40    Raymond Williams
work in a particular way for our own reasons, and it is better to know this than to to the mysticism of the 'great valuer, Time'. To put on to Time, the abstraction, the responsibility for our own active choices is to suppress a central part of our experience, The more actively all cultural work can be related, either to the whole organization within which it was expressed, or to the contemporary organization within which it is used, the more clearly shall we see its true values. Thus 'documentary' analysis will lead out to 'social' analysis, whether in a lived culture, a past period, or in the selective tradition which is itself a social organization. And the discovery of permanent contributions will lead to the same kind of general analysis, if we accept the process at this level, not as human perfection (a movement towards determined values), but as a part of man's general evolution, to which many individuals and groups contribute. Every element that we analyse will be in this sense active: that it will be seen in certain real relations, at many different levels. In describing these relations, the real cultural process will emerge.
5
PREFACE FROM
THE MAKING OF THE
ENGLISH WORKING CLASS
E.P. Thompson
book has a clumsy title, but it is one which meets its purpose. Making, because ^ls a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning, fř-lfrrié working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its ■'Wtii making.
te'Class, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. There is, of course, a difference. 'Working classes' is a descriptive term, which evades ÄŠ much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes. Vi- By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and Seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasize that it is a historical phenomenon. 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.
• • More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. 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. The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born - or enter involuntarily.
From Thompson, E.P.,  1963,  The Making of the English  Working Class, London: Victor Gollancz, pp. 8-13.
42    E.P. Thompson
Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms-embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any lam. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.
There is today an ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing. This was not Marx's meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much latter-day 'Marxist' writing. 'It', the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematically - so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production. Once this is assumed it becomes possible to deduce the class-consciousness which 'it' ought to have (but seldom does have) if 'it' was properly aware of its own position and real interests. There is a cultural superstructure, through which this recognition dawns in inefficient ways. These cultural 'lags' and distortions are a nuisance, so that it is easy to pass from this to some theory of substitution: the party, sect, or theorist, who disclose class-consciousness, not as it is, but as it ought to be.
But a similar error is committed daily on the other side of the ideological divide. In one form, this is a plain negative. Since the crude notion of class attributed to Marx can be faulted without difficulty, it is assumed that any notion of class is a pejorative theoretical construct, imposed upon the evidence. It is denied that class has happened at all. In another form, and by a curious inversion, it is possible to pass from a dynamic to a static view of class. 'It' - the working class — exists, and can be defined with some accuracy as a component of the social structure. Class-consciousness, however, is a bad thing, invented by displaced intellectuals, since everything which disturbs the harmonious coexistence of groups performing different 'social roles' (and which thereby retards economic growth) is to be deplored as an 'unjustified disturbance-symptom'.1 The problem is to determine how best 'it' can be conditioned to accept its social role, and how its grievances may best be 'handled and channelled'.
If we remember that class is a relationship, and not a thing, we cannot think in this way. 'It' does not exist, either to have an ideal interest or consciousness, or to lie as a patient on the Adjuster's table. Nor can we turn matters upon their heads, as has been done by one authority who (in a study of class obsessively concerned with methodology, to the exclusion of the examination of a single real class situation in a real historical context) has informed us:
Classes are based on the differences in legitimate power associated with certain positions, i.e. on the structure of social roles with respect to their authority expectations. . . . An individual becomes a member of a class by playing a social role relevant from the point of view of authority. . . . He belongs to a class because he occupies a position in a social organization; i.e. class membership is derived from the incumbency of a social role.2
The question, of course, is how the individual got to be in this 'social role', and how the particular social organization (with its property-rights and structure of authority) got to be there. And these are historical questions. If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of
Preface from The Making of the English Working Class    43
Itiences. But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we n oatterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions. Class is f j bv men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.
*nave shown insufficient understanding of the methodological preoccupations of sociologists, nevertheless I hope this book will be seen as a contribution to the standing of class. For I am convinced that we cannot understand class unless we ■ as a social and cultural formation, arising from processes which can only be stud-, they work themselves out over a considerable historical period. In the years between Ď and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as Jtween themselves, and as against their rulers and employers. This ruling class was '. much divided, and in fact only gained in cohesion over the same years because Main antagonisms were resolved (or faded into relative insignificance) in the face of »insurgent working class. Thus the working-class presence was, in 1832, the most Significant factor in British political life.
n The book is written in this way. In Part One I consider the continuing popular aditions in the eighteenth century which influenced the crucial Jacobin agitation of tie ,1790s. In Part Two I move from subjective to objective influences - the experiences :?of.groups of workers during the Industrial Revolution which seem to me to be of espe-fiial significance. I also attempt an estimate of the character of the new industrial work-discipline, and the bearing upon this of the Methodist Church. In Part Three I pick un the story of plebeian Radicalism, and carry it through Luddism to the heroic age at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. Finally, I discuss some aspects of political theory and of the consciousness of class in the 1820s and 1830s.
