The contributions of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson to communication and social change theory and practice

Williams, Thompson and ‘agency’

Both Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson were involved in theorising the basis for a just and egalitarian society through a call to mobilisation, access to the arts, education and communication. Williams hailed from a working-class background in rural Wales and despite his long association with Oxbridge was committed to working-class education and was a theorist of culture and social change. He made a case for cultural materialism as a way of moving beyond the ‘base-superstructure’ impasse and explored culture as a social, material and productive entity and process that was key to an understanding of dominant, residual, emerging and everyday cultures. To Williams, culture is not mere consciousness or the realm of re-production but is a productive activity and practical process that is intimately tied to the making of meaning. In particular, Williams’ approach to thinking technology as a cultural form whose limits are determined by its social and cultural context and uses as well as by political and economic decisions offers the means to a fuller understanding of context. Technology as material culture is an inescapably contested aspect of life. Williams offers CSC theory insights that are critical to understanding technological interventions in society – information and communications technologies (ICTs), social networking and so on that are today firmly grounded in technological determinist paradigms. See Freedman (2010) for an account of Williams’ critique of technological determinism. In other words, Williams offers pathways to understanding the resolutely materialist nature of such interventions. Thompson, unlike Williams, was a historian of the working classes, in some respects the original subaltern historian whose excavations of the lives of ordinary people was his basis for understanding the nascent, plebian public sphere in 18th-century England. His writings have explored the creation of political consciousness in working-class communities and their contributions to the framing of democracy in Britain. He was also, in addition to being a committed public intellectual, a fervent anti-war and nuclear disarmament activist who was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) that was established in 1957. Thomson offers a clear political vision for social change – and while subsequent post-structuralist and post-colonial writings have undeniably highlighted oppression that is other than class based, one can in Thompson’s defence argue that ‘difference’ has contributed to a diffuse politics in which the sectorality of social change has trumped the project of inclusive change. To CSC theory, Thompson offers a way of understanding the lives and histories of ordinary people and their structures of feeling that contributed, in his writings, to a larger understanding of the public sphere in 18th-century England. Both Williams and Thompson were committed to the cultural and communication rights of ordinary working people but were at the same time acutely aware of the structures – media, the war machine, the market, that short-circuited solidarities and commonalities. Both Williams and Thompson have a lot to offer CSC theory – Williams for his clear understanding of the worth of a common culture based on participation, the democratic potentials of communications, technology as culture and his commitment to popular pedagogies and media literacy and Thompson for his unflinching belief in ordinary voices contributing to social change. In the concluding chapter in the volume Culture and Society 1780–1950, Williams highlights the nature of a common culture that echoes the ethic and virtues of participatory communication:

Any culture, in its whole process, is a selection, an emphasis, a particular tending. The distinction of a culture in common is that the selection is freely and commonly made and remade. The tending is a common process, based on common decision, which then, within itself, comprehends the actual variations of life and growth.

Williams also believed that communication systems acted as a form of continuous informal education and that as such, its reform was a matter of public interest (O’Malley, 2013). The context of CSC requires new injections of theory. Today, there is a need to contend with a variety of narratives of progress in which technology and a recrudescence of sectarianism have obfuscated clear thinking of the means and ends of social change. The wide uptake of behaviourism has merely added another layer of complexity that needs to be reckoned with.

Raymond Williams, communication and social change

Raymond Williams (1961) in his classic study ‘The Long Revolution’ analyses the class structure in 19th-century Britain through the lens of English literature. He highlights the existence of a ‘selective’ tradition, the canon and the ways in which the dominant social character of the period expressed through ideas such as progress, individual success, along with multiple class–based distinctions coalesce into a dominant class’ shared ‘structure of feeling’. As Williams describes it,

… it is as firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible part of our activity. In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period … I do not mean that the structure of feeling, any more than the social character, is possessed in the same way by the many individuals in the community. But I think it is a very deep and very wide possession, in all actual communities, precisely because it is on it that communication depends.

