Max Shachtman
Archive
Marxist Writers’
Archives
From The New International, Vol. XXI No. 3, Fall 1955, pp. 139–151.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
THERE ARE FEW QUESTIONS calculated to provoke answers of more far-reaching implications and consequences for the development of the world than this one: Why is there no socialist movement in the United States?
Such a movement does not exist today. To avoid misunderstanding, let us eliminate ambiguity. Socialist organizations do exist in the United States. But they are not sustained by support from any substantial section of the working class or social elements sympathetic to it. They are held together by the devotion of their own members whose numbers have continued to decline in an isolation, produced by social indifference or hostility, which is only enhanced as this devotion flags. A socialist movement is one that is so clearly established as a political force in the country that it not only commands a large part of the suffrage of the working class but is able to call substantial sections of that class to political actions and have them respond to the call. Such a movement exists in every important capitalist country of the world where political freedom is more or less maintained. Of these countries, the United States, which is the most highly developed of them all, is at the same time the great and outstanding exception.
Now, one of two things.
Either:
The United States has developed a capitalist society so distinctive in its fundamental differences from the rest of the capitalist world that its soil will not nourish a socialist movement of any importance. This would only be another way of saying that the conflict of classes has been or can be overcome, or at least the conflicting social interests have been or can be satisfactorily reconciled, without resorting to a socialism which would abolish the capitalist mode of production and the state that preserves it. The revolutionary consequences of this are all but unimaginable! That it would mean the final dethronement of Marxism goes without saying. It might show among other things that while socialism was destined to be the outcome of the evolution of some capitalisms which were unable to resolve the problem of the class struggle, it was not at all destined to terminate the development of all capitalisms, in particular that unique to the United States. Or it might turn out that socialism, no matter how big a movement developed in its name in various countries, finally dwindled to unimportance in every capitalist land or union of lands that managed in one way or another to acquire those characteristics that immunized U.S. capitalism. The elation and relief that these tidings would arouse in many quarters would be marred only by the reproach at their so tardy arrival.
Or:
What is unique about U.S. capitalism proves to be of transient importance so far as the appearance of a decisive and power-challenging socialist movement is concerned. The material conditions which distinguish the United States are themselves modified and along with them the social and political relations in the country. It becomes obvious that U.S. capitalism succeeded only in retarding the growth of a socialist movement but not in preventing it. That movement, rid of the not-at-all inherent errors of its past, acquires a new power that rests solidly in the largest and most mighty working class of the world. With the most highly developed machinery of production and exchange at its command for the reconstruction of society, it begins, last-born of the capitalist world though it is, to take its proper place at the head of international socialism. With its triumph, indeed with the approach of its triumph, the lifecourse of world capitalism, which even now exists solely due to American capitalism, is irretrievably ended. As for world Stalinism, it is then a problem to be disposed of in a trice. A development of greater consequence, certainly of greater hope, for the entire globe, is hard to envisage. In the ensuing leisure, the young could be entertained by archaeological expeditions to dig up the literary bones of those who prematurely buried the socialist movement in the United States and wrote scholarly epitaphs on why such a movement could never flourish on its soil.
Investigation yields the surprise that there is a paucity of such scholarly attempts from the intellectual and academic world where a lavish variety might be expected. Not in fifty years has there been such plausible ground, one might think, for the anti-socialist or non-socialist to argue that the failure of a socialist movement to grow is inherent in the nature and capacities for development of American capitalism. It is not a question of the vulgar trash that appears in the regular press or is heard from the blatherskite’s platform about the failure of socialism in the United States being due to its “un-Americanism” or its “immorality,” but a question of a scholarly analysis, an attempt at an informed, cohesive, reasoned, objective appraisal. Yet, almost as startling as the failure of the socialist movement to grow in this country is the failure of its critics to explain it. In this general aridity almost anything, however unsatisfactory, would stand out like an oasis. Unfortunately, that is the main claim that can be made upon our attention by the most recent essay at an explanation.
