On Tue, 27 Oct 1998, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Pretty scary stuff, if it's true. It is true, but, as it turns out, there
> are workers and there are workers. More specifically, Mann acknowledges
> that "Most fascist workers...came not from the main manufacturing
> industries but from agriculture, the service and public sectors and from
> handicrafts and small workshops."
I like Michael Mann sometimes, but this is just wordplay -- he's redefined the lower middle class (the clerks) as workers. The social barriers between the two were actually much larger in Germany than in the US, a heritage of the Bismarkian state and the social categories it codified. There is an excellent discussion of this in Juergen Kocka's somewhat mistitled _White Collar Workers in American 1890-1940_ (Sage, 1980). It should have been called _White Collar Workers in America and Germany 1890-1940_, since the comparison is what his book is all about: why white collar workers became fascists in Germany, and not in America, under similar depression conditions. (Yes, he considers the exceptions, like Father Coughlin, and finds them to be exceptional.) His number crunching is very careful (everything about this book reeks of carefulness) and he concludes early on that:
"After 1929, under the impact of the conomic crisis, major disparities in the political outlook of workers and white collar employees [in Germany] became apparent. While the great majority of workers stood to the left of center and voted either communist or socialist, the great majority of salaried employees were politically right of center during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Under the pressure of depression white collar workers were more apt to radicalize to the right than the left. In clear contrast to manual workers, salried employees were disproportioantely strongly represented among the voters, sympathizers, member and functionaries of the rising NSDAP."
Kocka, 1980, p. 30
There follow discussions of the limits of the numbers and of exceptions.
I should note that Kocka is not making a Marxist argument here himself. He is instead focusing on different political outcomes for the same class under the same economic conditions -- his explanatory variable is national culture, which is very Weberian viewpoint. But on this point, his work strongly supports -- and reinforces -- Louis's critique of Mann, which pertains only to what happened in Germany.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com