THE LABOUR PARTY AND THE CAPITALIST FIRM, c. 1950–1970

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM TOMLINSON
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Issue Framing ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist Firm ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

One of the most profound challenges facing the Labour party in the post-war period was its ability to understand and make policy to reform the private sector. Before the Attlee government, Labour had little to say on this issue, but that government's experience exposed the dangerous ‘vacuum’ this involved. In the 1950s the nature of the capitalist firm ranked alongside the alleged ‘embourgoisement’ of the working class as an issue framing Labour's ideological and policy debate. The centrality of this issue reflected the fact that understanding the firm was inextricably linked to a raft of broader arguments within the Left about the nature of modern capitalism. The benign view of the corporation that flowed from the revisionist wing of the party was challenged by the ‘declinist’ politics of the 1960s, and in office after 1964 Labour pursued a modernizing agenda which centrally involved seeking to shape the behaviour of the private sector in order to deliver the higher economic growth that Labour so much desired. The failure of this growth to materialize led to great disillusion across the party about the policies pursued by the Wilson government, and this in turn led to a fundamental rethink of policy that was to underpin the radical agenda of the party in the 1970s.

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

The Post-War Period: 1946–1972

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Ragsdale ◽  
Jerrold G. Rusk
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Growth Rate ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Abstract: The chapter considers nonvoting after World War II, a unique electoral period in American history with the lowest nonvoting rates of any period from 1920–2012. The post-war period also boasts the highest economic growth rate of any of the four periods, coupled with the early days of television which transformed politics in the 1950s. In general, economic growth and the introduction of television move nonvoting rates downward. The chapter also considers in detail the struggles leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the law’s impact on nonvoting rates among African Americans. It also uncovers that in the 1960s the Vietnam War increased nonvoting. The chapter begins an analysis of nonvoting at the individual level. The less individuals know about the campaign context and the less they form comparisons between the candidates, the more likely they will say home on Election Day.

The European policies of the Labour Party, the PS, and the SPD

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Hertner
Keyword(s):  
Labour Party ◽  
The European Union ◽  
European Level ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Eu Policies ◽  
European Policies ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Project Data ◽  
The Eu

Chapter 3 presents a broad overview of the Labour Party, the Parti Socialiste and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ positions on the European Union. First, based on Manifesto Project data, it maps the three parties’ overall degree of Europhilia. It argues that a description of the three centre-left parties as ardent Europhiles would be an exaggeration. Second, the chapter provides a short historical overview of the three parties’ relationships with the EU. It explains that in the immediate post-war years, the three parties were rather critical of the European Coal and Steel Community, but that from the 1960s onwards, they took different paths. Labour only started to unconditionally support EC membership in the mid-1980s, almost two decades after the PS and three decades after the SPD’s ‘conversion’ to European integration. Third, the chapter maps out and compares some of the three parties’ recent EU policies as well as their EU strategies. Due to differing and changing domestic circumstances, the three parties focused their attention on different EU policy areas. Overall, it becomes clear that the EU creates challenges for centre-left parties and that in government, social democrats find it difficult to realise their ambitions at the European level.

British Class Consciousness and The Labour Party

1962 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leon D. Epstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Work Force ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Modern Capitalism

Customarily, the British Labour party has been regarded as the natural product of an advanced industrial society. Given a sufficiently developed economy, like Britain's in the early years of the twentieth century, it was assumed that a socialist working-class party was due to emerge as an increasingly large and effective force. In this democratized version of Marxism, the absence of such a party in the United States had to be explained as the result of the relative immaturity of American industrial society. Labor in the United States was on the same political road as labor in Western Europe, but well behind. Especially did it seem behind labor in Britain, “the country in which modern Capitalism first emerged to full growth — the country which was, therefore, the pioneer of Labour organisation.That this entire approach needs to be reconsidered is now plain. Recent American political trends fail to support the expectation of a European-style working-class movement in the United States, and this type of party in Western Europe itself appears by this time to have had more of a past than it has a future. Socialism is hardly a thriving faith in advanced western nations, and the old class base for protest movements is being shaken as Western European societies share larger national products, assimilate increasingly their higher paid workers to bourgeois styles of life, decrease the proportion of manualists in the total work force, and provide wider educational opportunities. As Aneurin Bevan said deploringly of the new generation of British working-class voters, whose support Labour had failed to attract in the 1959 general election, “This section of the population has become thoroughly Americanized.”

