The working class as a "class for itself"

[JimW]

Polanyi

I tried reading it years ago and only got part way, but liked what I saw IIRC and have stuck it on the Kindle for another go just recently.

 

[VfromtheG]

Imo, Sptme, it all comes down to neo-liberalism as Jay Park mentioned.

Chomsky covers the post war period and the class war waged on the working class every step of the way, from Caterpillar busting the union to anti-politics, in the book :
Class War: the Attack on Working People

 

[butchersapron]

Yes. Well, working my way through it, and also alongside Companion to Capital by David Harvey chapter by chapter both as adjuncts to reading Capital. Much prefer the Cleaver book.

That would be because they argue almost entirely opposed positions - Harvey still argues the classic marxist 2nd-3rd International understanding of Capitalism as largely a top-down machine following strict laws, whilst Cleaver is coming from a position that is reacting to that and saying what may appear to Harvey as laws are actually the outcomes of bottom up class struggle. Harvey still has things back to front and pre- the Tronti's Copernican Revolution. Castoriadis once wrote (inaccurately and also accurately) that Capital is a book about the history of class struggle from which the class struggle is almost entirely absent and that's what i always think of when i read Harvey on capital. He's rather sniffy and ill-informed about anarchism/autonomism/ etc as well.

Imo, Sptme, it all comes down to neo-liberalism as Jay Park mentioned.

Chomsky covers the post war period and the class war waged on the working class every step of the way, from Caterpillar busting the union to anti-politics, in the book :
Class War: the Attack on Working People

Alright zaphod.

 

[Jay Park]

That would be because they argue almost entirely opposed positions - Harvey still argues the classic marxist 2nd-3rd International understanding of Capitalism as largely a top-down machine following strict laws, whilst Cleaver is coming from a position that is reacting to that and saying what may appear to Harvey as laws are actually the outcomes of bottom up class struggle. Harvey still has things back to front and pre- the Tronti's Copernican Revolution. Castoriadis once wrote (inaccurately and also accurately) that Capital is a book about the history of class struggle from which the class struggle is almost entirely absent and that's what i always think of when i read Harvey on capital. He's rather sniffy and ill-informed about anarchism/autonomism/ etc as well.



Alright zaphod.

and yet, again, it was you that posted links up for Harvey a few years back.

 

[butchersapron]

Oh no.

 

[Jay Park]

Oh, yes

 

[VfromtheG]

Get fucked butchers lol.

 

[19force8]

I think I’d make two comments or offer two thoughts on this:

1. class relations and class formations are not static or preserved in aspic. They do not move through time in a linear fashion.

Here’s some more Thompson for you, “Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – not this and that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time - that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.”

Thanks for that.

The first part is a really handy way to think about class when confronted by identity politics, but then it looks like it descends into a kind of mush where just about anything can be a class. I'm going to have to reread The Making of the English Working Class again in the new year to see if I can make sense of it.

 

[butchersapron]

Thanks for the Thompson link, was very very vaguely aware of that dispute but none of the substance really, so enjoying his essay, some great lines too:

Great though that piece is - and it has a lot of problems, problems i found much more useful than anything nairn or anderson immaculately produced - it really does need to be placed within the 25+year debate to make full sense of. I've collected the main pieces and numbered them here, added in a few interesting related pieces too. Of course there were much shorter letters and snipes across the left mags and journals as well, but this is is the meat of it.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Thanks for that.

The first part is a really handy way to think about class when confronted by identity politics, but then it looks like it descends into a kind of mush where just about anything can be a class. I'm going to have to reread The Making of the English Working Class again in the new year to see if I can make sense of it.

It’s not mush. He’s arguing that class and culture are recognisable in a variety of settings, each with their own distinctive features. In the MEWC, he draws on lived experience and how existing ideas, norms and values were used by the proto working class to make sense of, and try to resist, what was happening to it during forced industrialisation. In doing so he shows how class consciousness emerges, submerges and ebbs and flows. It’s the best way, I’ve found anyway, to think about it

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Great though that piece is - and it has a lot of problems, problems i found much more useful than anything nairn or anderson immaculately produced - it really does need to be placed within the 25+year debate to make full sense of. I've collected the main pieces and numbered them here, added in a few interesting related pieces too. Of course there were much shorter letters and snipes across the left mags and journals and well, but this is is the meat of it.

