While it is always a huge mistake in politics to subject the past and present to the reductionist processes of both pseudo-science and romanticism, it's interesting to look at the position of the Socialist Party in the period just before, under orders from Lenin, it was destroyed by the communists in it and outside of it.
The book The Long Detour by James Weinstein is one of the better analyses of how the left went so wrong in the 20th century. While I think Weinstein isn't without his faults, he avoided many of the worst examples of both wishful thinking and demonization of opponents. That given he seems to have shared the far too common habit of not understanding the central role that religion, and especially Christianity have played in any successful political movement. I, of course, think that is one of the central defects of the would-be scientific left and among its strongest weaknesses. I will point out that when it comes to the Christian left, there isn't a reciprocal rejection of what science can legitimately tell us about the physical world, though there is, generally, a more sophisticated appreciation for the limits of where science can really do what it does. Weinstein certainly should have known that, considering the real presence of Christian socialists in the Socialist Party, more about which, later.
With that reservation, here's what he says about the rise of the old Socialist Party, not to be confused with many other "parties" which called themselves "socialist" and acted in ways that only brought discredit to the word.
After describing the industrialization and modernization going on in the late 19th century and early 20th, Weinstein said:
These developments marked a major step in the maturing of American capitalism. They were reflected also in the coming of age of social and political movements representing the interests of workers and farmers, among which was the creation of the Socialist Party. Even when socialism burst onto the political landscape as a bona fide American movement, however, its greatest strength did not reside in numbers. Indeed, socialism was a relatively minor player in the panoply of farmers, workers, and middle-class businessmen and professionals who formed the social base of the Populist and Progressive movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.
Still, the new party did grow rapidly. By 1912, its defense of working people and its democratic vision permeated all ranks of society and provided much of the yeast for the intellectual ferment of the time. From this mix of social forces and ideologies, the Socialists emerged as the most enduring organized group. To many of those who had not followed the arcane course of the sectarian left, the popularity of this new movement came as a shocking surprise.
Within ten years of the party's founding, more than 100,000 members were paying dues each month, and there probably were an equal number of sporadic adherents. By 1912, when Debs received 900,000 votes for president, Victor Berger had been elected to Congress from Milwaukee, seventy-four municipalities throughout the country had elected Socialist mayors, and 340 cities and towns had elected more than 1,200 lesser Socialist officials. In the American Federation of Labor, too - despite president Samuel Gomper's hostility and the influence of the Catholic Church's anti-Socialist Militia of Christ - one-third of the federations international affiliates had elected Socialist presidents. Still, in the years before the United States entered the first World War, Socialists elected only two men to the House of Representatives.
Agrarian progressives had done much better. They had elected hundreds to Congress and they had played a major role in initiating reform legislation. Yet the farmers movements were, on the whole a rearguard defense of their former status, while the Socialists' ideas and programs corresponded to the developmental path of corporate capitalism. As the living embodiment of socialist principles, the party far surpassed farmers in influencing the corporate transformation of property and market relations during the Progressive Era. That was the movement's greatest strength and the cause of its wide appeal.
If that would have continued, in some way, if events such as the First World War and the Wilson administration's suppression of large parts of the Socialist movement as a national security measure during the war hadn't intervened, isn't knowable. What is known is that the communists within the Socialist Party, both those who were rather absurdly encouraged by the Russian Revolution or who were, in fact, taking orders from Lenin destroyed the Socialist Party in 1919 when they were unable to rig things to take it over.
I do think that, typical of urbanites, Weinstein is rather dismissive of the political force of farmers and rural folk, considering their importance to both the Democrats and the Republicans as well as their actual role in the Socialist Party's successes he documents. Debs got more votes in Texas and Oklahoma than he did in New York City. For more of which, though I don't have it to type out an excerpt, you can see James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest 1895-1943. It's quite possible that populism - not without its own problems at that point - is a better model for understanding American politics or, at least, represents a crucial ingredient that can't be dismissed out of modernist, urban and, regional snobbery, one of the bigger self-inflicted disabilities of the left and a boon for Republican-fascism.
The Christian left, as well, has proved both more effective and more enduring than even Weinstein in his generous and realistic view was willing to acknowledge. The Militia of Christ, the one within the AFL, was hardly a reactionary group. And their reservations about socialism were informed by some already present advocates of violence. And it wasn't quite as vehemently anti-Socialist as all that. The Rev. Peter Deitz, one of its major figures said:
Catholic opinion stands between the silent but deep-going excesses of the capitalistic society and loud and oftentimes violent demonstrations of socialist democracy. It is difficult to say which of the two extremes is the greater menace to civilization, but I am inclined to think the unregulated capitalism is the greater offender.
The extent to which those communists within the Socialist Party, the ones who would go on to wreck it, accounted for those reservations would be interesting to know, the ones who threw away all of the work that had elected people to offices and were part of a growing political party, a real one that elects people and makes laws, not the make-believe party that chose to be a tool of the Soviet Government even as the Communist Party was forming. There was every reason for people on the left to distrust the Communists, starting in 1919 but even more so as they developed. In fact, some of those most suspicious of Communists proved to be their fellow Communists and their rivals in communism. Defections to both the would-be left and the right, schisms, expulsions over minutia and basic dogma and doctrine and, most often, power rivalries, the myriad of rival split-off parties is pretty much the real history of Communism in America, as elsewhere.
We can't know how history would have turned out if that hadn't happened. It's possible that the Socialists would have been undermined by their success being copied by the Progressives or the Populists due to their success. However, it was that record of Socialist success that the communists overturned for the ensuing century of total and complete idiocy, treachery, criminality and worship of mass murderers through which the left was weakened and discredited with the large majority of voters. Yet when leftists look to the history of the left, it is largely the communist - atheist left that it finds presented as that history.
Update: Why I'm going over the already junked Communist Party is due to the idiotic romanticism over it that is still a damaging delusion of so many on the left and because it is the most important case study in understanding why the left has failed, especially how so many of our natural allies have been turned into our enemies. As I said earlier this week, I think the current atheist fad is just a continuation of that folly. By an enormous number, the real left, traditional American style liberalism, is peopled by religious believers, inevitably the large majority of those Christians. I think the past century and more have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the tiny fraction of atheists has been a burden we have borne out of a misplaced sense of fairness and out of pity for their well-earned rejection and only somewhat less well-earned suppression. They certainly never hesitated to reject or suppress or oppress others on the left who they saw as their rivals. We need to get shut of them and their ideological descendants or we will never attract support.
No comments:
Post a Comment