2026-02-17.2_P Ortoleva and S Wright - working-class memory and tradition

“Brecher, [Ortoleva] argued, betrayed an ‘Enlightenment view of the historian’s role’ as one whose task was to restore in class memory a past scrubbed clean by capital. Against this, Ortoleva wrote approvingly of the efforts of Alice & Staughton Lynd (1981), who had started instead:”from a quite different presupposition, which is constantly verified in the course of [their] investigation: the hegemony of capitalist culture, and its version fo [US-]American history, does not translate into a tabula rasa of the ‘collective memory’ of the [US-]American working class. A store of working-class tradition remains, but it is the patrimony not of the [US-]American proletariat as a whole, but rather – disarticulated and sectionalised – of individual groups of workers, of rank-and-file union experiences etc.” (Ortoleva 1975:52)” - pg. 172

• Peppino Ortoleva & Steve Wright, Storming Heaven