Identity Formation and Class: Marc W. Steinberg

IDENTITY FORMATION AND CLASS
"The Labour of the Country Is the Wealth

of the Country": Class Identity, Consciousness,
and the Role of Discourse in the Making
of the English Working Class
Marc W. Steinberg
Smith College
In the history of English trades, few were more likely to wax poetic than
the silk weavers of Spitalfields London after a healthy tussle over matters
of rights and privileges. The preface to their piece-rate list of 1769—
a product of a series of "outrages" over wages which had left a trail of
cut silk, blood, and footsteps to the hangman's platform—recounted
their struggle in heroic couplets and ended with a prayer for peace and
prosperity.i
And may no treacherous, base designing men,

E'er make encroachments on our rights again;
May upright masters still augment their treasure,
And journeymen pursue their work with pleasure,
May arts and manufactories still increase,
And Spitalfields be blessed with prosperous peace.2
In terms relative to other trades in London the silk weavers were so

blessed, for four years later the first of the famed Spitalfields Acts was
passed. The Acts, to which we will return, erected a series of protections
for the weavers' piece rates, for their apprenticeship rights, and from incur-
sions of goods made outside both the district and the nation.3 For a half-
century the Acts were a vital marker both of these weavers' modest mate-
rial security and of their identity as honorable artisans. In 1823, however, a
group of large master manufacturers and political economists in Parliament
launched an assault upon this protection which was to end in its repeal. In
the initial skirmish in Parliament the politically savvy weavers mustered a
full-scale lobbying effort which defeated the first attempt at the Acts' erad-
ication. A grateful weaver penned the following lines in tribute to the
friends of the "glorious triumph,"
Against our lawful rights with vengeance fired,

Obdurate fiends and treacherous friends conspired;
International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 49, Spring 1996, pp. 1-25
© 1996 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.
2 ILWCH, 49, Spring 1996
In secret ambush long the ambiguous foe,

Aimed at our commonwealth the deadly blow;
Impending ruin stormed each vital pore,
Still Hope's indulging influence watched the door.
Wrongs unprovoked the British lion roused,
And freedom's sons her native cause espoused.4
In the weavers' verses are woven senses of collective identity and conscious-
ness that served as a bedrock for trade organization and collective action.
In their proclamations the weavers constructed abiding understandings of
their places as male artisans and citizens in a sometimes volatile and threat-
ening world.
My task in this paper is to examine how the discourse the weavers used
was part of the process of constructing a class identity and consciousness.
Both my theoretical discussion on the role of discourse and the analysis of
the silk weavers are produced in response to a growing literature in both
history and the social sciences which questions the existence of class
consciousness and collective identity among nineteenth-century workers.
Reacting to the work of Marxists in general and the writings of those influ-
enced by E. P. Thompson in particular, this influential group—including
Patrick Joyce, William Reddy, Jacques Ranciere, Joan Scott, William H.
Sewell Jr., Gareth Stedman Jones, and James Vernon—is developing to
varying degrees a postmaterialist history of nineteenth-century workers.5
Their revisions either seek to downplay the scope of class consciousness or
deny its existence altogether by interpreting workers' discourse as repre-
sentative of some form of artisanal consciousness or political populism.
I argue that by miscasting materialist accounts, these post-materialists
both misconstrue the concept of class and misread discourses of class con-
sciousness and identity. Post-materialists pose critical questions about dis-
course and representation, but they are questions to which materialists
have reasoned responses. Drawing on the theoretical work of the Bakhtin
Circle, I explore how a dialogic analysis of discourse performs this task. I
illustrate the utility of this approach by analyzing the discourse the weavers
used in a series of collective actions in the later 1820s.
Problems in the Analysis of Class Formation

One focus of the recent linguistic turn in European historiography has been
the nineteenth-century English working class. Critics of E. P. Thompson's
work (sympathetic though they may be) question Thompson's thesis con-
cerning the making of working-class consciousness by examining working-
class and radical discourse. The critical issues posed in this literature center
on the relationships between experience, discourse, and consciousness and
the neglect of gender as a fulcrum of worker solidarities, identities, and
conflicts. Because many revisionists question just what constitutes a "class"
"The Labour of the Country Is the Wealth of the Country" 3
discourse and the degree to which we can speak of the rise of a national
working class, it is important to briefly reiterate just how Thompson
viewed the process of class.
Since the publication of The Making of the English Working Class, soci-
ologists and historians on both sides of the Atlantic have debated the
critical dynamics of class formation. For researchers influenced by
Thompson and British cultural Marxism, class is viewed as a process in
which people, facing common exploitation and oppression imposed upon
them by the system of productive relations into which they involuntarily
enter, create a shared culture and way of life.6 From this perspective pro-
ductive relations are all of the material and social relations through which
social life is produced and reproduced, and thus the lived experience of
class necessarily intersects and is influenced by other systems of power and
domination such as those of gender, race, and ethnicity.7
A class formation is a historical grouping of people who share this
lived experience and produce a common consciousness and culture in re-
sponse to it. It is the result of class struggle and thus a product of the ways
in which people organize, resist, and act collectively to transform the sys-
tem of exploitation that so powerfully shapes their lives.8 Thompson main-
tained that by the 1830s English workers had produced a shared identity
and culture, forged in analogous experiences of economic exploitation and
political oppression, which provided them with a national vision of both
their suffering and its amelioration.9 They were a class formation produced
through diverse struggles.
In recent years critics such as Gareth Stedman Jones, Patrick Joyce,
and Joan W. Scott have asked whether Thompson draws the connection
between lived experience and shared consciousness too directly, since he
does not take into account the mediating (if not determining) effects of
discourse.10 Such advocates of the linguistic turn share an emphasis on the
autonomous and determinative power of discourse to shape workers' con-
sciousness and identity.11 Often this approach takes a political form,
which for Stedman Jones is radicalism and for Joyce is populism.
The first turn in this revision was taken by Stedman Jones in his
rethinking of Chartism.12 For Stedman Jones the political language of En-
glish radicals in the early nineteenth century intervened crucially between
the experience of domination and exploitation and working-class con-
sciousness and action. Radical politics, founded on a critique of the corrupt
ruling order, became the foundation upon which a shared consciousness
was structured and in whose cause struggle was conducted.13 Workers and
many other shopkeepers and tradespeople allied in common critique and
action against a corrupt government, church, and wealthy elite who system-
atically plundered and oppressed. Their ire thus was not directed against
capitalists or an economic system, but against a bankrupt political system
which robbed them of their wealth and deprived them of their rights as
Englishmen. Class antagonism and working-class action thus took on a
political form and reality for workers up through the Chartist agitations of
the 1830s and 1840s.
Stedman Jones's critique of Thompson cut substantially into the
strands of a cultural Marxist explanation by putting the role of lived experi-
ence into question. In his more recent study, Patrick Joyce goes even
further, leaving a few threads of the original argument to maintain a ten-
uous tie to class analysis. Joyce argues that the discourses through which
workers constructed their world views were largely part of a family of
populisms (including radical and liberal varieties) which were "extra-
economic in character" and transcended class location.14 These populisms
were generally more inclusive than divisive in their construction of the
nation, creating a focal identity for workers as a "righteous and dispos-
sessed 'people' rather than a working class." Class in this sense was only
one of many identities discursively constructed in a more encompassing
and deep-seated popular politics.15
Joyce defines class discourse, and thus identity and consciousness, as
those languages which speak more or less directly to a collective sense of a
shared socioeconomic condition. "[T]he problem," he informs us, "is to
know what class identity looks like, where it starts and stops."16 On the
whole, in Joyce's vision, it starts and stops quite quickly for most of the
century; workers had a consciousness of class, but rarely a class conscious-
ness. Popular languages of labor emphasized reciprocal rights and duties of
trade membership, respectability derived from independence in produc-
tion and domestic life, and the moral limits of the market. Thus the
moral economy central to Thompson's analysis of the eighteenth-century
plebeians could be articulated with some form of class model, but was not
in itself a class view.17 Importantly for Joyce, such languages neither fo-
cused on exploitation in production nor deprecated employers or capital-
ism as necessarily evil. Such absences disqualify them as languages of
class.18 Joyce does add important caveats. He finds class language in the
later nineteenth century, emanating from conflicts in the workplace and
creating a specific labor identity. Moreover, he concedes that there was
some semblance of a shared working-class identity in the early nineteenth
century that emphasized independence and conflict. However, during most
of the century workers' collective identities far outstripped class, and
Thompson's "making" is a chimera of materialist reductionism.19
"Language mattered in its own right," Joyce declares, and Joan Scott
heartily agrees.20 In one of the most sweeping attempts at reformulation,
Scott redefines the relationship between discourse, experience, and identi-
ty in her recent writings.21 Partly based on scrutiny of the intersection of
gender and class, and partly on an attempt to rethink the project of histori-
cal writing, Scott argues that identity, consciousness, and discourse are
inseparably fused. Experience is a linguistic event and subjects are consti-
tuted through discourse, though they have agency within it.22
Scott finds Thompson's account of experience reductionist, emphasiz-
ing the social relations of production over other forms of experience. Class
takes on a teleological status in The Making of the English Working Class,
privileging it above other forms of constructed difference and power, such
as gender. Identity is portrayed as uniform and assumed rather than prob-
lematized.23
The linguistic turn poses heady questions for historians of class forma-
tion, particularly as concerns discourse and the intersection of class, gen-
der, and nation. However, many of the revisionists vulgarize Thompson's
conception of class in The Making of the English Working Class, and fail to
see how the analysis of discourse can be wedded to his account.
Accepting part of the post-structuralist critique, we must understand
how the occurrence of class or gender formations is partially discursive; we
detect the process when we hear the articulation of collective oppositional
interests. Thompson indeed argued a compatible position in his articula-
tion of historical materialism. "I am calling in question," he stated, "the
notion that it is possible to describe a mode of production in 'economic'
terms; leaving aside as secondary (less 'real') the norms, the culture, the
critical concepts around which this mode of production is organized."24
Rather than abandoning the work of British cultural Marxists, we
should find ways of building in the open spaces they leave for discursive
analysis. We should center our analyses of identity and consciousness on
the intersection of language and material life.25 Some of the most impor-
tant discussions of this intersection are now occurring in the analysis of
gender. Scholars working here are building both frameworks and analyses
demonstrating how gendering and class positioning were as much a produc-
tion of the complex configurations of productive relations and social life as
of discourse.26 Paralleling these and related efforts, I will focus in the
remainder of this paper on the challenges set by the post-materialist critics
to Thompson's analysis of class consciousness and identity.
Discourse Theory, Class Identity, and Consciousness

