Why has a socialist or labor party never been successful in the United States? According to Marxist revolutionary theory, advanced capitalism is a necessary precondition for development of socialism. Capitalists would ruthlessly exploit workers, accumulating capital from their labor but not sharing it. This would lead workers to develop a collective class consciousness, overthrow their oppressors and replace their bourgeois government with a dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. socialism. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels expected that because the United States had the most advanced form of capitalism in the world, it was the most likely context for a proletarian revolution, yet no socialist or labor party ever became a major factor in American politics. . The American Communist, Socialist, and Labor parties were never able to become anything more than fringe groups of the radical left, even as a very perverse form of socialism came to dominate much of the planet in the course of the Cold War. “For much of the second half of the twentieth century,” writes Peter Singer, “nearly four in ten people on earth lived under governments that considered themselves Marxist and claimed… to use Marxist principles to decide how the nation should be run.” Far from falling under Marxist influence, the United States became the sworn enemy of global communism. Generations of theorists and scholars have proposed a variety of possible reasons why no socialist or labor party has ever achieved prominence in the American electoral system. Marx and Engels certainly believed that the United States would provide an example for the rest of the world with its inevitable consequences. move towards socialism. According to the American... half the paper... that, although there was no significant socialist movement in the United States yet, it was still likely to happen. He stated that all the factors he had indicated had hitherto hindered the development of American socialism were "on the verge of disappearing or transforming into their opposites, with the result that in the next generation American socialism will most likely experience the greatest possible expansion." . expansion of its appeal”. Obviously, nothing like this has ever happened. Socialist theorists such as Vladimir Lenin manipulated pure Marxian socialism to create an artificial proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917. As the twentieth century progressed, the United States became, if anything, increasingly hostile to anything resembling socialist or workers' movements. The question of why socialism had not yet developed in the United States was left to later scholars.