A century after Debs
Andrea Bauer, Mark Burrows, Carlos L. Garrido, Edward Remus
Platypus Review 191 | November 2026
On Saturday, April 11, 2026, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion at the University of Chicago, marking the 100th anniversary of the death of Eugene Debs. The speakers were Andrea Bauer (Freedom Socialist Party), Mark Burrows (Railroad Workers United and board member of the Eugene V. Debs Foundation), Carlos L. Garrido (American Communist Party, and author of Why You Need American Marxism), and Edward Remus (Platypus Affiliated Society and the Campaign for a Socialist Party). The panel was moderated by Conaugh Dwyer. An edited transcript follows.[1]
Introduction
“Thomas Jefferson would scorn to enter a modern Democratic convention. He would have as little business there as Abraham Lincoln would have in a latter-day Republican convention. If they were living today they would be delegates to this [Socialist] convention!”[2]
— Eugene Debs, May 6, 1904
Eugene Debs stood at the centre of the socialist movement in the United States during the era of the Second International. Like many socialists of the time, he understood the struggle for socialism as both continuous with, and an overcoming of, the wider legacy of the bourgeois revolution. The Socialist Party of America (SPA) rose contemporaneously with other movements which claimed America’s revolutionary legacy, such as populism and progressivism, yet Debs and socialists like him understood these movements to be fundamentally opposed to the goals of the proletarian socialist party.
Yet this Marxist orthodoxy would enter a dual crisis, both from the international “Revisionist Dispute” of the early 1900s as well as the success of the October Revolution in 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution and the international revolutionary wave of the post-war years appeared to many socialists, including Debs, as a moment of revolutionary possibility for the socialist movement, yet the subsequent history of socialism in the United States and globally raises the question of whether the split of the SPA, and of the global socialist movement, was a step forward or step backward for socialism.
What did Debs mean when he said, “From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it”?[3] What is the relationship between the crisis of the SPA, the rise of progressivism, and the wider crisis of the American Revolution experienced in the aftermath of World War I? How did Debs understand the role of the socialist party in the struggle for socialism? What lessons do the life and legacy of Eugene Debs hold for emancipatory politics today?
Opening remarks
Mark Burrows: Under the leadership of Debs and the American Railway Union during the Pullman Strike, there was a level of unity, solidarity, and militancy that today’s militant rebels and activists in the labor movement can only dream of. Debs learned the hard way that that was not enough. The working class needs to find a way to combine the fight for social and economic justice with the challenge for political power. Otherwise, we will continue to set ourselves up for violent repression when the rulers feel threatened and believe the political cost will be minimal. The industrial working class — and the rest of us who create the wealth — needs to mobilize our economic power, and, along with our allies (small business people, farmers, etc.), the vast majority of us need to mobilize our majority into a movement that can challenge for and ultimately conquer political power from the tiny minority that rules today.
The quote, “From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it,” is from an article Debs wrote, titled “The Day of the People,”[4] in February 1919, while his conviction for violating the Espionage Act was on appeal. There he weighs in on critical internal dynamics in Germany and Russia at the time and the struggle between the opportunists and the revolutionaries. No one identified with the Bolsheviks unless they specifically rejected the Menshevik program and particularly their practice. Debs heralded the Russian Revolution.
Debs understood that action was required. Internal factionalism was something he hated. People should be judged by what they do. The Bolsheviks at the time were the crowning epitome of what most working people in crisis situations knew they needed. They did what had to be done with discipline as well as principle. It’s worth noting that World War I was supported by socialist parties around the world. Debs didn’t see this as a debate topic but as evidence that those parties were no longer socialist. It’s also worth noting that many militants of his day had possibly lived through the Paris Commune and the political chaos and repression that followed. That helped form their understanding of what was at stake whenever battle lines were drawn for workers.
Progressivism was intended to co-opt and steal the thunder from the popularity of Debs and the Socialist Party by championing popular, no-brainer demands. The persecution of Debs and other socialists for speaking out against the war, followed by the Palmer Raids, showed how threatened the ruling class felt by the growing popularity of these ideas. The repression of that era made it much more difficult for the Socialist Party to regroup after the split in 1919 and for the newly-formed Communist Party to get its bearings, especially as political disagreements in the Soviet Union came to life.
