While trying to shy away from any kind of social chauvinism, I must admit that I prefer to read American penned socialist literature more than anything. I am, first and foremost, an American, and I prefer to speak and read American. Nowhere is this more important to me than in socialist literature. The direct, plain language of America will do more to win people to socialism than European theory, which, while relevant today, can come off as a bit dry at times. And, as always, something gets lost in translation. While I still laud Marx and Engels as co-kings of the movement, and Lenin and Trotsky (perhaps the most brilliant political theorist of the 20th century) brilliant theorists and politicians of the same order, the following five are the guys I go to when I want to read for education and pleasure.
5- Jack London
Jack London is an interesting character who summarizes the contradictions of the Socialist Party of America. He was a working class militant, a brilliant, plain spoken polemicist… and an anti-Chinese racist. The latter of which is why he ends up at the bottom of this list. But The Iron Heel, written a full two decades before the rise of fascism in Europe is both a brilliant exposition of the trajectory of capitalism, as well as one of the best proletarian polemics in favor of socialism ever. Watch as Jack’s fictional double decimates every argument against socialism you can think of. His prose is not that of a starry-eyed kid newly won to ideology. It is the hard-nosed realistic language of a highly intelligent proletarian. It is timely reading for an American Empire in decline.
Farrell Dobbs was childhood hero. Growing up as a young red, I idolized Farrell Dobbs for being someone I could connect with. Farrell started out as an anti-communist, but quickly became won to Marxism when he realized that the most militant fighters against the bosses were reds. He was a key leader in the Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike of 1934, the author of Teamster Rebellion and its various sequels, and ran for President on the Socialist Workers’ Party ticket four times. Sadly, he also presided over the degeneration of the Socialist Workers’ Party into its present sorry state as a cheerleader for Castro’s Cuba, and handed off the party to a bunch of cops. But I’ll concentrate on his years as a bona fide revolutionary socialist and militant trade unionist.
3- John Reed
John Reed is perhaps best remembered as the guy Warren Beatty played in the film Reds. I remember him as the guy who wrote Ten Days That Shook The World, an excellent, accessible history of the October Revolution written by someone who was there. John gets dismissed as a “playboy revolutionary” or a dilettante. This is nothing but base slander from people who know nothing about his life. The man was witness to two historic revolutions (the other being Mexican Revolution of 1910), and was never known as going with the flow or ducking controversy or c0nflict. He died in the Soviet Union, a victim of the imperialist blockade against the world’s first workers’ state.
Eugene Debs is the socialist everyone learns about in history class. However, he is almost almost presented incorrectly and unfairly as a reformist and a pacifist. Mr. Debs was nothing of the sort. Though he has the bookish looks of a professional researcher, he was the furthest thing from. A hard as nails trade union militant, Debs came out of the railroad fireman’s union, one of the most dangerous professions of his time. He was thrown in jail for urging Americans to resist the draft, and his penchant for praising Soviet Russia (where TV watches etc. etc. etc.) probably didn’t help much either. He got his highest percentage of the vote when he ran on an anti-war ticket from a prison cell.
James Cannon was another man that I admired greatly in my youth. My admiration for him as the leading light of American socialism, communism, and Trotskyism has not waned. Indeed, I see his place in the history of the American workers’ movement as far more important than I did as a teenager. Simply put, without James Cannon there is no international Trotskyist movement. It was Cannon who got Trotsky’s anti-Stalinist documents out of the Comintern meeting, and formed the first non-Russian Left Opposition group. While he remained a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party until his death, and long after it remained a fighting, revolutionary socialist organization, he also had, as his last hurrah, a letter against the increasing ossification and de-democratization of the party. The two most accessible works of American Trotskyism and revolutionary socialism are, I believe “America Under Workers’ Rule” and “What Socialist America Will Look Like.”
