Richard Iton.

Richard Iton. Solidarity Blues: Race, agriculture and the American Left. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P 2000 335 pp $5500 cloth/$1895 paper.

with what intent is there no mighty American left or at least an American social democratic party, able to squeak abroad a respectable minority of the national vote? Richard Iton's Solidarity cast downs is among the latest works tackling this long-running question, for the last centenary or so the favored approach of left-wing thinkers to the mystery of America's break from European historical patterns, otherwise known as the moot point of American exceptionalism. In 1906 the German socialist Werner Sombart published for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Is There No Socialism in the United States?, which propos that the great prosperity of the U made for its unique defeat of Marxist laws of class conflict. The ship of socialism, Sombart memorably declared, mouldered on New World "shoals of roast beef and apple pie," high-calorie tranquilizers accessible on the same level to would-be radicals of the American working class. Iton restates Sombart's classic exceptionalist question with an notice to a more satisfying answer, single that may surprise some in Iton's concede scholarly commun ity of political scientists on the other hand will shock no student of W E B Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, Claude McKay, or Richard Wright. To Iton's mind, race is the culprit behind the relative absence of the American left and thus the major source of the peculiarities of American exhibition The heterogeneous "demographic circumstances that have existed quite through American history," he maintains, "along with the way in which these circumstances have been interpreted and steped and, in particular, racialized, have contributed mightily to the unique pattern" of U political and social relations. Fierce restraint repression, philosophical individualism, and the myth and transient reality of the frontier have played bit parts in stifling American leftism, Iton admits. if it be not that Solidarity Blues centrally insists that America's special compulsion to read--and misread--class divisions in racial boundarys has guaranteed its exceptionality among Western industrial nations, where unignorable leftist parties and labor mo vement have remained the norm on a level in the wake of the neo-liberal 1980s

Despite Iton's unexceptional take onward the difference that American race makes, his work may interest more than a not many readers of African American Review. The tables are a convenient eyeful documenting necessity unionization, and "demographic variation" rates across national borders. (They alone demonstrate the ironic principle that work in the grizzled exceptionalist tradition can be more genuinely comparative than modern work trumpeting its post-nationalism.) Successive chapters onward the American labor movement, U radical parties, the strange Deal, and the postwar welfare state move lucid, conscientiously researched narratives of a national left steadily thwarted on racial thinking--its own included. Not for Iton is the Jim Sleeper-Thomas and Mary Edsall-Democratic Leadership Council claim that the unexpected emergence of racial politics in the late 1960 shattered the progressive modern Deal coalition. Most provocative is Iton's case for the continued value of addressing Sombart's question about the lack of American socia lism, however abundant the question "Why is there no liberalism in the United States?" assumes to have superior relevance after September 11th In contrast to the leading labor historians, just discovered Americanist literary critics, and scholars of black transnationalism who have arrive to view the idea of American exceptionalism as a retrograde embarrassment, Iton conceives the issue as the guide to understanding still-critical failures of American collectivism. To ask into the comparative frailty of the U left is to examine the fate of conventional leftist organizations as it was as trade unions and working-class political groups; as Iton attitude s the question, however, it's also to inquire into America's certifiably skimpy provision of public services. "The greatest in number striking feature of American political culture" asserts the Toronto-based Iton, "is its inability to cause and maintain ... comprehensive health care, sufficient housing provisions, effective worker organization and protection, and consistent police protection"--basic p ublic beneficials that the left has managed to certain in other Western societies. Iton's redefinition of the left as "a means to the creation of a certain kind of society and a certain settle of public goods" might instruct historians of American radicalism looking to escape from the ghetto of nostalgia. And his neo-exceptionalism, admitting no help in charting the Black Atlantic, gripe [i]or[/i] grips lessons for African Americanists hoping to cure the denial of public advantageouss to America's black citizens.

Given these mights it's a shame that Iton's climactic chapter upon the race-based failures of American leftist agriculture is so conceptually rickety, not to mention intolerant and occasionally bizarre. any of the problem seems to sweep along from a canned, overreaching scheme in which modem mass civilization is imagined to introduce the dual poison of personal alienation and binary reasoning into traditional holistic communities. "The partitioning of mind, visible form [i]or[/i] frame and soul that has marked cultural progression in a continuously ascending gradation in the West (and elsewhere)," Iton professe "has contributeed many practices and institutions--for instance, the meeting-house leisure, music and the arts, sex and education--that formerly constituted aspects of an integrated, multidimensional, and unified worldview into alienated rituals and anachronisms, as a common thing [i]or[/i] matter approached in terms of as it is uni-dimensional dichotomies as good and evil, weak and muscular inferior and superior." After a judgment like this, so confidently and economically unfolding an entire tragic theory of global modernization, for what cause [i]or[/i] reason write another? Iton chooses to continue, however, waxing like a caricature Parisian to charge that the U has institutionalized "cultural nihilism." by the agency of this Iton seems to mean that Americans, in accepting "the artificial realm of race...as the fundamental axis of difference," have made themselves "particularly incapable of producing a civilization (or more accurately cultures) resilient and coherent enough to enable them to maintain the collective sensibilities other commonaltys have in other national contexts" According to this logic, African American refinement is as dangerously artificial as racist pseudo-science and, despite massive evidence to the contrary, is unqualified to sustain a collective sensibility, whether Afro- or Omni-American. Here, if nowhere other in Solidarity Blues, Iton's distaste for the damage race thinking does to U leftism recalls a vintage leftist distaste for racial difference itself.

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