Why is There No Socialism In the United States

Werner Sombart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315496870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party-an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about "American exceptionalism" is untenable. Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart-Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar. Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.

Notes

For the purposes of notation the Editor's Introductory Essay and the translation of Sombart's text have been regarded a separate entities. Thus references common to both entities that are given in full when they first appear in the Introductory Essay are likewise given in full when they first appear in the translation.

Preface to the Original German Edition

1 Ed. - The studies appeared under the general title, Studien zur Entwick-lungsgeschichte des nordamerikanischen Proletariats [Studies in the Historical Development of the North American Proletariat], in three separate parts. On pages 210-36 was I: Einleitung [I: Introduction] corresponding to the Introduction of the present work. On pages 308-46 was II: Die politische Stellung des Arbeiters [II: The Political Position of the Worker] corresponding to Section One of the present work. On pages 556-611 were III: Die Lebenshaltung des Arbeiters in den Vereinigten Staaten [III: The Standard of Living of the Worker in the United States] and IV: Die soziale Stellung des Arbeiters [IV: The Social Position of the Worker] corresponding respectively to Section Two and Section Three of the present work.

2 Ed. - This is not quite the truth. Abbreviated versions of the Introduction and Section One of the present work did appear in the International Socialist Review shortly after they were published in the Archiv für Sozialwiss<enschaft und Sozialpolitik. They had been translated into English by A. M. Simons, the editor of the Review. In Volume 6, Number 3 (Sep 1905), 129136, there appeared parts of the Introduction of the present work under the title, 'Study of the Historical Development and Evolution of the American Proletariat'. In Volume 6, Number 5 (Nov 1905), 293-301, were pieces of the first part of Section One of the present work under the general title, 'The Historical Development of the American Proletarian', and subtitled 'The Political Position of the Worker'. In Volume 6, Number 6 (Dec 1905), 358-367, was the remainder of Section One entitled 'Studies in the History and Development of the North American Proletariat'. However, Section Two of the present work, in which Sombart argued that American capitalism had been successful enough to buy off the radicalism of American workers, clearly offended the leaders of American Socialism, and no further translation appeared in the Review. Instead, in Volume 7, Number 7 (Jan 1907), 420-5, there appeared a vitriolic review of Why is there no Socialism in the United States? that had been translated from Vorwärts [Forward], the newspaper of the German Social Democratic Party, of 9 October 1906; in the review Sombart comes in for some harsh substantive and ad hominem criticism. At the bottom of the final page of this review is the following footnote by the editor of the Review: 'The first chapters of the work reviewed above containing the valuable statistical portions appeared in the International Socialist Review. When we came to the nonsense on the condition of the American worker we stopped further publication. As Sombart has used the fact of such publication as an endorsement of his work, we publish the above to make this explanation - Editor.' Even this is not fully true, however, since most of the statistical material used by Sombart is included in the sections of his work that the Review chose not to publish.

3 Ed. - This reference is to Sombart's Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung, 5th ed. (Jena, 1905). The sixth edition of this work appeared in German in 1908 and was then translated into English by M. Epstein as Socialism and the Social Movement (London, 1909).

4 Ed. - Breslau is the German name for the city now in Poland that is called Wroclaw. In 1906, of course, it was in Germany. From 1890 to 1906 Sombart was Extraordinary Professor of Economics at the University of Breslau. When denied promotion to a regular professorship at Breslau, largely for political reasons, he became Professor of Political Economy at the Berlin Handelshochschule [Commercial University].

Foreword

1 Cf. Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970).

2 Leon Samson, Toward a United Front: A Philosophy for American Workers (New York, 1933).

3 Stephan Thernstrom, 'Socialism and Social Mobility', in Failure of a Dream?: Essays in the History of American Socialism, ed. John H. M, Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City, 1974) pp. 509-27; Lipset's 'Comment', in ibid., pp. 528-46; Thernstrom's 'Reply' to this, in ibid., pp. 547-52.

4 Adolph Sturmthal, 'Comment 1 [on an excerpt from Sombart's Why is there no Socialism in the United States?]', in ibid., pp. 610-11.

5 Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York, 1972).

Editor’s Introductory Essay

1 Failure of a Dream?: Essays in the History of American Socialism, ed, John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City, 1974), contains a comprehensive review of the reasons to which the failure of American Socialism has been attributed, and the reader is referred to this for a fuller presentation of the current issues in this subject.

