ABSTRACT
Looking at the period of the ‘classic’ industrial revolution - about 1780-1840 in Britain, slighdy later in the USA and on the European continent - a number of recent social historians have noted the importance of local community relations to what they call class struggle (see, among many, Thompson, 1968; Foster, 1974; Aminzade, 1981; Smith, 1982). By contrast, I shall try to specify the historical process further by suggesting that two different sorts of social relationships are at stake. Community is built of direct relationships; class, on the contrary, is made possible as a form of social solidarity only by the development of large-scale systems of indirect relationships. In Marxist theory in particular, class refers to social collectivities constructed not haphazardly on the local scene but at the level of the whole social formation under terms dictated by the dominant mode of production. Class is not at issue wherever there is hierarchy, nor class struggle wherever workers challenge the authority of bosses or employers. To be salient in the class struggle engendered by capitalism, classes - bourgeoisie, proletariat - must be organized at the same level as capital accumulation. Because of their smaller numbers and greater resources, elites (including members of the bourgeoisie) are likely to achieve some such organization before classes or ‘masses’. It is as weak to describe workers’ struggles caught within the bounds of locality - in Oldham alone, say, or even all of Southeast Lancashire - as comprising ‘class struggle’ as to describe the local industrial
organization as comprising (rather than reflecting, or being shaped by) capitalism; each must be understood in terms of a larger scale and more complex sort of integration.
