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American Socialism and Communism: Past and Future
| Article
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11657 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
7,715 Words |
| Author
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Richard L. Rubenstein
Richard L. Rubenstein is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished
Professor of Religion at Florida State University and
president of the Washington Institute for Values in Public
Policy. He is the coauthor (with John K. Roth) of Approaches
to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy |
Of all of the great powers of the modern world, none has been more consistently inhospitable to a socialist or communist revolution than the United States. Yet, the conditions making for large-scale social and political discontent have existed in the North American colossus at least since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Until World War II, harsh and exploitative labor conditions were a constant aspect of American life. In addition, large numbers of small agrarian holders and small businessmen have been ruined with every downturn in the business cycle. Moreover, socialist and communist led movements have exerted a powerful influence upon American writer artists, intellectuals, and media professionals throughout the twentieth century. Nevertheless, as early as 1903, the German sociologist Werner Sombart wrote a book entitled Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?
To this day political and social thinkers have been trying to answer Sombart's question. It was Sombart's opinion that the open frontier, the rising standard of living, and opportunities for upward social mobility inhibited the growth of an American socialist movement. Selig Perlman, an American economist, concurred in Sombart's judgment but pointed to the importance of the successive waves of immigration as a factor in the absence of amass American socialist movement. As a result of immigration there has been little ethnic, religious, or cultural homogeneity among American workers. Absent such homogeneity, there has been little sense of class unity binding American workers. To this must be added the fact that many workers, both native-born and immigrant, regarded their proletarian status as temporary. They confidently expected that they or their offspring would move up the economic and social leader. Social class was less fixed in the United States than it was in Europe. All these conditions have impeded the growth of a distinct, self-conscious working-class revolutionary political movement in the United States. As we shall see, insofar as revolutionary Marxist movements have had an American constituency, its most faithful members have come from the educated middle class.
In addition to the above, sociologist Daniel Bell has argued that the failure of socialism in the United States has stemmed from the movement's inability to resolve a basic dilemma of ethics and polities. According to Bell, there is, at least initially, a chiliastic or millenarian element in every convert to socialism. This is especially true in the United States where Protestantism has often taken sectarian and pre-millennial forms. In the history of religion, the view that the whole social and economic order is evil and must be radically transformed
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