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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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You're probably already familiar with the Orwell quote but for those who might not be, in 1936 George Orwell declared that "socialism draws toward it with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England."

Which would suggest that socialism has not fundamentally changed it's 'magnetic force' over the last century away from manual labor and toward the sandal-wearers, sex-maniacs, and fruit-juice drinkers it continues attracting today.

The Marxist parties (communist and social democratic together) commanded a solid majority of working class support in most European countries up through the middle of the 20th century.

Double posting but your response seemed to be, frankly, in bad faith. By all means put up a quote from a prominent early 20th century socialist that purports it's a magnetic force for every lugnut, troglodyte, hardheaded, menial laboring, 9 to 5, factory man in England or at least some data on party registration by demography. "But ackshually it was working class" has negative probative value. Better not to have responded at all.

This set of Piketty slides show that the correlation between education and voting behaviour changes sign over the 2nd half of the 20th century. He looks at France, the UK and the US, with and without controlling for income. The big left-wing parties in the UK and France were explicitly socialist or communist for most of this period, so you can't say "the working class may have been left-wing in the past, but they were never socialist".

You can also look at the political affiliation of blue-collar unions back when they were a big deal, which was consistently leftist, and in Continental Europe (but not the Anglosphere) was more often than not explicitly Marxist.

For the French Communist Party, see for instance this:

In Meurthe-et-Moselle, all the members of the governing body of the party(secre´tariat fe´de´ral) from 1944 to 1979 came from blue-collar classes, with theexception of a teacher and an industrial draughtsman promoted at the end ofthe 1950s.4The predominance of workers increased in the higher echelons ofparty hierarchy: the higher the level of the organisation, the higher the numberof militants from blue-collar backgrounds. In 1962, blue-collar militants madeup 53 per cent of the comite´fe´de´ral in Loire-Atlantique, and 60 per cent in thebureau fe´de´ral and the secre´tariat fe´de´ral overall. The dominant position ofworkers from heavy industries and of those with a protected status (railwayworkers, civil service workers, gas and electrical operators and so on) in theparty hierarchy can be observed everywhere, including in rural regions likeAllier. In this area, where rural populations – notably peasants – stronglysupported the PCF, Party leadership was in fact composed mostly by militantsfrom urban industries (who are often from peasants families).

Or this:

Their survey took these results further. The right-wing vote was higher among people who practiced a religion. The left-wing vote increased depending on the degree of integration in the working class as measured by the number of working-class connections or attributes possessed (being a worker oneself, having a working-class father or spouse, etc.). It went from 18% amongst women who were without any connection to 55% for workers whose fathers were also workers. The effects of “objective” social class were seen to combine with those of the “subjective” social class, i.e. the class individuals feel they belong to.12 Identification with the working class increased with the number of working class attributes.

For Finland, check this long study, specifically page 60 (printed numbers). Here's the specific table showing that in 1948 and 1966 70-75% of worker voters voted for Social Democrats (SDP) and Communists (SKDL) combined, with over 30 % of this vote going the SKDL. A table below shows that ca 80% of SKDL voters were workers in those elections, and as late as 1988 SKDL's support base was almost 70% worker.

This doesn't conflict with the Orwell quote - the European big communist parties still attracted freaky-deaky types, but they only formed a small minority in those parties compared to blue-collar lugnut jockeys, while they were considerably more important internally for Anglo Communist parties that lacked a similar mass base of worker support.

Thank you very much for this! Always happy to learn something new. Particularly enjoying poking through that Finnish study

The mining and industrial regions in the northern UK have been called the Red Wall because they consistently voted Labour for so long, until within the past decade.

There's also the similar 'Red Belt' in France, centered around the former heavy industry heart of the country, which voted for a long time not only socialist, but communist.

Wedding, the one-time working class slum of Berlin was known as 'Red Wedding' in the interwar years, because it was a communist stronghold.

In Spain, in 1934, several thousand socialist-communist miners stormed the city of Oviedo, torched a bunch of churches, shot a dozen priests, declared a 'soviet republic,' and fought the army for two weeks to protest the entry of a right-wing party into the government.

