A star-spangled spanner

In their compact pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels made the bold assertion that the history of all hitherto existing societies was the history of class struggle. For some labour historians no truer words were ever written, and Neville Kirk is among them.

Labour and Society in Britain and the USA is a bold and ambitious inquiry. It offers a genuinely comparative approach to the study of labour in Britain and America, and professes to be one of the first of its kind. Kirk, who presents a fascinating picture of capitalist development from the 1780s to the late 1930s, draws heavily on the work of E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm in his attempt to furnish a history of workers' and labour movements in the two countries. Through an effective combination of chronological and thematic presentation, Kirk endeavours to expose not only the formative influences on, but the entire development of organised labour and workers' movements. He scrutinises their characteristics and the debates surrounding their development. He devotes serious attention to labour institutions and their dynamic interaction within the wider social context. He examines the interaction between economic conditions, labour movements, and individual workers. And he reveals how that complex interaction contributed to individual workers developing a sense of class consciousness, a purposeful consciousness crucial to the shaping of their own destinies.

Kirk's reliance on a comparative method is fruitful and interesting, not only because no genuine comparative labour history of Britain and America exists, but because it permits him to take aim at the still widely adhered-to thesis of American exceptionalism. In its crudest form the thesis propounds that a working-class consciousness of the kind that developed in Britain and in Europe failed to develop in America because of a decisive combination of factors, ranging from the "the deep imprint of capitalist values upon large sectors of the population" through geographical and occupational mobility, to the absence of a homogeneous working class. In his endeavours to demolish this thesis, Kirk mobilises a mass of material that aims to prove not only that "national traditions coexisted and interacted with similar or common international influences and experiences" but that language, laws, customs and mores in ensuring close relations between Britain and America created conditions in which British and American workers, at least until the 1920s, had much more in common than is traditionally admitted. In today's world of multinational corporations and international finance, the contemporary motivations behind and relevance of Kirk's challenge to the thesis of American exceptionalism can hardly escape notice.

However, his challenge to American exceptionalism, the central thrust of these two volumes, while appealing, ultimately fails. The difficulty lies in an inadequate development of the concept of class and the idea of class consciousness. While Kirk is very careful to show how the British and American working classes were confronted with conditions and circumstances within the context of capitalist development that were radically different (a lengthy analysis replete with examples that comes uncomfortably close to confirming the thesis of American exceptionalism) resulting in the American working class being much more fractured than the British, he presents a conception of class as an objective unitary entity. Despite careful referral to Thompson and Hobsbawm as showing that classes "are never undifferentiated, uniform 'finished' wholes", Kirk lapses all too often into presenting a picture of a coherent working class unified by an objective interest. What is equally disappointing is that the picture is reflected; other classes are presented as mirror opposites of the proletariat. Kirk's portrayal of the middle class in the 1820s is all too characteristic. Presented as a unified and coherent whole working in the interests of capital, the middle class attempted to "transform I the personalities of workers, and to channel them into acceptance of acquisitive individualism, the 'truths' and 'laws' of political economy, and 'natural' subordination to their 'betters'". Such a portrayal is uncompromising and inaccurate. Kirk seems to ignore a substantial and powerful body of middle-class opinion, shaped by, for example, Unitarians such as William Ellery Channing and Joseph Tuckerman, which vigorously attacked laissez-faire capitalism, launched a spirited assault on the ethos of "acquisitive individualism", and sought to elevate the conditions of workers and the destitute.

While Kirk's endeavours to furnish a genuinely comparative history of labour in Britain and America are praiseworthy, and while he marshals a wealth of scholarly material to that end, his resolute defence of an objective conception of class and unified class interest detracts from much that is stimulating of this enterprise. The inevitable result is that the "objective" interests of the classes, which loom over them like Marx's spirit, pit them one against the other such that history really does become nothing more than class struggle.

Michael Drolet is lecturer in history, Royal Holloway, University of London.