THE PARTY WE LOST PAGE 36 THE PARTY WE WANT PAGE 92

PAGE 136
FEATURING THE PARTY WE NEED

HOUSING

MASHAEL MAJID 140

AND KAREN NAREFSKY

JOBS

138
MIKE BEGGS

EDUCATION

142
MEGAN ERICKSON

FINANCE

146
J.W. MASON $12.95

ENVIRONMENT

153
KATE ARONOFF

HEALTH CARE

155
ADAM GAFFNEY
The United States are today certainly the most
important and interesting of all civilized coun-
tries. Not England, but America, shows us our
future today, so far as any country can show anoth-
ers future, considering that every country has its
own peculiar development. Capitalism makes its
greatest progress in America. There it reigns with
the most unlimited brutality and carries the class
antagonisms to a climax...
The future which America shows us would be
very cheerless if it did not reveal at the same time
a growth of the Socialist movement. Nowhere are
all the means of political power so shamelessly pur-
chasable as in America: administration, popular
representation, courts, police and press; nowhere
are they so directly dependent on the great capital-
ists. And nowhere is it more apparent than there
that a proletariat with a Socialist conscience is the
only means of saving the nation.
Karl Kautsky, Socialist Agitation Among
Farmers in America (1902)
Features ISSUE 23 FALL 2016

THE PARTY WE LOST THE PARTY WE WANT

37 The Rise and Fall 95 Where Is Our Labor Party?

of the Socialist Party jason schulman

of America
paul heideman

101 A Blueprint for a New Party

seth ackerman

113 No Easy Solutions

mark dudzic & adolph reed

THE PARTY WE NEED 138 140

Jobs Housing
mike beggs mashael majid & karen narefsky

142 144 146

Education Policing Finance
megan douglas j.w. mason
erickson williams

148 150
Feminism Civil Liberties
maria svart joseph m. schwartz

151 153 155

Imperialism Environment Health Care
rania khalek kate aronoff adam gaffney

2 23 / FALL 2016
Departments
JACOBIN BOOKS

FRONT MATTERS Peter Frase CULTURAL CAPITAL

8 10 71 76 80
the soapbox party lines red channels bass & ways of seeing
superstructure
Letters Election FOUR The Romance It Takes
Day Blues of American Freedoms Call a Factory
FUTURES
life after capitalism
Liberalism

13 17 $14
friends & foes struggle Four Futures:
session Life After
Everybody
Hates Cornel What Did Capitalism
West Bernie Do? by peter frase

MEANS OF
DEDUCTION

25 26
misery index the vulgar
empiricist
Exalted and
Dastardly Bernie Bros
THE TUMBREL
Deeds

28 33 $12 129 132 134

uneven & transitions The ABCs girondins thermidor versailles
combined of Socialism
Let a Thousand Hillary Clinton Austerity With Nobody
Party in the Flowers Is Running a Vacant Face for Bloomberg
U.S.A. Wither JACOBINMAG.COM
for President
/STORE

READING MATERIEL LEFTOVERS

119 122 126 158 160 162

canon fodder field notes dossier popular front the cookshop means & ends
Trial and Error A Vast Beltway Results Voting Under Why We
Right-Wing to English and Prospects Socialism Publish
Conspiracy Dictionary

THE PARTY WE NEED 3

Contributors
Seth Ackerman
Seth Ackerman is on the editorial
board of Jacobin and a doctoral
candidate in history at Cornell.
Kate Aronoff
Kate Aronoff is a writing fellow at
In These Times covering the 2016
election and the politics of climate
change.
Nicole Aschoff
Nicole Aschoff is the managing
editor at Jacobin and the author of
The New Prophets of Capital.
Mike Beggs
Mike Beggs is an editor at Jacobin
and a lecturer in political economy
at the University of Sydney.
Alexander Billet
Alexander Billet is a writer, poet,
and cultural critic living in Chicago.
He is on the editorial board of Red
Wedge magazine.
4 23 / FALL 2016
Megan Erickson
Megan Erickson is a teacher, editor
at Jacobin, and author of Class War:
The Privatization of Childhood.
Harrison Fluss
Harrison Fluss is a phd candidate in
philosophy at Stony Brook
University and a corresponding
editor for Historical Materialism.
Peter Frase
Peter Frase is on the editorial board
of Jacobin and the author of
Four Futures: Life After Capitalism.
Adam Gaffney
Adam Gaffney is a physician who
contributes regularly to Jacobin
and blogs at The Progressive
Physician.
Paul Heideman
Paul Heideman is a graduate
student in sociology at New York
University.
Cedric Johnson
Cedric Johnson is the author
of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders
and a representative for uic United
Faculty Local 6456.
Eileen Jones
Eileen Jones is a film critic at
Jacobin and author of the book
Filmsuck, USA. She teaches at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Matt Karp
Matt Karp is the author of This
Vast Southern Empire and a Jacobin
contributing editor.
Rania Khalek
Rania Khalek is an associate editor
at the Electronic Intifada and
co-host of the weekly podcast
Unauthorized Disclosure.
Connor Kilpatrick
Connor Kilpatrick is a New York
based writer on the editorial board
of Jacobin.
Mashael Majid
Mashael Majid is a community
planner and racial justice organizer
based in Oakland, CA.
J.W. Mason
J.W. Mason is an assistant professor
of economics at John Jay College,
City University of New York and a
fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.
Branko Marcetic
Branko Marcetic is a journalist from
Auckland, New Zealand and an
editorial assistant at Jacobin.
Sam Miller
Sam Miller is a recent graduate of
Columbia University. She is
currently a teacher in Manhattan.
Karen Narefsky
Karen Narefsky is a community
organizer based in Somerville, MA
and a contributing editor at Jacobin.
Alex Press
Alex Press is a writer and phd
student in sociology at
Northeastern University.
She lives in Boston.
Jennifer Roesch
Jennifer Roesch is an activist
with the International Socialist
Organization in New York City.
Jason Schulman
Jason Schulman is on the New
Politics board and the author of
Neoliberal Labour Governments and
the Union Response.
Joseph M. Schwartz
Joseph M. Schwartz is the national
vice-chair of the Democratic
Socialists of America, and professor
of political science at Temple.
Robert Carpenter Shook
Robert Carpenter Shook is an
independent photojournalist and
documentary photographer.
THE PARTY WE NEED
Bhaskar Sunkara
Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding
editor and publisher of Jacobin and
the editor of The ABCs of Socialism.
Maria Svart
Maria Svart is the national director
of the Democratic Socialists of
America and a former campus fem-
inist activist and union organizer.
Jonah Walters
Jonah Walters is a researcher at
Jacobin and a graduate student in
geography at Rutgers University.
Douglas Williams
Douglas Williams is a doctoral
student in political science at
Wayne State University in Detroit.
5
Citoyens
Jacobin is a leading voice
editor & publisher outreach & development of the American left,
Bhaskar Sunkara Jason Farbman offering socialist perspectives
on politics, economics,
creative director reading groups
and culture. The print magazine
Remeike Forbes Neal Meyer
is released quarterly.
managing editor circulation
subscription price
Nicole Aschoff Katrina Forman
$29 US (print)
associate editor contributing editors $39 Canada (print)
Shawn Gude Bashir Abu-Manneh
$59 international (print)
Micah Uetricht Jonah Birch
$19 (digital)
Sebastian Budgen
editorial board
High-income $59
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Seth Ackerman Liza Featherstone Institutions $69
Alyssa Battistoni Sabrina Fernandes Lifetime $295
Mike Beggs Beln Fernndez
388 Atlantic Avenue,
Megan Erickson Eileen Jones
Brooklyn, NY 11217
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Connor Kilpatrick Cyrus Lewis jacobinmag.com/subscribe/
Chris Maisano subscriptions@jacobinmag.com
art editor Scott McLemee
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editorial assistants
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6 23 / FALL 2016
 FRONT
MATTERS

A HEALTHY
START TO A NUTRITIOUS
MAGAZINE.
 FRONT MATTERS
THE SOAPBOX
Letters
Hoffa Lives!
Joe Allens The Other Big Election, which focused on
the 2016 Teamsters election, would have you believe
in the timeworn narrative of a valiant group of militant,
rank-and-file oriented union leaders facing off against
an opulent old guard. Nothing could be further from
the truth. The fact is that the Teamsters union under
Hoffa has developed into a cutting-edge union deeply
committed to organizing and innovative strategies to
take on employers along with winning strong contracts
at major employers like ups and bravely negotiating
to save jobs in carhaul and freight where those industries
have been threatened by deregulation and years of
mismanagement. All of this in the context of two financial
crises and aggressive attacks against the labor move-
ment sweeping the country.
Eric Robertson, Teamsters Local 728
8 23 / FALL 2016
Fully Automated Luxury Genetic Engineering
I dont understand the demonization of genetic
engineering in Save the Mosquitos. The vast majority
of scientists recognize it as safe, and as a technology
it is specifically promising for those in the Third World
battling vitamin A deficiency and the increasing
effects of climate change. While the fact that these tech-
nologies are in the hands of large corporations does
suck, it doesnt change the actual science behind it.
As this article points out correctly, these gm mosquitoes
could help eradicate mosquito-borne diseases, help-
ing the worlds poorest. Science should be embraced by
the far left, not feared.
Paul Caffrey, Falmouth, Massachusetts
 Against Birdie Sanders
Dude. I dont mind Sanders a
damned bit. I will vote for
any Democrat in office but people
suggesting this is some sign

The
are absolutely bonkers. Dont make
a religion outta the dude. Birds
come up to me even when Id rather

Internet them not because I am doing

other shit, not because I am some

Speaks
sort of figure emblematic of
peace. It was a cute thing, but lets
not overblow it like God opened
up the heavens and delivered this
bird to Sanders.

Jackie Faulk, Tucson, Arizona

<3 u too
Because
I think you are the best publication
communication upon the Earth.
is at the heart
David Eugene Lapp Jost,
of any good Harrisonburg, Virginia
relationship.
Losing Your Target Demographic
I am a depressed vegetarian, but not
a Corbyn supporter.

Adrian Lucas, Basel, Switzerland

Thats One Position

Gun control is racist at worst and
ableist at best.

Chase Cole, Portland, Oregon

The Hestonites
I maintain the view that we should
enter the nra, form a Marxist sect,
and launch a coup.

Spencer Thompson, Undisclosed

THE PARTY WE NEED 9

 FRONT MATTERS
PARTY LINES
Election
Day Blues
We planned this issue to coincide with Election Day, so
youre probably feeling pretty miserable right about
now. Today, voters faced the unpalatable choice of filling
in the circle for a party of capital, lodging a protest
vote for a Green Party utterly disconnected from Amer-
ican workers, or supporting a puzzling Libertarian
candidate.
To put it bluntly, no major political party represents
your interests or those of your friends and family.
The Democratic and Republican apparatuses appear
impermeable to change from below, make little
effort to mobilize people between elections, and
routinely implement policies that hurt ordinary
Americans.
10 23 / FALL 2016
The fact that working people lack a real political voice
is no accident. The peculiar nature of US politics is
inseparable from battles between elites and workers;
in many respects its the result of the Lefts past
defeats and the strength of US capital. Unlike many
other democracies, we dont have a labor party to
represent the interests of working people. Instead of
a political system in which conscious working-class
political action plays a formative role, we have two
parties beholden to the prerogatives of big business. In
this system, demands for equity and justice for ordi-
nary people are drowned out or ignored.
This state of affairs isnt exactly new. If the past years
electoral circus showed anything, its that Americans are
sick of the parties of capital and their broken promises.
But the distance between being fed up and real change is
vast. We cant change the political morass by force
of will alone. Deciding to make the moral leap together
toward a better politics is simply not enough.
Its up to the Left to close this distance and move for-
ward with energy, ideas, and action. At the same time,
we must also take stock of where weve been. This
issue is meant to sit at the intersection of these impulses.
It both explores the absence of a lasting working-
class voice in the United States, and looks hopefully to
the future by considering the positive developments
of the past few years.
As you can see, this Election Day issue is hefty. We
wanted to give readers a glimpse of the myriad visions
of Jacobin contributors who are looking to the future
and working for change. The issue covers the rise
and fall of the Socialist Party of America the party
we lost. We also explore why we were never able
to build a sustainable labor party, as well as what at last
building the party we want would look like. Finally,
we asked a host of activists and scholars what the party
we need should be organizing for in the here and now.
No one is waiting for a quarterly socialist magazine to
tell them who to vote for. So we didnt. Instead, we hope
to keep alive the vision of independent working-class
political action, so that our choices in 2036 wont be as
miserable as they are in 2016.
Wildcat Series
From
Southern Insurgency
The Coming of the Global Working Class
Immanuel Ness
Workers in the South are developing new forms of resistance, and are now an integral part
of a global working class, under-appreciated developments brought to vivid life in Southern
Insurgency. This latest book by Ness is a needed corrective to the false idea that resignation to
neoliberalism is universal.Counterpunch
Paper $28.00

Just Work?
Migrant Workers Struggle Today
Edited by Aziz Choudry and
Mondli Hlatshwayo
Timely and provocative. . . . Just Work? is a smart and original contribution. . . . It is
a unique combination of theory and illustrative case studies.Samia Botmeh, Birzeit
University, Palestine
Paper $32.00

The Spirit of Marikana

The Rise of Insurgent Trade Unionism
in South Africa
Luke Sinwell with Siphiwe Mbatha
This book highlights the crucial role of ordinary workers in changing history. It is a richly
textured portrayal of the lives and activities of the grassroots worker leaders who organized
the historic platinum strikes in South Africa. It is a
path-breaking history of the labour movement.
Trevor Ngwane, South African anti-apartheid
activist
Paper $30.00

Working the Phones

Control and Resistance in
Call Centres
Jamie Woodcock
Woodcocks brilliant insider account of life in a British call-centre reveals the dirty realities
of digital capitalism. Its a grim world that business wonks and politicians would rather youd
not know about. But unlike other descriptions of the neoliberal workforce who are pliant and
broke, Woodcock finds workers fighting back.Peter Fleming, author of
The Mythology of Work
Paper $30.00

Forthcoming in December
12 23 / FALL 2016

Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

 FRONT MATTERS
FRIENDS & FOES BY CONNOR KILPATRICK

Everybody
Hates
Cornel West

The first time I met Cornel West was
at Disney World. He wasnt hard to
spot.
I didnt want to bother him I
was with my in-laws, he was with a
young member of his family but
just a few weeks after the rough-and-
tumble primary season in which both
of us dove headfirst into the Sanders
campaign, I couldnt get over the
irony of two Berniebros passing in
the night. And at Epcot of all places.
Despite the 90degree weather, he
was clad as always in the same black
suit, the same white shirt. Except
now, instead of that reverential band
of cloth he wears around his collar, his
shirt was unbuttoned halfway down
his chest, the collar spread out like a
disco-era leisure suit. It was the only
alteration of the iconic Brother West
uniform that he would permit under
the hot Orlando sun.
It was a much-deserved vaca-
tion for West. Itd been a rough
few months on top of a rough few
years. Only a couple of presiden-
tial cycles ago, West was on stage in
Harlem, exchanging embraces with
How Cornel West went
from liberal media darling
to pariah.
thenSenator Obama. But now, West
finds himself in a strange place. After
his public break with the Obama pres-
idency, the same liberal intelligentsia
that once championed West has not
only thrown him overboard, but
seems to delight in making a public
spectacle of their scorn for a man they
claim is little more than embittered
after being spurned by the first
black president.
Long beloved by liberals as the
premier black public intellectual,
West is now rejected by the same
crowd of Democratic Party apparat-
chiks that first helped him shoot to
fame through television appearances,
countless books, a hip-hop album, and
even an onscreen role in The Matrix
sequels. The Nations Joan Walsh
has said that West is in the midst of a
tragic meltdown. The Washington
Posts Jonathan Capehart the same
man who tried to claim a photo of
Sanders at a 1962 civil rights sit-in
was fraudulent has called West no
better than a Birther.
Michael Eric Dyson, in one of
the weirder and more personalized
anti-West takedowns, published what
can only be called a scornful ten-
thousand-word breakup letter to his
former mentor. Dyson, the George-
town professor and Aspen Institute
regular, spent one particularly
lengthy section of his New Republic

THE PARTY WE NEED 13

 FRIENDS & FOES
essay ranking black public intel-
lectuals prowess according to their
equivalent prizefighter. West was
given the rank of Mike Tyson.
All of this led up to the great
left/liberal schism of 2016 that was
Sanders vs. Clinton. As Dyson, Cape-
hart, and Walsh lined up firmly behind
the increasingly miserable Clinton
campaign, West found himself allied
first with Bernie Sanders and later
Green Party candidate Jill Stein. At
the height of Sanders-mania, while
Dyson, Walsh, and Capehart were
delivering cringeworthy apologetics
for Clinton, West was working with
the Sanders campaign in the South,
touring black churches and colleges
in support of the social-democratic
political revolution. In more than
a few of these events, he sat along-
side Adolph Reed, the man who had
written a classic excoriation of both
West and Dyson and their entire field
of black public intellectuals.
The irony of West literally sharing
the stage with Reed was lost on few.
Written in the 1990s, Reeds What
Are the Drums Saying, Booker?
reads like prophecy today. The black
public intellectual, in Drums, was a
freelance race spokesman; his status
depended on designation by white
elites rather than by any black elec-
torate or social movement only able
to claim that status thanks to a long
period of depoliticization. His role
was to thus interpret the opaquely
black heart of darkness for whites.
Unsurprisingly, this role fits per-
fectly within the brokerage model of
politics that the Democratic Party
has so heavily relied on for years to
enact an agenda that is increasingly
at odds with the material needs of
most black voters. In the original
essay, Reed found perhaps the clearest
14
articulation of this role in Wests work
up to that point referencing West-
isms like the call for a love ethic and
a politics of conversion.
But in the Obama era, black
public intellectuals find themselves
in a curious position. Its a diffi-
cult balancing act how to keep
interpreting the drums for the
Democratic Party elite, as Reeds
argument goes, while staying friendly
with that same party thats overseen a
mass economic immiseration of work-
ing-class Americans and an exploding
carceral state (both of which dispro-
portionately affect black Americans).
The contradictions in this rela-
tionship grow even starker as the
rhetorical victories have stacked
up. Today, even Silicon Valley ceos
proudly proclaim that Black Lives
Matter. The discourse of diversity
and the grad student seminar has
become entrenched in everything
from television criticism to celeb-
rity tabloids. The Obama years have
been a boon to the salaried intellectual
class of all races, but lean times for
the working-class constituents whose
needs, hopes, and desires the black
intellectual class vies to interpret for
white audiences. What is the role of
the black public intellectual when the
discourse of race relations is now
perhaps the liberal classs preferred
way some would say only way of
talking about our never-ending bar-
rage of social injustices?
Needless to say, the Obama era
has been a hell of a trip for Brother
West. As the analytical role of black
public intellectual became increas-
ingly unable to explain the growing
social inequalities in American life,
West bolted from the political main-
stream to the margins. Where he
once shared the stage with President
23 / FALL 2016
Obama, he now occupies it with
people like Revolutionary Communist
Party leader Bob Avakian. While the
Hillary Clinton campaign enlisted the
Democratic Partys black bourgeoisie
to batten down the hatches against
the Sanders threat, West assailed the
Obama legacy as one of illusory racial
uplift alongside the material reality of
a post-crash society in which single
black women were left with a median
net worth of five dollars.
When Clintons black surrogates
shamelessly accused Sanders of racial
aloofness, West fought back using
the same rhetoric of a black public
intellectual that had helped build his
career. But now, he was attempting
to forge that same language into a
weapon of social-democratic demy-
stification, wielding it against the
Clintonite fog of cultural studies
jargon, meritocratic appeals, and
subtle free-market apologetics.
It was always doomed. To no ones
surprise, Wests exhaustive interven-
tion failed. No matter how much he
vied with his former comrades for the
black public consciousness, Clinton
swept the South by even larger mar-
gins than anyone had expected. The
same brokerage politics of racial
authenticity that had, decades ago,
delivered black votes to the Clinton
machine werent about to win them
away for a seventy-four-year-old sen-
ator few had heard of. The Wests of
the world can deliver only righteous-
ness and fiery passions. Congressmen
Jim Clyburn and John Lewis can
deliver jobs, networks, and targeted
legislation.
As much as West tries to summon
what he calls the black prophetic tra-
dition in order to make it work for
the democratic-socialist agenda he
sincerely believes in, the battle over

that discourse has long since been
lost. The Democratic Party has only
grown more skilled at interpreting
the drums, even as it continues to
abandon or rewrite historical com-
mitments to trade unions and social
insurance programs commitments
that disproportionately benefited
black Americans.
We live in an era in which
Clinton who proudly supported
mass incarceration and the obliter-
ation of welfare declares that a
social-democratic program of finan-
cial reform and single-payer health
insurance wont end racism. A
recent WikiLeaks publication of
internal Clinton campaign emails
reveals another line they were testing
out against Sanders: Wall Street is
not gunning down young African
Americans or denying immigrants a
path to citizenship.
Its a sentiment that wouldve
bewildered civil rights veterans like
A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther
King Jr, John P. Davis, Bayard Rustin,
and Lester Granger, all of whom were
committed to social-democratic pol-
itics as a crucial means of putting
racism on a path towards ultimate
extinction. The tragedy of West isnt
that hes full of bitterness, as his
liberal detractors claim. Its that the
politics of Wests black prophetic
tradition, try as he might to wield
them for socialist ends, will today find
their strongest, clearest articulation
in the same old quest of interpreting
the drums for a mostly white ruling
class.
Earlier in the primary season,
during an interview on the Real
News Network, West directly called
out the black elite whom he calls
the lumpenbourgeoisie for
abandoning the black prophetic
Everybody Hates Cornel West
Long beloved by
liberals as the
premier black public
intellectual,
West is now rejected
by the same crowd
of Democratic Party
apparatchiks that
helped him shoot to
fame.
tradition for individual upward But as tragic as Wests crusade
mobility and the formation of the can appear, the sincerity of his com-
black professional class. As he put it, mitment to a more just and egalitarian
Black folk for the most part became world and the righteousness of
just extensions of a milquetoast neo- his passion cannot be called into
liberal Democratic Party. But Adolph question. Those who, like Michael
Reed and a host of others told this Eric Dyson, claim that Wests polit-
story many years ago. Its becoming ical commitments now derive from
much more crystallized. We have to nothing more than hurt feelings over
be willing to tell the truth no matter unreturned phone calls to Barack are
how unpopular it is. either not paying attention or shame-
West didnt hesitate to proclaim lessly projecting their own guilty
that his biggest left-wing critic had consciences onto West.
been right all along. But the fact that As soon as Sanders laid down his
he felt betrayed by this lumpenbour- arms and endorsed Clinton, West
geoisie in the first place only shows was already on the trail for Green
the limits of this political vision and Party candidate Jill Stein, telling Bill
the power of Reeds original critique. Maher that the Clinton train Wall
After all, why would a lumpen- Street, security, surveillance, milita-
bourgeoisie act different than any rism thats not going in the same
bourgeoisie? A vision of a harmo- direction Im going... shes a neolib-
nious insular black community eral. And while many criticisms of
without any internal class tensions the Green Partys electoral myopia
might sound appealing to some in are warranted, its impossible not
2016 particularly to the Democratic to respect Wests drawing a line in
Party but its a delusion no serious the sand against the Democrats a
leftist can afford to entertain. party he sees as irredeemable. If his
THE PARTY WE NEED 15
 FRIENDS & FOES
break with Obama made him sad and
bitter, one can only wonder what his
elite critics think of him now.
The truth is that Cornel West is
being punished for choosing a genuine
commitment to a more egalitarian
society over the faux radicalism (and
career opportunities) of the dnc and
msnbc black intelligentsia. On an
appearance on late-night television
a couple years ago, David Letterman
pitched him a softball question on
the overall improvement in race
relations. Instead, West chastised
Obama and Attorney General Eric
Holder for their inaction on police
violence: Its a question of what kind
of persons do you have, not just black
faces. After Letterman pointed out
how at least things had improved for
the lgbt population, West coun-
tered: The system is still structured
in such a way that one percent of the
population owns 43percent of the
wealth, you end up with an embrace of
gay and lesbian brothers and sisters,
especially uppermiddle class and
above, but the gay poor, the lesbian
poor, theyre still catching hell... Its
not just black. Its white. Its brown.
Its the structure of a system... its
worse [than ever].
I was thinking about that when
I stuck my sweaty hand out to shake
Wests on the Epcot promenade. I was
also thinking about the first time I
ever heard him speak in public. It
was at Left Forum just before Occupy
Wall Street and just after the Wis-
consin protests and the Arab Spring.
And while Ive never been shy about
poking fun at that venues tendency
towards Comic Con for Alternative
Politics, that year was different. It
felt like that disparate coalition of
marginal ideologies we call the rad-
ical left was beginning to cohere into
16
something. And Wests fiery speech
that day made that possibility feel just
within reach. Sure, there were a few
airy West-isms and of course weaving
in references to his favorite musicians
as sources of potential radicaliza-
tion trickling through the culture
(listen to a little Curtis Mayfield,
listen to a little Bob Dylan, listen to
a little Bruce Springsteen, listen to
Today, even
Silicon
Valley CEOs
proudly
proclaim that
Black
Lives Matter.
a little Aretha her birthdays on
Monday!).
But it didnt matter. Because for
the first time in years, it seemed like
something really was happening. And
the man on stage was the perfect one
to give voice to that excitement, to
that first hint of a lifelong passion and
commitment. I remember looking
around the auditorium: the young,
this new generation who would soon
file out in Occupy and, a few years
later, join the Sanders campaign,
were hanging on his every word as
they listened to West define what it
23 / FALL 2016
meant to be radical, what it meant to
be on the Left. That means we cut
radically against the grain of the last
forty years, especially in the Amer-
ican empire, where we have been told
lies. Unfettered markets generating
self-sufficiency, prosperity, and jus-
tice is a lie!... Wall Street oligarchs
and the corporate elites are sucking
so much of the blood of American
democracy in such a way that more
and more people are just useless,
superfluous. And they dont care!
They think that they can get away
with it because theres been no resis-
tance of large scale! And they think in
the end, the chickens dont come home
to roost, that you dont reap what you
sow... we simply say at Left Forum,
and here he backed away from the
mic, lowered his voice and smiled,
We stand for the truth. People were
on their feet, exploding in applause.
While Wests reputation has suf-
fered greatly among liberals, it has
never been better among socialists.
And while still marginal, after the
Sanders challenge to the entire lib-
eral class, ours is a corner with some
confidence now. West is a longtime
member of the Democratic Socialists
of America and his reputation for gen-
erosity among younger members is
unparalleled. He seemingly has time
for everyone. Especially those who
offer him nothing in career opportu-
nities or elite respectability.
Unlike his former student Dyson,
I doubt Cornel West will be receiving
any new invitations to the Aspen
Institute, at least for the time being.
The Democratic Party and msnbc
elite may hate him, and we might
quibble about the usefulness of his
conversations with Bob Avakian, but
it seems at long last Brother West has
found his home.
 FRONT MATTERS A CONVERSATION WITH
STRUGGLE SESSION CEDRIC JOHNSON
MATT KARP
JENNIFER ROESCH

What Did
Bernie Do?

Looking back at the Sanders

campaign and the struggles
to come.
Socialism in the
United States

The Bernie Sanders campaign

had success on a level no one
could have predicted, winning
tens of millions of supporters.
To what do you credit this?
Cedric Johnson
The ground was softened over the
past two decades for him. There have
been some really dark times going
back to the Bush years, but through
it all weve seen social struggles that
have illuminated the way forward.
Sanders benefited from that. He was
the beneficiary of organizing around
the Labor Party, antiglobalization
struggles, antiwar protests, fights to
save collective bargaining in places
like Wisconsin and Ohio, Occupy
Wall Street, and the demonstrations
against police violence. I think people
were ready, different constituencies
that have come into being in a way
that didnt exist a decade or two ago.
Jen Roesch
The struggles over the last two
decades especially the last eight
years are enormously important and
paved the way for Sanderss success.
Its almost a time-delayed Occupy
goes to the polls kind of expression.
The material basis for both
those struggles and the success of
Sanderss campaign is the growing
and dramatic levels of social inequality
in this country. Sanders managed to
tap into antiestablishment sentiment.
He spoke to a discontent that people
have with politics as usual, with the
Democratic Party, with disappointed
expectations of Obama. Sanders was
able to give expression to a politics
to the left of the Democratic Party
mainstream which could provide a left
populist answer to peoples discon-
tent in the inverse way that Trump
is tapping into that discontent.
Matt Karp
The scale of Bernies success is stag-
gering. This was the most successful
left-wing primary campaign in US
history. The only analogues are Jesse
Jackson in 1988 and Ted Kennedy in
1980, but Sanders won many more
votes, delegates, and primaries than
either of them.

THE PARTY WE NEED 17

 STRUGGLE SESSION
What made Bernie different? A
major factor was Sanderss embrace
of a social-democratic platform. The
campaign focused on simple, broad
solutions like national health care and
free college universal goods that
speak to peoples everyday problems,
and have been consistently shown to
be popular. But politicians in both
parties have studiously avoided
talking about them for decades.
Sanders also mobilized a direct
class politics in his rhetoric. He was
not afraid to name names, like the
Walton family or Goldman Sachs,
rather than just talking generally
about opportunity or inequality. And
he expanded his critique beyond indi-
vidual wrongdoing: these are not just
bad people, but they are in an inher-
ently exploitative class position, the
billionaire class. American politi-
cians dont ever talk this way, but it
resonated.
For us, Sanderss popularity was all
the more exciting for his embrace
of the socialist label. But how big
of a role did Sanderss socialism
really play in his public perception?
Cedric Johnson
Its remarkable that he was even
able to run as an openly demo-
cratic-socialist candidate and not
be marginalized. Clinton tried to
attack him on that, but he was able
to weather those criticisms. It didnt
really stick in the way it would have
a decade or two ago.
Jen Roesch
The important thing is that Sanderss
socialism wasnt a barrier to him get-
ting millions of votes. When I came of
political age, the Soviet Union was just
falling. Socialism was associated with
18
Stalinism. People told you to go back
to Russia. Twenty-five years later,
more than thirteen million people
voted for someone who calls himself a
socialist. Thats a certain kind of bar-
rier coming down, thats incredibly
important for the socialist left.
Matt Karp
There is a paradoxical effect when the
word socialism gets abused par-
ticularly the way the right wing has
abused it, calling Obama socialist,
calling Obamacare socialist, all this
crazy stuff.
So the word socialism gets
watered down, but it also expresses
a real truth. The polling on socialism
says that this younger generation
contains a large of group of people
interested in something beyond lib-
eral reform. Maybe they dont know
what it is, exactly, but theyre open to
it and theyre going to keep exploring
and I think its our job to keep pushing
them.
Jen Roesch
Matt is hitting on an important point.
Sanders opened up a discussion about
what socialism is. At various points
throughout his campaign he started
out with a broader conception, talking
about Eugene Debs and then at other
times would describe having a mili-
tary or anything thats owned by
the state as socialist. Its incumbent
on socialists to continue a discussion
about what kind of socialism we want
to fight for. That space has really
opened up for us.
Cedric Johnson
It is important that Sanders was able
to do what he did as a socialist candi-
date, but we need to think carefully
about what brought people to his side.
23 / FALL 2016
It wasnt the label, but the attraction
of specific policy platforms. Free
higher education, single-payer health
care, calls for regulating the banks, as
well as things like postal banking...
Unless youre over fifty, most people
dont even remember those things as
a possibility or a reality. Sanderss
success had more to do with, as Matt
pointed out, the resonance of his cri-
tique of class power and, as Jen noted,
the harsh conditions that people are
living through.
In all elections, peoples votes are
an expression of a temporal prefer-
ence, not necessarily a full-throated
acceptance of all things that a candi-
date represents. We should be excited
about Sanderss popularity, but we
should also be somewhat cautious in
how we think about what motivated
people to support him.
Matt Karp
There were some people on the Left
who were worried Sanders watered
down the term, that he would make
socialism meaningless, or turn
socialism into liberalism. But even
if there were some distortions, Im
glad we are having this conversation.
Id rather have millions of people
talking about socialism than have
millions of people not talking about
socialism.
Cedric Johnson
If something opens up the possibility
for a different kind of conversation,
a popular critique of capitalism, then
Im all for it. I dont think we have to
wait for the perfect set of conditions
to arise to make things happen. As we
see the potential for power, theres
a need for us to shift gears from the
kind of pristine conversations we have
within activist circles and accept the

fact of politics, that the process itself is
not always pretty. Things dont always
line up the way we want them to, but
we shouldnt be discouraged by that.
Jen Roesch
I was sitting in a meeting of students
on campus and an eighteen-year-old
said, I was against all of these dif-
ferent things and I was angry about
all of these different issues, and then
Sanders came along and gave it a
name and it made me want to start
understanding what socialism is and
learning more about it.
Thats a minority of people who
voted for Sanders, but its a minority
that far outstrips the current capacity
of the Left to bring those people into
activity.
Race, Class,
and Struggle
As Sanders increasingly posed
a threat to Hillary Clintons
nomination bid, all sorts of charges
were leveled against him. The
red-baiting stuff was a flop,
but there was more success when
Sanders was accused of paying
insufficient attention to race.
Were these complaints warranted?
Cedric Johnson
I think thats a wrong view of things.
Sanders is committed to antidiscrim-
ination along racial and gender lines.
A lot of the criticisms lobbed at him
were calling for him to adopt a typ-
ical kind of patron-client approach
to the elections to engage with
particular brokers of this or that
identity group. Throughout the pri-
mary I heard, If only Sanders had
adopted a reparations plank or If
THE PARTY WE NEED
What Did Bernie Do?
only Sanders had taken a stronger
position on Black Lives Matter, then
he could have taken away the black
vote from Clinton and he could have
won the primary and the Democratic
nomination.
I think thats just a wrongheaded
view of how politics works. It assumes
that most of this is about messaging
and if you just offer the right message
to people, then theyll rally by your
side. Theres also an oversimplified
view of black political life at work
here. Clinton made all sorts of mis-
steps which should have damaged her
support from blacks, like the instance
in South Carolina during that pricey
fundraiser where she shut down a
Black Lives Matter protester. Some
might think that that would have
eroded her black support, but it really
didnt because her superpredators
comment was not the only thing
people were thinking about when
they were deciding whether to sup-
port Clintons nomination.
19
 STRUGGLE SESSION
Jen Roesch
Sanderss positions on racism had
nothing to do with why he didnt
win the black vote. He is far to the
left of Clinton on racism, from his
social policies to his opposition to
mass incarceration, to his programs
to address broad inequality.
One of the central liberal cri-
tiques of Sanders on racism was that
he focused too much on class. But his
economic policies emphasizing
jobs programs and broad policies of
redistribution would be a huge
advance in addressing inequality
and improving the lives of millions
of black and brown people.
I am heartened to see similar calls
today, for example, in the platform
for the Movement for Black Lives.
Their seven demands dont just focus
on racist policing and mass incar-
ceration, but speak to the entire
experience of racism in this country.
Sanderss ideas clearly resonated with
people coming of age right now.
But there were also limitations to
Sanderss approach to race not so of solidarity.
much from the electoral calculus, but
from the perspective of building a new
left. He gave some amazing speeches
in front of black audiences, but he
didnt incorporate it into his stump
speech and did not highlight issues
of racism when he spoke in front
of primarily white, working-class
audiences.
Sanders brought class politics
into the discussion of the fight against
racism, but did not do enough to bring
the issue of racisminto the struggle
against class inequality.
Matt Karp
I agree with Cedric and Jen about black
voters and the Sanders campaign. But
I do think this is an important issue
20
Donald Trump
represents a
sign of things
potentially to
come if were
not able to put
forward a left-
wing alternative.
going forward. Theres no question
that for the center and for the right
of the Democratic Party, an appeal to
individual identity is at the heart of a
strategy to splinter and destroy any
broad-based, universalistic politics
Im not so worried about the
clumsier iterations of this, like when
Clinton said breaking up the big
banks wont end racism. I dont
think that really plays anywhere
except maybe with a small group of
white liberals who want to signal their
virtue. But the more significant man-
ifestations when we saw leaders
like John Lewis slam Bernie on civil
rights that was really powerful, and
its going to remain on the agenda.
The Democratic Partys institu-
tional ties to communities of color and
its ability to mobilize certain forms of
rhetoric to undermine universalistic
politics is something that we have to
reckon with. We cant just fight it with
ironic tweets. We need a vocabulary
23 / FALL 2016
and a strategy that goes beyond
calling out the hypocrisy of neolib-
eral antiracism. We need to develop
something that addresses specific his-
torical oppressions, and builds rather
than undermines solidarity based on
those oppressions.
Cedric Johnson
What Sanders did was put in front
of us a clear, progressive left agenda
and he appealed to blacks as he did
to all other voters. There was some
movement in different states, where
over time, he was able to build his base
of black support, not by pandering in
the way that Clinton did, but by actu-
ally presenting people with ideas that
resonated with their experiences and
seemed to connect with their needs
and interests.
When Clinton deployed Jim Cly-
burn and others in South Carolina,
they twisted things in ways that Im
still puzzled folks didnt see straight
through. For instance, Clyburn made
this argument that nothing in life is
free as a way to disparage the free
higher education proposal. Whats
odd about that is that free higher edu-
cation at public institutions would
have had a dramatic effect on the
capacities of black people at histor-
ically black colleges like the one
I attended, Southern University of
Baton Rouge to complete their edu-
cation. It would have been the same
for South Carolina State, Chicago
State, Grambling State University,
dozens of public universities across
the South, and even in some of the
northern states where blacks consti-
tute the majority of the student body.
Those are the institutions that
produce the most black graduates,
but in front of certain audiences in
South Carolina, Clyburn was able to

