture which enters relationships or undergoes process - demands closerscrutiny, and perhaps more explanation than he provides himself.

"Class as relationship" actually entails two relationships: thatbetween classes and that among members of the same class. The import-ance of stressing the relationship between classes as essential to thedefinition of class is self-evident when considered against the back-ground of "stratification" theories which - whether they focus onincome distribution, occupation groups, status, or any other criterion- have to do with differences, inequalities, and hierarchy, not rela-tions. It is surely unnecessary to point out the consequences, both socio-logical and ideological, of employing a definition of class (if class is ad-

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mitted as a "category of stratification" at all) which factors out rela-tions like domination or exploitation. Even more fundamentally, suchcategories of stratification may render class itself invisible altogether.Where is the dividing line between classes in a continuum of inequality?Where is the qualitative break in a structure of stratification? Even thecriterion of relation to the means of production is not sufficient to marksuch boundaries and can easily be assimilated to conventional stratifica-tion theory. It is possible, for example, to treat "relations to the meansof production" as nothing more than income differentials by locatingtheir significance not in the exploitative and antagonistic social relationsthey entail but in the different "market chances" they confer. 36 The dif-ferences among classes thus become indeterminate and inconsequential.If classes enter into any relationship at all, it is the indirect, impersonalrelationship of individual competition in the marketplace, in whichthere are no clear qualitative breaks or antagonisms but only a quantita-tive continuum of relative advantage and disadvantage in the contest forgoods and services.

It is explicitly against class as a "category of stratification" thatThompson directs much of his argument about class as a relationship,and precisely on the grounds that stratification theories tend to renderclass invisible. 37 The most obvious target of this attack is conventionalanti-Marxist sociology; but Thompson often points out that there areaffinities between certain Marxist treatments of class and these socio-logical conjuring tricks, to the extent that they are more interested inabstractly defined structural class locations than in the qualitative socialbreaks expressed in the dynamics of class relations and conflicts.

While the identification of antagonisms in the relation between classesis a necessary condition for a definition of class, it is not sufficient. Thatbrings us to class as an internal relationship, a relationship amongmembers of a class. The idea of class as a relationship in this sense alsoentails certain propositions about how classes are connected to theunderlying relations of production.

The proposition that productive relations are the foundation of classrelations is certainly the basis of any materialist theory of class; but itdoes not by itself advance the issue very far. If we cannot say that classis synonymous with productive relations, we are still left with theproblem (which is generally evaded) of defining precisely the nature ofthe connection between class and its foundation in production.

The relations of production are the relations among people who arejoined by the production process and the antagonistic nexus betweenthose who produce and those who appropriate their surplus labour. Thedivision between direct producers and the appropriators of their surpluslabour, the antagonism of interest inherent in this relationship, nodoubt defines the polarities underlying class antagonisms. Class rela-tions are not, however, reducible to productive relations.:" First, the

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clear polarities (when they are clear) inherent in the relations of produc-tion do not account neatly for all potential members of historicalclasses. More fundamentally, even if the individual appropriator oweshis exploitative power to the class power that stands behind him, it is notclasses that produce and appropriate. To put it very simply: people whoare joined in a class are not all directly assembled by the process of pro-duction itself or by the process of appropriation.

Workers in a factory, brought together by the capitalist in a co-operative division of labour, are directly assembled in the productionprocess. Each worker also stands in a kind of direct relationship to theparticular capitalist (individual or collective) who appropriates his sur-plus value, just as the peasant is directly related to the landlord who ap-propriates his rent. A direct relationship of some kind can also be said toexist, for example, among peasants who work independently of oneanother but who share the same landlord, even if they do not delib-erately combine in opposition to him. The relationship among membersof a class, or between these members and other classes, is, however, of adifferent kind. Neither the production process itself nor the process ofsurplus extraction actually brings them together. "Class" does not refersimply to workers combined in a unit of production or opposed to acommon exploiter in a unit of appropriation. Class implies a connectionwhich extends beyond the immediate process of production and the im-mediate nexus of extraction, a connection that spans across particularunits of production and appropriation. The connections and opposi-tions contained in the production process are the basis of class; but therelationship among people occupying similar positions in the relationsof production is not given directly by the process of production andappropriation.