Theoretical works based on the Bakhtinian Circle of literary analysis, as
well as approaches within cultural studies, provide a set of critical tools by
which to analyze the relationship between identity, consciousness, and
discourse. A guiding proposition of these related perspectives is that the
tensions of conflict are a fertile seedbed for the collective construction of
group consciousness. The discourses used in conflict explicitly focus on
such constructions of identity and interests, highlighting the relational
fissures between contending groups.
Drawing upon these perspectives, we can define discourse as the sym-
bolic practice by which people create and reproduce the cultural codes they
use to make sense of the world. Generally, discourse is the social process of
putting language in motion, and quintessential^ this involves dialogue.27
Such dialogues, however, are rarely conducted by equal participants,
marking discourse as a mediator and source of power. Through it actors

both explain and facilitate the asymmetries of social hierarchies, legitimat-
ing and constituting them at the same time.28 The ways in which discourse
legitimizes and constitutes hierarchies are the result of the meanings and
uses of language that actors can bring to a situation and the nondiscursive
power they can exercise to establish these as the standards for dialogue.
Discourses themselves are inherently multivocal, and the signs that
convey meanings are open to multiple meanings and interpretations.29
"The word in language," Bakhtin proclaimed, "is half someone else's."30
Dialogic analysis highlights the clash of meanings often involved in dia-
logues, the divergent meanings and inflections in discourse that class, gen-
der, and ethnic groups produce because of their distinctive structural posi-
tions and shared experiences.31
For any given context there is always a web of discourses, what some
theorists term a discursive formation or genre. A formation contains the
typical sets of vocabularies, meanings, and rules for using them through
which dialogue is conducted.32 Within any period and patterned social
context some formations are dominant. Such was the case for political
economy, which I analyze below. Dominant formations are defined by the
"social impossibility of their absence" and provide the most importantly
recognized public ways of interpreting the world. The capacity of dominant
classes to exercise power through a dominant formation is clearly based on
their ability to translate their accrued power from other spheres of social
and material life into control in discourse.33
An important facet of contention between contending groups is thus
the control of discourse.34 Multivocality creates the condition for ongoing
conflict to gain position in the battle over meanings. Within dominant
formations, groups seek to normalize and naturalize power-laden meanings
and valuations. Most importantly, clashes of meaning generally take place
within a dominant formation.
By wedding dialogic analysis to the Marxist concept of hegemony, we
can see that hegemony involves the dominant class or group's capacity to
limit dialogue and its clash of meanings in their interactions with subordi-
nates. While hegemony involves the organization of social life beyond
discourse, limiting what can be said, and how what is said can be under-
stood, creates critical boundaries in the way subordinates see their place
and actions in a system of power.35 Group identity and consciousness are
creations of this process.
My argument is that hegemony through discourse becomes partic-
ularly apparent during intergroup conflict and in discourses of contention.
Class conflict, for example, brings these discourses of identity and interest
to center stage in the clash of claims and counterclaims, making them both
more explicitly relational to their users and more imperatively subject to
questioning.
Discourse and class experience are thus recursively tied, but not in a
seamless circle and not in a way in which discourse has ontological priority
over experience. As Ava Baron argues,
Discourses may constitute individuals, but it is individuals trying to remake their

world that constitute the stuff of history. Discourses, located in social institu-
tions, mediate and shape our experiences. But discourses by themselves do not
change the material conditions of life. . . . The agency of individuals is required
before the social and political implications of discourse can be realized.36
When multiple formations and meanings converge, potentially to define

situations, the differences between and within discourses actually provide a
vantage point from which experience interrogates language.37
Critical pieces of any discourse are the collective identities which are
negotiated within its boundaries. They are mutual understandings of why
actors can or should cohere because of common histories, experiences and
practices, positions in social structures, and world views.38 Part of class
struggle involves defining the acknowledged and accepted components of a
class identity (in conjunction with others) and the license it gives for action.
Working-class groups must articulate to themselves and others a sense of
their legitimate collective agency and their efficacy in order to struggle.
Moreover, they must be able to portray their opponents as having violated
recognized standards of rights or obligations.39
While dominant classes limit and channel conceptions of class identity
and collective consciousness, the dialogic nature of discourses always con-
tains the potential for subversion.40 Within dominant formations subordi-
nated classes can construct notions of their collective worth to society, a
sense of binding ties and commitment fused by common life experiences,
and a moral foundation for collective resistance.
My argument is that class identity is built generally within dominant
formations and not (as Stedman Jones, Joyce, and others imply) outside of
them. In the analysis of class identity and consciousness we need to concen-
trate foremost on how working-class groups use "bourgeois" language to
construct a collective consciousness. The litmus test of class identity and
consciousness raised by the post-structuralist critics of Thompson is both
miscast and reified. The hunt for a "revolutionary" working-class discourse
and thus a "true" class consciousness is a mission to find a homology
between representation and social life where, according to Bakhtinian the-
ory, it is unlikely to exist. Indeed, if we are to take the linguistic turn
seriously, the focus of our analyses should be on the working-class use and
appropriation of bourgeois discourses. Moreover, this standpoint suggests
that these processes of appropriation can simultaneously reinforce other
existing social hierarchies, such as those of gender.
In general then, the discursive processes that deserve our attention are
working-class attempts at counterhegemony. Starting within the spaces
provided in dominant formations, working-class groups can seek to subvert
the legitimacy of bourgeois meanings and simultaneously fashion shared

interests and an oppositional consciousness. It is the process of counter-
hegemony that makes the resultant discourses representational of class
identity and consciousness, not the words or symbols used. Thus, terms
such as "nation," "people," "the poor," and "the productive classes" can
be as representative of class consciousness as the term "working class"
itself. In use, they can both intentionally and inadvertently reaffirm gender
hierarchies, even as they are used to undermine those of class. In the
analysis below, I seek to demonstrate how the weavers of Spitalfields were
engaged precisely in such a process.
The Case of the Spitalfields Weavers

