ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some of the important precepts in the poststructuralist analysis of discourse and ideology. It outlines Stedman Jones's examination of chartist politics. The chapter offers brief critiques of both. It explains this critique through an examination of the discourse of conflict used in a major industrial action by the cotton spinners of the Ashton-Stalybridge region of England during 1830. Poststructuralists view class ideology, conflict, and transformation as discursive constructions. In each variant of the perspective, it is discourse that defines peoples' interests and consciousness. For Stedman Jones, then, the history of chartism is one of how an ideology, conveyed through a discourse, structured working-class mass action. The spinners therefore had to construct a discourse of exploitation from extant streams, one that clearly denoted the antagonisms between themselves and the mill owners. Class conflict often is reduced to battles of signification.
