Why did a Socialist or Labor Party never gain traction in the United States?

Why did a Socialist or Labor Party never gain traction in the United States?

According to Marxist revolutionary theory, advanced capitalism is a necessary precondition to the development of socialism. Capitalists would ruthlessly exploit workers, accumulating capital from the workers’ labor but not sharing it. This would result in the workers developing a collective class consciousness, overthrowing their oppressors, and replacing their bourgeois government with a dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., socialism. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels expected that, because the United States had the most advanced form of capitalism in the world, it was the most likely setting for a proletarian revolution, yet, no socialist or labor party has ever become a major factor in American politics. American communist, socialist, and labor parties have never been able to become more than radical leftist fringe groups, even as a much perverted form of socialism came to dominate a large part of the planet over the course of the Cold War. “For much of the second half of the twentieth century,” Peter Singer writes, “nearly four of every ten people on earth lived under governments that considered themselves Marxists and claimed… to use Marxist principles to decide how the nation should be run.” Far from falling under Marxist influence, the United States became the sworn enemy of global communism. Generations of theorists and scholars have proposed a variety of possible reasons why no socialist or labor party has ever achieved prominence in the American electoral system.

Marx and Engels certainly believed that the United States would provide an example for the rest of the world with its inevitable move toward socialism. Following the American...

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... that, though there was not yet a significant socialist movement in the United States, it was still likely to happen. He asserted that all of the factors which he had indicated had heretofore hindered the development of American socialism were “about to disappear or to be converted into their opposite, with the result that in the next generation Socialism in American will very probably experience the greatest possible expansion of its appeal.” Of course, no such thing ever happened. Socialist theorists such as Vladimir Lenin manipulated pure Marxian socialism to create an artificial proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917. As the twentieth century wore on, the United States became, if anything, more hostile to anything resembling socialist or labor movements. The question of why socialism still did not develop in the United States was left to later scholars.