how did david thomsaan partially reject the marixan thesis
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E.P. Thompson and the Althusserian locusts: an exercise in practical criticism
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by RICHARD WEBSTER
Unpublished c. 1982
E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory was published in 1978. It contains four of Thompson’s strongest and most trenchant essays in cultural criticism and is dominated by the essay from which it takes its title – a polemic, extending over some two hundred pages, against the thought of Louis Althusser and the influence of structuralist models on modern Marxist theory.
The extraordinary wealth, energy and vigour of this polemic cannot be conveyed by any summary. By its sheer power and by its political zeal and moral force it towers above any other work of cultural criticism or philosophical polemic which has been produced by any British writer for many decades. The rugged vitality of Thompson’s political rhetoric has a strength which is reminiscent of Orwell and which conveys a political vision in some ways akin to his. ‘The job of the thinking person,’ wrote Orwell in Wigan Pier ‘is not to reject socialism but to make up his mind to humanise it.’ Thompson has rescued that pronouncement from Orwell’s own subsequent despair and placed it as the first item on the agenda-paper of socialism.
As the various committee meetings of socialism have wandered in their discussions from practice to theory, from the concrete questions posed by the nature and circumstances of ordinary men and women to the metaphysical discussion of abstractions, Thompson has not hesitated to rise from his seat and, holding aloft the agenda-paper which has been neglected, to seize the chair from whichever self-appointed convenor has assumed it and recall the meeting to order. In The Poverty of Theory he does so again. Because he does not hesitate to hammer upon the table, because he speaks with thunder in his voice, nearly all those present have shown at least signs of attending to him
There can be no surer indicator of the weight and significance of Thompson’s voice within English Marxism than the appearance in 1980 of a book length study of Thompson’s ideas and influence written by Perry Anderson. It was Anderson who, in the early 1960s so impressed the founders of the British New Left with his seeming intellectual fertility, his energy and his decisiveness that they, having reached in Thompson’s words ‘a point of personal, financial and organisational exhaustion’