American Left

Based on Wikipedia: American Left

The Puzzle That Haunted Lenin

Here's something that kept Vladimir Lenin up at night: Why wasn't America socialist?

It sounds strange, but think about it from his perspective. Marxist theory held that socialism would naturally emerge from the most advanced industrial societies. By the early twentieth century, the United States was the most industrialized nation on Earth, with massive factories, a huge working class, and all the conditions that Marx had predicted would spark revolution. And yet American workers seemed remarkably uninterested in overthrowing capitalism.

This wasn't just an intellectual curiosity. It was an existential threat to Marxist theory itself. If socialism represented the future of humanity, then shouldn't it be strongest precisely where industrial capitalism was most developed? The fact that America kept stubbornly refusing to follow the script has puzzled scholars, politicians, and activists for over a century.

What Is the American Left, Anyway?

The term "American Left" gets thrown around to mean different things depending on who's talking. Sometimes people use it as shorthand for the Democratic Party. But that's a bit like calling a house cat a tiger because they're both felines.

The actual American Left encompasses a much wider range of thinking. At one end, you have liberals and progressives who believe that equality can be achieved within capitalism itself—through regulation, taxation, and a strong social safety net. They don't want to abolish private property; they want to make the system work better for more people.

Then there are socialists, who think capitalism is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced with collective ownership of the means of production. Anarchists go further still, opposing not just capitalism but also the state itself, believing that people can organize society without centralized government. Communists, following Marx, envision a classless society where the very concept of private property has withered away.

These groups have historically disagreed with each other at least as much as they've disagreed with conservatives. The fights between socialists and anarchists, or between different factions of communists, have often been more bitter than any battle with the right. As the old joke goes, ask two leftists for their opinion and you'll get three factions.

The Utopian Experiments

Long before anyone had heard of Karl Marx, people in America were trying to build perfect societies from scratch.

The very first European socialists to arrive on American shores weren't inspired by political philosophy at all. They were a Christian sect called the Labadists, followers of a French mystic named Jean de Labadie. In 1683, they established a commune called Bohemia Manor about sixty miles west of Philadelphia. Their model wasn't Marx—it was the Book of Acts, where the early Christians "had all things in common" and shared their possessions freely.

This pattern would repeat throughout American history. Dozens of intentional communities sprang up, especially in the nineteenth century. Some were religious, like the Shakers, who practiced celibacy and communal living and produced furniture so elegant it's now displayed in museums. Others were secular experiments in utopian socialism, inspired by thinkers like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen.

Most of these communities failed within a generation. The ones that lasted longest tended to have strong religious foundations—shared faith turns out to be a more durable glue than shared ideology. But they left behind a persistent American tradition of people trying to opt out of mainstream society and build something better.

The Forty-Eighters

The year 1848 changed everything in Europe. Revolutions swept across the continent, from France to the German states to the Austrian Empire. Kings trembled. For a moment, it seemed like the old order might collapse entirely.

Then the revolutions failed. The old order fought back, and thousands of radicals found themselves hunted, imprisoned, or killed. Many fled to America.

These refugees, known as the Forty-Eighters, brought their radical ideas with them. Among them was Joseph Weydemeyer, a German military officer who had become friends with Karl Marx himself. Weydemeyer landed in New York in 1851 and immediately got to work spreading Marxist ideas. He founded what he grandly called Die Revolution, the first Marxist journal in America.

It folded after two issues.

Weydemeyer didn't give up. He established the Proletarierbund, which became the American Workers' League—the first Marxist organization in the United States. It too collapsed, for a reason that would plague the American Left for decades: it couldn't attract English-speaking members. German immigrants talked to German immigrants about German philosophy, while native-born American workers went about their business, apparently unconcerned about their historic mission to overthrow capitalism.

Why America Was Different

So why didn't socialism catch on in America the way it did in Europe?

Friedrich Engels, Marx's closest collaborator, had a simple explanation: America had no feudal past. In Europe, workers faced a rigid class system with centuries of history behind it. The aristocracy owned the land, the church told you to know your place, and your family's status at birth largely determined your fate. Revolution seemed like the only escape.

But America had never had lords and peasants. It had something else: an open frontier and the promise of social mobility. If you didn't like your boss, you could head west and stake a claim. If you worked hard enough, maybe you could become a boss yourself. This wasn't entirely myth—enough people actually did rise from poverty to make the dream seem plausible.

