Comparative Study of American and Soviet Labor Movements

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 h

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simple" union outlook (Lens 81). The essence of the problem was perhaps summed up best in the 1981 Warren Beatty movie, Reds. Actor Jack Nicholson, playing the playwright Eugene O'Neill, criticizes the radical American unionists, saying, how are you going to get the American worker to fight for the dignity of the working class when his fondest hope is to make enough money that he doesn't have to work anymore? Harsh repression and "red-baiting" also played their parts in defeating the radical wing of American labor, to be sure, but these repressions were employed with equal or greater ruthlessness but failed to achieve the same effect. The American worker never matched his European counterpart's fervor for fundamental social reform and was more readily co-opted by a fatter paycheck and the opportunity to buy a house and car and enroll himself economically and psychologically in the middle class. The prosperous 1920s were a period of decline in American labor organization (Lens 122). The Great Depression hit the United States harder, perhaps, than any other country, and it struck amid a prevailing Republican-oriented political orthodoxy that was less willing to accept even minimal "safety net" reforms. Yet while the Depres
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Approximate Word count = 2313
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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