Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:07 Welcome to talking strategy, making history.
Speaker 1 00:00:14 Hello friends. Welcome to episode two of season two of talking strategy, making history. Uh, in this episode, we're going to talk about socialism in the United States, the peculiar and special, a history of this global movement and ideology here, uh, in America. Um, we're going to start with, uh, as, as Dick put it, trying to squeeze at least a quarters worth of history lectures and to, uh, five minutes, uh, given a brief overview of, of socialist history in the U S which is much richer than, uh, I think the average person, the average American, and certainly the American media, um, uh, you know, portray it or think about it. Um, and then we want to delve into the questions of why and how, uh, left movements historically have avoided the S word here in the United States, unlike in many other parts of the world. And, um, and Dick, uh, I know, wants to delve into the particular as a sort of case study the, the new left that he was so instrumental in, in building and shaping here in the United States and their relationship with socialism as a set of ideas. And as a word, I think
Speaker 0 00:01:30 You were right on target and I'm eager for the conversation.
Speaker 1 00:01:35 Excellent. So, so socialism started in the United States or, uh, came to the United States, uh, and other, uh, European colonies as much the way that it did in, in Europe. Um, and in the places like, uh, Germany and Poland, Scandinavia, or even Britain that we think of as cradles of socialist thinking. Um, it, it happened starting in the 19th century, in the form of labor movement, radicalism, uh, particularly in places like San Francisco and New York, uh, uh, cities or communities in the United States that were really at the hub of 19th century capitalism. Um, you, you right away had resistance from the workers who were being exploited and used and, uh, underpaid and undervalued in that process. Um, but it also bubbled up starting in the 19th century here in the United States as a set of radical democratic reformist ideas. Again, the same way that it did in Europe and this, uh, uneasy coalition between the labor movement as a source, uh, and an engine for, uh, driving socialist or left politics and a more, um, intellectual or middle-class, or values-based, um, uh, kind of, um, uh, political style or political tradition, um, and everywhere that socialism has taken root, you've seen these two different currents, uh, in, in an uneasy relationship.
Speaker 1 00:03:10 Um, and all of this, you know, continued as the United States was, uh, uh, location, uh, a giant economy, uh, bringing in workers from all over the world. Uh, and so workers who had already started or joined trade unions or socialist groups, um, at home in Russia or Germany or Italy, they brought those ideas with them here to the United States.
Speaker 0 00:03:35 One thing that occurs to me though, is that the most popular socialism was expressed by the candidacy of Eugene, Victor Debs, uh, who was a straight arrow American, right. He was right out of Indiana. He converted to the socialist party from and help found it, uh, from having been like a democratic politician. But he, I always think of a moment he's in jail because he led this vast general strike of railroad workers in 1894. And, um, and they, he was jailed and he served, I think, a year in jail. And he did some reading there, which is always dangerous. And, uh, he came out of jail, converted to need for socialism that the two party system, as he understood it, couldn't serve the workers caused. And we did, we needed our own party. He went back to jail during world war one where he, uh, he was, he spoke against the draft and against the war, and that was a crime for which he served several years in jail. And while in jail, he ran for president and got almost a million votes. So you could use that as both a measure of the popular strength of what he was, uh, seen as the leader of, but also its limitations only got a million votes. He wasn't really contending for the presidency, but what do we know about the larger socialist party of which he was a figurehead?
Speaker 1 00:05:15 Well, at that time, um, when he was making his historic runs for president, um, we also saw a real uptick in, uh, socialists being elected, you know, in the early part of the 20th century, around the country, mostly at the municipal level. Um, but also at the state level and, and not just people that were affiliated with, or members of the socialist party of the United States, but, you know, socialists of other stripes, um, labor radicals who maybe used different terminology, but were part of an explicit laborist or farmer worker, uh, Alliance in electoral politics. Um, and you know, that was a high watermark for socialism and socialist, um, uh, expressions in electoral politics until today, until today. Um, and something that you pointed out. And I think in our introduction, right, is that I think we have to admit that there were a lot of mistakes made in that early, that first wave by the socialist party, including a kind of sectarianism in which they refused cooperation with other political parties. If their elected officials, you know, started to work too closely with, uh, populist Democrats or progressive Democrats or Republicans, since they were split between the major parties at the time, they could get recalled or denounced or had their party membership stripped. So there was this moment in which, even though we were in the United States with a very peculiar electoral system, peculiar electoral culture, uh, socialists were trying to build a political party very much on the model of the parties that were gaining and strengthened and governing. And
Speaker 0 00:07:00 Well that wasn't, that party in the U S was paralleling time, uh, with the labor party in Britain, which was explicitly socialist. And I guess, I don't know too much about the German social democratic party had more, had a longer history before that. Uh, but other European parties probably started around the same early 20th century, right? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1 00:07:23 Yeah. Were or became electorally powerful then even if
Speaker 0 00:07:26 They were started. So when I've taught this history a bit, I would say if we were giving the chorus, this course when the socialist party was founded in the early days, we might not have seen it as that different from what was happening in Europe. That's right.
