dick geary - labour history, the linguistic turn and postmodernism

Labour History, the 'Linguistic Turn' and PostmodernismAuthor(s): Dick GearySource: Contemporary European History, Vol. 9, No. 3, Theme Issue: Reflections on theTwentieth Century (Nov., 2000), pp. 445-462Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20081764 .

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Labour History, the 'Linguistic

Turn' and Postmodernism

DICK GEARY

Prologue

This paper is primarily concerned with changes in the nature of historical writing about the European working class in the late twentieth century, rather than with a

history of labour over the last one hundred years (a decidely un-postmodern but

nonetheless meaningful distinction). However, its concluding section does propose a few brief and highly schematic theses about changing working-class identities from

the turn of the century to the present day.

Autobiographical confessions

Postmodern theory informs us that there are no disinterested historians, that

historical writing is always autobiographical and that, when we write history, we

'privilege' one historical narrative' at the expense of other possible narratives'. We

need to realise what we exclude, as well as what we include, in our chosen narrative,

and we have to recognise and in some way seek to justify the choices we have

made. Hence I begin with a series of autobiographical confessions. I became a

'labour historian', if that is what I am, and chose to write about class and conflict in

the 1960s, when I wanted, for reasons which were obviously autobiographical, both

to expose social injustice and to destroy its foundations. For me, as a student at

Cambridge in the mid-1960s, the study of labour and of Marxist theory (where I

really started) was to be an instrument of this politics of liberation. My first book,

European Labour Protest, 1848?1939, though it appeared much later (1981), still had its

origins in this agenda and was primarily concerned to identify those factors which

bred collective working-class protest. Even so, my narrative, like that of many of my

contemporaries, was capable of grasping some of the commonplaces of the

postmodern critique of 'traditional' labour history, supposedly anchored in eco

nomic determinism and a teleology of class-consciousness. European Labour Protest

recognised that concepts of class were only indirectly and problematically related to

'industrialisation', that they found first expression in artisan protest, that workers in

the most modern forms of industrial production were rarely at the forefront of

labour protest before 1914, and that labour organisation was predominantly

Contemporary European History, 9, 3 (2000), pp. 445-462 ? 2000 Cambridge University Press

Printed in the United Kingdom



446 Contemporary European History

recruited from skilled males rather than from wage-earners 'in general' in this early

period. Thus there was no necessary connection between being a worker and what

used to be described as 'class-consciousness'. I also realised, like many other labour

historians, that issues of ethnicity, religious confession, gender, generation and

locality sometimes threatened, fragmented, dissolved or destroyed 'class' solidarity; and that where such solidarity did exist, it was not necessarily there to stay. European Labour Protest was further convinced of the centrality of politics, of the role of the state rather than the market, in the production of class (as distinct from occupational)

identity and action. My awareness of the fragility of 'class', however, was not the

result of a disdain of'meta-narratives' (? la Lyotard) but rather a consequence of the

observation of labour movements in different regions and different countries, that is, of attempts at comparison. Collective protest and class identity still formed my central narratives, and my work largely ignored, except most fleetingly, the issue of

gender. It also said far too little about agency (as distinct from structure) and even

less about the role of culture and community in the formation of identities.1

By the early 1990s I had become more concerned with the elements that

fragmented working-class solidarity ?

for political, as well as academic, reasons.

Issues of ethnicity, confession, gender, generation and nationhood now featured

more strongly than they had in my earlier work, as did conservative workers,

Catholic workers, nationalist workers, working-class Tories and women workers,

though in the last case my treatment was as cursory as it was elementary. That

neither industrial labour nor workplace experience necessarily explained or caused

'class' (as distinct from occupational or local) solidarity was stated more forcefully than before, and I had become more aware of the simultaneous co-existence of

multiple working-class identities. Yet my views were in no sense 'postmodern'. I

was disgracefully ignorant of the 'linguistic turn', of the French postmodernists and

of historians such as Hay den White, whose critique of all grand theory, but

especially of Marxism, now strike me as rather familiar and ancient, despite their

erstwhile (and now possibly demode) fashion. I still attempted to explain differences

within and between national working classes in 'old-fashioned' and primarily structural terms

? uneven economic development, different systems of pay,

differences in skill, in residential and social structures, the various, often conflicting,

experiences of young and old, men and women at work, in the market place and

crucially in the world of politics. But this was not politics (pace Patrick Joyce or

Gareth Stedman Jones) construed as discourse; what concerned me were rather the

concrete provisions of constitutions, the behaviour of regimes during strikes and the

varied policies of employers towards their workers.2 Although I have recently paid more attention to the culture of the German working classes, I still portray that

culture as one constructed within the spaces of real cities, in distinct kinds of

residential communities. For me communities are not simply 'imagined' but also

built in spaces of bricks and mortar (territoriality has been a distinctive aspect of

1 Dick Geary, European Labour Protest, 1848-1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1981). 2 Dick Geary, European Labour Politics from 1900 to the Depression (London: Macmillan, 1991).



Labour History, the Linguistic Turn' and Postmodernism 447

working-class daily life and is not simply an invention of cartographers, pace

Bourdieu); and I have never believed that identity is constructed primarily or

independently by language or culture, important though these are.3 Yet (to

stereotype) it is in such a claim ? that communities and identities are constituted by cultural discourse, rather than by structural realities - that the distinctiveness of

much postmodern social history resides.4

Class and the 'new labour history'

In Britain, France and the United States a new labour history has emerged, which

has been informed by currents of postmodern and post-structural thought, expressed

most influentially in the work of Derrida and Foucault. Starting from Derrida's

work on the autonomy of text and language, and Foucault's insistence that discourse

constitutes the subjects and objects it purports to represent, this historiography

rejects positivist accounts of historical change and in particular historical accounts

rooted in an 'economic reductionism'. Following Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, the

postmodern condition displays incredulity towards all meta-narratives. History is

about the unique and the contingent, and it must thus leave questions of causality unresolved (although most historians influenced by postmodernism tend to forget this part of the rubric in their formulations of what I later chastise as linguistic or

cultural determinism). The new history, championed by Hayden White, Dominick

La Capra and Paul Ricoeur, further contests explanations couched in terms of

interests, especially when these are construed as being in some way 'objective', and

is sceptical of all historical writing, which privileges class at the expense of other

identities, such as gender, ethnicity, nationhood and inter-class communities.

