#enormous condescension of posterity

[misterparadigm]

Epistemacrology: Lessons Learned at the Scale of Epochs

There are lessons in life that can't be learned in a single lifetime. This is the value that historians place on their field of study. It's also the value that fundamentalist philosophers and theologians place on their faiths. The idea is that there are things about existence which we can only learn in terms of empires, zeitgeists, eras, and epochs, because it takes that long for certain problems to become apparent.

From what I've observed, with each generation the education of existence is rebooted, and very often we view existence through a lens of modernity, limiting our ability to perceive and comprehend the complexity of an epoch problem--only seeing the iceberg tip of that problem as it manifests itself through the limited scope we've chosen as a matter of compulsion and ignorance.

I believe there are three things to blame for the propagation of this issue: cognitive ease (taking the easiest and lowest resolution view of a given concept), conceptual heuristics (simplifications of concepts for ease of comprehension), and what E.P. Thompson called the "enormous condescension of posterity" (the tendency to condescend past people and societies on the misguided principle that their being in the past is proof of lack of civilization, intelligence, or wisdom).

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

Thompson’s empathy with those forced to struggle on an inhospitable social terrain has lessons for us, too. Today, the issue is the enormous condescension not of posterity but of the present: the contempt for working-class people, the hostility to benefit “scroungers”, the derision of those forced to use food banks, the indifference to injustice. It is visible also in the scorn for the supposed bigotry and conservatism of the working class or in the disdain of those who voted the wrong way or have become disillusioned with the left. Thompson’s insistence that “their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experiences” is as necessary to acknowledge now as it was then.

Yes mate yes yes yes. Fuck the right view but also the left and these bellend communists and anarchists that view the WC through these often unjustified lenses.

[racefortheironthrone]

Where do the Luddites fit in the history of labor organization/protests?

If you want to understand the Luddites, you need to read E.P Thompson, and specifically his Making of the English Working Class.

I'm going to quote the same line from the Preface that everybody quotes, but it really does get at what E.P Thompson was trying to do by writing this book:

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity." (E.P Thompson)

See, thanks to centuries of capitalist (and economist) propaganda, Luddites have been given an extremely bad reputation as backwards fools who blamed technology for their problems and tried to halt the inexorable march of scientific progress. What Thompson lays out in some detail is that the Luddites were striking textile workers who didn't care at all about technology, they cared about the massive wage cuts that were being forced on them by textile employers.

Luddites destroyed machines, not because they feared that the machines would take their jobs, but because the machines were expensive fixed capital and smashing the machines cost their employers a lot of money. Most importantly, Thompson explains that the Luddites only smashed the machines of employers who were pushing for wage cuts - if an employer paid the old wage rates, they left their machines alone.

As to where the Luddites fit into the grand history of labor, I think they represent an example of the sabotage tradition among working-class movements that stretches back to Belgian workers chucking wooden shoes into the gears of capitalism, through to the IWW and their conception of sabotage as industrial direct action against the capitalist system (and god, the backlash that engendered during WWI), through to modern French workers who will wreck power stations to show Macron they mean business.

So yeah, don't fuck with Ned Ludd if you value your capital.

[geopolicraticus]

The Changing Meaning of History in Cinema

Films that depict the relatively recent past, of which there are still some traces remaining today, often portray this past with a campy wink and a nudge to remind us how charmingly backward and quaint the past was. We would never fall for that.

This, in turn, shines a smug and self-congratulatory light on our own times, which we believe to be much more sophisticated and quite beyond the quaint ways of life depicted in the film. We are, all of us, Whiggish historians, whether we know it or not.

Here it seems obligatory to quote E. P. Thompson: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”

The enormous condescension of posterity noted by E. P. Thompson suggests, in turn, the famous L.P. Hartley quote: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Because they do things differently in the past, we have difficulty recognizing exactly what they were doing.

Future critics may see our 20th century efforts to depict the 19th century (or earlier) as a fortunate kind of preservation of a not-entirely vanished recent past for us, that we were able to recreate with a certain authenticity that would not be possible, e.g., in a thousand years. 

