MORE ON AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

I've been reading Eliot Janeway's The Economics of Crisis and came across a discussion of American Economic Exceptionalism on pages 39 and 40:

The Marxists have a special term for the American phenomenon: they identify its characteristics as "American Exceptionalism." The fact is that Marxist theory has been negated and Marxist predictions have been confounded by the stubborn and elusive exceptionalism of the American economic phenomenon. Many complicated and unfamiliar ingredients have contributed to the exceptionalism of the American phenomenon—most obviously, the frontier and the continental scale and scope, first, of economic expansion and, then, of economic operation. The American phenomenon took form as a unique "triple play" which combined large-scale manufacturing operations with a generous support from large-scale reserves of extractive materials and an agricultural economy of limitless productivity (endowed, more than incidentally, with exportable surpluses). Other ingredients of the exceptionalist mix were an internal reservoir of labor, inherited from slavery; external additions to the labor supply provided by the successive waves of immigration; the diffusion of incomes and liquid savings allowed by our political and social systems; and, last but not least, the expansive dynamic renewed by successive wars.

Apparently, two early American Communists, Jay Lovestone and Bertram Wolfe, were the originators of the phrase "American Exceptionalism":

Lovestone's Thin Red Line
Paul Buhle
May 6, 1999 | This article appeared in the May 24, 1999 edition of The Nation.

Lovestone and former college classmate Bertram Wolfe nevertheless had a good idea in "American Exceptionalism," the theory that capitalism had achieved here a certain stability, and consequently, Communists had to abandon their near-insurrectionary mentality for a nuanced program of tactical alliances.