================= HES POSTING ======================
[Aside from its interest to historians of American economic thought, this
review (and the book) may also be of interest to students of Marx (see
comments about Marx). --RBE]
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (September, 1998)
Timothy Messer-Kruse. _The Yankee International: Marxism and the
American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876_. Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 1998. xi + 319 pp. Illustrations, notes,
bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2403-8; $18.95
(paper), ISBN 0-8078-4705-4.
Reviewed for H-Pol by Jonathan A. Glickstein
<[log in to unmask]>, University of California, Santa
Barbara
German Marxism and Homegrown "Socialism"
How radical has been the American radical tradition? What are the
factors that have limited that tradition's impact on the nation's
labor movement and on American society generally? These are among
the basic questions raised anew in Timothy Messer-Kruse's fresh
examination of the world's first international socialist
organization, the short-lived International Workingmen's Association
(1864-1876), featuring the ideological clash between the home-grown
American "Yankee" Internationalists and their German-born Marxist
comrades.
Messer-Kruse's opening chapter broadly summarizes the diverse
traditions of thought that animated the "Yankee radicals": American
Revolutionary and labor-artisan republicanism, land reform, utopian
socialist creeds, abolition and antislavery, feminism, spiritualism,
and evangelical religion with its own egalitarian impulses.
Specialists in antebellum reform culture will, of course, be
familiar with this subject matter. [1] Equally familiar, perhaps,
will be the author's conclusion that the widening, intensifying
northern crusade against slavery extension and the South was among
the important factors tending to unite the various northern reform
movements--in particular, that crusade helped dissipate some of the
antagonism that had heretofore divided abolitionist and labor
leaders. Not really addressed here is the further possibility, also
raised by previous scholars, that the growth of northern nationalism
acted in the late antebellum years more to eclipse and blunt various
antebellum utopian and radical sensibilities than it did to truly
unite them. However, this issue is not of central importance to
Messer-Kruse's subject.
What is of central importance is the author's emphasis in this
chapter and those that follow upon the eclectic perspectives that in
fact persisted within Yankee radicalism. In the years following the
Civil War, the author writes, "men and women who had devoted decades
of their lives to struggling against the evils of slavery, political
inequality, and social immorality now turned their considerable
organizational experience and willingness to confront authority and
convention to the task of elevating the working class" (p. 42). Yet
in part out of respect for their diverse legacies, radicals like
Richard Joseph Hinton, Joshua King Ingalls, and Victoria Woodhull
never achieved, or even particularly sought, any definitive
doctrinal consensus. Their common enthusiasm for applying "the
principles of radical democracy and universal equality to this new
field of reform"--the "'labor question'" (p. 43)--itself entailed a
marked willingness to agree to disagree. And in their disposition
to recognize, and tolerate different paths to radical progress lay
the fundamental, and ultimately fatal, difference between "these
descendants of the native radical tradition" (p. 43) and the
orthodox Marxists with whom they briefly allied under the banner of
the IWA. The characteristics that these two groups shared,
including "a passion for social justice and economic equality,"
would prove "too weak a glue to hold them together" (p. 128).
One of the more controversial features of Messer-Kruse's account is
likely to be his highly unflattering characterization of the IWA's
German Marxist contingent, and of above all, Karl Marx and his
right-hand man in the United States, Friedrich Sorge. Although the
author does not appear to doubt the sincerity of their socialist
convictions, both individuals emerge in his pages as utterly
manipulative, unscrupulous, and ruthless in the methods they
employed to control the agenda of IWA. For Messer-Kruse, moreover
the organizational infighting exposed not merely the character
shortcomings of Marx and Sorge; it also revealed, more
fundamentally, the ideological rigidities and inadequacies of their
materialist interpretation of history, at least as it applied to the
mid-nineteenth-century United States. In marked contrast to the more
open-minded, non-exclusionary, and racially and sexually egalitarian
idealism of the Yankee members of the IWA, the orthodox Marxist
commitment to "but one true line of socialist progress" (p. 43)
increasingly amounted, in the 1870s, to an altogether misguided
preoccupation with wooing the politically conservative,
anti-socialist workers of Irish descent who made up a high
proportion of the organized rank-and-file. This economist, trade
union strategy of Marx, Sorge, and their minions reflected both
their dismissive contempt for American political democratic
institutions and electoral processes as part of the
capitalist-controlled "superstructure," and their tactical
disregard--despite their own nominal commitment to the ideals of
racial and sexual equality--of the potential significance of blacks,
women, and other segments of unorganized labor as constituent
elements of the American left. The German Marxists' "Irish strategy"
proved, in Messer-Kruse's account, to be as futile as it was ugly.