discredit the proposal and present
this scenario where free higher edu-
cation was going to drain students
away from the smaller, black liberal
arts colleges that he is connected to. I
just think there were some dishonest
maneuvers, which is always a part of
this political process, but there were
things that worked effectively for
their side that we should have con-
tested more strenuously.
Matt Karp
Just a point of clarification. I do not
think ironic tweets are sufficient as
a left-wing political strategy, but
they are a good thing and I am in
favor of ironic tweets.
Building a
Bigger Left
In the years leading up to Occupy,
the US left seemed influenced by
strains of anarchism. Many of these
tendencies rejected structural cri
tiques of capitalism and traditional
forms of left-wing organization.
It may be safe to say that
post-Sanders the general moment
is more informed by social
democracy. By this we could mean
broad support for the welfare
state and more people willing to
make militant demands of the
state: providing free education and
health care, ensuring living wages,
curbing state violence, and so on.
Would you agree with that
characterization of a shift?
Cedric Johnson
Thats a fair characterization and it is
a welcome shift.
THE PARTY WE NEED
What Did Bernie Do?
Thinking back to the Katrina
disaster, we saw the same sort of
sentiment that would later animate
Occupy. People were so upset with
the governments failures, corrup-
tion, and the pervasive sense in New
Orleans was, Just get out of our way
and let us do what we have to do to
rebuild. The prevailing idea was that
government was an impediment to
rebuilding and in part they had reason
to believe that.
But to go back to Jens earlier
point about that end of the Cold War
moment: we both came of age when
ideas about socialism were cast in
the historical dustbin, that so-called
end of history moment in the late
eighties and early nineties. That sense
that you could actually use state power
to change peoples material circum-
stances, to improve livelihoods, was
abandoned. Today, weve come back
around to that view because we cant
really live in complex, urban societies
without some centralized planning.
21
 STRUGGLE SESSION
Jen Roesch
I agree and I think its one of the most
exciting and important developments
in the last year. Theres a broad shift
away from anarcho-liberalism
towards a class politics and an open-
ness to political organization.
There are social-democratic
elements, but I wouldnt neces-
sarily narrow it just to that. There
are real questions of organization. I
agree with Cedric on this. For a lot
of people Occupy was the first pro-
test they saw or participated in. And
people know that it failed. They know
that we were not able to sustain the
encampments and that the state was
able to shut us down. People see the
Black Lives Matter movement and
see that its gone up and down and
theres a whole range of struggles.
Theres a growing awareness that we
need something beyond single-issue
movements and we need something
beyond semi-spontaneous move-
ments that rise and fall without any
kind of political or organizational
direction.
Matt Karp
The Sanders campaign was also a
return of the US left to electoral pol-
itics in a serious way, which opens
up opportunities and challenges of
its own. Im hoping that Sanderss
surprising success is a reminder that
elections are something the Left
should take seriously and participate
in. Im not saying that the struggle
should be restricted to elections, but
its hard to imagine any kind of mean-
ingful left victories occurring without
an electoral component.
Theres an opening for social-
democratic politics at all levels. But
at the same time there are many
challenges that come with that kind
22
of strategy. How do you enact social
democracy on a state or local level?
You really cant. To even win the
barest essence of social democracy,
like a national health-care system,
you cant do that by winning city
council seats. We need to engage
in lower-level electoral politics
while continuing to build a national
movement.
Cedric Johnson
Elections certainly matter. It is
remarkable that we saw so many
people engaging in this election in
a way that we havent seen folks on
the Left do so in a while. I think the
danger, of course, is that we think that
elections matter more than they really
do. What they do is provide an oppor-
tunity to express or demonstrate the
amount of power that we might have
in a particular district or in a state, but
more importantly, they help shape the
political arena.
After Sanders ended his campaign
and endorsed Clinton, he vowed
to keep the fight going by forming
Our Revolution a political
organization to further the kind
of politics he championed. What
do you make that effort so far?
Jen Roesch
Our Revolution, empirically speaking,
has not galvanized Sanderss sup-
porters. It is really a continuing,
deepening contradiction because
the whole premise is about running
down-ballot candidates and trying to
reform the Democratic Party from
below. It is not the case that thousands
and thousands of people who sup-
ported Sanders have flowed into this
formation and attempted to turn it
into some kind of vehicle for building
23 / FALL 2016
the Left. Our Revolution was never
designed to do that.
People are looking for alterna-
tives that are bigger than electoral
politics. Thats not to say that elec-
toral politics dont matter and I
think the question of building a left
alternative to the Democratic Party
remains a central question, but that is
not going to happen through the slow
accretion of electoral victories. I think
its going to be through much more
fundamental breaks within sections
of liberal organization, who come
to see the need to build an indepen-
dent party. I think that thats what
we have to have our eyes on if were
going to talk about having an electoral
alternative.
Matt Karp
What Jen is saying about this being
a process is dead-on. Its not just
about organizing or appealing to
the already-existing left, but about
reaching out. That is the promise of
Sanders getting over thirteen million
votes.
Taking part in struggles in and
around the Democratic Party in the
short term, even in the medium term,
will be essential to this process. I dont
think that requires committing to a
naive idea that the Left is on the
verge of taking over the Democratic
Party, that all we need is 51 percent
of the primary votes and then the
party is ours. But elections are sites
of struggle, opportunities for engage-
ment, and we cant ignore them.
In a lot of places, the Democratic
Party is the only game in town, and we
shouldnt ignore it, either. We can use
elections within the party to diffuse
ideas and to mobilize people, energize
people, push people. Younger Bernie
voters are already open to a politics

that goes beyond liberal reformism.
Engaging them in more electoral
struggles can further that process, and
I dont think it demands a rigid fealty
to any particular party strategy. We
can be agnostic about the future of the
Democratic Party for the short term.
Cedric Johnson
Would a third-party candidate have
been able to garner the kind of support
that Sanders did by operating within
the Democratic Party machinery? It
is not likely given the way presidential
elections work; the process is stacked
against third-party candidates. I think
were stuck with that conundrum.
His historic run happened within
the Democratic Party and, as Matt
points out, in some places, its the
only game in town.
Im not against the idea of people
trying to work locally. A lot of people
at the Labor for Bernie meeting that
we had back in the spring were talking
about running down-ticket local can-
didates to challenge incumbent or
establishment Democrats. I dont
think that kind of activity necessarily
means a commitment to the Demo-
cratic Party. It just means working
within whatever specific political
geography youre stuck with in cer-
tain cities, and in different parts of
the country. But, at the same time
of course, I think we all agree that
theres a need to build something
outside of the parties of capital.
The Sanders campaign carved
out a significant base to the left
of liberalism. At the same time,
Donald Trump represents the
rise of a right-wing populism. Over
the next five to ten years, which
force do you expect will exert more
influence nationally?
Cedric Johnson
Im not convinced Trumps base is
going to remain intact. Some Repub-
lican strategists have been arguing
for a while now that their traditional
base the people that brought them
to power during the Reagan years and
really allowed them to consolidate
power is shrinking. The parts of the
electorate that are actually expanding
in the country right now, theyre not
trending towards the Republican
Party, for the most part. The base
that brought about the Reagan revo-
lution and the Contract with America
and that saw us through the Bush
years has been on a steady decline.
If that decline continues apace in
combination with organizing on the
left, theres a possibility to offset the
most disastrous impacts of the Trump
phenomenon.
Matt Karp
Looking beyond 2016, Im pretty con-
fident that the Republican Party will
be able to co-opt and constrain Trump
voters. Trump was a unique figure
a self-funding celebrity billionaire,
who entered the gop primary with
an immediate polling lead. He had
this massive independent platform
for his own style of politics, which
combined ethnic nationalism with a
rhetorical rejection of right-wing eco-
nomic orthodoxy. The rhetoric was
mostly bogus, but it was also a big part
of what made him popular not just
that he said appalling racist things,
but that he could humiliate Jeb Bush
for being in the pocket of his donors,
that he railed against trade deals, etc.
But how many Donald Trumps
are there? How many more have
emerged this year? The Republican
leadership has maintained solid con-
trol over the congressional party and
THE PARTY WE NEED
What Did Bernie Do?
the party in the states. Going forward,
I think that leadership will be able
to rule out Trump-like figures who
deviate from right-wing orthodoxy.
So you might get more nationalism
and even more racism, but I doubt
youre going to get more populism,
which is a big part of what made
Trump distinctive.
Jen Roesch
I think the right-wing base for Donald
Trump is real. A lot of it is incoherent,
but there is a hard right-wing core
to it. It is extremely racist and xeno-
phobic. I dont think its nearly at the
level that weve seen, for example, in
Europe, with the rise of genuinely
far-right, semi-fascist parties and
outright fascist parties, like Golden
Dawn in Greece. But Donald Trump
represents a sign of things potentially
to come if were not able to put for-
ward a left-wing alternative.
In some ways the question here
is really about the Democratic Party
and especially Hillary Clintons cam-
paign. America is already great is
not an answer to the discontent that
millions of people feel and it is not
an answer to the anger that Donald
Trump is tapping into with the estab-
lishment. Its critical that we carve out
an independent space to the left of
that, that is able to pose our own alter-
natives and say, Its not immigrants,
its not blacks, its not Muslims. The
reason youve seen your living stan-
dards decline, the reason that we see
a crisis of death rates for the mid-
dle-aged white working class and poor
Americans is because of the economic
devastation thats been run by both
major parties and by Wall Street and
the corporations in this country. Our
side needs to pose an alternative and
organize around that.
23
 MEANS OF
DEDUCTION

WE GOT MORE
GRAPHS THAN ROSS
PEROT.
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
MISERY INDEX

Exalted and Things are happening.

Big things.
Dastardly Deeds
Lawful

Ruth Bader Ginsberg denounces Colin Jeremy Corbyn reelected

Kaepernicks dumb and disrespectful Labour Party leader.
anthem protests.

Colombia farc peace deal

defeated in referendum.

Hillary Clintons speech transcripts Space Jam 2 delayed:

show her pandering to Wall Street. cant rush perfection.

Millions of Indian workers go

on strike demanding higher
Freemium wages and the end to Modis
mobile games. economic reforms.

Good
Evil

Polish women went on

nationwide strike in protest
of a law that would ban
abortion in all cases.
Donald Trumps Access
Hollywood tape.

The eleven Beyonc thinkpieces Celtic fc fans withstand

submitted to us this year (we ran uefa fines to show
none of them). Chaotic solidarity with Palestine.

THE PARTY WE NEED 25

 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST

They werent so white, male,

Bernie Bros or privileged after all.

Sanderss support
from ...

Democratic (Millennial) 1729 70.74%

3044 50.44%
Primary Voters 4564 35.48%
65+ 29.5%

White Black Asian Hispanic

Millennial Democrats
(1729) by Race
62% 52% 69% 71%

Millennial Democrats
(1729) by Gender
Men Women

52% 61.4%

26 23 / FALL 2016
Which candidate [between Sanders, Clinton, Trump, Cruz, Source: Harvard
Institute
and Kasich] will make things better for women? of Politics

Sanders Sanders

21% 30%
Clinton Clinton

32% 26%

Men Women

Favorability of Sanders, Clinton,

and Trump by Group
All Millennials
Bernie Sanders 55%
HIllary Clinton 38%
Donald Trump 22%

Men Women
53% 57%
32% 45%
28% 16%

White Hispanic Black

52% 52% 67%
28% 50% 60%
29% 14% 14%

THE PARTY WE NEED 27

 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
UNEVEN & COMBINED

Party
in the U.S.A.

Though almost forgotten Socialist Officeholders

today, the Socialist 18971960
Party had a mass presence
across the country.

Local Officials Mayors National

Legislators

Sheriffs/ State
Marshals/ Legislators
Constables

28 23 / FALL 2016
 Washington

Montana

Oregon North Dakota

Idaho

South Dakota

Nevada
Utah
Nebraska
California

Colorado
Kansas

Arizona
New Mexico

Oklahoma

Texas

THE PARTY WE NEED 29

 Illinois Ohio

Montana

Maine

Michigan Vermont Massachusetts

Iowa
Rhode Island

Indiana
Pennsylvania

Missouri

Virginia
Kentucky

Arkansas

West Virginia
Alabama

Mississippi

Florida
Louisiana

30 23 / FALL 2016
Wisconsin

New York

Connecticut

THE PARTY WE NEED 31

 UNEVEN & COMBINED

Debss Performance
in National Elections

1912

16.47% in Nevada

11.5% in Wisconisn

1920

32 23 / FALL 2016
MEANS OF DEDUCTION
TRANSITIONS

Let a Thousand
Flowers Wither

The long marginalization

of the US socialist left hasnt
lead to the consolidation
of its organizations.

Great Moments
in Socialism
For much of the last century, a vibrant American left was
more the exception than the rule. But in a few crucial
moments, the socialist movement rose to national
attention and witnessed rapid internal recomposition.
The Communist Movement Is Born
Following the October Revolution in Russia, radicals
within the Socialist Party (sp) sought to build support
to bring the organization into the Communist Interna-
tional. A referendum was passed to that effect with
90percent of the membership backing it, but the partys
leadership suppressed the result. A battle for control
of the organization ensued, in which the left was forced
out. Two new Communist parties were formed: the
primarily English-language Communist Labor Party of
America (clp) and the Communist Party of America
(cpa), composed of the SPs foreign-language federa-
tions. Together they had 12,000 members.
Both organizations were soon forced underground
by the Red Scare, stymying Moscow-supported efforts
to unify the groups. In 1922, the cpa merged with
the United Communist Party (established when the clp
joined a breakaway faction of the cpa) to create the
Workers Party of America (wpa). The party renamed
itself the Workers (Communist) Party, and then
finally in 1929 the Communist Party of the United States
of America.
The party would go on to play a major role in
the upheavals of the 1930s, reaching a membership
of 75,000 before declining under the weight of
McCarthyism and 1950s revelations about Stalinist
Russia.
From Ike to Mao
Students for a Democratic Society grew to over a
hundred thousand members before splintering
in 1969. One of the main currents left in its wake would
cohere as the Revolutionary Youth Movementii
and later as a smattering of Maoist groups that became
known as the New Communist Movement.
Buoyed by the resistance to the Vietnam War, the black
liberation movement, and other struggles, the con
stellation was, throughout the 1970s, the most dynamic
and racially diverse force on the US left. Particularly
strong on the West Coast, as many as 10,000 activists
tried to forge a revolutionary movement opposed
to both the post-1956 Communist Party and Trotskyist
groups like the Socialist Workers Party. But within
a decade it was clear that, as Max Elbaum writes, the
popular Maoist prediction at the time, The Future
Is Bright, The Road Is Tortuous, had proven only half
correct.
The End of an Era
After a decade of internal strife, the rightward moving
Socialist Party of America split into three in 1972.
With the support of chairs Bayard Rustin and Charles S.
Zimmerman, the majority faction changed the ven-
erable partys name to Social Democrats, USA (sdusa)
by a delegate vote of 73 to 34.
Two organizations emerged from those opposed
to the Socialist Partys evolution: Michael Harringtons
Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee
(dsoc) and David McReynoldss Socialist Party USA
(spusa). dsoc remained more oriented around
realigning the Democratic Party into a labor-backed
social-democratic party, while spusa ran independent
candidates for office.
Though at the time of dsocs founding the group only
had 840 members, less than half that of sdusa, it soon
became the largest descendant of the Socialist Party.
Out of the Desert

On the accompanying timeline, its striking just how
stable the notoriously fissiparous US left has been
over the past two decades. That isnt necessarily a good
sign: with no social base to speak of, much of the
socialist left has bunkered down, seemingly content
with maintaining small organizations.
Recent years, however, have shown some promise.
With the emergence of new social movements like
Occupy and Black Lives Matter, confidence has grown
within the Left.
The Democratic Socialists of America (dsa) has been
somewhat rejuvenated by the Bernie Sanders cam-
paign and has seen an uptick in membership and active
chapters. The countrys largest cadre group, the
Trotskyist-oriented International Socialist Organiza-
tion, boasts close to a thousand activists and played
a role in the Chicago teachers strike and other recent
struggles. Perhaps the biggest profile has belonged,
however, to Socialist Alternative. The Committee for
a Workers International affiliate elected member
Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council in 2013 and ran
a competitive campaign in Minneapolis that same
year, coming within 229 votes of electing Ty Moore to
city council there, with some local union and com-
munity group backing.
Solidarity, formed in 1986, has seen its influence wane,
though it still has a presence in the trade union move-
ment. Though from the Trotskyist tradition, Marcyite
groups like Workers World Party and the Party for
Socialism and Liberation make their presence felt most
in the antiwar movement, and focus their politics on
a staunch anti-imperialism not dissimilar from the kind
expressed historically by American Maoists.
The post-Stalinist Communist Party, as well as its 1991
split, has seen its politics converge with certain off-
shoots of the New Communist Movement and the more
social-democratic dsa. Both show a willingness
to tactically endorse Democratic Party candidates and
eschew Leninist orthodoxy.
Other socialist groups from the Spartacists to the
remnants of the Socialist Workers Party remain
small and marginal, at various stages of disintegration.
Still, with a new generation more willing to grapple with
socialist ideas and a continued crisis of establishment
politics, there is reason to believe that the Left can once
again make its presence felt in American politics.
1876 1877 1893 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Present

SLP Regulars

Workingmens Socialist Labor Party

Party of the Rochester SLP Socialist Party USA
United States SPUSA
National Party Social Democratic Federation Union for Democratic
Socialism
Springfield SDP
SOCIALISM

Social Democrats USA

Socialist Party Democratic Socialist
Organizing Committee

Chicago SDP
American Railway
DSA
Union
Democratic Socialists of America
Social Democratic New American Movement
Party
Social Democracy Revolutionary Socialist League
of America
Cooperative ISO

TROTSKYISM
Brotherhood International Socialist Organization
Workers International Independent International Workers Power
Brotherhood of the Party Socialist League Socialist Club Socialists Solidarity
Solidarity
Cooperative Commonwealth
Communist Fourth
League International
Tendency
Trotskyist League
Workers Party Socialist Unity Socialist
of the US Action
Socialist
Revolutionary Action Socialist Alternative
SA
Workers League
RWL
Socialist League (Democratic-Centralist)
SEP
American ACFI Workers League Socialist Equality Party
formation splinter SWP
Workers Party Socialist Workers Party Spartacist League
Spartacists
Workers World Party
WWP
Party for Socialism and Liberation PSL

*Students for a Democratic Society

*Though
not a socialist organization, Students SDS-WSA
name change split
COMMUNISM

for a Democratic Society came out of socialist

activism and its splinters later helped spawn
the New Communist Movement. Progressive PLP
United Toilers Labor Party
of America Revolutionary Youth Weather Underground

MAOISM
Movement I Bay Area
Revolutionary Union
merging dissolution RCP
Revolutionary Communist Party
October League
Revolutionary Youth
Movement II / FRSO
Communist Party of America
New Communist Revolutionary Workers Headquarters (Fight Back)
FRSO (Fight Back)
Movement
CP (Opposition) / Lovestoneites
unorganized Proletarian Unity League Freedom Road Socialism Organization
joining
current FRSO (Freedom Road) FRSO
League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Freedom Road)
League of Revolutionaries for a New America
LRNA
Workers Party of America Communist Party USA Provisional Organizing Committee Communist League Communist Labor Party of North America CCDS
Communist Labor Party Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
CPUSA
 DESPITE ITS ULTIMATE DEMISE, THE SOCIALIST PARTY SHOWS US THAT THE UNITED STATES POSSESSES NO SPECIAL IMMUNITY AGAINST SOCIALIST POLITICS.
The Party We Lost
The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Party of America
BY PAUL HEIDEMAN
In the middle of Bernie Sanderss
unexpected surge in the Democratic
presidential primary, Missouri gov-
ernor Jay Nixon echoed some folksy
wisdom against him: Here in the
heartland, we like our politicians
in the mainstream, and [Sanders] is
not hes a socialist.
Nixon would no doubt be
shocked to learn of his own states
history with the red menace. In the
early twentieth century, the Socialist
Party of America (sp) boasted 135
locals in Missouri. In St. Louis alone,
24 of the citys 28wards had a local.
St. Louis was hardly an anomaly.
For the first two decades of the twen-
tieth century, the sp was deeply
embedded in American life. In 1912,
38
just eleven years after its founding,
the party netted nine hundred
thousand votes in the presidential
election 6percent of the total.
Across the country, Socialists won
seats on city councils and in town
halls. In workplaces from breweries
to mines, Socialists served in elected
union positions, and locals (and even
entire internationals) passed socialist
resolutions. Socialist periodicals, like
the iconic Appeal to Reason, were
among the most read publications
in the country.
For the first two
decades of the
twentieth century, the
SP was deeply
embedded
in American life.
However, accusations that the
sp cut against the American grain
havent just come from red-baiters
like Jay Nixon. Prominent voices on
the American left have seconded this
verdict.
Daniel Bell, whose 1952 book
Marxian Socialism in the United
States served as the authoritative
history of the party for a generation
of leftists, argued that the sp was
trapped in the unhappy problem
of living in but not of the world.
The Socialists, Bell wrote, isolated
themselves from American society
with endless squabbles over Marxist
doctrine, its members contenting
themselves with the illusions of set-
tling the fate of history, the mimetic
combat on the plains of destiny,
and the vicarious sense of power
in demolishing opponents. Irving
Howe, another socialist of Bells
generation, largely concurred with
his assessment, declaring that Deb-
sian socialism may provide later
generations of American radicals
with moral and emotional inspira-
tion, but if they turn to it for political
guidance they are likely to get into
trouble.
When the New Left emerged
in the 1960s, it set about trying to
uncover a domestic radical tradition.
Leading this effort was James Wein-
stein, closer in generation to Howe
and Bell, but closer in sensibility to
Students for a Democratic Society.
In 1967, he published The Decline
of American Socialism 19121925, a
densely researched tome aimed at
rescuing the Socialist Party from its
critics, and extracting its lessons for
a new generation.
For Weinstein, the sp grew from
deep roots in American society, from
the Protestant reform tradition to
the class conflict of the late nine-
teenth century. The partys growth
to a hundred thousand members by
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOE ODONNELL
about 1912 reflected these deep roots,
and though the party didnt rise
beyond that mark, it maintained its
vitality until the end of World Wari.
At that point, already beset by state
repression for its antiwar stance, the
party underwent a devastating split.
In Weinsteins view, the influ-
ences that effected the schism were
foreign to the American socialist tra-
dition. While the party was divided
between a left and right wing, Wein-
stein argued that these were little
more than differences in tactical
approaches. The chasm only opened
when the party left, entranced by
the siren song of Bolshevism ema-
nating from Russia, embraced a
revolutionary perspective that made
no sense in the American context,
and launched an ill-considered war
against the party right.
The result, Weinstein lamented,
was the alienation of American
socialism: the sp left ultimately
morphed into the Communist Party,
initiating a long tradition of slavish
subordination to the Soviet Union.
The right, which held some promise
of responding to American particu-
larities, found itself unable to recover
from the split. And American radi-
calism, stripped of its foundations in
US society, never recovered.
However influential, Wein-
steins account is flawed. Above all,
39
 it effectively depoliticizes Socialist
Party history, confusing real dis-
agreements over socialist strategy
with rank sectarianism. For a socialist
historian, Weinsteins account is
curiously focused on consensus.
The history of the Socialist Party
that we have inherited from previous
generations has thus rendered the
partys past less usable than it might
otherwise be. Bell and Howe depolit-
icize it by identifying romanticism as
the partys key flaw, while Weinstein
sees a viable, internally coherent
party wrecked by the influence of
Russian Communism.
Today, the history of the Socialist
Party demands a reevaluation. In the
years since Occupy Wall Street, the
political mood of the American left
has changed decisively. Where once a
loose anarchism reigned, suspicious
of organization or program, party
politics are again all the rage. This
shift has been driven both by the lim-
itations of Occupy-style politics and
the appeal of efforts like the Sanders
campaign.
The Socialist Party sprouted
from similar impulses. Convinced
of the urgent need for social transfor-
mation but confronting a landscape
of fragmented oppositional efforts,
the founders of the Socialist Party
resolved to build an organization
capable of leading the fight against
40
the Farmers Alliance. Farmers in
the late nineteenth century found
themselves locked into a system of
indebtedness, constantly under the
thumbs of their landlords and cred-
itors. The Alliance began as an effort
to secure some breathing room for
poor farmers within this system.
Launched in central Texas in the
mid-1870s, the organization honey-
combed the state just a decade later,
claiming fifty thousand members.
Though it would later be denounced
as a force for anarchy and commu-
nism, originally the Alliance was
politically quietist. Its organizational
efforts focused on facilitating cooper-
ative buying and selling, and securing
new sources of credit for farmers.
More important than its
demands, however, was its existence:
it brought exploited farmers together
into a collective organization. The
Alliance gained strength by periodi-
cally holding massive encampments,
where thousands of farmers would
converge to hear lectures, discuss
their situations, and commiserate.
Between these events, Alliance lec-
turers would travel from county to
county, preaching the good word of
cooperation.
As the Alliance expanded, how-
ever, its attempts to circumvent
the crop lien system through coop-
erative buying were frustrated by
capital in the United States. Like
socialists everywhere in those years,
they saw the ballot box as the central
tool for building a socialist society.
Through their party, they would take
this strategy as far as it has ever gone
in the United States.
In doing so, American social-
ists revealed the promise and perils
of such an endeavor. Successfully
unifying the American left and
projecting socialist politics from
the Lower East Side to the Pacific
Northwest (not to mention strongly
opposing the First World War), the
sp accomplished a number of tasks
todays American left can barely
the power of the landlords and the
banks backing them. So it decided
to adopt more radical tactics, like
boycotts, and began setting its
sights on political office. In 1892, it
launched the Peoples Party, with a
platform calling for railroad nation-
alization, a progressive income tax,
a shorter workday, and a ban on land
speculation.
Many future socialists got their
start in this agrarian upsurge. Debs
supported the Populists, who in
turn saw him as one of their most
important allies. After Debs was
imprisoned for leading the Pullman
Strike in 1894, one Texan Populist
paper carried the headline With
Today, the history
of the Socialist
Party demands a
reevaluation.
dream of. At the same time, the party
was also beset with internal tensions.
From the very beginning, con-
flict erupted over questions like
whether the party should directly
challenge the conservative offi-
cialdom in the American Federation
of Labor, or whether it should act as
its loyal opposition. Similarly, party
members engaged in heated back-
and-forths over the relationship
between the partys electoral efforts
and the broader class struggle. These
differences persisted throughout
the life of the party, and eventually
proved so intractable that they splin-
tered it.
Debs in jail, no American is a
freeman. Similarly, the first venture
for future Appeal to Reason publisher
Julius Wayland was running a news-
paper for Populists in the Western
states.
By the early 1890s, the move-
ment had hundreds of thousands of
members and appeared poised for
victory.
As Populism gained steam, how-
ever, both internecine conflict and
external opponents also swelled
in size. Two key sources of tension
materialized. First, in the South, a
cleavage along class lines opened up.
Wealthy farmers, who had become
landlords by buying up the land of
Yet the history of the Socialist
Party offers more than warning
lessons about the dangers of roman-
ticism or sectarianism. It also offers
us a preview of the kinds of questions
our movement will no doubt have to
grapple with as it grows.
The Forerunners
The Socialist Party did not blossom
solely, or even primarily, because
of the brilliance of its organizers.
It arose as the final expression of
a half-century of social convulsion
that began after the Civil Wars
conclusion. These were the years
when an anarchist militant assas-
sinated the president and striking
workers engaged in gun battles with
state and private armies, when the
radical democratic experiments of
Reconstruction flourished for a brief
moment and workers fought tena-
ciously for the eight-hour day.
It was this legacy of insurgent
politics that the Socialist Party drew
on and tried to consolidate into a
coherent political force. And no two
movements were more important to
that effort than the Populist move-
ment and the union movement.
The Populist Moment
The movement now known as Popu-
lism began as an organization called
their less fortunate neighbors, began
to assert themselves, promoting a
bloodless vision of improved agricul-
tural technique and fighting attempts
by poorer farmers to restrict land-
lord power. The Alliances ability to
advance the interests of poor farmers
cratered as a result.
Second, the Populists electoral
efforts ran up against the same obsta-
cles that have dogged nearly every
left electoral strategy since them: the
Democratic Party and the power of
money in politics. In the 1894 con-
gressional elections, the Republican
Party won a sweeping victory, nearly
wiping out the Democrats in much
of the West. The Democrats, now
chastened, proposed an alliance with
the Populists using fusion voting (a
set-up in which candidates are listed
on multiple parties ballot lines).
Populists south of the Mason-Dixon
could hardly stomach such a pact:
in the one-party South, it was the
Democratic Party that was leading a
campaign of fraud and terror against
the Populist insurgency.
The Democrats overtures were
soon bolstered, however, by the
mining lobbys machinations. For
years, the Populist and Alliance plat-
forms had endorsed the coinage of
silver as an anti-deflationary mea-
sure, without ever lending it much
prominence. That all changed when
41
 the mining industry launched an
all-out campaign to promote silver
coinage, touting it as a cure-all for
the economys woes. Politicians
who promoted the silver cause
found themselves awash in cash and
backed by newspapers owned by
mining firms. A new crop of office-
seekers more concerned with
silver coinage than the power of
landlords ascended the Populist
Partys ranks.
It all came to a head in 1896.
William Jennings Bryan, a former
editor of a mining newspaper, cap-
tured the Democratic nomination,
promising relief for farmers centered
around silver coinage. The Populist
leadership, long since won over to
the mineowners program, isolated
the radical Southern farmers and
brought the organization squarely
behind a fusion ticket, with Bryan
at the top.
Even on its own terms, the
strategy failed miserably. Bryan was
trounced by William McKinleys
Republican machine. The Populists
fell apart, as the moderates left to
become Democrats. And the poorer
farmers were left with nothing but
their desperation.
In the years after Populisms
defeat, farm tenancy and sharecrop-
ping expanded even more rapidly,
laying the foundations for agrarian
42
conglomerates emerging of unprec-
edented size and power. The United
States thus emerged as a world power
with the dynamism of England, the
most advanced capitalist power, and
the labor relations of Russia, the his-
torical laggard in the economic race.
This combination goes a long
way to explaining the supine position
of American labor. While theories
of American exceptionalism often
focus on the working class, a more
profitable route is to look at the
power of the US ruling class, and
to look at labors various strategies
as attempts to deal with it. In this
light, the history of the American
working class looks a good deal less
exceptional.
The roots of the American Fed-
eration of Labor (afl) which by
the time the Socialist Party formed
was American labors leading organi-
zation lie in its attempts to adapt
to this inhospitable climate. Samuel
Gompers, who would go on to lead
the afl until his death, was partic-
ularly instrumental. As head of the
Cigar Makers International Union,
Gompers devised the union label
strategy, which tried to convince con-
sumers to boycott cigars not made
by union labor. Instead of directly
confronting employers, the unions
were to enter into a coalition with
their bosses, against both non-union
discontent that would soon be orga- history for much of the rest of the the combination of this violence with
nized by the Socialists. century. Compared with the rest of the extraordinary growth of the US
the capitalist world, the American economy. Millions of immigrants
The Labor Question union movement remained small were drawn in from the European
At the same time farmers were and defensive, constantly subject to periphery by capitals expansion. At
organizing against their landlords, the threat of violence both legal and the same time, a wave of mergers
American workers were struggling to extralegal. What made the American and consolidations swept through
assert their interests against capital. experience so unique, however, was corporate America, with new
The US labor movement had
emerged as a national force in 1877,
the same year Reconstruction came
to its anti-climactic end. That year,
more than one hundred thousand
workers went out on strike in the
Great Uprising. Spurred by wage
cuts for railroad workers, the wildcat
strike announced the working class
presence as a force in American
society.
For capital, it brought flashbacks Class conflict was
to the Paris Commune, which had
briefly terrorized the entire Atlantic
not something
ruling class. In St. Louis, the uprising isolated radicals
developed into a general strike that talked about in small
united black and white workers. rooms, but a fact of
The wealthy moved quickly to pro-
tect their privileges. Militias and
life for Americans
private armies battled with strikers as varied as Texan
across the country, and eventually farmers and Chicago
the National Guard was deployed to stockyard workers.
put down the strike city by city. Over
one hundred workers ultimately died
in the fighting, and the strike was
crushed.
The Uprising of 1877 set the
general pattern for American labor
bosses and their workers. In addition
to championing the union label,
craft unions sought to boost their
wages by controlling entry to the
workforce.
Both of these strategies, of
course, lent themselves to exclu-
sionary and anti-solidaristic stances.
Campaigns for the union label
accused non-union (often immigrant)
workers of shoddy craftsmanship
and unhygienic production, while
union shops melded seamlessly with
the desire of some white workers
to exclude non-whites from their
workplace. Even if capitalists had to
regularly battle striking craft unions,
the anti-solidaristic posture of
Gompers-style unionism prevented
its growth into a more general chal- organizers managed to exhibit all of
Foundations
lenge to capital. the pathologies that bedevil the Left
The same was true in the polit- By the time the sp emerged in 1901, a century later. Indeed, the early his-
ical arena. With craft unionism the country had been through almost tory of the sp stands as a rebuke to
dominant unlike in other coun- forty years of upheaval. Class conflict the cynicism that places responsi-
tries, where industrial unions were was not something isolated radicals bility for the American lefts decline
mushrooming any attempt to talked about in small rooms, but a on the simple inability of leftists to
institutionalize class struggle politics fact of life for Americans as varied just get it together. The founders
was bound to confront difficulties. as Texan farmers and Chicago stock- of the sp evinced every bit as much
And so they did. Before long, the yard workers. This was the context incompetence and blundering as any
impotence of industrial unionism that gave the party its vitality, and contemporary left group. But in the
would spark vigorous debates in the that the party hoped to organize crucible of the early twentieth cen-
newly formed Socialist Party about politically. tury, even ineptitude wasnt enough
how to relate to the craft unions of As grand as this history is, the to derail the formation of a new
the afl, and the insurgent industrial origins of the Socialist Party are Socialist Party.
unionism of the Industrial Workers rather less impressive. Within the The sp was created out of the
of the World (iww). period of its founding, the partys merger of two groups, each with
43
 their own distinct histories. On one
side was Eugene Debs and Victor
Bergers Social Democratic Party
of America (sdp), founded on the
belief that a mass base for socialist
politics existed in the United States.
Debs had become a socialist in
1897, after the Pullman Strike was
crushed, and was eager to lend his
formidable writing and oratorical
skills to the cause. Berger, an Aus-
trian immigrant, had built a durable
independent socialist organization
in Milwaukee that enjoyed a strong
base in the unions and in the citys
immigrant community.
At least initially, Berger was
a steadfast proponent of Marxist
orthodoxy. Berger had been friends
with socialist leader Karl Kautsky
while in Germany, and he saw his
mission as replicating in the United
States what the Social Democratic
Party had accomplished there.
Debs, an organizer and agitator who
never had much time for theoretical
matters, complemented Bergers
strengths nicely, and by 1900 the sdp
was ready to launch its first presiden-
tial campaign, with Debs at the top
of the ticket.
The other main group in
the party emerged from Morris
Hillquits group of socialists, based
in Rochester, New York. Hillquit, a
lawyer who represented local unions,
44
The party in spite of the lead-
erships blunders began life with
some clear strengths.
First, there was the tremendous
popularity of Debs. After gaining a
national profile as the leader of the
Pullman Strike, Debs had quickly
emerged as the countrys most
prominent advocate of socialism.
Debss 1900 presidential campaign
marked his first bid in what was to
become a perennial crusade. From
his platform, Debs denounced the
American occupation of the Phil-
ippines, lambasted the two parties
as twin representatives of big busi-
ness, and called for wage-slavery
[to] be supplanted by co-operative
industry.
Second, the new party had a
small but dedicated base in the union
movement. While only a few inter-
nationals were completely behind
the s p (including the Brewery
Workers and International Ladies
Garment Workers Union), it also
had real footholds in the United
Mineworkers of America, the Inter-
national Association of Machinists,
and the International Typographers
Union. In the latter, Max Hayes, a
leader of the union in Cleveland,
acted as the Socialists main voice
in the afl, challenging Gompers
in elections for head of the feder-
ation during the early years of the
had spearheaded a split from the slp,
the largest organization of American
socialists at the time. With several
thousand members, the slp was a
real force. However, it was crippled
by the sectarianism of its leadership,
particularly the former Columbia
international law professor Daniel
De Leon.
A relentless polemicist, De
Leon insisted on two points of
principle. First, the slp advocated
organizing socialist unions, out-
side the afl. Pushing such dual
unionism on principle was deeply
alienating, forcing party members
into uncomfortable situations like
trying to organize upstart socialist
locals against established unions, or
attempting to convince afl-affili-
ated locals to come over to the slps
alternative federation. Second, De
Leon opposed attempts to secure
reforms under capitalism, con-
tending that they would only prop
up a dying system. Though this
stance has often been attributed to
Leninism, and condemned as a for-
eign import corrupting American
radicalism, its most developed artic-
ulation in US socialist politics would
come from the pre-Leninist slp.
Unhappy with the party s
self-marginalizing policies, Hillquit
first waged a faction fight inside the
slp. When that failed, he set up a
sp. Though Hayes never came close
to unseating Gompers (who ran
the federation as his own fiefdom),
his campaigns demonstrated the
strength of Socialists in the union
movement. In the years after the par-
tys founding, dozens of union locals
passed resolutions in support of the
new party.
Third, the party inherited a
thriving socialist press. In Mil-
waukee, Bergers Social Democratic
Herald and Milwaukee Leader cir-
culated widely, anchoring the sps
presence in the city. In Cleveland,
Max Hayes edited the paper of the
Cleveland Central Labor Council.
For the first two
decades of the
twentieth century, the
SP was deeply
embedded
in American life.
new group with the same name. In
1899, the rank and file of both Debs
and Hillquits groups began to push
for unity. The leadership of the
sdp which was the larger organi-
zation tried to ensure that unity
would only occur on their terms.
As slp delegates were welcomed to
the 1900 sdp convention as guests,
the conventions committee on the
merger issued a majority report
demanding that a unified party
retain the name Social Democratic
Party. A more conciliatory minority
report urged adoption of the same
appellation, stopping short of an out-
and-out demand.
an audience embroiled in all manner
The International Socialist Review,
published out of Chicago, became
one of the main venues for theo-
retical argument in the party, and
soon affiliated itself closely with the
advocates of industrial unionism and
the sp left. Towering above them all,
Julius Waylands Appeal to Reason
claimed a circulation in the hundreds
of thousands, bringing socialist poli-
tics to a mass audience.
The young party thus seemed
well-positioned to fulfill Bergers
ambitions of recreating the German
example in the US. Though still
small, it had some infrastructure,
cadre with decades of organizing
Victor Berger rose to denounce
the minority report, claiming that
if it were adopted, all the sdp had
worked for over the previous few
years would be destroyed. The
reports sparked a fight between the
two groups that would smolder for
the next eighteen months. Denun-
ciations ran freely, with each side
accusing the other of underhanded
maneuvers to secure dominance in a
unified party. Yet despite their best
efforts, by 1902 the leaders of the two
organizations found themselves with
a unified group called the Socialist
Party, with a membership of a few
thousand.
experience, and most importantly,
of class conflict. These strengths,
however, were accompanied by
weaknesses that would only reveal
themselves in the years to come.
A Divided House
The sps first real test came in the
1904 presidential election. In the
local and congressional elections
of 1902, the party had captured
about two hundred thousand votes,
doubling Debss 1900 total. In
anticipation of further growth, the
Socialists assessed each member
half a days wages in extra dues to
create a campaign fund. Debs toured
the country relentlessly, speaking
six to ten times a day; his orations
directly reached a quarter million
people. The party backed up Debss
efforts by sending organizers across
the country, distributing literature,
and holding marches. In Illinois
alone, the Socialists fielded forty-five
speakers and handed out half a mil-
lion pieces of literature.
The results did not disappoint.
The partys vote total doubled again
from 1902, with Debs receiving over
four hundred thousand votes. There
was more good news further down
the ballot. Berger came in second
in a bid for US Congress, beating
45
 out a Democrat. And a worker in
Anaconda, Montana, a mining
company town, was elected mayor
on the Socialist ticket (leading the
Anaconda mine company to fire
hundreds of workers in retalia-
tion). The party was ecstatic. If the
Socialist vote continued to double
every two years, it would not be long
before Socialists were challenging
Democrats and Republicans on a
national level. Across the party, the
results were viewed as vindication
of the sps basic strategy of winning
socialism through the ballot box.
But the euphoria obscured the
creeping divisions. New fault lines
had begun to reveal themselves,
deeper than those that had wracked
the original unity process, and along
entirely different lines.
The first factional rift to appear
concerned the emergence of a
self-conscious right wing of the party.
Shortly after the original unity con-
vention in 1901, Victor Berger began
to propound the theories of German
socialist Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein
was an advocate of what became
known as revisionism. Breaking
with the German Social Democratic
Partys Marxist orthodoxy, Bern-
stein famously declared that the goal
of socialism was nothing, while the
movement for reforms that socialists
fought for was everything. Socialists
should give up all talk of revolution,
he contended, and instead concen-
trate on reforming the system (which
would end up midwifing socialism
anyways). In the German party,
leading figures like Karl Kautsky
and Rosa Luxemburg launched a
ferocious attack against Bernstein,
marginalizing his ideas for a time.
In the United States, however,
Berger claimed that Bernsteins
ideas had found their true home. He
welcomed the title his critics gave
him the American Bernstein the deadly enemies of socialists
and argued that Socialists should
concentrate on winning elections
and, once in office, pursuing reforms
such as good governance and munic-
ipal ownership. He also saw the
burgeoning Progressive movement
of middle-class reformers as not
just a natural ally, but a prime audi-
ence for socialist politics. Distressed
by talk of class struggle, Berger
demanded that the 1904 Socialist
platform delete all references to the
Communist Manifesto class hatred,
he contended, would only deprive the
movement of possible converts. In
Milwaukee, Berger took these ideas
to their logical conclusion, bragging
that the Social-Democrats in this
city have opposed almost every strike
that has ever been declared here.
All this was too much for the
rest of the party. From moderate
figures like Morris Hillquit to radi-
cals like Debs, much of the sp found
themselves in constant conflict with
Berger and his allies in the Wisconsin
party. For most of the sp, mid-
dle-class reformers like those on
the board of the National Civic Fed-
eration, an organization dedicated
to labor-management cooperation
were simply trying to pull the wool
over workers eyes, prettifying an
exploitative social system in order
to preserve its life. These forces were
possible, it was less sure of how its
not their latent allies.
When Berger went so far as to
endorse a Republican in a judicial
election, the party was livid, leading
the exasperated national secretary
to declare the dissatisfaction with
opportunism and Bergerism is
national in scope. In response to
such criticism, Berger acted as a petty
tyrant, refusing to pay Wisconsins
share of dues to the national party
and rebuffing any attempts to disci-
pline him within the organization.
At the same time arguments
raged over Bergers revisionism,
signs of more profound schisms
began to appear. The object of con-
tention: the partys relationship to propaganda work, arguing that a
the labor movement.
On the broadest level, there was
widespread adherence in the party to
the German model of party-union
relations. There, the social demo-
crats had worked out a division of
labor between the two organizations:
the party and the unions would sup-
port each other, but refrain from
intervening in the others internal
affairs. What this meant in practice,
however, was a different matter.
In its early years, the partys
trade union policy was rather under-
developed. While the sp obviously
supported unions, and encouraged
its members to join them wherever
political struggle should interact
with working-class struggle on
the shop floor. Much of the time,
socialists fell back on a simple for-
mula, holding that unions waged a
defensive struggle against exploita-
tion, but that the ruling class
could only be defeated through
political action.
In 1902, this stance was put to
the test. In May of that year, miners
in Pennsylvania went on strike,
demanding higher wages, shorter
hours, and recognition of their
union, the United Mine Workers
of America. Socialists in the state
immediately threw themselves into
Socialist vote among the strikers
could help bring the mineowners
to the table by raising the threat
of nationalization. At the national

