Politics & Power Quote by Earl Browder

Browder sells socialism here less as moral redemption than as a technical upgrade: capitalism has hit a ceiling, and socialism is the tool that cracks it. The phrase "nothing more nor less" is a preemptive strike against caricature. He is stripping the concept of romance and insisting on a single, measurable criterion: does it unshackle growth? That framing matters because it smuggles a controversial ideological project into the language of pragmatism, the dialect that persuades people who may not care about doctrine but do care about paychecks and production.

"Fetters" does heavy lifting. It casts capitalism not as dynamic (its usual self-myth) but as a system that, at a certain stage, restrains the very growth it once unleashed. The subtext is Marxist stage theory made palatable: capitalism was historically useful; now it is historically obsolete. Socialism becomes continuity with progress rather than rupture, a "new period" that sounds like the next chapter of modernity, not a leap into the unknown.

Context sharpens the intent. Browder led the Communist Party USA through the Popular Front era, when American communists tried to sound like credible national planners rather than permanent outsiders. He emphasizes "economic and social expansion" on a "much larger scale" to match New Deal-era ambitions and wartime/postwar production fantasies, where mass mobilization made central coordination seem not only possible but proven. The ideological bet is clear: if you can redefine freedom as freedom for growth, you can argue that reorganizing property and power is liberation, not coercion.