Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure. More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. I do not see class as a “structure,” nor even as a “category,” but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.
I emphasize that it is an historical phenomenon. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they a make up the working classes.īy class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. “Working classes” is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It was present at its own making.Ĭlass, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. Making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The experience of immiseration came upon them in a hundred different forms for the field labourer, the loss of his common rights and the vestiges of village democracy for the artisan, the loss of his craftsman’s status for the weaver, the loss of livelihood and of independence for the child, the loss of work and play in the home for many groups of workers whose real earnings improved, the loss of security, leisure and the deterioration of the urban environment.THIS BOOK HAS a clumsy title, but it is one which meets its purpose. Its messianic prophet was Dr Andrew Ure, who saw the factory system as ‘the great minister of civilization to the terraqueous globe’, diffusing ‘the life-blood of science and religion to myriads… still lying “in the region and shadow of death”.’ But those who served it did not feel this to be so, any more than those ‘myriads’ who were served. Its ideology was that of the masters alone.
It was unrelieved by any sense of national participation in communal effort, such as is found in countries undergoing a national revolution. But it was carried through with exceptional violence in Britain. It must involve the erosion of traditional patterns of life. “The process of industrialization is necessarily painful.
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