The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840-1940

Andrew Miles, Mike Savage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138161801
• eBook ISBN: 9781134906819
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Mike Savage and Andrew Miles provide a comprehensive introduction to the working class in Britain in the years after 1840. This textbook: * Includes a provocative, timely and clear defence of class analysis * Breaks new ground in showing how social mobility and urban change affected working class formation * Demonstrates how the history of the working class is politically reconstructed * Shows how class and gender interact in mediating social and political change

1 Politics and the British working class

The fundamental question which lies behind working-class history is that of agency. To what extent, in what form and for what reasons do workers become politically active and so affect historical developments? This chapter shows how answers to this question have changed according to the political climate in which historians were working. In particular it distinguishes three different perspectives on working-class history which have gained prominence at various times. First, early historical research optimistically believed that working-class agency was steadily increasing as the influence of the institutions of the Labour movement—trade unions, the Labour Party, the co-operative societies—grew. ‘Labour history’ was the history designed to service and celebrate the Labour movement. Second, from the 1950s and 1960s a new form of working-class social history began to develop which was more critical of the Labour movement, and denied that it was the necessary or inevitable form of working-class politics. Instead, this new social history located working-class agency in the activities of workers in their workplaces, in their homes and in their leisure activities. It sought ‘real’ working-class agency in the routines and practices of everyday life, away from the terrain of bureaucratic party politics. Third, since the mid-1970s, partly as a result of the electoral weakness of the Labour Party, there has been greater questioning about whether the working class has ever been an important historical agent. The result has been a new form of historical research which downplays the importance of class and rereads the historical record to bring out the importance of non-class forms of agency.

This chapter discusses the basic features of each approach, and argues that the recent reappraisal of class, while a helpful critique of earlier simplistic theories, need not invalidate a reformulated perspective which we term the class formation paradigm. We briefly elaborate this perspective as an introduction to the chapters which follow.

LABOUR HISTORY

In the years between 1945 and 1960 social class seemed the fundamental division in British society. The working class held a particularly visible place within this system. In the 1950s manual workers comprised no less than 70 per cent of the workforce, and the Labour Party and trade union movement enjoyed unprecedented popularity. The Labour movement was a magnet for all ‘progressive’ thought, and seemed to be the main force driving economic and social progress. The first majority Labour government, led by Clement Attlee and elected by a landslide in 1945, considerably expanded the provision of public welfare, and nationalised a significant sector of the economy. Although Labour lost power in 1951, the Conservatives made little attempt to undo its reforms.

In this climate labour history, the celebration of this new, powerful political movement, came of age. Labour historians examined the history of the Labour movement, its origins in early English radicalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and traced the development of working-class organisations (Webb and Webb 1902; Cole 1948). Particular attention was paid to the emergence of trade unionism, and the development of the Labour Party itself from the 1890s (e.g. Pelling 1965; Bealey and Pelling 1958). Labour historians tended to adopt an evolutionary perspective, in which early, rudimentary forms of worker organisation were inevitably replaced by more institutional, effective ones. Labour historians were not interested in political or cultural forms which did not appear to prefigure the twentieth century Labour movement, with the result that a variety of popular movements such as millenarian religion, producer co-operation, early feminist movements, self-help medical clubs or working-class Conservatism had little place in their histories. More generally, there was little interest in those many areas of working-class life which were not associated in some way with the Labour movement.

Over the course of the 1950s and the early 1960s the perspective of labour history matured. It became less concerned with simply charting the chronology of the rise of the Labour movement—a project which the Webbs and G.D.H.Cole had pioneered in the early twentieth century. Trade union histories became sophisticated exercises, increasingly written by academics (e.g. Musson 1954; Bagwell 1963). Admittedly, labour history struggled to get full recognition in more conservative history departments, but it had emerged as a legitimate form of historical inquiry. Perhaps the single most important historian in developing labour history, but also in challenging some of its ideas and preconceptions, was Eric Hobsbawm.

Hobsbawm's work, which began to appear in articles written in the later 1940s and 1950s (collected in Hobsbawm 1964), was distinctive due to his ambivalence towards the Labour movement. Because he was a Communist, he tended to see the rise of Labour not as a progressive political development, but rather as one which allowed the consolidation of capitalism through its reluctance to countenance revolutionary politics. Hobsbawm's interest lay not in charting the rise of the Labour movement, but in explaining why its ‘reformist’ politics had come to prevail over other political movements within the working class. Hobsbawm also set about exploring the puzzling time-lag between the development of the working class brought about by industrialisation from the late eighteenth century, and the emergence of the modern Labour movement which did not occur until the late nineteenth century.

Hobsbawm explained this time-lag in two ways, both of which were to have a deep influence on later debates. The first of these stressed how long it took for industrial workers to become familiar with the cultural norms of the new industrial-capitalist society. In the early nineteenth century workers were still governed by preindustrial values, with the result that it took them many years to come to terms with the logic and demands of industrial capitalism. In the early stages of industrialisation, skilled workers could have demanded a higher wage than they actually got, such was the scarcity of their skills, but they did not think of doing so since they were used to getting what they regarded as the customary rate for the job. The process by which workers came to learn the new ‘rules of the game’, in which they accepted that their wages were to be regulated by the laws of supply and demand, was a long one.

