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Written: 1964-1969.
First Published: 1971.
Source: A Bulletin Book for Labor Publications Inc., New York 1971.
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From almost the first moment of its beginnings as a colony in the 1600s the United States has had a violent, tumultuous history. Struggle against the ruling class was never absent for long in any period of United States history. But rarely was this struggle a conscious one, for there was always a deep antipathy towards conscious thought, towards theory of any kind in the United States. As Engels comments in a letter to his close collaborator Sorge in 1886: '. . . from good historical reasons the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for making the masses stupid.' 1
The Americans were and are the most empirical of peoples on earth. Never having to struggle against feudal institutions and ideology this American empiricism generally did not even reach the level of theoretical defence that it did in England. Empiricism has existed here largely as an absence of conscious coherent thought rather than as a philosophical body of thought fought for against metaphysical thought. Lacking a conscious and logical approach towards theory does not mean that Americans were ever free from theory. Rather it meant that, without conscious effort, Americans continued to hold the most discredited mumble-jumble of old and discarded theories pasted together in an eclectic manner to fit whatever practical project was at foot.
PopulismThe major stress of American radicalism is what we call Populism. Essentially this was a struggle of the great mass of the petty bourgeoisie against the largest capitalists and against the very logic of the market economy which has always kept this group in a weakened and impoverished stare. Over and over again, since the days before the American Revolution, the very same demands have been raised. The enemy is always 'Big Business' and especially 'The Banks' and 'Wall Street'. The basic demand is for cheap money through one gimmick or another which will aid the debtors and hurt the creditors. As time went on more radical demands, such as the nationaIization of the banks and the utilities, were also added, but these demands were intended to accomplish the same purpose.
This populist current has had great strength during different periods and has played an enormous role in American history. The struggle against the ratification of the constitution after the Revolutionary War in reality centred around this issue. The poor farmers and small artisans rallied to the Articles of Confederation and the autonomy of the local states; they used their control of these states to print large quantities of almost worthless currency which they used to pay off their debts.
The commercial and banking interests succeeded in establishing the Constitution with its relatively centralised government only by circumventing the real will of the overwhelming majority of the population. The great Jacksonian movement based itself on the populist ideology though it utilised this in a highly demagogic manner. Jackson was able to fuse into one movement the artisans and journeymen of the Northern cities with the small farmers of the West and South, though he administered the government basically in the interests of the ever-dominant big business and commercial capitalists of the North-east. Populism flared up again in the Greenback movement, the silver standard movement which expressed itself almost simultaneously in Populism, Bryanism and Teddy Roosevelt's Progressivism.
Even after World War I this populist outlook found partial expression in La Follette's Progressive Party, and appeared in an almost pure form in the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, the Non-Partisan Leagues of the Dakotas, and the 'socialist' CCF in Saskatchewan and other Western Provinces of Canada. Even today some of this spirit can be found in the National Farmers Organisation of Iowa and other Midwest agricultural states.
Basically, then, populism was a struggle of the petty-bourgeoisie – primarily the small farmer, and secondly the artisan of the small town and city – against the very logic of the capitalist system which pitted one small producer against another and subordinated all to the few large industrial and financial capitalist concerns, traditionally concentrated in the North-east. Being a struggle against the very logic of the market economy populism fought a battle which could not be won.
This being the case, populism had of necessity to have a false ideology. The populists had a classless outlook. Theirs was the battle of the poor against the rich, the battle for an equality which was utopian under capitalism. Thus it is understandable that populism paid little attention to theory and never had any real understanding of the American economy and society. Empiricism sprinkled eclectically with idealism (expressed in utopian dreams of small communist communities free from the terrible pressures of the ever-present market) was the ideological mixture of American radicalism for over two hundred years.
Groping Toward Class ConsciousnessIt was within this political and ideological framework that the American working class grew up. The history of the American working class during the nineteenth century is a history of one hopeful effort after another to assert class independence in developing the rudiments of class organisation and elementary class consciousness, only to have the whole effort swallowed up and destroyed by the latest outburst of populist fever.
In the 1830s, a full decade before Marx and Engels were to write the Communist Manifesto, workers in the North-eastern cities of the United States formed their own political parties – the Workingmen's Parties, on the basis of an elementary class consciousness. Over one hundred years have passed since these parties were formed and still today the class as a whole has not yet reached this level of class consciousness. Of course various petty-bourgeois do-gooders sought to infuse these parties with all varieties of utopian socialist nonsense but this is not what really destroyed this first large-scale outburst of consciousness on the part of an infant class. It was destroyed by the outbreak of Jacksonian 'democracy' which swept the Northern cities and absorbed these parties into the Democratic Party, developing a base among urban workers which this capitalist party enjoys to this day.
