The Century and a Half War against Socialism in the United States

[Time for change]

The war against socialism in the United States neither began nor ended with the Cold War. It began with the onset of the industrial age in the United States, shortly after our Civil War, and it continues today, with little evidence of abating.

It was in evidence during the Republican Presidential debates last Thursday when John McCain responded to a question about national health care, his voice dripping with contempt, as he explained that the provision of health care by our federal government would constitute “socialism”. No additional explanation was given or needed. It is the unshakable ideological dogma of today’s Republican Party and their adherents, written in stone, that “socialism” is a terrible or even evil principle that would ruin our country if it ever took root here. I’m not talking about a system of pure socialism. The provision of health care by our federal government to our 43 million currently uninsured fellow citizens would constitute merely the addition of a touch of socialism to a predominantly capitalistic system. But the Republican Party and a small portion of the most wealthy and powerful U.S. citizens who are the beneficiaries of their policies must fight the slightest tint of socialism at every turn, lest it become an acceptable topic for conversation.

How did we ever reach this state of affairs? The ultra capitalism advocated by today’s Republican Party benefits only a small minority of our citizens. Consider the Bush tax cuts, for example, which composed a major part of the platform on which George W. Bush ran for president and garnered enough votes in the 2000 election that our Supreme Court was able to select him as our 43rd president. Those tax cuts benefited perhaps 1 to 2% of our citizens, and yet Bush received close to 50% of the presidential vote. Likewise, Bush’s foreign policy benefits only a small proportion of our citizens, such as those who own Halliburton, Blackwater, or Bechtel. Yet, Bush continues to receive around 30% approval ratings from the American people, which is for now apparently good enough to prevent him from being impeached by our House of Representatives for his numerous crimes against our Constitution and the American people. Yet when anyone points out how our current economic policies benefit primarily the wealthy in our country they are accused of advocating socialism or “class warfare”. And that tactic works well enough to nearly silence the good majority of the Democratic Party on this issue. Given that the good majority of the American people favor a national health care program, most Democrats advocate some kind of national health care, but they are always very careful to choose their words and policies so as to avoid accusations of socialism or class warfare. Why is it that the good majority of today’s American politicians feel that they must walk on eggshells when advocating policies that will benefit the good majority of the American people?

A large part of the answer to that question is the long war against socialism in our country, which is waged today largely with the help of a national news media that is owned by a small number of wealthy and powerful corporations. That “war”, which has supplied a century and a half of nearly continuous propaganda, has conditioned a good portion of the American people to think of any hint of “socialism” solely in highly negative terms. Reversing the consequences of that propaganda will not be an easy task.


Reasons for the war on socialism in the United States

A simplified distinction between capitalism and socialism (discussed in some more detail here) is that with capitalism economic transactions are handled by individuals, whereas with socialism economic transactions are handled by the community (or by a government which represents the community). In reality, however, the idea of pure capitalism is a myth. Capitalism cannot exist without government intervention because government is required at the very least to make and enforce the laws and policies that govern the capitalistic system. Corporations require government licensure and enforcement of financial rules in order to operate, without which a state of anarchy would exist. Those financial rules are not God-given and they are not “natural”. Rather, they are created and enforced by government.

Therefore, the question is not whether government should intervene in the economy of its society, but in what manner should it intervene and who should receive the benefits of that intervention. More to the point, the financial rules of a society may be set mostly for the benefit of the rich and powerful, or they may be set up to more broadly benefit everyone. Policies which tend to benefit the less wealthy and powerful include such things as: protections against environmental degradation; protection for consumers against the risks of dangerous products; protection against dangerous working conditions; anti-trust laws to ensure competition; anti-discrimination laws; progressive tax laws; minimum wage laws; provision of government health care, education, and child care assistance; promotion or assurance of full employment for those able and willing to work; and labor laws that strengthen the bargaining capabilities of workers. I believe that these policies can operate without inordinately reducing the profit incentive to the point where the public suffers from a non-productive economy. And I believe that these policies should be used because: 1) they provide needed protections to the most vulnerable of our population; 2) I believe they benefit about 98% of the remainder of our population; and 3) I believe that they are fair.

The wealthy conservative elite of our society tag the “socialism” label on all those laws and policies, listed above, that benefit approximately the less wealthy and powerful 98% of our population, and especially those that benefit the poor. They accuse anyone who advocates those policies of being “socialists” and of engaging in “class warfare”. They do that, very simply, because those laws and policies reduce their own wealth and power. That is what the century and a half war against socialism in the United States is all about. Those conservative elites are right about one thing. The policies that they rail against are indeed socialistic. When added to a primarily capitalistic system, such as operates in our country, they produce a mixed capitalism/socialism system which can maintain the production incentives of capitalism while at the same time guarding against the harmful excesses of capitalism which tend to drive people into poverty and reduce the quality of life of millions of our citizens.


The war against socialism

A thorough description of the war against socialism in the United States is way beyond the scope of this post. The following merely provides some of the highlights.

