Do political parties merely represent divisions in society? Until now, scholars and other observers have generally agreed that they do. But Building Blocs argues the reverse: that some political parties in fact shape divisions as they struggle to remake the social order. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in Indonesia, India, the United States, Canada, Egypt, and Turkey, this volume demonstrates further that the success and failure of parties to politicize social differences has dramatic consequences for democratic change, economic development, and other large-scale transformations.
This politicization of divisions, or "political articulation," is neither the product of a single charismatic leader nor the machinations of state power, but is instead a constant call and response between parties and would-be constituents. When articulation becomes inconsistent, as it has in Indonesia, partisan calls grow faint and the resulting vacuum creates the possibility for other forms of political expression. However, when political parties exercise their power of interpellation efficiently, they are able to silence certain interests such as those of secular constituents in Turkey. Building Blocs exposes political parties as the most influential agencies that structure social cleavages and invites further critical investigation of the related consequences.
Do political parties merely represent divisions in society? Until now, scholars and other observers have generally agreed that they do. But Building Blocs argues the reverse: that some political parties in fact shape divisions as they struggle to remake the social order. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in Indonesia, India, the United States, Canada, Egypt, and Turkey, this volume demonstrates further that the success and failure of parties to politicize social differences has dramatic consequences for democratic change, economic development, and other large-scale transformations.
This politicization of divisions, or "political articulation," is neither the product of a single charismatic leader nor the machinations of state power, but is instead a constant call and response between parties and would-be constituents. When articulation becomes inconsistent, as it has in Indonesia, partisan calls grow faint and the resulting vacuum creates the possibility for other forms of political expression. However, when political parties exercise their power of interpellation efficiently, they are able to silence certain interests such as those of secular constituents in Turkey. Building Blocs exposes political parties as the most influential agencies that structure social cleavages and invites further critical investigation of the related consequences.
Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society
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Overview
Do political parties merely represent divisions in society? Until now, scholars and other observers have generally agreed that they do. But Building Blocs argues the reverse: that some political parties in fact shape divisions as they struggle to remake the social order. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in Indonesia, India, the United States, Canada, Egypt, and Turkey, this volume demonstrates further that the success and failure of parties to politicize social differences has dramatic consequences for democratic change, economic development, and other large-scale transformations.
This politicization of divisions, or "political articulation," is neither the product of a single charismatic leader nor the machinations of state power, but is instead a constant call and response between parties and would-be constituents. When articulation becomes inconsistent, as it has in Indonesia, partisan calls grow faint and the resulting vacuum creates the possibility for other forms of political expression. However, when political parties exercise their power of interpellation efficiently, they are able to silence certain interests such as those of secular constituents in Turkey. Building Blocs exposes political parties as the most influential agencies that structure social cleavages and invites further critical investigation of the related consequences.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804794985 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/27/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Building Blocs
How Parties Organize Society
By Cedric de Leon, Manali Desai, Cihan Tugal
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9498-5
CHAPTER 1
THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF WORKING CLASS FORMATION IN THE UNITED STATES
Chicago, 1844–1886
Cedric de Leon
THIS CHAPTER SEEKS TO EXPLAIN THE TWISTS and turns in the formation of working-class political identity in Chicago from the Jacksonian era (1828–1844) to the Haymarket Affair of 1886. The two main schools of thought in the literature on working-class formation correspond to what Pierre Bourdieu (1989) has called the "objectivist" and "subjectivist" moments of class. Objectivists claim that class formation results from the structural location of workers and their employers in the system of production. Subjectivists by contrast insist that workers come to identify as a class as opposed to another class in contexts such as labor disputes with their employers.
Yet the trajectory of class formation in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago does not fit either of these frameworks neatly. Chicago workers' first political organization was a land reform league established in 1848 to protest the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Workers organized the city's first trade unions as the slavery issue subsided in the early 1850s, but organizing dropped off as the controversy over slavery extension reemerged. Unions resurfaced midway through the U.S. Civil War. It was at this time that workers began increasingly to refer to themselves as a class. Moreover, although workers' analyses of their deteriorating conditions in the postbellum period referenced unscrupulous employers, they reserved a singular animosity for the major political parties, whom they accused of abandoning the republicanism of the American Revolution (which favored independent farming and artisanry over wage dependency) in support of free market liberalism (which viewed the individual wage contract as the ultimate source of freedom).