(Strictly speaking, rigorous postmodernism is - or should be - sceptical of the meta

narratives of gender, race and nation too.) History is no

longer an account of the

past but a terrain of competing discourses or narratives, which are themselves

constructed autobiographically. Communities are 'imagined', not created by some

social reality independent of language or culture. Classes and communities are

3 Dick Geary, 'Beer and Skittles? Workers and Culture in Germany in the early Twentieth

Century', Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 46, no. 3 (2000), 388-402. 4 Writings about history from the perspective of postmodernism and the linguistic turn (or about

these) include Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); idem,

Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); idem, The Content and the Form

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Dominick La Capra and Steven L. Kaplan, Modern

European Intellectual History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984/85); Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1989); Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, eds., Poststructuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Keith Jenkins,

Re-thinking History (London: Routledge, 1991); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Historical

Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Michael S. Roth, The Ironist's Cage: Memory,

Trauma, and the Construction of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); David D. Roberts,

Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1995); Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1997); Alan Munslow, Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 1997).




autobiographically constructed and never safe. They are

fragile, transient, shifting,

overlapping. Diversity is stressed rather than unity. Identities are forged from

engagement with cultural and political discourses and in the course of action; they are not social realities, which exist before and give rise to actions, language and

culture. Needless to say, such an approach drives a coach and horses through

an

antiquated teleology of class formation, which begins and ends with a narrative of

industrialisation and proletarianisation, and one of the prime targets or victims of the

linguistic turn and postmodern theory has been the construction of labour history in

terms of an economically determined and (according to the postmodernists) outdated concept of class, as well as histories, which have class as their dominant

narrative.5 It should be said, of course, that some of the French and British historians

whose work is discussed below dislike the postmodern label, and few of them see

history as only autobiographical. But their work has been strongly influenced by the

linguistic turn and certain aspects of postmodern scepticism. In particular they tend

to play down explanations couched in terms of socioeconomic structure and stress

the formative role of language and culture. They are perhaps better described as

'post-structuralists'.

In French labour historiography the narrative of class formation has undergone a

massive transformation and become detached from the old narrative of industrialisa

tion and its consequences. Sonnenscher, for example, has identified the roots of

artisan solidarity in a pre-industrial language and in particular in the realm of law (an

admittedly much neglected subject and one which might go some way towards

explaining, for example, the starkness of the blue-collar/white-collar divide in

Germany in the early twentieth century). Sewell's seminal study of radical artisan

identity in France in the first half of the nineteenth century is sceptical of

socioeconomic explanations and concentrates its attention on pre-industrial lan

guage and cultural traditions, relating to both the time-honoured language of

artisans and the discourse of the French Revolution, which together he regards as

being of prime significance in the constitution of labour's identity in France in the

first half of the nineteenth century. Reddy too insists on the power and longevity of

pre-capitalist modes of discourse in French labour before the First World War. For

him the market is a cultural construct rather than a mere economic reality. Jacques

Ranci?re stresses the mythical nature of artisan identity, while Traugott's analysis of

the June Days of 1848 sees identities and solidarities being forged during the political

struggles themselves, rather than as the product of some previous economically

or

socially created class structure.6

5 See the preceding note. See also Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1978); idem, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Nortwestern University Press, 1973); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); idem, The Order of

Things (New York: Random House, 1973); idem, Madness and Civilization (London: Tavistock, 1973);

idem, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); idem, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism

and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984); Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manche ster: Manchester University Press, 1984).

6 Michael Sonnenscher, Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge:




In Britain an equally impressive historiography has sought to remove the

centrality of class from its narrative. Rather it has stressed cross-class solidarities and

non-class divisions. Thus Linda Colley sees patriotism as a unifying theme of

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, Sonya Rose raises the significance

of gender above that of class, and Gareth Stedman Jones, Patrick Joyce and James Vernon replace

a class narrative with that of a more classless 'populism'. Somewhat

differently John Benson's work has emphasised the essentially private and non

political realm of workers as consumers. To look at two of these authors more

closely: Stedman Jones, in his seminal study of Chartism, pays close attention to the

language of its adherents and concludes that its ideology was rooted in a discourse of

populism and radicalism that was not class-specific. He also claims

- crucially, as far

as this article is concerned -

a primacy of language in the construction of social

reality: language in this account is not the product of experience but actually constitutes, gives birth to experience. Patrick Joyce similarly discusses a populist rhetoric, and although he sees that this was never completely devoid of class tones, he nonetheless asserts the autonomy of language and culture. Joyce recognises the

coexistence of different and sometimes contradictory identities among British (or more

properly English) workers, and, as already noted, does not deny the existence

of class. But he denies that class was any more important than classlessness in British

society before the First World War. For Joyce, as for Vernon and Stedman Jones, the dominant narrative of English labour before 1914 was radical populism, a

political discourse, rather than a class-based rhetoric supposedly formed by the

experience of industrial wage labour. As in the case of Stedman Jones, the primacy of production in the construction of labour's identity is disputed and political discourse replaces economic structure as the crucial formative variable.7 It is the

claim of the primacy of language and culture in the determination of identities

which forms the object of this essay. That language constitutes our only

access to

Cambridge University Press, 1989); William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1980); idem, Structure and Mobility: The men and Women of Marseilles

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Jacques Ranci?re, La Parole Ouvri?re (Paris: Union

G?n?rale d'Editions, 1976); idem, 'The Myth of the Artisan', International Labour and Working-Class

History, Vol. 24 (1983), 1-16; idem, La nuit des prol?taires (Paris: 1981); Mark Traugott, Armies of the Poor

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). For surveys of this literature see Lenard Berlanstein,

'Working with Language: The Linguistic Turn in French Labour History', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 33, no. 2 (1991), 426-40; James F. Mcmillan, 'Social History, "New Cultural History" and the Rediscovery of Polities', Journal of Modem History, Vol. 66, no. 4 (1994), 755-72; and the

introduction to Lenard R. Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labour History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1993), 3-37.