The farther our own time falls away into the past, the closer will be our relative proximity to past ages in comparison to the future ages that may look back to us for insights into a past more distant from them than it is from us.

Ten thousand years from now, we will be, relatively speaking, virtually indistinguishable from the 19th century, and practically on intimate terms with the Middle Ages, or even with classical antiquity.

Similarly, our reconstructions of past ruins may be seen as a near-historical peer restoring the monuments of our ancestors, and not the impossible and unbridgeable historical distance that we perceive today, and which often is used to argue against reconstruction. 

But even those who argue against the reconstruction of ruins do not argue against imaginative reconstructions in the arts, whether by way of painting, sculpture, or film. For the far future, our attempted reconstructions of the past will be seen as valuable historical record. 

The exception to this rule will be the historical finds yet to be made, which will be widely familiar in the future, perhaps to be seen in any textbook, as well as the enhanced abilities of a higher technology archaeology to reconstruct the past from fragments.

Even with further discoveries and higher technology, our spiritual proximity to the past allows us to authentically bring to life lost worlds that we approximate to a greater degree than we imagine—for example, the romanticized view of the American west depicted in countless films.

In a few hundred years we will become the foreign country of the past, it will fall to our heirs and descendants to condescend to us, and much of our condescension will be lost simply because it will be unrecognizable as such. After all, who could imagine such as us giving ourselves airs? 

[howieabel]

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rev. edn. 1968), p. 12

[therefractory]

Braudel and his followers in the Annales school cast the human story as one of people largely in thrall to the slow, grinding operations of geological and economic forces. His great English contemporary E.P. Thompson saw more of a role for human agency but investigated it above all in the ranks of the poor and downtrodden, famously promising to rescue them from the “enormous condescension of posterity.” In the process, the systematic investigation of how powerful individuals can shape historical events was largely relinquished to biographers and the authors of popular histories

Are We Living in an Age of Strongmen? | The Nation

[alaija]

“ Also 28 days is the lunar cycle. Just saying. “

And menses are etymologically intertwined with the Latin word for month. And month is similarly intertwined with the (English/Germanic) word for the Moon.

I suspect people considered all these things to be interrelated, and people thinking they did not is, to misuse the phrase, the enormous condescension of posterity.

“ ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’ “

Feminist fails to understand that “man” can be used as a gender neutral term, and always is in this form--- take a shot.

[rhythmic-idealist]

[Image descriptions under the cut, only because they wound up very long and I know big long chunks of text can be overwhelming. In general: the images are two barely sketched-out lyricstuck panels and one blurry photo of the notebook I’m planning it in.]

The unanimous lyricstuck vote: Believer! Here’s veeeery early a sneak preview of a couple panels I’ve started sketching out. Sorry Psii doesn’t have a head yet, I was excited to post this asap so I really only waited until I’d sketched out enough of him (hands+some basic implication of psionics especially) to get the idea across.

...As a side note, I’m not a very fast artist, I hope you guys know this’ll very likely take me like a year to finish.

Thanks to @officialprydonchapter and @twentyfourshards for your votes!

[Image 1: a pencil sketched layout of a panel for a lyricstuck set to “Believer” by Imagine Dragons. The Dolorosa's silhouette is at the top center, facing front, face obscured by the words "my life." Her shoulders are squared, the rest of her body stylized into little more than a rectangle and obscured by the Disciple and Psiioniic in front of her. The Disciple stands to the left of her, leaning out away from her open-mouthed as though delivering a speech or calling out to someone. Her long, natural hair and broad shoulders are minimally sketched in, and the words “my love” are written over the center of her chest. The Psiioniic stands to the right of the Dolorosa. His shoulders are hunched and hands are tensed, bolts of psionic energy arching between them. The words “my drive” are written over the psionic energy. All three of the characters cut off beneath the chest, and the Homestuck Blood aspect symbol sits a short space below them, bearing the words “it came from.” It’s irrelevant to the actual image, but I’ve left myself a note-to-self arrow marked “(bring in)” pointing from the Disciple toward the page’s center.]

