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Let us start at the beginning by asking what was the European left in its heyday. The defining characteristic of the post-war European left (which was distinct from the eastern European left of the time) was the democratic fight for the rights of working people. Shortly after the Second World War, most of the mainstream European left rejected Communism, and accepted a democratic path towards the emancipation and support of the working class. During the golden age of post-war development, the left participated in the construction of European welfare regimes, and where it has been most successful – in Scandinavia – it built up universalistic, egalitarian, and predominantly tax-funded and state-run systems of welfare provision.
In this construction, the parties of the left have primarily leaned on a significant and relatively homogenous group of working class electorates. These electorates were since the late 19th century defined by a strong sense of group belonging, or ‘class consciousness’. This consciousness was constructed from the cradle and lasted to the grave. It was passed on from parents to children, and cultivated by a plethora of party-associated organisations, such as daycare centres, sports clubs, choral societies, women’s clubs, and others. Together with workers’ unions organising the work on factory floors, and later in offices, these organisations helped construct a working-class subculture that permeated the social as well as the political, and that ensured the electoral stability of the European left.
Seymour Martin Lipset suggested that the greatest achievement of the left had been the lifting of the working class away from authoritarianism and towards cosmopolitanism espoused by left-wing intellectuals. Indeed, the general success of the left in capturing and ‘educating’ the lower social strata profoundly shaped European party systems. In western Europe, the political left has been uniformly and continuously associated with progressive policies not only in the economic domain, but also in non-economic matters such as the environment, women’s rights, and (slowly and shyly) the rights of minorities – both ethnic and sexual.
Somewhat paradoxically, the left’s success precipitated its own demise in a dialectic fashion. First, the emancipation of the working class – primarily the extension of access to higher education – changed the working class and its dependence on left-wing subcultures and organisations. Second, the left’s enabling of the search for rights allowed younger generations to seek personal liberation from traditional hierarchies, including those of the left.
From proletariat to ‘precariat’
Having lived in Gothenburg, Sweden, the home of the Volvo, I eagerly visited the Volvo factory, looking forward to meeting the contemporary proletariat. What did I see? Halls and halls of conveyor belts shuffling skeletons that would become fancy SUVs in about an hour, while silver robotic arms added various parts to them. And the working class? I saw precious few of them. They were mostly young women, sitting on comfortable chairs surrounded by computer screens and keyboards, listening to their iPods… I later learned that these workers earn as much as Swedish university professors (that means – a lot).
The traditional working class as we imagine it from the times of Henry Ford does not exist anymore. Most of the workers at Volvo with their above-average pay, comfort and job security can hardly be considered as such. Today’s working class is much less visible, and much more atomised. Today’s working class are the masses of unskilled service workers who predominantly cook, clean or drive. Often, their jobs are short-term or part-time, and low-paying. These people do not come into contact with each other nearly as much as the traditional factory-floor workers did. They are more often than not from diverse minority backgrounds, and thus are separated by cultural boundaries. In short, these people have significantly reduced ability to organise, and they do not. As my research with Allison Rovny shows, their political belonging is weak, and – in the absence of a formative subculture – it is malleable.
The extension of access to higher education has increased the individual ability of people to process more complex information and make their own choices. As education also brings better jobs, this process has created more cognitively and financially independent citizens. The 1968 generation opted for more socially liberal and less hierarchical politics, forming new social movements and later political parties that espoused left-wing economics, but that were defined by their social and cultural openness.
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