Rosenstone, Robert A.

English

Caltech Authors - Main

DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91125 
WHY IS THERE NO SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES? 
Robert A. Rosenstone 
To be published in Reviews in American History 
HUMANITIES WORKING PAPER 17 
November 1978 
WHY IS THERE NO SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES? 
Robert A. ltosenstone 
Milton Canton, The Divided Left: American Radicalism 1900-1975, 
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 248 pp., Bibliography 
and index. $11.95. 
Why is there no socialism in the United States? The question 
may be old, but it is one made new for each generation. Posed in 
this form, it was the title of a 1906 book by German sociologist 
Werner Sombart. Now, three major periods of radical upheaval later, 
it remains timely. Partly this is because it is a more general 
question than the word "socialism" might indicate, broader even than 
the fuzzier notien of "radicalism." The question really implies an 
inquiry into the nature of U.S. history and society -- not just 
social, political and economic arrangements, but also into that 
elusive but significant area of "consciousness," which includes 
values, life-goals, allegiance and self-definition of individuals 
and groups. 
To ask the question is to assume Karl Marx was on to 
something when he pointed to class struggle as the engine of history 
and advanced capitalist orders as most ripe for socialism. To 
attempt to answer it is not just to admit that Marx was wrong 
after all, Marxist revolution has come only to underdeveloped 
2 
countries -- but to explain why he was so far wide of the mark with 
regards to the United States. Certainly America spawns radical 
movements, but here there has been the least class consciousness, 
the greatest discontinuities between generations of radicals, the 
most conservative labor unions, and the weakest socialist parties 
of any highly industrialized nation. 
Over the years Sombart's query has been answered in 
different ways. These sort themselves into two categories: 
(1) American "exceptionalism," and (2) the internal problems and/or 
intellectual weakness of radical groups. The first camp is by far 
the most extensive, and Sombart was a member. "Exceptionalism" 
means that the U.S. has somehow escaped the pattern of development 
shared by other industrial societies. For SOmbart it was the 
rising standard of living, fluid class lines, open frontier and 
franchise which served to prevent the radicalization of the working 
class. (Once he put it simply: "All socialist utopias have come 
to grief on roast beef and apple pie.") With varying degrees of 
sophistication, this argument has been advanced by many scholars. 
Perhaps the most significant addition to it was Louis Hartz's notion 
(The Liberal Tradition in America, 1955) that class consciousness 
and socialism in Europe grew out of a feudal tradition which was 
wholly absent in the U.S. The second approach has been implicit in 
studies of individual movements -- Socialist Party, Communist Party, 
IWW or New Left -- where divisiveness and factionalism are bound to 
loom large. Here one might also place Daniel Bell's influential essay, 
3 
"The Development of Marxian Socialism in the United States," (in Stow 
Persons and Donald Drew Egbert, Socialism and American Life, 1952) 
best remembered for its charge that the SP was "in, but not of this 
world," that radical movements never faced the real problems of 
American life, but had their eyes focused upon messianic utopian 
goals. 
Despite a gap in the literature, no scholar has yet attempted 
a history of radicalism that spans two hundred years of American 
experience. Indeed, until recently even broad approaches to the 
Left in this century have been nonexistent. But now, evidently 
prodded by the activism of the sixties, historians have begun to fill 
this vacuum. First came John P. Diggins' The American Left in the 
Twentieth Century (1973), which interpreted radicalism "as an 
intellectual and cultural phenomenon" (vii) and dealt with the leaders 
and ideas of three generations, the Lyrical, the Old and the New 
Left. This was followed by James Weinstein's The Ambiguous Legacy: 
The Left in American Politics (1975), a work which combined scholarship 
and polemic, gave less emphasis to individuals than did Diggins and 
focused more upon the changing nature of corporate society. Now 
Milton Cantor has produced a volume which clearly builds upon the 
research of many recent specialized studies and biographies, 
acknowledges the insights of Weinstein and Diggins, and yet has its 
own distinctive point of view. 
Cantor incorporates both explanations for the failure of 
the Left, with "exceptionalism" seen as by far the more important. 
4 
But this is "exceptionalism" with a difference. The chief "obstacle 
to radical dreams for a socialist society" has not been the actual 
accomplishments of American capitalism, but "the bourgeois mentality 
of much of American labor." (6) This mentality is no mere reflection 
of rising wages or social mobility; rather, it is what Marx called 
a "false consciousness." By accepting the American dream, the 
"land of opportunity" mystique, workers have been blinded to "any 
realistic appreciations of the inegalitarian and class nature of 
the society." (8) The values shared by industrialists and workers 
and alike achieved what Antonio Gramsci called "hegemony" over 
American institutions -- unions, schools, churches -- and over the 
"values, attitudes, beliefs and morality -- which comprised 
consciousness." (7) One result is that grievances against "the 
established social order" can only be conceived "in terms supplied 