This trajectory bears out the broad subjectivist claim that workers come to recognize themselves as a class organically, in their own way and time, but adds that class formation may take place in contexts beyond workplace struggles, namely, in the political arena, where parties compete to articulate coalitions or "blocs" by naturalizing and denaturalizing social divisions such as race and class. Whereas Chicago workers saw themselves as an aggrieved class of producers together with farmers in the early years of the Democratic Party, and then as northern "free labor" during the political crisis over slavery, they began to identify as the working class when the major parties reframed the wage contract as a metaphor for freedom in the post–Civil War era. The city's workingmen viewed this discursive shift and the antilabor violence it permitted as a betrayal of their military service and the promise of the war, which they understood to be nothing less than the emancipation of white workers from wage dependency. In other words, whereas the antebellum period was marked by the successful articulation of workers to political parties, the postbellum period was marked by profound disarticulation.
The interlocking dynamics of articulation and disarticulation in turn helped to set the stage for the monumental clashes between capital and labor during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, not least in the Haymarket Affair of 1886, in which leading Chicago anarchists were hanged for allegedly bombing a rally that they themselves had organized. On the one hand, because of their victory in the late war, Chicago political elites claimed the coercive prerogative of the state to protect industrial capital from labor as it did from the South. Accordingly, the major parties often equated the Chicago labor movement's criticisms of capitalism with proslavery rhetoric. On the other hand, the end of the war limited the Chicago party system's ability to articulate northern workers together with their employers as partners in the Grand Army of the Republic, thereby creating room for a new mode of articulation in which trade unionists and socialists, among others, began to hail workers into a "workingman's party." The convergence of a triumphant and still belligerent northern political elite and a double-crossed working class therefore comprised the real Haymarket bomb, but its fuse, as I seek to demonstrate, had been set well before 1886.
Accordingly, this chapter is not only about the capacity of parties to articulate novel identities and forms of social organization but also about the ways in which the dissolution of previous articulations may give rise to alternative sociopolitical blocs. The postbellum eclipse of the slavery question and the major parties' failure to articulate workers with a contractual vision of a free society cleared the way for the incipient organized Left to articulate workers as a class.
CLASS FORMATION AND POLITICAL ARTICULATION
The debate over the origins of working class formation proceeds in large part from Marx's own enigmatic distinction in the Communist Manifesto between the class-in-itself (an sich) and the class-for-itself (für sich). Marx states that the goal of communism is "the formation of the proletariat into a class"; that is, from a group of workers who share the same structural position as non-owners of the means of production to a "self-conscious" revolutionary movement (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998, 51). The distinction is enigmatic, because it is unclear whether working-class formation follows inexorably from workers' structural location at the bottom of the capitalist system or if a working class can be said to exist only when workers actually identify as a class through their experience of struggle against another class.
Objectivists claim that class formation is a matter of structural position. Thus, Dahrendorf writes, "Classes are based on the differences in legitimate power associated with certain positions, i.e., on the structure of social roles." As such, an individual "belongs to a class because he occupies a position in a social organization; i.e., class membership is derived from the incumbency of a social role" (Dahrendorf 1959, 148–149). Perry Anderson likewise argued against the subjectivist notion that "class consciousness" is the "very hallmark of class formation." "Classes have frequently existed whose members did not 'identify their antagonistic interests' in any process of common clarification or struggle," Anderson wrote, adding, "the concept of class" is "an objective relation to means of production, independent of will or attitude" (Anderson 1980, 40). Erik Olin Wright reaffirmed the objectivist position when he defined class formation as "the formation of collective actors organized around class interests within a class structure" (Wright 1990, 272).