(Not the least part of the author's damning profile, in this
connection, is his inclusion of some of Marx's own unsettling
references to American "niggers.")
Racial and gender blinders, together with an over-attention to
organized labor's oppression at the point of production, were thus
embedded in what Messer-Kruse sees as the orthodox Marxists'
fundamental misreading, in all their intellectual certitude and
arrogance, of social and political conditions in the United States.
This interpretation, of course, is consistent with the
non-institutional, anti-hierarchical turn of labor history
scholarship of the last decade or so. The author, moreover, has
more than a small bone to pick with such chroniclers of American
radicalism as the labor historians David Montgomery and Philip S.
Foner, and the author of an earlier full-length study of the IWA,
Samuel Bernstein. All have erred in faulting the Yankee radicals
more than they have the German Marxists on points of ideology and
strategy. Bernstein especially, in Messer-Kruse's corrective
narrative, is guilty of misrepresenting the exchanges on this or
that issue and of generally distorting the historical record.
How such historians have most of all erred is in following Marx and
grievously understating the radicalism of the Yankee
Internationalists, usually by dismissing them as "sentimental" and
"bourgeois" reformers with an inordinate interest in achieving a
superficial civil and political equality for all. Thus Messer-Kruse
disapprovingly quotes Bernstein's insistence on the essentially
nonsocialist character of the New Democracy, the immediate
organizational forerunner of the Yankee wing of the IWA. The New
Democracy believed, Bernstein wrote, that labor enjoyed a basic
"compatibility with capital" and its aim was "not the abolition of
private property, but its wide distribution" (pp. 75-76). Marx
himself had always been inclined to similar suspicions regarding
American reformers; Messer-Kruse's recitation of these suspicions
recalls Marx and Engels' scornful dismissal back in 1846 of the
nonrevolutionary appeal that the National Reform program held for
land-hungry immigrants: "Which Europeans are those whose 'dreams'
have been fulfilled here? Not the communist workers, but bankrupt
shopkeepers and artisans or ruined dirt farmers who strive for the
good fortune of becoming petty bourgeois or farmers again in
America. And what kind of 'wish' is it that is to be realized
through fourteen hundred million acres? No other than to transform
all people into private property owners, a wish that is as
realizable and communistic as the one that would transform all
people into emperors, kings, and popes."[2]
But Messer-Kruse disagrees: the view of Marx and his scholarly
sympathizers to the contrary, the various programs championed by the
National Reformers and, more importantly, by their Yankee
Internationalist successors should not be summarily dismissed as
utopian, "unscientific," and "bourgeois" any more than their
indigenous American language of equality, republicanism, and
anti-monopoly should be misconstrued as sentimental and
intellectually flaccid.[3] Here we come to one of the most
important, and also one of the more problematic, features of
Messer-Kruse's study. Certainly the thrust of much recent
scholarship in nineteenth-century American reform and labor
movements, as in the accounts of labor republicanism, has been to
insist on the authentically radical, "anticapitalist" dimensions of
those movements. But little or none of this literature has gone so
far as to claim that such movements' disaffection with existing
economic and social arrangements equaled the radical vision of
Marxist thought itself. Indeed, recent American labor historians
have been inclined to follow the British historian Robert Gray's
suggestion that Marxism raised the bar too high. Furthermore, Gray
suggested that Marxist theory has served to impede historians'
acceptance of labor and other plebeian and oppositional movements on
their own, more lowly terms by creating "The straw person model of a
class conscious and revolutionary working class, equipped with a
rigorous class ideology and theoretical understanding of the
capitalist economy."[4]
But Messer-Kruse himself does goes further, insisting that the
anticapitalist radicalism of the Yankee Internationalists, for all
their eclecticism and frequently fuzzy language, was fully equal to
that of Marx and his followers. In seeking to make his case, the
author quite persuasively documents the Yankee Internationalist
radicals' antipathy to capitalist power and waged labor, and their
attendant promotion of consumer and producer cooperatives and the
collectivization of private industry. The Yankee Internationalists,
he concludes, were "socialists within the framework of republican
belief" (p. 140). But here one might still ask: did the
radicalism--the "socialism," as it were--of more than few of these
Internationalists also extend to the point that they favored the
abolition of all private property in the United States? Certainly
this had not been true of the great majority of their antebellum
reform antecedents: with the primary exception of the American
followers of Robert Owen, virtually all such reformers had rejected
community of property arrangements as "the grave of individual
liberty." Messer-Kruse appears to agree that while most Yankee
Internationalists firmly opposed landed and other "private
possessions" beyond a fixed point as "exploitative," they too held
to the insistence that "what individuals produce for themselves,
with their own labor power, is rightfully and absolutely theirs" (p.