The role of the Socialist Party in the struggle for socialism evolved over time. Debs wanted the Socialist Party to be an educational and organizing force, a tool of the working class. He opposed both simple trade unionism and electoralism, insisting that electoral politics had to be a means and not an end. World War I taught him that the party had to be an opponent and not a partner of the existing political order. While Debs supported the Bolshevik Revolution, he always maintained that the Socialist Party in the U.S. must grow from American conditions and traditions and not be dictated by the Comintern.
Debs foreshadows the historical lessons of working people in the U.S. He began his political career still believing in democratic party politics but was forced by his experience and that of his working-class comrades around the world that a break was necessary if we are not to repeat history. Something that gets overlooked is Debs’s capacity to continually question and challenge his own convictions and beliefs when confronted by real events and alternative theories and analysis. Granted, he never came around to being convinced of the need for a revolutionary combat party modeled after the Bolsheviks in this country.
On war, he held that supporters of capitalist war betray and abandon socialism; on racism, that any capitulation to racist sentiment aided the oppressor; on collaboration with capitalist parties, he learned the hard way that any alliance with Democrats or progressive capitalist reformers had to be opposed, and did not believe this was a matter for debate; and he was suspicious of party intellectuals, first and foremost because he didn’t think they understood how to talk clearly to ordinary workers.
He never lost sight of the fact that capitalism is evil and incompatible with human civilization and justice. He never abandoned the goal of freeing working people, and he was a soldier all his life for that cause. His example needs to be understood and duplicated. In the same way that Debs and other socialists related to and supported the Russian Revolution, socialists today have a similar challenge in how we relate to and support the Cuban Revolution when it’s being challenged like never before. I’d like to close with the words of James P. Cannon, from the statement on Debs’s death by the International Labor Defense:
The militant labor movement, of which the International Labor Defense is a part, mourns today the death of Eugene V. Debs. The cause of the class war prisoners suffers an especially heavy loss in the death of Comrade Debs. His name is linked with every labor defense struggle that took place during his life of activity in the labor movement. The prisoner of Woodstock and Atlanta was close kin to all persecuted and imprisoned workers. Comrade Debs was not one of those who shrug shoulders at the imprisonment of workers as though it were a matter of small concern. He burned with indignation at [every] case of capitalist persecution and was always in the vanguard of the fight for its victims, whoever they might be and whatever their political views or affiliations. ... Eugene V. Debs left to the workers’ movement a life record of unceasing struggle on the side of the oppressed, of dauntless spirit and careless disregard for personal rewards or hazards. It is a priceless heritage. That heritage belongs to the revolutionary workers. Let them claim it for their own. Today the grief of the militant workers is heavy indeed, but the grave of Comrade Debs is not the place for tears. He was a warrior and at his grave we raise a battle cry and begin again the forward march.[5]
Carlos L. Garrido: This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Eugene V. Debs and the 100th anniversary of the birth of Fidel Castro. Within the U.S., the socialist Left has basically collapsed since the heyday of the Socialist Party, when it led the most successful independent socialist campaign in the country’s history in 1912. The motto of Platypus rings true to me. The Left in the U.S. is dead. This doesn’t mean there aren’t many people who sympathize with vaguely socialist ideas, but a sovereign socialist Left just doesn’t exist and hasn’t for quite a while.
There’s no independent socialist organization achieving the political success the Socialist Party achieved electorally. None have the power the Communist Party had from 1932 to the start of the Cold War, when it was able to sustain almost 100,000 members and hold key positions in the labor movement, tenant and unemployment councils, the Black Freedom Movement, the struggle against apartheid, and the cultural milieu of writers, artists, and academics. Looking at where we are today — where the absence of the Left is felt most — it is worth going back to the self-criticism that Debs performed in 1920, shortly after the split:
The labor movement in the United States, in proportion to the working class, is the weakest and most backward in the world. . . . One reason … and a very real one, why we have not better succeeded in organizing the workers is to be found in our intolerant attitude and ill-tempered spirit toward those of our own class and of our own ultimate aim who differ from us. Socialists, communists, [and others] spend more time and energy fighting each other than they do fighting capitalism. . . . But if such differences are allowed to provoke ill temper and ugliness of spirit, the result is disastrous if not fatal to efforts to unite the workers in a class-conscious body for a common purpose, and that is what has happened among us and kept the labor movement in a backward state in America.[6]
These words would be true of the U.S. Left at any moment from 1920 to 2026. Today, the divisions of which Debs speaks are perhaps even more prevalent. This is what I call the “purity fetish”: this incessant obsession with only working with or supporting that which measures up to your “pure idea” — whether of socialism, national history, or an enlightened and socially liberal working class.
