The Essential Mike Davis

Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class

Mike Davis

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786635914
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the reelection of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

PART ONE

LABOR AND AMERICAN POLITICS

1

Why the American Working Class is Different

In 1828—as Karl Marx once reminded his readers—a group of Philadelphia artisans organized the first ‘Labor Party’ in world history. One hundred and fifty years later, a television news camera depicted a group of modern Philadelphia workers arguing in their local tavern over the candidates in the 1980 presidential election. Against a background of irreverent catcalls and hisses, one worker tepidly defended Carter as the ‘lesser evil’, while another, with even less ardor, tried to float the idea of a ‘protest’ vote for Reagan. Finally, with the nodding assent of most of the crowd, a rather definitive voice spelled out the name of the popular choice in the campaign: N-O-T-A, (‘none of the above’). He underlined his point with the declaration that he intended to occupy a barstool rather than a polling booth on election day.

In no other capitalist country is mass political abstentionism as fully developed as in the United States, where a ‘silent majority’ of the working class has sat out more than half the elections of the last century.¹ Arguably, this mute, atomized protest is the historical correlative of the striking absence of an independent political party of the proletariat in the country that once invented both the labor party and May Day.

Perhaps no other dimension of American history is simultaneously as salient and as difficult for Marxist theory as the complex evolution of the economic class struggle in relation to a political system that has managed to repulse every attempt to create an alternative class politics. A signal absence of working-class self-organization and consciousness comparable in scope to that represented in every other capitalist country by the prevalence of laborist, social-democratic, or Communist parties is the specter that has long haunted American Marxism. As a first approach to the problem, it may be useful briefly to review the perspective that classical revolutionary theory has offered on ‘American exceptionalism’.

At one time or another, Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, and Trotsky all become fascinated with the prospects for the development of a revolutionary movement in the United States. Although each emphasized different aspects of contemporary social dynamics, they shared the optimistic belief that, ‘in the long run’, the differences between European and American levels of class consciousness and political organization would be evened out by objective laws of historical development. In their view, the American working class was a more or less ‘immature’ version of a European proletariat. Its development had been retarded or deflected by various conjunctural and, therefore, transient conditions: the ‘frontier’, continuous immigration, the attraction of agrarian-democratic ideologies bound up with petty-bourgeois property, the international hegemony of American capital, and so on. Once these temporary conditions began to be eroded—through the closing of the frontier, the restriction of European immigration, the triumph of monopoly over small capital, the decline of US capital’s lead in world industrial productivity—then more profound and permanent historical determinants arising out of the very structure of the capitalist mode of production would become decisive. In this shared scenario, a systemic economic crisis of American society would unleash class struggles on a titanic scale. Furthermore the very breadth and violence of this economic class struggle would provoke escalating conflicts with state power. In such a crisis, the bourgeois-democratic institutions of American society—previously an obstacle to class coalescence—would provide a springboard for independent political action and the formation of a mass labor or socialist party. Stages of development that had taken the European proletariat generations to traverse would be ‘compressed’ in America by an accelerated process of ‘combined and uneven development’.

Thus Engels, writing in 1886, had little doubt that the dramatic growth of the Knights of Labor, together with the massive vote for Henry George in New York City’s mayoralty election, signalled the birth of mass labor politics in America. (Engels, in fact, exhorted the ‘backward’ English labor movement to take these more ‘advanced’ American events as their model.) A similar conclusion was drawn by Lenin with regard to the apparent giant strides of the Socialist Party in the elections of 1912, and by Trotsky when, in the aftermath of the great sitdown strikes of 1936–37, a labor party again seemed likely to emerge.²

Unfortunately, all these hopes for a qualitative political transformation of the class struggle in the United States have remained stillborn. The premonitory signs of a political break in the middle eighties turned out to be spurious, as renewed ethnic and racial divisions undermined the embryonic unification of Eastern industrial workers. Fledgling ‘labor parties’ collapsed, as workers were successfully reabsorbed into a capitalist two-party system that brilliantly manipulated and accentuated cultural schisms in the working class. The six percent of the presidential vote that Gene Debs won in 1912—internationally acclaimed as the beginning of the Socialist Party’s ascent to majority representation of the American proletariat—turned out to be its high-water mark, followed by bitter conflict and fragmentation. The socialist fratricide was, in turn, a manifestation and symptom of the profound antagonisms within the early twentieth-century labor movement between organized ‘native’ craftsmen and unorganized masses of immigrant laborers.

