"Class Not as a Thing but as a Relationship"

"Thompson's empathy with those forced to struggle on an inhospitable social terrain has lessons for us, too. Today, the issue is the enormous condescension not of posterity but of the present: the contempt for working-class people, the hostility to benefit 'scroungers', the derision of those forced to use food banks, the indifference to injustice. It is visible also in the scorn for the supposed bigotry and conservatism of the working class or in the disdain of those who voted the wrong way or have become disillusioned with the left. Thompson's insistence that 'their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experiences' is as necessary to acknowledge now as it was then."

Kenan Malik at The Guardian marks E.P. Thompson's 100th birthday.