working class

working class. The 18th cent. often talked of the poor, labourers, and artisans as part of its language of ranks and orders. Somewhere in the early years of the 19th cent. such groups were identified by contemporaries and later historians as a working class, or more frequently ‘the working classes’. This identity was seen as a response to their position as wage earners faced with an intensification of capitalist relationships of production, namely relationships which involved private property and production for profit, mediated by cash. The responses and experiences which accumulated to form the relationships of class included opposition to machinery, the dramatic fall in real wages experienced by hand-loom weavers, and the political inspiration of radicalism. In the 1820s and 1830s, trade unions, especially in the textile and mining industries, became a focus of industrial conflict more extensive than anything experienced by the mainly craft associations of the earlier century. The chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s became a focus of many working-class ambitions and gained mass support for a political programme demanding universal manhood suffrage. Many historians see chartism as a product of the economic experiences of the working classes. Others see chartism as a political movement which offered little analysis of economic relationships in terms of capitalist exploitation, but offered a radical attack upon political privilege and corruption as a base for explaining ‘the people's’ poverty. Debate also exists on the meaning of trade union conflicts. Many reflect particular trades and localities with little sense of the relationships of wage labour as a whole.

The 1860s saw the establishment of a more institutionalized trade union movement with legal status and centralized bodies like the Trades Union Congress (1867). This period saw a move from unstable conflict to social peace often identified with the influence of a ‘labour aristocracy’ of skilled workers prepared to co-operate with the owners of capital. The change was more broadly based and related to improvements in working-class living standards, the acceptance of many working people into political life, especially in the Gladstonian Liberal Party, and the development of a more sophisticated employer paternalism. It was a period in which the wage relationship was still partial and imperfect. Subcontracting, payment in kind, and gender and supervisory hierarchies mediated between labour and capital.

By the 1890s, a distinctive working-class culture had emerged, based upon a sense of neighbourhood and mutual support, especially amongst women, upon old and new leisure patterns built around the public house, spectator sports like football and the music-hall, and upon a labour movement consisting of a variety of institutions like the retail Co-operative societies, trade unions, socialist Sunday schools, and the ILP (Independent Labour Party). These values have been called ‘populist’, involving a pride in work and in mutual support in the face of poverty, a delight in having a good time, a derision of privilege, and a regional pride. Such populism could as easily move to a Union-Jack-waving nationalism as to a conflict-orientated sense of class. It represented a sense of cohesion which lasted into the 1950s and was celebrated by Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957).

The working class faced major periods of conflict in the late 19th and early 20th cents. culminating in the General Strike of 1926. This was related to the impact of new technologies, often involving de-skilling, to new management strategies, and to unstable and competitive conditions in world trade. Conflict was firmly related to wages and conditions and there is little evidence of any ambitions for revolutionary change. Socialism in the 1918 constitution of the Labour Party embodied a willingness to use any means including nationalization in the attack on poverty. Major success came with the 1945 Labour government, the welfare state, and the nationalization of key elements of capital.

By the 1950s, the life-style of the bulk of the working class had been transformed by so-called ‘Fordist’ relationships, in which social stability depended upon high productivity, high wages, and the consumption of an increasing variety of goods. A mass culture of film, football, and television began to entail a more private life-style. This was threatened in the 1970s, by de-industrialization, an accelerated shift in the economic structure of Britain away from traditional industries such as coal-mining, textiles, and iron and steel, accompanied by mass unemployment and new forms of poverty.

The problems of writing and understanding working-class history in Britain lie in its political meaning. The initial writings were undertaken by those seeking the origins and inspiration for the Labour Party in a long march of labour history from Tom Paine's Rights of Man, through chartism and the TUC, to the achievements of the 1945 government. Others led by Edward Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class wanted to reposition the Marxist tradition of British history and secure a recognition for the agency and creativity of working-class people, in place of a deterministic view of the impact of economic relationships. Recent writing has reflected the uncertainties and multiple identities of the late 20th and early 21st cents.

See also social history; class.

R. J. Morris