Women in and after a “classless” society

2004 ◽  
pp. 79-94
Keyword(s):  
Classless Society

Class in Thatcherite Ideology and Rhetoric

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Classless Society ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter examines Thatcherite rhetoric about class and individualism. Thatcher needed to distance herself from her own, narrow, upper-middle-class image; she also wanted to rid politics of class language, and thought that class was—or should be—irrelevant in 1980s Britain because of ‘embourgeoisement’. For Thatcher, ‘bourgeois’ was defined by particular values (thrift, hard work, self-reliance) and she wanted to use the free market to incentivize more of the population to display these values, which she thought would lead to a moral and also a prosperous society. Thatcherite individualism rested on the assumption that people were rational, self-interested, but also embedded in families and communities. The chapter reflects on what these conclusions tell us about ‘Thatcherism’ as a political ideology, and how these beliefs influenced Thatcherite policy on the welfare state, monetarism, and trade unionism. Finally, it examines Major’s rhetoric of the ‘classless society’ in the 1990s.

scholarly journals Marx and history: the Russian road and the myth of historical determinism

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-86
Author(s):  
Guilherme Nunes Pires
Keyword(s):  
Social Evolution ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Internal Relations ◽  
Classless Society

This paper aims to point out the limits of the historical determinism thesis in Marx’s thought by analyzing his writings on the Russian issue and the possibility of a “Russian road” to socialism. The perspective of historical determinism implies that Marx’s thought is supported by a unilinear view of social evolution, i.e. history is understood as a succession of modes of production and their internal relations inexorably leading to a classless society. We argue that in letters and drafts on the Russian issue, Marx opposes to any attempt associate his thought with a deterministic conception of history. It is pointed out that Marx’s contact with the Russian populists in the 1880s provides textual elements allowing to impose limits on the idea of historical determinism and the unilinear perspective in the historical process.

The Notion of Power and Liberalism Evolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 35.5 ◽  
pp. 62-82
Author(s):  
Oleg A. Matveychev
Keyword(s):  
Power Analysis ◽  
World View ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Human History ◽  
History Data ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Classless Society

The author of the article makes the attempt to explain the evolution of liberalism and even broader, of human history not through the evolution of the notion of freedom, that became the philosophic mainstream already at the time of Hegel and was convenient for liberalism itself, but on the basis of the notion of power analysis that is interpreted by the liberals as opposite to freedom. Proceeding from the linguistic and political history data, the author demonstrates the multi-components character of the notion of power that is interpreted as: 1) some intriguing and “charming” authority ensuring harmony and order; 2) the source of legal violence; 3) the promise of advantages that leads to voluntary assuming certain responsibilities; 4) dependence on the source of want satisfaction; 5) passion, irrational dependence. The present notion of power structure is coherent to the Varna system specific for Indo-European nations; each Varna has its own, specific only for it, understanding of power. In various epochs and in various societies we find a specific governing notion of power. So, in Russia since ancient times the worldview of Kshatriyas prevailed and it still determines to a large extent its civilizational specifics. The classic western liberalism was characterized by the Vaishyas ideology dominance, i.e. the bourgeois class; on the contrary modern liberalism, libertarianism share the world view of the “classless society” of the Dalits (“gone astray”), whose dominance deprives the world of controllability and destructs all vertical hierarchy. The way out of the universal crisis is possible only on the basis of new historical grounds that will become, according to Heidegger, “the new beginning of history”.

Class Resilience

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-122
Author(s):  
Peter Marks
Keyword(s):  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Family Background ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Tony Blair ◽  
Margaret Thatcher ◽  
Classless Society

Alwyn Turner’s compendious study, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (2013), ends after 574 richly observed pages seemingly contradicting its title. Turner writes of John Major and Tony Blair, that ‘both had sought to create a classless society, both had failed, with wealth inequality increasing and social mobility decreasing, and both found themselves ill at ease with the kind of classless culture that emerged instead’ (574). Turner adds that Major and Blair (and before them, Margaret Thatcher) had aimed to refashion Britain as a meritocracy, where ability was more pertinent and consequential than family background and traditional networks of social power.

A Classless Society

Russia To-Day ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
Sherwood Eddy
Keyword(s):  
Classless Society

Class as a Construct in a "Classless" Society

1996 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 13-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Lynn Baker
Keyword(s):  
Classless Society

Otto Bauer and the Philosophy of Praxis – Then and Now

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark E. Blum
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Models ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Scientific Instrument ◽  
Social Experiment ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Otto Bauer ◽  
Classless Society ◽  
Social Scientific

Otto Bauer (1881–1938) has emerged once more in the thought of Western Marxists. The dominant theoretical voice of the Austrian Social Democrats in the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the First Austrian Republic, Bauer was re-examined in the 1970s and ’80s as ‘the third way’ was being explored in European politics by Eurocommunists. Bauer again is being discussed in the twenty-first century as not only a European ‘third way’, but as a model for nations across the globe. Bauer’s vision theoretically as well as tactically between 1919 and 1934, when Austrian fascism ended the political efforts of Austrian Social Democracy, was of a pluralist parliamentary governance that sought through party coalitions and the influence of social experiment a developing societal praxis whose socialist principles would realise eventually Marx’s understanding of a classless society. A gradualism in long-range strategy and tactics would lead democratically to greater collective coexistence embracing differing cultures within and beyond separate nations. Reviewed here are five publications between 2005 and 2011 which are either thoughtfully supportive or critically dismissive of Bauer’s multi-cultural models for the socialist coexistence of communities and nations. Two conference collections and three books on Bauer’s thought and political life enable the contemporary mind to evaluate the seminal promise of Bauer’s Marxist understanding, where for him Marxism was a social-scientific instrument to guide societal development.

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