https://socialistworker.org/2019/01/24/how-debs-went-from-democrat-to-socialist
How Debs went from Democrat to Socialist
January 24, 2019
Kay Sweeney contributes to the discussion about socialists and the
Democratic Party with a look at how socialist leader Eugene Debs made
that transition.
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EUGENE V. Debs ran for office as a leader of the Socialist Party (SP) in
1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. His political life is often held up as the
most inspiring example of a socialist strategy in relation to the
Democratic Party.
The context behind these campaigns is important. After the SP’s founding
in 1901, the party’s membership grew to over 113,000 members by 1912.
Debs’ campaigns, which he used to project socialist politics, were
conducted in a very different time period, when tens of thousands — and
sometimes hundreds of thousands — of people were already convinced of
the need for an independent socialist alternative.
How did the left get to this point? And how was Eugene Debs himself won
to building such a party? Examining the answers to such questions
challenges common assumptions about the need for a “clean break” to win
activists today to independent politics.
Debs’ early political career
Debs began his political career as a union leader and served several
terms as a Democratic Party politician. He was firmly rooted in the
Democratic Party for 16 years before he broke with it.
Image from SocialistWorker.org
In The Bending Cross, A Biography of Eugene V. Debs, Ray Ginger
describes the beginning of the young union leader’s entrance into
politics: “When [Debs] mounted the platform on August 30, 1878, for his
first political speech, it was to champion the cause of the poor, the
oppressed, the crucified, and the Democratic Party...[T]he next year, he
was the Democratic nominee for City Clerk in Terre Haute, and easily won
by an 1,100 majority.”
Debs was re-elected as city clerk in 1881. Then, in 1885, wanting to
advocate for more legislation to protect workers, Debs was sworn into
the state House of Representatives of Indiana as a Democrat. Ginger
describes:
He had already drafted a bill which would require railroad companies to
compensate their employees for injuries suffered on duty. Appointed to
the Railway Committee, he maneuvered the bill through the lower chamber,
and rejoiced when it was sent to the Senate. But his exaltation was
short-lived. When the bill reached the State Senate, the members of that
body toyed with it for a few days, finally cut the guts out of it. Debs,
convinced that he had failed the railroad workers, promptly withdrew the
bill from consideration.
Other measures in which Debs was deeply interested also went down to
defeat. He bolted his party to vote with the Republicans on a bill to
abolish all distinctions of race and color in the laws of Indiana, but
the bill lost by three votes. He voted for a bill to extend suffrage to
women; again, he was on the losing side. By the time for adjournment,
Debs had decided not to stand for re-election. He was ill-suited for the
compromise and favoritism of political life.
This experience led Debs to conclude that he could fight for reforms
more effectively as a union leader than as a politician. It was a step
forward in his understanding of the electoral system. But he remained a
vocal advocate of “lesser evilism” and continued to campaign for Democrats.
Simultaneous to Debs’ development of political consciousness around the
political system was his growing understanding of the relationship
between labor and capital through his experiences as a union leader.
In the early 1870s, Debs believed strikes were unnecessary and that
disputes between labor and capital could be resolved through fair
negotiation. But with every struggle, and many more defeats than
victories, Debs slowly began to better understand that the interests of
capital were counterposed to the interests of working people.
Although his radicalization about the realities of class struggle grew
and grew, it was not until the Pullman strike that Debs’ relationship
with the Democratic Party would shatter.
From May through July of 1894, Debs helped lead a strike of over
125,000 railway workers that shut down 29 railroads in the Midwest.
Despite his urgings for workers to remain nonviolent, Debs was
ruthlessly slandered by the media.
When President Grover Cleveland mobilized the army to defeat the strike,
Debs welcomed the troops, believing they would maintain order. But it
soon became clear that the federal troops were there to support the
strikebreakers. The government issued an injunction against the strike
that led to Debs’ arrest.
The Pullman strike ended in a massive defeat. Debs continued to support
and lead the strike, despite being slandered by the media and sentenced
to months in jail. The overwhelming defeat was as demoralizing as it was
radicalizing. For the first time, Ginger writes:
Eugene Debs, a lifelong Democrat who three times campaigned for Grover
Cleveland, was deprived of faith in the major political parties by the
actions of Cleveland and Olney. He could no longer advocate labor’s
adherence to parties which were firmly controlled by the large corporations.
At the last strike meeting, Debs made a personal appeal to the
workingmen: “I am a Populist, and I am in favor of wiping out both
parties so they will never come into power again. I have been a Democrat
all my life and I am ashamed to admit it. I want all of you to go to the
polls and vote the People’s ticket.”
In the following year, as the 1896 presidential election came closer,
the Populist Party debated which candidate to run. They nominated Debs,
but he refused, feeling that his energies would not be best spent
through an attempt to become president. Then, the Populists decided to
endorse a Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, who had co-opted the
Populist platform.
Debs joined the campaign for Bryan. But the election was an utter
defeat. “Corruption, threats, and good luck brought a Republican
landslide,” according to Ginger. This experience radicalized Debs
further. As Ginger writes:
The steamroller tactics of [Republican businessman] Mark Hanna showed
Debs that he had underestimated the power of corporations. Big Business
not only had a firm grip on the government; it also had a firm grip on
the American mind. The reform movement had run into a stone wall, which
could not be scaled or breached, and could only be destroyed by means of
a persistent, long-run battle to convert the common people to socialism.
