The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Author:Bhaskar Sunkara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

SEVEN

SOCIALISM AND AMERICA

WERNER SOMBART’S CLASSIC 1906 book Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? tried to address a crucial question. If “modern Socialism follows as a necessary reaction to capitalism,” Sombart reasoned, “the country with the most advanced capitalist development, namely the United States, would at the same time be the one providing the classic case of Socialism, and its working class would be supporters of the most radical of Socialist movements.”

Why hadn’t it, and why hadn’t they? His answer was simple: prosperity meant that workers were too full of “roast beef and apple pie” to be drawn to socialist agitation. That answer has long been seen accurate to one degree or another, as have others, including the notion of American “exceptionalism”—an attachment to individualism and a limited state that goes back to the nation’s founding.

Yet socialism in fact has a long and distinguished history in the United States. In Sombart’s day, socialism might not have been a mass force in American politics, but it seemed to be gathering momentum. In 1912, the Socialist Party won almost a million votes in the presidential election, had a membership of a hundred twenty thousand, and elected more than a thousand people to office. Mayors of cities including Berkeley, Flint, Milwaukee, and Schenectady were all socialists. So was a congressman, Victor Berger, and dozens of state officials. Oklahoma alone was home to eleven socialist weeklies. And in clusters of the country—from the Jewish enclaves of the Lower East Side to the mining towns of the West—the “cooperative commonwealth” was the American dream that workers actually subscribed to.1

Nor were these sentiments new to America. In the late 1820s, the United States gave birth to the first workers’ parties in the world, in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. These movements largely represented the interests of artisans, as factory production was just being introduced and was concentrated in New England, employing mostly women and children. In New York, more straightforward demands to limit the working day coexisted for a brief while with the radical agrarianism of the party’s leader, Thomas Skidmore, who called for the equal distribution of all land. Drawing on the republicanism of the American revolution, Skidmore had a language for his criticism of wage labor: “thousands of our people of the present day in deep distress and poverty, dependent for their daily subsistence upon a few among us whom the unnatural operation of our own free and republican institutions, as we are pleased to call them, has thus arbitrarily and barbarously made enormously rich.”2

For the more fanciful parts of his program and his authoritarian personality, Skidmore was booted from the organization before its first electoral campaign, which was a relative success. Within two years, however, the New York “Workies” would be subsumed into the Democratic Party, in what would become a pattern for independent labor efforts.

In the same period, the United States proved itself fertile ground for utopian socialism. Robert Owen, a Welsh former industrialist, founded a community he called New Harmony in southwest Indiana in 1827.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.