The Great Depression furnished the most ironic experience of all. Despite a cataclysmic collapse of the productive system and the economic class war that the crisis unleashed, the political battlements of American capitalism held firm. Indeed, it can be argued that the hegemony of the political system was reinforced and extended during this period. The same workers who defied the machine guns of the National Guard at Flint or chased the deputies off the streets during the semi-insurrectionary Minneapolis General Strike were also the cornerstone of electoral support for Roosevelt. The millions of young workers aroused by the struggle for industrial unionism were simultaneously mobilized as the shock troops of a pseudo-aristocratic politician whose avowed ambition was ‘the salvation of American capitalism’. To the extent that so-called ‘labor’ or ‘farmer-labor’ parties emerged in industrial areas of the midwest or northeast, they remained scarcely more than advance detachments and satellites of the New Deal.

Thus, in spite of the periodic intensity of the economic class struggle and the episodic appearance of ‘new lefts’ in every generation since the Civil War, the rule of capital has remained more powerfully installed and less politically contested than in any other advanced capitalist social formation. In the face of this dilemma, and given the apparent inadequacy of the theory of the American working class as an ‘immature proletariat’, what other perspectives are available for conceptualizing the problem of an absent political class consciousness in the United States?

One strategy might be to shift theoretical focus from the dialectic of conjunctural constraints acting upon universal processes (the global logic of class struggle and class consciousness), and to emphasize, instead, the relative permanence of the decisive sociological or cultural features that have historically differentiated the United States. This is the approach of the current of idealist interpretations of American ‘civilization’ from Tocqueville to Hartz, including the Commons–Perlman school of labor historiography, which has tried to locate the originality of American history in constitutive essences like the ‘absence of feudalism’ or the ‘ubiquity of job consciousness’. From the standpoint of this liberal metaphysics, the problem of working-class consciousness is no problem at all: the political incorporation of the industrial proletariat was predestined even before its birth by the very structure of American culture—the lack of feudal class struggles, the hegemony of a Lockean worldview, the safety valve of the frontier, and so on. Conversely, socialist consciousness is seen as the result of industrialization in the specifically European socio-historical setting littered with relics of feudalism. Traces of this grandiose but empirically suspect architectonic have tinged the writings of some Marxist writers, who have also tried to explain the specificity of the American working class in terms of some grand peculiarity of US history, such as the impact of immigration or the role of early mass suffrage.³

There is, however, an alternative methodology both to the old Marxist ‘orthodoxy’, with its faith in the eventual ‘normalization’ of the class struggle in the United States, and to the various theories of American exceptionalism, with their emphasis on the passive submission of the working class to omnipotent socio-historical determinants. First we must reconstruct the basic frames of reference for the history of the American working class.

On the one hand, we must discard the idea that the fate of the American working class has been shaped by any overarching telos (liberal democracy, cultural individualism, or whatever) or a clockwork of simple, interacting causes (upward mobility plus ethnicity plus…). All plausible explanatory variables must be concretized within the historically specific contexts of class struggle and collective practice which, after all, are their only real modes of existence. Against such positivist conceptions of a working class permanently shipwrecked on ‘reefs of roast beef’ (Sombart)⁴ or shoals of universal suffrage (Hartz et al.), Engels, Lenin and Trotsky were absolutely correct to affirm the central role of class struggle in the making of American history and in the periodic renewal of opportunities for the transformation of class consciousness.

On the other hand, the Marxist classics tended to underestimate the role of the sedimented historical experiences of the working class as they influenced and circumscribed its capacities for development in succeeding periods. Each major cycle of class struggle, economic crisis, and social restructuring in American history has finally been resolved through epochal tests of strength between capital and labor. The results of these historical collisions have been new structural forms that regulated the objective conditions for accumulation in the next period, as well as the subjective capacities for class organization and consciousness. The emphasis on the ‘temporary’ character of obstacles to political class consciousness tended to obscure precisely this cumulative impact of the series of historic defeats suffered by the American working class. As I will argue in the present chapter, each generational defeat of the American labor movement disarmed it in some vital respect before the challenges and battles of the following period.

The ultimate, though by no means preordained, trajectory of this disrupted history has been the consolidation of a relationship between the American working class and American capitalism that stands in striking contrast to the balance of class forces in other capitalist states. It is a question not merely of the ‘absence of social democracy’—although this is the most dramatic symptom—but of a qualitatively different level of class consciousness and intra-class cohesion.