This phrase’s openness has been a source of debate for cultural theorists, and many words have been spent on understanding whether or not the phrase can be applied to an understanding of dominant, residual or emergent cultural formations. In Marxism and Literature, Williams (1971) states that this structure of feeling should not be equated with ‘worldview’ or ‘ideology’ but with

specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships … We are … defining these elements as a ‘structure’; as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process … which in analysis has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. (p. 132)

While Williams’ preference seems to be to use the term in the context of describing an emerging cultural formation, the very fact that it remains ‘open’ to interpretation allows one to use the phrase as a means to apprehend and understand both the dominant and the emergent. In the context of CSC, the term can be applied to an understanding of the affective dimensions of class and other markers of identity that structure responses to interventions in development, both technology mediated and unmediated. Studies show that the introduction of mobile phones, for example, in the context of hierarchical societies such as that in India has not led to a re-definition of inter-caste power relationships but to situations in which the dominant structure of feeling conditions the affective relationships in higher–lower caste mobile conversations. Beyond literary texts, the structure of feeling can help understand experience as a lived and contested reality in CSC between the dominant and the emergent. Understanding these ‘structures of feeling’ is critical to exploring solutions to the current impasse in CSC. Contemporary efforts to control ‘affect’ by managing its algorithmic modalities offer corporations the means to create ever closer correspondences between consumers and brands, be it footwear, alcohol or tobacco in multiple spaces – from music festivals, to night clubs through the everyday uses of new technologies and social networking in a variety of domestic environments and public spaces. These new and emerging structures of feeling based on what Williams (1974) once presciently described as ‘mobile privatisation’ requires understanding and offers the means to bring back ‘critique’ and balance to a field that is characterised by the profusion of celebratory studies on the relationship between social networking and social change (p. 26). If communication is to be leveraged to make a difference in people’s lives, then there simply has to be a renewed commitment to an understanding of how society works, how power flows and who controls the means of production – in other words, the ‘field’ of power along with the structures of feeling that condition, communication flows and endow it with meaning/s in any given context. At the very same time, it offers an opportunity to understand the experience of people living on the margins, their cultural formations and their emergent understandings of social change. Mathews (2001: 191) in an article on the structure of feeling concludes with the following observations:

The structure of feeling hovers at the edge of full articulation or understanding, in tension with those currents of work emerging in the 1950s which address hitherto marginal areas of British culture and history, exploring methods for the recovery and articulation of working class consciousness and experience.

Invoking Williams in the era of social media

Williams’ critique of technological determinism that was developed during the age of television could be equally applied to understanding the affordances and limitations of social media and devices such as mobile phones. This critique was linked to the need for a new ecology of television, rooted in community, the basis for a ‘new universal accessability’ via one of ‘the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in complex urban and industrial societies’ (Williams, 1974: 151). The expansion of ‘mobile privatisations’ today that are a consequence of the ubiquity of mobile devices and platforms has, as it is well known, invited McLuhanist celebrations of the power of independent devices and ‘prosumers’ who are often removed from any consideration of markets and production. This is most evident in the literature on social movements in Europe and elsewhere characterised by a focus on social media as the link between everyday life and politics. While activist affordances of social media for mobilisation, communication and direct action have been critical to the movements such as the Indignados in Spain and Nuit Debout in France, Nuit Debout has been described as a ‘technologically orchestrated network’ (Emeran and Players, 2016), leading to scholars such as Joss Hands (2015) putting forward the view that the ‘structure of feeling’ can be used to understand ‘the sociality of affect wherein intensities, the material resonances between bodies, are interlaced with the culture as a material process’ (p. 145). While there are nuanced studies of social media such as Croesner and Highfield’s (2015) study of independent and social media used by the antifascist movement in Greece, there continues to be a lack of studies on social media in context in which ‘determination is a real social process’ (p. 130) and in which the ‘limits and pressures’ (p. 130) are conditioned as much by the affordances of social media platforms as the increasing turn towards biopolitics by the state. A case in point is Rovisco’s (2016) study of the Indignados movement in which a claim is made for an ‘European Public Sphere’ and ‘Europeanisation from below’ (p. 439) that has been shaped by collective actions and the affordances of social media platforms. While collective actions in Europe have certainly contributed to a democratisation from below and to the cultivation of radical, pan-European structures of feeling, new writings on the relationship between social media industries and the political economy of affect suggest that there is a need for nuanced understandings of ‘participation’. Mark Andrejevic (2011) has, for example, observed that in ‘A context in which control relies increasingly upon expanded opportunities for participation requires a rethinking of the oppositions that place participation per se on the side of democratic empowerment’ for there is a need to recognise the ‘role played by participation in the modulation of affect as a modality of control’ (pp. 616–617). Williams, of course, rejected any celebration of technological determinism and believed that all technologies were tarnished by ‘social expectations or political and economic interests’ (Silverstone, 2004: viii), an understanding that is often lost on social media activists who are often oblivious to the reality of mobile privatisations, the materiality of social media cultures and the political economy of social media platforms.

