Working-class Party Research Articles

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

V. I. Lenin’s Struggle against Anarchism

ABSTRACT In the historical struggle between Marxism and anarchism, Lenin played an important role. In “Anarchism and Socialism,” written in 1901, Lenin denounced anarchism as a petty bourgeois ideology. Lenin defended this view over the next twenty years, as he fought for Bolshevik hegemony in Russia. This article argues that Lenin’s struggle against anarchism was significant for several reasons. First, it clarified the fundamental differences between anarchism and Marxism. Second, Lenin contributed to the victory of Marxism over anarchism, initially, in revolutionary Russia, and after that, within the Soviet era communist movement. Third, Lenin’s struggle offers original insights. For one thing, Lenin delineated the revolutionary limitations of anarchism. He identified the circumstances in which anarchism can empower or weaken the working class. Lenin also established the organisation, struggle, and leading role of the vanguard working class party as an independent distinction between Marxism and anarchism, a distinction that needs resurrecting today.

The Lebanese Civil War 1975–90

This article argues that the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) was in essence a terror of state directed by mercantile economic and political elites (the comprador class) controlling the Lebanese state and society against the middle and poorer classes (the working class). The aim of this terror or organized violence was to subdue the subordinate classes, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against the confessional system that operated for the benefit of the comprador class. The rebellion was expressed by members of the working-class joining cross-confessional nationalist and leftist parties. Hence, violence was aimed at reestablishing the confessional order as a means to restore a hegemonic system that served the interests of the comprador class at a time when this class was rehabilitating its economic role by resurrecting the financial system, which had received a severe blow in the late 1960s. It effected this rehabilitation through the Taif Agreement signed between Lebanese parliamentarians in 1989, under the auspices of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to favor the new mercantile elite led by Rafiq Hariri.

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean

The American Workingmen's Parties, Universal Suffrage, and Marx's Democratic Communism

The American Workingmen's Parties in the 1828–32 period occupy a distinctive place within the history of socialism: they were the first to embrace a strategy of organizing a working-class political party and seizing the democratic state for their collective self-liberation. With universal suffrage, a working-class majority could take political power electorally and expropriate the rich. Karl Marx read about these workers’ parties through works by Thomas Hamilton and Thomas Cooper in the period of his early political development. Like the American workers, he was stringently in favor of robust political rights and conceived of socialism as a democratic mass movement. Unlike the antipolitical socialists predominant in his day, Marx saw the northern United States as uniquely situated for socialism precisely because it had already solved the basic political problem facing Europe: the workers could vote.

From the Cold War to the Kosovo War

Cet article retrace les différentes approches de la politique étrangère au sein du Parti travailliste (PT) à travers le prisme de sa relation à long terme avec la Yougoslavie, au-delà de la vision caricaturale de la politique du PT et de la Grande-Bretagne comme simples forces de statu quo dans les Balkans. Reposant aussi bien sur des documents d’archives yougoslaves que sur des sources secondaires et sur la presse britannique, l’article montre que l’atlantisme était l’approche dominante dans le PT, du début de la guerre froide jusqu’à la reconfiguration des relations internationales qui a suivi la guerre froide. Les racines de cette orientation se trouvent dans la nature double du PT, à la fois classe dirigeante et parti ouvrier, qui l’a finalement lié aux intérêts géopolitiques de l’État britannique, mais a aussi poussé dans le sens d’une politique étrangère socialiste. Ainsi, pour la Yougoslavie, le PT a pu apparaître comme un interlocuteur privilégié à l’Ouest à une période de refroidissement des relations avec l’URSS, mais aussi comme un allié potentiel dans la lutte pour une politique étrangère indépendante, malgré une dépendance économique à l’Ouest. Néanmoins, les priorités du PT ont changé à la fin de la guerre froide, l’aile atlantiste ayant rapidement adopté une ligne pro-interventionniste en Yougoslavie, dans le sillage des États-Unis. La gauche, qui était auparavant réservée sur la tolérance de la Yougoslavie vis-à-vis de l’URSS, devint la championne des arguments anti-interventionnistes. L’article montre que si les deux côtés avaient eu des liens directs et des expériences en Yougoslavie, les alignements de l’après-guerre froide ont été déterminés par une interprétation locale des affaires internationales.

