#the effects of electoral politics are far far more limited in scope than trade union activity but the same holds for voting

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what does it mean when people say stuff like individual morality or action is incompatible with class analysis or class struggle?

alright so like one of the key ideas about class analysis is the idea that classes (as a whole) have economic interests that affect all their members but don't extrapolate out to an individual analysis.

for example, let's say that you can't find a job, and somebody offers to pay you below the table for below minimum wage. it's in your individual interest to do this--it beats having no job! but as a member of the working class, once this practice becomes normalized, suddenly the standards of pay for everyone are lower because people know that they can just pay less than minimum wage under the table. competition between workers for jobs drives wages down for everyone, leaving them all in a worse situation overall even if each individual choice to scab, to accept lower pay, to resist unionization, etc, leaves the person who makes it better off. cf. karl marx on what happens when wages and working conditions deteriorate:

The labourer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labour, either by working a great number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labour. The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does; so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class.

— Karl Marx, Wage Labour & Capital

similarly, any individual member of the working class is completely dispensable and replaceable by capital. if one person refuses to work unless they're paid a higher wage, they'll be fired and replaced with somebody who doesn't. the individual worker has no economic leverage whatsoever. but the working class has incredible economic leverage! and so does the intermediate stage between the working class and the individual--organized segments of the working class (e.g. trade unions) have economic leverage. if one person strikes, the capitalist can fire them. if 40,000 people strike, your industry is going to shut down.

so the reason why class analysis is compatible with individual action is that your incentives measurably change when you start organizing--it's in the interests of the individual to compete, but in the interests of the class to cooperate. and obviously you cannot just expect everyone to spontaneously coordinate! you, the individual, are disposable to capital! if you, personally, refuse to take the under-the-table offer, either on moral grounds or because you recognize your class interest, your neighbour's going to take it--unless you and her get together and agree that neither of you will take it. that's the only way that the guy making the offer is going to have to give in and offer the job for a living wage.

and this is what organization is--trade unions (although they have severe limitations!), communist parties, and other worker's organizations allow the working class to pursue their collective interest--which can only be pursued by collective action, because engaging in the strategies of collective action as an individual, without the cooperation of your peers, is high risk for no reward.

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utilitymonstermash reblogged your post: On the eve of the Great War, the Labour Party...

But like why did Labour eclipse the Liberals? From where and when did things like the gun ban, the nhs, the tv license, and bin this knife come? Why did labor jump in with both feet on the Iraq war?

The questions in your second and third sentences are well beyond the scope of my original post, but I should answer the first.

The necessary but not sufficient reason why Labour eclipsed the Liberals is that Labour represented the working class in a way that the Liberals never did. The first Labour Cabinet was largely working-class men, whereas the Liberals remained overwhelmingly middle-class. Even after middle-class men like Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps took over the Labour Party, they always had workers on the front bench, like Ernest Bevin, trade union bruiser and Attlee’s Foreign Secretary, Aneurin Bevan, the son of coal miners and the father of the NHS, or Harold Wilson, the scholarship boy.

Liberal identity signifiers were less important, and perhaps not even helpful: the unskilled working classes did not remember Milton, or Cromwell, or the Civil War and most of them did not go to chapel. That last bit is crucial: the middle classes went to chapel, but not many workers did.

Here’s Adrian Hastings on our period:

In larger towns almost nowhere was anything like 40 per cent of the population effectively church-going. Again, almost nowhere was the real urban unskilled working class to any large extent Anglican -- though perhaps a bit more in Lancashire than elsewhere. In places it was Methodist or Baptist or Roman Catholic. Mostly it was nothing. The rural working class was Anglican or Free Church, more occasionally nothing. The upper class was largely Anglican, the middle classes Anglican or Free Church, the skilled working class Free Church, occasionally Anglican, most often nothing.

One inexorable problem is that political religion was becoming less and less salient, as both faith and adherence were in steady decline. In 1874, 747 of every 1,000 marriages were solemnized in the Church of England; by 1909, only 614 were. 

