Why not give women the vote?

Not all women wanted the vote. Queen Victoria who felt quite capable of ruling an empire and yet opposed women’s suffrage referring to it as ‘this mad, wicked folly’. [1] Many women campaigners, such as Octavia Hill, were convinced that reforms in civil and social rights were of greater moment than political enfranchisement. Most national and regional newspapers, especially The Times were hostile to the women’s suffrage campaign especially after militant action began although this did encourage newspapers to print stories about the suffragettes, providing them with the ‘oxygen’ of publicity. There was a deep-seated fear of change particularly sharing power with women who had never been seen as men’s equals. Opposition to women’s suffrage was frequently instinctively hostile and blatantly prejudiced but much of it was also carefully considered and cogently argued. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian period, it was deep-rooted and influential, organised and vocal and the ‘antis’ came from across the social and political spectrum and involved women as well as men.

For those who accepted the notion of ‘separate spheres’, and many still did in the 1880s, the role played by men was different (and should be different) from that played by women. [2] While the masculine public sphere was for men, the feminine domestic sphere was for women. [3] Bax went so far as to deny that any oppression of women had occurred at all:

The whole modern women’s movement is based, in a measure, at least, on an assumption which is absolutely unfounded -- to wit, that man has systematically oppressed woman in the past, that the natural tendency of evil-minded man is always to oppress women, or, to put in another way, that woman is the victim of man’s egotism.....[4]

Before the 1872 Ballot Act, voting was ‘open’, a public statement on the hustings and violence and harassment was common. [5] Many men believed that women as ‘the weaker sex’ would not be able to cope with the ‘hurly-burly’ of elections and should be kept out of the political arena. Their strength lay within the family providing support, inspiration and raising children. If the vote was given to women, it might cause political disagreements with their husbands and consequently accelerate the break-up of the family. In short, women were a civilising element in society. Forcing women into a public, political role would detract from their femininity or, as William Gladstone put it in 1892, ‘trespass upon their delicacy, their purity, their refinement, the elevation of their whole nature’. [6] Goldwin Smith, in a letter published in The Times, wrote that women’s real object was ‘nothing less than a sexual revolution…deposing the head of the family, forcing women into male employments, and breaking down…every barrier which Nature or custom has established.’ [7]

The ‘different biology and psychology’ argument was a widely held that women tended to be temperamental and prone to outbursts of emotion so how could such beings be trusted with the franchise? The militant tactics of the WSPU after 1905 reinforced this viewpoint. Anti-suffragists held a number of assumptions about female psychology and physiology. It was argued that women were physically and mentally weaker than men. They were more emotional, unable to grasp abstract questions and slow to make up their minds and that it would be a highly undesirable product of women’s suffrage if women came to shape policy. This was frequently reinforced by their lack of education and it was difficult for many people to believe that women were as capable as men of making intelligent choices as voters. For those who had to conserve their limited energies for the vital and debilitating business of childbearing, politics would simply be too great a strain. The medical profession in general supported these views with scientific authority despite being largely ignorant about female physiology in this period. Sir Almroth Wright, an eminent if eccentric medical practitioner, expressed this view, most notoriously, in the letter published in The Times in 1912 at the height of the suffragette violence that was reprinted the following year. [8] He attacked the suffragettes as frustrated spinsters venting their bitterness on men but he also claimed that women in general were prone to hysteria that made them inadequate to receive the vote. His attack on ‘militants’ as a justification for denying the vote to women was echoed by others. For instance, Harold Owen, wrote:

The fact, then, that Suffragism has been supported by the vehemence and disorderliness of a few woman is no commendation whatever of the vote being granted as an act of grace. Their earnestness is counter-balanced by the orderly earnestness of women who do not want woman to be enfranchised....[9]

This delicacy of nature and also of physique unfitted women formed the key, traditional military role of the citizen. It was claimed, ‘The voter, in giving a vote pledges himself to uphold the consequences of his vote at all costs ... women are physically incapable of this pledge.’ [10] Male suffrage was justified by the fact that men could be called upon to risk their lives for their country, a sacrifice that women would not be asked to make and as a result, did not deserve full citizenship. Some opponents of women’s suffrage pointed out that the maintenance of the British Empire required a large army and because women did not contribute to the defence of Empire, they should not have the vote. Lord Curzon, an ardent anti-suffragist and former Viceroy of India told Glasgow audiences in 1912 that, if women received the vote, the sub-continent would be lost to the Empire.

The logic of their case was that women could properly be entrusted with municipal affairs, while imperial matters were outside their ‘sphere’; but the two doctrines did not combine very happily together. They [the anti-suffragists] had some trouble with their own members, particularly with the imposing array of Peers who were their vice-presidents, since these gentlemen objected just as strongly to the presence of women on borough councils as anywhere else (outside the home); and the spectacle of their troubles was a constantly recurring delight to their opponents... [11]

A further variant was the idea that, since women could not physically enforce the laws they made, men might simply refuse to accept them leading to a breakdown in law and order.

There were also fears about the practical results of enfranchising women. If adult suffrage were granted, there would be about 1.5 million more women voters than men. Government would reflect female views and as women were ‘less virile’ than men were it would result in Britain and the Empire being weakened. To concede even a limited vote would lead eventually to complete suffrage and a female majority that might well push anti-male policies. The eminent jurist A. V. Dicey warned that since women constituted the majority of voters they would be in a position to force Parliament into adopting policies opposed by the male minority.[12] There were also concerns that women would use their new political power to improve their position in the labour force or that they would neglect their domestic duties.

Some opponents of women’s suffrage suggested that the majority of women did not want the vote or at least, did not care whether they had it. This claim was plausible despite the suffragists’ best efforts to disprove it. The Anti-Suffrage League argued that the vote was overvalued. Even though some men had the vote, there was still plenty of poverty, unemployment and low wages. They maintained that it must not be assumed that female suffrage would solve all the problems of women. This view was reinforced by the argument that women themselves did not really want the vote. Suffragists, they claimed, were an unrepresentative and small, if vocal minority and their campaign for ‘their own emancipation’ was watched by most women with what in 1892 Asquith, who had long opposed women’s suffrage, called ‘languid and imperturbable indifference’. [13] Two further and somewhat contradictory arguments were put forward. There was the argument that women were already represented in Parliament by the men in their family. In addition, women already exercised some control over political decision making since leading politicians listened to the views of their wives, mothers and other female acquaintances. Also, since women were incapable of making decisions and would do what the men in the family told them to do, if they had the vote it would lead to some men, in effect, having several votes more than others.

Above all, the anti-suffragists drew strength from the fact that their membership was not exclusively male. Anti-democratic and hostile to the labour and feminist movements of their day which they saw as a threat to marriage and motherhood, they were ridiculed as absurd by supporters of the parliamentary vote for women. Many women, including some who enjoyed a prominent public role such as Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale and at one time Beatrice Webb, refused to support women’s suffrage although they were often enthusiastic about local government and the need for social action by women to improve the conditions of the poor. For them, involvement in local government was a ‘proper channel’ for ‘womanly’ influence and involved action in areas such as education and the Poor Law, areas of ‘home concerns’ or the upkeep of towns or ‘civic housekeeping’. Mary Ward called women’s civic duties the ‘enlarged housekeeping of the nation’ arguing that their domestic skills were need not just in the private sphere but in the public sphere as well. Bush suggests that the anti-suffrage women leaders were divided into three loose and overlapping groupings, the maternal reformers, the women writers and the imperialist ladies.[14] Although there was a diversity of view, most of the leading women drew their enthusiasm from deeply rooted convictions about womanhood, the nation and empire. It was almost universally assumed that differences between the sexes were natural, and that any major departure from women’s role as wives and mothers would bring social chaos to Britain and the Empire. [15] Their anti-suffragism was social rather than political and reflected the continuing development of their role as women in improving nation and empire. Theirs was a view of citizenship that saw women’s mission as essential to the proper development of the country and in that benign moral vision, the parliamentary vote had no place.

Many of the anti-suffragist arguments represented self-serving pleas by the traditional male elite anxious to preserve its position and authority. On the other hand, there is a danger in dismissing the entire anti-suffragist case simply because today we take it for granted that women should have the vote. From the view of the main women’s middle- and upper-class non-political organisations the anti-suffragist claims were far from absurd and reflected mainstream female opinion on desirable gender roles and on women’s positive role in national life. [16] Large women’s organisations such as the Mothers’ Union were not suffrage organisations and even the Women’s Co-operative Guild with 30,000 members did not adopt women’s suffrage until 1900. Anti-suffragist ballots to test public opinion on women’s suffrage suggested that those opposed to votes for women outnumbered suffragists by two to one. [17] Historians need to explain when and why certain parts of the anti-suffragist case lost their force. In the 1870s and 1880s, it is not obvious that most women were enthusiastic about the vote. Suffrage societies were small pressure groups until well into the first decade of the twentieth century and shared similar beliefs with anti-suffragists about their social mission to strengthen the family both at home and in the empire through their participation in social activism.

