Franz Mehring and the Problems of Liberal Social Reform, in Bismarckian Germany 1884–90: The Origins of Radical Marxism

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-255
Author(s):  
Glen R. McDougall
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
The Relationship

The purpose of this article is to analyze, using the example of Franz Mehring, the growing cleavage between German left-liberalism and social democracy in the 1880s. Due in part to the radicalization produced by Bismarck's anti-socialist law of 1878 to 1890, Marxism was firmly established within the German socialist movement in the 1880s. The reverse of that process, the growing ideological and political rigidity of left-liberalism, is less well treated. In this article, I will outline the program of social reform proposed by the then left-liberal journalist, Franz Mehring, to German liberalism in an effort to build a coalition of middle-class and working-class democratic forces in Imperial Germany. Mehring's failure was instructive both for his own intellectual and political development and for what it tells us about the relationship between social democracy and liberalism in Germany.

Disparate Recoveries: Wealth, Race, and the Working Class after the Great Recession

2021 ◽  
Vol 695 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Fenaba R. Addo ◽  
William A. Darity
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Net Worth ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Consumer Finances ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Relationship

What does it mean to be working class in a society of extreme racial wealth inequality? Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we investigate the wealth holdings of Black, Latinx, and white working-class households during the post–Great Recession (pre–COVID-19) period that spanned 2010 to 2019. We then explore the relationship between working-class and middle-class attainment using a wealth-based metric. We find that, in terms of their net worth, fewer Black working-class households benefitted from the economic recovery than white working-class households. Among white households, the working class saw the greatest increase in wealth in both absolute and relative terms. Working-class households were less likely to be middle class as defined by their wealth holdings, and Black and Latinx households were also less likely to be middle class. For Black households, racial identity is a stronger predictor of wealth attainment than occupational sector.

‘An intensive study of – feet!’ in two films by Lois Weber: Shoes and The Blot

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-48
Author(s):  
Pamela Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Wage Inequality ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Intensive Study ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Moral Compromise ◽  
The Relationship

In Shoes (1916), Lois Weber re-examines the relationship between shoes and social mobility. Far from guiding the working-class protagonist’s progress, a pair of worn boots trap her into a moral compromise, which destroys her hope of future advancement, either romantically or socially. Weber’s investigation into wage inequality, the rights of women and the influence of consumer culture via footwear continues in The Blot (1921), which revisits the same plot in a lower middle-class milieu and expands on the theme. Here, shoes are again a danger to women, but also an indicator of genteel distress and a cheap, impractical commodity, good only for profiteering rather than practicality.

Chicago’s Anarchists Shape the Police Department

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Strong Force ◽  
Real Mass ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines how the Chicago Police Department was transformed by its struggle with the city's anarchist and socialist movement during the 1870s and 1880s. Compared with the department's interaction with the wider labor movement and the working class generally, the relationship between the police and the militant workers' organizations varied solely in degree. The police and the anarchists consistently faced each other with unmistakable hostility. The first real mass confrontation between the anarchists and the police took place during the 1877 upheaval, when the police broke up their meetings with violence. But in the 1880s, the anarchist organizations grew rapidly in size and increasingly set themselves against the police. This chapter shows that the conflict between the police and the anarchists shaped the development of the Chicago Police Department, in part due to the threat of mass strikes, riots, and revolution that pushed the city's elite to seek a strong force that could be relied on to respond to the workers' movement.

Labour Party Politics and the Working Class

1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Beackon
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Opinion Polls ◽  
Urban Working

By the late 1960s the shift of the Labour party away from its traditional base among the urban working class appeared to be gaining momentum. The opinion polls showed a marked swing of working-class sentiment away from the party, and the policies advanced during the period, especially with regard to prices and incomes and industrial relations, hardly seemed designed to satisfy the redistributive concerns traditionally imputed to the working class. Indeed the government's overriding concern with the problem of the economy during a period in which the Labour party had a large majority over all other parties in the House of Commons was seen by one commentator as the final act of a tragic farce entitled ‘The Decline and Fall of Social Democracy’. Clearly this conclusion was drawn somewhat prematurely: in the 1970s there is fragmented evidence to suggest that the Labour party has regained the votes of a number of its traditional supporters who had previously defected, just as there is evidence that the ‘left’ of the party is asserting itself. However, the events of the early 1970s are not sufficient to refute the proposition that some kind of fundamental change either has occurred, or is occurring, in the relationship between the Labour party and its traditional supporters. Even if the curtain has yet to fall, there is no reason to believe that the play has not begun.

scholarly journals How class identities shape highbrow consumption: A cross-national analysis of 30 European countries and regions

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Reeves
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Using Data ◽  
National Analysis ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cross National

Highbrow culture may not always be central to cultural capital and, in such circumstances, the distinctiveness of middle-class consumption of highbrow culture may diminish, becoming more similar to working-class consumption. Using data from 30 European countries, I explore this issue through examining three questions: 1) is class identity associated with highbrow consumption; 2) does this association vary across countries; and 3) is the relationship between class identity and highbrow consumption altered when the majority of people in a given society identify as either ‘working-class’ or ‘middle-class’? After accounting for other socio-demographic controls, people who identify as middle-class are more active highbrow consumers than those who identify as working class. Yet, the distinctiveness of middle-class consumption of highbrow culture varies across countries and is negatively correlated with how many people identify as working-class in a society. As more people identify as working-class (rejecting middle-class identities) highbrow culture less clearly distinguishes middle-class and working-class identifiers. In the absence of any class-structured divisions in highbrow culture, whether and how cultural practices function as a form of cultural capital is likely quite different, reinforcing the claim that the centrality of highbrow culture to cultural capital varies geographically.