46

level, the party raised over $9,000
for strike relief.
On one hand, the engagement
was an unalloyed success: the par-
tys vote share shot up 400percent
that fall in mining country. But the
strike also raised political questions
that the party couldnt necessarily
answer yet.
In July, party secretary Leon
Greenbaum declined an invitation
to address the mineworkers conven-
tion, wary of intruding on the unions
turf. That same month, miners began
to debate whether to call a general
strike for all coalworkers. Green-
baum (who happened to be employed
by the afl) and other Socialist
leaders agreed with Gompers and
other union officials that a general
strike would be a breach of con-
tract, and must be opposed. Debs
and others on the left argued that a
general strike was necessary for vic-
tory against the mineowners, but
that it was outside the partys pur-
view to tell the union what to do. As
a result, on the crucial question of
whether the struggle would escalate,
the entire party took a curiously pas-
sive stance.
The party did begin to take steps
to intervene directly in the afl. In
1902, Max Hayes, the partys leader
of such efforts, proposed a resolu-
tion at the afl convention calling for
the union to endorse overthrowal
of the wage system and establishing
an industrial co-operative democ-
racy. A toned-down version of the
resolution was eventually defeated
in a close floor vote. Other socialist
resolutions also failed, though again
by small margins.
Even this degree of internal
dissent was too much for Gompers,
however, and in 1903, he launched
a bitter attack on the socialists. I
am entirely at variance with your
philosophy, he declared. Eco-
Within the period nomically, you are unsound; socially,
you wrong; industrially, you are an
of its founding, impossibility. Even the most con-
Socialist organizers servative socialists were outraged at
managed to exhibit Gomperss broadside. Victor Berger
all of the pathologies pronounced Gompers one of the
most vicious and venomous enemies
that bedevil the Left of Socialism and progressive trade
a century later. unionism in America.
Politically, though, the reaction
of Berger and the partys center
was more quietist. They viewed the
defeat of the partys resolutions as
evidence that socialist work in unions
should be restricted to winning over
individual union members. (Later,
Berger and his allies would oppose
resolutions by the sp to encourage
unions to organize the unorganized
and unskilled.) Berger may have
hated the anti-socialist Gompers,
but it wasnt enough to get him to

47
 THE Appeal to Reason is the greatest Socialist
newspaper in the world. It
advocates Socialism, which is the collective
ownership and democratic
management of the things collectively used and
the private ownership of the things
privately used. It has more loyal friends and
more bitter enemies than any other
paper in the world. It kindles hope in the hearts
of the oppressed and fear in the hearts of
the labor exploiters. It is scrutinized by practically
every prominent politician and
plutocrat because they recognize it as the militant
champion of the common people.
MISSION STATEMENT OF THE APPEAL TO REASON

48

actually challenge Gomperss hege- different trades represented inside,

mony in the union movement.
Debs was much more forthright.
In 1904, he published Unionism and
Socialism, laying out a militant
strategy for working-class struggle.
Unions, Debs argued, are simply the
working classs elemental response
to its exploitation by capital. As class
struggle escalates, however, the state
begins to intervene in industrial dis-
putes, deploying both injunctions
and the national guard against
striking workers. The states anti-
union activity teaches the working
class a valuable lesson: workers
must control the state themselves,
or theyll be crushed by its power.
Socialist politics, then, are the logical
culmination of the union movement.
Without them, unionism is at best
incomplete.
Debs summed up his strategy
with a declaration that would win
broad assent in the sp: The trades-
union expresses the economic power
and the socialist party expresses the
political power of the Labor move-
ment. Yet Debss pamphlet also
outstripped the party consensus in
multiple places, providing glimpses
of the road other socialists would
later explore more thoroughly. Craft
unionism, he argued, was no longer
appropriate. Because modern plants
were so massive, with hundreds of
to organize them on a craft basis is
to divide and not to organize them,
to give them over to factions and
petty leadership and leave them an
easy prey to the machinations of the Julius Waylands
enemy. While much of the sp would
have agreed with this in principle,
Appeal to Reason
Debs also discussed internal sources claimed a circulation in
of tensions in unions that figures like the hundreds of
Greenbaum and Berger would never thousands, bringing
broach. The trade union officialdom,
Debs noted, were at once the leaders
socialist politics to a
of labor and the lieutenants of cap- mass audience.
ital... who, in their dual role, find it
more and more difficult to harmonize
the conflict interests of the class of
who they are the leaders and the class
of whom they are the lieutenants.
Though Debs never fleshed
out the implications of this line of
analysis (and never articulated a
corresponding strategy), they are
considerable. If unions as organiza-
tions had built-in tendencies toward
conservatism that stemmed from the unionism was emerging as a political little law existed beyond the word
social position of the officialdom, it current within the labor movement, of the mineowners. The wfm left
could hardly be presumed that the explicitly challenging the a f l the afl in 1897, following a strike
union movement would naturally leadership. in which the federation offered only
evolve in the direction of socialism. In the first half-decade of the the most desultory support. The
Indeed, Gomperss tenure at the afl twentieth century, the locus for this union announced its intention to
seemed a repudiation of such a sim- challenge was the Western Feder- organize the unorganized, regard-
plistic perspective. ation of Miners (wfm). Formed in less of their skill level and regardless
Soon, the party would be forced the 1890s, as metalliferous mining of their trade. To extend its influence
to confront the question of unions developed in the Western states, the beyond the mines, it formed the
and politics head on. Industrial wfm grew up in mining towns where Western Labor Union in 1898, and

49
 then the American Labor Union in
1902. Three years later, with the help
of socialists like Eugene Debs and
Big Bill Haywood (and even Daniel
De Leon), it founded the Industrial
Workers of the World.
Buoyed by a membership of more
than twenty thousand workers, the
iww immediately began spreading
the gospel of industrial unionism
across the country, embracing
groups like migrant timber workers
in the northwest and farmworkers in
Kansas. Its raison detre was to bring
all workers under the union umbrella
and, relatedly, to chip away at the
afls hegemony over the American
union movement.
From its beginnings, the iww
garnered strong support from the
left wing of the sp. For Debs, the
iww was a way to confront these
rotten graft-infested [a.f.l.] unions,
which are dominated absolutely by
the labor boss. The right wing of the
party recognized the challenge the
iww posed to the afl, and reacted
accordingly.
Victor Berger accused Debs of
trying to wreck the American union
movement. Socialist union leaders
like Max Hayes protested that while
they supported industrial unionism
in principle, it could not be imposed
on the labor movement from
above it had to be won organically.
50
it had never before attempted. Debs
traveled across the country in a train
called the Red Special, speaking daily
to thousands. From New York to
California, he blasted the capitalist
system for crushing workers and
destroying the natural brotherhood
of man. He electrified audiences in
working-class cities like Rochester,
thundering: The capitalist refers
to you as mill hands, farm hands,
factory hands, machine hands
hands, hands!... A capitalist would
feel insulted if you called him a hand.
Hes a head. The trouble is he owns
his head and your hands.
Such speeches cultivated a deep
bond between Debs and his audience.
His biographies overflow with sto-
ries of the devotion he elicited from
workers across the country, who
took to viewing Debs as a latter-day
Jesus Christ, preaching kindness and
humanity against a corrupt social
system. His basic understanding of
the injustice workers faced, and his
affirmation that they deserved more,
won him a following no American
socialist has replicated since.
In the Southwest, as part of its
effort to organize among farmers
and agricultural workers, the party
cribbed from the Populist playbook
and started putting on massive
multi-day encampments. Thousands
of people, spread across multiple
(Hayes pleadings on this score would
have been more convincing if, at the
previous years afl convention, he
hadnt declared that the Socialists
were done trying to secure leader-
ship in the afl, and would confine
themselves to trying to attract union
workers votes.) Throughout the par-
tys right wing, members argued that
the afl was on the verge of adopting
industrial unionism, but that the
confrontational tactics of the iww
were scaring Gompers and his aco-
lytes away.
The iww was experiencing some
inner turmoil of its own. A strong
syndicalist current developed in
the iww in spite of the presence
counties, would load up their wagons
and congregate for socialist festivals
that culminated in a speech from
Debs. For workers listening to Debs
on the 1908 campaign, it was easy
to see joining the Socialist Party as
joining a movement of the masses.
The mainstream political par-
ties and their allies looked with
trepidation at the partys success.
Newspapers regularly fabricated sto-
ries about corruption in the party.
Samuel Gompers, who had thrown
the afls support behind the Dem-
ocrats that year, accused the party of
financing the Red Special with dona-
tions from business. Debs fired back:
Sam Gompers is trying to line up the
labor fakirs for [William Jennings]
Bryan. But their enthusiasm does
not last longer than the effect of the
whiskey which produces it.
These attacks on the party did
little to dampen enthusiasm for the
campaign. In mid-October, Debs was
speaking at a Cincinnati venue a few
days after Republican presidential
nominee William Howard Taft had
done so. Taft had barely filled the
building, even though his talk was
free; the Socialists charged a dime
at the door and had to turn people
away. Later in the campaign, the two
were speaking in Evansville the same
night, and, again, more people paid
to see Debs than watched Taft speak
of leading socialists like Debs and
Big Bill Haywood. For the syndi-
calists, any political campaign was
useless, a distraction from the class
struggle. The ballot box, they
argued, is simply a capitalist con-
cession. Though the original iww
constitution had offered a vague
endorsement of working-class polit-
ical action, syndicalism quickly came
to dominate the organization.
As the syndicalists rose, other
supporters of the iww found their
enthusiasm waning. Most signifi-
cantly, the Western Federation of
Miners, which had accounted for the
bulk of the iwws membership at its
founding, withdrew from the union
for free. Pressing their advantage, the
sp offered Taft the chance to speak at
their meeting if Debs was allowed to
address a Republican audience. The
Republicans wisely declined.
In spite of the palpable excite-
ment, however, Debs received only
421,000 votes in November, just
13,000 more than in the previous
election. Though the Appeal to
Reason put on a brave face, running
the headline Taft is elected; Bryan to take the party in this direction,
defeated; Debs Victorious, mem-
bers across the party were deeply
disappointed.
Party members put forward
three explanations for the failure
to grow. First, they argued that the
recession of 1907 had caused many
workers to move in search of jobs,
leading them to lose their registra-
tion for voting. Second, Gomperss
decision to throw the afl behind the
Democrats, abandoning the political
neutrality the federation had previ-
ously claimed (often as an excuse
to refuse endorsing the Socialists),
drove many workers into the Dem-
ocratic camp. Finally, both major
parties had included an assortment
of reform planks in their platforms,
stealing the issues on which Socialists
had often campaigned.
For the right wing of the party,
this final explanation represented an
opportunity. If the reform vote was
in 1908, leaving it both much-dimin-
ished and under the firm control of
its ultra-left, anti-political faction.
Debs was similarly disillusioned with
the iww s direction, and although
he didnt publicly attack the Wob-
blies, he allowed his membership to
lapse the same year.
The split over the Wobblies was
the most profound political schism
in the Socialist Partys short history,
and it would define politics in the
party for much of the remainder of
the decade. Many who had opposed
Bergers revisionism now recoiled
from the iww. Supporters, mean-
while, worked to develop a new vision
of socialist strategy that retained the
Wobbly emphasis on revolutionary
unionism. As fierce as the conflict
between these two groups was in
19056, it would only intensify in
the coming years.
Tensions Deepen
The tensions in the party did not stop
the Socialists from going all out for
the 1908 presidential campaign.
Expectations were high. Max Hayes
predicted a million votes for Debs.
Victor Berger anticipated 1.52mil-
lion. Across the party, Socialists fully
expected to build on the tremendous
gains between 1900 and 1904.
The party campaigned on a scale
growing, and the capitalist parties
were being forced to court it, didnt
this mean the audience for socialism
was bigger than ever? All the party
had to do was demonstrate it was
more committed to reform than
the Democrats or Republicans. And
that required jettisoning the par-
tys image as an instrument of class
struggle. Socialists like Hillquit, who
had once opposed Bergers attempts
now got on board. At the Interna-
tional Socialist Congress in 1907,
Hillquit bragged that the American
party was beating other socialist par-
ties in recruiting adherents from the
better classes of society.
Socialist leaders began declaim-
ing any interest in physical revolu-
tion. Socialist locals were counseled
to concentrate all activity on elections
and education. The sp, one news-
paper proclaimed, is not so much
a party militant as an organization
for the study of political economy
and the teaching of a true political
economy to the masses.
Simultaneously, Hillquit was
developing a more thoroughgoing
theoretical rationale for this shift in
the party. In a series of works pub-
lished shortly after 1908, Hillquit
laid out a theory of the transition to
socialism that would match the par-
tys new reform-oriented practice.
51
 Hillquit argued that socialism
was nothing more than the culmi-
nation of a series of reforms, such
as laws protecting labor and munic-
ipal ownership of industry. In an age
of reform, the conclusion was ines-
capable: it may well be said that we
are in the midst, or at any rate at the
beginning, of the socialist transi-
tional state. (Ironically, Hillquits
conception of socialism seems similar
to the one imagined by reactionary
paranoiacs in Obamas America a
kind of stealth social order that can
creep up on a nation unawares.)
If reform was already on the way,
and socialist transition had already
begun, the Socialist Party was the
natural choice to oversee the entire
process. While the capitalist parties
offered measures that were indeed
moving the nation along on the road
to socialism, these changes were only
partial, with far too many stops along
the way. Electing the Socialist Party
would be like buying an express
ticket.
At the same time the sp right was
orienting the party away from class
struggle and toward middle-class
reform (a shift aided by the rights
strong presence in the leadership),
the party was retreating even fur-
ther from challenging Gompersism
in the afl. Led by Berger, Social-
ists now abjured even attempting
52
being in a common position vis--vis
employers.
A better alternative, the pair
argued, was class unionism. Bohn
and Haywoods term for industrial
unionism, class unionism seeks to
unite all workers in one union, in
opposition to all employers. For
Bohn and Haywood, recognizing
class war precluded the signing of
union contracts, a practice the iww
In a country where a
massive proportion
of the working class
consisted of
immigrants, the
partys restrictionist
position was a
tremendous weakness.
to win endorsements from union
locals. When the Second Inter-
national issued a condemnation
of craft unionism and an endorse-
ment of industrial unionism, the sp
responded that this was all well and
good for Europe, but conditions are
entirely different here.
Previously, figures like Hayes
and Berger had argued that orga-
nizations like the iww hindered
their efforts to win the afl over to
an industrial form of organization.
Now, they dropped even the pretense
of supporting industrial unions, and
began to sing the praises of craft
unionism. The craft organization
of the afl, Hayes declared in 1914,
is the logical economic organiza-
tion for this country. Meanwhile,
socialist newspapers published
instructions for speakers, reminding
them to avoid endorsing one form of
unionism over another and imploring
them not to attack all capitalists as
thieves or scoundrels.
Berger and his supporters were
no longer viewed as renegades. They
now spoke for broad swathes of the
party, and enjoyed the support of the
bulk of the leadership.
Not everyone in the party was
happy with its rightward drift,
however. The same forces that had
supported the iww in 1905 were
now horrified to see conservative
also largely rejected. Contracts,
they argued, hamstrung workers by
banning strikes, while at the same
time failing to prevent the employer
from shutting up his shop and
turning the workers into the street
whenever he pleases. To sign an
agreement with the employers
was to abdicate its responsibility
to prosecute the fight against the
boss.
tendencies expanding within the
party. Grouped around Charles
H. Kerrs journal the International
Socialist Review, they began to chart a
strategy for the left wing of the party.
Even before the consolidation of
the sp right, left socialists had begun
to expound a syndicalist under-
standing of socialist practice, in
which industrial parties, not unions,
were the key agencies of social trans-
formation. In this view, the only goals
of socialist political action were edu-
cation (in strange symmetry with the
developing right-wing view) and
demonstrating increased socialist
support in elections.
It dissented sharply from the
core tenet of Berger-style construc-
tive socialism that society was restricted entry to the union, often
already evolving toward socialism
through reforms. The sp left looked
at the United States in the early twen-
tieth century and saw an abattoir,
consuming workers lives by the
thousands.
Perhaps no other document
articulated the syndicalist politics
of the sp left in greater detail than
Industrial Socialism, a pamphlet
written by Big Bill Haywood and
Frank Bohn, an slp leader turned
Wobbly and sp member. The first
half of the 1911 pamphlet surveyed
the history of capitalism in the United
States, explaining how it had evolved
While the Industrial Socialism
stressed the importance of union
action on the shop floor, it also
endorsed socialist political action.
Bohn and Haywood lauded the sp
as the party of the workers whose
purpose was to to seize the powers
of government and thus prevent
them from being used by the cap-
italists against the workers a
rather defensive conception of poli-
tics, but wholly intelligible given the
states frequently violent response
to strikes.
Bohn and Haywoods sup-
port for socialist politics belies the
rights characterization of them as
impossibilists who scorned any
demands short of revolution. In fact,
the sp left wing devoted real atten-
tion to thinking about the kinds of
reforms that socialists could secure
for workers before achieving rev-
olutionary industrial democracy.
In Industrial Socialism, Bohn and
Haywood even endorsed the quest
of socialist city governments for
expanded services, including public
water utilities, schools, and parks.
This agenda of sewer socialism
was closely associated with Berger
and the right, and while the left
pilloried the right mercilessly for
reducing socialism to such reforms,
they still appreciated their impor-
tance for American workers.
from the small workshops of the early
nineteenth century to the massive
trusts of the early twentieth. While
workers produced more wealth than
ever before, they were becoming
thinner, shorter, weaker that is,
they have less life than the Amer-
ican people of fifty years ago.... [T]he
vast majority of toilers... die prema-
ture deaths caused by overwork, by
underfeeding, and diseases.
After detailing the history of
American capitalism, Bohn and
Haywood turned their attention
to the forms of resistance workers
mounted against it. Craft unions,
they argued, were organized by
skilled workers in an attempt to
bid up the price of their labor. They
limiting it to the family of current
members. While this strategy could
succeed for a time, Bohn and Hay-
wood contended that the coming of
the machine doomed craft unionism.
Where workers depended on con-
trolling the spread of their skills to
preserve their wages, they could
compete with employers only insofar
as the latter had not yet devised a
way to make their skills superfluous.
In addition, the principles of craft
unionism directly contradicted the
principles of class solidarity, since
their membership was based on pos-
sessing particular skills, rather than
Similarly, while the sp left rejected
nationalization of industry, a key
demand of the right, as little more
than a way for capitalists to unload
their unprofitable ventures onto the
state, they backed reforms like an
eight-hour day, freedom of speech
for workers, and the elimination of
voting requirements like residency.
But the sp left wasnt without
its own shortcomings. The refusal to
sign contracts with employers made
it almost impossible to consolidate
the gains from successful union
action. Similarly, the lefts focus on
industrial over political action meant
that much of the left was simply less
aware of what was happening inside
the party, allowing the right to main-
tain its outsize advantage through its
control of the party administration.
Not all opposition to the right
was syndicalist-tinged. Debs him-
self fought against socialisms
identification with reform, while
simultaneously highlighting the cen-
trality of political action for socialist
advance. Debs argued that the sps
attempts to win reform votes would
inevitably backfire voters pulled
in because of the partys advocacy of
reforms instead of its commitment
to the working class would simply
abscond to capitalist parties in the
next election. The partys current
course of eliminating whatever may
53
 give offense to bourgeois sensibili-
ties was destined to leave the party
demoralized and disoriented.
Debs assigned first importance
to the working class character and
the revolutionary integrity of the
sp. The partys goal was socialism,
and working-class struggle was the
only way to achieve it. Those who saw
the socialist task as simply accumu-
lating more votes for reform forgot
that voting for socialism is not
socialism any more than a menu is
a meal.
The battle between left and right
was not the only schism in the sp in
these years. A number of other issues
divided the party, and often in ways
that did not map easily onto the left-
right split. Three in particular merit
attention: immigration, womens
emancipation, and the race question.
The Socialist Party and
Immigration
As US capitalism expanded in the
late nineteenth century, it drew
in massive amounts of labor from
the semi-capitalist periphery of
Eastern and Southern Europe. Mil-
lions of migrants came over, and
were absorbed almost immediately
into the workforce. In this context,
debates over immigration raged
in the American labor movement
and on the Left more broadly. The insisted, would place the Socialist Coast, argued that proletarian princi-
Knights of Labor, for example, while Party in opposition to the most ples of international solidarity meant
willing to organize black workers in militant and intelligent portion of little in his region of the country
the 1880s, wholeheartedly endorsed organized workers in the United because racial incompatibility was
Chinese exclusion. The afl main- States in other words, the afl. supposedly a daily fact of life there.
tained a similar attitude towards Berger and his restrictionist Ernest Untermann, another Berger
immigration, combining support allies (including Max Hayes) found critic, went even further, denouncing
for Chinese exclusion with racist anti-immigration confederates out- race-neutral immigration controls
rhetoric about protecting the white side the sp right. Herman Titus, a since they could potentially keep out
mans standard of living from unfair leader of the left wing on the West whites.
competition.
In the Socialist Party, immigra-
tion exclusion found favor on both
the right and the left. Hillquit had
backed restriction, voting in 1904 at
an International Socialist Congress
in favor of barring immigration for
backwards races. While the Con-
gress rejected the resolution, it came
up again three years later, precipi- Tragically, Debs never
tating a more general debate in the pressed a fight
party. Again the Congress voted
down the measure. In response,
internally for the kind
many sp members accused the of politics he favored
socialist body of abandoning the a fusion of class
working class. struggle unionism and
Berger in particular indulged in
the most lurid rhetoric, denouncing
political action.
the invasion of yellow men and
arguing that socialism was only
possible in a white mans country.
In 1910, when the sp National Con-
gress held a debate on immigration,
he explicitly argued that the party
needed to support racial immigra-
tion restriction. Doing otherwise, he

54

Likewise, criticisms of immi-
gration controls didnt emanate
exclusively from the left. In the
debates at party congresses, one
of the most eloquent opponents of
immigration restriction was John
Spargo, a key theorist of the party
right. He explicitly attacked the
racism of immigration restrictors,
noting that on the West Coast, Jap-
anese Americans had proved to be
fighting unionists wherever they
were able to join unions. Directly
challenging the racism of his oppo-
nents, he declared If the Jap will
carry the highest standard of civi-
lization, if he will carry the Socialist
banner where the white man fails, all
hail the Jap; let him carry it for me.
Debs excoriated the restric-
tors from the left. His argument
was simple: if Socialism, interna-
tional, revolutionary socialism, does
not stand staunchly, unflinchingly
uncompromisingly for the working
class and for the exploited and
oppressed masses of all lands, then
it stands for none and its claim is a
false pretense and its profession a
delusion and a snare.
Despite these arguments, in 1910
the party lent its imprimatur to race-
based immigration restrictions. In
1912, it went even further, affirming
such limitations and also arguing
that race feeling was a natural
product of biology, and would play an
important role in a socialist society
as well.
In a country where a massive
proportion of the working class
consisted of immigrants, and where
pogroms against Asian Americans
occurred regularly in Western states,
this position was a tremendous
weakness. It committed the party
to upholding divisions that aided
employers, placed it on the side of
lynchers rather than justice, and
subordinated working-class unity
to the reactionary craft unionism of
the afl.
Womens Place in the Party
The debate over the place of women
in American socialism was never
as fierce or extended as the back-
and-forth on immigration. From its
founding, the sp committed itself to
gender equality, and backed causes
like womens enfranchisement.
As historian Mari Jo Buhle
points out, what really would have
been noteworthy is if the party hadnt
made a firm programmatic commit-
ment to womens equality. After
all, the defense of womens rights
had a long history in the American
reform tradition, from abolitionism
to populism. Similarly, the inter-
national socialist movement had a
long tradition of supporting womens
emancipation.
But despite this doctrinal com-
mitment, the partys actual record
of fighting for womens liberation
left something to be desired. Of the
128 socialists present at the partys
founding in 1901, only eight were
women. And after nearly a decade
of significant growth, the ratio had
hardly improved; in 1909, only
two thousand of the partys fifty
thousand members were women.
Observers commonly noted the
sps hostile internal culture, which
thought nothing of holding meetings
in saloons that barred women.
Inside the party, some social-
ists expressed dissatisfaction with
this state of affairs. Among male
socialists, John Spargo spoke up
most insistently for his female com-
rades. He questioned why womens
emancipation received scant atten-
tion at party meetings and in party
publications, and, citing the English
suffragette movement, pointed to
the revolutionary spirit women were
manifesting. The party, he argued,
was failing women.
The most important critics
were socialist women themselves.
Though often few in number, they
played an important role in the party
from the beginning. Women like
Kate Richards OHare and Luella
Roberts Krehbiel worked as lec-
turers and field organizers, touring
the country to win audiences over to
the socialist cause. Josephine Con-
ger-Kaneko helped edit Appeal to
Reason, augmenting its pages with
regular columns about women and
socialism. At the grassroots, women
socialists formed their own auxiliary
clubs to sp locals.
Women socialists voiced consid-
erable discontent over their status
within the party. Not all men who
call themselves socialists, one noted,
are fully so where women are con-
cerned. Conger-Kaneko protested
that [w]omen are tired of being
included, tired of being taken for
granted. They demand definite rec-
ognition, even as men have it. Lena
Morrow Lewis, a prominent West
Coast Socialist, insisted that the
the prejudice of small-minded men
should not be catered to in the party.
In 1908, the party finally
responded by approving a cam-
paign specifically aimed at winning
women to socialism. As part of the
same resolution, the party formed
a Womens National Committee
to oversee socialist work among
women. Finally, the work of women
assumed a more prominent place
within the party.
Outside events also forced the
issue onto the agenda: when class

55
 struggle broke out in sectors dom-
inated by women workers like the
New York garment industry, the
party gained first-hand familiarity
with working womens twin struggles
against male domination and capi-
talist exploitation.
By its second decade, the
Socialist Party was taking an active
role in the struggle for womens
liberation.
The Race Question
In the history of American radi-
calism, the Socialist Party has often
come to stand in for the color-blind
approach to fighting racism. And
some in the sp did hew to this line,
seeing struggles against racism as
unnecessary distractions from the
class struggle or worse. Yet the
reduction of the party to a rac-
ism-blind formation is, as historian
William P. Jones has pointed out,
a distortion that obscures the real
contributions Socialists made to the
struggle for black equality.
The sps complicated legacy
on the racism question go back to
its establishment in 1901. At the
founding convention, three black
socialists participated in the proceed-
ings. One white delegate introduced
a resolution that recognized the
special oppression faced by African
56
anti-immigrant tide that plagued the
West Coast branches in particular.
Woodbey was joined by a
number of black preachers in the
party, as well some secular voices.
W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, briefly
joined the party and then left in 1912
to support Woodrow Wilson. But by
far the most important black voice in
the sp was Hubert Henry Harrison.
A Caribbean immigrant, Har-
rison became a member in New
York and quickly established a rep-
utation as one of its most formidable
voices. In New Yorks vibrant street
speaking culture he reigned supreme,
attaining wide recognition as the
most eloquent representative of the
socialist cause. He also wrote for the
party press, authoring a series of arti-
cles on The Negro and Socialism
that narrated the history of black
oppression and explained why the
sp needed to take a decisive place in
the struggle for black equality.
Socialism is here, he declared,
to put an end to the exploitation of
one group by another, whether that
group be social, economic or racial.
While Harrison did not expect
socialism to destroy race prejudice,
he did expect it to take the white
man from off the black mans back.
Disgusted with the rampant
racism in the afl, Harrison became
a supporter of the iw w and an
Americans, and encouraged them
to join the sp to fight it. This mea-
sure drew opposition from many
socialists, who denied the need to
make any specific appeals to a given
group. Two of the three black del-
egates agreed. However, the third
delegate, William Costley of San
Francisco, argued that the resolution
should be even stronger, and intro-
duced an amendment pointing out
that black Americans suffer oppres-
sion both from the ruling class and
the white working class, and con-
demning lynching, burning, and
disenfranchisement.
In response, some white dele-
gates protested that such a resolution
would doom the partys efforts to
build among white workers in the
South. Costley and his allies
including prominent socialists like
Max Hayes fought the compro-
mise, asserting that it was better to
lose every white vote in the South
than to pander to racism. In the end,
the party deleted the references to
lynching, but kept the recognition
of the additional oppression black
workers face, as well as the appeal
to join the sp.
The following year, the party
published a pamphlet entitled
Socialism and the Negro Problem.
The work, authored by a Christian
socialist, argued explicitly against
impressive representative of the
partys left. As tensions between left
and right escalated, he found himself
targeted by the New York leadership.
Harrison, who made his living as a
party lecturer, was forbidden from
speaking on the question of indus-
trial organization. When he objected
to this ban and accused the leader-
ship of treating him different because
of his race the party slapped a
three-month suspension on him.
Harrison, disgusted with his com-
rades conduct, decided to leave the
party altogether.
Harrison wasnt the last black
socialist of prominence in the party.
the economic reductionist position
so often ascribed to the party. It
acknowledged that a socialist society
could not abolish racism in one fell
swoop, and that pro-equality mea-
sures would be needed to destroy
race prejudice.
Once economic competition
between black and white workers in
the auction of the new slave market
was eliminated, equal, integrated
education for black and white chil-
dren would dissolve whatever racist
attitudes remained. While educa-
tion alone may seem like thin fare
for a socialist antiracist program, the
very fact that the party was thinking
about how to deal with racism in a
socialist society undermines much of
the received wisdom about the party.
Unfortunately, these kinds of ini-
tiatives which were revolutionary
steps for an overwhelmingly white
organization like the sp were
accompanied by racism of the most
vile sort. Unsurprisingly, Berger was
one of the most vicious exponents.
He wholeheartedly embraced the
race science of the time, asserting
that black people were a lower race
than whites and attributing the sup-
posedly high numbers of rapes in
areas with large black populations
to the degeneration resulting from
contact between the two races. Other
socialists were similarly enamored of
A. Philip Randolph and Chandler
Owen edited the Messenger, a rad-
ical black socialist monthly starting
in 1917. And Frank Crosswaith was
an important party organizer in New
York unions. But none would be as
insistent a voice for radicalism on the
race question as Harrison.
The sps legacy on race, then, is
far too complicated to be encapsu-
lated in any pat summary. The party
took more steps toward uniting class
struggle and the fight against racist
oppression than any organization
that preceded it, yet it also toler-
ated truly shameful behavior from
its members and leaders. Ultimately,
race science, holding forth at length
about the supposedly distinctive
characteristics of black anatomy.
The sp in the early twentieth
century thus contained both the most
enlightened thinking among white
Americans on the race question, as
well as endorsements of the nations
most destructive racial fantasies.
The most important perspec-
tives on the race question in the
party, however, were undoubtedly
black socialists themselves.
The Reverend George Wash-
ington Woodbey was the most
important black socialist in the par-
tys early history. Passing through
the prohibition movement, and
then Populism, he joined the sp
soon after its founding and quickly
became a prominent lecturer on
the West Coast. Among his speech
topics was Booker T. Washington,
whom he accused of playing into cap-
italist designs to pit black and white
workers against each other.
So popular was Woodbey among
California socialists that when a Los
Angeles hotel refused him admission
due to his race, the LA branch of the
party waged a successful boycott
campaign against the venue. Soon
after, he was elected to the state
partys executive board. Inside the
sp, Woodbey was a consistent voice
for egalitarianism, resisting the
however, the best of the sp laid the
basis for a class struggle approach
to fighting racism that would find
fuller expression in the decades
to come.
The Left Insurgency
Routed
By about 1910, tensions in the party
were reaching a breaking point.
Disagreements had escalated well
beyond debates, and the party infra-
structure itself was beginning to
crack under the pressure. Across the
country, expulsions and secessions
proliferated. The left had seen a surge
in membership since 1908, anchored
in states like Oklahoma and Ohio.
United by a devotion to industrial
unionism and a semi-syndicalist
suspicion of political action the
left had attained a measure of power
in the party.
The right wasted no time in
punching back. As early as 1908, the
right had indicated its tolerance for
left-wing advance was limited. That
year, Alfred Wagenknacht, a left-
wing leader on the West Coast, was
denied a national organizer position
on explicitly ideological grounds.
By 1911, the infighting had reached
the point where the California state
committee, led by some of Bergers
closest allies, forbade Haywood and
57
 even Debs from speaking before
socialist locals in the state.
Unbowed by the counterattack,
Big Bill Haywood ran for a seat on
the National Executive Committee
in 1911. For the right of the party,
this constituted a line in the sand. If
a Wobbly could make his way onto
the partys executive committee, all
hope was surely lost. Morris Hillquit
led the campaign against Haywood,
arguing that socialists couldnt abide
direct action and lawbreaking. After
all, how could they expect capital-
ists to obey socialist laws if socialists
would not obey capitalist ones? As
one supporter of the left pointed
out in response, if taken seriously,
this position would mean refusing
to support strikes in the face of
injunctions the very action that
had rocketed Debs to national prom-
inence as a union leader.
Despite the campaign against
him, Haywood garnered the third
highest vote total in the nec elec-
tion, beating out Hillquit himself.
Immediately after winning, he
demonstrated exactly why he
inspired such opposition from the
right, giving speeches denouncing
capitalist law for tolerating the
murder of workers and their families.
To the tremendous embarrassment
of the party right, the bourgeois press
quickly began covering Haywoods
58
women and children, to the four
million black men, to the disenfran-
chised white men... and I can carry
to them the message of Socialism.
But the right quickly struck
back. They proposed an amendment
to the party constitution calling for
the expulsion of any person who
advocates crime, sabotage, or other
methods of violence as a weapon of
the working class to aid in its eman-
cipation. Playing hardball, Berger
threatened to withdraw the Wis-
consin organization from the party
if it was not adopted. Hillquit
demonstrating why the left used
lawyer as a pejorative said that
while it was not the place of the party
to tell unions what to do, it was per-
fectly acceptable for the sp to kick
out members who advocated sabo-
tage in their unions. More ominously,
he declared not only that the partys
left was an enemy within, but that it
was more threatening to the party
than the capitalist class itself. The
convention passed the amendment.
So confident was the right at
the 1912 convention that it tried to
dislodge Debs as the partys stan-
dard-bearer. They offered up Charles
Edward Russell of New York and
Emil Seidel of Wisconsin, both rep-
resenting the party right. Russell and
Seidel ended up securing 110votes,
while Debs garnered an outright
speeches. As soon as he was elected, This was hardly a radical principle
they began calling for his removal. craft unions had long set rates of
Haywoods support was sub- work that every member agreed not
stantial enough that in New York, to exceed. The iww s radical pivot
the right agreed to a debate on indus- was to join the rhetoric of sabotage
trial unionism. His opponent? None to a delegitimization of the bosss
other than Morris Hillquit. private property. Yet even this did
In his address, the New York not entail the breaking of machines
lawyer contended that while the or the dynamiting of factories. In
entire party supported the principle iww-led work stoppages like the
of industrial unionism, the question famous Lawrence textile strike in
was whether it was the partys place 1912, machine-breaking actually
to advance that cause in the unions. decreased as the Wobblies assumed
He answered in the negative the leadership.
party, Hillquit argued, should con- Haywood knew all of this. But his
centrate on winning workers votes. aim wasnt to calm fears with a dose
And really, industrial unionism of clarity. His rhetoric was calculated
hardly needed the support of the to inflame and it had its desired
party within five years and no effect on much of the sp.
longer the American Federation of Most importantly, and tragically,
Labor and its rank and file will be Haywoods discursive decision cut
socialistic. In the name of hard- him off from his most important
headed realism and pragmatism, potential ally: Eugene Debs. The
Hillquit had embraced a disorienting socialist tribune had left the iww
utopianism. behind in 1908 as it embraced syn-
Yet Haywood did himself no dicalism, but remained devoted to
favors. He delighted in baiting the the cause of industrial unionism.
sp right as middle-class misleaders, Haywoods rhetoric, however, led
and was well aware that his rhetoric him to spurn his former comrade.
around sabotage and direct action Debs understood Haywoods argu-
would incite them. ment as anarchist individualism,
Its important to contextu- as opposed to socialist collectivism.
alize Haywoods rhetoric. As Mike As such, he saw in direct action and
Davis has pointed out, the iww saw sabotage merely a repeat of nine-
sabotage as simply the conscious teenth century propaganda of the
withdrawal of efficiency in work. deed. These tactics, he argued,
From the moment
the war was
launched, the entire
party found itself
under assault.
erendum that saw just 11percent
would do nothing more than make
the work of agent provocateurs even
easier.
Debs also saw the party right as
a real problem. They had, after all,
begun to ban him from speaking in
front of the party. In a letter to Victor
Berger, he confided that I favor put-
ting an end to Hillquitism, which has
become synonymous with bossism.
Of course, Berger himself had often
led the charge against Debs. Yet he
could not bring himself to organize
within the party against either of his
foes. Intimidated by their theoretical
knowledge, chary of jeopardizing his
role as the spokesman of American
socialism, Debs never pressed a fight
internally for the kind of politics he
favored a fusion of class struggle
unionism and political action.
As a result, the right was able to
mobilize its support in the party to
expel Haywood. The decisive move
came at the 1912 national conven-
tion. At first, it seemed as if the left
would continue its ascent. The party
passed a landmark resolution calling
for the organizing of the unorganized
and unskilled, and urged unions to
eliminate artificial restrictions
on membership. Haywood saw this
as evidence of progress in the party,
effusing to the delegates that, as a
result of this policy, I can go to the
working class, to the eight million
majority of 156. In putting forward
two candidates, the rights tactical
ineptness had doomed the effort to
topple Debs. But even so, they had
come within striking distance of
removing the countrys most beloved
socialist from the head of the ticket.
After the convention, the right
wasted no time in exploiting their
major victory. When Big Bill Hay-
wood continued to give speeches
advocating sabotage, the party
organization in New York launched
a campaign to recall him from the
National Executive Committee.
In February, in a party-wide ref-
turnout, Haywood was booted from
the committee, 13,000 to 4,000.
For once the sp found itself the
object of praise in the bourgeois
press, who congratulated the party
on its newfound sense of responsi-
bility and judgment. Much of the
party left saw the handwriting on
the wall, and simply exited the party.
Within a few months, the sp had lost
about a third of its membership.
War
The chaos in the party did not pre-
vent the Socialists from mounting
another presidential campaign
for Debs. In 1912, just as in 1908,
Debss speaking events drew massive
59
 crowds eighteen thousand in Phil-
adelphia, twenty-two thousand in
New York City. The campaign also
received a boost from the fractured
state of bourgeois politics. Teddy
Roosevelt left the Republicans for
the Bull Moose Party, while both
Wilson and Roosevelt borrowed
liberally from the Socialists array
of reforms. Despite losing member-
ship, the party managed to double
its vote total to more than nine hun-
dred thousand, or 6percent of the
electorate. It was the partys greatest
electoral success to date.
But in many ways, it also rep-
resented the partys peak. Further
progress eluded the sp in the years
that followed. Local elections failed
to produce any further advance. In
1916, with Debs sidelined by illness,
Allan Benson took up the torch as
the partys presidential candidate.
Benson, a writer for the Appeal, won
the nomination almost entirely on
the basis of his proposal that dec-
larations of war must be made by
national referendum (and that those
assenting to war would be drafted
first). Lacking Debss name recog-
nition or abilities, Benson received
only 3percent of the vote.
By 1916, the war had become
the overwhelming issue in both
national politics and the sp. As
Bensons nomination suggests, the
Though some
historians have
faulted the SP for its
opposition to World
War I, the party was
actually tapping into
a large reservoir of
antiwar sentiment.
party was unified in opposition as Manifesto drafted by Hillquit,
war raged in Europe. Many socialists his associate Algernon Lee, and the
at the time as well as historians lefts Charles Reuthenberg placed
like Weinstein have thus con- the party on firm antiwar ground.
cluded that the war brought the The Manifesto blamed the war on
party together, helping to heal the the acute competition between
wounds of 1912. But like the unity of the capitalist powers of the earth,
the Second International, which was their jealousies and distrusts of one
proclaimed by all sides right up until another and the fear of the rising
the declaration of war, the consensus power of the working class, and it
of the sp was fragile, and easily shat- committed the party to opposing all
tered by the cataclysm of war. war measures, from conscription to
As long as hostilities were con- the issuing of war bonds.
fined to Europe, the party spoke with Immediately, a section of the
one voice. But as American involve- party rebelled against this declara-
ment crept onto the horizon, dissent tion and left the party. John Spargo
spread through the party. In April led the renegades, having declaimed
1917, with US entry now inevitable, at the convention against the spirit
the party held an emergency con- of intolerance he perceived toward
vention in St. Louis to clarify its pro-war voices in the party. He was
position. The resulting St. Louis joined by other leaders of the right,
including Charles Edward Russell,
A. M. Simons, Winfield Gaylord, and
even Allan Benson. The left was also
represented in the exodus William
English Walling, Henry Slobodin,
and Frank Bohn all departed
though to a far more limited extent
than the right.
Those who remained in the party
largely maintained an antiwar posi-
tion. The party press denounced the
militarism and jingoism sweeping
American society. Leaders gave
speeches against conscription,
and demanded that the imperialist
powers cease hostilities with no
annexations and no indemnities.
Though some historians have
faulted the sp for its opposition to
the war, holding that this stance
alienated the party from the naturally
patriotic American people, the sp
was actually tapping into a large res-
ervoir of antiwar sentiment. Across
the country, young men gave their
draft boards false addresses, skipped
their physicals, or filed exemption
claims. naacp leader James Weldon
Johnson reported being laughed out
of his neighborhood barbershop after
asking the barber if he was joining
the military. The barber replied,
The Germans aint done nothin to
me, and if they have, I forgive em.
In addition to these individual
actions, opponents of the war also