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[1] Queen Victoria to Sir Theodore Martin, 29 May 1870, cit, ibid, Rover. Constance, Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics, 1866-1914, p. 34.

[2] Hart, Heber L., Women’s Suffrage and National Danger: A Plea for the Ascendency of Man, (Alexander and Shepheard), 1889, pp. 89-188..

[3] Delap, Lucy, and Heilmann, Ann, (eds.), Anti-feminism in Edwardian literature, 6 Vols. (Thoemmes Continuum), 2006, Heilmann, Ann, and Sanders, Valerie, ‘The rebel, the lady and the ‘anti’: Femininity, anti-feminism, and the Victorian woman writer’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 29, (2006), pp. 289-300.

[4] Bax, E. Belfont, The Fraud of Feminism, , (Grant Richards Ltd.), 1913, pp. 173-174.

[5] Kinzer, Bruce, The Ballot Question in Nineteenth-Century English Politics, (Garland), 1982.

[6] Gladstone to Samuel Smith MP, 11 April 1892, Matthew, H. C. G., (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, Vol. 13, 1892-1896, (Oxford University Press), 1994, p. 19.

[7] The Times, 26 May 1896.

[8] Wright, A. E., ‘Militant Hysteria’, The Times, 28 March 1912, reprinted in Wright, Sir Almroth E, The Unexpurgated Case against Woman Suffrage, (Constable and Company Ltd.), 1913, pp. 77-86

[9] Owen, Harold, Woman Adrift. The Menace of Suffragism, (Stanley Paul), 1912, pp. 138-139.

[10] NUWSS, Anti-Suffrage Arguments, (Templar Printing Works), 1913, a poster.

[11] Ibid, Strachey, Ray, The Cause, 1928, pp. 319-320.

[12] Dicey, A. V., Letters to a Friend on Votes for Women, (John Murray), 1909, pp. 69-70.

[13] Hansard, House of Commons, Debates, 27 April 1892, Vol. 3, c1510.

[14] Bush, Julia, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, (Leicester University Press), 2000, pp. 170-192.

[15] Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2007, pp. 23-139.

[16] Ibid, p. 4.

[17] Ibid, p. 5, results were summarised in The Anti-Suffrage Handbook, (National Press Agency), 1912.

Further causes of E. P. Thompson

Edward Thompson’s conceptualisation of experience is an important theoretical contribution in understanding history and in particular, the formation of class consciousness.[1] While the historical writing of Marx and Engels was generally subtle, the way they summarised the relationship between social being and consciousness was often crude or incomplete.  In practice, experience of the relations of production is continuous and its impact on consciousness on-going. But this does not mean it is predetermined since a specific form of exploitation does not automatically lead to a predetermined class consciousness. The working class is neither automatically revolutionary as a result of its position nor a helpless victim of the ideological dominance of its ruling class. ‘No ideology is wholly absorbed by its adherents: it breaks down in practice in a thousand ways under the criticism of impulse and of experience,’ Thompson observed.[2] At the same time, he vigorously rejected the notion that consciousness is independent of economics, posing the dialogue between social being and social consciousness as central to the historical process.[3]

Of all Thompson’s propositions, this is probably his most controversial. Critics commonly see Thompson collapsing both relations of production and actual consciousness into ‘experience’. It is forced to explain too much and its mediating role is consequently lost.[4]  Thompson may emphasise the experience of work and exploitation, of dealing with employers and merchants, but keeps distinct the real relations that generate the experience, for instance in his description of the reasons for child labour in the textile mills, of the forms of labour in cottage industry and also in his discussion of the way gluts were created to break the weavers’ resistance to price variation. Thompson also clearly distinguishes between experience and consciousness pointing out that the experience of workplace, friendly society and trade union solidarity invaded the chapel and affected workers’ religious ideas.

Perry Anderson argues that Thompson assumes that experience leads to actual (i.e. correct) knowledge, yet Thompson repeatedly points to the limits of experience--not only the farmers and sailors dealing mystified by kingship,[5] but the Methodism of the repressed English working class, and the way outworkers and artisans persisted with petitioning Parliament in spite of their’s and others’ experiences. Anderson also argues that experience is implicitly presented as the causal mechanism of history as a result of Thompson comparing it to Mendel’s genetics.[6] Yet Thompson rejected the idea of there being a causal mechanism or ‘motor’ to history.[7]

Thompson’s account of the weavers illustrates the way he combines a changed economic environment, consciousness, experience and class struggle to explain the destruction of a traditional artisan culture and the eventual development of a distinctive working class. These cottage industry artisans initially benefited from the industrial revolution as more and cheaper yarn led to a massive expansion in weaving. But this expansion soon saw them lose economic independence to the great clothiers who came to employ them, and who used this expansion to cut wages. This in turn drove each weaver to increase their own production, leading in turn to more savage wage cutting. The weavers fought this in the terms of their existing organisations and traditions. They petitioned parliament to legislate minimum wages, and its refusal led them responded with a massive strike, which was brutally suppressed. Among employers, magistrates and clergy, the conviction grew that poverty was essential to make people work hard and the experience of impoverishing the weavers may well have confirmed something which began as prejudice. Faced with a transformed industry and repression, their traditional craft unionism, with its emphasis on controlling the standards, prices, customs and even personnel of the trade, collapsed. The destruction of their industry by the power loom, from 1820, was the final step. Desperate poverty combined with the experience of parliamentary hostility and bloody repression to turn them from Church and King loyalism to machine breaking, mobilisation at Peterloo, Owenism and physical force Chartism. From proud participants in a narrow craft, they became an important part of a wider class with a common agenda for change and elements of a common consciousness.

There were others who were beginning to think and act in class ways, and one of the most important reasons was the existence and growth of an often illegal, radical press. The class struggle for a free press, free of taxes that make newspapers unaffordable to working men and women, is one of the most heroic episodes in the making of the English working class. Thompson’s emphasis on common experience in the formation of class is important, but it was the radical press that made England’s labourers aware that they shared a common situation with so many others. This is magnificently highlighted in Thompson’s short essay on William Cobbett’s journalism.[8]  Cobbett’s writing was very different from that of the essayist Hazlitt or the popular theorist Paine. His style was intimate, personal, immediate and concrete. Over more than two decades, his political articles appealed to experiences common to England’s labourers to make his points and to show in concrete terms that each individual’s situation was shared by others. His ‘extraordinary sureness of instinct...disclosed the real nature of changing relationships of production,’ Thompson wrote.[9] The ‘touchstone of his social criticism was the condition of the labouring man,’ a profoundly radical outlook, which, could lead, Thompson argues, ‘close to revolutionary conclusions.’[10] His writing ‘led outwards from the evidence of his senses to his general conclusions,’ an approach that was later to become a more conscious part of the revolutionary tradition. When Lenin discussed the Bolsheviks’ new newspaper Pravda in 1912, he observed that the many reports, written by workers themselves, about their lives, the abuses they faced, their opinions and how they were organising, were the raw material of experience from which wider political conclusions could be drawn.[11]  Alongside Cobbett there were a series of papers, writers and groups seeking ‘to render into theory the twin experiences...of the Industrial Revolution, and...popular Radicalism insurgent and in defeat.’[12] There were intense debates over Bentham, Malthus and Robert Owen, all educating a dispersed layer of working class activists who would help create the class consciousness and organise the struggles that would make ‘the working class presence...the most significant factor in British political life’ in 1832. ‘The experiences of the previous quarter-century had prepared men’s minds for what they now could read.’[13]

After writing The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson went backwards to the eighteenth century to study class relations: the nature of the part customary, part market economy, the struggles to defend it from deeper commercialisation, and the culture of the working classes. Most significantly, he presented these struggles as he had earlier presented Luddism, as rational and thought-out, not as the mindless conservatism of the ignorant. He was studying (and writing about) the class struggles that were ultimately to produce the decisive shifts of the 1790s.  He presents eighteenth century England as a society in which money has become of primary importance in economics and in political power, while for large numbers of lower gentry, yeomen, farming tenants and poor labourers, residual common use rights and community traditions remained of major importance, in their survival and their cultural life. The attack on these rights and the enclosure of the commons met sustained resistance, and obliged ‘agricultural improvers’ to develop an ideology to justify their theft: property no longer implied social obligations, but increasingly gave absolute rights to the possessor; the commons were ‘a hindrance to Industry, and...Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence’.[14] ‘Custom Law and Common Right’ describes some of the resistance (as indeed does Whigs and Hunters) from those poorer villagers who found their rights expropriated. Thompson sees in the prolonged process of enclosure, stretching well over a century, a measure of the tenacity (and also the localism) of that struggle. The law shifted its focus from the protection of the person to protecting property. The divisions between the classes grew.