by that order." (9) This has meant electoral politics, reform 
movements and trade union activity. 
In such a situation the problem for radicals is -- as 
Lenin would argue -- to demystify the ideology, to transform the 
consciousness of workers by showing how the ideas of Americanism 
have served to mask their exploitation, to turn them from faith in 
the system to a readiness tp abolish it. American Leftists disagreed 
over how to achieve this end, and Cantor sees them as taking two 
opposing positions -- "impossibi~ism" and "immediatism." The former 
meant maintaining faith in the "revolutionary nature of the working 
class," proclaiming that capitalism could not be reformed, keeping 
5 
labor from seeking improvements within the competitive system, eschewing 
electoral politics and preaching straight socialism rather than accepting 
short-term goals. In the U.S. it also seemed to mean isolation from 
the working class. Those groups which maintained their doctrinal purity 
Daniel De Leon's Socialist Labor Part and a half dozen Trotskyist groups 
have been among the smallest and most ineffectual of radical 
organizations. 
Daniel Bell to the contrary, Cantor maintains that 
"impossibilism" was not the dominant strain on the Left. Much more 
common was "immediatism," which implied a gradual road to socialism. 
Most radicals could not simply take comfort in the eventual 
revolution -- they wanted to help suffering people now, and so they 
worked inside labor unions, organized the unemployed or the powerless 
in urban ghettos and took part in electoral politics. In doing so, 
they had to stress limited goals and de-emphasize "socialist ideology 
and objectives," with the result that they often sounded little 
different from reformers. This was the path advocated by German 
revisionist Eduard Bernstein -- "the movement is everything, the 
ends are nothing" -- but Cantor sees it as one in which the means 
corrupted the ends. Opportunism flourished and winning elections 
or strikes became more important than raising "class consciousness" 
or preparing for socialism. Yet just this approach underlay the 
real, if temporary, successes of the century's most important 
radical movements -- the SP and the IWW before World War One, the CP 
in the thirties and forties and the New Left in the sixties. 
6 
Tension between adherents of these two positions divided 
Left groups all through this century and led to frequent schisms. 
Cantor judges the "immediatists" as shortsighted and mistaken, but 
he also shows no faith that "impossibilism" could have dented 
"hegemony." So it is with a kind of "damned if you do, damned if 
you don't" outlook, a vicious double-bind, that he details the 
story of twentieth century radicalism, follows the rise and decline 
of major organizations and finds room to describe the fortunes of 
splinter groups. Sharing with Diggins an interest in "culture 
radicalism," he also examines the Leftist proclivities of poets 
and artists from the playful radicalism of the teens to the 
infatuation with communism in the thirties to the gaudy counter 
culture of the sixties. For creative people the problem was less 
one of means and ends than that of the tension between political 
positions and the demands of artistic expression. What Cantor 
says of this dilemma for the Lyrical Left might refer to all --
culture radicals were forced to "compartmentalize their ideas --
placing political commitments in one box and views on the function 
of-:cu1'T:ure in another." (49) 
Since much of the ground covered in The Divided Left is 
familiar, Cantor's main contribution is the unrelenting insistence 
on the theme of "immediatism." No summary of all his evidence is 
possible, but a few examples can show how it was -- in his view --
i 
a self-defeating strategy. Take the SP at its high point in 1912, 
when Eugene V. Debs received six percent of the Presidential vote 
7 
and 1200 socialists -- including 56 mayors and aldermen -- were 
elected to office. This could only happen because the SP had become, 
in Leon Trotsky's words, a "party of dentists." The remarkable 
decade-long growth towards this apparent triumph had been built on 
immediatist goals that attracted a reformist constituency, while a 
vague "revolutionary patina" was confined to the ritual platform 
and voiced by a tiny minority within the SP. The irony was that 
electoral victories were a losing game. Socialists in office might 
sponsor "municipal ownership of utilities, improved sanitation, 
adequate school facilities, (and) free textbooks," (29) but this in 
no way distinguished them from Progressives or brought socialism 
nearer. 
The SP might be tame, but surely the IWW, CP and New Left 
were ready for the barricades. Not so, says Cantor. The rhetoric of 
the IWW -- with its calls for class war, sabotage and "propaganda 
of the deed" -- might be violent, but it was a labor union after 
all, and in strike situations leaders like Bill Haywood sought 
union contracts and negotiated responsibly over wages and hours. 
This meant that even a success like that at Lawrence, Massachusetts 
in 1913, was limited. Workers were attracted only by the union's 
ability to improve their condition and they dropped out when strikes 
were over. Thus, because the Wobblies neglected to explicate 
their vision of the "cooperative commonwealth," they left behind 
no "permanently radicalized constituency or labor organization." (39) 
Similar problems dogged the CP, born out of the Left Wing of the SP 
8 
just after the Bolshevik Revolution in the belief that a similar 
upheaval in the U.S. was near. In some periods the CP was a tiny, 
purist group, and respectability came only during the Popular Front 
