The something that has called itself ‘Marxism’

Fifty years constitute an eon in terms of scholarship. Only the very best books weather the inevitable cycling of historical subjects and we can learn much from the vicissitudes of their “careers.” That we are still debating E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class attests to its continued salience. The book served as a harbinger of a cultural tide of social history in the 1960s that called the very nature of society into question, a tide cresting in the early 1980s. During these years, Thompson cast a large shadow for graduate students, myself included. Inevitably tides ebb, as did social history, only to be succeeded by another wave of scholarship concerned primarily with positioning the self in culture. Key historians, Thompson included, made real this turning of the tide at a colloquium at New York’s New School for Social Research in 1985. The event proved pivotal to socialist scholarship, signaling the cultural turn but also Thompson’s growing disengagement from Marxism. I will use this event, near equidistant in time between the book’s publication and the present, as a glass through which to gain perspective on Thompson’s enduring sway on historical scholarship as well as to discern how, over the last decade, a riptide of current events and intellectual exhaustion with postmodernist conceits would return to the forefront of historical consciousness the same concerns addressed by Thompson: oppression and the quest for social justice in a world modeled on the market.

The Making

The Making took shape during the most frigid point of the Cold War. Most historical writing at that time tended to conservative examinations of politics and personalities within a past assumed as consensual and free of class conflict. Historical materialism still obtained on the left but structuralist enforcers of dogma had a theoretical stranglehold on Marxist history imagined as a reflex of economic forces. They conflicted with English scholars who believed theory only became real through praxis, human experience recovered by empirical study. Writing within this tradition, Thompson may have wished to rescue Marxist history from the enormous condescension of contemporaneity but certainly, with The Making, extracted human possibility from historical materialism, a quiet revolution caught in a simple shift of emphasis. Marx most succinctly expressed his understanding of historical causation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” He allowed for human agency but ascribed more power to the “tradition of all dead generations.” Since then, most of his followers and his myriad critics seemed to have ignored the sentence’s first clause whereas Thompson embraced the opening offered. He first reiterated Marx. “The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily.” Then he realigned the polarity of meaning with significant consequences. “Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not.” Moreover, Thompson defined class not as “a thing” but as “a historical phenomenon” entailing “the notion of historical relationship” between classes. Finally, in explaining the book’s title, he provided the capstone to this revisionary Marxism: “Making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning.”¹ From a static category of analysis conceived of as predetermined by objective forces, Thompson resuscitated class as a historical concept and struck the shackles from Marxist analysis.

Thompson’s prioritization of culture over mode of production and human agency over historical determination derived at root, it appears to me now, from ambivalence toward Marxism that grew over time. But this unease, manifested in a devaluing of theory relative to exposition, made The Making the breakthrough Marxist history text. Its rich descriptive passages and expansive detailing of working-class life allowed less politically committed academics to indulge in consumer...