English workers abandoned supranationalist class identity for protonationalism by the 1830s

Evidence

English society was the first to have developed an industrial proletariat among its working classes. Yet well before the peaks of Luddite and Chartist protests and during the heyday of the earlier Owenite socialism, the supranationalist class identity that Thompson has noted among English workers and in the “heroic culture” they produced between the French Revolution and the defeat of Chartism (while demonstrating its erratic course) had begun its retreat before protonationalism. This was one aspect of the “lost vision” of the English working classes in the 1830s, and one that Thompson was forced to reluctantly recognize: It is easy enough to say that this culture was backward-looking or conservative. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 237

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds this reader’s rise-and-fall arc: the retreat of the English proletariat’s supranationalist vision shows the racial/national detour that the Black radical tradition’s origin will diverge from or parallel.