My New Statesman essay on E. P Thompson sixty years on from the publication of The Making of the English Working Class, and thirty years since his death in 1993, can be read here.
1951
From William Morris and the Moral Issues Today:
In one of his first socialist lectures, William Morris said: ‘It is to stir you up not to be contented with a little that I am here tonight.’ That is the job we have to do. If we wish to save people from the spreading taint of death, then we must win them for life. We do not wait for a new kind of person to appear until after socialism has been won, any more than we wait for Marxism to arise within a communist society. We must change people now, for that is the essence of all our cultural work. And in this work, all the forces of health within society are on our side: all those who, in whatever way, desire a richer life, all those who have warmer ambitions for Britain than those of tedious insolvency and rearmament, all those, indeed, who desire any life at all, can be won to our side if we take to them the message of life against that of the slaughter-house culture.
1959
From Commitment in Politics:
At the commencement of the Dock Strike, Engels was lamenting England’s “bourgeois proletariat.” And this period, from 1850 to 1880 and beyond, saw a striving for status within the working class as sharp as any to be found today: self-made man against skilled worker, the skilled unionist against the labourer, the butty system in the pits. Exploitation has never been something done at a cohesive working class by employers above them; it has also been part of the very conditions of life and work of the whole people. The ethos which Stuart Hall describes so perceptively, and terms “the status ladder,” went by the name, in Victorian England, of “self-help.” Self-help was equally divisive, it entered as deeply into the organisations of the working people.
I am making two points. First, working-class history is not the record of a coherent “way of life”; it has always been a way of struggle, between competing moralities. At any given point a whole complex of objective and active, subjective factors determine which morality is dominant. The objective factors are most obvious: in times of relative prosperity and social flexibility, when it is possible for individuals or groups to “better themselves,” the acquisitive ethic and the status-striving assert themselves. Conversely, in times of hardship, when it is most clear that the working class can only defend themselves or advance by collective action, the communal ethic flowers.
This way of struggle, against class rule above, and between competing moralities within the working class, has never been a blind, spontaneous reflex to objective economic conditions. It has been a conscious struggle of ideas and values all the way … In times of brutalisation and degradation, working people have asserted their humanity only by revolt against these conditions; and the most conscious, morally-engaged form of revolt has been in political organisation.
For 150 years the political minority has been the carrier of the aspirations of the majority; it has been the point at which the diffuse ideal of community has come to effective expression. For working people above all, the road to human fulfilment in capitalist society has been bound up, in one way or another, with organisation. It is through conscious action against exploitation and class oppression that they have ceased to be victims of their environment, and have achieved the dignity of actors in the making of their own history.
1970
From Sir, Writing by Candlelight:
The grand lesson of the ‘emergency’ was this: the intricate reciprocity of human needs and services — a reciprocity of which we are, every day, the beneficiaries. In our reified mental world, we think we are dependent upon things. What other people do for us is mediated by inanimate objects: the switch, the water tap, the lavatory chain, the telephone receiver, the cheque through the post. That cheque is where the duties of the good bourgeois end. But let the switch or the tap, the chain or the receiver fail, and then the bourgeois discovers — at once — enormous ‘oughts’ within the reciprocal flow.
But these ‘oughts’ are always the moral obligations of other people: the sewage workers ought not to kill fish, the dustmen ought not to encourage rats, the power workers ought not to imperil invalids, and — this week it will be — the postmen ought not to deny bronchitic old-age pensioners their Christmas parcels from grandchildren in Australia. Why, all these people owe a duty to the ‘community’!
What the duty of the community is to these people is less firmly stated. Certainly, those whose lolly is the theme of the business supplements — those whose salary increases (like those of admirals and university teachers) are awarded quietly and without fuss, and which (it seems) create no national emergency and no dangerous inflationary pressures — have little need to compose letters to The Times as to their own moral obligations and duties.
It is the business of the servant class to serve. And it is the logic of this reified bourgeois world that their services are only noticed when they cease. It is only when the dustbins linger in the street, the unsorted post piles up — it is only when the power workers throw across the switches and look out into a darkness of their own making — that the servants know suddenly the great unspoken fact about our society: their own daily power.
1983
From In Defence of Britain:
On May 1st of this year I was invited by the very vigorous branch of CND on the Isle of Wight to speak at a meeting, and, since I had never visited the island, my wife and I decided to take a day off walking on the downs.
It was a beautiful day, and the Island was spared some of the drenching weather the rest of us have been having. What came into my mind, as we walked the downs, was what an extraordinarily favoured part of this planet we have the good fortune to live upon, and also how favoured this planet itself is in a universe which is mostly made up of emptiness and fire and gas and dust.
It is a fit which is falling upon me more frequently, in the intervals of 'grass-roots activism', and I suppose it is a premonition of something: perhaps senility. It came upon me again, three days ago, when I drove across from Worcester to a rally of Christian CND in Carmarthen in South-West Wales. Mile upon mile a garden unfolded itself before me, with lush grass and with huge trees with late-opening leaves and lilacs in bloom; the wet spring had left these counties as the greenest place in the whole universe, the place with the strongest grass-roots of anywhere in the globe. It seemed to be a pity to leave this place in the knowledge that, in a few decades or so, it would be burned up.
I think that we are favoured, and that we owe a duty, not only to ourselves, but also to our ancestors who attended to the culture both of our fields and of our laws and institutions - who made them kempt and yet not too tidy nor too disciplined - and a duty also to hand on the place to the future. Despite the worst that agro-businesses and multinationals can do, despite the avarice of developers, despite the blasting of our inner cities, and despite the growing invasion of an arrogant state upon our rights, there is still enough here—not just to preserve but carry us forward - to bring us through to a humane commonwealth.
