From Engels 1844 to Salford 2012: The Condition of the Working Class
Dave Kellaway reports on the well-attended film show and discussion organised by Hackney Left Unity on the 18th December
“Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness? No one. He knows that he has something today, and that it does not depend upon himself whether he shall have something tomorrow.” P 59 Condition of the working class, Engels 1844
A group of working class people, a majority of whom were women, were brought together in Salford Manchester in 2012 to create a theatre project linked to Engels’ famous book which analysed the British working class in figures, anecdotes and theory. Engels lived in Manchester, his father owned a factory there, and used his local knowledge to bring his book alive. Mike Wayne and Diedre O’Neil have done the movement a great service in recording this experience in a fascinating documentary of the eight week theatre project.
Drawing on the methods of political theatre developed by Augusto Boal and John McGrath’s 1970s 7:84 theatre company, the director recruited people from a working class background to use their own experiences to show the continuity between what Engels observed and present day reality. For instance, one young women gives a moving account of how she never was secure at work, it was always short term and she knew, just as Engels stated above, that what happened to her was largely outside her hands.
Although one or two of the volunteers had some drama experience the majority had not and the film is terrific at showing how they grow and get more confidence in what they are doing as the project unfolds. They were encouraged to use their own experiences in order for the play to bring together how working class identity is reproduced both materially and ideologically. So listen to the story of the working class girl who gets into the grammar school and is humiliated because of her northern accent. She is taught her place. Then there is the young woman worker who has to put up with the most boring jobs and the abusive sexist behaviour of her boss because, as she says, she has to survive. An older woman shows how the benefits system prevented her from trying out a great new job because it broke some rules about her disability allowance. A young drama student recounts how she felt totally alienated from the atmosphere at the audition for a drama college and so did not pursue it. An older man proudly explains how he became a mature university student.
It was also striking how the impact of Thatcherism was still very negatively felt by these northern workers. A couple of men sitting in a shopping centre recall how the area used to have factories with thousands of well organised workers. The bright new development with BBC TV studios at Salford Quays masks a devastation of the working class in political, trade union and human terms. Another man tells us in 1979, in what was one of the better trade union organised plants, how the day after Thatcher won the managers lined up and openly taunted the workers with the words “It’s our turn now.”
One thing I and others at the screening would have liked to have seen was the final play. We saw lots of snippets but had no idea how the whole project had worked out.
In the question and answer discussion session afterwards a number of themes were taken up in a lively debate that took us well past our normal finishing time.
One person raised the issue about whether the affirmation of working class identity against the ruling class enemy is then able to maintain its historical role of expressing the interests of all humanity and thereby going beyond a certain hate to a greater love and higher progress. Personal experiences about being working class at university were also shared. Indeed the film itself showed that the working class today is also filling up with people who have graduated but are working in low paid working class jobs. Often these people were originally from the working class. Other contributors brought up the question of the middle class, of the intermediary layers and even small business people. Does the 99% slogan skate over the complex reality of both upper middle layers who will block with the ruling class and the difficulty of winning all working people and the self-employed or small business person to a socialist project?
In my opinion this debate rather sustains the correctness of the Left Unity constitutional aims where it acknowledges the fact that we do not have to nationalise every hairdresser, newsagent and plumber in order to move beyond capitalism. The film features at one point a black shoe shop owner in Moss Side who was almost beside herself with rage about how the big stores like ASDA were ruining her business. Given capital’s aggressive restructuring of the labour market many former workers are self-employed or been encouraged to set up small businesses. Are we saying in Left Unity that because they are involved in some sort of private ownership that have to ally themselves with the ruling class? Of course we are not, that would be an ultra-left error. We certainly will not be able to win them over if we threaten them with immediate collectivisation.
The issue of social mobility came up as a way for working people to escape their conditions but as Mike Wayne explained this is based on a purely individualistic vision of society and does not affect the actual structures. As long as the unequal structures exist mobility just means shuffling the cards with different people occupying the same unequal positions. Of course we do not counterpose individual self-improvement with social progress through collective struggle. Teachers encourage working people to go the best universities while at the same time arguing for the universities hierarchy to be changed. The movement is full of individual stories of activists who became more formally educated as a result of getting involved with the trade union or a campaign.
For me perhaps the strongest argument of the film is that we do not have to accept the generally commodified way culture is produced and consumed in our society where working people are mostly treated as passive consumers or often ridiculed. The film shows another type of cultural production is possible that is not limited to a small number of specialists or experts but can potentially involve literally millions of people if there were the available free time, resources and radical movement for change. Today of course, X Factor is provided in a completely manipulative way to allow one or two working class performers to find success within a narrow cultural range. It makes huge money for Cowell and the TV companies on the backs of the hopes and illusions of hundreds of thousands of mostly working people.
This film is available for purchase as a DVD. MiKe and Diedre have organised around 50 showings in meetings like ours since April. You can still organise a viewing and a discussion at your Left Unity, trade union or community meeting. It is a great way of getting discussion going and can bring people along who do not always go to meetings.