Its author, whose work has been referred to before in our review, is Daniel Bell. He wrote the chapter on The Background and Development of Marxian Socialism in the United States that appears in the fourth of the Princeton Studies in American Civilization, a tome entitled Socialism and American Life. The rest of the chapters, with one or two exceptions, are hackneyed, bleak or ignorant, or all three at once, that is, authentic products of what passes in American academic life for “sociology.”
Bell dropped in for a short visit to the Socialist Party, out of which he lifted himself to the position of managing editor of the New Leader, and then further up the mountain to the position of an editor of Fortune. His writings, unlike those of the vast bulk of the former people, are virtually free of vindictiveness and malice toward the abandoned movement, and one can even detect here and there the trace of a wish that it were stronger and more influential than it is. In his Princeton essay, whose two hundred pages make it the biggest in the collection, he shows himself to be a serious and well-informed student of the movement in this country, with an extensive and instructive documentation which suffers from relatively few and minor factual errors. It is the only essay which makes an elaborate attempt to analyze, criticize and therewith explain the feebleness of “Marxian socialism” here; the only essay that is worth a Marxian commentary and reply. After studying it, the Marxist has at least this consolation: If this is the best that an earnest academic criticism of socialism in the U.S.A. has to offer, then we are not so badly off after all. If we are weak today, then at least on the intellectual field our opponents and critics, even the less unkindly ones, are utterly helpless – we repeat, utterly helpless. An examination of Bell’s views will make this sufficiently clear. At the same time, it will afford the opportunity for a long-postponed presentation of the Marxian view in a systematic and up-to-date outline.
BELL IS FAMILIAR WITH MANY of the elements in the explanation given by critical students up to now, both the Marxists and those who, with or without acknowledgment, employed the analytical method of Marxism. He recalls that fifty years ago, Werner Sombart, in replying to the question posed by the title of his book, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? “pointed to the open frontiers, the many opportunities for social ascent through individual effort, and the rising standard of living of the country as factors.” Others, like Selig Perlman, explained the lack of class-consciousness here by:
“... the absence of a ‘settled’ wage-earner class; the ‘free gift’ of the ballot ... and third, the impact of succeeding waves of immigration ... In the end, all such explanations fall back on the naturally- endowed resources and material vastness of America ... Other explanations have indicated equally general, and relevant, facts.”
Nowhere does Bell deny the validity of these “general, and relevant, facts,” that is, of the specific objective conditions under which American capitalism and consequently its working class have developed. But they do not satisfy him as adequate. “Implicit in many of these analyses, however, was the notion that such conditions were but temporary.” It is at this point that Bell begins his sharp fork away from the analyses of the past, and on to a road of his own. The expectation that, as capitalism matured and crises followed, “a large, self-conscious wage-earner class and a socialist movement, perhaps on the European pattern, would probably emerge,” is precisely what proved to be unwarranted, for nothing of the sort emerged when the “maturing” took place. The “depression was such a crisis.” It left a permanent scar on the American workers’ mind, shook the self-confidence of capitalism, produced a trade-union movement of more than fifteen million members, precipitated sharp class warfare, and brought labor into politics to safeguard its economic gains.
“Here at last was the fertile soil which socialist theorists had long awaited. Yet no socialist movement emerged, nor has a coherent socialist ideology taken seed either in the labor movement or in government. So Sombart’s question still remains unanswered.”
So far, let us say, so good, or good enough, or not bad enough to make a fuss about it. The failure of socialism to become an effective political movement in this country was attributed in the past to this and that objective condition; and the rise of such a movement was predicated on an expected radical change in these conditions. A change did take place, “yet no socialist movement emerged.”
