ABSTRACT

A radical class consciousness involves identification with, recognition of common interests with, workers in other situations, outside the immediate locality, outside the particular conditions of an occupational community. Radical class consciousness, and the organisation and action on the part of the working class which go with it, require two basic kinds of precondition. Class imagery involves an image of society; or a series of perhaps contradictory, conflicting, rather confused and ambivalent pictures of what society is like and where the individual fits into it. Counting class labels is an easy and misleading substitute for the complex and sensitive analysis required. Working-class daily life is circumscribed in very concrete ways by parochial limitations, by local boundaries and by boundaries of kinship, by the pressures of immediate need. Despite its parochialism the strength of that must have been historically important in the formation of working-class organisation, working-class action, and working-class consciousness.