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WHY IS THERE NO SOCIALISM in the UNITED STATES? Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?

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WHY IS THERE NO SOCIALISM in the UNITED STATES? Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? WHY IS THERE NO SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES? Why is there no Socialism in the United States? WERNER SOMBART Translated by Patricia M. Hocking Head of German, Lockleaze Comprehensive School, Bristol and C. T. Husbands Lecturer in Sociology, University of Bristol Edited and with an Introductory Essay by C. T. Husbands and with a Foreword by Michael Harrington This work was originally published inin 19061906 by thethe Verlag vonvon J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) of Tiibingen under the title Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? It was slightly revised from a series of articles that had appeared in the Archiv filr So%ialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik [Works in Social Science and Social Policy], XXI (1905) ISBN 978-1-349-02526-8 ISBN 978-1-349-02524-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-02524-4 English translation © Patricia M. Hocking and C. T. Husbands 1976 Editor's introductory essay and editorial material © C. T. Husbands 1976 Michael Harrington's foreword © The Macmillan Press Ltd 1976 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1976 978-0-333-18008-2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published I976 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in New York Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras SBN 333 18008 9 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement Contents Preface to the Original German Edition vii Foreword by Michael Harrington 1X List of Tables xiii Editor's Introductory Essay XV Translators' and Editor's Notes and Acknowledgements xxxix INTRODUafiON I Capitalism in the United States 3 2 Socialism in the United States I5 SECTION ONE The Political Position of the Worker I Politics and Race 27 2 The Political Machine 29 3 The Monopoly of the Two Major Parties 33 4 The Failures of All Third Parties 4I 5 The Inner Nature of the Ruling Parties 45 6 The Position of the American Worker in the State 55 SECTION TWO The Economic Situation of the Worker I A General View 6I 2 The Money-income of the Worker in America and Europe 63 3 The Cost of Living in America and Germany 75 4 How the Worker Lives 93 5 Standard of Living and Ideology I05 vi Contents SECTION THREE The Social Position of the Worker I The Democratic Style of Public Life in America 109 2 Employer and Worker I I I 3 The Worker's Escape into Freedom 115 Abbreviations of Journal Titles I20 Notes I2I Bibliography I68 Index I8J Preface to the Original German Edition The studies of the workers' movement and of Socialism in the United States of America published in this book first appeared in more or less identical form in Volume XXI of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolvtik. 1 I have departed from the original text only by intro­ ducing some new numerical data and a small amount of additional illustrative material. I decided upon a special edition of the work only after I had become certain that the principal points of my argument were correct. The verdict of American experts on the subject assured me of this, and not only have my middle-class American friends told me that they agree with me, but the leaders of the Socialist parties have also recognised the correctness of my interpretation - something that seems to me to be even more conclusive. The International Socialist Review, the official scholarly journal of the Socialist Party, has even reproduced my articles for its readers, mostly in the full text. 2 This study can serve as a supplement to the chapters of my book, Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung, where I have already attempted (in the last edition) to present a concise sketch of Socialism in the U.S.A.' w.s. Breslau, 14 August xgo6"' Foreword MICHAEL l!ARRINGTON The questions raised by Werner Sombart in 1go6 about the absence of Socialism in the United States are relevant to American politics in the 1970s. A number of factors and events are converging and it is clear that this decade will be a period of political realignment or political dis­ integration.1 The energy crisis, the great recession·inflation of the seventies, a growing sense of ethical and spiritual malaise, and many other trends all point to such a development. It can be argued, I think, that the nation is at one of those turning points which then fix the outlines of an entire era to come. In the past, there were the rise of Jacksonian Democracy in the 182os, the Civil War and the triumph of Northern capitalism, the emergence of the corporate and imperial structure under the direction of the Republican Party in the I 8gos, Roosevelt's welfare-state politics of the thirties. Now it seems that another moment of change is on the agenda. In Europe, Socialism became a mass movement during the transition from laissez-faire to organised, imperial capitalism (that is to say, between the 18gos and the First World War), although England, as the Editor points out in the introductory essay, is something of a special case. In America, the Socialists failed. The ongoing relevance of the fact in the seventies- and of Sombart's attempt to account for it- is that its explanation requires one to understand social forces and structures which are at work to this very moment and which will profoundly influence the realignments of the seventies and eighties. Thus, Why is there no Socialism in the United States? is not a scholarly curiosity, but a book which poses the issue of American 'exceptionalism', an issue which is quite pertinent in the present crisis. I will not for a moment attempt to survey the literature on the subject. That is well done in the introductory essay (even though, as will be seen in a moment, I have my interpretive differences with it). Rather, I will concentrate on a few of the themes raised by Sombart, and stressed by the Editor, which are important to the present and future as well as to the American past. First of all, I think that the notion of the 'civic integration' of the American working class is extremely important. Sombart treats it, of X Foreword course; but I would place even more of a stress upon it than he does. The continental-European Socialist movement, it must be remembered, began around a civil-rights, rather than an economic, question: the exclusion, or systematic undercounting, of the workers in the political process. In almost every instance, the psychological, emotional basis of the anti-bourgeois struggle was the demand for bourgeois equality. Even in the case of the partial exception in England, there is a striking fact that the first politically organised workers' movement, Chartism, had the same characteristic, even though it did not lay the ground­ work for a mass Socialist party. In the United States there was universal manhood suffrage almost from the very beginning. This led to the phenomenon, first brilliantly formulated by Leon Samson, of 'Americanism' as a substitute for Socialism.2 American capitalism, Samson argued, is the Socialist form of capitalism, i.e., it preaches an egalitarianism, a denial of the reality of class society, which is unlike anything one would have found in France or Britain. Therefore a worker in America could express his drive for equality in terms of, not in counterposition to, the prevailing ideology. The ongoing impact of this ideological factor can be seen in one of the anomalies of the seventies: that the most regressive tax in America is also the most popular. The Social Security levy does not allow for deductions or take into account family size, and it is an outrageous bargain for the rich, who get publicly subsidised retirement insurance on cheaper terms than anyone else. But Social Security retains the myth of being an insurance programme, i.e., of providing the recipient with benefits which he or she has already paid in. In fact, there is a large element of welfare in Social Security but that fact is known only to statisticians and experts. The public, with its Americanist, indi­ vidualist, self-help ideology, is relatively enthusiastic about this highly regressive tax. Secondly, the Editor points out the complexity of the 'roast beef and apple pie' theory of the failure of American Socialism. The evidence, incredible as it may seem, is still in dispute. Seymour Martin Lipset has pointed out that social mobility in America was not that different from Europe, but there are many, many complicating factors. Stephan Themstrom has done some ingenious research in trying to deal with the quantitative question, and a lively summary of the state of the debate can be found in Failure of a Dream?, a volume edited by Lipset with John H. M. Laslett.8 But what concerns me here is not the issue of the numbers but how one interprets them. There is an easy assumption, as the Editor points out in his introduc­ tory essay, which underlies much embourgeoisement analysis: that higher living standards are anti-radical. In fact, the period of the greatest growth of the German Social Democracy, from the abolition Foreword xi of the anti-Socialist laws to the First World War, was a time of relative prosperity for the working class. Moreover, as Adolph Sturmthal has pointed out, many of the statistical comparisons of the American and European living standards in this period omit the value of the Bis­ marckian (or, in England, Lloyd George) social programmes.' So one cannot assume that poverty is radical and affluence conservative, since the reverse is often true.
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