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Comparative Study of American and Soviet Labor Movements

The following is a comparative study of the American and Soviet labor movements. The fundamental goals of labor movements everywhere are the same--to improve the material and social conditions of life for the ordinary working people who make up the bulk of any nation's population. From their inceptions, however, the labor movements in the United States and Russia (originally the Czarist Russian Empire, now the Soviet Union) have differed widely.

In the beginning, in the nineteenth century, the Russian labor movement was an integral, if relatively undeveloped, part of the broader European labor movement. The European labor tradition, closely tied to socialist ideology and political movements, sought a wholesale reformation in the social order of society (Orth 188-89). This goal was rooted in the social stratification of European society, a stratification which went back ultimately to feudal times--and which was still extremely rigid in nineteenth-century Russia. While upward social mobility was not totally unknown in these societies, it was an anomaly, not something accepted or even to be seriously hoped for. Individual working people readily identified themselves as "workers" or members of "the masses." They thus readily accepted the proposition that the only path to a better life for themselves and their children lay in a complete restructuring of the existing order of society.

European-style socialistic labor unions had existed in Czarist Russia but had been rigorously suppressed by the Czarist secret police. Thus, union organizations hardly existed before 1917, though labor-union sentiment was strong. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, workers' committees sprang spontaneously into being at factories, taking them over as the previous owners fled (Ruble 9-10). But it was not out of these committees, but out of the Bolshevik Party itself, that the Soviet labor program emerged.

Lenin and his fellows and foll...

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Comparative Study of American and Soviet Labor Movements. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:06, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1687576.html