In the 1860s, following the Civil War, the National Labor Union, headed by one William H. Silvis, flourished briefly. This was the first great attempt of American workers to build an organisation encompassing the class as a whole to fight for its own independent interests. The times were more auspicious for the class than during the 1830s, as the period following the Civil War was one of great industrial growth and a tremendous increase in the size of the working class. But the NLU got itself Involved in American political life and by 1872 ended up being merged into the Greenback Party, the contemporary expression of populism.
In the 1870s and 80s, during a period marked by great strike actions of a most violent character, the Knights of Labor came into existence and thrived for a period. But by the late 1880s most of the craft unionists had left it and gone into the new non-radical American Federation of Labor; the remnants were merged into the Populist Party in 1892.
The first real, clear break of any sizeable section of American workers from this petty-bourgeois populist tradition took, naturally enough, an anarcho-syndicalist form. The formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905 was an extremely important turning point in the whole history of the American working class. The IWW was an indigenous organisation of revolutionary American workers. It was the organisational expression of the great strikes of the class which had taken place in the latter part of the nineteenth century during that great period when the 'Robber Barons' were amassing their fortunes on the backs of the workers.
The significance of the IWW lies in the fact that it represented the highest stage of class consciousness reached by the native American proletariat. Essentially it represented on a higher level that outburst of class independence which occurred earlier in the Workingmen's Parties, the National Labor Union, and the Knights of Labor. Its essential ideas were very simple – the basic rudiments of class consciousness. There are basically two classes: the capitalist class which owns the means of production and runs the government, and the working class which is propertyless. The working class must band together in a common organisation and struggle uncompromisingly against the capitalist class until it brings down the whole economic and social system and builds a new society on the basis of the rule of the working class.
The IWW, however, rather than adapting to populist type politics like its predecessors, rejected politics altogether, a rather natural reaction under the circumstances. The central weakness of the IWW was not this rejection of politics but its rejection of theory. On this score no other revolutionary working-class organisation in history anywhere in the world was to equal the IWW. At least the French syndicalists defended their rejection of politics theoretically. The IWW presented its essential 'theory' in a three-paragraph preamble to its Constitution. And they really never said anything more than what was in this statement.
Many historians see the AFL and the IWW as polar opposites – the former the conservative 'business unionist' organisation of the privileged craft unionists and the latter the epitome of class-warfare radical extremism. In reality the two organisations had much in common. Both shared a rejection of theory. Both felt that the working class could solve its problems by itself solely on the field of trade union organisation and did not need to really understand American and world capitalism and the long struggle internationally to build a working-class movement. One in a reformist way and the other in a revolutionary way expressed the level of the American working class at the turn of the century – its consciousness of the need for class organisation but its rejection of the need to understand the society in which it lived. By perpetuating this empiricist outlook both organisations showed the primitive nature of the working class in the United States which, despite its heroic class battles, had failed as yet to break theoretically from the method and theory of its opponents.
The Foreign BornWe have discussed briefly two trends in American radicalism: the dominant populist rebellion of the petty-bourgeoisie and the nascent empirical groping towards class independence by the working class which was constantly being swallowed up in populism. There was a third factor in the development of the American working class that it is difficult to over-estimate – the foreign-born worker. From the 1860s there was a constant wave of immigration from Europe to the United States. With rare exceptions, such as the Scandinavians in the Midwest, these immigrants settled in the large cities of the North East and the Great Lakes region and provided the basic manpower for American industry in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth.
The most significant fact to understand about American development, and a fact least understood by historians of American labour, is that the American industrial worker was first of all a foreign-born worker who in most cases could not speak a word of the language of the country he lived in. As early as 1872 F. A. Sorge described the American working class at the Hague Conference of the First International as follows: 'The working class in America consists 1. of Irishmen, 2. of Germans, 3. of Negroes, and only 4. of Americans. 2 We must face the fact that as far as the Northern industrial working class was concerned, Sorge was speaking the truth.
