Nov 07 2005
Book Review: The Making of the English Working Class, by E. P. Thompson
Book Review: The Making of the English Working Class, by E. P. Thompson
A common theme throughout the tradition of Greek tragedies is the tyranny of inevitability. When Oedipus is born, his life is foretold and fate sealed. All that left for the mortals to shed their tears for is what actually transpired. Reading “The Making of English Working Class”, one cannot but be imbued by the same despair as E. P. Thompson retells the life of working men and women at the onset of Industrial Revolution.
Unlike Wallerstein or Pomeranz, Thompson is not a theorist. In this book, he was not interested in the ad hoc events that fermented capitalist political economy. To Thompson, the arrival of Industrialization was a priori. It was the human tragedy destined to follow that was his greater concern. In this sense, E. P. Thompson is a humanist.
Personally, it was extremely difficult for me to read this book with a degree of detachment, so that I could convey a judgment that’s objective enough as to be universally accredited. The very great trauma Thompson had me relive is not as timely afar as it is spatially close. In today’s China, laborers are not unlike the oil beneath Arabian sand, except they are collectively renewable. As it so happened, a friend of mine recently brought me a book of photo essays on the life of migrants in urban China. In a sadistic way, the pictures served as graphical notations for the Thompson book. Whereas Thompson recounted English miners’ balding heads, the pictures showed children crying next to the bodies of their fathers from a collapsed coalpit. Then there are stories in the book that Mr. Thompson would surely have included, such as the one of a village school relocated itself to the midst of urban shafts after families in the village left for cities to search for jobs.
For those who study history, the great hope of such endeavor is to learn from the past and to improve upon the present. Yet I am still at a loss to explain what men have learned since Mr. Thompson’s age (or the Industrial Revolution) could have dampened the deep tracks the same wheels of history are imprinting on those less fortunate.
From what I have read, Mr. Thompson did not reveal whether he believed there could be a more humane capitalism. But he was unequivocal at condemning the capitalist apparatus that subjugated the working class. Besides the usual suspects: the merchants, the factory owners, he saved his utmost detestation towards the Methodist church. His fiery spirit combined with a fluent prose certainly made that chapter very entertaining. But, in my opinion, it is also where he betrayed a trace of radical romanticism (or Oedipus complex, perhaps?) and put the scholarly soundness of his work at risk.
For example, the Methodist Church split from the Church of England partly because Wesley thought the Establishment was too remote to the poor. And most the clergies in the Church echelon were from the working class. Thompson admitted as much in the book too. Therefore it is puzzling as how he could imply that the influences of just a few could have “transformed” the entire institution into an agent of the count-revolution. Just a chapter later after his rant against the Methodists, he described every other kinds of English communal organizations in a much more amicable light. While still adamantly unforgiving towards the Church and its doctrines, he nevertheless had little trouble explaining away the same conformist chants found in the charters of some Friendly Societies. It seems to me an inexcusable lapse of judgment that, as a historian, Mr. Thompson would defy the facts he collected himself.
Or may be Thompson had to present the Church in such a light? It is my speculation that the “Opium for the Masses” served an enlarged role in Thompson’s attempt to revise the Marxist theory to retrofit history. For the classical Marxists envisioned extreme exploitation could only lead to an apocalyptic clash of the classes. In order to explain why this had not happened, Mr. Thompson pointed his finger at the Methodist Church and blamed it for corrupting the spirit of proletariat. If my postulation is relevant, interestingly enough, history seems to have answered back: not only one of the last Marxist states, China, is working so hard trying to reverse course that it brings back exploitation en masse, but the state is also atheist. I couldn’t help but wonder what would E. P. Thompson think had he lived to see what happens in China today?
In many ways, the impact of a new political economy to the Chinese laborer is similarly shocking and violent as it was to the English two centuries ago. However, the two societies that each live in are dramatically different. In the 19th century England, there were myriad of social support groups: churches, guilds, and friendly societies. In China, the bonding among the working class is more traditional and less sophisticated. In England, representative government provided at least a viable alternative for the working class to obtain rights they could not have had through economic means. In China, it is really the paternalistic instincts of the rulers that are functioning as the pressure valve . Thompson quoted in his book, almost in full, the speech given by “A Journeyman Cotton Spinner” to the strikers in Manchester in 1818. The eloquence and coherence of the speech was a proof for Thompson’s contention that the working class had by then developed class-consciousness of an identity as against the interests of other classes (p194). Sadly, it is still not clear whether such consciousness exists among today’s Chinese laborers. Given the likely less-then-promising answer, maybe the question will become another “why not China” type of agony.