Max Weber, the great German sociologist, observed something else: Americans genuinely believed in individualism and free markets in a way that Europeans didn't. These weren't just economic arrangements imposed from above; they were core values woven into the national identity. "Laissez-faire" wasn't a policy—it was a creed.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing from a prison cell where Mussolini had confined him, developed this insight further. American capitalism, he argued, had achieved something remarkable: cultural hegemony. Workers didn't just accept the system because they were forced to. They internalized its values. They saw themselves not as an exploited class but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The historian David De Leon added another twist. When American workers did embrace radical politics, they tended toward libertarianism and syndicalism—not the state-centered socialism of European social democrats. They didn't want the government to own everything; they wanted to be left alone by bosses and bureaucrats alike. This streak of anti-authoritarian individualism made them suspicious of centralized power, whether it came from corporations or from would-be revolutionary governments.

The Structural Obstacle

There's a more mundane explanation too, and it has to do with how American elections work.

The United States uses a winner-take-all electoral system. In most races, whoever gets the most votes wins everything; second place gets nothing. This is dramatically different from proportional representation, which many European countries use, where a party that wins ten percent of the vote gets roughly ten percent of the seats.

In a winner-take-all system, third parties face a brutal dilemma. If you vote for a minor party that closely shares your views, you might help elect your worst enemy by splitting the vote with a major party that somewhat shares your views. This is why American politics has been dominated by two major parties for almost its entire history, while European democracies routinely have half a dozen or more significant parties.

For socialists, this meant that building an independent political party was always an uphill struggle. They could never get enough votes to win major offices, and every vote they did get could be portrayed as a vote stolen from the Democrats and gifted to the Republicans. The system itself made radical third parties nearly impossible to sustain.

The Other Kind of Repression

Ideas weren't the only thing holding the American Left back. There was also good old-fashioned repression.

Many American cities established what were called Red Squads—special police units dedicated to monitoring, infiltrating, and disrupting leftist organizations. After the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, where a bomb killed several police officers during a labor rally, authorities cracked down hard on radicals. It didn't matter that the bomber was never identified and most of the anarchists arrested had solid alibis. Eight men were convicted, and four were hanged.

The pattern repeated every time radicalism seemed to be gaining ground. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw the federal government arrest thousands of suspected radicals and deport hundreds, including the famous anarchist Emma Goldman. The Smith Act of 1940 made it illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the government—a law that was used after World War II to prosecute communist leaders.

Then came Senator Joseph McCarthy, who gave his name to an era. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy led a crusade to root out alleged communists from government, the military, Hollywood, and anywhere else he could find headlines. Careers were destroyed on the basis of rumor and innuendo. Being accused was often enough to ruin someone, regardless of whether the accusation was true.

Even after McCarthy's disgrace, the surveillance continued. The FBI's COINTELPRO program, which ran from 1956 to 1971, systematically monitored, infiltrated, and disrupted radical groups. Agents spread disinformation, encouraged internal conflicts, and sometimes collaborated with local police in violence against activists. When the program was finally exposed, it revealed that the government had been treating lawful political dissent as equivalent to enemy espionage.

As recently as 2008, Maryland police were caught adding the names of antiwar protesters and death penalty opponents to a terrorism database. A former deputy assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division admitted publicly that one of the bureau's missions had been to keep progressives and socialists out of office.

The Divided Working Class

Perhaps the deepest wound to American class solidarity was self-inflicted: racism.

The legacy of slavery created a working class that was divided against itself from the very beginning. White workers, even the poorest among them, could always console themselves that at least they weren't Black. Employers learned to exploit this division ruthlessly, using Black workers as strikebreakers to enrage white workers, and using white racism to prevent the interracial organizing that might have threatened their power.

This produced what scholars call a racially stratified, two-tiered labor force. Black workers were systematically excluded from the skilled trades and the unions that protected them. When they did find industrial work, it was usually the dirtiest, most dangerous, lowest-paid jobs. White workers often defended this arrangement as vigorously as any factory owner.

The result was that American workers never developed the kind of unified class consciousness that Marxist theory predicted. Instead of seeing themselves primarily as workers with shared interests against capital, they saw themselves as members of racial and ethnic groups competing with each other for jobs and status. This made building the broad coalitions that left-wing movements need almost impossibly difficult.

The Labor Movement's Choice

In 1886, two former socialists made a fateful decision.

Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers looked at the American socialist movement and concluded it was going nowhere. Workers didn't want to hear lectures about overthrowing capitalism. They wanted higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions—right now, not after some future revolution.

So Strasser and Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor on a radically different principle. The AFL would focus entirely on what Gompers called "pure and simple unionism." It would negotiate contracts, call strikes, and win concrete improvements for its members. It would stay out of politics, avoid ideological commitments, and make no promises about transforming society.

This approach had a certain hard-headed logic. Gompers argued that workers couldn't rely on government for anything, because any rights the government granted could be taken away by the next administration. The only power workers could count on was the power they built themselves, through organization and collective action.

The AFL was spectacularly successful on its own terms. It organized millions of workers, primarily in skilled crafts, and won them genuine improvements in pay and conditions. But it also deliberately excluded unskilled workers, women, and Black workers—the people who needed union protection most. And by rejecting political action, it gave up any hope of transforming the broader system.

