Socialist Groups In The United States

In the United States a totally different social pattern proved as unfavorable as was the Russian to the growth of a genuinely socialist mass movement. Thus the two cases present similarities that are no less interesting than the differences.

If the agrarian world of Russia, in spite of the streak of communism inherent in the structure of the Russian village, was practically impervious to the influence of modern socialism, the agrarian world of the United States provided an anti- socialist force that stood ready to make short work of any activities on Marxist lines important enough to be noticed by it. If the industrial sector of Russia failed to produce a significant socialist mass party because capitalist evolution was so sluggish, the industrial sector of the United States failed to do so because capitalist evolution rushed on at such a vertiginous pace. 11

The most important difference was between the respective intellectual groups: unlike Russia, the United States did not, until the end of the nineteenth century, produce an under-employed and frustrated set of intellectuals. The scheme of values that arose from the national task of developing the economic possibilities of the country drew nearly all the brains into business and impressed the businessman’s attitudes upon the soul of the nation. Outside of New York, intellectuals in our sense were not numerous enough to count. Most of them moreover accepted this scheme of values. If they did not. Main Street refused to listen and instinctively frowned upon them, and this was much more effective in disciplining them than were the methods of the Russian political police. Middle-class hostility to railroads, utilities and big business in general absorbed almost all there was of “revolutionary” energy.

The average competent and respectable workman was, and felt himself to be, a businessman. He successfully applied himself to exploiting his own individual opportunities, to getting on or, in any case, to selling his labor as advantageously as possible. He understood and largely shared his employer’s way of thinking. When he found it useful to ally himself with his peers within the same concern, he did so in the same spirit. Since roughly the middle of the nineteenth century this practice increasingly took adequate as the result of his supreme ability in handling them. In this respect, though in no other, Professor Laski’s proskynesis in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (article Ulyanov) is fully understandable, provided of course that intellectuals must prostrate themselves before the idols of their time.

the form of employees’ committees, the forerunners of the postwar company unions that acquired their full economic and cultural significance in company towns. 12

Beyond that, it was frequently good business for the workman to combine on a national scale with the other members of his craft in order further to improve his bargaining position as against employers directly and as against other crafts indirectly. This interest shaped many trade unions that are typically American, largely accounts for the adoption of the craft principle which is much more effective than any other principle can be in keeping away would-be entrants, and really produced workmen’s cartels. Naturally enough, these cartels displayed that lack of radicalism which was and is so eloquently lamented by both domestic and foreign socialists and fellow travelers.

Nothing but wage rates and hours mattered to them and they were quite prepared to study the wishes of the public or even of the employers in everything else, particularly in their phraseology. This is illustrated to perfection by the type and behavior of the leaders both of individual unions and of the American Federation of Labor which embodied that spirit, as well as by the attempts of the trade-union bureaucracy to enter, with trade-union funds, the sphere of industrial and financial enterprise that was quite congenial to them. 13

To be sure, the fact that the creeds and slogans—the ideologies—were so unrevolutionary and so averse to class war is in itself of limited importance. American trade unionists were not much given to theorizing. If they had been they might have put a Marxist interpretation upon their practice. It remains true however that, bargaining aside, they did not consider themselves on the other side of the fence in all things and that cooperation—which those of us who do not like it will call collusion—with employers was in accord not only with their principles but also with the logic of their situation. Beyond a narrow range of questions, political action was not only unnecessary but even meaningless to them. And for the influence he was able to exert, the radical intellectual might just as well have tried to convert the board of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

But there was another world within the world of American labor. Along with elements of supernormal quality, immigration included from the first some substandard ones also which increased in relative as well as absolute numbers after the Civil War. These numbers were swelled by individuals who, though not subnormal as to physical fitness or intelligence or energy, yet gravitated into that group, owing to past misfortunes or to the persistence of the influence of the unfavorable environments from which they sprang or simply owing to restlessness, inadaptable temperament or criminal proclivities. All these types were an easy prey to exploitation which was facilitated by the absence of moral bonds, and some of them reacted by a blind and impulsive hatred that readily crystallized into crime. In many new and rapidly growing industrial communities where people of the most varied origins and propensities were thrown together and law and order had to be kept, if at all, by action that was itself outside of the law, rough people, made still rougher by the treatment they received, faced employers, or agents of employers, who had not yet developed a sense of responsibility and were often driven to brutal courses by a fear not only for their property but also for their lives. There, so the socialist observer is inclined to say, was class war in the most literal sense—actual guns going off to illustrate the Marxist concept. As a matter of fact, it was nothing of the sort. It is hard to imagine any set of conditions less favorable to the development of political laborism or of serious socialism, and very little of either showed as long as those conditions lasted.

