Al Jassas's point that unions were relatively weak is nevertheless well taken. US Unionism did not grow strong until the New Deal, maximised its power during WW2, kept going on momentum through the 'fifties, and has declined ever since.

That US unions were so late developing any strength (given that unionism had just as early a start in the US as in Europe) is largely because of the ferocity with which unions were put down and union leaders jailed and assassinated. Until the fascist movements of the 20s and 30s, there was not anything to equal that in Europe.

I did explain that the entire issue was more complex than class difference.

I am more and more convinced that posts longer than one line most often go unread on discussion forums.   

Some members, more favorably disposed toward socialism, like the easier answers.  I like mine better. 

I think one of the reasons is that there were always large numbers of immigrants in American working class, who were easier to exploit than people who have been settled there for some time. Workforces in Europe had choices, they would find ways of supporting themselves through traditional ways if they went on strike, for instance. And the peoples of Europe have lived through wars and revolutions and they are not as easy to manipulate as immigrants fresh off the boat. Note that the capitalists don't need to have all of the workforce to be fresh immigrants, as long as they have a section which can be easily exploited, they can (and did) use them to break apart the united front they may present. 

The socialised French system has the luxury to send a doctor to check in every week on elderly patients with certain long term care illnesses and provides a nurse for all the terminally ill patients, so much for socialised medicine eh.

I'm not really sure how accurate this could be. The US was no less socialist than any of the Western European states until relatively recently; it has quite a long history of socialism itself, in fact, the US is one of the birthplaces of socialism. That's where the Owenites set up the New Moral World colony. You've also got Eugene Debbs, the IWW, the New Deal, Emma Goldman, and so on. 

The US was at one point a haven for international socialists and other revolutionaries: that's why the Forty-Eighters fled there after their rebellions were crushed in Europe (and exerted no small amount of influence in government and society once they arrived). Bakunin himself fled to the US, viewing it as something of a haven, beyond the reach of European authorities.

Semi-socialist views were also quite popular at one time in the US. William Jennings Bryan capitalized on popular resentment of banks, railroads, big trusts, and so on, catapulting himself to power thereby. These sentiments were not short-lived; Huey Long capitalized on them decades later.

I think in terms of national health care systems, the US wasn't necessarily less socialist at the time - elsewhere, these were set up in the wake of WW2, while the New Deal was still underway in the US. I think it's just that the US population at that time was much more scattered across a much larger area than, say, Britain or France. This made delivery far more problematic. Providing good ambulance and hospital coverage to the whole of the US population would have been a far more ambitious and expensive project than providing it to all of the UK.

Canada had similar difficulties, and didn't adopt universal health care until the late 60s. And, even so, its system is entirely different than that of the NHS: the NHS actually employs doctors and runs medical services, while Canada simply provides health insurance and all the services are delivered by private entities.

You may have a point there, but there's a spectrum (even in Western Europe) and the US certainly wasn't the least socialist of all (what about Spain, for instance?)

I'm sure that's true nowadays. But back then - was it even possible to guarantee equal access to everyone? One of the fundamental political requirements of a public health care system is that it has to be able to deliver roughly equivalent services to every region.

I'm not sure we were copying anyone ... it just sort of happened. The roots of our health care system lie in a shortage of doctors in the Western provinces, the provincial governments there came up with a variety of schemes to attract them through subsidies and things just kind of progressed from there.

Capitalism works just fine, provided its not too absolute - neoliberalism / market fundamentalism is almost as bad as communism.

The US in the 19th century (and most of the 20th) was more mercantilist than laissez-faire capitalist. I'm not sure that 'capitalist' as a single word isn't now so debased that it isn't much use any more as a technical term (rather like 'democracy').

You've got a point I can't deny!

Neoliberals do sometimes espouse or appeal to laissez-faire ideals but it does seem to be more of a rhetorical device than anything else.

Or 'socialism'. We're using it to talk about a command economy run by the state, but many of the early socialists wanted to abolish the state altogether. 

From what I know of Soviet bureaucracy it was indeed self-perpetuating and that was a betrayal of the revolution. It was more marked though in the satellite states where the elite intelligentsia and bureaucracy of the 'sixties and 'seventies were very often still the offspring of the self-perpetuating 'bourgeois' class of pre-1945. I don't think I ever met anyone privileged enough to be allowed to study in the West whose parents were not bourgeois (in the Marxist sense). 

Maybe for the Bolsheviks, because they had to justify their revolution, but not for Marx - his definition was simple and elegant, state capitalism was any sort of nationalization scheme that did not do away with capitalist institutions like the wage system. 

Going strictly by Marx, if there is a state, there is class rule - the state itself is evidence, because a state is nothing but an organ of class rule. Or, as Engels puts it:

"The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without . . .  it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel."

And again:

""But neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the organisation with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine; it is the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of all the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme. But at this extreme it is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict"

Moreover,  Marx observed  that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes" and that the working class would not be free of capitalism "without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class".

Bolsheviks, naturally, didn't think much of ideas like this (or pesky little things like the historical process of dialectic materialism, etc) and tossed them out the window - now they could have a "Marxist" revolution in a country that hadn't yet left serfdom behind, and set up a "communist state" (to Marx, this would be a contradiction in terms!). So we have Lenin stating:

"Socialism is merely a state capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and to this extent has ceased to be a state capitalist monopoly"

... Which is precisely the opposite of what Marx envisioned. Of such ideas, Marx had instead written:

"Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organization of the total labor" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway . . . a toiling people, through these demands that it puts to the state, expresses its full consciousness that it neither rules nor is ripe for ruling!"

The definition depends on who you ask. If you ask Lenin or Trotsky, communism is simply state monopoly of the means of production. If you ask Marx or Engels, communism is a new society which has abolished the state and all forms of capitalist relations like wages, rent, credit with interest, and so on and in which labour is supreme in the economy - there is no currency except labour, and all labour is equal.

What we really need are distinguishing terms for two very different ideas, and this is originally why Marx coined the term "state capitalism" - to distinguish state socialism from communism.

What might be more useful for the modern reader is to call one, 19th century communism, and the other, 20th century communism, and note that the two are very very different in how they view the state.