Speaker 1 00:07:40 That's the bottom line. I think it's really important to understand that a certain point there really isn't that much of a difference. The actual groups of people are overlapping because of immigration migration. Um, there's both, uh, a native, you know, Terre Haute, born DeSean kind of socialist thing happening, a Christian socialist thing happening, um, in various pockets of life in the United States. And then, you know, we have to admit a very immigrant driven, um, continental, socialist consciousness among parts of the working class. And in fact, you know, you in the late 19th and early 20th century, you actually have socialists in, uh, in, in labor leaders in Europe, looking at the United States with jealousy, um, and saying why can't a European workers be as militant and as radical in their demands and, and willing to strike as American workers, but then there's a divergence, right?
Speaker 0 00:08:34 That's right. Well, even, even that, so the militancy of American labor actions, which included a lot of direct physical combat and killings of people were, were killed by police forces and stuff. A lot of people went to jail. Uh, the militancy wasn't necessarily coupled in all cases with a radical ideology, but, but, uh, did, uh, kind of combat attitudes. The class struggle was real apparently in the minds of the south or on the railroad industry or in, uh, the textile wars of Southern textile factories. These are amazing struggles, um, that have been lost to most people's memory, but they were very vivid, powerful moments. I used to say, we, it would be great if Hollywood would make some class struggle, movies, not just westerns Cowboys and Indians and ranchers and settlers, but how about miners and their, and their bosses. So I think you're leading up in the story, however, to big break here and there probably also true in Europe, which was the Bolshevik revolution Lenin, uh, and this Bolsheviks in, so in Russia, uh, declaring themselves to be Marxists, uh, not only fighting in opposition to the regime as RS regime, but taking power, uh, which had never happened before in the name of, of socialism.
Speaker 0 00:10:05 And of course that meant socialists everywhere had to line up on board with, with the Bolsheviks or, uh, hostile to them for various reasons. So what's, what's your summary depiction of how this worked out in the USA? Well, I, I
Speaker 1 00:10:23 Actually say that before the successful Bolshevik revolution, there were another set of splits or crises in the movement that in some ways were directly related. In other ways, we're sort of presupposed that split. And that's that unlike in the United States where socialists in the early 20th century were winning elections in cities, you know, uh, getting some city council people here, members of the state legislature in Europe, they started to win national power. And then there's a question of you're, you're, you're running a country, you're running a capitalist economy and this really threw socialists for a loop, um, because, um, in their theory and Marxist theory, you know, there's supposed to be this revolution or something, some cleavage between capitalist and socialist society. So what happens when you're in charge of the capitalist economy and for a long time, the kind of Orthodox socialist approach, especially in places like Germany and France was, well, we can't do very much.
Speaker 1 00:11:31 We shouldn't tinker that much with capitalism. We should let capitalism develop and then inevitably there'll be a revolution or something and we'll have socialism. And it was really the Scandinavians more than anybody else that pioneered this idea that you could be socialists running a capitalist economy to socialist ends and to actually really get in and intervene in the way that the economy is structured. Um, start to make, uh, these, these massive changes to the labor market, build welfare states, et cetera. So a little bit before the Russian revolution, there was already this other tradition starting in socialism of like, we have to do what we can right now and not wait for the revolution. And then there was this,
Speaker 0 00:12:18 Well, wait, the other, the other feature was the world war one. And, you know, with the German social Democrats support the Germans government in the war effort, um, they did, uh, to a great extent, or they split profoundly over that. So in this country, the socialist party and the, and the IWW, the industrial workers of the world, which was sort of cynical is socialist movement, all opposed world war one. That's why the abs went to jail, but in Europe there was a big division, right. Even in the socialist ranks.
Speaker 1 00:12:56 And, and, and it's important because that's become such a talking point in communist history, right? That, that this is where socialism failed a moral test supported this horrible, I mean, horrible imperialist Charnel house of a war. Um, and so that's why communism and the Lennon is strategies better, blah, blah, blah. Um, you know, the, the actual positions of the socialist parties in Europe on the war were more complicated and nuanced including in Germany, but it was, um, exactly, as you say, like that was a split that, uh, that I'm saying was already fundamental and political and about overall strategy around capitalism, then the question was called in this very radical way of which side are you going to be on in this war? Um, and the socialist left in the United States never really recovered from that trauma of being against a national war mobilization. Um, and I think sort of was always seen as foreign and subversive, or rather could be painted that way cynically after.
Speaker 0 00:14:02 Yeah, the roots of why do we have an FBI was to ferret out the, the alien radical anti patriotic, um, socialists and get rid of them from the society is just one expression of a kind of widespread repression of people who oppose the war, mostly who were socialists at the time. Um, and, you know, on the other hand, one of the features of the left, which both you and I, um, uh, certainly wants to see, see if we can supersede as a, as a movement, is that if there's disagreement, that often turns into a profound, moral, um, polarization, so that each part of the disagreement becomes a tremendous moral issue, whether you're, or really revolutionary, whether you're actually a sellout or not, whether you are secretly betraying the cause or publicly betraying the cause. And both sides of these debates as they, they unfolded had, uh, felt was warfare was necessary within the left, in order to beat that other side, that was either morally so compromised or dangerous in one way or another.
