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"The English-speaking workman was in general
content to ignore the immigrants. Outside the mill he rarely
encountered them or entered their crowded streets. But
indifference often edged into animosity.. .Disdain could be
read also in the stereotyped Dago and Hunky in the short
stories that appeared in labor papers, and in the frankly
hostile remarks of native workers.
"Eager to dissociate himself from the Hunky, the
skilled man identified with the middlinp group of small
shopkeepers and artisans, and with them came to regard
the merchants and managers as his models. Whatever his
interests may have been, the English-speaking steelworker
had a psychological commitment in favor of his
employer. " (2 1 )
So the imperialist era had begun with Euro-
Amerikan wage-labor still a privileged, upper stratum
dominated by a petit-bourgeois viewpoint. And although
the new industrial proletariat was overwhelmingly European
in origin, it was primarily made up of the oppressed
national minorities from Eastern and Southern Europe -
"foreigners" widely considered "nonwhite" by the settlers.
The U.S. Empire's policy of relegating the work of
"supporting society," of carrying out the tasks of the proletariat,
to oppressed workers of other nationalities, was
thus continued in a more complex way into the 20th century.
At the same time the capitalists were raising the
possibility of buying off political discontent by offering
these proletarians Americanization into settler society.
2. Industrial Unionism
As U.S. imperialism stumbles faster and faster into
its permanent decline, once again we hear the theory expressed
that some poverty and the resulting mass economic
struggles will create revolutionary consciousness in Euro-
Amerikan workers. The fact is that such social pressures
are not new to White Amerika. For three decades - from
1890 to 1920 - the new white industrial proletariat increasingly
organized itself into larger and larger struggles
with the capitalists.
The immigrant European proletarians wanted industrial
unionism and the most advanced among them
wanted socialism. A mass movement was built for both.
These were the most heavily exploited, most proletarian,
and most militant European workers Amerika has ever
produced. Yet, in the end, they were unable to go beyond
desiring the mere reform of imperialism.
The mass industrial struggles of that period were
important in that they represented the highest level of class
consciousness any major stratum of European workers in
the U.S. has yet reached. And even in this exceptional
period - a period of the most aggressive and openly anticapitalist
labor organizing - European workers were
unable to produce an adequate revolutionary leadership,
unable to defeat the settler labor aristocracy, unable to oppose
U.S. imperialism, and unable to unite with the anticolonial
movements of the oppressed nations. We can sum
up the shortcomings by saying that they flirted with
socialism - but in the end preferred settlerism.
The Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.)
was the most important single organization of this period.
From its founding in 1905 (the year of the first Russian
Revolution) until 1920, the I.W.W. was the center of industrial
unionism in the U.S. It was the form in which the
Northern and Western white industrial proletariat first
emerged into mass political consciousness. Unlike the
restrictive craft unions of the A.F.L.., the I.W.W. organized
on a class basis. That is, it organized and tried to unite
all sections of the white working class (copper miners, auto
Solidarity, August 4, 1917,
workers, cowboys, hotel workers, farm laborers, and even
the unemployed). It was based on the European immigrant
proletarians and the bottom stratum - usually migrant -
of "native-born" Euro-Amerikan workers.
The I.W.W. saw itself as not only winning better
wages, but eventually overthrowing capitalism. It was a
syndicalist union (the "One Big Union") meant to combine
workers of all trades and nationalities literally around
the world. This was a period in the development of the
world proletariat where these revolutionary syndicalist
ideas had wide appeal. The immature belief that workers
needed no revolutionary party or leadership, but merely
had to gather into industrial unions and bring down
capitalism by larger and larger strikes, was a passing
phase. In 1900 these revolutionary syndicalist unions were
popular in Spain, France, Italy - as well as briefly in the
65 U.S. Empire.