A Brief History of the American Left（美国左派简明历史）

Socialists were influential in the leadership of some major American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions, as well as in independent unions such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Socialist and non-Socialist radicals in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) pioneered in the organization of unions among immigrant workers in mass production industries in cities like Lawrence and Patterson, and among migrant workers in the lumber camps and mining towns of the far west. While the Socialist Party was not immune to the racism endemic in turn of-the-century America, Socialists were among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The ideas of the Socialist movement attracted a growing following on college campuses, in church groups, and in the settlement house and women’s movements. The key to the Socialist Party’s success in the 1910s was unity in diversity. Its members disagreed with each other on some issues (whether, for example, to put their main emphasis on electoral or union organizing), but for a while the common goal of democratic socialism seemed more important than tactical or ideological differences.

社会主义党人在一些主要的美国劳工联合会（AFL）工会以及诸如合并服装工人等独立工会的领导中具有影响力。世界工业工人（IWW）的社会主义党人和非社会主义党人激进分子在Lawrence 和Patterson等城市的大规模生产行业的移民工人组织中，以及遥远西部的木材营地和矿业城镇的移民工人中成为了工会的先驱。虽然社会主义党在本世纪之交对种族主义流行病没有免疫，但社会主义党人是全国有色人种协进会（NAACP）的创始人之一。社会主义运动的思想吸引了在大学校园，教会团体，定居点和妇女运动中吸引了越来越多的人跟随。社会主义党在1910s取得成功的关键是保有多样性的统一。其成员在某些问题上不一致（例如，是否主要进行选举工作或组织工会），但有一段时间，民主社会主义的共同目标似乎比战术或意识形态差异更重要。

In the long run, Debs’s optimism proved misplaced. The year 1912 was the high-water mark of Socialist strength. The party fell on hard times with the coming of the First World War. Pre-existing internal tensions were exacerbated by debates over the party’s attitude towards American involvement in the war, followed by debates over whether (or how best) to support the Russian Revolution. Official repression of antiwar dissent led to the imprisonment of Debs and dozens of other Socialist leaders, while Socialist legislators were expelled from public office and the Socialist press was banned from the mails. As a Communist Party on the Russian model split from the Socialist Party, and the IWW went into a sharp decline, the radical movement in general slipped into the doldrums in the 1920s.

长久来看，Debs的乐观情绪被证明是错误的。 1912年是社会主义党力量的高潮。 但随着第一次世界大战的到来，该党陷入了艰难时期。 关于党对美国参与战争的态度的辩论加剧了先前存在的内部紧张局势，随后就是否（或如何最好地）支持俄国革命进行了辩论。 官方镇压反战异议导致了Debs和其他数十名社会主义党领导者被监禁，而社会主义立法者被驱逐出公职，社会主义出版物被禁止进入邮寄系统。作为俄罗斯模式的共产党从社会党分裂出来，IWW急剧下滑，激进的运动在1920s陷入了低迷状态。

With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, however, faith in American capitalism went into a tail-spin, and the fortunes of the radical movement revived. Despite the deep divisions that beset the left, radicals from a number of different groups — Socialists, Communists, and Trotskyists among them — played a central role in the struggles of the unemployed to win adequate relief in the early 1930s, and in the vast expansion of industrial unionism through the organization of the new Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) in the later 1930s. Socialists helped to organize Detroit autoworkers and southern sharecroppers; Communists were influential in drives to organize the auto, steel, electrical, and longshore industries, among others.

然而，随着1929年大萧条的开始，对美国资本主义的信仰陷入了尾声，而激进运动的未来又复活了。尽管深刻分歧困扰着左派，来自不同群体的激进分子—社会主义党人，共产党人和他们中的托洛茨基主义者—在失业者的斗争中发挥了核心作用，在1930s初期赢得了足够的救济，并在1930s后期组建新的工业组织大会（CIO），工业工会主义得到了广泛的扩张。社会主义党人帮助底特律汽车工人和南部佃农组织起来; 共产党人在推动组织汽车，钢铁，电力和沿海产业等方面具有影响力。

While neither Socialists nor Communists were able to replicate the electoral successes of the Debsian era, the Socialists were able to attract a million votes for Norman Thomas, their Presidential candidate in 1932. Running in the Democratic primary, the Socialist novelist Upton Sinclair captured the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in California in 1934. And during the “Popular Front” era of the later 1930s, when Communists sought to build a broad-based American movement not so explicitly tied to the Soviet model, the Communists developed a considerable political base and measure of influence within the Democratic Party in such states as Washington, Minnesota, and California, and in the American Labor Party in New York. The Thirties did not usher in “the Revolution,” contrary to the expectations of many at the start of the decade. Nevertheless, much had changed for the better in American politics in the space of a few years. While Franklin Roosevelt’s administration was never the hotbed of radicalism it was portrayed as in right-wing propaganda, it is certainly true that radicals helped play midwife at the birth of the liberal-labor “New Deal coalition” that would shape the contours of Democratic Party politics over the next three decades.