Crown, Church and Constitution: Popular Conservatism in England, 1815–1867, by Jörg Neuheiser, tr. Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser

What, if any, were the party-political preferences of English plebeians in the nineteenth century? The question cannot be answered by reference to parliamentary elections, for outside fifteen or so potwalloper boroughs (abolished in 1832), working men were unable to vote until 1867, when many were enfranchised as householders. Then, after just a single election, the introduction of the Secret Ballot (1872) rendered it impossible to know how any individuals voted. Historians are broadly agreed that a significant minority (perhaps even a third) of urban working men supported the Tory Party in the late nineteenth century, not enough to enable it to claim the mantle of a working-class party, but enough for it to call itself a national, as distinct from an upper- or middle-class, party. Various reasons have been put forward for a growth of urban working-class toryism—deference on the one hand and its antithesis (aspiration) on the other, conviviality as an antidote to perceived Nonconformist respectability, superior organisation, imperialism, royalism, No-Popery, Unionism—but the assumption has almost always been that it was a post-1867 development. The main point of Jörg Neuheiser’s extremely scholarly study (first published in German in 2010) is to see popular toryism as a continuation of an indigenous conservatism that had its origins in the patriotic loyalism of the 1790s and which continued to flourish, largely under the radar of historians, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Hence Neuheiser’s preference for the classical term ‘plebeian’ to that of the more commonly employed ‘working-class’. Effectively, he is substituting a slightly elongated nineteenth century for ‘the long eighteenth century’ (1660–1832) that became fashionable in some quarters about thirty years ago.

Louis Althusser’s Critique of the Communist Party and the Question of the Postrevolutionary State

This essay explores some aspects of the debate led by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar on the strategy of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the 1970s. They saw the Euro-communist turn of the party as a strategy that accepted the influence of social democrats without addressing the crucial question of mass participation in the party. Their criticism of the PCF was also a criticism of the statist strategy in socialist countries at that time, which they saw as a fusion of the socialist state with the working-class party. Althusser radicalized his stance when he demanded that a revolutionary party should stay outside the state, both before and after a socialist revolution. In this text, the references made by Balibar and Althusser to works of Marx and Engels are compared with the political positions developed in the original texts, and some conclusions for contemporary political strategies are hinted at.

A reversed double movement in Brazil: the (controversial) evolution of the Partido dos Trabalhadores’ education policy since 1980

Karl Polanyi identifi ed a double movement which took place during the bour- geoisie hegemony when, instead of liberalism, it has made use of interventionism to perpetuate its domination over the working class. Several studies have tried to update his analysis by identifying the double movement nowadays. Nevertheless, the aca- demia has not addressed the possibility of a reversed phenomenon where the working class would make use of liberalism to perpetuate itself in power. Th is paper aims at analysing the Brazilian case where the Partido dos Trabalhadores, a proxy for the work- ing class, has implemented pro-market policies in higher education. Whereas the party has not passed through structural reforms such as the British and German working class parties, it has drastically changed its approach to policy-making and campaigning since its origin in 1980. Th e study concludes that a reversed double movement may occur when the working class is in charge of the government.

Gramsci without the Prince

Peter Thomas, inThe Gramscian Moment, explains well how Gramsci strove to re-educate the communist movement in an expansive spirit, around the united front. He makes clear that the united-front approach advocated by Gramsci, based on working-class mobilisation and accompanied by clear communist criticism, was distinct from the policy of bourgeois alliances to be advocated by the Stalinist parties after 1935 under the name ‘popular front’. He demystifies the concept in Gramsci of working-class ‘hegemony’, from which so many speculations are spun, showing that it meant nothing other than working-class political leadership, achieved through sound use of united-front tactics. Yet Thomas makes the formula of ‘united front’ do too much, or bundles into it more than it can rationally contain. Meanwhile, the question of the revolutionary working-class political party is almost entirely absent in Thomas’s discussion.

Skład socjalno-klasowy KPCh w świetle 18. Kongresu

The 18. Congress of CPC (November 2012) was a great event in the political life of China and it had the influence on the world policy. It is reult of dynamic uprising of the economy and modernisation in China after last moree 35 years (second economy), also the position and rolle of PR of China in the international life. The main idea of 18. Congress is the conception of scientific development. The political and ideological force of China is CPC. What is a class-social character of contemporal CPC, its social-class composition, its new leaders, what was the CPC evolution from working class party through peasant party to allnational party, it`s the main questions of papers. The last problem is the prospect of socialism in China.

