Toward Soviet America

by William Z. Foster

Publisher: New York, Coward-McCann, inc Publication date: 1932
Subjects: Capitalism — United States

Socialism

Communism — United States

United States — Economic conditions 1918-1945
Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.
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Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction

343 pages, Hardcover

First published January 2, 1932

About the author

Labor organizer and Marxist politician. Joined the Socialist party in 1901, later became a Wobbly, Syndicalist, and Communist. Three times a presidential candidate of the Communist party.

Reviews

[Brad · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1932 the United States' Communist leader William Z. Foster wrote his book about the inevitability of the fall of capitalism and the rise of communism, and how that would and must occur in the United States before leading to the worldwide Soviet. We all know how that turned out, so reading Foster's Marxist prophecies of a glorious Soviet world are kind of funny. Not nearly as funny, however, as the moronic commentary provided in this book by Dr. Maurice Ries of Tulane University and House of Un-American Activities Congressman Francis E. Walter. I'll let those American gentleman speak for themselves in their final proof of the insidiousness and evil that is Soviet Communism:

But not all of the conspirators' [meaning Foster and his fellow communists] working hours are devoted directly to revolution. Many of those hours are expended upon subversion of other sorts. ...They include: agitating for the release of "political prisoners"; demonstrating against "imperialist war"; taking control of various non-political disagreements and turning them into "broad class struggles" having a "political character"; defending the Soviet Union, Red China, and other Communist countries; demanding more and more unemployment insurance; fomenting racial trouble [specifically aiding African-Americans in their fight against "the man"]; pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy; insisting upon shorter working hours with pay for a full day's work; pressing for rent reduction; claiming the right for people on relief to operate the relief agency that is supporting them; urging steadily increasing trade with the USSR; calling for larger relief payments; trying to force the withdrawal of American armed forces from areas of Communist aggression; proposing old-age benefits from the Government; clamoring for cash payments to farmers; ordering dock workers and longshoremen not to handle military shipments; proclaiming solidarity with the "masses in Latin-America in their fight against American imperialism"; opposing the deportation of foreign-born agitators and law violators; struggling to oust Conservatives from all positions of leadership; making "special demands" for women in industry, in order to obligate working women to the Communist Party; organizing students in Young Communist groups; resisting the finger-printing of foreign-born workers; forming "mass organizations" (Communist fronts) as needed; combating injunctions and court decisions by "a policy of mass violation"; carrying on agitation for "rights of free speech, free assembly"; working inside labor unions to split labor from management; striving to elect pro-Communist candidates to public office; creating Communist cells in mines, mills, factories, and other locations; maintaining an extensive party press; and ranting for the right of US Negroes to set up their own nation in the South's "Black Belt."

I presume more eloquent men that Ries and Walter could have done a better job of counteracting William Z. Foster's call for Soviet Revolution in the US, and made slightly smaller asses of themselves. But their jingoism and un-American opinions aside, there was one area of discussion in Toward Soviet America that was well researched, well thought out, and thoroughly convincing: when William Z. Foster was talking about what was wrong with Capitalism and how its influence would destroy American from the Thirties into the future, he was spot on. His criticism is as relevant today as it must have been on the verge of the Great Depression, with the First World War still a fresh wound and the Second World War looking large. Much of what he says could be stripped of its Communist bent and replanted in Occupy pamphlet or an Anonymous manifesto, and the evidence is staying fresh and renewing itself all the time.

This is worth a read if you are curious what the America Soviets really made of the country they were living in back the day.

[P Bernhardt · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a tough and slow read. Mr. Foster is a communist and uses statistics to demonstrate how excellent the Soviet system under Lenin is and how bad Fascism, Socialism, and Capitalism in America are. The most useful information I gleaned from this book is how he describes each of the different economic theories. Most of his glorious successes in the former Soviet Union have been shown by history to be failures. Still, he explains how someone might come to believe such tripe. For students of government and economics, it should be a more interesting read.

[Devin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Towards the end of the book, Foster admonishes the utopians, who, Foster says, recognized that humanity was capable of much great lives than that under which we suffer via capitalism, but their issue was that they did not know what the issue was with society or how to fix it. The same, unfortunately, can be said of Foster.

My main issue with this book is that it completely ignores the question of colonialism and the role of colonialism in the rise of u.s. capitalism and imperialism. It completely ignores the self-determination of Indigenous people -- Foster makes claim time and time again that "we" will redistribute the land under socialism, but he is part and parcel of the group of people -- white people -- who are responsible for continued colonization. Communism that does not focus on land redistribution of Indigenous people primarily, and thus, the self-determination of Black and Brown people, is just colonialism all over again. Oddly enough, Foster even makes MENTION of the self-determination of Black people! But fails to somehow connect this to an anti-colonialist struggle. This was written years before writers like Cesaire, Fanon, and Nkrumah came onto the scene, and it is sorely obvious.

Foster's analysis of u.s. capitalism is, largely, spot on. The exploitation of workers, the use of imperialism for world capitalist conquest, even the reactionary leaders of the trade unions, namely the AFL! Foster even goes for Al Capone in one sentence, which in this day, was probably pretty gutsy to do. He recognizes that the Great Depression has stripped bare the facade of capitalism's "prosperous" nature, and continually compares it to how the USSR at the time was handling it (spoiler alert: they were handling it very well -- don't let any Trots know I said that), but his attempts to put the entire framework and strategy of the USSR onto the struggle in the united states is like, say, trying to put a square block in a triangular hole. The revolution in the united states, if it had happened at all, would look VASTLY different than the the Bolshevik Revolution; it would have had to or it'd have failed immediately, or as soon as the colonialist question came to try to pass.

Foster's analysis is strictly class-based. He sees the proletarian as the Communist Party, with specially-oppressed groups intermixed and joining later. The Communist Party USA -- which has sense slid into so much reactionary views that they're essentially the democratic party's token to attack revolutionaries today, was full of white people, particularly white men, at this time, though you had powerhouses like Harry Haywood challenging his white comrades every step of the way, and because of this, it is easy for Foster to slip into some daydream where the proletariat just one day, regardless of race or gender, puts their tools down and says "I'm sick of this shit", and overthrows the bourgeois capitalists. It is grounded in the reactionary reality that white Communists at this time (and even today) do not pay attention to the anti-colonialist struggle, and do not address the colonialist question, and not in the revolutionary reality that the revolution will not be led by white people, but rather Black and Brown and Indigenous people, not the white-led trade unions, but by Black and Brown and Indigenous people, with or without a union.

Do I hate this book? No. Do I think it is an important work? Of course. Is it a primary text of Marxism-Leninism that taught me a lot? Yes, but most of the time, not in a good way.

[Sam (Twinkrev) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A timeless piece that translates well to this day, highlighting the flaws of capitalism, the groups who maintain the current order, and a vision for a free and prosperous socialist USA.

[Giles Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foster is a forgotten but highly influential figure from America's radical past. His writings are concise and devoid of much of the verbose rhetoric common to most Marxist writers, which makes this, his premier work, much like the "Common Sense" of the 20th century.

[Karl Golinski · Rating 1 out of 5]

Completely inaccurate as history has shown. Save your money. The dude was off his rocker