Subjectivists counter that such arguments lead analysts to unfairly chastise workers for not behaving in appropriately "classlike" ways (Somers 1997, 77). Accordingly, subjectivists favor a more relational framework, within which workers construct their own identity in historically and culturally specific contexts that may or may not fit with the revolutionary endgame that objectivists hope for and expect given workers' exploitation under capitalism. The canonical exemplar of this stance is E. P. Thompson, who, in The Making of the English Working Class, insisted, "Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs." Class is therefore "a relationship ... defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition" (Thompson 1966, 9, 11). Similarly, Katznelson and Zolberg (1986) favor a vision of class formation that is shaped by social relations that include "dispositions," which they define as either shared understandings of the social system or shared values of justice and goodness. Reflecting on Katznelson and Zolberg's framework, Steinmetz (1992) has added that successful cases of working-class formation are those in which workers elaborate coherent narratives about their individual and collective history around the category of social class.
Because the debate hinges on the relative impact of either structural position or identity, scholars of class formation are somewhat at a loss to address the impact of party politics. Przeworski's early research (1977; Przeworski and Sprague 1986), based in part on the work of Antonio Gramsci (see, for example, Gramsci 1971), is perhaps the one exception to this rule. In his now classic critique of objectivism, Przeworski urged an alternative formulation in which "economic, political, and ideological conditions jointly structure the realm of struggles that have as their effect the organization, disorganization, and reorganization of classes" (Przeworski 1977, 343). Here Przeworski attempts to resolve the theoretical antagonism between structure and identity by conceiving of class formation as the effect of both.
This notion of "class effects" finds a strong echo among scholars of democratic party politics. Within political science, Sartori (1969) has argued that parties comprise an "organizational variable" that influences the formation of social cleavages like class and religion. Elsewhere in the social sciences, Ernesto Laclau has criticized as "naïve" the view that "reduces the political forms" to "preconstituted" social groups (Laclau 2005, 7). In the introduction to this volume, de Leon, Desai, and Tugal use the concept of political articulation to denote the process through which party practices naturalize class, ethnic, and racial formations as a basis of social division by integrating disparate interests and identities into coherent sociopolitical blocs.
Following the political articulation tradition from Przeworski to the present volume, I take a subjectivist stance in regards to class formation, broadly viewing that process as having a relational dynamic instead of a straightforward structural one. However, I suggest that workers may come into their own as a class as they interact, not only with other workers or their employers but also with political parties, whose attempts to naturalize alternate social divisions may occasionally strike workers as disingenuous or worse. Of course, workers may conversely embrace these party alternatives and, in the case of labor parties, may arrive at a class identity precisely through political articulation. My own data suggest that Chicago workers (a) accepted the Democratic Party's view that they were members of an aggrieved class of producers together with farmers; then (b) abandoned the Democrats in favor of the Republican Party's view that they were partners in the northern free labor coalition against the slave South; and finally (c) repudiated both major parties as the war came to a close in favor of a view, articulated by socialists and others, that they were a class unto themselves.
METHOD AND DATA
Comparative historical methodology has moved beyond the notion that a single case such as nineteenth-century Chicago is a solitary observation or data point and thus able to generate only tentative theoretical ideas. As Rueschemeyer has argued, single case studies "can test theoretical propositions as well, and they can offer persuasive explanations," in part because they must go through "frequent iterations of confronting" alternative "explanatory propositions with many data points." This iterative process of fitting theoretical ideas to the complexities of a single case "allows for a close matching of conceptual intent and empirical evidence" (Rueschemeyer 2003, 318).
But why choose Chicago to make these particular theoretical propositions? As the queen city in the home state of both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas (the 1860 presidential nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively), Chicago was a key theater in the transformation of nineteenth-century American politics. Besides the obvious symbolic significance, Chicago manufacturing was then undergoing a dramatic shift from skilled to unskilled production in a variety of trades, a fact that allows us to assess the reactions of workers to industrial wage dependency (Jentz and Schneirov 2012; Schneirov 1998; Schneirov and Suhrbur 1988). Indeed, between 1840 and 1880, manufacturing in Chicago had increased in size from a mere $62,000 in capital investment and 414 total "persons" employed to $72,401,453 in capital investment and 79,414 total "hands" or wage workers employed (U.S. Census Office 1840 [3], 87, 302–309; U.S. Census Office1883, 960, 1047). Lastly, Chicago workers were at the vanguard of labor unrest that swept across the North in the postbellum era. Not only the Haymarket Affair, but also the nation's first May Day celebration, occurred in Chicago. This suggests that an important rupture occurred after the Civil War in the politics of working people and that Chicago was a critical site of this rupture (Green 2006; Jentz 1991). In all these ways, Chicago was really the crucible for the largest transformations going on in America at the time, prompting one historian to call it "The City of the Century" (Miller 1996).