This is really really helpful. Thanks Butchers. You are right that entering upon the debate at any point opens up a mass of other reading and that the debate twisted and turned for years and over thousands of pages. I’ve been trying to pull the key documents together for a reading group and we’ll use this as a starting point

 

[19force8]

It’s not mush. He’s arguing that class and culture are recognisable in a variety of settings, each with their own distinctive features. In the MEWC, he draws on lived experience and how existing ideas, norms and values were used by the proto working class to make sense of, and try to resist, what was happening to it during forced industrialisation. In doing so he shows how class consciousness emerges, submerges and ebbs and flows. It’s the best way, I’ve found anyway, to think about it

My problem with it isn't so much how class and culture are recognisable, but that he says class is just a social and cultural relationship that can only be defined in terms of its relationship with other classes. No mention of what I thought was a defining feature of class, namely the economic role, which is why it sounds to me much more like a sociological view of class than a Marxist one.

Mush was probably a bit strong and, as I said, it's what it looks like on the surface (to me anyway) and I need to look deeper to understand it fully.

 

[Jay Park]

My problem with it isn't so much how class and culture are recognisable, but that he says class is just a social and cultural relationship that can only be defined in terms of its relationship with other classes. No mention of what I thought was a defining feature of class, namely the economic role, which is why it sounds to me much more like a sociological view of class than a Marxist one.

Mush was probably a bit strong and, as I said, it's what it looks like on the surface (to me anyway) and I need to look deeper to understand it fully.

next time you come, you either come heavy or not at all

Next time you come in, you come heavy or not at all.

The Sopranos (1999) - S01E04 Drama clip with quote Next time you come in, you come heavy or not at all. Yarn is the best search for video clips by quote. Find the exact moment in a TV show, movie, or music video you want to share. Easily move forward or backward to get to the perfect...

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[VfromtheG]

Class definitions

A lot of people don't see the need to speculate about definitions and which one is correct . If you guys could get past the definition of what working class is maybe we could get onto how Marx described the process of the working-class entering the right phase to lead themselves or whatever .

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Class definitions

A lot of people don't see the need to speculate about definitions and which one is correct . If you guys could get past the definition of what working class is maybe we could get onto how Marx described the process of the working-class entering the right phase to lead themselves or whatever .

Have you checks the title of the section you are posting in? Theory. Philosophy. History.

Suggest you jog on over to the Protest, Direct Action and Demo section action man.

 

[butchersapron]

May be of interest, just published:

Berghahn Books are pleased to announce the recent publication of Histories of a Radical Book - E. P. Thompson and The Making of the English Working Class edited by Antoinette Burton and Stephanie Fortado.

E.P. Thompson’s monumental book The Making of the English Working Class has played an essential role in shaping the intellectual lives of generations of readers since its original publication in 1963. This collected volume explores the complex impact of Thompson’s book, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.

Histories of a Radical Book: E. P. Thompson and <em>The Making of the English Working Class</em> | Berghahn Books

Independent Publishing since 1994

berghahnbooks.com

 

[Smokeandsteam]

May be of interest, just published:

Berghahn Books are pleased to announce the recent publication of Histories of a Radical Book - E. P. Thompson and The Making of the English Working Class edited by Antoinette Burton and Stephanie Fortado.

E.P. Thompson’s monumental book The Making of the English Working Class has played an essential role in shaping the intellectual lives of generations of readers since its original publication in 1963. This collected volume explores the complex impact of Thompson’s book, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.

Histories of a Radical Book: E. P. Thompson and <em>The Making of the English Working Class</em> | Berghahn Books

Independent Publishing since 1994

berghahnbooks.com

Tempting. But not at £90.00.

 

[butchersapron]

24 quid pb, on other places for 20. It's not a big book either.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

24 quid pb, on other places for 20. It's not a big book either.

Just ordered from WH Smith for £23.65 inc P&P.

 

[brogdale]

May be of interest, just published:

Berghahn Books are pleased to announce the recent publication of Histories of a Radical Book - E. P. Thompson and The Making of the English Working Class edited by Antoinette Burton and Stephanie Fortado.

E.P. Thompson’s monumental book The Making of the English Working Class has played an essential role in shaping the intellectual lives of generations of readers since its original publication in 1963. This collected volume explores the complex impact of Thompson’s book, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.

