Working Class History: Fighting for a Better Past!

“By imparting new meaning and dynamism to artisanship, dance, music, literature, and the oral epic, the colonized subject restructures his own perception. The world no longer seems doomed.”—Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

They call themselves “a small collective of worker-historians,” and their cross-media project reaches an audience of 15 to 25 million per month, completely independently. Working Class History (WCH) is many things: a social media account with a huge following (on basically every platform), a podcast, a website with tons of carefully archived material, an interactive map, and some books. But ultimately Working Class History can be defined by its approach that questions both the canonical definition of history and the dogmatic understanding of the working class. In July 2024, WCH celebrated its tenth anniversary, and after a decade of articles and dozens of hours of interviews, they had set an example and an opportunity for all those who wanted to join the “fight for a better past.”

It was just a decade ago, but in the 2010s when WCH started, the world was different—especially the part of it that happened online. First of all, Facebook was a platform dominated by teens, a demographic that nowadays hardly ever engages there. There were no sponsored ads all over our newsfeeds, influencers were not a thing like they are today, and there were not all sorts of people live streaming their night or morning routines. But all of this was just around the corner: by the end of 2012 Facebook exceeded one billion monthly active users, and platforms started to become a big part of social dynamics.

When I ask the group to tell me about the beginning of Working Class History, our conversations start from there: from the moment in which social media became widely diffused, engaging people of all ages, and from the anniversary of the release of a Beatles’ new album. In 2014, as more and more people were signing up on Facebook, some contents became more popular than others: kittens of course are the internet favorites of all time but also “happened today” pages became very popular, most probably because 92% of users were already logging in daily. These kinds of pages were largely dedicated to movies and music: “we would see posts like ‘On this day, the Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart club’ with hundreds of comments of people sharing memories, personal or local stories about that event; so we thought let’s do one about history.”

One would think that an idea like that would come to the mind for a group of history students and scholars, very passionate about their subject, and willing to share their knowledge. Or, at least, watching the amount of material on WCH website and how meticulously it is archived, that is what I thought—wrongly.

This small bunch of workers-historians assembled among the streets of London through years of participating and organizing in local struggles. They are not united by a single ideology nor by being part of a single group. Some come from trade unionism, some from anti-fascist and anti-racist collectives. When Working Class History started, they had known each other for some years from “various kinds of political projects, mostly failed…” but not everyone in the group agrees with this characterisation, others wouldn’t “describe any of those projects as ‘failures’. They might not have had many concrete achievements as such, but concrete achievements are hard. I’d say they had varying levels of success. Mostly not very much.” We’ll leave the verdict to a future article maybe.

“We were also keen readers and very eager to study and share knowledge about social movements, since we were joining them.” Later they would be part of other organizing attempts—and still are—but at the time they also shared the need of a project that could go beyond the life of the groups and local experiences they had been part of. They opened the Facebook page as a game, but when it rapidly became huge, they asked themselves if this could be the occasion to use it to give an answer to their need. And that was when all the other things started to add up: the podcast, the website, the books etc. Truth to be told, not all in the collective were fond of this option. At first, some really did not welcome the idea: “it sounded like a lot of work!”

In the end—luckily for us—the others were able to convince the reluctant members, but if you skim through WCH, you will notice that they were quite right in the first place. It is a lot of work, all made possible by readers’ donations.

Time and place always matter and it is hardly a coincidence that the WCH started among a group of young people from the same country with E.P. Thompson, the author of the groundbreaking book The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963. E.P. Thompson was a member of the famous Communist Party Historians Group, the group that developed social history¹, and he described his approach to this subject as a “history from below.”² History from below is a term in which WCH can recognize itself “the most” when it comes to describing what they do and where they come from.

Bridging E.P. Thompson and WCH were also figures such as Raphael Samuels, Sally Alexander, and other British radical historians who, in 1976, founded the History Workshop Journal as a result of the History Workshops movement: groups of worker-students, originally from Ruskin College Oxford (where Samuels was a professor), and different socialist historians. In a few years, the Workshops events would gather hundreds of people. Samuels would later describe the experience of the Workshops which lasted until the eighties with the following words: “History is or ought to be a collaborative enterprise, one in which the researcher, the archivist, the curator and the teacher, the ‘do-it-yourself’ enthusiast and the local historian, the family history societies and the individual archaeologist, should all be regarded as equally engaged.” 

History from below is essentially linked to oral history, a subject in which the concept of “shared authority” is quite crucial. Formulated in 1990 by Michael Frisch, the expression became “something of a mantra for oral historians” as Linda Shopes wrote in her review of Frisch’s book. Frisch explains that in oral history the authority is shared between narrators— who “bring a very real authority” that is “grounded in a culture of experience”—and interviewers (meaning researchers with training and methodology). That, ultimately “shared authority” deals with the overall structure of the production of history, and offers an accurate description of the dialogical process that happens when oral historians craft an interview (or writers craft a profile).