Hobsbawm claimed that change began in the 1840s, when trade unions started to recognise the importance of the trade cycle and to provide benefits for the unemployed. However, the idea of the ‘fair day's wage’ still persisted, and it was not until the 1890s that workers began to adjust their sights. Only at this point did they accept that their wages should reflect market conditions rather than the intrinsic skill of a particular job, and learn to adapt to the trade cycle, taking what advantage they could when employment was relatively full.

Thus Hobsbawm could explain both how a reformist Labour Party became the ‘natural’ party of the working class, and why it took so long to do so. However, subsequent historiography was more influenced by Hobsbawm's second explanation of the time-lag: the idea, borrowed, in fact, from the thoughts of Engels and Lenin, of the ‘labour aristocracy’. This theory tried to explain the hiatus between the decline of early radicalism after 1850 and the development of the Labour movement after 1880 in terms of the existence of a distinct worker ‘elite’, with superior earnings and work conditions, living separate from the mass of the working class. Quiescent while in possession of a distinct set of economic and social privileges from the mid-nineteenth century, this stratum, he argued, was repoliticised by the attack on it after 1880.

Hobsbawm's work was vital in shifting interest away from labour institutions alone to the wider economic, social and cultural forces which shaped them. His work paved the way for historical studies of the working class which were much more interested in a wider working-class social history. This was particularly true in the work he inspired on the existence of a labour aristocracy, and on the history of industrial relations. But this reorientation was also related to political developments in the 1960s.

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF CLASS

In the 1960s the assumption that the Labour movement was ‘progressive’ was put into question. A new scepticism about the achievements of the post-war Labour movement appeared. Some socialists emphasised the limited impact of the Labour movement on British society. One of the earliest examples of this changed sentiment was the sociological study Coal is Our Life, published in 1956 (Dennis et al. 1969). This study was concerned with the impact of nationalisation on coal miners, and whether the reforms of the Labour government had changed the lives and aspirations of the miners themselves. But the study showed that even in this supposed new era, class divisions were little changed. Far from the Labour reforms creating a new social order in which miners might feel they ‘belonged’, research showed that there was actually a deep sense of fatalism and pessimism among them. They were oppositional and antagonistic to management, and to the privileged in society generally. They expressed a keen awareness of class divisions and inequalities, yet at the same time they lacked a wider political radicalism which sought to replace existing social relations with better ones:

That workers in all industries do see management or employers as opponents cannot be doubted…. For the most part, however, workers have learned the lesson of their own history, that business is business. They see it as natural that the employer wishes to make a profit out of their work…. But their aim is also to make money, and for this reason their relationship with the employer is one of struggle for the division of the spoils.

(Dennis et al. 1969:32)

Furthermore, the relationship between the Labour movement and the working class seemed more fraught and uneasy than had been assumed within mainstream labour history. The authors of Coal is Our Life showed how shallow were the roots of the Labour Party, even in an apparently cohesive working-class community. Although electoral support for the Labour Party was very strong, actual political campaigning was minimal, and the Labour Party had little real cultural presence in the life of the miners. Instead, miners tended to compensate for the danger and insecurity of their work by engaging in a hedonistic social life.

Not only was the rootedness of the Labour Party in working-class life and culture open to question. The ‘progressive’ record of the Labour Party itself was challenged. Far from ushering in real social change, it seemed that the Labour Party had merely helped to construct a form of welfare capitalism which had done little to challenge entrenched class divisions. This view was supported by sociological research in the 1960s and 1970s. The continued existence of poverty was pointed out by Abel-Smith and Townsend (1965), while Goldthorpe and Lockwood (1969) showed that even affluent workers had no real commitment to the social order. Goldthorpe's later work (1980) also demonstrated the very real disadvantages which working-class children had in getting on, compared to middle-class children. New types of social movements, for instance feminism, the gay movement and the student movement, began to raise demands which the Labour movement had done little to meet.

Particularly important here was the rise of the ‘New Left’, socialists who saw the Labour Party as a reformist, compromised political force, and looked to the renewal of Marxist politics. Marxists believe that the working class is the revolutionary class—the only social group able to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a just, Communist, society. Socialism could not be achieved by middle-class intellectuals legislating it into existence: it is only when the working class itself seizes power that real change can come about.

The problem for Marxist writers lay in explaining why it was that the British working class appeared more interested in going to the pub or winning the football pools than in setting up barricades and seizing political power. Why, despite the apparent solidarity and cohesiveness of working-class culture, despite the unique resilience and strength of the trade union movement, despite the entrenched class awareness evident in British society, was the working class apparently so unwilling to engage in radical political action to achieve a better society?

Some Marxists claimed that the problem lay in the leadership of the working class. In his book Parliamentary Socialism, Ralph Miliband (1961) argued that the leaders of the Labour Party had systematically marginalised socialist politics throughout the twentieth century. The implication was that the working class itself actually wanted a more radical Labour Party and supported socialist politics, but that they were let down by the generally reformist, often middle-class, leadership.

