Is There an American Socialist Tradition? Possibly, but it is Not the one today’s Left Celebrates
As I wrote in my first part of a blog post on this subject, John Nichols cites the most well-known American socialists of the past — Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington — as an example of how socialists were part and parcel of the American tradition, and how their socialism grew out of American values and as a basic part of our country’s heritage. This is particularly true of Eugene V. Debs, the titan of American socialism’s heroic years of growth and influence. Debs, as his biographer Nick Salvatore revealed in an excellent biography, spoke in the language of American republicanism and patriotism, eschewing Marxian ideology for the most part, and therefore managed to reach the average working-class citizen in a manner that other socialists never managed to match.
But Nichols ignores completely what happened to socialism after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, as the movement collapsed totally as many of its militants, contrary to Debs’ own advice, saw fealty to Lenin and his comrades as a necessary component of their program. Moreover, Nichols does not let his readers learn about the many socialists who broke with their party’s mainstream in two major respects — they came to value the American system as the embodiment of their dreams, and hence to both support its foreign policy (including entry into World War I) and to vigorously oppose the Bolsheviks and their domestic American supporters. This group included socialists like William English Walling, Algie M. Simons, Charles Edward Russell, and others. These socialists formed a pro-war and patriotic socialist group, The Social Democratic Federation. Although they are now forgotten, they were among some of the most well-known figures in the America of their time.
Among this group was John Spargo, whom I wrote about in this article which appeared in The Weekly Standard. Spargo was among the very first Americans to call for opposition to Bolshevism, and to urge various administrations to develop a strong anti-Communist foreign policy. He grew close to the State Department, and during the Wilson administration, he personally created the policy of non-recognition of Lenin’s new regime, and actually wrote the policy document issued under the name of Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. The policies he espoused would be exactly the kind both John Nichols and the other editors of The Nation opposed then and would find horrific today.
From the perspective of the American socialist tradition, what is most important are the conclusions Spargo reached about the country he loved. America, he believed, had become a nation whose system embodied the best of socialism: a belief in equality of opportunity, economic growth that would benefit the working man as well as the wealthy, and regulation of industry when it was deemed necessary. Spargo called it “a communism of opportunity” or “socialized individualism.” In a new era, he wrote, capitalist America had progressed towards “a new type of communism, based upon private property and individualism,” in which the genius of capitalism would be channeled to achieve “socialization of results.”
During the New Deal era, he saw public funding of government projects as steps that retarded, rather than advanced, economic recovery. As an alternative, he favored an industrial democracy similar to that called for by social democrats, and based on cooperation of progressive businessmen and moderate trade union leaders. In addition, he feared that some New Dealers favored an American style of central planning that would lead to collectivism and have the same dangerous results as in the Soviet Union. The New Deal, he thought, was driving towards what historian Markku Ruotsila calls a “centralized, illiberal and coercive governance on par with Bolshevism and Fascism.” Spargo also favored regulatory legislation that would stifle corporate greed; but he opposed any move of government into business, arguing that it would lead not only to an unnecessary bureaucracy but also to increased taxes that would harm the production of wealth. Roosevelt’s domestic policies were, in effect, what Spargo had opposed when he was a socialist: a centralized bureaucracy leading to a new state capitalism.
Near the end of his life, his last political act was to endorse Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Spargo’s analysis, then, is more than similar to the current analysis of the United States offered by my good friend, the historian Martin J. Sklar. In The Nation dated September 4-11, 2000, a discussion of Sklar’s importance is presented by Marc Chandler, who is identified as teaching international political economy at NYU, a columnist for the business publication TheStreet.com, and the chief currency strategist for the Mellon Bank! His curriculum vita is hardly that of a flaming far left radical!
Chandler writes (his article, unfortunately, is not online): “The idea that capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive anticipates an arguably more intellectually rigorous discourse. American historian Martin Sklar develops this line of argument in a collection of essays published under the title The United States as a Developing Country (1992) and in a number of subsequent essays, most recently in ‘Capitalism and Socialism in the Emergence of Modern America:The Formative Era.’”