Speaker 0 00:15:20 I'm being very over simple about a very long and complicated history. Once the communist party of the U S was founded to support the Soviet revolution, that was a split from the socialist party to a large extent. Um, and within the labor unions where both socialists and communists were operating tremendous warfare in some of those unions, uh, between the different factions. And there were factions within factions once Trotsky split with Stalin, there were Trotskys cause that factions and stolen inspections, they were actions within Trotskyism. Um, and a lot of the history, that's the point of trust? Well, a lot of the history of the left as written in the twenties, especially in the twenties and thirties revolves around these factional warfare battles. Um, uh, is there any way you can view those battles as having a positive side?
Speaker 1 00:16:22 Well, that's why, I guess I try to get back to the fundamental political questions rather than, um, the questions of strategy and what socialism should be trying to do. Um, because I think that then those splits become, I don't know, clearer and easier to read. I just, I mean, for me, I just, I think that Leninism was just an awful derailment of, uh, of the development of socialism in practice. And so to me it's been, uh, we just kind of recovering from, and, and need to like push past, I think, uh, decades of, uh, just needless harm to the ideas of socialism, not to mention the, you know, the loss of life of really tens of millions of people in a UN an offshoot of a, of a movement that I think a lot of w you know, well-meaning folks at the time predicted and called out. Um, and weren't listened to,
Speaker 0 00:17:29 I don't disagree with what you just said. And yet, uh, when Lennon ism, as you're referring to, it means in the us, I think are two big things. One the belief, at least in the early days of the communist party, that there was no political path to a socialist. You had to have an military attitude. And therefore the party had to be organized in a kind of top-down Vanguard party, military model, uh, because combat class struggle was going to be a literal war more important than that was, uh, simply the idea that, that it is better for, uh, a movement. This is the farm belief, I think in the thirties of lots of people in, in the left, better for a movement to have a strong li well-trained core of leadership that lived within the movement that was there. A state of being as people was to form this political hierarchy within the movement that could, uh, arrive at strategy and policy, uh, efficiently. And then it was anyone who a member of the party had to have party discipline. They had to implement, uh, what that party policy, the party line, uh, came to be. So in the thirties, the party line shifted to a much more small D democratic, politically oriented parliamentary, uh, way of operating so-called popular, front broad cultural, uh, alliances, coalition politics, critically supporting the new deal, uh, armed struggle, not on the agenda at all for the communist party, uh, in the thirties. Um, and yet internally the parties still had this, this, uh, authoritarian structure
Speaker 1 00:19:36 Happened to all the leaders who led that, that, that style of communist party organizing in the thirties,
Speaker 0 00:19:43 What happened to them? Yeah, well, the actual party leaders were very doctrinaire and, and even though they were supposed to be the font of wisdom, right, because they were the leaders, uh, they were the most cut off from him from reality. Their lives were entirely been this narrow organization. And yet the party had also encouraged and socialized large numbers of young people to be organizers in the real world to be labor organizers, to be tenant organizers, community organizers, uh, throughout the society. And, and these were people, my parents were like this school teachers, uh, who understood their responsibility as teachers to be unionists for teachers, but also to be, uh, working for against racism and working for social equality in their communities, in the classroom and so forth. And so those people, many, many, many more of those existed within the framework of the communist party, uh, their lives were not necessarily, some of them were governed by the fate of the party, which ended in a kind of total dead end of repression and, and, and, and sectarianism.
Speaker 0 00:21:02 They remained within their communities and unions and so forth. As often as, uh, important members of that generation, the more they were critical of their party experience, the better organizers they might be in the real world I've found. I don't know if that analysis makes sense, but that's the world that we young people who wanted to restart the left in the late fifties and early sixties, the world we saw was where these party like the communist party and other Trotskyist parties and the socialist party, all of them kind of dead end organizations without that didn't offer much in the way of, uh, avenues for change. But the members of those parties who, who were not the leaders, but the, what the committed members were often elders that we could learn from, and that we were inspired by, especially those who had remained within, you know, as labor or
Speaker 1 00:22:05 Organizers. My general point here was you, you were talking specifically about the, the, when the communist party, the United States had a small D democratic approach when they lessened their, like slavish NIS to the Soviet union, when they were like, let's go out and be part of popular movements, let's participate in electoral coalitions, inside the democratic party, all those things that we look back the like decade or so, when the communist party, the United States had a sensible, a much better approach to politics, frankly than socialists did. And a lot of other groups, the leadership that pioneered that were thrown out of the party right away afterwards, when the, when the Soviet union said, that's the wrong policy. And that to me is, that's why Leninism was always, always, uh, a mistake, a swamp, um, that we're like we're still recovering from. Cause we cause the fact is that even in this upsurge of not even recovering from like, we're still stuck with, in this upsurge of socialism now that's going on with young people being so excited about transforming the economy and, uh, politics to the left of liberalism.
