[PEN-L:33677] Weinstein on Lipset & Marks/Why Socialism Failed in US

["Michael Hoover" <HooverM@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Sunday, December 17, 2002

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

By JAMES WEINSTEIN
Special to the Times

It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States
By Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks
W.W. Norton: 384 pp., $26.95


     In 1906, Werner Sombart wrote a book titled "Why Is There No
Socialism in America?" He wasn't the first to expound on this aspect of
America's divergence from Europe, and he wasn't the last. The honor of
having written the latest, if not the last, book on the weakness of
socialism in America goes to Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, whose
"It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States" is an
intelligent and in many ways a thoughtful book. But do we need it? Do
Lipset and Marks look at the question of socialism's failure in a way
that opens our minds to rethinking the problem--if it is a problem--of
the absence of an organized American left rooted in traditional
socialist ideas?

     Don't get me wrong. As a lifelong socialist, I am deeply concerned
about what has happened to the political movement for socialism in
America, but I am even more interested in knowing what has happened to
the meaning of socialism and its democratic, libertarian and egalitarian
traditions in this era of highly developed corporate capitalism. Lipset
and Marks, however, restrict themselves pretty much to a discussion of
the fate of the party, or parties, that have called themselves
socialist. They write about this movement but fail to explore the
transformation of the public's understanding of the term. Nor do they
consider the ways in which socialists themselves may have changed in the
light of the Soviet experience.

     Consider this: Socialism, as it was understood by Karl Marx and by
many socialists in the West before 1917, hasn't happened anywhere in the
world--not in the United States, not in Europe, not in the Soviet Union,
China or Cuba. So in what ways is the United States unique? Perhaps
Lipset and Marks should have asked why there is no socialism worldwide.
They do raise this question, but only implicitly and obscurely, and then
they skim past it. They ignore the problems posed by communist countries
that have called themselves socialist but that did not--and probably
could not--embody the socialist principles underlying the Western
movement before 1917. Instead, they focus narrowly on American
exceptionalism--on how the United States is different from Western
Europe--and how these differences have affected the history of the left
in the United States. And they rely on familiar arguments and
assumptions about socialism, at least some of which were fixed in the
popular mind by the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.

     The arguments Lipset and Marks use have been made by commentators
on the American scene from Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s to Daniel
Bell in the 1950s, by socialists from Friedrich Engels to Lenin and by
American historians from John R. Commons and Selig Perlman to Louis
Hartz. The authors know this literature well and cite these arguments to
good effect, but they don't carry us beyond them onto new ground.

     The first reason for the weakness of class-conscious political
movements in America, Lipset and Marks tell us, is genealogical: The
United States was the first major capitalist country that came into
being without significant feudal ancestors. Never having to defeat a
domestic feudal ruling class and never having experienced the fixed
class divisions--and class resentments--that feudalism entailed, the
United States was born free. Thoroughly bourgeois and with a vigorous
civil society (except, of course, in the slave states), revolutionary
America still had an elite, made up of slave owners in the South and
merchants in the North, but the vast majority of the population were
independent producers who, as property owners, had the right to vote, a
right soon extended to all free males. As Lipset and Marks write,
socialism has had limited appeal because its social content "is similar
to what Americans think they already have, namely a democratic,
classless, anti-elitist society."

     Ethnic diversity is another reason that Lipset and Marks explore
for socialism's weakness in America. Unlike Europe, where workers in
each country shared a common language and culture, in the United States
workers were divided by their cultural differences. In its early days
the socialist movement in the United States was little more than an
import from Germany, isolated by language and culture from most American
workers. And, indeed, though premised on working-class solidarity, the
movement continued to be plagued by the old-world hostilities of an
ethnically divided working class well into the 20th century. Native-born
and immigrant Britons and Germans formed an elite stratum of skilled
workers as well as the bulk of craft union membership. Southern and
Eastern European immigrants--and, in the west, Chinese--were generally
relegated to unskilled work. And African-Americans, still only recently
freed from slavery and isolated by racism, were employed in the most
menial jobs--except when they were being used as strikebreakers, which,
of course, further fragmented the working class.

     These problems alone would have made the job of building a united
working-class movement difficult, but things were made worse because
most immigrants were politically and culturally conservative, and their
conservatism was encouraged by an actively anti-socialist Catholic
Church. As Lipset and Marks make clear, the predominance of immigrants
in the American work force worked against the growth of political
socialism, despite the movement's largely immigrant origins.

