U.S. history examined from a Marxist view

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higher living standards acted as a safety valve for working-class discontent.

Dawley demonstrates that the system of artisan production was an obstacle to capitalism because of the high degree of control exercised by the skilled worker over the pace, quality, and quantity of his or her work. In addition, the interdependence of artisan households allowed them to escape some of the constraints of the market, as they could and did exchange services and goods directly.

Dawley does not romanticize this period, however, pointing out that while the entwinement of personal authority and property rights created a sense of community, it also tended to prevent the BOOK REVIEW formation of class solidarities. While personal interaction and payment in kind softened the inequalities of property ownership, they also disguised the conflict over the wage payment between master and journeyman.

The establishment of the factory system represented the final triumph of capital over the work process, and it led rapidly to the formation of unions and workers' parties. Traditional accounts of the struggles of Lynn shoemakers have held that they were artisans protesting competition from unskilled labor. These accounts have also asserted that American laborers struggled merely over a more just distribution of the fruits of their labor, rather than, like their European counterparts, challenging the system of capitalist production.

Activists and industrial workers To the contrary, Dawley shows, the Lynn activists were predominantly industrial workers. They were militant, well-organized, and particularly effective because the exceptionally large numbers of female workers in Lynn permitted the development of a working-class movement united rather than divided on the basis of sex. They opposed capitalists, not other workers. Not a single strike was directed against unskilled workers or "green hands."

Yet it remains true that Lynn workAssI cansalias irnt rı ers, and the 19th-century labor movement in general, failed to sharply delineate a comprehensive working-class program. The vagueness of their "anti-monopoly" slogans allowed them to join political parties ostensibly representing the working person but in fact dominated by business interests. Thus, after the demise of the Knights of Labor, unions increasingly limited themselves to bread-and-butter demands.

Traditional explanations of labor's failure to chart a more revolutionary course in the 19th century center on the supposedly widespread satisfaction with a system that could still provide cheap land, significant social mobility, and a higher living standard than in Europe. In this self-serving analysis of American history, workers are seen as motivated, then and now, solely by considerations of individual economic advancement.

But Dawley points out that social mobility was in fact quite limited even in the 19th century. Furthermore, U.S. living standards, although relatively higher by European terms, did not stop workers from protesting their position relative to the capitalists. Workers' consciousness, moreover, was not directed primarily to individual enrichment: "Industrial workers looked mainly to collective action to improve their condition... [and] most wage earners sought to rise with their class" (p.233). The limits of the 19th-century labor movement lay not in a lack of class solidarity or militancy but in the failure to achieve independent political action.

One last progressive task Dawley's research suggests that the reasons for labor's political failures in the 19th century are to be found in the conjunctural circumstances that gave the American capitalist class one last progressive task to accomplish just as the worst effects of industrial capitalism were beginning to be felt. The association of early democratic reforms with the demands of small property-owners had created an illusion that property rights were compatible with equality.

Although Dawley relates this only to the American revolution, it was true in Europe as well. The early European 00... workers' movements also believed in the possibility of convincing their employers of their just demands. But in Europe this illusion was shattered by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, when the bourgeoisie proved conclusively its willingness to sacrifice its supposed political ideals to the defense of property.

In America, however, the presence of slavery gave the capitalists one more goal that was objectively in the interests of working people as well. The struggle against slavery temporarily obscured class differences in politics, allowing the capitalists, by virtue of their opposition to the Southern slave monopoly, to gain control of the political parties in the between a manufacturer and a banker? But... when has a manufacturer bargained for better terms with the bank by sending Pinkertons to shoot up the board meeting? What in American history is the businessman's counterpart of the workers' experience at Ludlow? When has an American corporation been destroyed by federal troops the way the American Railway Union was destroyed in the Pullman strike?" (p. 181)

In raising these questions Dawley forces the reader to take sides. At the same time he points out the potential that American workers have to end the inequality of capitalist production relations. And he does all this with more rigorous scholarship and intellectual integrity than the so-called "objective" historians who by refusing to "take sides" actually perpetuate the advantages of the capitalists.