What Debs was articulating in this article is, embryonically, what Mao would develop 17 years later, the category of principal contradiction. To keep our eyes on the common purpose is to keep focus on the principal contradiction. Secondary contradictions can be debated, but they should not be a cause for division when a common assessment of the principal contradiction of our time is shared. This Debsian attitude will go against those who profit from division, which isn’t just the ruling capitalist class but also the leadership of all the micro-sects who feel their territory and treasuries threatened by the existence of others. For them, the principal contradiction is not the struggle for socialism, but the self-preservation of their positions as self-proclaimed dissidents of a particular form. The unity which Debs speaks of is dialectical; it must include mechanisms for identifying which forms of unity ultimately lead to greater forms of division.
As Karl Liebknecht put it: “Not all unity means strength. Unity between fire and water puts the fire out and causes the water to disappear as steam. Unity between a wolf and a lamb results in the lamb finding itself inside of the wolf.”[7] Unity between the proletariat and the ruling class sacrifices the proletariat. Unity with traitors means defeat. Unity between socialists and self-preservationists is unlikely, and even when achieved, it fosters greater divisions, since each defines the principal contradiction differently.
There are many reasons why there is no strong independent socialist movement in America today. One is a failure to attune Marxism to an American context. Another is a failure to adapt to how subjectivity is constituted in the age of digital media, and therefore how, for lack of a better word, ideology operates today. But more central than these is the question of building the concrete and principled unity and difference which Debs identified 106 years ago. This Debsian wisdom is most relevant for those who want the Left to be reborn in America. The American Communist Party will stand unwaveringly in unity with all who seek to bring down this demonic Epstein regime and the capitalist imperialist system it serves.
Andrea Bauer: This discussion about the meaning of Debs’s life and ideas has a special relevance now with the rise in popularity of socialist ideas and the election of social democratic mayors Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle.
My first introduction to Debs was through James P. Cannon, one of the founders of not only the Communist Party but also the Trotskyist movement in the United States. To start at the beginning with some basics, Debs was born in 1855 in Indiana. He came of age at a time of incredible hardship for much of the working class. The capitalists were ruthless. The unions that did exist were mostly craft unions, which represented the more skilled and privileged workers in a specific trade. Debs and other founding Wobblies like Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, and Daniel DeLeon pushed the cause of industrial unionism. This is the idea that all the workers in an industry should belong to one big union, rather than be divided into different smaller unions according to the type of work they do. Those years of the late 1800s and early 1900s were tumultuous, in which working class and progressive activists were experimenting with new ideas and different organizations. Debs was no different. When young, he had a stint as a Democratic Party politician, about which he later said this:
There was a time in my life, before I became a socialist, when I permitted myself, as a Democrat, to be elected to a state legislature. I have been trying to live it down. I am as much ashamed of that as I am proud of having gone to jail.[8]
He did go to jail more than once. The first time was for violating an injunction during the bitter strike of the American Railway Union in 1894, which he led. In jail, he had time to read and reflect, studying socialist works by Marx and Karl Kautsky. After his release, he gradually became a revolutionary socialist dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism by workers’ revolution.
Debs held very advanced ideas about the rights of black workers and women. From originally seeing black workers simply as equal comrades in the class struggle, which was progressive enough in that period, he went on to understand that the oppression of black Americans was a special question requiring special demands on the system. Similarly, Debs encouraged women’s leadership in strikes and organizing, and he supported causes including women’s suffrage and birth control.
The Socialist Party in the U.S. was one of only two or three social democratic parties internationally that stood firm against World War I. From the start, the SPA was not a homogenous organization. Cannon called it a “variety store” of socialist politics.[9] Debs was part of its class-struggle, revolution-oriented Left wing. The reformist wing was led by Victor Berger, who was based in Milwaukee. While Debs toured the country popularizing socialism and supporting strikes, Berger maneuvered within the party to turn it into a reformist electoral machine concentrated on mainstream politics, especially at the local level, and immediate, ground-level issues in areas of public improvement. Berger and his crowd pushed the question of socialism versus capitalism into the background. Mocked as “sewer socialists,” some of them ended up embracing the label.