60

organized collective efforts. In Indi-
anapolis, they stole the draft records
for the entire county. In Minnesota,
pro-war bankers found themselves
the target of boycotts. In California, a
group of alleged Wobblies sabotaged
a troop train and fought with the
soldiers onboard. Indeed, far from
isolating the party, the antiwar stance
brought the most exciting growth
since 1912. In 1917, the party mem-
bership numbered about 80,000. By
1919, it had reached 104,000, nearly
as high as its 1912 apex.
The party grew at the ballot box
as well. In Ohio, Socialists swept the
city elections in Dayton for the first
time, winning nine of twelve wards.
In similar towns across the nation,
the partys vote totals suddenly shot
up as antiwar voters turned to the
only party opposing the war drive.
The Socialists success wasnt limited
to small towns. In Chicago, the party
raised its aldermen count to three,
its most ever. In New York, Morris
Hillquit ran on an antiwar platform
and refused to buy Liberty Bonds; his
campaign quintupled the Socialist
vote, bringing in 21.7percent of the
total. In all of these elections, the par-
tys electoral base wasnt limited to
immigrant communities it polled
well across the working class.
Still, despite the renewed vigor
in the party, divisions lurked below
the surface that would soon emerge
with frightening force. Though their
severity would only become apparent
in 1919, after the wars conclusion,
a close look at the partys course
during the war itself reveals that they
existed well before then. The rifts ran
along familiar factional lines. While
the party right largely adhered to the
St. Louis principles, they did so on
a quite different basis from the left,
and with far more equivocation.
This was most obvious in the
case of pro-war socialists, who were
concentrated in the party right.
New York City, one of the partys
strongholds, was a case in point.
Even as the citys organization
united behind Hillquits explicitly
antiwar campaign, pro-war voices
in the city were not difficult to find.
US congressman Meyer London had
opposed the war before it began, but
supported war appropriations after it
was announced, arguing when war
is an accomplished fact, then there
must be unity. The citys Socialist
aldermen adopted a pro-war stance,
and voted for Liberty Bonds. The
United Hebrew Trades, a socialist
association of Jewish labor unions,
dropped its opposition to the war
after Wilson announced his Four-
teen Points.
At the national level, neither
Hillquit nor Berger were exemplars
of antiwar politics in these years.
When the war first broke out, and
the Second International collapsed,
Hillquit was quick to exonerate
the European socialists, arguing
that national feeling. . . stands
for everything we hold dear... the
workingman has a country as well as
a class. Even before he has a class.
After the United States joined
the war, Hillquit was similarly equiv-
ocal. For one, the pro-war sentiment
from New York elected officials could
hardly have come as a surprise to him,
as Hillquit maintained tight control
over the party organization in the
city. In addition, he actively defended
the militarists. When the party mem-
bership across the country tried to
censure London for his pro-war
stance, Hillquit joined the rest of the
national leadership in blocking the
initiative. In an interview with the
New Republic, Hillquit even denied
holding any substantial antiwar posi-
tion, saying, I do not advocate an
immediate separate peace, a with-
drawal by America... I want America
to act, not to withdraw.
Victor Bergers opposition
was even more milquetoast. In the
drafting of the St. Louis Manifesto,
he fought for Spargos inclusion on public Berger maintained the image
the committee responsible for put-
ting together the majority report,
explaining that Spargo could express
his views better than he could.
When the resulting manifesto took
a decisive antiwar position, Berger
dismissed it as empty phrasemon-
gering, and worried it presented the
left in the party with an opportunity.
In Bergers Milwaukee, pro-war
activity among Socialist elected
officials was even more prominent,
thanks to the behavior of Milwaukee
Mayor Daniel Hoan.
When Wilson ordered mayors of
large cities to carry out draft registra-
tion, the Socialist mayor complied,
acting on Bergers advice. Hoan
helped organize a patriotic parade
in line with the Preparedness fes-
tivities put on by pro-war politicians
across the country. And he planned
pro-war propaganda with a group
of the citys industrialists, looking
to convince the population that the
war had nothing to do with capitalist
profits.
When he was finally forced
to confront the contradictions
between his actions and the St. Louis
platform, Hoan announced his oppo-
sition to the platform. This was too
much even for Berger. Though he
frequently wrote of his dislike for the
platform to friends in the party, in
of a loyal party man. Berger wrote
an editorial denouncing fence-sit-
ting, clearly aimed at Hoan. Yet

61
 the two quickly patched things up,
subsequently working together to
produce an election platform that
endorsed the St. Louis manifesto,
but didnt alter the conduct of either
one Berger both bought Liberty
Bonds and counseled his readers to
do so as well.
The equivocations of the partys
right fueled an increasing sense of
coherence on the left. In New York
and Boston, new publications were
launched to support the party left.
These magazines, and the social-
ists they represented, looked with
antipathy at the actions of Berger
and Hillquit, and wanted a party
whose models were the revolutionary
movements in Russia and Germany.
Confronting a party leadership that
seemed incapable or unwilling to
fully prosecute the antiwar case
even though the general public was
full of war skeptics the left decided
to mount a fight for the party lead-
ership for the first time since 1912.
Debs himself was drawn to this
milieu. He was furious at pro-war
socialists like Hoan, reminding Hoan
that [s]ocialists are not required to
demonstrate their patriotism for the
benefit of the capitalist class. He
also joined the editorial board of the
Class Struggle, one of the new jour-
nals of the left. Writing to a friend
in the party, Debs declared, I am
62
unionism was a central component
of socialist strategy.
The third factor was the Russian
Revolution. In early November 1917,
the Russian government collapsed
as the soviets councils of workers
and soldiers declared their sover-
eignty over the country. Led by the
Bolsheviks, who had recently won a
majority in the soviets, the revolu-
tion shattered the tsarist autocracy,
breaking the back of a state that for
nearly a century had served as the
chief force of reaction in Europe. To
socialists around the world, the revo-
lution seemed to validate everything
theyd been working towards.
In the United States, both the
right and the left of the sp hailed
the revolution as a working-class tri-
umph, soon to be repeated around
the world. Eugene Debs, writing in
the Class Struggle, proclaimed From
the crown of my head to the soles of
my feet I am a Bolshevik and proud
of it. The Day of the People has
arrived! Berger praised the new Bol-
shevik government, writing, [T]he
Russian people love the Soviets. They
are the Soviets. Here is a government
of the people and for the people in
actual fact. Here is a political and
industrial democracy.
The acclaim with which the
revolution was met, however, did
not translate into equal political
in sympathy with the radical ten-
dencies in our party... We have got
to take a clear cut stand in favor of
revolutionary industrial unionism...
[and] get completely away from
Scheidemannism.
The state, for its part, did little
to differentiate between Debss
militant opposition to the war and
Hillquit or Bergers half-hearted
campaigns. From the moment the
war was launched, the entire party
found itself under assault. Socialist
publications, from the International
Socialist Review and the Appeal to
Reason (which would soon relaunch
itself as a pro-war journal) to Bergers
Milwaukee Leader and the New York
dynamism for the two poles of the
party. The left was considerably
more energized by the revolution
than the right. While the right
greeted the upheaval as a step in the
march towards socialism, carried
out in uniquely Russian conditions,
the left saw the birth of the first
socialist state through revolution as
corroboration for their theory that
the parliamentary road to socialism
was closed.
Ironically, what triggered the
explosive growth of the left was
its initial repression by the party
right. After the New York Socialist
aldermen started backing the war
drive in late 1918, the left in New
York, concentrated in the outer
boroughs, launched a campaign to
discipline the officials. In early Jan-
uary, a meeting was held to assess
the aldermens actions. Chaired
by a loyal partisan of the right, the
proceedings systematically shut out
the lefts concerns. As the meeting
dragged on to almost midnight, and
not a single left winger had been
allowed to speak, it became clear
the fix was in. The left bolted from
the meeting, set up a committee
within the city to propagandize,
and issued a manifesto to the rest of
the party.
Soon after, the left expanded
across the country. By April, it
Call, found themselves either banned
from the mail or subject to vastly
increased postage rates. Socialist
leaders were arrested indiscrimi-
nately, from Charles Ruthenberg on
the left to Victor Berger on the right.
Equally as devastating as the
state crackdown were the actions of
local vigilantes. In Debss hometown
of Terre Haute, Indiana, a socialist
coal miner was lynched after he
refused to buy a Liberty Bond. In
Arizona, a mob loaded 1,200 iww
miners onto to cattle cars and
dropped them off in the Mexican
desert. In total, some 1,500 socialist
locals or one-third of the partys
chapters met their demise because
had gained control of the locals in
Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, Buffalo,
Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle,
Detroit, Philadelphia, and Newark,
as well as the Queens, Brooklyn, and
Bronx locals in New York. Equally
important to the lefts rising pros-
pects was its strength in the foreign
language federations. Comprised
of immigrants from countries like
Russia or Latvia, these federations
had seen their weight in the party
soar as vigilantism drove down the
sps native-born base in places like
Oklahoma. In 1917, the federations
constituted only 35percent of the
party membership in 1917; by 1919,
they accounted for fully 53percent.
As they became more powerful they
also became more radical, influenced
by the revolutionary movements
shaking Eastern Europe.
Ideologically, the partys new
left mixed left-wing mainstays
with some novel elements. First,
it replaced the purely syndicalist
emphasis on industrial unionism
with a more party-centered vision of
social revolution. In Russia, after all,
the revolution had not been launched
by the unions, but by the Bolsheviks
(after they had won a majority in
the soviets). Moreover, the federa-
tions membership was only thinly
connected to the mainsprings of
American working-class life. Most
of wartime repression. The entire
Oklahoma state party, once a bastion
of the left, voted to dissolve itself out
of fear of the violence coming its way.
This repression crippled the
party, inhibiting its ability to capi-
talize on its distinction as the only
major institution in American life
to oppose the war. It also strength-
ened the most moderate voices in
the party, as even left stalwarts could
be induced to rethink their princi-
ples in the face of a decade-long jail
sentence.
Repression, however, did not kill
the party. Even in the fall of 1917, as
the sp was coming under sustained
attack from both the state and vig-
ilantes, its vote totals continued
to grow. What would crush the
party, rendering it a truly marginal
force, would not be repression from
without, but disunion within.
The Split
From 1917 to 1919, the left in the sp
surged forward. Three factors pro-
pelled its advance.
First, steadfast opposition to the
American war effort gave the left a
new purpose and, with a war-suspi-
cious public, a new audience. Second,
the outbreak of heightened levels of
struggle in the US confirmed the
lefts argument that revolutionary
spoke little English, and were not
part of the union movement. As such,
they tended to de-emphasize unions
as a site of socialist activity.
They married this affinity for
political action with an impossibilist
strategy. With the hour of revolution
appearing near, the party left dis-
dained immediate demands, seeing
them as props for a decaying social
system. This was a devastating mis-
calculation: revolution was hardly
on the agenda in 1919 America, and
fighting for basic reforms was pre-
cisely the kind of struggle the US
working class needed to put itself in
a position to launch a broader assault
on capital.
The right, of course, was hor-
rified. Though figures like Hillquit
and Berger correctly observed that
the left vastly overestimated the
prospects for insurrection, their
opposition to the left went far deeper
than a disagreement over short-term
strategy. Massive differences of prin-
ciple separated the party leadership
from the left-wing insurgency.
Consider Victor Bergers writ-
ings on revolution. In a 1918 article
entitled Socialism, Revolution, &
Civilization, he warned his readers
that Some day in the near future
and soon after the war... there will
be a volcanic eruption. The hungry
millions will turn against the overfed
63
 few. A fearful retribution will be
enacted on the capitalist class as a
class. Far from celebrating this pros-
pect, however, Berger deplored it
as a revolution [which] will retro-
grade civilization it might throw
back the white race into barbarism.
Socialism, he argued, was the only
way to prevent such a revolution.
This vision of socialism as the
counter-revolutionary preserver
of white civilization could hardly
be more different from the lefts
vision. A conflict between the two
was inevitable.
The first blows came in spring
1919, during the elections for the
nec. The left dominated the vote,
winning twelve of fifteen seats.
Louis Fraina, an editor of the Class
Struggle, captured the most votes
overall; Victor Berger received about
a third of his total. Flush with victory,
the left called for a National Confer-
ence of the Left for late June.
The party right, however, was
not about to let the left take over
simply because they had won lead-
ership in an election. In April, the
partys New York state branch voted
to expel any local that affiliated
with the left. Four thousand mem-
bers were immediately kicked out
of the party. Then, in May, the old
National Executive Committee met
and decided to simply invalidate the
64
US was used against the Socialist
Party, too. During the period of its
ascent, Werner Sombart famously
argued that American prosperity pre-
cluded socialism from gaining a mass
base. The authorities, of course, were
not quite as confident that Sombarts
shoals of roast beef and apple pie
would be an effective prophylactic.
They recognized that socialism did
have a mass base, and in the crucible
of World Wari, when the country
was making its first bid for global
leadership, they resolved to do what-
ever it took to prevent the sp from
organizing an effective opposition to
the first project for a new American
century.
All of the bromides about the
American spirit of individualism,
about our exceptional national spirit,
and on and on, cannot hide the fact
that a self-declared socialist party
won the votes of hundreds of thou-
sands of American workers in the
early twentieth century by prom-
ising a revolution against the rule of
capital. This is a history that should
give confidence to any socialist
today.
In light of the sps history, the
verdicts of writers like Howe and
Bell are hardly sustainable. Far from
being out of touch with the reali-
ties of American life, the sp tapped
into a deep wellspring of ferocious
recent election results, citing spu-
rious accusations of fraud and low
voter turnout. The nec also voted
to expel the entire Michigan state
organization, which had recently
moved to write impossibilism into
the state party constitution, as well
as seven of the foreign language fed-
erations. Within a week, the nec had
thrown out more than twenty thou-
sand members.
The conservative leaders
haughty actions alienated it from
much of the party membership.
Hundreds of grassroots members
penned furious ripostes to the nec.
We do not accuse you of treason to
Socialism, one wrote, We know
you that you were never socialists.
Members who had been with the
party since the days of the Social
Democracy of America condemned
the leadership for dispensing with
internal democracy. But the right
was remorseless. Over the next few
weeks, it removed the state organi-
zations of Massachusetts and Ohio,
the Chicago local, and numerous
others. Two-thirds of the member-
ship would be kicked out during this
period; by July, the party was down
to thirty-nine thousand members.
The expelled left-wingers moved
rapidly to set up a new Communist
Party, in line with the perspective
laid out by the recently formed
discontent with American reality.
Declaring fundamental opposition
to capitalist society wasnt romantic
alienation, but a recognition that
society as a whole needed to be remade
if sharecroppers and workers were to
have any hope of justice. Indeed, it
was precisely the forces most dedi-
cated to accommodating to American
realities the sp right who chose
to destroy the party rather than let it
fall into the hands of the left.
Similarly, Weinsteins account
of a once-promising party destroyed
by sectarian imitation of revolution-
aries abroad evades the real political
questions posed by the sps history.
Communist International. How-
ever, at their meeting in June, large
differences erupted inside the left
itself. The foreign language federa-
tions wanted to start a revolutionary
party immediately. The native-born
left, by contrast, voted to stick it
out within the Socialist Party, until
it either recaptured the party or was
expelled.
As a result, two communist
parties formed: the Communist Par-
ty of American (led by the foreign
language federations) and the Com-
munist Labor Party (led by the
native-born socialists). The two par-
ties would eventually merge, under
Comintern pressure, in 1921, but for
their first two years they remained
utterly marginal forces.
The Socialist Party, meanwhile,
proceeded to its August convention,
now finally shorn of its left. And as
the conference would make clear,
they had no desire to welcome the
left back within its ranks.
When the Communist Labor
Party members attempted to gain
access to the conference which
was strictly controlled and choreo-
graphed by the leadership the nec
used the police to forcibly remove
the clp. Then, in what must be
regarded as one of the crowning acts
of chutzpah on the American left, the
right proceeded to issue a resolution
Throughout its history, party mem-
bers debated the best way forward
for American radicals. As early as
1905, it was clear that diametrically
opposed visions coexisted within
the party. While the right was, at
times, willing to challenge the afl
leadership, particularly when it
came to Gomperss dealings with
the two major political parties, it
was unwilling to countenance actions
which would cast it as disloyal to the
federation. This led to a peculiar uto-
pianism on the right, which managed
to convince itself that a federation
built around the most exclusionary
and anti-solidaristic forms of union
condemning the police as a capitalist
institution.
Unlearned Lessons
The Socialist Partys time as the
dominant institution on the Amer-
ican left ended in 1919.
What remained of the sp limped
along, in a position no more favorable
than the competing communist par-
ties. One party member, in a letter to
Eugene Debs, who languished in fed-
eral prison for his antiwar speeches,
confessed that [t]he Party is in a
weaker and more disorganized con-
dition than at any time in its history.
We are entirely without courage or
self-reliance.
By the mid-twenties, the sps
membership rolls had dropped to
a few thousand, and it was desper-
ately seeking alliances with various
reform efforts to maintain some
political sway. Though the party
would regain membership in the
late twenties and thirties, by then
the Communist Party had eclipsed
the sp as the leading organization
of American radicalism.
American socialists today should
be at once enlivened and chastened
by the history of the Socialist Party.
After all, every warning that bour-
geois ideologues deploy today about
the impossibility of socialism in the
activity was, nonetheless, naturally
evolving towards socialism.
The left maintained an entirely
different vision. Though compro-
mised by syndicalist impulses, it was
still clear-eyed about the level of class
struggle that would be required to
win even the most basic reforms from
the American ruling class. If it often
fell short of a strategy for mobilizing
that level of struggle, it at least saw
the terrain well enough to under-
stand that the afl or middle class
reformers were not going to be any
help in achieving it.
Ultimately, the history of the
sp that comes down to us from fig-
ures like Howe and Weinstein has
depoliticized the party. It obscures
the debates over strategy that raged
throughout the partys entire history.
It evacuates the conflict between the
right and left of substantive conflict;
the left are reduced to sectarians
whose only animating principle is
being the most radical people in the
room, while the rights equivocations
and ultimate purge of the left are dis-
connected from their basic strategic
vision. The history of the sp is both
more inspiring and more instructive
than this.
When Debs was sentenced to
prison for his antiwar activities in
1919, he ended his famous courtroom
speech with the following promise:
65
 Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no
immunity. I realize that finally the right
must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as
now the great struggle between the
powers of greed and exploitation on the one
hand and upon the other the rising
hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.
I can see the dawn of the better day
for humanity. The people are awakening. In due
time they will and must come to their
own.... Let the people everywhere take heart of
hope, for the cross is bending, the
midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the
morning.

66

The night has lasted longer, and the

cross has proven more solid, than
Debs, or indeed any of his contempo-
raries, might have imagined. Yet the
history of the Socialist Party shows
us that the United States possesses
no special immunity against socialist
politics. Today, as a new generation
turns left, the socialist movement
has a chance to continue the work
begun by Debs and his comrades.
Understanding their history will be
necessary for making our own.

67
THE PARTY WE NEED 69
CULTURAL
CAPITAL

OUT-OF-CONTEXT
GRAMSCI
QUOTES GO HERE.
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
RED CHANNELS BY EILEEN JONES

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
JAMES CLAPHAM

The Romance
of American
Liberalism

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT Grading a century of liberal film

Ralph Bellamy presidents.
Sunrise at
Campobello
REALISM

Well, he really did have polio.

Sentimental portrait of a dynamic
FDR struggling to revive his
political career after crippling SEX APPEAL ACTING FLOURISHES
illness. Given that Bellamy was known Starchy upbeat Roosevelt voice.
for playing the comical loser at Excellent chin work, keeping it
GRAVITAS love not bad! aimed at the sky.
When crutching his way bravely up
to the podium at the end, youre LOVABILITY SNAP COMPARISON
ready to sing Hail to the Chief. Polio changes him from haughty Dudley Do-Right.
rich guy to champion of the people.

A
CYNICISM

No, just charming political savvy CASTING (FOR ADMIRING

like people used to admire. Terrific. Bellamy gets the over- FDR)
whelming sunny confidence down
HAIR pat, and in wire-rim glasses even
Tawny and patrician. looks like FDR.

THE PARTY WE NEED 71

 RED CHANNELS

LOVABILITY

Off the charts. Its Bill Murray.

REALISM

Totally accurate portrayal if Bill CASTING

Murray had had polio and mis-
tresses and the presidency of the
United States in the 1930s and 40s.
GRAVITAS
Just go with it. Pretend it makes any
sense at all to see Bill Murrays Irish
mug representing FDRs long
waspy face.

Lots of Great Man poses in reverent ACTING FLOURISHES

light. Murray stays poker-faced while
being carried around, bride-style,
CYNICISM by a male attendant.
Lies to all the women in his life, but
only because hes got a lot on his SNAP COMPARISON
plate. FDRs just like Bill Murray.

HAIR GRADE
Thin, full of pathos.

B
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

Bill Murray SEX APPEAL (FOR BILL)

Hyde Park Lets just say the scene featuring

FDR getting a hand job is some-
on Hudson thing we could all live without.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT REALISM CASTING

Jon Voight
Ha! Insane. Voights a cold-eyed
humorless Tea Party conservative
Pearl Harbor GRAVITAS freak, and so-so acting ability cant
All attempts at a serious portrayal overcome utter lack of FDR
undone by Voights monstrous chin appearance or qualities.
prosthetics that double the length of
his face. ACTING FLOURISHES

Voight does an unexpected slapstick

CYNICISM comedy routine as wheelchair-
There can be no cynicism about bound FDR totters to his feet, sways
wwii. like the Tin Man in The Wizard of
Oz, to show doubtful military brass
HAIR that anything is possible.
Toupee.
SNAP COMPARISON

SEX APPEAL Frankensteins monsters politically

Jabba the Hutt is sexier. successful brother.

F
LOVABILITY
(FOR F&*# THIS
Nil. Its weird.
CASTING)

72 23 / FALL 2016
 The Romance of American Liberalism

REALISM

The usual presidential hagiography,

but admits Truman got his start
working for a corrupt political
machine.
GRAVITAS
More than youd think.
CYNICISM
Not Give Em Hell Harry, who
always tells it like it is!
CASTING
Good Sinise may be a loony
reactionary, but hes also a fine
actor who can do short and doughty
with hidden depths.
ACTING FLOURISHES
Braying Missouri accent.
SNAP COMPARISON

George Bailey in Its a Wonderful

HAIR Life put-upon regular guy but it
Its on his head. turns out everybody loved him after
all.
SEX APPEAL

B
Nah.
HARRY S. TRUMAN (FOR BETTER

Gary Sinise LOVABILITY

Seems like a nice man. Was sorry

THAN EXPECTED)

Truman about those A-bombs.

JOHN F. KENNEDY REALISM LOVABILITY

Cliff Robertson Heroics of young naval officer

JFK in the war of the Pacific,
Meh.

PT 109 vouched for by Kennedy himself, CASTING

with Robertson approved by the Shouldve tried harder to persuade

president personally. Movie still Jackie Kennedys choice for the
seems fake as hell. part: young Warren Beatty.

GRAVITAS ACTING FLOURISHES

Entirely too much. None. Robertson refuses to do

Kennedys New England clam
CYNICISM chowdah accent or flash his toothy
None. All generic wwii manliness. grin or take his shirt off.

HAIR SNAP COMPARISON

Nowhere near as luxuriant as young I dont know, some boring guy.

JFKs crop.

D
SEX APPEAL (FOR DULL)
Bizarrely low. Nobody bothered to
look at the old snapshots of
startlingly handsome, shirtless JFK
in the Navy? (Google em.)

THE PARTY WE NEED 73

 RED CHANNELS SEX APPEAL

So many erotic black-and-white

shots of JFK conferring intensely
with RFK by White House pillars,
its quite dizzying.

LOVABILITY
REALISM Were not doing lovable JFK here.
JFKs handling of the Cuban missile This is serious.
crisis seen through the eyes of his
worshipful friend and political CASTING
consultant Kenneth P. ODonnell, As good as were ever likely to get.
played by Kevin Costner (who
manages to interfere with realistic ACTING FLOURISHES
effects wherever they get a Keeps that jaw clenched
foothold). throughout.

GRAVITAS SNAP COMPARISON

Bruce Greenwoods JFK as one Dream Man of ten thousand tv
tense mass of gravitas in a nice suit. commercials.

B
CYNICISM
JOHN F. KENNEDY RFK handles that. (FOR BUT HES SO

Bruce Greenwood HAIR

GOOD-LOOKING)

Thirteen Days Awesome.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON REALISM CASTING

Tom Wilkinson
Dubious: LBJ simplistically
portrayed as the villain, trying and
Selma failing to thwart Martin Luther
Kings leadership in the struggle for
black voting rights.
Odd. Tom Wilkinson is a fine
British actor but conveys none of
the brute vitality of LBJ.
ACTING FLOURISHES

Querulous voice shakes when angry

GRAVITAS (always).
Shaky.
SNAP COMPARISON

CYNICISM Irritable businessman from

Not enough. Wheres the wily, Anytown, Texas.
formidable LBJ?

D
HAIR (FOR DUBIOUS)
Slicked back villain-style.

SEX APPEAL

God, no.

LOVABILITY

Zilch.

74 23 / FALL 2016
 The Romance of American Liberalism

BILL CLINTON REALISM LOVABILITY

John Travolta
Seems like they got Bill Clintons
number. Travolta needs no padding
Primary Colors to play that pudgy, lyin, cheatin,
cornpone-eatin sumbitch whose
Every character in the film suc-
cumbs to it. Audience, not so much.
CASTING

huckster charm got him into the Travolta has no Southernness to

White House despite scandals him, but hes got pudgy charm, and
popping up all around him. who else couldve done it any
better?
GRAVITAS

Nope. ACTING FLOURISHES

Cries copious tears.

CYNICISM

Off the charts, oozes it like bacon SNAP COMPARISON

grease. Southern-fried Pillsbury Doughboy.

B
HAIR

Dyed silver, with eyebrows frosted (FOR

to match. BUBBALICIOUS)

SEX APPEAL

Nowhere evident, in spite of all the

adultery.

THE PARTY WE NEED 75

 CULTURAL CAPITAL
BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE
Freedoms
Call
Inappropriate campaign
music is the only good
campaign music.
Watching politicians try to
humanize themselves through
beloved popular music is a bit like
an immovable object meeting an
unstoppable force. No matter how
hard the campaign tries to make
them work together, they just dont.
At best, politicians open themselves
up to lyrical interpretations
anathema to their message. At
worst, they inadvertently end up
embarrassing themselves by
provoking backlashes from artists.
Here are a few recent gems.
76
BY ALEXANDER BILLET
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
JAMES CLAPHAM
THE BEATLES
Here Comes the Sun
2016 Republican National Convention
Little darling, its been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since its been here
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
Its all right
Afterwards, the estate of George Harrison tweeted:
The unauthorized use of Here Comes the Sun at the
[convention] is offensive and against the wishes of the
George Harrison estate. Then followed up: If it had
been Beware of Darkness, we might have approved it!
23 / FALL 2016
 BIKINI KILL

Rebel Girl
promo video for Hillary Clintons 2016 nomination
campaign

When she talks, I hear the revolution

In her kiss, I taste the revolution!
When she walks, the revolutions coming
In her hips, theres revolution

When drummer, Bernie-supporter, and founding Bikini

Killer Tobi Vail discovered that Clintons camp was
using the song, she filed a copyright complaint to have it
taken down, claiming she was acting on behalf of scores
of Bikini Kill fans.

PATSY CLINE

Crazy
Ross Perot for his 1996 Reform Party presidential
campaign

Crazy, Im crazy for feeling so lonely

Im crazy, crazy for feeling so blue
I knew youd love me as long as you wanted
And then someday youd leave me for somebody
new

Perhaps Perot was attempting to make some sort of

point about the Washington establishment that Admiral
Stockdales Gridlock! failed to make, but given the
candidates eccentric personality, a rather different
reading ended up landing.

SAM AND DAVE

Soul Man
adapted as Dole Man for Bob Doles 1996
presidential campaign

Im a Dole man
Im a Dole man

This one almost makes you feel sorry for Dole. The then
seventy-three-year-old had a hard enough time making
himself seem hip next to the far-younger incumbent Bill
Clinton without awkwardly inserting his name into one
of the best-known soul songs of all time.

THE PARTY WE NEED 77

 THE CLASH

Rudie Cant Fail

Rudy Giulianis run for the 2008 Republican
nomination

I know that my life make you nervous

But I tell you that I cant live in service
Like the doctor who was born for a purpose
Rudie cant fail

On top of the shameless sacrilege it takes for any

conservative to appropriate The Clash, how exactly does
the man who turned whole swaths of New York City into
Disneyland think its a good idea to use a song about the
cool rebel street kids that his mayoral administration
spent ten years locking up?

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL

Fortunate Son
John Kerrys presidential campaign, 2004

It aint me
It aint me
I aint no millionaires son

Seeming to highlight Kerrys transformation from

Vietnam Veteran Against the War to pro-war Democrat,
this sixties antiwar favorite inadvertently pointed to the
gap between working-class soldiers and Kerrys
blue-blooded roots.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

Born In the U.S.A.

Ronald Reagans presidential campaign, 1984

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary

Out by the gas fires of the refinery
Im ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run aint got nowhere to go

Easily the best-known campaign song flub in recent

American presidential history, Reagans people clearly
missed that to Springsteens returning Vietnam vet,
being born in the USA is a burden more than a point
of pride.

78 23 / FALL 2016
 Freedoms Call

WOODY GUTHRIE

This Land Is Your Land

George H.W. Bushs presidential campaign, 1988

As I went walking I saw a sign there

And on the sign it said No Trespassing.
But on the other side it didnt say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

The arch-conservative Bush the First uses a song about the

evils of private property written by a lifelong communist.
What more can be said here?

THE PARTY WE NEED 79

 CULTURAL CAPITAL
WAYS OF SEEING
It Takes
a Factory
With lofty promises, the
Clinton Foundation helped
found an industrial park in
earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
Photographer Robert Shook
traveled there to document
how things went terribly
wrong.
80
BY ROBERT CARPENTER SHOOK
Haiti has had a miserable last few years. In 2010, a
7.0magnitude earthquake struck the already poor
country, killing more than 160,000, displacing nearly
1.5million, and starting a reconstruction effort that
continues today. Then this October, Hurricane Matthew
swept through the Caribbean, killing over 1,000people
and ripping homes, vegetation, and the countrys
infrastructure from the ground. More than a million
people are left needing food, clean water, and medicine,
as disease spreads in the midst of a cholera epidemic.
Disasters like these are compounded by endemic
poverty. Haiti, born from a 1791 slave revolution, was
hobbled from the beginning when France, its former
colonial overlord, forced the worlds first black republic
at gunpoint to pay extortionate reparations for winning
its own freedom. Haiti has been the venue of constant
Western intervention ever since, including a 1915
invasion by the United States.
This legacy continues. State Department cables released
by WikiLeaks in 2011 show that companies like Levis
and Fruit of the Loom colluded with the US Embassy in
Haiti to block a proposed increase in the minimum wage
in 2009. Hillary Clinton was running the State Depart-
ment at the time. Haitian workers currently earn a
minimum wage of 225gourdes a day, after successfully
raising the wage in 2014. Today that equates to us$3.40.
Caracol Industrial Park is one of the places paying this
wage. The park is a $300 million manufacturing center
created in 2012 through a joint venture of the Haitian
government, the US State Department, the Inter-
American Development Bank, and the Clinton Founda-
tion. Both Bill and Hillary were personally involved at
every step of its development and flew down for the
ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Today, the park is held up as a success story by both the
US government and the Clinton Foundation itself.
Workers now earn around twenty-five cents per day
more than they did two years ago thanks to a pay raise.
Yet due to a decline in the gourdes value, Caracol
Industrial Park workers earn less than four dollars a day.
And while teams sometimes receive small commissions
of around eighty cents per day, federal and work taxes
for water and toilet paper erode this wage further. I
traveled to Caracol in August 2014 and April 2016 to see
for myself how workers survive on these meager wages.
23 / FALL 2016
 WAYS OF SEEING

82 23 / FALL 2016
 It Takes a Factory

The parks founders often tout its

supposed economic benefits to
locals, including the projected
creation of up to sixty-five thousand
jobs over ten years. What they dont
mention is that these benefits are
built on land that once provided a
livelihood for hundreds of local
farmers.

Jean-Louis, eighty-five, is one of

more than three hundred farmers in
Caracol whose land was seized by
the Haitian government to make
way for the construction of
factories. Where fertile land once
served to grow corn that Jean-Louis
could sell at the market, there now
stand garment factories providing
low-wage jobs for Haitian workers,
and fueled by the Wests demand
for cheap consumer products.

Farmers like Jean-Louis had no

choice in the matter and were
compensated for their land, but still
struggle to survive. They are unable
to find jobs at the factory as they are
generally too old. Despite his age,
Jean-Louis still keeps cattle and
works for farmers who still have
land.

They said I had to [sell the land],

because everyone else was, explains
Duvales Paul, another farmer.
There were helicopters above us,
looking at us and the land.
Helicopters are a rare sight for Paul
and other farmers, who are used to
seeing them only when military
action is under way.

The majority of farmers I spoke to

said they would not have sold their
land willingly, and are now at a
similar or worse level of poverty
than before the seizure.

THE PARTY WE NEED 83

 WAYS OF SEEING
During my most recent trip to
Haiti, I stayed in the town of
Limonade with a family of three:
Daphne, her husband Renold,
and their daughter Stephanie.
Daphne is a garment worker at a
Caracol Park factory. Renold
was a construction worker before
losing his arm in a bus accident.
While he is sometimes able to find
work supervising construction,
Daphne brings in the majority of
the familys money.
Renolds hospital bills, and his
subsequent inability to find
consistent work, put extreme
financial pressure on the family.
While a living wage in Haiti for a
family of three is around $23 a day,
Daphne, Renold, and Stephanie fall
well under this. They live in an
unfinished two-room home which,
84 23 / FALL 2016
once completed, will have neither
running water nor indoor cooking
facilities. The family will forego
electricity because they wont be
able to afford the bill. At night, they
battle punishing heat and swarms of
mosquitoes.
For food, the family substitutes the
more nourishing rice and beans
for which they can only occasionally
scrape together money with
cheap crops like mangoes and
sugarcane. They rarely eat three full
meals a day. Despite not always
being able to send Stephanie to
school or even feed her, the family is
still better off than many sole-bread-
winner households, and generously
shared their meals generally
bananas boiled in fish sauce with
me and my translator Louines.
 Running Hed

THE PARTY WE NEED 85

86 23 / FALL 2016

The difficulty of getting to work
adds yet another obstacle for
workers in Caracol. Each day,
Daphne gets up at 5:45am, puts on
makeup, and by 6am is out the
door, running to catch the bus she
and dozens of other workers take to
get to the park. These buses are
often dangerously overcrowded.
Renold lost his arm because he was
hanging onto the bus on his way
home from work. Transportation
can add yet one more cost to
workers already precarious lives.
THE PARTY WE NEED
It Takes a Factory
While buses are free, if weather,
protests, or other incidents mean
the bus doesnt come, workers like
Daphne have to pay upwards of
g100 (us$1.55) out of their g240
(us$3.73) salary to get to work by
motorcycle. This happened twice in
the two weeks I stayed with the
family. While the cost is steep, its
worth it. Missing work means not
only a loss of a full days wages, but
also the loss of Sundays wages, a
bonus workers receive for making it
to every other day of work.
87
88 23 / FALL 2016
 It Takes a Factory

Schools in Haiti are not free.

Virtually all are private and can
charge as much as $180 a year for
primary education tuition and $400
for secondary education, far out of
reach for most Haitians. That
doesnt even include the cost of
items like books and uniforms.

Kalos, Daphne and Renolds

sixteen-year-old neighbor, is unable
to attend school because he doesnt
own a pair of shoes, which cost
around eight dollars at the local
market. For most Haitians, who live
on less than two dollars a day, this is
more than half of a weeks wages. To
make up for this, Kalos spends his
free time tutoring and being tutored
by other children in the
neighborhood.