Chandler sums up Sklar’s work in the following paragraphs:
For Sklar, socialism refers to a mode of production, or what he calls “property production relations.” Socialist relations are those that supplement or to some degree supplant the property stake as the bedrock of one’s role and status in society. Socialism comprises those tendencies, forces and institutions that blunt, mitigate or adapt market relations to social goals.
Socialism, according to Sklar, is the redefinition of property rights in ways that make the market socially accountable and responsible. It broadens the meaning of human rights and citizenship. He finds socialism in the ways in which we celebrate our identities as citizens and not simply as factors of production, like breathing appendages to machines. Socialism lies in those various political, associational and contractual relationships that mediate, restrain and redirect the rights of property and the cash nexus. The part-conflicting, part-symbiotic relationship between capitalism and socialism does not simply take place between classes and institutions but within them as well. Sklar argues against equating capitalism with markets or businesses and equating socialism with the state or unions, which is what … many others have done. He suggests that each sphere may embody the capitalist-socialist mix that characterizes the modern American political economy.
In fact, Sklar argues, the large modern corporation, which many consider a defining institution of capitalism, is itself an embodiment of both capitalism and socialism: Its very origins lie in self-conscious attempts on the part of individual capitalists to escape the vagaries of the “free market.”
At this point, I hope some readers of mine will actually go to the link and read Sklar’s entire article, as complicated as it might be for some to follow. What he develops is a new way of looking at the nature of both capitalism and socialism, by what he has called the theory and reality of “the mix,” in which both elements of capitalism and socialism arose together during the era of the birth of the modern large corporation. This principle, he argues, “cohered strongly with prevalent American political principles associated with republicanism and rooted in the traditions and experiences of the American Revolution.” Hence, when Sklar refers to socialism, in his terminology it is the very opposite of the kind of state-command economies that existed in what the world came to know as “socialism.”
Mr. Radosh, I greatly appreciate your work and no doubt believe that Mr. Sklar has given thoughtful analysis to the relationship between capitalism and socialism. However, the question I will pose to both of you is isn’t what Mr. Sklar proposes is what we have now? Has the fusion of socialism with capitalism caused stability? Has the wealth created by capitalism helped keep socialism in check? We all know the answer to these questions and the fallout from trying to fuse socialism and capitalism is playing out before us.
I say to you both that the problem with socialism is that it will always end up thuggish and antithetical to liberty and freedom. Indeed, the problem with socialism is who gets to decide and how do they decide it? Anywhere that socialism has been tried it has led to ruin.
Mr. Sklar sounds as though he is in the same vein as Christopher Hitchens and Walter Russell Mead. These men recognize the contradictions in their beliefs, but they cannot bring themselves to fully refudiate what it is they believe. Capitalism and socialism are NOT compatible; socialism needs capitalism far more than what capitalism needs socialism. Stability is something that mankind should never seek as it is as utopian as the idea that we can eliminate poverty or cure sickness. All three men understand this, and are effective at recognizing the evil that Mr. Nichols actually supports, but any hint of socialism invading capitalism inevitably leads us back to where we are.
Just to introduce George Orwell into this, he recognized the same contradictions and dangers of socialism that Mr. Sklar has. He too had a tough time letting go of his belief in socialism. However, George Orwell has been one of the strongest voices against the dangers of communism and state-managed socialism. I am glad that we have another Orwell in our time that we can all learn from in Martin Sklar.
Excellent article. I’ll be sure to check out Sklar’s piece.
The only thing that concerns me – and confuses me – is that we’re being introduced to yet another set of labels. I already have trouble figuring out who/what is a “socialist” or a “progressive” or a “liberal” or a “capitalist” or a “conservative.” In this article, what does it mean to say that liberals and conservatives have both shifted “toward the left?” What is “the left?” The definitions seem to shift all the time. Politicians and theorists use them as camouflage – radical socialists claiming they’re mainstream liberals, etc. And now Sklar is redefining “socialism” and “capitalism?” It’s giving me a headache.
