One of the major interests of the English historian E. P. Thompson was the historical processes through which social classes are formed. Thompson saw the dynamics of class-making as involving not just the “objective” economic changes that create new professions and “class positions” as economies develop, but also the political and cultural processes through which individuals come to see themselves as members of a group and then act politically.
For Marxists if not for Marx himself, it is class consciousness in this sense that is the difference between a number of similar but discrete individuals and the collectivity of a class, between a “class in itself” and a “class for itself”. In another register, it’s the difference between potatoes in a sack and a sack of potatoes.
One of Thompson’s lesser-known articles, from 1978, explores the ways in which 18th-century English society might be understood as a period of “class struggle without class”. Thompson offers this striking and seemingly contradictory characterisation of English history in part because of the conclusion he drew from his famous earlier investigation into The Making of the English Working Class (1963)—namely that the late 18th and early 19th century was the period in which the English working class developed class consciousness. As Thompson points out, struggle precedes the formation of classes for themselves. We live in an antagonistic class society, and it is through struggle in part that we come to understand our class position within it. This is why we can have class struggle even when the agents in the conflict do not recognise themselves as classes as such.
For Thompson, then, 18th century food riots in England—before the decisive period of class formation of the working class in the 1790s—took the form of a conflict between two groups (the gentry and the plebs) who were not yet classes. While there was no difficulty distinguishing rich from poor, the gentry and the plebs did not grasp their collective interests specifically as class interests. Thompson’s central insight is that classes need to be politically and socially constituted before they can be political actors, and it is through the process of class struggle that groups become classes.
For Thompson, we live in an antagonistic class society, and it is through struggle that we come to understand our class position within it. This is why we can have class struggle even when the agents in the conflict do not recognise themselves as classes as such.
Thompson’s perspective is needed today because the political situation of 18th century England is now more familiar to us than Thompson—who died in 1993—would have expected. This is because the thirty years since his death seem to have shown us the process of The Making of the English Working Class in reverse. That is, we have experienced not a period of new class-making in the past decades, but one of class-unmaking.
In this context, the central question today is not the forward-looking one of how rebellious groups become classes. It is rather a backward-looking one that Thompson’s analysis now suggests: if classes need political processes to be made, can they also—through the same processes—be unmade? In other words, can a class lose so much political agency and ideological self-consciousness that it ceases to act as a class?
We have experienced not a period of new class-making in the past decades, but one of class-unmaking.
There are good reasons to think that we might have seen this process of class unmaking reach the point where the central classes of capitalism—the working class and the capitalist class—do not really exist. The 1980s saw an epochal defeat of the organized working class, consolidated in the nineties and noughties. Less widely recognised is that this defeat of the working class was also a defeat of the capitalist class. The capitalist class gets its dynamism and historical mission not from the individual geniuses that compose it, but from the threat of revolutionary action on the part of labour. It is in the past decades that Western societies have seen the hollowing out of the intermediating institutions that previously helped produce class consciousness in the 20th century: trade unions, political parties, churches, and other associational groups of all sorts. We are now isolated individuals, posting alone. We also lack anything that can play the role previously filled by the Soviet Union, the Big Other of the American 20th century, that showed (through a glass, darkly) that a society based on another sort of class structure might be possible (though there is a remarkable increase of people in the West who now pretend that the Chinese Communist Party offers this sort of alternative today).
The defeat of the working class was also a defeat of the capitalist class.
If the above analysis is correct, then we may have entered a truly new historical situation: class struggle without classes, not because those classes do not yet exist, but because they no longer do.
Thompson’s analysis of history is ultimately an optimistic one: the knowledge that the plebs would become the great English working class gave their struggles a retrospectively elevated historical position. It might be the case that we are now in the opposite position. We have seen the passage from political conflicts in advanced industrial democracies, in which classes were central, to the plebs of the 18th century, which explains the extraordinary pessimism that pervades the West.
The normalization of visions of environmental catastrophe and the reality of technological stagnation sit alongside a profound scepticism towards the value of the human as such. But Thompson’s optimism is, of course, never possible for those looking at the present, who are forced to make their assessments of the meaning of the political conflicts of the day without knowing what they might develop into. If the tractor replaces the picket line as the symbol of working-class revolt, this can only be a good thing, even if we cannot know now what comes next.