The Spitalfields region of East London encompassed five different par-
ishes; those of Christ Church Spitalfields and St. Matthews Bethnal Green
enveloped the most space and people. It was within these crowded urban
spaces that the laboring poor dwelled. William Hale, a local luminary, silk
manufacturer and friend to the weaver informed a Lords' Committee that
within this territory lived "the great Mass of all the laboring poor;—
Carpenters, Bricklayers, Shoemakers, and People of every Description of
the labouring Poor, down to the Mendicant, the Lame, and the Blind."41 In
this mixed mass were large groups of silk weavers. Silk weaving had been
synonymous with the district since the arrival of the Huguenots in the late
seventeenth century, and by the 1820s some 13,000 to 14,000 weavers
inhabited the area.42
The weavers were geographically demarcated within this sprawl of
plebeian life by their clustering in specific neighborhoods which contained
dwelling units designed for their workshops.43 Weaving was family-based
domestic outwork, traditionally the realm of the small master, and on
average a male journeyman and his family sought to maintain the produc-
tion of two to three looms. Children were appended to the weaving process
as early as three or four years of age, and moved to the loom seat at age ten
or eleven. A large number of women (though just how many is difficult to
determine) sat alongside their husbands at the loom as well as engaged in
ancillary production tasks. In the 1780s and 1790s male journeymen fought
an unsuccessful battle to keep the trade a male preserve; by the early
nineteenth century the exigencies of the household economy had overawed
the weavers' construction of male exclusivity. The evidence suggests that
the trade was organized along the lines of what Anna Clark characterizes as
patriarchal sexual cooperation.44 Men and women were paid equally for
their labor according to the book rates. Male journeymen recognized the
importance of women and children to the workshop economy while main-
taining both control over its operations and a voice in the trade and com-
munity.45
From at least the late eighteenth century into the 1820s the male
journeymen constructed what I elsewhere term "a moral economy of la-

bor."46 This moral economy was produced through class and gender rela-
tions and trade practices, a web of community ties, and discourses that
provided notions of the rights of the productive male laborer and honor-
able artisan. This last status was the quintessential badge of the legitimate
tradesman. Honorable artisans were ideally those male workers who had
served a formal apprenticeship; had some claim to skill as the collective
property of the trade members; maintained some control and indepen-
dence over their workplace, work pace, and entrance into the trade (which
meant excluding women); and maintained a code of claimed rights sus-
tained by custom.47 Yet in the last analysis the label was a negotiated
achievement. As R. J. Morris observes, "positions of skill were socially
created and defended during the course of class conflict."48 The male
weavers masterfully negotiated a web of class relations to win and maintain
this collective status for a number of decades, and they managed this via
several different paths:
1. Basic weaving of silk broadcloth was little more than inglorious
shuttlecock throwing, resembling the degraded work of the impoverished
cotton handloom weavers.49 The dignity of the work was thus achieved
through the fancy portion of the trade—goods with aristocratic airs such as
satins, velvets, and figured fabrics. Production of such goods was a more
delicate and skilled operation, often requiring extensive preparation and
the aid of apprentices. Usually this was a male preserve. In the first quarter
of the century, between a third and half of the output of Spitalfields' looms
was in the fancy trade, giving credence to the trades' honorability.50 Thus,
even though women were an integral part of the weaving trade, their
existence could be separated from what was used to define silk weaving as
artisanal.
2. The silk weavers were enmeshed in a series of relations with the
petty bourgeoisie which reinforced their claims to respectability. The par-
ish vestries were populated by small tradesmen, skilled artisans, and mer-
chants, with purveyors of foodstuffs playing an especially significant role.51
The weavers were among the most steady rate-payers of a district increas-
ingly swelling with common and casual labor, the dispossessed, and beg-
gars. Moreover they were generally known to abhor parish relief as a sign
of idleness and parasitism.52 The petty-bourgeois authorities and the silk
weavers thus constructed ties of mutual recognition: The weavers were
publicly recognized as respectable and productive citizens and in turn
played their role in upholding the fiscal viability of the parish in a conspicu-
ous fashion.
In part because of this collective identity within the community, and in
part because of their relative abstinence from the turbulent winds of radical
politics, the silk weavers maintained their stature as respectable artisans in
the eyes of London society. As a dean of the trade noted in hearings on
their plight in 1832, "for so numerous a class, they were considered the
most respectable artisans."53 The weavers were often singled out through-
out the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for their relative
quiescence during stormy periods of radical politics and their generally
principled conduct.54 From a distance, the London bourgeoisie passed
favorable judgment on the weavers and affirmed their collective identity as
honorable artisans.
3. The third of the weavers' claims to respectability was the one in
which the friction of class interests would arise in the early 1820s—the
famed Spitalfields Acts. Both the weavers' ability to maintain standardized
piece rates and their status as honorable artisans rested firmly on the
foundations of the Acts. The most significant of the Acts was passed in
1773 by an anxious Parliament, in response to several spates of large-scale
collective violence by the weavers protesting piece-rate cuts during the
previous four years.55 The most significant provisions of the Acts man-
dated negotiation between masters and journeymen to establish piece
rates, which were published in the above-mentioned rate books. Binding
arbitration was required if the parties could not agree, and once the prices
were fixed they were considered inviolable. Piece-rate disputes were to be
adjudicated by local magistrates; this sometimes had the practical effect of
discouraging masters from imposing fines as a means of lowering wages.
The Acts also prohibited masters who employed district weavers from
contracting work outside of Spitalfields and fixed the maximum number of
apprentices for each journeyman at two. Finally, the Acts prohibited the
importation of foreign wrought silks, which severely limited competition
from France and the East.56
The Acts and the small manufacturers' conduct of trade within them
sanctified the weavers' moral economy of economic and social entitlement
as productive and honorable artisans. Through the discourses of the law
and their enactment in the myriad relations of trade affairs, the weavers
developed a sense of class rights. The discourse centered on the moral
claims of producers within an economic system, not just the weaving trade.
As a weavers' committee later observed, the law could be used to oppose
exploitation when manufacturers sought to undermine the journeymens'
rights: "[W]hen men forget their moral obligations due between man and
man, and as often as they can take poor men's labour without fair compen-
sation, it is high time to call in the strong arm of the law, and convince them
that they must not oppress with impunity."57 The law, as the quotation
suggests, was about relations between men, and thus also preserved the
male weaver's patriarchal authority in the workshop.
According to the city manufacturers, the weavers frequently invoked
the Acts in negotiations over piece rates, and in doing so argued that their
collective rights and power in the trade took precedence over the capital-
ists' demand for the operation of market forces.58 Both groups thus ac-
cepted a form of capitalist productive relations, but conceived of the struc-
ture and operations of those relations in quite different terms.
The Acts thus legitimated the weavers' standards of the value of their
labor and the male workers' voice in trade relations. Additionally, they
gave credence to the male weavers' belief that they had a right, protected
by the state, to secure employment by which they could provide for their
families and thus maintain their authority within the family. As a weaver
sullenly recounted before a Commons Select Committee in 1832,
[W]hen I was bound apprentice, the government of the country had protected the
trade and I considered were bound to protect it; I thought I had done the same as
purchased an annuity for life, as something by which I should be enabled to get a
living for my family; I considered the government to have protected the same, as
every other species of property.59
For fifty years the Acts were part of a moral economy through which the
weavers defined class relations. This moral economy provided the weavers
with a class identity and class consciousness as wealth producers. It also
legitimated their status as citizens with claims on the state for protection of
their living wage and their only property—their labor—and validated their
community respectability. The cultural ways in which they handled their
relations with other classes, the state, and each other were firmly anchored
in a conception of collective labor and its rights. The weavers had dynamic
discourses which articulated notions of the value of labor, the nature of
economic exploitation, and the role of the state in defending the collective
rights of workers. This is the stuff of class, and it cannot be simply labeled
as a trade or regional vision nor as another variation on radical politics or
populism.
Beneath the seeming serenity of the trade, trouble was fermenting. In
the mid-1810s, disgruntled large master manufacturers began to mobilize
to shake off the shackles of the Acts. By the early 1820s, they controlled a
significant share of the market and exerted a dominant influence within
trade affairs. As one observer cautioned during this period, "the silk trade
is very much under the influence of a few leading houses, who are ex-
tremely active, and distinguished for their zeal and perseverance."60 These
"warehousers," as they were called, each controlled the output of several
hundred looms, thus dominating the labor market. Unlike their diminutive
counterparts (the traditional small masters), they had little if any experi-
ence in production, and virtually none lived in the confines of the East
End.61
Economically, socially, culturally, and geographically, the weavers felt
the friction of class increasingly between themselves and their employers as
the warehousers came to dominance. The city manufacturers were also
aware of the chasm of collective interests and culture. As one of the leading
city men remarked in the early 1830s, when discussing their relations with
the weavers, "We are a very different people on the one side of Bishopgate-
street, and on the other there is the appearance of a different nation."62

