Marvin Gandall wrote:
>There's lots of literature, of
>course, on why there was no lasting socialist movement in America. I don't
>think you really have to look that far; America's constantly expanding
>economy, built on the continent's great wealth, produced a more powerful
>capitalist class able to provide more consistent upward mobility to
>successive generations of immigrants, as well as shelter from the two wars
>which ravaged Europe and served to raise the political consciousness of its
>working class. Immigration, as well as race, also served to divide the US
>working class to a greater degree than was the case with the more
>homogenous
>working classes in the European states.
-All true, but there's also Dan Lazare's favorite argument: the -constitutional structure of the US, with its divided government and -federal system all designed to frustrate popular power.
And yet European countries have had equally divided governments -- France's polarization between Parliament and President as extreme as in the US and strongly federal systems like Germany -- yet overcome many of those problems. Of course, my favorite villian is the Supreme Court as the true distinguishing factor in US history, but even I will not push that structural issue too hard.
The evidence of the power and violence of private capital in the United States historically is quite compelling. Some folks on this list point to fascism in Europe as showing a greater degree of violence, but in fact I would argue that it was precisely because US corporations were able to successfully both privatize the violence needed to suppress radical movements, from the Klan to the Pinkertons with the non-legislative support of both the military and the courts, that corporate America didn't need a fascist government to achieve many of their major aims. Fascism in Europe was in many ways the sign of the weakness of capital power in Europe in exerting their will in the purely economic sphere, not a sign of their strength.
Nathan Newman