虽然社会主义党人和共产党人者都无法复制Debs的时代的选举成功，但社会主义党人在1932年能够为他们的总统候选人Norman Thomas吸引到一百万张选票。参加了民主党初选，社会主义党人小说家Upton Sinclair在1934年在加利福尼亚州的州长提名中获得了民主党官员的支持。在20世纪30年代后期的“人民阵线”时代，当共产党人试图建立一个与苏联模式没有明确联系的基础广泛的美国运动时，共产党人在华盛顿，明尼苏达州和加利福尼亚州以及纽约的美国工党内发展出了相当大的政治基础和标准，以及在民主党内的影响。三十年代没有迎来“革命”，这与年初时许多人的期望相反。尽管如此，在几年的时间里，美国政治的变化已经有了很大的改变。虽然富兰克林罗斯福的政府从来不是右翼宣传中描绘的激进主义的温床，但自由派劳动者的“新政联盟”诞生时，激进分子帮助扮演助产士，这将在未来三十年内塑造民主党的轮廓。

Radicals were not, however, in a position to take independent advantage of the new political possibilities opening before them. The Socialist Party finished the decade once again in disarray, wounded by an internal factional battle with Trotskyists (with whom they shared little beyond a hatred of Stalinism), and divided over the question of whether they should abandon their long-standing refusal to back Democratic Party candidates. The Communist Party, though nominally more “revolutionary” than the Socialists, had proven tactically more flexible, and its tacit alliance with Roosevelt had helped it to grow to perhaps as many as 75,000 members by 1938 (with another 20,000 in the Young Communist League). After a bruising few years when its international guide, Stalin, was allied with Hitler, the American Communist Party seemed to emerge triumphant during the years of the “Grand Alliance,” when the United States and the Soviet Union were allied against fascism and it was possible to be both “patriotic” and “pro-Soviet.” But with the onset of the Cold War in 1945, radicalism of any sort was again suspect, and the Communists came under particularly ferocious attack.

然而，激进主义者并没有能够独立地利用他们面前开启的新政治可能性。社会主义党再一次陷入混乱，在与托洛茨基主义者的内部派系争斗中（他们除了在对斯大林主义的仇恨之外并没有共享更多相同之处）受到伤害，并且在是否应该放弃长期拒绝的态度并回去支持民主党候选人的问题上出现了分歧。共产党虽然名义上比社会主义党人更具“革命性”，但在战术上已经被证明更具灵活性，与罗斯福的默契联盟帮助它在1938年成长为可能多达75,000名成员（在青年共产主义联盟中又有2万名成员） 。在他们的国际导师斯大林与希特勒结盟几年之后，美国共产党似乎在“大联盟”期间取得胜利，当时美国和苏联结盟反对法西斯主义，并将是“爱国的”和“亲苏的”变得可能同时成立。但随着1945年冷战的开始，任何形式的激进主义再次受到怀疑，而共产党人受到了特别凶猛的攻击。

By the mid-1950s, dozens of Communist Party leaders had been imprisoned under the Smith Act, while thousands of rank and file Communists were harassed by the FBI, dragged before Congressional investigating committees, denied passports, and in many instances fired from their jobs. Several of the most unscrupulous men in postwar American political life, including Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, built their careers on the shrewd manipulation of anticommunist hysteria. In the end, the Communist Party was able to survive McCarthyism. What finally led to its demise as the most important force on the left was its own internal disagreements, brought to a head in 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of his now safely-dead predecessor Stalin. This “de-Stalinization crisis” led many American Communists to question not only their previous unquestioning support of Soviet policies, but also the undemocratic nature of Soviet-style socialism and the authoritarian nature of their own movement. Most of these dissenters left the party after 1956.