The sparks of class conflict illuminated the dividing line for both sides.
By the 1820s these divisions found their most acute expression in
dissension over the Spitalfields Acts, which became, in the words of one
historian, "the test case for the further progress of the application of laissez
faire."63 On May 9, 1823, a group of city manufacturers petitioned Parlia-
ment for the repeal of the Acts, which they depicted as a hindrance to free
trade, the employment of capital, and the expansion of the industry, and as
allowing the unwarranted influence of ignorant magistrates.64
This capitalist assault was conducted within the discourses of political
economy. By the 1820s political economy had assumed the role of the
dominant discursive formation in the discussion of economy and polity, and
the pragmatic ruling Tories had accepted many of its dictates of gover-
nance.65 Political economy also was imbricated with many other dominant
formations in theology and politics by this time.66 Most importantly for the
silk weavers, those who used the discourse of political economy sought to
define trade dynamics in ways wholly incompatible with their moral econ-
omy.
The weavers had never openly denounced capitalism per se, but nei-
ther had they accepted the free market and its tenets. However, within the
discourse of political economy, the worker emerged with a much different
status within both economy and polity than the one fashioned within the
discourse of moral economy. Relations between capitalists and workers
were constructed as individual rather than collective and as free within an
open market rather than governed by trade standards and the law. Labor
was just one more commodity in this market, instead of a collective proper-
ty of workers, and the male worker merely had the right to obtain the best
price he could for it, not necessarily a living wage for his family. The role of
the state was to protect the operation of this market from interference, not
to itself create such interference by setting piece rates or mandating condi-
tions of work.
The struggle over the repeal of the Acts lasted for over a year, and the
weavers conducted a sustained and sophisticated campaign in Parliament
for their preservation.67 By reputation they were sophisticated politicians;
"nobody knows how to secure a reply from the government better than
they," noted one writer, reflecting the wisdom of many social critics.68
Massive petitions were sent to Parliament, and weavers' committees lob-
bied strenuously to maintain their vaunted protections.69 However, after a
few initial successes the weavers lost their struggle with the city ware-
housers and the Acts were officially repealed in June 1824 (effective the
following year).
The fight against repeal had mobilized a relatively quiescent trade
community, and portions of the silk weavers remained active through the
decade's end. During these years the weavers pursued both the renewal of
trade protection and a living wage through a wide repertoire of collective

actions, including petitioning, public meetings, strikes, and riots.70 The
weavers' collective actions exhibit a contrapuntal character. In 1825, 1827,
and 1829 they conducted strikes to raise piece rates and achieved ephemer-
al successes. Their actions in 1826 and 1828 focused on petitioning the
government for renewed trade protection, while along this jagged path
they also dabbled in the founding of cooperative societies.71 By the later
1820s the weavers, once publicly praised for their patriotism and absti-
nence from radical politics, were also active in many of the East End's
radical reform movements.72 Most importantly, however, the assault of city
manufacturers and state actors brought forth a response to the political
economy discourse through which the actions of capitalists and the state
were legitimated.
In a dialogic pattern, the weavers responded to this hegemony by
seeking partly to refashion and partly to reaffirm representations of their
collective identity and consciousness. This was a struggle conducted largely
within the confines of the dominant discursive formations; at no point did
the weavers denounce the capitalist system, raise high the banner of social-
ism, or call for revolution. Yet that did not make it any less of a class
struggle, nor were the weavers' discourses any less a class product for being
actions short of open revolt. The direct engagement with political economy
and the explicit construction of the divide between wealth-producers and
nonproducers mark these discourses as more than just another version of
trade talk, populism, or political radicalism. While the weavers clearly
drew on this radicalism in their indictments of Parliament, their critique
was distinct from that of "Old Corruption." Their discourse demonstrates
that political radicalism, populism, and class could all be congruent.
In the remainder of this paper I analyze some key examples of the
weavers' counterhegemonic discourse to demonstrate how they constructed
their class identity and consciousness during these conflicts.73 I will high-
light examples of the weavers' discourse which show a clear sense of oppo-
sitional interest, a concept of exploitation and oppression, and a collective
understanding that a combination of capitalists and state authorities was
directly responsible for their increasing misery. As Thompson argued, by
looking within the struggle, we can view the cultural processes of class in
motion.
From the first moments of the repeal campaign the weavers contested
many of the manufacturers' central representations of the economy—such
as property and labor, and the freedom to control them—for the discourse
of political economy fundamentally altered their collective rights and iden-
tity. To counter the idea that labor was just another commodity, and that its
value should be left to the dictates of the market, the weavers sought to
transform from within the very definitions of property and protection to
suit their own collective interests. As many of the nation's artisans did
during this period, they represented labor not as a commodity, but as a

form of property, which deserved protection equal to that given other
property under the principles of the bourgeois state:
It has been stated to the committee of Lords, "that no interference of the law in
labour is just." Not just, Sir, why not? is not all acquired property protected by
law, and is not that just? Why then should it not be just to protect natural
property which is labour. Labour is the only property a poor man has, which is
the root and riches of the great and mighty, who are able to protect themselves,
while the poor have neither the means nor the power of self-defense without the
assistance of the law.74
While not questioning the right of a manufacturer to earn a living through

trade, they contested the bourgeois representation of unlimited profits as
the just reward for actions in the market. Labor, after all, was the origin of
all wealth. Again appropriating from political economy, they equated prof-
its with taxes and through the homology depicted the latter as an evil to be
vigilantly limited. As one writer argued, "Do not producers pay all the
taxes? Is not profit a tax? And why should not that be restrained within due
limits? But what tax is so oppressive as that tax imposed by the avaricious
employer upon his work people?" 75 And as a weavers' committee pamphlet
reminded M.P.s as they passed through the doors to the House on their
way to a vote, "It may be said of the weaving business, what Solomon said
of husbandry—'the profits of the earth are for all.'" 76
Throughout the protracted campaign to save the Acts the weavers
propounded representations of the just distribution of products and wealth,
and elaborated meanings of freedom, regulation, and polity. They directly
countered the warehousers' political economy of trade and minimalist con-
ception of governance. Precisely because societal harmony and prosperity
were obtained through civil regulation, they argued, the market freedom
proposed by the manufacturers and political economists was both partial
and injurious. Anti-repealers maintained that the proposed liberation of
capital was secured by the subjugation of labor.
But what sort of freedom is it they advocate? Why a freedom the very reverse of
the thing they pretend; it is nothing more nor less, in application to the produc-
tive classes, than freedom for the powerful to oppress and defraud the weak, for
by taking a view of what is going on in Parliament, it will be seen, that the poor
drudges from whose toil all derive their wealth have few advocates, and what
they have are powerless.77
If by 1826 the abstractions of economic and political theory were still open
to debate, the condition of the weavers under open markets was not. The
weavers' predictions of a scourge of their honorable trade rapidly mate-
rialized in successive depressive bouts. The majority of the fancy goods
trade was eviscerated, piece rates dropped between thirty and fifty percent
in many branches over the succeeding five years, and unemployment
soared. In Bethnal Green, the parish with the largest number of weavers,
outdoor relief increased almost 600 percent during this time span. Many
who visited the area were struck by the blight of destitution.78 Even a large
city manufacturer and staunch repealer admitted that the weavers "in fact,
possess nothing, if I may so speak, really beyond the extent of their own
skins."79
The weavers nonetheless continued to agitate, and through their dis-
courses of contention we see the continued elaboration of a class identity
and consciousness. While now an increasingly degraded trade, the weavers
sought to represent themselves as wealth producers worthy of the protec-
tion due other classes. Striking out with sharp attacks both at the state and
the manufacturers, the weavers, during several campaigns for both trade
protection and higher piece rates in 1826 and 1827, accused each of tram-
meling on their rights as laborers.80
By 1828 the weavers had developed well-honed discourses of conten-
tion. In late February of that year a general meeting of the broad silk
weavers convened to inaugurate a new campaign to petition to Parlia-
ment.81 The chair of the meeting opened with language typical of the
working-class appropriation of political economy which was now common-
place among the weavers:
They found, generally, in all situations where capital was employed, the individu-
als so employing it sought the Legislature to protect that capital. If he understood
the business which had called them together, it was for the protection of capital;
that capital which was the most valued in all states—it was labour.82
The meeting, which was attended by thousands of weavers and family

