The Socialist Party of America's Constitutional Critique

Luke Pickrell consolidates discussions about the SPA

I called myself a Marxist or socialist long before learning about democratic republicanism. My introduction to the latter came from reading Section Three of Marxist Unity Group’s nine-section reader, which includes the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s (RSDLP) 1903 Program and the 1912 Program of the Socialist Party of America (SPA). 

Engles wrote in 1893, “Marx and I have repeated ad nauseam that…the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.” Marx and Engels combined their interpretation of the capitalist economy and the development of history with the ideas of democratic republicanism that preceded them. The SPA reflected these two strands of Marxism.

When I first read the 1912 program, statements like “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” didn’t stand out. However, the party’s political statements caught my eye. 

• Unrestricted and equal suffrage.

• National and local proportional representation.

• Abolition of the Senate and the veto power of the President.

• Election of the President and Vice-President by direct vote.

• Abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court to pass upon the constitutionality of the legislation enacted by Congress (Judicial Review). 

• National laws are to be repealed only by an act of Congress or by a referendum vote of the whole people.

• Abolition of restrictions to amend the Constitution.

• Right of suffrage in the District of Columbia with representation in Congress and a democratic form of municipal government for local affairs.

• Abolition of federal district courts and the Circuit Court of Appeals. 

• The election of all judges for short terms.

• A constitutional convention to enact the above changes. 

I had no idea socialists talked like this. By the time I read the platform, I’d interacted with a handful of left groups in the Bay Area and perhaps a hundred self-described Marxists/Leninists/socialists, including some active for 40 or 50 years. None said anything about the Constitution, the Senate, or the presidency.  

I had been schooled to think that socialists didn’t concern themselves with questions of the existing state. Instead, they thought about smashing the state and erecting a system of workers' councils in its place.  Something called “bourgois democracy” existed in the US, but it was only a gimmick to obscure workers’ class consciousness and desire for communism. Democracy could only be used as a means to talk about socialism and advance the ends of communism. The coming revolution would be socialist, not democratic, since democracy already existed.

A section from the International Socialist Organization’s (1977-2019) “Where We Stand” pamphlet demonstrates this perspective. Everyone interested in joining the ISO (“contacts”) read through the pamphlet before joining:

Other things being equal, socialists prefer a bourgois republic to a monarchy or a military dictatorship because a republic affords better conditions (freedom of the press, of speech, of organization, within certain limits permitted) to organize and fight the capitalist system. These democratic rights had to be fought for to begin with, and are the basis on which we will be able to extend them. However, we understand that even the most democratic republic — with its bloated bureaucracy, police, and military — is still an instrument for the exploitation of the many by the few.

That is why Lenin wrote that the essence of bourgeois democracy is “to decide once every few years which member of the class is to repress and press the people through parliament — this is the essence of bourgois parliamentarian.”

The Working class needs an entirely different kind of state — a democratic workers’ state based on councils of workers’ delegates.

Gil Schaeffer analyzes this view of “democracy” in his recent article, “Marxism Is Democratic Republicanism: The History of the Struggle for Equal Human and Political Rights From the Inside Out.” This is what he calls the standard “Marxist” (scare quotes because Marxism is, actually, thoroughly democratic) objections to a democracy first strategy — “that it is reformist, not revolutionary; that it aims only for a liberal or bourgeois democracy, not a socialist or proletarian democracy; and that it foolishly imagines a constitutional convention will be able to establish its authority and power peacefully without first defeating the capitalist state militarily.”

Examining the SPA allows us to do two things.  First, we can appreciate the democratic-republican roots of Marxism. “Engels and Marx,” writes Schaeffer, “did not invent democratic republicanism.  They adopted its form essentially unchanged from its original incarnation in the French Revolution and 1793 Constitution.”  Second, we can appreciate the relevance of the SPA’s demands and the importance of a democracy-centered strategy.  Many things have changed since 1912, but the Constitution’s core — the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and Executive veto — have not.  The SPA’s critique is still valid.