The same process--the class struggle against paternalism and to impose commodification--was seen in food, as the marketing and consumption of grain was gradually separated from the community in which it had been grown. In ‘The Moral Economy of the Crowd’, Thompson describes this tension coming to a head in times of dearth, when villages expected ‘their’ grain to be available to feed them. He poses the organised food riot, when a community mobilised to use its force of numbers to impose an affordable price, as one of the characteristic forms of class struggle through the century.  In ‘Patricians and Plebs’, he describes the changing relationship between labourer and employer, as the old system of paternalist control over the whole life of the labourer was eroded. Marx wrote of the bourgeoisie putting ‘an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations’, leaving behind nothing more than a cash relationship.[15] In ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, he addresses the process by which employers of labour attempted to gain more production from employees. Work shifted from being task oriented to time oriented. The most interesting aspect is the description of employers experimenting with different forms of hire--day labour, by the hour--until they came up with the most profitable mix.

In these essays and in Whigs and Hunters as well, Thompson is studying the transition to capitalism. As he reminded us, the people he writes about did not see themselves as ‘transitional to anything’. They were incrementally changing and adapting: the law, relations with the labourers, the market system, property, even ideas of what was morally right. Thompson brings out the extent to which these changes were fought over. ‘The death of the old moral economy of provision was as long-drawn-out as the death of paternalist intervention in industry and trade,’ he wrote.[16] The relations of production of capitalism did not spring to life out of the steam engine or the mill; they were created gradually because they were resisted bitterly, and had to be fought for and imposed.  Nevertheless, there is a problem with Thompson’s narrative of class struggle: it is incomplete. We never find out why the differences involved between the classes cannot be settled by a greater measure of compromise, why the employers feel the need to push things so far, why the government feels confident it can engage in brutal repression. The economic imperatives facing the English working class are meticulously examined; not so the economic strengths of, or pressures facing, their employers, landowners and merchants.[17] This flies in the face of Thompson’s insistence on the mutuality of class. Why did Walpole and the Whigs face so little ruling class opposition to the substantial risk of passing the ‘Black Act’? Why did they prosecute the enclosures so slowly, while the tearing up of minimum wages is done abruptly? Were there not economic as well as ‘political’ reasons for the gradual rapprochement between manufacturers and the landowners and government which began in the 1790s and which so decisively shaped the circumstances in which the working class was ‘made’?  He is vague, too, about the nature of ruling class appropriation in Whigs and Hunters when he declares that it was ‘not clear what these [Whig] fortunes of thousands per annum rest upon’.[18] Even Bryan Palmer finds one discussion of ‘exploitation’ an ‘evasion’.[19] It is his failure to engage with the (changing) economic structure of production that makes ‘Patricians and Plebs’ one of his vaguer and less satisfactory articles.

Thompson’s stance also leads to a somewhat schizophrenic attitude to historical materialism itself. So much of Thompson’s polemic is directed against structuralism that he never gives us more than a truncated picture of what he actually sees as the relationship between the economic and ‘cultural’. The result in The Making of the English Working Class, argues Sewell, is that he assumes economic determinism ‘as a kind of unconscious rhetorical backdrop against which specific empirical accounts of working-class experience, agency and consciousness are placed,’ and that economic developments provide ‘a kind of hidden dynamo [that] propels the narrative in a certain direction.’[20]  The result is to make the economic changes appear ‘given’, inevitable, perhaps even natural--the opposite of Thompson’s intention. The flip side of his refusal to ‘privilege’ economics can be seen in Whigs and Hunters where we find him embracing the rule of law as ‘a cultural achievement of universal significance’ and ‘an unqualified human good.’[21] This comes at the end of his book, in a final, abstractly argued, ‘theoretical’ essay, which manages to contradict the evidence of the previous 238 pages. Instead of reifying the forces of production, he reifies the law.

Edward Thompson’s achievement impacted on the ways people study and think about history and historical change. He set out to show that the exploited and oppressed were makers of history through the class struggles they waged. By insisting on the need for concrete analysis of social forces, he underlined that nothing in history was inevitable, and that human society was created out of class struggle. In doing so, he challenged the view that capitalism developed peacefully in Britain and showed that the most fundamental of economic relations were themselves experimented with, and resisted, and made by people and over a long period of time. Wage labour and the alienation of what workers produce may seem ‘normal’ in western societies today; they did not in England in the eighteenth century. By focusing on experience he developed ‘an ability to reveal the logic of production relations...as an operative principle visible in the daily transactions of social life.’[22]

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[1] See Ellen Meiksins Wood ‘The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E.P. Thompson and His Critics’ in Studies in Political Economy: a socialist review, No 9, (Fall 1982), pp. 62, 58

[2] E. P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 431.

[3] For example, criticising Althusser for ignoring it, E. P. Thompson The Poverty of Theory and other essays, Merlin Press, London, 1978, p. 201. See also E. P. Thompson The Poverty of Theory and other essays, Merlin Press, London, 1978, pp. 224-225, and ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ in E. P. Thompson The Poverty of Theory and other essays, Merlin Press, London, 1978, p. 79 where he describes ‘dialectical intercourse between social being and social consciousness’ as being ‘at the heart of any comprehension of the historical process within the Marxist tradition.’

[4] William H, Sewell, ‘How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-class Formation’ in Harvey J Kaye, and Keith McClelland (eds.), E P Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Polity Press, London, 1990, p. 60, Anderson and Johnson make similar points; Wood disagrees, see Ellen Meiksins Wood ‘The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E.P. Thompson and His Critics’ in Studies in Political Economy: a socialist review, No 9, (Fall 1982), p. 58.

[5] Thompson’s example, E. P. Thompson The Poverty of Theory and other essays, Merlin Press, London, 1978, p. 199.

[6] Perry Anderson Arguments within English Marxism, Verso, London, 1980, pp. 25-27, 28-29 and 79-83.

[7] E. P. Thompson The Poverty of Theory and other essays, Merlin Press, London, 1978, pp. 295-300.

[8] E. P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 820-837.

[9] Ibid, p. 834.

[10] Ibid, pp. 835-836.

[11] Lenin, VI, ‘The Workers and Pravda’ in Collected Works, Vol. 18, April 1912-March 1913, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1963, p. 300.

[12] E. P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 781.

[13] Ibid, p. 806.

[14] Cit, E. P. Thompson Customs in Common, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993, p. 165.

[15] In the Communist Manifesto, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, edited and introduced by Lewis S. Feuer, Collins, New York, 1969, p. 51.

[16] E. P. Thompson Customs in Common, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993, p. 253.

[17] This point is in part made by Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Falling Through the Cracks: E.P. Thompson and the Debate on Base and Superstructure: in Harvey J Kaye, and Keith McClelland (eds.), E P Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Polity Press, London, 1990, pp. 125-152, p. 136.

[18] E.P. Thompson Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990, p. 245.

[19] Bryan D Palmer The Making of E. P. Thompson: Marxism, Humanism, and History, New Hogtown Press, Toronto, 1981, p. 124, footnote 4. The article is Thompson, E.P., ‘Eighteenth-century English society: class struggle without class?’, Social History, vol. 3, (2), (1978), pp. 133-165.

[20] William H Sewell, ‘How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E.P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-class Formation’ in Harvey J Kaye, and Keith McClelland (eds.), E P Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Polity Press, London, 1990, p. 57. Wood makes a similar point, in Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Falling Through the Cracks: E.P. Thompson and the Debate on Base and Superstructure: in Harvey J Kaye, and Keith McClelland (eds.), E P Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Polity Press, London, 1990, p. 135.

[21] E.P. Thompson Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990, pp. 265, 266.

[22] Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Falling Through the Cracks: E.P. Thompson and the Debate on Base and Superstructure: in Harvey J Kaye, and Keith McClelland (eds.), E P Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Polity Press, London, 1990, p. 142.

Making planning easier or how to circumvent democracy?

