MG: Agree. I think it's mistaken to see more differences than similarities between European and American capitalism and between their respective working classes, as Wojtek and others are inclined to do.
Broadly speaking, the working class everywhere has gone through the same historical experience within the boundries of their respective nation states. The class relations and working conditions under capitalism which generated industrial conflict in factories, mines, mills, and transport, and subsequently within the expanding public and service sectors ,were little different in America than in Europe, nor were the early forms of workplace struggle, the process of combining into trade unions, the successful campaigns for shorter hours and the universal franchise, the winning of the right to organize and strike, and the steady amelioration of workplace and social conditions.
The main difference has been in the way each labour movement historically engaged in poltical action to achieve these reforms at the state level. The American labour federations, in line with Gomperism and with the conspicuous exception of the IWW, accepted capitalism and relied on the Democrats, a party controlled by capitalist interests, to advance its goals. The European and British unions formed their own independent labour and social democratic parties which were programatically committed to the overthrow of the system and its replacement by socialism.
Despite the polemical heat engendered over generations around the issue of independent lasbour political action, capitalist welfare states with similar features emerged on both sides of the Atlantic (with health care a notable exception still outstanding in the US). The embourgeoisified European social democratic parties long ago abandoned any pretence of replacing capitalism with social ownership so there is now nothing to distinguish between their programs and that of the US Democrats, to whom they are firmly allied. Though unions are still more widely accepted in Europe and the welfare state is stronger at the margins, the trend is unmistakably towards a weakening of both the labour movement and social safety net, also as in the US.
> 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.
MG: Agree.
>
> 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.
MG: You place way too heavy a burden for the working classes for what are the crimes of its ruling classes. It's true the European working classes, like many American workers today, were infected with the national chauvinist, militarist, and racist prejudices common to all imperialist powers, which reached it's nadir at the outbreak of WWI. . But there also quickly developed a strong internationalist resistance to the war among civilian and uniformed workers as it progressed in all of the belligerent countries, which reached it's high point in mass strikes and mutinies and revolution, all of which mightily combined to help to bring the war to an end. So in that sense you are wrong in asserting that the "French & German working classes were...ineffective in stoppoing the mass slaughter" or that the workers in the West, including in the US, were similarly ineffectual in contributing to the unsuccessful invasion of the USSR,
Further, I attribute the political responsibilty for the weak resistance to fascism and imperialism to the leadership of the CP's and SP's rather than to the great numbers of their members and organized workers who offered resistance in the best way they knew how, oftentimes heroic and fatal. For sure, there also were and are great numbers of working people who are political ignorant and who have acquiesced in varying degree to state-sponsored atrocities - Iraq being the latest example - but I don't see what value there is in moralizing about "collective guilt" which serves, IMO, as an impediment to a deeper understanding of the problem and how to address it..
> 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, ??
MG: Therefore, let's see where things lead. Or start proselytizing in a small circle or a mass party, if you find that activity meaningful, no?