7 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707?1837 (London: 1994); Sonya Rose, Limited

Livelihoods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). More recently Rose has qualified the significance of gender relative to other identities: 'Gender and Labor History', International Review of Social History,

Vol. 38 (1993), supp. 1, 145-62. See also Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1984); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991); idem, Democratic Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); James Vernon, Politics and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); John Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain 1880?1980 (London: Longman, 1994). Specifically Joyce, Visions, 9.




'reality' is not self-evident, as occulists and neurologists might point out. In any case,

even if this claim were true, it would not mean that there is no reality apart from

language. In fact those historians influenced by postmodern theory rarely, if ever, go so far as to make to claim that there is nothing knoweable 'out there', for such a

claim would render any distinction between history and fiction untenable and there

is such a distinction, as those who mark undergraduate essays know!

The achievements of the new labour history after the 'linguistic turn' are in some

regards formidable. Its proponents have prevented labour history from becoming a

'eulogy for dashed hopes' (John Saville), they have destroyed crassly reductionist

theories of class formation ever more rigorously, and they have opened

our eyes to

the significance of non-class identities among workers, although we knew about

multiple identities long ago. Post-structural historians (many of whom would

disclaim characterisation as 'labour' or 'social' historians and reject the postmodern

label) have rightly reintroduced the political dimension into the social-historical

equation. Above all they have taught us to be more critical in our reading of the

'texts' of labour, to ascribe proper significance and pay due attention to language, and to be aware of the fragility and transience of ascribed identities. Whether or not

we agree with the conclusions of Joyce, Stedman Jones and Sewell, their work has

often been as impressive in its detail as in its theoretical underpinnings, and labour

history cannot be as unreflective as it once was. Nor will a gut dismissal of the new

historiography as 'faddish' or 'too-clever-by-half' by Anglo-Saxon empiricists suffice to restore an unreflective and positivist labour history, common though such

a reaction is. (I must confess I partly share this instinctive rejection, not least because

an absorption in the texts of labour can miss the physicality of manual work,

working-class play and working-class action.) Yet the methodological claims of

some postmodernists need to be contested on

grounds other than the strong

autobiographical desire to punch them on the nose (and thus give rise to a reality

scarcely constituted by language!).

The 'linguistic turn' and historical method

The conclusions of historians concerned to dispute the centrality of class and stress

other identities in British labour history before 1914 are, of course, far from novel.

Indeed there are times when Joyce (to a lesser extent), Stedman Jones, and Vernon

(in particular) sound positively Whiggish, as they rejoice in the shared values of

Englishmen. Furthermore labour historians have for years recognised that income,

skill, occupation, locality, region, religion, political loyalties, tradition and consump

tion all play a part in the differentiation of workers' thoughts and actions. What is

novel is the insistence of the new history on the primacy of language and culture.

(Strictly speaking, of course, such a claim itself falls foul of postmodern principles, which defy anything resembling a causal explanation in their insistence on the

unique and which reject a dualist distinction between the cultural and the material.) The first problem I have with the claim that language or text constitute amd do

not simply reproduce reality lies in its epistemological status. In what way is a claim



Labour History, the 'Linguistic Turn' and Postmodernism 451

of linguistic or cultural primacy methodologically different from a claim that

identities are primarily determined by economic structures? Both positions are

philosophically disreputable, unless they can provide us with a method of enquiry, which could substantiate one claim as against the other. Neither has ever done this

satisfactorily. At this level both claims are essentialist and locked in competition between a diffuse linguistic/cultural/political reductionism on the one hand and a

crass economic determinism on the other. Both claims (primacy of culture versus

primacy of economy) also rest upon the feasibility of making meaningful distinctions

between the cultural and the material (a quaintly familiar mind/matter distinction), and thus result in a latter-day Cartesian dualism. Such a dualism, of course, itself

contradicts postmodernism's critique of the untenable distinction between language and reality and was the central target of Foucault. But the trouble is that many of the

historians influenced by postmodern theory do end up claiming the primacy of

language and culture, that is, end up with an repertoire of understanding couched in

dualist terms. Furthermore, the study of a particular problem in a particular period

(Chartism in Britain, artisan politics in France) could never in itself constitute a

demonstration of a universal proposition about the primacy of language and culture, even if it did succeed in demolishing specific structural/economic/social explana tions of artisan radicalism or class identity. That some types of analysis based on

accounts of economic and social structure fail to deliver satisfactory answers to

specific historical questions is clear (for example, the growth of mechanised factory

production does not explain the emergence of the language of class and class-based

politics). This could be because such socioeconomic explanations in general or the

concept of class in general are inadequate. But it could equally be because of a

specific rather than a general inadequacy, could stem from the fact that there are still

areas of material existence and experience or aspects of class as yet un- or under

explored, or because the understanding of social and economic structure is itself

inadequate. For example, if class concepts pre-date widespread factory manufacture,

as they do, this does not necessarily mean that their origin resides exclusively in the

realm of political discourse or culture, in the realms of the non-economic, or at least

of the non-economic alone. (And of course there is no such thing as a structure/

event/action that is purely economic.) An analysis of changing structures of

dependence in the artisan workplace, or

changing relations of power between

merchant capitalists and nominally independent craftsmen, for example, certainly

turns out to be more helpful to an understanding of artisan socialism than any account of industrial mechanisation and factory labour. Yet this still means that

changes in the organisation of production were central to changing artisan identity, as the work of John Breuilly, one of the few real comparatavists, shows, even if the

old and simple narrative of industrialisation is inadequate.8 The emergence of similar

8 John Breuilly, 'Artisan economy, ideology and polities', in idem, Labour and Liberalism in

Nineteenth-Century Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 115-59. See also David

Gordon, Merchants and Capitalists: Industrialization and Provincial Politics in Nineteenth-Century France

(Alabama: University of Alabama, 1985); Michael Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post

Revolutionary France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). For a further critique of Sewell see B. H.




artisan responses to the phenomenon of merchant capitalism in Britain, France and

Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century cuts across any explanation formulated in purely cultural or linguistic terms that are nationally specific. This

explains the problem I have with Sewell's account of artisan radicalism in France; for similarities in the discourse and behaviour of English and German artisans,

inhabiting a world of language and culture different from that of their French

counterparts, suggests that there are limits to his essentially national?cultural

explanation, with its focus on the language of the French Revolution. Furthermore

Reddy and Joyce do recognise and treat as important the continued existence of

small-scale, non-factory labour, that is, the persistence of pre-industrial discourse is

contextualised in their account.9 In practice, therefore, historians cannot and do not

simply start from text or language, whatever claims they might make about linguistic or cultural primacy.