Histories of a Radical Book: E. P. Thompson and <em>The Making of the English Working Class</em> | Berghahn Books

Independent Publishing since 1994

berghahnbooks.com

Thanks for the heads up butchersapron

I'm currently (thoroughly) enjoying a re-read of MEWC having recently been led back after reading about early 19thC agricultural uprisings including Barry Reay's excellent The Last rising of the Agricultural Labourers about the 1838 Battle of Bosenden Wood and Hobsbawm & Rudé's Captain Swing.

Thing is, when I scoured the shelves for my old copy...horror of horrors...not there! (probably eldest had 'borrowed') Anyway...plenty on offer online and I was pretty pleased to get a 1980's Pelican edition for £4ish. But, talking about a material object, it had to have the same cover!



Look forward to hearing what you guys make of the Burton/Fortado book.

 

[yield]

My problem with it isn't so much how class and culture are recognisable, but that he says class is just a social and cultural relationship that can only be defined in terms of its relationship with other classes. No mention of what I thought was a defining feature of class, namely the economic role, which is why it sounds to me much more like a sociological view of class than a Marxist one.

Polanyi didn't "stay in his lane" which is why he had so many problems fitting in at the academies. The sociologists called him an economist and the economists thought he was a sociologist.

I don't really see a problem with it?

 

[butchersapron]

Great though that piece is - and it has a lot of problems, problems i found much more useful than anything nairn or anderson immaculately produced - it really does need to be placed within the 25+year debate to make full sense of. I've collected the main pieces and numbered them here, added in a few interesting related pieces too. Of course there were much shorter letters and snipes across the left mags and journals as well, but this is is the meat of it.

To add to this, the last but one NLR had a long (75+ pages) from Anderson looking back (from above, at some great height in fact) at how the Nairn-Anderson thesis and analyses from that start-point have stood up over the last 50-60 years. The first quarter or so is an excellent summation of original case with refs in footnotes to the key articles as goes along which is v handy. Anderson in rather generous to himself and his mates, as might be expected. The whole pro-eu period doesn't get much attention, again, as might be expected.

Seems free to read, will upload a version if anyone has problems.

Ukania Perpetua?

Some six decades—three generations—ago, this journal developed a set of arguments about British state and society that were distinctive, and controversial at the time, as they have remained since.footnote1 What bearing, if any, do they have on the present conjuncture, generally—if not incontestably—described as a turning-point in the history of the country? To get a sense of the question, it may be of use to resume briefly the original theses sketched in nlr in the early sixties and their sequels. Their novelty lay in both their substantive claims, on which debate has principally focused, and their formal concerns, which set them apart from ways of thinking about the United Kingdom current on the left, and beyond, in those years. Four features in the journal’s approach to the country were new. It aimed at a (naturally, schematic) totalization of its object, that is, a characterization of all the principal structures and agents in the field, rather than exploration of partial elements of it. It sought to situate the present in a much longer historical perspective than was customary in political commentary. Its analytical framework was avowedly theoretical, drawing on then unfamiliar resources of a continental—principally Gramscian—Marxism. It was resistant to the typical habits of social patriotism, left or right, folkloric or historiographic, of the period.

The initial nlr theses were produced in response to a gathering sense of crisis in Britain. This conjuncture was compounded of a growing realization of economic decline relative to capitalist competitors abroad; popular discredit, amid scandals and divisions, of the Conservative political regime of the period, culminating in its passage from Macmillan to Home; national humiliation at failure in suing for entry to the Common Market, vetoed by France; and widespread disaffection with, and ridicule of, the hierarchical social order presiding over these misfortunes. The novelty of the nlr theses was to locate the explanation of this crisis in the peculiar class configuration of England that developed from the late 17th to the late 19th century, and the institutions and ideologies it bequeathed to the 20th. Telegraphically condensed, the principal points of this explanation, and what ensued from it, went as below. Resuming about half of the 50-plus articles written by editors of the journal in these years, taken as the most significant, the account is selective, and does not distinguish between individual signatures beyond indicating them, though their accents and outlooks of course varied. Where substantive differences developed, sometimes in the positions taken by the same writer over time, these are touched on in conclusion.

 

[redsquirrel]

Seems free to read, will upload a version if anyone has problems.

I can access it. Cheers for the heads up BA