>This touches on one of the interesting - and, to be honest, appealing
>- aspects of Marxism: it's at once an "elitist" and a radically
>egalitarian doctrine. Marx himself made few compromises to appeal to
>a popular audience; even the Manifesto requires the reading skills of
>a high-school graduate (according to Microsoft Word's grammar
>checker, which recommends documents aspire to the 7th or 8th grade
>level!). Lenin and Trotsky had high cultural expectations for the
>working class - they wanted proletarians to assimilate the best of
>bourgeois culture.... Dennis Claxton
Doug wrote that. I just remembered it.
>-----------------
>
>I've wondered about this while reading Kapital. Who is this text
>for? How could you write for the working class and expect them to
>understand this?
>
>The best answer I could come up with was the self taught worker who
>went home at night and read under the gas light at the kitchen table
>after the wife and kids were tucked in their beds. Smoking his pipe
>and meditating on his life with some wine, gin, or tea, a book,
>turning in late. His heavy body falling into the soft covers and the
>warmth of his wife. It's not all that bad a life, he said, settling
>into dreams.
But it was more than reading alone:
http://www.okctalk.com/showthread.php?t=13351&page=1
Finally, the explanation for Oklahoma activists' success includes another sort of redefinition. Party members in the Sooner State came to understand that the message of socialism would not succeed as long as it remained an alien doctrine expressed in terms unfamiliar to its intended constituency. As they searched for a way of conceptualizing the truths of Marxism that would be consistent with the life experiences of small farmers, Oklahoma socialists seized upon the deep communitarian components embedded in the evangelical Christian tradition. A dominant cultural folkway in the Oklahoma countryside, evangelical Protestantism was a tradition they knew well. Employing the powerful cultural form of Christianity to help express socialist ideas, Party members in Oklahoma transformed both the gospel of Christ and the gospel of socialism. While retaining the Marxist core of the socialist message, activists in the Sooner State presented that message in a form that was instantly recognizable to virtually all of its potential constituents.
Here are the essentials that comprise the Oklahoma socialist movement. Through their experiences in the Farmers Alliance and the Farmers' Union, many Oklahoma socialists had learned valuable lessons in conducting the campaigns necessary to change the institutions of society. They presented a clear and concise indictment of the existing agricultural system, grounded firmly in past movements and in the life experiences of small farmers. They demanded that their organization and their leaders behave in democratic ways. And they knew how to present the ideas of Marxism in a cultural form that made sense in the Oklahoma countryside.
Inherent in the experience of Oklahoma socialists, in fact, was the joining of three important political and cultural traditions: (1) the Jeffersonian emphasis on the common man, the dignity of labor, and the importance of the land, brought by the Alliance and the Farmers' Union into the twentieth century; (2) the scathing indictment of capitalism set down by Karl Marx and brought to America by his disciples; and (3) the evangelical Protestant tradition that had been central to the American experience since the Great Revival of the early nineteenth century. In the hands of Oklahoma Party members, this concoction proved to be both relevant and powerful. The Marxist message of class conflict blended easily with the Jeffersonian promise of yeoman democracy to produce an especially volatile mix that became even more compelling when instilled with the moral authority of Christianity.
Yet these explanations present the Oklahoma success in terms that are almost exclusively political. As a result, they cannot completely account for its accomplishments. In the end, the energy, strength, and skill with which Oklahoma Party members built their movement was as much a cultural achievement as it was a political victory. In their party, Oklahoma socialists created a community where they could enjoy the basic privileges denied them in the larger society and through which they could work to correct the imperfections of their world.
The Oklahoma activists saw their proposed program as simply a more decent, fair, and just alternative to a world they knew to be fatally flawed. Since socialists in the Sooner State conceptualized their ideological and moral claims in a manner that fell well within accepted American boundaries, they did not think of their platform as militant or radical. Indeed, Oklahoma Party members saw the socialist program as a way of bringing their society into compliance with the democratic and moral values central to American cultural and political traditions, a goal they considered to be eminently reasonable. Even so, the core of their message remained uncompromisingly Marxist. Through their response to the European War, their stand on race, and their support for national socialist speakers and candidates, Party members in the Sooner State proved to be genuine, authentic socialists.
Here, then, was the secret to Oklahoma socialists' strength: They succeeded in presenting their views in a way that carried the power of the republican ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the moral teachings of Jesus Christ, and the political theories of Karl Marx. Only if we think of the Oklahoma movement in these terms do we begin to grasp the magnitude of its achievement. Those who were part of the movement believed absolutely in the propriety of their actions. Their story represents the life experiences of thousands of citizens who learned the lessons of democracy in the schoolroom of activism. Their sense of empowerment was deep enough to force all Oklahoma politicians -- Democrats, Republicans, and socialists -- to conduct their discourse in terms not generally present in the American political system. Presented in this context, the story of the Socialist Party of Oklahoma promises great insight into the workings of American democracy. It is well worth our careful attention. Also, I noticed this, Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980), at <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAzinn.htm>Howard Zinn
Eugene Debs had become a Socialist while in jail in the Pullman strike. Now he was the spokesman of a party that made him its presidential candidate five times. The party at one time had 100,000 members, and 1,200 office holders in 340 municipalities. Its main newspaper, Appeal to Reason, for which Debs wrote, had half a million subscribers, and there were many other Socialist newspapers around the country, so that, all together, perhaps a million people read the Socialist press.
Socialism moved out of the small circles of city immigrants - Jewish and German socialists speaking their own languages - and became American. The strongest Socialist state organization was in Oklahoma, which in 1914 had twelve thousand dues-paying members (more than New York State), and elected over a hundred Socialists to local office, including six to the Oklahoma state legislature. There were fifty-five weekly Socialist newspapers in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and summer encampments that drew thousands of people.
http://s8.photobucket.com/albums/a49/DougLoudenback/socialists/
Here's one clip from the 11/2/1906 Oklahoman, just to show that the Socialist Party was a real deal back then ... it even had it's own symbol on the ballot:
[]