We’re in a war or at least the economic equivalent of one, according to the Prime Minister.  He cites the Second World War when ‘normal rules were circumvented’ and everything was thrown at the one aim of defeating Nazism.  So his plan is that ministers will cut down on the ‘time-wasting’ he sees as legally challenging government policy.  The legal right to a judicial review of decisions, especially for major infrastructure projects has, he maintains, grown out of control and needs to be scaled back largely because it either delays or prevents things getting done.  So his plan is to reduce the three month limit in which people can apply for judicial review and charge more for reviews to prevent objectors bringing ‘hopeless cases’ to review.
The Prime Minister may be right to raise this issue given the burgeoning number of applications for judicial review: in 1975, there were 160 but by 2011 this had increased to more than 11,000 but three quarters of these were in immigration and asylum cases anyway.  The critical question is whether this increase in judicial review  has contributed to the government being ‘too slow in getting stuff done’ whether he is right that  ‘Consultations, impact assessments, audits, reviews, stakeholder management, securing professional buy-in, complying with EU procurement rules, assessing sector feedback--this is not how we became one of the most powerful, prosperous nations on earth’ .  There is an important balance in a democratic society between the need for any government to govern and the right of people to object to the policies that the government is pursuing and the Prime Minister is suggesting that the balance has shifted too far towards the right to object. 

All of this is to do with how best to stimulate the economy—the war that Cameron says we must win if we are to retain our economic global influence and prevent Britain sleepwalking into EU exit.  This may well be how the war looks from the bunkers of the generals but what about the cannon-fodder that appears to be the rest of us?  Stimulating the economy by making it easier for business to do things may well have a beneficial effect on the rank-and-file by providing much needed employment and hence taxation to address the country’s deficit but at what cost?  If you take two areas of policy—the need for additional airport space and the question of nuclear power as a means of addressing energy security—both are issues that will be vigorously contested but are also questions that need quick resolution largely because of the length of time they will take to implement.  These are projects of national importance so should a small number of objectors (small that is relative to the nation’s population) be allowed to hold things up?  David Cameron would argue that they should not: they should have to right to object but once their objections have been heard (and presumably rejected) the projects should go ahead.  I suspect that nationally there would be few objections to this stance; people are concerned about energy security especially where it relates to rising fuel prices and large infrastructure projects would create jobs especially if they were situated in areas of endemic unemployment.  The question in a democracy is when is it acceptable to run rough-shod over the views of the minority for the benefit of the majority and who decides?  The answer, of course, is precisely those institutions and processes that the Prime Minister thinks should be truncated. 
It would be much easier if Britain was not a democracy.  The government could decide policy and implement it whether people agreed or not.  But then we would not be a democratic society in which the right to be heard and to object to policies you disagree with is fundamental.  Democracy can be annoying, often inefficient and certainly from the political classes’ point of view frustrating but that’s the point of it!

Legitimacy, authority and elections

That the turnout for the election of police and crime commissioners is so low is hardly a surprise.  It has been talked up by the government over the past few weeks though I suspect that there was the hope that the figure would get over 20 per cent.  Early indications are that the government will not even achieve this and the blame game has already begun.  Apparently it was the media’s fault—insufficient coverage and a failure to get across what the elections were about.  Absolute nonsense…in my authority we received mailshots from all candidates and anyway there was widespread and effective coverage on the BBC website and through local television and radio.  The government may be right that in the next elections (to be held in May not on a dank November day) there may be an increased participation by the electorate as it gets to see what the police commissioners can do.  However, attempts to portray this as a victory for democracy are decidedly misplaced.  Those elected may have legitimacy but their authority to act is seriously compromised.  How could a police commissioner elected on less than ten per cent of the vote sack a chief constable or have the authority to push through unpopular changes? 

Why so few people used their votes is not difficult to explain.  The number of people voting in national and local elections has been declining since the 1950s though this has accelerated in recent decades.  The responsibility of individuals to vote appears to have gone out of fashion.  There are two main reasons for this.  First, as all political parties have become centrist in their aspirations so the differences between them have lessened: what people say is that it doesn’t matter who you elect, you get the same thing.  While this may not be true, it is increasingly how people view political parties and the non-ideological focus of much politics means that political parties often do not differ on the principle merely the details.  Secondly, there is an intense mistrust of politicians that predated the MPs’ expenses scandal but was intensified by it.  We simply do not trust politicians who say or promise one thing and then do another and generally fail to justify why to people’s satisfaction.  This is not helped when politicians make decisions that the public regard as simply unfair.  Take, for instance, the reduction of the upper level of income tax from 50p.  Although this may have made sound economic sense, in the minds of those on lower incomes it appeared simply to  advantage the richer at the expense of the poorer shattering any belief people ever had (if they ever did) in the notion of everyone being in this together and has proved a public relations disaster.

It may be true that turnout for elections for police commissioners will improve once the innovation is bedded in but I have my doubts.  Despite the protestations that the new positions are non-partisan and that those elected will act on behalf of the whole community (which they must if they want to be re-elected), there are grave concerns about how far their election will result in an even more politicised approach to policing.  It remains to be seen whether this will be the case but it does reflect an intense suspicion of constitutional change in this country and rightfully so.  Constitutional change is frequently introduced by political parties to advantage their own position at the expense of other political parties and often at the expense of the electorate.  Yet the one issue on which there would be widespread public involvement—a referendum of the European Union—has been denied by successive governments for reasons that are often specious and almost always politically motivated.  There is a growing chasm between the political classes and the public across Britain that these elections have served to heighten and a belief that politicians, of whatever hue, are only ever willing to allow people to vote on issues that they known they will win or that they are not too committed to and are prepared to lose simply to show that they do listen to the people.  In democracies, election provides those elected with legitimacy, a mandate to act but low turnout removed the authority they need to carry out that mandate.

The causes of E. P. Thompson

The ‘mature’ political and historical career of Edward Thompson began in 1956, when he launched a public, and at times bitter, struggle against Stalinism in politics, in Marxist theory and in history. ‘I commenced to reason in my thirty-third year,’ he wrote of that turning point.[1] In politics, Thompson set out to construct a libertarian, humanist communism, and to involve himself in a series of struggles, most notably against the spread of nuclear weapons. In history and theory, he challenged the tendency of both Stalinism and bourgeois sociology to reify human relations,[2] and fought to ‘restore to Marxism its commitment to the concrete struggles of actual men and women’,[3] as against the Stalinist tendency to treat people as the stupid instruments of the forces of production.

This project led Thompson to re-examine the process of historical causation. In his histories, he looked at the process by which the English working class was formed (and formed itself) as a class, and then went backwards to look at various aspects of the development of capitalism in the eighteenth century, and the plebeian resistance to it. In his theoretical writing, Thompson began by rejecting Marx’s notion of base and superstructure as ‘a bad and dangerous model, since Stalin used it not as an image of men changing in society, but as a mechanical model, operating semi-automatically and independently of conscious human agency.’[4] He launched his polemics against Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn for their schematic approach to English history and their dismissal of the radical traditions of the English working class, and against the anti-humanist structuralism of their intellectual mentor, Louis Althusser.[5] For much of his career, Thompson wrote as a Marxist and a revolutionary opponent of capitalism. Anderson, Nairn and some other Marxists arguedthat Thompson’s theory and his history was ‘culturalist’, anti-theoretical and built around a subjective redefinition of categories such as class.[6]

For Thompson, history was the history of class struggle, and the class struggle in its various forms was overwhelmingly the subject of his histories.[7] Society changed because class struggle took place and changed it, not always for the better. The theme running through The Making of the English Working Class is the way a distinctively working class movement, built upon organisations of mutual aid and with a new and distinctive class consciousness, emerged from political and economic struggles between 1790 and 1832. The essays making up Customs in Common look at the growing polarisation between patricians and plebs, the fights over enclosure of the common lands, the attempts to enforce the imperatives of the commercial grain market against those who insisted on feeding the local community in times of dearth, and the gradual imposition of a time-conscious work discipline on rural labourers and factory workers.