The Liberal faithful had the same problem. The Free Churches not grown as much as the Anglicans had had in the nineteenth century, and now they were both shrinking. In Liverpool, both Anglican and Free Church attendance fell 14 percent between 1902 and 1912.

This was inexorable decline. In 1934, D. W. Brogan remarked that “In the generation that has passed since the great Liberal landslide of 1906, one of the greatest changes in the English religious and social landscape has been the decline of Nonconformity.” The numbers bore him out: there were 435,000 Baptists in 1906 and 355,000 in 1945. 

One less inexorable problem was the expansion of the franchise. England went to the polls in 1906 on a limited franchise: only 62 percent of the adult male population were eligible to vote. Colin Crouch called Britain’s position “extraordinary”: “exceptionally developed economically but backward democratically.”

In 1918, Britain removed the last restrictions on adult male franchise, adding another six million men alongside women -- in a country that had only 39 million people to begin with. It is hard to identify the consequences of that reform, but Ross McKibbin believes that it “almost certainly benefit[ed] the Conservative and Labour Parties but would be of less certain benefit to the Liberals.”

So: having more workers in the electorate makes religious signaling less important and working-class signaling more important.

The more contingent reason why Labour eclipsed the Liberals is the one I mentioned in passing: “The war split the Liberals in two.” Herbert Asquith had been prime minister at the start of the war, but found himself out of the coalition and in opposition by December 1916, as David Lloyd George assumed command.

Lloyd George was ultimately left as the only Liberal in the small war cabinet, as Conservatives backed his thin government. Asquith and Lloyd George led opposing sections of the Liberal Party into the 1918 election. Lloyd George was returned as prime minister, but Conservatives won a majority: 382 seats to his 127 and Asquith’s thirty-six.

This set of contingencies and humiliations made it possible for Labour to usurp the Liberals relatively rapidly. Britain switched from a debate over culture and religion to one over class and socialism. The Conservatives usually won that debate, as I mentioned, but that’s another story.

Now, some suggest that Britain never became a ‘normal’ European country. They argue that the old divisions Liberals--Conservatives axis dominates the new Labour--Conservative one. Here’s Robert Tombs in The English and Their History (London: Allen Lane, 2014):

“Whig” and “Tory,” and the more modern “Liberal” and “Conservative” (terms borrowed from Spanish and French politics in the 1830s): are they now just archaic labels with no significant relationship to their origins in a society in which political choice is thought to follow individual opinion and socio-economic interest? The prudent answer would be yes. And yet: in 2010 the Tories still won in the English counties and small towns, as in the 1840s; the anti-Tory parties were stronger in larger towns, especially in the north, areas where Nonconformity is or used to be strong. London, today as in the 1880s, is different from the rest of the country, divided primarily along plain socio-economic lines; but for most of the country, the old religious divisions remain as a ghostly presence influencing instinctive loyalties. Some Nonconformist sects are still unusually disposed to vote for the Liberal Democrats. Anglicans are far more likely to vote Conservative: in the 2010 elections, twice as likely as Catholics. Furthermore, Tories are still attracted by Disraeli’s and Burke’s “one nation” ideal of unity and harmony, and would doubtless agree with the former that “the Tory party…is the national party; it is the really democratic party of England.” They retain a “Country Party” suspicion of expensive state bureaucracy and of ideology, regarding their own opinions as simple good sense. They are attached to traditional ideas of liberty, at least for people like themselves. If they love lords a little less than Disraeli and Burke did, they are relatively deferential, aspire to social ascension, and are not averse to the idea of a public-spirited elite, even to Old Etonians in government. That elite is often said to possess a complacent sense of “entitlement.” Tories often idealize the past, celebrating a triumphalist version of English and British history, and clinging to ancient symbols such as monarchy. Many retain a fondness for the Church of England, at least as an aesthetic and social, if not necessarily a spiritual and political, presence. Finally, of course, the Tory party is predominantly an English party: even in the 1860s it had only two seats in Scotland; in 2010 it had only one—on the English border.