So? The statement up to this point is not really enough to shock our interest to a quiver if only because it is not only familiar to tens of millions of people throughout the world but has actually been put down on paper by tens of hundreds of writers. It is only by what follows that the eye jaded by repetition of the obvious might be persuaded to open up. What follows? You might say:
The objective conditions that militated against a big socialist movement have not changed sufficiently, as is shown by the continued existence of this and that objective obstacle to its emergence and growth. In that case, the analyst who is exceptionally prudent would conclude that it is too soon to answer “Sombart’s question” and judgment must therefore be reserved. If he is more venturesome, he would conclude, by and large, in one way or the other:
Taking into consideration the way in which the main social forces at work are moving, the obstacles in the path of a socialist movement will presently be overcome.
Or, there are no significant indications that they can or will be overcome.
That is, one conclusion would answer “Sombart’s question” substantially the way Sombart himself did, rather prematurely, when he was himself still heavily under the influence of Marxism: the rise of a powerful socialist movement is as sure in the United States as is the change in the objective circumstances which so long impeded its rise. The other conclusion would answer it by saying that by virtue of the origin of American capitalism, by virtue of the way and the conditions in which it developed, and by virtue of the indications now visible of the way in which it will develop in the future – the basis for a socialist movement in the United States does not exist objectively and its rise in the foreseeable future is for the same reason precluded.
Bell turns out to be the type who eschews prudence. He will not suspend judgment. He is ready to pronounce it, more in sorrow than in anger, and it is literally deadly. The socialist movement in the United States, which had a preposterous past, is today a corpse and it will never rise again. After almost two hundred pages in which he examines, in great detail, the rise and fall of the organized socialist movement in this country from its earliest days down to the present, Bell suddenly, almost out of the clear blue, blurts out this disconsolate conclusion:
American society at the middle of the twentieth century was evolving in a far different direction from that predicted by Marxist sociology. There were not in America an “Army,” “Church,” “Large Landowners,” “Bureaucracy,” “Bourgeoisie,” “Petty Bourgeoisie,” and “Proletariat” – the staple ingredients of European social politics which in different combination accounted for the social forms of Germany, Spain, France and Britain. How could one apply standard political categories to explain the “social role” of a Franklin D. Roosevelt? ...
The old simplistic theories no longer hold. We seem to be evolving toward some form of technical-military-administrative state, especially as the pressures of a permanent war economy bring into focus a priority of needs which are national in character and override the demands of any particular interest group. The growth of a federal budget from four billion in 1930 to more than forty billion in 1950 (apart from the wartime peak budget of over ninety billion in 1944) was an unplanned and crescive fact, and yet these new enormous magnitudes are of decisive import in shaping the economy. Along the way, the nascent state capitalism has had to enlarge its social budgets and provide for the welfare of large masses; quondam socialists, now in high positions in labor and government, have tended to instill a sense of social responsibility. But it is not primarily a social welfare state which has developed. In the dimly-emerging social structure, new power sources are being created and new social divisions are being formed. Whatever the character of that new social structure may be – whether state capitalism, managerial society, or corporative capitalism – by 1950 American socialism as a political and social fact had become simply a notation in the archives of history.
And then, as if this heady cocktail must be completed with a couple of onions, the author concludes his essay with suggestions for an inscription and a remark which he nominates for a cenotaph for American socialism (a hard man, Bell, who wants to make so sure that this socialism which he has buried cannot possibly be resurrected that he weighs down its grave with a cenotaph.) One is the Chasidic tale of the Rabbi of Zans who is presented apparently as a symbol if not a member of the socialist movement. The eminent divine, fired in his youth with love of God sought to convert to it the whole world. He modified his ambition, successively, from the people of the whole world to his fellow townsmen, then to his household, and then concentrated exclusively on himself. At the heart-breaking end of his now modest effort, he grieves: “But I did not accomplish even this.” The other is an injunction by Max Weber, presented by Bell to the public for the first time as a counsellor on political matters: “He who seeks the salvation of souls, his own as well as others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics.”
