Second International Marxism in America: Origins and crisis

Chris Cutrone, Spencer A. Leonard, Pamela C. Nogales C., Ed Remus

Platypus Review 182 | December 2025 – January 2026

On March 30, 2023, at its 15^th annual International Convention in Chicago, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion on Second International Marxism in America. The panel was made up of Platypus members who addressed the origins and crisis of the Socialist Party of America (SPA): Spencer A. Leonard (prehistory and origin of the First International), Pamela C. Nogales C. (First International and prehistory of the Second International in America), Ed Remus (crisis of the Debsian-era SPA), and Chris Cutrone (legacy of the SPA). Platypus member D. M. Faes moderated the panel. An edited transcript follows.¹

Opening remarks

Spencer A. Leonard: I have been asked to represent the views of socialists, in general, and Marx and Engels, in particular, up to the time of the formation of the First International in the middle of the 1860s. I will talk about how the United States is simultaneously advanced and backward from the point of view of European socialist thinkers, up to the time when the crisis of the American Republic in the U.S. Civil War serves as the galvanizing event for the formation of the First International.

For the most part, America seemed outside the frame of capitalism and socialism for much of the period, even for Marx and Engels. In this respect, we can say that they followed reality. Unlike in Europe, especially Britain and France, but by extension in Germany as well, socialism posed itself as a question, as what was variously termed the “social question” or the “condition of England question” in the 1840s when Marx and Engels were coming of age. Not so much in the U.S., which was simultaneously free and backward. Marx writes in 1864 in his capacity as secretary to the First International in the famous letter congratulating Lincoln on his reelection, expressing the early 19^th century’s view of America: “[in America] the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.”² America stood as a distant beacon to, and refuge for, Europe.

Marx and Engels, like other early socialists, followed the Enlightenment in regarding the U.S. as what Hegel famously called “the land of the future.” It’s a tricky formulation. Hegel discusses America in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History:

As to the political condition of North America, the general object of the existence of this State is not yet fixed and determined, and the necessity for a firm combination does not yet exist; for a real State and a real Government arise only after a distinction of classes has arisen, when wealth and poverty become extreme, and when such a condition of things presents itself that a large portion of the people can no longer satisfy its necessities in the way in which it has been accustomed so to do. But America is hitherto exempt from this pressure, for it has the outlet of colonization constantly and widely open, and multitudes are continually streaming into the plains of the Mississippi. By this means the chief source of discontent is removed . . . Only when, as in Europe, the direct increase of agriculturists is checked, will the inhabitants, instead of pressing outwards to occupy the fields, press inwards upon each other — pursuing town occupations, and trading with their fellow-citizens; and so form a compact system of civil society, and require an organized state. . . . America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself . . . It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe. Napoleon is reported to have said: “Cette vieille Europe m’ennuie” [“This old Europe bores me”]. It is for America to abandon the ground on which hitherto the History of the World has developed itself.³

Hegel’s view was not particularly distinctive. For instance, Charles Fourier, perhaps following Adam Smith, felt that the U.S. could develop free of the social question because “in new areas like the United States . . . labour is lacking.”⁴ Robert Owen, for his part, established utopian communities in the U.S., even addressing Congress on “a new system of society” in 1825.⁵ And the utopian socialist and friend of Lafayette’s, Frances Wright, went so far as to attempt combining the Owenite principles of harmony with Jefferson’s plans for gradual abolition in the community she helped to establish at Nashoba, near present-day Germantown, Tennessee. As Jefferson wrote to Wright at the time,

at the age of 82, with one foot in the grave, and the other uplifted to follow it, I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises, even for bettering the condition of man, not even in the great one which is the subject of your letter, and which has been thro’ life that of my greatest anxieties. The march of events has not been such as to render it’s completion practicable within the limits of time alloted to me; and I leave it’s accomplishment as the work of another generation. And I am cheared when I see that on which it is devolved, taking it up with so much good will, and such mind engaged in it’s encoragement. The abolition of the evil is not impossible: it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.⁶

As late as 1843, various forms of socialist communes were being established in the U.S., Brook Farm being a substantial site for the incubation of American intellectuals such as Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Greeley, and Marx’s future editor, Charles A. Dana. In the end, what made America ideal for socialist experiments — abundant cheap land — would also provoke the crisis of the republic. Indeed, it was the acquisition of still more land from Mexico that would serve as the precipitating cause of the crisis of the 1850s.

But to reiterate and speaking in general terms, until the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, European radicals, including Marx and Engels, viewed America as standing largely outside the general fate of Europe, both on the ground of its republic enduring the general overthrow of the French Revolution after the 1815 Treaty of Vienna and because of its persisting labor shortage and abundance of unsettled land. Slavery was, by and large, still considered a doomed institution, one whose abolition, as Jefferson remarked to Wright, would be “[accomplished] as the work of [post-revolutionary generations].”⁷

Respecting the U.S., Karl Marx in his youth considered it, as he remarks in “On the Jewish Question” (1844), “the country of complete political emancipation.”⁸ The Revolution of 1776, its preservation through the Revolution of 1800 by electing Thomas Jefferson, and its further vindication in the War of 1812 fought by Jefferson’s successor, James Madison — these meant that “the state [was emancipated] from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general,” and the disestablishment of religion was but the corollary of the emancipation of public reason, as the U.S. Constitution itself makes clear.⁹ As the First Amendment laconically states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”¹⁰ Because its revolution still stood, because of its open frontier, and because of its buoyant labor market, America was, as Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy, the “most progressive of countries.”¹¹ The Enlightenment conception of the U.S., expressed by Hegel with his laconic phrase “the land of the future,” still endured. The very industrialization of America was not driven by proletarianization as it was driven by the distinctly American shortage of labor. As Marx wrote his Russian friend Pavel Annenkov in 1846, “where North America was concerned, the introduction of machinery was brought about both by competition with other nations and by scarcity of labour, i.e. by the disproportion between the population and the industrial requirements of North America.”¹²

During the Revolution of 1848, Marx and Engels expected, or at least hoped with revolutionary fervor, that Great Britain would be drawn into the Continental convulsion and ultimately, by the domestic crisis to which the British ruling class’s action would provoke, be forced to take the lead. As Engels wrote when the revolution broke out, “in a couple of months my friend, [the Chartist] G. Julian Harney . . . will be in [Prime Minister Lord] Palmerston’s shoes.”¹³ But as for America and its war with Mexico, there persisted an older frame of reference. America was still the land of the future. It was outside the frame.

If the question was beginning to take shape for some Americans of whether the Mexican War would be a new conquest for the empire of liberty or for that of slavery, Engels’s American optimism led him to assume the former. As he wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (by way of criticizing Bakunin) during the Revolution of 1848,

The United States and Mexico are two republics, in both of which the people is sovereign. How did it happen that over Texas a war broke out between these two republics, which, according to themoral theory[i.e., Bakunin], ought to have been “fraternally united” and “federated”, and that, owing to “geographical, commercial and strategical necessities”, the “sovereign will” of the American people, supported by the bravery of the American volunteers, shifted the boundaries drawn by nature some hundreds of miles further south? And will Bakunin accuse the Americans of a “war of conquest”, which, although it deals with a severe blow to his theory based on “justice and humanity”, was nevertheless waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilisation? Or is it perhaps unfortunate that splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it? That the energetic Yankees by rapid exploitation of the California gold mines will increase the means of circulation, in a few years will concentrate a dense population and extensive trade at the most suitable places on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, create large cities, open up communications by steamship, construct a railway from New York to San Francisco, for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilisation, and, for the third time in history, give the world trade a new direction? The “independence” of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, [and] in some places “justice” and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?¹⁴

Marx shared the underlying assumption that America was still bourgeois precisely because it was “the land of the future.” This is the key quote from the pre-Civil War period, from the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852):

The defeat of the June insurgents [in Paris], to be sure, had now prepared, had leveled the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and built, but it had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of “republic or monarchy.” It had revealed that here “bourgeois republic” signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes. It had proved that in countries with an old civilization, with a developed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production, and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life—as, for example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux, where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather compensate for the relative deficiency of heads and hands, and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world of its own, has neither time nor opportunity left for abolishing the old world of ghosts.¹⁵

This quote distills why, for Marx and Engels, the revolutionary strategy of 1848, in the lead-up and during the Revolution, was essentially European. What followed in the 1850s, namely the rise of the slave power in the U.S., and the consolidation of the Bonapartist world state with its headquarters in Europe, threatened even the bourgeois legacy in North America, and this transformed their thinking. The working-class movement for socialism, in Marx and Engels’s thinking post-1848, came to inherit the entire project of the modern revolution, and even the bourgeois revolution across the water was not safe.

