Socialists Used To Talk About The Constitution

Luke Pickrell's brief thoughts on the Socialist Party of America.

The 1912 program of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) surprised me when I read it for the first time. The language in the preamble was familiar enough: “Society is divided into warring groups and classes,” “The capitalist system has outgrown its historical function,” and “All political parties are the expression of economic class interests.” The economic demands were also familiar: “The collective ownership and democratic management of the banking and currency system,” “The immediate government relief of the unemployed,” and “A general system of insurance by the State.”

But the political demands sounded strange. Abolish the Senate? Direct elections? Rewrite the Constitution? So much minutiae, right? Socialists didn’t talk about how to manage the state, I thought, but how to smash it and erect a system of workers' councils in its place. The powers that be want us to waste time thinking about the Constitution. Don’t get distracted! Hit the streets and build power! 

Since then, I’ve mellowed a bit and started (emphasis on started) to read history. Aziz Rana’s new book, The Constitution Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them, is an effective antidote to the kind of semi-anarchistic, anti-politics thinking I used to indulge in. I’ll write a review of the book after interviewing Aziz for Cosmopod and Class. For now, here are a few thoughts on the SPA. 

The SPA was founded in 1901. According to National Party Platforms, 1840-9156, its first Platform was produced for the 1904 presidential elections. The SPA’s 1908 Platform seems to be the first to critique the Senate and the Supreme Court and address the difficulty of amending the Constitution through Article V (I should note that the Socialist Labor Party talked about abolishing the Senate and Supreme Court as early as 1892). The 1912 Platform added a call for a second constitutional convention. The 1916 Platform said, “The election of all judges of the United States courts for short terms,” “The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia,” and suffrage for women. 

By 1920, things were starting to change. The demand for a constitutional convention was gone. In its place was the demand to amend the Constitution to “strengthen the safeguards of civil and political liberty.” After its left-wing split to form the Communist Party in 1919, the SPA returned as an independent party in 1928. That year’s Platform retained a muted criticism of the Constitution (emphasis on muted). The Communist Party also entered the scene. Its 1928 Platform identified the undemocratic consequences of the malapportioned Senate and the Constitution's various minoritarian checks. However, the demand for a democratic republic was long gone. Instead of discussing a constitutional convention to create the foundation for a system of parliamentary democracy, the Communist Party named democracy one of the three “chief methods of capitalist dictatorship.” The state form of the rule of the working class would be councils of workers.

But I digress. How and why socialists and communists largely stopped critiquing the Constitution is the subject of Aziz’s book. 

For now, I want to emphasize how much the SPA said about the Constitution. The political structure of the United States was part of the radical zeitgeist. The Constitution was in the air. Center, left, right; all tendencies within the Party had something to say.

In 1911, Eugene Debs wrote “Why We Have Outgrown the United States Constitution,” in which he explained, “The new Constitution will not be framed by ruling-class lawyers and politicians but by the bona fide representatives of the working class, who in the day of their triumph will be the people in the complete sense of that magnificent and much-maligned term.” In 1914, SPA member and soon-to-be presidential candidate Allan Benson wrote Our Dishonest Constitution, in which he referenced the work of Charles Beard, whose work on the Constitution was nothing less than the “generally accepted…view of the founding” during the Progressive era. Beard also taught classes on the Constitution at the SPA’s Rand School of Social Science in New York. The SPA’s newspaper, Appeal to Reason, regularly ran constitutional polemics, such as “Tricked in the Constitution,” published in the March 2, 1912 edition. “Democracy — government by the people or directly responsible to them — was not the object which the Framers had in view,” the article explained. Make no mistake: an undemocratic constitution could not be used to bring about democratic ends. 

Socialists in the United States used to talk about the Constitution. Much to my delight, Aziz cites the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2021 Political Platform as a return to the tradition of the early 20th-century SPA’s constitutional critique. However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Yes, DSA says something about the Constitution in its Platform, but there’s a long way to go. Classes and political agitation centered on the Constitution are harder to come by in DSA than in the SPA. We still have a long way to go.