But today, our subject is the socialist party. The rise of socialism as a key element of american radicalism in the early 20th century. On a reading list, the chapter by michael casing gives a good quick summary of this moment in the various kinds of socialism at that time. From 1860 at least onward, there had been some kind of socialist presence in the u. S. But largely confined to immigrants from europe, particularly germans, english. The emergence of a mass socialist movement with a base in the u. S. Political system follows the final flowering of the 19th century radical tradition and the defeat of the populist party in the 1890s. The inheritors of 19th century radicalism were forced to kind of think about new ways of confronting the problems and inequities of the rapidly changing Industrial Society of that time. It is often said by those who write about the history of socialism that american socialism was particularly untheoretical. Very few americans produced theoretical works about this. Many more socialists here were influenced by their experience in populism. Or just the experience of the Labor Movement than reading karl marxs das kapital. By the turn of the century, all socialism, in some way or another, derived from the thinking and writing of karl marx, although interpreted in very different ways. One could give a whole course on karl marx, which i will not do. What people learned from marx is that history is the history of class struggle. That is the driving force of history. He claimed that under capitalism, society is being divided inexorably into two classes, the workingclass, or proletariat, and the bourgeoisie, the owning class. Production is concentrated in fewer hands, giant corporations. The gap between, what i guess today they call the 1 and the 99 , the gap between the very rich and everyone else would inevitably get wider and wider. Some of this resonates, of course, to the present day. 30 years of the administrations of Ronald Reagan and bush and clinton and bush and obama have done more to confirm marxs prediction of the rich getting richer and everyone else falling behind than 75 years of the soviet union. What was appealing in marx was that at the time of this dominant free contract ideology, which the Supreme Court and others were implementing social darwinism, that the marketplace is a site where equal participants compete, the result is best for all. Marx pierces through to the underpinning of the labor market and labor relations. He shows that it is based on inequality, exploitation, and wage earners not getting what they deserve. Something that has, of course, being an idea floating among american radicalism for a long time. What was different is that he insisted capitalism was inevitably creating the instrument of its own destruction. That was what he called the proletariat, workers whose coming selfawareness would lead them to seize power and change the whole system. Not because they were any better than anyone else, but because the very nature of their social existence made it inexorably pushed towards changing the whole system. They cannot abolish the inhuman conditions of life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of presentday society. Oddly in the year 2000 and soon after that, there was a flurry of rediscovery of karl marx. The new yorker, at the time of the millennium in 2000, published an article saying, man of the 21st century karl marx. Why . Because marx, among other things, is the prophet of globalized capitalism. The man who saw through, that capitalism must expand to make itself a global system. Unlike the previous american radicals, marx analyzes capitalism as a system, not as bad individuals, not trusts corrupting the political system, not nonproducers trying to conspire. The system itself has a logic which has to be understood. In a way, you can put marx, and many people do, under the same category of thinkers as darwin. Darwin tried to understand the underlying principles of the natural world. Or freud, a little later, tried to understand the underlying principles of the internal human mind. Marx is trying to understand the underlying principles of the economic system, the economic world. The first principle is, as he says i will just read a couple sentences from the communist manifesto. He lays out many more. It is a political polemic, highly oversupplied. Then you waded through the 3 ultradense volumes of das kapital. What did they find when they turned to this manifesto . First they found that the revolutionary element in the world is capitalism. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without revolutionizing instruments of productions and with them, the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form. The first condition of existence for earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, interrupted disturbance of all social conditions is what capitalizes characterizes the present world, he says. All frozen relations are swept away, all new forms once become antiquated before they can ossify. The often quoted sentence, all that is solid melts into air. That is our condition right now. All that is solid melts into air. That is the essence of the system. The constant revolutionizing of everything. There is no nostalgia here. Marx is not like earlier radicals trying to go back to a previous golden age. There is no previous golden age. The nature of life now is just this constant change of everything. Then, as i say, its not a national system. The need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie and its exploitating of the world market has given a cosmopolitan character to production in every country. National industry is destroyed, he says. This is 1848. National industry destroyed . Its just getting going. Today, that is what is happening. National industries destroyed by the inexorable forces of globalization. More than 150 years later. All established National Industries have been destroyed or are being destroyed. We find new wants, requiring a satisfaction by the products of distant lands and