60th anniversary of the Making of the English Working Class. Who was Thompson rescuing from the enormous condescension of posterity?
Radio 3 has been a series of short pieces on the 60th anniversary of E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class first published in hardback in 1963.
On Thursday long ago CPGB member and Times columnist spoke on ‘Rescuers’. To be honest it was hardcore and probably more for those us who remember (for better or worse) the days before 1990 when the old CPGB still existed.
Aaronovitch focused on Thompson’s argument with the Polish historian Leszek Kowalowski. Thompson argued that he had happened Marxism with the Stalinist bathwater and hence by implication there was something worth rescuing in Thompson’s view.
Aaronovitch focused on the section in the introduction to the Making where Thompson talks of rescuing utopians and defeated workers and causes from the enormous condescension of posterity. Thompson’s argument was, 60 years ago, that these causes defeated in Britain might yet be won elsewhere in the world. In the meantime South Africa has ditched apartheid and Vietnam ejected the US so perhaps there a point, even if limited there.
Aaronovitch by contrast seemed to be arguing that the Making was rescuing something in official Communism. Obviously Thompson made the point that his methodology was precisely not that of mechanical Marxism and agency is central to the book.
Aaronovitch who mentioned both Thompson’s elder brother Frank-shot as a partisan in World War Two and the fact that before 1956 the CP Historians Group had been relatively free from Moscow telling it what the historical line was seemed to have in mind the Making rescuing something or other in the CPGB tradition.
What I wasn’t too sure but again the point often made is the popular front tradition which relates to popular struggles and peoples history. It is a strand in the Making but not the only one suggesting the book was also part of the making or remaking of Thompson’s own political and historical perspectives
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