Page:Marx and Engels on Revolution in America - Heinz Neumann.djvu/21

 from the very beginning of its existence as an independent state. While in England capitalist monopoly delayed the development of a bureaucratic-militaristic state machine, in America the diametrically opposite cause, the immaturity of capitalist development, acted in the same direction. Engels was already able in the 'eighties to state that on the one hand England's industrial monopoly had been shaken to its foundations while on the other hand, the United States was changing from an agrarian country into an industrial power. Thus, almost simultaneously, the harmonizing of the most developed and the least developed capitalist countries took place, with the general legal line of development of the bourgeois state as analyzed by Marx. The premises for the "exception" to the Marxian theory of the state, thus vanished.

In a similar fashion, but much more slowly, the approach of the American labor movement to the European type is in process. The British worker already began this assimilation to the proletarian class struggle of the continent in the 'nineties. At that time Engels established the fact of the development of a "new unionism." This new tendency in the British labor movement required forty years to mature—its most recent fruits are the radicalization of the British trade unions through the Purcell group. The class struggle of the American proletariat has had to travel a much more difficult path. The after-effects of the downfall of an industrial monopoly were easier to overcome than the influence of bourgeois