mike, nothing to lose but their chains

(3): thesis--"Instead, I consider the inverse question: historically, how did welfare policies condition a working-class party’s success or failure in winning votes? In doing so, this project hypothesizes that private social provisions pushed industrial working-class political history in a radically different direction in the US than in Europe and Australasia."

(6): "The relationship between business and the government in the US, however, was unlike that found in other countries, whose states played a more directive role in providing welfare. The response to the upsurge in labor militancy in the US moved in a sharply different direction. While reformers in the American Association for Labor Legislation sought to establish workingmen’s insurance along the lines of the European model, few of their policies were taken up by the state. Unlike the legislative profiles of nascent welfare states in Europe and Australasia, the US was exemplified by its lack of nationwide public protections for male workers and the elderly."

(7): "But, while European workers found legislative pursuits increasingly rewarding between the 1870s and the 1910s, American workers encountered effective retrenchment. During the 1880s and the early 1890s, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor and other trade unions won some legislative victories in areas such as legal hour’s limits, prohibitions on sweated labor, prohibitions on company stores, and union protections. But these gains were not sustained, often paltry and too often unenforced. By 1920, the courts struck down roughly three hundred labor laws (Skocpol 1992:227)." [if i read this with skeptical eyes, though, i want more -- i need convincing that this wasn't the same in other countries--proving that there was a serious, qualitative difference, rather than a difference in degree]

(7): key--"Major industrialists, eager to check and repel labor militancy and a short-lived tide of government regulation, proffered welfare capitalism as an alternative to the welfare statism they saw taking form abroad."

(9-10): "Ultimately, the US developed a welfare regime with three main features: a network of minimal direct social spending programs, a constellation of indirect or “hidden” state interventions through tax breaks and regulations, and, most importantly for this project, the domination of private social protections in large firms (Hacker 2002:11)."

(11): I hypothesize:

1. Firm intervention into social policy in the US was sufficient to obstruct the consolidation and expansion of industrial working-class votes for the Socialist Party in national elections.
2. State intervention into social policy in non-American industrializing countries did not inhibit the political mobilization of workers support for working-class parties.
3. Private welfare measures were abandoned at different rates across firms (Moriguchi 2005), and it was precisely their disparate rate of adoption in the US that helps explain the uneven development of industrial working-class based politics at the municipal level.
   

(12): three ways in which private social insurance obstructs w-class party formation:

1. "Wider income disparity generated by private social benefits act to disincentivize the formation of class-based politics by widening inequality and exposure to risk between working people."
2. "serves to secure employee allegiance to particular firms. In more extreme cases, it disincentivizes unionization and independent political action by allowing the firm to only award those employees willing to reject such strategies for maximizing their income and benefits."
3. "they isolate employee grievances at the level of the firm or plant. If an employee wants to negotiate the conditions of their benefits, the individual firm is the natural object of contestation. On the other hand, public social benefits constitute the state as the key arena for employee voice over the conditions of their benefits."

(14-15): "The potential for industrial working-class support for working-class parties across all industrializing contexts was driven by two interconnected economic and social factors:

1. Industrialization of key economic sectors that were previously under the control of skilled artisans and craftsmen resulted in intense deskilling and restructuring after 1870; the workers in these firms became the main supporters of working-class parties in all advanced capitalist countries.
2. Economic dislocation, a series of crises in the late 1800s, drove people to seek alternative strategies for securing their economic livelihood in labor militancy and political action."

(16-?): introducing five positions in the literature that try and explain this

1. "Institutionalists are dominant in the American exceptionalism debate. They view state structures and state policies as independent and determinative forces on party formation and success." [electoral system, early suffrage stopped party formation] (16-17)
   
2. "Repressionists argue that in America, there was much more repression of working-class movements than elsewhere, which made potential working-class political activists skeptical about the effectiveness of building parties." (17)
3. "Culturalists, on the other hand, argue from a large range of different vantage points. But, what unites their claims is the notion that unique systems of self-understanding in the US, either by the entire population or critical sections of it, precluded the support of working-class parties. A dominant position here is that since the US lacked a feudal past, the liberal tradition that emerged undermined the class-based grievances found elsewhere that gave working people a reason to support working-class parties." [feudal shackles...] (17-18)
4. "Another set of explanations suggest that the tactical decisions of both influential labor leaders and the leaders of the Socialist Party can explain the failure of working-class politics." (18-19)
5. "Finally, economic arguments share a common failing with the rest of the literature in that they make broad claims that cannot account for internal variation. A frequently cited explanation rests on the claim that American workers simply had fewer economic grievances than their counterparts." (20) ["Others demonstrate that a surge in Socialist Party votes in both Europe and America corresponded with an increase in working-class income and living standards (Sturmthal 1973; Fetscher 1973). And critically, from my perspective, it is unable to account for internal variation within the US context."]

(29): "However, it also lays a theoretical groundwork for subsequent explanations for the more general weakness of class-based politics throughout America’s history since the turn of the 20th century. So, while this project offers a historically conditional theory of the failures and successes of the American Socialist Party in industrial working-class communities, in the end it aims to provide theoretical concepts useful for the study of present controversies concerning working-class political behavior and business unionism." [how much will you focus on this?]

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questions:

1. possibility that you are pushing back the causal chain -- i.e., you have identified something that will itself need to be explained. in fact, it could be that the five explanations you identify might work through this mechanism, that you are identifying. this does not compromise the research, of course, but raises questions about the scope of the conclusions you will be able to make.
2. in other words, when you switch from asking how w-class activism forced welfare provision, to asking how the type of welfare provision influenced w-class activism, there is a way in which you're framing makes the whole thing too neat. how do we explain the difference in the type of welfare provision, systematically? otherwise it becomes a kind of exogenous variable.