For two centuries socialism—a term first used by the French political economist Pierre Leroux—has been both a critique of capitalism and an alternative to it. In the United States, it has proved far more influential as the first than as the second. Before a joint session of Congress in 1825, Robert Owen, a wealthy, altruistic factory owner, condemned “this inferior trading system” (that is, capitalism) for allowing people “to obtain advantages over others” and giving “a very injurious surplus of wealth and power to the few” while inflicting “poverty and subjection on the many.” But nearly every agrarian collectivist colony he inspired across the country scattered to the winds after just a few years.
A socialist movement composed largely of wage earners sprang up toward the end of the nineteenth century. It effectively denounced the robber barons of industry and finance for ruling the economy, busting unions, and buying off politicians. But Marxists who dreamed of a workers’ republic could not compete with the reformers in Congress who enacted such measures as a progressive income tax, antitrust legislation, and a ban on child labor. Skillful organizers who belonged to the Communist Party incited mass movements during the 1930s and World War II. They led the sit-down strike that established the United Auto Workers, built a broad Popular Front to oppose fascism, and campaigned to integrate Major League Baseball. Fortunately, few Americans shared the party’s ultimate aim of creating a “Soviet America” in firm alliance with Joseph Stalin’s USSR.
Socialism may be as popular in our nation today as it has ever been. Pollsters report that close to 40 percent of Americans have a favorable view of it, a figure that rises to a majority among Democrats and young people. The Democratic Socialists of America languished in obscurity for years after the organization was founded in 1982. But it now has well over 100,000 members, including the mayors of New York City, Seattle, and soon Washington, D.C., and probably seven members of the next House of Representatives. Because its candidates run as Democrats, they come under attack by moderates in the party as well as by Republicans hoping to brand the opposition as beholden to disciples of totalitarianism.
Yet socialism remains as disputed an ideal for its adherents as Christianity has always been for its believers. Anyone can join the DSA for fifteen dollars or less a month, and the thousand or so delegates to its annual convention have elected members of hard-left factions to leadership posts. One current cochair, Megan Romer, belongs to a “Marxist-Leninist” caucus whose “primary goal…is to abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism.” In August the organization issued a statement honoring Fidel Castro on the centenary of his birth as “a stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle.”
Popular socialist politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez avoid spouting discredited slogans about grim regimes. They argue for changes that would give a measure of comfort and power to working Americans, among them universal government-funded health care, affordable housing, and the PRO Act, which would facilitate union organizing. Such policies have long existed in countries like Norway and Finland, where wealthy entrepreneurs also thrive. Bernie Sanders, whose two presidential campaigns kicked off the resurgent popularity of socialism, doesn’t call for the working class to seize the means of production. Instead he promotes Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and a big hike in the minimum wage—an updated version of the Economic Bill of Rights that Franklin Roosevelt proposed in 1944, “under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.”
The far left of the DSA tends to pan such reforms as palliatives that would sustain a corrupt and unjust system. Anyone who longs for or is simply curious about a radical substitute for that system can look to two new books for ideas. Shawn Gude’s biography of Eugene V. Debs, American Socialist, traces the life of the sole figure in US history who attracted a legion of admirers by preaching a gospel of social revolution. In The Blueprint three writers on the left argue in absorbing detail that Americans can have both an economy owned and run by workers and one based on efficient markets. They are not dissuaded by the fact that the kind of socialism they advocate has never existed anywhere in the world.
As the four-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), of which he was a cofounder in 1901, Debs became the most appealing messenger that creed has ever known, at least until an elderly senator from Vermont began competing in Democratic primaries. Crisscrossing the nation on a perpetual revival tour, Debs stretched out his long arms as if to touch the crowds. With sweat pouring from his bald pate, he implored them to use their votes to destroy “the foul and decaying system” and erect a “cooperative commonwealth” in its place.
He routinely expressed that dream in patriotic and religious phrases. “I like the Fourth of July,” Debs told fellow radicals at a holiday picnic in 1901. “It breathes a spirit of revolution.” Seven years later he instructed the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, “We know that economic conditions determine man’s conduct toward man and that so long as he must fight him for a job or a fortune, he cannot love his neighbor. Christianity is impossible under capitalism.” Sanders is fond of FDR; Debs praised both Jefferson and Jesus. Both understood that invoking symbols and beliefs cherished by most Americans helps gain legitimacy for radical ideas.