To document the creation and suppression of competing modes of political articulation, I rely primarily on party newspapers. Nineteenth-century newspapers were the official organs of the political parties and were the principal means through which the far-flung political elites of the early republic tied their leadership and rank and file together in a common public sphere (Cornell 1999; Starr 2004). As Robertson notes, "The principle vehicle for conveying the rhetoric and practice of mass partisanship was a growing network of newspapers" through which "the web of relationships between editors, correspondents, and readers grew and thickened" (Robertson 2004, 67–68).
To document workers' reaction to the parties' attempts at political articulation, I rely on two types of data. First, I analyze letters to the editor and the minutes of labor organizations published in the aforementioned party papers as well as in the Gem of the Prairie, the organ of Chicago's antebellum land reform league; the Workingman's Advocate, Chicago's English-language trade union weekly; and The Alarm, the newspaper of the Haymarket anarchists edited by Albert Parsons. Second, I track presidential electoral returns by ward from 1844 to 1876. The returns are cross-checked against manuscript census reports and other data that describe the wards' ethnic and socioeconomic makeup to discern how majority-worker wards voted from election to election.
FROM PRODUCER TO FREE LABOR, 1844–1860
If Chicago workers' first political organization sought to bar slavery from the western territories, it was because white workers had previously been articulated to the Democratic Party together with white farmers as an aggrieved class of producers, whose economic independence had grown precarious with the advent of the factory and market economy (de Leon 2008).
The rhetorical currency of antebellum Chicago politics was what Fraser and Gordon (1994) have referred to in another context as the "discourse of dependency." Dependency was a state of noncitizenship reserved for sweated wage laborers, slaves, and women, whose current or potential deprivation was said to make them far too desperate and self-interested to reflect on the broad interests of the republic as a whole. Conversely, white male subsistence farmers and artisans were the icons of independence, for it was imagined that they lived comfortably enough off their own labor that they could steer the course of the republic without prejudice to their own enrichment.
The implications of the discourse were threefold. First, it served as the ideological justification for a farmer–worker Democratic coalition. Second, captains of American industry and finance, though economically independent, were not to be counted in the same number as farmers and workers because they were deemed incapable of seeing beyond the horizon of their next speculative scheme. The result is that northern industrialists tended to join southern planters in support of the Whig Party (Ford 1988; Holt 1999; Thornton 1978; Watson 1981; Wilentz 2005). Third, citizenship was confined to self-employed white men and as such was inflected by ethnoracial, gender, and class distinctions (Boydston 1990; Fraser and Gordon 1994; Roediger 1991).
This broad construal of dependency to include and therefore to stigmatize not only women and blacks, but also sweated white men, as unfree, exemplified the dominant brand of Democratic politics in the 1830s and early 1840s. It rendered incipient capitalist institutions such as the Second Bank of the United States the main targets of political attacks (Ashworth 1983; Blau 1954; de Leon 2008; Sellers 1991; Thornton 1978; Watson 1990; Wilentz 2005; Wilson 1974).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Building Blocs by Cedric de Leon, Manali Desai, Cihan Tugal. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Political Articulation: The Structured Creativity of Parties chapter abstractThis chapter outlines the theory of political articulation upon which it builds a new theory of parties. It begins by providing a systematic review of the existing literature on parties and social movements, arguing that existing theoretical frameworks do not sufficiently account for the process of creating both social change and social order. It argues that attention to political articulation is crucial in providing such an account. Building on the work of several theorists, including Gramsci, Laclau, and Althusser, the chapter discusses how parties draw together different constituencies and create common ground, while at the same time constructing boundaries of 'us' vs 'them'. This fundamentally political process is central to the formation of the major cleavages in society, while the integration process is fundamental to social order. The chapter outlines the means of articulation employed by different parties, and outlines the reasons why some parties are more successful than others.
