Working-Class Identities in Europe, 1850s–1930s

This paper notes that the emergence of class-based politics preceded the advent of factory manufacture and that artisans or skilled workers continued to dominate the labour movement before 1914. It recognises that industrialisation alone does not explain the emergence of socialist politics and that working-class responses to the process have often been fragmented rather than characterised by solidarity. It first explains this in terms of the uneven nature of industrial growth between nations and within nations, and between and within industrial sectors. Hierarchies of pay and other employer strategies to divide the labour force made it even more unlikely that collective action and belief could result simply from common economic problems. Even where a repressive state, intransigent employers, as well as residential and cultural factors, did produce a large socialist movement, as in the German case, that movement did not monopolise working-class identity, which was fractured by issues of skill, gender, generation, religious confession and ethnicity. However, this does not mean that gender, generation, religious and ethnic identities necessarily obliterated the issue and awareness of class. Indeed these multiple identities often enjoyed a simultaneous existence.