[Image 2: another pencil-sketched layout of a panel for the same lyricstuck, captioned “last things last” at the top of the page. The Signless, tiny from this distance, stands facing away from us atop an enormous platform, leading offscreen to the left and right and branching off in one long path in front of him to the flogging jut, which sits centerstage. It, too, is tiny relative to the face of Her Imperious Condescension - who sits to the right of it, though just her face and small strands of hair are drawn in. To the left of the flogging just, the word “GHB” is just hastily scribbled in - a reminder to myself to draw in the Grand Highblood later.]

[Image 3: a notebook plotting out ideas for panels of the same lyricstuck, from the line “last things last” to the second “the blood in my veins, oh ooh.” I didn’t intend for it to be read, and it isn’t terribly legible at all, but if you’re interested in this rough draft, a transcript is included below:

“last things last —> already W.I.P. drawing of Signless w/ huge Condesce and Highblood at execution by the grace of the fire and the flames —> irons heating in the fire, embers prominent you’re the face of the future —> transition from smoldering irons as they appear to “cool” into Karkat’s shirt the blood in my veins —> (ideas)

1. 

the blood in my —> Karat starts, not firmly, to pick up sickle from desk veins, oh ooh —> mental image, like replaying a dayterror from Karat or something the Signless has witnessed, of a threshecutioner. options: threshecutioner culling Karat, threshecutioner culling someone on the street as Signless watched, image of a threshecutioner killing a limeblood in a history book or propaganda poster the blood in my veins, oh ooh —> Karat takes the sickle and spins it expertly (one frame) before holding it in a firm grip (second frame) -ooh —> sharp cut to black but they never did, ever lived —> exiting hive to a landscape of approaching imps and ogres ebbing and flowing —> same pic, pan up and/or out

2.

*** (I’m liking idea 1 a lot now that it’s written out; may never write out idea 2)”]

[disabilitymatters]

Talking about the book "Those they called idiots" by Simon Jarrett ⬇️

THOSE THEY CALLED IDIOTS (Article by Stephen Unwin)

In his masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), the great Marxist historian, EP Thompson, explained that he was seeking to rescue the labouring poor from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity.’ And with this exhortation the boundaries of history expanded exponentially to include a vast range of subjects usually overlooked, especially in terms of gender, ethnicity, religious belief, sexual orientation, class and so on. 

But there is one group which has been almost entirely ignored: namely, people with what we would now call ‘learning disabilities.’ This is partly because of a paucity in the documentary record but more significant, perhaps, is the feeling that such people aren’t very interesting: after all, who wants to read a book about ‘idiots’ when there are so many geniuses to study? But as anyone who loves a learning disabled person will know, if anybody needs rescuing from the ‘condescension of posterity’ it’s this loosely defined group who’ve so often been mocked and abused, neglected and ignored, segregated, sterilised and murdered, all for the crime of lacking the cognitive powers that the rest of us take for granted.

There are many challenges involved in such a history, but one of the biggest is that the language keeps changing. As Simon Jarrett’s title suggests, ‘those they called idiots’ may not be the same people we would call ‘idiots’ today, just as the other terms—'imbecile,’ ‘moron,’ ‘cretin,’ ‘mental defect’, ‘retard’ and so on—all mean something different to when they were first coined.  Indeed, they carry such negative connotations that they’re unusable in modern professional practice—if all too common in everyday speech. 

Jarrett’s exceptionally readable—and beautifully illustrated—history describes in meticulous detail the way that this group has been treated by a largely uncomprehending world. ‘Idiots,’ he explains, were subjected to a gradual process of institutionalisation in the 200 years between the French Revolution and the coming of Mrs Thatcher; but also that this ‘great incarceration’ was followed by the ‘great return’ when, finally, the worst of the asylums and long-stay hospitals were closed and their inhabitants—many of whom had never lived anywhere else—were moved back into ‘the community,’  where many still live, often with inadequate support and company.

