Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Five

Part Five: A Modern Syndicalism

In this series of posts, I have been sketching a common thread of left-wing thought which rejects both the state-socialist/communist tradition (for its authoritarianism and focus on the interests of the consumer over those of the producer) and the producer-only focus of anarcho-syndicalism, Wobblyism, and pre-war French syndicalism. In this post, I will bring together these different currents of thought (guild socialism, De Leonism, the post-war CGT, the Workers’ Opposition) and propose a synthesis based on the best ideas of each:

*The economy would be a mixed one, resembling Tito’s Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union under the New Economic Policy. The means of production would mostly be publicly owned, but workplaces and industries would be self-governing by the workers employed therein, subject to a degree of worker-consumer co-determination. Small businesses, sole traders, and private agriculture would continue to exist, and much of the retail and distribution sector would be taken over by consumers’ co-operatives.

*In the sectors of the economy in which the means of production are publicly owned, the relevant union would be charged with co-ordinating the activities of workplaces, by planning; procuring supplies and raw materials; organising distribution, branding, and marketing; and conducting research and development. In order to safeguard the interests of consumers, each industry will also have a state-appointed regulatory body, whose powers would be modelled on those historically exercised by the United States’ Interstate Commerce Commission with regards to preventing undue price rises and restrictions on output.

*Workers would keep all profits made, and workers in each workplace or industry would decide democratically how these would be split among them or re-invested. (If the new economic system comes about peacefully, a portion of the profits might be designated to compensating the former capitalist owners of the means of production.)

*The United States’ National Labor Relations Act would be adopted, in which a majority vote in a ‘bargaining unit’ is required to unionise the entire membership of the bargaining unit. By adopting bargaining units covering an entire industry, class-conscious industrial unions can secure compulsory unionism in their sector of the economy by majority vote. (The National Labor Relations Board did something like this in 1938, when it settled a jurisdictional dispute between the AFL and the CIO by placing all West Coast longshoremen, from San Diego to Anchorage, in a single bargaining unit.)

*The members of these unions would directly elect local, regional, and national officials of their union, as well as their union’s delegates to the All-Industrial Congress. The All-Industrial Congress would settle disputes between the unions, plan the national economy, arrange financing for new investment, and co-ordinate foreign trade. The unions, as well as militant minorities within them, would retain all rights to engage in industrial action.

*A number of consumers’ co-operatives, modelled on the British co-operative movement, would be set up with state aid. These would purchase products from the unions and agricultural marketing boards, and operate retail stores, returning their profits to their members through a ‘dividend’ weighted according to purchases made. Co-operative officers would be elected on a one-member-one-vote basis, and co-operatives would federate at local, regional, and national levels.

*To represent the interest of consumers of public utilities and public services, the nation would be covered in a patchwork of American-style special districts, dealing with subjects such as roads, railways, water, sewerage, electricity, gas, telecommunications, schools, health, and housing. These bodies would be elected for two-year terms of office by all residents of the relevant jurisdiction, and would act as consumers’ co-operatives, procuring goods or services from the relevant union(s).

*To deal with the remaining functions of the state (taxation, high politics, law and order, constitutional affairs), there would be established at local, regional, and national levels a series of soviets. On local soviets in each city, town, and shire, three-fifths of delegates would be elected by local union branches, while the remaining two-fifths would be split between delegates elected by local consumers’ co-operatives and appointees of special districts whose jurisdiction overlaps that of the soviet. Local soviets would send recallable delegates to regional Congresses of Soviets, which would in turn send recallable delegates to the national Congress of Soviets. All soviets would elect their executive committees, as well as regulatory bodies acting in the interest of consumers.

*Domestic purchasing power would be increased via the creation of extra scrip money, which loses value over time so as not to cause inflation (as proposed in the early twentieth century by the German-Argentine economist Silvio Gesell). This scrip would be put into the money supply so as to make up the shortfall between aggregate demand and aggregate output.

*Agricultural produce, both for domestic consumption and for export, would be purchased in bulk by grower-controlled marketing boards modelled on the Australian Wheat Board.

*International trade would be structured so as to allow developing countries the chance to industrialise. (In any case, increased domestic purchasing power resulting from the creation of the scrip will remove all countries’ need to dump their excess output in foreign markets.) Developing countries would practice import-substitution industrialisation, and would form OPEC-style cartels for various categories of agricultural produce and minerals.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Four

Part Four: Detroit and Donetsk

An early Soviet propaganda poster exhorted its readers:

Let’s take the torrent of the Russian revolution

Add the effectiveness of American technology

And construct socialism!

On a similar note, Bolshevik leader and former New York resident Nikolai Bukharin called for the party to “add Americanism to Marxism”. For them, and for many other leftists of their generation, the United States symbolised all that was modern and progressive.

In the first post in this series, I mentioned that the political base of Daniel De Leon and his Socialist Labor Party was in Detroit. In 1914, it was attempting to organise workers at Henry Ford’s automotive plant at River Rouge. To stave off the threat of unionisation and reduce staff turnover, Ford more than doubled the daily pay of his employees to the previously unthinkable five dollars, reducing the working day from nine hours to eight in the process. Thus, syndicalism – or the threat thereof – provoked one of the most important changes in the nature in capitalism.

Fordism was the practical implementation of the ‘scientific management’ theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer from Philadelphia who had become a household name in the United States in the early 1910s thanks to his work on rationalising the operations of firms. Aside from raising wages and lowering the prices of consumer goods, Fordism aimed at simplifying production methods so as to reduce the power of skilled workers, the base of the early American craft unions. Indeed, Fordism was opposed by the class-collaborationist leader of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gospers, and welcomed by the IWW, which fancied its chances of recruiting all the new unskilled workers created in the Detroit factories.

