This is the first in a Three-part series. The second part, “The Failure of the Popular Front” will follow.

Introduction

The last election, once again, gave US workers the choice between two imperialist parties. While Donald Trump’s second term has changed the political landscape within the United States in many ways, in one key respect it has not: The socialist Left is still confronted with the overwhelming question of how we engage with progressives as we try to build an anti-imperialist force. Trump’s election and the failures of Democrats have redrawn the boundaries of opposition to the state. Many who would have been supportive of a Harris administration will now be in fierce opposition to a Trump regime. These liberals will have to ask themselves: How did we reach this point? Why did Joe Biden and Kamala Harris fail?

In their search to answer these questions, many will join DSA or choose to work in closer coalition with the organization to develop the movement against Trump’s presidency. But many of these new recruits will remain as ‘progressives,’ seeking positive change but failing to develop a radical understanding that Trump and Harris are just two expressions of the flaws of the capitalist system, which cannot be resolved simply by electing a positive change maker. Many who do develop this understanding will be stuck using the tools of progressive politics, attempting to influence the ruling class, rather than building working class power. DSA members need a clear understanding of ‘progressivism’ and how it differs from socialism if we are going to turn opposition to the current administration into opposition to the capitalist state and class.

Radical Lobbying

Progressives have historically vacillated between coalitions with workers movements and coalitions with the bourgeoisie. When the progressive movement first gained proximity to power in the early 20th century, the movement attacked communists in the workers movement and black workers at large. Eventually, progressives were quite successful in purging the labor movement of communists, helping to increase the divide between the organized socialist movement and the broader labor movement. This divide also had the effect of strengthening Ultra-left tendencies, as methods of struggle became more distant from the mass action of the working class.

By 1970, Trotskyist Peter Camejo’s article “Liberalism, Ultraleftism, or Mass Action” described the creation of ‘liberal-ultraleftists,’ from liberals, radicalized after their attempts to influence the ruling class achieved nothing. However, rather than attempting to organize the means to force the political changes they wanted through the labor movement, these ‘liberal-ultraleftists’ resorted to radical posturing and sensational actions. Some groups even pursued terrorism, as they escalated their tactics while still pursuing the same liberal strategy of trying to influence the decisions of capitalist politicians.

This section of ultraleftists would soon dominate left organizations in the US. In the decades since, the police state has imprisoned or killed the section of ultraleftists that attempted urban guerilla warfare while isolated from an organized mass base of support throughout the 70s. The state masked this high level of repression in broad, racialized attacks on the working class through the War on Drugs which was promoted by both conservatives and progressives alike. The subsequent vacuum on the Left created the prevalence of the more mild variety of ‘liberal-ultraleftists,’ ultraliberals, who use radicalism as an aesthetic to appeal to the ruling class through either non-profits or academia, as described in Ramsin Canon’s Ultraliberalism: The Dominant Tendency of the American Left.

While Progressivism and Ultraliberalism hold different goals and values, they both rely on a politics of influence. Rather than building an organized movement with the means to take power, they seek to influence those in power by building large public pressure campaigns. The elected progressive leaders will at best capitulate symbolic consolations to these movements without changing the material conditions of class oppression and US imperialism. We should not expect even these consolations from leaders like Trump. DSA must push workers out of the clutches of the politics of influence, represented by progressives and ultraliberals, towards the sustained building of the means to take power and force an end to class warfare in its many forms of exploitation, bigotry, and genocidal imperialism.

We can see throughout US history that a strong workers movement was not only the center of independent Left opposition to the bourgeois two-party system, but also one of the Left’s greatest tools to combat US imperialism and the many forms of class domination. The destruction of the radical workers movement in the US has been directly related to the rise of Progressivism and cementing the dependence of political activity into the bourgeois Two-Party system. Progressives in many ways function to separate the radical elements of the workers movement from a mass political party by using their more prominent positions in society to guide revolutionary energy back electoral systems instead of encouraging workers to develop organizations among themselves.

