Kmflett's Blog

The socialist historian and activist E P Thompson was born 100 years ago today. He died aged 69 in 1993.

There is an event to mark the centenary in Halifax which unfortunately I am unable to attend. Partly through transport issues (solidarity to ASLEF) but also a duty of solidarity with Palestinian. Thompson who was a life long anti-imperialist who wrote that the British left has ‘so bloody much to oppose’ would have understood I suspect.

Consulting as I often to the Making of the English Working Class I continue to be struck by how much of an intervention in modern politics it is. Of course Thompson’s intervention was in the post-1956 first new left. However many of the brief but to the point wider political points he makes in the book remain relevant.

Talking of the demise of radical hopes for the 1789 French Revolution and Government repression of activists and writers who supported it, Thompson noted:

there commenced for an intellectual generation that pattern of revolutionary disenchantment, which foreshadows the shoddier patterns of our own century

The spectacle of those abandon the left at the very moment there is need to stay around and organise anew remains familiar.

Later in the book Thompson criticises the Webbs and Fabian histories and defends the tradition of Luddism. He notes that ‘for those who live through it history is neither ‘early’ or ‘late’. Forerunners are also the inheritors of another past. Men must be judged in their own context’

Again it is an historiographical comment with obvious relevance for the present. Ideas and movements should not be written off but understood on their own terms