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From The New International, Vol. XVIII No. 3, May–June 1952, p. 114.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The lead article in this issue of The New International, Critics of American Socialism; Their Method and Politics deals with the most extensive and intensive effort yet put forth by American bourgeois intellectuals to analyze, and dispose of, socialism as an ideology and a movement in their own country. The fact that the authors of the work in question come not only from academic circles and the fields of bourgeois journalism, but also from the intellectual staffs of the labor movement, simply emphasizes how completely bourgeois in ideology and outlook are all circles of “official” American opinion.
Although this article will be of special interest to Americans in and around the socialist movement, we feel that it will also have considerable value for our readers abroad. In our correspondence and occasional discussions with many of them, we find that the one question above all about America which baffles foreigners is this: how is it that in our country there is no mass socialist or even “labor” political movement? How can it be that the American working class, so powerful in its economic organizations, so massive in its relative numerical and sociological weight in the country, has failed to reach, ideologically, the level of the working class in Europe and Asia?
The book to which we devote so much in this issue of our review seeks to explain and justify what is the political backwardness of the American working class as specifically exemplified in the weakness of the American socialist movement. We venture the guess that no other publication in America will deal with this effort so thoroughly and so devastatingly as we do. We believe that this issue of The New International will become a handbook for socialists in the months and years ahead during which the discussion inaugurated here will run its course.
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Last updated on 15 December 2018