Thoughts on Capitalism and Socialism:
Utopian and Realistic

Martin J. Sklar
Bucknell University

The conference at which a shorter version of this discussion was originally presented had as its theme, "Eugene V. Debs and the Politics of Dissent in Modern America." Let me begin with a few words about "the Politics of Dissent," because it was part of the overall framework of our discussions, and because it has a significant bearing on the way we think about capitalism and socialism.	1
It would be a mistake in historical interpretation to equate dissent exclusively with minority currents running only on the left side of the mainstream, whether with or against it. In real history, dissent runs on left and right alike, and often in the middle, in the U.S. as elsewhere. Dissent may represent majority opinion out of power, as much as minority opinion out of power. Dissent may represent opinion of those holding power yet unable to translate it into effective law or policy. Dissent and the politics of dissent, then, are not as simple or obvious a matter of history as it may at first sight seem. Many of us, especially historians in the present mood, take pride in thinking ourselves dissenters and our work dissenting, and this tells us something about ourselves and our own biases or presuppositions. Nevertheless, let us not flatter ourselves, or indulge presumptuously righteous pretensions, in thinking or proclaiming ourselves and our favorite historical figures the dissenters, or the paragons of the politics of dissent or of the dissenting tradition. Let us be historians, not promoters.	2
In its colonial and early national times, the U.S. was founded, formed, and led by religious and secular dissenters, and its mainstream politics and culture have ever since frothed and bubbled with the ideas, values, and acts of dissenters. Take some examples. Dissenting Protestants led colonizing efforts and played prominent roles in colonial politics. Dissenting republicans and clergy led the Revolutionary struggle against Britain and in the founding of the new independent nation. Self-styled federalists started as dissenters against the Articles of Confederation, and they became the new establishment with the Constitution of 1787. The new Federalist Party of the 1790s started in power, and ended with the delegates at the Hartford Convention of 1814-15 acting as dissenters against war, expansion, and slavery, before the party as such disappeared. Abolitionists (evangelical and secular, female and male, black and white) started as marginal dissenters, and ended up in the mainstream and powerfully defining it. Slave-holders and pro-slavery advocates started in the mainstream, exercising great positions and levers of power in society and government, and ended up rebels, dissenters, and then out of it altogether unless they changed their holdings and their advocacy. Similar observations may be made about advocates of trade unionism and collective bargaining: at first dissenters then later victors over capitalists and free-marketeers; about advocates of womenÕs rights vs. male supremacists; about advocates of racial equality and civil rights vs. racists and state-rightists. Other examples in U.S. history may come to mind. Beyond the U.S., donÕt forget that Nazis and Fascists were at first dissenters, as were Communists, and when they took power, liberals, conservatives, social democrats became the dissenters.	. . .