Speaker 1 00:23:14 There's just all this horrible Leninism out there. That's trapping people. That's like behaving badly within DSA, et cetera, et cetera. So in terms of telling the story of socialism, I feel like there's one way to be like, oh, but there were these good people working under the banner of Leninism. Like that's true, but I just, it was, it's awful. I mean, it's something in telling the story of this great set of ideas about liberating people that we have to also acknowledge that, that there's a part of the family tree that engineered famines systematically liquidated, ethnic, ethnic groups, put all kinds of good comrades and good people in prisons and work camps. And, you know, as smack Shackman said, it was there, but the accident of geography than in the United States, people just got purged from the party and I'd find new friends. Well,
Speaker 0 00:24:12 Yes, I, I don't, I've never thought that the people who were communists in this country believed that these horrors were happening. They were, their delusion was not to support those things, but I don't want to conflate the crimes of the Soviet state and Stalin Stalin in particular, but the way beyond just his own actions, it was not, it was in no way, the state that anybody who was a communist in this country would have claimed to be what they were defending. Some were apologists for it. Most people were, were in denial about those crimes and the, and the reality of the Soviet union, uh, horrifyingly in denial. But when Khrushchev publicly revealed those crimes, that led to a huge ferment within the party, the remaining party in 1956, there was a hope for a moment, a couple of years, maybe, uh, that the party could be recreated as an independent force, like was happening in Italy. The Italian communist party always had a kind of different attitude toward the Soviet union that really came to the fore in the, in the mid fifties.
Speaker 1 00:25:32 Well, generally speaking from this point of divergence, wherever we want to locate it historically where socialism frankly, became more of a mainstream mass politics, uh, in Europe than it did in the United States, or really to be very specific about it. It didn't happen in the United States and happened everywhere else. Uh, it w where capitalism was, was developing. And this question became known as the question of American exceptionalism, why there is no strong socialist movement or politics in the United States and in the mainstream, um, it's been ironic or interesting, or kind of creepy to watch this question of, of, uh, of American history. That's a very interesting and good one turned into a, uh, a slogan on the right, you know, that America is exceptional and, and gifted by God with this, you know, specialness, that, that means that we don't have to follow any international rules, et cetera, et cetera. But, but originally this question was posed by historians and social scientists of being like, why did American society develop PO political society in particular developing in this way that it doesn't have a strong socialist movement what's wrong with it, really. Um, and,
Speaker 0 00:26:51 And a lot of those social scientists were, had been youthful socialists. And so they'd be absolutely common. Say American sociology was created in part by, by folks who wanted to try to figure out, you know, why we couldn't have socialism in this country, right. Or,
Speaker 1 00:27:09 Or less, fatalistically why it hadn't happened or why it was why we took this different route. Um, because frankly, as you say, like some of them were actually motivated and stayed motivated by the question of, well, how could we have it anyway? Um, or how can we find an American path to socialism? That's, that's different than, uh, other countries or other societies. And so there's been a number of theories that have been posited and, you know, just reams of papers and, you know, entire floors of academic libraries are filled with books, trying to answer this question. And I don't know what you think Dick, but having read a lot of these books over the years, I think I feel like they're all onto something. I mean, it explaining this really vast, uh, political, uh, uh, you know, set of, of differences, um, needs more than one variable, more than one explanation, but some of the most popular ones have been that unlike in Europe, the United States was never a feudal society among white folks, at least, you know, between in terms of the relation to the power and economic relationship between, uh, whites in the United States, it was never feudal.
Speaker 1 00:28:14 And so it didn't develop this sense of a hard and fast cast, like classes that you had in Europe, where people can see themselves as working class because they were, and their parents were, and their parents were, and their parents, and, and no real hope of moving into the upper-class because you have to be born into the right family. Um, unlike that, that at least the mythology in the United States is one of, of class mobility of anybody being able to make it and so forth, which just makes socialism or a Marxist worldview, a little bit of a harder sell if as people have said, and that we're all just like temporarily embarrassed millionaires. So that's made class consciousness, uh, a harder sell here in the United States and other similar but simpler explanation is that socialist parties in, in Europe really benefited from being the champions of universal suffrage and opening up the vote to new groups of people, whether it was, you know, working class men and then women.
Speaker 1 00:29:13 Um, and in the United States, we started as a Republic with were very early on extended to pretty universal male suffrage, white male suffrage. Sorry. Um, and so the socialist movement was wasn't the beacon of just small D democracy in the United States that it, it, it really was historically, um, in Europe. There's also, of course, the fact that a dive, uh, racially and ethnically diverse working class means it's really easy for, uh, bosses to divide workers and not just in that kind of nice, clean evil boss as the monopoly guy dividing up the workers kind of model, but just in general, that if you're working class working person and your boss replaces you with people who look different than you are, you already have prejudices against it's again, harder to get you to go and think of that person as someone to organize, organize alongside, um, et cetera.