members, lasted for hours and ranged over the whole course of their trials.
The heart of the Report delivered to them was a comprehensive critique
and veritable manifesto, and the committee secretary urged its reading at
all society meetings. In it the weavers listed a litany of causes for their
impoverishment and the means of their rejuvenation.
That from the long misrule, which has been pursued by legislators,—from the
manifestly erroneous policy of our commercial transactions,—from the cruel,
overreaching and tyrannical conduct of certain unprincipled, greedy, and spec-
ulative employers,—from the dangerous tendency of the pestilential dogmas of
certain professors of political economy,—from the unjust and oppressive exac-
tions of the lords of the soil and the loom, . . . your Committee cannot but
conclude, that there is no hope, no reasonable, well-grounded hope . . . that the
iron hand of oppression will be stayed by equal-handed justice,—that monopoly
and avarice will give way to the benevolent sway of knowledge and equity,—or,
that the industrious and wealth producing population of the United Kingdom will
ever obtain a fair remunerative price for their labour, but by and through the
united and devoted energies . . . of the labouring producers themselves; aided
by the benevolent, patriotic, and virtuous portion of the legislature, and of the
community at large.83
As during the repeal struggle, the weavers enunciated the substantive role
of the government in this critique, and a key portion of the blame was laid
at its feet.
The great end of all government, and that alone which renders a government
necessary, is to prevent one man from taking advantage of another, by withhold-
ing or abstracting from him the fruits of his industry, and is most fully accom-
plished when every man has secured to him the greatest amount of the products
of his labour.84
And the weavers made it abundantly clear that the one group that did not
receive due protection from the state was the artisans: "[A]s the artisan's
power of labour is his only property, it is irreconcilable with every sense of
justice, and of common right, that the incomes and property of all other
classes should be protected, whilst the artisans and labourers alone are left a
prey to be plundered by needy, rapacious, and unprincipled employers." 85
It is reasonably clear from the Report's language that the weavers
represented the city manufacturers as a group whose interests were op-
posed to theirs and who had the economic power to impose their will,
which they did "with the utmost impunity," and which made "the labouring
classes a ready prey to the capitalists, who have the means of acquiring
authority over others, in proportion to the quantity of the objects of desire
which they are able to possess, by whatever means these objects are at-
tained." 86 Echoing past pronouncements, the weavers ridiculed the free
traders' notion of "freedom," finding in it the chains of impoverishment:
[T]he present incongruous application of the principle of freedom, so far from

tending to promote the prosperity of the country in the aggregate,—on the
contrary tends to impoverish it . . . by increasing the riches of a portion of the
wealthy, and the poverty of the industrious classes, in a greater proportion than
the advantages which it gives to those who benefit by its operation.87
To counter the foil of political economy, the weavers drew their own rapier,
"the indubitable laws of social economy." The substantive rationale of this
social economy was laid out in a series of simple propositions predicated in
a labor theory of value:
An equitable reward for labour is best adapted, and is indeed indispensable to

secure the greatest quantity of wealth in any country, and to promote the legiti-
mate interests of all classes of society.
1st. Because it is labour which gives value to land and raw material for
manufactures. "The labour of the country is the wealth of the country" (Adam
Smith), and in proportion as the wages are high or low, the value of wealth of
such country is increased or diminished.
2nd. Because the great majority of the people of every country is necessarily
composed of those whose sole property is their labour . . . and, as Labourers
form the base of society, all the other classes must be benefited in due propor-
tion.
3d. Because the demand for the products of labour, in cases where it is
equitably rewarded, would always be commensurate with the power to produce:
under its influence there could be no appearance of redundant population. . . .
5th. Because adequate wages are necessary to the support of that self-
esteem, that honest and manly pride, and that state of comfortable enjoyment
and easy circumstances which constitute the greatness of a country; and that state
of society, in which alone the mass of the people can be expected to be virtuous
and orderly. . . .
6th. Because an inequitable remuneration for labour necessarily diminishes
the means of purchasing the products of labour, in a greater degree than the
reduced price of commodities tends to increase the means.88
These discourses of critique and redress evoked many of the themes and
representations of the repeal debates, while at the same time adapting
them to reflect recent history. In a somewhat muted fashion, they affirm
the importance of the male weavers' patriarchal control.89 The elaborate
critique of government partiality and neglect is redolent of moral economy
discourses used in previous battles. In their specific focus on wealth pro-
duction and consumption, these discourses are distinct from the populist
critique of Old Corruption. The hardscrabble lessons of increasing immi-
seration had clarified the interests and motives upon which the actions of
both the city manufacturers and government officials were based. Injudi-
cious policy was the deliberate result of a fully conscious and openly ma-
nipulative oligarchy of the nonproductive classes. Distress resulted from
purposive plunder by capitalists and other nonproducers, and it emascu-
lated the body politic. Among the chief culprits were the manufacturers,
who took every advantage to squeeze the wealth out of the weavers' labor.
The lesson articulated through the Report was that the power to exploit and
oppress had to be met with an equal and countervailing force. This lesson
led to the largest violent strike that the trade had seen in over fifty years,
but that is a subject for another paper.
Conclusion
From the start of the campaign against repeal into the 1830s, the silk
weavers contested what the city manufacturers and political economists
discursively constructed as natural, universal, and impartial trade and state
policies. Partly through a process of dialogic appropriation, male weavers

exposed these as specifically class-interested discourses which represented
the world through the eyes of an unholy alliance of unproductive classes.
As they did so, they countered with discourses of contention recognizing
their rights as wealth producers, honorable members of the community,
and patriarchal heads of households. Through these they depicted them-
selves as a cohesive group whose interests were opposed to those who
exploited and oppressed them. It was not pensioners and government
spongers that were the focus of this critique, but capitalists and their gov-
ernment allies. Through this language they represented their class identity
and consciousness and reaffirmed their patriarchal control of the work-
shop.
In this recounting of the weavers' struggle we see the dialectic of
experience and discourse and the process of class. The silk weavers were
confronted with the onslaught of capitalist degradation after a half-century
of relative repose. To counter the discourses of political economy through
which city manufacturers and government officials sought to redefine their
world, the weavers refashioned their moral economy discourses and appro-
priated aspects of political economy. In this they were true Bakhtinian
practitioners; they saw that the words in use were half theirs. Their struggle
was largely within the domain of dominant formations, and their responses
were often exercises in counterhegemony. They were able to engage in
such actions because the totality of their experience outstripped the ability
of any set of discourses to wholly define their world.
The weavers' response was to articulate a clear sense of class identity
and consciousness. They constructed traditions, value systems, ideas, and
institutional forms through which righteous opposition was broadcast
throughout the streets of London. Certainly this discourse mediated their
understanding of these oppositional interests, limiting what could be repre-
sented and how it was done. But the silk weavers were participants in the
production of these meanings. They were active in making their own lan-
guage, even if it is not just what some today are willing to accept as the
insignia of class.
These discourses explicitly elaborated a concept of exploitation that
was clearly economic. While the weavers indicted Parliament for its com-
plicity in the plundering of the working poor, capitalists had earned a full
measure of blame. Contrary to the interpretations of Stedman Jones and
Joyce, the silk weavers constructed an understanding of economic division
and conflicting interests distinct from the political radicalism which was
their shared focus.
Sifting through those words today we can see that Thompson was
surely correct when, in reclaiming the voices of the weavers and the poor
stockingers, he heard the rumblings of class. The logic of analysis is clear,
even if it is not always the same logic as he enunciated when he urged us to
listen three decades ago.
NOTES
An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the Social Science History Association
Annual Meeting, panel on "Class, Class Consciousness, and Identity Formation," Baltimore,
MD, November 4, 1993. The author thanks Michael Hanagan, Sonya O. Rose, Charles Tilly,
and ILWCH's anonymous readers for their comments and suggestions.
1. For accounts of the rioting brought on by the piece-rate disputes see Peter Linebaugh,
The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992),
270-79; George Rude, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford, 1962), 98-103; Walter J. Shelton, English
Hunter and Industrial Disorders (Toronto, 1971), 192-99; and Marc W. Steinberg, "Worthy of
Hire: Discourse, Ideology and Collective Action Among English Working-Class Trade
Groups, 1800-1830," unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Michigan, v. 1 (1989), 134-37.
2. A List of Prices in Those Branches of the Weaving Manufactory, Called Strong Plain,
Foot Figured and Flowered Branches (London, 1769).
3. A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown, and R. H. Tawney, ed., English Economic History: Select
Documents (New York, 1919), 547-51; J. H. Clapham, "The Spitalfields Acts, 1773-1824,"
Economic Journal 26 (December 1916):459—71.
4. British Library, Add. MSS. 27805, An Account of the Proceedings of the Committees
of the Journeymen Silk Weavers of Spitalfields; in the Legal Defence of the Acts of Parliament,
Granted to their Trade, in the 13th, 32nd, and 51st Years of the Reign of his late Majesty, King
George the Third (London, 1823), 67.
5. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class,
1840-1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Joyce, "The Imaginary Discontents of Social History: A Note
of Response to Mayfield and Thorne, Lawrence and Taylor," Social History 18 (January
1993):81—85; Jacques Ranciere, The Night of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-
Century France, trans, by John Drury (Philadelphia, 1989); William Reddy, Money and Lib-
erty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge, 1987); Joan
Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); Scott, "The Evidence of Ex-
perience," Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991):773-97; Scott, "The Tip of the Volcano,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993):438-51; William H. Sewell, Jr., "Toward
a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History," in Rethinking Labor History, ed. Lenard R.
Berlanstein (Champaign, 1993), 15-38; Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies
in English Working-Class History 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983); James Vernon, Politics and
the People: A Study in English Political Culture c. 1815-1867 (Cambridge, 1993); Vernon,
"Who's Afraid of the 'Linguistic Turn'?: The Politics of Social History and Its Discontents,"
Social History 19 (January 1994): 81-97. For a recent exchange on this post-materialism see
Sewell, "Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric," and Michael Hanagan, "Commentary: For
Reconstruction in Labor History," in Rethinking Labor History, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein
(Champaign, 1993), 182-99. This article was written before the publication of Patrick Joyce's
latest statements; see Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and The Social in Nineteenth-
Century England (Cambridge, 1994); and "The End of Social History?" Social History 20
(January 1995):73-91.
6. E. P. Thompson, "The Poverty of Theory," in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays
(New York, 1978), 250; Thompson, "The Peculiarities of the English," in The Poverty of
Theory, 245-303; Ellen Meiksins Wood, "The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E.
P. Thompson and His Critics," Studies in Political Economy 9 (Fall 1982):45-75. Writing on
British cultural Marxism and its conception of class is now voluminous. For two overviews see
Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Oxford, 1984); and the essays in Harvey J.
Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds., E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia, 1990).
Sonya Rose and Anna Clark provide analyses of the relation between this school and feminist
analyses for the British case. See Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in
Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992); Rose, "Gender and Labour History: The
Nineteenth-Century Legacy," International Review of Social History 38 (supplement,
1993): 145-62; Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the
British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995).
7. Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Falling Through the Cracks: E. P. Thompson and the Debate
on Base and Superstructure," in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kaye
and Keith McClelland (Philadelphia, 1990), 116; see also Derek Sayer, The Violence of
Abstraction (Oxford, 1987); Catherine Hall, "The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: Gender and
Working-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century England," in E. P. Thompson: Critical Per-