Debs was born in 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Alsatian immigrants and was named after the French literary giants Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo, whose novels often championed the persecuted and the poor. Young Gene was a man on the make, and he dropped out of school at fourteen to take a job on the railroad, which was the largest employer in town. “More than any other industry,” Gude writes, “it was Debs’s—the railroad—that powered the country’s dizzying leap into becoming an industrial capitalist society.”
Debs flourished in public life before he embraced the socialist cause. Within a few years he was elected to a top post in his union, the conservative Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. He also frequented the local headquarters of the Democratic Party. At twenty-nine, his talent for oratory won him a seat in the state assembly. There he split from fellow Democrats and supported a bill “to abolish all distinctions of race and color in the laws of Indiana” and another to give women the vote. Neither passed, and the frustrated neophyte declined to run again.
Debs migrated to socialism through a visionary new union that waged a grand struggle it could not win. In 1893 he helped establish the American Railway Union and became its undisputed leader. The ARU broke with the tradition that each craft in the nation’s most indispensable industry should have a separate organization. It welcomed, according to Gude, “any worker employed by any company connected to the railroad,” from firemen and brakemen to track repairers and clerks. In the spring of 1894 the ARU launched a successful strike against wage cuts by a major rail line in the upper Midwest and appeared to be on its way to blazing a new path for the labor movement as a whole. Just a year after its founding, it represented roughly half of all the union members in America.
That summer the ARU called a nationwide walkout to support the three thousand workers who lived at a Pullman Company town outside Chicago, where they built the sleeping and dining cars that were standard conveniences on interstate railroads. Their boss, George Pullman, had slashed wages by an average of 33 percent without cutting rents and the price of food at his company’s stores. “Children lacked the money to buy school books,” one historian wrote, “but that didn’t matter—they also lacked the shoes and coats needed to go to school.” ARU members refused to work on any train with a Pullman car coupled to it, which included those that carried the mail. Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, persuaded a federal court to enjoin Debs and his fellow union officials for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act by engaging in “a conspiracy in restraint of trade.” President Grover Cleveland dispatched thousands of troops and federal marshals to enforce the ruling and end the strike.
The Pullman strike failed, but it made Debs an idol to radicals everywhere in the nation, and for the rest of his life he devoted himself more to oratory and politics than to any union. While serving a short jail sentence in Woodstock, Illinois, for defying the court, he studied Marxist literature and met with veteran socialists. After the 1896 election, in which he endorsed the insurgent Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who lost, Debs announced his conversion to socialism. “We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough,” he wrote in the ARU’s newspaper. “Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society—we are on the eve of universal change.” What his beloved nation required was a secular great awakening. There is an aphorism, once popular among conservatives: If you’re not a socialist at twenty, you have no heart, but if you’re still a socialist at forty, you have no brain. On the cusp of middle age, Debs defied that opinion, at least by his lights.
Gude views the socialist movement of the early twentieth century as engaged in a heroic battle it lost to the dominant force of big corporations and the state. With lively anecdotes culled from the local and radical press, he captures both Debs’s appeal and the kind of Americans who flocked to his standard. Many socialists then lived in parts of the Great Plains and the Mountain West that have since become bastions of the GOP. E.Z. Ernst, for example, a farmer and artisan in his fifties from Kansas, had been a rural communard and spent his spare time selling subscriptions to radical newspapers and distributing literature at rallies. He had, writes Gude, “short hair and a long tangle of muttonchops and a beard, as if while clearing farmland the underbrush had leapt onto his face and taken up residence.”
Although most socialist rank and filers were plebeian whites like Ernst, Debs worked hard to convince Black Americans that the SPA was “the party of the working class, regardless of color.” With Jim Crow tightening its grip on the land, this was a brave if somewhat futile stand. Hardly any of his fellow white SPA leaders echoed him, fearing that a truly integrated party would alienate the white workers they needed to win over. But Debs refused to abandon his principles: he criticized white union members who assaulted Black workers, denounced D.W. Griffith’s racist film The Birth of a Nation, and became friends with A. Philip Randolph, the future civil rights and labor leader, who campaigned for socialist candidates in New York City. By World War I, Black newspapers, prosocialist or not, were running excerpts from Debs’s writings.