The feeling that the Labour movement's leaders did not reflect popular aspirations led historians away from labour history. Instead socialist historians sought out a more radical working class elsewhere, which found expression primarily outside the Labour movement. This reorientation involved showing that the Labour movement itself was not a necessary, inevitable development, but a distortion of other, more challenging forms of working-class politics. In this way socialists could continue to proclaim the revolutionary potential of the working class even though any actual signs of such sentiment might currently be lacking. Radical historians searched for the historical traces of a genuinely oppositional working class which had been undermined by the rise of Labour.

It was this context which explains the appeal of E.P.Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (first published in 1963), one of the most influential works of English social history ever written. This book rejected the idea that the English working class was politically immature or passive. Thompson argued that at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries working men ‘learned to see their own lives as part of a general history of conflict between the loosely defined “industrious classes” on the one hand and the unreformed House of Commons on the other’ (Thompson 1968:782). The working class led the early radical movement demanding political reform, produced a powerful critique of political corruption and injustice, and was the most important political force pressing for the creation of a democratic polity. It was the working class which was the main carrier of democratic traditions in Britain.

Thompson did not write a standard labour history because he located political radicalism in cultural forms, in communities, workplaces and social networks, rather than in bureaucratic models alone. Thus his story ended before the Chartist movement of the later 1830s and 1840s, which was in some ways the first organised political movement. Thompson's views were controversial. Two young Marxist writers, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, wrote a series of essays in the early 1960s which disputed Thompson's ‘heroic’ interpretation of the early working class. They agreed that there had been a radical moment in working-class history in the years before 1850, as Thompson suggested, but questioned its long-term significance. Nairn (1964a) argued that this early radicalism was only a series of ‘revolts’, forced upon workers by the desperate economic conditions under which they found themselves. As soon as these improved, as they did after 1950, it was inevitable that radicalism would wane. The workers had no developed theoretical understanding of social and political inequalities, their main targets were therefore unfocused, and they simply concentrated on gaining a place for themselves in the new social order. The decline of radicalism after 1850 was an inevitable product of the movement's earlier weaknesses.

Nairn (1964a and b) and Anderson (1963) claimed that the working class in Britain was unrevolutionary (compared to, say, the French working class) because of the long-term course of British history. They argued that Britain had never had a real bourgeois revolution, sweeping the monarchy and the aristocracy from power (in the way that the French had in 1789). This had left the emergent British working class devoid of revolutionary tradition and tutelage. The aristocracy had adapted to the development of capitalism, and their dominance prevented the conflict between capital and labour assuming the centrality it would otherwise have had.

The extensive debate provoked by these writers raises issues about the whole course of British history which go beyond the scope of this book. For our purposes it is important only to note that Thompson's views about the existence of a radical working class proved much more attractive to historians than did Anderson and Nairn's scepticism. Broad acceptance of Thompson's argument focused historical discussion on one question. What happened to the radical working class in the years after 1850 which made it into the reformist working class evident in the years after 1945? Thompson himself vacillated on this crucial question. The Making of the English Working Class ended its analysis in 1830. In a later essay, The Peculiarities of the English' (Thompson 1965), written as a direct critique of Anderson and Nairn's analysis, Thompson suggested two possible answers. First, he acknowledged that the defeat of Chartism marked the end of attempts to challenge industrial capitalism, and (echoing Hobsbawm's arguments about the ‘rules of the game’) he suggested that after a certain point workers cease to struggle for the transformation of society and attempt to secure their place within it:

For the workers, having failed to overthrow capitalist society, proceeded to warren it from end to end. This…is exactly the period when the characteristic class institutions of the Labour movement were built up—trade unions, trades councils, TUC, coops, and the rest—which have endured to this day. It was part of the logic of this new direction that each advance within the framework of capitalism simultaneously involved the working class far more deeply in the status quo.

(Thompson 1965:343)

Yet Thompson's general sympathies led him to deny that radicalism had come to an end. He argued that a ‘substantial minority tradition’ of the articulate Left remained in the years after 1850 (Thompson 1965:339), and that this exerted a significant influence on working-class politics, even after the development of the ‘reformist’ Labour Party. He pointed to figures such as William Morris (Thompson 1955) and Tom Maguire (Thompson 1961), both of whom were important influences in later nineteenth-century socialism. After 1920, the Communist Party, even though of marginal electoral importance, had a major impact on the Labour movement: ‘Communism is inextricably part of British Labourism for close on fifty years’, he stated (1965:347).

Thompson therefore hedged his bets. He recognised that after Chartism industrial capitalism had secured its legitimacy, while pointing to the existence of a strong radical tradition which continued to resist it. What he did not fully address was whether this radical tradition had any substantive social roots, or whether it was largely confined to a small number of intellectuals and political activists. The new social history of class was in many ways...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Series editors' preface
• Introduction and acknowledgements
• 1 Politics and the British working class
• 2 Occupational change, income and demographic class formation
• 3 Workplace independence and economic restructuring
• 4 Working-class formation and the city
• 5 Working-class politics
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Place and subject index