The Socialist Party of America’s Constitutional Critique
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The Socialist Party of America’s Constitutional Critique
Articles

The Socialist Party of America’s Constitutional Critique

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Luke Pickrell covers the emergence of constitutional criticism among US left-wing organizations at the turn of the 20th century, highlighting the democratic republicanism of those critiques found within the early Socialist Party of America.

Photo of Delegates to the First National Convention of the SPA, Chicago, IL, May 1904.

I considered myself a socialist long before learning about democratic republicanism. My introduction to the latter came from Chapter Three of Marxist Unity Group’s Reader, which includes the 1912 presidential platform of the Socialist Party of America (SPA).1 When I first read the platform, 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 demands—unrestricted and equal suffrage, national and local proportional representation, abolition of the Senate and the veto power of the President, abolition of judicial review, direct elections and short terms for all judges and Justices, and a second constitutional convention—caught my eye. 

I had no idea socialists talked like this. By the time I read the platform, I’d interacted with a handful of Left groups and perhaps a hundred self-described socialists, including some active for decades. None said anything about the Senate, the presidency, or the Constitution. I had been taught that socialists should not concern themselves with the details of the existing state. Instead, they should focus on smashing the state and erecting a system of workers’ councils in its place. “Bourgeois 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 toward the end of communism. The coming revolution would be socialist, not democratic, since some degree of democracy already existed.

A section from the International Socialist Organization’s (ISO) “Where We Stand” document demonstrates this perspective. Everyone interested in joining the ISO, myself included, read through the work before becoming a member:

Other things being equal, socialists prefer a bourgeois 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 bourgeois parliamentarianism.”

 

The Working class needs an entirely different kind of state — a democratic workers’ state based on councils of workers’ delegates.2

Gil Schaeffer analyzed this view of democracy in “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.”3

Examining the SPA through the lens of democratic republicanism does two things. First, it helps us 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.”4 Second, it helps us appreciate how far the US Left has strayed from its democratic core over the past century.  Many things have changed since 1912, but the Constitution’s heart—the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, the Executive veto, and the unusable Article V process—and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the US state have not. The SPA’s critique of the Constitution is still valid, even if the contemporary Left is slow on the uptake. 

Progressivism

The SPA was at its height during the Progressive Era (1901-1929) when a section of society looked to solve the problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, political corruption, and the concentration of capital in monopolies. The Constitution was often at the center of these discussions. Some 1,370 proposed amendments were initiated in Congress between 1897 and 1927.5 However, only two, the 17th Amendment in 1913 and the 18th in 1919, became law.

Between 1893 and 1911, thirty-one states passed seventy-three petitions demanding a convention to propose an amendment for the direct election of senators.6 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.”7

But constitutional discussions went 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.”8 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. Beard argued that the Framers were “so concerned with stopping majority power that they constructed a system that allowed minority power.”9 To him and many others, the Constitution was a class project that “protected the interests of the wealthy as the common ’good’” and revealed an interest in “the preservation of elite class authority as a critical safeguard against property rights infringements and ultimately against tyranny.”10  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.11 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).12

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.13 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.14

In 1911, Eugene Debs wrote “Why We Have Outgrown the United States Constitution,” which unambiguously 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.15 At the same time, established left-wing 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.”16 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.”17

Victor Berger, an 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.”18 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 the US’ 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.”19

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.’”20

The SPA made a great deal of Tom Paine and his democratic republicanism. Harvey Kaye writes that during socialist Sunday schools, one teacher portrayed Paine, not the “aristocratic Washington,” as the “real father of our country.”21 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.”22

Still, democratic republicanism was not hegemonic within the SPA. Not everyone thought it was important to talk about the Constitution. According to Rana, some dual-card members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) believed constitutional questions were too abstract and disconnected from everyday work experiences.23 Overcomplicated “conceptual gymnastics” where needed to understand the Constitution.24 “Workingmen on the job don’t care… they want practical organization first,” argued one IWW activist.25 Other SPA members disagreed with the 1912 platform’s call for a new founding document. Some thought the SPA’s demands could be realized under the existing Constitution and “without the structural rewriting the SPA’s own platform called for.”26 As one member told an audience in 193, “the constitution [is] all right, it’s all a matter of interpreting it.”27

Decline

By 1920, the SPA’s constitutional critique was starting to wane. 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.”28 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.

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 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.”29

Rana writes in The Constitutional Bind that by the time the US 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.”30 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.”31 Absurd celebrations ensued, including “a simultaneous reading of the Bill of Rights in all 83 [Chicago] neighborhoods.”32

The US emerged from the war relatively unscathed. In a matter of hours, the British, “clearly bled white by two world wars” and 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.”33 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 unfavorable. 

The SPA lasted into the 1970s, but its constitutional critique didn’t survive the buildup to war and the development of US imperial hegemony. The Russian Revolution, the development of the Third International, and the resulting loss of democracy within the Marxist (and increasingly Stalinist) canon also impacted the party’s orthodox democratic demands. Democratic republicanism became just another form of bourgeois democracy, and political agitation for a democratic constitution was abandoned. 