I oppose Obama’s health care plan. I do not oppose the fire department or public schools. So – does that make me a capitalist, a socialist, a liberal, or a conservative? And does it really matter?
That makes you a socialist. The fact that you want socialism in education but not so much in medicine just makes you unprincipled, or confused.
An unduly harsh assesment of an honest question from Bugs, dont you think?
Opposing the healthcare plan because its a finacial and administarive monstrocity of untold billions and a virtually unfathomable 1000+ pages of new rules does not make one “unprincipled” for, at the same time, wanting a local Fire Department to be on call while they sleep.
We DO pay taxess for a REASON you know.
Likewise, Public Schools a necessity….but for the criminality of the Teachers Unions laundering tax funded bribes through Democrat campaign donations, it could acually work.
We are a prosperous enough nation to have a fair, reasonable tax code to support decent, efficient services…but only if politicians and public unions werent so corrupt, and leftist
But thats the Black Hole called Socialism.
Everything goes in, nothing ever comes out.
Nothing confusing (or unintentional) about that
Thanks, Root. Screw you, TL.
No problem…
That which is politically “self evident” as national suicide is pretty easy to spot from an altitude of 50-thousand feet. But the details and the textures up close are important too.
I was hoping someone would pick up on, and go a little further with the points you raised about shifting labels and the like.
I actually gain something by bouncing ideas back and forth, even when I disagree with someone.
TL is soooo smart that he doesnt have a clue
I think I antagonized TL and gave others the wrong idea when I mentioned public schools. I just grabbed that off the top of my head as an example of “services provided by government and paid for by our taxes.” Didn’t intent to start a holy war.
Public schools are a good thing. The way they’re currently run is pretty bad.
merely ‘cutting to the chase’ nothing personal there.
Education is where the marxist/leninist virus takes hold. The public school systems began, slowly and surely, immediately after WWI to inculcate the statist thought and practice into the minds of our students/ By the 1930s, the campuses of many of our universities were peopled with marxist professors, as were our governments, municipal, state and federal. An easy history to verify. FDR’s and Truman’s administrations were rife with communists.
Bugs, as a general rule the terms left and right differ depending upon the political system in which they are employed. Left and right don’t mean the same thing in Britain as they do here, or in Pakistan, India, or any other country. The terms “hard left” and “hard right,” often used here, have no agreed-upon meaning at all. They are demeaning terms used by both sides.
In the U.S. today the left includes wacko-environmentalists, PETA activists, the Animal Liberation Front, Fabian Socialists, Marxist Socialists, and Fascists, and most other (but not all) Statists. Obama’s regime is filled with 1960s Saul Alinsky Marxist radicals. He and Hillary, for example, are Alinsky accolytes. The right today consists of Conservatives dedicated to the founding principles, but also of small para-military survivalist types of groups. (At least the left always tries to paint the right with that brush.) People who call themselves moderates or independents and seek to position themselves between left and right will slide in and out of the left or right, depending on issues and perceived self interest.
In 1840 the Whigs and in 1860 the Republicans took positions that many of today’s leftists would be comfortable with, specifically an overwhelmingly powerful central national government, with the power to dictate to states. The Democrats of those years more closely resembled today’s Conservative right.
The switcheroo, where today’s Democrats became composed of Statists of every variety, occurred when the 1960s radicals (Hillary, Julian Bond, Bill Ayers and others) realized that to achieve power they would have to infiltrate a political party. Since the Democrat Party had been friendly to socialists and communists for at least forty years, that was the party they infiltrated and took over. Conservatives realized the same thing and have been trying to gain control of the Republican Party since that time, too.
Old line Democrats such as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson realized that they could buy votes with social programs, putting (for example) Social Security recipients and Negroes virtually in their pockets.
Today the “left” indicates a preference for statism, a controlling central government, and contempt for the U.S. Constitution. The “right” indicates a preference for federalism, a small central national government, and adherence to the U.S. Constitution and reverance for it.
That was the best article I have read that explains exactly how I feel! I’m not a writter but that was supurb. I will pass it around at our next tea party meeting plus I will mail it to all my friends.
