Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
> Unless I'm misunderstanding, it seems to me we're generally in agreement
> that superior US economic growth - you cite, among other things, labour
> productivity, land availability, and social mobility - dulled the political
> consciousness of American workers compared to their more aware European
> counterparts; that European workers and intellectuals played a prominent
> role in the introduction of early socialist ideas into the American labour
> movement; and that the descendents of immigrant families, chasing economic
> opportunities and assimilating the host culture, including it's fierce
> individualism, abandoned the more benevolent traditions of mutual aid found
> in the immigrant enclaves.
>
I think the differences among the various core capitalist states and their working classes can be easily over-estimated and the fundamental identies easily ignored.
First of all, the easy way the term "working class" is used _always_ misleads. Marx mentions someplace that in (1860 or so?) there were more servants in London alone than there were industrial workers in the whole of the UK. In other word, the "working-class movements" of ALL capitalist nations have _always_ involved only a very small proportion of the whole class. Consequently, such gains as the various "working classes" (actually, fragments of each working class) won were in all cases unevenly 'enjoyed' by much of the class.
The French & German working classes were as ineffective in stopping the mass slaughter of WW1 or the genocide of the Jews and the invasion of the USSR as the U.S. and British working classes ever were in blocking the imperialist crimes of their nations. France, for instance, probably bears the greatest guilt in respect to the Rwandan genocide.
Something like 90% of the population of the u.s. can survive only by the repeated sale of the labor power of one or more members of each household. And no one has the slightest idea _what_ sectors of that working class may lead or constitute the next period of struggle here (and I would guess that the situation is essentially the same in every other 'advanced' capitalist nation).
Therefore, ……??
Carrol