Postwar affluence and mass culture threatened Labour’s class base

Evidence

As modes of radical engagement having a pervasive importance in modern social life, social movements provide significant guidelines to potential future transformations. For those who have associated modernity above all with either capitalism or industrialism, the labour movement is the social movement par excellence. Authors who have followed Marx see the labour movement as standing in “the vanguard of history”; their critics have concentrated their attention upon showing that the labour movement only has transformative impact in the early phases of the development of an industrial order, subsequently becoming one interest group among others. To be sure, capitalism remains a class system, and the struggles of labour movements are still relevant to what might lie “beyond” it. But a single-minded preoccupation with labour movements, though at one time largely justified by their strategic importance early in the development of modern institutions and capitalistic expansion, reflects the onesided emphasis upon either capitalism or industrialism as the sole significant dynamic forces involved in modernity. Other social movements are also important and can be connected to the multidimensional character of modernity outlined earlier. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 374 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hall linked post-war industrial decline to transformed consumer culture and new symbolic meanings; Commercialization-era cultural change drove Labour’s 1950s revisionist debates; Postwar affluence marked a transition to post-industrial class structures, not classlessness (+10 more)

Related

• Postwar affluence triggered a neoliberal counter-surge rather than classlessness (similarity 0.84)
• Postwar affluence shifted class structures from embedded tiers to consumption-based forms (similarity 0.84)
• Postwar consumer affluence shook Labour’s class base and fueled revisionist debates (similarity 0.84)
• Postwar affluence marked a transition to post-industrial class structures, not classlessness (similarity 0.84)
• Postindustrial class structures arose from consumer affluence and corporate capital (similarity 0.83)
• A singular focus on labour movements misreads modernity’s multidimensional dynamics (similarity 0.79)
• Hoggart’s book about class entered the Labour Party’s affluence debate and electoral politics (similarity 0.79)
• Deindustrialization transformed consumer culture and the symbolic meaning of possessions decades earlier (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• A singular focus on labour movements misreads modernity’s multidimensional dynamics #complicates (0.82) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 374
• The affluence debate directly shaped Labour’s politics from Gaitskell to Blair. #corroborates (0.80)
• Postwar affluence marked a transition to post-industrial class structures, not classlessness #complicates (0.70)
• Postwar affluence shifted class structures from embedded tiers to consumption-based forms #expands (0.70)
• New Labour’s aspirational consumer strategies had roots in 1950s debates about affluence #corroborates (0.70)
• Postwar affluence triggered a neoliberal counter-surge rather than classlessness #complicates (0.60)
• Labour’s representation of the working class actively constitutes that class #qualifies (0.60)
• Hall’s 1958 essay already predicted post-Fordist consumer culture’s class effects #corroborates (0.50)
• Labour’s statist strategy forced it to police its own working-class base #expands (0.50)
• The Social Contract’s gap between rhetoric and discipline destroyed Labour’s credibility. #contradicts (0.40)