American industrialization failed to produce the labor revolt Marx predicted

Evidence

What should have followed, Karl Marx and a long list of other political theorists predicted, was a large-scale labor movement. Factory workers made to log long hours under harsh conditions should have locked arms and risen up against their bosses, gaining political power in the formation of a Labor Party or even ushering in a socialist revolution. Britain experienced a militant working-class movement throughout the 1830s and 1840s, while France veered close to the wholesale adoption of socialism during the Second Republic (1848–51). An American labor movement did emerge in the nineteenth century, but it failed to bring about the kinds of sweeping reforms and political transformations that remade Western Europe. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 582

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘American exceptionalism’ labor question—why no socialism in the US—is a classic historiography topic (Sombart’s question) that pairs with the book’s reframing argument as a causal explanation.