Women, Class, and Identity Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Martha E. Gimenez
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
General Conditions

The question of the oppression of women, the critique of which constituted feminism as an academic and political pursuit, has been feminism's enduring source of strength and appeal, yielding numerous critical theories and perspectives. This has produced continual conceptual shifts defining an evolving feminism, such as the shift from women to gender and from inequality to difference. It has also involved shifts from theorizing the general conditions of women's experience—oppressed at home and in the workplace, while juggling the conflicting demands of both—to theorizing the implications of the claim that, while gender may be the main source of oppression for white, heterosexual, middle-class women, women with different characteristics and experiences are affected by other forms of oppression as well. A possible way for Marxist feminism to remain a distinctive theoretical and politically relevant perspective might be to return to class, in the Marxist sense, theoretically reexamining the relationship between class and oppression, particularly the oppression of working-class women, within capitalist social formations.

Charabancs and Social Class in 1930s Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael John Law
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Equivalent Motor ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Separate Class

The renowned writer J. B. Priestley suggested in 1934 that the motor-coach had annihilated the old distinction between rich and poor passengers in Britain. This article considers how true this was by examining the relationship between charabancs, motor coaches and class. It shows that this important vehicle of inter-war working class mobility had a complicated relationship with class, identifying three distinct forms of this method of travel. It positions the charabanc alongside historical responses to unwelcome steamer and railway day-trippers, and examines how resorts provided separate class-based entertainment for these holidaymakers. Using the case study of a new charabanc-welcoming pub, the Prospect Inn, it proposes that, in the late 1930s, some pubs were beginning to offer charabanc customers facilities that were almost the match of their middle class equivalent. Motor coaches and charabancs contributed to the process of social convergence in inter-war Britain.

scholarly journals How does parental time relate to social class in a Nordic welfare state?

2021 ◽  
pp. 000169932110520
Author(s):  
Anne Lise Ellingsæter ◽  
Ragni Hege Kitterød ◽  
Marianne Nordli Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Parental Time ◽  
Childcare Time ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
The Relationship

Time intensive parenting has spread in Western countries. This study contributes to the literature on parental time use, aiming to deepen our understanding of the relationship between parental childcare time and social class. Based on time-diary data (2010–2011) from Norway, and a concept of social class that links parents’ amount and composition of economic and cultural capital, we examine the time spent by parents on childcare activities. The analysis shows that class and gender intersect: intensive motherhood, as measured by time spent on active childcare, including developmental childcare activities thought to stimulate children's skills, is practised by all mothers. A small group of mothers in the economic upper-middle class fraction spend even more time on childcare than the other mothers. The time fathers spend on active childcare is less than mothers’, and intra-class divisions are notable. Not only lower-middle class fathers, but also cultural/balanced upper-middle class fathers spend the most time on intensive fathering. Economic upper-middle and working-class fathers spend the least time on childcare. This new insight into class patterns in parents’ childcare time challenges the widespread notion of different cultural childcare logics in the middle class, compared to the working class.

Millions Standing against Their Own Economic Interest

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mugambi Jouet
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Economic Interest ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Blind Faith

Millions of white working-class and middle-class Americans vote against their own economic interest by defending policies that hurt them while profiting the rich, including the 1% wealthiest Americans. Several factors help explain this peculiar dimension of U.S. politics: myopia fostered by anti-intellectualism; the relationship between religious fundamentalism and free-market fundamentalism; blind faith in the American Dream; and how racism hinders economic solidarity.

scholarly journals Class, Gender, and Rhoticity: The Social Stratification of Non-Prevocalic /r/ in Edinburgh Speech

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Dickson ◽  
Lauren Hall-Lew
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Analysis Of Variation ◽  
Middle Aged Adults ◽  
The Relationship

Despite the prominence of socioeconomic status as a factor in models of English variation, few studies have explicitly considered speakers whose social class status changed over their lifetime. This paper presents an auditory and acoustic analysis of variation in non-prevocalic /r/ among middle-aged adults from Edinburgh, Scotland. The speakers represent three groups: the Established Middle Class (EMC) and the Working Class (WC), both of which are characterized as socioeconomically non-mobile, and a third group we call the New Middle Class (NMC), comprising individuals born to working-class families and living middle-class lives at the time of data collection. The results demonstrate that realizations of /r/ have a significant correlation with socioeconomic status, and that the effect of class further interacts with gender. NMC speakers demonstrate the highest level of rhoticity of all three groups. In contrast, WC men show extensive derhoticization and deletion, while WC women show patterns of rhoticity that are more comparable to the NMC women. The EMC speakers show more non-rhoticity than either the NMC speakers or the WC women. A consideration of the indexical value of weak rhoticity highlights the need for more robust phonetic measures distinguishing non-rhoticity from derhoticization, and to that end we consider the cue of post-vocalic frication. Overall, the results point to the need to conceptualize socioeconomic status as potentially fluid and changeable across the lifespan, thereby improving models of the relationship between social class and linguistic variation.

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