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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
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(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?
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.
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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.
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.
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