EP Thompson on BBC radio 3

[ALB]

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?

[Young Master Smeet]

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.

[Author]

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