到1950s中期，数十名共产党领导人根据史密斯法案被监禁，而数千名共产党员受到联邦调查局（FBI）的骚扰，被国会调查委员会拖走，被拒绝护照，并在许多情况下被解雇。战后美国政治生活中一些最肆无忌惮的人，包括约瑟夫麦卡锡和理查德尼克松，在精明的操纵反共的歇斯底里的过程中建立了自己的事业。最后，共产党成功在麦卡锡主义中生存下来。最终导致它作为左派中最重要力量的消亡的是它自己的内部分歧，这是在1956年由苏联领导人赫鲁晓夫谴责他现在安全死去的前任斯大林引起的。这场“去斯大林化危机”导致许多美国共产党人质疑他们以前对苏联政策不加质疑的支持，也质疑苏联式社会主义的不民主性质以及他们自己的运动的独裁性质。这些持不同政见者大多数在1956年后离开了党。

Even as the Communist Party disintegrated in the mid-1950s, a new wave of radical activism began to take shape. This time, however, it would not be the traditional socialist parties of the left that would lead the way, nor would the organization of the industrial working class be the main concern of the new radicals. Starting with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and accelerating with the sit-in movement launched by black students in Greensboro and a dozen other southern cities in 1960, movements emerged that were destined to change the U.S. political landscape. White students, inspired by the example of their black counterparts in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), were drawn into civil rights protests, and from there into a wide range of movements for peace, university reform, and social change. Many joined a new campus group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which became the main organizational vehicle for what was beginning to be called the “new left”.

即使共产党在1950s中期解体，一股新的激进主义浪潮也开始形成。然而，这一次，左派的传统社会主义政党不会引领潮流，工业工人阶级的组织也不会成为新激进分子的主要关注点。从1955-1956年的蒙哥马利公共汽车抵制开始，由马丁·路德金博士领导，并在1960年由格林斯博罗和其他十几个南方城市的黑人学生发起的静坐运动加速，出现了注定会改变美国的政治格局的运动。受到学生非暴力协调委员会（SNCC）的黑人同行的鼓舞，白人学生被吸引到民权抗议活动中，并从那里进入广泛的和平，大学改革和社会变革运动。许多人加入了一个新的校园小组，民主社会学生（SDS），成为开始被称为“新左派”的主要组织工具。

A series of developments in mid-decade — including John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the murder of civil rights activists in the South, and the mounting escalation of the Vietnam war — spurred the growth of the new left, while tarnishing the optimism of the early 1960s. Over the years in which the war in Vietnam raged on, a loose coalition of radical activists developed the broadest and most diverse antiwar movement in American history. It was, to be sure, a turbulent and in many ways a tragic era. Some student protesters, in despair over bringing the war to an end (and sometimes egged on by government agents), turned to selfdefeating violent street confrontations and even to bombings. But it should also be remembered that, by the end of the 1960s, antiwar sentiment had spread from elite Ivy League universities to working-class community colleges and high schools, and that groups like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War were playing an increasingly prominent role in antiwar demonstrations. The general cultural and political ferment of the decade also gave rise to a revived feminist movement and a new gay liberation movement.

在这一个十年中期的一系列事态发展—包括约翰·肯尼迪被暗杀，南方民权活动人士被谋杀，以及越南战争的不断升级—刺激了新左翼的增长，同时玷污了新左派在1960s初期的乐观情绪。在越南战争非常激烈的岁月里，松散的激进分子联盟在美国历史上发展出了最广泛，最多样化的反战运动。可以肯定的是，这是一个动荡的时代，在很多方面都是一个悲惨的时代。一些学生抗议者，绝望地结束了战斗（有时候被政府特工怂恿），转向自我击败的街头对抗，甚至是爆炸。但我们也应该记住，到1960s末期，反战情绪已经从精英们的常春藤盟校扩展到工人阶级的社区学院和高中，像越战老兵这样的团体在反战示威中正在扮演越来越重要的角色。这十年的大众文化和政治骚动也促成了复兴的女权主义运动和新的同性恋解放运动。

At the end of the 1960s the left again faltered. If the old left Socialists and Communists had been too wedded to the “New Deal coalition” of urban ethnics and industrial workers to respond adequately to the new black, youth, and women’s insurgencies, nevertheless those new constituencies alone could not build a stable base for a mass new left. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 hastened the demise of the civil rights movement, while SNCC and SDS collapsed from sectarian excesses. The antiwar movement held on into the early 1970s but, by the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, had lost most of its momentum. And not only was the left collapsing, but this time the New Deal coalition itself — the mass base for American liberalism — was showing signs of increasing instability, as Richard Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972 indicated. This liberal weakness became progressively clearer as Nixon’s fall in the Watergate scandal led, not to a revival of the New Deal coalition, but to a long-term revival of radical conservatism in the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan.

