A Japanese Approach to Stages of Capitalist Development by Robert Albritton

Author:Robert Albritton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030990374
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Class and Class Struggle

The alliance between big banks and big industry creates a fraction of capital, which, following Hilferding, we have called “finance capital”. It is this fraction of capital that is economically dominant in the stage of imperialism. Beyond this confident and straight forward assertion, the situation becomes complex, and that is because the dominant mode of capital accumulation is fractured into different national capitalisms with different class structures and forms of class struggle. As argued previously the two most successful and most typical capital accumulators were Germany and the U.S.

In Germany a landlord class only recently emergent from feudalism, but becoming rapidly commercialized, was politically dominant, while the working class was increasingly attracted to the first mass Marxian socialist party, the SPD (Social Democratic Party in Germany). The threat from the left pushed finance capital and the landlords into an alliance. Because of the strength of the left, major strikes always raised the spectre of mass insurrection. For this reason, every effort was made to prevent mass strikes in heavy industry, and when they did, on occasion, occur, they tended to be short-lived. There was a real fear of violence and of even a small spark setting off a general conflagration. The state, therefore, was typically quick to intervene and bring about a peaceful settlement.

In the U.S. finance capital tended to be both economically and politically hegemonic, and in so far as there was a mass-based opposition, it took the form of agrarian populist movements. The industrial working class was not organized into a strong union movement or a mass socialist party. Since unions and strikes were not normalized as a part of a collective bargaining system, they were strongly opposed by management as bad precedents that could eventually infringe on managements’ right to have absolute control in the work place. The immediate threat in the case of the U.S. was not so much socialism as the undermining of the sacred rights of management. The state could afford to let strikes happen, could let them be long, and could let them be violent (within limits).55 Strikes could be absorbed by the spacious and anarchical social landscape of America. Management could feel free to resort to armed force, and workers often responded in kind. State troops were called out only in the most violent strikes, and then, not so much to stem mass insurrection, which was never a real threat, as to reestablish civil order.

Although the American state and big business had a different attitude towards strikes because of its different social environment, the more important point to make emphasizes the similarity between German and American big business in their adamant opposition to trade unions. In both cases the steel magnates successfully refused to bargain with trade unions, and used their power and influence to undermine and destroy the union movement.

Because of the paternalism and repression in the U.S., the new immigrants that flooded into heavy industry made organizing difficult. Yet, despite all these obstacles, growing militancy in the four years leading up to World War I did result in some important changes to the benefit of workers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.