A second problem revolves around the view of language as independently constituitive of social reality. It may be true that we can only comprehend and

construct reality through language and culture, although I should have thought that

physical experience does exist neurologically and without words. But this does not

mean that reality does not exist apart from language. Nor does it mean that there is

no connection between the signified and the signifier. Language is not necessarily or

always wilful. The historian who wants to deny that there is anything 'out there'

beyond our cultural constructions should get out of history, for history is not fiction

and most of us are aware of rules of evidence, which of necessity preclude some

kinds of interpretation, even though they do not provide us with certainty. (Of

course, few postmoderns do go this far.) And despite the conceit of some

postmodernists, narrative does not constitute explanation.10 Such a view may stem

from a particular French intellectual style, but it is only one style and one that is

arguably pass? in the world, from which it came. The preference for French cultural

and linguistic theory might almost be said to obscure other, possibly more profitable, avenues of understanding. There is more than one kind of critical theory, and a

great deal of'discourse analysis', especially in corpus linguistics in the Anglo-Saxon

world, not only does not claim the primacy or autonomy of language/text but

actually finds 'language' and 'texts' themselves insubstantial and problematical until

they are contextualised. Indeed, for one school of discourse analysts,

even particular

grammatical forms are seen to relate not only to the context of language itself but

also to both the immediate speech context and other, more distant, non-textual

contexts of politics and power (Halliday). Significantly Zellig Harris, who coined

the term 'discourse analysis' in a seminal article in 1952, was concerned 'to correlate

"culture" with language (i.e. non-lingustic and linguistic behaviour)'. For Van Dijk,

Moss, 'Republican Socialism and the Making of the Working Class in Britain, France and the United

States', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 35, no. 2 (1993), 402 ff., which not only stresses

the significance of competition for the emergence of new solidarities but also disputes Sewell's reading of the texts of French labour in the 1830s and 1840s.

9 Joyce, Visions, 3 3 3 ; Reddy, Rise of Market Culture.

10 This is Munslow's claim in Deconstructing History.




it matters not just how language is used but who uses it and when they use it, that is,

meaning and context cannot be dissociated: 'people use

language in order to

communicate ideas and beliefs . . . and they do so as part of more complex social

events'. In this corpus of work, therefore, as in the case of Foucault, discourse both

constitutes and represents reality. The central objective of Norman Fairclough's

study of language, for example, has been to integrate discourse analysis with the

social analysis of sociocultural change.11 Now Fairclough may be misguided in his

enterprise, but for many discourse analysts language and its meaning are not

abstracted from external context. The point here is not that Joyce and Stedman

Jones are wrong to learn from post-structural analyses of discourse (and they are

immensely knowledgeable about context) but rather to point out that many such

analyses point away from any primacy of language, text or autonomous cultural

realm.

The fact that context is required to give meaning to language and texts ? in fact

to give multiple, possibly competing meanings to language and texts - is a central

conclusion of modern discourse analysis and methodologically obviates the possibi

lity of the autonomous primacy of language or text. What is more, use of the same,

inherited terminology, does not of itself indicate a core and unchanging meaning. On this ground Dorothy Thompson and others are able to dispute Stedman Jones's

reading of Chartist texts. Similarly Axel K?rner has demonstrated how a continuity in the language of French working-class songs between 1840 and 1890, invoking

republican and popular (as distinct from class) terminology, does not preclude the

increasing centrality of class to their meaning. I have argued myself that the adoption of the same texts by the cultural organisations of German workers and those of the

German middle class (as in the case of Goethe or Schiller) did not indicate an

identity of understanding or preclude class, for their respective readings of the same

texts were often different.12 This point brings us back once again to context and the

social. The openness of texts precludes the kind of essentialist reading which informs

the work of both those who read only class and those who read only populism narratives therein. When it comes to the populist reading of texts, historians need to

heed the injunction to be more 'sceptical' and 'playful', that is, the same critical

tools can be deployed as much against

a narrative of populism, as

against a narrative

of class. Stedman Jones is certainly right when he claims that the term 'class' should

11 Zellig Harris, 'Discourse Analysis', Language, Vol. 28 (1952), 1?30; T. A. Van Dijk, 'The study of

discourse', in idem, ed., Discourse as Structure and Process, I (London: Sage, 1997), 1-34; M. A. K.

Halliday, Language as social semiotic (London: Edward Arnold, 1978); M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan,

Language, Context and Text (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1985); Norman Fairclough, Language and

Power (London: Longman, 1989); idem, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992);

idem, Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Longman, 1995). 12

Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (London: Temple Smith, 1984); idem, 'The Languages of

Class', Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Vol. 52, no. 1 (1987), 54?7; idem, Outsiders:

Class, Gender and Nation (1993); Neville Kirk, ed., Social Class and Marxism (Bookfield, VT: Ashgate,

io96), 7; Neville Kirk, Change, Continuity and Class (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Axel K?rner, Das Lied von einer anderen Welt (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1997); Dick Geary,

'Beer and Skittles? Workers and Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany', Australian Journal of Politics and History, 46, 3 (2000), 391 ff.




be analysed in its linguistic context, but that linguistic context is neither singular nor

autonomous of other, not necessarily linguistic, contexts. This is not to say that the

populist reading is itself incorrect, and Stedman Jones is, of course, well aware of

historical context. But it is to say that the dismissal of material or structural

explanations of identity or of class narratives cannot follow from this linguistic or

culturalist methodology alone. It is of some considerable significance that many historians of the cultural/linguistic bent have rarely engaged in any systematic

attempt to address the epistemological status of the claims they make about primacy or causation (although in this they are scarcely alone), other than to point out the

limits of the crassest forms of economic reductionism and to unveil the often

unconscious teleogies of class which have informed so much past labour history.

