Bernie Moss, "The Hidden Marxism of The Making of the English Working Class"

There is a contradiction between theory and practice in E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class and in much of the consciously "culturalist" labour history inspired by it.The theory is set out in the famous preface, which, written as anafterthought, distorted the reading and reception of the book. In the preface Thompson took three positions revising Marxism that contradicted the basic narrative and argument of the book.

First, he rejected, ambivalently to be sure, the economic determination of class and consciousness in terms of production relations in favour of the more indeterminate happening or historical experience. Second, Thompson attacked the substitution of vanguards for the study of workers themselves as though outside agitators and ideas had nothing to do with the raising of political class consciousness. In his third break he defined consciousness as the way class experience was 'handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms'.

Whatever Thompson may say in the preface the book has at its core a Marxist analysis of social being and class in terms of capitalist exploitation. In his discussion of the proletarianisation of cottagers, hand-loom weavers and skilled workers Thompson specifies the relentless logic of uneven industrial development laid out in Capital, inspiring numbers of studies that established proletarianisation, in terms of property, job autonomy and skill, as a fundamental process of modern history.

Second and third, the culmination of the book in the chapter on class consciousness is not really about class but about the creation of politically conscious cadres--Thompson even uses the party term. It is about the progression from the middle-class Cobbett and Place to the working-class Owenites and Chartists. Radicals initiated workers in class analysis with their vision of a society divided between the industrious classes and parasites--rentier aristocrats, fundholders, etc. By the late 1820s, after the first experience of proletarianisation, this critique was expanded with notions of exploitation in political economy. Thompson does not say, as critics have charged, that radical and socialist cultures were shared uniformly by all workers. They were assimilated by a vanguard that had its greatest influence during periods of mass mobilisation, such as in 1831 on the eve of the Reform Act.