Socialism :: essays research papers

HistoryThe state-controlled Party of the United States of America was formally organized at a unity convention in Indianapolis in 1901. The two merging groups were the Social Democratic Party of Eugene Victor Debs and the "Kangaroo" wing of the older Socialist application Party. From the beginning the Socialist Party was the organization for American radicals. Its membership included Marxists of various kinds, Christian socialists, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish socialists, foreign-language speaking sections, and virtually every conformation of American radical. The Socialist Party historically stressed cooperatives as much as labor unions, and included the concepts of revolution by education and of "building the sweet society within the shell of the old." The Socialist Party aimed to become a major party in the years prior to World War I it elected two Members of Congress, over 70 mayors, innumerable state legislators and city councilors. Its membership topped 100,000, and its Presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, received close to a million votes in 1912 and again in 1920. The outbreak of the war against Fascism and the wartime prosperity weakened all parties on the left. While the Communist Party suffered the most from the McCarthy period, all the left was severely impaired, and by the mid-fifties little remained of organized radical governing. The Socialist Party was down to about 2,000 members, and had more or less withdrawn from electoral follow up in the face of the increasingly restrictive ballot-access laws passed by state legislatures around the country. In 1956 the Socialist Party and the Social Democratic Federation reunited, under force per unit area from the Socialist International (with which both groups were affiliated).By 1970, the Socialist Party was showing a growing tendency toward democratic centralism in practice. At the end of 1972 the Socialist Party, changed its name to Social Democrats USA. Since 1973 the Socia list Party USA has focused its attention more on grassroots and local politics, and has dealt with the controversial issue of Presidential politics on a case-by-case basis. Due to Americas restrictive and often undemocratic ballot access laws (which have made it almost impossible to break the two-part monopoly on national politics), the party views the races primarily as opportunities for educating the public about socialism and the need for electoral democracy in the US. Socialist Partys PhilosophyThe Socialist Party stands for the abolition of every form of domination and exploitation, whether based on social class, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or other characteristics.