COMING AT THE END OF A LONG STUDY on the American socialist movement, these conclusions, including the wisdom which is to be carved into the cenotaph for this generation and its heirs and assigns, it is enough to make your head spin in unison with the author’s. What is all this heavily compacted chaos? Why this need to overtax a talent for hooking together meaningful words into meaningless sentences?
Does Bell know of a state which is not “technical-military-administrative” in form, and not only in form?
What particular “interest group” is making demands that are overridden by the needs of the permanent war economy? The interest group sometimes known as the labor movement? or that equally powerful interest group known as the American Committee for Cultural Freedom? or such obscure interest groups as the National Association of Manufacturers or General Motors?
Was the crescive fact, as it is commonly called, of the stupendous growth in the federal budget, including above all the arms budget, unforeseen in the crescive literature of Marxism on this subject in the past fifty years and more, and just what old and simplistic theory on this score no longer holds?
Has there been one modern capitalist country which, on the whole, has not had to enlarge its social budgets and provide for the welfare of large masses, with American capitalism enjoying the distinction of being the last of them all to place emphasis on the “enlarging” and “providing”? In any case, if it is “not primarily a social welfare state which has developed,” then surely the enlarging, plus the providing, and on top of them both the quondam socialists who have tended to instill a sense of social responsibility (where? when? and especially in whom?) – have a grotesquely trivial importance, and certainly not a crescive one, which would seem to confirm at least one of the old and simplistic theories.
We cannot ask Bell to say what the new social structure of tomorrow is, because he doesn’t know and you can’t get blood from a turnip. It might be added with apodictic certainty that Bell also doesn’t know what “new power sources are being created” and what “new social divisions are being formed.” There isn’t a pistol made that could compel his soaring mind to describe these sources and divisions to us – they are even dimmer in emerging from his thoughts than they are in emerging from society.
What “state capitalism” means to him, is nowhere indicated and therefore we do not know, although we strongly doubt if that places us at a disadvantage with Bell; what his “corporative capitalism” has in common with his “state capitalism” if it has anything in common with it at all, is a mystery and will unquestionably remain one down to the seventh generation to follow (out of respect for Bell, we want to believe that he does not mean by it the rhetorical joke that Mussolini played with for a while and now and then); as for his “managerial society,” the only right that any American has to refer seriously to this product of Burnham’s first nightmare upon deserting the Marxist movement is the one granted by the Ninth Article of the Bill of Rights.
But “whatever the character of that new social structure may be” – American socialism is dead and everlastingly buried – it is dead as a movement and it is dead as a hope, let alone a reality, for society. Capitalism is not a devilish lot better off, for its successor, “whatever it may be,” is enough to give you the shivers, even as seen in the dim emerging. Even more gloomy is the fact that, generally speaking, salvation of the soul (contrary to the old and simplistic theory of Marx and Engels) is not attainable by political action, as proved scientifically by Max Weber. Worse yet, it is not attainable by the only fashionable alternative to politics, prayer, as proved scientifically by the Rabbi of Zans. It is all somehow depressing.
However, out of chaos is born a star, as Nietzsche used to say. This star throws all the necessary light on the problem of why socialism never did or could amount to anything in the United States. Unlike Germany, Spain, France, Britain and their similars, all of which have a strong socialist movement (speaking in the broadest sense, acceptable at this point, of a politically-organized working-class movement which openly avows its aim to abolish capitalism and establish a classless socialist society), the United States has no army, no church, no large landowners, no bureaucracy, no petty bourgeoisie – and above all other things of importance on earth, it has neither a bourgeoisie nor a proletariat. This is not quoted from the excited reports about this country sent back home by the first discoverers, explorers or settlers who came here to find nothing comparable to what they had known in the Old World. We have been quoting from an essay written in the year 1950 by a certified citizen of the country and published without abbreviation, elision or amendment by Princeton University. Now, if there is no bourgeoisie in this country and no proletariat either, then our problem is solved down to the last period, and “Sombart’s question” is so explosively answered that the wonder of it is that anyone, the late Sombart included, was ever cretin enough to ask it.