The links that connect the members of a class are not defined by thesimple assertion that class is structurally determined by the relations ofproduction. It still remains to be explained in what sense and throughwhat mediations the relations of production establish connectionsamong people who, even if they occupy similar positions in productionrelations, are not actually assembled in the process of production andappropriation. In The Making of the English Working Class, as we haveseen, Thompson addressed himself to this very question. Here, hesought to account for the existence of class relationships among workersnot directly assembled in the process of production and even engaged inwidely divergent forms of production. In his account, it was indeed therelations of production that lay at the heart of these class relationships;but the determining structural pressures of production relations couldbe demonstrated only as they worked themslves out in an historicalprocess of class formation, and these pressures could be apprehendedtheoretically only by introducing the mediating concept of"experience. "

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Class formation is particularly difficult to explain without resorting toconcepts like Thompson's "experience." While people may participatedirectly in production and appropriation - the combinations, divi-sions, and conflicts generated by these processes - class does notpresent itself to them so immediately. Since people are never actually"assembled" in classes, the determining pressure exerted by a mode ofproduction in the formation of classes cannot easily be expressed with-out reference to something like a common experience - a lived exper-ience of production relations, the divisions between producers andappropriators, and more particularly, of the conflicts and strugglesinherent in relations of exploitation. It is in the medium of this livedexperience that social consciousness is shaped and with it the "disposi-tion to behave as a class.,,39 Once the medium of "experience" isintroduced into the equation between production relations and class, sotoo are the historical and cultural particularities of this medium. Thiscertainly complicates the issue; but to acknowledge, as Thompson does,the complexity of the mechanism by which production relations give riseto class is not to deny their determining pressure.

Thompson has been accused of idealism because of his emphasis on"experience," as if this notion had slipped its material moorings. Hisuse of this concept, however, is certainly not intended to sever the linkbetween "social being" and social consciousness or even to deny the pri-macy which historical materialism accords to social being in its relationto consciousness. On the contrary, although Thompson sometimesdistinguishes among levels of experience ("lived experience" and"perceived experience"), his primary use of the term is as "a necessarymiddle term between social being and social consciousness," themedium in which social being determines consciousness: "it is by meansof experience that the mode of production exerts a determining pressureon other activities. "40 Experience in this sense is precisely "the exper-ience of determination. "41 Indeed, to the extent that Marx's concept ofsocial being itself clearly refers not simply to the mode of production asan impersonal "objective structure" but to the way that people live it(one can hardly avoid saying experience it), Thompson's "experience"substantially overlaps with "social being."

The concept of "experience," then, means precisely that "objectivestructures" do something to people's lives, and that this is why, forexample, we have classes and not only relations of production. It is thetask of the historian and the sociologist to explore what these "struc-tures" do to people's lives, how they do it, and what people do about it- or, as Thompson might put it, how the determining pressures ofstructured processes are experienced and handled by people. The burdenof the theoretical message contained in the concept of "experience" is,among other things, that the operation of determining pressures is anhistorical question, and therefore immediately an empirical one. There

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can, therefore, be no rupture between the theoretical and the empirical,and Thompson the historian immediately takes up the task presented byThompson the theorist.

Neither Marx nor Thompson nor anyone else has devised a "rigor-ous" theoretical vocabulary to convey the effect of material conditionson conscious, active beings - beings whose conscious activity is itself amaterial force - or to encompass the fact that these effects assume aninfinite variety of historically specific empirical forms. Nevertheless, itcan surely be no part of theoretical rigour to ignore these complexitiesmerely for the sake of conceptual tidiness or a framework of "structuraldefinitions" which purport to resolve all important historical questionson the theoretical plane. Nor is it enough merely to concede theexistence of these complexities in some other order of reality - in thesphere of history as distinct from the sphere of "objective structures"- which belongs to a different level of discourse, the "empirical" inopposition to the "theoretical." They must somehow be acknowledgedby the theoretical framework itself and be embodied in the very notionof "structure" - as, for example, in Thompson's notion of"structured process."