Jarrett emphasises the idealism that informed the early days of the ‘idiot asylums’ but explains how this gradually gave way to something much darker as the learning disabled came to be seen as an inchoate menace to the social order. He also describes the emergence of the eugenics movement, with its conviction that ‘the race’ could be improved if only ‘mental defectives’ were prevented from reproducing, leading to segregation, sterilization and, in Nazi Germany at least, state sponsored murder.  

Although Jarrett’s account brings us up to the present day, it’s particularly strong on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I’m especially grateful to him for two key insights. The first is into the relatively relaxed and tolerant attitudes of Georgian England, where, it seems, the ‘idiot’ was accepted: subject to mockery and jokes, certainly, but also recognized as part of society and celebrated as an expression of those frailties which are fundamental to the human condition. As such, Jarrett argues, the learning disabled—many of whom held down jobs and lived alongside the rest of the population—avoided the categorisation, exclusion and persecution that was such a feature of the worst that soon followed.

His other great insight is into the relationship between nineteenth-century colonialism and the disabled mind, with humanity being divided into three distinct ranks: at the top sat civilised white men, capable of rational thought and, of course, European; next stood barbarians—Chinese, Indian etc—who lived in cities and organized societies but were irrational, greedy and cruel; at the bottom were nomadic savages who seemingly lacked any powers of reason or intellect, ‘idiots’ who couldn’t manage their affairs and had no rights over the territories where they were found. Thus, in championing the great achievements of the European Enlightenment, the very idea of ‘idiocy’ was used to describe ��inferior races’ in ways which are still deeply damaging.

Jarrett’s subtitle is ‘the idea of the disabled mind from 1700 to the present day’ and he tracks with considerable care the way that the learning disabled have provided the rest of us with a contrast group against which we can define ourselves. And he shows in the most elegant way imaginable that the evolution of this idea and its many perversions has not just had incalculable impact on those with learning disabilities, it’s shaped the assumptions that inform our most deeply held beliefs. 

The history of learning disabilities matter to us all because in our response we can see a mirror for who we are and what we care about.  We should be grateful to Simon Jarrett for telling this complex, compelling and frequently troubling story with such tremendous clarity and style. I can’t recommend this wonderful book highly enough, even if—especially if, perhaps—you have no lived experience of the subject.

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

As E.P. Thompson sought to humanise social history and ‘rescue’ England’s working class ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’, MacColl’s circle sought to appraise the working-class culture of the past amidst the rise of American rock imperialism.

They shed light on the proletarian experience of history as expressed through music, a sentiment echoed by many in the decades that followed.

As Yorkshire folk legend Norma Waterson once said, ‘Our oral history is what made us march. It’s what made us sing, it’s what made us happy, and it does deserve as much respect and dignity as any of those history books high on a shelf.’

[alaija]

“those silly backward Past people, they didn’t get it”

To slightly misuse the phrase, it’s the enormous condescension of posterity.

Random thought but I’m studying for a history exam and having a lot of thoughts about FDR’s disability

Like...so many books I read as a kid legitimately portrayed him as “American hero who overcame polio” rather than “disabled man who had to use constant, difficult, complicated artifice to pretend to be abled in order to maintain the trust and confidence of the public.”

He was president right after Herbert Hoover, writer of “Rugged Individualism,” in a time when American capitalism was becoming fully codified as an ideology, central to the ideals of America. It was this environment in which he had to lead and inspire Americans to maintain confidence in these ideals, and he did it partially by projecting this image of a man who had overcome his disability by sheer hard work and gumption.

Furthermore, most of the New Deal programs were very much predicated on the idea that such aid is deserved mainly because it is done in exchange for work—that was what allowed the people to accept such programs. And that’s also, in part, what made Hoover’s presidency such a fuckup at the time of the Depression—he was so firmly against any kind of welfare program because it would “compromise” the hard working, individualistic character of the American people.

This is...definitely something to do with why FDR could not be disabled in the public eye. And his more-able-bodied public persona really took people in.