Speaker 1 00:30:10 And then I'd say that what I think I is one of the more sophisticated takes and one that I've always really liked, um, and thought was really powerful is that capitalism, the arguments for capitalism, for free markets, for low levels of government intervention, all of those things in the United States have themselves been made on populist grounds and what, um, some thinkers have talked about as a socialist capitalism. So, whereas in Europe, you might find, uh, especially back 70 years ago, you would have had people defending capitalism by saying, Hey, there, some people just have to be bosses and other people, workers there's just differences. You can't have social chaos of people not knowing their place, people in make that argument for capitalism. The United States, the argument they made is, Hey, you could be the boss. Um, and by, by keeping, I mean, we see this all the way to right now, right where working class people will vote against tax increases on the wealthy, because they're going to be wealthy someday. I mean, and that is a thing that I think has stuck in the CRA and impeded socialists and social democratic politics and arguments in the United States in this very subtle, but persistent way for a very long term,
Speaker 0 00:31:25 I would add to what you said that, that I've always thought is important is that with respect to racism and, and, uh, anti-immigration, uh, it wasn't just bosses manipulating the craft union movement, which was a kind of class consciousness, uh, was organized strongly in this country around ethnic lines. So it wasn't just that you had carpenters organizing on their craft and excluding, you know, part of the purpose of the union was to keep the, keep the number of qualified carpenters low so that they could have strong bargaining power. Well, those carpenters typically might've been, let's say Irish, uh, and it was not only excluding unskilled people from the trade. It was, uh, excluding non Irish people let's say from the trade, right. And those divisions are embedded deeply. And what we mean by class in this country. And you, if you add that to the machine, the urban machines in the different major cities, also strongly ethnically organized, you can see that if you were working class and belonged to a certain kind of union and voted a certain kind of way, you still might be embedded in a very racist, uh, framework in terms of attitudes toward other in fact, I think it's true that the socialist party in its early days, they had an anti-Asian immigration policy, for example.
Speaker 0 00:32:56 Absolutely. Yeah. There's, you know, there's, uh, that, so that's one thing, but one thing I'd like to highlight, which isn't often said is, is a kind of, um, you know, what, what's their plausible scenarios, uh, after the thirties for a progressively developing left in this country, uh, that got derailed. And I think this, this it's worth considering that if you took the thirties, you had the seeds of what could have been an ongoing development, developing a center, left a political and cultural coalition in this country, part of what damaged it, where was the left itself, especially the communist lid left because when the Nazi Soviet pact, uh, happened and suddenly there's stout sitting down with Hitler, the American communist party, very stupidly defended that as if it was, uh, correct and became anti war and, and, and took it an antiwar stance for a few year or so.
Speaker 0 00:34:05 Um, and then when the Soviet union was invaded by Hitler, they switch well, that kind of turned the stomach of some people in the party, but more that the allies and coalition members in the developing new deal coalition were, were burned by this, the war situation kind of concealed that split to some extent, because us in Russia were allies, there was a general toning down, you know, in fact, it was sort of pro Soviet mainstream view that to encourage Americans to accept the Soviet union as our wartime ally, but after the war, this, uh, this, uh, division became the central part of American politics. The Republicans used the center left coalition of the thirties to try to discredit the new deal, to try to, uh, the democratic party split the communist supported Henry Wallace running on a third party ticket. He'd been the vice president under Roosevelt. Uh, he ran against Truman against the cold war, but on a third party, uh, strategy that was a real failure and people who now think that's still plausible, should take a look at how catastrophic, uh, that was because it further the split that could otherwise, you know, in a more normal politics. Uh, you could, you could imagine that what if you take, let's say McGovern in 1972 was, was a kind of center left coalition back in the mainstream of politics. Maybe not the best example, but
Speaker 1 00:35:48 Let me help you out there because I think McGovern the side and the, and the, the strengths or weaknesses of him as a candidate, and that moment, I do totally agree with you that there's a continuity between the moment of opportunity and loss in the thirties. And then again, in the sixties, and then again, in the labor liberal, uh, civil rights coalition, um, that was another moment that got blown up around, you know, around Vietnam and a lot of mistakes, uh, on all sides and so forth. So I would agree with you McGovern side, that moment was,
Speaker 0 00:36:22 Yeah. And, and actually McGovern had been a Wallace supporter in his youth. Yeah. Um, I think one thing that occurs to me in this conversation is to point out something I hadn't really foregrounded. I don't think till this moment that that generation who came out of the thirties or became, or part of the socialist party or communist party or other explicit left wing groups. So people like Michael Harrington or, or, uh, say Byard Rustin or AIJ musty, um, and other lesser known labor organizers. So they continued their work within whatever, you know, the AI within the AFL CIO within the democratic party. It was Rustin who organized the March on Washington in 1963. It was Rustin who was, who was the behind the scenes advisor to Martin Luther king from the time of Montgomery on, um, and not as a socialist, although it was, it was known that he was among other parts of his personality.
Speaker 0 00:37:28 He was a socialist, but, but he was a savvy political strategists with, with principles. Uh, and he's one example. There are many others that a lot of the Southern movement of the late fifties and early sixties, the senior advisors, or the, the, the veteran figures in the south white leftists in the south had been socialists and communists in an earlier period. Uh, Hoover tried to discredit king because of another guy Stanley Levinson, who was an advisor of king, who presumably had been some kind of communist earlier. But when you look at the lives of the people who we know are the pioneer leaders of the civil rights movement, Ella, Baker's another case, where did she come from? What was her schooling politically? So I'm trying to paint a little bit of a background for the, what became my generation, the sixties, red diaper baby, and other young is looking around, you know, what, w what could we see about 11
Speaker 1 00:38:38 You're emerging as young thinkers and leaders in a time where there are socialists around, but not a strong socialist organization or movement set the scene? What, what is influencing you? What do you care about? How, how what's the what's the road to port Huron?