Lived practice: The case of mobile phones in India

Shanmugavel’s (2013) study on the everyday uses of mobile phone among caste communities in South India shows how the terms of information exchange corresponds with the terms and patterns of traditional, inter-caste communication. While the lower castes in India have certainly experienced social change, and in some parts of India have become politically organised and a force to reckon with, the politics of caste as a factor that is central to the structuring of inter-personal and inter-community relationships in India has not withered away in the context of modernity but has been reinforced and its terms recalibrated. Such findings surely need to be followed up on precisely because it would seem to imply that the social structuring of access to these new technologies of the self has by no means been straightforward or in line with textbook and media perspectives on mobile phone appropriations and use. Assa Doron’s (2012: 430) anthropological study on cell phones, gender and the self in Northern India, specifically in Benares, reveals the complex nature of phone use between the genders, from mother-in-laws controlling the use of the family cell phone to cell phone gifting as the means of primarily reinforcing filial loyalties and only secondarily to conjugal relationships:

Mobile phone usage within the household is an issue fraught with dilemmas and uncertainties. In some case, the phone is ‘kept in place’, assuming the ‘safe’ and stable character associated with the fixed phone. The phone can be incorporated into the household in ways that reaffirm norms and practices, all of which are bound by political and social considerations that frame gendered spaces and, roles, community structures and ideologies. One should therefore be cautious in celebrating the potentially ‘emancipatory’ qualities of the mobile phone, for these do not necessarily extend to all spheres of sociality and vary greatly across region, class, age and caste.

As an anthropologist, Doron has an understanding of both the changing and unchanging nature of the self in a society that continues to be calibrated by traditional norms and practices. Like Thompson who had a relational understanding of class, Doron understands the distinctions of gender within traditional family structures just as Shanmugavel makes sense of caste as a relationship. And like Williams, there are attempts to understand the structure of feelings of the communities that they deal with. Shanmugavel’s exploration of everyday practices follows in a tradition that Williams’ was involved in defining:

Williams believed that cultural practices should be studied from within; that is to say, from the lived experience and daily practices of historically situated actors; and that such study should pay as much attention to the cognitive, affective and aesthetic dimensions of textual and other expressive modes, as to their formal characteristics. (Brochu, 2006)

