{"id":4188,"date":"2021-09-24T10:56:04","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T14:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=4188"},"modified":"2021-10-01T12:38:38","modified_gmt":"2021-10-01T16:38:38","slug":"cutting-history-to-fit-a-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/09\/cutting-history-to-fit-a-model\/","title":{"rendered":"Cutting history to fit a model"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n the ongoing search for a historical precedent for the \u201cDirty Break\u201d model for socialists entering the Democratic Party via its primaries in order to leave it, Eric Blanc has proposed the birth of the British Labour Party<\/a> as a source of \u201clessons from the international example most similar to our own.\u201d This raises a number of questions for socialists in the United States. First, does Blanc\u2019s representation of a more or less continuous journey of working-class representatives from trade unionism through the Liberal Party on to the Labour Party present an accurate portrayal of the processes of political class formation? Or is it, as E. P. Thompson said of some of his New Left comrades in the 1960s, an effort \u201cto cut history to fit a model<\/a>\u201d? Second, and more importantly, just what if anything about the birth of the British Labour Party or the organizations involved in it actually contains applicable precedents or lessons for socialists in the United States today? Third, does any of this fit with what appears to be Blanc\u2019s more recent take on \u201cDirty break propagandism\u201d?<\/p>\n

Class Formation, the Liberal Party, and Socialism in Nineteenth Century Britain<\/h4>\n

Working class formation is a contradictory process. Class formation arises \u201cat the intersection of determination and self-activity.<\/a>\u201d This process involves the interaction of the changing material growth of the class; conflicting developments in organization, consciousness, and politics; setbacks and defeats, sometimes of historic proportions; missteps as well as advances, all in relation to similarly complex developments in the capitalist class and other intermediate social formations. In the case of Britain, this involved among other things the contradictory relationship in which capital on the rise in the nineteenth century came to politically represent both the exploiters of labor and simultaneously sections of the working class through the Liberal Party for a time.<\/p>\n

To grasp the significance of the political <\/em>dependence of the growing and changing working class on the Liberal Party we need to understand both the relative conservatism of the working class and the class and political content of Liberalism in the formative period from 1850 to 1900. There were three elements crucial to understanding the history of class formation in Mid-Victorian Britain: the state of the socialist movement; the nature of the Liberal Party and the Lib-Lab phenomenon; and the recurrent upsurges of class conflict that shaped organizational and political development more profoundly than the electoral maneuvers leading to the foundation of the Labour Party.<\/p>\n

First was the absence of a socialist movement or even of a significant number of socialists in the years 1850\u201380, which one historian has described as \u201cThe Blank on English Socialism.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> This was due mainly to the collapse of Chartism and its mass organizations in the 1840s and the failure and violent suppression of the European revolutions of 1848\u201350, which represented a major defeat and step backward in terms of political self-activity. The primary form of working-class self-activity in the wake of this retreat was self-help, not electoral engagement, or mass direct action. In this period, \u201cthe working class turned from political to economic association\u201d in the form of \u201can uninterrupted increase in the membership and financial strength of Friendly societies, Co-operative Societies and Trade Unions.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> These provided in turn minimal sickness and funeral benefits, the regulation of basic consumer prices, and the negotiation of wage rates, at least for the more skilled sections of the working class.<\/p>\n

Even into most of the 1880s, when the generally sectarian Social Democratic Federation (SDF) founded by H. M. Hyndman, who had been a Radical Tory not a Liberal, and the always gradualist and elitist Fabian Society were formed; there were only a few hundred socialists active in all of Britain. Still more startling was the fact that \u201cbefore 1914 the total vote of all <\/em>labour and socialist candidates, whatever their affiliation, never amounted to more than perhaps 20 percent of union membership.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> In addition to the exclusion of millions prior to 1918, widespread abstention from voting, and continued support for Liberals, the major political orientation of unions in the period through the 1880s and 1890s was through the Trade Union Congress\u2019s Parliamentary Committee, which limited its activities to lobbying Parliament, occasionally discussing <\/em>union political representation without acting, and generally supporting the Lib-Labs. Electoral politics was never the major expression of the political or social attitudes or activities of the British working class up to and even after World War I. As we will see below, there is much more to the picture of class formation than voting or running for office.<\/p>\n

The unions and their leaders in Victorian Britain up to the late 1880s were by all accounts conservative and based almost exclusively on skilled workers. The union leaders were not socialists, were obsessed with respectability, denied the existence of a fundamental class struggle, and engaged in employer-union cooperation punctuated by occasional strikes over wages. This reflected the acceptance of much of the liberal \u201ccommon sense\u201d<\/a> of markets in society through much of this period. This was also, of course, the period in which the International Working Men\u2019s Association (IWMA), or First International, was headquartered in London. Despite the best efforts of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, however, the International, as one Marxist historian put it, \u201cwas not able to wean them from their respectability and insular craft prejudices.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n