E. P. Thompson: historian and socialist

In the early 1960s, when E.P. Thompson published his classic, The Making of the English Working Class, history writing was still a favorite vehicle for left intellectuals. There was no great mystery about the contribution of this ground-breaking work of historical scholarship to the politics of the socialist project. When Thompson crafted his marvelous and much quoted phrase about rescuing ordinary people from "the enormous condescension of posterity"--a phrase quoted in just about every obituary--it did not sound like romantic nostalgia or like some kind of populist antiquarianism (which is the tone all too often given to it by people who quote it now). Instead, it held a clear and immediate political message about the agency of the working class in making its own history, a message that goes to the heart of the socialist project as the self-emancipation of the working class.

Today things are different. They are different not only for the obvious reason that the very idea of socialism, not to mention the concepts of class and class struggle, is being challenged even by substantial sections of the left, but also because the left is losing sight of the historian's craft as a political project. So an appreciation of Thompson's work now has to do something more than remind us of the tremendous influence he has had on working-class history and on social history in general, or of his role in creating what is often called the "new left." We cannot even take for granted that people on the left, and especially intellectuals, will recognize the political resonance of history.

When I talk about the politics of history, what I have in mind is not the subordination of historical scholarship to ideological preconceptions, or anything like that. On the contrary. I am talking about history as critique, as a way of exposing ideological presuppositions, a means of achieving critical distance from what is commonly taken for granted. This kind of critical "discourse" is not much in fashion today. But I think it is more now than just a matter of history (and maybe even political economy) being displaced by, say, cultural studies as the privileged discourse of left intellectuals. I guess we all know that this is part of a larger picture--what for lack of a better word people have been calling postmodernism, with its rejection of grand narratives, totalizing knowledge, even conceptions of causality, and so on. But this too is part of an even larger picture--a picture that I would characterize as a general submission to what is. And what is, of course, is capitalism. Capitalism is triumphant and universal. The market is an inevitable natural law. History is over.

The critique of capitalism is out of fashion--and here there is a curious convergence, a kind of unholy alliance, between capitalist triumphalism and socialist pessimism. The triumph of the right is mirrored on the left by a sharp contraction of socialist aspirations. Left intellectuals, if they are not actually embracing capitalism as the best of all possible words, have little hope for anything more than a bit more space within the interstices of capitalism; and they look forward, at best, to only the most local and particular resistances. And there is another curious effect of all this. Capitalism is becoming so universal, so much taken for granted, that it is becoming invisible.

Now clearly we have plenty to be pessimistic about. Recent and current events have given us plenty of cause. But there is something curious about the way many of us are reacting. If capitalism has indeed triumphed, you might think that what we need now more than ever is a critique of capitalism. Why is this the right moment to embrace modes of thought which seem to deny the very possibility not only of surpassing capitalism but even of critically understanding it? How are we supposed to gain access to a critical knowledge of capitalism if we start with modes of thought which see only contingency, fragmentation, difference, and are generally hostile to any notion of capitalism as a systemic unity, any notion of a systemic logic, or even any notion of causality?

I really do think we are in an unprecedented situation now, something we have not seen in the whole history of capitalism. What we are experiencing is not just a deficit of action, or the absence of the necessary instrumentalities and organization of struggle (though those are certainly thin on the ground). It is not only that we do not know how to act against capitalism but that we are forgetting even how to think against it.

This is why I think that Thompson's historical project is more important now than it has ever been. This may be the most important political legacy of his historical work--that more than any other historian, or maybe even any other scholar or writer of any kind, he brought to life the specificity, historicity, and contestability of capitalism as an economic, social, and moral system. I cannot think of anyone more skillful at achieving the kind of anthropological distance a critique of capitalism requires, anyone better at bringing the otherness of capitalism into sharp relief, or anyone better at displaying it to us as a contested terrain.