These class struggles are driven in considerable part by conflicting material interest. In searching for the reasons behind the sudden declaration of fifty new capital offences in England in 1723, Thompson finds an eruption of ‘class war’ in the forests of East Berkshire and Hampshire. He therefore begins Whigs and Hunters by teasing out the rival claims for the use of forest resources between the declining gentry and yeoman class of the long-established forest communities, and the newly rich landowners and lords (temporal and ecclesiastical) who asserted their right to graze their deer unimpeded in ‘their’ forests. Also involved was a struggle over the legal and ideological bases of economic life as ‘non-monetary use rights were being reified into capitalist property rights’[8]. The long tradition of communal access to the forests, regulated by local forest courts was being overturned by those who benefited from the new commercial approach that saw property (including the forest) as private, to be ruthlessly used in personal self-advancement. This was an attitude shared by the new-rich landowners and the forest officials they appointed, who set out to monopolise the forest for themselves. [9]

The significance of this method is that it really does put human beings at the centre of ‘making history’. Social development is shaped by the outcome of these struggles, and this is never predetermined. Instead, the result of any conflict is influenced by a range of factors: the economic ‘weight’ and political strength of the rival classes, their internal solidarity, the cohesion provided by commonly held ideas, the strength of their leadership and their ability to make common cause with other classes or elements in society or alternatively the degree to which they are internally divided, enervated by traditions of deference, badly led or isolated. For Thompson, the history of actual class struggles can neither be unravelled nor understood without concrete analysis, and attempts to short-circuit this ‘end up by explaining nothing.’[10] Thus we find him insisting that ‘every real historical situation’ arises ‘from a particular equilibrium of forces,’[11] and that concrete analysis of the various competing forces, and the particular equilibrium of forces at key moments, play a major role in his histories.

In Whigs and Hunters, this is evident at many levels. A localised rebellion gave rise to a turning point in English law because the king’s deer were involved, because Walpole, a new Prime Minister was eager to consolidate his power, because the authority of the government was undermined at a moment when it had become tenuous as a result of the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. Thompson also speculated that it was the collapse of the Bubble that had impoverished many of the forest gentry and made desperate their struggle to defend traditional usages. On another plane, the ‘Black Act’ crystallised the prior development of a ‘Whig state of mind’ that saw defence of property as the highest duty of the state, to the point where human life itself had been severely devalued. So when the immediate crisis in the forests passed, the 1723 ‘Black’ Act was entrenched in English law, its already wide scope extended. At another level again, the skilful politician Walpole used or manufactured Jacobite conspiracies with links to the Blacks to bind Parliament and the ruling class more firmly behind his new laws.[12] Thus a turning point in legal history arose from both the prior development of capitalist relations, and the particular conjunction of economic and political circumstances and the way people fought out their rival claims. This ‘victory’ for England’s capitalists became an element in shaping the future, as it was then used for another hundred years to terrorise those who lacked sufficient respect for property.[13]

However, a focus on class struggle by itself is not enough to ensure that the making of history is understood as the work of ‘men’ (to paraphrase Marx). The combination of Weberian sociology, Second International Marxism and Stalinism had transformed class into a static sociological structure into which people were duly slotted according to occupation, which then obediently produced (in the ‘Marxist’ variant) class struggle. The efforts of ordinary men and women to understand and change their world are written out of such an approach. Thompson set out to write them back in; indeed to put them at the centre of our understanding of class and class struggle. He did this in The Making of the English Working Class. He began with a short, but very pointed polemic against those who saw class as a ‘thing’, a static ‘structure’, defined by relations of production, arguing instead that class could only really be understood as a relationship between people that becomes apparent to them over time as they find themselves engaged in struggle alongside other people with whom they begin to feel, and then understand, an identity of interests as against others.

The making of the English working class involved, for Thompson, the transformation of a disparate layer of wage earning artisans and labourers, who identified predominantly with their separate trades and the struggle against the landed interest, into a class, singular, involving widespread identification of a common class interest, in open conflict with its symbiotic rival, the class of (especially manufacturing) employers, and the government. There are, in fact, a number of transformations or ‘makings’ involved here. There are new forms of class struggle; the strike, trade union, and radical press which tend to replace the ‘food riot’ and other plebeian mass actions. There is a profound ideological shift, from the radical constitutionalism of the 1790s, the retreat into Methodism, and then Owenism and quasi socialist political economy. Dramatically changed too are class alignments, the methods and scale of production, economic relations, the size and nature of the new factory labour force, and finally the depth of class divisions. A modest revolutionary current centred on London artisans in the 1790s is transformed, by 1830, through repression, exploitation and struggle, into a widespread determination across the broad working class to overthrow the existing order. Much of Thompson’s book is aimed at explaining and documenting the growth in revolutionary temper of the English working class.

The overall transformation of class relations was only in modest part a product of changed methods of production and changed economic relations. One of the central arguments of The Making of the English Working Class is the role played by the growing rapprochement between the landed gentry and manufacturers after the hostilities of 1792, when many manufacturers supported the reform agitation. These two classes were pushed together by their mutual ‘counter-revolutionary panic’ in the face of the French revolution and its English echoes, and, Thompson argues, this in turn expressed itself in every aspect of social life. The Combination Acts of 1799-1800 repressed both Jacobin conspiracies and trade union attempts to raise wages, further cementing the ruling class alliance and the alienation of working people from both their economic and political rulers. Napoleon’s self-installation as emperor saw former Jacobin-baiters appealing to English Jacobins to support the new war against France as lovers of liberty.[14]

The repeal of most paternalist legislation, one of the main hegemonic mechanisms of gentry ‘leadership’, allowed free rein to the employers, and again profoundly alienated wide layers of the working class. Thompson sees the class struggles of Luddism as one of the results.[15] And the challenge of Luddism, the inability of the magistrates and armed forces to penetrate and destroy Luddism, and the successful armed defence of the Rawfolds factory by the mill owner, further illustrated their mutual dependence and cemented a growing partnership. ‘But what brought emotional reconciliation to the properties classes brought profounder antagonism between them and the working classes.’[16] The old means of resistance, for example, the defence of traditional use rights and customary prices, the petitioning of parliament, had become anachronistic. Trade unionism was the one working class response which survived and flourished because in the environment of the factory and workplace community it was just possible to sustain and protect illegal unions whereas insurrectionary conspiracies culminated in the disastrous Pentridge rising of 1817. Friendly societies also emerged ‘in response to certain common experiences,’[17] and in turn stimulated trade unionism. In trade union politics, William Sewell sees a dual transformation. Collectivism was generalised from narrow individual trade union solidarity to all workers; while in the radical republican tradition, which had established roots amongst London artisans in the 1790s, the central role of private property was challenged in favour of collective aims. The result was a view of political rights being due to those who laboured, rather than those who owned property. These new ideas proved to be ‘remarkably durable’.[18] The English working class was in considerable part made by, and in response to, the united ruling class offensive it faced.

A critical element in Thompson’s account, and in all his history, is the part played by human experience. He rejected the idea that social being determined consciousness as mechanical and false, and instead posed a more mediated, though still materially based relationship.

Changes take place within social being, which give rise to changed experience: and this experience is determining, in the sense that it exerts pressures upon existent social consciousness, proposes new questions... [it] walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve: their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned: in prison they meditate in new ways about the law. In the face of such general experiences old conceptual systems may crumble and new problematics insist upon their presence.[19]

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[1] E.P. Thompson The Poverty of Theory and other essays, Merlin Press, London, 1978, p. 1.

[2] Ibid, p. 271.

[3] David McNally, ‘E. P. Thompson: class struggle and historical materialism’ in International Socialism (London), No 61, (Winter 1993), p. 76.

[4] Cit, Harvey Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis, Polity Press, London, 1984, p. 172.

[5] These were ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ and ‘The Poverty of Theory’, both published in E. P. Thompson The Poverty of Theory and other essays, Merlin Press, London, 1978.

[6] Tom Nairn quoted in Ellen Meiksins Wood ‘The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E. P. Thompson and His Critics’ in Studies in Political Economy: a socialist review, No 9, (Fall 1982), p. 46.

[7] This is also the theme of Harvey Kaye’s analysis; see Harvey Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis, Polity Press, London, 1984, p. 173.

[8] E. P. Thompson Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990, p. 244.

[9] The criticism of culturalism is rejected by, among others, Keith McClelland, William Sewell, Ellen Meiksens Wood, Harvey Kaye and Bryan Palmer

[10] E.  P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ in EP Thompson The Poverty of Theory and other essays, Merlin Press, London, 1978, p. 48.

[11] Ibid, p. 45, ‘Patricians and Plebs’ in E. P. Thompson Customs in Common, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993, p. 93.

[12] This analysis is spelled out in the Chapter, ‘The Politics of the Black Act’, E.P. Thompson Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990, pp. 190-218. See also the brief discussion of ‘causation’ on p. 214.

[13] Ibid, pp. 245, 255.

[14] E. P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 495-6.

[15] Ibid, pp. 600-601.

[16] Ibid, pp. 613-614.

[17] Ibid, p. 462.

[18] William H Sewell, ‘How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E.P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-class Formation’ in Harvey J Kaye, and Keith McClelland (eds.), E P Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Polity Press, London, 1990, pp. 70-71.

