Saving Debs from His Epigones

Lital and Edward are joined by Professor Jacob Zumoff to save Eugene Debs from his many self-professed disciples. We talk Debs' views on everything from industrial unionism to class independence to black liberation and anti-imperialism...and why Sanders, Mamdani, and AOC claiming him would have the father of American socialism rolling in his grave.

Jacob is a research associate at the Prometheus Research Library, which you can follow on X and email at library@prl.org if you'd like to visit! The PRL has an event coming up on September 24th featuring Jacob's book, The Red Thread, which you can register to attend here. Also make sure to check out Jacob's book The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929.

As always, you kind find all of JBA's resolutions, petitions, statements and everything else we're up to at our Linktree! Follow us on X @cleanbreaknow and on Instagram @dsa_justbreakalready. 

We're always up for debate! Send us a DM if you're with another DSA Left caucus and want to debate the way forward or to send us your feedback, comments, criticisms, fan mail and hate mail. We read all our comments–leave us a review, it helps boost us in the algorithim–and share with your friends inside and outside DSA!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:06

Come with me to Indiana Back to 1855 To the little town of Terre Haute Where railroading once thrived There Eugene Victor Jebs was born And before that boy could stand He told the world and his mom palm gonna beat Railroad Man He went to work in the railroad yards at 14 years of age His pay was fifty cents a day That was the going way When he became a farmer He learned to shovel cone He loved to hear the whistle blow and the mine The driver's road Well railroading was a dangerous life Men died every day Many's the time the engine ran right off the right of way Railroad men were burned and crushed and often made for life And many's the time Depps gave the news to Bro Get hard and white Well Debs became a union man when he was just 16 A better life for the railroader that was his constant dream He preached the union gospel in every railroad town He said let's build a brotherhood on man grind it down Well he fought the yellow dog country He fought the blacklist He fought against the Pinkertons and all that evil crew He battled the injunction and the railroad bosses green He said let's build a union that'll meet the workers Depps went down in the pool strike of 1894 They put Gene Debs in prison Big Lock on the door They said it was a dangerous man breaker of the law gentler human soul you have You had the soul Now tell me you cheat Victor Temps What's your philosophy I'll tell you my philosophy as simple as can be Wherever there's a cry for justice that's where I will be As long as there's a soul in prison I cannot be free Hello and welcome to another episode of Give Me a Break, the podcast of the Just Break A Ready Caucus in the DSA. I'm your host Lee Tal here with my co-host Edward.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Hello.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

And as you may have assumed from the song about Eugene Debs played at the beginning of the episode, which was written by Joe Glazer, this episode is focused on saving the heroic working class legacy of Eugene Debs from his epigons. It's more of an educational episode than our others, but it's a topic near and dear to the hearts of many in the DSA. But the revolutionary legacy of Debs is very much abused and distorted today. So if you actually study what Debs stood for and fought for, you would see that Democratic Party hustlers like Bernie and Mamdani and AOC cite Debs to neuter him and actually drag his name through their mud. As Lenin famously said, during the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly pounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred, and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hollow their names to a certain extent for the quote consolation of the oppressed classes, and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge, and vulgarizing it. Now, this really perfectly describes both the courageous acts of Debs' life and the persecution he faced from the capitalist ruling class, and also the modern vulgarization of his legacy. One of the best examples of this vulgarization was when Mamdani spoke at this past May Day in New York City. He's the first mayor to do so since Fiorello LaGuardia. And he said, quote, we speak of Eugene Debs calling for the eight-hour workday and the end of child labor, where 20,000 plus called for change after the triangle shirtwaist fire in 1911, end quote. And he cited this as he was actively working against passing a bill to end the slave-like 24-hour workday for immigrant women home care workers. You have Bernie Sanders, who received the Debs Foundation Award just last year. And often Sanders emphasizes that Debs was an incredible human being and emphasizes his humanity. And AOC, in presenting the speech to Sanders last year, said Debs, quote, elevated our class consciousness to understand that the indignity that people experience is not necessary. It has a cause and thus it has an end. So these are the same people that stood on the DNC stage that promoted Genocide Joe and killer Kamala and the DNC as fighting for the future of humanity. In the same breath, war criminals and Debs, quote, fight for humanity. It is quite gross and reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote, hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. So to save Debs from these fakers and to discuss what Debs' real legacy is for those who want to fight the oligarchy and fight both of its parties, we have a special guest and expert on the socialist movement in the United States, professor and author Jacob Zumoff. So welcome, Jacob.

SPEAKER_03 7:14

Welcome. Thank you very much for having me. I'm quite excited about this.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