You and Glenn Beck need to get together and start a program where every college across the country should here you’re message. Every PtA meeting should here how they are indoctrinating our children. When did Americans get so stupid! I’m just hoping we are not too late. I saw right through this man from the beginning but I know people that think he is wonderful. I’m working on them. Did you see how he is using facebook to his advantage?
Fascinating and engaging article, with some really intriguing ideas. I downloaded the Sklar article and will read it this evening.
Mr. Radosh has greatly added to the marketplace of ideas with this piece – bravo!
Even American socialist condemn Obama`s demagogy.Mr Radosh explains well as the slogans of the next “Great society” can be the cover of the creation of party-state combination for extra power acquisition, and the American constitution is the real barier for social demagogs.Big social programs must be not the results of party theorists but the fruit of nation- wide discussion and consensus.It`s evident that the “socialism” has nothing in common with the procedure described.
Viewing this from a more biologic perspective, we have symbiotic, parasitic, and collaborative relationships which are ill defined as to their boundaries. In the dynamic capacities of a large organism, all relationships must exist for the benefit (evolution) of the whole. Degeneration (or crime) predominates when one of the principles exceeds its boundaries.
When one gives one’s coat to the poor, there is a difference from when one’s coat is given to the poor.
True Socialist?
The ultimate goal in their lives is to have others follow you [the useful idiots] in the belief that it is for the good of all mankind and that they have found the way to world harmony. How those goals are achieved does not matter [executive orders and policy czars], just that they are, and that it is perceived that are achieved in the most respectable and honorable of ways. All your short comings and mistakes can simple be brushed aside by using the Bush syndrome [blame it on Bush]. Failure is not proof that something doesn’t work [the old Soviet Union]. In fact failures of any kind can always be explained away by the use of false information, [as in global warming] and backed up by your own academic experts. The most compelling sign of a socialist is when they end a discussion with, well — that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
In Canada we don’t call the lieberals for nothing.
socialism is a parasite of a free market
sure, because a free market society creates wealth unknown in any other system the government’s intrusion can be nearly painless in the beginning but once it finds a host it will feed until the host is dead, the parasite explodes under its own engorgement, or the host picks it off and kills it
multinationals exist because governments intrusion into the free market destroys the proverbial “little guy” from its onerous regulations
government intervention not only fosters giant multinationals but the crony cozy “capitalism” between government and “Big Business” is inevitable and the ruination is guaranteed
there is no bargaining over our principles
a free market society with a government existing only within it’s legitimately limited constraints nurses the conditions on our planet that gives the most freedom and wealth to an individual.
Exactly right.
Parasitic opportunism upon the back of the “already” successful. Socialists and politicians. They sit back, and wait for an industry to be created, for a market to soar, for a civilization to succeed, THEN they step in and say “hey now, we all need some of that”
No heavy lifting involved….just wait for the next FANTASTIC CAPITALIST SUCCESS STORY to become reality, wait for the next visionary to bust outside the box, and pounce, demanding a “fair share” from these now uber wealthy capitalists, as if they just woke up one day and decided to printed all that money, from dirt…
Think, if youre old enough, of the days before PC’s & cell phones. Before air-bags and GPS. Men like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are thought of as big Philanthropists today, and expected to support and sustain a lot of charitable enterprises…but where DID all that money come from?.
Where WERE the Needy Socialists and demanding Politicians when they were writing code, mining for rare earth elements, designing the molds, clamps, boards, lenses, glass and plastic pieces to fit together and FUNCTION, in a new and revolutionary ways so visionary, that people would line up by the millions and gladly BUY THEM FOR MORE THAN THEY COST TO PRODUCE?
If there is no successful MANUFACTURED PRODUCTS TO SELL, where WOULD all those CHARITY DOLLARS COME FROM?
Oh, thats right, Politicians and Socialists dont do details. None of them are very mechanically inclined….wrench?..whats a wrench? Theyre not around for the technical brainstorming, the design, the investments, and certainly not the RISK.
They only come in at the end, after a thousand failures, and the heartache and loss associated with reaching for a prize with your own bare hands, and your own money, is suffered by many, and accomplished by a few. They show up at the end, to Cherry Pick among the winners, as if they had some influence on the results.
