Why Did "Frontier" Calm Agitation in the US But Did Not Prevent Revolution in Russia?

[Outinleftfield]

Part of the explanation for why there wasn't as much socialist or even progressive agitation in the US as other countries and why the US has lagged behind Europe in social reforms is because the frontier served as capitalism's "safety valve" for discontent. Workers who had enough were more likely to pack up and move out West than agitate.

Whats odd is how effective the frontier was as a safety valve for the US but not for Russia. Russia had/has an even bigger frontier but while the frontier slowed down even agitation for minor reforms in the US it did not prevent revolution in Russia. What is different about Russia that caused the frontier to lose its "safety valve" effect.

[MilkmanofHumanKindness]

Part of the explanation for why there wasn't as much socialist or even progressive agitation in the US as other countries and why the US has lagged behind Europe in social reforms is because the frontier served as capitalism's "safety valve" for discontent. Workers who had enough were more likely to pack up and move out West than agitate.

Whats odd is how effective the frontier was as a safety valve for the US but not for Russia. Russia had/has an even bigger frontier but while the frontier slowed down even agitation for minor reforms in the US it did not prevent revolution in Russia. What is different about Russia that caused the frontier to lose its "safety valve" effect.

Well, there were a few things different.

1. Individuals who moved West in the U.S were able to no longer be workers, but farmers, who owned their land.*

2. Because these individuals could own their own land, they viewed themselves to be free, as separated from the tenant system in Russia.*

3. There is a much more extreme climate in Siberia, than in the Midwest.

*Note*: I am in no way stating that these farmers actually owned their own means of production. They were dominated by the Capitalist class which forced them to pay exorbitant fees for use of railroads, and indebting farmers by coercing them into massive amounts of debt. This led to the rise of the Populist Party in the United States, one of the first progressive parties that worked to fight and limit the power of the Capitalist class.

[FreeFocus]

Perhaps I am not familiar enough with the Russian idea of the frontier, but the American frontier involved imperialist expansion and ethnic cleansing that allowed for land speculation, gold rushes, other capitalist activities, and it provided a place ("the west") for people (almost exclusively whites) to escape to, to get a fresh start.

I would also imagine the mythology is different, which changes the entire national psychology.

[khad]

Part of the explanation for why there wasn't as much socialist or even progressive agitation in the US as other countries and why the US has lagged behind Europe in social reforms is because the frontier served as capitalism's "safety valve" for discontent. Workers who had enough were more likely to pack up and move out West than agitate.
Where the hell did you even hear that? The physical frontier was about market expansion and the acquisition of resources. That had a lot more to do with maintaining capitalism than some mystical psychologizing.

[soyonstout]

That's a really good question. The two big differences that immediately jump to mind are: 1) serfdom in Russia seems to have been significantly more prevalent in agriculture than slavery in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia#Serfdom.27s_Extent_in_Russia) so the fact that most people in agriculture were 'unfree' laborers and there were very few examples of self-sufficient independent family farms, would have given this 'escape route' way less traction in the popular imagination.

2) This one is less worked out in my head but I think there's a good amount of truth to it (correct me if I'm wrong) but I would think the preponderance of foreign investment in Russia compared to the US (Russia being rapidly modernized by British and French and German capital with production mostly geared for export, rather than the gradual development of an internal market as in the US) may have left less 'breathing room' for small farms or really for any portions of the productive process not geared toward export (tiny family farms with a couple chickens, a couple pigs, and multiple small plots of crops are really no use to the British cereal companies, for example). This makes sense to me, but I don't really have it worked out that cohesively.

People who are actually experts on Russian history should chime in too, because I'm sort of winging it based on snippets from Bukharin, and various articles and books on the slow development of the US workers' movement.


-soyons tout

[khad]

I can't believe you people are seriously considering this piece of discredited bourgeois polisci from the 1930s. The safety valve was never an argument made about capitalism. It was an argument that dealt with unemployment rates in American cities following the 1862 Homestead Act.

For analysis of the frontier that actually pertains to capitalist development, I suggest you look into William Appleman Williams and the revisionist school of American diplo history. It's essentially a reinterpretation of the Open Door model that links continental expansion with overseas empire through the function of the market.

For the role of territorial expansion in Early Republican political economy, I would suggest reading Drew McCoy's The Elusive Republic.

[soyonstout]

Where the hell did you even hear that? The physical frontier was about market expansion and the acquisition of resources. That had a lot more to do with maintaining capitalism than some mystical national character psychology.

It's actually a fairly common theme in explaining:

1.) the difficulty of building a working class movement in the US, due to the allure of the self-sufficient farmer's lifestyle out west.
2.) the absence of a national labor party in the US until its artificial creation by the CP
3.) the preponderance of openly petit-bourgeois ideology all over american politics (the extolling of famers and small business owners as 'common people' in every presidential speech ever, as opposed to Europe where at least lipservice is paid to the working class)

the frontier and its relation to the development of the working class is for example mentioned here: http://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-American-Dream-Politics-Economy/dp/1859842488/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278481074&sr=8-1 and here: http://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_iww

the theft of this land from its original inhabitants is a different, albeit related issue, but when talking about the US working class, one cannot get around the popularity among them of 'escaping' their fate as working class by starting their own business, or moving out to the country to 'live off the land' and this has been a tremendous brake on the development of the workers' movement in the US.


