DIMENSTIONS OF CULTURAL HETEROGENEITY

Nation formation is the second macroprocess that sets the context for the development of working-class movements. In particular, the point of interest here is national cultural standardization. Although the nineteenth-century socialist movements were decisively characterized by their international character, that is, they were “anational” when not deliberately “antinational,” their successive history showed plenty of evidence of their actually being national movements that were part of and an expression of the formation of a national culture and identity. Where the formation of a relatively homogeneous cultural national context was lacking or weak, working-class movements experienced profound problems of organizational consolidation and spread of appeal. The heterogeneity of the class cultural environment will be regarded in this chapter as a crucial element for the successful establishment and consolidation of a working class movement and of a class left electoral mobilization.

A class and social group analysis of the political mobilization process rests on a model that links the formation of social position, the development of group solidarity, and uniformity in group political action. Socialist thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century clearly regarded any social (and political) identities that were not rooted in the social position related to the productive process as supra structural factors amenable to false consciousness. They therefore assumed that the role of such identities was deemed to disappear with time. This position is echoed in recent works that implicitly or explicitly assume that the pro-left party and organizational behavior of workers is normal and that only deviation from this pattern needs to be accounted for. In this sense, other political identities are the result of the failure of the class identity.