That book does contain a small translated excerpt from Why is there no Socialism in the United States?, but the parts chosen are from the end of the book, where Sombart is presenting his material on the effects of affluence on the working-class psyche and where he argues that the democratic character of social life in America had repressed radical tendencies. None of Sombart's arguments about the effects of the American political system is contained in the excerpt reproduced. In addition, the present translation incorporates editorial corrections of some of Sombart's data, which have been reproduced in their original incorrect form in Failure of a Dream?.

2 For example, Henry F. Bedford's Socialism and the Workers of Massachusetts i886-igi2 (Amherst, 1966) documents how the Socialist Party in that state failed quite quickly to live up to its dramatic early promise. John H. M. Laslett, Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, i88i-ig24 (New York, 1970) contains a series of locally oriented studies.

3 Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany (New York, 1973) 133-264.

4 See the articles on Werner Sombart by Georg Weippart in Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften [Concise Dictionary of the Social Sciences], ed. Erwin v. Beckerath et al. (Stuttgart, Tübingen and Göttingen, 1956) Ix 298-305, and by Jürgen Kuczynski in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York, 1968) xv 57-9.

5 Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement, 264.

6 Ibid., 227.

7 Tom Bottomore, 'Class structure and social consciousness' in Aspects of History and Class Consciousness, ed. Istvan Meszaros (London, 1971) p. 58.

8 Karl Marx, Essential Writings of Karl Marx, selected by David Caute (New York, 1970) 197.

9 V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done?, translated by S. V. and Patricia Utechin (Oxford, 1963 ed.) esp. 61-118.

10 For example, Frederick Engels, 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific', in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow, 1962) 11 116.

11 See, for example, his discussion of German national character in Werner Sombart, Socialism and the Social Movement, translated from the sixth (enlarged) German edition by M. Epstein (London, 1909) 171.

12 Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, 2nd ed. (London, 1973).

13 David Goates, The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism (Cambridge, 1975).

14 See E. J. Hobsbawm, 'Labour Traditions', in his Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (Garden City, 1967 ed.) 441, for an example of militance combined with political moderation in the case of workers in the small Sheffield metal crafts.

15 Tony Lane, The Union Makes Us Strong: The British Working Class, Its Trade Unionism and Politics (London, 1974).

16 Comments on the more detailed aspects of some of Sombart's arguments appear in the Notes to the text added by the Editor. These comments are intended to evaluate Sombart's evidence or to assess the particular argument of his in the light of subsequent research and debate on the subject.

17 Daniel Bell, 'The Failure of American Socialism: The Tension of Ethics and Polities', in his The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, new, revised ed. (New York, 1962) 275-98.

18 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York, 1962 ed.) 331.

19 David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, 1954) e.g., 118-19.

20 Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (London, 1964) esp. 170-204.

21 T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class; and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1950) 1-85.

22 Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of our Changing Social Order (New York, 1964) 55-104.

23 Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, 1963).

24 Robert McKensie and Allan Silver, Angels in Marble: Working-Class Conservatives in Urban England (London, 1968).

25 Norman Thomas, 'Pluralism and Political Parties', in Failure of a Dream?, pp. 654-60.

26 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955) 97-8.

27 The view put forward by Ira Kipnis in his The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (New York, 1952) that Socialism failed in America because the Socialist Party was taken over by right-wing leaders ready to jettison the really Socialist planks of the Party's platform in an effort to win votes at any price would be consistent with this analysis of the role of third parties in America. James Weinstein, in his The Decline of Socialism in America, 79/2-/925 (New York, 1969 ed.) 109-10, also reports a sentiment expressed by Walter Lippmann in 1913 that the Socialists should include in their programme only measures that could not be stolen by Progressives.

28 C. A. R. Crosland, Can Labour Win?, Fabian Tract 324 (London, i960) 4, 11—13. D. E. Butler and Richard Rose, in The British General Election of 1959 (London, i960) 2, 15-16, provide a version of the embourgeoisement thesis that is somewhat more refined than the simple assertion that prosperous working-class voters tend to support working-class political parties less merely because of ownership of consumer luxuries. Butler and Rose regard affluent workers with middle-class standards of living as being socially marginal between the working and middle classes and hence less likely to support a working-class-based political party. A further classi...