Karl Marx knew what the DSA doesnt. America hates socialism

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels weren’t right about much, but they made some astute observations about America while trying to explain why it was so resistant to socialism. According to Marx’s theory, as the world’s most advanced capitalist country, and one that was industrializing at a rapid clip, the United States was supposed to be closest to the inevitable socialist revolution. “The country that is more developed industrially shows to the less developed the image of their future,” Marx wrote in “Das Kapital.” This meant that “Americans will be the first to usher in a Socialist republic,” a leader of the German Social Democrats said in 1907, one among countless such confident predictions. If Polymarket had existed at the time — and socialists had been OK with prediction markets — all the Marxists would have bought “yes” shares on a proletarian revolution in the United States. But it became pretty clear that this wasn’t happening, at least not on anything like the schedule that the socialists were expecting. So, Marx and Engels had some explaining to do. In his stilted terms, Marx remarked how the mobility of American workers kept a dispossessed class from developing: “The wage-worker of today is tomorrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself.

He vanishes from the labor-market, but not into the workhouse.”Engels noted how we never experienced feudalism. Americans, he wrote, “are born conservatives — just because America is so purely bourgeois, so entirely without a feudal past and therefore proud of its purely bourgeois organization.”Then, there was our prosperity. “The native American workingman’s standard of living is considerably higher than even that of the British,” Engels observed, “and that alone suffices to place him in the rear for still some time to come.”Granted, Marx and Engels never met Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist congressional candidate in New York City who made f...