Labour History and Culture: A Postscript

Abstract

This thematic section ably demonstrates how cultural perspectives in labour history can produce key insights which are strikingly valuable not only for labour analysts but for activists. The authors here deliberately refuse a crude Marxist model of a weighty economic base and a derivative superstructure which they feel has narrowed the focus of traditional labour history to paid (mainly male) economic activity in the workplace and has led to a dismissal of cultural processes as secondary. These articles turn the tables by bringing cultural analysis straight into the traditional heartland of labour history where they cast fresh light on workplace life, class consciousness, and industrial militancy, while at the same time setting a new agenda for research. Before giving the articles the closer attention they deserve, I want briefly to discuss the history of the concept of culture, the direction cultural studies has recently taken and the reasons why labour historians are well-placed to make some of the most exciting and relevant uses of these developments. Culture, as Raymond Williams famously observed, is one of the 'most complicated words in the English language'1 for good reason. It is not so much that culture is an imprecise and confused concept but that it has been continually contested by groups of people with very different, even contradictory, social identities and aspirations. This contestation makes culture an intensely political concept. Even from the beginning, culture had incompatible meanings. In Britain, as Williams reminds us in Keywords, culture expanded in the nineteenth century from an early meaning of horticulture or the nurture of plants to signify the culture of human beings especially through education. It then became more exclusively equated with 'high' culture by first denoting the process of creating outstanding religious, philosophical and artistic works and then becoming abstracted to signify the works themselves, which concealed the labour process involved. By contrast, there was also a more inclusive understanding of culture developing which was eventually reshaped and absorbed both by anthropology and cultural studies. In German romanticism at this early period, culture was used to denote the way of life particularly of the people or volk of a nation. This area of definition appealed to Raymond Williams, a major theorist of culture, who grew up in the Welsh valleys as the son of a railway signalman, and who was as deeply committed to literature as he was alienated from the cultural values of Cambridge University which he attended as a mature student (and returned to as Professor of Drama).2 His intellectual project was to develop a bridging concept of culture and a mode of cultural analysis which would include his kind of people and value their creativity, often expressed in social institutions which embodied a collective ethos rather than in artistic production. His 'cultural materialism' insisted on the analysis of the