“Red Saxony!”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Retallack
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Reform Debate

The long build-up to the Reichstag elections of 1903 produced a dramatic outcome when Social Democrats scored an overwhelming victory. The epithet “Red Saxony” was born overnight, and thereafter it remained a triumphal shout for Social Democrats and a nightmare for their enemies. This chapter begins by examining the 1903 election in its local, regional, and national contexts. The SPD’s organizational strength and élan are considered in light of the shock this election produced. The election also restarted a suffrage reform debate that convulsed Saxon political society until 1909. The Saxon government presented a complicated, hybrid suffrage proposal at the end of 1903. It was torpedoed by the anti-socialist parties in the Landtag. But by 1905 this defense of Saxony’s three-class suffrage had confounded National Liberal attempts to challenge Conservative hegemony, and it fueled further working-class protests.

Worker and the Welfare State in Imperial Germany

1991 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 18-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Steinmetz
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Social Democratic Party ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
The Social ◽  
Insurance Funds ◽  
The Welfare State

A complex relationship existed between working-class formation and the development of the welfare state in Imperial Germany between 1871 and 1914. In the 1880s, the Social Democratic party voted against the three major national social insurance law's, and many workers seemed to spurn the incipient welfare state. But by 1914, socialists were active in social policy-making and workers were participating in the operations of the welfare state. Tens of thousands of workers and social democrats held positions in the social insurance funds and offices, the labor courts and labor exchanges, and other institutions of the official welfare state. Hundreds of workers had even become “friendly visitors” in the traditional middle-class domain of municipal poor relief. This shift is interesting not only from the standpoint of working-class orientations; it also challenges the received image of the German working class as excluded from the state —an interpretation based on an overly narrow focus on national parliamentary politics.

Crisis and Retrenchment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Retallack
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
The Right

This chapter begins by examining the violent street protests in 1905 in favor of suffrage reform in Saxony. At this time, the authority of Saxony’s state ministry reached a new low, and opponents of Social Democracy were forced to temporize even as they considered which suffrage reform proposals to adopt. Then the culture of working-class protest is examined from the perspective of Social Democracy’s new confidence and bourgeois fears of “the rabble.” This chapter’s second section examines the setback suffered by Social Democrats in the Reichstag election of 1907, and the lessons they and their enemies learned. This section examines the reasons for Social Democratic losses in Saxony, which included a new willingness on the Right to undertake the hard labor of grass-roots agitation. Yet the Right still sought to slow or halt Germany’s political democratization.

Social Democrats and Communists in Weimar Germany

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim C. Häberlen
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter discusses the Social Democratic and Communist Parties during the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic was the working-class movement’s biggest accomplishment; and yet, it was also an immense disappointment for many in the working-class movement. Social Democrats considered the achievements of the republic, such as equal voting rights and the extension of the social welfare state, a tremendous victory; for Communists, by contrast, the revolution of 1918 had not gone far enough. They had hoped that Germany would follow the Soviet Union’s example towards socialism, and when this did not happen, they felt that Social Democracy had betrayed the revolution. The result was a lasting division within the working-class movement, which the chapter analyses. The chapter first inquires about the role both parties played in the foundation of the republic; it then looks in more detail into the parties during the republic, emphasizing the Social Democrats’ support for Weimar, and the Communists’ attempts to prepare for a revolution in non-revolutionary times; finally, the chapter explores how both parties responded to the economic depression and the mounting political violence at the end of the republic.

UK Labour Party is unlikely to split before 2020 vote

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Party Members ◽  
The Right

Significance While 62% of party members and registered supporters voted for Corbyn, over 80% of members of parliament (MPs) supported a vote of no confidence against him on June 28. However, the current crisis engulfing the party has deeper roots than Corbyn's leadership. Impacts A comfortable Conservative victory at the next election is highly probable. Labour's woes mean that the real dividing line in UK politics is currently between the right and centrist wings of the Conservative Party. Labour's struggle for a clear identity is shared by other European centre-left parties, including Germany's Social Democrats. Corbyn appeals to the radical left while traditional working-class voters increasingly favour the identity politics of the populist right.

The “Polishness” of Production: Factory Politics and the Reinvention of Working-Class National and Political Identities in Russian Poland's Textile Industry, 1880-1910

Slavic Review ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura A. Crago
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Social Democratic Party ◽  
National Union ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The Social ◽  
Polish Society

While the development of nineteenth-century Polish nationalism has received considerable scholarly attention, it has almost always focused on how the intelligentsia became the standard-bearers of Polish national consciousness. As a result, we know very little about how other members of Polish society constructed national identities. This is particularly perplexing when it comes to studying Russian Poland's workers, for there was no dearth of Polish nationalist activity among these workers. National demands articulated by Łodź's Polish workers during strikes in 1892, for example, inspired a group of social democrats to abandon internationalism and instead create the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). During the revolution of 1905, nationalism once again assumed an important place in both working-class protest and organization. Workers played a prominent role in the Polish school strikes. They also supported and sustained a uniquely Polish phenomena—a nationalist working-class political party, the National Union of Workers (NZR). Although the NZR and its constituent trade unions could be found within every industry within Russian Poland, the organization gained its greatest foothold within the textile industry. Moreover, it was within the textile industry in 1906 where bitter debates between nationalist and socialist workers erupted in violence after a disgruntled weaver from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) concluded a political argument with an NZR coworker by gunning him down in the street.

scholarly journals “The road from Mandalay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking it aren’t immediately clear”: A World-System Biography of George Orwell

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-338
Author(s):  
Brendan McQuade
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Action ◽  
World System ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
The Road ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Historical Moment

George Orwell is one the best known and highly regarded writers of the twentieth century. In his adjective form—Orwellian—he has become a “Sartrean ‘singular universal,’ an individual whose “singular” experiences express the “universal” character of a historical moment. Orwell is a literary representation of the unease felt in the disenchanted, alienated, anomic world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This towering cultural legacy obscures a more complex and interesting legacy. This world-system biography explains his contemporary relevance by retracing  the road from Mandalay to Wigan that transformed Eric Blair, a disappointing-Etonian-turned-imperial-policeman, into George Orwell, a contradictory and complex socialist and, later, literary icon. Orwell’s contradictory class position—between both ruling class and working class and nation and empire—and resultantly tense relationship to nationalism, empire, and the Left  makes his work a particularly powerful exposition of the tension between comsopolitianism and radicalism, between the abstract concerns of intellectuals and the complex demands of local political action. Viewed in full, Orwell represents the “traumatic kernel” of our age of cynicism: the historic failure and inability of the left to find a revolutionary path forward between the “timid reformism” of social democrats and “comfortable martyrdom” of anachronistic and self-satisfied radicals.

A New Blue-collar Force

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 29-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Adorf
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Party System ◽  
Blue Collar ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
German States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alternative For Germany ◽  
The Welfare State

Within a mere five years, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has established itself in the German party system. During the same period, however, it has undergone a significant ideological transformation as well. Initially regarded as a direct competitor to the small-government Free Democrats, the AfD has since adopted the tried-and-tested electoral approach of other rightwing populist actors by embracing welfare chauvinist positions, linking the survival of the welfare state to that of the nation state. In doing so it has made substantial inroads into the blue-collar electorate, in some German states even overtaking the Social Democrats as the preferred choice of the working class.

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