The Closet in the Party: The Young Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Workers Party, and Homosexuality, 1962 – 1970

During the 1960s, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) and Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were highly active in the movement against the Vietnam War and other social movements in the United States. Between 1962 and 1970, their leaderships sought to exclude homosexuality from their ranks. Using all available documentation, oral history, and correspondence, this article reconstructs for the first time how SWP and YSA members attracted to others of the same sex were either pushed out of the movement or compelled to circumvent the policy by building closets. By drawing on recent scholarship on the “straight state” in the United States, it explains that these socialist groups moved to bar same-sex sexuality because the state had incited both security concerns (fears that the government would pressure arrested homosexuals to become federal informants) and cultural anxiety (fears that “bohemian” styles would alienate American working-class recruits from socialism). It compares YSA and SWP policy to those of other leftist and working-class parties and organizations, including the Communist Party and Maoist and New Left organizations. After coming under strong external criticism by the gay and women's liberation movements, the YSA and SWP abandoned their antigay membership restriction in 1970. They therefore exemplify both the institutional suppression of homosexuality at midcentury and the transformations in civic and political culture generated by the gay liberation movement.

Marx, Marxism and the British Working Class Movement: Some Continuing Issues for the 21st Century

For Marx the British working class was both a practical inspiration and a challenge. Britain's was the world's first majority proletariat and in the 1840s was also the first to create a mass working class party. Yet in the second half of the 19th century British trade unions changed direction, allied themselves with bourgeois political parties and worked within the assumptions of the existing system. Marx's explanation of this transformation is, the article argues, of continuing importance for our understanding of working class consciousness—with its key elements carried forward by both Luxemburg and Lenin in their critique of the revisionism of the Second International. The main intent of the article is to use more recent examples of working class mobilization in Britain to show the continuing relevance of this analysis. It focuses in particular on the issue of the relationship between the working class and a Marxist party. In doing so it draws on the Soviet school of Vygotsky and Leontiev to argue for a dialectical and materialist understanding of the development of working class consciousness in which the role of a Communist Party, in Marx's terms, remains critical.

Abe Isoo and Kawakami Hajime in Interwar Japan — Economic Reform or Revolution?

This article explores the views of two eminent professors of economics, Abe Isoo (1865-1949) and Kawakami Hajime (1879-1946), regarding their socialist economic theories for easing poverty in Japan during the interwar years (1918-1939). Prior to this period, Abe believed the cure to capitalism’s ills lay in a combination of socialist economic reforms (sangyo demokurashii) and individual spiritual refinement. Kawakami, at that time a bourgeois economist, prioritised the spiritual revolution of the rich over any socialist-type economic reform. Thus, although convinced of the need for a different approach to eradicating poverty, they nevertheless agreed in the need for gradual change rather than radical reform (Gavin East Asia An International Quarterly 24:1, 30). The year 1928 marked a significant turning point both for Japanese social movements and in the lives of Abe and Kawakami. That year heralded Japan’s first national election under the new Universal Male Suffrage Law, and saw the police exercise their extended authority as they undertook a nationwide round-up of students and intellectuals suspected of left-wing tendencies (the March 15 Incident). Also in that year, Abe and Kawakami resigned from academic posts to dedicate themselves to alleviating the privations of the working class. Abe, by then well known as the father of Japanese socialism and as a Christian pacifist, became a symbolic figure for Japan’s working class parties, although he later came to support the government during WWII. Kawakami, who was forced to resign from his post during the round-up, “washed his hands of bourgeois economics”, became a prominent spokesman for Marxism in Japan ([28], xi, pp. 76, 169). This article will reveal that both Abe and Kawakami’s social and economic theories changed during the interwar period, so that Abe came to see imperial sovereignty as crucial to socialist economic reform, while Kawakami came to see it as a minion of the capitalists and advocated institutional and political revolution.

Radicalism or Reformism? Socialist Parties before World War I

This article builds on social movement theory to explain ideological variation among socialist, social democratic, and labor parties across 18 countries in the early twentieth century. We propose a causal argument connecting (1) the political emergence of the bourgeoisie and its middle-class allies to (2) the political space for labor unions and working-class parties, which (3) provided a setting for internal pressures and external opportunities that shaped socialist party ideology. Combining quantitative analysis and case studies, we find that the timing of civil liberties and the strength of socialist links with labor unions were decisive for reformism or radicalism. Refining Lipset's prior analysis, we qualify his claim that male suffrage provides a key to socialist orientation.

