Working-class Agency
September 12th, 2006
The arguments in E.P. Thompson's Customs in Common and George Rude's article “The London 'Mob' of the Eighteenth Century,” are largely correct. Elements of their approach can potentially be applied to other areas of history, including labor history. Both writings can be seen as an attempt to rescue history from the ruling class, to put forward a “history from below.” They put greater emphasis on subjectivity and working class agency than some other approaches, including other versions of Marxism.
Both Rude's work and especially chapter 4 of Thompson portray workers and the lower classes as having agency rather than merely responding to stimuli like robots. Rude's work examines the actions and motivations of London's “mob,” instead of casting them as passive instruments responding to outside agitators or particular events. Chapter 4 of Thompson similarly emphasizes working class agency by arguing that English food rioters were doing more than just responding to hunger.
Their emphasis on working class agency differs not only from the ideas they are attacking but also with many version of Marxism, which often give no one agency (reducing everything to a set of impersonal economic laws) or sometimes give only capital agency (having capitalists act, while workers react). Their version of British Marxism thus has similarities with autonomous Marxism, although it doesn't take it as far as the autonomists do.
The use of the term 'riot', and to a lesser extent 'mob', to obscure actions of the lower classes (or sometimes other classes) with chaotic stereotypes, as discussed by chapter 4 of Thompson, is not limited to 18th century England. For example a common portrayal of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion is that of chaos and random destruction, largely ignoring the pattern of targets selected which show it an uprising by the poor against targets they considered oppressive.
The same method Thompson applies to the British food riots can potentially help us understand collective direct action in other circumstances. The rioters' notions of right and wrong will clearly affect whether and how they rebel in any circumstances. Early resistance to capitalism in other nations may well be informed by similar pre-capitalist norms, although those norms will vary from place to place and so correspondingly change the shape of resistance, or even change whether or not resistance occurs. In the US, early working class and farmer resistance to capitalism often drew on other different pre-capitalist values, often in a Jeffersonian mold.
Even in cases where pre-capitalist norms clearly have nothing to do with unrest, looking at the specific nature of that unrest (its targets, methods, etc.) and how that relates to the “mob's” conceptions of right and wrong can still give us a better picture of events then merely portraying resistance as random destruction. Of course, we have to pay close attention to the specific historical circumstances of whichever event(s) we're looking at and be careful not to overgeneralize. In some cases Thompson's approach may not be useful at all, but even in those cases looking at the specific nature of unrest and how it relates to the rioters' norms will likely give a better picture than simplistically arguing that hunger automatically causes people to go wild and randomly destroy things.
Thompson's argument about industrial capitalism and the social construction of time can also be applied to other capitalist nations, which he discusses a little in the chapter. As elsewhere, he gives workers a degree of agency in looking at how workers resisted the new time discipline and, eventually, internalized it. In the US struggles over time have followed a similar, but not identical, pattern with conflict over the new time discipline followed by conflict over working hours, overtime, etc.
Thompson's discussion of the 'problem of leisure' and how it may affect future conceptions of time may have been plausible when he wrote it, but it isn't today. Workers in the US, and much of the world, work longer and harder, for less pay, than we did 30 years ago, with a corresponding drop in leisure time. Working time is a function of class struggle, not of a society's economic or technological level. In the mid-twentieth century working class and revolutionary movements were large and powerful, which forced capitalists to reduce working hours to survive. Those movements are now weak, so working time is being expanded.
Some of the theoretical concepts used in these readings are potentially useful approaches that can be kept in our tool box for dealing with unrest and class issues. By incorporating workers agency into its approach it fixes a flaw in more orthodox forms of Marxism, which reduce history to a set of impersonal laws or give only capital agency (with capital acting and workers reacting).