Early labor movement in the United States

James Green in his book, “Death in the Haymarket – A story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America”, describes in detail some of the early struggles of the labor movement in the United States. Here are some of the major issues he discussed:

With the onset of the industrial age working people in the United States had it very rough. They often worked very hard, under very bad physical conditions, for very little money, and for so many hours that they had very little time for leisure or to spend with their families. Labor unions began to form as a response to these conditions, and industry vigorously resisted their demands, greatly assisted by the leading newspapers of the time, as well as the powers of government.

On May 5, 1986, during a major labor protest, a bomb exploded in Haymarket Square, Chicago, following which police fired into a crowd, resulting in the deaths of 7 policemen and 3 civilians. That “terrorist attack” set off hysteria throughout the country. In the following days many of the leaders of the labor movement in Chicago were rounded up and held for interrogation. Eight of them were indicted on conspiracy to commit murder. These eight men were mostly anarchists, Communists, or socialists.

The trial of the eight men became one of the most controversial trials in American history because of its many irregularities. In the first place, people were admitted to the jury only if they expressed prejudice against the defendants. The person who threw the bomb was neither identified nor charged, and indeed many people suspected that it was thrown by someone whose motivation was to cast a cloud over and destroy the labor movement. Furthermore, it was made clear to the jury that the defendants were being tried on the basis of their political beliefs rather than on the basis of their relationship to the specific events of May 5th. 7 of the 8 men were found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hung. A new mayor several years later pardoned those who remained alive, based on the paucity of evidence against the defendants, the numerous irregularities of the trial and the finding that most of the witnesses for the prosecution had been bribed, threatened, or tortured into testifying against the defendants.

Nevertheless, the hysteria and fear occasioned by the “terrorism” unleashed at Haymarket Square led to aggressive suppression of the labor movement in the following years, very possibly setting back the labor movement in the United States by decades. By the first decades of the 20th Century, the United States was in the midst of such a Red scare that Eugene Debs, perennial Socialist candidate for President of the United States, was repeatedly imprisoned for speaking out about his beliefs.

An overall idea of the violence involved in conflicts between labor and employers in the United States is provided by the historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1970. Hofstadter concluded that the United States had experienced at least 160 instances in which state or federal troops had intervened in strikes, and at least 700 labor disputes in which deaths were recorded, with clearly most of the violence being perpetrated by state or federal authorities.


The counteroffensive by FDR

Probably no figure in American history is despised as much by conservatives as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was accused in his day of being a Communist by many a conservative. Cass Sunstein, in his book, “The Second Bill of Rights – FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More than Ever”, describes the philosophy that motivated Roosevelt to fight for his radical (at the time) programs to benefit the American people:

To Roosevelt, human distress could no longer be taken as an inevitable by-product of life, society, or “nature”; it was an artifact of social policies and choices. Much human misery is preventable. The only question is whether a government is determined to prevent it…. Foremost was the idea that poverty is preventable, that poverty is destructive, wasteful, demoralizing, and that poverty is morally unacceptable in a Christian and democratic society.

Consequently, FDR introduced the concept of economic and social rights, which had not gained much traction in the United States until his Presidency. FDRs Presidency and fervent advocating of these rights coincided with circumstances (The Great Depression) that made their need glaringly apparent to a large proportion of American citizens.

Roosevelt’s method for establishing a Second Bill of Rights was through more than twelve years of advocating for these rights and putting them into practice through executive orders and pushing Congress to enact legislation.

Some of the most concrete results of FDR’s efforts were the Social Security Act of 1935, the creation of several agencies that produced greatly needed jobs, labor protection laws that created the right for workers to organize into unions and a federal minimum wage, antitrust policies, the GI bill of rights, and to help pay for some of those programs, record tax rates on wealthy corporations and individuals. But perhaps more important than these concrete accomplishments, by the end of FDR’s Presidency large segments of the American population accepted many aspects of his Second Bill of Rights as legitimate rights – for example, the right to a good education.


Military and CIA interventions against Communism, socialism, or just plain leftist regimes

The United States has a long history of CIA or military intervention against countries that posed no threat to us whatsoever, based solely on the fact that they were either Communist or socialist or simply a leftist regime and therefore (so the reasoning went) susceptible to Communist takeover.

This practice began long before the onset of the Cold War. We first intervened against the Communists in Russia as early as 1918, by sending troops to Russia to unsuccessfully fight in the Russian Civil War to oust the Communists from power. Some other examples include the following:

Iran 1953
In 1953 our CIA intervened in Iran to overthrow a popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had done much to improve the lot of the Iranian people. Here is how Stephen Kinzer describes Mossadegh in his book, “All the Shah’s Men – An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”:

His achievements were profound and even earth-shattering. He set his people off on what would be a long and difficult voyage toward democracy and self-sufficiency… He dealt a devastating blow to the imperial system and hastened its final collapse. He inspired people around the world who believe that nations can and must struggle for the right to govern themselves in freedom.