Deductive "structural definitions" of class cannot explain howpeople sharing a common experience of production relations but notunited by the process of production itself come by the "disposition tobehave as a class," let alone how the nature of that disposition - thedegree of cohesion and consciousness associated with it, its expression incommon goals, institutions, organizations, and united action -changes over time. It cannot take into account the pressures againstclass formation - pressures that may themselves be inherent in thestructure, the objective determinations, of the prevailing mode of pro-duction - and the tension between the impulses towards and againstcoalescence and common action. The notion of class as "structuredprocess," in contrast, acknowledges that while the structural basis ofclass formation is to be found in the antagonistic relations of produc-tion, the particular ways in which the structural pressures exerted bythese relations actually operate in the formation of classes remains anopen question to be resolved empirically by historical and sociologicalanalysis. Such a conception of class also recognizes that this is where themost important and problematic questions about class lie, and that theusefulness of any class analysis - as either a sociological tool or a guideto political strategy - rests on its ability to account for the process ofclass formation. This means that any definition of class must invite, notforeclose, the investigation of process.

Thompson's insistence on class as process again puts in question theaccusation that he equates class with class consciousness, that - to putit another way - he confuses the phenomenon of class itself with theconditions that make class "an active historical subject. "42 The first

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point to note about this accusation is that it is itself based on a confu-sion: it fails to take account of the difference between, on the one hand,class consciousness - that is, the active awareness of class identity -and, on the other hand, forms of consciousness that are shaped invarious ways by the "determining pressures" of objective classsituations without yet finding expression in a self-aware and active classidentity. Thompson is especially concerned with the historical processesthat intervene between the two. More fundamentally, to equate classwith a particular level of consciousness, or with the existence of classconsciousness at all, would be precisely to identify class with one stageof its development instead of stressing, as Thompson does, the complexprocesses that go to make up the "disposition to behave as a class."Thompson's conception of class as "relationship" and "process" isdirected precisely against definitions which, at best, imply that there isone point in the formation of classes where one can stop the process andsay" here is class, and not before," or at worst, and perhaps more com-monly, seek to define classes outside the medium of time and historicalprocess altogether. This can be done either by "deducing" classes from"structural positions" in relation to the means of production or by"hypostasizing class identities - great personalized attributions of classaspirations or volition - which one knows are at best the metaphoricalexpression of most complex, and generally involuntary, processes.v "Thompson's object, then, is not to identify class with a particular levelof consciousness or organization which makes it a conscious politicalforce, but rather to focus our attention on class in the process ofbecoming - or making itself - such a force.

Class as "structure" or "identity" conceptualizes away the very factthat defines the role of class as the driving force of historical movement:the fact that class at the beginning of an historical mode of production isnot what it is at the end. The identity of a mode of production is com-monly said to reside in the persistence of its production relations: aslong as the form in which "surplus labour is pumped out of the directproducer" remains essentially the same, we are entitled to refer to amode of production as "feudal," "capitalist," and so on. But classrelations are the principle of movement within the mode of production.The history of a mode of production is the history of its developing classrelations and, in particular, their changing relations to the relations ofproduction. Classes develop within a mode of production in the processof coalescing around the relations of production and as the composi-tion, cohesion, consciousness, and organization of the resulting classformations change. The mode of production reaches its crisis when thedevelopment of class relations within it actually transforms the relationsof production themselves. To account for historical movement, then,means precisely to deny that the relation between class and the relationsof production is fixed. 44

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The difficulties encountered by conceptions of class-as-identity in ac-counting for historical movement and the role of class as an historicalforce are often dealt with, as Thompson suggests, by attributing per-sonal volition to class as "It." The other side of that coin is the ten-dency to attribute failures to some kind of personality defect in "It,"like "false consciousness." There is more than a little irony, then, in thefact that Thompson, when countering conceptions of this kind, is ac-cused of subjectivism and voluntarism. What is presented as an object-ivist alternative to Thompson turns out to be a more extreme and ideal-ist subjectivism and voluntarism, which merely transfers volition fromhuman agency - a human agency bounded by "determining pressures"and drawn into "involuntary processes" - to a more exalted Subject,Class, a thing with a static identity, whose will is largely free of specifichistorical determinations.

It can be argued that this transfer upward of subjective volitionreaches its highest point in structuralist arguments. "Althusserians,"for example, purport to expel subjectivity altogether from social theoryand deny agency even to class-as-It; but in a sense, they merely create aneven more imperious Subject, the Structure itself, whose will is deter-mined by nothing but the contradictions in its own arbitrary personality.Arguments which appear to Thompson's critics as subjectivist andvoluntarist - his conception of human agency and his insistence on his-torical specificity apparently at the expense of "objective structures" -are those which he marshals against subjectivism and voluntarism andfor a recognition of the objective determining pressures that impingeupon human agency. Far from subordinating objective determiningpressures to subjectivity and historical contingency, his point is preciselyto set historical investigation against the kind of inverted subjectivism,voluntarism, and idealism that creep into analyses which lack a firm his-torical and sociological ground.

