The making of the English working class

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1. beedeebeedeeJul 2024
   I met him once but never took a class. I wish I had because I enjoyed listening to him. Deeply knowledgeable and great intellect. We spoke mostly about the Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson, which is worth reading by everyone in the US and UK (and elsewhere). The other great book by James C. Scott is Weapons of the Weak.
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2. paganelJan 2018
   If you haven't read it already I highly recommend reading "The Making of the English Working Class", by E. P. Thompson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Work...). I know it's almost required reading in many Anglo-Saxon countries but as a guy who grew up and lives in (Eastern) Europe I only found out about it pretty recently, and I was pretty fascinated by it (and I say that as a guy who leans to the right of the political spectrum).

   In the same vein I also recommend Jacques Rancière's "La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier." (link to English translation on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Proletarian-Nights-Workers-Nineteenth..., I've read the book in French, can't vouch for the translation), which writes about the French worker movements active around the 1840s-1860s and their relation to utopian ideas. There are also a couple of chapters on Étienne Cabet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_Cabet), a pretty interesting character.

   > In 1848, Cabet gave up on the notion of reforming French society. Instead, after conversations with Robert Owen and Owen's attempts to found a commune in Texas, Cabet gathered a group of followers from across France and traveled to the United States to organize an Icarian community.[6] They entered into a social contract, making Cabet the director-in-chief for the first ten years, and embarked from Le Havre, February 3, 1848, to take up land on the Red River in Texas. Cabet came later at the head of a second and smaller band. Texas did not prove to be the Utopia looked for, and, ravaged by disease, about one-third of the colonists returned to France.[2]

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3. paganelFeb 2017
   > First, large tracts of lands in Britain, largely held in the commons, were stolen from the peasantry and given to private individuals and landlords, as part of the Enclosure movement. This forced the peasants to look for work in cities en masse, providing cheap labor for the capitalists.

   A very interesting related book that I've read about that period and which I'd recommend to everyone generally interested in economic and social history is E. P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Work...). I'm generally leaning on the right side of politics and economics (I'm a sympathizer of both Bentham and Benjamin Constant, who are not receiving very kind words in this book), but I found it super interesting and I find it intellectual honest to try and and understand opinions (and related facts) coming from multiple sides of the story.

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4. Alex3917Feb 2013
   "Again, any kind of research to back up such a bold and incredibly controversial statement?"

   There are dozens of books and movies about this. Life Inc by Douglas Rushkoff, the documentary Century of the Self, even John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education goes into this quite a bit. Not to mention The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson.

   The idea that we arrived at mandatory fiat currency, compulsory education, ubiquitous advertising, etc. through some process of 'cultural consensus' is ridiculous.

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5. thwestMay 2012
   On Mayday of all days such a characterization of Marxism as the extreme on a 1D number line of political responses to urbanization feels simplistic.

   Of the infinitude of academic distinctions of Marx's writing to be raised here, the distinction between "political Marxism" and "analytical Marxism" seems fruitful. For the purposes of this distinction, political Marxism would be the set of writings embedded in the political climate of Marx's age, The Manifesto, etc. The politics that resulted from these writings bloomed initially, but as the mantle was passed through Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky the politics became increasingly fraught with problems (being gentle here.)

   Analytical Marxism for me is limited to _Capital_. Marx proceeds analytically, taking the rich tradition of political economy to heart. Ricardo and Adam Smith are addressed directly. Marx attempts no emotional arguments here, no appeals for solidarity or revolution. Instead, the ideals of capitalism (e.g. exchanges between individuals are mutually beneficial) are taken as true, and Marx attempts to create a framework for analyzing the structural forces that result from this economic mode.

   _Capital_ provides a set of analytical tools that are timeless and non-dogmatic. A great example is the exploration of how the relative prices of various commodities are set (Marx suggests it is emergent behavior). _Capital_ also takes on such problems such as the contradiction between exchange value and use value, and how the investor's and producer's perspective on exchanging commodities and money differs. These are problems many writers wave away as non-problems by maintaining a myopic focus on individual exchanges.

   _Capital Vol.1_ Text http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ A crash course youtube of Marxist analysis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0 All of David Harvey's supplemental materials to _Capital_ are highly recommended: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

   Another text you might be particularly interested in is _The Making of the English Working Class_ by E.P. Thompson, which expounds a humanist perspective on the migration from farm to factory in England.

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6. DubiousPusherJul 2026
   My bona-fides here amount to little more than being a big time reader of non-fiction. But IMO, there's a nice synthesis here. Rather than going long rounds of asking LLMs about a subject, I usually end up asking it for book recommendations. It's much better than a google search and you can push it into some deep corners if you go past the surface level recs.

   You can get quite specific. You can find texts you wouldn't discover unless you spent years studying the topic. Often these are completely approachable and give interesting perspectives they just get buried behind a wall of syllabi and listicles.

   This is how I ended up reading Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' and Graves' 'Goodbye to all That' among others.

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