     After 1900, when Eugene V. Debs first ran for president and the
Socialist Party of America was founded, the Socialists faced yet
another, perhaps more daunting, problem: the peculiar structure of the
American political system. Ours is a system that militates against the
success of third parties. The parliamentary systems of Europe and Canada
make it relatively easy for a minority party to be heard and even to
become part of a ruling government coalition, because the heads of
government are chosen by parliamentary majorities, not separately as in
the United States. As the European systems have evolved, minority
parties, like the Greens in Germany, have become members of ruling
coalitions. Even in France, where the president is elected separately,
the parliament is elected by a partial system of proportional
representation and minority members are easily elected and sometimes
become part of governing coalitions.

     In the United States, however, single-member congressional
districts and the separate election of the president by nationwide
popular vote (constrained by the Electoral College) greatly disadvantage
any minority party. No third party, except the Republicans, has ever
successfully rivaled a major party in the United States. And the
Republicans succeeded only because the Whig party had disintegrated over
the question of the extension of slavery, an issue that split the
nation. Although since then there have been many third-party efforts, no
significant third party except the Socialists has lasted more than two
presidential elections. The Socialists survived, at least until 1932,
Lipset and Marks suggest, because they were a highly ideological and
principled party. But that also prevented them from making the kinds of
compromises that might have made them more relevant and influential,
though perhaps less distinct.

     All of this is well-traveled ground, but two ideas, one presented
in the first chapter, the other in the last chapter, hint at a new way
of looking at this question. Early on, Lipset and Marks quote Marx's
introduction to "Das Kapital" in which he suggests that rather than
being an exception, America would be a model for capitalist countries.
Only in the last chapter do the authors return to this idea and point
out that over the last half century, the left throughout the world has
followed America by moving to the right. This has been true throughout
Europe and in Japan, especially, Lipset and Marks observe, in England,
Australia and New Zealand, where all three labor parties have become
unionist, rather than socialist.

     In those countries, the authors write, this has simply been a
return to form; "Only during and after World War I did labor parties in
these countries adopt socialist programs." This reference to the
destabilizing effect of war receives only glancing attention, but
perhaps it is the key to the politics of the left in the last century.
Consider this: The chaos and devastation of World War I created the
conditions in which the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the German
Social Democrats were elected to office and the British Labor Party
turned socialist and was elected. As a result of conditions created by
World War II, Mao Tse-tung and his party took control of China, the
Communist parties of Italy and France greatly increased their strength,
and the British Labor Party swept back into office as Clement Atlee
ousted wartime hero Winston Churchill. In short, the world wars weakened
state apparatuses and delegitimized the capitalist class of these
countries and opened up space for the left, which emerged from the world
wars as the champions of a populist nationalism.

     Of course, in the United States, the world wars had exactly the
opposite effect on the left. Isolated from wartime destruction and
enjoying a boom in producing military and other goods for its allies,
American capitalism emerged from both world wars greatly strengthened.
At home, the wars provided full employment after serious depressions.
Wages rose sharply, unions cooperated with management and grew
substantially. In both cases, the postwar years saw savage attacks on
the left which, because of its own internal weakness, was particularly
vulnerable each time. (This is a complex story to which Lipset and Marks
do not do justice in their chapter on political repression.) Rebuilding
Europe after both wars and Japan after the second war further solidified
American capitalism's control over the American state and the world
economy. (Interestingly, the only significant growth of the left in the
last 50 years was also in reaction to a war: the war against Vietnamese
independence. That war did not wreak physical damage on the country, but
for millions of Americans it played havoc with the idea of America as a
democratic ideology.)

     This brings us back to Marx's idea that "the country that is more
developed industrially shows to the less developed the image of their
future." Lipset and Marks quote this remark as if it were a comment on
politics, but Marx meant it as a statement about the developmental logic
of capitalist society. And though Marx believed that capitalist cant
development was a prerequisite for socialism, he had little to say about
how the political movement for socialism would or should develop. He did
believe that Britain, or more likely the United States, would be the
first to achieve the level of technological development and the
experience of democracy required to make possible a peaceful transition
to socialism. So far, history has not proved him wrong in this regard.
Indeed, one might argue that the United States has achieved this level
of development and awaits the growth of a left to appreciate that
potential. If that is so, then perhaps the title of Lipset and Marks'
book might better have been "Why Socialism Hasn't Happened Here Yet"
rather than "It Didn't Happen Here."

     Asking why it didn't leads to the rehash of already answered
questions that this book barely transcends. But asking why socialism
hasn't happened encourages thinking about many questions: To what
extent, for example, have socialism's principles been incorporated into
corporate capitalism and mainstream American culture? And what else in
the socialist tradition might revitalize our culture and point the way
to a more democratic, humane and egalitarian society?
***

James Weinstein is the author of "The Decline of Socialism in America,
1912-1925" and the founding editor of In These Times.