Labour governments functioned as crisis managers who fragmented working-class resistance

Evidence

The dominant strategy had a distinctively corporatist character, incorporating sections of the working class and unions into the bargain between state, capital, and labor, the three “interests.” Crisis management has drawn successively on different variants of the same basic repertoire : incomes policy, first by consent, then by imposition; wage restraint; social contracting. The “natural” governor of this crisis has been the party of social democracy in power: Labour. This last factor has had profound effects in disorganizing and fragmenting working-class responses to the crisis itself. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1100

Categorization

• XREF: Chimes with the Frankfurt School finding that working-class parties absorbed and neutralized opposition — here Labour’s corporatism disorganizes labor. — connects to: Labour’s dilemma was compounded by civil-society disorganization since the 1980s — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 300