of the late thirties and then again during the Second World War. The 
cost was the surrender of "revolutionary goals" and "its identity 
as an independent political force." (118) By supporting the New 
Deal, helping to organize the CIa and keep workers from striking 
during the war, party leaders dug their own grave. For when 
politicians and unions turned against communism in Cold War years, 
there was no class conscious rank-and-file to defend them. As for 
the New Left, it was different from former groups in that it was 
largely based on students, was closer to romantic anarchism than 
socialism, and -- for most of its brief history -- cared more for the 
personal authenticity of action than for ideas. Its goals such as 
ending the Vietnam War or organizing the poor were thus easily 
coopted by government programs or defused by reform leaders like 
Gene McCarthy or George McGovern. 
While some might cheer the accomplishments of radical groups, 
The Divided Left argues that any successes were worse than illusory 
for the cause of socialism they were counterproductive. The idea 
is that anything that humanized the system has also strengthened it. 
For example, municipal reform in the Progressive era made a 
contribution to social stability that "hastened the acceptance of 
the business civilization and confirmed the beneficence of its 
values." (29) Similarly, to organize successful unions was to 
9 
integrate workers into the capitalist system and contribute to 
"working-class acceptance of a consumer-oriented, middle-class 
culture." Ultimately, then, the "irony of the radical experience 
in America" was that whatever small successes radicals achieved 
only helped to strengthen "the class system and dominant values of 
the society." (40) 
This argument is hardly original. Much of it is voiced 
in Weinstein and supported by works such as Melvin Dubofsky's 
We Shall Be All (1969), with its assertion that radicals "acted as 
midwives at the birth of the 'welfare state.'" (484) Any assessment 
of its truth or falsity is bound to result in what philosophers call 
a "nonterminating argument," one obviously dependent upon individual 
values. A major issue involved is the truth of Gramsci's notion of 
hegemony -- ,that is, "to what degree was the prevailing ideology 
socialized within the work force and embraced by it?" (8) This raises 
the question of whether an "impossibilist" position might ultimately 
have taken the Left farther along the road towards socialism -- as 
Weinstein asserts -- or whether Cantor is correct in claiming that 
hopelessness of both approaches? Like other studies, The Divided Left 
concentrates on the strategy of leaders and the author admits that 
the broader question can only be answered "by a direct investigation 
of working class attitudes and behavior." (9) 
Such a study would return us to that realm of "consciousness" 
which is so central to histories of radicalism. Not only does it 
help to structure the past but it also underlies assessments of future 
10 
developments. Here the three recent surveys differ considerably; 
Weinstein, hoping to tear away the veils of hegemony to include 
"industrial workers as a . . part of the new socialist party" 
(170); Diggins, wondering if the Left can absorb the challenge of the 
counter culture, "a new consciousness that seeks not so much to 
realize but to obliterate the western ideal of consciousness" (195); 
and Cantor, foreseeing no change in consciousness because the 
"economic, political, social and ideological factors (that) shaped 
a non-revolutionary society ... are still operative." (227) 
One way to approach such disagreements and to answer the 
question posed by Sombart might be to investigate more closely the 
notion of "consciousness" itself. As usually used in the term 
"class consciousness" it is a sociological and economic notion that 
can seem crude and simplistic to anyone familiar with the traditions 
of Freudian or developmental psychology -- after all, it assumes a 
kind of class loyalty without exploring the dynamic matrix of the 
family in which personalities develop and values are internalized. 
To understand if and how it actually exists within individuals and 
groups, one could calIon the methodologies and insights from the 
growing field of psychohistory. Perhaps studies of the family could 
serve to reveal why workers have identified themselves with middle 
class Americans rather than as a "proletarist." Similarly, 
psychobiographical analysis migh~, explain why -- assuming Cantor 
is correct -- American leaders were so disposed towards "immediatism." 
Comparisons with the European Left would also be helpful, for the 
11 
struggle between the two positions has also occurred there, the 
difference evidently being that "impossibilists" have had a somewhat 
greater constituency and workers have more readily identified 
themselves in terms of class. Ultimately, one can commend Cantor's 
book as an intelligent, useful analysis that takes its place along 
side the works of Diggins and Weinstein. All three are must reading 
for those interested in the American Left, together, they bring us 
as far along the road towards understanding as conventional or Marxist 
history can. Now it is possible that a different approach to the 
problem of belief structures and individual and group identity might 
take us even farther. 


Why is there no socialism in the United States?

Perhaps the most significant addition to it was Louis Hartz's notion (The Liberal Tradition in America,

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Why is there no socialism in the United States?

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