EP Thompson on BBC radio 3

December 2024 Forums Events and announcements EP Thompson on BBC radio 3

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  • #249063
    ALB
    Keymaster

    We missed the series of talks last week on the 60th anniversary of the publication of his work The Making of the English Working Class on BBC Radio 3 but I suppose we can still listen to them on BBC iPlayer :

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x3hl/episodes/player

    It’s a good book, a very good book that can be recommended to anyone. I have say that personally I have always had doubts about his argument that the working class did not exist until it considered itself as a class. I would have thought that it did even if it didn’t recognise that it was a class. And Thompson was talking about the working class acquiring a “trade union consciousness” which would still leave it as a “class in itself” rather than Marx’s “class for itself”, wouldn’t it?

    #249065

    I thought his argument was more that the working class was an active agent in its own creation, not simply a passive victim of impersonal forces, and so working class actors, in their own self interest, drove the creation of the wages system.

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