Page 48 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 37

useful knowledge’, as nineteenth-century radicals would have called it. It is
needed to inform a political practice that is not chauvinistically blind to ‘foreign’
lessons and sympathies, nor yet incapable of seeing, through a concern with
‘absences’, the most evident features of an immediate world. Of particular
importance in this understanding of place are the most persistent long-term
features, the most ‘structural’ and abiding peculiarities, the contours that need to
be observed.
Finally, we need to engage with the ways of studying history that are already
in the field and with which we have, of necessity, been brought up. This is
important because the kind of history we should practise here remains quite
unformed. It can only develop through a series of critiques of existing modes.
We have not, in this Centre, defined our ‘cultural history’, and we are not even
sure if that is the right phrase. All we have are some rules of practice and slogans
(‘Struggle against idealism and other common reductions!’ ‘Keep it complex/
concrete!’ ‘Preserve the authenticity of subjective experience!’) and some
powerful but incomplete or incompletely understood models (Marx as historian;
historians of the Marxist revival in France and Britain; the Annales school as the
historical variant of the French structuralist family; Gramsci for his suggestive
and profoundly historical ‘notes’). This is not much more than a beginning.
A project like the one outlined above sounds grandiose, especially in England,
where historical ambitions are meagre. It has to be collective and long-term. This
paper is meant to clear a tiny bit of ground for one part of the enterprise—
sketching the peculiarities of the English—by considering those who have been
there before.
In November 1844 Engels finished his Condition of the Working Class in
England. Written from ‘personal observation and authentic sources’, it marked
an important point in the development of Marxism, serving to repair the young
Hegelians’ ignorance of ‘the real condition of life of the proletariat’, helping to
ground their communism not, as hitherto, in the critique of philosophy and
1
political economy, but in the experience of the first working class. Engels now
planned a bigger project: ‘As soon as I am through with that [he wrote to Marx] I
shall tackle the history of the social development of the English, which will cost
me much less effort, because I have the material for it all ready and arranged in
my head, and because the whole business is perfectly clear to me.’ This plan
2
was never carried out and if one traces Marx and Engels’s encounter with the
English it seems that the initial clarity was clouded. After 1848 the English
experiences seemed more and more paradoxical: the oldest capitalist country
with the most ‘developed’ working class seemed immune to revolution and ‘the

*This article first appeared in Culture and Domination, WPCS 9 (1976). It is a twice-
revised version of two papers given to the Theory Seminar at the Centre in November
1974. Earlier versions were also given to the Social History Seminar at Birmingham.
Acknowledgements to everybody in a mind-stretching first year at the Centre.