When these techniques spread across the Atlantic, they initially met with fierce resistance. As mentioned earlier, the quasi-syndicalist Workers’ Opposition arose in Russia and the Ukraine to resist the Taylorist policies of the Soviet leadership in the transport and metallurgy industries. In France, the then-syndicalist CGT said that the worker under the Taylorist regime was “reduced to a machine without a soul, producing intensely and excessively”. But after the War, much of the European Left came round to the position of a German writer who stated that Fordism was “the most powerful and welcome ally of socialism”. The new breed of CGT leaders such as Jouhaux and Merrheim became supporters of both Fordism and the consumerist economy which was the logical product of its proto-Keynesian stimulation of demand (which meshed nicely with their revision of pre-war producer-only syndicalism), while commentators inside and outside of the early Soviet Union hailed it as the world’s first Taylorist state.

In some ways, the CGT’s reconciliation with mass production was not an accident. There was a definite technocratic and productivist strand in left-wing French thought going back to Saint-Simon, the déclassé aristocrat and early nineteenth-century utopian socialist who proposed a new order based on industrial progress, full employment, class collaboration, and technocracy. It was Saint-Simon who first introduced the concept of the ‘government of men’ being replaced by the ‘administration of things’. CGT leaders and thinkers in the 1910s adapted some saint-simonien ideas, such as the central role of technology in economic history, and used them to reassess their own ideas. For example, the Marxist contention that capitalism was doomed by a falling rate of profits was held to be negated by mass production and mass consumption.

While the Left saw the emancipatory potential in Fordism, it was Europe’s reactionaries who defended the small workshop and craftsman of the nineteenth century against this new invasion. Rightists such as French electoral geographer and future Vichy collaborator André Siegfried bemoaned the homogenising and levelling social effects of consumerism; a fashionable Frenchwoman, Siegfried moaned, could no longer be the only lady in Paris wearing a particular type of hat if hats were being mass produced for an undifferentiated mass market. Unlike the twenty-first century, when so-called ‘leftists’ take up middle-class NIMBY concerns about development and growth and attack popular consumption habits, the Dieselpunk era was one in which the Left was the side of politics which hailed technological advance and consumerism.

With the economic climate of the New Economic Policy being open to the granting of concessions to foreign capitalists, Henry Ford took the opportunity to set up a plant at Nizhny Novgorod (later known until the fall of communism as Gorky) in 1929. The Soviet regime’s emulation of American industry went even further – when it established the planned iron and steel city of Magnitogorsk, the city was modelled on Gary, Indiana. Like many good things about early Soviet society, this flirtation with Americanism was cut short by Stalin’s accession to power.

The Soviet Union in the following years did, however, have its own version of Fordism-Taylorism. Named after Alexei Stakhanov, a coal miner from the Donetsk region who supposedly hauled a ridiculous amount of coal in a short period of time, the Stakhanovite movement was the regime’s way of exhorting workers to higher productivity. Writers on the subject have suggested that Stakhanovism was less about increasing the authority of management, and was instead a way for the regime to harness the workers against their managers; nevertheless, Stakhanovism was only an incomplete adaptation of Fordism, lacking the high wages and consumerism of its American counterpart.

The impact of Ford’s new way of doing business was profound enough that the era from (approximately) the 1920s to the 1960s is referred to as the ‘Fordist’ period, and that Aldous Huxley portrayed his dystopian future society in Brave New World (1931) as worshipping Ford as a deity. While Ford was hostile to unions, many syndicalists saw his methods as beneficial to the material prosperity of the working class, while also providing a blueprint for a rationally governed post-capitalist economy.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Three

Part Three: Parallels with Syndicalism/Guild Socialism in Yugoslavia and Broken Hill

Although history furnishes no examples of syndicalist states as such, a (very partial) imitation was found in Yugoslavia under communist rule. After Marshal Tito’s early rift with Moscow, the Yugoslav regime wanted to differentiate itself ideologically from the Soviet Union, and fell back on an old idea common to syndicalism and libertarian forms of socialism – workers’ self-management. Reportedly, when presented with the idea by an advisor, Tito paced around the room and exclaimed: “[f]actories belonging to the workers – something that has never yet been achieved!”

The system in operation in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia resembled syndicalism and guild socialism in its broad outlines. Workers in state-owned firms elected works councils, managers, and delegates to federations of enterprises in each industry, and shared in the election of firm directors with the organs of state power. They procured parts and raw materials, and marketed the products of the labour autonomously, in a mixed economy more like the New Economic Policy than anything in the post-1928 Soviet Union (indeed, Yugoslavia’s public sector accounted for a lower share of the country’s workforce than in some ostensibly capitalist countries). In common with other communist regimes, however, it lacked a strong trade union movement independent of the state which could provide a solid basis for working-class power; otherwise, its system of worker-state co-determination was reminiscent of the ideas of the Lyon congress, the Plumb Plan, and the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain plan mentioned in earlier posts. At the height of the experiment, however, the system was working: in the 1950’s, Yugoslavia was the world’s fastest-growing economy.