(On this latter point they certainly have a strong case.) Their work does makes us

think about language and culture, and in this it has performed a major task in

refining our understanding of historical identities and the precariousness of domi

nant narratives. To do this, however, is not to establish the explanatory, heuristic or

ontological primacy of language or culture. Nor does it mean that the concept of

class is invariably wrong or redundant either as a heuristic device or as a reality

experienced by individual historical actors. To substantiate or negate such claims of

primacy requires the discovery of a method of investigation, which could demon

strate or negate claims of the autonomy of language and culture. I am far from clear

about what such a methodology would look like. But. . .

'A material world' (Madonna)

I do not wish to claim that class or other identities are determined by some

'economic reality'. Such a position is as

problematical as claims of linguistic and

cultural primacy; and there is no reality that is purely economic. I am in complete

agreement with Patrick Joyce when he writes that 'class was a fairly late arrival and

was for long subordinate to other ways of seeing the social order' and that

'ideological versions of classlessness constantly reproduce themselves'.13 My own

work has stressed that, where an overarching class (as distinct from occupational)

identity does become historically significant and in particular where it manifests

itself in the political arena, this usually relates to factors outside the workplace and

the realm of production, in particular to aspects of popular culture, residential

structures, the attitudes of other social groups and above all the nature of the state, as

well as the creative role of institutions and political parties. Like most labour

historians, I recognise the existence of a host of concerns which militate against and

cut across the adoption of class-based identities: concerns of gender, religious

confession, race, region and - at the most basic level - individual psychology. However, I am

suspicious of the 'rush to culture' to explain diversity. What I would

claim is that many of the divisions among workers can be explained without resort

to the cultural or at least the purely cultural, and lie at least in part in the uneven

13 Joyce, Visions, 8, 217.




nature of economic development, and secondly that the dominance of one discourse

rather than another among specific groups of workers, as well as the timing of its

dominance, can often, although not always, be related to structural factors or

external conjunctures - where people live, the job they do, how they are treated by

employers and the state, how these variables are changing/have changed. There is

indeed a world of freedom, there are political choices to be made. But the world of

politics is occupied not only by discourses but also by constitutions, armies,

policemen, parties, parliaments, and it is often the behaviour of these agencies which makes one discourse more

meaningful than another. In short, choices and

discourses are structured and rarely wilful. It is possible to make informed guesses/

predictions about the likely membership of European socialist parties before 1914 in

terms of gender, skill and place of residence, or about the likely incidence of strikes

which take us out of the world of discourse to relations of exploitation and power across national boundaries. A Weberian comparative methodology

can make sense -

much more sense than the nominalism of postmodern singularity -

of cross-cultural

regularities (as well as the unique) in working-class behaviour and identity. Finally the openness of discourse applies

as much to non-class as to class identities; that is to

say, apparently non-class discourses can be open to class. In short, the inadequacy of

certain explanations couched in terms of economic or social structure need not

always lead to a rush to 'culture' to find the answer.

Industrial growth, for example, has everywhere been characterised by uneven

development - between countries, regions and localities. The different pace and

timing of industrialisation in the various European states produced and still produces national labour forces with markedly different structures. Within national bound

aries the industrialisation of some regions has been and is being accompanied by the

de-industrialisation of others. To take some examples from the last century: despite the growth of large-scale mining and metallurgical industries in the Ruhr and

industrial expansion in the cities of Saxony and Berlin, Germany's vast agrarian

provinces in the east remained largely untouched by this process, as did much of the

country south of the river Main. In France Languedoc de-industrialised, in contrast

to Paris and the north-east; and in Italy the gulf that separated the mezzogiorno from

the Genoa?Milan-Turin triangle grew notoriously large. Differences in regional economic development

were if anything even more

pronounced in Spain, Russia

and Austria-Hungary. The timing of technological modernisation varied from one

industrial sector to another: Germany, for example, possessed highly capital

intensive electrical and chemical industries but domestic shoe manufacture even into

the 1920s, while France had a large artisan sector but was at the forefront of

European automobile and synthetic textile production before 1914. Such moder

nisation and its timing also varied within one and the same industrial sector. This

was as true of knitting in Troyes as it was of the Bielefeld engineering industry. In

consequence there existed simultaneously workforces of very different structure.14

14 A classic study of uneven development is F. B. Tipton, Regional Variations in the Economic History

of Germany (Middleton, CT: Weslyan University Press, 1976). The theme is also central to Sydney




These were further fragmented by hierarchies of pay ? different forms of payment

for blue- and white-collar workers, or skilled and unskilled labour, or payment by

seniority and length of service. Some of these differences have become more and

not less marked in the twentieth century. Additionally employers have adopted

strategies to set worker against worker, including the provision of welfare benefits

for particular groups of employees and the physical separation of different national

ities in segregated housing colonies. Thus the absence of a unitary and 'class

conscious' working class has been hampered not only by the presence of other, non

class identities, not just by cultural factors, but also by the nature of the economy itself. The extent of solidarity has also tended to be greater in times of economic

upswing than periods of depression, which can set worker against worker, men

against women, young against old, and employed against unemployed in the

struggle to keep or to get jobs, as was evident in the Depression of 1929?33 and has

been noted in the recession of the 1970s and 1980s.15

Of course, this does not give the lie to linguistic/cultural accounts of division and

non-class identities amongst labour. It does not, for example, explain why workers

in similar jobs in similar factories were sometimes divided along lines of religious confession or ethnicity in imperial Germany (with Catholics and Poles staying away from the 'socialist' Free Unions and the SPD), or why others overcame the diversity of workplace and occupational identities to join a movement speaking the language of class. However, that certain structures informed the option for socialist rather

than liberal, for collectivist rather than individualist, discourse, is undeniable.

