In Search of a “New” Historical Subject: The End of Working-Class Culture, the Labor Movement, and the Proletariat

Two debates currently mark West German discussions of social history. The first centers around the contention of an "end of the labor movement." The second focuses on the "New History Movement" with its related efforts to describe the everyday life of the past (Alltagsgeschichte) and to rewrite history "from the bottom up ." Certainly the Social Democrative party (SPD), the trade union movement, and perhaps even the cooperative public-sector economy (Gemeinwirtschaft) consider themselves to be part of the continuity of the German labor movement. This view, however, is contested. Some observers see a general crisis or argue the demise of the "old" labor movement. While controversy raged during the years of the Weimar Republic over which faction represented the "legitimate" labor movement, such disputes today play an insignificant role. Current critics cast doubt not only on political legitimacy, but even question the idea of the labor movement as it now exists and its relation to the social base that it presumably represents. The work of Theo Pirker has been particularly effective in publicizing the thesis of an end to the labor movement. Pirker argues that after 1945, the West German labor movement lost touch with its working-class constituency. The SPD, says Pirker, integrated itself deeply into the state, while the trade unions became little more than insurance agencies. He maintains that statism and reformism in the SPD and in the trade unions, as well as the self-imposed obligations of the cooperative economy, have made it increasingly difficult to speak of a genuine labor movement in the Federal Republic. Pirker contends that the integration of social democracy into West German society took place without transforming either the capitalist system of production or established relations of political power. Such integration resulted from an abandonment of the party's roots within working-class culture. Here we must draw an important distinction between "workers' culture'" and the culture of the labor movement. The former includes areas such as housing