About five miles from Limonade is

s&h School. The school houses two
plaques that feature endorsements
from both Clintons. It was set up by
Sae-A Trading, a Korean textile and
garment manufacturer that is
Caracol Industrial Parks main
tenant and a Clinton Foundation
donor. The company, which
exported $1.8billion worth of
products in 2014, supplies clothing
to stores like Walmart and Gap.

THE PARTY WE NEED 89

 WAYS OF SEEING

Shifts at the Sae-A factory are six

days a week, eight hours a day. With
transportation included, Daphnes
job typically means she doesnt get
home until after 6pm. Workers at
the Sae-A factory produce around
150 shirts per hour, receiving g240
(us$3.73) per day. If they manage to
churn out more than 1,100 t-shirts
in a day, they receive a bonus of as
much as g50 (us$0.78). The wages
take care of only food and rent, and
not much else.

When then Haitian president

Michael Martelly visited the Sae-A
factory, several workers personally
complained to him about conditions
at the factory and were docked a
days pay as punishment. Not that
they had a friendly ear: Martelly
sent in the Brigade dIntervention
Motorise (bim) a famously
corrupt, elite unit of the Haitian
police to quell the unrest.

These conditions are not limited to

Sae-A. Noel Jeancinor, another
farmer whose land was seized, was
paid a mere g200 (us$3.10) for
construction shifts that could at
times stretch far longer than twelve
hours if he was paid at all. While
he was promised overtime, it was
rarely given.

90 23 / FALL 2016
 It Takes a Factory

THE PARTY WE NEED 91

The Party
We Want
One defeat looms larger than
any other for the American left: our
failure to build a party in the
interests of the countrys working
majority. We explore why the
United States doesnt have a labor
party and what, if anything,
can be done to bring that dream
to life.
94 23 / FALL 2016
 Where Is
Our Labor
Party?
Over the years, efforts of US workers
to build a party that
represents their interests have come
up short. Why?

by Jason Schulman

A
s Bernie Sanders thundered and gesticulated this election
season, many paid attention. Few had been exposed to such
an unflinching social-democratic program, or heard an anal-
ysis of society that blamed inequality and exploitation on the
billionaire class.
But if Sanders inspired allegiance unlike any other left-wing candidate in
decades, his decision to run within the Democratic Party invited caution from
many on the socialist left. The Democrats, after all, are dominated by repre-
sentatives of the capitalist class, imposing grave limitations on any left-wing
candidacy under its umbrella.
Why was the Sanders wave such a novelty in American politics? And why
was the senator forced into such a predicament choosing between his cher-
ished status as a political independent and any chance of national relevance in
a two-party system? The answer lies in a missing labor party. The US is alone
among advanced capitalist countries in lacking one. But another question then
arises: why is the US such an exceptional outlier?
Werner Sombarts classic Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?
provides a good place to start the search. Writing in 1906, Sombart sought to
explain why the Socialist Party of America (sp) was so marginal compared to
its continental European counterparts and, secondarily, why the American
Federation of Labor (afl), the strongest union federation at the time, had no
interest in socialist politics or even in building a labor-based party.

ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY HAYSOM THE PARTY WE NEED 95

THE PARTY WE WANT

If modern Socialism follows as a necessary reaction Hartz declared that the prevalence of egalitarianism in
to capitalism, Sombart reasoned, the country with the the US minimized or eliminated the status-based griev-
most advanced capitalist development, namely the United ances that would have made a labor party possible. Hartz
States, would at the same time be the one providing the considered the dominant liberal ethos of the country so
classic case of Socialism, and its working class would be socialist that Americanism effectively became a sub-
supporters of the most radical of Socialist movements. stitute socialism, ensuring a labor party would never get
Yet clearly this hadnt happened. Sombart offered off the ground. The late US socialist leader Michael Har-
two explanations as to why. First, the two major political rington shared this view and considered the Democratic
parties cribbed the platform planks of oppositional parties Party a labor party in disguise.
when they grew sufficiently large and threatening. This But when it comes to the labor party question, is
was particularly common for the Democratic Party, which America really so exceptional?
effectively absorbed the Peoples (Populist) Party in 1896,
and lifted parts of the Socialist platform in the 1930s.
Against Exceptionalism
Sombarts primary explanation, however, was pros-
perity US workers were simply too well off (and too able Count Robin Archer among the skeptics. For Archer
to scale the social ladder) to support the founding of a labor author of the 2010 book Why Is There No Labor Party in
or mass socialist party. Workers, bathed in affluence, devel- the United States? the conventional wisdom mistakenly
oped a conservatism and even a love for capitalism; all relies on comparisons with Europe. Archer instead urges
socialist Utopias, Sombart famously us to look at the USs most similar
concluded, came to nothing on reefs New World counterpart: Australia.
of roast beef and apple pie. In the 1890s, Australia and the
Not everyone bought Sombarts US were both suffering through the
thesis. Over the next century, thinkers worst depression of the nineteenth
offered competing explanations of century. Their unions were utterly
Americas political exceptionalism.
Anti-labor defeated in a series of major indus-
Some blamed anti-black and anti-Chi- trial confrontations. Yet contrary to
nese racism for reducing the viability
crackdowns their US comrades, Australian union-
of a labor party in the 1890s. Others destroyed ists responded by establishing one of
(including Karl Kautsky and Vladimir the base of the earliest and most electorally suc-
Lenin) focused on the early presence
semi-skilled cessful labor parties in the world.
of universal manhood suffrage for The nationwide Australian Labor
whites, arguing that it removed the
and unskilled Party (alp) took office for the first
kind of class-based political griev- workers needed time in 1904 and returned in 1908.
ances that fueled the formation of to establish a These were short-lived minority
labor parties elsewhere.
labor party. governments, but in 1910 it formed
The institutional features of a majority government supported by
the American political system half the electorate. No social-demo-
(federalism, presidentialism, and sin- cratic government approached this
gle-member, winner-take-all electoral level of support until the New Zea-
districts) was another target. Morris land Labour Party and the Swedish
Hillquit, a Socialist Party founder, Social Democrats took office in 1938
placed himself in this camp, asserting and 1940, respectively.
that the structure of American politics made most trade Back in the US, operating in similar conditions, the
union leaders see a labor party as an electoral pipe dream. afl ignored labor party campaigners and retained its com-
Institutional analyses were matched by an equally mitment to the Democratic Party and pure-and-simple
passionate emphasis on political ideology. Historian Louis unionism (which held that organized labor should concern

96 23 / FALL 2016

itself with the workplace more than the state). The decision
to reject the party-building option soon hardened into
settled doctrine, dooming attempts to get an independent
working-class politics off the ground.
Archer uses the Australia comparison to shoot down
an array of claims about US exceptionalism. For example,
while its true that American workers enjoyed high living
standards compared to their European counterparts in the
1890s, the conditions of Australian workers were higher
still.
In addition, Australian unionists had the same basic
racial antipathies as their American counterparts, and yet
this was quite compatible with the establishment of new
industry-wide unions and a labor party. However deplor-
able, this racial animus bound white workers together
against immigrant colored labor, and for years the alp
officially supported, in the words of political scientist Dean
Jaensch, the cultivation of an Australian sentiment based
on the maintenance of racial purity. Championing White
Australia enabled Labor to pose as the Australian nation-
alist party and win support among middle-class racists.
Archer also downplays racism as a particularly
important wedge between American workers in the late
nineteenth century. The US labor movement, he argues,
had not yet fully embraced racial hostility toward southern
and eastern European immigrants, and the great migration
of black workers to northern factories had not yet occurred.
Kautsky and Lenins explanation that because
basic political rights already existed in the United States,
American workers didnt develop European levels of class
consciousness and organization comes in for criticism
as well. While Australian men enjoyed equal rights, this
did not impair efforts to create the Labor Party. Quite the
contrary: in both cases, Archer contends, the prior achieve-
ment of suffrage legitimized efforts to engage in political
mobilization, and provided a ready-made electoral arena
in which to undertake this task.
Similarly, labor leaders and the pro-labor press in
Australia regarded the dominance of liberal values as an
opportunity rather than as a constraint. They saw them-
selves as defenders of these values, which, they argued, were
being threatened by contemporary social developments.
What about the electoral rules of the game in the US?
Did the election system and federalism derail attempts to
launch a labor party? In the late nineteenth century, both
countries used a first-past-the-post system based primarily
THE PARTY WE NEED
WHERE IS OUR LABOR PARTY?
on single-member districts. Yet in Australia (thanks to the
geographic concentration of working-class voters in many
areas), labor parties often overcame such thresholds and
elected members to parliament.
Federalism also fails as an explanation. Archer argues
that while it made nationwide change more difficult to
achieve in the early twentieth century, the decentraliza-
tion of the state also made it easier for the Australian labor
movement to establish a political foothold.
So why then, despite widespread interest, did US
workers fail to form a labor party? At the top of Archers
list: the degree of armed repression in America, which sig-
nificantly outstripped anti-union violence in Australia. As
Archer writes: While troops in Australia faced outwards
towards imaginary foreign threats, troops in the United
States faced inwards towards imaginary domestic threats.
When repression did befall Australian workers, it acted
as something of an impetus, convincing many unionists
that they needed to form a party and contest parliamentary
elections. In the US, anti-labor crackdowns had no such
silver linings. They destroyed the base of semi-skilled and
unskilled workers needed to establish a labor party, and
made craft union leaders fearful of taking strong electoral
steps.
Archers second reason for the absence of a US labor
party is ethno-religious cleavages, which created a hurdle
that Australian unions did not have to jump. afl leaders
worried that establishing a labor party would force their
members to choose between union solidarity and loyalties
rooted in conflicting religious commitments. They con-
cluded that, in such a contest, God would prevail and the
unions would be destroyed. In other words, labor leaders
believed that the tendency of Americans to vote based on
their religious and ethnic identities would condemn both
trade unions and their labor party to oblivion.
Lastly, Archer examines the problems of Marxist
organizations themselves. Fights between Marxists and
followers of Ferdinand Lassalle rivals in the German
socialist movement who disagreed about whether the state
was a class-based entity that existed to maintain capitalist
exploitation raged in the United States, but found no
equivalent in the Australian labor movement.
Ironically, it was avowed Marxists who took a pure-
and-simple unionist perspective that saw establishing a
labor party as an overt or covert attempt to undermine
the unions. Personal recriminations, deep distrust of
97
THE PARTY WE WANT
opponents, and dogmatic certainty characterized both
sides, but Archer claims that it was the paradoxical strength
of a sectarian version of Marxism which opposed the
independent working-class political action that Marx him-
self supported that helped undermine the possibility of
an American labor party.
Squandered Opportunities
Archers analysis goes a long way toward explaining why
a nationwide labor party didnt emerge around the turn
of the century. But the reasons why a party still failed to
emerge after the formation of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (cio) in the 1930s remain somewhat murky.
Part of the explanation, as the sociologist Barry Eidlin
has shown, is that that unlike their counterparts elsewhere,
Roosevelt and the Democrats responded to farmer and
labor insurgency with cooption rather than coercion, using
the Great Depression to broaden their coalition with
appeals to the forgotten man and policy offerings that
absorbed some working- and agrarian-class fractions.
Roosevelts support for the Wagner Act, in particular,
strengthened ties between labor and the Democrats,
as union officials like Amalgamated Clothing Workers
(acwa) president Sidney Hillman and Teamsters presi-
dent Daniel Tobin became prominent Democratic Party
advisers and officials.
But why did the cio unions refuse to organize a labor
party when, as Eidlin notes, there was such a disconnect
between Democratic Party rhetoric defending labor rights
and the reality of Democratic governors using state troops
to break strikes?
Some scholars, like historian Eric Davin, hold the cio
leadership responsible. In the early 1930s, local labor par-
ties ran candidates in at least twenty-three areas and won
control of the local government of Berlin, New Hampshire.
Central labor councils in at least ten other places advo-
cated building a national labor party, as did state labor
federations in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and
Wisconsin. At the 1935 afl convention, which led to the
creation of the cio, various unions submitted proposals
for a labor party; a resolution endorsing the idea only
narrowly failed.
But by 1936, John L. Lewis, president of the United
Mine Workers of America (umw) and the cio, and
Sidney Hillman, head of the acwa, had founded Labors
98 23 / FALL 2016
Nonpartisan League a move designed to ensure the cio
would remain loyal to the ostensibly pro-labor Roosevelt.
The impact of Lewis and Hillmans decision was soon
evident. When rank-and-filers in the South Bend local
of the fledgling United Auto Workers (uaw) defeated a
resolution to back Roosevelt proposing a farmer-labor
party instead the cio leadership sprung into action.
Lewis dispatched Adolf Germer, his personal representa-
tive, to convince the uaw delegates to backtrack on their
plans. If they dug in their heels, he said, the cio would
rescind the uaw s funding to organize the auto industry.
The rebels relented.
By this point, historian Mark Naison writes, ties
between the labor movement and the national Demo-
cratic Party had become so powerful that labor leaders,
whether radical or mainstream, could not challenge them
without jeopardizing their careers. Those who did so, like
Communist Party trade unionists who supported Henry
Wallaces Progressive Party in 1948, soon found themselves
booted from organized labor.
It was the complete failure of Wallaces presidential
campaign that led union leaders like Walter Reuther, once
an advocate of building an independent labor party, to
shelve the idea in favor of pushing for social-democratic
welfare programs through the Democratic Party.
Assuming that the Republicans would win the presi-
dency in 1948 (and fearful of more anti-union legislation
like the Taft-Hartley Act, which the Republican Congress
had passed a year earlier) the uaw executive board had
initially called for a new party after the election. Walters
brother Victor even planned an educational conference
featuring leaders of British and Canadian social democracy.
But when Harry Truman unexpectedly triumphed,
Walter threw his lot in with the Democrats, despite the
growing potential of American organized labor which
by 1950 was larger and more powerful than ever before
to go its own way.
Reuther now claimed that in Europe where you
have rigid class groupings, there labor parties are a natural
political expression because there you have a highly fixed
and class society. But America is a society in which social
groups are in flux I believe that we have a society that
is not rigid in character along class lines, and that is the
great hope of America. A former Socialist, a union leader
once labeled The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, was
now echoing Werner Sombart.

The Australian
experience proves that
an electoral system
with high barriers
isnt an automatic
death sentence for
labor parties.
By the mid-1960s as Lyndon Johnson constructed
his Great Society and waged a War on Poverty it millions of other Americans endorsed his social-democratic
seemed like the Reutherite strategy of social-democra-
tizing the US through the Democratic Partys liberal wing
was finally being realized. But this moment proved quite
brief. The War on Poverty was, as Martin Luther King
said, shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam, and the
dominant wing of the Democratic Party would soon move
from liberal Keynesianism to neoliberalism.
The last real attempt to found an independent labor
party came in the 1990s. Led by the late Tony Mazzocchi,
leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Inter-
national Union (which has since merged with the United
Steelworkers), the effort initially went by the name Labor
Party Advocates (lpa). In 1996, the lpa declared itself
the Labor Party (lp).
Their timing seemed opportune, given Bill Clintons
support for the North American Free Trade Agreement
(nafta), the election of more progressive leaders in
the afl-cio, and the rebirth of a left wing in American
unions after decades of institutionalized, conservative
anticommunism.
THE PARTY WE NEED
WHERE IS OUR LABOR PARTY?
But the expected revitalization of the labor move-
ment didnt pan out, former lp national organizer Mark
Dudzic acknowledges, and the party floundered. Unable
to enter electoral politics from a position of strength,
the lp couldnt garner much interest from the majority
of US union officials. The transformation of lpa into the
lp proved to be premature.
Once again, the efforts of US workers to build a party
that represented their interests had come up short.
Will There Ever Be an American Labor
Party?
Over the past few decades, organized labors size and influ-
ence has steadily declined. The dominant, business-backed
wing of the Democratic Party does almost nothing that
could be construed as pro-labor. And even though Bernie
Sanders ran a staunchly pro-labor campaign on the Demo-
cratic ticket, the majority of national union leaders refused
to support his primary bid, endorsing the inevitable
winner Hillary Clinton instead. What Nelson Lichtenstein
calls labors institutional conservatism runs rampant
within most unions; they dare not risk losing a bet even
when winning yields so little.
Still, many rank-and-filers did support Sanders, and
message. So are the grounds for an independent labor party
more fertile today?
Its hard to say. Even if the current union leadership
wanted to make a clean break with Democratic Party pol-
itics and the recent primary indicates they clearly do
not organized labor is in a seriously weakened state.
While the Australian experience proves that an electoral
system with high barriers isnt an automatic death sentence
for labor parties, union-based formations elsewhere in the
world were established when workers represented a rising
class. It would be hard to characterize the US working class
this way today, even if the illusion of the United States as
a middle-class society is vanishing.
The establishment of a labor party may have to wait
until a genuinely new mass union movement arises
and with it the radical political currents that once
flourished in the United States. But Dudzic is right: what-
ever the difficulties, however delayed its birth, a labor
party remains the great unfinished business of the US
working class.
99
100 23 / FALL 2016
 A Blueprint
for a
New Party
After Bernie Sanders, we need
to think seriously about
what it would take to form a
democratic organization
rooted in the working class.

by Seth Ackerman

W
hen Bernie Sanders announced he would run for presi-
dent as a democratic socialist, few believed it would amount
to much. Then, against all expectations, Sanders drew mas-
sive crowds, commanded high levels of favorability in almost
every demographic category (including overwhelming support
among young people), and raised hundreds of millions in campaign dollars
from small donors.
Not least, he came within a few percentage points of beating Hillary Clinton,
a frontrunner once assumed to be unassailable.
Waged by a candidate who had never run as a Democrat before and has
declined to do so in the future, the Sanders campaign has revived hope that a
serious electoral politics to the left of the Democratic Party might be possible.
The question is what such a politics would mean in practice.
The question isnt new, and so far the debate has unfolded along familiar
lines. Advocates of third-party politics who backed Sanders in the primaries, like
Seattle councilmember Kshama Sawant, went on to support Jill Steins Green

ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY HAYSOM THE PARTY WE NEED 101

THE PARTY WE WANT
Party candidacy. Meanwhile, longstanding opponents of
the third-party route, like democratic socialist columnist
Harold Myerson, have argued that the Left should focus
on trying to change the Democratic Party from within.
Others have called for a different approach, standing
neither wholly inside nor wholly outside the Democratic
Party. But few concrete proposals have been discussed
so far.
This political moment offers a chance to fill in some of
these blanks to advance new electoral strategies for an
independent left-wing party rooted in the working class.
But we wont get far unless we grapple seriously with
the exceptional character of the American party system,
and the highly repressive laws that undergird it.
Lessons from the Labor Party
The last major effort to form a national vehicle for work-
ing-class politics was the Labor Party (lp), founded twenty
years ago. Under the leadership of Tony Mazzocchi, pres-
ident of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, the
partys organizers gathered support from other major
unions and grassroots trade-unionists and held its founding
convention in 1996.
The Labor Partys history is not well-known in the
broader progressive world. But as the most recent major
effort by organized labor to form an independent party,
it is a story that should interest anyone who hopes to see
a revival of left politics, because on the Left only unions
have the scale, experience, resources, and connections
with millions of workers needed to mount a permanent,
nationwide electoral project.
By all accounts it was an inspiring effort that seemed,
for a moment, to portend a renaissance for the labor-left.
But the party lost momentum just a few years after its
founding. By 2007 it had effectively ceased to exist.
In a history of the party based on interviews with major
participants, lp activist Jenny Brown cited two key factors
as being most important in explaining its decline. The
first was the weakening of the labor movement itself after
2000, especially the industrial unions that had formed its
original core.
But the second, more immediate reason was essen-
tially political: the party failed to attract enough support
from major national unions. That wasnt due to any great
fondness for the Democratic Party on the part of the labor
102 23 / FALL 2016
leadership of the time, or because they opposed the idea
of a labor party on principle. As Mazzocchi said in 1998:
Ive never found a person in the top labor leadership say
theyre opposed to a labor party.
Instead, the problem arose from the oldest dilemma of
Americas two-party system: running candidates against
Democrats risked electing anti-labor Republicans. For
unions whose members had a lot to lose, that risk was
considered too high.
Despite the dedication of its organizers, the Labor
Party didnt succeed. But its founders were right to believe
that a genuinely independent party, rather than a mere
informal faction of the Democrats, is indispensable to
successful working-class politics.
Today we can learn some lessons from their effort. A
true working-class party must be democratic and mem-
ber-controlled. It must be independent determining its
own platform and educating around it. It should actually
contest elections. And its candidates for public office should
be members of the party, accountable to the membership,
and pledged to respect the platform.
Each of those features plays a crucial role in mobilizing
working people to change society. The platform presents
a concrete image of what a better society could look like.
The candidates, by visibly contesting elections and winning
votes under the banner of the platform, generate a sense
of hope and momentum that this better society might be
attainable in practice. And because the members control
the party, working people can have confidence that the
party is genuinely acting on their behalf.
But notice what is missing from this list: there is no
mention of a separate ballot line.
The Labor Party always assumed that a genuinely inde-
pendent labor party must have a separate party ballot line.
That assumption was a mistake.
The assumption gave rise to an intractable dilemma:
if the party took a separate line and ran candidates against
incumbent Democrats, it would destroy relationships with
Democratic officeholders who might otherwise be sympa-
thetic to unions, and thus lose the support of the unions
that depended on those officeholders.
On the other hand, if it didnt run candidates which
is ultimately the path it chose the nagging question
would arise: whats the point of having this so-called
party in the first place? That question ended up spur-
ring endless internal debates over whether and when to run
 A BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW PARTY

The Grass Is
Greener
CANADA
* to receive official 250 official members nationwide*
recognition as a
100 signatures for each candidate
political party
Among democracies, the United MEXICO
** no petition
States enforces some of the most requirement for 3,000 members nationwide*
restrictive ballot laws in the world. ballot access

AUSTRALIA
500 signatures

candidates. And in the end, by not contesting elections, UK

the party failed to give workers a reason to pay attention 10 signatures
to the organization in the first place.
NORWAY
The dilemma stands out clearly in the recollections of
5,000 signatures
Labor Party veterans. The Labor Party had to start with
the assurance that it wouldnt play spoiler politics and that AUSTRIA
it would [first] focus on building the critical mass necessary 200-500 signatures per district
for serious electoral intervention, former lp national
organizer Mark Dudzic recalled in a recent interview. Yet, BELGIUM
as Les Leopold of the Labor Institute told Brown, that path 200-500 signatures per district
ultimately led to irrelevance: Its not easy for Americans
ITALY
to understand a party thats not electoral. I think that that
500 signatures for single candidates
was just a difficult sell.
1,500-4,000 signatures for party lists
In retrospect, Dudzic concluded, I think it was pre-
mature for us to coalesce into a party formation without FRANCE
an understanding of how we would relate to elections. **

SWEDEN
Only in the USA **
Labor Party organizers were not the first to worry about
IRELAND
being electoral spoilers discussions of third-party
**
politics have hinged on this problem for decades. However,
history shows that, contrary to popular belief, the spoiler NETHERLANDS
problem is not insurmountable. In fact, **
the trade-union activists in other coun-
tries who organized the successful labor
parties of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries faced the same dilemma: the RUSSIA
prospect of splitting the vote and causing 2,000,000 signatures (for national candidate)
defeat for more labor-sympathetic main-
stream parties (usually liberal parties). UNITED STATES
> 1,000,000 signatures (for a national candidate to
But those activists and their allies
appear on all state ballots) (ex:)
persevered, and as labor parties gained
in strength the spoiler issue gradually Georgia: 1% of total registered voters for state
became a threat to the mainstream par- office; 5% for national office
ties had. At that point, in the interests of
self-preservation, liberal parties moved New York: 5% of total votes cast in previous
to accommodate the upstarts, either gubernatorial election
by forging defensive electoral pacts (in
Pennsylvania: 2,000 for national legislator. 2,000 for
which the two parties agreed not to run governor, including 100 from at least 10 counties.

THE PARTY WE NEED 103

THE PARTY WE WANT
candidates against each other in specified districts) or by
pushing through proportional representation systems.
That gave the labor parties an initial foothold in the polit-
ical system.
But the United States is different. Beneath our win-
ner-take-all electoral rules, we also have a unique and
uniquely repressive legal system governing political
parties and the mechanics of elections. This system has
nothing to do with the Constitution or the Founding
Fathers. Rather, it was established by the major-party
leaders, state by state, over a period stretching roughly
from 1890 to 1920.
Before then, the old Jacksonian framework prevailed:
there was no secret ballot, and no officially printed ballot.
Voters brought their own tickets to the polls and depos-
ited them in a ballot box under the watchful eye of party
workers and onlookers.
Meanwhile, the parties which were then wholly
private, unregulated clubs, fueled by patronage chose
their nominees using the caucus-convention system: a
pyramid of county, state, and national party conventions
in which participants at the lower-level meetings chose
delegates to attend the higher-level meetings.
At the base of the pyramid were precinct-level cau-
cuses: informal, little-publicized gatherings where
decisions on delegates to be sent to the county conven-
tion were sewn up through private bargaining among a
few patronage-minded local notables.
In the 1880s and 1890s, this cozy system was dis-
rupted by a new breed of hustling candidates, who
actively campaigned for office rather than quietly cur-
rying favor with a few key party workers. When informal
local caucuses started to become scenes of open com-
petitive campaigning by rival factions, each seeking
lucrative patronage jobs, they degenerated into chaos, often
violence.
Worse, candidates who lost the party nomination
would try to win the election anyway by employing their
own agents to hand out pasted or knifed party tickets ments and filing deadlines were tightened and various
on election day, grafting their names inconspicuously onto
the regular party ticket.
Party leaders were losing control over their traditional
means of maintaining a disciplined political army. Their
response was a series of state-level legislative reforms that
permanently transformed the American political system,
creating the electoral machinery we have today.
104 23 / FALL 2016
Repression
Henceforth, state governments would administer party
primaries, print the official ballot for primary and general
elections, and mandate that voting be conducted in secret.
In the lore of American politics, these direct-primary
and Australian ballot laws (i.e., laws mandating govern-
ment-printed ballots cast inside a private booth) were the
work of idealistic progressive reformers aiming to depose
the party bosses and enshrine popular sovereignty. In
reality, they were adopted by the party leaders themselves
when such measures were deemed to suit their interests.
Of course, theres nothing objectionable about secretly
cast, government-printed ballots. Countries around the
world were adopting such good-government reforms
around the same time. But once the job of printing the
ballot was handed over to governments, some mechanism
was needed to determine who was officially a candidate,
and under which party label.
This is where the American system began to diverge
wildly from democratic norms elsewhere.
When the worlds first government-printed secret
ballot was adopted in Australia in the 1850s, the law
required a would-be parliamentary candidate to submit a
total of two endorsement signatures to get on the ballot.
When Britain adopted the reform in 1872, its requirement
was ten endorsement signatures. But when the first US
state, Massachusetts, passed an Australian-ballot law in
1888, it required one thousand signatures for statewide
office, and, in district-level races, signatures numbering
at least 1percent of the total votes cast at the preceding
election.
Yet those barriers were mild compared to what came
afterward. Over the three decades following US entry into
World Wari, as working-class and socialist parties bur-
geoned throughout the industrialized world, American
elites chose to deal with the problem by radically restricting
access to the ballot. In state after state, petition require-
forms of routine legal harassment, unknown in the rest of
the democratic world, became the norm.
The new restrictions came in waves, usually following
the entry of left-wing parties into the electoral process.
According to data gathered by Richard Winger of Ballot
Access News, in 1931 Illinois raised the petition requirement
for third-party statewide candidates from one thousand

signatures to twenty-five thousand. In California, the
requirement was raised from 1percent of the last total
gubernatorial vote to 10percent. In 1939, Pennsylvania
suddenly decided it was important that the thousands of
required signatures be gathered solely within a three-week
period. In New York, according to one account, minor-
party petitions began to be challenged for hyper-technical
defects.
Although these statutes have been assailed on all
sides, a 1937 Columbia Law Review article reported, their
severity is constantly being increased, probably because
the interests oppressed seldom have representation in
the legislatures. Indeed, when the Florida legislature
found socialists and communists advancing at the polls,
it responded in 1931 by banning any party from the ballot
unless it had won 30percent of the vote in two consecutive
elections; naturally, when the Republican Party failed to
meet that test, the state immediately lowered the threshold.
By comparison, in Britain getting on the ballot was
never a major concern for the newly founded Labour Party;
the only significant requirement was a 150 deposit (first
instituted in 1918), to be refunded if the candidate won at
least 12.5percent of the vote. In its first general-election
outing in 1900, the party started with a mere 1.8percent
of the national vote. Despite the allegedly fatal spoiler
problem, it then gradually increased its vote share until it
overtook the Liberals as the major party of the Left in 1922.
Today, in almost every established democracy, get-
ting on the ballot is at most a secondary concern for small
or new parties; in many countries it involves little more
than filling out some forms. In Canada, any party with 250
signed-up members can compete in all 338 House of Com-
mons districts nationwide, with each candidate needing
to submit one hundred voter signatures. In the United
Kingdom, a parliamentary candidate needs to submit ten
signatures, plus a 500 deposit which is refunded if the
candidate wins at least 5percent of the vote. In Australia,
a party with five hundred members can run candidates in
all House of Representatives districts, with a $770 deposit
for each candidate, refundable if the candidate wins at least
4percent of the vote.
In Ireland, Finland, Denmark, and Germany, signature
requirements for a parliamentary candidacy range from 30
to 250, and up to a maximum of 500 in the largest districts
of Austria and Belgium. In France and the Netherlands,
only some paperwork is required.
THE PARTY WE NEED
A BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW PARTY
The Council of Europe, the pan-European intergov-
ernmental body, maintains a Code of Good Practice in
Electoral Matters, which catalogues electoral practices
that contravene international standards. Such violations
often read like a manual of US election procedure. In
2006, the council condemned the Republic of Belarus for
violating the provision of the code proscribing signature
requirements larger than 1percent of a districts voters, a
level the council regards as extremely high; in 2014, Illinois
required more than triple that number for House candida-
cies. In 2004, the council rebuked Azerbaijan for its rule
forbidding voters from signing nomination petitions for
candidates from more than one party; California and many
other states do essentially the same thing.
In fact, some US electoral procedures are unknown
outside of dictatorships: Unlike other established democ-
racies, the USA permits one set of standards of ballot access
for established major parties and a different set for all
other parties.
That Americas election system is uniquely repressive
is common knowledge among experts. Nowhere is the
concern [about governing-party repression] greater than
in the United States, as partisan influence is possible at all
stages of the electoral contest, concludes a recent survey
of comparative election law.
Perhaps the clearest case of overt partisan manipu-
lation of the rules is the United States, where Democrats
and Republicans appear automatically on the ballot, but
third parties and independents have to overcome a maze
of cumbersome legal requirements, writes Pippa Norris,
a world elections authority at Harvard and director of
democratic governance at the United Nations Develop-
ment Program.
One of the best-kept secrets in American politics,
the eminent political scientist Theodore Lowi has written,
is that the two-party system has long been brain dead
kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that
protect the established parties from rivals and by federal
subsidies and so-called campaign reform. The two-party
system would collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled
and the ivs were cut.
Regulation and Its Consequences
These considerations cast the usual debates about third
parties, particularly on the Left, in a peculiar light.
105
THE PARTY WE WANT

Typically, advocates of the third-party route depict
their strategy as a revolt against a rigged two-party system;
sometimes they even castigate doubters as timid accommo-
dationists. Yet, in the context of American law, when such
advocates speak of creating an independent party, what
they mean, ironically, is choosing to subject their organiza-
tion to an elaborate regulatory regime maintained by, and
continually manipulated by, the two parties themselves.
This is one fundamental problem with the third-party
strategy: the need to continually maintain ballot status
an onerous process in most states places the partys
viability at the mercy of the legislature.
A cautionary tale unfolded last year in Arizona, where
the Republican-controlled legislature, concerned about
the strength of the Libertarian Party, passed a law effec-
tively raising the number of signatures each Libertarian
candidate needs to appear on his or her partys primary
ballot from 134 to 3,023. (This is in addition to the hoops
the party itself has to jump through to keep a ballot line
in the first place.)
The bills Republican sponsor, Representative J.D.
Mesnard, helpfully explained his thinking on the floor
of the state House: I believe that, if you look at the last
election, there was at least one, probably two, congres-
sional seats that may have gone in a different direction,
the direction I would have liked to have seen them go, if
this requirement had been there.
Another unique aspect of American party law raises
similar issues: in their internal affairs, ballot-qualified
parties in the United States are some of the most com-
prehensively regulated parties in the world.
Normally, democracies regard political parties as
voluntary associations entitled to the usual rights of
freedom of association. But US state laws dictate not only

Brick by Brick
The barriers to third-party participation in American
elections were erected piecemeal until Democrat 1897
versus Republican was the only game in town. Republican majorities successfully
ban fusion voting in Illinois, Iowa,
Indiana, North Dakota,
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and
Wyoming.

1888 1895 18991907

Massachusetts becomes the first
state to introduce an Australian
ballot system, complete with
petition requirements for
prospective candidates.
18921893
In many states, including Oregon
and Minnesota, Republicans use the
Australian ballot to undercut third
parties, inhibiting fusion voting by
preventing candidates from
appearing twice on the ballot.
1893
South Dakota becomes the first
state to pass explicit restrictions on
fusion voting.
Republican-controlled legislatures
in Michigan, Oregon, and
Washington pass anti-fusion laws.
1896
Ohio passes the anti-fusion Dana
law after a coalition of Populists,
socialists, and dissident Republicans
nearly unseats the Republican
mayor of Cincinnati.
1896
State restrictions on fusion voting
hobble the presidential candidacy
of William Jennings Bryan,
splintering his coalition of
Democrats, Populists, and Silver
Republicans.
California, Nebraska, South Dakota,
Kansas, Minnesota, Idaho, and
Montana all ban fusion voting,
bringing the total number of
no-fusion states up to eighteen.
circa 1920
State-level fusion voting bans
effectively end the practice in the
United States, forcing third parties
to turn to gathering signatures to
run candidates on their own ballot
lines. Today, New York is the only
state in the country where fusion
voting is still commonly practiced,
although it remains legal (in some
form) in seven other states.

106 23 / FALL 2016

 A BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW PARTY

a ballot-qualified partys nominating process, but also its
leadership structure, leadership selection process, and
many of its internal rules (although its true that these
mandates are often waived for third parties deemed too
marginal to care about).
In other words, when third-party activists seek ballot
status, they are often seeking to grant far-reaching control
over their own internal affairs to a hostile two-party-dom-
inated legislature. That is a peculiar way to go about
smashing the two-party system.
Yet the perverse consequences of the system are often
at their most visible when third parties do succeed in get-
ting on the ballot.
These parties are frequently forced to devote the bulk
of their resources not to educating voters, or knocking on
doors on election day, but to waging petition drives and
ballot-access lawsuits. The constant legal harassment, in
turn, ends up exerting a subtle but powerful effect on the
kinds of people attracted to independent politics. Through
a process of natural selection, such obstacles tend to repel
serious and experienced local politicians and organizers,
while disproportionately attracting activists with a cer-
tain mentality: disdainful of practical politics or concrete
results; less interested in organizing, or even winning
elections, than in bearing witness to the injustice of the
two-party system through the symbolic ritual of inscribing
a third-partys name on the ballot.
The official parties are happy to have such people as
their opposition, and even happy to grant them this safe
channel for their discontent. And if, unexpectedly, a third
partys fortunes were to start rising, the incumbents could
always put a stop to it, simply by adjusting the law.
The Labor Party wisely, in my opinion adopted
a strategy of not seeking ballot status until it had built

1931 1939 1997

Illinois raises its signature
requirement for third-party or
independent candidates from 1,000
to 25,000.
1931
California raises its signature
requirement from 1 percent of the
last gubernatorial vote to
10percent.
1932
Florida establishes a law stating a
party must have won 30 percent of
the vote in the previous two
elections to appear on the ballot.
(This law is promptly revised after it
inadvertently disqualifies the gop.)
Pennsylvania limits prospective
candidates signature collection
period to just three weeks.
1971
The Federal Elections Campaign Act
(feca) establishes some of the
greatest barriers to third party
participation by guaranteeing a
lump sum contribution of tens of
millions of dollars from the Federal
Elections Commission (fec) to each
of the major-party presidential
candidates. Third party candidates,
meanwhile, are eligible for fec
funding only after the November
election (and only if they reach
hefty benchmarks of support), but
are still beholden to donation caps
of 1,000 dollars for individuals and
5,000 for political action groups.
In Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New
Party the Supreme Court fails to
affirm fusion voting as a protected
civil right.
2015
Fearing the election of Libertarian
Party members to state office,
Arizona hikes its signature
requirement from 134 to 3023.
2016
Donald Trump appears on the
California ballot as the presidential
candidate of both the Republican
Party and the far-right American
Independent Party, becoming the
first fusion candidate in that state in
eighty years.