If there is no bourgeoisie, against whom could the struggle of socialism be directed – inasmuch as socialism never aimed or could aim at any other class but the bourgeoisie? If there is no proletariat, upon what class (or as it is commonly called, “interest group”) could the struggle of socialism be based and what class would conduct the fight – inasmuch as socialism could never have as its basis or its director any other class but the proletariat? If socialism in the United States never had anyone to fight against or anyone to fight for it, the wonder of it is that it ever assembled as many advocates as the seven tailors of Tooley Street. A movement attempted under such conditions could never be anything but a mirage, doomed from the egg to disintegration and disillusionment.
There is still a tiny puzzle left – of no seminal importance, to be sure – as to why, in addition to the “psychological types” which the author assures us are attracted to the socialist movement, there were some intelligent and, at least at a quick glance, psychologically more or less normal people who made the attempt to organize such a movement when, no matter what they would do or how they would do it, their efforts were foreordained to failure by our unique and intrinsic national characteristics. But the failure of socialism in the United States is no longer a puzzle. This is now proved scientifically by Bell, or more exactly, he has now proved it all over again, for – right is right and fair is fair – it has been just as scientifically proved for decades in every school and university, in every church, and in virtually every newspaper and magazine, down to the most primeval of them.
But just a minute! Hold on! It just occurs to us that in the very first part of his essay, Bell wrote that “Sombart’s question still remains unanswered.” Didn’t he indicate in that part that there is a different answer to be made to the question than the ones he cites from others, an answer which is more significant than the customary ones that refer to objective conditions? So he did. Didn’t he indicate that the explanation did not lie, or did not lie so much, in the specific nature of American capitalism as it did in the nature of the socialist movement. He did. But when we turn abruptly from the end of the essay to its beginning, the only connection between the two proves to be our short circuit and the little glimmer of light thrown on the problem is extinguished. We are thrown into a new chaos.
“Most of the attempted answers have discussed not causes but conditions,” continues Bell after his references to Sombart’s unanswered question which we have quoted above. He goes on to say:
An inquiry into the fate of a social movement has to be pinned in the specific questions of time, place and opportunity, and framed within a general hypothesis regarding the “why” of its success or failure. The “why” which this essay proposes (with the usual genuflections to ceteris paribus), is that the failure of the socialist movement in the United States is rooted in its inability to resolve a basic dilemma of ethics and politics. The socialist movement, by its very statement of goal and in its rejection of the capitalist order as a whole, could not relate itself to the specific problems of social action in the here- and-now, give-and-take political world. It was trapped by the unhappy problem of living “in but not of the world,” so it could only act, and then inadequately, as the moral, but not political, man in immoral society. It could never resolve but only straddle the basic issue of either accepting capitalist society, and seeking to transform it from within as the labor movement did, or becoming the sworn enemy of that society, like the communists. A religious movement can split its allegiances and live in but not of the world (like Lutheranism); a political movement can not.
A couple of pages later on Bell comes to the end of what is really the preface and summary of the bulk of the essay and of what he deems to be his own contribution to the understanding of the problem:
Socialism is an eschatological movement; it is sure of its destiny, because “history” leads it to its goal. But though sure of its final ends, there is never a standard of testing the immediate means. The result is a constant fractiousness in socialist life. Each position taken is always open to challenge by those who feel that it would only swerve the movement from its final goal and lead it up some blind alley. And because it is an ideological movement, embracing all the realm of the human polity, the Socialist Party is always challenged to take a stand on every problem from Viet Nam to Finland, from prohibition to pacifism. And, since for every two socialists there are always three political opinions, the consequence has been that in its inner life, the Socialist Party has never, even for a single year, been without some issue which threatened to split the party and which forced it to spend much of its time on the problem of reconciliation or rupture. In this fact lies the chief clue to the impotence of American socialism as a political movement, especially in the past twenty years.
