Page 64 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 53

Against this view—which is not altogether a parody—one would want to
insist on a pattern of challenge and response, action and reaction, problem and
‘solution’, threat and containment (but containment always on a higher level): a
pattern, in short, of struggle. At least this permits a curiosity about periods of
working-class challenge, even if these ended up being contained within the
corporate adaptation. For it is a matter of historical record that every now and
again Nairn and Anderson’s supine, untheoretical giant (who is usually
preoccupied by less dramatic but necessary forms of subversion) has flexed
muscles, hunched back and shaken the whole edifice. Then, of course, the
politicians and the ideologues have got busily to work again, tying him down,
eroding his gains, conceding the inevitable but patching the bigger breaches—
hence a new ‘order’, incorporating a few real gains, exhausting one part of a
repertoire of ‘solutions’ but representing an advance minute in proportion to the
original effort.
To think in these terms is useful in two ways. It helps to make sense of an
obvious feature of the story: the periodicity of crisis and relative stabilization. This
is a recurrent, if irregular, pattern. One crude periodization might go like this:
Each crisis or dissolution, of course, has its own determination and configuration;
a cyclical pattern is not intended.
To think in these terms also allows us to give a proportionate historical role to
the living force of 70 to 80 per cent of historical populations. For at the base of
every moment of challenge are the experiences of a working class, or groups of
working people, trying to live their everyday lives under capitalism. What these
lives are like, and how the mass of the people understand them, and how control
enters into that understanding are therefore key themes for our history.
The principal and determining fault in the substance of the Nairn/Anderson
account is their recreation of the relationship of industrial and landed groups
within the dominant class since the Industrial Revolution. It is possible to