Exploitation: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?

The Making is an epic of origins. While the English working class was not simply made by the 1830s - it was of course subject to major changes in its composition and political outlook - in the late 1950s and early 1960s the labour movement remained a dominant presence within a welfare state and society divided along class lines. Merely a decade and a half after the publication of The Making, Eric Hobsbawm wrote his prescient essay, "The Forward March of Labour Halted?" In fact, the vision of an implied social trajectory was an optical illusion. In the 1960s, there were already signs that the "traditional" working-class culture identified in the work of [Thompson], [Raymond Williams], and Richard Hoggart was on the wane, although only a clairvoyant could have predicted the advent of Thatcherism. We live now in a post-working-class era. Industrial labour has given way to the increased dominance of labour engaged in the production of knowledge, information, entertainment, "affective" service, etc. Post-modern identities are fractured and our social imaginary is one of surfaces. It is a transformed world of capitalist dominion characterized by global integration and the exploitation of the many by the few. The possibilities for generating as well as sustaining movements for democracy out of a shared experience of exploitation remain to be seen. The "Occupy" movement, Tahrir Square, Taksim Square, and recent waves of resistance summoned in the street and projected globally illuminate a new idealism seeking justice and democratic change. But can the "myriads of eternity" (Thompson quoting Blake) join forces to become "more than the sum of grievances" they share? To conclude, one should note the utopian impulse that runs through Thompson's work, his recognition of the importance of longings for that which is "not yet," and for what he referred to elsewhere as "the unprescribed initiatives of everyday men and women who, in some part of themselves, are also alienated and utopian by turns."6 If asked to choose one might argue that the book's key chapter and driving concept is that of exploitation, seen as inseparable from class. Chapter six, entitled simply "Exploitation," opens Part Two of The Making, "The Curse of Adam," consisting of a series of chapters that address the experience of work and community during England's industrial revolution. A short chapter in a long book, "Exploitation" includes some of the book's more striking passages; for example, the work's