The Secessionists’ goal was to extend slavery into new territories within the U.S. and — in alliance with Britain, France, and Spain — to reverse the movement for independence and abolition across the Western hemisphere. The first major step in this direction, Louis Bonaparte’s expedition to conquer Mexico, Marx dubbed “one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history.”¹⁶ And, just as French fleets were anchoring off Veracruz in December 1861, British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, seizing the opportunity offered by the Trent Affair, sent 10,000 troops to Canada and threatened to send, in addition, at least twice that number more. Unlike in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the Union lacked a major European ally. Or, rather, it did so until the very moment the European powers moved to weigh in on the side of the Confederacy.

The formation of the First International was a direct outgrowth of the expressions of working-class (and liberal) solidarity with the Union cause against the manifest policy of both Britain and France, which was to support the Confederacy as soon as that was feasible, that is, as soon as the Confederacy vindicated its claim to national self-determination on the battlefield. For his part, in the opening year and a half of the war, Marx wrote to his New York Tribune audience exposing the hypocrisy of British liberalism, especially British abolitionism, which played into British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston’s hostility to the Union on the grounds that the Union wasn’t anti-slavery enough. At the same time, Marx wrote for the Viennese liberal paper Die Presse sweeping analyses of the American conflict, helping to lay the groundwork in Central Europe for the working-class solidarity with the Union that supplied the basis for the formation of the First International. At the same time, in the early 1860s, he participated directly in the working-class solidarity actions in Britain. In the First International’s famous letter congratulating the American people on the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, Marx summarizes the view he had come to over the course of the War.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver? When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, “slavery” on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding “the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution”, and maintained slavery to be “a beneficent institution”, indeed, the old solution of the great problem of “the relation of capital to labor”, and cynically proclaimed property in man “the cornerstone of the new edifice” — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic.¹⁷

The American Civil War demonstrated, yes, that the democratic republic of the New World that had previously seemed outside of the European orbit of social crisis was now drawn into it, but it also showed how the struggle for simplest bourgeois revolutionary program might entail a global revolutionary crisis.

The year 1864 saw Louis Bonaparte follow up his 1861 invasion of Mexico with the installation of Maximillian I, the younger brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I, on a newfangled Mexican imperial throne. Meanwhile, the British kept an eye on the main chance should the Monroe Doctrine completely collapse. Foiling these schemes, Union victory marked the transition from the post-1848 counterrevolution to a time of fraught political possibility globally. With backing from the U.S., Mexican republicans led by Benito Juárez captured and executed Maximilian I in 1867. In Europe, the 1863–64 January Uprising in czarist Poland, the 1864 founding of the First International, the 1867 passage of the Second Reform Bill in Britain, the 1867 Fenian Uprising in Ireland, the Glorious Revolution in Spain overthrowing Queen Isabella II in 1868, the 1870 capture of Rome as the final act of the Italian Risorgimento, the liberalization (then collapse) of the Second French Empire (culminating in the Paris Commune), all absorbed, radicalized, and returned to America with interest the impetus first given by the outbreak of Civil War. Revolution ricocheted around the world before finally exhausting itself back where it began, with the Compromise of 1876 that definitively ended Reconstruction. The breaking of the Great Railroad Strike the following year confirmed that the fillip that Union victory and Reconstruction had given the cause of labor was exhausted, but not before Reconstruction, the passage of the 13^th–15^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and the passing of free womb legislation in Cuba and Brazil, placed, if not they did fully drive home, the final nails in the coffin of the old New World slavery. But, more importantly, the crucial lesson that Marx drew through the First International, the combination of social with political action, because — not despite — their mutual contradiction, stood as a legacy to be appropriated by later generations. As Marx had already proclaimed in the Inaugural Address of 1864 with reference to the American Civil War,

If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.¹⁸

Ultimately, socialism could only be won through an international dictatorship of the proletariat. This was the legacy of the First International.

Pamela C. Nogales C.: I’m going to talk about the pre-history of the Second International in America, dealing with the First International in the United States.

After the dissolution of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party in the late 1820s, Jeffersonian politics split. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren’s party deployed Jefferson’s legacy to build a new form of “Democratic” politics, where the productive activity of the farmer and artisan took ideological primacy over commercial and financial expansion. However, Jackson’s true political ingenuity was his ability to present himself as the representative of Western farmers and urban artisans, all the while remaining faithful to Southern planters. Jefferson’s party had strongly supported protectionist tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing, but these were no longer politically viable if Democrats hoped to retain their base among cotton-growing Southern planters. Appealing to Northern artisans and Western farmers, Jackson’s Democrats eliminated property requirements for voting and political office while also promising greater access to land. Their political program for greater democratization thus helped maintain a tacit alliance between small farmers, urban laborers, and slaveholders under the leadership of the Democratic Party. On the other side of the split were Northern Jeffersonians and Paineites (after Thomas Paine), champions of free labor, and leaders of the shorter-hours movement.

The split in Jeffersonian politics deepened in the political crisis of the Mexican-American War –– “America’s 1848,” when liberals were forced to confront the future of the republic: would America extend the “Empire of Liberty”? Or would the republic establish the hemisphere for slavery? Would the war, as Horace Greely wrote, force “the world [to] recede toward the midnight of Barbarism”?¹⁹ This is how the crisis of liberalism presented itself in the United States.

During and after the defeats of the 1848 Revolutions, the American republic, once again as it had in the 18^th century, served as a shelter for a new generation of revolutionaries. This has led some scholars to label the arrival of socialist political ideas as “foreign importations,” at odds with the so-called American “reform tradition.” But the story was a lot more cosmopolitan than this narrative conveys. Throughout the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, Europe’s republicans promoted the ideals of the “Transatlantic Republic” as their own. They drew from the egalitarian values of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, and early American Paineite societies. German reformers wrote biographies of the Founding Fathers; British Chartists incorporated the American flag as a guiding symbol in their meetings; and trade-union leaders and socialists in London doubled down against the affront on free labor during the American Civil War by founding the International Workingmen’s Association. Once revolutionaries and reformers landed in the United States, they thus brought back to Americans concerns about the future of liberty, which had their origins in the republic’s founding. In the early fights for a shorter working day in the U.S., for example, the Chartist ex-pat John Cluer (a leader in New England circles) called for a “Second Independence” among American workingmen. In the American Civil War, one tenth of the entire Union Army were German born. No wonder then that once the First International reached the United States, in 1869, four out of the seven New York City labor unions were German. Needless to say, the so-called “German problem” in America was a fundamentally American problem, since it displayed one of the main features of the United States, as a nation of nations — the site of the World Republic (Paine).

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Southern attack on free labor was denounced across European labor circles as a step backwards from the aspirations of 18^th-century revolutions. The working men of Britain rallied behind the Union cause, alongside French, German, and American reformers. From 1862 onward, British workers engaged in meetings and mass protests to mobilize public opinion against Prime Minister Lord Palmerston’s bellicose plans to support Confederate “independence.” Cooperative reformers founded “Emancipation Clubs” to rally labor’s support for the North, and social democrats wrote furiously in the labor press against what German exile Karl Marx called the “criminal folly” of the ruling classes.²⁰ Speakers at these packed meetings included abolitionists and Chartists, as well as influential liberals such as John Bright, black Americans like J. Sella Martin, and leading Garrisonians Mary and William Craft. The Union Emancipation Society brought together textile workers and abolitionists to lead the political opposition against Southern rebels, at a time when the established British anti-slavery forces failed to do so.²¹

The founding of the First International in London, 1864, coincided with the rising trade-union activity in the 1860s in both the U.S. and Europe. The first enduring, nationwide labor organization in the United States was founded in 1866, the National Labor Union (NLU), which the International called “the most advanced practical advocates of the rights of labor in America.”²² The NLU had a peak membership of 300,000; among them was First International leader and Baden revolutionary Friedrich Sorge. In London, the General Council followed the activities of the NLU and established lines of communication with officers William Sylvis, president of the Iron Molder’s International Union and tireless advocate for the eight-hour day, and William Jessup, the corresponding secretary for the most powerful trade union body in the country, New York City’s Workingmen’s Union.