Progressivism

The SPA was at its height during the Progressive Era (1901-1929) when a section of society (called Progressives) looked to solve problems caused by rapid industrialization, urbanization, immigration, political corruption, and the enormous concentration of industrial ownership in monopolies. The Constitution was often at the center of these discussions.  Woodrow Wilson, a leader of the Progressive movement, concluded as early as 1885 that “the present generation of Americans” had become “the first to entertain . . . serious doubts about the superiority of our own institutions compared with the systems of Europe.” 

Some 1,300 proposed amendments were initiated in Congress between 1897 and 1927.  Between 1893 and 1911, thirty-one states passed seventy-three petitions demanding a convention to propose an amendment for the direct election of senators. The 17th Amendment was passed in 1913, and the 18th in 1919.  

But constitutional discussions went far beyond amendments. During the first decade of the 20th century, fifteen states pursued convention requests that were not issue-specific or tied to the direct election of senators but called for a general rewriting of the Constitution.  Aziz Rana writes in The Constitutional Bind that this energy spoke to “an underlying discontent in American political life and a fairly widespread feeling that perhaps another generation could improve upon the 1787 effort.”  By the end of the 19th century, many questioned the extent to which democratic ideals and the Constitution were compatible. 

To launch a critique of the Constitution, many critics revisited the document's origins to argue that the Framers were far from unbiased actors.  Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States was published in 1913. Beard, a respected history professor at Columbia, argued that the Constitution was structured to benefit the Founding Fathers financially.  But Beard went further, claiming that “the framers were so concerned with stopping majority power that they constructed a system that allowed minority power.” To him, the Constitution was a class project that “protected the interests of the wealthy as the common ’good.’ The framers may have opposed, on republican grounds, a society marked by extremes of wealth and poverty.  Nonetheless, they also saw the preservation of elite class authority as a critical safeguard against property rights infringements and ultimately against tyranny.”  

Rana argues that Beard’s take on the Constitution’s origins was nothing less than the “generally accepted” academic view of the founding during the Progressive era.

Critique

The SPA was founded in 1901, and its first presidential platform was produced for the 1904 elections.  The SPA’s 1908 platform was the first to critique the Senate and the Supreme Court and address the difficulty of amending the Constitution through Article V (the Socialist Labor Party talked about abolishing the Senate and Supreme Court as early as 1892). 

As opposed to Progressives, who tended to look toward the Supreme Court, the President, or amendments as a means of change, the SPA emphasized the Constitution’s inflexibility. The 1912 platform added a call for a second constitutional convention.  That year, the party, with Eugene V. Debs as its candidate, won 900,000 votes, or six percent of the votes cast for president.  The party’s 1916 platform called for “The election of all judges of the US courts for short terms,” “The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia,” and suffrage for women. 

In 1911, Eugene Debs wrote “Why We Have Outgrown the United States Constitution,” which clearly called for a new founding document.  “The new Constitution will not be framed by ruling-class lawyers and politicians but by the bona fide representatives of the working class, who on the day of their triumph will be the people in the complete sense of that magnificent and much-maligned term,” wrote Debs.  At the same time, established lefty newspapers, including The Messenger and Appeal to Reason, regularly ran constitutional polemics.  

Later, Debs called Gustavus Myers’s landmark work, History of the Supreme Court, “beyond a doubt the book of the year for Socialists.”  Myers, a journalist, historian, and one-time member of the SPA, had concluded that “A dominant class must have some supreme institution through which it can express its consecutive demands and enforce its will, whether the insulation is a king, a Parliament, a Congress, a Court or an army. In the US, the Supreme Court is the one all-potent institution automatically responding to these demands and enforcing them.”

Victor Berger, a SPA member and congressman from Wisconsin, denounced the Senate as “an obstructive and useless body, a menace to the people's liberties, and an obstacle to social growth.”  The only solution, Berger declared, was to place all legislative power in the House and strip the Executive and Judicial branches of their veto powers.  Berger was on the political right of the party; he believed his bill might make it through the legislative meat grinder and become law. 

In 1914, SPA member and soon-to-be presidential candidate Allan Benson wrote Our Dishonest Constitution, a comprehensive dissection of America’s undemocratic political system.  Benson called for a unicameral legislature with a powerful (“near-supreme”) legislative branch, writing, “A congress, composed of a single house,” should act as “the chief instrument of government” because it “respond[ed] most promptly to the desires of the people.” 