[19] E. P. Thompson The Poverty of Theory and other essays, Merlin Press, London, 1978, pp. 200-201.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the BBC in crisis

I have resisted the temptation to comment on the current debacle at the BBC for two reasons.  I have always had considerable respect for the organisation but also because I have an intense dislike of feeding frenzies and comment in the media over the past month or so has increasingly resembled sharks circling a fatally wounded seal.  George Entwistle is undoubtedly the most unfortunate media mogul I can remember.  With a long and distinguished record with the BBC, his appointment as Director-General was almost universally welcomed and yet, after 54 or 55 days in post, having been hit not by one but two perfect media storms, he took the honourable course and fell on his own sword.  This morning's ‘stepping aside’ by Helen Boaden and her deputy—I suspect others will follow—demonstrates that the crisis in the BBC (and it is a crisis) is one of bloated, largely unaccountable management rather than poor journalism (though this was also the case with the North Wales child abuse issue).

The Director-General would probably have survived the decision not to air the Jimmy Savile programme last year on Newsnight.  His defence of the decision before the House of Commons Media Select Committee was hardly his finest hour—his answers were weak and often evasive and appeared to rely on the somewhat worn formula that he did not really know about the proposed programme—but he did act fairly promptly and set up an inquiry to ascertain the rationale behind the decision not to air.  The media has juxtaposed this decision with the broadcasting of fulsome tribute programmes on Savile over Christmas 2011: it would not have been possible to broadcast both and the Newsnight programme would have meant changes to the Christmas schedule.  By juxtaposing the two, it becomes easy for critics to suggest, largely without any evidence to back it up, that the Newsnight programme was sacrificed because of the tributes.  I’ve always thought this was an incredibly weak argument as the BBC changes its schedules with relative ease on other occasions. That Newsnight decided not to broadcast its findings may have been a poor editorial position—but perhaps poor only in retrospect. 

The North Wales care home programme is another matter.  After the Savile controversy, was this a case of getting a hard-hitting programme on child abuse out before the opposition?  One of the first things prospective journalists are told is ‘check your sources’ and yet this is what apparently experienced journalists and editors abjectly failed to do.  A simple phone call to the ‘leading Tory minister of the Thatcher era’ or showing his photograph to the witness would have simply settled the matter and yet for some unaccountable reason no one thought to do this. Perhaps they thought that by not naming him, there would be no problem but even the most green journalist would have realised that this would lead to a rabid and rapid response from the social network media.  It was his flaccid response on the Today programme on Saturday to this that led to Entwistle’s resignation twelve hours later. 

It is important, I think, to see the decision not to broadcast the Savile investigation and broadcast the North Wales programme in context.  The first decision is defensible and is only judged (possibly) as erroneous in retrospect; the second has no defence at all.  This does not mean that all BBC investigative journalism is suspect as some in the media have suggested.  What it does show, however, is that the managerial chain of command is suspect with serious questions to ask about who reported to whom.  Although the more general issue of how the BBC is managed is important and needs close examination, the important thing is to restore the image of investigative journalism and that is relatively easy to do: verify your sources, lawyers view and sign off on the programme, senior editor approves broadcast.  If these simply and obvious steps were not in place, they should have been and if they were, why did they not work? 

Setting the question

The Scottish government has confirmed the question to be put to the people of Scotland in the independence referendum in the autumn of 2014.  Those eligible to vote will be asked to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question: Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?  The Electoral Commission, an independent body will test the Scottish government’s preferred wording in focus groups to see whether it is fair and easily understood.  Getting the question right and unambiguous is important to all those with an interest in the outcome of the referendum. 

The proposed question is essentially divided into two parts: ‘do you agree’ and ‘that Scotland should be an independent country’.  There are problems with the proposed wording but also problems with what is not included in the question.  What is blatantly omitted from the question is any reference to leaving the Union.  You might agree that Scotland should be an independent country but that might not include leaving the Union but independence within the Union.  The critical word is ‘independence’ and what that actually means in practice.  The SNP understand independence to mean that Scotland should become a sovereign nation over which the rest of the Union have no control at all.  However, if Scotland retains the pound sterling as its currency, highly likely given the present instability in the euro-zone, decisions about interest rates, for instance, would be retained in London.  Untangling a union of three hundred years duration will inevitably be messy so that any notion of sovereign independence will inevitably be diluted because of the realities of the existing union and the problems in making a clear, unambiguous divorce.  The problem with not including ‘independence’ by using a question such as ‘should Scotland be governed as a separate country’ is also replete with problems. 

I have always thought that the solution to the Scottish question and the Welsh question lies best in the development of a federal structure in which domestic policy is decided by the constituent countries while those areas that affect the four countries, such as foreign policy, relations with the European Union, terrorism and so on are decided by the Union parliament.  Since the introduction of devolution, the old constitutional notion of a unitary state has become increasingly redundant yet there has been little discussion of the ways in which the nature of the union could be changed to accommodate nationalist aspirations in its constituent parts.  The alternatives appear to be either retaining a unitary union or independence for countries that vote for it.  There has been little debate over the merits of a federal system that maintains union but with a more devolved constitutional framework.  To move in this direction would require a changed mind-set among English politicians who are the most rabid advocates of the existing union and would give the population of the United Kingdom as a whole the opportunity to vote for a changed structure.  In practical terms, this would give Scotland independence especially if linked to fiscal independence to decide those issues that affect Scotland and come up with different policy decisions from England, Wales or Northern Ireland: an evolution of the existing devolved systems.  Independence within an overarching federal union has advantages over complete sovereign independence. 

Arguably, the question proposed is the wrong question not because Scotland is likely to vote for the status quo (if polling is accurate) but because it does not address the question that really needs to be asked: should the United Kingdom be a federal rather than a unitary union?

It’s the story silly: Edward Thompson and narrative

Thompson’s critics argue that his unique narrative style further imposes biased principles onto his historical subjects. It is widely known that Thompson’s initial academic interests were primarily in literature, and his inspiration to become a historian largely has been attributed to his admiration for William Morris, a nineteenth-century politician and historian. Like Morris, Thompson did not object to painting a very lofty and glossy picture of a utopian socialist future. Thompson also agreed with Morris that a socialist revolution would not only entail an economic change but an alteration of peoples’ mind-sets that would embrace the benefits of a socialist system[1].  Thompson’s ideological development as a Marxist historian was shaped just as much by Dickens’s Hard Times as Engel’s The Housing Question[2]. Thompson abandoned his extensive activism for historical writing in the 1960s, because he felt as though a revelation of a past development of working-class consciousness would be equally if not more fruitful to his leftist endeavours. Thompson’s friend Robert Palmer called Thompson’s Marxist beliefs ‘a communism driven less by economic necessity and the logic of determinative forces than by moral passion and desire.’[3] Thompson’s most famous work, The Making of the English Working Class, heavily reflected this fervour with his appreciation for Romantic literature.

While many historians admire Thompson’s writing style in The Making of the English Working Class, Renato Rosaldo is critical about the implications of his writing structure. Rosaldo describes historical writing as a practice that must both remain true to the historical evidence and create a narrative to explain the evidence. Though these components are two distinct entities, they cannot be adequately separated. Facts without an accompanying story are nothing more than a chronology; however, the historical narrative must remain consistent with the information, or else it is simply fiction[4]. Rosaldo then claims that Thompson tells his story in a very ‘melodramatic’ fashion, as to present the history in such a light that the reader would sympathise with the working class. Rosaldo uses the character of Thomas Hardy, the leader of the Correspondence Society in London in the 1790s as an example; Thompson portrays Hardy as a man who was persecuted by the ‘evil forces’ of the state. Nevertheless, this interpretation of Hardy’s oppression could have just as easily been interpreted as a consequence of divine fury, a ‘consequence of moral flaws,’ or ‘a quirk of destiny.’ Rosaldo believes that Thompson’s choice of this ‘melodramatic’ tone is not so much consistent with his subjects’ own perception of their situation but simply Thompson’s interpretation[5].

Rosaldo’s complaint about The Making of the English Working Class is that Thompson treats his narrative as a ‘neutral medium,’ though he has imposed his own understanding of what happened onto his subjects. By telling the history of the working class in a storybook-like fashion, Thompson takes the role of the omniscient narrator in a novel, presuming to know how his subjects really thought and felt. However, Rosaldo identifies the values conveyed in the work as those of Thompsom and not those of the nineteenth-century working class. Thus, the major lesson is that historians, particularly those who are ultimately concerned with human agency, must take care to not conflate their subjects’ perceptions and values with their own, or else they are being unfaithful in their narratives[6]. In Rosaldo’s words, the most unfortunate flaw of The Making of the English Working Class is that ‘the very identification which enables other voices to be heard in their full persuasive force as they speak to the present can at the same time muffle the distinctive tones of the past.[7]‘ Ultimately, the question is that one can never be sure whether historical concepts make history or if they are inherent within historical change.