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Good roundup… ever looked up any of the Prairie Populists? While not necessarily true socialists, they certainly bent in that direction… while William Jennings Bryan is the most famous (and unfortunately tarnished by his “monkey trial” infamy), there are other compelling figures in the movement, such as South Dakota’s first Senator, Richard F. Pettigrew, who also wrote “Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story of American Plutocracy From 1870 to 1920″. A few small excerpts:
“Capital is stolen labor and its only function is to steal more labor”
“The early years of the century marked the progress of the race toward individual freedom and permanent victory over the tyranny of hereditary aristocracy, but the closing decades of the century have witnessed the surrender of all that was gained to the more heartless tyranny of accumulated wealth”
“Under the ethics of his profession the lawyer is the only man who can take a bribe and call it a fee”
“The sum and substance of the conquest of the Philippines is to find a field where cheap labor can be secured, labor that does not strike, that does not belong to a union, that does not need an army to keep it in leading strings, that will make goods for the trusts of this country”
“It had come into being as a protest against slavery and as the special champion of the Declaration of Independence, it would go out of being and out of power as the champion of slavery and the repudiator of the Declaration of Independence.” ––On the Republican Party.
“The Russian Revolution is the greatest event of our times. It marks the beginning of the epoch when the working people will assume the task of directing and controlling industry. It blazes a path into this unknown country, where the workers of the world are destined to take from their exploiters the right to control and direct the economic affairs of the community.”
Dude. And the best South Dakota can do today is limp-wristed Tom Daschle? Gimme a break.
There’s also Ignatius Donnelly, Senator from Minnesota, who is better known today for his studies of Atlantis, but in his time was a major impulse in the groups leading up to the foundation of the Minnesota Farmers and Workers party, which today is still a force in Minnesota politics by way of the DFL, probably the most radical Democratic party in the US.
The populists were an interesting bunch. They owed more to Thorstein Veblen, one of the founders of technocracy, than they did to Marx, however; while Veblen doesn’t get much play these days, it seems likely that he’ll see a revival. Many upper midwestern economics departments are still dominated by Veblenian Institutionalists.
| October 6, 2009 @ 5:41 am
Interesting picks all former Woblies or Industrial Workers of the World except for Farrell Dobs. Isn’t it funny what we learn and and don’t learn in school.
I loved Jack London’s books the Iron Heel about a German attack on Pearl Harbor and the use of war a pretext to get ride of the facade of democracy. Or the People of the Abyss a forerunner to Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris. But if just went by what you heard in school he wrote dog and sailing stories. No mention of his union membership in the IWW or his run for Mayor of Oakland on the Socialist Party ticket.
Farrell Dobbs is an amazing character and midwestern militant. His work with the Teamsters and the SWP is awe inspiring. His books on the Minneapolis strike are required reading. Instead we are taught about crooks like Jimmy Hoffa.
John Reed is an interesting character too. An IWW and founder of the Communist Labor Party which merged with CPA to form CPUSA. He wrote three great books on the insurgent uprising in Mexico, the horrors of the eastern front, and 10 Days that Shook the World about the revolution in Petrograd. I saw his plaque on the Kremlin wall when I visited Moscow.
Eugene Debs is a lion. Founder of the IWW. He became militant because of the government and railroads attempt to crush the unions and earned nearly a million votes for president while in prison (the most votes for a Socialist candidate ever). Even more impressive because most of his supporters couldn’t vote. Women couldn’t vote, blacks were prevented by Jim Crow, sailors and farm workers couldn’t because of residency laws, and immigrants were restricted. He said America would have to change to answer the dissenfranchised “either by the ballot box or by the bullet box.”
What can I say about Cannon other than is Notebooks of an Agitator is required reading.
| October 6, 2009 @ 4:49 pm
this is a pretty hip little article. What’s your stance on the DSA nick?
| October 8, 2009 @ 6:06 pm
Gross.
| October 8, 2009 @ 6:16 pm
I’m so sick of snark in place of real human interaction.
| October 8, 2009 @ 10:05 pm
You asked what I thought of DSA. I gave you the same answer I’d give you in person. DSA are sub-ISO garbage. They operate explicitly as a faction of the Democratic Party.
Thank you for playing. Better luck next time.
| October 8, 2009 @ 10:40 pm
But, to be more specific:
The endorsed Walter Mondale, Jesse Jackson, and John Kerry. Found Michael Harrington said awesome things like “the left wing of realism is found today in the Democratic Party.” No class analysis, all 58 members of the Progressive Caucus are members, etc etc etc. Not my brand of socialism.
Gross.
| October 8, 2009 @ 10:56 pm
was that so hard? Man, I thought you LIKED complaining about things.
| October 22, 2009 @ 10:47 pm