Abstract
This chapter engages with the failure of traditional accounts of working-class consciousness to explain the mechanisms promoting or inhibiting radical beliefs. These, too often, have been overly-concerned with assessing the ability of the working class to fulfil its historic role as characterised by Marxist definitions, or have concentrated on the descriptive analysis of areas and times during which radical activity took place. The first type of approach adopts a simplistic perspective that fails to grasp the complex nature of belief, and the ambiguities and contradictions that it may contain. The second disengages particular episodes from the flow of time and thus fails to account for the relationship of radical stances to their historical background.1
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Notes
Both of these orientations can be found within J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London: Methuen, 1974) which not only offers a simplistic account of the orientations of the Oldham working class in the nineteenth century due to his determination to locate events within a Marxist-Leninist approach, but which also, despite an analysis over time, fails to account adequately for the changing nature of subjective understandings.
See, for example, P. Abrams, Historical Sociology (Shepton Mallet: Open Books, 1982);
R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977);
Z. Bauman, Memories of Class: The Pre-History and After-Life of Class (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
A. Heller, A Theory of History (London: Routledge, 1982).
C. Tilly, ‘19th Century Origins of our 20th Century Collective Action Repertoire’, CRSO Working Paper, no. 244, Michigan, September, 1981.
S. Najam, ‘The “Winning” of the Eight-Hour Day: An Historical Analysis of the Origins of Militancy among the Fife Miners’, Edinburgh: unpublished paper, 1986, argues that the Fife miners were not, indeed, the first to win the eight-hour day. Historical documentation from the period is in clear disagreement with the arguments put forward by R. Page Arnot, The History of the Scottish Miners (London: Unwin Brothers, 1955) to this effect. It would appear that Page Arnot’s argument may be based on a misrepresentation of a letter written by Fife Union leader, Davie Proudfoot, to Allen Hutt in London and to which Page Arnot would have had access.
This letter is reprinted in I. MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1981). However, this belief is widely held by the Fife miners and referred to frequently to assert their historical militancy. In this sense, objective truth is of less importance than what the miners believe, and its consequences for identity.
S. F. MacIntyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Inter-War Britian (London: Croom Helm, 1980).
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© 1990 The British Sociological Association
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Najam, S. (1990). Aye Tae the Fore: The Fife Miners in the 1984–85 Strike. In: Kendrick, S., Straw, P., McCrone, D. (eds) Interpreting the Past, Understanding the Present. Explorations in Sociology. British Sociological Association Conference Volume Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20786-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20786-2_9
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