Tito: the only communist leader to give ‘the factories to the workers’

Tito’s Yugoslavia also embraced, for a time, another aspect of syndicalism and guild socialism. Between 1956 and 1963, it operated a bicameral legislature with a lower house elected by territorial constituencies and a ‘Council of Producers’, in which voters selected representatives based on their economic function (with a touch of malapportionment favouring industry over agriculture). This feature, however, was later dropped – given Yugoslavia’s ethnic and national antagonisms, its leaders preferred to use the upper house of its legislature for the ‘senatorial’ function of equally representing its constituent republics. While it lasted, however, the Council of Producers could be seen as carrying on the tradition of the CGT, De Leon, Kollontai, and Cole, who argued for separate bodies to represent producing and consuming interests.

While there was no officially stated link between Titoism and syndicalism or guild socialism, orthodox communists were quick to draw the comparison, branding Tito with the tag of ‘syndicalist deviationist’ that they had bestowed on Kollontai in 1921. In addition, one of Tito’s chief economic advisors had studied in London and was familiar with the works of the guild socialists.

As described in two earlier posts, Broken Hill provided a good model of working-class rule in action during the middle chunk of the twentieth century, when it was Australia’s ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’. The Barrier Industrial Council functioned in the way the fin-de-siècle French syndicalists imagined their bourses du travail would operate. It enforced a virtual city-wide closed shop, negotiated with employers on behalf of its constituent unions, and regulated social conditions, prices, and labour markets in the Silver City.

Like the guild socialists’ proposed guilds, Broken Hill’s mining unions oversaw the supply of labour in their industry, limiting the mining companies’ ability to choose their employees to men born in the town or qualifying by a period of residency. Echoing Cole’s concept of ‘encroaching control’, they infringed upon the prerogatives of the capitalists, such as in the 1930s and 1940s when militant ‘job committees’ asserted their freedom to determine how their jobs were to be carried out. The Barrier Industrial Council functioned as a parallel legislature, taking away the initiative in much local economic decision-making from the city council and state and federal governments.

However, the unions at Broken Hill were never – aside from a short period of syndicalist agitation in the immediate aftermath of the First World War – ideologically committed to anti-capitalism. Their contribution to syndicalist/guild socialist theory resides in the practical example that they set: a city in which the working class holds the whip hand would look a lot like mid-twentieth-century Broken Hill.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Two

Part Two: Guild Socialism in Britain

Syndicalism spread to the British Isles, where it was strong among shipbuilders in the west of Scotland and coal miners in South Wales. James Connolly, one of the executed leaders of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, was a syndicalist of the De Leonist variety. It was in Britain, however, that a group of young intellectuals ironed out some of the kinks in early Franco-American syndicalism and transformed it into guild socialism.

The name ‘guild socialism’ gives it a somewhat misleadingly medieval image. Although this was the intent of the first (in 1906) exponent of the guild idea, A. J. Penty, it was expanded upon in the next decade by S. G. Hobson and G. D. H. Cole, who adapted it to the needs of the modern, industrial economy. In the Middle Ages, guilds united the producers in a particular town or city who practiced the same craft. In addition to the trade union-like function of forming a ‘labour cartel’ to secure higher remuneration, they self-regulated their respective industries. They operated at a time when the state lacked the omnipotence it assumed in later centuries, and was instead one of a number of sovereign institutions in society, alongside the church, the guilds, and other voluntary groupings. Both of these aspects of medieval life (control of the economy by producers and the taming of state power) appealed to the guild socialists.

For the guild socialists, however, the ‘guilds’ of which they spoke were not citywide federations of individual artisans, but nationally-organised industrial unions. Like the unions in a syndicalist economy, the guilds would regulate the internal affairs of their industry, ensuring a supply of labour and raw materials and guaranteeing production of goods and services. The break with pre-war syndicalism came in guild socialism’s view of the state. At this time, Fabian socialists frankly admitted that their goal was to run the economy in the interest of consumers rather than producers, hence their use of the state as their preferred instrument. Guild socialists sought a middle path between anarcho-syndicalism and state socialism; for them, the state could not ‘wither away’ because some organisation was necessary to represent the interests of the consuming public, but neither could the state be entrusted with supreme power, as this would be used to oppress producers.

Different guild socialists had different solutions at various times, but the best exposition of the movement’s principles was Cole’s Guild Socialism Re-stated (1920). A post-capitalist society would have guilds to represent producers, who would self-regulate their industry or service. The ‘consumptive’ functions of the state would be hived off to councils elected on a geographical basis at local, regional, and national levels. There would be Co-operative Councils for regular goods and services, Collective Utilities Councils for public utilities, and Cultural Councils and Health Councils for education, health, and other public services. (Although Cole doesn’t make the connection, these bodies would be similar to the patchwork of special districts in American local government, and which, in the form of school boards and boards for administering the Poor Laws, still existed in Cole’s Britain.) Local, regional, and national ‘communes’, uniting producers’ and consumers’ bodies in equal measure, would carry out the remaining functions of the state: taxation, the police power, high politics, and demarcation of functions in the network of guilds and councils.

A further idea of the guild socialists was the doctrine of ‘encroaching control’. Rejecting both the parliamentary tactics of the official labour movement and blanquiste revolutionary methods of the communists (not to mention Sorel’s general strike), they developed a third way between the two. Instead of merely agitating for wage increases and security of tenure, unionists would seek to wrest managerial powers, such as the appointment of foremen and the supplying of labour, away from the capitalists. In this way, the capitalists would be transformed from dictators of the economy to constitutional monarchs, until they became superfluous.

During and after the war, guild socialism began to permeate the thinking of the labour movement. In 1919, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain proposed the public ownership of the mines, with national, regional, and local committees comprising an equal ratio of delegates elected by the workers and appointees of the state. Its influence could be seen in the French CGT’s 1919 proposals for tripartite worker-consumer-state co-determination of nationalised firms (mentioned in the previous post, and which Cole regarded as bearing a close resemblance to guild socialism), and in the Plumb Plan, a proposal for the nationalisation of American railways which assigned workers, management, and the state one-third of the members of national and regional boards to govern the industry.

