The American Marxist

Hillquit’s lifelong project was to translate Marxism into the idiom of American democracy. Following Kautsky, he believed that socialism would arise from capitalism’s contradictions, not from a conspiratorial plotting. Yet unlike European Marxists, he held that the United States offered a uniquely favorable terrain for peaceful transition. Its democratic framework — universal suffrage, a free press, and freedom of assembly — gave the working class the tools to conquer political power legally. “The conquest of political authority,” he wrote, “can and must be achieved through the lawful exercise of democracy.”

This wasn’t Bernsteinian revisionism — Hillquit still envisioned temporary compromises as part of the road to the end of private property, the abolition of the market, the socialization of industry, and the end of the wage system; and he never would have said, as Bernstein did, that “the movement is everything, the end is nothing.” Yet he rejected violent revolution as both impractical and unnecessary in a country where workers already had the vote. His vision was of industrial democracy — the extension of political rights into the economic sphere.

That perspective made Hillquit the intellectual architect of what later historians would call “American Marxism.” He regarded the Constitution not as a bourgeois trap but as a usable instrument, a set of forms to be filled with new social content. The socialist task, as he saw it, was to complete the democratic revolution the American Republic had only begun.

Opponents to the Left and Right

Within the socialist movement, Hillquit’s moderation earned him enemies on both flanks. When the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) emerged under the charismatic “Big Bill” Haywood, preaching sabotage and the general strike, Hillquit warned that “insurrection without organization is chaos.” Haywood, a former miner with one eye and a commanding presence, saw Hillquit as a timid intellectual. Their feud at the SPA’s 1912–13 conventions split the party: the IWW wing walked out, accusing Hillquit of bureaucratic conservatism; Hillquit accused them of adventurism that would doom the cause.

For Hillquit, socialism was not a rebellion against law but its extension to the economic sphere — “industrial democracy” realized through collective ownership and political majorities.

The ILGWU, where Hillquit served as counsel and strategist, embodied this tension. It was one of the few AFL unions explicitly committed to socialism; yet it was also deeply pragmatic, balancing militant strikes with collective bargaining and legal contracts. For Hillquit, this synthesis — mass action within a legal framework — was the essence of Marxism adapted to American soil.