The Communist Experience in America

A Political and Social History

Harvey Klehr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781412810562
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351484749
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Arguments about whether distinctive features of American society, culture, political structure, economic system, or population account for the relative weakness of American radicalism have engaged historians, sociologists, and political scientists for decades. Influential concepts such as frontier theory have been linked with the absence of class conflict in America. Other analysts have attributed the failure of the American Left to fierce repression, giving red scares and the McCarthy era as illustrations. Some have linked the American Left's failure to American immigration, winner-take-all elections, and the cultural values of individualism. The Communist Party, one of America's largest and longest lasting radical groups, offers many lessons about how radical political groups can take advantage of-or squander-their opportunities.Klehr focuses on the theme of American exceptionalism and problems that America's capitalist society raised for Marxism and other radical groups. The Communist Experience in America deals with dissident communist formulations. Such groups included a number of talented men who went on to a variety of political and literary careers. Klehr also deals with fellow travelers, some of whom wrote fascinating essays on American exceptionalism and the decline of political extremism.In part, Klehr hopes to inspire the same moral outrage about Communism that fuels those dedicated to ensuring that Nazi crimes are never forgotten or obfuscated. Communism, in practice everywhere in the world, also came at enormous human cost. Regardless of their other virtues or qualities, those who supported or defended Communism from the safety of the United States must be called to account. This work does just that; in detail and depth.

Part 1

American Exceptionalism

1

Marxist Theory in Search of America

Marxist theory has, to this day, not been able to inspire a large social movement in America. On the contrary, left-wing groups, during the infrequent occasions when they have thrived, have done so precisely when they were least committed to Marxism. The heyday of socialism came at a time when it most nearly resembled the major American political parties in its hospitality to all shades of left-wing opinion. The Communist Party gained influence in direct proportion as it abandoned Marx for Jefferson and Lincoln and proclaimed Marxism to be twentieth-century Americanism.

A social theory offers a political movement an interpretation of the world. It provides a picture of the past, a map of the present, and a forecast of the future. Marxism, in particular, demands that theory and practice remain intimate. The failure of Marxist practice in America thus casts some doubt on the adequacy of the theory itself. In fact, many people have discovered in the Marxist theoretical armor chinks which supposedly have eliminated it as an adequate guide to American reality. Others have seen America as a deviant example, concluding that Marxism might apply to Europe but not to the United States.

Few people, however, have specifically looked at Marx’s analysis of American society to discover where he went wrong. The emphasis tends to be on the differences between the Marxist analysis of capitalism and the actual development of American society. Marx did, however, discuss America and was not as clear as one might expect. In this chapter, I shall examine some of the difficulties that America raised for Marx and Engels and argue that there are actually two Marxist theories of the American past. This suggests that differing Marxist explanations of the American present might exist and might lead to differing projections of the American future although these themes are not pursued here.

The first theory is a product of Marx’s writings. The second is largely the product of Engels’ pen, although Marx occasionally gave support to it. After examining these two theories, I shall argue that they do not exhaust the contradictions in the Marxist analysis of America. In particular, the Civil War presented a theoretical problem neither theory could contain. The confusion of Marx and Engels when confronted by American development has been glossed over by their fellows. In the conclusion, I have tentatively suggested some of the reasons for that oversight and a few of the consequences.

In 1860, Karl Marx informed Frederick Engels, his life-long friend and collaborator, that “in my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the slaves in Russia.”¹ Despite the importance that he attached to events in these two countries, however, Marx never wrote a detailed, major analysis of American or Russian development – or even of a particular phase of their development.²

Both Marx and Engels devoted most of their prodigious energy to understanding and influencing events in Europe. In an even more narrow sense, the great bulk of their writing concerns three countries – England, Germany, and France. Neither America nor Russia ever received sustained literary attention. For one thing, they simply were on the periphery of European life, impinging in very important ways on European matters but still distant enough to be ignored on most occasions. A more important, intellectually crucial, reason for this neglect is that the empirical work Marx and Engels did illustrated capitalist development and decay within a limited class of societies.

Marx was convinced that the ultimate fate of capitalist society was socialism. But, how was socialism, this paradise on earth, to descend from the heavens? Marx is not a thinker whose works admit of only one interpretation. At different times he emphasized different themes. And, like most men, in the course of his life he changed his mind about some matters. Nowhere is Marx’s ambiguity more apparent than when one asks how he expected capitalism to turn into socialism.

Marx provided at least three models of the transition from the one system to the other.³ The first was a product of his early writings. Later adopted by Lenin, this model envisioned a revolution made by a small band of conspirators for the benefit of the masses. The second model had two different scenarios. In the Manifesto, Marx argued that capitalist economic development would lead to an ever-increasing proletariat facing an ever-decreasing bourgeoisie. Elsewhere, particularly in the Grundrisse, Marx abandoned this simplistic, dichotomous vision but retained his belief that socialism would emerge from a revolution made by a majority of the population.