Unfortunately, Cole wasn’t able to resist the lure of consumer-based socialism, and was more or less a card-carrying Fabian by the end of the 1920s (though at least he didn’t follow the trajectory of certain Fabians towards useful idiocy for Uncle Joe). The ideas that he developed as a young radical intellectual, however, serve as a guide to how the interests of producers and consumers can be reconciled in a post-capitalist society. Although the Cole of Guild Socialism Re-stated rejected syndicalism as the producer-centred mirror image of consumer-centred state socialism, it is clear that syndicalists such as Jouhaux and Merrheim, De Leon, and Kollontai were moving in his direction.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part One

It’s been a while since I set out my political philosophy on this blog, and my views have changed a little since then. This, therefore, is something of a manifesto in the form of a history lesson.

Part One: Syndicalism in France, the United States, and Russia

Syndicalism, derived from the French syndicat, meaning ‘trade union’, was described by the 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica as “the most purely proletarian in origin” of all then-existing political ideologies. It was first espoused in France around the turn of the century, where it was associated with the publication Le Mouvement socialiste, edited by Hubert Lagardelle. Lagardelle promoted segregation of social classes (as a reaction to the middle-class domination of socialism), opposed parliamentarism and liberal democracy, and defended the right of a militant minority (similar yet different from the Leninist conception of the vanguard party) to act on behalf of the working class. The next major French syndicalist thinker to emerge was Georges Sorel, who published Reflections on Violence in 1908. This work gave the syndicalist movement the concept of the general strike, which would be used to bring down capitalism and the bourgeois state.

The key to understanding the rift between syndicalism and socialism is the question of whose interests a post-capitalist economic order ought to serve. Socialism, particularly in its Fabian and Leninist/Stalinist varieties, sees the administrative state as the agent which should control the economy in the interests of all. Syndicalists understood that the state’s function is to represent people in their capacity as consumers (of public utilities and public services), and thus sought to give to the workers in each workplace, firm, and industry a large degree of self-government. This necessarily entailed the disappearance of the state, and the management of the economy by producers organised in a nationwide federation of trade unions. (As we shall see, guild socialists and post-war syndicalists modified their views to provide some space for the expression of both consumers’ and producers’, interests.) Put simply, syndicalism puts its faith in the workers themselves, and in their self-created organisations (trade unions and co-operatives), rather than in the state or in majoritarian public opinion.

Syndicalism was at its most powerful and widespread in the first fifth of the twentieth century. It was the dominant ideology in the trade union movements of France, Italy, Spain, and Argentina. In France, it also inspired the formation of bourses du travail (‘exchanges of labour’; roughly equivalent to Australian Trades Halls), which syndicalists conceived of as the local governing bodies of their future society, which would regulate local economic conditions and the supply of labour.

Paris’s bourse du travail

France’s syndicalist-led union body, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was divided over the question of the First World War, and in the resulting convulsions the dominant anti-political strand of thought lost power to a new species of syndicalist. At its first post-war congress at Lyon in 1919, the CGT called for the socialisation of transportation, mining, electricity generation, and banking, but balked at putting the power to run these industries in the hands of the state. It also shied away from advocating control by the workers only; instead, it called for workers, organised consumers (co-operatives and industrial consumers), and the state to each elect one-third of the board of the socialised concerns, with the state’s quota to be further split between national, regional, and municipal government. Further proposed reforms included profit-sharing in the socialised industries, and a Conseil Economique du Travail (‘Economic Council of Labour’), which united the CGT with white-collar unions and co-operatives, and which was conceived as a replacement for the parliament. Anarcho-syndicalists have portrayed the Lyon congress as the victory of a reformist wing over the previously dominant radical wing of the CGT; a better explanation is that leaders such as Léon Jouhaux and Alphonse Merrheim took note of ideological developments in England, the United States, and Russia to craft a syndicalism fit for a modern, industrial, productivist economy.

Across the Atlantic, the Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the ‘Wobblies’) was formed in Chicago in 1905, an attempt to create the industrial unionists’ ‘One Big Union’. The IWW rapidly gained a sizeable following, particularly among unskilled and/or immigrant workers, and its influence spread to Britain and Australia. After the war, it was one of the main targets of the First Red Scare. State legislatures passed ‘criminal syndicalism’ laws, criminalising the advocacy of syndicalist doctrines, and IWW members were lynched and assassinated by Pinkerton agents.

Daniel De Leon became a key figure in the Socialist Labor Party in 1890 and supported the foundation of the IWW in 1905. He split from the Wobblies in 1908, however, and his Detroit-based faction later rebadged itself as the Workers’ International Industrial Union. The cause of the split was the question of political action; the majority ‘Chicago faction’ followed the same anti-political line as the pre-war CGT, while De Leon saw the IWW and SLP as two pillars of a dual strategy by the working class to overthrow capitalism. If this goal were accomplished, however, he saw no further place for the SLP, arguing that it should have Congress “adjourn sine die” and leave the management of industry to the unions, which would be united in an All-Industrial Congress, meeting not in D.C. but in a Midwestern industrial centre such as Chicago, and governing the nation by finding “the statistics of the wealth needed, the wealth producible, and the work required”. De Leon had added the concept of political action to the economistic doctrines of the IWW and CGT, but shared their blanket condemnation of the state (although modern De Leonist groups often do provide for separate economic and political legislatures). It would be left to others to provide for the representation of consumers alongside producers.

