Paul Reynolds (CSSS/Social Movements Research Group, Edge Hill College), " 'We Cannot Have Love Without Lovers, Nor Deference Without Squires and Labourers': Reflections on the Contemporary Relevance of The Making of the English Working Class in the study of Social Movements and Making Democracy"

Contemporary theorists and cultural historians of democratic politics and social movements present the politics of social movements alternately as superseding Marxist class politics and revisionist labour politics or as the latest form of emancipatory politics, unencumbered by overdetermined, undemocratic and rigid Marxist categories, but retaining Marxist values and concerns. In order to develop this argument, such theorists have drawn upon more structuralist conceptions of class and capitalism to create a parody of Marxism that is overdetermined, conceptually rigid and theoretically dogmatic. This gives them the space to develop their ideas from a politics of recognition, difference and identity that broadens the scope of a politics of emancipation but sits uneasily within a limited democratic imaginary that straddles liberal capitalist and post-materialist democratic politics.

This paper suggests that the work of Marxist cultural historians, and notably E. P. Thompson, provides a fertile ground for a critical engagement with contemporary understandings of democratic politics and social movements. Such an engagement both acknowledges contemporary conceptual concerns and political ideas and enriches them within a fertile materialist conception of history that extends these conceptual concerns alongside a class analysis and a dynamic and dialectic understanding of the balance of social forces in contemporary politics. Such an engagement involves:

• A focus on the historical construction, constitution and contextualisation of the subject
• An understanding of the essential and dialectic relationship between agent and structure in materialist politics
• An understanding of the materialist basis of ideas of identity, difference and culture
• An understanding of the materialist basis of the relationships between being, becoming and location in the construction of the emancipatory subject.

What this paper tries to do, then, is to "read in" the conceptual ideas of Thompson'sMaking of the English Working Class into contemporary debates on democratic politics and social movements. It suggests that such a reading provides a fertile avenue to develop a coherent and radical forward move for radical democratic ideas and social movements in the 21st century, beyond the present limitations.