Toward Soviet America: The Crises and Decline of Capitalism; the Impending Rise of Socialism in the United States

by William Z. Foster

Writing during the Great Depression, William Z. Foster describes burning injustices in the economic orthodoxy, and predicts the gradual emergence of socialism in the United States. By the time the Depression struck in 1929, Foster was already a veteran campaigner and organizer of labor, having a prominent role in the great steel strike of 1919. At the time he published this book in 1932, Foster was leader of the United States Communist Party, and had developed a comprehensive policy platform based upon the Soviet Union. The USA's fraught economic situation at the time led many disillusioned and impoverished citizens to consider socialism and communism as an alternative. Foster begins by describing various aspects of decay in capitalist society, identifying its proclivity to indulge in war, its worsening cyclical economic crises, the impoverishment and neglect of vast numbers in the labor force, and so on.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History

160 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]

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]

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]

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.

[Tammy]

While, I’m thankful for the opportunity to read such an old book, this did not age well. It’s interesting to read how hopeful communist were that it would actually bring around the solution when capitalism failed. Clearly that did not happen. While this book goes on and on about the wondrous success of the Soviet Union, there are some good takeaways to understand how blind they were to actual truth. The main component of the success was removing God from all aspects of life. They believe that science was the method that would prove helpful to bring about the success.

What’s funny to me is that the author is living a good life in America not realizing how deceitful and dishonest the Soviet Union was under the leadership of Lenin a d Stalin. Just because they were successful in their eyes of completing the five-year plan in three years, doesn’t mean it was actually happening. I’ve read too much of history to know how it really ended up. It was fun to read about what happened in World War II in light of what this author thought to be the result of applying these principles on such a large scale.

My favorite part was when discussing the freedom of women in Russia. The woman had the freedom to put our kids in school run by the government while she spent all day at work. The other classic line was how burdensome housework was. No worries the communist have got you covered. They will have state run kitchen so you just pick up food and go home and eat it. Can you say win-win?

I’m thankful they weren’t completely successful in seeing this come to fruition in our nation, however, they did make some good strides. I think it’s helpful to understand these pieces of literature in our history so that we can begin to remove that which does not belong, sucking your life out of our constitution. We are ignorant people when we have a long way to go to understand how we are not living in our constitutional Republic, as it should be, but how progressive and socialist tweaked it to fit their government run, loving version of freedom that they believe can be achieved apart from God. We all know how that story ends. The starvation and death of millions upon millions who were unfortunate enough to have to live under the communist dictators.

[Sam]

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.

[Rudy Herrera]

If you are looking for more context on communists in the early 30s, then this is the book for you. However, there is information here that can easily be gotten from other sources, and, if you are already well-read in the subject, this could be redundant. Obviously, from a communist perspective, this book didn't work for the context that it was in, but it didn't really need to work. There is no secret plan here, there is no active organizing strategy that Foster claims is "for sure going to work." In this book, he merely is highlighting the opportunity of revolution, and he is hoping that it happens in the US soon, but he doesn't exactly know how it's going to happen. This is the principled communist stance, and one that should be respected more by liberals and modern demsocs alike. Communism is something that happens in a long-form way, not over the course of years or decades, but much more likely centuries, and Foster is a believer in this position outlined in this book.

[Samuel Djoreski]

Slow but an okay book. I highly recommend the part where he speaks of a Soviet American government modeled in a sense after the USSR’s pre-Stalin constitution, for historical purposes. Foster is still highly regarded in modern American communism is a good communist hero who fought against the more revisionist elements in his Party.

[Giles Cox]

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]

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