climbs. National onesightedness becomes more and more impossible. In other words, this is a global system, a global world, a global interchange. And thats good. This is not a critique. That is good. That is part of the progress of history because capitalism is creating the conditions in which a humane life is possible. It is overcoming the barriers of nature and population to massive production. The possibility for an equal or Fair Distribution of wealth around the world is, for the first time, created by advanced capitalism. Many people who read the communist manifesto are very surprised that most of it is based on praising capitalism for sweeping away all these old systems that are an obstacle to progress. Marx many of the people that followed marx thought of him as scientific. Later on its called scientific socialism, because he tried to understand the system. There are very few predictions in marx. Much of his writing is analytical, not predictive. His predictions change over time. Even though there is a teleology, i mean history is moving in a certain direction, its not inevitable by any means. Although later, readers would see it as an inexorable progress to a predetermined end. In the 1880s, the american ,abor journalist john swinton went to england and interviewed marx. He asked marx, what do you see for the future . And marx answered, thought for a minute, and answered in one word struggle. The future will see struggle. He didnt say the end of that struggle is inevitable. He didnt say what that struggle is going to lead to. As we will see in a minute, many people saw in marxism a way of predicting the future, which i think is not the essence of what he is talking about. The point is the whole analysis suggested that once you marry the productive capacity, the radical productive capacity of socialism to a more equitable distribution, and a more democratic control of the economy, its a utopian world. Its like bellamy, his utopian world of equality. Socialism appealed to people on an ethical level as much as on an analytical level. It was an unbounded dream. A promise people would be 10 feet tall under socialism. An italian socialist said, all children will grow up to be galileos under socialism. Marx had shown, according to people that followed him, that it was inevitable in a way. Not exactly inevitable, but the process of history working in that direction. But ultimately, especially the u. S. , the ultimate appeal of socialism is ethical, moral as much as analytical and economic. Socialism said capitalism said eugene debs is simply wrong. The vast inequality is simply wrong. Its a kind of christian underlying notion of morality beneath the sort of scientific analysis. Anyway, in the 1890s we mentioned this last time the main expression of socialism in the u. S. Was a tiny socialist labor party, headed by daniel de leon. De leon, a very strange and difficult guy, was one of the first to think in the u. S. Of some of the modern problems of radicalism. The rise of mass culture. What does that mean for alternatives . Already you are getting mass newspapers and magazines and things like that. What should radicals do in a society where a certain dominant culture this goes back to goodwin is permeating the society . He concluded the way to do that is to form an uncompromisingly radical party that would work with radical unions to mobilize workers, to get them to think in a radical way. Not a new idea. But he also concluded that the entire Labor Movement was basically an obstacle to this. Particularly the American Federation of labor, which he said was dominated by labor fakers and that the immediate role of socialism was to destroy the existing Labor Movement and create new radical unions. You can imagine that the existing unions were not too happy with the notion that the role of socialism was first to destroy their units. Some of them had joined the socialist labour party in the 1890s. Then they said, wait a minute, why is my Political Party trying to destroy the union i am working with . Many of them left rather quickly. De leon, as i say, his views actually would influence the Industrial Workers of the world, which attempted to mobilize those mass productive workers. When the socialist party of america is founded in 1901, de leon and his group are the socialists that remain outside of this group. So who does come together in 1901 to form this Umbrella Group called the socialist party of america . A conglomeration of people. After the defeat of bryan in 1896, some followers of eugene debs and others formed the group called the brotherhood of the cooperative commonwealth. They wanted to move en masse to some Western State with limited population and basically take over the state by people moving in. They thought about planned colonies in the state of washington or something. It didnt get anywhere, but i was the old unitarian ethos. The brotherhood of the commonwealth is part of this socialist party. Many people who were disaffected by the failure of populism, quite a few labor unions, the American Railroad union of debs. Under this umbrella they formed the socialist party of america. Very small group. Within a decade or so, up to world war i this is really the point between 1901 and world war i, which breaks out in 1914. Socialism grows to become a significant part of the political discourse in the United States. A factor in american life. Not a majority by any means. But not a fringe, sectarian group, as it would later become. The first thing we have to do to think about this is to remember my admonition, which i mentioned before, to read history forward, not backward. You cannot understand the socialist party of the preworld war i. People who read the pre world war i period without forgetting about the Russian Revolution, the cold war, and many other things that will happen in the history of socialism, then communism, which will split socialism into sectarian groups, which will discredit it in many ways. But nobody knows that is coming in the period of 19011917. Today, socialism, to the extent