Membership of virtually all European labour or socialist parties was dominated by manual wage labourers in the period before the 1960s. Admittedly this did not mean

that being a

wage-labourer was ever sufficient to determine membership:

a majority

of workers have never belonged to the organised labour movement, although

increasingly large numbers did vote socialist between 1918 and 1950 in most

European countries. It does suggest, though, that the choice of a particular political discourse was usually not independent of social position. This perception

? the

centrality of manual labour to voting behaviour -

was even repeated by studies of

affluent workers in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s and reinforced by cross

national similarities in working-class behaviour over long periods of time, as in the

case of printers or dock workers. Union and socialist party members were almost

Pollard, Peaceful Conquest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The importance of region is

developed in essays on France, Italy and Spain in Dick Geary, ed., Labour and Socialist Movements in

Europe before 1914 (Cheltenham Spa: Berg, 1989), and further stressed by A. Cottereau in I. Katznelson

and A. Zollberg, eds., Working Class Formation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). On

the uneven pace of modernisation in specific industrial sectors see Heidrun Homburg, 'Die Anfange des

Taylorsystems in Deutschland', Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Vol. 4, no. 2 (1978), 170 ff.; Karl Ditt,

'Technologogischer Wandel und Strukturver?nderung der Fabrikgesellschaft in Bielefeld', in Werner

Conze and Ullrich Engelhardt, eds., Arbeiter im Industrialisierungsprozess (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979); Michael Hanagan, The Logic of Solidarity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press; 1980), 3-27.

15 Pay hierarchies are explored in J?rgen Kocka, Unternehmerverwaltung und Angestelltenschaft

(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1969); and in Rudolf Vetterli, Industriearbeit, Arbeiterbewusstsein und gewerkschaf tliche Organisation (G?ttingen: Vandenhoek, 1978).




everywhere predominantly skilled and male before 1945. They were also more

likely to live in towns than in the countryside, though there were some significant

regional variations (the Po valley and the French Midi). However, these variations

are themselves amenable to explanations in terms of integration into a

capitalist

market and spatial factors, that is, structural as well as more specifically cultural

variables. That social-democratic culture in Germany before 1945 was built in bricks

and mortar (as well as a secularised Protestant culture) is indicated by the fairly

regular distribution of levels of support between towns of different sizes and

particular types of housing, where confessional and ethnic variables are held

constant.16 Additionally, adherence to Catholicism was not sufficient to deter all

Catholic workers in imperial Germany from support for socialist politics. It is true

that the Social Democratic Party (SPD) made only slow inroads into the Catholic

vote from 1871 to 1914, but where it did so was not random. It was more successful

with Catholic newcomers to the Ruhr, for example, than in settled Catholic

communities of the region, that is, the hold of Catholic 'culture' was not

independent of other variables.17 It is the perception of such regularities which

makes possible the activity of historical explanation. Weber got it right - in terms of

comparative method, at least!

I would be the first to agree that this is not the end of the matter. People join unions and political parties for different reasons, while the discourse of many

working-class organisations (Catholic and company unions, liberal voting) was not

dominated by considerations of class. Arguably the greatest national variations in

working-class behaviour were to be found precisely in the degree of support for

independent working-class politics and the politics of class. The liberalism or

populism of large numbers of British workers can be contrasted with the strength in

Germany of the Marxist SPD and its language of class, reproduced in the daily discourse of its cultural organisations, and with the weakness of working-class liberalism in Germany before the First World War. Here, then, were significant differences in the political choices of industrial workers that seemed to override a

uniform identity as wage labourers. However, there were differences in the

'material' world of British and German labour, especially in terms of residence (the

possibility in the United Kingdom of a 'modest domesticity', for example) and

strength in the labour market (with British unions enjoying much more success in

16 Geary, Labour Protest, 70-80; Adelheid von Saldern, 'Wer ging in die SPD?' in Gerhard A.

Ritter, ed., Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991), 163-71; Bernhard

Mann, 'Die SPD und die preussischen Landtagswahlen 1893 ?1913', in Ritter, Aufstieg, 41; Dieter

Fricke, 'Die Entwicklung und Ausbreitung der Parteiorganisation der deutschen Sozialdemokratie',

Ritter, Aufstieg, 157; John Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, 3 vols.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968-69). 17 Karl Rohe, 'Die Ruhrgebietssozialdemokratie im Wilhelminischen Kaiserreich', Ritter, Aufstieg,

325 ff.; Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im deutschen Kaiserreich (Bonn: Dietz Verlag,

1992), 598 ff.; Wilfried Spohn, 'Religion and Working Class Formation', in Politics and Society, Vol. 19

(1991), 109-32; Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolution?rer Attentismus (Frankfurt/Main:

Propyl?en, 1973), 282 ff; Gerhard A Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im wilhelminischen Deutschland

(Colloquium Verlag, 1989), 73-78; Mann, 'SPD', 41 ff




struggles with employers than their German equivalents), which go some way,

although by no means the whole way, towards explaining these differences. I agree,

nonetheless, that an essential element of liberal or socialist choice, of class-based or

cross-class politics, lay in the political sphere. This political sphere was constructed,

however, not just by a repertoire of discourses but by different political structures

and different forms of government. In the German and British case before 1918 this

involved a contrast of semi-authoritarian rule with limited but nonetheless real

parliamentary government, of great with relatively small state intrusions into private and industrial relations, of relatively more with relatively less repression.18 It seems

to me, therefore, that it is in the comparison of economic, social and political structures and agents as well as of the ideologies

or discourses, of different nations,

regions, localities and social groups, that a solution to our problem can be found, that some kind of measure of the autonomy of language and culture can be

constructed.