It's our pleasure. Yeah. So Jacob has written a number of very useful and important books for the workers' movement. I highly recommend his book, The Communist International and U.S. Communism 1919 to 1929, which was published by Brill in 2014. He has also published published several articles on communism and Afro-Caribbean migrants and on Central America. His most recent book is The Red Thread, The Passaic Textile Strike, which was published in 2021. He also wrote an article particularly relevant to our topic today, The Left in the United States and the Decline of the Socialist Party of America, 1934-35, for Labor Le Trevaille, published by Canadian Committee on Labor History. And Jacob is also a research associate at the Prometheus Research Library here in New York City, which is a working Marxist archive. So I wanted to organize this episode into a few key themes to discuss what Debs' contributions were on the particular key issues for the socialist movement in America and what the lessons are for today. Now, the JPA is a Marxist caucus in the DSA. And as Marxists, we don't believe in empty hag yag. So we will also go into some of Debs' shortcomings and differences that we have. In addition to, of course, reading the collection of Debs's writings and speeches, I also want to recommend a piece in Labor Defender, which was the magazine published monthly by the International Labor Defense, which was a Communist Party-led partisan defense organization. And this piece was published in 1926. It's called The Revolutionary Heritage of Eugene Victor Debs. And it was written by James P. Cannon, who also went on later to become the founder of American Trotskyism. Also, I would recommend Canon's longer pamphlet, EV Debs, from 1956. Both of these are on Marxist.org. And in the latter work, Cannon says, quote, Debs campaigned for the overthrow of capitalism by workers' revolution and refused to settle for anything less. As he himself expressed it, he quote, determined to stick to the main issue and stay on the main track, no matter how alluring some of the byways may appear. End quote. So I think that really is a good way to start here and captures Debs. So I think the first topic we want to talk about was labor. So maybe Edward can take it away here.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yeah, I think it's a great idea to start on labor. This is one of Debs' major contributions. He was a founder of the American Railway Union, the ARU, in 1893, which sought to unite all railroad workers into one single organization, regardless of their specific craft or jobs. In 1894, he led the first great strike of an industrial union, the ARU strike against the Pullman Company. It was in this strike that the injunction was first used against workers combined in struggle, and it was Debs who led the fight against it. This fight led him to the Woodstock jail and set his feet on the road of the revolutionary movement. We know that AOC, by contrast, in 2022, along with her squad comrades, spiked a railway strike in cahoots with the Democrat Biden, imposing a contract on them that kept railroad workers working without paid sick days. So it's pretty rich that she would speak to Debs' legacy when she is and has been on the other side of the class line. Of course, Mom Donnie, for his part, also endorsed Kathy Hokel for governor at the same time she was scab herding against the New York nurses' strike. So yeah, I guess we should start there. Let's talk about what Debs thought about industrial unionism and what he thought about scabs.

SPEAKER_03 10:59

The Coleman strike is an important place to start and the railroads, because then as now, there were on the railroads sometimes literally dozens of different unions. And Debs, even before he became a socialist, he was a big proponent of industrial unionism, which is to say that all the workers who were working for the same company, in this case the railroad, should be a member of the same union and not cross each other's picket lines, not to break each other's strikes, but to fight together. And that was a major part of the development of the labor movement in the United States. And so one of the things that people that don't often think about with Devs is that he came out of the labor movement and he came out of this industrial struggle. And so if you read his writings from the period or his speeches, because oftentimes he would speak instead of write per se, but he constantly stresses the need for industrial unions against the leadership of the American Federation of Labor at the time, which was Samuel Gompers. Debs was one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World about a decade after the ARU, which was an attempt to actually forge a union, an industrial union that was both organizing all workers regardless of craft or skill, and also was dedicated to getting rid of capitalism altogether. Because what Debs believed is that the fight for labor was also a fight not just for better wages, not just for better conditions, but actually to get rid of the entire capital system. So that's something that really animated Debs throughout his career, including repeatedly being targeted by the state. So as Edward said, it was in the ARU where he was a victim of injunction, he was put in prison. And this actually was when he was trying to analyze what happened to deal with it, led him to becoming a socialist. So one of the key things about Debs is his real sense of connection between uh organizing the Socialist Party as a political force, but also organizing workers in class struggle, which is obviously completely opposite of what the various people of AOC or Mandami, who are just capitalist politicians. I'm sure Debs would be turning in his grave about uh AOC breaking the railroad strike, because if there is one industry that was dear to Debs' heart, it was the railroad industry. In terms of what he thought about scabs, well, he was totally well, I'd say totally opposed to scabs as an understatement. At one point he wrote the term scab has a significant it's wholly repulsive. It is suggested of filth, disease, and corruption. There is nothing in the term scab to redeem it from loathing when a creature in the form of a man rightfully receives the sobriquet of scab is known to be a mass of moral putrescence. This is not just eloquent, though it is, but it's keeping in mind that it was common that workers that were that one union would cross the picket line of another union. So this idea of the need for basic class solidarity uniting in a fight was something that was core at the core of Debs uh political uh being.

SPEAKER_02 14:27

Right. But the question of industrial unions, I mean, there was there's a whole history of that, which maybe is too much to get into for this episode, but there's very little of that left today, right? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:42

In many ways, the ideas that Debs was putting forward in 1894 are not just advanced for his days, they're far ahead of what the labor bureaucracy is even talking about today.

SPEAKER_02 14:54

Right. Even the railway unions, right? Aren't they all divided today?

SPEAKER_03 14:59

Remember earlier this year there was a strike by Long Island railroad workers, but there was like at least like five or six different unions, and not all of them were actually on strike. Right. And other unions have even more. The idea of all workers one employer, one union is basic, but it's something that has been lost.

SPEAKER_02 15:24

Yeah. You mentioned the Long Island Railroad strike, which once again Kathy Hokel was the main antagonist in it that she was also organizing scabbing on that strike. This is the person mom Donnie has endorsed for governor and proclaimed sites for working people. So that's another affront to Debs' legacy.

