Theory

The Second Industrial Revolution brought nationally integrated economies, stiffer international competition, and commercialization of agriculture throughout the West. To each country it brought capital concentration, industrial science, expansion of the metallurgical and chemical industries, of mining, and of transport, and the corporation. In every country this greatly expanded and massified the urbanindustrial labor force and led to employer pressure on wages, hours, and the de-skilling of artisans. This economic revolution was astonishingly similar in all countries, and workers responded with similar, though ambiguous, collective organizations.

This chapter charts the resulting conflict between capitalists and workers in several countries. It focuses on explaining the curious outcome that such marked economic similarities among countries generated varied worker ideologies – all six types distinguished in Chapter 15 – and varied outcomes of industrial class struggles. Russia was on the road toward revolution; Germany seemed on a different, quasirevolutionary road; Britain was embarking on a mildly mutualist road; the United States, on a sectionalism largely devoid of socialism; and France still hotly debated all six options. Chapter 19 charts the similarly varied struggles in agriculture during the period. Both use a comparative method, taking national states as independent cases. I leave aside noncomparative aspects of labor movements – interactions among transnational, national, and nationalist organizations – until Chapter 21. I explain class conflicts in this period in terms of interaction between essentially similar industrial and agrarian economies with the variety provided primarily by political crystallizations and to a lesser extent by the structure of working-class communities.