1The Political Origins of Working Class Formation in the United States: chapter abstractThe scholarly debate on the origins of working class formation correspond to what Pierre Bourdieu (1989) once called the "objectivist" and "subjectivist" moments of class. Objectivists claim that class formation results from the structural location of workers and their employers in the system of production. Subjectivists by contrast insist that workers come to identify as a class in the course of labor disputes with their employers. Yet the erratic trajectory of workers' political identity in Civil War era Chicago does not fit either of these frameworks neatly. Chicago workers came to recognize themselves as a class organically, in their own way and time, as subjectivists would expect, but they did so in contexts beyond workplace struggles, namely, in the political arena, where parties compete to articulate coalitions or blocs by naturalizing and denaturalizing social divisions such as race and class.
2Continuity or change? Rethinking Left Party Formation in Canada chapter abstractScholars usually take for granted that an independent left party would take root in Canada. But despite favorable political terrain, no left party achieved long-term success prior to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in the 1930s. Why did the CCF succeed where previous parties failed? Using an "articulation" model of politics, focused on parties' role in assembling and naturalizing political coalitions, I show that the CCF succeeded because ruling parties' repressive and neglectful response to Depression-era labor and agrarian protest left these constituencies politically excluded. This allowed the CCF to articulate an independent farmer-labor alliance that eluded its predecessors. The CCF was ideologically and organizationally coherent enough to avoid co-optation, while being flexible enough to unite previously fragmented constituencies. Repressive ruling party policies created a "common foe" that broke farmer and labor groups away from previous allegiances, while CCF ideology and practice forged a new independent coalition.
3Religious Politics, Hegemony, and the Market Economy: Parties in the Making of Turkey's Liberal-Conservative Bloc and Egypt's Diffuse Islamization chapter abstractThis chapter on Islamist parties in Egypt and Turkey demonstrates the autonomous role of politics in crystallizing certain cleavages and rebuilding society around them. It first focuses on Turkey to demonstrate this claim. Divisions between Kurds and Turks, secular and pious sectors, upper and lower classes, and ultimately the ruling elite and the people have impacted the political scene for decades. These divisions found their expression in the opposition of the center-left and the center-right until the late 1980s, but after that point, Islamist leaders worked to revise these divisions. By redefining the normal citizen as a wronged yet entrepreneurial Muslim, they attacked the secular elite and thereby rendered free market identity "popular." As evidence of this claim, the chapter discusses how the lack of a professionalized Islamic party has restricted the process of Islamic neoliberalization in Egypt.
4Democratic Disarticulation and its Dangers: Cleavage Formation and Promiscuous Powersharing in Indonesian Party Politics chapter abstractEven the most strongly felt cultural and ideological identifications do not necessarily find enduring expression in national politics. When Indonesia democratized in the late 1990s, it appeared that party competition would be characterized by two primary cleavages that had been incubated under Suharto's "New Order": a regime cleavage pitting reformist opponents of the recently fallen dictatorship against its holdovers, and a religious cleavage distinguishing parties by their views on the proper political role for Islam. Yet some fifteen years later, neither a reformist nor a religious bloc exists in Indonesian politics. This chapter seeks to explain how this surprising outcome came to pass. In so doing, it aims to highlight the dangers that democratic disarticulation poses not only in Indonesia, but in young democracies around the world.
5Weak Party Articulation and Development in India, 1991-2014 chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the case of weak articulations in India between 1999-2014, arguing that the two major parties, BJP and Congress, have failed to create stable articulations that would enable a developmental transformation. Although India has undertaken a market path to development, it is characterized by high levels of poverty, as well as weakly coordinated capitalist growth. The two key questions are: why has a growing consensus for market-based development not translated into a momentum for developmentalism, and second, why, has growing democratization not led to a greater redistributive developmental thrust from below? The root cause of these problems, this chapter shows, lies not simply in the absence of state autonomy or in excessive democracy, but in the nature of the political articulations led by the two parties.
6Coda: Hegemony, Class and Democracy in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks chapter abstractThis chapter compares Gramsci's concept of hegemony with the notion of articulation as presented in the book. It argues that the two issues of social class and democracy were central to Gramsci's notion of hegemony, and that a focus on these phenomena will aid the research program of articulation going forward.