Music, the Fête de l’Humanité, and Demographic Change in Post-War France

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Drott
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
Public Outreach ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines music's role in the Fête de l'Humanité, an annual festival organized by L'Humanité, the French Communist Party's principal organ. Beyond generating revenue and mobilizing support for the Party, the Fête has long served an important ritual function, fostering a sense of camaraderie among participants. Music has proven particularly effective in this regard, offering a medium through which one's membership in an imagined (communist) community could be experienced. The chapter focuses on the Fête's transformation during the 1960s and 1970s, a period that saw the Party struggle to broaden its electoral appeal beyond its working-class base. By expanding the range of musics featured at the event, its organizers sought to address an increasingly diverse electorate. Yet the Party's reliance on the Fête as an instrument of public outreach proved problematic, given that the image of inclusiveness it projected masked rather than resolved the Party's long-term demographic difficulties.

scholarly journals Experiences of political mobilization and popular participation in Milan's working-class neighbourhoods: 1945–1967

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Marco Soresina
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Integration ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War

Abstract The years 1945–55 were a period of reconstruction for Italy; the following decade was one of economic growth. An aspect of this transition is analysed here, in relation to the forms of social integration created in working-class neighbourhoods. The case-study focuses on Milan, and the two organizations studied are the consulte popolari (the ‘people's councils’), created by the left in the immediate post-war period, and the ‘social centres’ created in the mid-1950s by the IACP (the Autonomous Institute of Public Housing). Both were attempts to involve the new, outlying suburbs in the city's political life, each of them trying to adapt to different political phases. Both, I would like to suggest, succeeded in achieving certain results.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Jobson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
New Labour ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact

After an initial discussion of recent developments in the Labour Party, this introduction examines New Labour’s critique of ‘Old Labour’. New Labour often declared that Old Labour had been a fundamentally nostalgic party. Although this idea was underdeveloped and lacked analytical depth, it provides a starting point for an examination of Labour’s relationship with nostalgia. Through an engagement with existing studies on memory (and, more specifically, nostalgia), identity and power, this chapter moves on to outline how the idea of the group ‘nostalgia-identity’ offers a useful conceptual lens through which to assess Labour’s post-war development. It provides an overview of the academic literature on Labour and highlights the ways in which a study that explores the impact of nostalgia on the party’s trajectory offers something innovative. This introduction ends with an assessment of the extent, contours and significance of Labour’s male traditional industrial working-class identity in 1951.

The Siege of Harlem and Its Commune

Novel Shocks ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Black Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jane Jacobs ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

Warren Miller’s Siege of Harlem is a strange and vexing novel that draws on the “internal colony” thesis of black power thinkers and imagines Harlem’s secession from the United States. It is also a novel that marks the end of the era of urban renewal and the passing from the era of Robert Moses to that of Jane Jacobs. This concluding chapter suggests that Siege can help us refuse the forced choices between Moses and Jacobs, or the planners and the walkers, that dominate conversations about post-war planning. Siege does so, the conclusion argues, by offering a different trajectory of urban thinking and politics, one that stretches from the multicultural and often Communist-led left in the 1930s and 1940s, to the working class, Puerto Rican, and black urban revolts of the 1960s, which put forward a militantly socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist urban vision. It is this form of urbanism, the conclusion suggests, that we need to return to today.

Short Films from a Small Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Public Information ◽  
Industrial Process ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Art And Architecture

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.

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