“Under a satanic light:” Argentine readings of The Making of The English Working Class

Cristiana Schettini (Brasil)
Professor of Universidad Nacional de San Martin and Conicet researcher, Argentina
Martín Albornoz (Argentina)
Professor of Universidad Nacional de San Martin and Conicet researcher, Argentina

We first read The Making of the English Working Class in Argentina and Brazil, respectively, during the 1990s. We were moved by a nascent historiographical curiosity that emerged amidst the many political urgencies during the first decades of the redemocratization in our countries. We devoured the book eagerly, as if it was a kind of oracle to assess the world from below. Our youthful expectations guided the enthusiastic reading of a text that, at times, seemed hermetical to those who, like us, were far from mastering the literature, religiosity, history, and geography of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. We wanted to learn about capturing the historical process in motion, and how it was possible to combine social history (in its determinations and materiality) with dreams and expectations of groups that received nothing more than condescension from posterity. For us, it was urgent to understand how class antagonism took shape in a capitalist society and how part of humanity was dehumanized.

Three decades later, as postgraduate professors, we proposed ourselves to revisit this reading as part of a course named Problems of Social History. We were motivated by the memories of euphoria over discovering Thompson, as well as the concern with some usual readings of his work in Argentina. We had suspected that the meanings attributed to the adjective Thompsonian were related to the replication of superficial readings that, most of the time, were reduced to the famous preface and the chapter “Exploitation.” We also thought that a course aiming at retracing the debates on social history throughout the twentieth century was an excellent opportunity to reread The Making – no longer to study English history or the Industrial Revolution, neither the process of class formation, but to think about how to do history in today’s Argentina. The challenge of reading this monumental work in extenso was such that forced us to reorganize the course’s syllabus. It also forced us to refine arguments to convincing our students to abandon momentarily the usually dizzying reading pace and isolated discussions of chapters by different authors. In exchange, we proposed weeks of classes focused on one single author, one single book, one single subject. We sought to convey those youthful expectations of thirty years ago. Cautiously trying the waters, we promised them that, if we allowed ourselves to be carried away by the sequence of chapters – with inevitable interruptions to consult names, dates, references, maps, and images on the internet – we would not only understand that epic narrative on class, but to be rewarded with the revelation of a mystery: how to encompass the historical process as it unfolds itself. At the risk of sounding not even “vintage,” but openly démodé, we assured our young audience, interested in other policies and subjects, that there was something extremely valuable in Thompson’s Marxist view of social history. To our surprise, year after year, the proposal was taken with a mixture of perplexity and enthusiasm.

After five years repeating the experience of reading the almost thousand pages of the text (with a pandemic in between), the results have also surprised us. Returning to The Making at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in an Argentina in constant crisis, continues to be fruitful and inspiring. We think this is partly due to the context in which we reassessed the work. On the one hand, we shared a challenging climate of perseverance, of facing a task that, to some extent, had become arduous. At some point all of us, professors and students, some born after Thompson’s death in 1993, converged on reading Blake’s enigmatic verses out loud, walking around the city with increasingly underlined and annotated copies of the book. Some of us were carried away by the alluring Thompsonian rhetoric, while others began to wonder why we continued the reading when we had already understood its core idea. As the semester went by, almost all of us chose our favorite excerpts and images, references that concentrated Thompson’s literary power and the impact of his arguments. We recognized expressions like “Behold the head of a traitor,” as if we were followers of “curious societies” and sects. We traced the omnipresence of spies, the melancholy of the old Jacobin, the immoderation of conspiracies, the “Satan’s strongholds” and the Luddite anonymity.

As expected, successive groups of students did not hesitate to point out the known silences and absences in the work. This is not surprising, considering that the book was published in 1963. For decades, there has been discussions about how women, the Irish and colonial actors were treated in those pages, or left out of them. In the second part of the course program, we professors proposed possible interlocutors for Thompson’s work. We considered the feminist critiques, led by Joan Scott, and approaches to global social history from the works of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh. We also sought to relate Thompson’s post-book trajectory to his contemporaries from the Italian microhistory, and his dialogues with Natalie Zemon Davis at the height of the social historiography that flourished in the 1970s. Finally, we opened up space to explore other creative uses, as those seen in some Brazilian works on slavery, based on the reflections raised by Silvia Lara. Regardless of our intentions, the search for the book’s limitations and absences was gradually substituted by something else: the collective effects of exercising a careful reading, able to detect some less evident threads within the arguments’ weave. An impressive number of themes, interrelationships and encounters were now connected to that epic of class formation. Instead of absences, the many presences in the work began to draw our attention. The text was not valuable despite its Marxism, but with it. We started to consider how Thompson’s ways of investigating and writing history resonated with some authors in the construction of their problems of investigation – even those who may not consider themselves Thompsonians, much less Marxists. The Making has taught them, and us, how to think historically and how to practice the craft in ways that may be far removed from the original focus of concern. By doing it, this work allows us and the students to revisit our own hierarchies, beliefs, and convictions, fostering many other stories.

We would like to highlight one of the unexpected effects that ultimately gave our proposal a meaning. As a group, we were quite surprised with the subtlety and sophistication with which Thompson interpreted literary and police records. Neither of us could imagine that the use he made of this heterogeneous historical documentation in constructing the famous history from below would generate so much discussion. We were often led to pore over these sources and read them over Thompson’s shoulders. On some occasions, we even managed to bring them closer to our own experience. We watched, for instance, the television show in which Thompson reads and comments on fragments of William Blake; we circulated a digital edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley; we listened to a Luddite anthem performed by the English anarchist group Chumbawamba on their album English Rebel Songs 1381-1914. During these exercises, the initial otherness gave way to new layers of interpretations and the production of new meanings. Above all, we were confronted with one of the central teachings in The Making regarding the historical agency of those from below: the procedures to uncover them – whoever those from below may be – must be inseparable from a dialogical and relational interpretation of the sources. This perspective is summarized in one of Thompson’s teachings that most thrilled different groups of students: if we want to know what the “jolly tar” and the “Sandgate lass” thought about the Authority and the Methodists; if we want to understand “tavern world” and the “social attitudes” of criminals, sailors and soldiers, we have to expose the documentation “to a satanic light,” and read it “backwards.”

In short, more than reliving the book’s epic narrative, this collective reading experience brought us closer to its internal architecture; to its paths not taken, but glimpsed; to the loose threads of a story centered on class but spills over into other problems. By thinking of The Making as an old piece whose power could be rediscovered through outdated (but full of possibilities) study habits, we believe we have contributed to building a common ground far from orthodoxies, suitable to resuming the debates – fortunately still open – on the place of class and Marxist traditions within social history.

Translation: Eneida Sel