They show up for the big meeting, the catered luncheon, the tour, and the photo-op. Always standing by, in their self inflated arrogance, ready to be the essential dispenser of societies “fair share” of someone else’s success.
Fucking parasites.
I would add something if I could think of anything. VERY well said!
Of course you are SO WRONG! There is definitely a socialist tradition in America. If you don’t believe it then try to explain why the demos and repubs are always arguing about the same things. On the other hand there is a way to get off that field. If Sarbanes-Oxley is good for business it is good for government. If 1099-MISC and W-2′s are good for income then 1099-GOV is good for ‘income, redistributed’. If we are serious about financial credibility then we quit arguing about how much ghost money is on the ground and pass a Balanced Budget Amendment which also requires our elected employees must cast a yea or nay vote for any expenditures…or be held in contempt of Congress.
In addition to all you have written, and it is considerable, the problem for Conservatives, and an aiding current that runs very deep alongside the agenda of the Democratic Party are two entities that amount to almost a de facto coup d’etat against lawful and Constitutional liberty.
One is a heavily layered and stultifying career bureaucracy whose enormity sets up an ‘us versus them’ mentality. The public becomes a chicken to be plucked but worse, the very nature of this bureaucracy smothers us like a blanket philosophically and financially because of its tendency to protect itself against and foresee law suits and at the same time protect the public from harm; protecting itself and the public become twin engines that fuel and serve one the other; the problem is that ‘they’ become the public.
This bureaucracy grows larger and larger, brooks no dissent and brings us all within itself. Our nation continues to consolidate its gains decades after its borders have been defined and now a form of imperialism and colonialism has been visited on its own people.
We have come a long way from getting together to build and equip a school house. Also, and not the least of this effect, is the ability to ignore law by, ironically, using complex psuedo-legal frameworks to subject us all to rules that inhibit our freedom. Workarounds to the Freedom of Information Act are already in place and I cannot videotape a police officer but he can perhaps copy all the information from my cell phone because I have a tail light out. I don’t have the money or time to legally challenge whether this is right or wrong and if I challenge this I will sit in jail, losing more time and money.
The second and most important, is the very nature of the lasting effects and perceptions that are the result of the cultural revolution which, like a bureaucracy, nicely and unwittingly set up and serve the same ends as the Democratic Party envisions as its goals.
Broad generalizations of what it means to be ‘fair’ or a ‘real’ American are common in film, music and TV and they are not Conservative principles or based in reality but in faith and Jim Crow guilt; whatever they are it is a form of indoctrination that goes far beyond a normal community desire to conform because one is made to conform. Childish stereotypes of political correctness dispense morality to skin color, scale of disenfranchisement and ones workplace and has the effect of us all calling each other ‘comrade’ or ‘citizen’.
The law giveth and the law taketh away and our courts see what it wants to see and it obeys its own legal imperatives only when they do not conflict with the cultural zeitgeist that places, for example, illegal immigrant minorities at the top of a reverse food chain. Oaths of office by politicians follow this rule as well as also plainly shown by sanctuary cities and policies.
Our population is now so large and legal precedents so complex that Federal judges can literally gerrymander words as they see fit along with foreign nationals to follow cultural necessity as in the case of the AZ immigration bill. Law always follows culture but in this case it has morphed into us being legally MADE to follow culture from which the law then emerges anew, an approved culture that stands over and surveys us.
This natural intertwining of law and culture has turned into a monstrous version of itself and one that clings to its rules even to the point of not protecting the very people who created it from massive immigration.
That monstrous bureaucracy is not threatened by a replacement of the original creators of itself by the Third World because it has culturally and legally turned its back on the principles that created America as being racist and exploitative; it believes it can survive without empiricism and on its own momentum and its misplaced faith in the ideals that posit a distorted and historically cheapened version of the phrase ‘we are all created equal’. The legal/bureaucratic/cultural zeitgeist that are the trio underlying the Democratic Party and its socialist values believe everyone in the whole world is an American and that the exceptionalism in front of their very eyes and written plain in history books and in statistics is a falsehood and a myth, to be shunned and done away with.
