Labour’s statist strategy forced it to police its own working-class base

Evidence

But, once in government, social democracy is committed to finding solutions to the crisis which are capable of winning support from key sections of capital, since its solutions are framed within the limits of capitalist survival. But this requires that the indissoluble link between party and class serves both to advance and to discipline the class and the organizations it represents. This is only possible if the class-to-party link can somehow be redefined or dismantled and if there can be substituted for it an alternative articulation: people-to-government. The rhetoric of “national interest,” which is the principal ideological form in which a succession of defeats has been imposed on the working class by social democracy in power, is exactly the site where this contradiction shows through and is being constantly reworked. But people-to-government dissects the field of struggle differently from class-to-party. It sets Labour, at key moments of struggle—from the strikes of 1966 right through to the 1979 five percent pay norm—by definition “on the side of the nation” against “sectional interests,” “irresponsible trade-union power,” etc., i.e., against the class. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1106 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

Related

• Labour’s ‘national interest’ rhetoric relocates it against the working class it represents. (similarity 0.93)
• Social democracy made the state police the working class it claimed to represent. (similarity 0.85)
• Labour’s statism has always avoided popular democratic mobilization (similarity 0.82)
• Labour governments functioned as crisis managers who fragmented working-class resistance (similarity 0.81)
• Labour substituted a people-to-government articulation for the class-to-party link (similarity 0.81)
• Statism without popular mobilization is intrinsic to Labour’s Fabian heritage (similarity 0.80)
• Labour’s corporatist crisis management disorganized working-class resistance to the crisis (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Labour’s ‘national interest’ rhetoric relocates it against the working class it represents. #expands (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1106