 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And we're here today to talk about American exceptionalism. Why the American working class is different? Or perhaps it's more correct to say why the American working class produced different types of social movements than was seen in Europe and not in Canada or in Japan. Why the American work class did not produce a powerful, a large socialist or communist union movement and political organization. Okay, last time we talked about Sombat and his simple-minded model, which is things happen to workers who then create institutions. Now there are several things wrong with this model. For starters, within this model, Sombat acts as if workers create the institutions of their own choosing. This is a very popular idea. People just go around, kind of rolls off the tongue. If people wanted X, then they would do Y. If they don't do Y, it must be because they don't want to do it. They don't want X. If American workers wanted socialism, they would have a socialist party. If they don't have a socialist party, it must be because the American workers don't want socialism. Well, American workers are only one part of the class struggle. And it's reasonable to say American workers are the weakest part of the class struggle. If you have conflicts, labor conflicts, they go between workers and capitalists. Capitalists who are usually fewer in number, richer, better organized, there are more resources, and there are state officials who have control over the army, over the police, over legitimation, over the law. These two, capitalists and state workers, may have more impact on the rise or fall, the success or failure of social movements than do the workers. When you get down to it, do we want to say that American workers are exceptional? Because of things that happen to them? Or do we want to say that it's the American state that's exceptional? Or that it's American capitalists who are exceptional? Either one would accomplish the failure of socialist institutions in the United States. Now, in my first book, which is on the reading list, State Making and Labor Movements, I argue that it's the American state that's different by making a comparison with the experience of French labor unions. I might add that, just in background, that I started working on that book in 1981, shortly after the United States elected Ronald Reagan, a very conservative, free enterprise Republican to the White House. And the French elected François Mitterrand to the L.E.C. Palace, the president of France. Mitterrand was head of a coalition of communist socialists and left radicals. So it really did seem like the countries were moving in divergent directions, which to some extent has continued since. So it seemed like these are two capitalist economies, two prosperous capitalist economies, the standard of living were comparable in France and the United States in the 1980s, though the United States had a higher standard of living before World War I, the period that I was examining. But the state institutions were very different. My argument in state making is that the fundamental differences in the United States, the capitalists and state officials were united. There was no significant division among America's ruling elite after the Civil War. After the Civil War, who was left on top? Capitalists, merchants, rich people. They all had the financial basis in capitalist labor relations. France, on the other hand, in the same period of the 1870s and 80s, the elite was still divided between an agrarian elite with its origins in feudal property and the capitalist elite based in capitalist property. That division, which continued well into the 20th century in France, divided those who favored the restoration of the monarchy against those capitalist bourgeois workers who favored a republic. And remember, France's republic, the Third Republic, was founded in 1871, arguably 1877 after the monarchists lost control of the Constituent Assembly. It was a very open question down to practically to World War I whether the republic was going to survive or would be replaced by a monarchy. Monarchists regularly received over 40% of the vote in French elections. Indeed, there was an attempted coup d'etat in 1900 during the Dreyfus Affair. There was another attempted coup d'etat as late as 1934. If you walk around Paris, you go to the Place de la Concorde and you look across the Seine at the Palais Bourbon, which was then and now the headquarters of the Chambre des députés. And you can see the bridge where that coup failed because the mob of right-wing fascist proto-monarchists tried to storm the Palais Bourbon and were beaten back. Following that, there was a huge rally in Paris of over a million people, communists, radicals, liberals, socialists, all marching under the tree color, singing the Marseillais, sometimes with fists in the air if they were communists, but united in defense of the Republic. That elite disunity in France meant that workers and their institutions, their unions, had allies in the state against the capitalists. Just as in the United States, there was no elite disunity anymore. It took a while, as we talked about, for things to settle down after the Civil War, but by the late 1870s it was clear it was capitalist against workers. The capitalists couldn't look to any particular group of allies among the elites. All the elites were in defense of a particular vision of free labor that underlay capitalist labor relations. They didn't have to worry about finding allies against the slaveholders because the slaveholders were gone, defeated. There was no contentious property interests in the United States. He was just workers against capitalists. And in that type of fight, American workers had to go looking to hide, to cover any radicalism, to not anger the capitalists and the state officials. So American unions learned between 1886 and 1914 that their best advantage was in avoiding strife, avoiding the types of turmoil and upheaval that will bring in the state officials. Because the state, when it intervenes in labor relations in the United States in this period, intervenes against workers. So to the standard exceptionalist model we need to add events. Workers do things, they go on strike, they create events, and events shape the workers and their attitudes. You go to American unions in 1910, 1905, and they'll tell you, we have to avoid this, we can't do that because the police will be on our necks. You go to French unions and you ask them, how are you going to achieve your ends? And they'll say, we're going to get out in the street and we're going to make the prefect, the government official, listen to us. And he'll lean on the capitalists. French workers achieved their goals, won their strikes by getting state intervention. In about a quarter of French strikes in the years before World War I state officials intervened and workers achieved at least some of their goals in virtually all of their strikes. There's no comparable data set for how often state officials intervened in the United States, but when they did, it's pretty clear workers lost. Workers in the United States unions did not benefit from state intervention, so they tried to avoid it. They kept their strikes small, they avoided radical rhetoric, they kept quiet, they became exceptional. French workers and their unions became exceptional in their own way because they had exceptional opportunities to influence the state because of the divisions within the elites. Over time in the 20th century, those divisions in European elites have been eroding. And that's something that we'll be talking about much later in the course when we talk about the decline of the social welfare state in the United States and Europe. But till then, have a nice day. Thank you. Bye-bye.