Postwar consumer affluence shook Labour’s class base and fueled revisionist debates

Evidence

The growing commercialization of mass culture, the birth of television, youth culture, and the rise of mass consumption were part and parcel of what came to be known as “the affluence debate.” The impact of these forces on the working class had particular resonance for the Labour Party, its electoral prospects, and what Anthony Crosland, in his prophetic book, called The Future of Socialism . Was the class basis of Labour’s support being eroded by sociocultural change? True, culture had played a somewhat residual role in Labour thinking. The roots of “Labourism” in the dense, defensive, subaltern, corporate structures of working-class culture had not been the subject of much serious reflection until exposed by the newer class attitudes and values emerging with the onset of commercialization. Hoggart’s book played directly into these anxieties. These fueled the Labour Party’s revisionist debates of the late 1950s, underpinned Mark Abrams’s Must Labour Lose? , with its negative assessment of Labour’s prospects in the wake of social change among its heartland class supporters, and was summed up in Gaitskell’s famous 1959 Labour Party Conference speech where he vividly inquired whether Labour as a political force could survive the coming of “the car, the telly, the washing machine and the fridge.” Tony Blair’s “New Labour” and the aspirational culture has long historical antecedents … — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 154

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the affluence debate framing and later New Labour political economy; useful for the reader’s project of situating Hall in economic thought. — connects to: Left-wing radicalization, not right-wing opposition, made Labour unelectable for two decades — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 424
• SEED: An essay angle: how consumer goods (the car, telly, washing machine, fridge) became electoral-political symbols across Labour history from Gaitskell to Blair.