If, as Stuart Hall suggests, a truly non-reductive Marxism "must en-tail facing up to all that is involved in saying that socialism has to beconstructed by a real political practice," then it must also entail facingup to the objective historical and sociological realities that confrontpolitical practice. Thompson has all this in mind when he attacks thoseforms of Marxism which must attribute historical movement to the per-sonality or will - often irrational, perverse, and stupid (like, appar-ently, that of the "reformist" English working class)" - of some trans-historical Subject. It is these Marxisms that leave no room for facing upto the exigencies of political practice.

The Politics of TheoryLet us return, then, to Stuart Hall's accusation that Thompson con-flates "class-in-itself" with "class-for-itself" and that inscribed in thisconfusion is a politics of "too simple 'populism'." Hall seems to be

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arguing three things. First, he suggests that Thompson conflates the ob-jective determinants of class with their appropriation in consciousnessby allowing the "catch-all category of experience" to stand indis-criminately for both together. Second, Hall seems to argue that this con-flation renders Thompson incapable of distinguishing between cases inwhich a class exists only as an "objective" or "structural" condition -that is, only as a "class-in-itself," an objective identity or similarity oflife-situations and interests deriving from production relations anddividing its members from other classes - and cases in which a classexists for itself - that is, where the same objective or structural condi-tions "beget" an actual unity, a conscious and politically organizedclass formation whose members are capable of struggling for theirinterests "in their own name. "46 Finally, Hall concludes that the failureto make this distinction is at The root of Thompson's "populist"optimism.

It has already been argued here that Thompson's historical project isopposed precisely to the conflation - or, what is in effect the samething, the simple equation - of objective determinations and theirexpressions in consciousness, and that his focus on the process of classformation presupposes a distinction between them since it is concernedprecisely with the changing relations between them. In this respect, hecannot be accused of conflating the "objective" and "subjective"determinants of class, or structure and consciousness. The distinctionbetween "class-in-itself" and "class-for-itself" is not, however, simplyan analytic distinction between objective class structure and subjectiveclass consciousness. It refers to two different stages in the process ofclass formation and, in a sense, two different historical modes of rela-tionship between structure and consciousness. If "class-in-itself" and"class-for-itself" represent two modes or stages of class-formation, per-haps Stuart Hall means to accuse Thompson of failing to note the dif-ference between these modes. If this is what he means, it hardlyimproves matters, since he cannot then consistently maintain thatThompson neglects the objective determinants of class. If anything, tothe extent that Thompson insists on treating all forms of class exper-ience as, precisely, class experience - whether they represent only"class-in-itself" or "class-for-itself" - he could as easily be accused ofattaching excessive importance to objective conditions, claiming to seethe operation of class contradictions even where the relevant historicalactors are very far from perceiving themselves as belonging to classes, letalone acting in conscious and organized class formations.

Much of Thompson's work has, as we have seen, been devoted to ex-ploring how objective class oppositions affect social experience evenwhen people are not yet conscious of their class identity. This is, forexample, the significance of his investigations into popular customs andhow they have been shaped and transformed as they have come within

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the "field of force" of class." These investigations have constitutedprecisely a study of how' 'class-in-itself" structures a complex historicalreality even in the absence of class consciousness. Thompson'ssensitivity to the class-determinations at work in such cases, his effortsto "decode" the evidence of class experience where there is no clear con-sciousness of class - "class struggle without class" - has allowed himto explore the process by which a class that exists only "in itself" maybecome a class "for itself."

The question, then, is whether Thompson crosses the line betweenthese two modes of class too soon, whether he is too quick to perceive,in any form of consciousness touched by objectively class-determinedlife circumstances, the class consciousness that suggests a readiness toact purposefully as a class. This question (as Stuart Hall understands) isabove all a political one. Hall finds "inscribed" in Thompson's view ofclass-consciousness a "too-simple 'populism " which treats as unprob-lematic the construction of a socialist politics out of popular culture.There is undoubtedly a danger here. Romanticism about the customsand traditions of the "people" and about the radical promise containedin the mere difference and separateness of popular culture is not thesoundest foundation for building a socialist movement or assessing andovercoming the "people's" own resistance to socialist politics. ButThompson surely has no illusions about this, whatever his successors in"people's history" may think.

