This says it all.
Carl Jarvis
"I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you
could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that
there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves."
-Eugene Debs
On 9/2/18, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistworker.org/2012/08/31/a-million-votes-for-socialism
When 1 million voted for socialism
August 31, 2012
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We're told that the choice between Democrats and Republicans is the best
the American political system has to offer--and that it's unrealistic to
expect a left-wing campaign to win mass support. But in the early years
of the 20th century, Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs won up to 1
million votes in his five presidential campaigns.
In this article first published in the October 2004, Elizabeth Schulte
describes what a presidential campaign that put workers' power on its
agenda looked like.
"THE WORKERS in the mills and factories, in the mines and on the farms
and railways never had a party of their own until the Socialist Party
was organized," presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs said in 1912.
"They divided their votes between the parties of their masters. They did
not realize they were using their ballots to forge their own fetters."
During his Socialist Party (SP) campaign for president in 1912, Debs
traveled across the country, speaking four or five times a day. It's
estimated that Debs' socialist message reached half a million people.
That campaign year, some 323 newspapers and periodicals took up the
cause for socialism. The Appeal to Reason, one of the most widely read
socialist papers, reached a circulation of 600,000 copies in 1912.
On Election Day, Debs won 897,000 votes--which, considering that this
was before women had the right to vote, amounted to 6 percent of the
voting population. For the SP, the 1912 campaign translated into big
growth, with the party reaching almost 118,000 dues-paying members.
Eugene V. Debs on the speakers' platform
Eugene V. Debs on the speakers' platform
In particular, the campaign succeeded in places with left-wing SP
chapters that supported local workers' struggles. According to historian
Ira Kipnis, the SP in Allegheny, Pa., where members participated in
union activity and strikes, experienced a 300 percent increase in
Socialist votes from 1908. This compared to far less impressive turnouts
in conservative SP chapters in Wisconsin, New York and Massachusetts.
THE 1912 campaign was the fourth of five presidential races that Debs
ran in the early part of the century. In his last run in 1920, Debs
campaigned from behind bars--in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where
he was jailed for opposing the First World War in his famous 1918 Canton
speech. Debs' campaigns spoke to the thousands of working-class people
who knew firsthand the corruption and brutality of capitalism--and
challenged them to draw socialist conclusions.
Debs himself wasn't born a socialist. Like thousands of others, he was
transformed by the world around him. His life, from 1855 to 1926,
spanned an era of upheaval in U.S. capitalism--a huge expansion in
industry, the rise of the wealthy robber barons like J.P. Morgan,
repeated economic depressions, and an explosion in the size of U.S.
working class.
These conditions produced some of history's bravest labor struggles--the
fight for the eight-hour day; the great strike wave of 1877; the Pullman
railway strike of 1894 in Chicago, which Debs helped lead; and the
Lawrence, Mass., textile strike of 1912. Debs, a former supporter of
populist Democrat Williams Jennings Bryan, eventually concluded that the
Democrats were no friend to the U.S. working-class and that workers
needed their own political party.
He helped found the SP in 1901. Debs used his political campaigns to
point out the inequality and brutality of capitalism, and spread the
ideas of unionism, class struggle and revolutionary socialism to an
ever-growing audience.
One continual theme of his speeches was to shine a light on the
corruption of the two-party system. "Both the Republican and Democratic
parties will, as usual, strain every nerve to whip the 'voting kings'
into line and every conceivable influence will be exerted to that end,"
Debs said during his 1900 campaign.
"Corruption funds, national, state and municipal, will flow out like
lava tides; promises will be as plentiful as autumn leaves; from a
thousand platforms, the Columbian orator will agitate the atmosphere,
while brass bands, torchlight processions, glittering uniforms and free
whisky dispensed by the ward-heeler will lend their combined influence
to steer the 'patriots' to the capitalist chute that empties into the
ballot box."
