On February 11th a discussion was held on Carnegie Mellon’s campus regarding Hosni Mubarak’s resignation from the Egyptian presidency. The discussion was facilitated by Professor Nico Slate who addressed the significant youth presence amongst the protests leading up to Mubarak’s resignation, “It’s not just that young people are more inclined to go out and protest, which they are . . . It’s also that young people need jobs, and they want good jobs.” He went on to recall one of the regimes attempt to thwart the revolution: paying protestors in Cairo to side with the state. “Well you have to put yourself in that person’s shoes. This calculation’s going through their head. How likely is my participation going to make a difference? How much money is being offered to me and what is that money going to do for my life?”
In many ways, I found Thompson’s humanist history of the English working class to be plagued by the contradictions that inevitably arise when politics and political action are rooted foremost in self interest, as seen in Egypt. Thomspon seems determined to convince us, while carefully citing exceptions to the rule, that the values of the English working-class came to be political radicalism, unity, and egalitarianism amidst the wave of industrialization. Implicitly, acting out one’s self-interest (if one is a sober craftsman or, at the very least, a non-‘scab’ member of the working class) and political radicalism become interchangeable in Thompson’s discourse.
He writes that the small-ware and check-weavers had strongly organized trade societies that resisted the influx of unapprenticed labor – “the men who “would be content to work upon any Terms, or submit to do any Kind of servile Work, rather than starve over the winter” – by advocating laws that would enforce apprenticeships. They were sadly defeated and their industry continued to be subsumed by immigrants, drunks, and rootless men. But not all weavers were forced beyond the edge of starvation and depravity during this time. The Leeds stuff weavers were successful in keeping up wages in the 1830s “by a combination of picketing, intimidation of “masters” and “illegal” men, municipal politics, and violent opposition to machinery.” Both these instances of what Thomspon identifies as political radicalism, are not fundamental efforts to achieve human dignity, an ethos of mutuality, but an attempt to serve the relatively narrow interests of a working class sect (at the obvious cost of others).
In the early 1800s, “With no hope of legal protection the weavers turned more directly to the channels of political Radicalism.” Here, Thomspon clearly equates political Radicalism with a method of bringing about change that might as well be “violence” and “intimidation” (as ironically seen in Leeds). He concludes the book with a curious last breath that speaks to the chasm between working class philosophy/consciousness and their activism, “Hence these years appear at times to display, not a revolutionary challenge, but a resistance movement, in which both the Romantic and the Radical craftsmen opposed the annunciation of the Acquisitive Man. In the failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something was lost”(832). This is a critical point which he does not explore. As we know, the Romantics, as all literary schools, operated under a theoretical framework. Their writing was driven by revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and against the scientific rationalization of nature that was manifested in their style, method, subject matter, and so forth. The Romantics operated under a revolutionary literary philosophy/consciousness that was expressed via their material art. I believe that the failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, as Thompson laments, lies within the absence of a fundamental philosophy fueling the actions of the working class this time. While many working class members were simply not capable of this kind of truly radical activism – whether they were too drunk, too greedy, too poor to care, too illiterate and uneduated to understand the fundamental structure of the Romantic movement, etc. – other were unsuccessful in creating an form of activism that spoke to the allegedly radical change they desired.
Thompson criticizes economic historians, specifically “futurists,” who justify the suffering of the hand-loomer as symptomatic of a transitional period. “But this argument which discounts the suffering of one generation against the gains of the future. For those who suffered, this retrospective comfort is cold” (313). Good thing Martin Luther King did not defer to this logic once he had accumulated some celebrity, respect and financial stability. The success of the Civil Rights movement is inextricable from its commitment to nonviolent activism, action that conveyed their philosophy and interests. nbvhjbajv
Carnegie Mellon Preofessor Nico Slate reluctantly shared his pessimism regarding Egypt’s future, “My concern is that even if these protests lead to some form of democracy, that whatever form that takes will be structures in a fashion that it won’t change fundamentally the realities that led so many people to protest in the first place.”
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