It is no accident that this is the conclusion of Ronald Aminzade in his comparison of the development of labour in different urban settings in France. Taking into

account local economic structures and institutional alternatives, he writes of 'the

importance of class relations in shaping constraints and opportunities' faced by

political actors.19 Another historian of French labour, Michael Hanagan, agrees that

language can only be understood in a specific political context and sees the

significance of class as something held in a flux between importance and irrele

vance.20 The point is not that it is always wrong to deny the centrality of class but

rather that its significance as an organising construct of the lives of workers is

chronologically and spatially variable, and that the variability is often explicable in

terms of differing economic and political structures or conjunctures, as well as

language and culture, that is, by means of systematic comparison some

reasonably

successful predictive variables can be derived.

We noted earlier that discourses, which may seem at first sight devoid of class,

may nonetheless embrace class in both less and more obvious ways. Thus Dorothy

Thompson and Neville Kirk combine linguistic with class-informed readings of

Chartism.21 The possibility of multiple yet simultaneous identities can further

compound the problem of supposed non-class identities. Catholic workers may in

the main have rejected German social democracy; but many of them did join

together with socialist workers in strike waves in the Ruhr in 1905 and in Upper Silesia in 1913, as well as the socialisation campaign of 1919. What is more, the

'Christian' (largely Catholic) Unions of imperial Germany, initially chaired by

18 The role of these factors is explored in Dick Geary, Labour Protest, 47-70; idem, 'Class in

Germany, 1850-1930', Bradford Occasional Papers, 9 (1988), 42-61. 19 Ronald Aminzade, Class, Politics and Early Industrial Capitalism (Albany, NY: 1981); idem, Ballots

and Barricades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Specifically idem, 'Class Analysis, Politics

and French Labour History', in Lenard R. Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 95.

20 Michael Hanagan, 'For Reconstruction in Labor History', in Berlanstein, Rethinking, 182-200. 21 See n. 12 for Dorothy Thompson. Also Neville Kirk, Social Class and Marxism (Brookfield, VT:

Ashgate, 1996), 7.




priests and eschewing industrial action, increasingly came to resemble their socialist

rivals in initiating strikes and giving out strike pay. In the Weimar Republic they

played a

major part in the creation of a fragile welfare state.22 In France Mazamet

workers voted for conservative election candidates, yet proved capable of solid and

lengthy industrial conflict, and there is some evidence that members of company unions in Germany voted for the SPD when ballots were secret and that they were

later involved in ultra-leftist uprisings during the civil war in the Ruhr in 1920.23 Poles in the same area formed their own, separate union and gave their political

support to the cause of Polish nationalism, yet they played a major role in strike

action and were certainly aware of their class identity. In fact to be a Pole in the

Ruhr before 1918 was to be a worker. In this case national and class identity reinforced each other, as they have in many colonial struggles subsequently.24 The

reading of texts and cultures thus needs to be extended and complemented by a

study of actions, and there are times when actions speak louder than the words of

worker poets. This seems especially relevant to the history of many women and

unskilled male workers, who often lacked the resources to join workers' organisa

tions, yet played a significant and growing role in informal protest as well as in

strikes. It was particularly true in the social and political upheavals of 1917-23,

when apparently quiescent and previously silent folk erupted on to the stage of

protest in unprecedented numbers. Female labourers may have been put off by the

gendered construction of class on the part of the dominant, male organisations of

labour, but their actions indicate that they also knew that they were workers.25 So

the study of texts, cultures, actions and organisations needs to be complemented by

an attempt to understand silence and even inaction. By comparing the circumstances

of the different (and not just observing difference), we may come closer to an

understanding which postmodernism's insistence on difference and diversity may obscure.

So understanding labour's discourse is an important but far from sufficient step in

the reconstruction of labour history. We do need to know where people lived, what

they did, how many of them did it. (Of course, Stedman Jones, Joyce, Sewell and

Reddy do know these things, and that is why they can do what they do so well.) From the linguistic turn we can and must learn many things. But save us from the

'hubris of wordmakers who claim to be the makers of reality' (John Toews)!

22 Michael Schneider, Die Christlichen Gewerkschaften (Bonn: Dietz, 1992); William L. Patch, Jr, Christian Trade Unions in the Weimar Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

23 Klaus Mattheier, Die Gelben (D?sseldorf: Droste, 1973); Dick Geary, 'The Industrial Bourgeoisie and Labour Relations in Germany, 1871-193 3', in David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans, eds., The

German Bourgeoisie (London: Routledge, 1990), 140-61. 24

Christoph Kiessmann, Polnische Bergarbeiter im Ruhrgebiet (G?ttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht,

1978); John J. Kulczycki, The Foreign Worker and the German Labour Movement (Oxford: Berg, 1991). 25 Dick Geary, 'Revolutionary Berlin', in Chris Wrigley, ed., Challenges of Labour (London:

Routledge, 1993), 24-50: idem, 'Rhein, Ruhr und Revolution, 1900-1923', Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts

zur Geschichte der europ?ischen Arbeiterbewegung, Vol. 7 (1984), 30-38.



46o Contemporary European History

The European working classes in the twentieth century

Up to this point I have sought to contest an historiography which has relegated class

to the sidelines in its understanding of labour. I now want to make a few, very schematic points about 'class' and the working classes in twentieth-century Europe.

i. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century there emerged in most

European countries organisations (sometimes anarcho-syndicalist but more usually

socialist), which did speak the language of class and claimed to represent specifically

working-class interests, that is, the collective interests of all dependent wage earners.

In some countries these arguably became the dominant political expression of

working-class identity, as in German Austria and in Germany itself before 1914. Even in Germany, however, these organisations, and had to compete with Catholic,

Polish and 'yellow' (company) workers' organisations; in Holland with Catholic and

Liberal opponents within the working-class, and in general they could never claim

to speak for the whole of organised, let alone for unorganised, labour. In some

places, primarily Britain, though often in France and Scandinavia too, cross-class

identities and rhetoric remained as important as, if not more

important than, class

specific attitudes, at least in the world of politics, while powerful unions rested on

occupational rather than on a more general class solidarity (especially evident in the

case of skilled engineers and miners in the United Kingdom before 1914). In all

places the values and dreams of the unorganised largely remained veiled in silence.

