Well, the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill. When growing up within that ‘greater militancy and political consciousness’ lots of us thought that US living standards were something to aspire to. It is true that the trade unions in Europe were generally integrated into Social Democratic parties that were the opposition and sometimes even the governing parties. But they really were not as radical as that sounds. Those parties – and those unions – were the institutions that represented the integration of the working class into capitalist society, just as consumerism and anti-communism did in America.
Marv is right too that the Social Democratic movement was for the most part dismantled in Europe in the 1980s, and the European working class today is much less unionised than it was, especially in Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The trend is less pronounced in Southern European and Scandinavian countries – though pointedly, the former are the places that are the focus of the current European austerity drive. I regret to say it, but despite the high profile of the recent ‘Occupy’ protests in England and Spain, and the Syntagma square protests, overall the ruling class has got away with whatever it wants, even to the point of forcing out the elected governments of Greece and Italy, replacing them with governments of technocrats, tasked with cutting public expenditure and wages. What is remarkable is that this anti-democratic measure is mostly accepted.
Pointedly, though, most of this misery is contained in the European periphery, and the ruling classes in Britain, Germany and France have been cautious in unleashing a full-blown assault on mass living standards. That is probably more to do with their weakness than the strength of working class organisation, though.