Les partis politiques et les élections européennes un an après : bilan et perspectives

This study covers the one-year period since the first election of the European Assembly by universal suffrage, the results of which were rather misleading. The authors attempt to elaborate a conceptual framework capable of analyzing empirically the programs and ideological stands of the parties in the Strasbourg Chamber as they have evolved since the election. As a point of reference, the analysis has recourse to three socio-political cleavages which were observable throughout late European history or tend to appear in the modem context of political life; these include the divisions between 1) "bourgeois" and working class parties; 2) europeanist versus nationalist parties, and 3) industralist (or productivist) as opposed to "ecological" party formations. A detailed examination of both the interventions of euro-deputies in Assembly debates, and data recorded in several interviews with some deputies during this first year of their mandate, reflects not only the existing constellations of power and party alliances within the Assembly that reaffirm themselves on specific issues, but also the potential coalitions which may arise due to the rapidly changing political scene. These new coalitions, which tend to form more easily among members of different parties who share common interests with regard to social and economic issues, may eventually serve to overcome the traditional ideological divisions among parties. In terms of the near future, it doesn't matter so much whether the Euro-right or the Euro-left will succeed in imposing its majority in the Assembly, but whether the European Parliament itself, as an institution, will be able to demonstrate that it can have an effective and more representative voice in the formulation of EEC policies.

On the Non-Formation of a Working-Class Political Party in the United States, 1900–45

On the Non-Formation of a Working-Class Political Party in the United States, 1900–45

The “Polishness” of Production: Factory Politics and the Reinvention of Working-Class National and Political Identities in Russian Poland's Textile Industry, 1880-1910

While the development of nineteenth-century Polish nationalism has received considerable scholarly attention, it has almost always focused on how the intelligentsia became the standard-bearers of Polish national consciousness. As a result, we know very little about how other members of Polish society constructed national identities. This is particularly perplexing when it comes to studying Russian Poland's workers, for there was no dearth of Polish nationalist activity among these workers. National demands articulated by Łodź's Polish workers during strikes in 1892, for example, inspired a group of social democrats to abandon internationalism and instead create the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). During the revolution of 1905, nationalism once again assumed an important place in both working-class protest and organization. Workers played a prominent role in the Polish school strikes. They also supported and sustained a uniquely Polish phenomena—a nationalist working-class political party, the National Union of Workers (NZR). Although the NZR and its constituent trade unions could be found within every industry within Russian Poland, the organization gained its greatest foothold within the textile industry. Moreover, it was within the textile industry in 1906 where bitter debates between nationalist and socialist workers erupted in violence after a disgruntled weaver from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) concluded a political argument with an NZR coworker by gunning him down in the street.

"The State in a Changing World": Social-Democratizing Global Capitalism?

There are two central developments that define our era. One of these is the historic failure of the socialist project of the mass working-class parties, both Communist and Social Democratic. The other is, of course, what has commonly come to be known as the "globalization" of capitalism. These two developments are certainly related to one another, but they cannot be reduced to one another. Each also has its own specific dynamics which need to be analysed separately.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Siamese Twins: Citizenship Rights, Cleavage Formation, and Party-Union Relations in Western Europe

Prophecies of doom for both working-class party and labor unions have gained popularity in the Western industrial democracies over the last two decades. The “old” Siamese twins, working-class party and labor unions, have a century-long history of their combined struggle to achieve political and industrial citizenship rights for the working class. Both forms of interest representation are seen as facing new challenges if not a crisis due to internal and external changes of both long-term and recent nature. However, despite these prophecies political parties and union movemehts have been differently affected and have responded in dissimilar ways across Western Europe. The Siamese twins, party and unions, as social institutions, their embeddedness in the social structure, and their linkages, were molded at an earlier time with long-term consequences. Hence, we cannot grasp today's political unionism, party-union relations and organized labor's capacity for change, if we do not understand the social and political conditions under which the organization of labor interests became institutionalized. An understanding of the origins and causes of union diversity helps us to view the variations in union responses to current challenges.