Fifty years of EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, Tuesday, London, 25 June 2013
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Tuesday, 25 June 2013
Day conference: Fifty years of EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Speakers: Bryan Palmer (Trent) on ‘Paradox and the Thompson School of Awkwardness’; Mike Kenny (QM) on ‘Understanding Thompson’s ‘English idiom’’; Madeleine Davis (QM) on ‘The politics of The Making: Thompson in the New Left 1956-1963’; Kevin Morgan (Manchester) on ‘Thompson, history and the left’; Christos Efstathiou on ‘Thompson’s concept of class formation: literary derivations and political implications’; Stuart Middleton (Cambridge) on ‘The concept of experience and The Making of the English Working Class 1924-1963’; Nick Stevenson (Nottingham) on ‘The “Making” and the “Doing” of global civil society’: E.P. Thompson and Cosmopolitanism’; Karen Buckley (Manchester) on ‘The making of the global alter-globalization class'; Roundtable: 'Class and The Making today' with David Howell (York), Jon Lawrence (Cambridge) Barbara Taylor (QM), Bryan Palmer (Trent); Film: The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott (Luke Fowler, 2011).
Time: 10.00 a.m. – 5.30 p.m. Venue: Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Campus Mile End Road, London E1 4NS. For programme, further details and to book a place, click this link.EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is a classic which is recommended reading. But this doesn't alter the fact that he advances a different theory of class to the one we have tended to use. We say that a/the working class exists whether or not those in it recognise it, something similar to what Marx meant by a "class-in-itself". Thompson seems to start from the assumption that a class only exists if and when its members see themselves as belonging to it.This is not the same as Marx's class-for-itself, i.e when a class is consciously acting in its own interest because Thompson's theory does assume this, merely that people should see themselves as a class. It would be something nearer to what Lenin described as "trade union consciousness" (which included "labour representation" and demands for "labour legislation").His theory gives rise to various problems. For instance, what are those who are objectively members of a class but don't recognise it? A mob? A mass? A what? An important theoretical question given that this is the position of many, perhaps a majority, of members of the working class-in-itself today. I suppose this will come out at the Conference.Having said this, it is an important field of historical study to trace the emergence of "class consciousness" amongst some workers and Thompson's does this very well.
This too is an excellent read from EPhttp://libcom.org/library/time-work-discipline-industrial-capitalism-e-p-thompson
A worth a read article on EP Thompson http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/23/remembering-ep-thompson/
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