Dispossession and Party Formation in Broader Comparative Perspective

This chapter shows that rather than emerging from a ready-formed cohesive industrial labor movement, these parties’ original constituency was the demoted artisan and peasantry in transition to be, but not yet, proletarianized. Second, in a related way, the chapter shows that the period of party emergence followed a process of economic and political dispossession: these parties articulated new political subjectivities in the context of eroding traditional economic and political structures. The differences in the timing of party emergence between the countries lie precisely in how these processes of dispossession developed: in Germany, the process of economic dispossession coincided with a political dispossession setting the terrain for the mass-party form, while in the British case, economic dispossession was not initially accompanied by political dispossession of the working classes, who maintained a degree of self-presentational authority, particularly in the form of “friendly societies.”