Most of the books in this series are answered by the tradition from which this introduction is written. This one is, for the most part, agreed with — and that makes it the harder book to read honestly.
The US Two-Party System: Past and Present is a two-hundred-year history of the Democratic and Republican parties, from the Federalists and Jeffersonians to Reagan's second term, written by a collective of Moscow University Americanists and issued by Progress Publishers in English in 1988. It is not the work of an apparatus hack. Its own jacket describes the contributors as "experts on American history at Moscow University and institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences," working in a series sponsored by the Scientific Coordinating Council at Moscow University; the immediate predecessor it names is N. Sivachev and E. Yazkov's History of the USA Since World War I (Progress, 1976). This is the Sivachev–Yazkov school of Soviet Americanistics — the most professional wing of Soviet scholarship on the United States, whose members read the American sources in the original and cited them by page. The translation, by Sergei Sossinsky, is clean and the apparatus is dense: across the book the authors quote James MacGregor Burns, Henry Steele Commager, Clinton Rossiter, Barry Goldwater, Robert Taft, Walter Dean Burnham, the collected works of Lincoln and Jefferson, the party platforms and the Congressional Quarterly, alongside their own Soviet monographs. Whatever else is wrong here, the citation test — does the book read what it argues against, in the original? — is a clear pass. Credit that at the outset, because the argument that follows depends on it.
The date is real. Progress translations often lag their Russian originals by years, and this series has learned to date the text rather than the spine. Here the spine is honest. The concluding chapter reaches "the events of 1986 and 1987 (the 1986 midterms, the Iran-Contras affair, and the fall 1987 currency upheavals)," and mentions "the success of the Washington summit" — the December 1987 INF signing. This book was finished in late 1987 or the first weeks of 1988 and reads like it. That matters, and we will return to why.
The book's core claim is stated on its first analytic page and never abandoned. The two-party system is "a single political complex consisting of two bourgeois parties operating in close interaction and interdependence and linked together by fundamentally similar goals pursued, however, by different methods." The parties "form a system mechanism chiefly because they have a common mission in the Political process — to protect and improve capitalist social relations." Their rivalry is real but bounded: a "consensus" within a single class over the inviolability of private property, dressed for the electorate as a choice. When one governing party is discredited, the authors write, this "leads not to a loss of faith in the system as such but only to a change in the party decor in the Washington halls of power." The system is, in their fine phrase, "a kind of shock absorber protecting the American government machinery from abrupt jolts."
The trouble for a critic in the anti-Stalinist tradition is that this is, very largely, our analysis. The proposition that the Democrats and Republicans are two parties of one ruling class, that their contest is engineered to keep an independent workers' party off the field, and that the Democratic Party in particular functions as the burial ground of insurgent movements, is not a Soviet discovery. It is the classical position of American Trotskyism, argued continuously in The Militant, the International Socialist Review and the writings of the Socialist Workers Party for half a century. Set the Soviet text beside George Novack, the SWP's most prolific writer on American politics, and the sentences interleave. Reviewing Matthew Josephson's The Politicos in 1938, Novack wrote that "the Democratic and Republican Parties share the task of enforcing the domination of big capital over the people. From the social standpoint, the differences between them are negligible." On the Cold War consensus the Soviet authors dwell on at length, Novack in 1956 had already written that the monopolists rule "through a coalition of the two capitalist parties, which differ on incidental domestic issues but have basic unity on foreign policy." The Moscow book's account of the parties absorbing protest to defuse it is the same mechanism Novack described in 1938: the managers of the two parties "had to head off any independent mass movement which jeopardized the two-party system and therewith the domination of the plutocracy."
So where the book is describing the machinery of exclusion — the shared corporate financing, the marginalisation of third parties, the bipartisan foreign-policy front, the manufacture of a "choice" between two servants of the same class — it is broadly right, and it is right in a way American radicals were right before it and independently of it. The authors even reach the sharpest of the conclusions. The Democratic Party, they write, has performed "immense services for the US Establishment by integrating within its structure social forces seeking to break free of the control of the two-party tandem. It is the basic tool for involving the working people in the legitimate political process controlled by the monopoly bourgeoisie." A reader who knows the SWP's lifelong polemic against liberals who herd every movement back into the Democratic column will recognise the thought exactly. On this, the book is a witness for the prosecution, and should be read as one.