Although it is impossible to recover a completely (or even mostly) objective account of history, Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class can be criticised because it confuses the author’s own biases on his subjects. If the tone of the work reflected Thompson’s actual relationship to his subjects, it would have been at the hefty expense of the fluidity between past and present and the complex dynamics of human interactions that Thompson wanted so much to convey. Moreover, though Thompson is nearly as guilty of this hazy conflation as Rosaldo claims. The questions posed and answered by The Making of the English Working Class are quite deliberately connected to the work of the New Left. Thompson’s very concern for making the connection present in his work in itself admits the author’s agenda for trying to find links in the Radical Tradition. Thompson never asserted that he was outside of history; he always intentionally and purposefully spoke about the past to the Present. Both in his history and in his activism, Thompson linked the past to the present, because it is the past that provides us with our cultural legacy; however, it is the duty of the present humanity to create the future. Rosaldo himself says quite eloquently that for Thompson, ‘Cultural traditions are selected, recombined and invented as an active part of class formation. Cultural traditions, understood as actively selected versions of the past, constitute and reconstitute themselves through the future.’[8]

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[1] Bryan D. Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, Verso, 1994, pp. 58-59.

[2] Bryan D. Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, Verso, 1994, p. 58.

[3] Bryan D. Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, Verso, 1994, p. 57.

[4] Renato Rosaldo, ‘Social Analysis in History and Anthropology,’ in Harvey J. Kay and Keith McClelland (eds.), E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Temple University Press, 1990, p. 103.

[5] Ibid, pp. 116-117.

[6] Ibid, pp. 116-120.

[7] Ibid, p. 120.

[8] Ibid, p. 103.

Edward Thompson and Marxist history

Edward Thompson made a considerable impact on my first year at university largely because I had the daunting task of reading his The Making of the English Working Class in a week.  Published in 1963, it is the work for which he is still best remembered and, as I quickly found, a work of rare elegance, an exercise as much in literary as historical writing.  E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) was one of the most prominent British historians of the twentieth century. Not only was he a historian but a communist activist, and his insights into the nature and function of history provide interesting answers to some of the most fundamental questions of the discipline. Should one study history solely for its own sake or for its practical use? If one studies history for its present use, how truthfully can one recover the past? Every historian is inevitably biased, but to what extent do they impose their own values and writing styles into the meaning of history?

An insight into Thompson’s early life reveals that he was, first and foremost, a leftist and an activist. He was born in England in 1924 to ardent critics of British imperialism. Thompson followed in his parents’ footsteps[1], joining the British Communist Party in 1942 while a student at Cambridge. Later, he fought in the World War II to fight Fascism in Europe. After the war, Thompson married Dorothy Towers in 1948, also a devoted communist, who was his political and intellectual equal. The Thompsons lived a fulfilling but financially constrained early married life in Halifax, England. Both Edward and Dorothy worked part-time jobs and relied extensively on family to help support their children. Edward worked as a professor in adult education at the University of Leeds, hoping to convert them into socialists. This teaching post was more than a job to Edward; it was another way to transform society. The Thompsons used almost all of their extra money to finance communist activities with which they were both heavily involved. In the 1950s, he was head of the Halifax Peace Committee, editor of Region of Peace (a local leftist journal) and participated in grass-roots activities, such as collaborating with the local working class movement[2]. Miraculously, the Thompsons’ idealism would never fade, even with their subsequent break with the British Communist Party. In fact, the years only seemed to increase their dedication to the movement. In 1956, Edward and Dorothy Thompson resigned from the British Communist Party. Increasingly, they increasingly had become disgruntled by the Communist Party’s attempts to exert their influence among people who were not affiliated with the Party. However, the biggest disappointments came after the February 1956 announcements of the atrocities under Stalin’s regime and the subsequent suppression of the anti-Stalinist activities of the Hungarian working class. By the end of that year, little hope remained for widespread support of the British Communist Party. The Thompsons and seven thousand other members would resign from the British Communist Party in 1956. A few years later Edward Thompson and John Seville published The New Reasoner, a journal for disgruntled communists[3].

Thompson’s departure from British Communist Party politics and its brand of Marxist orthodoxy led him to socialist humanism as a counter to Stalinism that he had come to regard as theory that denied the creative agency of human labour and the values of the individual as an agent in historical process. Stalinism, which was allegedly Marxist theory in practice, failed to implement the ideology’s inherent humanity. Stalinism eliminated values from the political sphere and feared independent thought. Through Stalinist practices, Marxism became an ideology that led to suffering, death, and destruction. The Thompsons eventually joined the mainstream Labour Party in the 1960s and allied themselves with some of the more radical factions. Although the Thompsons remained radicals and not Labour reformists, joining the Labour Party entailed no contradiction. The Thompsons, who abhorred violence, espoused a peaceful revolution within the system and through the ballot box. Unlike some of his contemporaries who changed ideologically to embrace capitalism, Thompson would later speak out against both superpowers during the height of the arms race.

Approaches to History

There is little to distinguish Thompson’s views as an activist from his views as a historian. Just as Thompson realised the need to modify the strict Stalinist interpretation of communism, Thompson also understood the need to reinterpret Marxism on a theoretical level for the purposes of historical writing. Thompson rejected the notion that history must conform to theory. For Thompson, being a Marxist historian simply meant relying on a loose body of theory, which could be modified and reinterpreted. History must not be studied to uphold overarching philosophies. Thompson says that

‘History is not a factory for the manufacturer of Grand Theory…Its business is to recover, to explain and to understand its object—real history.’[4]

Nevertheless, he had faith in historical materialism as an ‘interpretive historical category.’[5] Thompson believed that Marx and Engels had not originally intended for their theories to seem so static, but they were so caught up in developing their ideas that Marxism eventually seemed necessarily inert[6].

Thompson thought that it was best to overcome these synchronic portrayals society by presenting the complexity of human interactions and relationships. He was quite critical of disciplines such as anthropology, which attempt to study human development through a ‘series of stills…each of which shows us a moment of social time transfixed into a single eternal pose.’[7] Instead, Thompson proposed that one should study each second of humanity as though it were ‘...not only a moment of being but also a moment of becoming…Not only is each present moment intricately and necessarily linked to the past and future—a single still could never capture the complex dynamics of human relations and conditions.’[8] It is most important to acknowledge that a historical moment is comprised of an innumerable amount of diverse conflicts, interests, and persuasions. One cannot completely and accurately convey every aspect of even a single historical moment.

Thompson did not believe that Marxist theory was ‘true’ or ‘complete’ in itself but that the ideas derived from this school of thought explain history better than other ideological schools; he felt as though Marxist theory was the closest approximation to the truth[9]. Thompson embraced Engels’ view that theories, understood as only approximation of reality, are not necessarily false when they fail to encompass the complete truth. Theories simply help to make sense of reality, and they should not be discarded, only adjusted and amended to fit historical evidence[10]. In his preface to The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson suggests that there are definite parallels or a unifying ‘logic’ among different social movements, but since nothing ever happens in exactly the same way, there can be no law[11]. In the constructions of historical concepts, it is often hard to generalize. Historians must form ‘expectations’ rather than strict ‘models,’ and they must always allow great flexibility for irregularities, for there are always exceptions to the rule. Despite Thompson’s elasticity in theoretical matters, he did not seek to eliminate theory so much as postmodernists would suggest and only believed in modification of theories rather than a complete obliteration of them. Also, Thompson failed to tackle such issues as linguistic turn or the Derridean ‘metaphysics of presence,’ and his works would never satisfy a postmodernist critique. In response to such challenges, Thompson maintained that ‘the appeal is not (or is rarely) to a choice of values, but to the logic of the discipline. But if we deny the determinate properties of the object, then no discipline remains.’[12]

As a historian, Thompson was an empiricist believing in the ability of historians to reveal the past if they were honest about their motivations and intentions. Thompson thought that the past was subject to an infinite multitude of variables; the historian should attempt to piece these variables together into a collective whole. He was often defensive about the perceived inadequacies of history as a discipline, and in his article ‘Historical Logic,’ Thompson said, ‘Our knowledge may not satisfy some philosophers, but it is enough to keep us occupied.’[13] Thompson argued that history could not be held to the same standards as the sciences. Further Thompson stated

