Selina Todd's book arrives at a time when declaring the
decline of the working class has become a common theme in academic and
political discussions. From André Gorz's 1980 Farewell to the Working Class to
John Major's concept of a "classless society" and Tony Blair's
statement that "we are all middle class now,' decades of debate have
focused on the idea that the working class is disappearing, at least in a
political sense. Todd's title, with its narrative of rise and fall, positions
her within this ongoing conversation, regardless of her personal views.
This thesis has faced many challenges over the years. Since
its 2014 release, and especially during the social upheavals caused by
COVID-19, strikes, large-scale protests, and a resurgence of socialist ideas
have emerged. These developments challenge any story of inevitable
working-class decline. In fact, the pandemic vividly revealed who sustains
modern economies and whose labour is vital for society.
History from below, without the historical materialism
Todd works self-consciously in the tradition of
"history from below," and the resemblance to E.P. Thompson's The
Making of the English Working Class is not accidental. She describes the
period she covers as a "working-class century," beginning when the
vast majority of Britons still worked with their hands. The implicit claim of
her title—that this class has since fallen—does not survive close examination
of her own material. The working class of the early twenty-first century is not
the same as in 1910. Still, its position in relation to capital is unchanged in
its essentials, and repeated economic crises have, if anything, driven layers
of the middle class back into it rather than out of it.
Todd's own account of her motivations is that existing
labour history concentrated on organised, unionised workers and left out the
domestic servants, casual labourers and unemployed among whom she grew up. This
is a harder claim to sustain than she perhaps intends, given how much social
history of exactly this kind has been produced over the past thirty years.
Whatever the merits of that claim, the resulting book is a serious piece of
work. It is well researched, readable, and strongest where it draws on oral
testimony: Todd combed local studies libraries and the social surveys of the
1950s and 60s to assemble the voices of more than two hundred people, and the resulting
text is genuinely rich—servants, militant trade unionists of the 1960s and 70s,
the first generation of council-house buyers under Thatcher, lives transformed
and destroyed by fortune, unemployment and war.
The book runs into difficulty in its underlying conception
of class. Like Thompson, whose influence on her is explicit, Todd treats a
historical-materialist account of class as inadequate on its own, preferring to
speak of class, in her words, "in a less determined way." This
follows directly from Thompson's own definition of class in his essay on
"The Peculiarities of the English": not a fixed position in the
relations of production but a "happening," a shared body of
experience and tradition that a group of people come to recognise and act upon.
The political origins of this method are not incidental.
Thompson left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956 and, with John
Saville, founded The New Reasoner; it later merged with Stuart Hall's Universities
and Left Review to form the early New Left Review. Both Thompson and
Saville were sharply hostile to the Trotskyist current represented at the time
by the Socialist Labour League. What was presented as a "socialist
humanist" recovery of an authentically English Marxism functioned, in
substance, as a means of carrying forward the Communist Party's Stalinist
"British Road to Socialism" in a new theoretical idiom—one that
substituted nation, culture and, later, gender and ethnicity for a materialist
analysis of class. The consequences of that substitution for Marxist
historiography have been considerable, and Todd's own treatment of class bears
their imprint.
This is not simply an academic dispute. It shapes what Todd
does and does not do with her material. She does not sentimentalise the working
class, and to her credit she is clear that most of it has historically sought
to reform capitalism rather than overthrow it. But her treatment of the trade
union bureaucracy and the Labour Party is correspondingly soft, coming at
points close to passing over their record rather than confronting it directly.
The point made by the Trotskyist writer Cliff Slaughter, in a 1960 polemic on
revolutionary leadership, remains relevant here: working-class consciousness of
its own historical role does not arise spontaneously but has to be fought for,
against the educational and political institutions through which the ruling
class reproduces its own outlook within the class it exploits—and that struggle
cannot be won without a high degree of centralised political organisation.
What is missing
It is telling that a book of more than 450 pages on the
twentieth-century English working class does not mention Karl Marx and refers
to the Communist Party only twice. More significant still is what the book
omits from its account of the century's defining events. Todd treats the Second
World War and the rise of Thatcherism as the pivotal moments for English
workers, but the single event that did most to shape the modern labour
movement—in Britain as everywhere else—took place not in Britain but in Russia:
the October Revolution of 1917—a history of the twentieth-century working class
that leaves out 1917 leaves out its own centre of gravity.
Equally striking, given her acknowledged debt to Thompson,
is Todd's silence on the Communist Party Historians Group of the 1940s and 50s,
of which Thompson himself was part, alongside Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm and
Christopher Hill. One need not endorse the group's politics to recognise that writing
a serious history of the modern English working class is difficult without
reference to their work. As the Marxist writer Ann Talbot observed in her 2003
assessment of Christopher Hill, this generation of historians represented a
specific and critical juncture—the passing of British world hegemony to the
United States and the sharpening of class conflict—in which socialist-minded
intellectuals looked to the Soviet Union and to 1917 for a model of an
alternative society, even as their work carried the marks of Stalinist
politics. Talbot's critique of the "People's History" genre this
milieu helped establish, associated above all with A.L. Morton, applies with
some force to Todd's own approach. By absorbing rebels and revolutionaries of
every period into a single national-popular tradition, that genre tended to
blur their actual class character, in the service of a Popular Front politics
that subordinated the independent interests of the working class to alliances
with supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie.
Conclusion
The People is a genuinely useful record of
working-class experience across the twentieth century, carried by real skill in
oral history and narrative construction. It is not, and does not present itself
as, a Marxist analysis of class. What it lacks—a materialist account of class
as a structural relationship to the means of production rather than a shifting
cultural identity, and any serious engagement with 1917 or with the historians
who took that event as their starting point—is not a peripheral omission but
the book's central weakness. A future study by Todd prepared to take both
questions seriously would be a genuine contribution.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary text
Todd, Selina. The People: The Rise and Fall of the
Working Class, 1910–2010. London: John Murray, 2014.
Interviews
Gill, Joe. "British historian Selina Todd
interviewed." Dear Kitty. Some Blog, 3 May 2014. http://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/british-historian-selina-todd-interviewed/
Theoretical and historiographical sources
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class.
London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.
Thompson, E.P. "The Peculiarities of the English."
The Socialist Register 2 (1965): 311–362. Marxists' Internet Archive.
Slaughter, Cliff. "What is Revolutionary
Leadership?" Labour Review 5, no. 3 (October–November 1960): 93–96,
105–111. Republished by the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Talbot, Ann. "'These the times... this the man': an
appraisal of historian Christopher Hill." World Socialist Web Site,
25 March 2003. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
Works referenced for context
Gorz, André. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on
Post-Industrial Socialism. Translated by Michael Sonenscher. London: Pluto
Press, 1982. Originally published as Adieux au prolétariat (1980).
Morton, A.L. A People's History of England. London:
Victor Gollancz, 1938.
Note on sourcing: Quotations from Thompson, Slaughter
and Talbot above are drawn from the citations as they appear in the original
draft under review and have been kept brief and paraphrased where necessary in
line with standard citation practice; readers wishing to consult full
statements should refer to the primary sources listed.