THE PARTY WE NEED 107

THE PARTY WE WANT
enough strength to mount a credible challenge to the
Democrats. But confronted with the dilemmas of a repres-
sive electoral system, combined with the more familiar
spoiler problem, it never actually reached that point. In
the end, the party sought and obtained a ballot line only
once, in South Carolina (a state where ballot laws were
relatively relaxed), in a last-ditch effort near the end of its
active life. But by then it was too late, and ultimately the
party chose not to wage a serious electoral campaign in
the state.
One lesson from this history is clear: We have to stop
approaching our task as if the problems we face were akin
to those faced by the organizers of, say, the British Labour
Party in 1900 or Canadas New Democratic Party in 1961.
Instead, we need to realize that our situation is more like
that facing opposition parties in soft-authoritarian systems,
like those of Russia or Singapore. Rather than yet another
suicidal frontal assault, we need to mount the electoral
equivalent of guerrilla insurgency. In short, we need to
think about electoral strategy more creatively.
Boring From Within?
Does that mean opting for the strategy championed by
most progressive critics of the third-party route namely,
working within the Democratic Party?
No. Or at least, not in the way that phrase is usually
meant.
Its true that a number of sincere, committed leftists,
or at least progressives, run for office on the Democratic
ballot line at all levels of American politics. Sometimes
they even win. And all else equal, were better off with such
politicians in office than without them. So in that limited
sense, the answer might be yes.
But electing individual progressives does little to
change the broad dynamics of American politics or Amer-
ican capitalism. In fact, it can create a kind of placebo effect:
sustaining the illusion of forward motion while obscuring
the fact that neither party is structurally built to reflect
working-class interests.
Working within the Democratic Party has been the
prevailing model of progressive political action for decades
now, and it suffers from a fundamental limitation: it cedes
all real agency to professional politicians. The liberal office-
seeker becomes the indispensable actor to whom all others,
including progressives, must respond.
108 23 / FALL 2016
Think of Ted Kennedy or Mario Cuomo in the 1980s;
Paul Wellstone or Russ Feingold in the 1990s; Howard
Dean, Elizabeth Warren, or Bill de Blasio since 2000. Each
emerges into the spotlight as they launch their careers or
seek higher office. Each promises to represent the dem-
ocratic wing of the Democratic Party. Each generates
a flurry of positive coverage in progressive media and a
ripple of excitement within a narrow circle of progressive
activists and voters.
Orbiting around these ambitious office-seekers are
the progressive grassroots organizations exemplified
by MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, or Progressive
Democrats of America. (In an earlier, direct-mail era, it
was Common Cause, People for the American Way, or
even the Americans for Democratic Action.)
Run by salaried staffers, these groups monitor the
political scene in search of worthy progressive candidates
or legislative causes, alerting their supporters with bulle-
tins urging them to stand with whichever progressive
politico needs support at the moment. (Support, in this
usage, usually means sending money, or signing an email
petition.) Such groups generally maintain no formal stan-
dards for judging a candidates worthiness. Even if they
did, in drawing up such standards they would be account-
able to no one, and would have no power to change those
candidates policy objectives.
Although its too early to tell, Bernie Sanderss recently
created Our Revolution organization seems in danger of
falling into the same trap: becoming a mere middleman,
or broker, standing between a diffuse, unorganized pro-
gressive constituency and a series of ambitious progressive
office-seekers seeking their backing.
In this party-less model of politics, its the Demo-
cratic politician who goes about trying to recruit a base,
rather than the other way around. The politicians plat-
form and message are devised by her and her alone. They
can be changed on a whim. And there is no mechanism by
which the politician can be held accountable to the (fairly
nebulous) progressive constituency she has recruited to
her cause.
The approach taken by the Working Families Party
(wfp) is different, but it, too, remains vulnerable to the
problems of such party-less politics. The wfp has built
an impressive record of policy achievements in its New
York State home base, using fusion voting a ballot
strategy forbidden by most state laws. (The ban on fusion

is another legacy of the two-party election reforms of the
1890s.) Under fusion, a minor party places the name of
a major-partys nominee on its own ballot line, hoping
that, if the major-party candidate wins, he or she will feel
beholden to the minor party for however many votes it
managed to deliver.
But the contradictions of its 2014 endorsement of New
York governor Andrew Cuomo showed how the wfps
fusion strategy can place it in the worst of both worlds.
On the one hand, the party remains chained to the inter-
ests of Democratic Party politicians, forced to endorse
candidates that are not its own, who run on platforms far
removed from its priorities, as if it were a mere faction of
the Democratic Party. On the other hand, it still needs to
worry about keeping its third-party ballot line, leaving it
exposed to the kind of ballot-repression problems that
more marginal third parties face.
At a deeper level, the party-less model that dom-
inates progressive politics today is an outgrowth of
Americas lamentable history of internally mobilized
parties: that is, parties organized by already-established
politicians for the sole purpose of creating a mass constitu-
ency around themselves. The Democratic Party created
in the 1830s by a network of powerful incumbents led by
New York senator and power broker Martin Van Buren
is the classic case.
This stands in contrast to externally mobilized
parties: organized by ordinary people, standing outside
the system, who come together around a cause and then
go about recruiting their own representatives to contest
elections, for the purpose of gaining power they dont
already have.
For reasons that are not hard to guess, historical parties
of the Left true parties of the Left have, almost without
exception, been mobilized externally. As the historian
Geoff Eley recounts in his history of the Left in Europe:
Parties of the Left sometimes managed to win elec-
tions and form governments, but, more important,
they organized civil society into the basis from which
existing democratic gains could be defended and new
ones could grow. They magnetized other progressive
causes and interests in reform. Without them, democ-
racy was a nonstarter.
By contrast, not a single externally mobilized party has
ever attained national electoral significance in the United
THE PARTY WE NEED
A BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW PARTY
States. The major political parties in American history,
writes Martin Shefter who first introduced this tax-
onomy of party mobilization and most conservative and
centrist parties in Europe, were founded by politicians
who [held] leadership positions in the prevailing regime
and who [undertook] to mobilize and organize a popular
following behind themselves.
Modern democracy, in E.E. Schattschneiders classic
formulation, is unthinkable save in terms of the parties.
Popular, working-class democracy, on the other hand,
is unthinkable without parties mobilized from outside the
political system that is, by people organizing around
common goals.
What Is a Democratic Party?
In a genuinely democratic party, the organizations mem-
bership, program, and leadership are bound together
tightly by a powerful, mutually reinforcing connection.
The partys members are its sovereign power; they come
together through a sense of shared interest or principle.
Through deliberation, the members establish a program
to advance those interests. The party educates the public
around the program, and it serves, in effect, as the lode-
star by which the party is guided. Finally, the members
choose a party leadership including electoral candi-
dates who are accountable to the membership and bound
by the program.
It might seem obvious that those are the characteris-
tics of a truly democratic party. Yet the Democratic Party
has none of them.
Start with the most fundamental fact about the Dem-
ocratic Party: it has no members. A few months ago I was
flattered to receive a letter signed by Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, then chair of the Democratic National Committee,
in which she urged me to consider sending a donation,
thereby becoming a dnc member, in her words.
Was she proposing to let me vote on the Democratic
primary schedule, or its mode of selecting convention dele-
gates or, for that matter, the next dnc chair? Obviously
not. Mere members arent allowed to influence such deci-
sions because, fundraising letters aside, there are no real
members of the Democratic Party: Unlike these [British,
Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand] democracies,
where members join a political party through a process
of application to the party itself, party membership in the
109
THE PARTY WE WANT

Missed
Opportunities
Many local elections go
entirely uncontested.

OPEN-SEAT
(no incumbent) 1,056

UNCONTESTED
2,181

TOTAL STATE-LEGISLATIVE RACES

6,057

United States has been described as a fiction created by
primary registration laws.
Just as the Democratic Party has no real membership,
it offers only the most derisory semblance of a program:
a quadrennial platform usually dictated by an individual
nominee (or occasionally negotiated with a defeated rival)
at the height of the election-season frenzy, a document that
in most years no one reads and in all years no one takes
seriously as a binding document. (At the state level, party
platforms often reach hallucinatory levels of detachment
from real politics.)
Its true, of course, that in a constitutional democracy
theres never anything stopping an elected representative,
once elected, from doing the opposite of what he or she
had promised. And in the history of left-wing party politics
its not hard to find instances where elected politicians
have gone turncoat. One famous example was Ramsay
MacDonald, a founder of the British Labour Party, who
betrayed his party after becoming prime minister by joining
with the Conservatives and pushing through drastic public
spending cuts in the midst of the Depression.
But since MacDonald was accountable to a demo-
cratically organized party, he could be repudiated and
expelled from that party as he was in 1931, while still a
sitting prime minister. For generations afterward, he was
reviled within Labour Party circles, his name synonymous
with betrayal.
Suppose, by way of comparison, that some onetime
liberal Democratic hero say, a senator decides to flout
the promises he or she initially made to MoveOn.org, or
Democracy for America, or their constituents. Those groups
staffs whom no one has elected anyway would have
no power to meaningfully discipline, let alone expel, them.
To whom, then, is the senator accountable? An elec-
torate, in theory, come reelection time. But no party.
This is the treadmill we need to get off.
A Party of a New Type
The widespread support for Bernie Sanderss candidacy,
particularly among young people, has opened the door
for new ideas about how to form a democratic political
organization rooted in the working class.
The following is a proposal for such a model: a national
political organization that would have chapters at the
state and local levels, a binding program, a leadership

110 23 / FALL 2016


accountable to its members, and electoral candidates nom-
inated at all levels throughout the country.
As a nationwide organization, it would have a national
educational apparatus, recognized leaders and spokes-
people at the national level, and its candidates and other
activities would come under a single, nationally recognized
label. And, of course, all candidates would be required to
adhere to the national platform.
But it would avoid the ballot-line trap. Decisions about
how individual candidates appear on the ballot would be
made on a case-by-case basis and on pragmatic grounds,
depending on the election laws and partisan coloration
of the state or district in question. In any given race, the
organization could choose to run in major- or minor-party
primaries, as nonpartisan independents, or even, theoret-
ically, on the organizations own ballot line.
The ballot line would thus be regarded as a secondary
issue. The organization would base its legal right to exist
not on the repressive ballot laws, but on the fundamental
rights of freedom of association.
Such a project probably wouldnt have been feasible in
the past, due to campaign-finance laws. For most of the last
four decades, the Federal Elections Campaign Act (feca),
along with similar laws in many states, would have left any
such organization with little alternative but to fundraise
through a political action committee (pac). That pac would
have been limited to giving a maximum of $5,000 (the
current threshold) to each of its candidates per election,
and barred from taking money from unions or collecting
donations larger than $5,000 from individuals. That kind
of fundraising could never support a national organization.
All of these restrictions would be waived if, like the
dnc or rnc, the group registered as a party committee.
But theres a catch: a group can only register as a party com-
mittee if it runs the ballot-access gauntlet at the state level
(a requirement from which Democrats and Republicans
are exempt), then wins a ballot line and runs its candidates
on it. (Here we find one of the many reasons scholars have
described the feca as a major-party protection act.)
In the years leading up to the Supreme Courts 2010 Cit-
izens United decision, these regulations were already being
eroded by the emergence of so-called 527 groups, which
evaded the laws by taking unlimited donations to finance
independent expenditures on behalf of candidates.
But in the wake of Citizens United (and subsequent
rulings), the restrictions no longer pose a serious obstacle
THE PARTY WE NEED
A BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW PARTY
at all. Today, a national political organization could adopt
the Carey model of campaign finance, validated in 2011
by the Carey v. FEC federal court decision. In this model,
the national organization would incorporate as a 501(c)4
social welfare organization, permitting it to endorse
candidates and engage in explicit campaigning, while
accepting unlimited donations and spending unlimited
amounts on political education. (It would also, of course,
be free to adopt rigorous self-imposed disclosure rules, as
it should.)
In addition, it would be allowed to establish a pac that
maintains two separate accounts: one permitted to donate
to, and directly coordinate with, individual candidates
(though subject to feca contribution limits and allowed to
actively solicit contributions only from the organizations
own members); and the other allowed to accept unlimited
contributions and make unlimited independent expendi-
tures on behalf of its candidates (though not donations
to candidates themselves). A separate online conduit
pac, on the ActBlue model, could aggregate small-donor
hard-money fundraising on a mass scale to finance the
individual campaigns.
With a viable fundraising model patterned along these
lines, all of the organizations candidates nationwide, up
and down the ballot, would be able to benefit from its name
recognition and educational activities. It could sponsor
speakers, hold debates, establish a network of campus
affiliates, and designate spokespeople who would be recog-
nized as its public voices. In the media and on the internet,
voters would be continually exposed to its perspective
on the events of the day and its proposals for the future.
To put the electoral possibilities of this approach into
perspective, consider a few numbers. In 2014, there were
1,056 open-seat state-legislative races (races where no
incumbent was running). The median winner spent only
$51,000, for the primary and general elections combined.
Two-thirds of the races cost less than $100,000. And in
36percent of all state-legislative races that year almost
2,500 seats the winner had run unopposed.
I think this model can work. But like any blueprint, its
not a panacea. Simply filing the paperwork to create such
an organization is not going to magically conjure a large
and successful movement into existence. To make it work,
it needs to be a real vehicle and voice for working-class
interests. And that means a significant part of the labor
movement would have to be at its core.
111
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 No Easy
Solutions
A reply to Seth Ackerman

by Mark Dudzic & Adolph Reed

S
eth Ackerman is to be commended for seriously engaging
with the problem of how to build a sustainable and effective
working-class politics in the post-Bernie moment. Unlike
many commentators who portray this phenomenon in ahis-
torical terms, as if it sprang up from the minds of the faithful,
Ackerman roots his analysis in a historical understanding of American politics
and, concretely, in the failed attempt to launch a union-backed labor party in
the late 1990s.
As we assess the capacity for independent working-class politics in the
post election period, Ackermans suggestions about how to build a party of
the working class outside of the highly regulated formal party structures of
US election and campaign financing laws may prove valuable.
The Sanders campaign has shaken up politics in potentially significant
ways. Here was an open socialist running on a social-democratic program
who received nearly 13million votes and challenged the connection between
big money and viable political candidates. Unlike contemporary European
strains of social democracy, Sanders placed class struggle at the center of his
appeal, denouncing Wall Street greed and an economic elite whose control
of the political process is the most proximate cause of massive and growing
inequality.
The campaign also exposed the fault lines within labor and related social
movements, between transactional and transformational politics. In the United

ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY HAYSOM THE PARTY WE NEED 113

THE PARTY WE WANT

States in particular, with its winner-take-all two-party also reflects the growth of new social movements that
system, the stakes are very high when unions put at risk have helped to change, at least temporarily, the terms of
important political relationships that may be needed when debate about the definition of a living wage, the right to
attending to the day-to-day needs of their members. These higher education, the policies of extreme policing and mass
mundane politics of negotiation and compromise are a incarceration, and the need to expand social security and
necessary part of the activities of any organization that other social insurance programs.
represents and is accountable to an actual constituency However, it is important not to get ahead of ourselves.
with real needs. As Ackerman points out, running as an insurgent Democrat
The problem arises when unions embrace this trans- is very different from building a political party that is con-
actional practice as the only possible activity, indeed, as nected to a mass movement powerful and organized enough
the central mission of the organization, to the exclusion to implement substantial pro-worker policies in the face of
of transformational politics linked to an understanding the united opposition of capital. The American system of
of the class contradictions at the core of their relation- campaign financing and lack of candidate accountability
ship to capital and its political class. to formal party structures makes the
Thus, this year we had the spectacle Democrats particularly unsuitable to
of the two largest education unions advancing these interests.
supporting the candidate who favored Beginning with Ted Kennedy in
privatization and charter schools, and 1980, there has been a long history
the union most identified with the of insurgencies objecting, to some
Fight for $15 campaign supporting
Multi-class degree or another, to the rise and con-
the candidate who opposed a $15per parties are by solidation of neoliberalism within the
hour living wage. their nature Democratic Party. All of them failed
Nonetheless, six national and
controlled and to change the fundamental control
dozens of regional and local unions that capital has had over the policies
endorsed Sanders and over forty
subservient to and practices of the Democratic Party.
thousand unionists signed a pledge to the dominant The party remains the left wing of
support the candidate, often against class. neoliberalism: promoting diversity
the wishes of their national leader- while doing next to nothing of sub-
ship. A much larger group of unions, stance to address inequality. A new
as well as the national afl-cio, politics must start from the under-
remained neutral throughout the standing that the Democrats are
campaign despite massive pressure ultimately unreformable and that a
from the Clinton organization with party of our own remains the great
the implied threat that failure to jump on the bandwagon unresolved challenge of the US working class.
would threaten their immediate transactional interests. But proclaiming this reality does not make it so. Work-
This neutrality, in turn, opened a space for local leaders ing-class parties are not built by constructing a shopping
and activists to begin to organize grassroots support efforts list of progressive proposals or assembling a letterhead
that began to define a new working-class politics. of prestigious left leaders and organizations. They are
The Sanders campaign struck a chord with millions built by engaging in the nitty gritty of building a constit-
of Americans who are still suffering under the effects of uency and giving voice to their needs and concerns. The
the 2008 economic crisis.They see that growing inequality long history of the Green Partys dilettantish dabbling in
and lack of basic security is abetted by a bipartisan political national electoral campaigns shows that the results of their
regime that serves the interests of a global financial elite approach are essentially zero. Indeed, leaders of organi-
(the revanchist anger exploited by the Trump campaign zations representing real constituencies with pressing
also arises from many of the same causes but with vastly demands are correct to view such politics as self-indulgent
different perspectives and proposals). To some degree it and counterproductive.

114 23 / FALL 2016

THE PARTY WE WANT

Ackerman situates the challenge of party building Without the

in the unique history and structure of US political par-
ties. He is right that, in a rigid two-party winner-take-all
resources,
system that is structured to be self-perpetuating, the spoiler constituency, and
problem is fundamental. His analysis of the uniquely organizing
repressive ballot system help explains why. capacity of a labor
But the problem is deeper, and in a way simpler, than
just these technical issues. Multi-class parties are by their
movement
nature controlled and subservient to the dominant class. at the core of any
Scholars and pundits have produced a voluminous liter- effort to build
ature that explains in more or less technical, more or less truly independent
cultural and mystical ways how the American political
system is exceptional, how there are distinctive features of
working-class
American institutions and/or values that have preempted politics, we are
the development of ideological or openly working-class doomed to
based parties. While Ackerman discusses technical fea- the status quo.
tures that significantly increase the degree of difficulty,
the cultural/mystical ones have their origins principally
in the postwar anti-left ideological campaign. A much
simpler explanation of that failure is that, where Euro-
pean capitalist classes came out of the war weakened
and discredited by their association with fascism, US
capitalists emerged strong, with a largely rehabilitated
reputation.
Politically, the pendulum had swung our way by the
end of the war. In the context of Roosevelts Second Bill
of Rights proposal and debates over whether the Office of
Price Administration and other planning agencies should
continue after the war, a Roper opinion poll only weeks
before the 1944 presidential election found that 68percent
of respondents indicated that they would not support any
political system, no matter what it was called, that did
not guarantee a right to a job for everyone willing and
able to work.
By 1946, progressive labor leaders like A. Phillip Ran-
dolph and Walter Reuther had begun to consider that the
Democratic Party was not a proper home for working
peoples interests and aspirations. Randolph, John Dewey,
and several others, constituting themselves as a National
Education Committee for a New Party, put out a call for dis-
cussion of Ideas for a New Party: Provisional Declaration
of Principles. They put up $25,000 more than $300,000
today to explore possibilities. The effort received serious
discussion among progressive intellectuals and activists,
but it didnt get off the ground, no doubt for the same
reasons that had impelled it in the first place: the business

116 23 / FALL 2016


offensive had hit its stride in 1946, and thereafter the labor-
left was on the defensive.
We point to that moment to illustrate, first, that at a
time when the labor-left had made its greatest advances
in American political history, key leaders recognized the
Democratic Partys inadequacy as a vehicle for continuing
to pursue working-class agendas. Second, the effort was
undone not by idiosyncrasies of American governmental
forms but by capitalist class power.
More recently, the Working Families Partys attempt
to address the institutional problems that raise the degree
of difficulty for new electoral parties has been interesting
and informative. While it is a legitimate effort to pro-
mote working-class politics, from the start the wfp has
conceded the permanence of the two parties of capital
and has attempted to accommodate itself to that perma-
nence by finding the leverages and small cracks in the
system to win tactical improvements for workers while
conceding strategic control to capital. (The jury is out on
whether the new constituencies called together by the
wfps enthusiastic participation in the Sanders campaign
will result in any significant change in the practice of
the wfp.)
Ackerman is correct in stating that the assumption that
a Labor Party must ultimately have an independent party
ballot line was in tension with the immediate transactional
concerns of its member unions. That tension certainly
caused significant cognitive dissonance in the internal life
of the young party. However, the fundamental cause of
the Labor Partys decline was the labor movements stra-
tegic defeat at the turn of the century and the subsequent
diminishment of the field of action.
Our strategy depended on broadening and deepening
support within the trade union sector, as a source of both
institutional resources and activists who could take the
program and party out through their union bodies, work-
places, communities, families, and personal networks. In
the absence of that growing, dynamic base of labor sup-
port, there was little space for expansion on a left-of-center
political landscape largely characterized by an activistist
and sectarian left with few organic roots among actual
constituencies and that had accommodated to defeat by
withdrawal into a pageantry of protest, insular debates,
and wish-fulfillment.
Indeed, our prohibition of fusion candidacies
stemmed primarily from a political concern to distance
THE PARTY WE NEED
NO EASY SOLUTIONS
ourselves from a common tendency to propound alliances
or coalitions promiscuously with any and all nominally
progressive initiatives that came along, without regard
to their class character, substantive programs, or what
actual forces and constituencies they represent. It is
important to keep these lessons in mind as we assess
the prospects for independent working-class politics
today.
We agree that the essential next step for the Bernie
movement is to explore how to begin the construction of
the kind of externally organized political movement that
Ackerman calls for. Adopting his suggestions may have an
additional advantage beyond facilitating ballot access: a
party constructed around the principles of free association
(and thus outside the strictures of election laws), would be
much more capable of holding its candidates and officials
accountable to a real constituency and program, a central
problem in US politics as well as in many existing left for-
mations around the world.
Central to that project is a revitalized institutional
labor movement. Such a revitalized movement would, by
definition, reject neoliberal orthodoxies, be immersed in
a culture of organization and be engaged with a working
class constituency that moves beyond narrow interests to
a class perspective.
Some say that the institutional labor movement is no
longer capable of rising to the challenge and becoming a
vehicle for a working-class politics. Many of these criti-
cisms can be dismissed as the rantings of identitarian and
anarchist elements. However, more serious critics like
former cwa president Larry Cohen have also weighed
in with concerns that, Too often, a particular unions
political stance may reflect a private employers growth
plans, not the general good for working people and that
we should, ...not necessarily focus on [labor] unity about
political strategy.
These criticisms are significant. But they dont change
the fact that, without the resources, constituency, and
organizing capacity of a labor movement at the core of any
effort to build truly independent working-class politics, we
are doomed to the status quo: marginalization or second
best efforts like the wfp.
These political challenges must be met. Once that
happens, Ackermans tools, suggestions, and insights may
prove highly valuable in developing the techniques to
breath life into a party of our own.
117
READING
MATERIEL

WE READ THINGS
YOU SHOULDNT
READ, SO WE COULD
TELL YOU
WHAT TO READ.
 READING MATERIEL SPECIAL THANKS TO
CANON FODDER JONAH BIRCH

Trial and Error

Populism Guides to a century

of left history.
The Populist Moment
Lawrence Goodwyn (1978)
Lawrence Goodwyns book restored
the Populist movement to its place
as one of the countrys most
important radical moments, after
generations of historians had
dismissed it as little more than an
irrational rural outburst.

The Socialist Party

The American Socialist
Movement
Ira Kipnis (1952)
A half-century after its publication,
Ira Kipniss The American Socialist
Movement is still the best guide to
the politics of the Socialist Party.
Though it unfortunately stops its
narrative in 1912, its a great
exploration of the debates that
shaped the party.

THE PARTY WE NEED 119

 CANON FODDER

The Communist Party

The Roots of American
Communism
Theodore Draper (1957)
While dated and marred by
Drapers undisguised hostility to
the cp, this is still the definitive
account of the rise of American
communism, from its origins in the
1910s through the 1920s.

Communists in Harlem
during the Depression
Mark Naison (1983)
A now classic work on the 1930s rise
of the Communist Party in Ameri-
cas most famous black
neighborhood. Though a dense
read, Naison provides a look at the
far lefts efforts to spearhead
struggles against capitalism and
racism.

The Romance of American

Communism
Vivian Gornick (1977)
Vivian Gornick captures the
vibrancy and spirit that animated
the thousands of workers who
devoted their lives to the pursuit of
a better world. They werent
faceless servants of a foreign
bureaucracy and though they were
wrong about Stalinism, history will
judge many of their efforts in the
United States well.

120 23 / FALL 2016

 Trial and Error

The Left in Labor The New Left Era

Walter Reuther: The Most Race, Reform, and Rebellion
Dangerous Man in Detroit Manning Marable (1984)
Nelson Lichtenstein (1995) The best book on the Civil Rights
A classic study of the most Movement deserves to be
important postwar American labor reintroduced to a new generation.
leader. Lichtenstein explores
Reuthers rise to the top of the SDS: The Rise and
United Auto Workers, which he led Development of the
for more than two decades until his Students for a Democratic
death in 1970. In Reuther we find a Society
figure that embodied the power and Kirkpatrick Sale (1973)
tragedy of Golden Age American
This is still the most comprehensive
unionism.
overview of Students for a Demo-
cratic Society available. At over
Labors Giant Step: The First
seven hundred pages, Sales
Twenty Years of the CIO
research was exhaustive, spanning
Art Preis (1972) from the Student League of
An excellent overview of militant Industrial Democracy days to the
industrial unionism in the United movements slide into ultra-leftism.
States. Forged in the crucible of An important study of a crucial
titanic class struggles during the period.
Great Depression, the cio repre-
sented an enormous advance from Black Against Empire: The
the narrow craft unionism of the History and Politics of the
afl. Preiss traces the unions Black Panther Party
evolution, from its founding amid Joshua Bloom and Waldo E.
the 1930s labor upsurge, to the Martin Jr (2012)
increasing conservatism and
Clear and well-researched, this book
bureaucratism of the postwar years
represents the first full-length
and McCarthy period.
account of the rise and fall of the
Black Panthers.
Striking Flint
Susan Rosenthal and Genora Soldiers in Revolt: GI
Dollinger (1996) Resistance During the
Genora (Johnson) Dollingers Vietnam War
account of her role during the David Cortright (2005)
193637 General Motors sit-down
Essential reading on a little known
strike, which eventually led to the
episode in American history, this
unionization of the entire auto
book details the spectacular
industry.
rebellion of American gis in
Vietnam and the role it played
ending a brutal war.

THE PARTY WE NEED 121

 READING MATERIEL
FIELD NOTES

A Vast Right- The WikiLeaks release of Hillary

Clinton campaign chair John
Podestas emails has escalated the

Wing Conspiracy now months-long hyperventilation

about the Russian hackers hiding
under your bed. But try as Demo-
cratic Party elites might to distract
from whats actually in the leaks
with cries of Putin did it!, people
are paying notice to the revelations.
Clinton surrogates are eager The emails offer a rare glimpse
to rule, but not very bright. of the machinations of a modern
political campaign. Heres some
of what we learned.

The Clinton campaign plotted
to use gender and race against
Bernie.
One of the themes of this years Democratic primaries was the weaponization
of identity politics as a cudgel with which to beat Bernie Sanderss message
about inequality. The Podesta emails suggest this was a conscious strategy. One
email from ex-Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau (not that Jon Favreau) urges
the Clinton camp to continue perpetuating the idea of Sanders as a single
issue voter, saying: This idea that class is the only divide and economic issues
are all that matter is a very white male centric view of the world (a Bernie Bro
view, if you will).
Another email from Labor Secretary Tom Perez suggested that a Clinton
win in Nevada was a real opportunity, letting Clinton change the narrative
from Bernie kicks ass among young voters to Bernie does well only among
young white liberals.

122 23 / FALL 2016


Clinton thinks environmentalists
should get a life.
The dnc rigged the debate
schedule for Clinton.
Donna Brazile warned the
campaign in advance about a
debate question.
John Podestas Merry Band
Much has been made about the statement Clinton made in one of her paid
speeches (itself a Podesta email revelation) that one needs both a public and
private position when negotiating. It makes sense, then, that at the same time
she was presenting herself as a climate crusader and scrubbing references to
the Keystone pipeline from her memoir, she was telling the Building Trades
Union that she would defend natural gas, defend repairing and building the
pipelines we need to fuel our economy, and defend fracking under the right
circumstances. She also had some choice words for those radical environ-
mentalists supporting Bernie Sanders: Get a life, you know.
For many, the earlier dnc emails release proved their suspicions that the dnc
had placed its thumb on the scales in favor of Clintons campaign, such as one
email that showed dnc chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz nixing a final debate
between Clinton and Sanders. The latest release all but confirms it, with a
briefing memo laying out discussions between the Clinton campaign and the
dnc about the debate schedule, including the need to limit the number of
debates, start the debates as late as possible, and keep debates out of the
busy window between the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. At
least the dnc failed to eliminate the possibility of one on one debates, as the
memo had advocated.
While she was the dnc vice chair, and before she became dnc interim chair
in the wake of Debbie Wasserman Schultzs resignation, Donna Brazile was a
pro-Clinton pundit who regularly appeared on cnn. While employed by the
network, and one day before a televised town hall event it was hosting, Brazile
sent the campaign an email titled From time to time I get the questions in
advance.
Brazile passed on a debate question on the death penalty that worries
me about HRC, which was identical to a question asked the next day at the
town hall. Brazile has since denied doing anything wrong, alternating between
suggesting the emails are doctored and complaining that private emails were
stolen from individuals.
Jake Tapper, the cnn moderator of the town hall, called the revelation
very, very troubling. Wed like to suggest to cnn a way to avoid something
similar in the future: Just dont hire paid party apparatchiks as contributors.
THE PARTY WE NEED 123
 FIELD NOTES
Neera Tanden advised the Clinton
campaign to ignore the $15
minimum wage.
John Podesta hates Bernie
Sanderss single-payer health-care
proposal.
The campaign coordinated with
the media relentlessly.
124
Clinton received plenty of criticism for hemming and hawing on the issue of
the $15 minimum wage, even as the Fight for15 movement gained momentum
around the country. This position might have stemmed from her friend and
Center for American Progress (cap) director Neera Tanden, who suggested
in early 2015 that the Clinton campaign ignore the issue. Substantively, we
have not supported $15, she replied to a query from Podesta about a series of
economic policies. You will get a fair amount of liberal economists who will
say it will lose jobs.
This was despite, as Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan noted, the support for
the measure among the Democratic base or the Red Army as he derisively
termed them. Tanden went on help block a call for a $15 minimum wage in the
Democratic platform.
Speaking of bashing the Left, health care became a major issue in this years fight
for the Democratic nomination, with Sanders proposing replacing Obamacare
with a single-payer system and Clinton rubbishing the idea (which she once
championed), saying it will never, ever come to pass.
In January, ThinkProgress editor Judd Legum alerted Podesta to the fact
that such attacks were backfiring. See it being fit into the shes dishonest/will
say anything to win frame, he wrote. [Sanderss] actual proposal sucks, but
we live in a leftie alternative universe, grumbled Podesta.
It wasnt the only time Clintons allies shook their fists at lefties over
the issue. Five days earlier, at Podestas request, Tanden made ThinkProg-
ress (the editorially independent offshoot of cap) change a headline that
called Clintons criticisms dishonest. They are crazy leftists down there,
explained Tanden.
The chumminess between the Clinton campaign and the media was not lim-
ited to outlets funded by her friends. There is an army of liberal bloggers and
journalists who have pushed for Clinton since the primaries, and the campaign
was not hesitant to make use of them.
When one Clinton aide wondered which reporter could be relied on to push
back on the media narrative about Clintons emails and hold other journalists
accountable in the future, she was told that person, the degree to which they
exist, is Ezra Klein. And we can do it with him today. One staffer mentioned a
meeting with writers like Jessica Valenti, Jamil Smith, and Sady Doyle on the
topic of a Bernie Backlash.
Another staffer claimed Clinton adviser Philippe Reines had cultivated
Business Insider. In another email, Neera Tanden claimed that the campaign
had cultivated a number of brown and woman pundits who could be used
to shame the times and others on social media and defend Clinton, such as
Joan Walsh, Perry Bacon, Jr., and, puzzlingly, Matthew Yglesias.
23 / FALL 2016

Clintons strategy was to build up
the Trump campaign.
Aides knew Clinton wasnt telling
the truth about her bankruptcy bill
vote.
Union leaders maneuvered to help
the campaign, swore revenge on its
behalf.
A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
Upon pivoting to the general election, the Clinton campaign has largely
eschewed a positive, affirmative vision in favor of stressing how much worse
Donald Trump would be in office. We cannot allow this man to become pres-
ident, her campaign recently tweeted. But back in the campaigns early days,
Trump was one of three Pied Piper Candidates along with Ted Cruz and Ben
Carson the campaign planned on elevating so they are leaders of the pack.
We dont want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, the memo
strategy read, but tell the press to [take] them seriously. The Clinton camp
hoped their rise to prominence would move the more established candidates
further to the right, making the eventual nominee unelectable come November.
Depending on the Trump campaigns afterlife, the Clinton team may come to
regret helping create this monster.
Clintons 2001 vote for a bankruptcy bill (which as First Lady she opposed) that
would have hurt poor families was briefly a flashpoint during the Democratic
primaries, thanks to a twelve-year-old video that surfaced of Elizabeth Warren
citing it as an example of the corrupting influence of money in politics. An out-
raged Clinton claimed in 2016 that she only supported the bill due to pressure
from womens groups, something one email thread shows her campaign staff
knew was untrue. We have a problem, wrote one. HRC overstayed [sic] her
case this morning in a pretty big way. As the staffer explained in a subsequent
email: She said women groups were all pressuring her to vote for it. Evidence
does not support that statement.
A number of Podestas emails show the behind-the-scenes relationship between
Clinton and some labor leaders. One email shows that Tom Buffenbarger, the
now-retired international president of the International Association of Machin-
ists and Aerospace Workers (iam), moved the union boards endorsement vote
up months early to mid-August 2015, because he didnt want to wait until
2016 to endorse Clinton.
Buffenbarger, who later joined Clintons campaign, did this without telling
most of the iam officers in order to make sure the plan succeeded. Later,
Randi Weingarten, president of the Clinton-endorsing American Federation
of Teachers, vowed to get back at National Nurses United in some way for its
endorsement of Sanders. We will go after nnu and there [sic] high and mighty
sanctimonious conduct... she wrote. Its hard to know whats more shocking:
the threat, or the fact that the head of a teachers union doesnt know the dif-
ference between their and there.
THE PARTY WE NEED 125
 READING MATERIEL
DOSSIER BY ALEX PRESS

Beltway to Means-tested
Puts an end to the epidemic of poor

English people buying convertibles and

caviar with welfare checks and food

Dictionary
stamps.

No-fly zones
A defensive strategy that happens to
mean shooting down another
countrys planes.

Officer-involved shooting
Because sometimes Its purely coincidence that the
words mean other words. officer is always involved because
they shot someone.

Ad hominem
Yell this repeatedly when anyone
brings up your history of having
advocated for the Iraq War/
torture/trickle-down economics/
US intervention as a means of
dismissing your legitimacy as a
political commentator.
Bernie Bro
Bernie Bros are white guys mad
about Hillary Clinton getting her
due (even if theyre people of color
and/or women/queer, as they often
are).
Evolved
Focus groups now tell me I should
be for gay marriage.
Find savings
Cut vital social services. See
Necessary reforms.
Firewall
Useful for now, soon to be ignored.
Globalization
A McDonalds in every country!
Pragmatism
I know youre sick of wages that
have stagnated for almost half a
century and worsening inequality
but if we roll up our sleeves, quit
worrying about purity, and make
the compromises necessary in
politics, who knows, we might just
achieve a twelve-dollar minimum
wage.
Privileged
Not voting for Hillary Clinton.
Vital national interests
The class interests of a few thousand
people.
Working class
White, undoubtedly lives in
Appalachia, likely male, definitely
straight, has racism built into their
dna.

126 23 / FALL 2016

THE TUMBREL

RIGHTEOUS
HATERADE AGAINST
THE GREAT
ENEMIES OF PROLETARIAN
PROGRESS.
 THE TUMBREL
GIRONDINS BY HARRISON FLUSS & SAM MILLER

Hillary Clinton
Is Running
for President

In case you havent noticed...

Hillary Clinton 2.0 Hillary Clinton 1.0

On working Too
many kids say bye to their Hillary Clinton supported the Personal Responsibility
families... parents every morning, not and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.
knowing if mom or dad will be Welfare reform effectively destroyed an economic safety
there when they get home. We net for millions of Americans, leaving states to eliminate
have to fix this. welfare entirely, and condemning people to increased
July14, 2016 poverty and low-wage work (especially single mothers).

THE PARTY WE NEED 129

 GIRONDINS
Hillary Clinton 2.0
On lgbt To lgbt men and women
equality... worldwide, let me say this:
wherever you live and whatever the
circumstances of your life, whether
you are connected to a network of
support or feel isolated and
vulnerable, please know that you
are not alone.
December6, 2011
On war... There
is something wrong with
our country. There is too much
violence ... too much senseless
killing, too many people dead who
shouldnt be.
July8, 2016
On black We
need to listen to those who say
lives... Black Lives Matter. Too many
black Americans... feel like their
lives are disposable.
July13, 2016
On the If
you see bigotry, oppose it. If you
Donald... see violence, condemn it. If you see
a bully, stand up to him.
April29, 2016
130 23 / FALL 2016
Hillary Clinton 1.0
As first lady, Clinton supported the 1996 Defense of
Marriage Act, which codified the second-class status of
gay Americans. The Clinton Foundation continues to
accept money from governments that oppress women
and lgbt people, like Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and
the United Arab Emirates.
As first lady, Clinton endorsed the 1998 bombing of
Iraq. As New York senator, she supported the ongoing
sanctions against that country and later its invasion.
According to some estimates, the Iraq sanctions cost the
lives of a half million children. While there is still debate
regarding how many have died as a result of the 2003
invasion, some estimate it was as many as one million.
Hillary Clinton supported and lobbied for the Omnibus
Crime Bill in 1996. She also referred to black children as
superpredators, and coldly dismissed a Black Lives
Matter protester at her fundraiser. The Omnibus Crime
Bill fueled the rise of mass incarceration, disproportion-
ately affecting black males and encouraging punishment
for nonviolent drug users. The superpredator
comment was used to justify draconian policies for poor
communities, extending Republican policies of zero
tolerance and the further policing of children.
The Clintons have enjoyed a cozy relationship with the
Trumps. As recently as 2012 Bill Clinton said, I like
Donald Trump and I love playing golf with him. They
attended Donald Trumps wedding to his third wife,
Melania. Trump has donated at least $100,000 to the
Clinton Foundation and thousands to Clinton
campaigns.
 Hillary Clinton Is Running for President

Hillary Clinton 2.0 Hillary Clinton 1.0

On America
has always been a nation As a senator, Clinton voted for the Secure Fence Act of
immigration... of immigrants and refugees. On 2006. This called for seven hundred miles of fencing
#WorldRefugeeDay, lets reaffirm that would stretch across the length of the US southern
our commitment to welcoming border with Mexico. The cost was estimated at about
them. $7billion.
June20, 2016
As secretary of state, she served the Obama administra-
tion as it deported more immigrants than any other
administration in US history. She has never publicly
criticized President Obama for his deportation record.

On Wall Were
going to make sure that The Clintons have accepted $153million in speaking
Street... Wall Street, corporations, and the fees from big banks and corporations. In the 1990s, Bill
super-rich pay their fair share of Clintons deregulation policies including the Gramm-
taxes. Leach-Bliley Act, the Commodity Futures
July12, 2016 Modernization Act, and the Community Reinvestment
Act created the predatory environment that led to the
2005 and 2008 financial collapses.

On dictators... Donald
Trumps praise for brutal Hillary Clinton is close friends with Henry Kissinger,
dictators like Saddam Hussein who helped to overthrow democratic leaders around the
knows no bounds. world. She defended her role in the Honduras coup,
July6, 2016 considered ousted Egypt dictator Hosni Mubarak to be
a friend of the family, and raised money with other
repressive governments like Saudi Arabia for the
Clinton Foundation.

No wonder exCentral Intelligence Agency director

Michael Hayden endorsed her candidacy.

Hillary Clinton 3.0?

I
love having the support of real billionaires
and theyve been speaking out because
Donald gives a bad name to billionaires.
October 26, 2016

THE PARTY WE NEED 131

 THE TUMBREL
THERMIDOR
Austerity
With a
Vacant Face
Capitals third favorite party
sounds a lot like its first.
Just two days after presidential
hopefuls Donald Trump and Hil-
lary Clinton faced off in their first
debate, Libertarian candidate Gary
Johnson published an op-ed in the
New York Times. The headline: Take
a Deep Breath, Voters. There Is a
Third Way.
Johnson, a former New Mexico
governor and construction mogul,
built a public persona this year by
splitting the difference between
Trumps blowhard conservatism and
Clintons technocratic liberalism. In
recent months, he has consistently
polled at about 6percent nationwide.
Four state legislators have defected
from the Republicans to join the
132
BY JONAH WALTERS
Libertarian Party and endorse his
candidacy. Amid this years electoral
circus, Johnson fancies himself the
only grown-up in the room.
So we shouldnt be surprised
that after an evening of back-
and-forth between the two major
candidates during which Trump
boasted about evading federal
income taxes and Clinton hid her
own dismal economic policies behind
the sound-bite Trumped-up trick-
le-down Johnson couldnt wait to working conditions for most Amer-
sop up the mess.
The America I know wasnt
on the television screen on Monday
night, he lamented in his op-ed.
According to Johnson, neither Trump
23 / FALL 2016
nor Clinton can deliver what America
needs: a president who can make
government live within its means.
Only the Libertarian Party, he claims,
can break the partisan gridlock
which for too long has kept real solu-
tions out of reach.
Why? Because our ticket is the
only one to support free trade. This
is the sharp line Johnson wants to
draw between himself and the bellig-
erent Republican hes challenging. By
invoking free trade, Johnson is angling
for conservatives who feel alienated
by Trumps populist message.
But hes trying to outflank the
Republicans on the left at the same
time, hammering home his socially
liberal credentials by, for example,
calling for marijuana legalization. It
seems Johnson thinks he can rehabil-
itate the Libertarian Party by playing
a game of political Twister, contorting
himself in a clumsy effort to tack
simultaneously left and right.
One thing remains clear: he
wants voters to believe that he offers
a real alternative to Donald Trump.
But the two candidates have more
in common than either would like
to admit. Theyre both singing the
same song, just in slightly different
registers. Trump directs his message
to the disinvested Rust Belt, winning
support by emphasizing Ameri-
cas failure to deliver prosperity to
ordinary workers. Johnson avoids dis-
cussing economic ills, instead wooing
those happy conservatives who, like
him, refuse to recognize the mas-
sive decline in living standards and
icans, instead burying their heads in
the sand shifting from beneath the
American Dream. Still, despite their
rhetorical differences, both advocate
austerity.

