Socialism Failure

Introduction

It has been discussed a number of times that what milestones socialism has achieved so far and what are the failures related to it in the history. We often hear a question that “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” and it has been prompted by the failure of deterministic socio-economic explanations, the most popular type of response emphasizes the “exceptional” character of America. A wide variety of different variables has been proposed as the essence of American “exceptionalism”, but neither one of them stands the scrutiny of a comparative empirical assessment. The lack of a comprehensive cross-national perspective also leads to a misleading empirical premise of exceptionalism arguments, since the failure of a mass-based socialist party during labor's formative stage in the political arena before 1919 occurred not only in the United States. A certain number of “exceptionalism” arguments, moreover, treat the lack of socialism as an anomaly, identifying the US as a deviating case that is not amenable to incorporation into a comparative explanation. An opposing anti-exceptionalism perspective suggests a fitting critique of the “exceptionalism” discourse and a compelling meta-framework of analysis, but it has not succeeded in pinpointing the causal factors responsible for the lack of socialism in the context of a substantive theory.

Discussion

This paper attempts to move beyond the impasse at which this debate has arrived. I explain the failure of American socialism in the framework of a general theory for national variation in dominant models of labor politics that is open to the empirical possibility of American “exceptionalism”. Instead of proposing an exclusively “negative” explanation for the lack of socialism, I also account, positively, for the dominance of moderate syndicalism, and I discuss why its craft based variant pursued by the AFL succeeded over a producerist variant proposed by the Knights of Labor. I understand moderate syndicalism as a form of worker mobilization in politics, which is different from social democracy, because it does not establish an independent presence in the political arena. Moderate syndicalism emphasizes economic organization through unions, yet it is constantly involved in politics through selective interventions into the process of policy making and electoral conflict. Prior work typically uses the terms “business unionism” or “pure and simple unionism”, but these labels underestimate the political involvement that was part and parcel of American labor's dominant strategy. Most of the existing literature also conflates the goal of socialism and the process of party formation. I suggest an explanation for the embrace of moderate syndicalism and the lack of social democratic party formation, where the absence of socialism as a formulated goal and a widely embraced ideology is understood as a consequence of party formation failure.

The failure of a mass-based social democratic party to achieve permanent institutionalization during labor's formative stage in the political arena before 1919 is not a unique American outcome - it also occurred in Russia, Japan, and Canada. While insurrectionist models of labor politics were adopted as an alternative to Russia and Japan, Canada is similar ...