The 1451 Review (Volume 1) 2021

legal requirement in Britain that some people must own capital while others must
work for it, but it is not possible to privately organise the means of production if this
is not the case. For there to be capitalism, there must be an organisation of labour
which fulfils the needs of capital, and we can call this rubric a ‘class system’.
The key aspects of any class system are not transcendental, they emerge from
specific historical conditions. In Britain, the development of an ‘Atlantic-wide division
of labour’ (Inikori 1987: 785), particularly in the expansion of slave economies at the
periphery of the empire, had major structural implications for the making of the
working class in Britain. To take one example: ‘The early history of the Calcutta jute
industry cannot be separated from that of the industry at Dundee’ (Chakrabarty 1989:
15). Dundee as a key centre of British linen production, depended upon reliable
imports of jute from Bengal, which were of course established and underwritten by
British colonisation of India. As such, the proletarianisation of the Scottish factory
worker, was deeply intertwined with the expropriation of surplus value from India.
Similarly, Britain also imports a significant supply of labour from other parts of
the world. This is not new a development. Leaders of Irish and African descent (such
as William Cuffay) played a significant role in the early development of Chartism in
the 1830s (Virdee 2014: 30). To this extent, one journalist writing in The Times
declared of the movement: ‘We doubt if there are half-a-dozen Englishmen in the
whole lot’ (Fryer 2010: 242). Viewed from the longue durée (Braudel 2009: 171), the
British working class has always been a multi-racial formation.
Classes then, broadly constituted, are necessary components of capitalist
societies. They are also formations distinct to those societies (Przeworski 1977: 347).
There is no general class teleology that applies in both India and Britain. To think with
class, we need to be attentive of the varied non-economic factors that also shape the
formation of classes. As Thompson (2013: 213) points out, classes as demographically
coherent entities do not emerge via ‘spontaneous generation’ from the economic
structure: ‘The Industrial Revolution... [was] imposed, not upon raw material, but
upon the free-born Englishman — and the free-born Englishman as Paine had left him
or as the Methodists had moulded him’.
English working-class revolt in the early nineteenth century was not driven by
a simple downward trend in material conditions caused by industrialisation, which
paradoxically improved in the early nineteenth century (Thompson 2013: 486), but by
the destruction of self-identity among artisans that was caused by the severed
relationship between workers and reciprocal rights pertaining to land. For example,
Luddism, was not an atavistic reaction to progress, but an attempt to resist and
eventually negotiate the destruction of this 'moral economy' of English society
(Thompson 2013: 593-598; 1976: 129). To understand the making of the working class,
and indeed the development of capitalism, we might note that capitalism does not
simply replace old societies with new ones. Pre-capitalist traditions, and the people
that maintain them, do not simply disappear, and in certain cases, can be essential to
the maintenance of capitalist class-ties.
If we think of class as negotiated with and against pre-existing symbolic relations, such
as that of the ‘free-born Englishman’, we must also take seriously that class is not
constituted separately from other social relations, particularly race and gender
(Thompson 2013: 213). Class action is formed in mutually constitutive relations with
race and gender. This kind of process is stated clearly by Du Bois, who articulated in
his study of American reconstruction that there can be no race concept without
capitalism, and no meaningful analysis of capital without class:
Theoretically we [Black Americans] are part of the world proletariat in the
sense that we are mainly an exploited class of cheap laborers; but practically
we are not a part of the white proletariat to any great extent. We are the
victims of their physical oppression, social ostracism, economic exclusion
and personal hatred (Du Bois 1921: 151).
For Du Bois, this situation is the product of struggles both within classes and
between classes. He argues that a coalition of southern planters and northern elites
could always threaten to revoke the 'psychological wage' (Ibid 1998: 700) of white
supremacy, as a tool for maintaining the support of the white working class and to
continue the division of the proletariat. In Du Bois' account, the cause of race
oppression is not ignorance. Instead, it is a calculated, self-interested move by the elite
classes to maintain their own exploiting power over both the black and white sections
of the proletariat (Ibid 1998: 12). Following Pzreworkski (1985: 70), we can state the
class struggle in America was an example of a struggle about who could be working
class, as much as it was a struggle between classes.
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