The gradual decline of constitutional critique and democratic political agitation within the SPA represented three interconnected phenomena: the erasure of democratic political demands from the Marxist canon, the decline of constitutional critique in the US, and the concurrent growth of a “credal constitutionalism” that glorified the framers’ creation.34

Revival 

Recently, conservative political analyst Jonathan Turley lamented “a growing counter-constitutional movement that began in higher education and seems recently to have reached a critical mass in the media and politics” and warned readers about “an explosion of books and articles laying out a new vision of ‘democracy’ unconstrained by constitutional limits on majority power.”35 Turley’s observations are correct. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, is the latest academic to wade into the fray of constitutional discourse and cause Turley to throw a fit. Chemerinsky’s latest book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, elicited contrasting responses from Jennifer Szalai and Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times,36 Louis Menand in the New Yorker,37 and Elon Musk on X.  

Creedal constitutionalism is fading. Though much work remains, the framers’ creation is no longer “hiding in plain sight.”38 The past year alone has seen an explosion of constitutional critiques within sections of the academy and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Cleveland and San Diego DSA chapters passed resolutions authored by Marxist Unity Group (MUG) members decrying the Constitution’s denial of democracy and calling for a new and radically democratic constitution drafted through a constituent assembly elected by direct, universal, and equal suffrage.39 These resolutions complement YDSA’s call for all DSA members in and out of office to advance the struggle for a democratic republic.40 

While constitutional critique is still not central to MUG or DSA’s strategy, the ideas are alive and will spread. The SPA’s democratic republicanism and constitutional critique will remain relevant until the US becomes a democracy.

 

 

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  1. “The Socialist Party Platform 1912,” Sage American History, https://sageamericanhistory.net/progressive/docs/SocialistPlat1912.htm.
  2. “Where We Stand,” International Socialist Organization, 2024, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vfn29e_HCeOL1bJPgGkVHvDI_pjXjTR5/view?usp=drive_link.
  3. Gil Schaeffer, “ “Marxism Is Democratic Republicanism: The History of the Struggle for Equal Human and Political Rights From the Inside Out,” The Democratic Constitution Blog, September 16, https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/marxism-is-democratic-republicanism.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Aziz Rana, The Constitution Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), 96.
  6. Ibid, 96
  7. Ibid, 102.
  8. Ibid, 96.
  9. Ibid, 98.
  10. Ibid, 113.
  11. Kirk Harold Porter, National Party Platforms, 1840-1968 (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1970).
  12. SA Reed, “American Socialism from 1892 to 1908,” Cosmonaut, January 27, 2023. https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/01/american-socialism-from-1892-to-1908-a-study-in-two-programs/.
  13. Rana, Bind, 115.
  14. Porter, National, 250.
  15. Eugene Debs, “Why We Have Outgrown the United States Constitution,” Jacobin, February 15, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2021/02/eugene-debs-why-outgrown-constitution.
  16. Rana, Bind, 713 n5.
  17. Ibid, 112.
  18. “House Member Introduces Resolution to Abolish the Senate,” United States Senate, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/House_Member_Introduces_Resolution_To_Abolish_the_Senate.htm.
  19. Rana, Bind, 132.
  20. Ibid, 132.
  21. Harvey J. Kaye, Tom Paine and the Promise of America (Hill & Wang, 2006), 178.
  22. Fawn McKay Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (Norton, 1959), 292.
  23. Rana, Bind, 149.
  24. Ibid, 149.
  25. Ibid.
  26. Ibid, 153.
  27. Ibid.
  28. Porter, National, 241.
  29. Ibid, 311.
  30. Rana, Bind, 359.
  31. Ibid, 359.
  32. Ibid.
  33. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (Ballantine Books, 1993), 453.
  34. Rana, Bind, 3.
  35. Jonathan Turley, “The Left’s Assult on the Constitution,” The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-lefts-assault-on-the-constitution-pack-the-court-attack-free-speech-kamala-harris-47a78eda.
  36. Jennifer Szalai, “The Constitution is Sacred: Is it Also Dangerous?” The New York Times, August 31, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/books/review/constitution-secession-democracy-crisis.html; Michelle Goldberg, “A Leading Law Scholar Fears We’re Lurching Toward Secession,” The New York Times, September 23, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/opinion/electoral-college-presidential-election.html.
  37. Louis Menand, “Is it Time to Torch the Constitution?” The New Yorker, September 23, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/30/constitution-book-reviews-chemerinsky-pierson-schickler.
  38. Daniel Lazare, “US Constitution: Hiding in Plain Site,” Cosmonaut, September 29, 2020, https://cosmonautmag.com/2020/09/us-constitution-hiding-in-plain-sight/.
  39. Cleveland Democratic Socialists of America, “Winning the Battle for Democracy,” https://www.dsacleveland.org/winning-the-battle-for-democracy; San Diego Democratic Socialists of America, “DSA San Diego Passes Resolution ‘For a Democratic Constitution,’” August 20, 2024, https://dsasandiego.org/dsa-san-diego-passes-resolution-for-a-democratic-constitution/.
  40. Young Democratic Socialists of America, “For R21: On the Front Lines of the Battle for Democracy,” July 29, 2023, https://y.dsausa.org/the-activist/for-r21-on-the-front-lines-of-the-battle-for-democracy/.