SPEAKER_03 15:47

Yeah, I mean, not only was Debs obviously opposed to people who crossed picket line, but any attempt to build political support to politicians who bust strike. They don't even know if Debs could have even fathomed some kind of so-called socialist doing that. Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

I actually think that's a pretty good segue into talking about one gigantic difference between Debs and all of those who claim to be his followers, which is the question of the Democratic Party. Debs famously ran for president, I don't know, three or four times.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

Five, I believe.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Five. Okay, five times. Debs famously ran for president five times. The last time he ran, he did so from a prison cell. Uh, we'll get more into that later, but I thought this speech uh he gave, he started the 1912 presidential campaign was Debs' best result for president. He got six percent of the vote, which is much more than any independent socialist candidate as a proportion of the vote has gotten since. And he launched his 1912 presidential campaign at Riverview Park in Chicago, and he gave this speech. I thought this quote was really, really kind of sums up the difference between Debs and the DSA Democrats, where he says, quote, we are today entering upon a national campaign of the profoundest interest to the working class and the country. In this campaign, there are but two parties but in but one issue. There is no longer even the pretense of difference between the so-called Republican and Democratic parties. They are substantially one in what they stand for. They are opposed to each other on no question of principle, but purely in a contest for the spoils of office. To the workers of the country, these two parties in name are one in fact. They, or rather, it stands for capitalism, for private ownership of the means of subsistence, for the exploitation of the workers, and for wage slavery. End quote. So the other day I posted the questi this question uh on my Twitter account at ZenSoc. If you don't follow me, go ahead and do that. But I put a question forward for those on the DSA left, like Mug, who argue that the Democratic Party is just a ballot line. The post I was quoting, the guy talked about how you mug are serious individuals. And so I quoted the guy and I said, question for the serious individuals. When did the Dems become just a ballot line? Clearly, Debs and the SPA didn't think that was the case, nor did the CPUSA pre-Stalin. What changed in the last century that made it acceptable for Marxists to support the world's oldest imperialist party? So I think it it would be useful maybe to talk a little bit more about Debs, the Democrats, his opposition to the two-party system and these capitalist parties versus what DSA does today.

SPEAKER_03 18:19

That's an excellent point because what Debs was really known for and what made him, I think, beloved among workers and became the kind of the voice of socialism for a generation is that he would go and he would run for president, but he would constantly be speaking. And if you read his speeches, he makes the same point or the same basic points of the need for workers to unite for socialism, the need for workers to understand their common interests against the capitalists, and like in the speech that you read, the need for workers to be politically independent of the different capitalist parties. And that was kind of like an ABC for Debs. And he pounded that time and time again. And it wasn't just that he would say it, it's that he would actually do it. As you mentioned, he ran for political office time and time again. And this was something that was completely different from the American Federational Labor, which was the main labor organization at the time. Samuel Gompers, who was the head of the AFL, had a famous slogan that his goal was that labor should reward its friends and punish its enemies. And what that meant is that they should endorse different capitalist politicians who would do better for the AFL. Usually it was the Democrats, but occasionally it was the Republicans as well. Uh, but the whole concept of the American trade union movement under the leadership under Gompers was not to have a working class independent political voice. So Debs constantly stressed that time and time again. And as you mentioned, if you look at the people Bernie Sanders or or Mandami, who are claiming to be in the legacy of Debs, they're doing the exact opposite. That really requires a either a level of cynicism or ignorance, depending on the particular person, to wrap that up in socialist scarf. Because that was really the essence of what Debs was about.

SPEAKER_02 20:34

Debs ran like five times. You know, he got a lot of votes, especially compared to today. I remember reading something by him where he was like, he wasn't a politician, he didn't see himself that way, and he wasn't running because he actually thought he was gonna win and become president. That really wasn't what he was doing. I contrast that with the DSA today pushing, running on the Democratic Party ballot line as key to quote viability and being able to have power, as they put it. And you see this with AOC and Mamdani, they're total careerist politicians in the everything that they do. So maybe you can speak a little more about that contrast to what was Depps trying to do when he was running in these elections. I mean, he ran later from prison.

SPEAKER_03 21:21

If you read what he says in these speeches, he's very clear. By no means was he a fool. He didn't think that he was necessarily gonna win the election in 1912. His goal wasn't re-reorient the Democratic Party or realign anything. He was very clear. This is from a speech in 1897, and he says, is the Democratic Party, which we are assured has, quote, strong socialist tendencies in favor of collective ownership of the means of production? Is it opposed to the wage system from which flows in a ceaseless stream the poverty, misery, and wretchedness of the children of toil? If the Democratic Party is, quote, the friend of labor any more. More than the Republican Party, why is its platform dumb in the presence of Cordelane, which is where there is a massacre of workers? It knows the truth about these shocking outrages, crime upon working men, their wives and children, which would blacken the pages of Siberia. Why does it not speak out? The differences between the Republican and the Democratic Party involves no issue, no principle in which the working class has any interest. Between these parties, socialists have no choice, no preference. So what he was trying to do was not to get workers to support one or another capitalist party, but rather he would make the point that workers had to see that they had to get rid of capitalism altogether and that they had to unite for socialism. But he would also make the point that they weren't going to win it in the ballot box. He was very clear that socialism was not going to come from the ballot box and that he, as opposed to some other people in the socialist party, constantly stressed again the labor component. So, I mean, we can talk a little bit about some of our differences with Debs about how socialism can be achieved, but what you can't criticize Debs for was a vision that by pushing the Democrats or the Republicans that you could somehow open a space for socialism. But that would be totally alien to him.