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5 responses to “From Engels 1844 to Salford 2012: The Condition of the Working Class”
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In praise of … The Making of the English Working Class
Edward Palmer Thompson was one of the first to see the working class as agents rather than cogs in the machine
Guardian Editorial
The Guardian, Thursday 26 December 2013
“Fifty years ago, a great slab of a book was published by a small leftwing publisher. Written by an extramural lecturer at Leeds, it became a sensation, then a classic; it remains a landmark. No historian of British society has since produced a book to match EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Weavers and labourers were not then usual subjects for research and the working class were typically treated either as cogs in the capitalist machine, or victims of history. But the socialist Thompson saw them as agents, reacting to the industrial revolution with collaboration and political action. Through 900-odd pages, the book crackles with energy, as it uses scraps of evidence such as popular songs and workshop rituals to paint a picture of workers’ lived “experience”. Edward Palmer Thompson was a second world war veteran, former Communist party member, CND activist, quoter of English poetry and possessor of what he called a “notoriously ill-natured polemical manner”. His writings never pretended to be some desiccated offering from the archives, but were charged with the political commitment that ran through the rest of his life. That led to some poor judgments (Methodism as “psychic masturbation”), but also offered a vision of scholarship as fully joined on to society. The nature of class has changed; the fact of its existence certainly hasn’t. The cleaners and call-centre operatives of today await their own EP Thompson, who can write about them with the same elegance and dedication.”
Possibly to complement the post above and help stimulate further debate and discussion,there are two Guardian comments sections, one in respect to a recent Guardian editorial on the 50th Anniversary of the publication of EP Thompson’s ‘Making of The English working class’ and the other in respect to Richard Seymour’s recent post ‘Can you be too Left wing ?’, both of which make for interesting reading and could do with a well thought out plug for Left Unity with links, as there are a lot of despondent, disorientated people out there desperately wanting to see evidence of a Left alternative if not being part of it, who are not yet aware of the existence of Left Unity, which we hope can be instrumental in giving people hope and confidence in being part of helping to create that necessary Left socialist alternative
I don’t like the term “working class”, it does not resound with me. I don’t relate to that kind of language.
Dave, you are dead right about us “not having to nationalise every hairdresser, newsagent and plumber in order to move beyond capitalism”.
People with few or no GCSEs have no chance apart from working for themselves as a painter & decorator (after obtaining some capital to buy transport, which they can’t get from a bank) or similar forms of marginal self-employment, or else working for one of the new private sector organisations which have arisen out of the austerity programme (which offer wages just above the minimum wage, horrible working conditions [as shown on the TV programme about Amazon last month] and no trade union rights), or unemployment. Alternatively, they can go into the black market sector or criminal activity. Most people in this position move between these 5 options, so sometimes they are on benefits and sometimes they are not and sometimes they ar ein marginal self-employment. Focusing on the working class as if it were a permanent group of people is the mark of dogma, not observation. Marx was well aware tha in describing how capitalism operated as a system, he was not under the illusion that he was encapsulating everyone within his division into working calss and capitalist class. In politics, as opposed to economics, it is where people decide to stand that matters; the choices we all make under capitalism change from time to time and might place us within all sorts of social categories – so what? Essentially, under this system you either work for someone else for wages or do something else equally unrewarding to get by; what you don’t become is a capitalist.
Many well made points , John. If Left Unity is to reach out beyond the tiny bubble of the current activist Left we are going to have to ditch our obsession with total nationalisation as representing the essential feature of either a radical Left transformational strategy in the short and medium term , and the structure of “socialism” in the longer term.
In my proposal ” Towards a radical Left Economic Regeneration Plan for Britain in the 21st Century” ( to be found as a download on the left Unity Policy Commissions “Economy” site), I try and tackle the issue, and the issue of building class alliances beyond the nowadays pretty outdated Left image of what constitutes the “working Class”. As an example from that document :
“1.6 Building class alliances: We believe that a radical Left transformational government with the mass support of the majority of working class people will also be capable of building meaningful, mutually beneficial, class alliances with some sections of the middle classes and some small and medium sized business owners. Not to do so risks the recruitment of these sizeable social forces to the side of the forces of reaction. These significant social groups are also, like the working class majority, being increasingly crushed and exploited by the unlimited greed for profit of the tiny super-rich class and their political and financial sector agents. We obviously cannot accept any diminution in workers wage and conditions bargaining rights ,or indeed make any concessions to that class of businessperson running what can best be termed exploitative “sweatshops” as a condition of political alliances with sections of the business community. However we believe that there is a potential long term community of interest between many private owners of high growth potential innovative manufacturing and creative companies willing to play their part in the overall National Economic Plan , and the working class. We also see a continuing bright future for the huge class of small shopkeepers and many other “microbusiness” types. Though we expect that , over time, a process of “insourcing” will also occur as the larger public sector and co-operative/social enterprises bring previously “outsourced” functions in-house and provide a much more secure employment situation than is current for the precarious “white van man” category of microbusiness. We believe that our model of a progressive , democratically planned, radical mixed economy , can provide a positive way forward for the majority of our citizens. “