258). Marx himself, at least, embraced a more far-reaching
"communist" vision, one that entailed the dissolution of all private
property. Given this difference, the possibility therefore suggests
itself that there may indeed have been some justifiable grounds for
orthodox Marxists' ultimate repudiation of the Yankee
Internationalists as bourgeois reformers. There may, in other
words, be more validity in the conventional Marxist interpretation
than Messer-Kruse acknowledges.[5]
One has a sense, in any case, that in his zeal to provide an
antidote to the previous Marxist-oriented scholarly accounts,
Messer-Kruse himself has given us less than the complete picture.
At the same time, it remains conceivable that Yankee
Internationalists' attitudes toward the place of private property in
the good society, whatever these may have been, simply did not play
a significant role in their growing conflict with the German
Marxists. To insist otherwise would be to argue for an overly
rarefied interpretation of what in fact often amounted to sheer
power struggles between competing factions over other issues and
more immediate strategies. More important still: the possibility
that the ideology of Yankee Internationalists was less radical than
Marxist thought in certain limited, if still important respects is
not to dislodge Messer-Kruse's other primary argument: that this
ideology remained better-suited to diffusing radical, anticapitalist
principles throughout the American working-class and American
society generally.
Something has already been said of the author's opinion of the
wrong-headed trade union strategy favored by Marx, Sorge and their
followers in the IWA. Messer-Kruse believes that the Marxists'
inability to come to terms with Yankee radicalism, followed by their
successful purge of the Yankee Internationalists in 1871, had
disastrous implications for the American labor movement and for the
American left. As a young member of the "inner circle of the
immigrant Marxist milieu" (p. 228), Samuel Gompers imbibed the
Sorgeans' materialist contempt for Yankee idealism. However
unwittingly, Sorgism would help pave the way for the hegemony of
Gomperism--in other words, a racist and sexist, economist business
unionism that was bereft of the redeeming revolutionary ideals and
goals of orthodox Marxism. "In the final analysis," the author
writes, the American Federation of Labor's ideology of "'pure and
simple' exclusionary unionism"--"a conception that narrowed the
horizons of the labor movement to improving wages, hours, and
conditions of employment for its own members"-- "originated out of
Sorge and his Tenth Ward Hotel faction's collision with the American
reform tradition and its refusal to adapt Marxism to American
conditions" (pp. 229-30).[6] It was just such internecine conflicts,
and not only "the antagonisms between workers and employers," that
produced "the modern American labor movement" (p. 246). As a result
of the purge, too, Messer-Kruse concludes in his Epilogue, the
Yankee Internationalists "lost their connection to the organized
American Left" (p. 252). In their dogmatism the German American
Marxists thus "took the first decisive step" in severing from the
"institutional Left" its connection with the nation's vital
republican reform tradition (p. 257). The particular "internal
dynamics" that was played out within the IWA accordingly emerges,
for the author, as the heretofore neglected piece of the old puzzle,
"Why is there no socialism in the United States" (p. 257).[7]
There is plausibility in these provocative, and ably advanced,
arguments. But readers may still feel that Messer-Kruse overreaches,
and lays an inordinate degree of responsibility in the laps of Marx
and his followers in the IWA. Certainly they have the appeal, but
also the limitations, of other counterfactual arguments. We simply
cannot know, even had the Yankee brand of republican
idealism/socialism prevailed within the IWA, whether that
organization would have endured for longer and wielded greater
impact in the United States. Citing the popular following won by
the Yankee Internationalist-like schemes of Henry George and Edward
Bellamy, Messer-Kruse suggests that an organized socialism grounded
in indigenous, "easily understood" (p. 252) republicanism would have
made far greater inroads among American workers than did such
late-nineteenth-century Marxist-inspired efforts as the Socialist
Labor Party. But he also recognizes that the Yankee radical agenda,
through its "overlooked" influence on the "inclusive and egalitarian
ideology" of the Knights of Labor, only antagonized many workers,
and "provoked a trade union backlash" (p. 246) that ultimately led
to the AFL's organization in 1886. Even had the Marxists
incorporated rather than cast off Yankee Internationalism, it must
remain questionable whether the late nineteenth-century American
labor movement would have somehow followed a more sweeping and more
broadly egalitarian, less exclusionary course, and whether the
American institutional left in general would have developed into a
more formidable presence grounded in a widely-based, "republican"
appeal. After all, "labor republican" activists, land reformers,
utopian socialists, and other antebellum radicals, drawing earlier
and equally on "homegrown" traditions and impulses, had remained
more or less marginalized, unable to mount a truly effective
challenge to ongoing capitalist forces. Messer-Kruse's suggestions
to the contrary, there remains some plausible reason to doubt that
the Yankee Internationalists' programs would have been any more
successful in this regard even had their struggle with the Sorgians
resolved itself in their favor.