Resolving take up this task, Debs published his personal manifesto in
the Railway Times on January 1, 1897.
This manifesto was the first time that Debs came out publicly in favor
of socialism. Never again would he support a Democrat. Soon after, Debs
joined the Social Democratic Party alongside well-known communists like
Victor Berger. Five years later, he helped found the Socialist Party and
became one of the most consistent and inspiring champions of a
working-class third party and revolutionary socialism for the rest of
his life.
They’ll sell us out...
Debs’ early life challenges some common notions about how people
radicalize against the Democratic Party. Some argue that we shouldn’t
work with the Democratic Party because it will betray us and pressure
our imperfect candidates to compromise. If only we had perfect socialist
candidates who were principled, didn’t have illusions in the Democrats...
But if the Debs of 1885 were around today, no one would have predicted
he’d someday become a revolutionary socialist who would help convince
over a million people to cast a protest vote against both parties.
It wasn’t just that the early Debs was a product of the politics of that
era, his politics were behind his era. Ginger describes how, when others
argued the necessity of strikes, Debs disagreed. When others argued the
irreconcilable nature of class struggle, Debs ridiculed them. He stood
for lesser evilism and he was firmly entrenched in the Democratic Party
which sought to co-opt him.
But Debs didn’t “sell out.” After his term Indiana state legislature, he
decided he would rather stay out of political positions than face
another four years of pressure to compromise and watching progressive
legislation fail.
It wasn’t that Debs was a better person than the hundreds of radical
politicians who have betrayed the people once in office. The reality is
that we just cannot predict the outcomes of today’s genuinely
progressive politicians based on their current politics.
Something to break toward?
Some argue that we must focus our efforts on building a third-party
alternative, even if it’s very small. They argue that this will help
people break away from the Democrats, because they will have something
to break towards.
But interestingly, Debs didn’t break from the Democrats by seeing a
third party with a much better platform for change. At the height of the
Populist Party in 1892, when they won over a million votes, Debs
campaigned for Cleveland. As Ginger notes, “Debs never deserted a
possible solution until he became convinced that it had failed.”
Debs joined the Populists only after Cleveland smashed the Pullman
strike. This suggests that the betrayal of the Democrats, not the
existence of an alternative, was the driving force behind Debs’
decision. But the smashing of the Pullman strike only brought him halfway.
It was the defeat of the Populist Party and witnessing the corporations
pull out all their tricks to ensure a Republican victory that Debs
radicalized against not only the Democratic Party, but the whole U.S.
government. That’s when Debs understood that the U.S. was not a
democracy, the working-class cannot vote its way to socialism, and the
purpose of elections became projecting socialist ideas to the widest
audience and building a working-class alterative.
The need for firsthand experience inside the Democrats?
A layer of activists today have been convinced of the need for an
independent alternative to the Democrats without direct participation in
the Democratic Party, with history and theory playing a strong role in
their radicalization. But it’s likely that patient argument, history and
theory cannot convince everyone, or even a majority of people, to
radicalize against the Democrats.
There is abounding evidence that Debs was thoroughly exposed to radical
arguments throughout the 1880s and 1890s. He was an avid reader of all
political traditions. He met radicals and conservatives alike throughout
the country. As editor of The Magazine, his office was flooded with
articles about Marxism. Through the course of a decade of labor battles,
Debs became an advocate of strikes and learned that workers and
capitalists had opposing interests.
But participation in labor militancy alone wasn’t enough to convince
Debs that the Democratic Party was not a friend of working people.
Attempting to enact change from above himself by his term in the Indiana
legislature, seeing the very president he campaigned for smash the
Pullman strike, witnessing the failure of the Populist endorsement of
Bryan — this is what solidified Debs’ unwavering commitment to
independent socialist organizing.
Thus, the recipe for Debs to become a socialist required at least two
ingredients: witnessing the power of working-class struggle and
firsthand experience of the failure of orienting on the Democrats.
Debs supported the Democrats throughout his early life, fully believing
that the party was on workers’ side. He left with a very different
understanding. That process took 16 years. But the driving force was the
inherent contradiction between the class interests of oppressed and
working-class people who are moving in struggle and the class interests
of the ruling class that controls the Democratic Party.
Even the best revolutionaries can’t, by good ideas alone, lead such a
massive break. But imagine if revolutionaries were there to contribute
to one that arose from this inherent contradiction?
What can Debs’ radicalization mean for today?
Many revolutionaries agree that the working-class must accumulate a set
of collective political lessons learned in the course of the struggle
for reforms over many years before the class will become revolutionary.
Today, we face a situation where new activists are testing all possible
methods for change. This generation set up tent cities through Occupy,
blocked highways for Black Lives Matter, went on strike for teachers.
And despite the best arguments of revolutionaries, a layer of new
activists are building campaigns for socialist candidates running in the
Democratic Party.
Rather than forecasting that this strategy will send the left to its
ruin, revolutionaries should consider analyzing the historical
situations in which people in the Democratic Party have radicalized
against the party and consider how revolutionaries could intervene to
deepen this radicalization.
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