Anarcho-socialism in the USA in the 19th century: land and freedom

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Americans are very offended when they are told that socialism was invented in Europe. In fact, the first half of the 19th century passed in the United States under the sign of a multitude of socialist ideas and practices. True, it was agrarian anarcho-socialism. It was based on the very principles of the creation of the United States - autonomy and assistance to the poor with "assets", land, which was then in abundance in America. Also at the heart of these ideas was the struggle against cities, monopolies and banks. The city and its main elements and took this "old" socialism from the mainstream. But during the Great Depression, these ideas were revived.

The current lurching of the US economic course may seem to many to be the first sign of a departure from canonical right-wing and liberal ideas. However, America has a rich tradition of radical wealth redistribution and basic income implementation. One of the brightest representatives of this tradition is Hugh Long, a senator and "dictator of Louisiana", as his contemporaries called him, a contender for the presidency of the United States in the 1936 campaign, "an idol of shopkeepers, small entrepreneurs and middle-income white farmers," as she wrote about him in early 1930s American press.

But Long's ideas were based on the rich tradition of American anarcho-socialism.

American writer Upton Sinclair wrote in the 1930s: “Even among our individualistic pioneers, there were Americans who dreamed of a society based on justice. We had - almost a hundred years ago - Brook Farm and many other colonies. We had our own socialist movement led by leaders like Albert Brisbane, Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, Francis Willard, Edward Bellamy and finally Eugene Debs and Jack London.

Many Americans viewed socialism not as a theoretical and practical denial of capitalism, but as one of the ways - and, moreover, quite legitimate - the implementation of the ideas and promises of the American revolution and the correction of those deviations from the predetermined path that were made by careless politicians and greedy entrepreneurs."

Socialism, thus, was interpreted as meeting the very spirit of the ideas of the "founding fathers" and consistent with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and therefore compatible with the "idea of America" itself.

(The interpreter wrote about these ideas of "agrarian socialism" of the founding fathers of the United States at the end of the 18th century:

“After independence, the founding fathers of the United States, Franklin and Jefferson, portrayed the country's future as an agrarian civilization. In their opinion, only a person working on his own land can be free. Whereas factories and trade are "carriers of vices and instruments that serve to destroy the freedom of the individual and the state.")

Socialist utopia, like its creators who visited the United States, met at first not only a warm welcome from the Americans, but also direct interest from the official America. Suffice it to say that Robert Owen spoke twice in the American Congress and received an audience with such prominent American politicians as Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Jackson, Monroe.

American anarcho-socialism combined the ideal of economic individualism, which was attractive to many Americans (embodied in the utopia of “farmer America”), with the ideal inherent in all socialist utopias and, in general, also traditionally attractive for a significant part of Americans of the 19th century, the essence of which is most accurately expressed by the concept “community "- let's call it" fraternal unity "," community of free people "or" free community of equal citizens. " It was the ideal of the community (which also inspired the creators of various kinds of communities), and not the ideal of socialized production and "equality of property", that attracted Americans to socialism in the 1820s and 40s.

As for property relations, most of the adherents of socialism in the United States preferred not socialization, but an even distribution of property. This is the way we find the question, for example, in Thomas Skidmore, one of the most prominent American socialists of the first half of the 19th century. The title itself - which sounds like a manifesto - is characteristic of the book he published in 1829: “Human rights to property: the essence of the proposal concerning how to achieve its equal distribution among the adult representatives of the present generation and how to take care of its equally equal transfer to each representative the next generation upon reaching adulthood”.

Skidmore, in particular, proposed that every man over the age of 21 and every single woman be given 160 acres of freehold land (approximately 65 hectares), provided that ownership of this land is retained as long as the owner of the land cultivates it. myself (and then one of the children). The right to sell and lease land was to be canceled forever.

The "Help Fund" was also formed from indirect taxes. It was assumed that until the new farm gets back on its feet, as well as in the event of force majeure (death of a husband or wife, drought, tornadoes, and other natural disasters), $ 6 a month was allocated free of charge for each adult, and $ 2 for each child. dollar. Thus, a typical family with three children and a husband and wife could count on a temporary welfare of $ 18 per month. Since the 1820s, the dollar has depreciated 60-80 times, i.e. with our money it is 1100-1400 dollars per month for such a family.

The erosion of socialist-agrarian ideas occurred with the growth of cities and industrialization. The corruption of American, Protestant anarcho-socialism, as it was later believed by its representatives, also occurred due to the mass arrival of Catholics (Irish, Italians, part of Germans, Poles, etc.) and especially Jews - who brought Marxism and other radical "urban" types socialism.

However, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, these ideas were reborn. We have already mentioned Senator Hugh Long. Another prominent representative of these ideas was Charles Coughlin, an American religious leader, a popular radio preacher in the 1930s. Interestingly, he was just a Catholic (from an Irish family) and sympathized with the left flank of Italian fascism. His views were just radical, but he, like an intelligent preacher, understood that it was necessary to reach out to the hearts of white Protestants by applying their old anarcho-socialist ideas.

An interesting Soviet book by Batalov, Social Utopia and Utopian Consciousness in the USA (1982), describes Coughlin's ideas as follows:

“The Coughlin plan, which, like Long’s project, expressed the illusions and expectations of the petty bourgeois oppressed by the monopolies, was sustained in the same spirit. Building on the traditional thesis of private property as a metaphysical basis for freedom and democracy, traditional for the utopia of farming America, Coughlin wrote:

“Private property,” he said in one of his radio lectures, “must be protected from corporate property. Small business must be reasonably protected from monopoly business. If we allow the gradual assimilation of private property and small business by corporations and monopoly entities, then we will only pave the way for state capitalism or for communism."

Coughlin also proposed introducing a progressive income tax, nationalizing banks (F. Roosevelt's refusal to follow this path led to Coughlin's break with the president, whom he had previously actively supported), and drastically reduce the bureaucratic apparatus. The plans of Long, Coughlin, and a number of other reformers in the 1930s testified to the fact that the utopia of farmer America as a type of mass democratic utopia, which it was for almost the entire 19th century, has outlived its usefulness. The ideals that were laid in its foundation - equal opportunity, entrepreneurial individualism, small private property, local government, "minimal state" - still retained their attractiveness to a large segment of Americans. However, under the new historical conditions, these ideals, while retaining their critical function, have lost their former progressive role - both in their traditional combination and in conjunction with other ideals that were initially alien to them, such as a “strong state” or “strong power”.

But now the growth of socialist ideas in the United States (according to opinion polls, more than 50% of the youth sympathize with them) is based on the synthesis of the anarcho-socialism of the early USA and the "strong left state" - this idea is borrowed from Europe. If a left-wing politician appears in the United States who has managed to combine these two ideas, he may well expect a meteoric rise.

And many of the ideas of American anarcho-socialism may well be transferred to Russia, primarily to vast devastated spaces outside the attraction of large agglomerations.