Search

Why and under what conditions do class interests become politically salient? Theories of the "democratic class struggle" posit a relatively natural progression from economic interests to class politics, mediated by cleavage structures, political institutions, and class alliances. Instead, I develop an argument that centers on the pivotal role that parties play in both articulating and suppressing those interests. I illustrate this using a study of party-class alliances in the U.S. and Canada in the 1930s and 40s. While both countries began the period as the only industrialized countries with no labor party, Canadian labor developed an independent model of class politics through an alliance with the socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), whereas U.S. labor developed a dependent model of class politics through an alliance with the Democratic Party. To explain this I focus on the role of parties in incorporating interests and articulating different configurations of class alliances in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. In Canada, a hostile ruling party response excluded workers and farmers, keeping them available as constituencies for an independent party, while also leaving room for the CCF to develop a framework for the farmer-labor alliance. In the U.S., by contrast, the combination of New Deal policies and ruling party political maneuvering incorporated certain labor and agrarian interests and excluded others, while capturing the ideological space within which a left independent political project could have developed. The result was a dependent alliance of labor with a reactionary agrarian bloc within the Democratic Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]