Socialist/Socialism

Socialist/Socialism

In the middle of the twentieth century and in the midst of a historical period of anticommunist hysteria in the United States, Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons, the editors of Socialism and American Life, opined that “no American can hope to consider himself (or herself) educated who does not seek to understand the premises and history, the possible contributions and limitations, of the chief varieties of socialism in comparison to and contrast with the American democratic tradition.” Thirty years later, in an essay entitled “Socialism and Americanism,” Warren Susman, freed from the constraints of the cold war, expanded the focus beyond political meanings to incorporate how the very constructions of Americanism as a way of life and system of values were measured against socialism. (Berman 2007)

In light of these earlier and other efforts to track the impact of socialism in America, it follows that socialism should be viewed both as a political project and a cultural sensibility. That is, socialism is not just about social and political movements, party organizations, and protest networks. Beyond this instrumental realm, socialism has an expressive side that reflects a cultural sensibility of aesthetic and even eschatological concerns. While the political project and cultural sensibility occupy different and, at times, distinct fields, they do overlap. Moreover, they are both informed by ideological discourses riddled with convergences with and contradictions of the hegemonic order. Hence, in tracing the role of socialism in America, it is important to keep in mind its instrumental and expressive dimensions, as well as the extent to which socialism offered alternative and oppositional projects and sensibilities. (Birnbaum 2009)

Of course, tracing the role of socialism in America means defining those political projects and cultural sensibilities within a historical context. Emerging in the nineteenth century at the dawn of an age of industrialism and modernism, socialism had to contend with residual Enlightenment values and the emergent laissez-faire liberalism of industrial capitalism. In reaction to the depredations of capitalism and the alienation of social life, socialism held out the promise of a radical, even redemptive egalitarianism. Although seeking ways to equalize property relations, to expand democracy, and to exult the spirit against the dominant economic, political, and cultural practices of the early nineteenth century, socialism shared the modernist sensibility of scientific and material progress and the liberal ethos of reform. Moreover, as noted by Susman and other cultural historians, socialism had a difficult time keeping its political projects and cultural sensibilities from being contaminated and coopted by emergent reformist impulses from within a reconstituting hegemonic order. (Aronowitz 2010)

Although socialism in the 1890s grew as a consequence of the economic, social, and political crises of the decade, the formation of a coherent socialist movement floundered because of the contradictory instrumental goals and expressive sensibilities of those who began to identify themselves as socialists. The legacies of racial oppression and immigrant exclusionism were evident even among socialists, especially among California socialists exercised by the “ yellow peril,” such as the labor leader Burnette Haskell and ...