Engels understood the deep significance of this for the development of the American working class. This is the way he stated it in a letter to Herman Schlueter, editor of the New York Volkszeitung:
Your great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native-born workers. Up to 1848 one could speak of a permanent native-born working class only as an exception. The small beginnings of one in the cities in the East still could always hope to become farmers or bourgeois. Now such a class has developed and has also organized itself on trade union lines to a great extent. But it still occupies an aristocratic position and wherever possible leaves the ordinarily badly paid occupations to the immigrants, only a small portion of whom enter the aristocratic trade unions. But these immigrants are divided into nationalities, which understand neither each other nor, for the most part, the language of the country. And your bourgeoisie knows much better even than the Austrian government how to play off one nationality against the other; Jews, Italians, Bohemians etc., against Germans and Irish and each one against the other, so that differences in workers' standards of living exist, I believe, in New York to an extent unheard of elsewhere. 3
This situation had a deep distorting effect on the development of the American working class. The early working-class movements we have briefly described were organisations of the native working class and largely hostile to foreign-born workers. The NLU and Knights of Labor were openly opposed to immigration and closed the doors of their organizations to many immigrants. The IWW, while formally having a good position on this question, was deeply infected with anti-Chinese poison on the West Coast. Most important, the IWW was basically an organisation of a section of the native working class and in this respect was similar to the AFL. While the IWW organised the Western miners, the agricultural migrant workers and the lumberjacks, the AFL organised the Eastern skilled workers. Except for rare occasions which did not result in permanent organisation, both groups were incapable of organising the industrial working class which was almost entirely made up of foreign-born. The IWW, to its credit, led great strikes of foreign-born workers in Lawrence, Mass., and Patterson, N.J., in the period just before World War I, but these strikes did not lead to a permanent organisation. Much the same can be said for William Z. Foster's AFL-backed efforts with the steel workers in Chicago a little later. There cannot be the slightest doubt that this antagonism between native and foreign born workers was a potent force in pushing the native worker time and time again into the mire of populism – that is to seek an ally in his own petty-bourgeoisie on the basis of petty-bourgeois programme, rather than to turn to his fellow worker with a different language and culture.
Marxism Before World War IIt was in this kind of political situation which had grown up on what Trotsky called 'the virgin, unhistorical soil of America', 4 that efforts were made from the late 1860s on to build a conscious Marxist movement in the United States. The first Marxists in the United States were German immigrants, many of whom had gone through the 1848 Revolution in Germany – and had come into contact with Marxism in the old country. The leading German Marxist in the United States was F. A. Sorge, a close confidant of Marx and Engels who played an important role within the First International as a solid supporter of Marx during a difficult period.
The first big crisis within the American section of the International was highly symptomatic of the problems that were to plague Marxism in the United States through the early years of the American Communist Party. A split developed between an English-speaking section led by one Victoria Woodhull and the German-speaking section led by Sorge. The struggle between the two sections was to take up a good deal of time at the Hague Conference of the International in 1872. Mrs. Woodhull had achieved a certain notoriety in the United States as an outspoken exponent of free love. Her 'section' was made up almost entirely of native-born middle-class reformers active in multitudinous causes like free love, feminism, spiritualism and temperance, as well as running their private businesses on the side. This section disagreed with the statement in the Communist Manifesto that 'The emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself.' They felt it was the task of Mrs. Woodhull and friends. Sorge did not feel that Mrs. Woodhull's views would go over very well with the Irish workers who were the people the International needed primarily to reach at that time. Needless to say the International rejected Woodhull's group and recognised the Sorge group. 5
Thus we see that the English-speaking base of the first Marxist group in the United States lacked a serious proletarian content. The solid base for the International was among the foreign-born workers, primarily Germans. But it was soon discovered that this group itself had serious weaknesses, weaknesses which were to mark virtually all foreign-born Marxist groups in the United States for the next quarter of a century. These German-speaking Marxists were mainly interested in Europe. Their ideas, like themselves, never went beyond being European imports. But theory cannot develop inside a small group isolated from the real class struggle going on in one's country. Thus these Marxist groups turned Marxism into a sterile dogma and refused to learn the English language and in any serious way take part in the life of the working class as a whole in the country.
