E. P. Thompson na África do Sul

Português

English

Edward Webster (África do Sul)
Professor Emérito de Sociologia da Universidade de Witwatersrand, África do Sul

Conheci o trabalho de E. P. Thompson pela primeira vez em 1970, quando era estudante na Universidade de Oxford. Os alunos haviam ocupado o prédio da reitoria em apoio a um protesto de estudantes da Universidade de Warwick. A descoberta de que as autoridades estavam produzindo e mantendo fichas com perfis políticos dos estudantes para monitorarem sua atuação durante uma ocupação na Universidade de Warwick, em fevereiro de 1970, levou a uma massiva onda de protestos jamais vista na Grã-Bretanha. A questão dos fichamentos políticos serviu para aglutinar uma série de queixas sobre a estrutura repressiva e autoritária do ensino superior e o crescente imiscuir entre interesses acadêmicos e empresariais. E. P. Thompson, então professor de História do Trabalho daquele campus, editou um livro em que atacava o papel central da comunidade empresarial na universidade.

Warwick University Ltd. causou-me impacto e impulsou minha crescente consciência política, colocando-me no caminho de uma participação ativa na educação de trabalhadores ao longo da vida. Na verdade, em 1972, enquanto pós-graduando na Inglaterra, fui nomeado pelo Departamento de Extensão da Universidade de Leeds para lecionar em tempo parcial no programa da Associação Educacional dos Trabalhadores (WEA). Coincidentemente, vinte anos antes, Thompson havia sido contratado pela mesma associação para ensinar história do trabalho em Yorkshire, para estudantes vindos em sua maioria da classe trabalhadora. Seu livro mais célebre, The Making of the English Working Class(1963), foi desenvolvido ao longo de vários anos enquanto ele lecionava. Como o próprio Thompson observou, seus alunos eram os herdeiros das tradições sobre as quais escreveu, e as discussões e interações com eles foram cruciais para o livro.

Quando regressei à África do Sul, na sequência das greves de Durban em 1973, fui um dos membros fundadores do Instituto de Educação Industrial (IIE), a primeira faculdade para trabalhadores na África do Sul. Mas não foi isso que me ligou ao trabalho de Thompson, e sim uma iniciativa da Universidade de Witwatersrand, em 1977, de criar o History Workshop, um grupo interdisciplinar de historiadores e cientistas sociais determinados a desenvolverem uma história a partir de baixo, “ um programa de estudos mais ‘descolonizado’, que questionava categorias importadas e paradigmas metropolitanos”.¹ É importante ressaltar que seu objetivo era democratizar a pesquisa, produzindo publicações acessíveis ao público não acadêmico, representadas no livro Gold and Workers (1981), de Luli Callinicos.

Como escreveu Isobel Hofmeyr, uma defensora do History Workshop, “a história social ao estilo thompsoniano inspirou o movimento da ‘história vista de baixo’ (…), que talvez tenha sido mais evidente entre no final dos anos 1970 e os anos 1980, e é geralmente atribuído a um constante fluxo de acadêmicos brancos sul-africanos ingleses expostos ao marxismo britânico no Reino Unido, bem como ao espetacular ressurgimento da resistência política e sindical ao estado de apartheid na década de 1970, após a repressão da década de 1960”.² Hofmeyr prossegue apontando que The Making forneceu um modelo de como deveria ser uma nação radical baseada na classe, como ela poderia ser narrada e como, por meio de um cuidadoso trabalho de arquivo, era possível representar a experiência de outros. The Making poderia, portanto, “resolver” contradições imperativas e, na verdade, o lugar social deste grupo, que era sul-africano, mas “inglês; que produzia textos de autoria branca, mas de alguma forma “negra”; que versavam sobre raça, mas eram “realmente” sobre classe; que eram nacionais ao mesmo tempo em que derivavam do antigo império.

O mais proeminente dos thompsonianos sul-africanos é Charles von Onselen.³ Embora ele quase nunca invocasse explicitamente o autor, a marca thompsoniana em seu trabalho era evidente, escreve Jon Hyslop, “no desejo de recuperar vidas esquecidas, na ênfase na forma como as obrigações pré-industriais moldam a classe trabalhadora, e na ênfase nos tipos informais de resistência social”.⁴ Sem dúvida, a acadêmica sul-africana mais influenciada por Thompson foi a falecida Belinda Bozzoli. Como Hyslop observa com precisão, The Poverty of Theory tornou-se uma espécie de aval intelectual para a hostilidade de Bozzoli em relação ao teoricismo excessivo em geral e à influência de Althusser e Poulantzas na historiografia sul-africana em particular.⁵ Clive Glaser leva o argumento de Bozzoli um passo adiante, lembrando que Thompson oferecia uma alternativa socialista humanista para os esquerdistas desiludidos com a tradição leninista na África do Sul.⁶

Que relevância Thompson tem hoje? O breve momento thompsoniano nas décadas de 1970 e 1980 na África do Sul já passou há muito tempo. Além disso, afirma Delius, o papel decisivo e central que é atribuído a sua obra não condiz com realidades muito mais complexas e localizadas.⁷ Com o triunfo do nacionalismo africano e a emergência de um discurso mais vocal, baseado na raça e crítico dos estudos eurocêntricos, a ênfase de Thompson na classe como experiência e a ênfase na agência dos trabalhadores que desenvolvem a sua própria compreensão do mundo foram marginalizadas. Mas à medida que as contradições de classe no capitalismo racial da África do Sul vêm à tona, ainda poderemos muito bem testemunhar a emergência de um equivalente africanista da história vista de baixo no século XXI.