SPEAKER_02 23:26

Right. And he he was very clear on the class line. That was very clear on the class line. Yeah. Maybe, Edward, you can speak a little to some of the answers that you got to your question, because your question went a little viral. There's like maybe 70,000 views now, and basically a lot of DSA right and left answered. So that might be interesting to just gear how those in the DSA answer this question and really how they justify running on Democratic Party ballot lines.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

If you had to sum them up in one word, like one overarching theme, is that things are different today than they were a hundred years ago, which is sort of like an obvious thing, right? So I got answers like the ballot access laws were a lot easier a hundred years ago. I got answers like during the Red Scare, they passed a bunch of laws to make it basically illegal to be a socialist. So that's why you can't run independently. Um I got arguments like, well, what Debs probably the most honest argument from people was that what Debs did didn't work in the sense that they think what politics is about is that you get person elected to Congress and they pass a law and you voila, you have socialism or whatever. That was probably the most honest one. My favorite personal one, however, was that the Democratic Party ceased to exist in 1972 because they started selecting candidates through primaries instead of like a party convention, which is an amazing argument given that uh we've probably had like what five Democratic presidents or six since 1972. I guess they weren't Democrats. The Democratic Party ceased to exist. That's a particularly absurd one. That was my favorite because it's the depths you will go to justify total opportunism. Go pretty deep.

SPEAKER_02 25:18

I think the key thing is that the fundamental nature of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party has not changed. These are capitalist parties, just as Debs described them a hundred years ago. While their methods, certain things can change the policies, whatever, in reaction to what their interests are, it's always about their interests. That is the capitalist class's interests. And it's about protecting and defending American capitalism with everything that goes with that exploitation, segregation, anti-immigrant exploitation. That has not changed.

SPEAKER_03 25:56

And one of the things that is is still very much the the same, which I think has to do with Debs, is the Democratic Party is the party of imperialism. Right. I mean, obviously the Republicans are also the party of imperialism, but the Democrats are just as vociferously imperialist. And so Debs, when he ran in 1912, he he was running against the Democrats. And when the war came, he continued to run against the imperialist war. We could talk about that later, but he was very much opposed to the imperialist bloodletting.

SPEAKER_02 26:26

He was trying to expose the machinations of the capitalist imperialist system and its parties. Whereas DSA dem electeds, like Mamdani, like AOC, their purpose is the opposite. It's to obscure and to cover up what is actually the fundamental nature of the capitalist system and its parties.

SPEAKER_03 26:49

The biggest strength that Debs had is that he told the truth about capitalism, the class struggle, the Democrat-Republicans, the need for working class independence in a very accessible way that workers could understand, which I think is different than a lot of the people who claim his legacy, which seem to specialize in obfuscation.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

So connected to the nature of the Democratic Party in American capitalism is the question of uh racial oppression in America, which is inherent in American capitalism. On the one hand, you have DSA promoting sewer socialism. This is a positive word now for many in the DSA, and even promoting Victor Berger, who was infamously racist and elected SP member. I think he was the first elected SP member of Congress. And then you have Sanders in his speech when he was getting the Debs Award last year, he said, quote, Debs was decades ahead of his time in breaking down color barriers. I wanted to talk about the way that Debs dealt with the question of black oppression in America. This is the period of Jim Crow segregation. There is really a connection between, you know, Bernie's colorblind populism and essentially Debs did that too in relation to the black question. I wanted to speak about that and get into some of the contributions of Lenin and the comintern intervention on this question for the American left. Debs said, quote, I have said and say again that properly speaking, there is no Negro question outside of the labor question, the working class struggle. Our position as socialists and as a party is perfectly plain. We have simply to say the class struggle is colorless. The capitalists, white, black, and other shades are on one side, and the workers, white, black, and all other colors on the other side. So what is wrong with this, Jacob? Why do we differ here with Debs?

SPEAKER_03 29:02

Well, I mean, there are there's a lot of things wrong with it. I guess we could start off by just noting that Debs, in in opposing racial segregation, put them on the left wing of a lot of the socialists, as opposed to Victor Berger, who actually wrote that under socialism there would be segregation.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

Right.

SPEAKER_03 29:24

And so if you pardon the expression, you have to kind of look at it dialectically, which is in the context, Deb's his opposition to segregation, his insistence, his letters to socialists in the South that they cannot support white supremacy, actually was to the left of what a lot of his other socialists were. But what is what he offered was the quote that you read, and there's a lot of things from us that are just wrong with that. I mean, it basically is saying that all workers have to do is join together in an economic struggle, white workers and black workers, and oppose the capitalists, whatever color they are, and this will get rid of capitalism and then also improve the status of black people. Now, from a historical standpoint, his statement about uniting against capitalists of whatever color there were, especially in 1903, I mean, there wasn't any significant black capitalist class in 1903. I mean, to this day, there's still capitalist class is literally white.

SPEAKER_02 30:29

Right.

SPEAKER_03 30:30

But the problem with that is that it ignores the fact that black oppression is something that is core to the way the American bourgeoisie rules. The special degradation, the special oppression of black people, not just workers, but all black people. And in 1903, when this was written, I would say the overwhelming majority of black people in the United States were actually in the South. And a lot of them were sharecroppers. This was even before the beginning of the Great Migration. By ignoring this, it ignores the fact that there is no way actually to unite the working class without making the fight for black liberation central to the working class struggle. It also ignores the fact that the struggle for black liberation is a tremendous motor force for class struggle in this country. If you look what happened about the time that he was writing it, it was very common for capitalists when mainly immigrant white workers would go on strike, they would go to the South and hire black scabs, and then the strikes would oftentimes uh devolve into race riots. So the question is how to break through that, and Debs didn't offer anything for that. Now, to be fair, nobody in the socialist movement was certainly no white socialists. There were uh there were a small number of black socialists, but nobody in the socialist movement really understood the importance of the struggle against black oppression. And this is what I look at in my book, really until the common term, the Communist International in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, really focused on the issue and said a socialist movement that doesn't put black liberation at its center is not going to be able to lead a revolution.