The Democrats, in particular, were a favorite target of Debs. "In
referring to the Democratic Party in this discussion, we may save time
by simply saying that...it is near enough like its Republican ally to
pass for a twin brother," he said in a 1904 campaign speech in
Indianapolis. "The former party of the 'common people' is no longer
under the boycott of the plutocracy since it has adopted the Wall Street
label."
Likewise, the Democrats attacked the Debs and the Socialist Party at
every turn. For instance, in 1908, AFL head Samuel Gompers--who had
thrown the union federation's official support behind Bryan--accused the
Republicans of financing Debs' "Red Special" campaign train. The SP
responded by printing the names and addresses of the 15,000 contributors
who had given pennies, dimes and dollars to pay for the $35,000 train.
Debs encouraged progressives in the Democratic Party to defect and join
the SP. "The radical and progressive elements of the former Democracy
have been evicted and must seek other quarters," he said in 1904. "They
were an unmitigated nuisance in the conservative counsels of the old
party. They were for the 'common people,' and the trusts have no use for
such a party.
"Where but to the Socialist Party can these progressive people
turn?...Every true Democrat should thank Wall Street for driving them
out of a party that is democratic in name only and into one that is
democratic in fact." Debs concluded, "With either of these parties in
power, one thing is always certain, and that is that the capitalist
class is in the saddle and the working class is under the saddle."
EVEN AS the SP experienced success in the 1912 election, divisions
between the party's left and right wings were also coming to a head.
Since its founding, debates raged over the purpose of the party and how
socialism would be achieved--fundamentally, the question of reform or
revolution.
The SP had held together, despite the festering disagreements. The right
wing of the party saw electoral successes as the be-all and end-all of
party activity, and attempted to pull the party further away from class
struggle as it courted middle-class and even wealthy support.
The left, which included Western Federation of Miners and Industrial
Workers of the World leader Big Bill Haywood, supported the eventual
goal of a workers' revolution. Debs argued that the point of the
electoral campaigns was not so much getting elected, but convincing
workers of socialism and of the need to join a socialist organization.
"We should seek only to register the actual vote of Socialism, no more
no less," he told fellow SP members in 1911. "In our propaganda, we
should state our principles clearly, speak the truth fearlessly, seeking
not to flatter, not to offend, but only to convince those who should be
with us and win them to our cause through an intelligent understanding
of its mission...
"Voting for Socialism is not Socialism any more than a menu is a meal.
Socialism must be organized, drilled, equipped, and the place to begin
is in the industries where the workers are employed...Without such
economic organization and the economic power with which it is clothed,
and without the industrial co-operative training, discipline and
efficiency which are its corollaries, the fruit of any political
victories the workers may achieve will turn to ashes on their lips."
With the coming of the First World War and the 1917 revolution in
Russia, the differences within the SP could no longer be papered over.
In 1919, left-wing delegates to the party's 1919 Chicago convention
walked out and formed organizations that later became the Communist Party.
Unfortunately, though, Debs never intervened in the internal arguments
about the future of the party--and he stuck with the SP after the left
walked out. Many of Debs' speeches, however, are as relevant for
socialists as they were a century ago. He gave voice to the concerns of
workers everywhere, spurring them to break from the Democratic Party and
have confidence in their own ability to win change.
"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead
them out of bondage," Debs told a New York audience in 1905. "He has not
come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if
you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make
up your minds that there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves.
"You do not need the capitalist. He could not exist an instant without
you. You would just begin to live without him. You do everything, and he
has everything, and some of you imagine that if it were not for him, you
would have no work. As a matter of fact, he does not employ you at all;
you employ him to take from you what you produce, and he faithfully
sticks to this task.
"If you can stand it, he can; and if you don't change this relation, I
am sure he won't. You make the automobile, he rides in it. If it were
not for you, he would walk; and if it were not for him, you would ride."
First published in the October 1, 2004 issue of Socialist Worker.
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