that it exists at all in our political discourse, is just an allpurpose term of abuse, right . You hear on tv, obama is a socialist. What do the people who say that mean . They dont understand either obama or socialism. Its just a way of saying i dont like obama. I dont like the things that hes done, fair enough. But to call him a socialist is absurd. We have to go back before that, before all these events of the 20th century to understand his context. It is difficult to do because the historical literature doesnt help us all that much. Liberal historians, which is probaly the majority, think socialism is really irrelevant, because the real story is the rise of 20th century liberalism, with Woodrow Wilson through the new deal of fdr to the great society. That is the trajectory, and socialism is just irrelevant next to that. On the other hand, communist historians who wrote in the 1930s and 1950s saw the socialist party as lacking in revolutionary fervor. It seemed kind of moderate and mild compared to the radicalism of communists later on. They did not think much of it either. The fact is that a broadly based socialist movement did exist in america in the two decades coming up to world war i. At the height of their influence, the socialist party had 150,000 duespaying members. Today to be a part of a Political Party, you just have to vote in the primary. But they had dues. There were hundreds of socialist papers scattered across the country. Debs, in 1912, got nearly one million votes running for president in the fourway president ial election of 1912. More than 1000 Public Officials were elected by the socialist party, from places like ridgeport, connecticut to milwaukee. Congressmen from new york. In industrial areas, but also in the west. Local socialist legislators, mayors, etc. When the American Federation of labor had their annual meeting, at least 1 3 of the unions were headed by people who call themselves socialists of one kind or another. Moreover, the socialist party was not a narrow fringe. It was a kind of umbrella, in which many people passed or took part, who were connected to major movements of the time. Womens suffrage, for example, connected to the socialist party in some ways. Municipal reform. Labor legislation of this era. Demands for Public Ownership of utilities like streetcar lines and gasworks. In other words, it was a broad, amorphous allencompassing party. Many leading figures at the time either work in it were connected to it, or sympathetic in some way or another. The idea of socialism was a rather vague idea to many people, but it was part of the political discourse. The socialist party had many diverse elements. There was often tension between them. Often it is described as left versus right, radical versus reformer, within the socialist party. What held the party together, what did they have in common . One central thread, which takes us back into the radical tradition of the 19th entry, was a faith in education as the way to build a mass socialist movement. Marx wrote of socialism in the communist manifesto as a revolutionary doctrine. A doctrine of revolution. But american socialist were not revolutionaries, although had some revolutionary rhetoric. The way social change would come is like education, convincing people. You could convince people to be socialists by talking to them, by giving them things to read, etc. As long as you did it in the language of american society, not in this european jargon, as many socialists said. A leading socialist writer at the time says, too long are socialist writings brought up by the application of a german metaphysics to english economic theory with a french vocabulary. The great task of socialist writers in the next two years is to interpret American Experience in a language and style which will appeal to the american people. In a straightforward, common sense, nontheoretical, noneuropean language. And this writer himself tries to do this in not uninteresting works of American History. In 1905, he publishes first socialist history of the u. S. , called class struggles in American History. Its written in a very popular manner. Its essentially, in a way, borrowed from Frederick Jackson turner, who had developed the frontier thesis in the 1890s. American history starting in a very democratic mode. Then the rise of corporations, greater inequality, leading up to a socialist movement. That is his effort to bring socialism into people in that language. The notion of education is broader than that. And we should understand this, being in a Great University like this. Marxists saw themselves as heirs of the western tradition. This is hard to understand when people see socialist ideas as alien. They were the heirs of the enlightenment, they felt. The heirs of the western tradition. Socialism was part of legacy of the enlightenment. The rational, the effort to analyze society rationally. And to understand it and to try to improve it. Back in the 1980s, one of these french movies, i cant remember the name. A bunch of guys sitting around talking for two hours. Thats it, thats the movie. Lowbudget, but still. I kind of like these movies. This was about the socalled new philosophers at the time. One was asked in his movie by the narrator, do you think that marx is dead . His answer, i thought was interesting. If marx is dead, that means shakespeare is dead, einstein is dead, and im not feeling all that well myself. In other words, this is part of an intellectual heritage. It doesnt mean you have to accept it or not accept it, but you have to know it. You have to find out what it is. And indeed, the socialist press, even though were talking about americanizing it, published articles not only about pompeii and other radicals, but about aristotle, about plato. Education of workers is a general education. Since we are on tv, i wont even comment on the notion floating around in our political discourse that people dont really need to go to college and learn anything. Socialists believe we did need to learn. Even ordinary workers have a right to lea