Webber EPThompson Jacobin July24 2015
Webber EPThompson Jacobin July24 2015
Webber EPThompson Jacobin July24 2015
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/makingenglish-working-class-luddites-romanticism/
E. P. Thompsons Romantic
Marxism
E. P. Thompson brilliantly chronicled the ravages of early
capitalism and the fierce resistance it provoked.
by Jeffery R. Webber
exchange value, of the cold calculation of price and profit, and of the
laws of the market, over the whole social fabric.
With the quantification of life in bourgeois civilization came the
decline of all qualitative values social, religious, ethical, cultural
or aesthetic ones the dissolution of all qualitative human bonds,
the death of imagination and romance, the dull uniformization of
life, the purely utilitarian i.e. quantitatively calculable relation
of human beings to one another, and to nature.
This quality of quantification under capitalist social relations
expressed itself in specific ways in the workplace and labor process
of the Industrial Revolution. Pre-capitalist handicraft, and its
association with creativity and imagination, was replaced by an
increasingly strict division of labor, and dull and repetitious toil, in
which the worker, losing what made her human, became a mere
appendage to the machine.
Marx himself drew with gusto from Romantic novelists, economists,
and philosophers, even if the pull of the Enlightenment and classical
political economy on his thinking would make it erroneous to label
him a romantic anticapitalist.
Neither apologetic of bourgeois civilization nor blind to its
achievements, Lwy notes of Marx,
he aims at a higher form of social organization, which would
integrate both the technical advances of modern society and some
of the human qualities of pre-capitalist communities as well as
opening a new and boundless field for the development and
enrichment of human life. A new conception of labor as a free, nonalienated, and creative activity as against the dull and narrow toil
much more recent date but with, none the less, their own cultural
patterns and traditions were literally extinguished . . . Until these
final agonies, the older weaving communities offered a way of life
which their members greatly preferred to the higher material
standards of the factory town.
Avoiding naive sentimentality, but punching back against the
disparagers of the weavers tragedy, Thompson notes the unique
blend of social conservatism, local pride, and cultural attainment
that made up the way of life of the Yorkshire or Lancashire weaving
community. For Thompson, these communities were certainly
backward in the sense that they clung with equal tenacity to
their dialect, traditions and regional customs, and gross medical
ignorance and superstitions. But a story that ended there would be
too partial and reductive.
The closer we look at their way of life, Thompson urges, the more
inadequate simple notions of economic progress and backwardness
appear. Moreover, there was certainly a leaven amongst the
northern weavers of self-educated and articulate men of
considerable attainments. Every weaving district had its weaverpoets, biologists, mathematicians, musicians, geologists, botanists,
and so on.
The threat to this way of life encapsulated in the Industrial
Revolution drew the weavers into the Lancashire Radicalism of
18161820, and contributed to its character and content in myriad
ways. They had, like the city artisan, a sense of lost status, as
memories of their golden age lingered, Thompson suggests.
But they had, more than the city artisan, a deep social
egalitarianism. As their way of life, in the better years, had been
Resisting Proletarianization
It is in part three of The Making, however, in its vast, qualitative
measurement of working-class presence, where we encounter the
7.24.15
Jeffery R. Webber teaches politics and international relations at Queen
Mary, University of London. He sits on the editorial board of Historical
Materialism, and is the author of Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in
Modern Bolivia.