Speaker 0 00:38:56 There were intellectual influences like the monthly review magazine, Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman Marxist journal that was independent of the communist party. Uh, and that was very smart, but their view overwhelmingly what they were saying was, well, there's no hope for a left in the U S so it has to come from the third world. It has to come from China. It has to come from Africa and Latin America. And the U S would be the last place. You can find a left. Well, that's not great news for, you know, someone who's 20 years old, looking around for a political, uh, avenues of expression, but what began to happen out of it, partly out of the civil rights movements influence was a coming together of, uh, young people from, and I, uh, in, in those early years of the sixties was meeting people in Ann Arbor, where we were, whose parents might've been anticommunist socialists, or they were red diaper babies, or they were Quakers, you know, and had other kinds of, um, sort of left wing or progressive heritage in their own background.
Speaker 0 00:40:14 And we were all part of the same civil rights activism that was beginning to start there. Uh, and, uh, uh, picketing of Woolworths to protest their segregated lunch counters in the south would be a good case. Uh, in 1960, there was something in the air. That's the only way I can put it that some new kind of thinking was possible and necessary at this point, that thinking wasn't going to start with older people, that our generation, for some reason, and it's pretty, we have a Yiddish term hotspot. It's, there's a lot of chutzpah in the belief that at age 20, you are going to solve the problems of the left that the older generation had failed to solve yet. We thought so. Um, and it wasn't wait in retrospect that we had no influences from the past we did, but they tended to be people who were independent, who were not party identified.
Speaker 0 00:41:13 I don't mean just CP, but any party. Um, one of my heroes was AIJ musty who had experimented his entire life. And I mean, decades with different ways of being a revolutionary pacifist, Gandhi, and Marxist, what kind of fusion is that Gandhian Marxism. And there was C Wright mills who said I'm a plain Marxist, which very explicitly meant I'm not part of any party. Mark's is a tool among other tools. And what I've since learned by the way is that, um, this is this impulse to find a new vocabulary and a new way of thinking on the left. Isn't simply something that emerged in the late fifties, early sixties. One of the father figures of the new left turned out to be John Dewey, who was not alive at the time of the sixties, but who had been, uh, he was, uh, he was America's philosopher.
Speaker 0 00:42:16 And you wouldn't think at first glance that he would be a guide for the left, but, but do, he was a socialist and explicitly. So, and he wanted to find something in this countries, uh, cultural and political, uh, foundations back instead of Marxism, what could be a foundation for an American left that would be radical, uh, and, and, and have appeal to Americans. And he is, I think the originator, if there's any single thinker of the idea that a radical democracy, participatory democracy, even use that phrase, um, is the way to think about the alternative to, uh, to a capitalist society, uh, that would fit into the American vocabulary and the American, uh, American cultural framework, Tom Hayden, who was, who was in the early days of STS, the beginning of the STS was assigned the job of writing some kind of a manifesto for the new left.
Speaker 0 00:43:29 The decision at port Huron was, it was, it was understood from the beginning that we weren't going to define the new left with the word socialism, uh, because the baggage of the word socialism included to what you were talking about, the Leninist baggage, the horrors of the Soviet union and communism, but at the same time, Hayden and others who had not been red diaper babies, he came out of the Heartland of America. They were disgusted by the obsessive anti-communism of, of the people like Mike Harrington, that, that, that, that represented the socialists movement to them, Tom Aden and people and others at port Huron were thinking this anti-communism, as it's practiced, feeds the cold war, it feeds into a repression of the left. It feeds into, uh, that that's one problem with it. We need some way to supersede that. And, and one of the big problems with the anticommunist left way of behaving in those early days was if you were seen as style annoyed, that was a term that Mike Harrington used stolen oil.
Speaker 0 00:44:56 Well, what's stolen oil. It's someone who won't condemn the Soviet union in the same terms that let's say Harrington did, uh, because of worry about supporting the cold war in the arms race, uh, the nation magazine was styling OID. Well, if the nation was stolen annoyed, it meant they were beyond the pale. You weren't really supposed to ally with the nation magazine with IFF stone. They, they were, they were soft on the Soviet union, even though stone was a bitter critic of, of, uh, of the Soviet communist party, because he wouldn't buy into cold war politics. Again, I'm probably over simplifying, but that's when Tom Hayden drafted the port Huron statement, part of what he wrote was a critique of, anti-communism not in order to defend Soviet union in any way, but simply to say, we need to supersede this.
Speaker 1 00:45:57 Yeah. I signed that part of the, of the port Huron statement, like totally maddening.
Speaker 0 00:46:02 Well, you shouldn't, you shouldn't, it was very creative because it pre saged. If you, if that's a word, uh, what happened in the European left Euro, socialism Euro communism later much later, uh, there's this recognition that, uh, too much oversimplification I'll tell you one story that might affect your thinking about this, the Rocca, our parent organization, which, which had league for industrial democracy, which had been providing the budget for, for the SDS and, and Hayden and Al Haber and others were staff members paid by DLID. They decided after port Huron, they hadn't even, the statement hadn't even been revised and written, but they had heard that we had, it was stolen annoyed or so, um, and so they fired Hayden and Haber. And then there was a hearing, you know, Hayden and Haber said, look, give us due process. Let's have a little hearing about this.