SPEAKER_02 32:22

Obviously, he was opposed to racial oppression and racism, but his whole thing was colorblind unite and fight. If we unite on economic questions, then all these questions will just disappear and we'll all be equal. That actually is still a very prevalent argument today that we find in in the unions in particular, in in the class, you know, different class battles that have happened where the trade union bureaucracies refuse to fight on the basis of explicitly fighting against racial oppression in America, which is really the key thing that the ruling class uses to keep the working class as a whole down. How do you think that, like that question of economism from Debs' time, you mentioned there was the contribution of the Comintern and Lenin, which did make a difference, right? In the Communist Party's interventions on this question?

SPEAKER_03 33:17

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess it would be a whole other episode, but there's a lot of criticisms that one could make. Certainly Canon would make of the Communist Party after the rise of Stalin. But one of the things starting in the 1920s and then going through the 1930s, that the Communist Party did do is that they made the fight for black rights, for black liberation central to their work. And they recruited a large number of black workers. I mean, another aspect, I mean, it's not just ideological, it's that starting in the early 1900s and then going on, more and more black people moved to the north and became more and more integrated into the actual industrial working class. And the CP heavily stressed the need to organize black workers, to fight the color bar within the labor movement. And again, this is part of the importance of industrial unionism.

SPEAKER_02 34:15

Right.

SPEAKER_03 34:16

But one of the things that the CP is most famous for is their defense of the Scottsboro nine, a nine black youth in Alabama who were framed up and sentenced to death for supposedly raping white women in a train in Alabama. They threw all of their energy and made it a national and international case against what they call the lynch law, lynch justice. And so they let it be known that it was the obligation of communists to fight all forms of segregation. They recruited a significant number of black workers, intellectuals as well in Harlem, the south side of Chicago, but also in parts of the South. And that was, despite the Stalinist deformations, kind of underlines the potential and the power of putting the fight for black liberation central and not just saying that black and white workers need to unite. And Debs and the Socialist Party never really, uh even at its best, did that. And that I think was a direct result of the uh intervention of the leadership of the Communist International in the labor movement, in the left, in the Communist Party in the 1920s.

SPEAKER_02 35:31

But the Socialist Party really represented a different trend.

SPEAKER_03 35:36

The Socialist Party had a completely different view. At its best, it was colorblind.

SPEAKER_02 35:40

Right.

SPEAKER_03 35:42

And at its worst was, as I said, in favor of segregation. Right. So the Communist Party was able to recruit the most militant revolutionary members of the Socialist Party, but that was to a large degree on a qualitatively different program because of the intervention of the Comintern. Uh where Debs fits in is he died in 1926. So it's a little bit past his time, as it were. But that I think is one of the main weaknesses of Debsian socialism is that even though he was able to articulate a heartfelt opposition to racism, it kind of ended at like a moral revulsion and an economist view that all workers have to get together. How linking this fight for black liberation to the fight for socialism was not something that Debs or the entire socialist movement in the United States was a big weakness, that nothing that they did they weren't linked together until the common turn came in.

SPEAKER_02 36:46

Debs would cite Marx saying working men of all countries unite, which of course is true. They should, but he kind of used it as it doesn't matter regardless of race, sex, creed, any other condition, all men are equal, which is true. But Marx actually said in volume one of Capital, which was uh 1867, labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. That is still true today. That's really what socialists today in America have to learn from these weaknesses in the history of the socialist movement. If you're actually going to fight for socialism in this country, you cannot do that with a colorblind program.

SPEAKER_03 37:28

Absolutely. I think it also says something about the right-wing elements of the DSA. I have a book, Class Struggle and the Color Line, by uh somebody who is in the DSA and alibying Debs' view on the black question. Nowadays, you have people like Eric Blank who are alibying Victor Berger. Right. So it really shows maybe that's what's changed in the last hundred years.

SPEAKER_02 37:55

Yeah, right. They've removed themselves even further away from socialist politics. Yeah. I guess the next question I wanted to deal with is what we call the party question, which is a real area of difference with Debs and the Socialist Party, which is the big tent and what Kautsky called the party of the whole class. So let's let's dive into that. What was Debs' view on this? What are our criticisms? But also prefacing this with the fact that Debs was for a big tent, but his big tent never included the agents of the exploiters, Democrat or Republican. So just to make that clear to begin with, that wasn't what he was talking about as far as a big tent of the whole class, the working class. In Canon's pamphlet on Debs that I referenced earlier, he contrasts Lenin and Debs on the party question. And he talks about how Lenin really believed that for victory, the workers were need a party that is fit to lead a revolution. And to Lenin, that meant a party with a revolutionary program and leadership, a party of revolutionists. That was what Lenin concentrated, the main energies of his life was on constructing such a party and on the struggle to keep it free from bourgeois ideas and influences. Lenin never shirked from internal discussion and conflict. As Canon put it, the Menshevik Philistines, the Russian counterparts of the American burghers and Hillquits hated him for that, especially for his single-minded concentration on the struggle for a revolutionary program and for his effectiveness in that struggle, but that did not deter him. And Canon talks about how Debs after 1904 refused to attend party conventions, which is where policy was decided. He declined nomination for the leadership for the national committee. Lenin's attitude was the exact opposite of that. He saw the party congress as the highest expression of party life. He was always on hand there, ready to fight for his program. He regarded the Central Committee as the executive leadership of the movement and took his place at the head of it. Lenin wrote a book about the conflict at the second Congress of the party in 1903, where it was this the first basic division between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks took place. And Lenin wrote, I cannot help recalling in this connection a conversation I happened to have at the Congress with one of the quote center delegates. Quote, how oppressive the atmosphere is at our Congress, he complained. This bitter fighting, this agitation, once again, one against the other, this biting controversy, this uncomradly attitude. And Lenin replied, What a splendid thing our Congress is. A free and open struggle. Opinions have been stated. The shades have been brought out. The groups have taken shape. Hands have been raised. A decision has been taken. A stage has been passed. Forward, that's the stuff for me. That's life. That's not like the endless, tedious word chopping of intellectuals, which terminates not because the question has been settled, but because they are too tired to talk anymore. The comrade of the center stared at me in perplexity and shrugged his shoulders. We were talking in different languages. This is Lenin from one step forward, two steps back. I thought this was hilarious because I felt this conveys how it is in a lot of political discussions on the left today. But Lenin saw the struggle against opportunism in the Russian Social Democratic Party as really an essential part, an essential part of the struggle for revolution. And Canon notes that it's important to remember that the Bolshevik Party, constructed in the course of that struggle, became the organizer and leader of the greatest revolution in history. Jacob, I don't know if you want to talk a little about the problem of leadership of the party with the socialist party, how that really connects to this whole big tent conception and why that's really not gonna cut it if you're trying to actually lead a revolution in this country.

