Working-Class Conservatism in the Late 19th Century (original) (raw)

Labour and the Caucus: Working-Class Radicalism and Organised Liberalism in England, 1868–1888

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2015

challenges notions of the teleological rise of an independent parliamentary Labour Party by offering an intensively researched and intricately argued analysis of the years 1868 to 1888 when labour activists reassessed and renegotiated relationships with the Liberal Party in a host of local contexts His conclusions, nuanced but significant, are carefully woven into the contentious historiography surrounding relations between the labour movement and Liberalism. He argues labour activists were at key points able to determine the nature of their relationships with middle-class Liberalism in local contexts, relationships that revealed both flexibility and pragmatism. Further, acknowledging the significance of links between workingclass radicalism and the socialist 'revival' after 1880, and locating them within the broader 'continuity' thesis, he analyzes prevailing tensions within relations between working-class radicalism and Liberalism at the local level and writes that establishing a truly '… national picture of labour's relationship with Liberalism is fraught with difficulty ...' (p. 15). Central to Owen's study is the way in which the label of 'caucus' was rhetorically deployed by representatives of the working class to articulate their opposition to Liberal selection and electoral processes they felt excluded them. The rhetoric of the 'caucus,' he believes, offers insight into problematic relations between labour activists and Liberalism. 'The 'caucus' was not a fixed term, but a malleable one, and was a versatile rhetorical weapon that could be adapted to suit the local political context' (p. 21). Rigorous, analytical, and intimately connected with local sources, Owen's study addresses labour-Liberal relationships between 1868 and 1888 across five roughly chronological chapters encompassing post-1867 electoral efforts, responses to caucus politics in the United States, the influence of Irish nationalist parliamentary representation on calls for an independent labour voice, and the impact of the post-1880 'revival' of socialism upon labour-Liberal relations. Complex and specialized, Owen's Labour and the Caucus offers new perspectives on 19th-century labour and political history backed by assiduous research and a willingness to re-visit prevailing assumptions. In 'The struggle for political representation: labour candidates and the Liberal party, 1868-76,' Owen writes that relations between labour activists and organized Liberalism were quite fluid as both Liberals and Conservatives sought to negotiate the era of mass politics. The Howell-Glyn pact of 1868 offered a mechanism for bringing working-class political activists under a Liberal umbrella, yet it was soon evident to leaders of the new Labour Representation League (LRL) that the managers of local Liberal associations were

Party formation and activity among workers during the Hawke and Keating governments

2009

In the last decade, the Greens consolidated as the electoral alternative to the left of the Australian Labor Party. Earlier, however, during the 'long Labor decade' 1 of the Hawke and Keating governments, from 1983 to 1996, the varied efforts of thousands of people which went towards creating new parties culminated, after the Greens' formation at the start of the 1990s, in the party's relative stagnation for several years. This paper uses data from nine surveys (including National Social Science Surveys (NSS) and Australian Electoral Studies (AES)), 2 federal election results, 3 newspaper reports and interviews to show that in the long Labor decade many working class people rejected the ALP in favour of alternatives. This is how some who were involved understood the situation, too. For example, Chris Lloyd stated in 1990 that: 'objective conditions for a new organisation are excellent. The Labor Party's membership is declining … There is an enormous electoral space out there for a party which is capable of coming to terms with the issues that matter to the people who vote in that space.' 4 The paper will also show that those who spearheaded the new party activity had considerable differences, which they generally failed to resolve. Thus, much of the potential for political alternatives was temporarily exhausted. Political science literature discusses party identification trends in the long Labor decade principally as a reactive 'dealignment' from the major political parties. The purported result is a protest vote, which is not directed by partisanship and focused on the Senate, and some shift from voting based upon occupation to voting based on issues raised by 'postmaterialist values'. 5 This analysis distorts our understanding of the development of popular political consciousness-in particular, in the working class-in the long Labor decade. It presents people as 'naturally' identifying with one of the major parties. It also downplays the importance among these trends in party identification of shifts away from the ALP. That affected electoral results. More significantly, however, ALP identification was initially predominant among the workers who, through their activities in parties, unions, social movements and elections, made the working class an historical agent. So the reduced ALP partisanship was a major starting point for the changes that occurred in the workers' class political consciousness. Two aspects about those developments are presented in this paper. Key trends in working class identification with and political engagement through the ALP, and identification with and voting for the Democrats, and for the NDP and Greens, are discussed. Within this, differences between the labour aristocracy, which is the stratum of workers who experience sustained advantageous conditions in the class struggle and, therefore, tend to engage in it more readily, 6 and the rest of the working class, are considered. Illustrations of the dynamics involved in the attempts to form new parties are then presented. ******* Who belongs to the 'working class' and the 'labour aristocracy' might be considered problematic. Here, from a starting point that the working class includes all those who in their lifetime principally rely for subsistence on employment by another, this is resolved rather pragmatically. Generally, employment and occupation serve as proxies for the social relations involved. Survey respondents were not considered working class if they: identified as upper brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