Orwell’s nightmare has crept upon us for the rather simplistic reason that the particulars are different in Orwell’s story and that is what we tend to see, the literal, rather than the overarching premise that underlies a real ability to see and which is the real enabler of Socialism and not its pedantry and dogma. Without that overarching perception that is the basis of the American zeitgeist today, Socialism has no car to ride in.
We thought that if we guarded against the particulars and dogmatic pedantry written down in manifestos that we would be safe – we were wrong because we were blindsided from the very place we least expected a form of fascism to emerge but were warned about by some – the meek, the environmentalists, the animal rights activists, the peaceniks, the anti-racists, the gay lobby – in short, the liberal, progressive political Left.
The meek have inherited the Earth, at least the West and certainly America and it has been in play for a long time now. Obama and his ilk have simply focused a lens on our broken system and exploited it along its weakest seams which is establishment law that has been subverted from within by a new generation that saw that a true revolution is best done from within and like a revolution it does not respect the institutions but uses them while breaking them to its will to further what they see as right and the law can come along or not as it pleases.
With all the labels we have bruited about and guarded against, it is the very semantically clever socialism that has no name that has done us in. The country’s philosophical infrastructure is steeped and indoctrinated with it from top to bottom. What do you call it when the repeal of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act cannot even be breathed by one single politician in this country or even by those politicians most ardent supporters? We have been undone.
Nicely done, but are you not acknowledging that the meek, dark forces have evolved more effectively than have “strong” “good” guys (or however you would choose to describe them)? This is what civilization now means; as always, one has to adapt to one’s environment. Much of what I read here seems to be a wail or a curse that things have changed.
It seems to me that one can critique the excesses and win elections when lefties over-reach, or the public is just discouraged by something, but in this climate, a return to exceptionalism would be dangerous, as in how exceptional Hitler convinced the Germans that they were. We didn’t fight them because we thought we were exceptional, but because it seemed like it had to be done and the exceptional Japanese attacked us.
Does exceptionalism imply that rules that apply to the rest of the world do not apply to us, because we are us? Where would exceptionalism get us right now?
A perfect example is Wisconsin with all the battles against unions. The public elects a GOP government for the first time in like forever, and then months later is revulsed by the union-busting. Just look at the recall elections and Walker’s approval rating. It seems that whenever the left overreaches, they get thrown out only to be disgusted by the GOP if they dare to actually reform anything. I don’t get it.
Surely “exceptionalism” is not meant to express the idea that Americans are superior beings. America’s constitutional republic, as originally formed, was exceptional for the liberty it allowed to its citizens. Quite ordinary people — energized by the knowledge that they were free to pursue their own interests within the constraints of law — created an even more exceptional country. It’s imperative that we return to constitutional government.
Hitler caused the suffering he did not because he convinced the Germans and Austrians they were exceptional but because he had absolute power. He acquired that power long before he began flattering the people.
Fascinating piece. Most of the comments are insightful. Many are worried at the movement toward the centralized, command and control collective Statism that we are intuiting but can’t quite name. The meaning of words has become very imprecise which makes it difficult, for a nonexpert, to analyze.
Bravo, Ron!!! reaaaallllll nice piece!!
Like I said a while back: my revolution has been stolen!!! The concept of a healthy tension between making and taking has been skewed in favor of taking and destroying. enough already!! stop the giveaways!!!! encourage pride and honest work!!!
Bravo, Ron!!! real nice piece!
Socialism in America dates back to the Plymouth Plantation. The year 1623, when the Communitie of Common Wealth almost doomed them, as William Bradford points out. It appears the young and energetic decided to relax and grow only enough to feed themselves. They learned their lesson the hard way. Why do we have to learn this the same way?
Why? Because people do not perceive themselves as Pilgrims entering a wilderness, where people starve if they don’t work 24/6.
And we can’t have that, now can we?
and therefore managed to reach the average working-class citizen in a manner that other socialists never managed to match.