Sylvis had established a common alliance with the Lassalleans in America in the National Labor Congress of 1867, when he introduced a resolution calling for the U.S. Congress to appropriate $25 million “to aid in establishing the eight-hour system.”²³ He defended the proposal against criticism with the support of several German members. During the following year, he called for the establishment of a federal Department of Labor to distribute public land, regulate trade unions, and promote cooperatives. When members challenged this motion, Sylvis argued in favor of the Lassallean model: “We were fifty years behind Prussia, which nation had a labor department in its government, presided over by one of the ablest men of the day. There the working class has the arm of government thrown around it, and is properly protected.”²⁴ For both Lassalle and Sylvis, the “people’s state” was a permanent feature of a liberated society. The official affiliation of the NLU and the International was cut short, in part due to the sudden death of Sylvis.

Outside of the NLU, the International lacked the deep connections to trade-union circles that it had in England. American efforts leaned heavily on the German Forty-Eighters, Friedrich Sorge, and Siegfried Meyer. German immigrants made up about half of the total membership of the International in the U.S. In 1869, Sorge became the spirited leader of the first section in America. In addition to members from their defunct Communist Club, Sorge and Meyer sought to bring together Lassalleans, former members of the General German Workers’ Association, as well as anti-Lassalleans from the N.Y. Arbeiter Union. While this period of social democratic unity among German immigrants had formed the basis for Section 1, the Franco-Prussian War split the immigrants as many of its members defended Bismarck’s war on the basis of national unification. By publicly opposing the war, the International in the U.S. lost its connection to the larger German workers’ movement. This turn of events, combined with the decline of the NLU in the 1870s, meant that the International found itself isolated from its ideal audience: the American working class, both English and German-speaking members. The mass anti-war meeting did, however, significantly raise its profile among American-born citizens and incited curiosity from veteran land reformers, communalists, and free-love radicals, who were also in attendance at Cooper Union’s anti-war demonstration. In the months that followed, many of them joined the International as new English-speaking sections.

The American English-speaking faction, which eventually battled Sorge for leadership of the International, was spearheaded by prominent republican reformers William West and Victoria Woodhull, whose departure from the North American Central Committee resulted in the formation of two rival “Federal Councils” in November 1871 — note the year. Woodhull was an early supporter for women’s rights, spiritualist, and free lover, who gave the opposition its voice on the pages of her paper Woodhull & Claflin Weekly, the first newspaper in the United States to print an English translation of the Communist Manifesto (1848).

The ideological tensions within the U.S. sections grew from arguments over the meaning of the “social republic of labor.” The American split was shaped by the aftermath of the Paris Commune in 1871. While the Commune took the International from relative obscurity into mass notoriety, it also exacerbated tensions among the General Council in London, the leading body of the organization. Its vigorous campaign for the recognition of the Commune prompted the first break in the leadership, with two members stepping down from the Council after the publication of Marx’s “Third Address” on the Civil War in France (a text commissioned by the leadership).²⁵ Among London’s leaders, the old Chartist and influential trade unionist, George Odger sided with liberal reformer Charles Bradlaugh in a “Republican campaign” supporting the Versailles Republic against the Communards. It was this break over the Commune which was at the center of the International’s demise. Although the disagreement with labor republicans in England was an ocean away, the American strife between Woodhull’s section and Sorge’s faction originated from a similar predicament. That is, from a fundamental ambivalence toward forging the independent political power of labor, in a country where workingmen had the vote.

In her newspaper Woodhull defended the democratic republic against the social revolution and argued that workingmen should deploy “the power of the Almighty Ballot” against monopolists in power. “The fault,” she argued, “[lies in] the Constitution — and the laws of the country which allow for such a usurpation of power to take place.”²⁶ The American faction thus echoed the early Chartist formulations about constitutional change and representational “justice” in government, which had been opposed by London radicals like Joseph Harney — Marx and Engels’s associate in the 1830s and 40s. Woodhull’s section published an “Appeal” in the Weekly where they argued that the primary task of the International was the expansion of political participation so that all citizens could take part “in the preparation, administration and execution of the law by which all are governed,” which would justly deliver industry back to “the people through the state” under a “new government.”²⁷

In correspondence with Sorge, Engels wrote that “it was not the task of the International to shift the foundations of the existing state but, rather, to exploit it.”²⁸ The International should not “perfect” the democratic republic, but abolish the external compulsion of capital on political action. The International, argued Sorge, “is and ought to be a Workingmen’s organization — nothing else.” He called on the General Council to introduce a resolution which would admit new sections only “when at least two thirds of their members are wage-laborers,” resulting in a minority of middle-class reformers in each section. When Sorge’s faction unfavorably compared “middle-class” to “working-class” reforms, they were making a political judgment, not a sociological one. The distinction lay in whether or not reforms advanced the democratic control of industry by workingmen. “Middle-class reforms” would make capitalist class rule more inclusive at the expense of labor’s political independence. These were the lessons of 1848, a return to the problem of Bonapartism. A workers’ state, as Marx wrote of the Paris Commune for the General Council, was “the political form . . . under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”²⁹ The original mandate for the International was for workingmen to “conquer political power” in order to lead the democratic discontent in society. While, in the first years of the organization, this mission remained purely theoretical, the Paris Commune brought latent disagreements to the forefront. The International split both in America and England on this critical point.

After the International disbanded in July of 1876 — by this time the headquarters had been moved to New York in an attempt to let the International die in peace, away from the controversy of Bakunin — by then, it was a shell of its former self. Sorge continued his fight well into the late 1870s, when the Marxists in America slowly won over the Lassalleans and the two sides reconciled on principles similar to the ones that united the two groups back in Germany at the Gotha Congress of 1875. But this unity was short-lived. Sorge along with the former Irish Secretary of the International, J.P. McDonel broke off from Lassalleans. They left the joint venture of the Workingman’s Party of the United States, because the Lassalleans successfully pushed for electoral collaboration with the Greenback-Labor Party. So Sorge and his supporters joined the American eight-hour-day reformers Ira Steward and George E. McNeill — a leader in the Knights of Labor. Together they founded the International Labor Union, an “organization of all workingmen” under the “National and International amalgamation of all Labor Unions.”³⁰ Clearly, this was a concession — a step backwards from the calls for political power which were at the forefront of the “Inaugural Address.” Perhaps it was a step back in order to move forward. Amidst the political decline after the International, Sorge, along with Marx, regarded Steward’s ideas as “an oasis in the desert of currency reform humbug” which had overtaken the Lassalleans.³¹ Steward and McNeill were especially taken by a copy of Marx’s Capital (1867). After reading it, Steward had nothing but praise for the chapter on the working day and wrote Sorge that he wanted this “translation of Karl Marx to be read.” He found a common ally in Sorge. In his correspondence, he wrote that the Lassallean opposition which Sorge had faced all these years was “made up of the same middle-class reformers that he’d been fighting for the past ten years in New England.”³² It was the same problem, just the German kind.

Ed Remus: In January I gave a teach-in at our Northwestern chapter titled “Debsian socialism in the rearview mirror.”³³ I tried to paint a general picture of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) during the lifetime of Eugene Debs and offer a framework for understanding the Party’s crisis, eclipse, and suppression. Here I stress the importance of the Party’s relationship to capitalist progressivism. In the second part, I treated the Left’s historical consciousness, specifically its historical memory of Debsian socialism, as a collection of symptoms registering the decline of the Left over the course of the 20^th century. On this panel, I want to do something different: to bridge the Marxism of the American Left in the 19^th century to the Marxism of the SPA at the dawn of the 20^th century.

In his book Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952), the sociologist Daniel Bell portrays the competing approaches to organizing into party politics that populated the fractured landscape of the late 19^th-century American Left. For Bell, this era was characterized by an antinomy between purism and pure-and-simple. That is, between the purist Marxist sectarianism of Daniel de Leon, who led the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), and the pure-and-simple trade unionism of Samuel Gompers, who led the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Between these two extremes, Bell argues that the formation of a political party, like the British Labour Party, would have represented the proper middle ground. Bell laments that the SPA fell, in his view, in its opposition to the first World War on the purist side of the scale, adjuring the role of junior partner and capitalist state governance in favor of fidelity to its utopian Marxist politics.

