[...] the whole of Thompson’s historical work, from The Making to Whigs and Hunters , The Poverty of Theory and beyond 18 —“capitalist society was founded upon forms of exploitation which are simultaneously economic, moral and cultural. Take up the essential defining productive relationship … and turn it round, and it reveals itself now in one aspect (wage-labour), now in another (an acquisitive ethos), and now in another (the alienation of such intellectual faculties as are not required by the worker in his productive role).”