spectives, 78-102; Sonya O. Rose, "'Gender at Work': Sex, Class and Industrial Capitalism,"
History Workshop 21 (Spring 1986):113-31.
8. Wood, "The Politics of Theory," 49; Adam Przeworski, "Proletarian into a Class: The
Process of Class Formation from Karl Kautsky's The Class Struggle to Recent Controversies,"
Politics and Society 7 (1977):343; see also Peter Meiksins, "New Classes and Old Theories:
The Impasse of Contemporary Class Analysis," in Recapturing Marxism: An Appraisal of
Recent Trends in Sociological Theory, ed. Rhonda Levine and Jerry Lembke (New York,
1987), 37-63; E. P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without
Class?," Social History 3 (May 1978):133-65.
9. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966).
10. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, 1983, 101; Joyce, Visions of the People, 9.
11. David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, "Social History and Its Discontents: Gareth
Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language," Social History 17 (May 1992):177-79.
12. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class.
13. Stedman Jones's revisionist interpretation has spawned considerable debate. For
citations of these numerous critiques and commentaries see Marc W. Steinberg, "The Re-
Making of the English Working Class?" Theory and Society 20 (1991):173-97; Mayfield and
Thorne, "Social History and Its Discontents." Lawrence and Taylor argue that the latter pair
misconstrue Stedman Jones's work as being part of the linguistic revisionism, when it is in fact
part of his larger enduring program to rethink the transformation of nineteenth-century
society. While Lawrence and Taylor seem justified in asserting a distinct trajectory for Sted-
man Jones, his work has certainly been influential in motivating this allied revisionist project;
Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, "The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the
Politics of Language—A Reply," Social History 18 (January 1993):1-15. A recent defense of
Marxist historiography against the linguistic turn has been conducted passionately by Bryan
Palmer, Descent Into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History
(Philadelphia, 1990); "The Eclipse of Materialism: Marxism and the Writing of Social History
in the 1980s," in The Socialist Register 1990, ed. Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch and John Saville
(London, 1990), 111-46; and "Critical Theory, Historical Materialism, and the Ostensible
End of Marxism: The Poverty of Theory Revisted," International Review of Social History 38
(1993):133-62.
14. Joyce, Visions of the People, 8, 16-17.
15. Joyce, Visions of the People, 12, 329.
16. Joyce, Visions of the People, 11.
17. Joyce, Visions of the People, 57, 90-92, 99-100, 108-9.
18. Joyce, Visions of the People, 94, 100.
19. Joyce, Visions of the People, 329, 334-35.
20. Joyce, Visions of the People, 333.
21. See note 5 for references.
22. Scott, "Evidence," 793.
23. Scott, "Evidence," 785; Gender, 84. In her essay on The Making of the English
Working Class, Scott contends that Thompson in fact genders his account of class formation
by identifying the rational and progressive as male and the feminine as the sphere of the
domestic (i.e., nonproductive), expressive, religious, and irrational, and therefore subvertive
of class consciousness. See Scott, Gender, 79. As I have argued elsewhere, Scott is surely right
that there is a neglect of women and gender in the volume; see Steinberg, "The Re-Making."
However, the duality of gendering she finds in Thompson is an idiosyncratic one, based on a
binary and structuralist reading which Laura Downs has in other ways argued is inherent in
much of Scott's work. Downs, though, finds this only in Scott's French work and enthusi-
astically endorses her critique of Thompson. See Laura Downs, "If 'Woman' Is Just an Empty
Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night? Identity Politics and the Post-
modern Subject," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993):421-23.
24. E. P. Thompson, "Folklore, Anthropology, and Social History," Indian Historical
Review 3 (January 1977):262. In their recent analysis of the growing divide between material-
ist and post-materialist accounts, David Mayfield and Susan Thorne perceptively reiterate
Thompson's concern with language and culture as a central point of material life. While they
perhaps errantly find analogs between the epistemological premises of Thompson and the
deconstructionism of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, they are surely correct in maintaining
that Thompson's reading of Marx opens a wide space for the role of language in class analysis.
See Mayfield and Thorne, "Social History"; Mayfield and Thome, "Reply to 'The Poverty of
Protest' and 'The Imaginary Discontents,'" Social History 18 (May 1993):219-33. Both Car-
olyn Steedman and John Goode also see potential links between Thompson and recent
discourse theory. See Carolyn Steedman, "The Price of Experience: Women and the Making
of the English Working Class," Radical History Review 59 (1994):108-19; John Goode, "E. P.
Thompson and the 'Significance of Literature,'" in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed.
Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (Philadelphia, 1990), 183-203.
25. For other recent discussions see Ron Aminzade, "Class Analysis, Politics, and
French Labor History," in Rethinking Labor History, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein (Champaign,
1993), 90-113; and Hanagan, "Commentary."
26. See Sally Alexander, "Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s;
Some Reflections on the Writing of Feminist History," History Workshop 17 (Spring
1984):125-49; Christina Crosby, "Dealing with Differences," in Feminists Theorize the Politi-
cal, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London, 1992), 130-43; Rosemary Hennessey,
Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse Analysis (London, 1992); Denise Riley, Am
I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Minneapolis, 1988); Riley,
"A Short History of Some Preoccupations," in Feminists Theorize, 121-29; Rose, Limited
Livelihoods. Recent work by Purvis and Hunt suggests the potential for a fruitful union
between what they term the critical perspective on ideology developed by Marx and poststruc-
turalism. See Trevor Purvis and Alan Hunt, "Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology, Dis-
course, Ideology . . . ," British Journal of Sociology 44 (September 1993):473-99.
27. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London, 1991), 9; Richard Terdiman,
Discourse!Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-
Century France (Ithaca, 1986), 55.
28. Robert Stam, "Mikhail Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique," in Postmodernism and
Its Discontents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London, 1988), 123. See also Fred Evans, "Language and
Political Agency: Derrida, Marx, and Bakhtin," Southern Journal of Philosophy 27
(1990):505-23; V. N. Volosinov, "Literary Stylistics," in Bakhtin School Poetics, ed. Ann
Shukman (Oxford, 1983), 93-152.
29. Lawrence Grossberg, "History, Politics, and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultur-
al Studies," Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (Summer 1986):66. Michael Holquist,
Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London, 1990), 24; Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dos-
toevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis, 1984), 183, 202.
30. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 293.
31. Ken Hirschkop, "Bakhtin, Discourse and Democracy," New Left Review 160
(November-December 1986):98; "Introduction: Bakhtin and Cultural Theory," in Bakhtin
and Cultural Theory, ed. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepard (Manchester, 1989), 16.
32. Eagleton, Ideology, 45, 195; Michael Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique: M. M.
Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (London, 1992), 74, 81; Stuart Hall, "Signification,
Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates," Critical Studies in
Mass Communication 2 (June 1985): 104; Hirschkop, "Introduction," 21. See also Purvis and
Hunt, "Discourse, Ideology"; Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans.
Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1986).
33. Terdiman, Discourse, 61; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance-
Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 188.
34. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 401.
35. Eagleton, Ideology, 115; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of
Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), 326; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith (New York, 1971), 323. See
also Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the 'Popular'," in People's History and Socialist
Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London, 1981), 227-40; Alan Hunt, "Rights and Social Move-
ments: Counter-Hegemonic Strategies," Journal of Law and Society 17 (Autumn 1990):309-
28; Purvis and Hunt, "Discourse, Ideology"; Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
(Oxford, 1976).
36. Ava Baron, "Gender and Labor History," in Work Engendered: Toward a New
American Labor History, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca, 1991), 31.
37. Scott herself notes that the very multiplicity of discourses allows the possibility for
people to stand outside a particular discursive formation; in any one situation the given
ontology through which a set of social experiences or relations is naturalized can thus be
questioned. See Scott, "Evidence," 793. However, two points concerning this position should
be raised. First, as British analytic philosophers such as John Austin note, language is both an
act in saying something and an action through saying something. See J. L. Austin, How to Do
Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass. 1975), 99-103. There is a tendency in Scott to
lose focus of the fact that language is thus a complex process of human action.
Second, there is both epistemological and ontological slippage in Scott's deconstruction-
ism. In arguing that all discourse is contextual, she sets up a relational contrast between
context and discourse. See Scott, "Evidence," 793-95. Yet if there is nothing beyond dis-
course, context is an impossibility. I think it is possible to maintain on the ontological side that
the situational constructions of discourse facilitate extra-situational networks of action, which
is what we normally term social structure. This in turn limits the possibilities for discourse.
Perhaps this is what Harrison White argues in part. See Harrison White, Identity and Control:
A Structural Theory of Social Action (Princeton, 1992).
38. William A. Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge, 1992), 57, 60.
39. Rick Fantasia, in his analysis of class conflict, has argued that such senses of agency
(as well as the concepts of identity upon which they are based) are constructed within what he
terms "cultures of solidarity." These cultures provide workers with a set of collective meanings
that heightens their solidarity and validates their contentious actions. See Rick Fantasia,
Cultures of Solidarity (Berkeley, 1989). In a somewhat different vein, Margaret Somers has
suggested that workers develop "narrative identities" through which they make claims for
rights and structure their collective identities as citizens and producers. See Margaret R.
Somers, "Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-
Class Formation," Social Science History 16 (1992):591-630; Somers, "Law, Community, and
Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy," American Sociological Review 58 (October
1993):587-620; and Somers, "Rights, Relationality, and Membership: Rethinking the Making
and Meaning of Citizenship," Law and Social Inquiry (1994):63-112.
40. Scott, Domination, 103.
41. British Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP) (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 15.
42. G. R. Porter, Treatise on the Origin, Progressive Improvement, and Present State of
the Silk Trade (London, 1830), 80; PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 5, 186. See also Gerald B.
Hertz, "The English Silk Industry in the Eighteenth Century," English Historical Review 24
(October, 1909):710-27; Alfred Plummer, The London Weavers' Company 1600-1970 (Lon-
don, 1972); Frank Warner, The Silk Industry in the United Kingdom: Its Origin and Develop-
ment (London, 1921).
43. George Dodd, "Spitalfields," in London, vol. 2, ed. Charles Knight (London, 1851),
386; PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 23; PP (Commons) 1834 [36], XXXV, App. B. 2, Pt. IV, 83i,
87i.
44. Clark, Struggle, 126-30.
45. PP (Commons) 1835 [572], VII, 10-11; PP (Commons) 1818 [211], IX, 44, 148; PP
(Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 5, 56, 62, 102, 126-28; Dorothy M. George, London Life in the 18th
Century (London, 1925), 181-82; W. M. Jordan, "The Silk Industry in London, 1760-1830,
with Special Reference to the Conditions of the Wage-Earners and the Policy of the Spit-
alfields Acts," unpublished M.A. thesis in History, University of London (1931), 12; Ivy
Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (London, 1969), 168,
176-77; Trades' Newspaper, February 23, 1828. In a fascinating account of the mechanization
of the winding trade, William Hale told a Select Committee of the Lords how the movement
of women into weaving actually led to the mechanization of that industry. In the first decade of
the century, "almost all the Females left the Trade and went into the Looms, which forced the
Manufacturers to turn their attention to Machinery; they then commenced, and they do now
nearly wind all their Silk by Machinery." See PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 5. There are bits of
evidence to suggest that by the 1820s male weavers were accepting girls with no kin ties as
apprentices. It is possible that the apprenticeship premium became an important source of
additional income, particularly after the repeal of the Spitalfields Acts (which I discuss
below). See Trades' Newspaper, September 18, October 9, 1825; January 22, 1826.
46. See Marc W. Steinberg, "The Roar of the Crowd: Repertoires of Discourse and
Collective Action Among the Spitalfields Silk Weavers in Nineteenth-Century London," in
Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action, ed. Mark Traugott (Durham, 1995), 57-88; Stein-
berg, Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Discourse, and Collective Action In Early Nine-
teenth-Century England, unpublished manuscript. I am drawing here from Thompson's work
on the moral economy of the eighteenth century. See E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy
of the Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 50 (1971):76-136; Customs in
Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1991). Thompson argues that
class relations can be analyzed in terms of a moral economy when they are negotiated through
a series of community practices which recognize mutual obligations, when market practices
are thus publicly acknowledged to have normative underpinnings, and when the ideological
bases of these practices are articulated in plebeian discourses. See Thompson, Customs, 271,
343,350; see also Charles Tilly's definition as quoted in Thompson, Customs, 338. My claim is
that the weavers' class consciousness was based precisely on such notions of entitlement based
on membership in both a trade and political community.
47. See Clive Behagg, "Custom, Class and Change," Social History 4 (October
1979):455-80; Behagg, "Secrecy, Ritual and Folk Violence: The Opacity of the Workplace in
the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Popular Custom and Culture in Nineteenth-
Century England, ed. Robert Storch (New York, 1982), 154-79; John Belchem, Industrializa-
tion and the Working Class: The English Experience, 1750-1900 (Portland, 1990); Clark,
Struggle; Eric Hobsbawm, "Artisan or Labour Aristocrat?" Economic History Review, second
series, 37 (1984):355-73; Iowerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century
London: John Gast and His Times (London, 1979); John Rule, "The Property of Skill in the
Period of Manufacture," in The Historical Meaning of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge,
1988), 99-118.
48. R. J. Morris, "What Happened to the British Working Class, 1750-1850?" Bulletin of
the Society for the Study of Labour History 41 (Autumn, 1980):14.
49. Porter, Origins, 222-23, 274.
50. Natalie Rothstein, "The Introduction of the Jacquard Loom to Great Britain," in
Studies in Textile History, ed. Veronica Gervers (Toronto, 1977), 281; PP (Commons) 1832
[678] XIX, 213, 488, 716, 725.
51. PP (Commons) 1834, XXXV, App. 2, B. 2, Pt. 1, 83f; Tower Hamlets Library
(London), Local History Collection, Christ Church Spitalfields Vestry Minute Books, 1828-
31; Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government From the Revolution to the Munici-
pal Corporations Act: The Parish and the County (London, 1906), 79-90.
52. Phillip McCann, "Popular Education, Socialization, and Social Control: Spitalfields
1812-1824," in Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Phillip
McCann (London, 1977), 3; PP (Commons) 1817 [642], VI, 31.
53. PP (Commons) 1832 [678], XIX, 714.
54. An Account, 20-21; PP (Commons) 1818 [134], IX, 160; PP (Commons) 1832 [678],
XIX, 230; PP (Commons) 1834 [556], X, 320; PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 115.
55. See Bland, Brown and Tawney, English Economic History, 547-51; J. L. and Barbara
Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, 1780-1832 (New York, 1967), 209-12; Rude, Wilkes, 100-
103; Plummer, London Weavers' Company, 320-29; Shelton, English Hunger, 192-97.
56. An act of 1792 extended these provisions to mixed fabrics. In 1811 they were legally
extended to women as well, providing some indication of the significance of women in the
trade. See Clapham, "The Spitalfields Acts," 460-2; Hammond and Hammond, Skilled
Labourer, 209; Plummer, London Weavers' Company, 328-29; PP (Commons) 1818 [211], IX,
190.
57. Letters, Taken from Various Newspapers, Tending to Injure the Journeymen Silk
Weavers of Spitalfields, with an Attack against the Acts of Parliament, Regulating the Prices of
Their Work . . . Also, the Answers, by the Journeymen and Their Friends (London, 1818), 42-
43.
58. PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 172, 176.
59. PP (Commons) 1832 [678], XIX, 734.
60. British Library, Francis Place Newspaper Cuttings and Clippings Collection, Set 16,
v. 2, fo. 32; Jordan, "The Silk Industry," 3; see also "Verax," Review of the Statements in
Hole's Appeal to the Public on the Spitalfields Acts (London, 1822), 22-23.
61. PP (Commons) 1818 [134], IX, 143, 168,161, 192; PP (Commons) 1834 [44], XXIX,
Pt. Ill, 112A.
62. PP (Commons) 1835 [572], VII, 86.
63. Barry Gordon, Economic Doctrine and Tory Liberalism 1824-1830 (London, 1979), 19.
24 ILWCH, 49, Spring 19%
64. Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, new series, 9 (1823), c. 146-49.

