Class War Is an American Tradition
As capitalism took shape in the United States during the late 19th century, there was nothing metaphorical about the idea of class war. For American workers facing the merciless brutality of employers and the state, it was simply a fact of life.
Riot by Baltimore and Ohio Railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, August 1877. (Photo12 / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In America during the late nineteenth century, class war wasn’t just a metaphor. Struggle between workers and their employers would regularly lead to actual warfare.
This tendency has as much to do with the conditions of American capitalism as with the militancy of strikers. The global hegemony of the United States, as both an economic and a geopolitical superpower, was the result of industrialization — and its industrialization was entwined with war.
The Next War
So writes world-systems theorist Giovanni Arrighi and a team of researchers in their global history of political transformation:
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