Theres love in his opponent not to mention from the
eyes, but hatred business conservatives Johnson hopes
in his soul. to lift onto the Libertarian ark both
candidates advance a vision of strong
business, weak government, and
Heres what Johnson promises for unprotected workers.
the first days of a Libertarian pres- Johnsons political career in New
idency: Cuts of up to 20percent Mexico shored up his conservative
or more... for all programs, plus bona fides along precisely those lines.
changes to Social Security and Medi- As governor, he helped wealthy inves-
care. It sounds familiar Trump tors like himself line their pockets,
has also vowed to make deep cuts to while further immiserating the states
social spending, including cutting the most vulnerable citizens.
Department of Education. Johnson funded tax cuts for the
While Trumps opposition to rich by handing state-run prisons
nafta and other free trade agree- over to private companies. When
ments does set him apart from his Johnson took office, New Mexicos
THE PARTY WE NEED
Austerity With a Vacant Face
prison system was so notoriously mis-
managed and overcrowded that the
courts imposed federal supervision
through a consent decree. A different
politician might have worked to solve
this problem by reducing the prison
population, but Johnson vetoed a
bill that would have authorized early
releases due to overcrowding. Then he
opted to further harm inmates well-
being by shuttling them into private
facilities, which cut costs by about a
third and rid himself of pesky federal
oversight.
Now that hes running for presi-
dent, Johnson claims that mandatory
minimum sentencing and draconian
law enforcement policies infringe
American freedom thus, theyre
anathema to the libertarian credo.
But as governor he was no enemy of
mass incarceration. Johnson actually
realized many of the law-and-order
measures Trump called for during the
debate: he championed a three-strikes
sentencing rule and let his fetish for
small government lapse long enough
to advocate extending capital punish-
ment to minors.
Johnson and Trump also agree
on labor. Despite Johnsons persona
as a stalwart free-market defender
in the face of Trumps protectionist
assault, the two entrepreneurs built
their fortunes on the same repertoire
of abusive and dishonest labor prac-
tices. To make matters worse, both
have expressed extreme skepticism
about or, in Johnsons case, out-
right opposition to the minimum
wage.
The choice between Trump and
Johnson is a choice between austerity
with an angry face and austerity with a
vacant one. The Libertarian Party may
be a third party, but its nothing like
the third party we need.
133
 THE TUMBREL
VERSAILLES
Nobody
for Bloomberg
Elites may disagree, but most
American voters arent
looking for sensible centrist
candidates.
The United States is not looking so
good lately. Medical costs are spi-
raling out of control, wealth continues
to be siphoned to the very top, pov-
erty and homelessness are rampant.
Fortunately, elites have a solution
for us: a healthy dose of political
moderation.
The fetishism of pragmatic cen-
trism for its own sake finds its most
common expression in calls for former
New York billionaire mayor Michael
Bloomberg to run for president, a reg-
ular ritual that comes around every
election season.
In October2015, concerned that
Clintons primary fight had pushed
her too far to the left, Bloombergs
134
BY BRANKO MARCETIC
Wall Street friends pushed him to run,
with billionaire hedge fund investor
Bill Ackman declaring, Hes all the
best of Trump without the worst of
Trump. Michael Wolff, citing Clin-
tons tack in early 2015 towards an
Internet-and-millennially-centric left
that... sees the center as its enemy,
also endorsed a Bloomberg run, while
the New York Posts Michael Goodwin
pointed to Bloombergs social liber-
alism, support for the Iraq War, and
tough-on-crime policies as reasons he
would make a credible challenger
to Clinton. Bloomberg even got a nod
from Rupert Murdoch.
This longing for a sensible
center isnt solely focused on Bloom-
23 / FALL 2016
berg. Only last month, Tim Geith-
ner the former treasury secretary
responsible for the bank bailout
lamented the scary erosion of the
pragmatic center in politics, the
diminished capacity to make sen-
sible economic choices. For years, the
medias stock advice for Democrats
who suffered losses in the midterms
has been to move rightward. In 1997,
in a private conversation with then
British prime minister Tony Blair,
Bill Clinton offered Blair his personal
admiration for having the freedom
to capture the center and move into
tomorrow.
The center is a moving target.
The center is often held up as a kind of
ideology-free zone that exists outside
space and time, a neutral area that
straddles the line between left and
right where the true solutions to the
worlds problems lie.
But it should go without saying
that as political belief shifts leftward
or rightward, the center does with
it. What is centrist today may be
tomorrows wacky extremism, and

vice versa. As much as pundits like to
complain that the problem lies with
both major parties drifting towards
their ideological extremes, the fact
is that they have both experienced a
dramatic rightward shift over the past
few decades.
This development has been most
dramatic for the gop, which one
study found is the most conservative
it has been in one hundred years.
The rabidly anti-tax, anti-govern-
ment, anti-immigrant Republican
Party of today is quite different than
the partys past positions. What was
socialized medicine in 2007 was
originally Richard Nixons health-
care reform proposal, and even
Ronald Reagan raised taxes several
times and gave amnesty to undoc-
umented immigrants. This isnt to
mention the big government poli-
cies pursued by the Republican Party
of the 1950s.
Extreme ideas have broad
support.
Despite the certainty of political
elites that the path to political suc-
cess sits directly down the middle a
belief typically based on nothing
but gut instinct there is plenty of
evidence that policies typically con-
sidered far to the left enjoy broad
support.
For instance, while Hillary
Clinton and others have dismissed
Sanderss calls to break up the big
banks, 61percent of Democrats and
47percent of Republicans are in favor
of it. Ditto for Sanderss proposal
to make college tuition-free, which
critics charged doesnt make sense
and would kill historically black col-
leges: 62percent of Americans back
the proposal. And despite Clintons
reluctance to adopt a fifteen-dollar
The center is
held up as a kind
of ideology-
free zone that
exists outside
space and time.
federal minimum wage, 63percent
support it.
This is the trend for a whole host
of other supposedly far-left policies.
Large majorities of Americans believe
money has too much influence on
politics and want campaign finance
reform. 58percent favor replacing
Obamacare with a federally funded
health insurance program, with only
22percent in favor of repealing it with
no replacement. 61percent say the
wealthy pay too little in taxes. Just
over half think the Obama admin-
istration failed to do enough to
prosecute bankers. And 54percent
agree with the statement that a polit-
ical revolution might be necessary to
redistribute money from the wealth-
iest Americans to the middle class.
The ideas championed by fire-
brands like Sanders are not fringe
policies to be abandoned in the rush to
the center. They are the center.
Centrism doesnt necessarily
translate into electoral success.
For decades now, moving to the center
has been viewed by the liberal political
THE PARTY WE NEED
Nobody for Bloomberg
establishment as a surefire strategy
for winning elections. The thinking
goes that by moderating any progres-
sive beliefs they may hold, Democrats
can siphon independent or even
conservative voters away from the
Right. In the process, even if they
compromise on some core principles,
they can make incremental reforms
while preventing the worst conser-
vative policies from being enacted.
A study released last year, how-
ever, shows that while triangulation
may win votes in the short term, in
the longer term it causes disillu-
sioned core supporters to abandon the
party, while not engendering loyalty
among the more conservative voters
it poached. Thats just what happened
in the 2010 shellacking the Demo-
crats received, in which a few voters
switched sides, but rather many Dem-
ocratic voters stayed home.
Sanderss electoral success in
the primaries reflects this. He per-
formed best in states that held open
primaries like Alaska, Michigan, and
Wisconsin and polled better among
independents than a self-described
moderate like Clinton. In fact, until
the day he dropped out of the race,
Sanders continued to poll better than
Clinton in head-to-head match ups
against every Republican candidate.
Pundits demands for liberals to
move to the center arent likely to
disappear overnight. And while at
seventy-four, Michael Bloomberg
isnt likely to ever launch that presi-
dential bid hes been threatening for
a decade, there will always be some
centrist technocrat like him who
establishment figures will hold up as
the answer. But while centrist politics
was once seen as the future, shifting
norms appear to be making it a rem-
nant of the past.
135
 THE PARTY
WE NEED
ILLUSTRATIONS BY

MARCO MICCICH

136 23 / FALL 2016

 A JOBS

B HOUSING

C EDUCATION

D POLICING

E FINANCE

F FEMINISM

G CIVIL LIBERTIES

H IMPERIALISM

I ENVIRONMENT

J HEALTH CARE

N
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

o one could have predicted the
rollercoaster ride of this election
year. But amid all the drama some-
thing powerful emerged millions of Americans
demanded a different kind of society, one that puts
people over profit.
Some of this desire was expressed in the plat-
form adopted by the Democratic Party, which is
its most progressive in decades. But for many, the
Democrats stopped miles short of offering a real
vision for change. To tackle inequality, poverty,
racism, sexism, and environmental collapse we need
bigger ideas. Socialists have these ideas.
Granted, we dont have a political party in the
United States. We dont have a labor party. And
were a long way away from becoming a force that
can enact policies to represent and empower the
working class. But were building momentum and
making demands.
In what follows, Jacobin contributors articulate
a set of concrete and achievable demands
demands that if implemented would reshape the
world in a direction that lifts up working people
and set the stage for broader transformations in
the future.

CONTINUED ON THE NEXT PAGE

THE PARTY WE NEED 137

 A RUNNING HED A JOBS

It is in this climate that the demand for full

employment is resurfacing with a vengeance.
The importance of full employment is not just
that, when peoples subsistence depends on selling
their labor power, being unemployed sucks. If that
were all, cutting a few percentage points off the
unemployment rate would be a worthwhile reform
but nothing to build a platform around. The bigger
point is that the tightness of the labor market affects
the whole working class.
A tight labor market is a sellers market. It
reverses the normal order of things. As Chris Mai-
sano put it: A full employment economy raises
the bargaining power and living standards of the
working class in the short run and
erodes the relative power of cap-

JOBS A jobs guarantee ital, opening up possibilities for

radical social transformation.
would do more Demanding full employment
MIKE BEGGS than anything doesnt mean glorifying wage

else to restore slavery: its perfectly compatible

Full Employment... has become
an aim of Conservative policy and labors power.
the strongest argument against
socialist critics. Thats famed
economist Joan Robinson, in 1962, trolling to her
left and her right. British unemployment had been
below 2percent for most of the period since the
war, without runaway inflation. Keynes had solved
the problem of unemployment, converted the
Conservatives, and stolen the communists best
argument. Capitalism apparently didnt need a
reserve army of labor after all.
Just fifteen years later, like a Star Wars opening
crawl: The hopes which accompanied the
Keynesian revolution, of reforming capitalism so
as to ensure continuous prosperity with full employ-
ment, are now all but extinguished. The slide into
crisis in the capitalist world has re-established the
pre-Keynesian orthodoxy as the conventional
wisdom at both national and international levels...
The rentier strikes back.
Two generations have since come of age in a world
where getting a joband building a career is a fierce
competition against your peers. Even the winners
are anxious, comfortable spots are precarious; the
losers have nothing to blame but their cv. In a buyers
market it seems like the employers are bringing the
goods; they create the jobs, we just work in them.
with converting technological
advance into leisure time. Full
employment is simply a state in
which demand for labor matches
supply. If supply falls because working people earn
enough to be comfortable from fewer hours of
work, thats great. In fact the aims support one
another: full employment gives workers the bar-
gaining power to reap the benefits of productivity
growth as they choose, while a managed reduc-
tion in working hours spreads the demand for
labor around. (A program of work-sharing and
voluntary time reductions is a key part of Dean
Baker and Jared Bernsteins 2013 full-employment
plan.)
Some on the Left have taken the view that full
employment is a regressive goal because auto-
mation is steadily reducing capitalisms need for
workers. Better to redistribute to the surplus pop-
ulation through a universal basic income. But the
idea that machines are about to supplant workers
is a trope as old as capitalism itself. It always looks
plausible because so many particular tasks are
always in the process of being automated, and
new wonders are always just around the corner.
And yet, new jobs have always come along. Maybe
this time of driverless cars and machine learning
really will be different, but it would be foolish to

138 23 / FALL 2016

A JOBS
place our political bets on it, especially before it
starts showing up in the productivity growth stats.
Technological change can certainly be very
disruptive to particular jobs and the value of par-
ticular skills. In recent decades, people have lost
stable, well-paying careers in manufacturing and
found their replacements precarious and low-paid.
Almost all net job growth in the United States since
1990 has been in low-productivity growth sectors:
construction, retail, hospitality, health care, edu-
cation, government, and finance. Recent times
have been no exception to the historical pattern
of workers being displaced from some sectors and
absorbed by others. This decade, net job growth
has been concentrated in education, health care,
social assistance, hospitality, and retail, sectors with
average hourly pay and weekly hours much lower
than the economy-wide average. For Matthew Klein
in the Financial Times, this suggests the growth of
make-work has been the main thing preventing
mass joblessness.
But there is no technological reason that such
jobs be low-paid and insecure. Rather than moving
into inherently low-paid jobs, the American work-
force has been shifting sectors at a time of chronic
labor weakness. It has moved from organized
industries with longer-standing norms in wages,
hours, and conditions to a casualized wasteland.
The problem over the longer run is displaced
workers not joining an ever-growing scrap heap,
but spending their lives in insecure service to the
winners.
Thatcherism and Reaganism came and went.
Friedmanite monetarism failed on its own terms
but fulfilled its historical mission of smashing the
labor movement. Friedmans legacy is also a set of
pernicious assumptions about the labor market a
reframing of unemployment as a technical problem
shared by conservatives and liberals alike. Its per-
vasive message is to not set our sights too high, to
accept a certain level of slack in the labor market as,
if not natural, at least necessary for price stability.
The impact on labor has been stark. In the
United States the median real wage has barely risen
in twenty-five years. Here, where employment was
only briefly really full in the 1960s, the post-1970s
have been marked by only intermittent visits to
below 5percent unemployment. Job growth has
typically been slow in recoveries, and especially
THE PARTY WE NEED
A JOBS
so since 2010. Only for a few years in the late 1990s
could the labor market plausibly be called tight
and this was unsurprisingly also a brief period of
real wage gains, declining poverty, and a slowdown
(not a reversal) of the rise in income inequality.
Though the US unemployment rate is back
where it was in 2005, the labor force participa-
tion rate is more than 3percentage points lower:
some of that reflects demographic trends, but most
is due to discouraged workers giving up the job
search. The Bureau of Labor Statisticss broader
measure of unemployment, which includes workers
who want work but have not been actively job-
seeking as well as part-time workers who want
full-time employment, has been stagnant at almost
10percent for most of the past year, still 2per-
centage points off its pre-crisis level. Moreover,
despite the apparent dovishness of Janet Yellens
Federal Reserve, as soon as genuine labor market
tightness begins to raise expectations and bar-
gaining power, the monetary hawks will almost
certainly be back in ascendance. In this context,
it is important for the Left to remember that when
central bankers and liberal economists welcome a
lower natural rate of unemployment, that is pred-
icated on labors chronic weakness.
The Left needs to reach higher. Restoring labors
economic power is the point of full employment
and at that point our interests diverge from the
liberal technocrats.
This divergence is a good thing. Genuine, lasting
full employment could be a massively popular aim
for a revitalized left. It is hard to explain to the pop-
ulace that a strong economy needs just the right
amount of anxiety, but that has long been the posi-
tion of the technocratic center. We should be calling
liberals bluff here. Basic economic security for all
freedom from fear hardly seems too much to ask
in a wealthy, technologically advanced society. But
liberalism cannot deliver it.
There are many ways to get there, and they
all have the advantage of being desirable poli-
cies in themselves: public investment in education,
health, infrastructure; green transformation; job
guarantees; income transfers the precise mix will
depend on the movements preferences and the
circumstances. (Two books one by Robert Pollin,
and one by Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein have
sketched plans for full employment in America.)
139
 A JOBS
The postwar boom showed us that full employ-
ment is possible in a capitalist society, but only
under fortunate conditions that are not themselves
under policy control. Once the luck runs out, or if
the luck is not there in the first place, full employ-
ment demands nothing less than a politicization of
distribution, and of production itself. It is, in Andr
Gorzs terms, a non-reformist reform, dysfunc-
tional for the system. Such a reform sooner or later
faces a crisis, and either the system spits it out or
is reshaped around it. Once there, a whole new
game begins.
HOUSING Everyone
deserves an
MASHAEL MAJID affordable home.
& KAREN NAREFSKY
In an age of visceral neoliberalism and skyrock-
eting housing costs, it can be hard to imagine a
truly transformative housing platform. Part of the
problem is how we talk about housing. Many of us
still use abstract market language: housing is imag-
ined as units, not homes with people living in them,
making it easier to accept eviction and displace-
ment and treat people as a secondary concern.
This framework also assumes that the free
market, unencumbered by political red tape, can
140 23 / FALL 2016
B HOUSING
provide enough housing for all who need it. But
we need only look at New York City, where up to a
third of luxury housing units in certain areas of Man-
hattan are unoccupied, to see that many housing
units are built to supply a demand for investment,
not housing.
Urban renewal projects have been displacing
working people since the late 1940s to make way
for services desired by the elite. Today, the same
cities whose exclusionary zoning, redlining, and
housing covenants disenfranchised communities
of color are now advancing policies to revitalize
blighted areas, often deepening gentrification pres-
sures in the process.
Instead of working for the public interest,
elected officials often act as real-estate proxies,
amplifying displacement within and from their
communities. Sometimes, the effect is subtle, but
even when the poor are not directly displaced by
a new transit line or sports arena, their inability to
pay inflated rents means they will eventually be
forced out, and the new amenities will serve those
who can pay.
A radical housing policy must aim to strengthen
working-class communities, not just increase the
number of total housing units.
One important way to do this is through rent
control and just cause for eviction policies. Rent
control limits annual rent increases, helping to sta-
bilize neighborhoods and leave tenants with more
money to spend in the local economy. Just cause for
eviction laws prevent the arbitrary
eviction of tenants and go hand in
hand with rent control.
If housing is about people, rent
control is about protecting those
people, respecting their funda-
mental dignity, and allowing them
to develop and maintain roots
within the community without constant fear of
displacement.
Conservative ideologues and liberals both like to
argue that rent control doesnt work that it holds
down property values, disincentivizes repairs, and
hey, arent San Francisco and New York City two of
the most unaffordable places to live despite having
rent control? But these arguments overlook how
outside factors shape rea-estate markets, and the
ways in which rent control has been implemented.
B HOUSING
Rent control in San Francisco and New York applies
only to buildings built before the mid to late 1970s,
so the current housing boom is not governed by
rent control. San Franciscos rent control laws are
also subject to the Ellis Act, meaning landlords can
evict their tenants in order to sell a building or con-
vert the units to condos.
Instead of dismissing rent control, we need to
view it in a new light. Poor people are losing the
little access they once had to affordable housing
close to job opportunities. New housing is prohib-
itively expensive, with only a small percentage set
aside as affordable. Uniformly applied rent control
would force contemporary developers to play by
the same rules as longtime landlords, and remove
the incentive for landlords to evict tenants through
flipping or condo conversion.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the need for
stronger rent regulation and tenant protections
is sparking an organized regional response. Mul-
tiple cities there are facing an unprecedented
challenge to housing affordability resulting in racial-
ized resegregation largely driven by a burgeoning
tech industry, a powerful real estate lobby, and
unaccountable political actors.
Because the market is failing those it was never
meant to protect, Bay Area tenants and advocates
are sharing scalable strategies and advancing pol-
icies like rent control and just cause for eviction
to challenge a dominant theory of trickle-down
gentrification that suggests we can build our way
out of this crisis. After years of solidarity and move-
ment-building across jurisdictions and a lack of
local political will six Bay Area cities are going
to the ballot for the first time in more than thirty
years this November to take up rent stabilization.
Ultimately, however, rent control preserves a
paradigm in which private individuals and cor-
porations profit from rents. It is one of the best
harm-reduction strategies in this paradigm, but our
transformative demand must be housing and land
that is owned by the people, through large-scale
public housing and community land trusts.
After years of appropriation and displacement,
control must be returned to residents, with the
profit motive subordinated to the universal right
to housing.
Community land trusts are a viable way to create
long-term housing affordability, but there has yet to
THE PARTY WE NEED
B HOUSING
be a substantial public investment in this strategy.
The Movement for Black Lives platform, released
this summer, promotes cooperative land ownership
as a way to build wealth, stability, and power in
black communities. The platform calls on the federal
government to use public resources funds and
land to implement fair development, prioritizing
community-based cooperative entities governed
by traditionally excluded communities and com-
munity members.
To achieve these objectives the state must be
front and center: the federal government must
invest in building and maintaining public housing
for people of all incomes throughout the country,
seeing shelter not as a commodity but as a basic
need. We should pursue a policy of full housing,
just as we talk about full employment.
When a substantial portion of the population
lives in government-subsidized housing, the ability
of private landlords to extort, harass, or evict is
greatly reduced, and tenants gain increased power
within their communities. As David Madden and
Peter Marcuse argue: the balance of power
between tenants and landlords, or between real
estate owners and communities, cannot be deter-
mined in a neutral, apolitical way. Quality public
housing will require the state to actively shift that
balance toward those currently marginalized by
our housing market.
US housing activists are in good company.
Movements like Plataforma dAfectats per la
Hipoteca (Platform for People Affected by Mort-
gages) in Barcelona and Ndifuna Ukwazi (Dare
to Know) in Cape Town are demanding the right
to a dignified home. And in Pakistan, the vibrant
Awami Workers Party (awp) is organizing around
the issue of squatter settlement demolitions in
Islamabad. Known as the katchi abadi nonviolent
resistance, the awp is amplifying the demands of
Pakistans landless population as part of its rad-
ical pro-labor, anti-imperialist, and redistributive
vision.
Gentrification and displacement systematically
remove affordable housing and other resources
from the reach of poor people. The only real alter-
native is a project of systematic investment in those
people. Leftists must engage in grassroots intersec-
tional organizing that reconceptualizes housing as
a true public good one that can only be secured
141
 B HOUSING
through transformative, disruptive, and liberatory
fights led by affected communities.
Building movements for rent control, public
housing, and the right to remain in our communi-
ties is vital to preserving multiple levels of security
for us all. Its time to take bold positions that not
only react to or reform bad policies, but lift up the
demands of people who are already imagining
another world.
EDUCATION A truly
progressive
MEGAN ERICKSON education
must be won,
Since their inception in the 1990s
and early 2000s, philanthrocapi- politically, by the
talist ngos like the Gates, Broad, working class.
and Walton family foundations
have used their immeasurable
resources to bring about a corporate vision of
education reform that places responsibility for
equalizing educational opportunity on the shoul-
ders of public schools, while forcing them to
compete with each other for funding, and intro-
ducing reforms borrowed from the business world.
Meanwhile, segregation is on the rise, and
ability grouping the practice of separating kids
based on ability, which ultimately results in more
142 23 / FALL 2016
C EDUCATION
race and class segregation has reemerged in
classrooms after falling out of use in the 1980s and
90s. Seventy-onepercent of fourth-grade teachers
reported grouping students based on ability in
2009, compared to less than a third in 1998. This
resegregation is directly related to corporate edu-
cation reforms increased testing, privatization,
deregulation, union-busting, budget-cutting, and
top-down standards and accountability pushed
by philanthrocapitalist ngos who increasingly have
the ear of federal education officials.
Aside from the serious moral and practical prob-
lems that have arisen from the corporate reform
formula, it is fundamentally flawed as policy. Corpo-
rate reform has been driving American education
policy for over a decade. Yet 2015 was the first
instance in twenty-five years that national standard-
ized test scores have fallen in math, and America
continues to lag far behind the oecd average on
the major comparative international test, the Pro-
gram for International Student Assessment (pisa).
As socialists, we must recognize first that
education alone can never make a more equal
society we need a working-class-led politics to
do that. But it is worth asking what education looks
like in a society in which childrens rights and the
right of all human beings to continue to learn far
into adulthood are taken seriously.
1. To improve education out-
comes for all people, we must
decommodify public education
and make it a basic universal
human right. That means abolishing
charter and for-profit schools,
and eliminating public subsi-
dies including philanthropy tax
loopholes for private schools.
Like k12 institutions, public col-
leges and universities should be
free and accessible to all.
2. The dominant metaphors of education must
be thrown out. The current preoccupation
with learners as consumers of education, with
education as a product, and with administra-
tors as managers carving out efficiency and
results from teachers and students in both
k12 education and higher education must
C EDUCATION
To improve education
outcomes for all people,
we must decommodify
public education and
make it a basic universal
human right.
be replaced by meaningful improvements in
quality for all. The small class sizes, beautiful
spaces, and collaborative, student-centered
curriculum that today distinguishes private
schools should be available to all learners.
Progressive education reform extends
beyond devising technocratic solutions. Educa-
tion is political, and the specifics of how school
systems run are less important than who has
a say in them. Real reform requires a broad
political commitment to equalizing outcomes
for everyone at all levels of society.
3. No meaningful, systemic reform of education
is possible until we recognize that children,
parents, and teachers, who at present are
allowed to play only a marginal role, if any, in
actually shaping policy, are the experts. (Their
growing presence on the streets suggests that
they, like their counterparts in Chile, Mexico,
and Quebec, are fed up with the education
status quo.)
Parents and teachers are longtime advo-
cates for small class sizes, and students like
them too. So while opinion-shapers like Mal-
colm Gladwell may dismiss the benefits of
smaller classes, research shows unequivocally
that reducing Americas comparatively large
class sizes would have an enormously posi-
tive effect on student learning, especially for
low-income students.
4. These improvements will require an increase
in funding, with new money distributed in a
way that addresses the reality that kids walk
THE PARTY WE NEED
C EDUCATION
into school having been born into dramatically
unequal financial situations which influence
their present and future successes far more
than their teachers or schools ever possibly
can (something that nearly every other oecd
country is already doing). We can pay for this
by collecting money that were already owed.
America has one of the lowest tax rates of all the
oecd countries, but the nations working and
middle classes bear the burden disproportion-
ately. The corporate share of federal tax revenues
has dropped by two-thirds in the past sixty years.
From 2008 to 2012, twenty-three American com-
panies (ge, Boeing, Verizon, etc.) paid less than
the poorest families zero in federal income
taxes. American corporations successfully avoid
paying $90billion a year every year in taxes, and
hold $2.1trillion in profits offshore.
The fact is the United States has more than
enough money to pay for every single citizen to
get a high-quality, state-funded education, if edu-
cation is truly our priority. And while it would be
an unprecedented expansion, its not impossible.
The time has come for radical change. Its
clear that the systems we currently have in place
to ensure social welfare and provide an equal
education for all are not working not only for
specific interest groups like teachers unions or
children of color or poor children but for the
entire 99percent. They are not working because
they are based on a number of assumptions that
are fundamentally flawed, and because they are
shaped and controlled by philanthrocapitalists and
corporate management consultants.
We cant cut welfare, destroy labor rights, and
leave it to schools to pick up the pieces if we want
a functioning society, let alone a fair or egalitarian
one. There is no progressive reform of education
possible without a social-democratic and polit-
ical reckoning. Behind us lies an extensive body
of peer-reviewed research on whats needed in
schools and how to bring it about, and ahead of us
lies a future in which freedom means more than
relief from government intrusion: it means creating
schools that are useful (and happy) places for the
people who spend their days in them. It means
reimagining education from something that hap-
pens to individuals between the ages of five to
143
 C EDUCATION
eighteen, to a collective undertaking that embraces
lifelong learning. It also means prioritizing it through
actions, not language.
A truly progressive education like a more
egalitarian society can never and will never be
given to us by billionaires. Both must be won, politi-
cally, by the working class. When it comes to school
quality and access, we have little left to lose and
everything to gain.
POLICING Communities
of color have
DOUGLAS WILLIAMS the right to be
free from the
The destruction of black and
brown life has become normal in American
the age of militarized police and state.
mass incarceration. The gruesome
scenes from Baton Rouge, Loui-
siana and Falcon Heights, Minnesota last summer
gave America a shocking look at state violence
perpetrated against low-income people of color.
But any response to this injustice would be
lacking without addressing the broader social and
economic context of this assault.
State violence against poor communities is
situated within a broader arc of neoliberalism.
Workers of color has been hit hard over the past
144 23 / FALL 2016
D POLICING
few decades as the growth of precarious service
work has far outpaced that of stable manufacturing
jobs. This transition has been devastating for many,
but especially for young black men.
Alongside painful job market shifts, begin-
ning in the late 1970s government at all levels
began dismantling the countrys already meager
social safety net. A new generation of state man-
agers, unchecked by working-class politics,
saw people as nothing more than potential cus-
tomers to be molded to the imperatives of the
marketplace.
Those who couldnt find a place in the new mar-
ketplace became the targets of an increasingly
aggressive policing system. As Richard Fording, Joe
Soss, and Sanford Schram argue: [T]hese develop-
ments have given rise to a double regulation of the
poor. The left hand of the welfare state and the
right hand of the carceral state now work together
as integrated elements of a single system.
Fighting the neoliberal states right hand is
imperative for socialists today. Poor people of color
have a pervasive relationship with the police. Even
schools have come to resemble security lines at
international airports, many replete with secu-
rity officers and metal detectors. Zero-tolerance
disciplinary policies disrupt, and sometimes even
end, educations over tiny infractions, and the use
of force against children is not
uncommon in classrooms.
Outside of school, black and
brown neighborhoods are under
constant surveillance from the
police. Friends gathering on a
street corner are vulnerable to
unwanted encounters with law
police enforcement encounters that
can profoundly impact the lives
of poor people: arrest drains
precious financial resources, and
having a criminal record can put gainful employ-
ment out of reach.
Policing the poor doesnt come cheap. The Jus-
tice Policy Institute reports that the United States
spends $100billion annually on its police, and nearly
$40billion a year on prisons. Instead of spending to
lock up millions of Americans, these resources could
have been directed at creating the jobs and services
desperately needed to curb poverty and violence.
D POLICING
The time has come to dismantle the Amer-
ican police state. But todays focus on piecemeal
policing reforms is out of touch with the realities
faced by communities of color. Popular reforms
like body cameras do little more than blunt state
brutality (witness the aftermath of Alton Sterlings
murder, where Baton Rouge police officers stated
that the body camera came loose before they
summarily executed a subdued Sterling). Instead,
police forces across the United States must be dis-
armed and brought to democratic account.
Prison reform is equally important. The United
States imprisons more people than any other
country. And with the rise of private prisons, partic-
ularly at the state level, the brutal nature of modern
incarceration has reached new heights. This bru-
tality and disregard for human life will only change
through ending mandatory sentencing protocols,
ending a parole system that does little more than
keep ex-felons tethered to the right hand of the
state, and the eventual abolishment of prisons. The
money used to maintain and build out the system
of mass incarceration in the United States would
then go towards funding more effective measures
to prevent crime and addiction, like jobs programs
for the unemployed, mental health treatment, and
drug rehabilitation.
Accomplishing these goals will take a militant
social movement rooted in communities of color.
Thankfully, history shows that this kind of polit-
ical change is possible. In 1964, against all odds,
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party ended
the all-white delegations being seated at the
Democratic National Convention. The United Cit-
izens Party of South Carolina (ucp) succeeded in
electing the first black people to the state house
of representatives in the 1970 election. And the
southwest-Texas-based La Raza Unida Party won
local offices across the region during the 1970s.
To repeat these successes today we need
to overhaul our political system. Defanging the
American police state and bringing about a rad-
ical redistribution of wealth are hard to imagine
unless we first decriminalize protest, freeing those
who have been imprisoned for civil demonstra-
tions and expunging the records of those with
protest-related convictions. These laws serve no
purpose beyond scaring away people from political
engagement.
THE PARTY WE NEED
D POLICING
Police forces across the
United States must be
disarmed and brought to
democratic account.
In addition to this, limitations on the expres-
sion of political preference through alternative
parties must also be lifted. This includes statutes
such as signature requirements and high thresholds
for securing automatic ballot access. Nationwide
legalization of fusion voting which allows mul-
tiple parties to endorse a single candidate would
deepen political engagement. Fusion is legal in
South Carolina, and is one of the reasons that the
black-led ucp remains active today.
But as scholars like political theorist Carole
Pateman argue, its also essential to take back power
in the workplace. The development of political
power and efficacy is directly tied to workplace
democracy. And in this respect, it is no surprise
that feelings of political efficacy have diminished
as labor union density has withered in the United
States. These issues are exacerbated for workers
of color, who find themselves unemployed, under-
paid, and isolated from the broader economy even
in boom times.
The appetite for workplace democracy and
the idea that workers and their communities should
own the products of their labor has grown in
recent years. In Jackson, Mississippi, the late mayor
Chokwe Lumumba tried to build a cooperative
economy as a means of reviving the citys economy.
In Cleveland, economic cooperatives are thriving
in the citys most vulnerable neighborhoods, and
city officials in Rochester, New York have commis-
sioned a research study on the feasibility of building
cooperativism there as well.
Ultimately, the goal is liberation. To get there,
we must continue the process of articulating rev-
olutionary demands while building the coalitions
necessary to bring about change through all
manner of political participation. We must fight
oppressive structures in the streets, in our homes,
at the ballot box, and in our communities.
145
 A RUNNING HED E FINANCE

who hate finance as the destroyer of their own

small capitals, and sincere believers in competition
who see finance as collector of illegitimate rents.
And on a practical level, there may be common
ground between these positions and a socialist
program. But we cant accept the idea that finance
is an intrusion into some more humane or authentic
capitalism.
On the one hand, it is finance (as a concrete
institution) that generates and enforces the money
claims against social persons of all kinds human
beings, firms, nations that extend and maintain
the logic of commodity production. (Student loans
reinforce the discipline of wage labor; sovereign
debt upholds the international
division of labor.)

FINANCE Socializing Yet the financial system is also

where conscious planning takes
finance is about its most fully developed form
J.W. MASON more than taking under capitalism. Banks are, in

on Wall Street Schumpeters phrase, the private

At its most basic level, finance has
two logically distinct functions: its about a new
bookkeeping a record of money economic vision.
obligations and commitments
and planning a set of institutions
for allocating claims on the social product. The
fusion of these functions is as old as capitalism,
and has troubled the bourgeois conscience for
almost as long.
For 250years, economists, reformers, and cranks
have proposed ways to separate the bookkeeping
and planning functions of the banking system and
restore objectivity to the money system. They seek
by legislative fiat to compel money to be what it
really is: a measure of value that reflects the real
value of commodities, free of the human judgments
of bankers and politicians.
Socialists reject this fantasy. We know that
there was no precapitalist world of production
and exchange on which money and then credit
were later superimposed. Networks of money
claims are age-old; they are the substrate on
which commodity production has grown and been
organized.
There are political positions that view finance
as the enemy of a more humane or authentic cap-
italism: managerial reformers who criticize finance
as a parasite on productive enterprises, populists
equivalent of Gosplan, the Soviet
planning agency. Their lending
decisions determine what new
projects will get a share of soci-
etys resources, and suspend or
enforce the judgement of the market on mon-
ey-losing enterprises. Socialists oppose the power
of finance because we seek to progressively reduce
the extent to which human life is organized around
the accumulation of money. But we embrace the
element of planning already inherent in finance; we
want to expand the domain of conscious choice,
and reduce the domain of blind necessity.
For the American left today, this suggests a pro-
gram along the following lines:
1.Decommodify money.
Shifting responsibility for the monetary plumbing
of the economy to the state addresses some of the
directly visible abuse and instability of the existing
monetary system while pointing the way toward
more profound transformations.
This could involve: a public payments system in
which routine electronic payments are the respon-
sibility of the state in the same way as the physical
currency theyve largely replaced; postal banking;
and public credit ratings, both for bonds and for
individual borrowers.