Lessons for Today

If we are to break out of the cycle between two imperialist party’s which support genocide and war abroad and at home, we must learn from the past and not cede our movements to chosen representatives and leaders who express radical ideas but fail to lead us towards mass struggle. Progressive leaders will always have greater access to media, campaign structures, and funding because they are not challenging the capitalist class’s domination over the world. While they might use similar phrases, state they have similar goals, if they are not focused on building independent worker’s organizations and working class power, they are funneling energy back into the capitalist state whether they mean to or not.

Progressive leaders will always have greater access to media, campaign structures, and funding because they are not challenging the capitalist class’s domination over the world.

This should not mean we avoid the electoral process, if we do not challenge the two parties with an alternative, the frustration of workers will not be channeled in a unified effort and will be diffused and de-escalated through an election process. Instead, we should follow through consistently expanding mass political action after the elections. Using elections to build democratic organizations of working people to fight for specified material goals.

The class war which is raging whether we fight back or not. DSA must lead workers influenced by ‘Progressivism’ and ‘Ultraliberalism’ out of the clutches of the two-party system. To do this we must create an independent party apparatus of our own. We must engage in an ongoing working class struggle with clear demands that builds our leverage as an anti-imperialist force, independent from either party and the bourgeoisie that controls them. This will not be an easy or short process, but those in power will not simply give power to working and oppressed people, we have to create the means to take it.

Part I: Progressivism and the Two Party System

American Progressivism and its Discontents

American Progressivism in its modern form began to gain influence at the end of the 19th century. On the national stage, figures such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson captured the wider movement under their influence. At this time much of the professionalized proletariat and petit bourgeois were still urbanized and lived between both the over-opulent wealth and waste of the gilded age bourgeois and the squalor the working class was forced to endure.

Feeling pressured by the rising proletarian movement (very much led by immigrant communities) and the all-consuming upper class, progressives proposed a cross-class compromise, founded on ‘rationality,’ ‘common sense,’ and, of course, policies enacted by the competent small business leaders and professionals who made up the progressive base.

However, we can also tie the rise of Progressive politician’s to power to a contradiction within one of the largest 3rd party forces in the last 150 years in the US: the People’s Party. The People’s Party united small farmers, workers, and debtors around a program of increasing inflationary policies to reduce the weight of debt over their heads. They viewed themselves as antagonistic to the elements of society that both did not produce goods and oppressed them through loans, corporate policies, and their influence in government.

Although they had a mixed consciousness and drew on mixed-class elements, they were composed of the workers’ movement arising out of farmer movements that had developed in the South (led in militancy by Black farmer organizations such as the Colored Farmer Alliance which was generally tailed by similar white organizations), the mining movements in the West, the factory laborers in the North led by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and other future leaders of the Socialist Party of America such as Eugene Debs were part of the Left faction of the party. Although the party often had mixed consciousness and racist elements, it became the site of collaboration between white and Black workers, who were often in segregated labor organizations, in their collective struggle against capital. Notably, the People’s Party also expanded popular opposition to imperialism. William Jennings Bryan, the leading figure of the party, ran on an explicitly anti-imperialist platform in 1900 (under both the Democratic and People’s Party Platform), but was largely undercut by the conservative section of the Democrats.

However, it’s no coincidence the dissolution of the People’s Party happened during Roosevelt’s first term, after he unexpectedly gained office from his post as vice president in the wake of McKinley’s assassination. Despite arising out of a smaller tendency within the Republican party, Roosevelt’s presidency was able to split part of the base of support for the People’s Party. He was seen taking on monopolies, creating federal regulatory boards, appointing qualified Black candidates to high ranking jobs in his administration, and settling labor disputes.
However, after Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination and created his own Progressive Party in a failed bid for presidency, the People’s Party largely dissolved as progressives left to join the new coalition. As a result, much of the People’s Party membership eventually filtered into the Democratic party after Roosevelt lost and his independent progressive party dissolved.

Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party’s nominee in 1912, put forward a new model for mediating between the interests of US capitalism and the rising wave of anti-capitalist sentiment. His “New Freedom” platform proposed taking on the monopolists and reducing tariffs, but at the same time he supported an expansion of US imperialism, turning the energies of US capitalists outwards.