Speaker 0 00:47:07 And we, the founding council of SDS met in New York and listened to the recording of the hearing. So this is one of the moments in the recording that I thought was pretty revealing. Um, Harrington, I think says, well, one thing you guys did that was extremely wrong. He says to Hayburn, Hayden is you communicated with an organization called the Japanese anti a and H bomb association. And we know that that's a Soviet front. So Haber says, well, why don't you ask us what we said to them? And Harrington said, it doesn't matter. Our rule is you don't communicate with these people. So Haber says, well, what we communicated with them is that we didn't want to have anything to do with them because they were Soviet front. That's what we communicated with them. And it was a moment of really, uh, I think Michael, you know, Michael Harrington himself, uh, really transformed his interpretation of a lot of those events, you know, within the decade after, um, you know, that he had been much too judgmental, much too hasty in his conclusions about what, what port Huron meant and what SDS was about.
Speaker 0 00:48:28 That's where I'm coming from in, in my efforts to reconstruct this history. Um, we, we, there's one other thing I want to say about the alternative society that we were trying to imagine in writing the port Huron statement. What, how did we define it? Um, we were interested in other traditions within the left that seemed in the 19th century and much of the previous time we're separate from the socialism, but seemed relevant like anarchism at like pacifism, like a certain part of the left wing. So to speak of, of the progressive movement of the early 20th century, like radical democracy. Uh, and it seemed like a new terminology was needed to capture the fullness of this tradition that we were identifying with. Um, so, uh, some people think Portner on avoided the word socialism because it was a bad word and it had all the negative baggage in American political culture, and that's undoubtedly a part of it.
Speaker 0 00:49:40 But I always felt from the beginning that, uh, it was a creative impulse that led to say, let's not define ourselves as socialists. Let's leave this question open, uh, about what it is that we are reaching for, but the heart of it is not ambiguous or vague that, that vague it's to fulfill a radical understanding of democratic participation in the decisions that affect people. So participatory democracy means, uh, you construct an institution, whether it's a workplace or a community or a city or a prison, or a mental or a family, one of the ways you examine those institutions a fundamental way is, are how much do the underlings within that institution have a voice, have a chance how that decision, how that institution operates in terms of their interests in terms of their needs. Instead of looking for an alternative system, you want to engage in an ongoing radicalizing process of change, uh, which, which privileges movements rather than parties, uh, as the, as the, as the organized center of, of, of the, of the change effort.
Speaker 0 00:51:07 Um, that's how I see it. Uh, and, but we were convinced here's, here's where we were so wrong that socialism had no future as an idea. Uh, and so one of the big questions for you and me on this podcast, but for the left, um, of course is how come socialism is back as a framework that people are reaching for rather than rejecting how come Bernie Sanders can be defining himself as a democratic socialist, and yet be the most pop single most popular politician. I think, in this country, in spite of that, or because of that, I'm really interested in trying to figure that question out. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1 00:52:01 I, I think it's because the optimism of that moment in the sixties that a whole bunch of historical questions were settled, questions was just misplaced. Um, and whole bunch of hardcore realities started to flood back, um, very soon in the seventies and with a vengeance in the eighties, the fact that the welfare state couldn't be taken for granted. So this sort of notion of realigning politics around a liberal American in the American sense, liberal welfare state, and some transcendental new politics that just isn't how the cookie crumbled. Um, and very soon we were back in, uh, like civilization, should we have a welfare state versus not? Um, and, and then, and so then in that context, and then we have the nineties where, you know, the Clintonism and Blairism was also like, oh, those all those historical questions of class. And so those are all, and, and, and with Clintonism that people don't remember, he also sort of thought the same thing about race.
Speaker 1 00:53:07 Um, and so we're going to move on to this neoliberal future of markets and the world is flat, and everybody's going to be an entrepreneur. So fast forward, the consequences of all of those delusions is that we're back to a very rapacious kind of capitalism. The welfare state struggling, um, needs to be reinvigorated and defended. Um, and so we could talk about it using other words, but certainly the right wing is going to keep reminding us that we're actually having an argument about socialism and capitalism. And so I think it was Bernie coming at the right moment with a particular kind of political honesty, uh, combined with there being a generation of voters who don't remember the Soviet union or any of those, you know, that stigma just being like, wait a minute, if I've been told that socialism all my life I've been told that socialism is, you know, public schools and, um, taxing the rich and a welfare state and those kinds of things, then, you know, I'm a socialist. So that's, I mean, that's, that's how I think we,
Speaker 0 00:54:16 Well, you making a very important point, uh, which is that in the sixties, there was absolute consensus, not only among the new leftist, but across the intellectual spectrum, that the welfare state that the new deal and its legacy was definitely the status quo. And we use terms like corporate liberalism to mean that, to mean that the corporate sector, uh, was able to see the welfare state, uh, as part of what they needed to maintain social stability and legitimacy and working class morale, you might say, um, and to, and one of the functions of the welfare state was to pay a social wage to workers that could protect the profit margins of private companies, corporations that's how, and w to us, it was completely obvious. I'm being sarcastic that the welfare state was very much a tool of late capitalism. And, and we learned that in, in our mainstream college classes.