The book is at its best, in fact, on the strangling of the labour party. It follows the story the American Marxist tradition considers decisive: the near-misses of independent working-class politics and the men who killed them. It records the Socialist Party's million votes for Debs in 1912, the founding of the Farmer-Labor and American Labor parties around 1919-20, and the Conference for Progressive Political Action of 1922-24. And it identifies, correctly, the fatal act — that the trade-union and reformist leadership of the CPPA refused to build the independent mass workers' party the movement's left wing demanded, and instead channelled the drive for independent political action back into support for candidates on the two old tickets. On Franklin Roosevelt it is equally clear-eyed, describing his "vigorous flirtation in 1934-1936 with the leaders of the Farmer Labor Party of Minnesota and the Progressive Party of Wisconsin" — and how, "as soon as he managed to tie them sufficiently strongly to the Democratic bandwagon, he immediately adopted a tougher line toward his allies on the left wing." That is precisely the operation Trotsky, in his 1938 Mexico discussions with Cannon, Dunne and Shachtman, warned the American section against joining: he told them to enter the union political movement only to fight for "an independent party, not for Roosevelt or LaFollette, a machine for the workers themselves," and never to let it become "a purely opportunistic appendage to the Democrats." The book and the exile are analysing the same betrayal.
The convergence is real, and it is also where the book's Stalinism hides — not in what it denies but in what it is structurally unable to say.
The first fault is a single, load-bearing exemption. The whole book is an indictment of parties that draw insurgent movements into the safe channels of the two-party system. Every actor is measured against that standard — except one. Where the narrative reaches the Communist Party of the USA, the analytic machinery switches off. The CPUSA appears as "a force on the political scene which challenged the bourgeois two-party system and put forward a revolutionary program for socialist transformation of society," and there the matter rests. But the Communist Party's most consequential decade in American electoral politics was the Popular Front, from 1935, when it became the most energetic advocate in the country of voting for Roosevelt and the Democratic Party — the very operation the book spends four hundred pages condemning. The tradition this introduction speaks for named that at the time. In Trotsky's 1938 discussion, Vincent Dunne reported that in Minnesota "the Stalinists, together with a wide section of the progressives, intellectuals, are at one in turning the labor party more and more into a bloc with the Democratic and liberal candidates." Novack, surveying the same history in 1968, wrote that both the Socialist and Communist parties, having once stood for independent class politics, "began to alter their attitudes and break with the tradition of independent class politics upon which the socialist and communist movements had been built" — and did so "with equally disastrous results." The book cannot write that sentence. Its own framework convicts the party it exists partly to protect, so the party is lifted out of the framework. This is not a small evasion. The strangling of American labour's political independence, which the book narrates so well for the 1920s, had a second act in the 1930s and 40s in which Moscow's own party was a principal — and the book's silence on it is the silence of an interested party.
The same tilt distorts the book's account of Debs. The Socialist Party's growth, the authors write, drew its "major replenishments" "not by the workers, but rather by petty-bourgeois elements." This is the old Comintern demotion of the Debsian party, deployed to keep the crown of "genuine workers' party" reserved for the Communists — and it is bad history. Debs's Socialist Party had a deep working-class base in the mining towns, the needle trades and the railroads; the judgment is doctrinal, not evidential, and it is the kind of judgment the book would never accept from a bourgeois scholar about a party it favoured.
The second fault is subtler, and here the book is better than a reader of Soviet textbooks might expect, so it must be stated precisely. The authors do have a theory of mass pressure. They quote the Soviet historian V. L. Malkov to the effect that Roosevelt moved left "only under the impact of the popular forces," and they build a genuine dialectic in which protest movements force concessions that the parties then absorb. That is more than the monolithic ruling-class conspiracy the genre usually offers, and it should be acknowledged. But notice the angle of vision. The movements enter the story almost entirely as pressure to be managed, and the parties as the managers. Of the 1960s the book writes that "the most trying problem was to integrate the black movement into the system." Integrate — the verb belongs to the ruling class; the Black freedom struggle is the object of the sentence, not its subject. The labour upsurge that built the CIO, the civil-rights movement that broke Jim Crow, the anti-war movement the book itself describes as a serious potential threat to the foundations of bourgeois society — these appear mainly as forces to be neutralised, rarely as agents that wrested real and permanent gains from a system that conceded nothing willingly. The book sees the co-optation clearly, which is its strength; it sees the self-activity of the oppressed dimly, which is its Stalinism. History from above, even when the above being described is the enemy, is still history from above.
The third fault is the one that ought to have been unbearable to write, and the book does not appear to have noticed it at all.