We can admit the antinomy Bell presents here without conceding the political conclusion Bell draws from it. From its founding 1901 moment, the SPA did indeed represent a profound mediation of this antinomy. On one side of the antinomy stood Samuel Gompers and the AFL. Bell narrates Gompers’s rise:

When Gompers was twenty-three he went to work in the cigar shop of David Hirsch, a German revolutionary exile whose factory was the center of many burning theoretical controversies . . . In the shop Gompers came under the influence of Karl Ferdinand Laurrell, an ardent Marxist who had been active in the First International. Marxism then meant, however, a fierce trade unionism, as against the political biases of the Lassalleans, and Gompers was quickly won to the trade-union viewpoint. But it was the obstinate manner in which the sectarians ignored the bread-and-butter concerns of the union that soured him completely on the political socialists.³⁴

It was Gompers’s early Marxism qua economism, Bell suggests, that underlay Gompers’s mature political philosophy of “voluntarism.” Bell describes Gompers’s voluntarism as a fear of the state akin to Manchester liberalism. Gompers opposed unemployment insurance, for example, for fear that it would render workers dependent on the state and on political parties rather than on unions and on workers’ associations. Gompers eventually opposed laws to limit the hours of the working day because he thought such laws would only serve to empower the courts while setting a de facto floor rather than a real ceiling on the hours, which unions could win from their employers. Even when, in 1900, Gompers co-founded the National Civic Federation, a tripartite body of business, labor, and state leaders aimed at ameliorating labor conflicts, he viewed this not as a collaboration between labor and the state, but one between labor and capital.

Gompers’s fear of the state was only partial and selective, however. Bell’s narration of Gompers’s early life continues:

[Gompers’s] cigarmakers union faced competition from cheap, low-paid “homeworkers” who made the cigars in their tenement homes. Gompers, as the head of the union, sought legislation outlawing the production of cigars in homes. He marked for reprisal those legislators who voted against the measure and called for support of those who worked for the bill. These men were running on old-line party tickets. But the political socialists were dead-set against voting for old-party candidates, even the prolabor ones, charging that such a move might provide temporary gains for the cigarmakers but corrupt the labor movement and destroy political socialism.³⁵

Here we see a logic consistent with Gompers’s support for state restrictions and Chinese immigration with the AFL union’s close relationship with the ward healers and the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall, and with Gompers’s eventual embrace in 1916 of Woodrow Wilson’s military preparedness initiatives. In this last instance, Gompers was inspired by the benefits labor had won through partnership with the state in Britain during wartime. If “the way out of the wage system is through higher wages,” as Gompers quipped in 1891, this way might well run through partnerships with capitalist political parties and with the capitalist state.³⁶

On the other side of Daniel Bell’s antinomies stood Daniel de Leon and the SLP. In 1888, Engels, in a letter to Sorge, derided the SLP as a catch basin for theoretically confused refugees from Germany’s anti-socialist laws. But in the years that followed, the SLP recruited talented organizers and intellectuals among New York’s Eastern European immigrants, among them Morris Hillquit of the United Hebrew Trades. De Leon joined the SLP in 1890 and assumed leadership in 1891. De Leon attempted without success to capture leadership of both the growing AFL and the declining Knights of Labor. He came to believe that leaders of these unions control the rank and file in a machine-like fashion and thereby prevented socialist unionists from conducting propaganda and recruiting to the Party among union members. He therefore created a new labor organization, the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance (STLA) which was explicitly affiliated with the SLP and its program. The STLA set up rival unions and AFL shops, including in Gompers’s own cigar-makers’ union. Using Marx as his warrant, de Leon argued that it was futile for unions to struggle for higher wages and shorter hours within capitalism. He argued that immediate demands would only corrupt a socialist political party’s platform, and he argued that capitalism would inevitably absorb labor leaders as its “labor lieutenants,” a phrase for which de Leon became famous.

These Left propagandistic electoral campaigns and socialist education are the only tactics available to de Leon’s party and his unions. A theoretical visionary, de Leon stressed the need to organize workers along industry-wide lines as a necessary condition for a soviet-type government of representation by trades. In de Leon’s hands, however, this platform only proved, as Engels wrote to Sorge in 1891, “how useless is a platform, for the mostly theoretically correct, if it is unable to get into contact with the actual needs of the people.”³⁷ Indeed, SLP membership never topped 6,000, and over the course of the 1890s, the Party declined. It failed to recruit new unions and lost many of the 100 unions that it initially commanded. Perhaps most significantly, the SLP alienated socialist unionists within the AFL who had initially hoped, only to be bitterly disappointed, that the mission of de Leon’s STLA would be to organize the unorganized rather than to establish rival dual unions in the AFL’s own shops.

The Marxian socialists who founded and led the SPA represented, both individually and together, a political intervention aimed at mediating the antinomy described above. Their politics contained key elements of the perspectives of both Gompers and de Leon while transcending the political limitations of each man’s approach. Like Gompers, and unlike de Leon, the socialists that founded the SPA thought that the unions should struggle to improve workers’ wages and conditions and that a socialist party should support unions in this task. The SPA’s founders thought that labor unions need not and should not explicitly affiliate with political parties, however, or themselves become political bodies, and they opposed the formation of rival unions in a single shop for this purpose. Some SPA leaders like Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit shared Gompers’s orientation to craft unions of skilled workers, and they minimized the need to organize the unorganized. The SPA’s leaders, like Gompers, opposed attempts by AFL unionists to form a labor party. Unlike Gompers, though, the SPA’s leaders thought that socialist unionists should spread socialist ideas and recruit party members among the AFL rank and file and should make every effort to steer their unions away from dealings with the capitalist parties. Additionally, like de Leon and unlike Gompers, the SPA’s leaders reserved their political support for exclusively socialist political parties and never, at least until 1924, supported capitalists or petite bourgeois political parties of any kind. SPA leaders Eugene Debs and Bill Haywood even shared de Leon’s vision of organizing workers along industry-wide lines, and they denounced Gompers for his unwillingness to organize the unorganized.

This is not to say that the SPA resolved the antinomy between sectarianism and economism, between purism and pure-and-simple. Indeed, the internal controversies of the SPA during the lifetime of Eugene Debs can all be read as symptoms of the Party’s success in deepening that contradiction. At the dawn of the 20^th century, this is how Marxism in America had advanced from the 19^th.

Chris Cutrone: The title of my talk is “Gilded age socialism — historically past?”

The great question regarding Marxism today is whether it is still current or rather belongs to the past: was Marxism in its highest moment confined to its contemporary period of the Second Industrial Revolution? — to the industrialization of the United States after the Civil War, which took place contemporaneously with that of the other countries where the Second Industrial Revolution was centered, Germany, Japan, Italy and Russia, where Marxism also, as in the U.S., had its greatest influence over the socialist movement?

By “Marxism” I mean, of course, not the theory of Karl Marx, but rather proletarian socialist politics in the historically Marxist mold, which combines social and political action, economic and political struggle, as opposed to other forms of socialism.

The question before us today is that of the historical Socialist Party of America, member of the Second or Socialist International, and led by Marxists such as Eugene Debs, its most prominent public political figure. Was the SPA a phenomenon specific to the era of the rapid industrialization of the U.S., the Gilded Age between the Civil War and World War I? For the SPA did not really survive the War and its aftermath, split as it was into the new Communist Party of the Third or Communist International, and repressed by the government both during the War and afterwards, in the notorious Palmer Raids.

I am going to deliberately place certain blinders on my consideration, namely confining my history to specifically American socialism. In so doing, I am going to have to ignore some glaring omissions — for instance leaving aside the Russian Revolution and the subsequent history of Soviet Communism and Stalinism. That being said:

The long legacy of the SPA is found today in such phenomena as First Amendment freedom of speech and association disputes contra public safety, as in the expression that “one cannot yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater,” which dates back to the suppression of SPA, as Debs’s vocal opposition to the War was the supposed threat to public safety not protected by the First Amendment, according to the Supreme Court. The SPA’s members had previously established the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union — as well as having established the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The issue, then, is the relationship between the Socialist Party and Progressivism, for the latter eclipsed socialism in the United States, starting with Woodrow Wilson’s election in 1912 and culminating in FDR’s election in 1932 and New Deal reforms implemented in the 1930s that flipped the U.S. capitalist political party system, and replaced the prior ruling Republican Party since the Civil War with the Democrats as the progressive liberal party. This latter change was so profound that it has been regarded as a Third American Revolution — after the original and the Civil War.

