Political Philosophy: Part One

 This is intended to be the first of a series of posts outlining my political philosophy. There isn’t one single, linear narrative, but rather a series of snippets of nineteenth and twentieth century history, which, taken together, will give the reader some idea of how I see the world and how I think it could be improved.

Part One: Manchester, Barcelona, the Wobblies, and Hollywood: the rise and fall of working class cultural institutions

The journey begins in my ancestral home city, Manchester. In 1840, followers of the pioneering socialist Robert Owen were accused by local grandees of practicing a “hideous form of infidelity.” Their crime? Establishing a school, the Hall of Sciences, which gave working class people access to education at a time when there was no secular school system. Their efforts were part of an autodidactic trend in Britain – the education of workers was a cause promoted by the Owenites and the Chartists, and had its roots in the discussion groups formed by republicans around the turn of the century, when the writings of Thomas Paine were the all the rage, and when the spirit of the American and French Revolutions threatened to cross the Atlantic and the Channel. The political, commercial, and clerical elite were threatened. “If they are to have knowledge,” said the then-Secretary of Education, “surely it is the part of a wise and virtuous government to do all in its power to secure them useful knowledge and to guard them against pernicious opinions.” Within three decades, Westminster had made education compulsory, forcing children into church-run schools and out of the network of workers’ schools.

In the nineteenth century, Barcelona was one of the most industrialised cities in Europe, but the loss of overseas markets for its products which followed Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War hurt its economy. Unlike in some other places, where socialism and communism were popular, Barcelona became a hotbed of anarcho-syndicalism and of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), the world’s best-known anarchist union movement (thanks largely to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia). In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the CNT was the dominant political force in Barcelona’s working class districts, or barris (the Catalan equivalent of the Spanish barrios), which played host to a culture of independent working class institutions. The book Class, Culture, and Conflict in Barcelona 1898-1937 by Chris Ealham (downloadable in PDF form here) documents this masterfully, but two examples will suffice here. By 1914, the city had seventy-five ateneus, social clubs for workers which offered leisure, cultural, shopping, and library facilities. In addition, just as in Britain, working class schools were established, often with help from the CNT, and which prided themselves on offering an alternative to the Catholic Church-run education system.

The response to all this self-governance by the lower orders sent the city’s elites into a panic. Ealham’s book describes the rise of gents d’ordre (‘men of order’), elites who demonised the inhabitants of the barris as disorderly, criminal, disease-ridden, racially degenerate, and threatening to Catalonia’s culture (Barcelona’s working class was, and is, disproportionately composed of migrants, most famously Andalucians). Their ideas, and the moral panics they flamed, gave the state the ideological cover it needed to violently repress strikes and other forms of resistance, as well as to terrorise migrant groups (the Catalan regional government was deporting migrants to other regions of Spain well into the Second Republic). Naturally, the culture of CNT locals and ateneus suffered under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, before being completely destroyed by the Fascist victory in the Civil War.

The Industrial Workers of the World supposedly got their nickname, ‘the Wobblies’, from a mispronunciation of their name by a migrant worker who said something like ‘I wobble-you wobble-you’. Unlike the business-friendly craft unions affiliated to the American Federation of Labor, which often segregated African-American workers and campaigned against Asian immigration, the IWW provided a welcoming home for people of all sorts of national origins. It practiced (or, rather, practices – it still exists) industrial unionism, that is, the organisation of all workers in a workplace into a single union local, as opposed to craft unionism, which divided them by skill and occupation. Its ideology was a form of syndicalism, which entailed management of the economy by the workers themselves through their unions, and because of this, Wobblies took steps to prepare for that eventuality. Their union halls typically contained books which provided the technical knowledge needed to run factories, in addition to literature on non-work related topics. Observers noted that IWW halls were full of discussion of culture and ideas, and new members were invited to chair meetings – something which was aimed at developing leadership and confidence.

As with the CNT, the elites used the state as a means of suppressing Wobbly activity, and were cheered on by the American Federation of Labor. The IWW’s opposition to the First World War gave the elites the ammunition they needed, and no tactic seemed to be considered out of bounds. IWW leaders were imprisoned on trumped-up charges, and members were massacred and lynched. The post-war Red Scare led to another wave of repression, and the IWW entered the 1920s as a shadow of its former self. Once again, an independent working class organisation was destroyed by the state.

At the same time that the IWW was leading strikes and opposing the war, Americans were developing a new national passion: film. The development of cinemas in the early twentieth century gave people a new way to spend their money and leisure time, and the patronage of many cinemas had a decidedly working class bent. In Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, Steven Ross points out that the majority of pre-First World War movie-goers were workers. A substantial proportion were also women, children, and migrants, and the rise of cinema culture made it possible for those groups to mould public space in America’s cities to better suit their interests.

The movie-going culture quickly found itself under attack from the self-proclaimed guardians of public morality. Their target was sometimes the sexual content of films, but more often they were disturbed by the political atmosphere of the cinema – films often challenged traditional authority, and cinemas were used by various progressive political groups to spread their message. Ross produces a telling quote from a group of civic leaders in Cincinnati calling themselves the ‘Juvenile Protection Association’: “healthy recreation in individual and community life”, they pontificated, meant that the film industry “must submit to social control.” The result of the attacks on the industry was that cinemas began to be built in ‘better’ neighbourhoods and aimed at a more middle-class audience; the increasing cost of admission that needed to be charged to pay for all the new amenities in cinemas also made it more difficult for working class people to go to the movies regularly. In the name of public order and traditional morals, another venue of working class self-governance was turned into a depoliticised, consumerist form of mass entertainment.

I will conclude this part with an observation: although the middle of the twentieth century saw social democratic parties come to power, who built welfare states and made working class people more materially better off than at any point in history, I can’t shake this feeling that the working class had more power to control its own destiny and to manage its own institutions beforehand.