Hello and welcome to casualties of history a podcast from Jacqueline magazine.

I'm Gabe Winnet, your co-host with Alex Press and today we are here with a special episode to celebrate finishing part one in the making of the

English working class well done those who are reading along and rather than

reading with a assignment from the book this week we are going to be having a special

discussion on the famous polemical exchange between Thompson and Lue Altisser, the French philosopher.

And we have with us to talk about it Assad Hader, who is the author of the book from

Verso, Mistaken Identity, and co-editor of Viewpoint Magazine. Oh, I'm not. Welcome. Welcome, Assad.

Saat.

Thanks for having me.

Thompson and Al-Cisair had this very infamous, very kind of hostile encounter in the 1970s and I think it would be interesting for

our listeners who probably have some sense of it obviously have been reading

Thompson mainly will not have read much out to Serra. probably have some sense of it. Obviously I've been reading Thompson,

mainly will not have read much out to Sarah if I had to hazard a guess,

to try to kind of set it in its historical context and to explain some of the main issues involved.

Well, you know, this is a complicated story

because in some sense it was not actually an exchange.

Thompson wrote a book called The Poverty of Theory, which came out I believe in 78,

and it was framed as a takedown of Alta Ser. Now if you read it and you're familiar with

the context you're familiar with both the French intellectual and

political context and the English one, it becomes clear that this book is not

really about Alta Serra, it's about other people within English Marxism who had been taking up the work of

Alta Serra in various ways with whom Thompson had already had about a decade of disagreement. You may have discussed this already in the show, but

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