65. For Tory policy see Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of
the Tory Governments 1815-1830 (Oxford, 1977); Gordon, Economic Doctrine.
66. For the relationship between Evangelicalism and political economy see Boyd Hilton,
The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought,
1795-1865 (Oxford, 1988). As Gregory Claeys observes, "For much of the nineteenth century,
political economy successfully dictated the terms of debate about such vital issues as poor
laws, trades' unions, hours and conditions of labour, emigration, the morals of the poor, and
the extension of the factory system." Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-
Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), 144. Claeys maintains that much of the
age's working-class radical thought accepted some notion of free markets, and that even the
Owenites initially tried to displace such ideas with moral rather than economic arguments
concerning production and consumption. Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 174-83; see also Mit-
chell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (Lon-
don, 1991); Thomas A. Home, Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain,
1605-1834 (Chapel Hill, 1988).
67. For a narrative account see An Account.
68. Barrie M. Ratcliffe and W. H. Chaloner, trans, and ed., A French Sociologist Looks
at Britain: Gustave D'Eichthal and British Society in 1828 (Manchester, 1977), 25.
69. An Account, 29. The campaign was extensive and aided by many other weavers'
groups from around the country. On 21 May 1823 the MP for Weymouth presented an
antirepeal petition with eleven thousand signatures, a number all the more remarkable be-
cause women and people under twenty had not been permitted to sign. Petitions were also
presented from Spitalfields (with a reported twenty-three thousand signatures) and other
areas around the country on 5 March 1824, 10 March from Coventry, 18 March from "silk
manufacturers of London" (presumably the smaller masters), 19 March from some "silk
manufacturers in England", and 22 March from the parish of Bethnal Green (with 7,000
signatures). See Hansard's, new series, 9 (1823): c. 378; Hansard's, new series, 10 (1824): c.
780-81, 869, 1221, 1285, 1312.
70. For an analysis of this repertoire see Steinberg, "Roar of the Crowd"; Marc W.
Steinberg, "New Canons Or Loose Cannons? The Post-Marxist Challenge to Neo-Marxism as
Represented in the Work of Calhoun and Reddy," Political Power and Social Theory 8
(1993):221-70.
71. On the scope of these collective actions, see Steinberg, "New Canons"; Steinberg,
Fighting Words, chap. 7.
72. On the uneven history of the weavers' participation in radical politics from the 1810s
to the early 1830s see David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838-1848 (Cambridge, 1984),
185-89; Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study of Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830s
(Oxford, 1970), 264-65; J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796-
1821 (Oxford, 1982), 97; Plummer, London Weavers' Company, 330; Prothero, Artisans and
Politics, 70, 142, 285; Steinberg, Fighting Words, chap. 5; Thompson, The Making, 634.
73. I cannot examine the whole dialogic interplay between the weavers and their adver-
saries, which I analyze at varying lengths elsewhere. See Steinberg, "Roar of the Crowd";
Steinberg, Fighting Words, chaps. 6 and 7.
74. An Account, 60. One expert the weavers sometimes quoted when constructing their
case was Adam Smith. On the issue of wage levels one weaver's advocate noted sardonically
during the course of the repeal debate that "Adam Smith, an authority our great pretenders
are fond of quoting, says, 'the prosperity of a country consists in the comforts and enjoyments
that the people, both rich and poor, possess beyond the common necessaries of life." See
British Library, Add MSS 27805, John Powell, A Letter Addressed to Weavers, Shopkeepers,
and Publicans, on the Great Value of the Principle of the Spitalfields Acts: In Opposition to the
Absurd and Mischievous Doctrines of the Advocates for their Repeal (London, 1824), 5; see
also William Hale, An Appeal to the Public, in Defence of the Spitalfields Act: with Remarks
on the Causes Which Have Led to the Miseries and Moral Deterioration of the Poor (London,
1822), 41.
75. British Library, Add MSS 27805, "Coventry Freeman," Animadversions on the Re-
peal of the Act for Regulating the Wages of Labour among the Spitalfields Weavers; and in the
Combination Law (London, 1824), 3.
76. An Account, 25. Although the male weavers did not emphasize consistently who
should distribute wealth within the household, this was made clear on several occasions. The
man held authority, and indeed part of his degradation was its attenuation. As one weaver
noted during a campaign in 1826, "His industry, which should promote the welfare of his
family, ultimately hastens to its ruin; . . . he beholds his helpless family bereft of their natural
protector, and compelled to apply to that miserable and degrading substitute, the parochial
fund." Trades' Free Press, July 9, 1826.
77. "Coventry Freeman," Animadversions, 5.
78. William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, vol. 1 (London, 1967), 57;
John Prout, Practical View of the Silk Trade (Macclesfield, 1829), 23; PP (Commons) 1832
[678], XIX, 212, 387-89, 476, 479, 488, 701, 719, 725; PP (Commons) 1834 [556], X, 4, 324.
79. PP (Commons) 1832 [678], XIX, 770.
80. See Steinberg, Fighting Words, chaps. 6 and 7.
81. The petition was presented with twenty thousand signatures as part of a larger
working-class campaign for wage protection legislation. Petitions were also sent from the silk-
weaving towns of Coventry (ribbon weaving), Macclesfield, Manchester, and Norwich, as well
as other industrial areas. See Trades' Free Press, 5, 26 April 1828, May 3, 1828.
82. Trades' Free Press, February 23, 1828.
83. Report Adopted at a General Meeting of the Journeymen Broad Silk Weavers, held in
Saint John Street Chapel, Brick-lane, Spitalfields, On Wednesday, the 20th of February, 1828, to
take into Their Consideration the Necessity of Petitioning the Legislature for a Wage Protection
Bill and Such Other Purposes as May Arise out of the Same. To which is Appended, The
Petition (London, 1828), 31.
84. Report, 12-14.
85. Report, 7 (from the petition, paginated separately).
86. Report, 20, 25-26.
87. Report, 21.
88. Report, 14-15.
89. In her analysis of patriarchal sexual cooperation among the silk weavers, Anna Clark
argues that the male weavers were less likely than skilled artisans to construct pronounced
gender differences in their trade rhetoric because of the centrality of women in production.
See Clark, Struggle, 127-28, 199.