Despite his reputation as a theorist, Williams had an abiding interest in the education of the working classes. While English literature was the lens through which his pedagogy was communicated, his own origins in a working-class family contributed to this commitment to education as the making of political consciousness – a tradition that the better-known CSC theorist such as Paulo Freire is known for. Social change that is the result of conscientised communities creating their future is an alien concept for many of the agencies involved in contemporary CSC interventions. Education, in this context, is piecemeal, related to the development task at hand and is almost always bereft of a critical engagement with reality. An example of such an approach is the routinising of ‘participatory action research’ (PAR) by development agencies throughout the world. While such research is expected in theory to result in empowerment, the reality is that in the vast majority of cases, an emphasis on imparting technique/s trumps any meaningful grappling with context and the political economy of development. While training in PAR does help communities understand their household economy, it remains an expendable method since macro changes are not part of the equation. Williams’ practical involvement in the adult education of the working classes through the Worker’s Educational Association (WEA) reveals an approach to communication and social change that is grounded in a pedagogy of knowing the world – in his case through enabling encounters between the working classes and literature and media content during the period 1940–1961. Fred Inglis (1995), in a biography of Williams, writes that

Three times a week Raymond turned out of the house into a couple of the coldest winters of this century round about half-past four to be sure of a six-thirty start twenty-odd miles away. Travelling by elderly buses or even shabbier trains, carting with him a heavy box of books, the WEA tutor picked his way cross-country to a village hall, a school room, the back premises of the local library, the annexe to a church vestry, and on occasions, somebody’s sitting room, to meet with a dozen or fifteen people in order to talk about Ulysses, or Puccini, or the future of socialism, or the history of newspapers. (pp. 118–119)

This type of adult education although different from the Freirean method of adult education that in a sense is based on people making their own texts is, nevertheless, based on dialogue and an opportunity for mutual understanding, for understanding texts in context and consciousness raising. Mcilroy (1993) has commented on

Williams’ lifelong commitment to the working class, its values and its institutions, its collective democracy, its solidarity, its potential for making a better society, For Williams, involvement in adult education was first and foremost about the working class, his own relationship with the class he came from and the collective emancipation of that class. (p. 14)

Williams’ commitment to adult education culminated in his involvement in the establishment of the Open University, Britain’s key experiment in the democratisation of knowledge during Wilson’s Labour government. Williams was accompanied by other fellow Left sojourners in this endeavour including Charles Taylor, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall, and they were in a real sense followed in the wake of earlier projects related to working-class education such as the London Corresponding Society that E.P. Thompson has fulsomely described in his volume The History of the English Working Classes. In fact, this book was written originally as a history of the British labour movement for extra-mural students when Thompson was teaching adult education at the University of Leeds Extra-Mural Department (see Edelman, 2012: 51). As Josh Cole (2008) has observed,

Adult education offered a unique means of deconstructing the social hierarchies created by other forms of education, rather than reinforcing those hierarchies in the name of private or commercial interests. In adult education, people could cultivate critical skills by interacting with others whom they might not normally encounter (a factory labourer and a physician could engage in philosophical discourse, for instance) and thus create a concrete, working model for a future democratic society … Anticipating Paulo Freire’s great work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (published in 1968), Williams argued in the early 1960s that the educational process cuts both ways. The adult instructor has much to learn about herself and her discipline from her students. Ideally, through adult education, instructors and students would ‘meet as equals’ in the classroom, and share fully in the process of democratic learning.

Williams’ (1962) commitment to public control over communication including the terms for adult education is clearly outlined in chapter 5, ‘Proposals in the book Communications’. Here, Williams outlines a framework for adult education based on teaching speech, writing, creative expression, contemporary arts, institutions and criticism along with proposals to make key media institutions including the press, advertising and broadcasting responsive to the public interest and open to public scrutiny. We also see Williams’ nascent attempts to develop a theory of culture that was developed in the Long Revolution and that became the basis for his understanding of cultural materialism. Interestingly enough, E.P. Thompson’s (1961) two-part review of the Long Revolution in the New Left Review highlights the fact that in Williams’ desire to distance himself from traditional Marxian analysis and centre Culture as a whole way of life and as a primary element in social change, there was a danger of reifying an exclusive Tradition, eschewing class conflict as the basis for social change and downplaying the role played by power and ideology in the structuring of society. Thompson’s rather trenchant critique of the position taken by Williams foreshadows some of the debates between the cultural studies and political economy traditions.

