I am not alone in finding Luke Pickrell’s insistence on democratic republicanism and constitutional critique repetitive, un-insightful, and racially ignorant. Blindspots that were present in Luke’s earlier work have now become glaringly apparent in his two latest articles, his review of Aziz Rana’s latest book and his overview of the SPA’s critique of the Constitution. In neither article does Luke seriously assess the role of white supremacy in complicating the democratic republicanism he so cherishes. In brief, he draws a simplistic and problematic correspondence between constitutional critique and a movement’s historically progressive character. Let us begin.
Luke traces the roots of socialist critique of the Constitution to the SPA before the Great War. His portrayal of them is glowing:
Criticism of the Constitution peaked in the lead-up to World War One, as evidenced most clearly by the activity of the Socialist Party of America (SPA). These turn-of-the-century socialists — still grounded in the democratic republicanism of Marxism and the homegrown democratic republicanism of Tom Paine and later Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens — were among the most vociferous critics of the Constitution.
The white blindspot here is quite clear. Luke makes no mention of the SPA’s infamous white supremacist politics, which the party found perfectly compatible with democratic republicanism. Either Luke is simply unaware or he is deliberately ignoring a very embarrassing element of the politics that he aims to push. In both cases, his position leads to chauvinist rightism. For example, his silence on the SPA’s rough edges explains his silence on Tom Paine’s similarly unsavory views, as expressed in Common Sense:
There are thousands and tens of thousands, who would think it glorious to expel from the Continent, that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and the Negroes to destroy us; the cruelty hath a double guilt, it is dealing brutally by us, and treacherously by them.
In this respect, Luke is right to say that the SPA was grounded in a “homegrown democratic republicanism.” I diverge from him in viewing this as a major problem. Likewise, he makes no mention of Thaddeus Stevens’ highly progressive positions on race, which contrast with the SPA’s own positions which were routinely at the far right of the Socialist International, oftentimes portending fascism. There is little shared ground between a man like Stevens who wanted to be buried in a Black cemetery and a party like the SPA which proudly justified Jim Crow and the lynching of Black people. Luke goes on to quote SPA leader Victor Berger:
SPA co-founder and Congressman from Wisconsin Victor Berger denounced the Senate (created by Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution) as ‘an obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people, and an obstacle to social growth.’
Again, he does not mention that Berger was a vicious white supremacist who viewed Black people, Asians, and Chicanos/Mexicanos as inferior races, destined to be either exterminated or ruled by whites. That Berger saw no contradiction between these views and republicanism should give pause and encourage interrogation about what exactly republicanism entails–today, most would call Berger a National Socialist. Later in the piece, Luke urges DSA to build the kind of movement that would produce a modern Berger–and some wonder why socialism still has a white reputation. Bringing up any of these facts would greatly undermine Luke’s narrative, so he has instead opted to ignore them in favor of a squeaky-clean lineage of “democratic republicanism.” For my part, I’ve no interest in sweet lies and half-truths.
Luke’s white blindspot is especially clear in his contrast between the SPA and the Communist Party:
Meanwhile, the SPA’s 1928 party platform proposed a ‘modernized’ constitution with direct elections for the Executive, proportional representation in Congress, and the elimination of judicial review. The newly-formed Communist Party, on the other hand, while identifying the malapportioned Senate and the Constitution’s various minoritarian checks, named ‘democracy’ one of the three ‘chief methods of capitalist dictatorship.’ Henceforth, communists largely abandoned the idea of a democratic constitution based on universal and equal suffrage as the ‘first’ and ‘fundamental condition’ for the ‘political liberation of the proletariat.’
To the CP’s credit, it made far greater strides in combating white supremacy than the SPA ever even attempted to. There is no SPA equivalent to the CP’s defense of the Scottsboro Boys. In fact, in 1903, the International Socialist Bureau interrogated the SPA due to its bizarre disregard for escalating violence against Black people. The party’s executive board replied:
The Socialist Party points out the fact that nothing less than the abolition of the capitalist system and the substitution of the Socialist system can provide conditions under which the hunger maniacs, kleptomaniacs, sexual maniacs and all other offensive and now lynchable human degenerates will cease to be begotten or produced.1
The Bureau was apparently satisfied with this response and issued no further inquiries, which highlights the dangers of the kind of socialist politics Luke urges us to return to. It’s notable that when Luke brings up Black socialists and communists, such as Dr. WEB DuBois or the Black Panthers, he does not mention their critiques of the SPA or this vague “democratic republicanism.” As with Reconstruction and the SPA, he creates a false narrative of continuity to back up his practical political injunctions: “DSA should consider Rana’s statements a challenge to live up to the SPA’s standards.” The DSA is already living up to the SPA’s standards. The organization still permits open Zionists to hold membership and spread their lynch mob oratory. Its disgusting inability and refusal to mitigate or even oppose the genocide in Gaza makes it a fine heir to Victor Berger and Ernest Untermann.
