The Detour has been much longer than the road of influence

Reviewed by J. Grattan, 2005-12-24

Though not obvious from the title, the book is largely devoted to an overview of the history of socialism, and by extension communism, in the U.S. Socialism gets a lot of credit in this account as being the basis for various social welfare measures that have made it into our laws since the turn of the 19th century. However, the rise of industrialism generated any number of large and vigorous protest movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the Knights of Labor, the Farmer's Alliance and the Populist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, many labor groups including the craft unions of the AFL, the Progressives, and various forms of socialism. Though socialism made its last great statement in the election of 1912, it is a bit presumptuous to say that future legislation derived directly from socialism in this sea of protest.

There is no doubt that the Bolshevik revolution impacted the Left. The socialists splintered into Communist groups who could never come to grips with the realities versus the propaganda of the Russian experiment. The author diverts from the principal subject by devoting substantial time to the ruthlessness, miscalculations, and rationalities of the Stalin regime. But the effectiveness of the Left is hardly a case of self-derailment. It is a fact that the U.S. capitalist class backed by the state was perhaps the most repressive of any in the Western world towards those at odds with them. In those years of protest, the capitalist class could always rely on military and private security forces and reactionary courts to suppress protesters. In conjunction with the Russian revolution, the author could have mentioned the Alien and Sedition Acts or the Palmer raids that squashed the socialists and the IWW during and after WWI. Also, union density plummeted after WWI in the face of employer "Red Scare" tactics.

Since WWI the so-called Left in the U.S. has had few periods of much influence and those were situations where the state accommodated the Left only to the extent necessary to preserve the U.S. economic system with few changes. The Wagner Act in 1935 permitted the unionization of mass production industries; the War Labor Board in WWII basically made grievance systems mandatory in labor contracts in return for no-strike clauses. It should be noted that the Taft-Hartley amendment to the Wagner Act in 1947 rolled back many of the pro-labor parts of the Wagner Act. The so-called business-labor compact after WWII amounted to little more than high wages and good benefits for consumeristic workers with no loss of managerial prerogatives - hardly a leftist proposition.

It is difficult to get a handle on the exact timing for when the author contends that the Left was a factor versus being detoured. From the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to WWI was only forty years - the era for most all leftward protest. If the rise of the CIO is included, then the time of Left influence is extended to about sixty years. But it has been 85 years since the suppression of the great steel strike of 1919 and nearly seventy since the rise of the CIO. In other words, the Left has been detoured longer than it has been a force.

The author does devote a chapter to issues that a revived Left needs to consider: foreign affairs, trade policy, education, health care, electoral reform, etc. He contrasts that needed broad-based approach to what he sees as the essential narrowness of the New Left of the 60s and 70s. He is especially wary of third-party efforts. He harkens back to the non-partisan league capturing North Dakota by running as Repubs or Dems.

It's difficult seeing many being satisfied with this book. It is not clear as to when or why the Left was relevant or not. The Left is now about as marginalized as it can be. It is hard to see an era three-quarters of a century ago, providing much insight into a prescription for reviving the Left. This is Weinstein's last book, but far from his best.

Getting the left back on track

Reviewed by E. David Swan, 2005-08-23

Over the last half century Socialism has taken enough beatings that you can scarcely find a self identified Socialist living in the United States yet many of the ideas of Socialism are now embedded in the fabric of America. Socialists (along with progressives) were instrumental in enacting the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, civil rights, unemployment insurance, child labor laws and countless other benefits we take for granted. So why has Socialism been so viciously maligned? Perhaps it was the amount of atheists within the Socialist movement or perhaps it was seen as a legitimate threat to the two party system or perhaps it just rubbed the wealthy the wrong way. The most devastating blow came when Marxist Socialism was adopted by Lenin as the ideology of the Soviet Union. As a test of Socialism the Soviet Union was a dramatic failure. The question the author asks is whether or not the Soviet Union even qualified as Socialist.