Thompson's message is indeed political; but there is something else inhis recovery of popular consciousness and the "making" of class than afailure to recognize the difference and the barriers between, on the onehand, popular culture, which arises directly out of experience - anexperience of work, exploitation, oppression, and struggle - and, onthe other hand, an active socialist consciousness which is painfullycrafted by political practice. His historical project, his reconstruction ofhistory as it is made by the working class as active agents and not simplyas passive victims, grows directly out of the basic political principle ofMarxism and its particular understanding of socialist practice: thatsocialism can come only through the self-emancipation of the workingclass." This proposition entails a judgment that the working class is theonly social group possessing both a collective power adequate to trans-form society and an essential and overriding objective interest in sodoing. The proposition also implies a scepticism about the authenticity- or, indeed, the likelihood - of emancipation not achieved by self-activity and struggle but won by proxy or conferred by benefaction.However difficult it may be, then, to construct socialist practice out ofpopular consciousness, there is, according to this view, no other mater-ial out of which it can be constructed and no other socialism that isconsistent with both political realism and democratic values.

It can be argued - and this is Thompson's conviction - that the

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impulse in much of Marxist theory has been away from this under-standing of the socialist project, towards a theoretical abandonment ofthe working class as the principal agent of social transformationthrough the medium of class struggle, and a transfer of that role to othersocial actors - most especially to intellectuals. This kind of theoretical"substitutism" in its most extreme form can be achieved by doing whatStuart Hall accuses some Althusserians, though apparently notAlthusser himself, of doing: treating all "classes as mere 'bearers' ofhistorical process, without agency: and historical process itself as aprocess 'without a subject'. "49 It is not, however, necessary to go so far.All that is needed, as Thompson argues, is to conceive of class as a staticcategory, and to be less concerned about the historical process of classformation than about the deductive charting of structural class locationsor the theoretical construction oT an ideal class identity. These are thekinds of formulation that lend themselves far too easily to the dismissalof actual historical - and hence imperfect - forms of class conscious-ness as "false" and therefore in need of substitutes. 50 The problem liesprecisely in the failure to acknowledge theoretically as well as practicallythat the process of class formation cannot either be taken for granted orcircumvented by substitution, and that the outcome of the process isfinally determined by political practice and the self-activity of classes inthe making. If there is a political message inscribed in Thompson'stheory of class, it is against the "theorization" of a "substitutism" inwhich the working class is not merely represented but eclipsed by itssubstitute.

Thompson's treatment of the concept of hegemony sums up his para-mount concern with the political implications secreted in theory. Muchof his work has been directed, explicitly or implicitly, against the viewthat hegemony is one-sided and complete, imposing "an all-embracingdomination upon the ruled - or upon all those who are not intellectuals- reaching down to the very threshold of their experience, andimplanting within their minds at birth categories of subordination whichthey are powerless to shed and which their experience is powerless tocorrect.">' There has certainly been a tendency in recent Marxist theoryto identify hegemony with the thorough absorption of subordinateclasses into ruling class ideology and cultural domination (probably withthe assistance of Ideological State Apparatuses), so that theconstruction of a counter-hegemonic consciousness and culture and theestablishment of working class hegemony must apparently be accom-plished by free-spirited intellectuals. 52 Such a definition of hegemonyaccords well with theoretical constructions of class in which nothingexists between the objective constitution of classes by modes of produc-tion on the one hand, and an ideal revolutionary class consciousness onthe other, except a vast empirical-historical (and hence impure andtheoretically indigestible) spectrum of "false" consciousness.

For Thompson, in contrast, hegemony is not synonymous with domi-


nation by one class and submission by the other. Instead, it embodiesclass struggle and bears the mark of subordinate classes, their self-activity and their resistance. His theory of class, with its emphasis on theprocess of class-formation, is intended to permit the recognition of"imperfect" or "partial" forms of popular consciousness as authenticexpressions of class and class struggle, valid in their historical circum-stances even if "wrong" from the standpoint of later developments. It isone thing to mistake the mere separateness of popular culture for radicalopposition, ready to be harnessed immediately to the struggle for social-ism; it is quite another simply to mark out the space where the culturalwrit of the dominant class does not run, and to identify "popular"consciousness - however resistant it may be to the formation of "true"class consciousness - as the stuff out of which a complete classconsciousness must and can nevertheless be made. To deny theauthenticity of "partial" class consciousness, to treat it asjalse insteadof as an historically intelligible "option under pressure.t' " has impor-tant strategic consequences. We are invited either to look for surrogateagents of class struggle and historical change, or to abandon the fieldaltogether to the hegemonic enemy. It is against these political alter-natives, and their theoretical foundations in a concept of class as "struc-ture" or ideal identity, that Thompson sets his own theory of class asprocess and relationship.