Daniel De Leon: father of political syndicalism

Although most syndicalists around the world welcomed the October Revolution, it wasn’t long before they had buyers’ remorse when the Fabian instincts of the Bolshevik regime became clear to all. Syndicalist ideas motivated many of the leftist opponents of the Bolsheviks, and touched a raw nerve with the authoritarian state-socialists in the Kremlin, who slandered one such group, the Workers’ Opposition, as a “syndicalist and anarchist deviation” at the 1921 party congress. Trotsky, the slayer of the Kronstadt rebels, hysterically squealed that “[t]hey have placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the Party”.

The public face of the Workers’ Opposition was Alexandra Kollontai, radical feminist, first People’s Commissar for Social Welfare, and first Soviet ambassador to Norway. The faction received its strongest support from workers in those industries – primarily metallurgy and transport – which had been most thoroughly revolutionised by Taylorist or Fordist production techniques. Although it didn’t cite any foreign influences, the ideology of the Workers’ Opposition closely resembles De Leonism. Kollontai called for management of the economy by the workers themselves, via trade unions uniting in a central body akin to De Leon’s All-Industrial Congress. She didn’t call for the abolition of the state, however, and proposed the leave the Bolshevik Party in charge in the ‘political’ sphere, giving it a role somewhat similar to De Leon’s SLP.

Alexandra Kollontai: ‘syndicalist deviant’

Thus, when we combine the ideas of the Lyon congress, De Leonism, and the pamphlets of the Workers’ Opposition, we have a type of syndicalism which conceives of two supreme bodies jointly controlling a society: on the one side, an economic governing body channelling the interests of producers, and on the other, a political governing body channelling the interests of citizen-consumers, as well as a two-pronged strategy – militant industrial unions and a party – for the working class to attain power.

Political Philosophy: Part Five

 The fifth in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. In this post, I will cover the eclipse of self-managed working class organisation by statism.

Part Five: Progressives, Fabians, and Bolsheviks: the state against the people

It is common among American liberals to claim the Progressive movement as part of their heritage. In this telling of history, the likes of Theodore Roosevelt are champions of the working class who fought against concentrations of privilege. This narrative becomes especially problematic when the Populist Party of the 1890s is also included as an ancestor of modern liberalism – the Democrats’ Populist-backed 1896 presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, was labelled a “Jacobin” and a “Bolshevik” by Roosevelt. In The Age of Reform, Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote one of the best accounts of the differences between Populism and Progressivism, and differentiated between the bottom-up radicalism of the former and the top-down style of the latter – though he went overboard with his portrayal of the Populists as cranks and conspiracy theorists. The Progressives were generally drawn from the elites, justified their ideas using the language of straight-laced bourgeois moralism, and were hostile to popular self-organisation.

Prior to the Progressive Era, most major American cities were run by some form of Democratic Party machine. These machines were not an ideal way to govern a metropolis – they were corrupt, monarchical, and clientelistic, and had mixed results in governing their fiefdoms. One of their advantages, however, was that they allowed people of lesser means (and especially of non-Anglo ethnicity) to band together and use their numbers to overcome the advantages of wealth and notability possessed by elite politicos. (The most famous such machine, Tammany Hall in New York, was founded at the same time as the Democratic-Republican clubs mentioned in an earlier post.) By instituting such changes as at-large voting systems and independent agencies, Progressive reformers weakened the machines. Irish, Italian, and Jewish politicos lost power to Ivy League-educated Anglos, and African-Americans and Hispanics were pre-emptively prevented from following the same path to political power taken by other ethnic groups.

(For a first-hand account of the valuable social capital which political machines provided to working class and migrant constituents, the memoirs of Tammany veteran George Washington Plunkitt are an entertaining read.)

Like so many negative trends in American politics, the Progressive takeover of working class self-organisation had a trial run in Britain. When founded in 1884, the Fabian Society took its name from a Roman general who used delaying tactics to win a battle, something which was seen as a metaphor for the Society’s support for gradual reform. Its actual thought, however, betrays something different. Early Fabian publications advocated imperialism, eugenics, and slum clearances, and used the language of racial hygiene and mercantilism. They shared these fixations with the Progressives across the Atlantic, who helped to turn the United States into an imperial power (via the Spanish-American War) as well as the centre of pro-eugenic thought and activism.

Between the 1930s and 1960s, when the Puerto Rican struggle for independence was at its height, American authorities enacted a number of measures aimed at reducing economic and population pressures – most notably Operation Bootstrap, which promoted emigration to the mainland, and forced sterilisations of Puerto Rican women. Although eugenic policies were carried out across the United States, Puerto Rico was singled out in particular, and the use of eugenics to artificially reduce its population was often advocated using racist language. (An internal document circulated within the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s called for the elimination of all Puerto Ricans.) Puerto Rican women were often sterilised without their consent, and were prevented from accessing information about birth control.

The sterilisation program was established during the New Deal era, when Rexford Tugwell, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s closest allies, was the appointed Governor of the island. The infrastructure, expertise, and propaganda which fuelled the effort were supplied by foundations such as the aforementioned Rockefeller Foundation, corporations such as Proctor and Gamble, and lobby groups such as Planned Parenthood. Although eugenics fell out of fashion after the Second World War, the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for Malthusian ideas has never abated – the Club of Rome, one of the world’s most prominent pushers of climate change hysteria, was founded in 1968 at the Lake Como estate of one David Rockefeller. It is little wonder that over the course of the twentieth century, ‘left-wing’ came to equal ‘big government’, but the constellation of political forces which inflicted eugenics on Puerto Rico could not be said to be left-wing, at least not in the sense that the radicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have understood the term.