Identity Formation and Class: Marc W. Steinberg

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IDENTITY FORMATION AND CLASS

"The Labour of the Country Is the Wealth

And may no treacherous, base designing men,

In terms relative to other trades in London the silk weavers were so

Against our lawful rights with vengeance fired,

In secret ambush long the ambiguous foe,

Problems in the Analysis of Class Formation

Discourse Theory, Class Identity, and Consciousness

marking discourse as a mediator and source of power. Through it actors

Discourses may constitute individuals, but it is individuals trying to remake their

When multiple formations and meanings converge, potentially to define

the legitimacy of bourgeois meanings and simultaneously fashion shared

The Case of the Spitalfields Weavers

journeymen constructed what I elsewhere term "a moral economy of la-

street, and on the other there is the appearance of a different nation."62

trade protection and a living wage through a wide repertoire of collective

during this period, they represented labor not as a commodity, but as a

While not questioning the right of a manufacturer to earn a living through

The meeting, which was attended by thousands of weavers and family

[T]he present incongruous application of the principle of freedom, so far from

An equitable reward for labour is best adapted, and is indeed indispensable to

policies. Partly through a process of dialogic appropriation, male weavers

Working-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century England," in E. P. Thompson: Critical Per-

64. Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, new series, 9 (1823), c. 146-49.

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