"It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States"

[Kléber]

This semi-recent book tries to explain why Social-Democracy failed to exist as a mass movement for a significant period of time in the US like it did in Europe. The authors work in an interesting direction but they are motivated by an anti-communist bent and I don't feel they accomplished much. However I thought the premise of the book was interesting and it would be interesting to see what comrades here think about this historical dilemma and the book as well if anyone has read that.

http://www.amazon.com/Didnt-Happen-Here-Socialism-Failed/dp/0393322548


Marx decreed in Capital that the most industrially advanced nation would usher the world into the bright dawn of socialism. But it didn't happen in America, the pinnacle of capitalist achievement. This broad but unambitious survey addresses one of the classic questions of American historiography: What accounts for the weakness of working-class radicalism in the U.S.? Preferring to restate the highlights of an admittedly worked-over literature on the subject rather than make significant new arguments of their own, Lipset (professor of public policy at George Mason University) and Marks (political science at UNC-Chapel Hill) present a 'political sociology' of socialism's American flop. Lacking the feudal history that spurred Europe's early labor movements, the authors explain, American workers were 'born conservatives,' already enjoying social mobility and a relative prosperity. Moreover, strong constitutional limits on government power thwarted collectivists from the get-go and led homegrown radicals toward libertarian or anarchist camps. America's invincible two-party system made it all but impossible for a socialist candidate to succeed; since the Civil War, the authors point out, just nine non-major party candidates have won more than 5% of the national vote in any presidential election. What surprises there are in this book pop up in little-known annals of U.S. radicalism, such as the North Dakota Nonpartisan League, a strikingly successful contingent that in 1919 proposed a system of state ownership, only to be bitterly attacked by America's socialist party as an opportunistic rival. Green parties, the authors say, are the latest venue for utopian reform desires; again, the U.S. remains exceptional, as they point out, with no influential environmental party.

How do people here consider the roles of various theorists of the Socialist Party of the United States? Especially the divide between the revolutionaries and the "sewer socialists?" And how it addressed the crisis of WWI? Why did the SPUSA fall apart even though it had a clearly antiwar position? What was the role of Eugene V. **** (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._****)? Who holds the legacy of the SPUSA today? The offspring of John Reed and the Comintern, the surviving party itself, Bernie Sanders..?

Also, what do people think about rivals to the SPUSA like the DeLeonist SLP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Labor_Party) and the North Dakota Nonpartisan League (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_League)?

[syndicat]

I didn't find Lipset and Marks very enlightening.

The old SP was highly eclectic, despite officially defining itself as a class party. It was actually to the left of the social-democratic parties in Europe. This is reflected in the fact that it opposed U.S. entry into World War 1, unlike most social-democratic parties. Some have said it was based on a narrow immigrant base -- Germans (Reading and Milwaukee), Jews and Finns. But this is not entirely accurate. One of the strongest SP branches was the L.A. chapter which was based on the native-born Anglo-American working class.

Another reflection of the radicalism of the SP was that it was mainly from this party that the IWW...and other forms of radical grassroots unionism of the World War 1 era (such as the first Auto Workers Union)...emerged. IWW was based on an alliance between syndicalist left of SP and anarchists.

The distinction you draw between revolutionaries and "sewer socialists" wasn't really so clear cut. In L.A. the socialists controlled the daily newspaper with the highest daily circulation (Record). It was social-dem in its orientation. But one of the main writers and editors, a woman (Estelle Lawton Lindsay) who was a city council candidate in 1913, considered herself a revolutionary. However, she rather naively believed that "American democracy" made it possible to carry thru a revolution by capturing the existing government. It was an early idealistic form of "democratic socialism."

After the breakup of the party thru the expulsions and splits that formed the CP, radicals in the labor movement moved towards the idea of a less ideological class party...and the North Dakota Nonpartisan League was one expression of that, along with the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The description of the books makes it seem like there are a lot of "common sense" assumptions about US history that only make sense from the point of view that radicalism is somehow "alien" to the US working class.