The history of the Knights of Labor, the one really important and nation- wide organization of all wageworkers regardless of skill or craft—and in fact of all who cared to join—covers about a decade of significant power and activity (1878–1889). In 1886 the Noble Order’s membership was almost 700,000. The part of it which consisted of industrial—mainly unskilled— laborers energetically participated in or even initiated the strikes or boycotts that accompanied the depressions of that time. A scrutiny of programs and pronouncements reveals a somewhat incoherent medley of all sorts of socialist, cooperative and, occasionally, anarchist ideas that we can trace, if we wish, to a wide variety of sources—Owen, the English agrarian socialists, Marx, and the Fabians among them. The political point of view was much in evidence and so was the idea of general planning and of social reconstruction. But such definiteness of aims as we may discover is really due to our reading back from the standpoint of our own time. In reality there were no definite aims and it was precisely the comprehensive character of the ideology of the Good Life—Uriah S.Stephens, the founder, had been trained for the ministry—and of the American Constitution which appealed to so many people, farmers and professional men included. The Order thus was a sort of exchange for the plans of all kinds of reformers. In this respect it indeed filled a function which its leaders had in mind when they stressed the educational aspect of its activities. But an organization formed of such different clays was constitutionally incapable of action. When definitely socialist profession was insisted on, it broke. Similar movements (Populists, Henry George’s and others) tell the same tale.

The obvious inference is that in the American environment of that time there was not and could not be either the requisite material or the requisite motive power for a socialist mass movement. This can be verified by following the thread that leads from the Knights to the Industrial Workers of the World. This thread is embodied in the career of a Marxist intellectual, Daniel De Leon, and hence should have, for the faithful, considerable specific weight.14 It was under his command that, in 1893, socialists within the Order of the Knights rose against the old leader, Powderly, thereby, as it turned out, dealing a death blow to the organization. The idea was to create an instrument for political action on more or less Marxian lines. Class war, revolution, destruction of the capitalist state and the rest of it were to be sponsored by a proletarian party. But neither the Socialist Labor Party (1890) nor De Leon’s Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (1895) had any life in it. Not only was the working-class following small—this would not in itself have been decisive—but success even of the Russian kind, that is to say, conquest of a controlling nucleus of intellectuals, was not attained. The Socialist Labor party first split and then lost most of the remaining ground to the new Socialist party.

The latter came as near to being an orthodox success as any group did in this country. To begin with, its origin was orthodox. It arose from the labor struggles during 1892–1894, when strikes were broken by the use of force, the federal government and the judiciary lending resolute support to the

15 It will be observed that this was done at a time when most European governments were rapidly adopting another attitude. However, this does not simply spell “backwardness” on this side of the Atlantic. It is true that the social and political prestige of the business interest was here much greater than anywhere else and that American democracy in consequence took a much narrower view of labor problems than did, say, the Junker government in Prussia. But employers. 15 This converted many a man who had been previously a “conservative” craft unionist. At any rate, it converted Eugene V. Debs first to industrial unionism and then to the principle of political action. Secondly, the general attitude adopted by the Socialist party was orthodox. It tried to work with and to “bore from within” the trade unions. It gave itself a regular political organization. It was in principle revolutionary in the same sense as were the great socialist parties of Europe. Its doctrine was not quite orthodox.

In fact it did not stress doctrinal aspects to any great extent—either under Debs or later—and it allowed considerable latitude to the teaching activities within its ranks. But though it never succeeded in absorbing the little local labor parties that kept on cropping up all over the country, it developed fairly well up to the postwar period when communist competition asserted itself.

A majority of socialists would, I think, agree in calling it the one genuine socialist party of this country. Its voting strength, though swelled as that of most socialist parties is by non-socialist sympathizers, measures the scope there was for serious socialist effort.

De Leon however had another chance. It came from—and went with—the Western Federation of Miners whose radicalism, quite independent of any doctrinal background, was nothing but the product of rough people reacting to a rough environment. This union provided the corner stone for the structure of the I.W.W. (1905). De Leon and his, associates added the wreckage of their own and other unsuccessful organizations as well as splinters mostly of dubious character—intellectual or proletarian or both— from everywhere and nowhere. But the leadership—and in consequence the phraseology—was strong. Besides De Leon himself, there were Haywood, Trautmann, Foster and others.

Shock tactics that knew no inhibitions and the spirit of uncompromising warfare account for a series of isolated successes, and the absence of anything else but phrases and shock tactics, for the ultimate failure that was hastened by quarrels with and defections to the communists as well as by incessant internal dissensions. But I need not retell a story that has been told so often from every conceivable standpoint. What matters to us is this. The organization has been called syndicalist—even anarchist—and later on the criminal syndicalism laws enacted in several states were applied to it. The principle of “direct” action on the spot and the doctrinal concession to the Western Federation of Miners which assigned to industrial unions a basic one can recognize this and even judge it according to one’s moral or humanitarian standard, and at the same time also recognize that partly owing to the undeveloped state of public administration, partly owing to the presence of elements with which no gentler method would have worked, and partly owing to the nation’s determination to press forward on the road of economic development, problems did present themselves under a different aspect and would have done so even to a governmental agency completely free from bourgeois blinkers.

role in the construction of socialist society—De Leon’s contribution to or deviation from classical Marxism—no doubt suggest that it was. But it seems more correct to speak of the insertion of syndicalist elements into what substantially was and remained an offshoot, of the Marxian stem than to base diagnosis entirely on those elements.

Thus that great sociologist, the man in the street, has been right once more. He said that socialism and socialists were un-American. If I catch his meaning, it amounts pretty much to what, less succinctly, I have been trying to convey. American development practically skipped the phase of socialism which saw the career of unadulterated Marxism and of the Second International. Their essential problems were hardly understood. The attitudes appropriate to them existed only as sporadic imports. American problems and attitudes occasionally borrowed these imported articles. But that was all. And the events of the next phase impinged on intellectuals and on a proletariat that had not gone through the Marxian school.