American immigrant workers aspired to become capitalists rather than a laboring class

Evidence

The new labor that came to the United States, while it was poor, used to oppression and accustomed to a low standard of living, was not willing, after it reached America, to regard itself as a permanent laboring class and it is in the light of this fact that the labor movement among white Americans must be studied. The successful, well-paid American laboring class formed, because of its property and ideals, a petty bourgeoisie ready always to join capital in exploiting common labour, white and black, foreign and native, (p. 17) Eschewing the traditions forming in the European labor movements that would mature into the nineteenth century’s socialisms of the First and Second Internationals, syndicalism and anarchism, the transplanted European workers became preoccupied with the possibility of accumulating wealth and power, of becoming capitalists. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 940

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in why American labor diverged from European socialist traditions — a key causal fork in the history of radicalism.

Related

• Prosperous white American workers formed a petty bourgeoisie that joined capital in exploiting labor (similarity 0.88)
• European immigrants brought developed labor traditions that shaped American radicalism. (similarity 0.81)
• Early American industrial labor was overwhelmingly foreign-born (similarity 0.80)
• Marxist categories presumed a white American working class. (similarity 0.80)
• Immigrants founded and dominated America’s socialist movement from its first convention. (similarity 0.79)
• Immigrants, not native-born whites, composed most of the American industrial workforce. (similarity 0.79)
• American workers’ identities responded as much to race as to class (similarity 0.79)
• American industrialization failed to produce the labor revolt Marx predicted (similarity 0.79)
• Black agrarian labor funded America’s industrialization; European immigrants carried labor traditions with them. (similarity 0.79)