Speaker 0 00:55:27 Um, and it's part of what, why was Herbert MACUSA big critic? Because he was against the welfare state framework. He was looking for something beyond the welfare state, C Wright mills, you know, assumed that power elite would keep using a liberal rhetoric while maintaining a control over the society. And so this is how we thought of it. Um, and I'm not defending, I think that you're absolutely right and saying that one of the big shocks of the seventies was the corporate abandonment of the welfare state in favor of some cases, very explicit class warfare from above, uh, to lower wages, not to, not to subsidize workers with social wages, but to lower taxes and wages, according to this line, uh, because the S had to be competitive in the global marketplace. And, uh, yes. So in the seventies, um, you know, Tom Aden ran for us Senate in California.
Speaker 0 00:56:37 He got a million and a half votes. I, you didn't win the nomination, but he ran the democratic party. And after that, he formed an organization called the campaign for economic democracy. So it wasn't from the, from, from our particular circles of new lifts circles, evolution, w E economic democracy was the term we began to use, uh, coupling it with social democracy and political democracy. So three forms of democracy, interwoven, but socialism still wasn't, uh, the label we used, uh, because, and I think by then, because we didn't Tom Hayden, I'm sure believed that if he said I'm forming the Californians for the socialism organization, it would get nowhere.
Speaker 1 00:57:28 And he probably would, he probably would have been right. Um, but the, the, uh, but it is, it's just, it is interesting that, uh, uh, kind of tradition of euphemisms and sort of talking around things is, has dried up. And I, for one just completely welcome it, because I think it's able to, we're able to, I mean, it's not like the good thinking around participatory democracy, or as a beautiful explanation of socialism talking about economic, social and political democracy. I think that's a great way to continue the conversation. But what I like is that we can get back to a kind of shorthand, an easier, a more politically honest conversation about, um, about what about, uh, uh, systematic criticism, uh, politics that's, that's based in a systematic criticism of capitalism itself. And even if that's not a politics that's hyper radical and wants us to break with capitalism tomorrow, it's still rooted in an understanding that there are some things that are just fundamentally anti-human and inefficient and anti planet, uh, about capitalism as a system, um, which is what I'd like to jump into in our next episode.
Speaker 0 00:58:47 Well, I, I want to just say briefly what I'm hoping by the end of this season, we will have thoroughly explored in addition to what you just said, which is one of our fundamental purposes. What you just laid out is two things that are not discussed much. One is what do people mean by socialism? I mean, this is a remarkably undefined term, and I'd like to explore what the term has referred to over, over history, but even more so what it looks like people are thinking, they mean by it. Uh, I, but I think crucial point that people in the earliest yes, understood, but, and I'd like to bring back this way of thinking, if you think that there's a system called capitalism and that has to be replaced by a system called socialism, does that lead you to a, an attitude of dismissal toward what appeared to be reform is politics that then leads you to a kind of measuring of how do we know that socialism is progressing?
Speaker 0 01:00:05 It's how many people believe in it? It's, it's the idea that the strategy of change is to persuade people, to become socialists. And I reject that. I don't. And so if we agree with that, then let's examine me when we can agree with you. What's the problem with thinking that the main job of socialists or of DSA and groups like that is to convince people about socialism. What's the alternative strategies that, that we prefer you and me, and what are the dangers? And the dangers is a kind of tribalism in sectarianism that will come back, because if you measuring who's a socialist as the, as the goal, as, you know, that's what we're after to make socialists
Speaker 1 01:00:54 It's back. And it never went away. And as I was trying to go through in the, in the outline to just put it in context is this is a century old question yesterday that in my mind, people solved a hundred years ago, and we've just allowed like a pathological version of socialism to persist that.
Speaker 0 01:01:12 Yeah. And that's what we, you and I are on this planet now to correct from here on in this. So I think to wind things up now, I'd like to play a bit of tape, might say of some of the people who were at the port Huron conference of SDS in 1962, talking about the vision of participatory democracy that was enunciated in the statement, what it meant to them. And you're going to hear the voices of Tom Hayden, who was the primary author of the port Huron statement of Bob Ross, who at the time of the conference was a vice president of STS and Steve max, who was the staff organizer for SDS during that period. And they're pretty good. I think, um, articulations of what we at port harm were thinking was a good way to frame our vision of a new society. What we were about, we,
Speaker 2 01:02:18 The activist was the resurrection of the decentralized democracy or the direct democracy or the town meeting democracy. There was a kind of element in American history from the bottom up
Speaker 3 01:02:32 Vision of participatory democracy is that people separately and together have the power to direct the key institutions of the society, power to control their own life.
Speaker 4 01:02:46 Democracy was something that you go out and do every day. And, but it wasn't merely voting for representatives every couple of years, but that, uh, that you, you found, you found ways of implementing, uh, democracy. Uh, every time you got up in the morning, uh, if you didn't wait for the government to pass a civil rights law, if you couldn't get into the barber shop, you opened the doors and you, you went in, I mean, that was the, that was the essence of what participatory democracy was about.
Speaker 5 01:03:14 and is owned by labor. There's joy in these for all.