That sort of mood fell upon me also in the downs on the Isle of Wight. We are not well-fitted by our history to be the kind of people who just lie down and give up the ghost. There is something here that is still worth defending. Even if there is little opportunity for livelihood now in our shattered inner cities, there are people there who still inherit a culture which enables them to resist. And I thought of a pamphlet which I might write, as my contribution to the coming election next October. It would be a sequel to Protest and Survive, and it would be about the defence of all this – of our lives and of our liberties. It would be called The Defence of Britain.
....
The question is: is this really the kind of nation which we wish to be, and is this how we wish to be seen in the world? For I have travelled a bit since then, and have found that the Falklands War was regarded by most other nations in a very different light. It was seen as a bizarre episode, a sudden flush of imperial nostalgia, as if Britain had suddenly fallen through a time-warp into the 18th or 19th century. It made other peoples recall that Britain was still a nation to be feared. But fear is not the same thing as respect.
The Falklands War was the last episode of our old imperial past. It summoned up the nostalgias and the resentments of a nation in decline…there is no way forward for any nation down the paths of nostalgia and reminiscence. That will become the rhetoric of rogues, and we will be screwed as their subjects. To become lost in the rehearsal of past grandeur (as Spain once did) is the path towards true decline.
That is one kind of Britain we can choose : a security state, with a subjected people – a client state which still struts and postures in the world as a bully, which lets its staple industries decline while it exhausts its revenue upon an absurd and obscene great-power-symbol (the 'independent deterrent'), and whose written culture oscillates between cynicism and self-deluding nostalgia.
There has, however, always been an alternative Britain in these islands, and I suppose that my pamphlet may get through to some of them. I know all the dangers of national feeling, and I know more than most (since I am an historian) about Britain's imperial sins. Yet I cannot agree that the history of this island has been, in every way, a disgraceful one; nor that there is nothing in it that it is worth defending.
This has not only been a nation of bullies. It has also been a nation of poets and of inventors, of thinkers and of scientists. It has been, for a time, a place of innovation in human culture. Here were worked out certain laws and democratic forms which have influenced the forms of States in every continent; here there were conducted, over centuries, great arguments of religious faith which were then carried across the Atlantic; here some of the first trade unions and co-operatives were formed, without whose example multitudes over the whole earth might still suffer extremities of exploitation; here, and in our neighbour, France, were worked out some of the clearest claims to human rights.
I say that the alternative Britain must stand to those rights now, and exercise them with the very greatest vigour. And in doing this we may be fortified by the knowledge that in defending ourselves, we may also be defending the future of the world.
1991
From Ends and Histories:
How on earth can these prestigious persons in Washington ramble on in their sub-intellectual way about the "end of history"? As I look forward into the twenty-first century I sometimes agonize about the times in which my grandchildren and their children will live. It is not so much the rise in population as the rise in universal material expectations of the globe's huge population that will be straining its resources to the very limits. North-South antagonisms will certainly sharpen, and religious and nationalist fundamentalisms become more intransigent. The struggle to bring consumer greed within moderate control, to defend the environment and to prevent ecological disasters, to share more equitably the world's resources and to insure their renewal – all this is agenda enough for the continuation of "history." It is an agenda that will not find all the answers in an unrestrained market economy.
On the contrary, we are going to need the fullest repertory of forms – cooperative, individual enterprise, social democratic, the centralised planning of some resources, autonomous units – as well as new forms and ways based on families, communities and neighbourhoods, and new forms of self-government and simplified styles of living. In all this, socialism has not been discredited, although command economy communism has; socialism is part of the inheritance we shall need, although drawn upon critically and selectively. The most viable future may well be a kind of socialism, although of a green and individualistic kind, with strong anti-state resistances…
When the time is ready, ideas can flow like the rivers of China in flood. I think that ‘we’ helped to throw down the banks and let those pent-up waters through. Those waters are not just those of the rejection of all forms of socialism. They are also those of renewal … So when I speak of a healing process I do not mean that this process should start today or tomorrow. I mean that it has long been the hidden and unreported script; for a decade the forces of peace and freedom, or a ‘green’ libertarian socialism, have been recognizing each other. The events of late 1989 were a part of that healing. It is already far advanced.
Of course, the long process of finding our friends, of mutual recognitions and rejections, of forming new alliances and establishing new projects, will not be the work of five or six months … it is a terribly long and thankless task to try to influence the course of history by little movements ‘from below’. Yet such minority positions, through most of recorded human history, have been the only honourable places to be; nor do they always fail in the long run. Today there is nothing to prevent these minorities, East and West, from growing in strength and discovering common strategies. The citizens’ search for a common project, bringing together widening constituencies in a direct discourse unmediated by Cold War agencies or media, is the urgent task of our time.
Lots of news: I have a new job, as an editor at Plough. I have a new website, which you can view here. I am, if not entirely returned to health, less ill than I was.
Aside from the Thompson essay, more writing in the pipeline than emerging from it, but you can read my TLS review of Christina Moretti’s ‘The Invention of Marxism’ here.
I am going on retreat at Pluscarden soon, ahead of my birthday, which falls on the feast of the exaltation of the holy cross; please pray that it is a spiritually fruitful time for me.
Wishing you a quiet night and a perfect end. ☩