^{EP Thompson speaking, Youth CND rally Coventry 1984. © Stefano Cagnoni/reportdigital.co.uk, 26/05/1984. Disponível em: https://www.reportdigital.co.uk/search?s=ep+thompson}

Notas

¹ Belinda Bozzoli, “Introduction: History, Experience and Culture,” in Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response, ed. Belinda Bozzoli (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983). Para uma crítica dos esforços descolonizadores do History Workshop via uma perspectiva africana nacionalista, ver Bernanrd Magubane, “Whose memory-whose history? The illusion of liberal and radical historical debates,” in History Making and Present-day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, ed. Hans Erik Stolten (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrika Institutet, 2006), 251–279.
² Isabel Hofmeyr, “South African Remains: E. P. Thompson, Biko, and the Limits of The Making of the English Working Class,” Historical Reflections 41, no. 1 (2015). Ver também Belinda Bozzoli e Peter Delius, “Radical History and South African History,” Radical History Review on History from South Africa 46, no. 7 (1991).
³ Ver, por exemplo, Charles Van Onselen, “Randlords and Rotgut, 1886–1903: An Essay on the Role of Alcohol in the Development of European Imperialism and Southern African Capitalism,” History Workshop, no. 2 (1976): 33–89, e The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine. A South African Sharecropper. 1894–1985. (Cape Town: David Philip.,1996).
⁴ Jonathan Hyslop, “E.P. Thompson in South Africa: The Practice and Politics of Social History in an Era of Revolt and Transition, 1976–2012,” IRSH 61 (2016): 95–116. Ver também Martin Murray, que aponta que Von Onselen não se concentra no “fazer” da classe operária, mas sim na resistência ao processo de proletarização de formas individualistas. “The Triumph of Marxist Approaches in South African Social and Labour History,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, 23 (1988).
⁵ Hyslop, “E.P. Thompson in South Africa”. Ver também os trabalhos de Bozzoli: “Introduction: Popular History and the Witwatersrand,” in Labour, Townships and Protest (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1979) e “Class, Community and Ideology in the Evolution of South African Society,” in Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1988), 1–43.
⁶ Clive Glaser, “Thompson on the highveld? Social history and humanist socialism in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s,” Social History 45, no. 4 (2020): 427–439.
⁷Peter Delius, “E. P. Thompson, Social History, and South African Historiography, 1970-90,” Journal of African History 58, no. 1 (2017): 3–17.

Translation: Eneida Sela

E.P.Thompson in South Africa

Edward Webster (South Africa)
Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa

I first came across E.P. Thompson’s work in 1970 while a student at Oxford University. Students had occupied the main administrative building in support of a protest by students at Warwick University. The discovery of political files kept by the authorities on students during an occupation at Warwick University in February 1970 led to the most massive wave of sit-ins Britain had yet seen. The issue of files served to focus a whole number of grievances about the repressive and authoritarian structure of higher education, and the increasing interpenetration of academic and business interests. EP Thompson, then Reader in the History of Labour at the university edited a book, Warwick University Ltd (1970), attacking the central role of the business community in that university.

The book had an important effect on me. It gave impetus to my growing political awareness, setting me on my way to a lifelong active participation in worker education. Indeed, In 1972 while a graduate student in England, I was appointed to the Leeds University Extra-Mural Studies department to lecture part-time in the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) programme. Coincidentally, twenty years earlier Thompson was employed in the same WEA to teach labour history in Yorkshire to largely working class students. His celebrated book, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), was developed as he taught classes over a number of years and crucially, as Thompson himself noted, by discussion and interaction with his students, the inheritors of the traditions that he wrote about in the book.

When I returned to South Africa in the wake of the Durban strikes of 1973, I was one of the founding members of the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE), the first workers college in South Africa . But it was not worker education that was to connect me with Thompson’s work but an initiative in 1977 at the University of the Witwatersrand to establish the History Workshop, an inter-disciplinary group of historians and social scientists determined to develop a history from below, “a more ‘de-colonised’ scholarship, which questioned imported categories and metropolitan paradigms ”.¹ Importantly it aimed to democratize research by producing ‘accessible’, non-academic publications, epitomized by Luli Callinicos’s book Gold and Workers (1981).

