The British working class since the 18th century – Identity(-ies), representations, (re)definition

Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France, 15-16 December 2022

Deadline for submissions: 31st May 2022

By the mid-19th century, workingmen were already such a well-established socio-economic group in Britain that Marx and Engels were adamant that the country would be the first to witness the rise of the ‘dictatorship
of the proletariat’.

However, the dramatic shift they advocated never happened even as the workers’ movement went from strength to strength in terms of organisation and commitment towards addressing the consequences of all manner of crises taking place on a rather regular basis.

Despite these bitter and sometimes long-drawn-out industrial disputes (e.g. the so-called ‘hunger marches’ of the 1920s and 1930s, or the large-scale strikes in the coal-mining sector in the early 1970s and the mid-1980s), the working class seems to have eventually withered to such an extent that John Prescott, the former Labour deputy Prime Minister, and a workingman’s son, felt justified in saying in 1997: ‘We are all middle class now’.

Does this then mean that there is nothing, or little, left today of a social group that was inevitably conspicuous in days gone by not only on account of its involvement in extractive industry, manufacturing, land and sea transport, and so on, but also due to its very presence in the urban environment (working-class districts and leisure activities, accents, speech patterns, clothes, etc.)? Or is John Prescott’s pronouncement purely normative, i.e. the archetype of an external viewpoint? Besides, is it not a fact that dealing with ‘the workers’ or ‘the working class’ has always consisted in expressing a specific viewpoint, inspired either by a sense of pride and respect or by pure distrust, without regard to that socio-professional category’s objective characteristics?

All these terms, nowadays, may sound old-fashioned, even stigmatising, while the word ‘worker’, which in this day and age basically means the same as ‘wage-earner’ or ‘employee’, tends to cloud the issue. On the other hand, what about the use by e.g. the managers of a major e-commerce company of the word ‘associate(s)’ to refer to those shop-floor employees who, in fact, generally perform tiring, repetitive, low-skilled and poorly-paid tasks, i.e. tasks typical of those carried out by the ‘workers’ of yesteryear?

Which probably brings us back to the beginning of this overview: indeed, understood as the outcome of a disadvantageous power relationship within the economic sphere, the working class seems therefore not to have disappeared since it is an integral part of that relationship.

Thus, a multitude of further issues arises:

We welcome submissions by the 31st of May, 2022. They should be sent to

• Didier Revest <Didier.REVEST@univ-cotedazur.fr> and
• Ruxandra Pavelchievici <Ruxandra.PAVELCHIEVICI@univ-cotedazur.fr>

and contain the following elements:

• title;
• author(s), institutional affiliation, contact email(s);
• abstract (300 words maximum);
• a short biographical note

Confirmed guest speaker:

Professor Selina Todd (St Hilda’s College,
Oxford University).

Registration fees: 20€