The war, which the US entered in the spring of 1917, doomed both the party and the liberty of its celebrated spokesman. Unlike most leftist parties in other belligerent nations, American socialists refused to endorse the war and voted to mobilize “continuous, active, and public opposition” to what one SPA official called “the all devouring Moloch of militarism and war.” The federal government under Woodrow Wilson responded with the greatest repression of civil liberties in US history, shutting down much of the radical press and prosecuting activists who spoke out against the war and conscription. After Debs told draft-age men at another Socialist Party picnic, “You need at this time to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder,” he was tried and convicted for violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to ten years in prison; President Warren Harding freed him after three.
Gude writes movingly of Debs’s time in the Atlanta penitentiary where he spent most of his confinement and from which he ran a final race for president in 1920 as Convict #9653. He treated his fellow inmates with the egalitarian care he hoped would become the ethic of a virtuous society. He gave away most of the packages of food and flowers admirers sent him and urged the warden to stop locking inmates in solitary cells. One prisoner recalled that witnessing the abuse of any prisoner by guards would leave Debs “talking to himself and shaking his head.” Such behavior surprised no one who had read how he began his address to the Cleveland court that handed down his sentence in 1918:
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
But Gude fails to give a convincing explanation of why such a deeply humane and energetic figure could not make his party into either a significant political force or an enduring one. The apex of SPA strength occurred in the 1912 presidential election, when Debs received 6 percent of the popular vote without coming close to winning a single state. Only two congressmen were ever elected on the party’s ticket, and the leaders of the American Federation of Labor turned back every attempt to yoke their movement to the SPA. In 1919 an angry conflict between SPA members who thought the time was ripe for Bolshevik-style revolution and those who put their faith in gradual change tore the party apart. It never regained even the beachheads of strength it had captured before Debs was imprisoned.
Gude blames the failure almost entirely on the might of the party’s adversaries. He contends that “the most powerful, most virulent anti-union business class in the capitalist world” crushed the hopes of radical working people with a mountain of cash and the guns of police, National Guardsmen, and soldiers. He does not mention the far greater repression visited on leftist parties across the Atlantic at around the same time or a few years later. In Germany, France, Italy, Russia, and Spain, authoritarian states forced activists to flee into exile or go underground. Yet Socialists and Communists recovered in all those nations to become either the governing party or a large and potent opposition.
Scholars have debated for more than a century why no Marxian party has ever risen to such heights in the US. Did the heritage of slavery continue to divide white workers from Black ones? Did ethnic and religious identities in a nation of immigrants eclipse those of class? Did the unbroken tradition of two procapitalist major parties squeeze out partisan rivals on the left? Gude prefers not to engage with this old but still relevant argument. That DSA members like Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez hold office as Democrats suggests that having a separate socialist party may not have been such a good idea after all.
Gude does acknowledge that Debs was better at preaching the gospel of class liberation than at describing who would run a socialist America and how. The SPA’s orator-in-chief, he writes, “never laid out precisely what a democratic socialist economy would look like,” other than to assure audiences that workers and their intellectual allies would figure it out when they took over.
In The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, Mike Beggs, Ben Burgis, and Bhaskar Sunkara aim to fill that gap. They stake out a position that rejects the old Soviet model of state planning and authoritarian workplaces, which met neither the goals of its commissars nor the needs of its citizens: “The lesson of the twentieth century…is that central planning cannot function as the organizing principle of an entire economy.” What they propose instead is a consumer-friendly collectivism. “In our system,” they write, “the commodity-producing sector overlaps with workplace democracy, socialized financial institutions, a large noncommodified sector, and an active democratic state.”
One could excuse such abstract terminology if the authors delivered the working socialism that the subtitle of their book promises. They understand that only a socialism that retains markets could appeal to ordinary Americans who are used to having an array of high-quality products to choose from and enough money to afford them. According to their model, workers would run every business, and every business would vie for customers and have to pay “benchmark wages” set by a central labor board to assure, for example, that the “incomes of day care workers, teachers, and hairdressers” did not fall behind those in the industrial sector. A central bank would provide financing for promising start-ups. If a company went bankrupt, its “worker-members” would have to find a job in another cooperative firm or in the large public sector, where Americans would go for health care and transportation and other needs common to all. But no one would fall into poverty, even temporarily.