Socialism is about workers rights, pure democracy and a decentralization of power (or at least restructuring). As the author puts it the Soviet version turned Socialism on its head. Another question would be to ask whether the Soviet Union was the inevitable end result of Socialism regardless of initial intent. Marx saw Socialism as the natural evolutionary stage beyond Capitalism. He also believed that Socialism required a significant amount of initial capital to be successful. The Soviet Union had neither the Capitalistic history to evolve from nor the monetary resources necessary to fund Socialism which is why Stalin was so obsessed with converting the West. He needed the capital. The Soviet Union was at least a century behind technologically and financially wrecked by WWI and the Bolshevik revolution when Stalin decided to compete with the West. It was Stalin's obsession with matching the West and his utter lack of respect for civil rights that created the dismal conditions in the Soviet Union. Few things could demonstrate Stalin poor leadership than his appointment of Trofim Lysenko to chief geneticist as Lysenko is perhaps the worst and most vile scientist in history.

Since the writer is a self proclaimed Socialist and one time Communist you might expect this book to be a vigorous defense of Socialism but it's really a balanced history warts and all. In Socialisms heyday, figures like Gov. Huey Long were attempting to enact changes that would be mind blowing if attempted today such as a one million dollar cap on salaries, a five million dollar cap on personal net worth and a 30 hour workweek. These attempts were overly extreme, still, it's a shame that Socialists are now treated like persona non grates and maligned by history because many showed incredible bravery in the fight for worker and minority rights. The tragedy is that extremist groups like the Weatherman and Black Panthers gave the right all the ammo they needed to ruin liberal momentum to the point where the left has yet to recover its bearings.

The final chapters should be codified into the minds of liberals. This is the author's view of the future agenda for the left. Mr. Weinstein's first goal is to see a reduction in military spending which may seem inappropriate at this time but as he points out much of the danger American's face is blowback from the fact that the U.S. is the number one arms dealer in the world. He also sees many of the oppressive tactics of globalization as fuel for international anger. Domestically we need to spend more money on education and the environment. His final goal is a national health care plan. As brilliant as capitalism may be it seems to be less than effective in health care. The United States is the only industrialized national where the health care industry actively avoids the sick. The other problem is that competition is supposed to lower costs yet American's pay twice the cost for the same health care that Europeans and Canadians get.

The left needs more introspective books like this. Liberals need to recognize the mistakes of the past and clarify a vision of the future. It's not enough to demand universal health care liberals need to articulate why this is the best way to proceed into the future. It's time for the pendulum to swing back.

Why couldn't they get off the detour?

Reviewed by hopefulskeptic, 2005-04-24

One of my beliefs is that the American political system is badly out of balance, being essentially without a left. No communist or socialist or even populist party has had any influence since the post war debacle caused when American Communists took orders from the USSR and totally discredited the far left. This has been exacerbated by the refusal of many communist or "former-communist" spokes-persons to acknowledge the errors of submitting to management of their activities by USSR-directed organizations and to providing recruitment for spies to work for the USSR. Although social responsibility in the form of Progressivism was quite active under Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, LBJ and even Nixon(surprise), doctrinaire Socialism never took root in the USA. Even progressivism faded out of the Democratic party under Bill Clinton as he was badly beaten on health care and then moved to the right of center and eagerly pursued world free trade agreements under terms unfavorable to the USA and continued the process begun under Reagan of letting money rather than common interest determine tax and investment policy. Without any real bogeymen to deal with, the Republicans have been reduced to making the word "liberal" into a swear word even though once it was one of the nicest things you could say about a gentleman was that he was "of a liberal turn of mind" - Merriam-Webster's dictionary synonyms are generous, bountiful, and munificent - terms which could well be applied to a dedicated Christian.

My purpose, then, in reading "The Long Detour" was to find out how so many well-intentioned people let themselves be led so far astray during the 30's, 40's and 50's as it was already clear early in the 20's that the Soviet version of communism was totalitarianism. I found that the information I sought was only hinted at in Weinstein's book. He reminds me of the many well-intentioned, idealistic people with laudable social intentions who were not able to bring themselves to actively oppose a viper in their midst. In stead of openly opposing and exposing these foreign agents, they shut up and covered up. Only the rather ineffective spy Whitaker Chambers and the evastatingly effective Elizabeth Bentley came clean while many on the far left screamed epithets at them. To many on the left, loyalty to socialist ideas was more important than loyalty to country. Weinstein does not even mention Bentley and Chambers in this book nor does he spend a significant number of words pondering the ultimate worth of loyalty to an international movement, which had become corrupted, as opposed to loyalty to the country which had nourished those who betrayed it.

