Working-Class Agency, Past and Present

How usable does the understanding of the working class in Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class still remain? Like Marx, Thompson approached his project by thinking about continuity. He saw the formation of class-collective agency as a long struggle against patterns of exploitation inherent to industrial capitalist production, whose effects accumulated through history. The brute ontologies of working-class circumstances over time, and the necessity of their conditions of exploitation, delivered a sense of continuity grounded in the unavoidable experience of class relations. This made it possible confidently to connect the struggles of a past working class with present-day exigencies, whose logics of persistence were taken to be given by the capitalist conditions of production. So the genealogies of class inherent in Thompson’s method rendered continuity an unproblematic concept. That earlier thinking about continuity as a narrative of class experience invoked agency in two distinct ways: first, by deriving the possibilities for popular agency in the past from an argument about the collective dynamics of working-class self-making; second, by claiming that the process of recuperating historical experiences of that kind could serve to create radical political agency for the present. That leaves us with the following question: what power does class have to produce agency in the contemporary world; and how might this depend on historical understandings of class as well as on the continuities carrying these forward to a later time?”