In theory, this system would retain what capitalism does well but eliminate the insecurity and authoritarianism built into an economy run by bosses who answer to major stockholders or no one at all. Under this version of democratic socialism, Amazon could still deliver thousands of products around the nation. But its workers would decide how to run it, pay one another a decent wage, use delivery vehicles powered by sustainable energy sources, and sell and distribute products made exclusively by firms that adhered to the same rules and standards. The authors of The Blueprint acknowledge that it is far more challenging to design a new society than a skyscraper or airplane. “The capitalism that exists now is an enormously complicated machine with countless moving parts,” they write. “The hypothetical socialism we’ve sketched out will be one too if it ever comes to pass.”
They say nothing, however, about what it would take to convince Americans to make and preserve so radical a change. Although one of them—Sunkara—founded and directs Jacobin, the unofficial flagship journal of the DSA left, they neglect the same question Debs and his comrades failed to answer more than a century ago: How can working Americans be persuaded to express solidarity with their fellow toilers in the US and around the world?
A society in which most people take the essentials of capitalism for granted and behave accordingly, even if reluctantly, tends to make grand alternative visions seem implausible. The authors realize that only “a culture of solidarity” would enable their vision to take root and become common sense. They are “optimistic that a more equal and less materially precarious society will incubate more generous attitudes…than those that often prevail in capitalist democracies.” But they do not solve the puzzle of how to get to that promised land any better than socialists did in the past.
The Blueprint also elides the thorny matter of how dissidents would fare in an economy that aims to guarantee plenty and power for all. The book contains just a single paragraph that refers obliquely to the news media of the cherished future as “state-funded but not state-controlled” and warns that “care must be taken not to let performative nonpartisanship substitute for genuine orientation to the truth.” The authors do assure that “denying financing to a newspaper because of the political content of the editorial page” would be unconstitutional. But would workers in those socialist factories, schools, and offices be free to organize parties and vote for candidates who favor a return to the bad old days of private property and class domination?
The authors reject the Soviet economic model and are no admirers of one-party states. But it is worth remembering that some socialists, once in power, did not resist the temptation to permit only speech and action that approved of their new regime. In 1961, two years after he and his comrades marched into Havana, Fidel Castro announced his cultural doctrine to a meeting of artists and writers: “Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing.” Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara acknowledge that the market socialism they espouse borrows from a liberal tradition of setting limits on those who hold economic power. If they hope to gain a hearing from ordinary Americans, they should endorse the freedom to dispute its benefits and to seek to replace the institutions of their future order as well.
A more feasible alternative to our unequal republic already has popular leaders with millions of followers, even if they don’t agree on a name. Sanders speaks for it when he campaigns for Medicare for All. Mamdani nurtures it by making childcare free for toddlers and attempting to impose a tax on second homes owned by the wealthy in the city. Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, gestures toward it when he declares that the union’s “mission is to ensure a secure retirement, a living wage, adequate healthcare, and work-life balance for every one of our members, and every member of the working class.” Elsewhere in the world this alternative is known as social democracy.
The term has never caught on in the United States, but the Scandinavian nations long governed by social democrats alone or in coalition are among the most equal, healthiest, and, according to polls, happiest places on earth. Current tensions over immigration and slow economic growth have not dented the popularity of the welfare state there. To carry out the kind of transformation The Blueprint advocates would likely require a revolution, preferably one with violence held to a minimum. But American progressives could create a robust social democracy by electing politicians committed to it at every level of government and by appointing federal judges who would rule that its reforms pass constitutional muster.
Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara admit that “the most advanced social democracies are the most just and livable societies humans have so far built.” So why take the risk of alarming voters who fear that socialism would mean a state takeover of firms large and small and curbs on free speech? Instead its proponents could update and greatly expand the kind of popular programs that benefited Americans during the New Deal and Great Society and that are synonymous with “socialism” for many who embrace the term today. The socialist intellectual Michael Harrington, a founder of the DSA, yearned to transcend capitalism but famously stuck to pursuing what he called “the left wing of the possible.” Do not make the dream of a perfect society the antagonist of a decent and achievable one.