In between these two quotations there are the learned references, now standard equipment in all scholastical criticisms of socialism or Marxism or Bolshevism, to Max Weber, Karl Mannheim and of course Lord Acton, who are all as helpful in promoting our understanding in this matter as a blind man is to the progress of a seeing-eye dog. But the quotations themselves are enough and more than enough.
How does Bell distinguish between “causes” and “conditions”? Does he mean that the “conditions” to which reference is made by himself and others, the conditions in or under which the socialist movement exists (here or elsewhere) do not constitute causes affecting its rise or decline in one degree or another? Does he mean that the “causes” to which he refers can determine the success or failure of a socialist movement although they are factors that somehow do not constitute part of the conditions of existence of the movement? If they are not part of the conditions of existence of the movement, then these “causes” must be inherent in and inseparable from the innermost nature, so to speak, of the socialist movement as an abstraction, that is, of a socialist movement independent of the conditions which gave it birth and in which it exists. But inasmuch as there is not, never was, never will be, and never could be such a movement, it would be impossible to know what Bell is writing about, impossible for us and impossible for him. Therefore, if it were not for the fact that specialists in semantics may know what Bell means and may disconcert us by explaining it in one of the modern languages, we would be tempted to conclude that his feet are entrapped in a bog of verbiage up to the armpits.
We are worse off when we come to Bell’s special contribution, the one that distinguishes him from those who have discussed only conditions, his “general hypothesis” regarding the “why” of the socialist failure. The “why” – read each word at least twice, otherwise you will not believe your eyes – “is rooted in its inability to resolve a basic dilemma of ethics and politics.”
We suggest with the usual politeness that this statement is, in the light of what Bell says elsewhere, literally and utterly without meaning.
In the first place, we must reiterate the question: If there is no proletariat in the country and no bourgeoisie, what conceivable basis could there be for a socialist party, a socialist movement, of any kind? Is it not the absence of these two classes that makes the very attempt to form a socialist movement absurd, utopian, doomed for sure and for certain to failure? And if these two classes do not exist to begin with, how indeed could there be a socialist movement to begin with, and how could it have the basic dilemma between remote goal and immediate means, and what possible difference could it make how it resolved this dilemma?
Let us suppose I am dying of hunger in a desert and finally drag myself to a magnificent figtree guarded by a savage and well-armed nomad. I lie panting on the sand, ignored by the guardian except for the occasional kick in the face and stream of abuse he bestows on me, and I cogitate: Shall I kill him and make the figtree equally available to all, or trade him my scout knife for one immediate handful of figs, or wait for him to die of internal contradictions? Shall I ignore him altogether and try to shake down some figs with my hands, or lasso some with my lariat, or climb up to them with a ladder, or wait for an inevitable rain to loosen them, or lie under the tree until the fruit falls into my lap? There is a very wide variety of ideal and practical solutions, some ethical, some political, you might say. But unfortunately I am a congenital schizophrenic, full of ambivalences and God alone knows what. While I cogitate indecisively on a solution, I simply die of hunger. A not-badly-fed traveler who comes across my parched remains reads the diary of my agony (which, it seems, I left by my side) and reports to Princeton University that, contrary to the feverish images I conjured up in my utopian mind, there is, as far as the eye can see (a) no figtree, (b) no nomad, savage or otherwise, (c) no scout knife, (d) no lariat, (e) no ladder and (f) not the slightest possibility of rain in the future. Then, to emphasize the pathos of my passion, he sets a stone over me with an epigram from Max Weber (or Lord Acton or Sidney Hook or H.V. Kaltenborn) saying that he who would sate his hunger should not look for food, and below that a Chasidic tale about a rabbi who no matter how much he ate died anyway.
Now I ask, repressing my doubts about the good taste of the cenotaph, was my failure rooted in my inability to resolve a basic dilemma of ethics and politics, or to the fact that there was no figtree there to begin with?