It is significant that the SPA peaked in 1912 — when it so happens that the SPD in Germany also peaked — and Progressivism replaced it since then, namely, replacing the struggle for socialism with the reform of capitalism.

As I have written in “The End of Millennial Marxism,” historically, workers have engaged in new organizing efforts with each successive wave of capitalist development, motivated by transformed conditions created by new industries.³⁸

Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, for instance, had his formative experience in the 1894 Pullman Strike, which took place in the era of the rapid expansion of American railroads. We might observe that the wave of worker militancy and socialist organizing that made Marxism into a mass political movement took place around the world in the wake of the 1893 Panic. This led to the growth and development of the SPD in Germany and led to the birth of the Labour Party in the UK and the SPA in the United States. It also created the conditions for the formation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party of Lenin.

In capitalism, great economic depressions — nowadays called “recessions” — have not brought an end to capitalism but rather its reinvigoration. Capitalism reproduces itself through crises and resulting regeneration. Capitalism is reconstituted through its self-destruction. Working-class movements are part of this process. The question, then, is how this could lead to socialism instead of rebooting capitalism.

What is peculiar is how, although capitalism has experienced countless business cycles of boom and bust in the last 200 years, only one era saw the emergence and blooming of Marxism as a mass movement in the advanced capitalist countries, namely, the historical period in question, that of the Second Industrial Revolution Gilded Age, or roughly the 50 years between 1870 and 1920, scarcely two generations in time.

These two generations, those of August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Georgi Plekhanov, and Eugene Debs, on the one hand, and Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky, on the other, brought the Marxist movement into existence and experienced its historical crisis and downfall.

What we are concerned with here is the potential reproduction of such an achievement for our time — or at least at some point in the foreseeable future. Is there a future for Marxism?

So the question hinges on conditions for social mobilization and political radicalization: how to build a revolutionary movement? Unfortunately, many misconceptions abound regarding what that even means: what a revolutionary movement fundamentally is. These misconceptions have their basis in distortions of memory, how this history is misremembered, subject to a selective reduction in hindsight.

There are two questions: How did workers become radicalized? And, how did intellectuals become revolutionaries? For normally workers, like everyone else, are not especially radical under capitalism, and intellectuals serve not to change but rather to preserve the status quo. In both cases, we are concerned with workers and intellectuals becoming socialists: workers might be mobilized in capitalist politics; and intellectuals might contribute to change, but within the overall maintenance of capitalism.

Capitalist politics plays a role in the periodic crises and waves of destruction and reproduction in capitalism. Is there a specifically socialist as opposed to capitalist way that workers and intellectuals might take part in these cycles of history?

In certain respects, the period 1870–1920 was the first and remains the only time that the subaltern have constituted a mass social and political movement, and not been merely the followers of those already dominant in society. Certainly, it was the period of its greatest extent in the advanced capitalist countries. What made this period so unique? Was it contingent and unrepeatable, or was there something of this time that continues in its essence today?

I’ve already mentioned the succession of progressive liberal capitalist politics over socialism at the end of this historical era. How did Progressivism succeed over socialism? Was socialism a variety of progressivism, but just an inferior or antiquated one?

I would offer that we still live with the consequences of the failure of Marxism, and with the continuing effects of how that failure was institutionalized in progressive capitalist policy and politics. Progressivism has provided a successful way of managing capitalism as a substitute for socialism — although lately it seems to have itself reached certain limits. Insofar as it has succeeded, economically, politically, and socially, progressivism has made the struggle for socialism redundant or unnecessary, and considering the great effort required for the latter, undesirable, if not impossible. We have experienced now two waves of progressivism: those of the early and late 20^th centuries, or, in terms more familiar to Platypus, of the 1930s Old Left and the 1960s New Left. In both cases, the struggle for socialism was replaced by capitalist reforms. Today, we are facing the limits of the progressive capitalist reforms instituted in the wake of the New Left, namely neoliberalism. We are also apparently facing the limits of the progressive capitalist reforms that were instituted in the era of the Old Left, in response to the Great Depression, the welfare state.

Intellectuals in our time — the Millennial Left — have harked back, first to the Old Left reforms and more recently to the New Left reforms, hoping to rejuvenate them. What has been forgotten by the Millennials is how those historical reforms were expressions of crises that were supposed to lead not to reconstituting capitalism but to socialism — at least in the minds of the original Old and New Leftists of the 20^th century. In this way, socialism has been confused and mistaken for the reform of capitalism.

In this way, the dialectical relationship between capitalism and socialism has been misapprehended.

An example to help illustrate how this has functioned can be found in the history of the labor movement that is related but not identical with and at some distance from the history of socialist politics.

The American Federation of Labor or AFL was led by Samuel Gompers, who was a socialist educated in his perspective by Marxists. Eugene Debs had a famous conflict and contest with Gompers over the direction and character of the labor movement, with Gompers representing older craft-based trade unionism and Debs representing a newer perspective of industrial unionism. Eventually this led Debs with other socialists to found the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. Related to this was Gompers’s preference for supporting Progressivism in the Democratic Party instead of Debs’s Socialist Party. Later, after Debs and Gompers’s time, industrial unionism was accomplished by the Congress of Industrial Organizations or CIO, with leading participation by socialists of a variety of ideological tendencies, including the Communist Party, which filled the new needs of labor organizing neglected by the old AFL. Eventually the AFL and CIO merged, and they are now a key constituency of the Democratic Party.

But the older craft trade unionism was radical for its time — it was led by socialists and even Marxists. As was industrial unionism. But both became not movements leading beyond capitalism but rather institutions within and part of capitalism.

There was an upsurge of labor militancy and organizing in the 1960s and 1970s, but it did not transform the existing labor unions nor produce a new form of unionization as might have been required by the new form of capitalism that emerged at that time, what we now call neoliberalism, namely, the more service-based and decentralized forms of work, at least as compared to the older.

What prevented the last major wave of new capitalism from producing new forms of labor organizing as well as new forms of socialist politics? One could say that the surviving legacy organizations and political parties stood in the way of meeting the challenge and achieving this.

What is remarkable about our time, then, is the test to which the existing political parties and civil social organizations are being subject in the latest crisis of capitalism. Unlike the 1960s and 70s, the existing formations seem unable to meet the new needs, in however minimal ways.

This is what makes the Millennial capitulation to the Democratic Party so painful to witness: it was so unnecessary. But there was evidently a significant lack of imagination — filled, however spuriously, by the haunting ghosts of past Leftism. There was a sense of an old need being presented anew, but it was ill-defined. The lack of clarity was precisely over the meaning of socialism and Marxism for which the Millennials reached back: they became subject and beholden to the confusion and mistakes of their ancestors.

Perhaps it is inevitable that the past should be recalled and rehearsed. But the question is, which past, and how? It is specifically tragic that the past that was remembered was not the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and the Second International but rather the Great Depression-era Communist Party of Stalin and the Comintern and the New Left of the 1960s and 70s. The Millennials could only imagine emancipation as expansion of the welfare state and of identity politics. They could only imagine more Democratic Party policies.

There are failures and there are failures: not all are equal in significance or poignancy in their tragedy. The 1930s and 60s were much lesser failures than that of original historical Marxism. And worse still, the 1930s and 60s are misremembered not as failures but as successes, not as tragedies but as heroism — forgetting that what makes heroes heroic is their tragedy.

The question is what results from the tragedy: what is the lesson to be learned in the cosmic story that is told? The story at this point is the history of capitalism. What is the lesson to be learned from the history of socialism? What was the purpose of that struggle? Was it to reform capitalism or to get beyond it? That is the question we are faced with today.

It is clear in hindsight that, unlike the original era of Marxism at the turn of the 20^th century, both the 1930s and 1960s lacked dedication and belief in overcoming capitalism, at least not directly. Now that we are reaching the exhaustion of the capitalist reforms born from those times, we might be haunted rather from that earlier time which was so much more hopeful and organized, but which bequeathed us no significant reforms of capitalism — nothing to be confused with and mistaken for socialism. The old socialism accomplished nothing, not even to change capitalism. It is this that might be its redeeming virtue.

Responses

SL: It occurred to me when I was listening to Pam — I glossed over a great deal in the pre-1848 history, and I was wondering to what extent you find the roots of American socialism in the debates over the Mexican-American War. Was Engels’s optimism about that war naïve? Was he out of touch with American debates of the time?