Far from a series of flops, US radicalism has been a series of waves in which large organizations (labor or radical) were built and then fell apart or were destroyed from within or without. To say that there has never been a radical traddition in the US is just ahistrical and ignores the general strikes, the most violent and militant strike waves in the late 1800s, the abolitionist movement, the 8-hour day movement, the IWW, the Black Panthers, the US CP (in it's heyday), the Socialist Party that appealed to both urban immigrants and the rural poor and western workers, the populist party, and all the other smaller movements and parties that I don't know or can't think of right now. See, this is why Zinn was so important to the US left.:crying:

One of the most striking omissions in this description from the book is NOT ONE mention of repression in the US. After the radicalism of the US civil war there was the racist backlash including the murder of prominent blacks and radical republicans; the fight for the 8 hour day famously led to the framing and execution of the anarchist leaders of the movement; the rise of militant labor unions led to a backlash that included everything from hired gun-thugs, police (redundant), state militias, and the NATIONAL GUARD shooting workers! The Socialist Party's popularity at the turn of the century along with the growing influence of the IWW and then the Russian Revolution led to a red-scare where anarchists and socialist papers and organizations were raided and destroyed by the police and feds; the black power movement faced bombs from racists and police did drive-by shootings of the Black Panther Party headquarters; COINTELPRO led to radicals being framed, assassinated, and their papers/fliers were altered to cause in-fighting between radical groups.

I'm fairly certain that radical abolitionist John Brown was the first person executed by the US state... the haymarket martyrs... the Rosenburgs... potentially Mumia. Gov. Arnold Terminator (as I call him) said that Tookie Williams was not redeemed and worthy of a stay of execution because he dedicated his book to "violent inmates" like Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela.

Violence isn't the whole story why there are no permanent dem-soc parties or radical groups in the US - in fact violence and repession doesn't mean you have loose - but it is a big part to why the left has been repeatedly smashed in the US and then has to be rebuilt a generation (or two - I think we are long overdue for another "wave" of radicalism) later.

[Zeus the Moose]

Sure, there was a large immigrant base for the Socialist Party of America (some of them are described in this Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_federation) page on the Language Federations), but there was a fair amount of "homegrown" radicalism that contributed to its early successes. In the Plains States in particular, the SPA grew to be very large because of farmers and workers that were organised in the People's/Populist Party in the 1880s and 90s. Once that party started to collapse (partially due a strategy of cooperation with the Democrats which sapped their independence as a political organisation), many people who once supported the Populists moved towards the Socialist Party. As a result, Kansas and Oklahoma had some of the largest SPA organisations in the country (and were actually among the most radical, compared to other strongholds like Milwaukee and New York City.)

As to why the SPA fell apart, I think it was a combination of a couple different factors. Part of it was government repression precisely because of its anti-war stance. An environment where a party's elected officials are being denied their seats and activities are being watched and harassed isn't necessarily a good one for party stability. Also, the right wing in the SPA was not particularly keen in giving control of the party to the left wing (which by 1918-19 was probably a majority of the party.) So they manipulated delegate credentials and such to prevent the left from obtaining that majority. Of course, some parts of the SPA left, seeing that the right wing was probably not going to let them take control, boycotted the convention. Personally, I'd say that pulling out without a fight was the wrong thing to do, particularly since it further weakened the forces of the SPA left. But that's what happened.

[Das war einmal]

" Marx decreed in Capital that the most industrially advanced nation would usher the world into the bright dawn of socialism."

Isn't this wrong? Didn't Marx say that these nations where best suited for revolution because they were already industrialised?

[Kléber]

Yes but he also did muse that the revolution would happen in Germany. Lenin and Trotsky with their theories of imperialism and permanent revolution, respectively, both tried to explain why and how revolutionary processes developed in the less-industrialized colonial and semi-colonial nations. Things have changed quite a bit since those theories were developed, though. Now the semi-colonial countries are more and more the centers, not the periphery, of industrial production. In my opinion, the forces compelling a proletarian overturn seem strongest in India and China today. And that prediction may turn out to be just as wrong as Marx's about Germany.

[AmericanRed]

A better book is Robin Archer's Why Is There No Labor Party In the United States?