History never afford the conditions for identical experiments; and while, by comparative procedure, we may observe somewhat similar experiments in different laboratories (the rise of the nation-state and industry), we can never reach back into those laboratories and impose our own conditions, and run the experiment through once again. [14]

History, therefore, necessitates its own logic and criteria to be evaluated. The human condition is impossible to generalize, and it is always in flux with contradictions existing in every second. In Thompson’s own notion of ‘historical logic,’ a historian could attain relatively objective knowledge by undergoing an ‘arduous preparation’ and research to arrive at a ‘dialogue’ between successive hypotheses and historical evidence. Thus, information is deemed to be ‘true’ via historical logic if nothing proves it false. A hypothesis is true if it works well enough with the historical evidence to ‘prove’ the outcome at hand. After the historian arrives at this ‘objective knowledge,’ then the second part of this process is for the historian to assign the information a special significance. However, Thompson stresses that it was essential for historians to uncover the truth (though it will inevitably be incomplete) to the very best of one’s ability first. Any new and contradictory piece of data must be taken into account. Bess says about Thompson, ‘He saw no reason why rival explanations could not be fruitfully compared with each other, with an eye both to the internal coherence and to the way in which they confronted ‘fresh and inconvenient evidence.’’ The more accounts and interpretation the historian has, the better he or she can come to a fuller understanding of the subject. After the historian feels comfortable and confident in his or her discoveries, only then should the historian impose his or her own meaning and importance to the matter[15].

Likewise, in evaluating historical knowledge, there are also two levels of contemplation. The first phase is the ‘listening’ phase, in which the historian attempts to understand the situation as objectively as possible. Most importantly, the historian must try to comprehend the events in terms of the subject. In the preface to The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson says about potential criticisms of the subjects, ‘But they lived through these times of acute social disturbances and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experiences; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned, in their own lives, as casualties.’ However, to be made useful to the present, the historian should review the circumstances and then evaluate them in terms of his or her own standards. The lessons from the past are still often relevant today. Thompson says that the West often touts its own values and ideals but forget about the social evils that were never remedied. Moreover, peoples in other areas of the world may successfully prevail over the challenges that the West failed to overcome. The coexistence of these two kinds of aims—accuracy and advocacy—did not trouble Thompson, for he believed that a conscientious writer could distinguish the two and assign each to its own appropriate moment.

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[1] On Thompson’s father see, Mary Lago ‘India’s Prisoner’: A Biography of Edward John Thompson 1886-1946, (University of Missouri Press), 2001. Edward John Thompson, novelist, poet, journalist, and historian of India, was a liberal advocate for Indian culture and political self-determination at a time when Indian affairs were of little general interest in England. As a friend of Nehru, Gandhi, and other Congress Party leaders, Thompson had contacts that many English officials did not have and did not know how to get. Thus, he was an excellent channel for interpreting India to England and England to India. Thompson first went to India in 1910 as a Methodist missionary to teach English literature at Bankura Wesleyan College. It was there that he cultivated the literary circle of Rabindranath Tagore, as yet little known in England, and there Thompson learned of the political contradictions and deficiencies of India’s educational system. His major conflict, personal and professional, was the lingering influence of Victorian Wesleyanism. In 1923, Thompson resigned and returned to teach at Oxford. Interest in South Asia studies was minimal at Oxford, and Thompson turned increasingly to writing Indian history. That work, and his unique account of his experiences in the Mesopotamian campaign in World War I, supply a viewpoint found nowhere else, as well as personal views of literary figures such as Robert Graves and Robert Bridges. Thompson was also a major influence on the work of his son.

[2] Bryan D. Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, (Verso), 1994, pp. 50-65.

[3] Ibid, Bryan D. Palmer, Objections and Oppositions, pp. 72-73.

[4] E. P. Thompson, ‘Historical Logic,’ in The Essential E. P. Thompson, edited Dorothy Thompson, (New Press), 1993, p. 454.

[5] Ibid, p. 458.

[6] Ibid, pp. 464-467.

[7] Ibid, p. 455.

[8] Ibid, p. 455.

[9] Ibid, p. 452.

[10] E. P. Thompson, ‘Marxism and History,’ in The Essential E. P. Thompson, p. 461.

[11] E. P. Thompson, ‘Preface from The Making of the English Working Class’ in The Essential E.P. Thompson, pp. 4-7

[12] E. P. Thompson, ‘Historical Logic,’ in The Essential E. P. Thompson, p. 449.

[13] Ibid, p. 458.

[14] Ibid, p. 455.

[15] Ibid, pp. 447-450.

Is Britishness anything more than a construct?

I was born and spent my early years in the Fens now seen as part of East Anglia, something many people born there still resent.  Like many other areas in the country the Fens are a distinctive area with its own culture and history.  Two stories illustrate what was its character forty years ago.  During the war when road signs were removed, a Yorkshire man was travelling through the Fens and in its horizontal landscape lost his way.  Seeing a local farmer, he asked for directions which the farmer freely gave.  Twenty minutes later, the Yorkshire man arrived back at the same place and found himself facing the farmer and his shotgun.  When asked why he’d given the wrong instructions, the farmer retorted that he thought the man’s accent was German and that he was a spy.  Whether the tale is true or, as I suspect, apocryphal (could anyone be quite that stupid!), it illustrates the isolation and parochialism of the Fens at this time.  The second story is certainly true as it involved my father.  He was born in London but although he lived in the Fens for over forty years he was still regarded as an outsider.  There was a harvest dance, held annually and regarded as the height of the social calendar but my father always had to go into the dance via the back door as only those born in the Fens could come in the front..local custom it may have been but incredibly insulting to someone who, in every other respect, was highly regarded in the area.  Today all of this has changed but for many born in the Fens, they still see themselves as Fenmen or women first and then grudgingly English but rarely as British.
 

With the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence and the debate over what sort of History should be taught in schools, Britishness is again a matter for national discussion.  The problem is that what Britishness actually means is unclear and calls for a stronger sense of our British identity are often met with some hostility; it is seen as very ‘un-British’!  As David Cameron said, somewhat dismissively on one occasion, that unlike the Americans we ‘don‘t do flags on the lawn’.  Jana Ganesh of The Economist may be right to suggest that ‘What Englishness can't do that Britishness can do is appeal unambiguously to people of different ethnic origins’, but this does not resolve the problem of definition other than the vague and inherently contested notions of toleration, freedom and individual liberty.  The problem is that Britain is a geographical terms on to which has been foisted the political concept of the United Kingdom, itself a recognition that there are political different parts in Britain and that Anglicisation was a fundamental part of that process of unification.  One approach advocated by the education right is for a return to traditional teaching of British history.  No one could deny that it is important for people to know about their history and across the world this is a central feature of the school curriculum but traditional British history is rarely British in nature but centres on ‘top-down’ story of monarchs and parliaments.  What happened outside England was, and this was evident in my school experience, only ever taught when it impinged on England.  So my experience of Welsh history was confined to Edward I and castle-building; the Potato Famine for Ireland; and, Bannockburn, Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobite Rebellions for Scotland.  No Black or Asian history and the British Empire as a beacon of civilisation rather than a violent, destructive and economic multinational company.  The traditional history curriculum reinforced a sense of English superiority not Britishness. 

Britishness was an expression of English superiority and for some the two terms were synonymous.  But Scotland, Wales and Ireland have their own history that is separate from what occurred in England.  In fact, studying history suggests strongly that what makes Britain is an amalgam of different and often conflicting histories and it is through this diversity that Britishness, if it exists at all beyond its sense of a social construct, needs to be addressed.  In fact Britishness is meaningless without this and a recognition that the British Isles are and always have been a cultural melting-pot in which different peoples have come for vastly different reasons: conquest, settlement, economic immigration, political asylum…..  Britishness reflects how and why those groups have eventually integrated even if they retained, at least initially, their own cultural identities and is a common feature across the United Kingdoms.  How we see ourselves is the result of where we were born, where our parents and grandparents were born, where we live now and the cultural values we inherit from the past and those cultural values are diverse.  The strength of Britishness lies in its inherent vagueness and ambiguity and attempting to define it more precisely will destroy what is its most positive expression: British diversity allows for different levels of Britishness and cultural integration and values it.  The advantage of a social construct like Britishness is that it cannot be defined or expressed in definitive terms; to do so would eradicate its annoying but essential inconsistencies and ambiguities, prevent people from buying into some but not necessarily all of its characteristics and result in a culturally poorer society.