Luke’s overview of the SPA’s constitutional critique intensifies the problems identified above. In the entire piece, he makes no mention of race or white supremacy, which would be an extremely important dynamic for any “democratic republican” project in the US. Since the piece mostly repeats the review of Aziz Rana (including verbatim passages, see addendum), most of my criticisms for the latter still hold true. Instead, note this passage:
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.
There is an implicit condemnation of the Communist International and the Soviet Union as such, rather than a constructive critique. He apparently sees nothing positive in the Soviet Marxist tradition. The bolded lines are very telling. Was anti-colonialism not democratic? Or Soviet political and economic aid to fledgling socialist and postcolonial states? Or the Comintern’s (admittedly fraught) role in the anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles of the interwar? The point is not a blanket defense of the Soviet project and its affiliates, but to highlight Luke’s very narrow definition of “democratic political demands.” Democracy is about substance, not form. A supposedly “authoritarian” government that actively empowers the masses of its own country while fighting for the global oppressed majority is democratic in all of the most important aspects. It is telling that the fall of the USSR led to a global ultra-right wing wave, the consequences of which we can observe across the planet, most notably in Gaza and Ukraine. None other than Stalin predicted this in 1926:
What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.2
It is worth contrasting this to the ex-Communards, who, after the fall of the Paris Commune, overwhelmingly became vicious agents of the French colonial empire.3
One likely reply to my criticism is “We don’t endorse the SPA’s white supremacy, we can leave that behind and take the good democratic republicanism.” It is questionable whether Luke is really leaving “that behind,” when we see that he still boosts the writing of white supremacist Daniel Lazare.4
Leaving that aside, this same excuse is one that US liberals use to defend the Founders. The objects of defense change, but the logic does not: “The core idea is worthy of defense, even if they did not adequately put it into practice.” In both cases, the uncomfortable link between the “core idea” and white supremacy is unexplained. Why did the SPA see no contradiction between democratic republicanism and white supremacy? Why did the International Socialist Bureau fail to interrogate them on this point? In other words, why did so much of the Socialist International endorse a similarly racial form of democratic republicanism? These questions cannot be answered by “false consciousness”–this is a non-answer. Luke often bemoans the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution in jettisoning this ideology from the canon of Marxism. It is telling that the RSDLP were among the few members of the Socialist International to consistently oppose racial oppression and imperialism. Similarly, they intensified this opposition after taking power and after discarding democratic republicanism–in sharp contrast to their right wing opponents. It seems that this ideology was inessential. The same point comes up in Luke’s piece on MLK, where he writes:
Some of my conclusions may feel anticlimactic. In the end, the various movements of the 1960s could only express a profound understanding that something was wrong. They failed to locate the Constitution as the obstacle to lasting political and social change and could not develop a democratic republican ideology as a result.
Per Luke’s admission, the SPA did not make this same error, yet it achieved nothing close to the Civil Rights Movement. This remains unexplained. All of these questions are too big to rigorously answer and examine here, but they are worth considering in the meantime.
Addendum
While writing this letter, I noticed that Luke reproduces entire passages and passes them off as new articles. This takes “repetitive” to a new level. From “Escaping America’s Constitutional Bind”:
In 1914, SPA member and soon-to-be presidential candidate Allan Benson wrote a comprehensive dissection of America’s undemocratic political system called Our Dishonest Constitution.18 The SPA’s newspaper, Appeal to Reason, regularly ran constitutional polemics, such as ‘Tricked in the Constitution,’ which declared, ‘Democracy — government by the people or directly responsible to them — was not the object which the Framers had in view.’ For two decades, the SPA’s national party platform consistently called for the abolition of the Senate, the direct election of federal judges, and convening a second constitutional convention.
Many socialists, including Benson and Crystal Eastman (co-founder of the parent organization 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, ‘‘[t]he 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.’’
From “Socialist Party of America’s Constitutional Critique,” published six months later:
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.’
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.’’
Six months is plenty of time to reformulate the same ideas in new terms. This is just insulting to readers.
-Rob Ashlar
- Quoted in: Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (Monthly Review Press 1952), 132. Kipnis’s book remains the best study of the SPA, especially its white supremacism.
- “The Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the E.C.C.I.,” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1926/11/22.htm.
- Alain Ruscio, “Commune(s), communards, question coloniale,” Travailler les animaux. L’exploitation animale, de l’Antiquité à nos jours 153 (2022), https://journals.openedition.org/chrhc/18864.
- https://x.com/LukePickrell/status/1865125678250614800?t=gqV2vSep40ubIVkamEHfrg&s=19.