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. 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’.Īt one time or another, Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, and Trotsky all became fascinated with the prospects for the development of a revolutionary movement in the United States. The absence of the level of working-class self-organization and consciousness represented in every other capitalist country by the prevalence of labourist, social-democratic, or Communist parties is the spectre that has long haunted American Marxism. 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. footnote 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 labour party and May 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.

He underlines his point with the declaration that he intends to occupy a barstool rather than a polling booth on election day. Finally, with the nodding assent of most of the crowd, a rather definitive voice spells out the name of the popular choice in the campaign: n-o-t-a, (‘none of the above’).

Against a background of irreverent catcalls and hisses, one worker tepidly defends Carter as the ‘lesser evil’, while another, with even less ardour, tries to float the idea of a ‘protest’ vote for Reagan. Now, one hundred and fifty years later, a television news camera depicts a group of modern Philadelphia workers arguing in their local tavern over the candidates in the 1980 presidential election. I n 1828-as Karl Marx once reminded his readers-a group of Philadelphia artisans organized the first ‘Labour Party’ in world history.

Engels conditions of the working class