Surely someone has written something excruciatingly in-depth and academic about how all this affected how disability was seen in American culture during the 20th century. Surely.

[mondaycircle-blog]

Against Capitalism: Resisting Wage Labour in the 19th Century

In the advanced economies of Europe, you would be hard pressed to find somebody who still calls themselves an ‘artisan’. The closest you might find, perhaps, is a marketing savvy barista whose artisan job title indicates they have mastered the complex arts of pouring coffee in a fashionable café. Yet throughout most of the 19th century, skilled and independently employed artisans were a sizeable and relatively autonomous part of any national workforce. More importantly, this autonomy and casualised form of life meant that, for a time, they were able to mobilise collectively and politically in order to counter the existential threats posed by the industrial revolution.

Alongside the contemporary collapse of the labour market, we have seen the rise of the ‘informal economy’, self-employment, and a return to casualised work. In Britain and across Europe, this transformation has inadvertently stoked an anti-immigrant sentiment, whereby mass migration is blamed for the lack of full time jobs and meaningful employment. But those who genuinely feel the fullest effects of this dual crisis of work and migration, should perhaps remember that these crises are the systemic products of a historically volatile capitalist process. Although this process now operates on an unprecedented global scale, the British artisans and self-employed of the 19th century once suffered similar effects of coercion into meaningless wage-labour, and were also forced to continually migrate from town to town, or emigrate overseas.

In the following article I explore the work of a few historians who have researched this often overlooked period in our history, of working people who, as with many of my own generation today, spent most of their time not working, but looking for work.

Throughout the length and breadth of our native land there has not been a corner or village but what some of our members have perambulated in pursuit of employment; our high roads have resembled that of a mechanical workshop, or a mighty mass of moving human beings.

– Higenbottam, Our Society’s History, 1872

The masterless, migrating artisan is a recurring figure of mobilization throughout the history of socialist thought. The artisans appear, for example, during the social, religious and political upheaval of the English Revolution in the 1640s and 50s, roaming the countryside and woodlands in search of employment alongside preachers, vagabonds and beggars. The Marxist historian Christopher Hill dedicated a chapter to ‘Masterless Men’ in The World Turned Upside Down, describing “the seething mobility of forest squatters, itinerant craftsmen and building labourers, unemployed men and women seeking work […] congregating especially in London and the big cities, but also with footholds wherever newly-squatted areas escaped from the machinery of the Parish or in old squatted areas where labour was in demand.”2

John Rees’ The Leveller Revolution has more recently illustrated how the casualised labour, physical mobilisation and auto-didacticism of the London Apprentices (artisans in training), enabled them to become a core group of revolutionary subjects from which large numbers of Levellers, including the famous John Lilburne himself, emerged onto the political scene. They existed in vast numbers, he writes: the lowest estimates are above 10% and the highest above 20% of the population; it is likely true that apprenticeship in London made the capital into the largest educational site that existed in England before compulsory basic schooling was introduced in the late 19th century.3

Could this intense proliferation of educated individuals and unusually free political agency have had anything to do with the radical stirrings of the English Revolution? We are left with little doubt that Rees believes so. E.P Thompson has elsewhere provided us with incredibly rich accounts of the 18th century formations of the English working class, much owed to the central role of the radicalised artisans’ coordinated political gatherings and unionism.4 Iorwerth Prothero has notably examined the position of the skilled artisan in the politics of early nineteenth century London, and in another comparative study on radical artisans in England and France.5

The post-war period was a high water mark for Marxist Historiography in Britain. Its most recognisable methodology, ‘history from below’, was coined by E.P Thompson in an essay of the same name. In the preface to his 1963 book The Making of the English Working Class, he wrote: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”6 Among the historically silenced voices of the oppressed and marginalised subjects unearthed by Thompson and his contemporaries, the artisans stand out as exemplary figures of mobilisation and resistance. Their traditional, pre-capitalist forms of life stood in stark opposition to the centralising encroachment of industrialisation. The emergence of bourgeois monopolies, rapid technological development and the introduction of wage-labour led to their eventual dissolution as a quantitatively significant social class. Yet this decline did not happen instantaneously.