In Mossadegh’s place we installed the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah. The stated reason for our overthrow of Mossadegh was that we were concerned that he would open his country to Communist influence (his nationalization of the Iranian oil industry was also undoubtedly part of the reason). This is how Kinzer sums up the effect of that intervention:

In Iran, almost everyone has for decades known that the United States was responsible for putting an end to democratic rule in 1953 and installing what became the long dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah. His dictatorship produced the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought to power a passionately anti-American theocracy that embraced terrorism as a tool of statecraft. Its radicalism inspired anti-Western fanatics in many countries…

The violent anti-Americanism that emerged from Iran after 1979 shocked most people in the United States. Americans had no idea of what might have set off such bitter hatred in a country where they had always imagined themselves more or less well liked. That was because almost no one in the United States knew what the CIA did there in 1953.

Indonesia 1965
A power struggle in Indonesia in 1965 that resulted in the overthrow of Achmad Sukarno and the installment of a military dictatorship resulted in the massacre of up to a million people, mostly civilians, including a substantial portion of women and children – which the New York Times called “one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history.” With respect to this episode it was later reported by Kathy Kadane that:

The U.S. government played a significant role in one of the worst massacres of the century by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and killed them, former U.S. diplomats say…. Nobody cared about the butchery and mass arrests because the victims were Communists, one Washington official told me.

Vietnam 1954-73
The Geneva Conference Agreements, which officially ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954, provided for general elections which were to bring about the unification of Vietnam. However, the United States, fearing a Communist victory in those elections, intervened to prevent the elections from taking place – and so began our long involvement culminating in an eventual Communist victory, but not until two million Vietnamese and 58 thousand Americans were dead.

South and Central America
As described by William Blum in his article, “A Concise History of US Global Interventions, 1945 to the Present”, the United States intervened in eleven different South and Central American countries during the Cold War including Guatemala, Costa Rica, British Guyana, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. The main purpose of these interventions was to facilitate changes to regimes that were friendlier to the United States (and in almost all cases less friendly to the indigenous populations of those countries.) For this purpose, we developed the School of the Americas, which was used to train native personnel in the techniques and ideology of insurgency and counter-insurgency.

This article on reasons to shut down the School of the Americas (SOA) provides a good description of what was involved, and can be summarized as follows:

It describes numerous atrocities committed by graduates of SOA, which are consistent with the SOA curriculum. While SOA torture manuals have been withdrawn, their content has not been repudiated by SOA, and some of the worst abusers continue to be honored as guest instructors for SOA courses.

School of the Americas training is oriented to support the military and political status quo in each country, which places the U.S. in opposition to any who seek free speech to discuss problems, alternative means to solve problems, or democratic means to change governments. More specifically, the enemy is identified as the poor, those who assist the poor, such as church workers, educators, and unions, and certain ideologies such as “socialism” or “liberation theology”. All of this just to make sure that Communists or “leftists” don’t get a foothold in any of these countries.


Current status of the war on socialism

We are at the point now where corporate power, closely allied to the political elite, especially of the Republican Party, threatens to get out of control. Our national news media is largely controlled by them, thereby posing a grave danger to our First Amendment rights to free speech; we have a tremendous wealth gap in our country; millions of people either cannot find work or else they can only find work that grinds them down while paying them little; forty three million Americans have no health insurance; a decent college education is unattainable to many millions of our youth; poverty is rampant and on the rise; too many of our elected representatives sell out to the highest bidder; and our election system is susceptible to rampant fraud.

This didn’t happen by accident. For a century and a half the wealthy and the political elite (which today is the Republican Party) have carried on a propaganda war against the slightest hint of socialism. Though the good majority of Americans today favor a national health plan, our Republican elected representatives are nearly unanimously and aggressively against it. They call it socialism, and they feel no need to say any more about it. Minimum wage hike? Socialism. Government work projects to reduce unemployment? Socialism. Everything is an all or none proposition for these ideologues. Suggest anything that involves the slightest hint of socialism and they become apoplectic – as did the American slave owners of the 18th and 19th Centuries whenever they heard anyone say an unkind word about their “peculiar institution”.

That’s what McCarthyism was all about. Let’s make the American people believe that the slightest hint of Communism is pure evil, and must be completely rooted out so that we can have a free society.

The toll of our anti-Communist wars, in dead, wounded, economic well being, human rights abuses, and thwarting of democracy movements is difficult to imagine. What motivated all of this? The official answer, of course, is that Communism was a deadly enemy, so we had to do all that we could to fight it – and undoubtedly many of our leaders who led us in the cold war believed that at least in part.

But nearly a century and a half of propaganda against socialism by the conservative elite of the United States suggests that there were other, probably more important reasons for this. Could our leaders over a 44 year period possibly have believed that almost every single leftist uprising in third world (or first world) countries represented a mortal military threat to us? I doubt it. To the extent that any Communist or Socialist country succeeded in establishing a successful government, that might set an example for Americans. Middle class and poor Americans might look at those countries and ask themselves if they might not provide worth while role models. And our conservative elite couldn’t let that happen. The war waged against socialism for the century and a half since the beginning of America’s industrial age has been a major part of a class war waged by the conservative corporate and political elites of the United States against their fellow citizens – a class war that continues to this day.

Democrats must recognize what is going on and not be cowed by accusations of socialism or “class warfare” into conceding the issue to the Republicans. If they stand up for the American people, the American people will be with them.