Page 93 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

82 Chapter Two

(1963), is third of the inaugural cultural studies texts. Interestingly, like Cul-
ture and Society and The Uses of Literacy, The Making of the English Work-
ing Class, too, came out of adult teaching. 129 Poet, historian, and peace ac-
tivist, Thompson was also biographer of the British socialist William Morris
and of the poet William Blake.
The opening paragraphs of The Making of the English Working Class show
both the inseparability in Thompson’s mind of what are today known as po-
litical economy and cultural studies, and the inadequacy, for him, of the
base/superstructure model. “Class,” he declared, “is a cultural as much as an
economic formation.” 130 Class “happens,”

when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel
and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and against
other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.
The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into
which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in
which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions,
value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. . . . Class is a relationship, and not
a thing. 131

Later, even more clearly and insistently in what may be taken as a précis
of his entire book, he wrote:

The making of the working class is a fact of political and cultural, as much as
of economic, history. It was not the spontaneous generation of the factory sys-
tem. Nor should we think of an external force—the “industrial revolution”—
working upon some nondescript undifferentiated raw material of humanity, and
turning it out at the other end as a “fresh race of beings.” The changing pro-
ductive relations and working conditions of the Industrial Revolution were im-
posed, not upon raw material, but upon the free-born Englishman—and the free-
born Englishman as Paine had left him or as the Methodists had moulded him.
The factory hand or stockinger was also the inheritor of Bunyan, of remembered
village rights, of notions of equality before the law, of craft traditions. He was
the object of massive religious indoctrination and the creator of political tradi-
tions. The working class made itself as much as it was made. 132
In these excerpts, interdependencies among such key terms as culture, lit-
erature, class, productive relations, conflict, experience, traditions, religion,
ideas, laws, institutional forms, and relationships are proposed with clarity
and brevity. Thompson’s book—over 900 pages—amplifies these connec-
tions through historical study and analysis of the period of the Industrial Rev-
olution in England, particularly 1780 to 1832.