The AFL's choice would shape American labor for generations. Unlike European countries, where unions and socialist parties grew up together as two wings of a single movement, American labor became divorced from electoral politics. Workers voted for Democrats or Republicans based on ethnicity, religion, or regional loyalty, while their unions focused narrowly on workplace issues.

The Wobblies

Not everyone was satisfied with Gompers's approach.

In 1905, a remarkable gathering assembled in Chicago: socialists, anarchists, and trade unionists who were fed up with the AFL's conservatism and exclusivity. They founded the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the IWW or the Wobblies, with a simple and radical vision. Instead of organizing workers by craft, keeping carpenters separate from electricians and both separate from unskilled laborers, the IWW would organize entire industries. Instead of negotiating for better conditions within capitalism, they would prepare for the day when workers would take over the factories and run them themselves.

The IWW's leaders were colorful characters. William D. "Big Bill" Haywood was a hard-rock miner from Nevada who had lost an eye in a childhood accident and looked like a human embodiment of working-class toughness. Helen Keller, already world-famous for overcoming deafness and blindness, threw her prestige behind the organization. Eugene Debs, the most beloved figure in American socialism, helped found it, though he would later drift away.

The Wobblies were especially effective at organizing the workers no one else wanted: the migrant laborers who followed the harvest through the Western states, the lumber workers in remote forest camps, the immigrant textile workers packed into Eastern factory towns. They weren't afraid of unskilled workers or immigrants or people who didn't speak English. They weren't afraid of violence either.

That willingness to fight made the Wobblies terrifying to employers and authorities alike. They faced brutal repression—organizers were beaten, jailed, and sometimes lynched. During World War I, the federal government essentially destroyed the organization, prosecuting its leaders under espionage laws for opposing the war.

But the Wobblies left behind something important: a tradition of militant, inclusive, unapologetic class struggle. Their songs, their slogans, their spirit would echo through American labor history long after the organization itself had faded to a shadow.

The High Water Mark

By 1912, American socialism had reached heights it would never see again.

Eugene Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket and received almost a million votes—5.9 percent of the total. This might not sound impressive, but in the winner-take-all American system, it was extraordinary. The Socialists had elected a congressman, Victor Berger of Milwaukee. They controlled city governments in Milwaukee, Berkeley, Butte, Schenectady, and Flint. More than a thousand Socialists held elected office across the country: fifty-six mayors, over three hundred city councilmen, and members of state legislatures.

The Socialist Party had built a genuine media empire. Five English-language daily newspapers and eight in other languages. Over two hundred weekly publications. A network of magazines and pamphlets that reached hundreds of thousands of readers.

Even within the AFL, the Socialists were gaining ground. When one of their number challenged Gompers for leadership of the federation, he won a third of the vote.

It seemed, for a moment, like socialism might actually become a major force in American politics. Then the war came.

The War and the Red Scare

American entry into World War I in 1917 unleashed a wave of patriotic hysteria that crashed directly onto the American Left.

The Socialists had opposed the war, arguing that it was a conflict between rival imperialist powers in which workers had nothing to gain and everything to lose. This position was popular before the American declaration of war—but afterward, it became treason in the eyes of many.

The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal to interfere with military recruitment or to say anything "disloyal" about the government or the war effort. These laws were used mercilessly against the left. Socialist newspapers were denied access to the mail. Antiwar activists were arrested. Debs himself was sentenced to ten years in prison for giving a speech opposing the draft. He would run for president from his jail cell in 1920, still winning nearly a million votes.

The IWW was essentially decapitated. Over a hundred of its leaders were charged under the Espionage Act, convicted, and sent to federal prison.

Then came the Russian Revolution, and American hysteria intensified further. In 1919, a series of bombings by anarchists—including one at the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer—triggered the Palmer Raids. Federal agents and local police swept through immigrant communities, arresting thousands. Many were held without charges or access to lawyers. Hundreds were deported, including Emma Goldman, who was shipped to Russia on a boat that newspapers called the "Soviet Ark."

The Red Scare of 1919-1920 broke the back of American radicalism for a generation. Organizations were smashed, leaders imprisoned or exiled, members intimidated into silence. The American Left would not recover until the Great Depression.

Communists and Their Enemies

The Russian Revolution didn't just inspire repression. It also split the American Left in two.

Some American socialists looked at what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had accomplished and saw a model to follow. In 1919, two groups broke away from the Socialist Party to form competing communist organizations. These eventually merged into the Communist Party USA, which aligned itself with Moscow and accepted direction from the Communist International.

For the next several decades, the Communist Party would be both the most dynamic and the most controversial force on the American Left. At its peak in the late 1930s and 1940s, it claimed perhaps seventy-five thousand members—not a huge number, but they were extraordinarily active. Communists threw themselves into labor organizing, civil rights work, and antifascist campaigns with an energy that impressed even their enemies.