As Isobel Hofmeyr, a stalwart of the Wits History Workshop has written, ‘ Thompsonian-style social history inspired a “history from below’” movement ….. that was perhaps most apparent in the late 1970s and 1980s and is generally ascribed to a steady stream of white South African English academics exposed to British Marxism in the UK, as well as the spectacular re-emergence of political and trade union resistance to the apartheid state in the 1970s after the crack- down of the 1960s’. Hofmeyr goes on to argue that ‘The Making provided a model of what a radical nation based on class should look like, how it might be narrativized, and how through careful archival labor one might represent the experience of others. The Making could hence “solve” the contradictory imperatives, and indeed social location, of this group: South African yet “English”; producing texts that were white-authored but were somehow “black”; were about race but were “really” about class; and being national while also being derived from the former empire.’²

Foremost amongst South African Thompsonian’s is Charles von Onselen.³ Although he seldom explicitly invoked Thompson, the Thompsonian stamp of his work was evident , writes Jon Hyslop, in the desire to recover forgotten lives; the emphasis on the way in which pre-industrial obligations shape the working class; and in the stress on informal types of social resistance.’⁴ Arguably the South African academic most influenced by Thompson was the late Belinda Bozzoli. As Hyslop accurately argues The Poverty of Theory became something of an intellectual charter for Bozzoli’s hostility to excessive theoreticism in general and to the influence of Althusser and Poulantzas on South African historiography in particular.⁵ Clive Glaser takes Bozzoli’s argument a step further by arguing that Thompson offered a humanist socialist alternative for leftists disillusioned with the Leninist tradition in South Africa.⁶ What relevance does Thompson have today? The brief Thompsonian moment in the seventies and eighties in South Africa has long gone. Besides , writes Delius, the decisive and central role that is ascribed to his work does not accord with much more complex and localised realities.⁷ With the triumph of African nationalism and the emergence of a more strident race -based discourse critical of Eurocentric scholarship, Thompson’s emphasis on class as experience and his stress on the activity of working people developing their own understanding of the world, has been marginalised. But as the class contradictions in South Africa’s racial capitalism come to the fore, we may well see the emergence of a 21^ST Century Africanist equivalent of ‘history from below’.

^{EP Thompson speaking, Youth CND rally Coventry 1984. © Stefano Cagnoni/reportdigital.co.uk, 26/05/1984. Available at: https://www.reportdigital.co.uk/search?s=ep+thompson}

Notes

¹ Belinda Bozzoli, “Introduction: History, Experience and Culture,” in Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response, ed. Belinda Bozzoli (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983. For a critique of the History Workshop’s aim of decolonisation from an African nationalist perspective see Magubane, Bernard M. 2006. “Whose memory-whose history?” The illusion of liberal and radical historical debates. In History Making and Present day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa , edited by Hans Erik Stolten. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrika Institutet. 251-279.
² Isabel Hofmeyr, “South African Remains: E. P. Thompson, Biko, and the Limits of The Making of the English Working Class,” Historical Reflections 41, no. 1 (2015). See also Belinda Bozzoli e Peter Delius, “Radical History and South African History,” Jonathan Hyslop, “E.P. Thompson in South Africa: The Practice and Politics of Social History in an Era of Revolt and Transition, 1976–2012,” IRSH 61 (2016): 95–116. Ver também Martin Murray, que aponta que Von Onselen não se concentra no “fazer” da classe operária, mas sim na resistência ao processo de proletarização de formas individualistas. “The Triumph of Marxist Approaches in South African Social and Labour History,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, 23 (1988). Radical History Review on History from South Africa 46, no. 7 (1991).
³Charles Van Onselen, “Randlords and Rotgut, 1886–1903: An Essay on the Role of Alcohol in the Development of European Imperialism and Southern African Capitalism,” History Workshop, no. 2 (1976): 33–89, e The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine. A South African Sharecropper. 1894–1985. (Cape Town: David Philip.,1996).
⁴Jonathan Hyslop, “E.P. Thompson in South Africa: The Practice and Politics of Social History in an Era of Revolt and Transition, 1976–2012,” IRSH 61 (2016): 95–116. Ver também Martin Murray, que aponta que Von Onselen não se concentra no “fazer” da classe operária, mas sim na resistência ao processo de proletarização de formas individualistas. “The Triumph of Marxist Approaches in South African Social and Labour History,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, 23 (1988). See also See Murray, Martin. “The Triumph of Marxist Approaches in South African Social and Labour History”, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 23 (1988).who argues that Von Onselen does not focus on the ‘making’ of the working class but rather on resistance to the process of proletarianization in individualistic ways.
⁵ Hyslop, “E.P. Thompson in South Africa”. Ver também os trabalhos de Bozzoli: “Introduction: Popular History and the Witwatersrand,” in Labour, Townships and Protest (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1979) e “Class, Community and Ideology in the Evolution of South African Society,” in Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1988), 1–43.
⁶ Clive Glaser, “Thompson on the highveld? Social history and humanist socialism in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s,” Social History 45, no. 4 (2020): 427–439.
⁷ Peter Delius, “E. P. Thompson, Social History, and South African Historiography, 1970-90,” Journal of African History 58, no. 1 (2017): 3–17.

E. P. Thompson na África do Sul – Edward Webster