Guest Essay: Stanley Aronowitz on Left Political Organization

Today we post the second chapter of Stanley Aronowitz's recently published Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future. Aronowitz will be speaking at our Teach-In: Why Vote? this Saturday. A few selections from his book are pasted below; for the full chapter, click here.

From Left Turn Chapter 2: On Political Organization

"The United States is the only nation in the “advanced” capitalist world without a significant left party, whether labor or socialist/communist. Although these parties have existed since 1828 at the local level when many cities had Workingmen’s Parties; the Socialist Party made important electoral inroads at the turn of the 20th century; and the Communists were key organizers of the mass industrial union and other social movements in the 1930s and 1930s, in general Americans have been tied to the two-party system. The question is whether the absence of a left political formation of significant influence and constituency is a function of “American Exceptionalism” as was first argued by the German sociologist, Werner Sombart whose book Why There is No Socialism in the United States first appeared in 1907 when the Socialists were in a phase of rapid growth. Or whether far more concrete, that is, “subjective” influences have prevented the sustenance of a left party of national influence."

"We are at a moment when all of the old arrangements are in disarray. As we have noted in many of the major countries of Europe, as well as Latin America, the disintegration of the Center/Left parties has resulted in a revival of a series of Left political formations whose relation to the old Russian question has been partially severed. Is it not the time to consider a similar break from both anti-party and anti-radical assumptions in the United States?"