But the Party's connection to Moscow was a constant liability. When the Soviet line changed, American communists changed with it, sometimes with whiplash speed. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, in which Stalin allied with Hitler, was a particular disaster; members who had spent years fighting fascism were suddenly told to oppose American aid to Britain. Many walked away in disgust.

The Party's internal life was also troubled. Like most communist parties, it practiced what was called "democratic centralism," which meant that once the leadership made a decision, all members were expected to support it publicly. Dissent was treated as disloyalty. Factions formed, fought, and purged each other with depressing regularity.

The Trotskyists were particularly bitter enemies. Leon Trotsky, exiled from the Soviet Union and eventually murdered by a Stalinist agent in Mexico, became a symbol for those who believed that the Russian Revolution had been betrayed by Stalin's bureaucratic dictatorship. American Trotskyists were few in number but fierce in their convictions, and they spent almost as much energy fighting the Stalinists as they did fighting capitalism.

The Socialist Collapse

While the communists grew during the Depression, the Socialist Party shattered.

The party that had once won a million votes split into warring factions. An "Old Guard," led by figures who remembered the party's glory days, fought against younger "Militants" who were more sympathetic to the Soviet Union and more impatient with electoral gradualism. The Old Guard eventually left to form the Social Democratic Federation.

Then the Trotskyists, looking for a larger platform, negotiated their way into the Socialist Party in 1936. They operated as a faction within the party, recruiting members and pushing their line, until they were expelled a year later. They took the party's youth wing, the Young People's Socialist League, with them.

Norman Thomas, the Presbyterian minister who had inherited Debs's mantle as the party's perennial presidential candidate, watched his organization tear itself apart. By the end of the 1930s, the Socialist Party that had once seemed poised to reshape American politics was a hollow shell.

A Distinctly American Critique

Out of all this sectarian warfare emerged at least one genuinely original idea.

Max Shachtman was a Trotskyist who had been expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940 over his analysis of the Soviet Union. Trotsky had argued that the USSR was a "degenerated workers' state"—bureaucratically deformed but still fundamentally socialist because it had abolished private ownership of the means of production. Shachtman disagreed. He looked at Stalin's Russia and saw something new: not capitalism, not socialism, but a novel form of class society he called "bureaucratic collectivism."

In this system, the state itself became the collective exploiter. The bureaucrats who ran the Soviet state extracted surplus from workers just as capitalists did, but they did it through political control rather than private ownership. This made them, in Shachtman's analysis, a new ruling class—one that might actually be more oppressive than traditional capitalists because there was no private sector to escape to, no civil society outside state control.

This theory resonated with dissidents who had experienced communist rule firsthand. The Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas, writing his famous book The New Class from a prison cell, developed similar ideas independently. The argument would prove influential far beyond the tiny circles of American Trotskyism. It offered a way to be on the left—to oppose capitalism, to support workers' rights, to believe in equality—while also opposing the Soviet Union and everything it represented.

The Longer View

When you step back and look at the whole sweep of American left-wing history, certain patterns emerge.

First, there's the consistent difficulty of building organizations that can bridge the gap between immigrants and native-born Americans, between different ethnic groups, between white and Black workers. The American working class was never the unified force that Marxist theory imagined. It was always fragmented by language, culture, race, and religion. Every left-wing movement that has tried to overcome these divisions has eventually run aground on them.

Second, there's the repeated pattern of government repression. Whenever the Left has seemed to be gaining momentum—in the 1880s after the growth of the Knights of Labor, in the 1910s with the Socialist Party at its height, in the 1930s and 1940s with the Communist Party's influence—the federal government has intervened to break it. The specific methods have varied from era to era, but the pattern is consistent enough to suggest that it reflects something structural about American politics rather than just the decisions of particular presidents or attorneys general.

Third, there's the recurring tension between reform and revolution. Should the Left try to win elections and change the system from within? Or is electoral politics a trap that co-opts radicals and defuses revolutionary energy? American leftists have been arguing about this question since the nineteenth century and show no signs of reaching consensus.

Finally, there's the question of what "left" even means in an American context. The mainstream Democratic Party today would be considered center-right in most European countries. Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, advocates policies that are standard social democracy in Scandinavia. The spectrum of what's considered possible in American politics has always been narrower than in Europe.

And yet the ideas persist. Every generation produces new radicals who rediscover the old critiques of capitalism and inequality, who organize and agitate and dream of transformation. The names change—Wobblies become New Leftists become democratic socialists become whatever comes next—but the underlying impulse remains. As long as there is inequality, there will be people who believe it can be overcome. The American Left has failed, over and over, to build the mass movement its theorists predicted. But it has never quite disappeared either.