It wasn’t only in the democratic world that supposed progressives were using the power of the state to suppress emancipatory movements from below. After taking power, the Bolsheviks began behaving the same way as the Progressives, the New Dealers, and the Fabians. Articles began appearing in the official press promoting the production-line methods employed by Henry Ford. Leon Trotsky, whose reputation as being a less authoritarian communist than Stalin is surely undeserved, sent in the Red Army when the sailors revolted at Kronstadt in 1921. It seems that once handed untrammelled state power, previously progressive movements absorb the mentality of the former elites, and begin to see their role as oppressing and disciplining the working class, as well as destroying any alternative sources of social capital which threaten their monopoly on the allegiances of the people.

The urge of the technocrats to micromanage the lives of the people continues today under the guise of ‘green’ politics and the nanny state. The former poses as a left-wing ideology, yet downplays the importance of economic inequality in favour of a Malthusian narrative of overpopulation. In addition, its critique of public works projects helps to reduce demand for public goods, something which can only mean a political climate more favourable to conservatism. As for the increasing remit of the nanny state and its arguable transformation into the ‘bully state’, it is the inevitable outcome of the Bull Moose-Fabian-Bolshevik style of politics.

Political Philosophy: Part Four

 The fourth in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. This post focuses on the progressive content of the American republican tradition.

Part Four: Locofocos and log cabins: the egalitarian tradition in the United States

The idea that the American Revolution made little change to the social structure of the Thirteen Colonies is a common one, and an incorrect one. While the top layers of political power may have been monopolised by a merchant and land-owning elite which was prominent before the Revolution, the 1780s and 1790s witnessed a flourishing of social capital among ordinary Americans. Despite lacking the right to vote, working class people (which in those days meant skilled artisans) organised mechanics’ societies and Democratic-Republican clubs to further their interests, make their voices heard, and disseminate political writings. When members of the elite such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were elected to the White House, they did so thanks to the campaigning and propaganda of groups such as these.

The Democratic-Republican clubs supported the party of Jefferson, but went further than him in their advocacy of egalitarian principles, their views often being closer to those of Thomas Paine. They served a similar social and educative function to Britain’s radical schools and to Catalonia’s ateneus, but as with every form of popular self-organisation, the elites felt threatened and set about destroying them. The Washington Administration blamed the clubs for inciting the Whiskey Rebellion, just as the British government was trying a number of radical leaders in the treason trials of 1794.

Although the American Revolution (unfortunately) didn’t cross the Atlantic, the Industrial Revolution crossed it from the other direction. Between 1815 and 1850, the United States experienced what historians term the ‘Market Revolution’, in which a previously agrarian economy was industrialised, marketised, and made more unequal with the help of transport and infrastructure. Not all Americans were pleased with these developments – partisans of the Democratic-Republican tradition believed wage labour and the factory system to be contrary to egalitarian principles and profit-making to be a breach of republican ideas about civic virtue. They also made much of the pork-barrelling of certain Whig politicians and the concentration of wealth in institutions such as President Andrew Jackson’s bête noire, the Second Bank of the United States.

The Locofocos must surely be one of the most unfairly overlooked political formations in American history. They were a group of hardcore Jacksonians in New York who broke from the regular (Tammany Hall-controlled) Democratic Party in 1835, and who served for the next few years as the radical wing of the egalitarian, anti-bank tendency, both inside and outside the party. The issues on which they agitated are largely forgotten now, and modern observers would doubtless view them as libertarians due to their free-market rhetoric. They were, however, advocates of measures such as public education, but opposed state regulation of commerce (particularly the issuance of paper currency) as they saw it as always favouring the capitalists. Their support came from the city’s working class, and their leadership partially overlapped with the activists of the city’s early union movement. Like most Americans of their time, they viewed plutocracy as a product of state intervention in the economy, not the natural outcome of market forces.

Historian Sean Wilentz has written of an egalitarian thread in American republicanism, traceable back to Jefferson (who wrote that inequality caused “much misery to the bulk of mankind”), and which was grounded in the labour theory of value and in a belief in the impossibility of equal political relations between people who held vastly different levels of wealth. While observing the usual caveats about that thread not being extended to women and racial minorities, we can see its influence in radical and reformist movements throughout pre-Civil War America. Its ideas formed part of the rhetoric of the Jackson-era Democratic Party, working class movements, and abolitionists. (The latter often denounced slave-owners as aristocratic and parasitic on the producers of wealth.) This tradition continued to find its expression in progressive movements until the First World War. The Greenback and Populist parties, the Knights of Labor, and the Wobblies all used Jacksonian anti-wage labour rhetoric to attack the robber-baron capitalism of their own times. The Wobblies even harked back to 1776, calling their movement the ‘Continental Congress of the working class’.

To fully understand the egalitarian tradition described by Wilentz, we must compare it with modern American political rhetoric. The positions of both major parties on economic questions align with those of the Federalists and Whigs. Against the egalitarian, populist, and anti-monopoly rhetoric of the Jacksonians and unionists, Whig spokesmen argued that capital and enterprise were as worthy of respect as labour, that anyone could rise from poverty to start a business and live the American Dream™, and that egalitarian rhetoric was demagogic and divided Americans against each other. The Democratic and Republican parties of today make no attempt to challenge the prevailing Whiggish consensus, differing only in the extent to which the state should intervene; the shrill ‘class warfare’ slur which greets anything resembling egalitarian rhetoric, and the valorisation of ‘job creators’, would be very familiar to Jacksonians.

