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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

     Read the first chapter
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 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.

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