The Making of the English Working Class
Book by E. P. ThompsonWikipedia
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Search complete. 56 mentions across 8 episodes found for "The Making of the English Working Class".
Oct 13, 2026
Lewis BassettHOST
But what is class? Is class a matter of taste? Does buying olive oil and liking sourdough make you middle class? Does liking a fried breakfast and a sausage roll from Gregg's make you plebeian? Or is class more to do with the money that you have and not what you choose to spend it on? Our next guest on the Full English Podcast is Dan Evans.
Lewis BassettHOST
Dan is a sociologist who has spent a lot of time thinking not only about class, what it is and how to define it, but his book, A Nation of Shopkeepers, offers a new take on our class system in the UK.
Lewis BassettHOST
Dan argues that seeing Britain in terms of a ruling class on the one side and a lower or working class on the other has always been too simplistic, especially today after huge numbers have joined the middling ranks or what Dan calls the petty bourgeois.
Lewis BassettHOST
In this episode I chat to Dan about his work and why this kind of sociology matters for politics as well as its relevance for understanding our food culture in Britain.
Lewis BassettHOST
You can find me and subscribe to this podcast in all the usual places, including Substack, where to coincide with this episode, I've written a piece entitled, Are Chefs Like Me Petty Bourgeois? The meaning of that term and its relevance should hopefully become clear by the end of this show.
Lewis BassettHOST
And one last thing.
Lewis BassettHOST
My book, The Full English, is out now with Verso.
Lewis BassettHOST
So if you like what you hear and you want to read more, you can grab a copy of it now.
Alex DohertyHOST
[intro music] Hello, and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other.
Alex DohertyHOST
My name is Alex Doherty, and my guest today is Taimur Bascola, author of the new book, The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: How Communism Built a Capitalist Superpower.
Alex DohertyHOST
In the interview, we talked about how China's remarkable economic rise was facilitated by the state's socialist inheritance, and about the central role played by Chinese migrant workers, and the critical importance of the fact that they were only partially proletarianized, being dependent both on wages, but also the rural hinterland of China's urban centers.
Alex DohertyHOST
We went on to discuss the creation of a conventional capitalist labor market in China as the so-called iron rice bowl of the state-owned enterprises and the cradle to grave welfare system for urban workers was broken up, and we went on to talk about the so-called new enclosure movement in the Chinese countryside that is finally expropriating the rural population of their control over land and making them entirely dependent on wages and markets.
Alex DohertyHOST
Go to patreon.com/poltheoryother to sign up.
Alex DohertyHOST
Taimur Bascola is an interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work addresses questions of politics, history, and theory.
Alex DohertyHOST
He's the author of Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law, and his new book, which was the topic of our conversation, is The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: How Communism Built a Capitalist Superpower.
Alex DohertyHOST
[upbeat music] So the title of the book, of course, refers to E. P. Thompson's pathbreaking nineteen sixty-three book, The Making of the English Working Class.
David McNallyGUEST
And, you know, I quite explicitly, Daniel, locate myself within what I consider to be the both most rigorous but also most Marxian trend within history coming out of that New Left, which is to say history from below.
David McNallyGUEST
Now, history from below really begins with some rebels of the British Left after 1956, the revelations about Stalin, the Russian invasion of Hungary, where people like E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class, Christopher Hill, the author of The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution, and others take their distance from the Communist Party, which they had been in, particularly during the anti-fascist struggle, and they begin to innovate and build a much more robust history from below of the British working class, and there's also a parallel movement happening, uh, among French historians, going back and looking at the French Revolution from below.
David McNallyGUEST
Now, one of the things I want to emphasize in this context is that there are two great predecessors of history from below, and in my own work, as you'll know, I'm trying to integrate them.
David McNallyGUEST
One is W.E.B. Du Bois with his classic Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, which foregrounds the general strike of the slaves.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
Um, uh, I grew up in India, um, although I went to grad school in the United States, and so I did mostly, um, Indian history and some European history growing up.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
Um, but, you know, one of the books that I read as an undergraduate that fueled my interest in social history and history from the bottom up, which is very much a feature of this book, was E.P. Thompson's, uh, The Making of the English Working Class and, uh, the various works associated with Subaltern Studies, um, in India.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
And so, yes, it was, um, this, this book, I think, offered an opportunity to marry my, uh, original interests in history with my training as a scholar of American history.
Ahmed Y. AlMaazmiHOST
And because of that, you were able to unearth a, a wide range of, uh, individual stories, and what amazing stories they are.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
Um, uh, I grew up in India, um, although I went to a grad school in the United States, and so I did mostly, um, Indian history and some European history growing up.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
Um, but, you know, one of the books that I read as an undergraduate that fueled my interest in social history and history from the bottom up, which is very much a feature of this book, uh, was E.P. Thompson's, uh, The Making of the English Working Class and, uh, the various works associated with Subaltern Studies, um, in India.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
And so, yes, it was, um...
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
This, this book, I think, offered an opportunity to marry my, uh, original interests in history with my training as a scholar of American history.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
Um, uh, I grew up in India, um, although I went to grad school in the United States, and so I did mostly, um, Indian history and some European history growing up.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
Um, but, you know, one of the books that I read as an undergraduate that fueled my interest in social history and history from the bottom up, which is very much a feature of this book, uh, was E. P. Thompson's, uh, The Making of the English Working Class and, uh, the various works associated with Subaltern Studies, um, in India.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
And so, yes, it was, um...
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
This, this book, I think, offered an opportunity to marry my, uh, regional interests in history with my training as a scholar of American history.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
Um, uh, I grew up in India, um, although I went to a grad school in the United States, and so I did mostly, um, uh, Indian history and some European history growing up.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
Um, but, you know, one of the books that I read as an undergraduate that fueled my interest in social history and history from the bottom up, which is very much a feature of this book, uh, was E.P. Thompson's, uh, The Making of the English Working Class and, uh, the various works associated with Subaltern Studies, um, in India.
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
And so, yes, it was, um...
Gunja SenGuptaGUEST
This, this book, I think, offered an opportunity to marry my, uh, regional interests in history with my training as a scholar of American history.
Charlie TaylorHOST
In short, as a result of five decades of post-Mao reforms, there now exists, for the first time in China's history, a vast industrial proletariat of both urban and rural origin.
Charlie TaylorHOST
but despite its unquestionable existence in a socio-economic sense, it has not yet emerged as a political subject with a collective identity, through a process similar to the one E.P. Thompson described in his classic The Making of the English Working Class.
Charlie TaylorHOST
Although Chinese workers do not lack self-awareness, there is no adequate public idiom to describe or address their circumstances that would allow that self-awareness to solidify into an organized political identity.
Charlie TaylorHOST
For now at least, workers remain mostly too isolated from each other for a collective consciousness to congeal and take an overtly political form.