The third model, only occasionally hinted at, postulated a revolution by example. Just as capitalism had bested feudalism by demonstrating its economic superiority, so would socialism slowly eliminate capitalism: “As the co-operative sector continues to grow and the capitalist sector continues to shrink, the socialist era will arrive like a thief in the night.”⁴ Engels rejected the first model as the product of youthful enthusiasm, and neither he nor Marx emphasized the third model.⁵ While socialism was to be a democratic movement, Marx and Engels never specified unambiguously whether the same democratic model would be followed in all countries.

The clearest expression Marx ever made on the question of whether all nations would follow the same path to socialism is contained in a letter written in 1877. Marx attacked those critics who felt they “absolutely must metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historical-philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself.”⁶ The immediate cause of Marx’s letter was the problem of Russian development. A continuing debate was taking place among Russian radicals over whether the Russian village community, a primitive form of collective land ownership, could serve as the nucleus for a socialist society. In short, did Russia have to undergo capitalist development, which would destroy the collective land system, before socialism arrived?

Marx seemed to answer no. He argued that “if Russia continues to move in the path followed up to 1861, it will lose the finest occasion that history has ever offered a people not to undergo all the sudden turns of fortune of the capitalist system.”⁷ The village community could form the basis for a leap from a primitive to an advanced economic system.

The Russian road to socialism, then, might traverse a different terrain than that of Western Europe. Russian socialism could, depending on events in more developed lands, arise out of the particular institutions of Russian society. When we turn to Marx and Engels’ analysis of the United States, however, we find no such clear view of whether this country would undergo, or had already experienced, a course of development comparable in major respects to that of the Old World. While America was frequently used as a convenient illustration of some theoretical point, only once did Marx discuss American development as a theoretical problem.⁸ In the last chapter of Volume I of Capital, entitled “The Modem Theory of Colonisation,” Marx attempted to explain American economic development. Despite their political status, Marx thought that “the United States are, speaking economically, still only a colony of Europe.”⁹

In this chapter, Marx points out that there are two kinds of private property. One is founded on the producer’s own labor; the other is founded on the employment of the labor of others. The former type is an economic form antagonistic to capitalism; the latter is capitalism’s essence. Indeed, capitalism cannot come into existence until private property in land founded on the producer’s own labor—the small, independent proprietorship—is abolished or substantially reduced.

One of the prerequisites of wage labour and one of the historic conditions for capital is free labour and the exchange of free labour against money. . . . Another prerequisite is the separation of free labour from the objective conditions of its realisation-from the means and material of labour. This means above all that the worker must be separated from the land, which functions as his natural laboratory. This means the dissolution both of free petty landownership and of communal landed property.¹⁰

In a fully developed capitalist system, private property based on the labor of others is of immeasurably greater significance than the other kind of private property. In colonies, however, independent private property presents a severe problem for aspiring capitalists. The independent laborer “employs that labour to enrich himself, instead of the capitalist.”¹¹

Capital, Marx points out, is not something tangible but is a relationship between things. Both a capitalist and wage-laborer must establish a productive relationship to each other before capitalism can be said to exist. And, in turn, the productive relationship requires the presence of both capitalists and wage-laborers.

The colonial setting hinders the transformation of the independent producer into a wage-laborer who is devoid of all property but his own labor power. Deprived of all other forms of property, he has been forced to sell his labor power to survive. In order for him to have reached this state, the dissolution of productive forms in which the worker had property in the land, either individually or communally, or in instruments of production, or was himself a “direct part of the objective conditions of production,” that is, a slave or serf, must have taken place.¹²

Money available from usury and mercantile wealth provides the starting point of capital, but it cannot begin the productive process alone. Free labor must be available. English capitalism did not begin its life until the landowners dismissed large numbers of retainers and farmers drove out small cottagers. These groups were forced to choose between banditry and selling their labor power. When the first course proved futile, they chose the second.¹³ Money formerly used to support these feudal retainers was then made available for exchange.

This primitive accumulation, Marx argues, is the starting point of capitalism. “The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process” by which capitalism begins its conquest of the world.¹⁴ In a colony such as the United States, money is available from the mother-country to stoke the capitalist fires, but there is a want of the fuel to be burned—wage laborers. The simple reason for this lack is that the agricultural producer cannot be transformed into a wage laborer.

The essence of colonies, or at least of relatively unpopulated colonies such as the United States, is that “the bulk of the soil is still public property and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.¹⁵ Since private property based on a man’s own labor was widespread, wage laborers were in short supply. And since these independent producers were largely self-sufficient, the internal market for manufactured goods was severely limited:

As in the colonies the separation of the labourer from the conditions of labour and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, nor the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. Whence then is to come the internal market for capital?¹⁶

A number of other consequences flow from the availability of land at low prices. Capitalism requires a population movement from farm to city as peasants become wage laborers. In the United States, however, the attractions of private ownership made it difficult to retain even wage laborers imported from Europe. The nascent capitalist enterprises in America thus were forced to offer high wages in order to secure a working force:

Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: American Exceptionalism
• Part 2: American Communism and Its Splinters
• Part 3: Revisionism/Traditionalism Debate
• Part 4: Espionage/Scholarship on Venona Documents
• Index