The other key difference between then and now is the link that was made between government intervention in the economy and inequality, the opposite of what is believed today. Wilentz dates the reversal to the first few decades after the Civil War, when the owners of the newly-emerging ‘trusts’ began to justify their monopoly control of entire industries as being the product of market forces, and the labour theory of value fell out of fashion. Since the rise of the Progressives and New Dealers, the energies of progressives has been spent trying to capture state power, in order to create what historian Arthur Schlesinger called ‘countervailing power’ against the corporate elite. The purpose of this series of posts, it should be clear by now, is to explain why those energies have been wasted. Perhaps what we need is a modern-day Locofoco movement.

Political Philosophy: Part Three

 The third in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. The first two posts dealt with the neutralising of an authentically working class public space and popular culture between the Industrial Revolution and the Second World War. This one will examine the history of working class self-organisation in industry.

Part Three: Blackshirts from the Combination Acts to the New Right: the union double standard

In 1792, with successful revolutions having taken place across the Atlantic and across the Channel, the British elite moved to ensure that no such thing would occur on its soil. A Tory politician, John Reeves founded the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. Its mission: inciting mobs to attack radicals, burning effigies of Thomas Paine, and assisting the authorities with prosecutions for sedition, such as those which led to the treason trials of 1794. After successfully keeping the British people under the rule of church and king, it faded away, but the tactic of employing private force to suppress working class revolt emerged again and again.

The Association’s main targets were the network of republican organisations such as the London Corresponding Society, which disseminated radical literature and agitated for political change. Their members were typically skilled artisans, whose trades were in high demand, making them less vulnerable to boycotts aimed at curbing their political activism. In response to this flurry of popular self-organisation, Parliament passed an act in 1793 forcing all such groups to register their constitutions and lists of office-bearers with the government. Four years later, they were banned from administering oaths to new members.

The practice of working class self-organisation (and the paranoid elite reaction thereto) dotted the radical history of nineteenth-century Britain. Schools were established which promoted radical opposition to the regime of the day, only to be forced out of existence by the provision of compulsory state education. The co-operative movement was formed in Rochdale in 1844. Friendly societies popped up everywhere, only to be made into historical relics by the coming of the welfare state. The repression of unions, however, was the most powerful use of the state’s power against the working class. History remembers the Tolpuddle Martyrs, but less so the prolonged struggle for the right to organise of which they formed a part. The British state banned unions, then legalised them but severely restricted their activities; it also replaced customary Saints’ Days with Bank Holidays, of which there were fewer, in order to impose greater discipline on the workforce. As late as 1911, Westminster (in the person of Home Secretary Winston Churchill) was still willing to use military force against striking coal miners in South Wales.

The tactics pioneered by the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers were employed again in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Faced with worker occupations of factories, the country’s classical liberal ruling class began negotiations to hand power in an orderly fashion to the workers’ movement, and the owners of the FIAT motor company offered to turn their factory in Turin into a co-operative. Not all of the country’s elites, however, were as conciliatory, and the ones who weren’t found an ally in Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Far from being some new radical, revolutionary form of right-wing politics indigenous to the twentieth century, as many historians have argued, fascism can be seen as the mid-twentieth century’s version of a tradition of elite-inspired private violence against popular self-organisation which goes back at least to the anti-republican mobs of 1790s Britain.

When the elites can stifle working class self-organisation through peaceful, legal means, however, they will choose to do so. If one examines the provisions of anti-union legislation enacted over the years, one can see many restrictions on behaviour which would be denounced as unconscionable violations of freedom of speech and association if applied to any other type of organisation (especially a corporation). The landmark Taft-Hartley Act, for example, prevents American unions from donating to political campaigns, engaging in secondary boycotts, solidarity strikes, or wildcat strikes, and negotiating ‘closed shops’ with employers. It also requires union leaders to affirm that they are not communists. The Act succeeded insofar as it locked unions into a three-way coalition with the state and business for three decades, but every new generation brings new measures imposed from above to stifle the struggle for freedom and equality.

Observers struggle to account for how the world has changed since the end of the Keynesian Consensus. I put forward here a few suggestions which provide an outline of my explanation of the triumph of the New Right and the malaise of the left:

• The spike in working class activism (France’s May 1968, Italy’s Hot Autumn, Britain’s mid-1970s wave of strikes) led the elites to believe that the Keynesian Consensus was no longer enough to contain the aspirations of workers.
• The economic crises of the early 1970s (the end of the Bretton Woods system, the OPEC-induced oil shock, etc.) allowed for those inspired by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand to pounce.
• The aim of the world’s elites for the past few decades has been to reduce demand for public goods (transport infrastructure, dams, etc.), so as to allow that part of the world’s wealth which is not paid to workers as wages to accrue to them in the form of accumulated capital.
• Far from being a radical, anti-systemic critique of capitalism, the ‘green’ ideology serves one of the key purposes of the New Right’s agenda. By pointing out (and usually exaggerating) the negative environmental effects of railways, dams, and other forms of infrastructure, greens help to stave off popular clamour for more and better public goods.
• The increasing militarisation of society (SWAT teams, the War on Drugs, CCTV cameras) is a means of dulling the rebellious spirit of the people. 
• The New Right’s Gramscian ideological hegemony manifests itself in the most mundane ways: witness the spontaneous outpouring of grief last year over the death of that modern-day robber baron capitalist, Steve Jobs. Entrepreneurship and innovation in the production of useless consumer goods have become more fashionable to freedom, justice, or equality.

