Wing to elaborate the categories needed to interrogate evidence, historical or otherwise, to produce scientific knowlerge. But the necessity of elaborating a systein knowledge is a sine qua non of all scientific procedure, not just an Althusserian whim.
No wonder then that Thompson so radically rejects the elaboration of Marxist categories undertaken by Althusser and his principal collaborators, some of which - the distinction between mode of production and social formation, over-determinanion. dominance - have passed into common usage. Class Perry Anderson challenges the definition of class given by Thompson. polemicises against Althusser's insistence that class relations are objective structures, and that individual subjects are just the "bearers' or supporiusser s notion is aimed at laska conces. objective of class consciousness and the "class for itself'.
For Thompson the anti-humanist content of the Althusserian position is stark. If human ity is reduced to being the "bearers' of social relations, then what role exists for conscious human action? Thompson replies that class is not an objective structure, but a process of common identity:
'Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, their antagonistic interests, and come to value and think and struggle in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self"given, although under conditions which are An even more extreme (and influential) statement of this position is to be found in The Making of the English Working Class. Ander son points out that such a definition is a break with the Marxist notion that class position is not determined by consciousness.
On the contrary, order son finally ing with the the 'British Road' advance.
resolves at the political level around Stalinism, Trotskyism and revolution.
The political period to which Thompson makes constant nostalgic reference is that of the anti-fascist Popular Front and the period of national unity against the Nazis. While breakThompson never fundamentally broke with the strategy of - of peaceful, democratic All his references to Trotskyism are of a derogatory nature, treating it as a subvariant of Stalinism,_another arid and dogmatic clericy.