So what form did this mobilised resistance ultimately take? The artisans were forced to initiate new processes of labour, systems of employment, and political organisation. Devised to deal with structural problems concerning the supply and demand of labour, unemployment and economic depression, their initiatives were instrumental to the formation of the early trade unions and modern kinds of welfare. Eric Hobsbawm’s 1951 essay The Tramping Artisan captured some of the key aspects of the systematic migration that took place during the industrial revolution. From the beginning of the 18th to the early 20th century, the ‘tramping system’ sustained calico printers, wool combers, paper-makers, hatters, smiths, carpenters, boot and shoe-makers, metal-workers, bakers, tailors, plumbers, painters and glaziers, bookbinders and others.7 It worked via documents, ‘blanks’, or ‘clearance’ which the artisan would carry on his travels, and affirmed his abilities as ‘a member in good standing of the society.’ He showed this upon arrival at his destination, a ‘clubhouse’ or ‘house of call’, which was ‘generally a pub ̶ receiving in return supper, lodging, perhaps a beer, and a tramp allowance. If there was work to be found, he took it; the call-book (if there was one) was of course kept at the house of call, an unofficial labour exchange. If there was none, he tramped on.’8

Hobsbawm’s essay was cited in The Making of the English Working Class — Thompson apparently enthused by the reference to the system as the artisans ‘Grand Tour’, which was about 2,800 miles long in the 1850’s.9 Thompson instead sought to demonstrate the artisans intellectual capacities, the political activities of The London Corresponding Society, of ‘organic intellectuals’ like John Thelwall, and the observations recorded directly by Henry Mayhew in his comparison with unskilled labourers. In his 1862 study, London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew witnessed that “the artisans are almost to a man red-hot politicians. They are sufficiently educated and thoughtful to have a sense of their importance in the State…The unskilled labourers are a different class of people. As yet they are as unpolitical as footmen, and instead of entertaining violent democratic opinions, they appear to have no political opinions whatever; or, if they do… they rather lead towards the maintenance of ‘things as they are’, than towards the ascendancy of the working people.”10 Although participation varied across the country it is understood that the early trade unions, with their lodging and call houses facilitated a cross-fertilization of radical ideas, formalized in ‘friendly societies’, and within the walls of debating clubs. The tramping system itself sustained a similar circulation of radical thinking, as Hobsbawm discovered: “the traveller acted as a link between different areas, passing on information about local wage rates, advising on the best times to start a wage-movement, a walking encyclopedia of comparative trade-union knowledge.”11

Both Hobsbawm and Thompson fundamentally understood the system as a defensive measure. This defence was both lived and intellectual, consciously developed by the artisans in order to remain in frequent employment, and avoid subjection to mundane, restrictive, unskilled wage labour. They knew how a sustained and concerted migration could strengthen their bargaining power. Hobsbawm attributed its expansion and surge in popularity during the middle of the 19th century, to its ability to relieve strike funds, and provide means of countering victimization: from this to a more sophisticated calculation of political economy was only one step.

By removing the unemployed from places of slack trade, and keeping them in circulation, tramping kept the supply in the labour market limited. “If it had not been in our power”, wrote the General Union of Carpenters in 1846, “to keep up our tramping transport… a general reduction in wages would have taken place.”12 Just as it appeared at its height, with certain tramping trades perhaps coming close to the classical ideal of a perfectly mobile labour force, by the year 1860 the seeds of its undoing had already been sown. Aside from the technological advancement of public transport, such as the tram or train, one of the reasons for the tramping systems decline was the inability of small-scale competitive businesses to function within the dominant free market mechanism.

