2
Although it is enjoyable to spin stories, my own non-existent labouring past fills me with its ghostly afterlife. How strange, to have spent much of my life – and livelihood – preoccupied with work I never did. I performed a kind of shadow-work, chronicling the decay, and subsequent absence, of a form of labour passing away. What, I wonder now, have I achieved, as I survey a lengthening shelf of largely unread publications, newspaper cuttings eaten by sunlight and time, forgotten reviews on writings about changes that are over, if not entirely done with?
From 1963 I wrote regularly for New Society, a weekly that flourished for the space of one generation. I have thought a great deal about the significance of this short-lived publication and my place in it. For its existence straddled the period of what Karl Polanyi might have called the ‘second great transformation’ – the dissolution of the working class, and the re-making of the labour of Britain following the requirements of a single global economy. This was an era no less epochal than the making of the labouring classes at the time of the Industrial Revolution; and although this re-shaping of human vocations was accompanied by a great increase in prosperity, it was also attended by psychic and social disturbances akin to those of the first industrial era, when a working class was violently created out of a fading, impoverished peasantry.
Mills and factories closed, industrial buildings were demolished in a cloud of powdered red brick, and machinery lay exposed to the sky, the metal skeleton of industry. The function of people, manifest in gaunt factories and warehouses of the sooty towns and cities, became more elusive, and the dismantling of the reason for their existence was certainly not universally regarded as a liberation. Inner city riots and industrial action against the erasure of industry caused disquiet and vexation. Would the transition be accomplished without excessive social dislocation? Would it be accepted by the British, whose temper was, at the same time, equable and tolerant, but also refractory and given to outbursts of violent excitability? How acceptable was the rise in crime, addictions, psychiatric and emotional disorders, and were these a reasonable price for the economic upheaval in train?