Marxism and the American Experience

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Marxism and the American Experience

• History 351
• January 10, 2007

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Announcements

• The University is closed on Monday, Jan. 15 for
  Martin Luther King Jr. Day. No class that day.
• Please be sure to put the Hist 351 syllabus on
  your favorites list http//www.uoregon.edu/dapop
  e/351syl--w07.htm is the URL.
• A short video or website review is due Jan. 29.
  For instructions, see http//www.uoregon.edu/dapo
  pe/351webvideo--w07.htm

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More Announcements Emma Goldman Video Showings

• Well show the video on Emma Goldman this
  afternoon in 248 Gerlinger after class.
  (330-500) and again next Wednesday (Jan. 17),
  same time and place.
• A copy of the video should be on reserve in
  Knight Library soon.

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Some Links to Explore

• Marxists.org, a vast internet archive of Marxist
  writings
• A brief intellectual biography of Werner Sombart
• Brief excerpts from Robert Hunters 1904 study,
  Poverty. Hunter estimated that there were about
  ten million poor Americansabout the same poverty
  rate as in the U.S. today (12.7 in 2004)

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Some Information on Hunger in the United States
and in Oregon

• Here are some recent figures on hunger in the
  United States and in Oregon

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(No Transcript)
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Marxism in One Easy Lesson

• From Utopian to Scientific Socialism
• Discovering the laws of motion of capitalism
• Exploitation, Capital Accumulation, Worker
  Immiseration
• Contradiction and Revolution

• Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to
  lose but your chains. You have a world to win.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist
  Manifesto, 1848

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Marxisms Great Lesson/Marxisms Great Error

• Does capitalism create within itself
  contradictions that lead to crises and eventually
  capitalisms downfall?
• Contradiction between the forces of production
  and social relations of production
• Contradiction and class conflict. Does
  capitalism create its own gravediggers, the
  proletariat?

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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
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Two Paths in Early 20th Century Marxism

• If Marx was correct, would the laws of motion of
  capitalism themselves inevitably cause its
  collapse? What should Marxists do? Sit around
  and watch the process unfold?
• Two responses emerged around the turn of the 20th
  century
• Leninism in Czarist Russia
• Revolutionary vs. Trade Union Consciousness
• Vanguard PartyBolsheviks
• Dictatorship of the Proletariat
• Revisionism in Germany
• Eduard Bernstein Evolutionary Socialism
• Parliamentary Socialism and the SPD

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Eduard Bernstein/V.I. Lenin
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The (Ir)relevance of Marxism

• Determinism and destiny?
• Classes and other social groupings
• A theory of production in a consumer society?
• Dominating nature in an era of environmental
  limits?

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Werner Sombart and American Socialism Explaining
an Absence

• Why is there no socialism in the United States?
  (1906)
• The German contrast with the United States
• American Exceptionalism

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Roast Beef and Apple Pie

• All socialist utopias come to nothing on roast
  beef and apple pie.
• The American worker lives in comfortable
  circumstances. On the whole, he is not familiar
  with oppressively impoverished housing
  conditions. He is not forced out of his home
  into the tavern, because his home is not like the
  room of the worker inEurope.He is well fed
  and is not acquainted with the discomforts
  thatresult in the long run from the mixing of
  potatoes and alcohol. It is no wonder if, in
  such a situation, any dissatisfaction with the
  existing social order finds difficulty in
  establishing itself in the mind of the worker.

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Democratic Style of Public Life

• In his appearance, in his demeanour, and in the
  manner of his conversation, the American
  workercontrasts strongly with the European one.
  He carries his head high, walks with a lissom
  stride, and is as open and cheerful in his
  expression as any member of the middle class.
  There is nothing oppressed or submissive about
  him. He mixes with everyonein reality and not
  only in theoryas an equal.
• The bowing and scraping before the upper
  classes, which produces such an unpleasant
  impression in Europe, is completely unknown.

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Frontier as Safety Valve

• The mere knowledge that he could become a free
  farmer at any time could not but make the
  American worker feel secure and content.One
  tolerates any oppressive situation more easily if
  one lives under the illusion of being able to
  withdraw from it if really forced to.
• (The most famous statement of this safety valve
  concept was the essay of historian Frederick
  Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier
  in American History, 1893.)

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Sombart on the Future of American Socialism

• All the factors that till now have prevented the
  development of Socialism in the United States are
  about to disappear or to be converted into their
  opposite, with the result that in the next
  generation Socialism in America will very
  probably experience the greatest possible
  expansion of its appeal.

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Was Werner Sombart Right?

• About 1906?
• About 1930s?
• About today?
• Pedlar living in a cellar with three others, New
  York, 1892