[Die Neue Zeit]

A better book is Robin Archer's Why Is There No Labor Party In the United States?

I heard of that book, which compares the US to Australia. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it was the very imitation of the German organizational model that led to whatever little success the American left of that time had. Later imitation of the British "model" turned out to be a dead end.

[Kléber]

Please expand Jacob

[Kibbutznik]

A better book is Robin Archer's Why Is There No Labor Party In the United States?
Totally agree.

I wrote a term paper in my Parties and Election's class on this very subject, and in it I examined this thesis about the lack of a feudal tradition in the US relating to the failure of labor and socialist politics in the US. The utter crap about the Publisher's Weekly blurb is that it makes this notion out to be a new idea. It isn't. Louis Hartz wrote about it in the 1940s, and probably originated this explanation.

And for a number of reasons, the thesis is indefensible. First of all, the institutions of feudalism still existed in the American colonies after the revolution. They persisted in many forms for centuries: the sharecropping and tenant farming in the South, and the company towns of the frontier were feudal in their nature. Second, it assumes that American workers had democracy to begin with, and didn't need to struggle together to win it. This is another historical lie. The exact same kinds of battles for suffrage, for democratic government and accountability that occured in Germany or the UK happened also in the US, and in all cases it demanded an alliance between liberal egalitarians and socialists in order to win.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Please expand Jacob

Overreliance on trade unions, no aggressive push towards amending the Constitution for PR, among other things.

The CPUSA's fetish for illegality stemmed more from the sectarian Social-Democratic Federation of the UK than from imitating the Comintern. The British left has the twin disease of tred-iunionizm and petit-bourgeois sectarianism.

[Red Commissar]

The way I see it, a big thing that killed the Socialist movement in the US was the Palmer Raids during WW I, as well as notions of nationalism that divided the workers.

Race and ethnic relations were much more complicated in the US than anywhere else, imo, and it provided away for industrialists to divide workers from achieving anything meaningful. It was very easy to play to the fears of white, protestant Americans to the Catholic Italian and Irish workers, the Eastern Orthodox Russians, and Jewish workers, than it was anywhere else.

Everyone got their worker movements destroyed with the wave of nationalism following WW I, but they still retained social democratic movements because "socialism" had a strong link with Republicanism. It wasn't the case in the United States, because its form of republicanism was tied to classical liberalism and thus didn't have the added benefit of fighting a visible nobility, or the more revolutionary nature of republicanism that France had.

This being said, like Higgins posted, radical Americans were always fighting in history. The struggle in the US was far more violent and far-reaching in the US than anywhere else, I would say.

Though what drew people to the socialist creed in the first place was bad working conditions. Socialists campaigned heavily on things that the Democrats and Republicans initially had little concern for- a minimum wage, banning of child labor, better working conditions, etc.

Once Democrats and Republicans began to institute those things, Socialists lost the support they once had.

Norman Thomas on accusations that Roosevelt is "socialist"

Thomas said Roosevelt has not “carried out most of the demands of the Socialist platform—unless he carried them out on a stretcher.”

“There is nothing Socialist about trying to regulate or reform Wall Street,” Thomas said. “Socialism wants to abolish the system of which Wall Street is an appropriate expression.”
And Upton Sinclair to Norman Thomas

The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to "End Poverty in California" I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them. Workers were lured away into labor aristocracy that formed in the AFL, with the false gains of the 1920s, and ultimately fear of foreigners acting as agents for the Soviet Union.

What Socialists couldn't fight however was stamping unpopular movements as "socialist", or demonizing it in other instances like the then-new Soviet Union. And that itself is still being abused. We still see socialist being thrown around in the US as a word to conjure up bad memories, because it has been associated with oppressive things.

Socialist and Communist groups had a resurgence in the 1930s, though I attribute this more to the dire times than actual belief in the system.

And with the US being one of the players of the Cold War later on, anything considered remotely close to Communism had little room to breathe. The few socialists left from the old days by this point was Max Shachtman, who ended up encouraging socialists to work with the Democrats towards the end of his life since COINTELPRO really slammed most socialist movements. Things weren't helped with the growth of neo-conservatism in the late 70s and 1980s either.