在1960s末期，左派再次摇摇欲坠。如果旧左派社会主义党人和共产党人过于坚持城市伦理学和产业工人的“新政联盟”，对新的黑人，青年和妇女的反抗没能作出充分的反应，那么仅靠这些新选民也无法为一个新的大众左派建立一个稳定的基础。马丁路德金于1968年被暗杀，这加速了民权运动的消亡，而SNCC和SDS因派系过激而崩溃。反战运动一直持续到1970s初期，但是，1973年签署的“巴黎和平协定”使得反战运动失去了大部分的势头。不仅左派崩溃了，而且这次新政联盟本身——美国自由主义的群众基础——显示出不稳定性增加的迹象，正如理查德尼克松在1968年和1972年的胜利所表明的那样。随着尼克松在水门事件丑闻中的垮台，新政联盟并没有复兴，以及罗纳德里根统治下共和党的激进保守主义的长期复兴，这种自由主义的弱点变得越来越清晰。

From the beginning of this long period of deepening conservatism in the early 1970s, several groups continued to uphold the traditions of the American left. Two in particular sought to recreate the broad and tolerant spirit of the Debsian Socialist Party, while absorbing also the new lessons, causes, and constituencies over which the left had stumbled in the intervening decades. The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) had been founded by Michael Harrington out of some fragments of the old Socialist Party. DSOC continued to operate, in the old Socialist or Communist manner, as the left-wing of the New Deal coalition, clearly now not as a separate political party but as an explicitly socialist force within the Democratic Party and the labor movement. It met with some success in attracting young activists disenchanted with the Democratic Party’s drift and seeking ways to galvanize the ailing party coalition. DSOC also drew to its banner a number of well-known public figures, such as Machinists’ Union leader William Winpisinger, feminist Gloria Steinem, gay rights activist Harry Britt, actor Ed Asner, and California Congressman Ron Dellums, the first avowed socialist in Congress since World War Two.

从1970s初这一长期深化保守主义周期的开始，几个团体继续坚持美国左派的传统。特别是其中两个组织试图重建Debs的社会主义党的广泛和宽容精神，同时也吸收了左派在几十年间偶然发现的新的教训，事业和选区。民主社会主义组织委员会（DSOC）由Michael Harrington从旧社会主义党的一些碎片中建立起来。DSOC继续以旧社会主义党或共产党的方式作为新政联盟的左翼运作，显然现在不是一个单独的政党，而是民主党和工人运动中明确的社会主义力量。它在吸引年轻活动者方面取得了一些成功，这些活动者们对民主党的漂移感到不满，并寻求激励陷入困境的政党联盟。DSOC还展示了不少知名公众人物成员，如机械师联盟领导人William Winpisinger，女权主义者Gloria Steinem，同性恋权利活动家Harry Britt，演员Ed Asner以及加州国会议员Ron Dellums，他是国会上自二战以来第一位公开宣称自己的社会主义者。

The New American Movement (NAM) emerged at about the same time, more from the new left than from the old, though it counted in its number some former Communists who had left their party after 1956. NAM, true to these new left origins, was more skeptical about the long-term future of the New Deal coalition, and accordingly devoted its energies more than did DSOC to the new movements of the 1960s, especially feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, and local community organizing.

新美国运动（NAM）大约在同一时间出现，更多来自新左派而不是旧左派，尽管它算入了1956年以后离开他们党的一些前共产党人的数量。NAM，对于这些新左派来说是真实的， 他们对新政联盟的长期未来持更加怀疑的态度，因此比DSOC在1960年代的新运动中投入更多，特别是在女权主义，同性恋解放和当地社区组织中。

But neither NAM nor DSOC saw their heritages and organizing areas as mutually exclusive, and by the early 1980s — especially considering the weakness of the American left — came to see themselves as complementary, completing a formal merger in 1983. The merged organization, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for the first time since the First World War brought together the various splinters of left opinion in America: former Socialists and Communists, former old leftists and new leftists, and many who had never been leftists at all. The decades of disunion had taken their toll. The hundreds of thousands of Debs’s day had dwindled to mere thousands. But a new beginning now seems possible in the 1990s As the old Cold War polarities break down, DSA has an opportunity to demonstrate that the history of the American left had reached a turning-point, not an end.

但是，NAM和DSOC都没有看到他们的遗产和组织区域是相互排斥的，到1980s初期—特别是考虑到美国左派的弱点—开始认为他们自己是互补的，并在1983年完成了正式合并。合并后的组织， 美国的民主社会主义者（DSA），自第一次世界大战以来第一次将美国左派观点的各种碎片汇集在一起：前社会主义党人和共产党人，以前的旧左派和新左派，以及许多从未成为左派的人。几十年的分裂造成了损失。Debs时期的几十万人现在已经减少到数千人。但是，在20世纪90年代，现在似乎有了一个新的开始。随着旧的冷战两极的瓦解，DSA有机会证明美国左派的历史已经到了一个转折点，而不是结束。

https://www.dsausa.org/a_brief_history_of_the_american_left