E.P. Thompson, voice and the plebian public sphere

If Williams provides us with conceptual categories to understand the contested nature of CSC interventions and the role played by ‘affect’ in the structuring of mediations, E.P. Thompson offers CSC an appreciation of historical methods that are key to capturing the lives and experiences of working people that are critical to an understanding of their ‘structures of feeling’. In the preface to his classic text The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson, 1980), he clarifies the purpose of this venture in the following words:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their craft and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience … (p. 12)

Thompson’s monumental work captures an incipient public sphere in the making in the England just before and after the French Revolution, one in which Tom Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense created a revolution against the crown in the United States and radicalised working classes in the United Kingdom. Arguably, the public sphere that Thompson has re-created is based on an incipient, emerging consciousness based on action and reflection – different from the dry, philoso-theoretical framework for the public sphere that is attributed to Habermas (1991). This public sphere, however, is real precisely because Thompson captures the lives and struggles of ordinary people – Methodists and millenialists, artisans and weavers, cadgers and criminals, Chartists and Owenites among many others who contributed to the making of spaces for democracy that culminated in the social revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. The experiences of these mostly ‘unlettered’ folk in contexts far removed from the customary places and spaces where power was exercised provided the foundations for democracy:

Whenever the pressure of the rulers relaxed, men came from the petty workshops or the weaver’s hamlets and asserted new claims. They were told that they had no rights, but they knew that they were born free. The Yeomanry rode down their meetings and the right of public meeting was gained. The pamphleteers were gaoled, and from the gaols they edited pamphlets. The trade unionists were imprisoned, and they were attended to prison by processions with bands and union banners. (p. 914)

There are direct links between Thompson’s work and the writings of James Scott (1990) and arguably John Downing’s (2000) work on radical media. Fundamentally, Thompson’s writings provide significant insights into understanding the lives of real people who have the most to lose from the globalisation of poverty in the 21st century. In CSC practice, people have become targets, objectified, nameless, statistics, with no history. They have become stakeholders, but their story as a people is seldom factored into their ‘development’. Instead, they are dependent on players in an international game where the power to control resources also includes their power to define the boundaries of ‘voice-making’. Thompson’s work engages with agency, with experience as the basis for the making of agency, in the context of plebian cultures, based on the excavation of a great range of experiences that fed into the making of the English working class. As Steinberg (1991) has observed, ‘As an experientially grounded culture of resistance it was in fact born of this diversity and underlying commonalities’ (p. 177). In another important contribution, Thompson (1970) explains the ‘moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’ – a crowd that rioted during times of dearth, when bread was in short supply while the gentry indulged in a surfeit (p. 126). The riot though was most always geared towards a settlement ‘The cost might be to achieve some medium, between soaring “economic” price in the market, and a traditional “moral” price set by the crowd’. Thompson blames ‘The breakthrough of the new political economy of the free market’ to the ‘breakdown of the old moral economy of provision’ (p. 136). Daniel Little (2008) points to the meanings and uses of the term the ‘moral economy’:

… what kind of concept is the ‘moral economy’? – we can say several things. It is a proto-theory of the theory of justice that certain groups possess (18th-century English farmers and townspeople, 20th-century Vietnamese peasants). It implicitly postulates a theory of political motivation and political agency. It asserts a degree of generality across peasant societies. It is offered as a basis for both interpreting and explaining events – answering the question ‘What is going on here?’ and ‘Why did this event take place?’ In these respects the concept is both an empirical construct and a framework for thinking about agency; so it can be considered both in terms of its specific empirical adequacy and, more broadly, the degree of insight it offers for thinking about collective action.