In the second place, Bell has constructed and qualified the terms of his “dilemma” in such a way as to make it irresolvable by definition. He starts his entire examination of the socialist (and, for that matter, the trade-union) movement in the United States from the standpoint of a dogma, which he states explicitly only at the very end and without any serious attempt at objective demonstration, but which suffuses everything he writes. That is: there are no classes in the United States, neither bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie, nor proletariat (for how can there be a proletariat if it is not conscious of being one? – by which same token you could say that no man can be an imbecile unless he knows it). There are “interest groups” or “self-interest groups,” as he calls them, but not classes. If there are no classes, there cannot be a class struggle. And obviously if there is no class struggle, it cannot be an irreconcilable one. With this viewpoint, the notion of a socialist prospect for the United States is ridiculous on the face of it, and so is the pathetic fool who entertains it. By definition, then, “socialist movement” is and cannot but be a contradiction in terms. If it is “socialist” it cannot possibly be a “movement” – because socialism is a utopia that can attract only those who do not live in this world or do not want to live in it (they are for “rupture” with it). If it is a “movement” it cannot possibly be “socialist,” because a movement can only be built with people who do live and want to live in the world (they are for “reconciliation” with it). And the “chief clue to the impotence of American socialism as a political movement, especially in the past twenty years,” lies in its failure to decide for “rupture” or for “reconciliation.” To decide for the one, meant to lose its influence; for the other, to lose its socialist character.
Let it be so. Then how does Bell explain the rise and power of what he acknowledges to be a socialist movement in Europe? (The communist and Stalinist movements, lumped into one by Bell, he places in a special category defined by as ridiculous a display of word-juggling as is to be found anywhere. It must be dealt with separately.) We cannot be put off by being told that, after all, the European socialist movement is or has become predominantly reformist. While this is true, it is irrelevant to the explanation worked out by Bell. For he asserts in one part of his essay that those who argued that “Capitalism as an evolving social system would of necessity ‘mature.’ Crises would follow, and at the same time a large, self-conscious wage-earner class and a socialist movement, perhaps on the European pattern, would probably emerge” – proved to be false prophets because they “discussed not causes but conditions,” an error he would set straight. If the European socialist movement has not been a failure (we are speaking now in Bell’s terms, bear in mind), then his statement that “the failure of the socialist movement in the United States is rooted in its inability to resolve a basic dilemma of ethics and politics” must be taken in the literal sense of those words, namely, it is only in the United States (of the modern countries) that the socialist movement showed this inability.
In that case, all the learned references to Weber and Mannheim and Sorel and of course Lord Acton, and to orgiastic chiliasm, the ethics of responsibility, the ethics of conscience, and the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, which are cited for their universal applicability, are beside the point. And in that case, the “inability” is not rooted in the socialist movement, at least not ineradicably rooted, for if that movement has grown in any number of countries (we are still speaking of the movement in Bell’s terms), it must have succeeded, more or less, in solving the “basic dilemma.”
The conclusion seems to us inescapable: the failure of socialism in the United States up to now does not lie in the nature of the socialist movement which, like original sin, brands it at birth, torments it in life and destines its death, but must lie primarily in the specific objective conditions of American capitalist development which, at all times, underlie the form and intensity of the class struggle and of its working-class political expression.
The trouble with the socialist movement (only here? everywhere? in the past? today and tomorrow as well?), the “unhappy problem” that has “trapped” it, is that it tries to “live in but not of the world” – and while a religious movement can do it “a political movement cannot.” There is the most completely squeezed together summary of the wisdom that bourgeois sociology, as academically isolated from the decisive reality of the class struggle as it can get, has contributed to the understanding of the socialist movement. There is the contribution so fashionable, above all in the United States, among the apes of bourgeois sociology who now have their uneasy day in and around the labor movement. Bell has adopted and adapted it. So much the worse for him and for all the “quondam socialists,” as he calls them, of whom he is one. When he puts on the same plane the “other world” of religion and the “other world” of socialism, he reveals not so much his agnosticism toward supernatural rubbish as the abysmally low esteem in which he, like all the worn-out ex-socialists who have become “reconciled,” holds humanity in general and in particular the working class which, to him, is forever doomed to the status of an exploited ox; it should be treated decently wherever possible, but well-treated or ill-treated, in the society of today or in the “dimly-emerging social structure” of tomorrow, it cannot but remain an ox.