Weinstein does recognize that there was a disaster for the far left and, ultimately, the near left. He points out the many good ideas that were ultimately co-opted by the progressives and Democrats and recognizes the distinct lack of interest among Americans for state-run enterprises. He provides some details on the monstrous behavior of Stalin which are well-known to anyone interested in the subject. Perhaps telling, he describes how the hard-core of the leftist movement came principally from immigrant Europeans who really did not understand how Americans looked at their country. Americans tended to want to get a piece of the action rather than to overturn the whole system. He does not attempt to analyze how this disaffection of loyalty to country took hold of and persisted in so many American intellectuals in the northeast, the upper midwest, and the west coast. Was it an "in thing" to do? Was it a sort of American class distinction between the intellectuals and the rest of the country? What was it?

I will have to look further for the answers that I seek and maybe those answers are to be found in books on psychology rather than books on politics. However, there were other items of interest. One of the most interesting to me was Weinstein's description of Huey Long. Although I don't like the rough-and-tumble politics he played, I found myself in agreement with his social goals. There is also a bit of interesting material on the battles of farmers and ranchers with railroad and banking interests prior to WWI.

All in all, a good read but ultimately disappointing to me.

Highlights of U.S. Socialist History

Reviewed by Thomas M. Seay, 2004-01-12

James Weinsteins new book "The Long Detour" situates the problems and potentialities of the American Left within a brief history. From the earliest years of the Left, we see some of the issues which American left-wing activists still address: purity of ideology vs pragmatism, relationship to nationalism, sectarian nit-picking, authoritarianism, foreign models vs a model truly adapted to American conditions, the problem of single issue movements vs. a broader movement against capitalism, centralism vs. decentralism, etc. By providing a panorama of these issues within a historical context, we can see that in general, each generation of U.S. leftists repeats similar mistakes as in the past and often fails to implement strategies that have worked.

The U.S. Left in recent history has thrived on "negative" movements. This is apparent through the names of these movements: anti-war, anti-racism, etc. When these single, negative movements come to an end, so does the whole cycle of struggle. Often, as Weinstein shows, these movements get co-opted by liberal capitalists. At the end of the book, Weinstein attempts to put forward a "positive" program of his own. One might criticize Weinstein's program as one that could be co-opted by a liberal agenda as well: health care and education reform. Certainly these are reforms worth fighting for, but his positive program gives no clue as how to include this program within a broader strategy of moving to a socialist society...it only is a program that would try to revamp the deteriorating welfare system.

Unfortunately Weinstein's history ends more or less at the demise of the New Left. He barely mentions the anti-globalization movement and that is unfortunate. The current anti-globalization movements face novel issues and it would be helpful if Weinstein brought his experience to bear on it. Capital has tended reconstitute itself into global networks. The nation-state is no longer the node in the capitalist nexus that it once was. Vast movements of capital can
take place in the click of a mouse. Weinstein correctly says that the terrain changed with the arrival of post-industrialism, but he does not seem to fully appreciate the novelty and challenges (for the US left) of the mature informational society and globalization . He suggests that the nation-state is still relevant in that the military- to be used as a stick against those who would revolt against the new global order- still reside within the nation-state. That is undoubtedly true, but Weinstein does not address the other forms of control and power-both blatant and insidious- that exist within the global order.

Weinstein's postive program relies mostly on electoral politics; while we should not dismiss the ballot box as a locus of struggle, the author should address the potential pitfalls of restricting a movement to the voting booth. In any case, this books is well worth reading for its summary of problems and traps that the American Left has fallen into historically. It does attempt to promote a positive program, but it fails in this regard. That is an important chapter that has yet to be written.

The Long Detour

Reviewed by norman wishner, 2003-09-29

James Weinstein, in covering the rise and fall (but not death) of socialism in the U.S., does an excellent job of recounting many momentous (and perhaps forgotten) events, expertly summarized in clear, comprehensible prose. (Reminded me of Howard Zinn in that respect.)

Besides great clarity, he displays a heady mixture of humanitarianism and pragmatism: check out the penultimate chapter with its prescriptions for overcoming the shortcomings of a great nation.

The Long Detour couldn't have come at a more propitious time, considering our disasterous foreign and domestic policies.

One can learn more than a few things from this book. I know I did. (And I'm 75.)