2. Variations in the strength of independent class identity (awareness of a

universal working-class interest and an idea of difference from other social groups) were not random but related to factors such as the role and nature of the state

(parliamentary or autocratic), the willingness of employers to recognise unions, the

strength or weakness of liberal political parties, the strength or weakness of religious observance, patterns of residence (the possibility or impossibility of a 'modest

domesticity') and the presence or absence of a commercial leisure industry to

compete with more class-based forms of recreation.

3. For a short period in continental Europe the rhetoric of class seemed to be on

the edge of victory ?

in the Russian, Austrian, German and Hungarian revolutions

of 1917/18/19, in land seizures and factory occupations in Italy in 1919/20, in the

most massive waves of strikes that Europe was to see before 1945, and in spectacular

increases in both the electoral strength of the parties of labour and the membership of trade unions between 1917 and 1922. Significantly this happened when the

traditional forces of social control were seriously weakened at the end of the First

World War, when labour found itself in a strong position in the labour market

(albeit temporarily) in the postwar boom, and when large numbers of previously

unorganised workers (such as women, rural labourers, white-collar workers) joined the ranks of protest. For a short period class did appear as one of the forms, if not the

dominant form, of identity for millions of European workers. Even at this high

point, however, counter-revolutionary forces were able to re-establish control, not

least because labour was rarely united and because many workers did not give their

first allegiance even to some diffuse concept of class, let alone to class-based




revolutionary politics. Even where they did, however, politics often set worker

against worker (Social Democrats versus Communists, both versus anarcho-syndic

alists), as in Weimar Germany, interwar France or republican Spain.

4. In the 1920s and 1930s labour's identity as a separate 'class' remained fragile

and contested. More industrial workers than before might have broken with

bourgeois politics, as is suggested by the electoral fortunes of many European labour

parties, but processes of residential segregation and social housing presented some

workers with the possibility of a private family leisure and segregated working-class communities in new ways, while a

popular leisure culture (one which was not class

specific) made ever greater inroads into the daily life of workers (and of young workers in particular) between the wars, although its spread was still limited by real

poverty among many groups of European workers. The structures of solidarity,

always precarious, were threatened in new ways. The process of de-solidarisation

was advanced apace, at least in central Europe, by the experience of mass and long

tern unemployment, which hardened generation and gender divisions within the

working class, and in Italy and Germany by Fascist regimes. In this period factory labour's percentage of the workforce had already begun to decline, and an increase

in both white-collar employment and female labour outside the home could be

observed. Thus many of those factors which are held to have eroded the centrality of class in western Europe since the Second World War - the restructuring and re

gendering of the labour force, the reduction in size of industrial labour, the arrival of

private leisure and consumerism, increases in welfare provision and decent housing, a commercial and classless popular culture

- were

already intimated, even before

1945. Postmodernism's emphasis on

diversity is clearly more relevant to an under

standing of working-class identity, therefore, at some points in time than at others,

but it should not obscure the fact that 'class' remained the organising conception of

proletarian politics for millions of workers in many European countries for half a

century or more.26

5. It was no accident that postmodernism arrived when it did. The critique of

class and other grand concepts was located in a world in which meta-narratives were

becoming increasingly untenable. Privatisation, commercialism, consumerism, rela

tive affluence, welfare, casual labour, female labour and de-industrialisation have

arguably done for the old working class in many parts of Europe since 1945, though

unemployment and homelessness have generated a largely impotent and marginal underclass (not Marx's proletariat) in the post-industrial countries, which in turn

have become increasingly dependent on the labour of the Third World. Previously

upper-class tastes and opportunities (foreign travel, international cuisine) have

percolated down the social scale, although specific choices still reflect social

difference as well as economic resource, while what were formerly and primarily

working-class tastes (for example, attendance at soccer matches) have percolated

26 These bald Statements summarise the arguments of my European Labour Protest, European Labour

Politics and other articles, some of which are mentioned above. Further elaboration occurs in Dick

Geary, 'Working-Class Identities in Europe, 1850S-1930S', Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 45, no. 1 (1999), 20-34.




upwards. At the same time fashion has become more classless in most Western

societies, especially through the pervasive medium of the advertisement. Much of

the distinctiveness of working-class culture has been displaced by universal television

and by car and home ownership. In Britain (or more precisely England), the accents

and language of class do still reproduce themselves daily. In eastern Europe it still

means something

to be a worker. Life chances are far from equal, even in western

Europe, and they have become less so in places where 'Thatcherism' has held sway and especially where communist regimes have been replaced by free-market forces.

But in these cases it is clear that the residues of class lack an agenda to change the

world. Indeed agendas themselves are increasingly formulated around issues that are

not necessarily class-specific but which find supporters and opponents across social

divides (such as the environment, animal welfare, gender). Class may not have

disappeared, but its all-encompassing primacy most certainly has, not least because

the division of labour is now global rather than national, and because the old enemy

(capitalism) is more powerful (materially and ideologically) and yet simultaneously more diffuse and less tangible, at least in the 'First World', than it once was. The

disjunction between political nation and international capitalism renders increasingly

marginal the national-political agenda of class, as it was classically formulated and

easily comprehended in Europe between 1850 and 1950. Not least for this reason

have we the Blairs and Schroeders of the present epoch.27

27 Goldthorpe, Affluent Worker; Hartmut Kaelble, A Social History of Western Europe, 1880-1980

(Dublin: Gille Macmillan, 1990); William E. Paterson and Alastair H. Thomas, eds., The Future of Social

Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Frances Fox Piven, ed., Labor Parties in Postindustrial

Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (London:

Abacus, 1995), 302-9; Margaret Walsh and Chris Wrigley, 'Womanpower: the transformation of the

UK and USA labour force since 1945', paper delivered to a conference on 'Comparative Labour

History', University of Nottingham (November 1999); Stefan Berger and David Broughton, eds., The

Force of Labour. The Western European Labour Movement and the Working Classes (Oxford: Berg, 1995).



dick geary - labour history, the linguistic turn and postmodernism

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