The Strange Career of "the Working Class" in US Political Culture Since the 1950s

LABOR: STUDIES IN WORKING-CLASS HISTORY, 2018

This article explores the use of the term "working class" in US political culture since the 1950s. It finds that in the NEW YORK TIMES at least, authors began in the late 1960s to use the term especially when they wanted to identify as specifically as possible racist white people and when workers were down on their luck, defeated, struggling. The essay explains why so many observers attributed the election of Donald Trump to the working class.

The Decline of Class Revisited: Class and Party in England, 1964-1979

The American Political Science Review, 1985

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 140.

2016

This thesis examines the transition between working-class radicalism and labour politics in two provincial English constituencies, Bristol and Northampton, between 1867 and 1918. By combining local case studies with a textual analysis of empirical material and a conceptual approach to ideology, it offers fresh insights into popular political change in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Its central argument is that, contrary to the prevailing historiography on labour politics and identity, a distinctive sense of class could shape working-class radical and labour strategies, languages, identities, and ideologies continuously between 1867 and 1918. In particular, it demonstrates that, before the mid-1880s, working-class radical activists in Bristol and Northampton exhibited a non-adversarial sense of class, which shaped their perceptions of the social order, their interpretations of radical ideology, and their relationships with both mainstream liberals and middle-class radicals. It also suggests that while working-class radicals came to use 'labour' to describe themselves and their organisations from the mid-1880s, this was primarily a rhetorical move rather than one reflecting a substantive change in their political identity. Over the next thirty years, labour activists in both Bristol and Northampton remained fiercely committed to the dominant strategy, the non-conflictual conception of class, and the political ideology that had long shaped local working-class radical traditions. In these constituencies, the Victorian tradition of working-class radicalism left an indelible mark on twentieth-century labour politics. This study has important implications for our understanding of political and ideological change in modern Britain. Firstly, confirming the existence of a decidedly working-class radical movement makes it easier to understand the rise of a class-based labour politics in late-Victorian Britain without having to account for either discontinuities in popular politics or the re-emergence of a dormant class-consciousness within the British working class. Secondly, establishing a line of continuity between working-class radicalism and later labour politics helps us to explain some of the tensions that characterised progressive politics in the Edwardian era. Finally, seeing working-class radicalism as a distinctive ideology with its own conceptual framework enriches our understanding of non-liberal progressive thought in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century.

Parliamentary History, 2007

The Conservative party used to be absent at the rich historiographical feasts of nineteenth-and twentieth-century British popular politics. This was ironic given that the tories were in office, either on their own or as part of a coalition, for nearly 58 years of the nineteenth century, and they were also the dominant electoral force of the twentieth century. To historians of popular politics the electoral success of the Conservative Party was unremarkable, largely attributable to the enduring power of the propertied classes. What 'popular', or more specifically, workingclass, Conservatism existed was usually dismissed as a form of political deviancy.' To many of the left-leaning historians of popular politics writing in the 1960s through to the early 1980s the issues of real historical substance clustered around radicalism, Liberalism and the rise of Labour. When historians did pay attention to

Rethinking class: The lineage of the Socialist Register

Socialist Register, 2014

In 1960, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote to a letter to his friends in the British New Left, published in its recently founded house journal New Left Review, in which he urged them to abandon what he dubbed the ‘labour metaphysic’ – a belief in the working class of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency of change – as ‘a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic’. This labour metaphysic, Mills said, ‘is an historically specific idea that has been turned into an a-historical and unspecific hope’. His phrase quickly became a classic. Much quoted, it may be seen as presaging later debates in the US New Left as well as the broader displacement of class as the major analytic of the left. Convinced that working-class agency in the advanced capitalist countries ‘has either collapsed or become most ambiguous’, Mills was especially interested in the potential of the radical intelligentsia as an agent for change, an interest often taken to be...

Working-Class Conservatism in the Late 19th Century (original) (raw)

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