{"id":3823,"date":"2026-07-06T11:10:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T11:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=3823"},"modified":"2026-07-06T11:10:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T11:10:00","slug":"karl-marx-knew-what-the-dsa-doesnt-america-hates-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=3823","title":{"rendered":"Karl Marx knew what the DSA doesn\u2019t. America hates socialism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels weren\u2019t right about much, but they made some astute observations about America while trying to explain why it was so resistant to socialism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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According to Marx\u2019s theory, as the world\u2019s most advanced capitalist country, and one that was industrializing at a rapid clip, the United States was supposed to be closest to the inevitable socialist revolution. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe country that is more developed industrially shows to the less developed the image of their future,\u201d Marx wrote in \u201cDas Kapital.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This meant that \u201cAmericans will be the first to usher in a Socialist republic,\u201d a leader of the German Social Democrats said in 1907, one among countless such confident predictions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If Polymarket had existed at the time \u2014 and socialists had been OK with prediction markets \u2014 all the Marxists would have bought \u201cyes\u201d shares on a proletarian revolution in the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it became pretty clear that this wasn\u2019t happening, at least not on anything like the schedule that the socialists were expecting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, Marx and Engels had some explaining to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In his stilted terms, Marx remarked how the mobility of American workers kept a dispossessed class from developing: \u201cThe wage-worker of today is tomorrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labor-market, but not into the workhouse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Engels noted how we never experienced feudalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Americans, he wrote, \u201care born conservatives \u2014 just because America is so purely bourgeois, so entirely without a feudal past and therefore proud of its purely bourgeois organization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, there was our prosperity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe native American workingman\u2019s standard of living is considerably higher than even that of the British,\u201d Engels observed, \u201cand that alone suffices to place him in the rear for still some time to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

Granted, Marx and Engels never met Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist congressional candidate in New York City who made favorable references to communism in a since-deleted Twitter account.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She represents a socialist movement that\u2019s making a serious bid to take over one of the country\u2019s major political parties, and has some chance to nominate one of its own as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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If this movement succeeds, it will do it by running against the grain of American tradition and mores.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the late political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset noted in his incisive book, \u201cIt Didn\u2019t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States,\u201d left-wing intellectuals long grappled with the question of the failure of socialism in the United States.<\/p>\n

Lipset and his co-author Gary Marks blamed a cluster of attributes and values that they called \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d (which American conservatives later adopted as a positive descriptor).<\/p>\n

They worked through the various explanations for the lack of a significant socialist movement \u2014 from the difficulty of cracking the two-party system, to the ideologically uncompromising nature of the Socialist Party of America in the early 20th century, to how the Socialist Party and the labor movement resisted working together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But they found that America\u2019s distinctive culture, with its emphasis on anti-statism and individualism, was most fundamental to the socialist fizzle.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Prior to the Great Depression, even labor organizations in the United States tended to be anti-statist, believing in their own initiative more than government action.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

This is not to say that there weren\u2019t early-20th century socialist successes in select cities, especially Milwaukee.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The DSA is beginning to duplicate these advances, and in a position to play for bigger stakes \u2014 although it will require overcoming inherent resistance in the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the 1930s, the radical socialist Leon Samson wrote of Americanism as \u201ca solemn assent to a handful of final notions \u2014 democracy, liberty, opportunity, to all of which the American adheres rationalistically much as a socialist adheres to his socialism \u2014 because it does him good, because it gives him work, because, so he thinks, it guarantees him happiness. <\/p>\n

\u201cAmericanism has thus served as a substitute for socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their comrades hope to reverse this dynamic and\u00a0substitute socialism for Americanism \u2014 a project that even Marx and Engels had their doubts about.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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X: @RichLowry<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If the Democratic Socialists’ movement succeeds, it will do it by running against the grain of American tradition and mores.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","category-rich-lowry"],"yoast_head":"\nKarl Marx knew what the DSA doesn\u2019t. America hates socialism - Metro Transit Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=3823\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Karl Marx knew what the DSA doesn\u2019t. 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