The organising indictment of the entire volume is that the American two-party system is, in Lenin's phrase that the authors quote twice, "one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party." The scandal, in the book's telling, is a rigged choice: two parties of capital, and no lawful road to a third. That is a serious charge, and much of it lands. But it is issued by the export house of a state that offered its own citizens not a rigged choice between two parties but no choice at all — a single party, the CPSU, with opposition of every kind proscribed and, within living memory of these authors' teachers, punished by death. A book whose whole complaint is the artificial narrowing of political competition to two permitted options is written from within a system that permitted one. The asymmetry is not incidental to the argument; it is its shadow, and the book never once turns to look at it.
This is testable, and it tests out. The one-party system is discussed in these pages — but only ever the American kind: the "Era of Good Feelings" when the Republicans stood unopposed, or the New York Times's 1942 relief at "a swing back to a normal pattern from a very abnormal pattern of one-party domination." The Soviet Union appears constantly, on nearly every page after 1917, but always as an actor in foreign policy — the target of the "anti-Soviet course," the partner in détente, the summit at Washington — and never as a political system with a party structure of its own that might be held to the standard the book applies to the United States. The word the reader keeps waiting for never comes.
And here the date does its work. This book was completed in the winter of 1987-88. By then glasnost was two years old, the Nineteenth Party Conference that would authorise contested elections was months away, and the question of the CPSU's monopoly of power was the most openly argued question in Soviet public life. A book on democratic pluralism, appearing in the very season the USSR's own one-party settlement was cracking, contains not one occurrence of glasnost, perestroika, or Gorbachev's name. That silence is not neutrality; it is the sound of a genre outrun by events. The Americanists could dissect the manufacture of consent in Washington with real skill precisely because it was someone else's system. Turned inward, the same instruments would have been seditious. So they were not turned inward, and the book stands as an unintended monument to its own thesis: an analysis of how a political order restricts the field of the sayable, produced by an order that had just restricted this one.
The comparison the book could not make had already been made from the other side, and made plainly. Reviewing the American mythology of the two parties in 1968, George Novack wrote: "The ordinary American believes in the two-party system as devoutly and dogmatically as the Stalinist does in the one-party system." That is the whole matter in a sentence. The revolutionary-Marxist critique of the American duopoly was never a defence of the Soviet monopoly; it was a case for something both regimes denied — the working class's right to its own party, and its own state, controlled from below. Novack could name both dogmas because he served neither. The Moscow authors could name only one.
What, then, did the tradition offer in place of the two-party system it also condemned? Not the Soviet model, and not mere abstention. From the 1930s onward the American Trotskyists argued the case the Moscow book gestures at and cannot complete: a mass labour party based on the trade unions, independent of both capitalist parties, as the indispensable next step for American workers. Trotsky's position was neither a slogan nor a dogma — in 1932 he had been sceptical of the labour-party demand, fearing it would become "a hindrance to the progressive evolution of the working class"; by 1938, with the CIO exploding across basic industry, he pressed the SWP to advocate an independent party of the unions armed with a transitional programme, "a machine for the workers themselves." The argument recurred through every election the book covers, in the journals — the International Socialist Review, The Militant, later Intercontinental Press — that answered these campaigns as they happened. A reader who wants the counter-case to this book, stated in the same decades, should go to Novack's Third Parties in American Politics (1968) and his 1938 review of The Politicos, and to Trotsky's 1938 discussions On the Labor Party in the United States. They share the diagnosis; they differ on the cure, and on who they were willing to indict.
None of this cancels the book's real merit, and the honest verdict has to hold both halves. Where The US Two-Party System describes the corporate financing of both parties, the exclusion of labour and the left from the ballot, the bipartisan Cold War, and the seesaw that changes the "party decor" while leaving the class in power untouched, it is often acute and broadly correct, and it earns the respect of anyone in the tradition it partly overlaps. Its scholarship on the nineteenth century — the Federalist-Republican origins, the collapse of the Whigs, the realignments of the 1850s and of the New Deal — is serious work that reads its American sources and cites them. This is not a book to be dismissed; it is a book to be corrected on three points and credited on the rest.
The corrections are these. It exempts the one party — its own tradition's American party — from the very analysis it applies to every other; it treats the movements of American workers and Black Americans as objects of ruling-class management rather than as agents of their own history; and it prosecutes the crime of a narrowed political choice while representing a regime that had abolished choice altogether, in the very year that regime began to come apart. The first is factional; the second is a limitation of vision; the third is the one that dates the book forever. A Soviet study of how the American ruling class keeps the workers from their own party is worth reading. That it could be written, in 1988, by scholars forbidden to ask the same question of their own state is the last and most eloquent thing it has to teach.