146 23 / FALL 2016

E FINANCE
Decommodifying money would also mean
fighting for things like public housing finance and
public retirement insurance. Mortgages for own-
er-occupied housing already are a patina of market
transactions laid over a system that is substantively
public. We dont need to support the cultivation of
a hothouse petty bourgeoisie through home own-
ership to insist that it be done directly rather than
disguised as private transactions. Similarly, provision
for old age, like housing, is an area where social
policy promotes what Gerald Davis calls the capital
fiction conceiving ones relationship to society
in terms of asset ownership. Instead, we should
support the abolition of existing programs that
encourage private retirement saving, and a great
expansion of Social Security and similar systems.
2.Repress finance.
Historically, financial regulation has sometimes
taken the form of financial repression, in which
the types of assets held by financial institutions
are substantially dictated by the state. This allows
credit to be directed more effectively to socially
useful investment. It also allows policymakers to
hold market interest rates down, which especially
in the context of higher inflation diminishes both
the burden of debt and the power of creditors.
Regulation should also focus on functions, not
institutions. The political power of finance comes
from its ability to threaten routine social book-
keeping, and the security of small property owners.
(If we dont bail out the banks, the atms will shut
down! What about your 401(k)?) Policy should
focus on preserving socially necessary functions,
not the institutions that perform them. Deposit
insurance is a model here.
3.Democratize central banks.
Central banks have always been central planners.
They condition the profitability and direction of
productive activity through their choices about
interest rates and how financial institutions are reg-
ulated and rescued. This role is often concealed
behind an ideology that presents central bank
behavior as somehow reproducing the natural
behavior of markets.
Developments since the 2008 financial crisis
have left this ideology in tatters. Central banks inter-
vened directly in credit markets, in some cases
THE PARTY WE NEED
E FINANCE
replacing private lenders entirely. And the failure
of conventional monetary policy to restart growth
has pushed central banks reluctantly toward credit
policy, directly channeling credit to selected bor-
rowers. This represents a grudging admission that
the anarchy of competition is unable to coordinate
production.
The challenge now is to politicize central
banks to make them the object of public debate
and popular pressure. In Europe, the national cen-
tral banks (which retain substantial autonomy) will
be a key terrain of struggle for future left govern-
ments. In the United States, we can demand Fed
leadership who will seek lower unemployment and
faster wage growth, and will actively direct credit
to socially useful ends.
4.Defend the spaces of politics.
Really existing capitalism consists of narrow streams
of market transactions flowing between vast areas
of non-market coordination. A core function of
finance is to impose a capitalist logic on these non-
market structures. The claims of shareholders over
nonfinancial businesses, and bondholders over
national governments, subordinate them to the
logic of accumulation.
Socialists must therefore build up defenses
against these claims not because we have any
faith in productive capitalists or national bourgeoi-
sies, but because they occupy the space in which
politics is possible.
Specifically we should stand with corporations
against shareholders. The corporation, as Marx long
ago noted, is the abolition of the capitalist mode
of production within the capitalist mode of produc-
tion itself. Without the threat of takeovers and the
pressure of shareholder activists, the corporation
can become a space where workers and other
stakeholders can contest control over production
and the surplus it generates. This does not imply any
affection for existing corporate hierarchies. Rather,
its a recognition of the value of the corporation
as a social organism as a space structured by
relationships of trust and loyalty, and by intrinsic
motivation, and as the site of consciously planned
production of use values.
The Left should also stand with national econ-
omies against foreign capital. States can only be
vehicles for conscious control of the economy
147
 E FINANCE
if financial claims across borders are limited.
Accordingly, we should support efforts of national
governments to delink from the global economy,
to escape the discipline of capital mobility, and
to maintain or regain control over their financial
systems. Such efforts are often connected to a pol-
itics of racism, nativism, and xenophobia, which we
must uncompromisingly reject. Instead, we can look
toward a world in which national borders pose no
barrier to people and ideas, but limit the movement
of goods and act as impassible barriers to private
financial claims.
FEMINISM Policies that
combat sexism
MARIA SVART are policies that
empower poor
This years election marks the
first time a woman has stood as and working-
a viable candidate for president class women.
in the United States. But socialist
feminists arent celebrating too
much they know real change, as opposed to
symbolic change, will come only when wealth and
power is redistributed to poor and working-class
women.
Socialist feminists believe that, in all stages of
life, women benefit from policies that allow them
148 23 / FALL 2016
F FEMINISM
to participate in society on equal footing with men,
rather than depending on a formal or informal male
partner for economic survival: the right to healthy
food, clean air, and safe housing during childhood;
quality education and an environment safe from
harassment in the transitions to adolescence and
adulthood; income support for their children as well
as access to contraception and abortion; control
of the conditions of and fruits of womens paid and
unpaid labor; universal health care; and a secure,
dignified retirement.
What stands in the way of achieving these kinds
of policies? Capitalism, for one thing. Our eco-
nomic system relies on womens unpaid labor in
heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear families to create
and nurture future workers and maximize the pro-
ductivity of male workers. The majority of women
also work outside the home, often employed in
low-wage sectors of the economy like care work,
which is itself undervalued because of its associ-
ation with women.
In addition to the elite men and women who
exploit women in the workplace, cultural and polit-
ical elites also play a central role in oppressing
women. They shape public perceptions and institu-
tions to foster the upward distribution of wealth by
championing the notion that individual success and
worth depends on personal responsibility, merit,
and the ability to produce profits for corporations.
At the same time, women (and increasingly men) are
pressured to participate in, and identify with, con-
sumption and performance rituals
designed to maximize spending
on beautification.
In other words, the capitalist
system is rigged to benefit a tiny
elite, and that elite uses every
opportunity to exploit segments of
the working class in complex ways
as both producers and consumers,
including women. The vast majority
of women face a combination of
class and gender oppression, and
in many cases others as well, based on race, citizen-
ship, and sexual and gender orientation, to name a
few. Women are taught to think of ourselves as indi-
viduals yet we are treated as an exploitable class.
Thus, a left analysis of sexism diverges from
mainstream feminist arguments. Socialist feminists
F FEMINISM
The capitalist system is rigged
to benefit a tiny elite, and that
elite uses every opportunity
to exploit segments of the
working class, including
women. Women are taught
to think of ourselves as
individuals yet we are treated
as an exploitable class.
argue that while sexism is not independent of the
capitalist mode of production, it influences and is
influenced by that system. Furthermore, the way
to eradicate sexism is not to expect each woman
to lean in and prove herself to the powers above
her, but rather to come together with other women
and collectively demand a voice in the conditions
that shape their lives, whether economic, political,
or social. Women as a class particularly the work-
ing-class and poor women who are the majority of
our sex are much stronger united and more able
to demand concrete policy changes that challenge
both the logic of capitalism and our current sex/
gender system.
Left policies to combat sexism are those that
empower poor and working-class women.
Medicare for all, a single-payer universal health-
care system, would disproportionately benefit
women because coverage would be indepen-
dent from both employment and marriage, it would
encourage better care for chronic illnesses, and
address the cost issues that send women into debt
and bankruptcy. It would help the women who
tend to be the ones taking time outside the formal
labor market to care for sick family members, or
shouldering that burden on top of paid work. Such
a system must include reproductive health services
such as contraception, abortion, and prenatal care.
THE PARTY WE NEED
F FEMINISM
A new publicly funded, universal high-quality
child-care system would relieve families of the cost
of private care, particularly mothers who still do a
disproportionate share of child-rearing and other
domestic work. In addition, ensuring providers
receive adequate training and a living wage would
lift this work out of its current position as under-
valued and underpaid, and administering it via a
public program would provide transparency and
prevent the isolation of domestic workers in indi-
vidual homes. The same applies to workers in k12
and higher education.
Women make up the majority of the low-wage
workforce and are overrepresented in industries
with low rates of unionization. Many simply cannot
survive alone and lack the financial cushion that
would allow them to leave domestic abusers, or
even simply choose life partners based on true
compatibility. A livable minimum wage pegged
to inflation, starting at fifteen dollars but ideally
higher, and the abolition of the gender pay gap,
would go a long way towards promoting womens
independence, as would the removal of barriers
to unionization.
Increased direct income support or subsidies in
the form of expanded food stamp and welfare pro-
grams would immediately help millions of women
and children. To overcome the political barriers the
ruling class has erected through racialized appeals
to segments of the working and middle classes,
such programs could even be turned into a uni-
versal basic income, which could lead to not only
a physically healthier society but a much broader
cultural renaissance.
Absent a universal basic income, a deliberate
choice to invest in education, training, and liv-
ing-wage jobs in the kinds of public programs listed
in this plank would begin to address a fundamental
problem with the capitalist system the shortage
of decent jobs.
But the coming wave of automation is also likely
to change our society in ways we cannot predict.
Survival may not always depend on working for a
wage. For this reason, women need to be on the
ground floor of discussions about a new kind of
economic system. Poor and working-class women
must have a voice in deciding how we create new
institutions and allocate resources to disrupt old
patterns of sexist behavior.
149
 A RUNNING HED
CIVIL LIBERTIES Real democracy
rests on strong
JOSEPH M. SCHWARTZ political, civil, and
social rights.
Democratic socialists have histori-
cally been consistent advocates of
political, civil, and social rights, criticizing author-
itarian governments on both the right and left.
Self-proclaimed capitalist democracies frequently
violate the rights of oppressed racial and national
groups, lgbt people, immigrants, women, labor
activists, and dissidents particularly in periods an emerging state-corporate surveillance complex,
of alleged national security crisis.
Socialists consider political and civil liberties as
worthy in and of themselves. These rights were not
granted to working people by capitalists aiming to
buy off popular dissent, but rather by people of
color, women, the working class, and poor engaged
in epochal, often deadly fights against the powerful.
This struggle continues today.
To secure the freedom of all particularly
women and the lgbt community individuals must
be free from sexual violence and harassment. We
will not achieve full civil rights until lgbt people can
publicly express their gender and sexual identity
without fear and with full legal guarantees of equal
access to public facilities. The Left must continue
the battle to win federal legal guarantees against
employment discrimination and workplace harass-
ment and discrimination in public accommodations
and commerce for lgbt individuals. The Left must
also fight for equal adoption and parenting rights,
150 23 / FALL 2016
G CIVIL LIBERTIES
as well as their right to cohabit and to share prop-
erty and parenting responsibilities. These rights
must be secured within the purview of civil law,
free of any influence of religious belief.
Socialists are also keenly aware that the goals of
the civil rights and feminist struggles of the 1960s
and 1970s have not been fully achieved. Women and
men will only be able to equitably balance parental
and work responsibilities when our society joins the
rest of the advanced democracies in guaranteeing
paid parental leave and in developing a universal
public child-care system.
People of color still experience unequal and
inhumane treatment from our police and criminal
justice system. Over 7percent
of African American adults are
denied the franchise by felony
exclusion laws (including 25per-
cent of black Floridians). We must
combat all forms of voter restric-
tion and put an end to mass
incarceration by treating drug use
as a public health issue, abolishing
mandatory minimum sentences, and subjecting
nonviolent crime to community reparative forms of
justice rather than punitive imprisonment.
There are also new civil liberties fights to take
on. In an age of massive corporate data-mining and
socialists must fight for vigorous guarantees of
freedom from surveillance by both the state and
corporations. The government-corporate secu-
rity state frequently uses data-mined information
to issue national security letters or to get secret
courts (such as the Federal Intelligence Surveillance
Court) to authorize surveillance of US citizens and
residents, violating the basic procedural rights of
the rule of law.
The government should only be able to invade
an individuals privacy if they can demonstrate
before a regular court of law clear evidence that
the individual may be engaged in legal wrongdoing.
This principle of individualized suspicion not only
protects individuals and targeted groups from unfair
and illegal treatment, but also produces necessary
restraints on law enforcement agencies engaging in
wasteful, repressive, and inefficient fishing expedi-
tions. The tsas No Fly List and the nypds secret
demographic units multi-million-dollar surveillance
G CIVIL LIBERTIES G CIVIL LIBERTIES

of Muslims in the New York area constitute mass courts. Individuals charged with terrorist acts must
violations of individual civil liberties that have failed be publicly tried in American courts and guaran-
to identify a single attack or threat. teed full legal rights. Both the US Constitution and
The ability of private data-mining corpora- international law prohibit the use of lethal force
tions (e.g., Choicepoint, Intelius, LexisNexis and outside of armed conflict zones, unless it is used
US Search Profile) to sell individuals cyber-usage as a last resort against a concrete, specific, and
data to governments and companies poses another imminent threat of great harm and every effort is
grave threat to individual freedom. Federal security made to prevent harming civilian bystanders. The
agencies spend approximately $56billion a year on executive must report such activities to Congress,
such data-mining, with 70percent of those funds and elected representatives must be allowed to
spent on contracts with private data-mining firms. restrain or prohibit such activities.
The United States should emulate some other Making these demands a reality will only happen
countries and create overarching data privacy if a vigilant movement from below compels the state
laws that restrict the corporate sharing of sen- to take action to preserve political, civil, and social
sitive personal data with either governments or rights. As longtime defenders of these rights, social-
private organizations. Corporations should only be ists must be front and center in the struggle.
allowed to share personal data with other private
entities if individual users grant advance permission.
Behemoths like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and
Microsoft track the internet usage patterns of their
customers and sell this data to private data-aggre-
gators who then sell this information to corporations
and government agencies. These private data-ag-
gregators must, at a minimum, be heavily regulated
by an independent government agency. Before the
internet age, court rulings held that phone records
were protected by privacy law, except in the case
of extraordinary government security needs estab-
lished in a regular court of law. If wiretaps were
illegal except for extraordinary security needs, the
same status should be given to government access
to personal information gathered by corporations.
While the Freedom Act of 2015 allegedly elimi-
nated the National Security Agencys indiscriminate
data-mining of individual phone records (made
public by Edward Snowdens 2013
revelations), it left intact Article215
of the original Patriot Act. This
article enables federal govern-
Building a more IMPERIALISM
ment agencies to secretly obtain peaceful world
data held by libraries, businesses, means taking RANIA KHALEK
and other third parties without
on American
a court-issued warrant. Both The chaos and instability created
Article215 and the 1978 National militarism. by the US war machine over the
Intelligence Acts creation of the last fifteen years, particularly in
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance the Middle East, has reached
Court (fisc) must be overturned. catastrophic levels. Author and journalist Patrick
In addition, the United States must stop vio- Cockburn calls the present moment the age of
lating international law through its secret military disintegration.

THE PARTY WE NEED 151

 H IMPERIALISM
In Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle
East, millions of people are on the brink of famine
thanks to a US-supported bombing campaign led
by the richest and most tyrannical country in the
region, Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, Israels colonial project in
Palestine grinds on with the unconditional support
of the American taxpayer. Obama recently handed
Israel $38billion in military aid, dooming Palestinians
to another decade of suffocating repression, ethnic
cleansing, and periodic slaughter.
Fifteen years after 9/11, the United States is still
bombing Afghanistan in a war thats been largely
forgotten despite Afghanistan producing the
second largest number of refugees in the world.
The United States is bombing Iraq again as well.
This time the enemy is isis, the murderous death
cult that rose from the ashes of the 2003 US inva-
sion and occupation, which killed at least a million
Iraqis and unleashed sectarian civil wars that have
plunged the region into madness.
In 2011, our leaders insisted Libyan dictator Mua-
mmar Gaddafi was about to massacre thousands
of civilians and only Western intervention could
stop him. But a recently released study by the UK
Parliament determined that the looming massacre
was a myth based on faulty intelligence and that
the real motivation behind the intervention was
securing Western economic and political interests
in the region. Even by these standards, it was an
utter failure. Thousands were killed and since then
the country has devolved into a lawless haven for
extremist groups, including isis.
isis has also made its way into Syria, where US
forces are bombing the group while simultaneously
arming and funding an Islamist-dominated insur-
gency against Russian-backed Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad. Back in Washington, the armchair
war hawks are pushing for a confrontation with
Russia, just one of the proxy wars that has engulfed
Syria since the uprising in 2011.
The broad pattern is clear. Our military adven-
tures since 9/11 have been nothing short of
disastrous. Millions of lives have been shattered
and an endless stream of refugees is now trapped
between borders and drowning at sea.
Throughout its history the United States has
continually engaged in both overt and covert
warmaking. But unlike the wars of the past,
152 23 / FALL 2016
H IMPERIALISM
Washingtons incoherent war on terror appears
endless. So far, the US government has spent a
staggering $5trillion on this war while maintaining
some eight hundred military bases that touch every
corner of the globe.
Wars are still waged to secure the interests of
ruling elites and make the world safe for capitalism.
But elite interests are no longer limited to looting
resources, crushing democracy, and pacifying resis-
tance. These days more war is an objective, with
defense industry giants prospering from both ends
of the crisis. There are more refugees today fleeing
war and persecution than at any time since World
Warii. In the process, war profiteers like bae Sys-
tems, Thales, and Lockheed Martin have become
refugee profiteers as well, lobbying for contracts
to militarize western borders, warehouse migrants,
and build complex surveillance systems that keep
those fleeing their bombs from reaching safety.
But these militarized borders havent prevented
instability from migrating to the United States
instability follows insecurity and want. In the richest
country in the world, over fifteen million children
go to bed hungry every night and millions more
struggle to get enough to eat, entire communities
are poisoned by dirty drinking water, student debt is
stunting a generation, the middle class is shrinking,
and police look like occupying armies to the millions
of poor and working people. And this decaying
neoliberal order is fueling a resurgent far right that
feeds off of anti-Muslim and anti-refugee hysteria.
On a brighter note, theres also a resurgent
left, which swelled during the campaign of Bernie
Sanders, whose demands for economic justice res-
onated with millions of people. Unfortunately, with
a few minor exceptions, Sanderss foreign policy
vision was vague on details and failed to challenge
Americas ongoing costly wars that, like Wall Street
banks, benefit the billionaire class to the detriment
of everyone else. That has to change.
Americas disastrous foreign adventures help
drive right-wing extremism domestically and
abroad while enriching those at the top. Consider
Islamophobia. Islamophobia is about more than
just reactionary hate and bigotry; its also a tool for
legitimizing a US presence in the Middle East. Thats
why weapons companies like General Dynamics,
Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Ray-
theon are among its key funders. Meaningful
H IMPERIALISM
opposition to Islamophobia demands principled
rejection of the bipartisan US war machine that
profits from it.
Its crucial that the socialist left offer not only
a critical intervention against American militarism,
but also a broader vision for a better country and
a better world. First and foremost, the Left needs
to take a clear stand against US military interven-
tions. They do not serve humanitarian purposes. The
country that is starving Yemen cannot possibly save
Syria. Its also important to acknowledge that while
extremist groups like isis and al-Qaeda do pose
serious threats in the lawless areas they control,
fifteen years of war have demonstrated that reli-
gious fundamentalism cannot be defeated militarily.
Bombing these groups has created nothing but
chaos, desperation, and poverty the conditions
in which fundamentalism thrives.
As socialists, our goal should be to reduce and
eventually end the presence of US military forces
abroad, quit arming and enabling tyrants, end the
endless wars, prioritize diplomacy, and turn our
bloated defense budget toward meeting peoples
basic needs at home and abroad. The stability of
the world depends on it.
ENVIRONMENT The future of our planet depends on us
wresting power from fossil-fuel capitalists.
KATE ARONOFF
THE PARTY WE NEED
I ENVIRONMENT
There is no future in which the fossil-fuel industry
and human civilization as we know it can coexist.
Scientists estimate that we have just a one-in-three
shot at keeping catastrophic floods, devastating
heat waves, and prolonged drought from becoming
a new and terrifying normal, and thats only if we
keep at least 80percent of existing fossil-fuel
reserves in the ground. Nations like the United
States need to scale back their carbon emissions
by a full 10percent each and every year, and transi-
tion entirely off of carbon-based fuel sources by no
later than 2035. This radical transformation is entirely
possible, but it wont happen until we wrest power
away from fossil-fuel capitalists and allow ourselves
to imagine whats possible in a world without them.
This wont be an easy task. Those already suffering
the impacts of climate change are almost always the
people whove contributed the least to it. And the
people and institutions with the power to mitigate
rising tides seem to be doing the least to keep
them at bay. From the doomed battle for cap-and-
trade in 2009 to the lackluster Paris Agreement last
year, climate policy has been hobbled by policy-
makers zeal to compromise with fossil-fuel execu-
tives and the politicians whose campaigns they fuel.
In the United States both major political parties
have been guilty of their own kind of denialism:
Republicans, in denying the existence of a problem,
and Democrats, in believing that it can only be
solved by placating the people and institutions
that created it. Limiting, too, has been the lack of
a transformative vision for what our low-carbon
world might look like.
Our challenge now is twofold: transition entirely
off of fossil fuels in the next twenty years, and build
an economy that can prosper without them.
At the top of the agenda should be creating
and aggressively enforcing a carbon budget in line
with science and the needs of the countrys most
vulnerable communities, putting a stringent limit
on emissions rather than just a price.
Neoliberal explanations for the climate crisis
point the finger at our collective failure to bike and
recycle more. But this is a stark misreading of reality.
153
 I ENVIRONMENT
The lions share of our consumption problems
come from the top, where the yachts and private
jets reign. Just ninety companies are responsible
for an astounding two-thirds of climate change.
While corporations might be the greatest threat to
humanitys survival, the rich are right behind them.
The top 1percent of emitters in the United States
just 3.4million people have a carbon footprint
over 2,500 times greater than the bottom 1percent
worldwide. If the top 10percent of the planets
polluters lived like the average European, global
emissions would decline by a full third. As climate
scientist Kevin Anderson puts it, The poor will not
become wealthy enough within sciences timeline
for their emissions to matter. In other words, a
stringent and progressive carbon budget will curb
trips to Mar-a-Lago not pta meetings.
In terms of production, the solution is even more
obvious and more pressing than curbing life-
style choices: put the fossil-fuel industry on a strict
carbon budget of its own, cut off its $20.5billion
in state subsidies, and run it clean out of business.
Conveniently on this front, taking power also means
taking over the Environmental Protection Agency,
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the
Department of the Interior, the Department of
Energy, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the
myriad other agencies which wielded effec-
tively can stop new fossil-fuel infrastructure
projects, shutter existing ones, and leverage pro-
hibitive fines and legal sanctions on the industry.
Even at the state and local level, city councils and
state-level departments of environmental protec-
tion often have the power to stop pipelines and
fuel export facilities in their tracks.
Better still is bringing these companies under
public ownership, managing their liquidation, and
using the assets to retrain employees for jobs that
actually need doing. Todays fossil-fuel workers
could build and install solar panels and wind tur-
bines, retrofit the countrys perilously outmoded
grid system, and erect public housing thats com-
fortable, energy efficient, and able to withstand the
kinds of climate impacts that are already inevitable.
Of course, energy workers wont be the only ones
jilted by the kind of deep economic transforma-
tion this transition will require. Consequently, a just
transition should also include wider-reaching eco-
nomic protections, like a universal basic income
154 23 / FALL 2016
I ENVIRONMENT
and comprehensive program for full employment.
All this begs the question: How do we keep the
lights on? Today, the majority of Americans get their
energy from investor-owned utilities. The poorer
and browner you are, the bigger percentage of
your income your electricity bill eats up. A minority
of power distribution is handled by cooperatives
and state-run utilities, many of which have fallen
prey to the same kinds of corruption and bureau-
cratic tendencies that plague investor-run firms.
Renewables are even tougher to come by. Get-
ting residential solar typically requires either a hefty
down payment up front, or a high credit score in
order to qualify for a loan. Rooftop installation pres-
ents an obvious barrier for renters, whose landlords
have little incentive to either source power sustain-
ably or install solar panels on the roofs of multi-unit
buildings. Wind turbines are scarce in the United
States, and hydro and nuclear power are each sad-
dled with serious social and environmental costs.
Making power a public right clean, affordable,
and universal offers a way forward. Here the
New Deal is instructive: when some 90percent of
American homes lacked electricity in the years after
the Great Depression, the government invested
capital up front for communities to kick-start their
own sourcing and distribution networks. Explicitly
set up to fill gaps left by the private market, the
Rural Electrification Administration built over four
hundred rural electric cooperatives (recs), owned
and operated by ratepayers. Today, there are nine
hundred, serving some forty-two million people in
some of the countrys poorest and most conser-
vative parts. Unfortunately, over the years many
have been commandeered by old-boys networks,
though campaigns to reclaim recs are now being
waged around the country.
Once erected, these utilities became self-
funded and operated by member-owners. Its a
model strikingly similar to a much more recent
example: Germanys Energiewende, which has
made it possible for Germans, in ideal weather, to
harvest 100percent of their power from clean and
largely community-owned sources. (Worth noting
here as well is the fact that these energy coopera-
tives have in many places managed to outcompete
the countrys own monopoly power providers.)
Each of the programs above resulted from years
of militant agitation from below, which is at least as
I ENVIRONMENT J HEALTH CARE

instructive as their structure for understanding how element of an egalitarian society. As medical
to implement similar efforts in our own context knowledge grows and new, salubrious treatments
and to improve upon them. and technologies emerge, the task of realizing the
Decarbonizing Americas economy will require social right to health care will become only more
a slew of other changes, including agricultural pressing.
reforms, scaled up r&d, and more compassionate Developments in recent decades, however, have
immigration policies. Outside pressure even on often been in the opposite direction. Pharmaceu-
our own advocates in the halls of power will be tical giants corrupt and control the research agenda
necessary to ensure these shifts take place on a while pricing drugs beyond the means of many;
democratic footing, and receive the levels of state the corporate insurance industry reaps profits by
investment needed for them to succeed. denying care and constraining choice; for-profit
Fossil fuels are hardwired into our economy. providers from hospitals to hospices trans-
But even more deeply ingrained in Americans is form the art of healing into yet another business
an abiding spirit of resistance from slave upris- venture.
ings to the labor militancy of the 1930s to Occupy The 2010 Affordable Care Act partially ame-
and the movement for black lives. Todays climate liorated some of the inadequacies of the US
movement has already put a target squarely on health-care system (in particular, slashing the rate
the fossil-fuel industrys back. Climate change is a of uninsurance). Yet the framework leaves most
chance for the Left to take a shot at building a better of the gravest inequities of commodified health
economy and a brighter future for all of us. care intact: nearly thirty million Americans remain
uninsured, racial and class-based health-care
inequalities persist, and the corporate transfor-
mation of care continues unabated.
And there should be little doubt that it is the
working class that bears the brunt of these trends:
as insurance premium growth outpaces wage
growth, and as the cost of care at the time of use
rises (for things like copayments and deductibles),
working people are doubly squeezed.
Meanwhile, new research suggests that levels
of health inequality are rising, with a progressive
divergence between the life expectancies of the
rich and the poor. And another recent study shows
how a rising proportion of health-care spending
is going towards the care of the better off at the
expense of ordinary folks.
Yet there is hope on the health-care horizon.
Across the country, campaigns are being waged
to move us beyond the status quo. Activists
have fought for state-level
single-payer or universal health-

HEALTH CARE Universal health care reforms; against pernicious

racial health inequalities; to force
care is essential recalcitrant, reactionary state gov-
ADAM GAFFNEY to an egalitarian ernments towards the expansion

society. of Medicaid; and to roll back the

A universal health-care program conservative assault on reproduc-
with care available to all on the tive health-care access.
basis of needs not means is a foundational On the national level, meanwhile, the unexpected

THE PARTY WE NEED 155

 J HEALTH CARE
success of Bernie Sanderss presidential campaign
helped to propel the movement for a federal sin-
gle-payer health-care reform into the limelight.
The systemic causes of health-care injustice
should be simultaneously advanced from multiple
angles. But articulating an overarching long-term
platform for a national health-care program is
imperative for the Left. What might such a program
look like, in broad strokes? A multitude of activist
health-care voices have called and struggled for
radical single-payer programs that would provide
quality health care for all. Physicians for a National
Health Program is one group that has made great
strides in articulating a national health-care pro-
gram, and the model that follows draws from our
recent revised proposal.
First, a truly democratic health-care program
must be based on single-payer universalism: the
inclusion of every person in the nation in a public
program that provides comprehensive benefits
including ambulatory and inpatient care, mental
health care, long-term care, reproductive health
care, dental care, and home care is the inelim-
inable core of a national health-care program.
A second foundation is the end of financial bar-
riers to care. Fees at point of health-care use for
physicians visits, hospitalizations, or medications
deter those who need care from obtaining it. Such
payments are also economically regressive. Patients
should not be forced to enter the cash nexus to
receive care health care must be free at point
of use.
A third element is a socialized system of health-
care financing and payment. When all funds flow
through a single payer that is to say, the govern-
ment we eliminate the vast inefficiencies of the
bloated private health insurance industry, allowing
us to pay for this expansion of health care without
diverting resources from other important social
projects. Additionally, financing a health system
through progressive taxation directly functions to
reduce economic inequality.
A socialized health-care financing system
would have other advantages as well. For instance,
a national health-care program could directly
plan and fund the construction of new health-
care infrastructure where it is most needed, not
where it is most profitable. This will go a long way
towards rolling back the famous inverse care law
156 23 / FALL 2016
J HEALTH CARE
Obamacare improved some
of the inadequacies of the US
health-care system. Yet the
framework leaves the worst
inequities of commodified health
care intact: nearly thirty million
Americans remain uninsured.
articulated by Julian Tudor Hart, which posits that
care is least available where it is most needed (and
vice versa).
Fourth, it is imperative that we contend with
the changing health-care landscape in America:
increasing consolidation is leading us towards
ever larger, sometimes near-monopolistic health
systems. There are indeed some benefits to large
integrated systems, but as the recent Physicians
Proposal for a Single-Payer Health Care Reform
asserts such systems should be brought under
direct public control.
Finally, a progressive health-care platform
should go beyond traditional single-payer reform,
and envision fundamental changes in the manner
that we develop new medical treatments. Big Phar-
mas domination of drug development skews the
research agenda towards profitability, not medical
need. While a single-payer system could better
control the price of drugs by direct bargaining with
pharmaceutical companies, more transformational
change is required. A fully public drug development
track would allow for the creation of new, innovative
drugs geared to medical benefit rather than profit:
these new therapeutics would be public goods,
not subject to patent protection, and so could be
manufactured at the cost of production throughout
the globe for the benefit of all humankind.
Such a transformation will not be easy. Yet its
realization would constitute enormous progress
towards a fundamentally more decent society
one that is healthier, happier, and, indeed, more
free.
LEFTOVERS

OUR WORK
HERE
IS NOT YET
DONE.
 LEFTOVERS
POPULAR FRONT

Results and
Prospects:
Q3 2016

Round Two
A quarter of less defeats The Chicago Teachers Union (ctu) has

than usual. been one of the few bright spots in

todays labor movement. After the
Caucus of Rank and File Educators
took power in 2010, the union has been
dedicated to militant, democratic
unionism that anchors a much broader
social movement in Chicago. That
vision led to a successful strike in 2012.
Now, the ctu is taking on Mayor Rahm
Emanuel and the neoliberal education
reform project again. Teachers staged
a one-day strike in April, and 96per-
cent voted to engage in an open-ended
strike set to begin October11.
The strike may not come to pass,
but the ctu is united internally and
has the backing of workers in the
city. Emanuel, on the other hand, is
politically vulnerable after the police
shooting of Laquan McDonald and
years of unpopular austerity mea-
sures. But victory is far from assured.
The ctus demands would amount
Preparations underway in October to a complete reversal in city policy
for a potential Chicago Teachers and a massive tax hike for the rich
Union strike. demands that are bold and necessary,
but cant be won at the bargaining
Bob Simpson / Flickr
table.

158 23 / FALL 2016


Prison Strike
September9 saw the forty-fifth anni-
versary of the Attica prison uprising,
in which a thousand prisoners rioted
at the New York prison over demands
for better living conditions and polit-
ical rights. On the anniversary this
year, prisoners around the country
launched a strike, demanding to be
treated as workers for the incredibly
low-wage work they perform while
incarcerated.
The strikes were organized by the
International Workers of the Worlds
Incarcerated Workers Organizing
Committee, who say that thousands
of workers have participated in work
refusals along with other acts of resis-
tance like hunger strikes. While its
impossible to confirm exactly how
many prisoners took part, scores of
reports many filed by prisoners
from contraband cell phones make
clear that prisoners in multiple states
joined in.
Hillary Clinton greets a supporter on stage
with aft president Randi Weingarten after
speaking at the unions national convention
on July 18, 2016.
Andrew Harnik / AP Photo
No DAPL
As the consequences of climate
change have become starker, the need
to block construction of oil pipelines
like Keystone xl has become clearer.
The latest front in this battle is in
North Dakota, where the Standing
Rock Sioux tribe is leading efforts to
block the Dakota Access Pipeline.
dapl would stretch from North
Dakota to southern Illinois, carrying
nearly half a million barrels of oil per
day through the tribes sole water
source. One spill and the tribe could
be without water.
Footage of the pipelines private
security siccing dogs on protesters
and of Green Party presidential can-
didate Jill Stein spray-painting a
pipeline construction company bull-
dozer (I approve this message) drew
widespread attention. As legal efforts
to block the pipeline continue, pro-
testers are now preparing to camp
out through the harsh North Dakota
winter.
THE PARTY WE NEED
Results and Prospects: Q3 2016
The Nightmare Continues
Every four years, the entire Amer-
ican labor movement drops what its
doing and dumps truckloads of money
into the Democratic presidential can-
didates campaign. And every four
years, whether their candidate wins or
not, they have little to show for it. Its
an exaggeration to say their spending
produces nothing, but its also not
clear it produces better results than,
say, mailing hundreds of millions of
dollars to Jacobin readers at random.
Such is the case again in 2016.
Only this time, unions could have
endorsed a candidate during the
primaries who gave a full-throated
endorsement of their agenda: Bernie
Sanders. Union boots on the ground
might have helped Sanders carry the
day in some key primary battles and
the nomination itself. Instead, much
of labor stuck with their longtime
failed strategy of backing a sure thing,
in this case the market-friendly cen-
trism of Hillary Clinton.
Clintons victory seems all but
assured. The same is true for unions
abandonment and disappointment
under her presidency. But dont
hold your breath for labor leaders to
change course any time soon.
159
 LEFTOVERS
THE COOKSHOP
Voting Under
Socialism
Itll be more meaningful
but hopefully wont involve
endless meetings.
After watching months of media cov-
erage, you go to the polls for a few
minutes and cast a vote for someone to
represent you... and then its over. This
is what democracy means today.
To be sure, winning even this lim-
ited form of electoral democracy was
an important working-class victory.
And access to the polls remains an
important issue. Conservatives con-
tinue their efforts to roll back voting
rights for people of color in the United
States. Other populations, such as
felons, non-citizen residents, and
teenagers under eighteen, are out-
side the franchise entirely.
The question remains, however,
whether these are anything more than
160
BY PETER FRASE
tactical battles, ways to win advan-
tage in the struggle against capital.
In a better world, isnt there more to
democracy than this? What kind of
political organization is suited to a
socialist society?
Direct democracy isnt enough.
Well still need representative
institutions.
Historically, socialists have argued
that democracy should be extended
into one of the least democratic parts
of capitalist society: the economy and
the workplace. We already have insti-
tutions like unions that do that in a
limited way. But how could we democ-
ratize the economy as a whole?
23 / FALL 2016
Some advocate direct democracy,
in which people develop and vote on
initiatives themselves, rather than
choosing representatives based on
general platforms and granting them
the right to make policy.
One of the most influential recent
arguments for postcapitalist direct
democracy is Michael Albert and
Robin Hahnels book Parecon. In it
they conceive of a world in which
every possible task is rated in terms
of its level of empowerment so that
the burden of work is distributed
evenly. Moreover, everyone orders
their consumption and working-time
preferences in order to ensure they
receive an optimal allocation of time
and goods.
But as many critics have pointed
out, this system entails an absurd
amount of effort and time to imple-
ment. The job allocation system
would require nonstop meetings,
committees, and analyses, while the
goods allocation system imposes
immense bureaucratic requirements
on individuals. Direct democracy may
be ideal for, say, a small cooperative,

but it doesnt make sense as a way to
run a whole society.
Some kind of representative
system is necessary, both in orga-
nizations and whatever state exists
after capitalism. However, it should
be as small and simple as possible.
Modern governments, with their con-
stant elections for all manner of minor
functionaries and local officials, are
in their way just as cumbersome and
impractical for people to participate
in as Parecon. They are only superfi-
cially democratic.
Hopefully one day well live in a
future of limitless energy and auto-
mated production, and so the many
aspects of our governments that are
dedicated to either protecting or
redistributing wealth will be unnec-
essary. But there will still be big
questions that arise. Do we build that
high-speed train? Do we try to salvage
Earth or do we go to Mars?
In that case it may be useful to
have representative institutions in
some highly attenuated form, which
can organize and focus opinions
about huge and complicated issues,
concentrating them into ideological
platforms and parties that are more
democratic and participatory than
most of those we have today.
But were not quite done yet.
Even in capitalism, there is another
system, neither representative nor
direct democracy, which is sometimes
offered as an alternative to both.
In a socialist society, markets could
help democracy.
Right-wing libertarians often argue
for the market as a superior form of
democracy. Representative democ-
racy, they claim, is flawed because it
allows majorities to impose their will
on minorities, and because it allows
uninformed voters to support irra-
tional policies.
In contrast, these libertarians
regard the market as a perfect dem-
ocratic mechanism. Vote with your
dollars, and the invisible hand will do
the rest, ensuring optimal outcomes
for all.
Given its provenance, many left-
ists are quick to dismiss anything
having to do with the market as nec-
essarily antithetical to democracy. But
rather than rush to this judgment,
we should stop to consider just what
makes the libertarian form of market
democracy so unpalatable.
The problem does not come
primarily from the act of market
exchange that is, using money as
a medium for buying and selling.
Rather, its the unequal endow-
ments that precede that exchange. We
oppose the fact that a tiny few com-
mand huge amounts of money and
thus huge power on the market
while a vast many have little money,
and few ways to obtain it other than
selling their own labor-power.
This problem isnt restricted
to private market exchanges. In a
capitalist society, it also affects rep-
resentative democracy itself. While
that system is formally based on the
principle of one person one vote, the computer and a transatlantic flight, I
rich invariably find ways to corrupt
the process in their favor.
The result, in every capitalist
democracy, is somewhere in between
pure one person one vote and the
oligarchical-libertarian ideal of one
dollar one vote. Campaign finance
reform may move things away from
dollar-democracy and toward per-
son-democracy, but the only way to
completely overcome the power of
the rich is to remove their control over
social wealth.
THE PARTY WE NEED
Voting Under Socialism
But if we were able to do that
expropriate the ruling class and
overcome capitalism where
does that leave the market? If the
inequality of initial resources is
erased, the market can in fact serve
as a mechanism of democratic coordi-
nation. Your dollars can be your votes.
The problem of resource conser-
vation provides a way to think about
this. Suppose we live in a democratic
socialist society in which work has
been mostly abolished, and everyone
has equal resources. The only catch is
that we still live in a world with severe
resource limits, and so we have to find
an equitable way to keep people from
using too much stuff.
In some cases, some kind of cen-
tralized regulation or planning may be
necessary. But we dont want to have
to spell out in detail just how much of
every consumer good each person is
entitled to that way lies the Parecon
dystopia of endless meetings.
So instead, imagine assigning
everyone an equal number of credits
to spend, on goods whose prices are
tied to their ecological impact. In the
simplest case, this could be carbon
cost, but it could include many mate-
rials and resources. This way, if I dont
have the credits to get both a new
can choose which one I want, without
attending any meetings or applying
through a government office, and the
price of particular scarce resources
will adjust based on society-wide
demand for them.
This is a vast oversimplification,
of course. But the overall point is that
in any conceivable future society,
we will need a variety of different
methods of coordinating our common
life in other words, different forms
of democracy.
161
 LEFTOVERS
MEANS & ENDS BY BHASKAR SUNKARA

Why We
Publish

Having history on our The turn to print shortly after was an act of despera-

side isnt enough. tion maybe people would notice us if we were

competing with a smaller pool of publications. We got a
We need your support. hundred or so subscribers, enough to help finance the
first print run. We needed a couple hundred more
between its release and the second issue to keep things
going. Things were looking so bleak that the third
Jacobin volume, just as thin as the first two, was billed as
a double issue.

If the early execution was wanting, the core purpose was

Its the best time to be a socialist in the United States
since the 1970s. The bad news is that its still not a very
good time to be a socialist in the United States.
But things are certainly better than when Jacobin
launched six years ago. Back then, I knew next to
nothing about editing and publishing. Not surprisingly,
the initial rollout was a failure: a few hundred visitors to
an ugly website the first day, mostly people already on
the Left or friends and family.
always clear. Before we understood publishing, Jacobin
had politics. Granted, our contributors didnt always
agree, but they shared a desire to win a tiny, fragmented
left back to fundamentals: a class-based analysis of the
world that knew (if not exactly how) that the Lefts task
was to rebuild working-class organizations capable of
capturing and transforming state power.
But we didnt just want to convince a few thousand
people already on the Left. Our ideas were marginal, but
they captivated us: the dream of a society without
exploitation or oppression, without unnecessary
suffering, where every person could reach their
potential. A world with our animal problems solved, so
we could start dealing with our human ones. This was a
vision that once stirred hundreds of millions around the
world. And we knew there was still an audience for it
beyond the Lefts ghettos.

162 23 / FALL 2016

 MEANS & ENDS
The second purpose of Jacobin, then, was to be an
ambassador for socialist ideas. We wanted to be plain
spoken and bullshit free. At our best weve done this,
reaching thousands through our reading groups and
print publications and millions online.
After a rocky start weve grown faster and more
sustainably than we ever expected. But we have no
illusions about how marginal we still are. Going from a
few hundred to twenty thousand subscribers in a few
years is a nice story, but it only matters if our political
mission is advancing.
What that mission is, however, has never been
clearer.We publish pieces that reveal the truth about
capitalism: a system based on exploitation and the
degradation of the human spirit. Most of our daily
online posts dont seem to go deeper than that. But we
also have a vision of a world after capitalism, one built
from the wealth and abundance around us. We want to
radically extend democracy into spheres liberalism has
always shied away from the social and economic
realm and challenge private property in order to
foster the type of collectivism that can truly create
conditions for individual flourishing.
But most importantly, we have some idea about how to
get from our miserable here to that lofty there. We, like
many before us, see the working class as an agent of
change. While working people are as different and
164 23 / FALL 2016
Why We Publish
If you want to help Jacobin in our mission please donate
online at jacobinmag.com/donate/ or through check to:
Jacobin Foundation
388 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11217.
divided as ever, they are still positioned to rattle the
capitalist cage and win real gains. As socialists we
believe the short-term struggle for reforms can not only
help millions suffering today, but also put workers in a
better position to win more radical demands in the
future. This doesnt mean that struggle happens at a
steady pace or in a straight line there will be great
upheavals and ruptures en route to a socialist society
but it does mean that were serious about meeting
people and movements where they are and engaging
with them.
Of course, even amid a small revival of socialist thought
and practice, this abstract vision seems just that.
William Morris wrote in 1885 that the real business of
socialists is to convince workers that they are a class,
whereas they ought to be a society. Today, we might
have to convince about that class part too.
Still, I hope this note provides some clarity about our
aim: helping in small part to foster class consciousness
and build the institutions that can tame and eventually
overcome capital.
Socialism is the name of our desire, but it may not be
what the movements that will one day transform the
world will use. In the meantime, we hope we can
continue to play a role keeping alive the dream of
liberty, equality, and solidarity.
 Voting for socialism
is not socialism any more
than a menu is a meal.

Eugene
V. Debs