With respect to Ed’s presentation, I’d put a finer point on how the defeat of Reconstruction and the end of Radical Republicanism conditions the rise of American socialism. How would you narrate that?

Chris, you just concluded in talking about American socialism not contributing to capitalism, not reforming American capitalism, and that being its virtue. How would you view the earlier 19^th century in those terms? What would it mean to think of the American Revolution and the American Civil War as not actually the conception or seed time of American capitalism, but something more like an unredeemed legacy?

PN: On the question of the Mexican-American War, it was forward- and backward-looking in terms of defining class politics; the Northern circles around the Working Men Parties — the Ricardian socialist intervention in the U.S. — these critics, Jeffersonians in the North, felt that their job was to organize against the expansion of slavery, so it gave them this boost. At the same time they had to find, in the same way as in England, a common cause with those whom they had begun to critique — the Northern liberal leaders.

I wanted to raise the question, for Chris, about Marxist intervention. You were asking if socialism is simply a lesser or inadequate progressivism, and that Marxism is some kind of critique within socialist politics — as a way of raising that question historically. In the past years within Platypus’s own conception of the socialist turn within our organization, of putting the question of socialism forward, it was emphasized that you can’t have a Marxist critique or intervention without this object of critique, socialist politics. What would allow for a recrudescence of the question of Marxism today, given the absence of that?

ER: It wasn’t until 1912 that the SPA had full state chapters in all the states of the Union; the deep South proved to be difficult to organize. The Party was strong in the western South, like parts of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, but comparatively weak in the South, as a legacy of the failure and defeat of Reconstruction that was still with the Party as of the 1900s.

As late as the late 1860s, there were labor organizers thinking about the political expression of the labor movement who were shocked that some socialists would consider a party other than the Republican Party. But this changes. It’s a kind of watershed moment — the Reconstruction period.

CC: The questions you all raised about my presentation are the issue of socialism and liberalism. This would be an anachronistic way of putting it, but nonetheless: the Republican Party was the progressive liberal party before FDR, and that flipped. The U.S. capitalist political parties are the two parties — one is the progressive liberal party and the other is the conservative liberal party. It is basically the split within liberalism.

What is the relationship between socialism, progressive liberalism, and conservative liberalism? One thing that makes this history difficult to navigate is that socialism looks like it’s on both sides of the split in liberalism that takes place in capitalism. In that respect, Spencer’s question about the American Revolution and the Civil War as legacies for socialism rather than legacies just for capitalism goes to this point, namely that liberalism has two histories: those of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Those are the two great accomplishments of liberalism in American history.

To Pam’s question of lacking an object of critique: in Platypus over the past 12 years, ever since I presented my piece at the Left Forum on Lenin’s liberalism, there has been this question: is Marxism not only a self-criticism of socialism but also a self-criticism of liberalism? Behind the question of Lenin’s liberalism, or historical Marxism’s liberalism, is the question of Marx’s own liberalism. This haunts Marxology in terms of when Marx changed. When did he go from being a liberal to a socialist? He never did; he never gave up being a liberal in becoming a socialist.

I am aware that this language of liberalism is unfamiliar, and generally the Left only has scorn and contempt for liberals. Liberalism is a dirty word; it’s a bad word even in Marx’s own mouth. He excoriates the liberals, the French small-L liberals and the capital-L Liberals, namely the British Liberal Party. Why and how is that the case? It’s not the case that the liberals are the capitalists. In fact — this is where British and American history are closely related — the Liberals are, politically, the party of the working class, both in the U.S. and in Britain. When did that cease to be the case? When there was a manifest crisis of liberalism, and there were several in the 19^th century and in the 20^th century. The Labour Party in the UK simply replaced the Liberal Party. It became the liberal party — the progressive liberal party as opposed to the conservative liberal party. In Britain you have the Tories — the Conservatives — but the conservatives are not like feudal monarchists throwbacks; they are conservative liberals. The whole nomenclature, the “Tory,” is just a derogation. They are conservative liberals. The history is not different. Indeed, the gravitation in the 19^th century for socialists was towards the liberals in Britain and towards the Republican Party in the U.S.

One minor criticism I have of you, Pam, is that you leave a lot unsaid. You should have mentioned the Greenback connection to the currency humbug, and you should have mentioned that when the Jeffersonian party split, it split into the Democrats and the Whigs; and the Whigs later split and became the Republicans. What was that split about? What was the progressive-vs.-conservative wing of that split, and where were the workers and the socialists in regard to that history? You can trace it through. The whole question of proletarian socialism — socialism in the era of the Industrial Revolution, namely socialism per se — has always been in this relationship with liberalism and progressive liberalism, even when we didn’t have a language to describe it. Like I said, I’m speaking somewhat anachronistically. Progressivism is a term from the late-19^th century. That’s the enduring issue of capitalist politics today: what is the relationship of socialists (or wannabe socialists) to liberalism, as the form of capitalist politics?

Q&A

To what extent did the William Jennings Bryan populist movement subvert socialism and socialist politics in the late 19^th and early 20^th century?

CC: Debs was around the Populists and then split with them. The nature of that split has to do with the conversion to Marxism. I don’t think that split would have been as easily effectuated if Debs hadn’t been converted to Marxism. We normally think of Marxism as emphasis on class, as if we need Marx to tell us that class exists — but we have in Marxism an analysis of politics. In other words, what is William Jennings Bryan, and what is populism? We have the indelible phrase that Debs used to describe the Democratic Party in 1900, when Bryan was no longer an independent populist but had become a Democratic presidential candidate, namely that the Democrats represent the wail and cry of the dying middle class — as opposed to the working class. The working class can join in that wail and cry. Every wave of capitalism destroys the existing concrete working class, and insofar as the working class has a vested interest in capitalism, it can easily become part of that “middle class.” It can be the petite bourgeoisie as opposed to the haute bourgeoisie; it can be the people at the bottom of bourgeois society as opposed to people at the top. There is a difference between workers and capitalists, that’s a different definition than petite bourgeois and haut bourgeois. The workers can be petty bourgeois, and they often are.

The real issue is this: what is populism’s complaint against capitalism? What is the nature of this complaint? What’s the nature of the opposition to the Republican Party as the capitalist party, which was nonetheless the progressive liberal party?

William Jennings Bryan is an interesting one. He was famous later as the Secretary of State in the Woodrow Wilson administration, and then even later he was famous for the Scopes trial. He defended Christianity against Darwinian evolution. That should tell you something about this populism: it’s reactionary, and always was. Bryan goes down in history as a liberal progressive reformer and an anti-imperialist — isn’t that good? But the question raised by Debs is, why are you opposed to imperialism? On what basis? Debs says that the workers are, in some ways, more on the side of capitalist development. They oppose imperialism, but oppose it differently; they oppose finance capital, not just overseas empire; oppose monopoly; they oppose collusion of the state with the capitalist class differently than the middle class does, than the populists did, than the Democrats did and do.

SL: This is the issue of liberalism. I sometimes think that Marxists think that the Marxian critique of Bonapartism or imperialism comes from Marx. It does not; it comes from liberals. They registered this. Marx is unoriginal. It also gets to this question that anticipates the comments that Chris just made about Debs’s comments on the Republican Party: the formation of the Liberal Party in 1859 is the object of critique, in a British context, for the formation of the First International. Gladstone and Palmerston are trying to maneuver Britain into war with the Union. The person who Marx himself is helping to platform is John Bright, the great Manchester liberal — as Chris put it, the haute bourgeoisie. It is the spokesperson for the capitalist class that is being placed on the platform as the lead speaker for opposition to the British government’s attempt to recognize the Confederacy. At the heart of the formation of the First International, Marx is acknowledging the struggle with liberalism in the sense of the spokespeople for capital. John Bright’s speeches acknowledge the same thing. His whole audience is working-class in those meetings in London.