-soyons tout

[khad]

It's actually a fairly common theme in explaining:

1.) the difficulty of building a working class movement in the US, due to the allure of the self-sufficient farmer's lifestyle out west.
2.) the absence of a national labor party in the US until its artificial creation by the CP
3.) the preponderance of openly petit-bourgeois ideology all over american politics (the extolling of famers and small business owners as 'common people' in every presidential speech ever, as opposed to Europe where at least lipservice is paid to the working class)

the frontier and its relation to the development of the working class is for example mentioned here: http://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-American-Dream-Politics-Economy/dp/1859842488/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278481074&sr=8-1 and here: http://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_iww

the theft of this land from its original inhabitants is a different, albeit related issue, but when talking about the US working class, one cannot get around the popularity among them of 'escaping' their fate as working class by starting their own business, or moving out to the country to 'live off the land' and this has been a tremendous brake on the development of the workers' movement in the US.
And all this is useless sophistry because America became significantly more, not less, urbanized during the latter half of the nineteenth century, which is the crux of the safety valve thesis (as it was iterated in the 1930s), as it presupposed the transfer of urban population to rural areas.

The preponderance of petit-bourgeois ideology in political mobilizations is more readily explained by the process of political enfranchisement. In Europe, mass enfranchisement was a right that was won later in the 19th century, under the banner of popular workers' parties and institutions.

In the United States, the party system was formed at a time when such consciousness did yet exist, and the parties that did emerge were heavily invested in the clientelist modes of organizing voters that often typify preindustrial parties. By the time a real proletariat began to emerge after the Civil War, these parties appealed to workers on the basis of ethnic, religious, and individual advantage.

[ComradeOm]

Whats odd is how effective the frontier was as a safety valve for the US but not for Russia. Russia had/has an even bigger frontier but while the frontier slowed down even agitation for minor reforms in the US it did not prevent revolution in Russia. What is different about Russia that caused the frontier to lose its "safety valve" effect.Leaving aside the "safety valve" aspect, Russian conquests in the late 19th C came in a different form to that of mass US colonisation. That is, in Central Asia they were conquests that largely maintained local customs/elites in place; while Siberia never attracted settlers in anywhere near the same numbers as the American West. In both cases it was not until the 20th C that there were concerted attempts by the state to populate these areas with ethnic Russians

[chegitz guevara]

The safety valve really wasn't one, as the Great Labor Uprising of 1877 and subsequent labor struggles show. And the self-sufficient life on the prairies was actually one of hard struggle and grinding poverty.

Nonetheless, there was the illusion that, if life in the factories was too hard, you could escape West. Siberia wasn't a place to escape to, it was a place to escape from. It's where you were sent as a punishment.

Ultimately, the differences were the contradictions of the political system with the economy. The United States had a bourgeois government, Russia, a feudal one. Russia groaned and agonized under the oppressive feudal yoke of the Romanovs.

A book I highly recommend, despite it's over anti-Bolshevik stance is, A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes. Despite that fact that he spits venom about the Bolsheviks, he is forced by the facts to prove that they were the only party that were giving the people what they wanted and needed. What you really get in the book, though, is a sense of just how oppressive Tsarism was, not so much in a random death squad kind of way, but in the, having to fight bureaucracy every step of the way. Tsarism was like a python around the rib cage of Russia.

For better or for worse, and keeping in mind that for people of color it was harder, America was simply an incredibly free society, compared to just about any other country on Earth. If you wanted to do something, as long as you had the money and the ability, you could do it, and I mean anything.

[S.Artesian]

Where the hell did you even hear that? The physical frontier was about market expansion and the acquisition of resources. That had a lot more to do with maintaining capitalism than some mystical psychologizing.

Probably got it from some Cliff Notes version of Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History.

Anyway, it's bullshit. First off, when do we get conscious socialist agitation in Europe? Not until after the revolutions of 1848, the same time we get the workingman's circles in the US.

And in the period of the Civil War we get emancipation of the serfs in Russia, the Mejii reformation in Japan, Bismarck's consolidation of Germany, coincident with the development of the IWMA, which certainly had a US section.

In the 1870s, we get-- the Paris Commune in 1871, and the great railroad strike in 1877 in the US, where the troops pulled out of the South, cementing the restoration of the Southern plantation class, are now shuttled from city to city in the North to battle and shoot the railroad workers. This occurs during international capital's "long deflation," the period starting in 1873

Then we move on to the struggle for the 8 hour day, we get another severe depression in 1893, labor strikes in the 1903 recession, a brief uptick in 1905, another downturn in 1907-- all with growing strength of avowed socialists in the US.

So I don't know where this stuff about lack of class struggle in the US comes from-- the "frontier" has no separate significance in any close study of US history.

[Andropov]

In the 1870s, we get-- the Paris Commune in 1871, and the great railroad strike in 1877 in the US, where the troops pulled out of the South, cementing the restoration of the Southern plantation class, are now shuttled from city to city in the North to battle and shoot the railroad workers. This occurs during international capital's "long deflation," the period starting in 1873.
Do you have any links regarding this?

[Tablo]

The US had a large advantage simply due to the fact that they were the first real Capitalist nation and that Capitalism is based upon infinite growth. This growth came much more naturally when there was unexplored(by white people) land and massive amounts of untapped resources. With this quick boost in the beginning of the age of Capitalism the US was easily capable of expanding its markets and taking advantage of people in other parts of the world that also had untouched resources. As far as I know the regions of eastern Russia did not hold any real value until oil was discovered there. Beyond that I believe it is completely worthless in the eyes of a market economy.

BTW I have been drinking a bit of rum and hope this all made sense.