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.  

Many socialists, including Benson and Crystal Eastman (co-founder of the ACLU), defended civil rights as innate human rights endangered by the Constitution's denial of universal and equal suffrage.  Eastman and her collaborators strove to “uproot the existing mode of constitutional decision-making” and ensure “meaningful control by working people over the constitutional system as a whole.” As Benson explained, “‘The rights of citizens would be safeguarded’ only if constitutional power was ‘vested in the people themselves,’ since ‘no flimsy words in a constitution ever safeguarded human rights.’” 

The SPA made a great deal of Tom Paine and his democratic republicanism. Harvey Kaye, recently interviewed on the Democratic Constitution Podcast, writes that during socialist Sunday schools, one teacher portrayed Paine, not the “aristocratic Washington,” as the “real father of our country.”  In The Masses, one author placed Tom Paine in dialogue with God, Satan, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mark Twain, and V.I. Lenin. 

Socialists also drew from the proud history of Radical Republicanism during Reconstruction. Republicans were frequently referenced, including Thaddeus Stevens, who, during his battles with President Andrew Johnson to advance Reconstruction, called the Constitution a “piece of parchment” and declared, “the whole sovereignty rests with the people, and is exercised through their representatives in Congress assembled…No other branch of the Government…possesses one single particle of the nation's sovereignty.”

However, not everyone in the SPA thought it was important to talk about the Constitution. Some members of the International Workers of the World (IWW) believed that the Constitution was an “abstraction” and “disconnected” from everyday work experiences. Others felt that the Constitution required “complicated conceptual gymnastics to link legal-political design to the underlying realities of immiseration and dependence.”  Still others considered the Constitution “superstructural” and less important than the economic “base.” (See Gavin Kitching’s work for a more extended discussion on base/superstructure.) 

Decline

By 1920, things were starting to change.  That year, the demand for a constitutional convention was absent from the party’s presidential platform. 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 appeared. 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 called democracy one of the three “chief methods of capitalist dictatorship.”

Rana writes in The Constitutional Bind that by the time America entered the Second World War, the country had been “swept up in one of the most extensive mass celebrations in national history, far greater than any previous constitutional anniversary.” Criticism of the Supreme Court by New Deal supporters ceased for fear that condemnation would provide an ideological opening for dissident voices, foreign or domestic.  Labor unions began honoring the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment.  In 1941, Roosevelt declared December 15 “Bill of Rights Day,” and almost everyone closed ranks. Soon, “fully one-quarter of the nation’s population…belonged to organizations that ‘actively supported’ the celebrations.”  Absurd celebrations ensued, including “a simultaneous reading of the Bill of Rights in all 83 [Chicago] neighborhoods.”  To some extent, Black Americans were incorporated into the nationwide celebrations of constitutional reverence to prove that racism belonged to the Nazis, not the US. Some even claimed the country was “committed to equality from the founding.” 

The US emerged from the war relatively unscarred.  In a matter of hours, writes David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest, the British, “clearly bled white by two world wars” and were unable to bail out the Greek economy or fund the Turkish army, “handed the job of world leadership with all its burdens and all its glory to the US.” Success in the war was attributed to the Constitution and its magnificent system of checks and balances.  Victorious, the US was well on its way to Cold War nationalism and the hardening of constitutional reverence to the point where abolishing or fundamentally changing the Constitution became “unthinkable.” 

The SPA lasted into the 1970s, but their constitutional critique didn’t survive the buildup to war and the development of American imperial hegemony.  The party’s orthodox democratic demands were also impacted by the Russian Revolution, the development of the Third International, and the resulting deemphasis of the democratic struggle within the Marxist (and increasingly Stalinist) canon.  Democratic republicanism became just another form of “bourgeois democracy.”  The socialist struggle was no longer about creating a democratic republic to realize socialism. 

In this sense, the gradual decline of constitutional agitation in the SPA represents three interconnected phenomena: the decline of democratic political demands across all socialist parties, the decline of constitutional critique, and the growth of “credal constitutionalism” in the US.