--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> The American labour movement grew out of its own
> soil, and I'd dispute that
> the culture of social solidarity which found
> expression in both the IWW and
> CIO were essentially European imports, as you
> suggest.
>
> Union militancy in the US was contained and
> eventually suffocated by
> economic growth and improvements in working
> conditions and living
> standards, notably the widespread acquisition of
> homes and other personal
> assets - what you describe as "massive
> suburbanization and consumerism" -
> all of which which moved the political centre of
> gravity in the US unions to
> the right. But the same process has unfolded
> belatedly in the other OECD
> countries, which lagged the US in economic growth
> and where the socialist
> left had a much more considerable presence in the
> unions.
[WS:] I do not dispute that American labor movement grew out of its own soil. All I am arguing is that: (i) labor movement required a precondition - social solidarity ties; (ii) those social solidarity ties have its origins in immigrant communities, and (iii) those social solidarity ties have been weakened by the particularly nasty form of capitalism that grew on the Amerikan soil.
I think that proposition (ii) is most difficult to prove empirically - all we have is anecdodal evidence of tightly knit immigrant communities. Of course it is impossible to tell whether social solidarity networks were Old World relics brought across the ocean, or someting that grew out of the US soil. Probably both.
But whatever the source of those social solidarity networks might have been, i think that it is difficult to argue with proposition (iii) of my argument - that they were destroyed in this country to a far greater degree than in Europe due to a particularly virulent form of capitalism that developed here. That virulent form of capitalism combined high industrial productivity with peculiar demographic composition (vis a vis Europe) characterized by low density (and thus land availability) and high ethnic heterogeneity, and the ideological hegemony of the WASP business class.
These three elements allowed social engineering on a much larger scale than it was ever possible in Europe. It involved continuous physical relocation of millions of workers, upward mobility opportunities to select groups, and fanning of ethnic and racial tensions - which undoubtedly weakened communities and social solidarity ties. At the same time, the American middle class has been ideologically aligned with the bosses and capital owners through shared values (individualism, free market, and pursuit of wealh accumulation) - unlike in most European countries, where middle class were either ideologically aligned with labor (e.g. Scandinavia) or split between labor and capital (e.g. Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy, or Czechoslovakia).
This obnoxious mix of weak social solidarity ties, capitalist social engineering and capitalist cultural hegemony form the social environment that suffocates labor organizing in this country. I think it is important to take this into account, before embarking on guilt tripping (Left's specilialte de la maison) against evil union bosses.
Wojtek
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