Once fully in the Democratic Party, figures such as Bryan endorsed imperialist progressives like Wilson, while radicals like Debs left for the Socialist Party. The mass support around anti-imperialism and giving more power to workers that had shored up the People’s Party was shuffled back into the two-party system. Roosevelt and Wilson alike took up the mantle of progressivism, portraying an image of class harmony with a foundation of explicitly imperialist policies, capturing the larger movement in class collaboration.

Roosevelt and Wilson both championed the reactionary, class collaborationist section of the labor movement while pushing consumer protections and racist immigration restrictions. The anti-monopoly and antitrust policies they put forward were softened by the supposedly unifying projects of expanding American imperialism in the Philippines, Latin America, and stealing land for the parks system. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, with its influence spreading to the United States, Wilson’s model of class conciliation gained an even greater mandate, with Wilson overseeing the brutal Palmer raids where thousands of socialists were rounded up by police and hundreds were deported.

From a Left standpoint many of these policies seem to be contradictory, but from the perspective of the self-important professionals, self-serving labor bureaucrats, skilled tradesmen, and small business owners it offered moderate improvements and a seat at the table. They saw society as trapped between two forces—greedy, crass, and undemocratic big business and criminal, dangerous, and un-American radicals. They aimed to educate, temper, and reconcile those tendencies in such a way that happened to expand their power, influence, and consumer base by increasing the power of the institutions for which they worked.

Progressives and the Labor Movement

There has long been a class compromise tendency in the US labor movement which has primarily worked with and been influenced by the progressive movement. In the original Progressive era, this was represented by craft unions like the AFL which attempted to only represent skilled workers who were “sufficiently American,” under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. As president of AFL, he advocated for a society where “American workers” would become capital’s main consumer base, an ideology which was obviously meant to exclude immigrant and black workers. He supported increasing wages to increase profits while papering over the necessity of a brutal imperialist system to create a sort of consumerist utopia, as progressives still do today.

However, with the emergence of Eugene Debs as a popular figure, the militant industrial unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and political parties such as the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, the American Left was not reliant on or controlled by the progressive movement. This led to real, brutal conflicts between the progressive Wilson administration and the nascent Left of the Socialist Party and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Carrying out or abetting violent crackdowns and racist pogroms in the first Red Scare and then the Red Summer, the Wilson administration led a violent assault on the American Left and simultaneously on those small pockets of Black wealth and influence which were emerging.

Wilson had first re-introduced segregation into the federal government so as to not cause “friction,” which in practice meant only hiring white workers. This completely gutted a huge section of stable jobs for Black workers, which they had been able to rely on and removed many stable incomes from their communities as the Great Migration was in full swing. After riots, Wilson would refuse to meet with leaders from Black communities and even held a screening of Birth of a Nation at the White House, practically endorsing the influential propaganda piece that painted racial terrorism as a heroic defense of the American way of life.

Riots became frequent and were often blamed on communists, creating a cycle of mass racial violence and subsequent crackdowns on Left dissidents. This was the progressive mantra of “balance” in action—a new, modern state, smashing the anti-war Left, jailing dissidents, deporting radicals, and killing its own citizens in the name of order. This would become a recurring pattern that used war and fear of international enemies of the imperialist order to crack down on the anti-war movement, the Left, and foment racist violence.

A Cycle Beginning

The beginning of major US political leaders taking up the mantle of progressivism was immediately followed by the removal of any popular anti-imperialist agenda and the violent reaction against the Left and marginalized communities within the US working class. While this violence is not unique to progressives (it is the constant state of the US capitalist regime whoever is in office), what Progressivism offered was a method to diffuse radical movements by offering what seemed to be an easier alternative. Why destroy Capitalism when you can “reduce its harm”? Why build a party when there already is a candidate voicing your concerns? Why stand against US imperialism if it’s spreading democracy?

Progressive leaders were not able to destroy the independent Left at once, but they whittled away at the edges, balancing violence with cooptation. Progressivism rose into its peak in the New Deal Era as the Great Depression set US workers into a level of militancy that the capitalists could barely control. While previously the left had been able to maintain its independence from the progressives and the two-party system, the height of Progressivism was also the period of the Popular Front for the American Communist Party. What followed prepared the stage for the emergence of Ultraliberalism and set back the radical labor movement in the US for decades.