ER: I would not put it as Bryan’s populism subverting the SPA; if anything it would be the progressivism of the period that eclipses the SPA. If progressivism didn’t exist as a political tendency within capitalism there might still be a Debsian socialist party today. It’s not populism that’s a fatal threat to the Party in a meaningful way. In fact, the Democratic Party absorbed Bryan and the section of the Populist Party movement, but not all Populists followed Bryan into the Democratic Party. Among those who don’t, many were attracted to the SPA, and they proved capable organizers. They organized farmers cooperatives, civil social associations, and the Party was open to them. If you read Kautsky’s writing ca. 1906 on the situation of farmers in the U.S., he points out that historically, what land and a farm meant in the U.S. is that anyone with hard work and talent could leave the proletarian condition of the cities and become a yeoman farmer. This opportunity starts to close in the 1890s; by the 1900s, it seems fundamentally limited. This in part explains the appeal of the SPA to farmers and some of the populist constituency, because it’s no longer the glory days of the yeoman who could escape the city and “escape capitalism.” Populism is expressing that closing, but precisely because of that closing, it is bound up with imperialism and monopoly. The populist current in America becomes, to some degree, sympathetic to the SPA and the Party’s ability to organize them.

It’s important when talking about this period to recognize that we are talking about two different stages. The 1800s is the period of the bourgeois democratic revolutions, from the late 1700s through the period of the Paris Commune, etc. These are progressive revolutions that overturned feudalism, including the fight against a basically feudal system, the Spanish legacy in Mexico. That’s what was partly involved in the Spanish American War, which gets misunderstood today in light of what rapidly developed after the Civil War — the beginnings of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. The Second International is destroyed by the first world imperialist slaughter (WWI) because the leadership of almost every party of the International support their own bourgeoisies in the war, including the SPA — with exceptions, as the American Socialist Party was divided; Debs was against the War and that’s why he went to jail. He left the Party to be dominated by its Right wing. Then you have the Bolshevik Revolution, which showed the possibility of doing what the Paris Commune showed the beginnings of: taking and holding state power. It’s important to remember that when talking about a Debsian socialist party after the example of the Bolshevik Revolution — there’s a lot to learn from this period, but in terms of what kind of party needs to be built today, it has nothing to do with the Debsian period of the Socialist Party. In my opinion, the greatest weakness of Debs was not seeing the need of building a party that could lead the fight for political power, and he did it a great disservice. He was a supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, but couldn’t see his way to building a Bolshevik-type party in the U.S.

PN: This gets to some of the lessons and crisis of liberalism — e.g., what kind of lesson was the Paris Commune for Lenin? — and why we might revisit the Paris Commune as the crisis of liberalism in the 19^th century in order to provoke a recognition of Lenin’s politics. To clarify, it’s not a move away from Lenin, but rather a deepening of our understanding of what it meant to be a socialist in 1917 and inherit the task of the Paris Commune in a new age. Maybe that’s lost in transmission in how we return to that problem of continuity and discontinuity — this problem of historical consciousness today without the International. That’s what this panel is trying to do: what was the lesson Lenin supposedly was acting on?

On this issue of liberalism in the U.S. and the Whig and Republican parties: there’s Henry Clay, and there’s Lincoln. Lincoln is a break in how the Whig Party presented itself as an expansion of commerce and finance. The “splinter” within the 1820s and the 30s is made up of these workingmen parties, who tap into Ricardian socialist critique. Marx wrote of these people: they had rediscovered the problem of the theory of value through Benjamin Franklin, and that’s why they became this object of critique for Marx. But in a sense, the Republican Party does break with that emphasis. Lincoln is a student of Clay, but he still believes that there is a harmony of capital and labor; and that you can have free labor in the U.S. in ways that Sorge, with the lessons from Europe in a different temporality, doesn’t think is possible.

ER: The SPA has a sphinx-like character in the 1910s; it points towards both the Bolshevik Party in Russia and the SPD in Germany in terms of how Pam characterized it, especially in relation to the War. On the one hand, the SPA remains anti-war, at least in its pronouncements, so much so that a lot of the leading intellectuals in the Party, like William English Walling and the influential ex-socialist Walter Lippmann, leave the Party in order to support the War as they could not remain otherwise. The Party gains a lot of recruits in this period who are anti-war because they have an anti-war position, even picking up some populist currents who were anti-war. On the other hand, Elmer Beck’s The Sewer Socialists (1982) tells the story of how some of Victor Berger’s lieutenants in his municipal machine in Milwaukee end up collaborating in these tripartite state, industry, labor boards and commissions that the progressives in the Wilson administration roll out in the period of the War.³⁹ There’s unofficial collaboration and official denunciation.

Historian Jack Ross writes in his book The Socialist Party of America (2015): “The thwarting of the potential of the American socialist required the merciless domestic terror and repression of the Wilson administration during the First World War, the worst in American history and the worst, saving perhaps in Tsarist Russia, of all of the belligerents in the First World War. Thus did the suppression of the socialist and its wider ramifications prove a critical condition for America’s rise as a world power.”⁴⁰ Ross is essentially arguing that the Wilsonite terror was the condition of possibility for what we considered geopolitically to be the American century. I would add that the historian Adam Hochschild last year published his book American Midnight.⁴¹ We’re familiar with this concept of the 1940s, the midnight of the 20^th century; Hochschild says that the American midnight is when the SPA was brutally repressed by the Wilson administration. One has to acknowledge that the Party was now deemed as a significant enough threat in the context of its opposition to the War, and the October Revolution — both combined to make the Party, in the eyes of the U.S. capitalist state, seem dangerous enough to brutally suppress.

“Advanced and backwards at the same time” means advanced in the bourgeois revolution and backwards in socialist class consciousness, characterized by Britain and America in the period of the Second International. Chris mentioned this idea of whether the Socialist Party is a phenomenon of the Second Industrial Revolution and therefore no longer with us, or whether parts of the Second Industrial Revolution are still with us. I’d like to put forward a different view which was commonly held: there is a British-American problem rather than a Continental success, and that the SPA was never a mass party. Recently in Platypus we discussed Kautsky’s article “Sects or Class Parties,” which was popularly circulated by ex-ISO⁴² types during the Bernie Sanders, DSA, kind of neo-Kautskyian revival; and it’s about the debate over the British Labor Party in the Second International.⁴³ There’s a whole debate with Theodore Rothstein, Karl Radek, Max Beer — the former two being critical of Kautsky. Kautsky says that in Britain and America, you don’t have a mass socialist party. This was in 1908, and therefore it’s acceptable for the small socialist parties to maintain separate existence in the hope that they will at some point fuse with a larger labor party. And that’s the task facing Britain and America, which was not tolerable in Germany, where there already was a mass socialist party. That is connected to this question implicitly by Kautsky and explicitly by Theodore Rothstein in an earlier article called “Why is Socialism in England at a Discount?”:⁴⁴ Britain and America had early and advanced bourgeois revolutions, and that the character of socialism on the Continent was due to their backwardness at the level of liberal development; Russia and Germany are illiberal lands, and France is weirdly in-between Britain and Germany. What do we make of that?

CC: It sounds like Kautsky was looking forward to something in Britain and the U.S. that was similar to the Gotha unification of the Lassalleans and the Marxists. The Lassalleans, despite being hostile to the workers’ economic struggles, were the working-class organizers. In comparison to the Eisenachers and the Marxists, they had a much larger membership, following a larger base in the working class. It’s a strange thing — the labor party was established by the Fabians, and the Fabians were admirers of Bismarck, as was Lassalle. My off-the-cuff response is that this is Kautsky falling victim to his own linear view of history that would actually neglect precisely what you’re saying — the backward and advanced character, which is not a paradox but is a contradiction.

What I was saying about the Second Industrial Revolution is not that we still live in the world with the Second Industrial Revolution. The point is the recurrent crises of capitalism. Are the recurring crises and regenerations of capitalism opportunities for building a socialist party, or was there just that one moment of the Second Industrial Revolution? That’s where Kautsky would see that there is something of a paradox, meaning that the Lassalleans do represent the failure of 1848 in Germany; they represent democratic republicanism as a current in Germany. The bourgeoisie in Germany abdicated on that, so the workers had to take up the struggle, and that’s why they’re the “Social Democrats.” In many respects the SPD in Germany — why they’re the Social Democrats instead of the socialists — is a concession to Lassalleanism. On the first question: Marxism did have a view of mass politics, which was that the workers should lead the middle class. The workers should lead the broader democratic struggle, indeed the broader liberal struggle that, otherwise left in the hands of the middle class, will be treacherous; certainly under the leadership of the middle class it will be disastrous for the working class. That would be my riposte to why they had to reproduce this history that Germany had experienced.

