Ep Thompson Quotes

The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.

There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or the East that is not active in some Indian mind

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience…

The process of industrialization is necessarily painful. It must involve the erosion of traditional patterns of life. But it was carried through with exceptional violence in Britain. It was unrelieved by any sense of national participation in communal effort, such as is found in countries undergoing a national revolution. Its ideology was that of the masters alone. Its messianic prophet was Dr Andrew Ure, who saw the factory system as ‘the great minister of civilization to the terraqueous globe’, diffusing ‘the life-blood of science and religion to myriads… still lying “in the region and shadow of death”.’ But those who served it did not feel this to be so, any more than those ‘myriads’ who were served. The experience of immiseration came upon them in a hundred different forms; for the field labourer, the loss of his common rights and the vestiges of village democracy; for the artisan, the loss of his craftsman’s status; for the weaver, the loss of livelihood and of independence; for the child, the loss of work and play in the home; for many groups of workers whose real earnings improved, the loss of security, leisure and the deterioration of the urban environment.

In the "free world" (Natopolis) the centres of ideological orthodoxy are rarely defined. The diversity of intellectual trends within the orthodoxy, the indeterminate and shifting character of its boundaries, the existence of real centres of dissent (and the licence given to even Stalinist opposition)--all these conspire to create the central illusion of "Natopolitan" culture, that there is in fact no orthodoxy but only an infinite variety of opinions among which one is free to choose.

Later he worked with E.P. Thompson at the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick to learn the art and craft of ‘people’s remembrancing’ which has taken printed results in Albion’s Fatal Tree, The London Hanged, The Many-Headed Hydra, Magna Carta Manifesto, and Stop, Thief!

In this Postscript I distinguish references back to the revised text of this book by placing these in italics thus (262), from references to the works of other authors under discussion, which are thus (p. 162). account

Se vamos ter mais tempo de lazer no futuro automatizado, o problema não é “como as pessoas vão conseguir consumir todas essas unidades adicionais de tempo de lazer?”, mas “que capacidade para a experiência terão as pessoas com esse tempo livre?”. Se mantemos uma avaliação de tempo puritana, uma avaliação de mercadoria, a questão é como empregar esse tempo, ou como será aproveitado pelas indústrias de entretenimento. Mas se a notação útil do emprego do tempo se torna menos compulsiva, as pessoas talvez tenham de reaprender algumas das artes de viver que foram perdidas na Revolução Industrial: como preencher os interstícios de seu dia com relações sociais e pessoais mais enriquecedoras e descompromissadas; como derrubar mais uma vez as barreiras entre o trabalho e a vida.

Not only petty theft, but primitive forms of industrial rebellion – destroying a silk loom, throwing down fences when commons were enclosed, and firing corn ricks – were to be punished by death.

in the years between the Restoration and the death of George III the number of capital offences was increased by about 190 – or more than one for every year:

The British people were noted throughout Europe for their turbulence, and the people of London astonished foreign visitors by their lack of deference. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century are punctuated by riot, occasioned by bread prices, turnpikes and tolls, excise, ‘rescue’, strikes, new machinery, enclosures, press-gangs and a score of other grievances.

The great Marxist historian of England, E. P. Thompson, writing in the Sunday Times in the run-up to the 1975 referendum, gave this disgust an explicitly anti-Common Market turn, brilliantly fusing English puritanism with anti-capitalist politics: ‘It is about the belly. A market is about consumption. The Common Market is conceived of as a distended stomach: a large organ with various traps, digestive chambers and fiscal acids, assimilating a rich diet of consumer goods… This Eurostomach is the logical extension of the existing eating-out habits of Oxford and North London.’8