Socialist Parties of the United States

 

     In spite of the obvious advantages of a popular front against exploitation the left has always been a fractious place.  What some participants and historians might see as the struggle to develop a correct “line” that will most effectively advance the people’s cause will seem to others internecine infighting. At times, activists were perhaps influenced by the temptation to defeat one’s comrades when capitalism seemed too big a bully to challenge.  Nonetheless, the history of American revolutionary groups is a rich one, full of heroism and critical to the reforms that have made our economic system more livable for more people over the last hundred and fifty years.  This survey is meant to pay tribute to the generations of activists who have moved the country forward, and socialists have been at the forefront of nearly every campaign for social progress from abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and labor rights, but it may also remind progressives of the energy lost to factionalism.

     I have sought to include in this list all parties explicitly calling for revolutionary change while excluding reformist or mixed groups like the Progressive Parties associated with Robert LaFollette and with Henry Wallace, or the Working Families or New York Liberal Party.  I have concentrated on groups that meant to initiate a mass electoral movement, however limited their success.  The Industrial Workers of the World is included due to its outsize role in American history though it was a union and not a political party.

     Though my arrangement is primarily chronological, some broad general groupings exist.  The early groups contributed to the formation of the Socialist Party which has been the top socialist vote-getter by far, having achieved totals little short of a million in 1912 and 1920 with Debs as candidate and in 1932 with Norman Thomas at the head of the ticket.  The formation of what came to be called the Old Left was inspired by the Bolshevik victory in Russia and the formation of the Comintern.  Though the Communist Party was America’s most organized and active left-wing group, its members were obliged to adopt the Soviet line and to suppress internal discussion.  Later, with the arrival of the New Left in the ‘sixties, others imitated the Maoist program while some sought to follow models from Cuba or Vietnam.   Since the collapse of the mass movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, many groups of the New Communist Movement, none very large, argued over correct policy while many other leftists worked in single-issue groups.

     The overwhelming positive implication of this simple listing is the evidence it provides of a grand tradition of workers, both native-born and immigrant, continuously agitating for a better society, thus illuminating a history often ignored.  It suggests as well several negative factors that have contributed to the relative weakness of socialist ideas in the American political forum. 

     First is factionalism itself.  Apart from dividing workers and thus diluting their interests, this tends to encourage the suppression of open discussion essential for a vigorous movement.  In politics, as in science and other arenas, the enforcement of orthodoxy deaden progress.  There can be no certainty that a given analysis or strategy is effective; a healthy organization will be always ready to consider opposing conclusions from the facts and to take new information into account.  For political purposes numbers are far more useful than a theoretically perfect program.

     The development of antidemocratic tendencies was further encouraged by the emulation of foreign regimes whether Soviet, Chinese, or Third World.  Just as the people’s victory in Russia was largekly subverted by the Leninist idea of a dictatorship euphemistically labeled “democratic centralism” and Stalin’s dictatorship.  Communist parties were until recent times intolerant of internal discussion.  The unfortunate effects of Americans “tailing” after other regimes rather than seeking appropriate American solutions include agitation against comrades such as Trotskyites and the artificial linking of the priorities of socialists in the United States with the practices in countries abroad with claims to be socialist.

     The hard fact is that the most disciplined parties, typified by the Communists of the ‘thirties, have been the most effective.   The same pattern emerged again in the ‘sixties as activists from Socialist Workers and Progressive Labor in gained outsize influence in contrast to the more casually organized members of SDS.  An openness to the free discussion of new ideas seems contrary to the unanimity useful for collective action.   This dialectic is evident today on the right wing as the Trumpite fascists have proven far more successful than the more reasonable traditional Republicans.

     Most Americans have a shallow involvement in politics and, unfortunately, little grasp of their own interests.  They have often been distracted and misled by racism, sexism, and xenophobia, but some in every generation have recognized that socialism offers the solution of social and economic problems.  The following list is a reminder of this ongoing struggle.  I am sure it is far from complete.

 

 

1876 The Socialist Labor Party (originally the Workingmen's Party of the United States) was the first socialist party in the United States.  Some elements broke to help form the Socialist Party.  

1898 the Social Democratic Party of America was founded which merged into the Socialist Party in 1901.

1901 the Socialist Party organized including elements of the Socialist Labor Party.  In 1971 the party changed its name to Social Democrats, USA which split in 1973 into two factions, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Socialist Party USA.

1905 Industrial Workers of the World as a union did not run candidates but included people from the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party.

1919 Communist Party of the USA from a split in the Socialist Party.  Another splinter, the Communist Labor Party of America merged with the CPUSA in 1921.

1928 Communist League of America formed by Trotskyites after their expulsion from the CPUSA which in 1934 joined with the American Workers Party to establish the Workers Party of the United States which lasted until 1936 when its members joined the Socialist Party.