There is a lot that can be gained from understanding how ordinary people ‘negotiate’ development and make their peace with the demands of the development industry as a way of resisting imposed development. A deep and abiding concern for people based on sound empirical knowledge was the basis for much of his theorisation:

Thompson’s heroes and occasionally heroines were frequently marginal figures, oppressed by the values and norms of the culture in which they lived, but whose struggle to transcend marginality resulted in an enhanced moral independence and bolstered sense of self. Through his historical reconstruction of their struggles, Thompson explored how the emergence of a strong sense of self-hood for both individuals and groups, laid the foundations for robust and independent citizens – the precondition, he believed, for meaningful democratic advance. (Kenny, 1999: 322)

Thompson fundamentally contributed to the making of a historiography based on valuation of a variety of submerged experiences and voices. In that process, he transformed working people into communities, conscientised as a class, who are aware of the contexts of class and privilege and who articulate, however incipiently, the idea of equality as a structuring pillar of democracy. Fundamentally though, Thompson’s method of data collection, his attention to context, his careful delineation of meanings in a context in which multiple meanings exist, can be applied to an understanding of communication and informational interventions in social change, a context in which unfortunately ‘thin’ descriptions abound. In a review article in the Midland History, Thompson (1971: 45) highlights the making of a good historical account:

Only when the evidence is studied within its whole historical context – the rules and expectations of inheritance, the role of influence and interest, the norms and expectations not of ‘society’ but of different social groups – can it bring fruitful results. (See also Calhoun, 1994)

To Thompson, meanings mattered, not just as a matter of semiotics or interpretation but in relationship to resolutely material contexts. Thompson unearthed ‘experiences’ – the experiences of ordinary people, the intangibles of memory and affect as they relate to the tangibles of material life. Arguably, the tendency to ignore experience is a critical shortfall in contemporary CSC interventions. The imposition of behaviour change without the benefit of understanding experience is typical of contemporary CSC practice.

Sumit Sarkar (1993) in an obituary on E.P. Thompson describes his capacity to make lives real:

In Thompson, economic relationships and categories constantly get translated into everyday life, the market ceases to remain an abstraction and becomes poor people haggling over prices at shops and fairs, and sometime struggling to enforce norms of subsistence vital for their survival through collective action. (p. 2055)

Such understandings arguably contribute to textured and empirically rich understandings of communications as a process that is engendered and shaped by social structures. However, such studies are altogether rare, and the vast majority of CSC interventions simply do not invest in investigations that explore the material conditions, the semiotic environments and trajectories of the everyday in the lives of people. There is an absolute need for CSC practitioners to understand context, the ways which power affects spaces and places, structure opportunities and life chances.

Arguably, Thompson’s legacy, especially his belief in collective action and the moral economy of collectives has in recent years been expressed through the many struggles in Europe over the peace dividend, anti-austerity movements, the Occupy and anti-debt student movements in the United Kingdom along with a myriad pro-democracy protests in different parts of that world that evolved in response to the globalisation of what David Harvey has described as accumulation by dispossession. This descriptor refers to accumulation that occurs through extra-economic means and in which the state plays a primary role in creating the conditions for accumulation. Engaging with both Rosa Luxembourg’s view of capital accumulation’s ‘dual character’ (accumulation as a purely economic process and accumulation as a result of relations between capitalism and non-capitalist modes of production; p. 137) and Marx’s views on ‘primitive accumulation’ ‘the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; the conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property; the suppression of rights to the commons …’ (p. 145), Harvey deals with the presence and persistence of these earlier forms of accumulation in the contemporary era. It is a process that is ‘both contingent and haphazard’ (p. 149) meaning that a number of factors outside of any normative framework are germane to accumulation by dispossession. ‘The original sin of simple robbery’, a phrase used by Hannah Arendt to describe the basis for original capitalist accumulation, has, as Harvey has observed, been multiplied many times as capitalism has expanded its footprint and commodified hitherto un-commodified sectors. The student-led anti-debt movement in the United Kingdom that evolved in response to the raising of tuition fees in 2010 can be considered an example of a moral economy as students attempted to create the moral basis for education as a right and entitlement and not a privilege. Between November 2010 and March 2011, the National Union of Students organised close to 40 university occupations along with protests and marches that were an affirmation of voice and student’s right to a debt-free future. These protests continued well into 2016 under the aegis of the National Campaign against fees and cuts (Taylor, 2014). Thompson’s commitment to understanding both context and process is a key aspect of critical approaches to CSC (see Enghel and Wilkins, 2012; Thomas, 2015), and the concept of the moral economy reflects Thompson’s belief in repertories of contention being grounded in both the customary cultures of a given population and as a reflection of a collective, moral stance (Edelman, 2012). Thompson was a theoretician and strategist but also a communicator and activist who was adept at mobilising people in the cause of nuclear disarmament in Europe and creating enabling environments supportive of the cause of a common culture. Here, one can see some parallels with the Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire whose commitment to social action is matched by a similar emphasis on the valuation of struggles in context and who consistently valued the process of participation as the basis of ‘cultural actions for freedom’:

The project of participatory communication is built on the assumption that individuals and communities share the right to speak their word, to name reality, and to act on it. It is a means to both apprehend and critique the logic of dominant power flows and its resultant inequalities and to create a share conviction in another orientation towards development. (Richards et al., 2001: 246)

Just as the food riots in 18th-century Britain were not ‘a direct, spasmodic, irrational response to hunger’ (Thompson, 1971: 136), but were a ‘highly complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives’ (Thompson, p. 78), the UK student riots too involved students who were, of course, concerned with the spectre of student indebtedness but who were also keenly aware of their right to protest and right to entitlements. Their repertories of contention including the symbolic occupation of Milbank and the University of Manchester, their use of social media platforms were historically contingent although arguably as effective as the strategies and tactics adopted during the food riots (Ibrahim, 2014). Similarly, Stanley et al. (2015) have used the term the ‘moral economy’ to describe the new online spaces that have emerged in support of debtors, from Internet forums such as Money Saving Expert and Consumer Action Group, along with a vast array of sub-forums that ‘provide the space for debtors to share tips and advice, offer moral and emotional support an even indirectly –begin to sow the seeds of collective action’ (p. 2). While Thompson’s claims related to the moral economy, for example, that the rioter’s actions were motivated by market innovations and the role played by women in leading the riots have been critiqued (see Bohstedt, 1992; Wells, 1994), his contribution to the moral dimension of everyday politics remains an important contribution to the theorising of social movements and social change.

Williams, Thompson and CSC

What I have attempted to do in this article is to highlight theoretical and methodological insights from two theorists – Williams and Thompson – who are not normally referenced in the literature on CSC. While these two theorists share a common commitment to working-class pedagogy, democracy and cultural action, they have each made distinct contributions to communication, culture and social change: in the case of Williams, to an understanding of technology as a cultural–material form, media literacy and the need for social change to be based on an adequate understanding of the ‘structures of feeling’. Thompson’s radical interpretations of English working-class history highlighted the agency of the oppressed, their ‘moral economy’, the value of experience and the contributions made by the ‘plebian public sphere’ to democracy and the culture of the commons in England. These two theorists exemplified a commitment to a radical theory of knowledge, based their work on a clear understanding of structures and of practice, careful understandings of context and were acutely aware of power – hegemonic and counter-hegemonic. Fundamentally, both scholars explored critical questions related to the role that an enabling communication can play in the creation of empowered citizens. If communication and social change theory is to remain relevant today, it simply must address issues related to power and privilege, the intense materiality of social media platforms, the nature of uneven globalisation and solutions that place people at the centre of social change. In the words of Paulo Freire (2001), a fellow traveller with Williams and Thompson, ‘Without social classes, without struggle, without thought of quarrel, without the need for choice, therefore for rupture, without the yoke of ideologies that clash, an empire of neutrality would arise. It would be the disavowal of history’ (p. 255).