Here, then, is Thompson's "populism." If the term applies to him atall, it is in a sense that tells as much about those who use it as aboutthose to whom it is applied. The world "populism" has generally beenstretched beyond all meaning, and it should perhaps be retired - or atleast temporarily suspended - from the vocabulary of politics al-together. One relatively new meaning is particularly dubious: the use of"populism" as a term of abuse by one section of the Left againstanother. Raymond Williams, in his "Notes on British Marxism inBritain since 1945," has explicated this usage and the political choice itimplies. Williams writes of his own stance in relation to the availablechoices confronting British Marxists in the I950s and his rejection of therhetorical populism which complacently ignored the implications of"consumer" capitalism and the "powerful new pull" it exerted uponthe people. At the same time, he continues,

because I saw the process as options under pressure, and knew where thepressure was coming from, I could not move to the other available posi-tion: that contempt of the people, of their hopelessly corrupted state, oftheir vulgarity and credulity by comparison with an educated minority,which was the staple of cultural criticism of a non-Marxist kind and whichseems to have survived intact, through the appropriate alterations ofvocabulary, into a formalist Marxism which makes the whole people,including the whole working class, mere carriers of the structures of acorrupt ideology. 54

It was from the contemptuous standpoint described here by Williamsthat a new use of "populism" was coined. The term could now be used

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to describe those who denied that "the existing resources of the peoplewere so depleted that there was no option but to retreat to a residualminority or a futurist vanguard," those who insisted that "there werestill, and still powerful, existing resources." Of this "populism,"Williams writes:

To stay with the existing resources; to learn and perhaps to teach newresources; to live the contradictions and the options under pressure sothat instead of denunciation or writing-off there was a chance of under-standing them and tipping them the other way: if these things were popu-lism, then it is as well that the British Left, including most Marxists,stayed with it. 55

Edward Thompson, for one, has certainly stayed with it. His theoryof class, the discovery of authentic expressions of class in popular con-sciousness and culture, represent an effort "to live the contradictionsand options under pressure ... instead of denunciation orwriting-off." His insistence on an historical and sociological account ofworking-class "reformism," for example, instead of the ritual excom-munication which denounces it from a vantage point outside of historyas the "false consciousness" of a working class "It," implies that wemust understand the "existing resources" in order to "tip them theother way." If this is populism, then Thompson is certainly a populist;but it can be argued that in this sense, to be a Marxist, committed to theproject of self-emancipation by the working class through the mediumof class struggle, is necessarily to be a "populist."

There are, of course, dangers here too. "To stay with the existingresources" can become an excuse for not looking beyond them; to ac-knowledge the "deep sociological roots" of "reformism" as a politicalreality that must be confronted may lead to accepting it as a limit on thehorizons of struggle. It is one thing to acknowledge the authenticity ofworking-class "options under pressure" and to be wary of the notion offalse consciousness as an invitation to "write off." It is quite another topass over the failures and limitations in many forms of working classorganization and ideology. There is certainly room for debate on theLeft about where the line is to be drawn between accepting "existingresources" as a challenge to struggle and submitting to them as a limitupon it. 56 In this debate, however, it is important to recognize that todissociate Marxism from Thompson's kind of "populism" - whetherby rejecting it with contempt or even by granting it qualified andpatronizing approval as a useful but naive ally for Marxism in itsstruggle to mobilize the people, a romanticism "not infallibly Tory in itsresults't " - may be to propose a significant redefinition of Marxisttheory and practice and to make a far-reaching political choice. Thelogic of this choice may lead away from the self-emancipation of theworking class and away from class struggle as the principle agency ofchange.

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Notes

My thanks to Robert Brenner, Peter Meiksins, Gregory Meiksins, and NealWood for many helpful suggestions, and also to Leo Panitch and Bryan Palmerfor the constructive criticisms in their Readers' Reports.

