The making of the English working class
by E. P. Thompson · first published 1963
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Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom historians had treated as anonymous masses.
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…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0 All of David Harvey's supplemental materials to _Capital_ are highly recommended: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/ Another text you might be particularly interested in is _The Making of the English Working Class_ by E.P. Thompson, which expounds a humanist perspective on the migration from farm to factory in England.
on “The Pink Collar Future” ↗If you haven't read it already I highly recommend reading "The Making of the English Working Class", by E. P. Thompson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Work...). I know it's almost required reading in many Anglo-Saxon countries but as a guy who grew up and lives in (Eastern)…
on “The Peterloo Massacre of 1819” ↗…about this. Life Inc by Douglas Rushkoff, the documentary Century of the Self, even John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education goes into this quite a bit. Not to mention The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson. The idea that we arrived at mandatory fiat currency, compulsory education, ubiquitous advertising, etc. through some process of 'cultural consensus' is ridiculous.
on “Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)” ↗…for the capitalists. A very interesting related book that I've read about that period and which I'd recommend to everyone generally interested in economic and social history is E. P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Work...). I'm generally leaning on the right side of politics and economics (I'm a sympathizer of both Bentham and Benjamin Constant, who are…
on “Warren Buffett's Annual Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders [pdf]” ↗I met him once but never took a class. I wish I had because I enjoyed listening to him. Deeply knowledgeable and great intellect. We spoke mostly about the Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson, which is worth reading by everyone in the US and UK (and elsewhere). The other great book by James C. Scott is Weapons of the Weak.
on “James C. Scott, author of Seeing Like a State, has died” ↗…stripped of every way to exercise the kind of morality or have the opportunities that come so easily to the top fifth. At least in the case of the Industrial Revolution, as described by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, there was religion—the new Methodist faith that gave the English working class a sense of moral superiority over their owners. But in the working class remade and discarded for the postindustrial age,…
on “Educated Fools” ↗…and “bottom-to-top” complete pictures of a society is called Social History. Social History is now over 60 years old (one of the most brilliant and influential books in this tradition, E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, is from 1963), and Social History has shaped the perspective of pretty much every professional historian writing in the last half century, whether they were for or against the key ideas. The intellectual…
on “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II” ↗E.P. Thompson, „The Making of the English Working Class“. It is admittedly a specific cherry picked point in time at which this was true, but useful to illustrate the issue.
on “The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Where Do We Go from Here?” ↗…studying the topic. Often these are completely approachable and give interesting perspectives they just get buried behind a wall of syllabi and listicles. This is how I ended up reading Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' and Graves' 'Goodbye to all That' among others.
on “Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop” ↗It is interestingly skipping period after 1832 (where The Making of the English Working Class ends) and now. The social problems were quite large and very real.
on “Educated Fools” ↗