SPEAKER_03 42:03

The Socialist Party was a big tent. It was a tent of people who wanted socialism. It was not a tent of uh Democrats and Republicans or wanna be Democrats and Republicans, but there was a wide array of different views, including people like Berger, who was very much on the right wing of the party, people like Hilquitt, who were uh somewhat more sophisticated, so kind of in the center. But there were and so the Socialist Party was not a party, unlike Lenin's party, it really didn't have a conception of how to get socialism. There were some on the far left wing, like Big Bill Haywood, some on the the right wing. And so they're all different things, and it was quite unstable in a sense once you got down to political brass tacks. And so I think that's part of the reason that Debs didn't want to get involved in these issues. He saw them as, I think, a distraction of what he thought was the most important thing, which was to win workers to the idea of socialism. That's his point, his articles, his speeches constantly make that point over and over. And that was, on one level, his strength is that he was quite good at uh talking about socialism in a way that workers could understand. But then the question is, what is the party going to be? And I think that really came to a head. I mean, it came to a head several times. There were several different splits within the Socialist Party, including over the question of the IWW and the AFL, where some leaders of the Socialist Party didn't want to support the IWW because it would upset their role in the leadership of various AFL unions. It came to a head during World War I, where the right wing of The Socialist Party didn't oppose the war, but it also came to a head after the Bolshevik Revolution, where even though there was a lot of sentiment in favor of the Bolshevik Revolution, there was a strong aversion on the part of the leadership of the Socialist Party to actually create a party that could carry out a revolution in this country. If you look at the 21 conditions to entry into the Communist International, Morris Hilquitt is one of the few socialist leaders who were named by name as not being able to enter into the commentary. It's really not just a question of a political position on this or that issue, though there were things like that, but what is the point of the party? The problem with Debs in that is that he was very explicit that he wanted everybody basically to get together and to remain in the same party. Debs was in prison when the American Communist Party was founded, when it was expelled or split from the Socialist Party. And some leaders of the early Communist Party went to a prison where Debs was in Atlanta to try to win him over to try to get him to side with the left wing. And his response was that he he supported the Bolsheviks.

SPEAKER_02 45:29

He supported the Bolsheviki. That's what he called.

SPEAKER_03 45:32

Oh the Bolsheviki, yes. But he didn't see that as having any real ramifications for socialist politics in the United States. That is to say, he did not want there, he opposed the split between the left wing and the right wing in the American Socialist Party.

SPEAKER_02 45:50

Right.

SPEAKER_03 45:52

And so that was a major weakness, if you want to put it put it moddly, in Debs's view. So the in that sense, the left wing of the American Socialist Party, which had all kinds of its own problems, including on the issue of the black question, which we talked about. But they saw the need for there to be a communist party in the United States and to break with opportunism. Debs did not. That was a fundamental weakness that he had. But that did not stop the communist movement from working with Debs. You mentioned the article in Labor Defender by Canon. In that article, he makes clear that actually Debs was uh one of the original members of the right, I think it was the national committee of the ILD. It was one of the last political things that he did to join this organization that was clearly, obviously openly aligned with the Communist Party, but it was a non-sectarian class struggle, class and social defense organization to defend workers and others victimized by the capitalists. So in that sense, the heritage of Debs is not with the opportunists who may claim them or the right wing of the DSA, but strengths and weaknesses that belong to the working class.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