1934 Workers Party of the United States formed by the merger of the Trotskyist Communist League of America and A. J. Muste's American Workers Party.

1935 the Revolutionary Workers League split from the Workers Party of the United States, disbanded in 1946

1936 American Labor Party formed by members of the Socialist Party.

1937 Socialist Workers Party of Trotskyites expelled from the Socialist Party.

1938 the Leninist League broke from Trotsky and the Socialist Workers Party, In 1946 it was renamed the Workers League for a Revolutionary Party.

1959 Workers World Party split from SWP.

1962 Progressive Labor Movement formed by Maoists within the CPUSA renamed Progressive Labor Party in 1965.

1964 Spartacist League split from the Socialist Workers.

1966 Black Panther Party disbanded in 1982.

1966 Freedom Socialist Party feminist split from Socialist Workers, spawned the Radical Women activist group.

1967 Marxist-Leninist Party (USA), dissolved in 1973.

1967 Peace and Freedom Party.

1967 Youth International Party formed by hip radicals

1968 Young Lords, a Chicago gang, reformed as a political group.

1968 Young Patriots formed by white Southerners in Chicago along the model of the Black Panthers.

1968 White Panthers formed by hip white radicals along the model of the Black Panthers.

1970 Gray Panthers, old persons group along the model of the Black Panthers.

1971 People’s Party, a national grouping including the Peace and Freedom Party that functioned only in the 1972 election, reformed in 2017 by supporters of Bernie Sanders

1971 New American Movement, formed by SDS members, merged with DSOC in 1983 to establish the Democratic Socialists of America

1971 Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) was formed from the October League (Marxist–Leninist), many of whose members had been SDS activists who followed a Maoist line.

1972 The African People's Socialist Party.

1973 Communist Workers' Party split from Progressive Labor, dissolved to join New Democratic Movement in 1985.

1975 Revolutionary Communist Party (originally the Revolutionary Union)  split from Progressive Labor.

1986 Labor Militant founded by Trotskyites, changed to Socialist Alternative (United States) in 1998.

1990 Green Party evolved from environmentally concerned Committees of Correspondence

1995 Socialist Equality Party (United States) formed by the Workers League, the US supporters of the ICFI. The Workers League had been founded in 1966 by the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI), which emerged out of a split with the Socialist Workers Party

2004 Party for Socialism and Liberation, split from Workers World

The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Port Huron Statement

     When I first attended the University of Illinois in 1963 there was no radical organization on campus. I joined the local NAACP, helped to establish a small Independent Socialist Club, and was active in our local imitation of the Berkeley Free Speech movement, originally Students for Free Speech and then SCOPE (the Student Committee on Political Expression). But in fact the political ferment of youth was well under way. Red diaper babies and those with experience in the Southern Movement joined with others whose reaction to poverty, racism, and the Cold War had opened their eyes to an America they had never learned about in civics class. Soon we had Friends of SNCC, Students Against the War, and Students for a Democratic Society. I attended the organizational meeting of SDS in Champaign-Urbana and remained involved until the breakup in 1969.
     The Port Huron Statement was adopted by the first national convention of Students for a Democratic Society in June of 1962. On the fiftieth anniversary of this occasion, I offer a few comments on this seminal statement by the leading radical group of my generation, the most significant statement of what was called the New Left. The text of the Port Huron Statement is readily available online.


