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                                             SOCIALIST MOVEMENTS

Socialism refers to a very wide variety of efforts to create systematic alternatives to the the inequalities of wealth and other social injustices endemic to market capitalism. Socialist movements have been a major force in economic and social justice in the US since the 19th century. A  variety of utopian socialists put forth theories and created experimental communities throughout that century in the U.S. and Europe. Karl Marx drew upon but critiqued the impractical nature of many of these efforts, and created the major body of theory and practice that led to a worldwide set of parties, movements and revolutions with a variety of ideologies aimed at replacing capitalism with a more egalitarian forms of economy.

           socialist party campaign flyer 1912      You do not know what the word socialism means   

A variety of socialist parties and movements formed in the U.S. in the latter half of the 19th century. In the early 20th century socialist mayors were elected in many cities around the country, and the socialist presidential campaigns of Eugene V. Debs garnered millions of votes.

Throughout U.S. history, government forces have sought illegally to repress the free speech of socialists, and destroy socialist parties and movements. The Red Scare of the 1920s and the McCarthy Era of the 1950s were particularly brutal and extensive in their often illegal efforts to curtail socialist movements, but the movements have always survived and revived.

Democratic and non-violent forms of socialism are rising once again as a force in U.S. politics in the face of  increasing economic inequality under current forms of capitalist globalization, and against new forms of right-wing authoritarianism offering fake solutions to these economic and social issues.     

Featured Site:

Socialism in US History

Selected Socialist Journals 

Marx, Engels & Some Other Key Marxian Theorists

See also our sister site: Marxisms and Neo-Marxisms.

A Range of Socialist, Marxist & Communist Organizations Worldwide

Select Bibliography of Socialism in the U.S.

  • Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left. London Verso, 1991. Excellent general overview.
  • Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle,  Dan Georgakas, Dan. Encyclopedia of the American Left . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  • Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century. London: Verso, 2011. Brilliant book on the impact of radicalism on 1930s and 40s culture.
  • Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. Brilliant study of African American left in the 20th and 21st centuries.
  • Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1921. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005. Best book on the most successful socialist movement in US history.
  • Isserman, Maurice. The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. New York: Public Affairs, 2000. Bio of one of the most important figures in US socialism from 60s to 2000s.
  • Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer…: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993.  Traces the transition in the 1960s to new forms of radicalism.
  • Kazin, Michael. American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. New York: Vintage, 2012. Long-range story of how the US Left has brought about major improvements in American life for which they have seldom been given full credit.
  • Lieberman, Robbie.  "My Song Is My Weapon" People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-50. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
  • Lipsitz, George. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
  • Nichols, John. The S Word: A Short History of an American Tradition ... Socialism. London: Verso, 2011.
  • Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Best book on women writers in the radical movement of the 1930s.
  • Ross, Jack. The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History. Lincoln NB: Potomac Books, 2015. For those who want a more detailed examination than Kipnis's.
  • Holmstorm, Nancy, ed. The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory & Politics.
  • McCarthy, Timothy Patrick, and John McMillan, eds. The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition.  New York: New Press, 2003
  • Panich, Leo. Renewing Socialism: Democracy, Strategy, and Imagination.
  • Philipson, Elaine, and Karen Hansen, eds. Women, Class & the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader.
  • Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
  • Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist.
  • Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston, 1998.
  • Storrs, Landon R. Y. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Princeton, NJ, 2013
  • Wald, Alan M. Exiles From a Future Time. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
  • ___. Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
  • ___ American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Wald's trilogy is the definitive story of the impact on socialism on US literature and culture.
  • Washington, Mary Helen. The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. New York, 2014
  • Wolf, Sherry. Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books,  2009.