Historians of Marxism: was there One Weird Trick to how early socialists installed horizontal class consciousness overriding vertical tribal consciousness?
From the perspective of 120 years later it looks like a magic trick.
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Basically it's because (1) employers were such assholes and (2) in Europe the emerging model of liberal democracy was seen as a trick to make workers' life even more miserable. (Democracy being a given in the US explains why Marxism never settled there—cf. Louis Hartz's book.)
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The Marxist movement grew by polarizing against employers and bourgeois democratic values at the same time. If you revere employers as "job creators" and accept democracy as a given => no Marxism => tribal society.
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Getting people to do hard repetitive interchangeable tasks for 10 hours a day in a miserable, dangerous factory does wonders for boosting class consciousness.
Socialism is always a victim of it's own successes.
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It wasn't called The International for nothing.
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It's all about the common enemy. The French republic threw peasants from each nation it rolled over against aristocratic armies unprepared for the unwashed masses. This pan-european revolution was a populist uprising that spanned the continent. Communism used the same tricks.
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Issue of perspective. “Horizontal” is only horizontal in retrospect. We are always slicing and dicing identity - country, nation, religion - don’t forget the European aristocracy was still a *thing* when Marxism took off
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The trick was not done by the marxists, but by the railroads. Huge growth of cities, markets, companies destroyed pre-industrial social fabric and created demand for new structures.
("Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein." Karl Marx)
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