MARX, MARXISM AND THE BRITISH WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT: SOME CONTINUING ISSUES FOR THE 21st CENTURY
<p class="first" id="d333498e59">For Marx the British working class was both a practical inspiration and a challenge. Britain's was the world's first majority proletariat and in the 1840s was also the first to create a mass working class pa...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Pluto Journals
2011-11-01
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| Series: | World Review of Political Economy |
| Online Access: | https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.2307/41931950 |
| Summary: | <p class="first" id="d333498e59">For Marx the British working class was both a practical inspiration and a challenge.
Britain's was the world's first majority proletariat and in the 1840s was also the
first to create a mass working class party. Yet in the second half of the 19th century
British trade unions changed direction, allied themselves with bourgeois political
parties and worked within the assumptions of the existing system. Marx's explanation
of this transformation is, the article argues, of continuing importance for our understanding
of working class consciousness—with its key elements carried forward by both Luxemburg
and Lenin in their critique of the revisionism of the Second International. The main
intent of the article is to use more recent examples of working class mobilization
in Britain to show the continuing relevance of this analysis. It focuses in particular
on the issue of the relationship between the working class and a Marxist party. In
doing so it draws on the Soviet school of Vygotsky and Leontiev to argue for a dialectical
and materialist understanding of the development of working class consciousness in
which the role of a Communist Party, in Marx's terms, remains critical.
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| ISSN: | 2042-891X 2042-8928 |