This is a group of studies, on related themes, rather than a consecutive narrative. In selecting these themes I have been conscious, at times, of writing against the weight of prevailing orthodoxies. There is the Fabian orthodoxy, in which the great majority of working people are seen as passive victims of laissez faire, with the exception of a handful of far-sighted organizers (notably, Francis Place). There is the orthodoxy of the empirical economic historians, in which working people are seen as a labour force, as migrants, or as the data for statistical series. There is the 'Pilgrim's Progress' orthodoxy, in which the period is ransacked for forerunners - pioneers of the Welfare State, progenitors of a Socialist Commonwealth, or (more recently) early exemplars of rational industrial relations. Each of these orthodoxies has a certain validity. All have added to our knowledge. My quarrel with the first and second is that they tend to obscure the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed by conscious efforts, to the making of history. My quarrel with the third is that it reads history in the light of subsequent preoccupations, and not as in fact it occurred. Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten. I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking.
44    E.P. Thompson
Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspir acies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute socia disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their ow experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in thei own lives, as casualties.
Our only criterion of judgement should not be whether or not a man's actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end o social evolution ourselves. In some of the lost causes of the people of the Industrial Revolution we may discover insights into social evils which we have yet to cure. Moreover, the greater part of the world today is still undergoing problems of industrialization, and of the formation of democratic institutions, analogous in many ways to our own experience during the Industrial Revolution. Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.
Finally, a note of apology to Scottish and Welsh readers. I have neglected these histories, not out of chauvinism, but out of respect. It is because class is a cultural as much as an economic formation that I have been cautious as to generalizing beyond English experience. (I have considered the Irish, not in Ireland, but as immigrants to England.) The Scottish record, in particular, is quite as dramatic, and as tormented, as our own. The Scottish Jacobin agitation was more intense and more heroic. But the Scottish story is significantly different. Calvinism was not the same thing as Methodism, although it is difficult to say which, in the early nineteenth century, was worse. We had no peasantry in England comparable to the Highland migrants. And the popular culture was very different. It is possible, at least until the 1820s, to regard the English and Scottish experiences as distinct, since trade union and political links were impermanent and immature.
Notes
1.    An example of this approach, covering the period of this book, is to be found in the work of a colleague of Professor Talcott Parsons: N.J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959).
2.    R. Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959), pp. 148—9.
6
THE YOUNG AUDIENCE
Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel
,e have no delinquent generation of young people; we have a most selfish generation of ting people. We have a materialistic generation of young people. We have a greedy feneration of young people; having been given so much on a plate they expect the lot for
h'e taking.
(Teachers' World editorial, 8 December 1961)
Go for the youngsters, go for as much sex as you can, go for as much violence as you can ,- and we are going to succeed.
(Mr J. Goodlatte, Managing Director of ABC: reported in the Daily Cinema, April 1963)
iÄMie main emphasis in this book is on the content and forms of mass communication .-ÍJnd the popular arts, rather than the sociology of audiences. But when we come to deal twith 'teenage' entertainments and culture, the distinction between media and audience "lfe>difficult to maintain. For one thing, the postwar spurt in the growth of the media And the change in adolescent attitudes have gone hand in hand - apparently two aspects Ijfvthe same social trend. Secondly, we are dealing with a whole culture from one Specialized point of view: in our study particular weight is given to the nature and qualify of popular entertainment for young people, whereas a full account of the culture Would place more emphasis on other aspects of life - such as work, politics, the relation \o the family, social and moral beliefs, and so on. Thirdly, we are dealing with the Complex interaction between the attitudes of the young and what is provided for their Öönsumption by the world of commercial entertainments. The picture of young people as innocents exploited by the sharp merchants of Denmark Street has some truth in it, but is over-simplified. We have a situation in some ways more similar to that of television, where the use intended by the provider and the use actually made by the audience of the particular style never wholly coincide, and frequently conflict. This conflict is particularly marked in the field of teenage entertainments, though it is to some extent common to the whole area of mass entertainment in a commercial setting. Our main purpose here is to show how these two aspects of the culture interact, and then to attempt
From Hall, S. and Whannel, P., 1964, The Popular Arts, London: Hutchinson, pp. 269-83, 294-7, 310-12.