Thanks for this, appreciate it

(1) Calling the British Labour party a "Marxist" party is stretching the word absurdly far. Yes, they were social democratic. Yes, social democracy was partly inspired by Marxist ideas. That doesn't make the British Labour party into a Marxist party. The Communist Party of Great Britain never won more than a few seats in Britain.

(2) "Extremely popular" is a vague phrase, but unless you mean just "popular by the standards of communist parties," I wouldn't say that French communism was "extremely popular" among the working classes of France. A single region where they did well in municipal elections doesn't prove that. Nor a single communist electoral stronghold in Berlin. Similarly for Czechoslovak communism, which you didn't mention but which did have some electoral success in competitive elections.

Nobody is disputing that there were working-class communists and that communists had some electoral successes in Europe. That's a fine motte to retreat to. However, the original claim was "This doesn't really account for Marxism being extremely popular with manual laborers in Europe for decades." (emphasis added) Can you defend that claim?

Calling the British Labour Party a "Marxist" party is stretching the word absurdly far.

The British Labour Party was never a Marxist party, but it self-identified as socialist, was committed to seeking "common ownership of the means of production" by Clause 4 of the Party Constitution, and did in fact nationalise the country's largest companies after gaining power in 1945. At the point Orwell complained about the lifestyle weirdness of "socialists", he was a member of the Independent Labour Party, one of those weird far-left groupuscles the British like so much, because he did not consider the Labour Party properly socialist. So he was writing about the lifestyle habits of the weird far-left, which has always been much more middle-class than the electorally serious left.

The quote is taken from The Road to Wigan Pier, which was a polemical book trying to get the Marxist left in Britain to get the stick out of their backside and compete for working class votes. Less than a year after writing the book, Orwell would travel to Spain to fight for the Nationalists. Foreign fighters were assigned to International Brigades based on the Spanish political party their home-country party was affiliated with. The Spanish left-wing group whose militia Orwell joined based on his ILP membership was POUM, which was a heavily working-class movement - it was led by an autodictat journalist from a working-class family and a union organiser.

Calling the British Labour party a "Marxist" party is stretching the word absurdly far.

Labour was an explicitly socialist party for decades. The plank calling for the socialization of industry/property was only removed, I think in the 80s or 90s. The communists didn't think they were hardcore enough and wanted violent revolution now, but that doesn't change the party's ideals in its early years. This was even more true of the Second International parties on the continent like the SPD, the SFIO, and especially the PSOE. Do you deny those parties were very popular with the working classes of their respective countries?

I said "marxism" not "communism" and explicitly identified both the social democratic and comintern-affiliated communist parties, because it's true that the latter alone never commanded a majority of working class support in European countries. Though they still did pretty good. The PCF got 15% of the vote in national elections France in 1936 (calling the red belt 'a single region' underrates it. It was the French equivalent of communists dominating the US industrial regions in the great lakes in the 50s). The KPD got 17% of the vote in Germany in 1932, especially from unemployed workers.

Do you deny those parties were very popular with the working classes of their respective countries?

No, my criticism was specifically regarding Marxist parties, not social democratic parties. Your original claim was about Marxism, which is related to but distinct from social democracy.

All of the major social democratic parties in Europe were explicitly Marxist for a long time. A different interpretation of Marxist from the Bolsheviks, but still Marxist.

Some were. The German Social Democrats were in theory, but not UK Labour or the Swedish Social Democrats.

That's a historical path dependency thing and you can tell because of the way the working class majority has moved away from Marxism.

The working class was attracted to left wing parties of all sorts in the 19th century. Over the course of that century and into the 20th, Marxism slowly won an internal power struggle amongst the left wing parties and factions of many countries. Even those which maintained a non-Marxist policy bent often adopted Marxist language and trappings (if only formally -- see: the Social Democratic parties in Scandinavia, who were never interested in actually going through with a Marxist revolution but often put Marxist goals in their platforms early on).

As the Cold War heated up, this started to drop away. Social Democrats started to explicitly and consciously disassociate from Marxism, many transformed over time into more or less social liberal, welfare capitalist parties as the big state post-war consensus fell apart, and now much of their voting base has switched sides to right-wing or conservative populist parties.

Okay, with what level of veracity should I approach that assertion?

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