|
|
|
BOOK REVIEW
| Robin Archer, Why is There No Labor Party in the United States?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007. pp. xv + 348. US $35.00 cloth.
|
| Historians, political scientists and labour movement activists have long sought to explain why – in contrast to other advanced industrial societies and despite a history of often ferocious class struggle – there has never been a successful labor party in the United States. From the Philadelphia Workingman's Party set up in 1828, to the brave efforts of Eugene Debs, to the Farmer-Labor parties of the desperate 1930s, generations of dedicated activists sought to build class-based political parties, yet none have survived to break the stranglehold of the two-party system. |
1
|
Every so often a book emerges to challenge old assumptions, and Robin Archer's thoughtful new study does this admirably, offering radically new answers to the US labor party puzzle. In the process, Archer invites us to take a fresh look at American 'exceptionalism' as a whole. According to standard interpretations – long the stuff of undergraduate history and political science textbooks – the American workers failed to build an enduring class-based labor party for three interrelated reasons: the dominance of liberalism, established democratic institutions, and general material prosperity. This explanation rests largely on a comparison of the late nineteenth century American experience with that of older societies in Europe. Archer, however, argues convincingly that a more valid comparison is with Australia – which, like many European countries, does have a successful labor party. He concludes that
comparison of the extent to which the main potential explanatory factors were present in [both] the United States and Australia casts doubt on many of them by demonstrating that they were common to both countries (p. 233).
|
2
|
|
Both Australia and the USA were 'new', frontier societies, 'born modern', with many common social, economic, political and cultural characteristics. Yet, while the Australian trade unions laid the foundations for a strong and enduring labor party in the 1890s, a similar attempt across the Pacific at the same time failed dismally. Archer carefully examines a number of potential explanatory factors, which he groups into three broad categories: economic and social factors (prosperity, union organisation, farmers, race and immigration); political factors (early suffrage, electoral system, federalism, presidentialism, the courts, repression, the party system); and ideas and values (social egalitarianism, individual freedom, religion and socialism) (p. 19). He concludes that while there were some crucial differences between the two societies, and these provide us with explanations, these are not the ones usually advanced to explain the failure of the US labor party. |
3
|
|
Conventional wisdom has it that it was economic prosperity that sank the socialist and/or labor party ship in the United States. Perhaps the earliest statement of this thesis is to be found in Werner Sombart's famous 1905 study Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (Macmillan, London, 1976). Sombart's broadly accepted explanation was that American socialist utopias had foundered on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie. Sombart argued that because American workers enjoyed such high living standards in comparison with their European cousins, they saw no need for socialism. The same explanation is generally offered to explain the lack of a class-based labor party. Archer takes issue with this 'meat and pudding' thesis. While agreeing that American workers did enjoy considerably higher real wages than their European counterparts, he points out that by the late nineteenth century, Australia was the richest country in the world and its workers enjoyed an even higher standard of living than their US cousins. This, however, did not prevent them from building a labor party. In both countries, too, there was the potential to draw small farmers and workers into common cause. Nor does the common explanation of the existence of democratic institutions, which deprived working-class agitators of a rallying point, provide a convincing explanation. While white male American workers did enjoy the right to vote much earlier than was the case in Europe, this was also true of Australia, as Archer reminds us. The same was also true of greater social egalitarianism and the commitment to individual freedom, which were apparent in both societies despite the pretensions of Australian 'bunyip aristocrats' and neo-feudal captains of industry in the USA. |
. . . |
There are about 764 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