By contrast, the anti-Tory traditions, Whig, Liberal and Labour (and more recently Scottish and Welsh nationalist), have a different myth of England and Britain. They reject the Burkean vision of harmony in favour of one of conflict—“the rich story of the people of these islands who fought for and defended our rights,” in which the populist royalists of 1381, the hell-fire fundamentalists of the 1650s, ambitious opportunists such as Wilkes and Paine, strait-laced suffragettes, and tight-fisted social engineers such as Beveridge are transformed into a torch-bearing relay of Progress. There is too a streak of Whiggish elitism: leaders of the “left” (a term not applied to English politics until the twentieth century) have usually been of comfortable, even wealthy, backgrounds, sometimes with a family tradition of politics, and a sense of intellectual, moral and even social superiority over plebeian and provincial Tories (“the stupid party,” “the nasty party”), including lofty disdain for popular royalism and today a cosmopolitan distaste for “Euroscepticism.” Alternatively, even simultaneously, comes identification with proletarian, ideally northern, roots. The Nonconformist tradition bequeaths campaigning militancy, a self-image of anti-Establishment rebellion, a view of politics as moral struggle (as opposed to “the art of the possible”), a taste for shibboleths (from Church disestablishment to fox-hunting), and sectarian suspicion of the motives of opponents (“lower than vermin”). Both traditions are very different from the mainstream European right and left, which are based on clearer ideological differences or plainer socio-economic interests that simply do not match English politics. The origins of the English divide can be traced far beyond Gladstone and Disraeli: to the wars against Revolutionary France, to the American Revolution, and ultimately to the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “The really important attitudes [in Victorian politics] had nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution, much to do with the English Civil War.”

Geographical voting patterns, magnified by the first-past-the-post system, make these deep continuities visible: the Ambridge versus Coronation Street polarity. The pattern is even reflected in our genes, though its reappearance at every national election seems always to astonish us. The areas of strength of the Anglican Church uncovered in the 1851 census are strikingly similar to the electoral strongholds of the modern Conservative Party. In every election since the introduction of democracy, predominantly Anglican areas have voted Conservative. Conversely, there was long a clear correlation between Methodism and Liberal and Labour loyalties. (In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the influence of religion has been, and remains, more marked than in England.) Those who saw themselves as nineteenth-century heirs of the Commonwealth men, whatever their social background, provided the leadership of the Liberal Party, trade unionism and the Labour Party. Nonconformity was the closest predictor of voting Liberal (“the party of Christ”) and then Labour well into the twentieth century. Labour voting was also strongly associated with Catholicism, with its strong links to Irish immigration. The expansion of the electorate strengthened this pattern, in which community identities shaped individual political choices, and it has been strong enough to outlast political changes such as the middle-class shift to Toryism at the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of Labour, the cuckoo in the Liberal nest. In some places today, the mosque is replacing the chapel in this respect, with Muslims now the most strongly left-voting group in the country, despite commonly holding “right-wing” views.

Enduring geographical and religious patterns are found in many countries. In France, Catholics and anticlericals battled for two centuries; the Protestant north/Catholic south divided Germany; and there was long a regional pattern to Republican and Democratic loyalties in the United States dating back to the Civil War. One long-debated question about the English experience is whether the influence of Methodism—proverbially judged more important to the English left than Marxism—restrained extremism and class conflict. Élie Halévy, in one of the many influential histories of England by non-Englishmen, thought so: Methodism explained “the miracle of modern England, anarchist but orderly, practical and businesslike, but religious, and even pietist.” E. P. Thompson rather agreed, but deplored its “self-effacing and apologetic” tone, “forever professing their submission” to the established order. There are doubtless several reasons why English politics has long been unusually peaceful, at least to the extent that it is very rare for people to kill or even hurt each other; but it seems plausible that the shared Christianity of rival parties was one of the causes. When we combine this restraint with a visceral and unrelenting partisanship eager to see the worst in the other party’s actions, an imperviousness to argument, a sanctimonious relishing of moral scandal, a taste for tub-thumping and an aversion to coalition government, we see the legacies of Victorian sectarianism in a political culture strikingly different from that of other Western democracies.

I found this amusing but ultimately unpersuasive. It is, however, far more fun to think about.