Prosperous white American workers formed a petty bourgeoisie that joined capital in exploiting labor

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

• XREF: Connects to the labor-aristocracy thesis elsewhere in Marxist historiography and to the Frankfurt School treatments of working-class embourgeoisement.