This new kind of economy led to the relative obsolescence of ‘casualism’ (the temporality of the artisans labour) as a viable form of life in Britain. As much as 36% of the workforce operated within the manufacturing industries as early as 1841, most of which was comprised of large private firms, factories and fixed capital.13 The rest of the population was largely concerned with agricultural production at this time. The centralized capitalist industries could not function without a constant influx of wage labourers willing to toil at the modern machinery, and had no need for independent, ‘self-employed’ artisans, unless they wished to join Britain’s reserve army of unemployed (although the actual term ‘unemployed’ was not in use at the time), or ‘surplus’ labourers.

Another contributing factor to the tramping systems demise worth mentioning here, and which for Hobsbawm ‘marked an important stage in the education of the labour movement’, was the introduction of ordinary unemployment relief by the trade unions. This followed, in particular, the massive unemployment and social upheavals of the 1840s. The unions adopted ‘static-out-of-work pay’, and developed more efficient ways to send workers from “slack places to busy places more efficiently than the happy go lucky tramping systems.”14 These ‘new unions’ Hobsbawm credits with recognising that the capitalist economy was not something to be sidestepped, but had to be dealt with by understanding its specific laws of motion.15

It is clear, then, that for Hobsbawm the tramping system was a foundational stage in a genealogical development of trade unionism. By tracing a line to the later unions he implicitly refers to the artisans, although diverse in occupation, as members of a homogeneous working class movement, as agents of socially produced knowledge which the movement advanced from. Perhaps this is part of the reason why critics of his generation of Marxist historians railed against them for their supposed historical ‘determinism?’16 For concocting the sense of an inevitable working class march, or class struggle, moving towards a Communist horizon.

But for all his perceived partisan unionist tendencies, Hobsbawm understood clearly, largely due to Karl Marx’s critique of capital, the economic reasons that made the tramping system’s continued functioning within the capitalist heartlands of Britain an economic improbability. At the end of the essay he speculates: “no doubt a mass exodus from low wage centres, a mass influx of organized men refusing to work below the rate, might have levelled conditions. But in the nature of things, this could rarely happen.”17 The ideal of an oppositional, or ‘levelling’, ‘anti-capitalist’ tramping system remained a figment of a socialist imagination, an imaginary which Hobsbawm himself had almost seemed hopeful that he would find in his research. The system was in fact always the last line of defence for a pre-capitalist class of artisans, which had to transform itself if it wanted to survive, or else emigrate overseas, where freedom from alienated labour still remained a possibility.

I believe the artisan remains relevant today because it is a figure tied closely to the labour process, but not, historically speaking, to the wage relation itself. Their self-reliance and masterless existence should not be taken as an affirmation of contemporary ‘self-employment’, but rather as a vivid portrait of a historical subject which, if only temporarily, managed to resist wage labour and in the process distort the flow and structure of aggressive capitalisation. The fruits of their resistance ̶ the birth of trade unionism and the precursor to our contemporary welfare system ̶ should stand as a vindication of workplace organisation, and continue to inspire the ailing trade unions that nonetheless still remain an important resource for the workers of today.

Tom Holland, March 2017

This article is an excerpt from the essay Towards an Artisan Imaginary, commissioned by Nikki Kane as part of a project for CuratorLab at Konstfack, Stockholm

References

Higenbottam, Our Society’s History, (1872), as cited by Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.42

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, (Penguin Books, 1972), p.49

John Rees, The Leveller Revolution, (Verso, 2016), p.24

P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Penguin Books, 1963)

Iorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London, (Routledge, 1979) & Radical Artisans in England & France 1830–1870, (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Penguin Books, 1963), p.12

Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.36

p.34

P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Penguin Books, 1963), p.267

Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1862), III, p.243 & E.P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Penguin Books, 1963), p.20

Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.52

p.41

Office for National Statistics, 170 Years of Industrial Change across England and Wales, (Released: 05 June 2013) <http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/170-years-of-industry/170-years-of-industrial-changeponent.html> [accessed February 2017]

Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.48

Ibid, p.48

See Geoffrey Elton’s essays: The Stuart Century, A High Road to Civil War? and The Unexplained Revolution in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Volume II (Cambridge University Press, 1974)

Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.53

Originally published at www.eurstrat.eu on April 10, 2017.

[howieabel]

“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience…” ― E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class