If you look at the party question from the angle of DSA today, there's a similarity and there's a difference, right? In the sense that DSA claims, you know, it's a big tent organization. The Socialist Party of Debs was also a big tent organization in the sense that the Socialist Party had a revolutionary wing, it had a centrist wing, and it also had pretty open reformist wing as well. In DSA, we've got Maoists, there's Trotskyists, there's anarchists, there's Kautskyites, every flavor of leftist you can imagine. But the difference is the Big Tent expands all the way into the Democratic Party, which is a huge difference from the Socialist Party under Debs, which was explicitly independent of both capitalist parties. It like makes the character of the Big Tent different in a sense. We are Leninists, we don't favor political organization like a big tent where you have reformists and revolutionaries in the same party. In DSA, it's such a distorted thing, right? Because you have people who call themselves revolutionaries, and then you have the oldest imperialist party on the planet coexisting under the same big tent. And the people who call themselves revolutionaries are always seeking to maintain their ties with the people on the DSA right who are more or less just open agents of the Democratic Party. This is the main problem with like a big tent form of organization for socialists. Because to maintain the big tent, you have to the revolutionary wing has to subordinate its politics to the interests of unity with the reformists. The reformists are under no obligation to do the same thing. And in fact, and maybe you could speak to this, Jacob, a little bit too, but in fact, any time that the political program of the reformists was threatened within the old socialist party, the right wing would either expel the left or later on in the 30s it split itself away from the socialist party. They don't see any reason to like be subordinate to people they regard as like fanatics or whatever. Not that there's many of those in DSA. You can see this in DSA as well. In 2024, after DSA did not endorse Harris for president, the right-wing caucuses launched their own campaign for Harris called Socialism Beats Fascism. Or just recently, whenever there was the kerfuffle in the NPC over the membership poll to endorse AOC, there was all this stuff like immediately after where the treasurer or something, I think, if I if memory recalls.

SPEAKER_02 49:39

Yeah, and the New York City DSA that said something about how we have all the time. New York City DSA away from national.

SPEAKER_01 49:54

This is what it leads to, right? The people who really want to be revolutionaries, everything they do is subordinate to making sure they don't lose the people who aren't socialists, have no interest in socialism, and whose goal in life is to become a staffer for AOC or Nitya Rahman or something like that, who the LA DSA just endorsed, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 50:14

Shame. 40. It seems like 40% voted against.

SPEAKER_03 50:19

You're absolutely right in terms of the the history of the SP with that. I can think of the biggest, the earliest fight between the left and the right had to do the right wing wanted to expel Big Bill Haywood, and they did from the National Executive Committee, I think in 1911, uh because they thought the IWW were too radical and in favor of sabotage because they were in favor of class struggle. Then the big one, well then during the war, there was a whole layer like John Spargo and other people on the right wing who just thought that Woodwell Wilson was enacting the socialist program, that World War One was a progressive war against German militarism, and they happily decamped without any problems. Then but then the big split was in 1919 when Morris Hilquitt and others who just expelled the the communists. Hilquitt said you have to clear the decks. And there were mass expulsions, including the leadership of the Ohio Socialist Party, which was in the hands of CE Ruthenberg, who went on to help lead the Communist Party. So that's the dynamic. And then, like you mentioned, in the 30s, which is a whole other context, but there was the right wing of the Socialist Party, especially, but not only in New York City, that had a base in the garment trades, that was loyal to uh Mandami's hero, Firo LaGuardia. They walked out of the Socialist Party because they thought the left was getting too powerful and they wanted to just esconce themselves in the New Deal coalition without any contradiction. So you're absolutely right that the right wing is always happy to split with the left when it's convenient to them. Uh, but what you often see is the so-called left, the centrists who are begging the right wing not to leave.

SPEAKER_02 52:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 52:22

Or tailing them along. So it is a weakness again, not in the 30s, because Debs was dead, but he was, I think, honestly, but very strongly, opposed to a split within the socialist movement between opportunism and revolutionary. Whereas if you read what Lenin wrote during World War One, he believed there had to be a split between opportunism and revolutionary Marxist.

SPEAKER_02 52:49

Yeah, I think that we can learn a lot from that history, and I can totally see a scenario in the not too far future where the DSA right tries to clear the decks in pursuit of their really rotten bloc with the imperialist democratic party. But this what you get today from DSA Left too is unity is really the only way to build a mass socialist movement. And this is how you do mass politics. If you actually draw a class line on this question of the Democratic Party, then you're just a sect and you just want to be isolated and so forth. But I mean, I think you can really see from this history that really the only shot at a real socialist mass movement in this country is a split of the DSA on class lines because what they are building is not socialist. There is nothing socialist about what Mamdani or AOC are doing right now. AOC was recently asked about uh arresting Netanyahu as well, and like she couldn't even answer that she was for that. Even like one of these right geese guys was like, oh, this is very worrisome. They've been like the biggest pushers of AOC or fascism. This is not leading us to socialism. This is leading us to defeat. That's the part of Deb's, that part of his legacy of class independence and fighting to get rid of the capitalist system as a whole. And it's really what we what the just breakery caucus upholds and fights for in the DSA today. That's also why we fight for a real united front of the left and everyone who wants to fight for this for this break on class lines. Yeah, so just to conclude, I think fittingly on the question of imperialist war, Debs gave a speech, an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, on June 16th in 1918. And he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for delivering this speech. He ended up serving more than two years in the federal penitentiary while behind bars. He ran for president in 1920, and I think he earned nearly one million votes. He was commuted and released in December of 1921. He was also charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for attempting to obstruct military recruitment and cause insubordination in the armed forces. So that was really a very proud moment in the history of American socialism that Dubbs gave this speech and stood up in opposition to World War I, to this inter-imperialist war. You can also obviously contrast that with our quote socialist mayor in New York City, Mamdani, who will do nothing to free Venezuelan president Maduro from a prison in New York City or to arrest Netanyahu. There's a very clear contrast here of Eugene Debs as a socialist candidate and what Mamdani does in New York City. So maybe just to conclude, Jacob, if you have any comments on that aspect of Debs, this question of the war and his brave opposition to it.

