The story of the formation of a radical class-conscious working class through a patchwork of different struggles and experiences over the fifty-year period from the 1790s to the 1830s seemed to break open the whole of history, and not just this story alone. Before this book, my head was full of ultra-left revolutionary rage and enthusiasm, alongside bits of technocratic social democracy, with phrases and notions absorbed from bourgeois sociology.
Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class was how the liberation of the working class must be a revolutionary act of self-emancipation. What I didn’t understand until reading E.P. Growing up in a socialist household, there was never a time when I did not think of myself as a socialist in some sense. A classic work of social history chosen by Dominic Alexander
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