This is the best year ever for American socialism. In 1912, the Socialist Party of America had a hundred and twenty thousand members, and newsstands groaned under the weight of some three hundred socialist newspapers and magazines, including one based in Kansas. appeal to reasonThe site has three-quarters of a million subscribers and firmly believes that “socialism is not just a theory, but a destiny”. Socialists are winning elections, and voters are angry at the trusts, corporations, millionaires, and oligarchs whose monopoly of political power relies on a two-party system that ignores labor’s demands and a deeply conservative Supreme Court. (In 1895, the Court declared the federal income tax unconstitutional; in 1905, it declared laws limiting workday hours unconstitutional.) Year after year, the socialists grew in power. In 1910, Milwaukee journalist Victor Berger became the first Socialist elected to Congress, and he co-founded the Socialist Party in 1901 with Indiana Railroad Union leader Eugene V. Debs: He vowed to abolish the Senate. In 1911, Schenectady, New York, was elected as a socialist mayor. “We know we cannot dismantle the capitalist system in Schenectady,” he said at the inauguration. But “we can and will demonstrate to all men the spirit of socialism and the application of socialist principles, despite the obstacles to the laws that establish and sustain capitalism.” (He promised to lower streetcar fares.) In 1912, Debs ran for president as the Socialist Party candidate, calling for an end to “wage slavery.” In a great striving land of wheat and cornfields, steel and automobile factories, coal mines, copper mines, and iron mines, more than a thousand socialists held public office, including fifty-six mayors (in cities as diverse as Berkeley, California, and Flint, Michigan), one hundred and sixty aldermans, and one hundred and forty-five aldermen. A machinist became mayor of St. Mary’s, Ohio; railroad brakeman in New Castle, Pennsylvania. “But, comrades, we congratulate ourselves not only on our physical growth, nor on our great strength,” declared the president of that year’s Socialist Party convention in Indianapolis. “The fact is that the Socialist Party has at all times remained true to its trust and has held high the banner of international socialism in this country.” The moment for socialism seems to have arrived.
At that congress, the party adopted a platform that first denounced capitalism as a system that generates evils such as “exorbitant costs of living”: “a system in which the working class faces toxic conditions, faces horrific and unnecessary dangers to life and limb, is besieged by court decisions, injunctions and unjust laws, and is constantly subjected to the predatory nature of interests controlled by wealthy oligarchs.” The country led a call for action against the railways, all their legacy, corporate enterprises and entities. It called for a shortened working day, a working week of no more than five and a half days, a minimum wage, pensions, workers’ insurance, unemployment insurance, and the abolition of child labor. It also called for a graduated federal income tax, women’s suffrage, the abolition of the Senate, the presidential veto, the Electoral College—and, since each item on the final list would require amending the Constitution, a constitutional convention.
“The socialist moment has arrived,” said Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Socialist Magazine current eventsannounced last summer, pointed to the Democratic Socialists of America’s growing membership and the socialists’ newfound prominence: Zohran Mamdani on the cover of the Democratic Socialists of America time. Has 1912 passed again?
This year, the socialist flag is being carried by the DSA, whose 130,000 members already include two U.S. representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib; there are hundreds of DSA-backed state and local officials across the country. (Bernie Sanders is a long-time socialist, but he is not a member of DSA.) DSA is not a political party, but it does have a platform. Sort of like. In 2017, the National Political Committee decided to replace “priority resolutions” with platforms. The meeting originally scheduled for 2019 was postponed to 2021 due to the “ideological diversity” of the DSA. A new platform was launched this summer, which DSA prefers to call a “program.” It had much in common with the 1912 Socialist Party program.