SPEAKER_03 56:11

Yeah, I mean he was opposed to the war. He saw it as a war of workers being sent to die for capitalist aims, and he was not at all afraid to oppose it, and not in a mealy-mouth way either. But it's also important to keep in mind that Canton at the time was a pretty big steel town, and so his attitude was that the workers had to oppose the war. It was against the interest of the working class. And as you mentioned, he was arrested. And and and and probably the time in jail led to his death because I believe he got I don't know if it was tuberculosis or some kind of respiratory disease that led to him dying not that long afterwards. It kind of broke him physically. Yeah. Uh but it didn't break him politically. It's true that he was commuted his sentence after the war, but he never got his political rights back. That is to say, I think they took away his citizenship. The bourgeoisie really hated him because of what he stood for. It's hard to imagine AOC or no. I just kidnapped.

SPEAKER_02 57:22

Giving her Munich speech about how Trump didn't go far enough in regime change in Venezuela. Very opposite of what Debs stood for.

SPEAKER_03 57:32

Debs. In the article that you mentioned from uh the labor defender, Canon says the great fighter was our elder brother and he remains ours in spite of the differences that we may have had with him. But there are a lot of political differences, I think, between revolutionary Marxism today and what Debs articulated, but he certainly does not belong to the right wing of the DSA.

SPEAKER_02 57:56

Definitely not. Well, hopefully this episode has contributed to saving Debs from their clutches.

SPEAKER_03 58:03

Yes, they could have Victor Berger, I suppose.

SPEAKER_02 58:05

Yeah, they can have him. We'll keep Debs. That was a really great conversation, Jacob. Do you w wanna make a pitch at all for the PRL? And if people want to come out.

SPEAKER_03 58:16

Yeah, so as you mentioned, I'm a research associate at the Prometheus Research Library. It's a working Marxist archive that we collect material on the history of the left in this country and in and internationally. It's a great place to read about the communist movement, the Trotskyist movement. You mentioned Canon. We have quite a bit of canon, including stuff on the Socialist Party in the 1930s. If people are interested, you could follow us on Twitter at PRL underscore library. You could also email us at library at prl.org. And we welcome people who are interested to contact us. And if you're in New York City to make an appointment and to come and see what we have, we'd love to give you your tour.

SPEAKER_02 59:06

Great. Okay, so just uh before Edward ends on a pitch for the Give Me a Break podcast in JBA, we're gonna end this episode with an excerpt of that very fine speech that Debs gave at Encanton, Ohio, that we referenced.

SPEAKER_01 59:25

That concludes this episode of the Give Me a Break podcast. You can follow all of the work of the Just Break Already caucus by checking out our Linktree. That is linktree.com slash DSA underscore just break already. We are on X at Clean Break Now and on Instagram at DSA underscore just break already. On our Linktree, you can find all of our statements, resolutions, petitions, everything if we've everything we've been up to lately. And we love to get your comments, DMs, hate mail, love letters. We like to see reviews. So if you like the podcast, you can you should leave a review on, well, wherever you're listening to this podcast. That helps boost us in the algorithm. Share it with somebody you know, um in DSA, outside of DSA, whoever you want. But we're always looking forward to the possibility of others in different DSA caucuses coming on so we can have some debate. That hasn't materialized yet, but we are working on it. So if you are interested in coming for coming on, we can talk about anything you want, AOC 2028, but or anything else that's coming up in your chapter. Um yeah, so hit us up. RDMs are always open.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:33

To turn your back on the corrupt Republican Party and the still more corrupt Democratic Party, the gold dust lackeys of the ruling class counts for still more after you have stepped out of those popular and corrupt capitalist parties to join a minority party that has an ideal, that stands for a principle, and fights for a cause. This will be the most important change you have ever made, and the time will come when you will thank me for having made the suggestion. It was the day of days for me. I remember it well. It was like passing from midnight darkness to the noontide light of day. It came almost like a flash and found me ready. It must have been in such a flash, that great, seething, throbbing Russia, prepared by centuries of slavery and tears and martyrdom was transformed from a dark continent to a land of living light. There is something splendid, something sustaining and inspiring in the prompting of the heart to be true to yourself and to the best you know, especially in a crucial hour of your life. You are in the crucible today, my socialist comrades. You are going to be tried by fire. To what extent no one knows. If you are weak fibered and faint-hearted, you will be lost to the socialist movement. We will have to bid you goodbye. You are not the stuff of which revolutions are made. We are sorry for you unless you chance to be a quote intellectual. The quote intellectuals, many of them, are already gone. No loss on our side, nor gain on the other. They would have us believe that if we had no quote intellectuals, we would have no movement. They would have our party, the rank and file, controlled by the quote, intellectual bosses, as the Republican and Democratic parties are controlled. These capitalist parties are managed by, quote, intellectual leaders, and the rank and file are sheep that follow the bellwether to the shambles. In the Republican and Democratic parties, you of the common herd are not expected to think. That is not only unnecessary, but might lead you astray. That is what the quote intellectual leaders are for. They do the thinking and you do the voting. They ride in carriages at the front where the band plays and you tramp in the mud, bringing up the rear with great enthusiasm. When you have organized industrially, you will soon learn that you can manage as well as operate industry. You will soon realize that you do not need the mass idle masters and exploiters. They are simply parasites. They do not employ you as you imagine, but you employ them to take from you what you produce, and that is how they function in industry. You can certainly dispense with them in that capacity. You do not need them to depend upon you for your jobs. You can never be free while you work and live by their sufferance. You must own your own tools, and then you will control your own jobs, enjoy the products of your own labor, and be free men instead of industrial slaves. Organize industrially and make your organization complete. Then unite in the Socialist Party. Vote as you strike and strike as you vote. Your union and your party embrace the working class. The Socialist Party expresses the interests, hopes, and aspirations of the toilers of all the world.