Engels, of course, understood this situation and wrote a number of letters to correspondents in the United States urging the Germans to break out of their isolation and to play the critical role of bringing revolutionary theory into the mass movement of the American working class. For instance, he writes in 1886:
I think also the K of L a most important factor in the movement which ought not to be pooh-poohed from without but to be revolutionized from within, and I consider that many of the Germans there have made a grievous mistake when they tried, in the face of a mighty and glorious movement not of their creation, a kind of alleinseligmachendes (necessary to salvation) dogma and to keep aloof from any movement which did not accept that dogma. . . . What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory – if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848 – to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische (actual) starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme; they ought in the words of the Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present. 6
This, I am afraid, did not take place. Rather, a few native-born intellectuals joined the organisation, later called the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and themselves adapted to and developed the sectarianism of the German immigrants. In this way De Leonism was born. It is inevitable that in a country as empirical as the United States will develop both a political tendency which divorces thought from action, by devoting itself solely to action, like the IWW, and an organisation which accomplishes the same thing by doing the exact reverse, like the SLP. Neither trend was anywhere near the real Marxist method in which theory and action are constantly and at every moment a unity, each enriching the other.
The Socialist PartyThe Socialist Party, which grew up between 1900 and World War I, was perhaps the world's most peculiar socialist organisation. Needless to say it has been the world's least understood one because of its unique nature. Many seek to view the SP as an American reflection of the great social democratic parties of Europe which broke up over World War I and the Russian Revolution. Not only was the party as a whole quite different from these European parties, so too the left wing within it was very, very different from similar left wings in Europe. This is extremely important, for it was out of this left wing that the Communist Party emerged and this party, too, was quite different in critical aspects from most of the European Communist Parties.
The Socialist Party was, in fact, a loose combination of all the trends in American radicalism which had preceded it. Had it been simply a sizeable working-class party which bad become bureaucratised and conservatised like the European parties, then certainly a sizeable section of the party would have survived the war. But it was far broader, more heterogeneous and unstable than this, and therefore virtually nothing of the SP survived World War I.
The dominant ingredient in the SP during the period of its greatest strength – around the time of the 1912 election when it got almost 900,000 votes – was populism. With the collapse of the regular Populist Party many populists flooded the SP. The largest votes for the party in 1912 came from predominantly agrarian Midwestern and Western states. In Oklahoma, for instance, the SP held large revival-type tent meetings throughout the rural areas and it was this kind of appeal that marked much of the work in such areas. It was the turn of the populists to other parties after 1912 that did much to contribute to the decline of the party.
There was also a legitimate reformist working-class trend within the party led by men like Victor Berger of Milwaukee and Morris Hillquit of New York. The primary base for this trend was an older generation of immigrant workers, like the Germans, who carried over socialist traditions from Europe but who had, by the 1900s, achieved a more privileged position within the American working class when contrasted with the new immigration from the Slavic countries and Southern Europe. One commentator has claimed, not without a certain justice, that the right wing of the SP was more working-class in composition than the left wing. 7 This was certainly true when one realises that the populist sections of the party generally supported the left wing.
There was a third radical trend within the SP which represented a sort of amalgam of the sectarianism of the SLP and the syndicalism of the IWW. 'Only in America' could such opposite outlooks as extreme rigid sectarian Marxists and absolute opponents of all 'politics' get along so well. They wrote for the same journals and in many cases one and the same individual espoused both causes. The main plank they rallied around was a rather ill-defined concept taken from the Dutch ultra-lefts called 'mass action'.
Adding to the already confused situation was the influx of foreign speaking socialists into the SP especially just before and during World War I. These foreign language groups came in as separate foreign language federations with their own publications and internal life. They maintained their affiliation with the Socialist Parties in their native lands and divided between left and right during the war along the lines of the divisions within the native parties in Europe. In 1917 35 per cent of the SP membership was in these foreign language federations and by 1919 the figure had risen to 53 per cent. 8
Sitting on top of all this was Eugene V. Debs, the great spokesman for the party. Debs was, of course, no theoretician. He had learned his rudimentary Marxism from the popularising pamphlets of Kautsky, never reading Marx himself. Ideologically he represented the same stage of consciousness as did the IWW. His ideas were the elementary recognition of class division and his programme was the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class. But to how this could be achieved he gave little thought. There was also a strong populist element in all his speeches and in many ways all sections of the party could find something in Debs that they felt close to. 9 But American Marxism was to need more than the pamphlets of Kautsky, the heroic class battles of the Wobblies, the dogmas of the De Leonists, and certainly the money schemes of the populists. What was needed was exactly what Engels called for in 1886. Real living Marxism had to be taken into the great mass movements of the American working class, foreign-born and English-speaking alike, and a conscious vanguard for the class as a whole created. This is what the Communist Party set out to accomplish.
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