Free An Economy is Not a Society by Dennis; Glover

size to War and Peace. That’s how in 1985 I ended up reading E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class by a pool at the University of California. It must have been near an air force base because my memory is of watching B-52 bombers taking off and lazily circling to cruising height, off on patrol, perhaps even to their failsafe points, should the balloon suddenly go up – which I thought ironic, given Thompson’s role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
    Thompson’s book – 958 pages of small, close-set type – was one that every serious left-wing historian of the time had to read but few did, the way every serious Christian one day plans to read the Old Testament, and every Young Liberal Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. As a book it was so intellectually overwhelming that one needed a gap year to take it on, which is what I now had. I had spent the previous half-year since completing my BA doing shift work in various canning and assembly factories to save for the trip, so in important ways I was in the mood for Thompson’s message about how the working-class communities that reached their zenith in places like Dandenong and Doveton created themselves out of the violence of the Industrial Revolution.
    For reasons that will become obvious, Thompson’s thesis is worth recounting briefly. At the end of the eighteenth century, the English working class of handloom weavers, agricultural labourers, ironworkers, miners and the like still lived a largely rural existence, employed at home or in small workshops, with strong connections to village or parish life. Yet by the early 1830s many had been agglomerated into large factories under the discipline of the overseer and the mechanical clock, and their once middling towns like Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds had been transformed into the ‘dark satanic mills’ of Blake’s poem, with thousands upon thousands of factory hands crammed into dangerous slums, where they died young and poor. The old world had been physically transformed: bricked over, blackened, cheapened, uglified.
    In the long run and on average, Britons ended up wealthier, the economists tell us, but the economic transformation was carried through with callousness and violence, according to a set of economic ideas imposed from on high, totally unrelieved by any sense of participation in a common project for the national good. Its ideology, according to Thompson, was that of the masters and the masters alone. In barely thirty years – the same period of time that spans from the mid-1980s to today – an economy that had previously served the whole community now served a narrow class of winners, practically enslaving the rest. It wasn’t until the political system caught up half a century later that the material benefits began to be spread with any degree of justice. Thompson’s book suggests a question: did it have to be done that way? This, in some ways, is our question too.
    It’s not surprising that people resisted this change, sometimes violently, by smashing up the power looms and threshing machines that had taken their jobs, and by forming unions, some of whose members were transported to Australia for their troubles. We have too easily forgotten that the horrors of the industrial revolution – the fourteen-hour days, the pregnant women down mines, the stunted children up chimneys, the life of hunger followed by an early death – existed in the folk memory of Australia’s working-class settlers. (The same nightmare still haunts trade union officials whenever they hear the term ‘WorkChoices’.) These horrors are what many early settlers came here to escape. Their idea of Australia was a society that worked for everyone, not just mine owners and factory owners and landholders. After crossing the Atlantic on my backpacking trip in 1985 I went to the Belfast streets where my parents grew up; I saw the cramped,