I. Bryan Palmer, in his very useful book, The Making of E.P. Thompson:Marxism, Humanism, and History (Toronto, 1981), has provided anilluminating general discussion of the relationship between Thompson as asocial historian and as a political activist. Palmer has warned me againstdescribing Thompson's work as "history from below," on the grounds thatthe phrase has misleading "American populist" connotations and has lostfavour with historians. He suggeststhat it obscures the extent of Thompson'sconcern for the relations between "top" and "bottom" and, in particular,his increasing interest in the problem of the state. I accept the warning againstmisrepresenting the nature of Thompson's concerns, but want to retain theterm in the sense in which it is (still) applied to an historiographicalmovement, deriving much of its early impetus from the British CommunistParty Historians Group in the 1940sand 1950s,that has sought to explore thebroad social foundations of historical processes and to illuminate the role ofthe "common people" in shaping history. See, for example, RaphaelSamuel's first preface to Raphael Samuel, ed., People's History and SocialistTheory (London, 1981), especially p. 30.

2. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London, 1977), p. 304.

3. Stuart Hall, "In Defense of Theory," in Samuel, People's History, p. 384.(See n. I above.)

4. Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London, 1980),p. 55.

5. G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, 1978),p.75.

6. Hall, "Defense of Theory," p. 384. (See n. 3 above.)

7. Cohen, Marx's Theory, p. 75. (See n. 5 above.)

8. Ibid.

9. Anderson, Arguments, p. 40. (See no. 4 above.)

10.Ibid., p. 55.

II. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle withoutClass?" Social History 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 149, n. 36.

12.Ibid., p. 150.

13.Ibid.

14.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth,1968), p. 10.

15.Ibid.

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16. For example: Cohen, Marx's Theory, p. 76; Anderson, Arguments, p. 40.

17. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society," p, 147. (See n. 11above.)

18. See, for example: Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 9-10. (See n. 14above.) See also Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978),pp.298-9.

19. Anderson, Arguments, p. 39.

20. Ibid., p. 34.

21. Ibid., p. 33.

22. Ibid., p. 32.

23. Ibid., p. 33.

24. Ibid., p. 45.

25. Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 213, 231.

26. Ibid., p. 211.

27. See, for example: ibid., pp. 217-8, 226. The structure of the book as a wholeis worth noting. Part One describes the political culture and traditions ofstruggle which people brought with them into the transforming experience of"industrialization." Part Two describes in great detail that transformingexperience itself, the new relationship of exploitation and its multifariousexpressions in every aspect of life, in work and leisure, in family andcommunal life. Part Three describes the new working class consciousness, thenew political culture, and the new forms of struggle that emerged out of thattransformation. Part Two is the pivotal section, explaining the objectivetransformations through which the old popular tradition was reshaped into anew working class culture.

28. See, for example: Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 221-3, 230.

29. Ibid., pp. 215-8.

30. Ibid., pp. 224-5.

31. Ibid., pp. 288-9; see also pp. 222-3.

32. Elsewhere, Thompson explicitly questions the "suspect" concept of"industrialism," which mystifies the social realities of industrial capitalismby treating them as if they belonged to some inevitable "supposedly-neutral,technologically-determined, process known as 'industrialization' .... ""Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," in Essays in SocialHistory, ed. Flinn and Smout (Oxford, 1974), p. 56.

33. Anderson, Arguments, pp. 45-7. Anderson refers here to Gareth StedmanJones's discussion of the "re-making" of the English working class in thelatter part of the nineteenth century, in "Working-Class Culture and

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Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1890: Notes on the Remaking of aWorking Class," Journal of Social History (Summer 1974): 460-508.

34. Thompson, English Working Class, p. 213.

35. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, p. 298. (See note 18 above.)

36. See, for example: Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York, 1968),pp.927-8.

37. For example: Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 9-10.

38. An illuminating discussion of the complex relationship between theantagonisms of production relations and class appears in Peter Meiksins, TheSocial Origins of White Collar Work (Ph.D. diss., York University, 1980),chap. 6.

39. Thompson, "The Peculiarities of the English," in his Poverty of Theory,p.85.

40. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, p. 290; also pp. 200-1. See Thompson, "ThePolitics of Theory," in Samuel, People's History, pp. 405-6. A conception of"determination" similar to Thompson's is given a systematic treatment inRaymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), pp. 83-9.

41. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, p. 298.

42. Cohen, Marx's Theory, p. 76.

43. Thompson, "Peculiarities of the English," p, 85. (See n. 39 above.)

44. Just as Thompson's emphasis on the process of class formation compels himto reject the simple equation "relations of production = class," so, it can beargued, must he dissociate himself from its obverse - the "unitary" defin-ition of relations of production as encompassing the totality of class rela-tions. This "unitarian" approach (which is exemplified by Simon Clarke's"Socialist Humanism and the Critique of Economism," History WorkshopJournal 8 (Autumn 1979): 138-56, esp. p. 144) is sometimes associated withThompson. It is correct to say that this approach shares Thompson's concernfor eliminating the artificial fragmentation of class experience into "region-ally" separated economic, political, and cultural spheres. Nevertheless,Thompson's many defenders may have been overzealous in re-establishingthe unity of social experience, if in the process they have (like theiradversaries, though from the opposite direction) conflated productionrelations with class, in effect conceptualizing away the process of classformation and the changing relation of class to production relations.

45. See Thompson, "Peculiarities of the English," pp. 69-70, where he attacksschematic, unhistorical and unsociological conceptions of class - in partic-ular, those which have produced ritual denunciations of working classreformism, instead of an understanding of its "deep sociological roots," andhave thus neglected a vital datum confronting any socialist political practice.

46. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in Selected Works(Moscow, 1962), p. 334; and the Poverty of Philosophy in Collected Works(New York, 1976), p. 211.

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47. See, for example: Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society,"pp. 150-62.

48. The ways in which Thompson's historical project comes together with hispolitical commitments is suggested in the preface to The Making of theEnglish Working Class. (See n. 14 above.) Here, for example, he opposes hisown work to the "prevailing orthodoxies" of historical scholarship, citing inparticular the "Fabian orthodoxy, in which the great majority of workingpeople are seen as passive victims of laissez faire, with the exception of ahandful of far-sighted organizers (notably Francis Place)" (p. 12). It is worthnoting that this principle of Fabian historiography is reproduced in theFabian political programme, with its view of the working class as passivevictims requiring the imposition of socialism from above, not by means ofclass struggle but through piecemeal reform and social engineering by anenlightened minority of intellectuals and philanthropic members of the rulingclass.

49. Hall, "Defense of Theory," p, 383.

50. See, for example: Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society," p, 148.

51. Ibid., p. 164.

52. See ibid., p. 163, n. 60.

53. This phrase is used by Raymond Williams against the tendency to denounceor "write off" the "people" as hopelessly vulgar and corrupt when theyshow themselves to be inadequately revolutionary and too ready to succumbto "consumer" capitalism. He proposes instead the necessity ofunderstanding these responses as the "options" of actual people under thepressures of real historical conditions and contradictions. It then becomespossible to perceive the resources still available within the working class andto build upon them. "Notes on Marxism in Britain since 1945," New LeftReview 100 (November 1976-January 1977): 87.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. It would, of course, be useful if Thompson himself took up this question andanswered those who argue that he has already conceded too much to thelimits of "existing resources" and "reformism," or perhaps that the category"people" has altogether replaced class in his view of social change andpolitical action, with all the strategic implications this entails. A particularlyforceful argument has been made by Perry Anderson about the limitations ofThompson's struggle for the preservation of civil liberties. (Anderson,Arguments, esp. pp. 201-5.) And a very respectful criticism of Thompson'sapproach to the campaign for nuclear disarmament is contained in RaymondWilliams's "The Politics of Nuclear Disarmament," New Left Review 124(November-December 1980): 25-42. Neither critic questions the vitalnecessity of these campaigns, Thompson's tremendously important role inthem, or the depth of his commitment to socialism; but both, in variousways, call for a more specifically socialist understanding of the problems anda more specifically socialist programme of struggle, in which the clarity ofsocialist analysis and the integrity of socialist objectives are preserved even

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within collaborative alliances. Bryan Palmer voices similar concerns andsuggests that Thompson, in his revulsion from Stalinism, has gone too far inneglecting the need for organization and a party structure in the struggle forsocialism. Palmer, The Making of E.P. Thompson, pp. 133-4. (See n. Iabove.)

57. Nairn, Break-Up of Britain, p, 304. (See n. 2 above.)

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Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E.P. Thompson and His Critics

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