ER: I recalled reading one of the SPA leaders and Marxists discussing the comparison of the prospects for a socialist party in Germany vis-à-vis the U.S. They state that prospects could seem better in the U.S. because of its bourgeois revolutionary heritage and the backward political character of Germany. But they go on to observe that the working-class movement for socialism has grown so powerful in Germany by the 1890s and 1900s that the state in Germany is able to get away with far less suppression of organized labor and of the SPD there than it's often able to do in the U.S. You see in that notion that the societal power of the party and the movement has actually put a check on the state, and it has in some ways rendered less important the fact that the state, at a political level, appears to be more backward. The prospect of the party could be greater.

SL: In the minds of socialists in the 1840s, Britain and America are both advanced and backward in radically different ways. The question of America is bound up with the question of the New World as a refuge of European labor or European dissent. The promises of the New World are bound up with the American Revolution and the Monroe Doctrine in the early 19^th century. The question of expansion, the settlement of agriculture, reaching the Pacific Ocean; have been present since the discovery of the New World. The kind of comment you’d get from L’abbé Raynal or Adam Smith, that the discovery of America marks an epoch in world history, is still there. Within that is the legacy of the American Revolution in 1776.

The backwardness of Britain has to do with the crisis of the Whig revolution. The American Revolution is an expression of the crisis of the revolution and the empire as a whole. This is the defining question of the high Enlightenment. Why does the Enlightenment cease to be Anglophile? The Enlightenment is defined by its admiration for John Locke and Isaac Newton, straight down to Montesquieu. The Rousseauvian aftermath is a crisis of that, and it's conditioned by the American crisis, the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath, which after all is a huge crisis of the British political system in what it means to be a Whig or a Tory. Obviously the Tories have ceased to be connected to the Stuart Restoration or the Jacobite impulse. The Whig Party cannot emerge from the American crisis unscathed, which is why William Pitt, Lord Chatham, gets up from the House of Lords and says he’s glad he can die with the knowledge that the cause of the Whig revolution is safe, if only across the water. That problem is compounded by Britain organizing what Marx calls the anti-Jacobin war. Marx speaks of the debt that Great Britain has to the revolutions of the 18^th century.

Chartism takes up demands concerning the betrayal of the heart of the Glorious Revolution, the failure of Parliament to adequately represent civil society. That’s where demands for the reform of suffrage are made. Universal suffrage was demanded in 1776 by London radicals. The Chartists are aware of that and the inadequacy of the reform bill to address it, that it hasn’t shaken to the core the old party political system that was created by the American crisis. You’re combining that unique (in the minds of socialists) situation — of not the absence or presence of a bourgeois revolution, but of a bourgeois revolution that has already entered into crisis. That’s why people in Britain today actually aren’t sure if there’s an English Revolution. As a historian, I can ask people what they think about their revolution and their bill of rights, and they would say what are you talking about? That’s a civil war.

ER: I mentioned that the US South makes a mockery of the promise of the bourgeois revolution in the U.S.; there’s also the cities. Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904) describes cities becoming massive sites of graft, corruption, and patronage. The Gilded Age becomes characteristic of this. At the same time, while labor should have the right of free speech and free assembly, you have the U.S. courts, the state, the police constantly interfering against the labor movement and various strikes and actions, even in consumer boycotts. In some ways paradoxically, it’s easier for a socialist party to win municipal governing power, to win a city government election in Germany, in a free and fair election than it is in many places in the U.S., and it's easier for the labor movement to conduct a strike or a boycott in Germany than in the U.S.

PN: This issue of bourgeois society in crisis, how it seems the working men already by Andrew Jackson’s time have this capacity to gain political power but don’t register bourgeois society in crisis — that’s the task of the International: to bring to the U.S. the historical experience of acknowledging bourgeois society in crisis, not as a national but an international problem. It’s not successful in doing so, and it faces resistance from people who hold onto the idea of another path far into the 19^th century, this other historical future for the U.S. Even those who support Louis Blanqui and others will say to come to the U.S. and realize one’s society here. This is something that the socialists in America understood that was not possible, and somehow it’s not registered in the U.S. That seems to be its backwards political character. |P

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1 Video of the panel is available at <https://youtu.be/5N7A8duA_3U>.

2 Karl Marx, “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America” (November 29, 1864), The Bee-Hive 169 (January 7, 1865), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm>.

3 G.W. F. Hegel, “Geographical Basis of History,” in “Introduction,” in Lectures on the Philosophy of History, ed. and trans. J. Sibree, M. A., revised edition (New York: The Colonial Press, 1899), 85–87.

4 Charles Fourier, “Letter to the High Judge” (1803), in The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, eds. and trans. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 89, <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/fourier/works/ch04.htm>.

5 Robert Owen, Two Discourses on a New System of Society; as Delivered in the Hall of Representatives at Washington (London: Whiting and Branston, 1825).

6 Thomas Jefferson to Frances Wright (August 7, 1825), <https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5449>; Jefferson’s spellings are retained.

7 Ibid.

8 Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question,” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (February 1844), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/>.

9 Ibid.

10 U.S. Constitution, amend. 1.

11 Karl Marx, “The Metaphysics of Political Economy,” in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/>.

12 Karl Marx to Pavel Annenkov (December 28, 1846), in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 38 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 95, <http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1846/letters/46_12_28>.

13 Friedrich Engels to Emil Blank (April 15, 1848), in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 38, 170, <https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1848/letters/48_04_15.htm>.

14 Friedrich Engels, “Democratic Pan-Slavism,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung 222 and 223 (February 15 and 16, 1849), in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 8 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 365–66, <https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1849/02/15.htm>.

15 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).

16 Karl Marx, “The Intervention in Mexico,” New-York Daily Tribune (November 23, 1861), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/11/23.htm>.

17 Marx, “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln.”

18 Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association” (1864), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm>.

19 Horace Greeley, New York Tribune (May 12, 1846).

20 Marx, “Inaugural Address.”

21 The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society denounced Lincoln’s emancipation and attacked the Union. An excellent account of this astonishing episode in British abolitionist history is in James Heartfield, The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1838–1956: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 149–72.

22 “Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association to the New Democracy of New York,” The Bee-Hive (November 27, 1869), in Documents of the First International: 1868–1870 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1963), 352–53, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/pdfs/iwma-sep68-jul70.pdf>.

23 Daily Evening Voice (August 27, 1867).

24 “Department of Labor and Census Statistics,” in “New York Congress, 1868,” in A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. 9: Labor Movement, eds. John R. Commons, et al. (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1910), 225.

25 Marx gave the third of his addresses concerning the Civil War in France to the General Council of the International on May 30, 1871. This address served as the text of The Civil War in France (1871) until Engels republished it on its 20^th anniversary and included two addresses that Marx had given concerning the Franco-Prussian War.

26 “The International,” Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly 4, no. 2 (November 25, 1871): 3.

27 “The International: Appeal of Section no. 12,” Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly 3, no. 19 (September 23, 1871): 3.

28 Friedrich Engels, “Die Internationale in Amerika” (July 9, 1872), Der Volksstaat 57 (July 17, 1872): “Also nicht die Grundlagen des bestehenden Staates umzuwälzen, sondern ihn auszubeuten war hiernach der Beruf der Internationalen.”

29 Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871).

30 Labor Standard (October 12, 1878).

31 Friedrich Sorge, Labor Movement in the United States: A History of the American Working Class From 1890 to 1896 eds. Philip S. Foner and Brewster Chamberlin, trans. Brewster Chamberlin and Angela Chamberlin (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987), 139.

32 Ira Steward to Friederick Sorge (probably 1876), Ira Steward Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

33 Ed Remus, “Debsian socialism in the rearview mirror” (January 26, 2023), <https://youtu.be/iQeyh7KVtog>.

34 Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 37.

35 Ibid., 38.

36 Ibid., 39.

37 Ibid., 36.

38 Chris Cutrone, “The End of Millennial Marxism,” Compact (July 1, 2022), <https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-end-of-millennial-marxism/>.

39 Elmer A. Beck, The Sewer Socialists (Fennimore: Westburg Associates Publishers, 1982).

40 Jack Ross, The Socialist Party in America: A Complete History (Lincoln: Potomac Books, 2015), xix.

41 Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (Boston: Mariner Books, 2022).

42 International Socialist Organization.

43 Karl Kautsky, “Sects or Class Parties,” Neue Zeit 13, no. 7 (July 1909): 316–28, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/07/unions.htm>.

44 Theo Rothstein, “Why is Socialism in England at a Discount?,” Social Democrat 2, no. 3 (March 1898): 69–74, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/rothstein/1898/03/socialismengland.htm>.