project47

It was the New Left historian E. P. Thompson who transformed histories of the working class with a simple inversion.

Rather than analyzing class in terms of the relationship between workers and the means of production, he suggested that if we were to look at workers’ shared experience of capital we would find that they would articulate their experiences differently to other classes.

This lead to a notion of ‘working class culture’ which would radically change how history was even conceived, much less practiced. It was to labour songs, the chants of demonstrations, the banners of protest and the rituals and practices of weekend leisure that Thompson opened up as areas of legitimate research in the search for working class politics during the 60′s.

If we are to take the lessons of Thompson to heart, Millwall FC is rich in politics; even in its darkest hours.

Norbet Elias may well be right when he suggested that the bourgeois classes saw potential in organised sport to sooth the disenchantment of the working class, effectively anesthetising revolutionary tendencies by providing a controlled outlet for it. But it is through Thompson that we can see manifestations of the political periodically erupting through this numbed and anesthetised condition in the form of excess.

It seems to me, if we want to look at politics and sport, then we must take seriously those things that are so easy to condemn as brutish and apolitical…