Perhaps most of all, it seems likely that the author rather
understates what radical reformers--whether of the native Yankee
socialist or the "foreign" dogmatic Marxist stripe--were up against,
and this included not only the conservative values of the trade
union rank-and-file of which he does take ample note. Consider
Barrington Moore, Jr.'s recent description of what he identifies as
merely "the third obstacle to an egalitarian society," one deriving
from the division of labor: "An elaborate division of labor into
numerous types and grades of skill, ranging from eye surgeons to
trash collectors, is an inherent characteristic of modern industrial
societies. The serious egalitarian would have to find a way to
recruit, train, allocate, and motivate each of these different kinds
of labor without resorting to differences in pay, or at most using
very small differences. To state the problem is enough to show that
it is just about insoluble short of a near total destruction of
modern society. Even if.... the capitalist division of labor and
corresponding system of rewards display many irrationalities, an
egalitarian one is hardly the remedy, and looks like an
impossibility if taken at all seriously." [8]
Notwithstanding all of the foregoing reservations and caveats
regarding Messer-Kruse's arguments, he has for the most part
successfully rehabilitated a group of Yankee radicals whose
"historical legacy," he recognizes, "may be one of failure" (p.
246). The author's arguments are themselves evidence that his
contentious book offers much food for thought, and constitutes a
valuable addition to the literature of American radicalism.
Notes:
[1]. For a recent study of evangelical religion's contribution to
antebellum labor movements and their embrace of a radical labor
theory of value, see Jama Lazerow, _Religion and the Working Class
in Antebellum America_ (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1995).
[2]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The Economics of the _Volks-
Tribune_ and Its Attitude Toward Young America," in _Circular
Against Kriege_, Section 2, May, 1846, repr. in _On America and the
Civil War. Karl Marx_, ed. and trans. by Saul K. Padover (New York,
N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 5.
[3]. We are, as Messer-Kruse no doubt recognizes, speaking in
relative terms: while the reform traditions on which the Yankee
Internationalists drew were certainly, as a whole, more indigenous
to the United States than was orthodox Marxism, some of these
(Owenite and Fourierist socialism among the most obvious) themselves
had vital intellectual roots in the Old World.
[4]. Robert Gray approvingly quoted in Leon Fink, "The New Labor
History and the Powers of Historical Pessimism: Consensus, Hegemony,
and the Case of the Knights of Labor," _Journal of American
History_75 (June 1988): 123.
[5]. That the mature as well as the "young Marx" retained the
vision of a communist society without private property, together
with the most radical of distributionist principles, is evidenced in
his work of 1875, _Critique of the Gotha Program_; repr. in Lewis S.
Feuer, ed., _Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and
Philosophy (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959), 112-32.
[6]. In an instructive illustration of how the passage of time
yields shifting perspectives, Daniel Bell's classic study coupled
somewhat similar criticisms of the dogmatism and "foreignness" of
orthodox Marxism with an appreciation of Samuel Gompers and "pure
and simple" unionism for their flexibility and pragmatic
accommodation to American circumstances; _Marxian Socialism in the
United States_ (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952).
[7]. Not at issue here is the fact that various scholars have for a
variety of reasons found this famous question, the title of Werner
Sombart's essay of 1906, a misleading formulation of the phenomenon
of the left's marginalization in Amerian society.
[8]. Barrington Moore, Jr., _Moral Aspects of Economic Growth, and
Other Essays_. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998),
142-43.
Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact [log in to unmask] [The book review editor
for H-Pol is Lex Renda <[log in to unmask]>]
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]
|