Bell can be adjudged a popular writer, for there is nothing more popular today in the United States, it would seem, than the idea to which he makes his own particular contribution – the idea of completely dissolving the socialist movement, down to its very last remnant. In what other country than the one chosen by the Good Lord himself for his special beneficence would there be, on top of everything else, a magazine that dedicates itself, in the very name of socialism, to the proposition that the socialist movement should liquidate itself completely, head, hair, hide and hoof, fetlock and forelock, rump and rib, blood and bone? Where else could that happen save in a country where there is neither a bourgeoisie nor a proletariat but a veritable polychrome of terrified, forlorn and disoriented philistines?
The socialist has no reason to be frightened by the charge that he lives “in but not of the world.” “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver,” sayeth Solomon in Proverbs. Even if the words Bell likes so much have an ecclesiastical aroma, they are really fitly spoken – but only if properly understood. What Bell sees as the source of fatal weakness of the socialist movement, we see as the source of its strength. It represents the triumph of the revolutionary scientific socialism of Marx over all the schools of Utopians who preceded us as well as over all schools of thought and thoughtlessness to whom some original sin of the working class damns it forever and a day to the status of the ruled. It represents the basis of the power of the socialist movement as the militant political organization of the proletariat and the assurance of its triumph over the rule of capital. Bell’s disdainful criticism only reveals his own basic incomprehension, not only of the socialist movement but of the proletariat. That movement lives in but is not of this world because the proletariat which is its bearer lives in but at the same time is not of this – that is, of the capitalist – world! The proletariat is compelled by the very conditions of existence that make up the capitalist world to fight against these conditions of existence. The socialist movement is nothing but the conscious expression, in the theoretical and political fields, of this proletarian struggle. It differs from the working class in its daily struggles not in that it finds it hard or impossible to participate in them lest it lose sight of the socialist goal, but on the contrary only in this, that “in the movement of the present they [the Marxists] also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”
If the socialist movement in this country is weak and uninfluential today it is due primarily to objective conditions beyond its immediate control. But only primarily. It would be idle to excuse our weakness today, and our weakness in the past fifty years, for that matter, by reference to the objective conditions exclusively. The socialist movement can live and glow only by a constant self-criticism and re-examination of its theoretical and political armament. This presupposes the obvious fact that seldom does the socialist movement utilize to the best advantage or even in the right way the possibilities afforded it within the limitations set each time by the objective conditions.
The history of the socialist movement in this country is, contrary to Bell, a long history of achievement. It is also a long history of errors and shortcomings, not those listed so painstakingly by Bell or not so much those he compiles in his basic misunderstanding of the movement, relieved only by occasional and – we would be the last to deny it – very valuable insights. To review them could not, for a socialist, have as its purpose a supercilious hindsighted criticism of the men and movements of the past, of those who were of the right wing or those who were of the left. It could have the fruitful object of distinguishing the essential from the accidental, the important from the trivial, the unavoidable weaknesses from the unnecessary one. Above all its object would be to learn from the past to prepare better for the future. In the course of such a review, a clearer and more balanced picture would emerge for the reasons behind the present weakness of American socialism. At the same time it would be possible to indicate the grounds for our revolutionary optimism about its future. Bell, like so many others, has been a little previous about burying it. We will seek in the articles to which we next devote ourselves to show why socialism is not dead but very much alive in the United States and why it has a grand future – a future that will make the final decision for the fate of the entire world.
Max Shachtman Archive |
Marxist Writers’ Archives |
Last updated on 15 August 2019