In Praise of Amateur Politics

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


In Praise of Amateur Politics
David Marcus ▪ Fall 2015


Left intellectuals often like to lament that there once was socialism in America—that between 1901 and the end of the First World War, a small ingathering of urban reformers, trade unionists, and German immigrants banded together to create an American counterpart to European social democracy. The apex of this movement was 1912. That year, the Socialist Party controlled seventy-nine mayoralties, published a weekly newspaper that had a national readership of over 750,000, and ran a presidential candidate who won nearly a million votes in a contested four-way race. Such was the pride and envy of European socialists that even the ever-dour August Bebel proclaimed that, at this rate, “Americans will be the first to usher in a Socialist Republic.”

Of course, we all know how the story goes. American Socialists did not usher in a new republic. Many of their ideas—state-centered economic planning, local infrastructure development, suffrage for women—were absorbed into the progressive wings of the Democratic and Republican Parties. But many others—neutrality during the First World War, the nationalization of major American industries, an antagonism toward business unionism—proved so unpopular that they became central reasons for the party’s demise.

The Socialist Party boasted a membership of well over 100,000 in the 1910s. By 1930, it was around 9,000. What once had been a broad-based movement was now a sect. Having expelled its left wing for demanding revolutionary action and its right wing for collaborating with the Democrats, the Socialists became a small cadre of the faithful. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once quipped, “Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”

Many on the left still look back to these salad days of American socialism with pride, lamenting that this was the one moment when socialism might have become as American as apple pie. But the failure of third-party socialism was a pivotal moment for the democratic left. Having released its activists and intellectuals from the ambition of seizing state power, the collapse of the Socialist Party was not—as many contemporary leftists insist—the end of socialism in America; it was, in fact, an important beginning. It enabled the left to turn away from professional politics and direct its energies to that realm where the left has always made its gains—that of amateur politics, of everyday citizens organizing and agitating outside the party system.

.....(snip).....

Today, in fact, we are witnessing an exciting uptick in citizen insurgencies, many of which have the potential to become broad-based movements. From graduate student unionism and Title IX activism to Fight for $15 and Black Lives Matter, a centripetal force is developing. American citizens are not only directing more and more of their energies to sites of political action outside formal institutions of power; they are also helping to shift public opinion by invoking a set of commonly held American ideals and principles. Equal protection under the law, for instance, is one of the demands at the center of Black Lives Matter, as it was in the fight for marriage equality. Likewise, low-wage and contingent worker campaigns also appeal to the long tradition of labor radicalism by arguing that all workers, no matter their status, deserve the right to earn a fair and decent wage. While a truly intersectional movement may still lie in the future, these campaigns are succeeding, in part, because they have found ways to universalize their demands—to show how they represent an ever-growing and intersecting set of interests. ..............(more)

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/in-praise-amateur-politics