The Social Origins of Radicalism Among Finnish Immigrants in Midwest Mining Communities

Abstract

The purpose of this working paper is (1) to review and criticize the in adequacies of a number of influential bourgeois theories which try to account for the political response of workers to the "discontinuities" of the immigration experience and the transition to capitalist industrial society, (2) to present an alternative to these theories based upon the writings of Marx, Engels and contemporary Marxist theor ists ; and (3) to derive a series of hypotheses which could be empirically examined with data on Finnish and Swedish emigration patterns and the differing responses of the two groups to conditions on the mining ranges of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.