This idea of history challenges beliefs that “things have always been this way,” and shows the means of production of historical knowledge as an active part of how we think about history and what we think we know about it. For “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities and our aspirations.”³

By examining how the idea of history itself evolves, we become more aware of the impact of our shared actions and the obstacles we face. It also inspires us not just to analyze history, but to actively shape it. As WCH writes on their website, “history isn’t made by kings or politicians, it is made by us: billions of ordinary people. It is our struggles which have shaped our world, and any improvement in our conditions has been won by years of often violent conflict and sacrifice. WCH is dedicated to all those who have struggled in the past for a better world, and who continue to do so now. To help record and popularise our grassroots, people’s history, as opposed to the top-down accounts of most history books.”

Actually, “people’s history” almost became the name of the project in a deliberate homage to Howard Zinn’s famous text, A People’s History of the United States, “but we decided against it because we thought we should stress the importance of class, although our project would probably be most popular if we did [name it like that].”

We had talked for a while now and I was wondering when we would arrive here: we had been down the memory—and history—lane, and it was time we turned to the working class road. This is one of the things that compelled me when navigating their material, the idea of the working class that builds up through them. Far away from the dogmatic understanding that identifies working class history with labor history, excluding all sorts of people: slaves, women doing unpaid domestic labor, indigenous people resisting colonization, civil rights movements and antiracist struggles, peasant uprisings from before the so-called industrial revolution to name a few.

“We never approached the idea of class thinking it was limited to the definition of an ‘individual selling their labour power.’ We try to have a broad understanding of what class is: our idea was forged reading books like There Ain’t No Black in The Union Jack where Paul Gilroy argues to include the struggles of enslaved people and ‘maroons’ in class analysis, or the monumental work of Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, in which she shows how witch-hunting and the slave trade were essential to capitalism to assemble an army of unpaid workers not labeled as such following strict Marxian analysis.”

“We do not think of class as a fixed entity, it’s a social relationship, so of course Indigenous resistance in the United States has a different class relationship with colonizers than workers in the factories at the dawn of the last century. But we could go back to E.P. Thompson, who says that the English working class was present in its own making. What he meant is that history didn’t happen from one day to another: it wasn’t like playing tag where the colonizers touched Indigenous peoples and turned them into proletarians. Indigenous struggles against colonization shaped the concrete forms which class and capitalism took in colonial contexts.. Capitalism was affirmed through colonialism, and even if theoretically as a mode of production it could work without white supremacy or patriarchal traits, this actually has never happened, and most probably never will. History of class societies needs to address how classes come to be formed and reproduced, especially among those who want to overcome them.”

Trying to summarize what has most influenced the Working Class History team, is maybe something that could be done more easily without their presence, since every time I make an attempt in that direction, new authors, experiences, and influences come up: “Basically we’re stealing from everyone.”

As said, some books (or better, many books) were fundamental to define their idea of what goes under the label of Working Class History, but maybe the most relevant part of their answer to my question about how they shaped their idea of WCH are those that could not possibly fit in a bibliography: they told me about organizing struggles in workplaces with majorities of female and racialized workers, as well as long discussions with comrades that challenged their thoughts throughout years, meetings with other people part of the international History from Below network⁴, in other words; collective experiences.

“We could say we’re millennials, so by the time we had a job, our parents’ unions had all been defeated. We grew up without any strong labor movement in the ‘old’ sense, the majority of us don’t even understand what something like that could mean, how something involving a large part of society could actually work… and this is still true for people that could be our children and that enter the workforce these days. So, there was a huge generational break and we always thought that created a huge problem.”

In this light, Working Class History seems both an attempt to understand and to contribute to mending this break. But how widely is this idea of “working class history” shared among their readers? When you reach millions of people, you reach millions of opinions: Of course, we wouldn’t know precisely, but it’s funny that people’s reaction to how we stress the category of working class differs from the type of story we publish: “no one says ‘this isn’t working-class history’ when we post about peasant uprisings in medieval Europe, only when we talk about Indigenous resistance, despite both being ‘pre-histories’ of the working class in a technical sense. Same with LGBT history, like the Stonewall Rebellion, despite many participants being working-class people of color.”

“One of the criteria we use to choose what we publish on WCH, is that our stories must be about people taking direct action to improve their conditions, we could say it’s the main one. At the end of the day, we publish the stories we believe working class movements and people should know about.”

For what it is worth I think that is a great criteria: good theory goes along with good practice.

Footnotes

1. The same Communist Party Historians Group where Tariq Ali, Eric Hobsbawm, and other historians known way beyond academy were part of (E. Hobsbawm also wrote a book about its history). ↩︎
2. A fun fact ↩︎
3. Raoul Peck, Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes, 1966. ↩︎
4. To know more about it check their website, but I suggest you start form here: History is the new Punk ↩︎