Despite profound differences in national tradition as well as evident divergences in the levels of class conflict, all the proletariats of Western Europe are politically ‘incorporated’—I use this term only in a highly qualified and contingent sense—through the agency of labor reformism. That is, their relationship to capitalism is mediated and regulated at a multiplicity of levels (political, economic and cultural) by collective, self-formed institutions that tend to create and maintain a corporate class consciousness. Admittedly, in the postwar period, European workers have increasingly become subject to the ‘Americanizing’ influence of a socially disintegrative model of class culture and consumption, yet the solidity of working-class culture is remarkable and continues to provide the infrastructure for socialist and communist politics throughout Western Europe.

The American working class, on the other hand, lacking any broad array of collective institutions or any totalizing agent of class consciousness (that is, a class party), has been increasingly integrated into American capitalism through the negativities of its internal stratification, its privatization in consumption, and its disorganization vis-à-vis political and trade-union bureaucracies. As Ira Katznelson has emphasized, the absence of ‘“global” institutions and meaning systems of class’ in America has led to an extreme fragmentation and serialization of the work, community and political universes of the American proletariat.⁵ The proposed distinction, therefore, is between a reformist working class in Western Europe—historically Janus-faced in the irreducible tensions of its integrated and potentially revolutionary aspects—and a ‘disorganized’ and increasingly ‘depoliticized’ working class in the United States.

I must stress, however, that this differentiation was not inscribed, once and for all, in some primordial matrix of historical or structural conditions. If anything, this contrast has only acquired its sharpest visibility and salience during the postwar wave of economic expansion when there has been, for the first time in history, a general tendency in Western Europe—or at least the EEC countries—toward a stabilization of parliamentary democracy and the growth of mass consumption. In other words, it is precisely in the period of the most well-defined structural convergence and homogenization of political terrains that the profound differences in the historical formation of the American and European proletariats have become more striking and politically consequential. This suggests that the watershed for creating the divergence between European and American levels of proletarian class consciousness was the failure of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s to unify the American working class on either the economic or the political planes.

An analysis of this pivotal conjuncture of course requires some treatment of the accumulation of previous defeats which conditioned its outcome. The present chapter aims to be a kind of historical preface to an analysis of the contemporary crisis of class consciousness in the United States. Focusing on the changing interfaces between the economic class struggles, class composition, and the political system, I have attempted to trace the chain of historic ‘defeats’ and blocked possibilities that have negatively determined the position of the working class in postwar society.⁶ This problematic of the ‘unmaking’ of the American working class is argued in three steps:

First, by examining the unique course of bourgeois democratic revolution in the United States in relation to the emergence of a factory working class and its failure to achieve any initial political autonomy.

Second, by surveying the contradictory relationship between unifying waves of labor militancy and the turbulent recomposition of the proletariat by European immigration and internal migration. In particular, I will focus on the successive failures of ‘labor abolitionism,’ ‘labor populism’, and Debsian socialism to provide durable foundations for the growth of independent class politics or to generate the sociological supports for a unitary proletarian subculture.

Third (in the next chapter), by considering, in magnified detail, the legacy of the class struggles of the Roosevelt–Truman era in contributing to the current disorganization and weakness of working-class consciousness and militancy in the United States.

I. THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN ‘DEMOCRACY’

There have been two ‘ideal-typical’ historical paths by which independent labor politics have emerged in industrializing societies. The first, embracing continental Europe, has involved the precipitation of a proletarian current in the course of bourgeois-democratic revolution. The second, later route—followed by Britain and most of its white-settler offspring (Australia, New Zealand, and Canada)—has passed through the transformation of trade-union militancy by economic crisis, state repression, and the rise of new working-class strata.⁷ In this section, I will examine some of the most important reasons why the political terrain in the early American Republic was so unfavorable to the first of these processes.

In every European nation, the working classes were forced to conduct protracted struggles for suffrage and civil liberties. The initial phases of the active self-formation of the European working classes encompassed both elementary economic organization and rudimentary political mobilization for democratic rights. Every European proletariat forged its early identity through revolutionary-democratic mass movements: Chartism in Britain (1832–48), the Lasallean and ‘illegal’ periods of German labor (1960–85), the bitter struggle of Belgian labor for the extension of the vote, the battle against absolutism in Russia (1898–1917).

In the face of the weakness or simple treason of the middle classes, the young working-class movements were forced to carry on the democratic struggle through their own independent mobilization. Thus the strength of proletarian radicalism and the degree of its conscious self-reliance were conditioned by both the relative social power of the bourgeoisie and the extent to which the democratic revolution had been left ‘unfinished.’ In a general sense, we can distinguish three kinds of national contexts in which an original coalescence of economic and political class consciousness took place: 1) against a hegemonic bourgeoisie in the context of a restricted franchise ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part One: Labor and American Politics
• Part Two: The Age of Reagan
• Epilogue: Inventing the American Left
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index