     What differentiated the New Left from its elder parent was first of all inclusiveness. The youth of SDS annoyed their paternal institution, the League for Industrial Democracy, by welcoming all who cared to work together. For decades the Communist Party, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers, and other elements of the Old Left had insisted on the value of a dogmatic ideology and had mercilessly excluded those who did not toe the line. Often splinter groups splintered yet again, maintaining fierce polemics against those with whom they agreed on most issues. The actual enemy, of course, was much more difficult to combat than one’s fellow activists. In its early years, SDS was a model of breadth, including numerous Democrats as well as every variety of libertarian, socialist, communist, and anarchist with a good number of unclassifiable elements tending toward the yogic and vegetarian.
     The youth-centered character of the movement of the sixties was novel. While it is true that most photographs of insurgent crowds anywhere in the world show predominately young and reckless men, earlier movements such as abolitionism, trade unionism, social work, the struggles for socialism and women’s suffrage in America were not age-based. Progressive movements around the world have often been campus-centered, but these often included significant participation by faculty and other elements of the intelligentsia. SDS, as a university group inherently youth-dominated, began by challenging the assumptions of the parent organization, to the frustration of comparative elders such as Michael Harrington.
     Part of the reason that the movement was youth-oriented was the Selective Service System. The specter of the draft obliged every young man to decide where he stood on the Vietnam War, and I am typical of the educated people in my age cohort in having spent years evading the draft. The poor, both in cities and rural areas, were more likely to simply enter the military without reflection. Resistance to military service alone accounts for the large numbers temporarily swept up in the movement greater by several orders of magnitude from the number of committed civil rights activists in the early sixties. Put upon by huge demonstrations in the spring of 1970, Nixon adopted the air war strategy and relaxed the draft, causing the mass movement to evaporate once people did not feel their own lives were in jeopardy.
     A further factor in the youth-consciousness of the New Left was the coalescence of the left movement with the bohemian artistic elements and drug culture that associated with the concept of hip in the sixties. This alliance is prefigured in the Port Huron Statement which bases rebellion in alienation rather than actual want. The Old Left focused for good reason on the material want of the masses. To most Marx’s own talk of alienation in the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 seemed tainted with idealism. Yet obvious and continuing inequity in the distribution of goods is not the sole symptom of capitalism’s failure. The very use of labor to accumulate wealth rather than for human fulfillment leads, Marx argues, to the fetishism of money and the replacement of earlier human ties by the cash nexus. (The term is actually older yet and had been used by Carlyle in The Chartists.)
     Whereas earlier left movements had typically arisen when people were pushed too far into actual want, and sympathetic intellectuals pointed to that physical suffering as the primary evidence of the need for change, the very first sentence of the Port Huron Statement points in a decidedly different direction. “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” The postwar prosperity and the labor movement had combined with neo-imperial profits to bring comparative affluence to a large sector of American workers, and an unprecedented number of people were attending university. Yet the text goes on to speak of “troubling” elements in their experience, “deeply felt anxieties,” “complicated and disturbing paradoxes,” “the emptiness of life,” “loneliness,” “estrangement,” “isolation,” “doldrums,” “malaise.” The language reflects the fact that Existentialism was enough past its crest to have been absorbed by undergraduates by 1962.  Sartre not only influenced the language, the philosopher was not slow to support the students’ cause.
     Even in the black community, where the experience of outright injury and insult was universal, the mission statement of SNCC is largely expressed in spiritual language: “The redemptive community supersedes immoral social systems.” For a significant anti-war movement to arise in an aggressor nation is rare, though the American experience has elements in common with the earlier experience of the French in Algeria and the later one of the Portuguese in Africa. Surely it is historically unique for such a sizable political movement to arise from alienation among a population that might seem more privileged than oppressed. The Port Huron Statements records the conscious attitudes expressed by an obscure group fifty years ago which, six years later had spread to millions of Americans and a good share of the rest of the developed world, and, by the spring of 1970 had become normative on campus.
     On virtually every issue Tom Hayden and his fellow delegates have been vindicated history. No one today would defend racism, yet the gap in pay and wealth between white and black is greater than ever. By all social standards (such as rates of drug addiction and incarceration) inner-city black communities are worse off than they were before the Civil Rights Act. The Vietnam War is now regarded across almost the entire political spectrum as a colossal mistake, yet America continues to launch neo-colonial military adventures. The students’ concern for the poor received government sanction in the so-called War on Poverty. Yet gains in economic democracy have been rolled back in recent decades, by both Democratic and Republican politicians. The self-critical analysis of the youth of 1962 seems admirable indeed in a twenty-first century USA in which a belief in American exceptionalism, once thought of as indicating erroneous thinking on its face, is required of every politician. Their vision of true community satisfying all its members in the practice of “participatory democracy” has been replaced by unapologetic pursuit of empty riches even by many of the more intelligent among our youth.
     Liberal critics of American policies tend to view racism, neo-colonialism, environmental degradation, and exploitation of workers as problems caused by correctable factors such as mistakes, miscalculations, the fruit of unfortunate faulty advice or of stupid, wicked, or ignorant office-holders. It was the wisdom of SDS from the start to recognize what Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) and Martin Luther King eventually came to believe, that all these negative social effects are the result of capitalism, that the flaw is a systematic and institutional requiring radical change. Far from errors, the injustice and suffering are naturally caused by corporations when they function as they are designed to do, privileging the bottom line to the exclusion of all other consequences.
     The social movements since the sixties have achieved significant victories in the fields of feminism and gay rights and have mobilized a great many people in support of the environment and in opposition to nuclear weapons and power generation. Yet as long as these struggles are separate, activists will never address the root cause of the evils they combat.
     I believe it is more than nostalgia that makes me feel the Port Huron Statement is relevant today. What we once thought of as the grey Eisenhower fifties in fact had far higher marginal tax rate for the rich, a more vigorous union movement, less egregious maldistribution of wealth and a considerably larger middle class. Today the greedy seek an ever bigger share for themselves while offering the rest of us little but junk food, three hundred television channels, and the opportunity to spend a career working without health benefits or pension to make a few fat cats fatter. There is no need to be nostalgic for the sixties. The far-sighted youth who gathered in Port Huron in 1962 set righteous priorities for America that, unfortunately, remain distant goals to this day. For anyone horrified by the violence and venality of our culture, anyone seeking a more meaningful life in true community with compatriots, will find much useful thought in this fifty-year-old document.