Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

VI. THE U.S. INDUSTRIAL
PROLETARIAT
1. "The Communistic and Revolutionary Races"
The industrial system in the U.S. came into full
stride at the turn of the century. In 1870 the U.S. steel industry
was far behind that of England in both technology
and size. From its small, still relatively backward mills
came less than one-sixth of the pig iron produced in
England. But by 1900 U.S. steel mills were the most highly
mechanized, efficient and profitable in the world. Not only
did they produce twice the tonnage that England did, but
in that year even England - the pioneering center of the
iron and steel industry - began to import cheaper Yankee
steel. (1) That-year the U.S. Empire became the world's
leading industrial producer, starting to shoulder aside the
factories of Old Europe. (2)
Such a tidal wave of production needed markets
on a scale never seen before. The expansion of the U.S.
Empire into a worldwide Power tried to provide those. Yet
the new industrial Empire also needed something just as
essential - an industrial proletariat. The key to the even
greater army of wage-slaves was another flood of emigration
from Old Europe. This time from Southern and
Eastern Europe: Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Serbs,
Hungarians, Finns, Jews, Russians, etc. From the 1880s to
the beginning of the First World War some 15 millions of
these new emigrants arrived looking for work. And they
came in numbers which dwarfed the tempo of the old Irish,
German and Scandinavian immigration of the mid-1800s
(and that was 3 M times as large as the Anglo-Saxon, German
and Scandinavian immigration of the 1898-1914
period). (3)
They had a central .role in the mass wage-labor of
the new industrial Empire. The capitalists put together the
raw materials and capital base extracted from the earlier
colonial conquests, the labor of the Euro-Amerikan craft-
61 sman, and the new millions of industrial production