Political Philosophy: Part Two

 The second in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. It covers many of the same themes of the first post, and is intended to reinforce the argument of its conclusion, but will focus specifically on the history of sport.

Part Two: The People’s Olympiad, Ultras, and hooligans: the elite capture of sport

In July 1936, just as General Franco’s fascist troops were preparing to launch their coup d’état, Barcelona was getting ready to host the People’s Olympiad. Earlier that year, the ‘official’ Summer Olympic Games had been held in Berlin. The story of those games, of their use as a propaganda tool by the Nazi regime and the symbolic rebuke to their ideology of white supremacy that was Jesse Owens’ four gold medals, has been told many times over. The People’s Olympiad is not well-known, and neither is the culture of self-managed working class sport of which it formed part.

The People’s Olympiad grew out of a movement calling for a boycott of the Berlin Olympics, which was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading most countries not to send athletes to an event which they knew would be used for fascist propaganda. The Popular Front government elected in Spain in early 1936 organised the games, and attracted six thousand competitors from twenty-two countries, including regional teams representing Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Alsace, a team of Jewish athletes, teams from French and Spanish colonies in North Africa, and teams of German and Italian exiles. After the cancellation of the games, some took up arms for the Republican cause in the Civil War. The organisations which sent athletes to Barcelona instead of Berlin in 1936 were those socialist and non-communist sporting bodies affiliated with the Socialist Workers’ Sport International. These groups opposed both the conservative Olympic movement and the Soviet-organised Spartakiads.

Organised sport has its roots in the extension of leisure time to workers – historians often cite the various Factory Acts passed by the British Parliament in the mid-nineteenth century, giving workers Saturdays off, as being key to its development. While most early sporting bodies were funded and managed by elites, working class people played important roles as players and paying spectators. Oppositional politics have played an important role in the development of certain sporting bodies: the best-known example which still exists is the link between Irish nationalism and the Gaelic Athletic Association. Even where sporting bodies were not explicitly organised on political or class lines, their activities were attacked by elites on those grounds. For example, when the Victorian Football League continued playing during the First World War, conservative elements portrayed players as unpatriotic for refusing to enlist in the military. When the league was reduced to four teams in 1916, it was no coincidence that the four in question were from suburbs of Melbourne with large Irish-Australian communities (Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, and Richmond). And, of course, the strict yet selectively applied rules enforcing amateurism in the Olympic movement (prior to 1980) and in rugby union (prior to 1995) were aimed at preventing working class players from earning a living from sport.

At Italian soccer matches, one can often see banners reading ‘contro il calcio moderno’ (‘against modern football’). The phrase is the slogan of a loose set of ideas among fans, who oppose the commercialisation of soccer and the policing of their activities. The groups of fans which are most vocal in support of these ideas are Ultras, a word often mistranslated by English-language media as ‘hooligan’. The Ultra culture emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of political, cultural, and economic upheaval in Italy, and shares many features of ‘autonomist’ Marxist groups which were common at the time. Some have a distinct political orientation – usually far-left, but with quite a few exceptions. Ultras groups act as autonomous institutions which at times have a hostile, oppositional attitude to club and league authorities. When rivalries get more heated than usual, those authorities are quick to assert their authority, and the organs of elite opinion are quick to denounce the entire Ultras scene – as The Guardian did in 2001 with the headline: ‘Racist. Violent. Corrupt. Welcome to Serie A’.

Although Ultras survive in Italy, as well as in other European and South American countries, the terraces of many other countries have been deprived of an autonomous non-elite fan culture. The policing of the Ultras witnessed in Italy, and the methods and language employed by elites to justify it, finds its parallel in Britain, and in the crackdowns on hooliganism. Using the disruption caused to public order by a minority of apolitical trouble-makers as a pretext, successive governments, most notably that of Margaret Thatcher, have largely succeeded in de-proletarianising the country’s soccer stadiums. In 1989, the government commissioned the Taylor Report, which was charged with proposing solutions to the hooligan problem, which had reached its height in the mid-to-late 1980s. One of its most influential results was the diktat that all professional clubs eradicate terraces from their grounds and establish all-seater stadiums. Just as with the palatial cinemas mentioned in my first post, the need to recoup the cost of construction led to escalating ticket prices. By the year 2000, it was possible for the captain of Manchester United, Roy Keane, to deride his own club’s fans as the “prawn sandwich brigade.” From the perspective of the desirability of autonomous working class institutions, this was a regrettable development.

Today, there is no self-managed sport. Everything is under the control of state-sanctioned national governing bodies, affiliated to IOC-sanctioned international governing bodies. The dependence of sporting bodies on public funding and favourable legislation ensures that it is virtually impossible to operate outside the state sphere. The idea of sport as a venue for political struggle has become alien – the accusation of ‘politicising sport’ has been levelled at those campaigning for sporting boycotts of South Africa during apartheid, and at those who dared question Beijing’s human rights record in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. The idea that sport and politics don’t mix would be anathema to the organisers and competitors of the People’s Olympiad, or to the Italian workers and students who formed Ultras groups in between strikes and protests.

Just as with the workers’ schools and co-operatives in nineteenth century Britain, the ateneus of fin-de-siècle Barcelona, the Wobblies, and the oppositional culture of early cinema, sport has been subject to the same attacks and attempts at co-option by the elites. This strategy was successful in destroying the independent working class sporting bodies most prominent in the 1920s and 1930s, and the autonomist terrace cultures such as Italy’s Ultras which emerged in the second half of the century.

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.