There are radicals and socialists today who believe this would be a good model for the Left, arguing that it is a pragmatic choice to appeal to people on the basis of achievable reforms rather than systemic change. This underestimates where millions of people in the United States are at. More people than ever understand capitalism as the root cause of war, environmental catastrophe, authoritarianism, global poverty, and the rollback of hard-won rights and freedoms. The millionaire and billionaire abusers exposed in the Epstein files make them sick. So do the ICE agents rounding up people at schools and job sites and shooting people dead in the streets. They are sick of the corrupt two-party system.
The policies being pushed by Mamdani in New York or Katie Wilson in Seattle, are important to people, but people have a lot more on their minds. Electoral politics are, by their nature, limited in what they can accomplish under capitalism. Socialists like Debs saw the value of elections mainly as a means to reach out to people widely and recruit them to socialist ideas. He told the crowds that conditions would not change until the workers became the masters of the tools.[10]
Debs certainly believed in fighting for reforms, but not as the endgame. He didn’t approve of so-called “socialism” and hated intra-party fighting. Just as he believed in one big union, he hoped for one big socialist party uniting all the different tendencies. But a union and a party are different beasts.
Debs applauded the Russian Revolution and never deviated from his Marxist ideas, but during the showdown between the revolutionaries and the reformists in the Socialist Party, largely sparked by the Russian Revolution, Debs didn’t fight for his position the way his authority would have allowed him to. When the party split, Debs stayed with what had become the Right-wing majority, while a good part of the Left wing split to form the Communist Party (CP) in 1919. Debs had profound differences with the CP in the years that followed, but remained steadfast in his defense of workers persecuted by the capitalist state.
Debs’s life leaves us much to emulate: his non-sectarianism and internationalism, his brave opposition to World War I, and his staunch defense of political prisoners throughout his life, no matter their national origins or political affiliation.
Can the Left rise to the occasion today? For now, the answer lies in our willingness to form democratic united fronts. We don’t need to be in the same party to collaborate and fight rising fascism, imperialist war, and the rollback of centuries worth of advances for workers’ rights and human and civil rights. We can compete over our ideas at the same time. But we have to put the working class first. It is really a question of survival.
Edward Remus: The title of my talk is “Eugene Debs, Progressive.”
There are three views of Eugene Debs and of the Socialist Party he led: the orthodox view, the revisionist view, and the progressive view.
The orthodox view is the view from the world revolution. During his 1917 sojourn in New York, Leon Trotsky told the Left wing of Debs’s Socialist Party of America that the world revolution was coming and a new type of party was needed to lead it.[11] The Left wing’s 1919 manifesto explained why. “Political action is a valuable means of propaganda,” the manifesto argued, and “the capture of legislative seats is an effective means of capturing the political state; but … this capture of the political state is merely for the purpose of destroying it.”[12] Channeling Marx, the manifesto cautioned that the “moderate” socialist “aims to lay hold of the ready-made machinery and wield it for his own purposes,” thereby “falling into the error of believing he can eventually legislate socialism into existence.” Quoting Rosa Luxemburg, the manifesto described Debs’s SPA as “sausage socialism,” “mixing real socialism with bourgeois reforms.”
Meanwhile, the New York Call, a socialist daily aligned with the centrist SPA leader Morris Hillquit, declared it too early to tell who was right: Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the socialists who threw their support behind the 1918 German Revolution, or Ebert and Scheidemann, the socialists who suppressed it.[13] The Call advertised Liberty Loans to fund the American war effort, and in Milwaukee, where Hillquit ally Victor Berger ran a socialist political machine, party members were permitted to openly support the war and to serve on labor councils organized by AFL president Samuel Gompers to prevent strikes in war industries. Unlike the German party, the American party — including even Hillquit and Berger — staunchly opposed the war, and never voted to fund it. But Hillquit’s Aldermanic Delegation did vote to fund a Victory Arch in New York City. Thus William Z. Foster would quip that “the Hillquits and Bergers are only Scheidemanns and Noskes lacking opportunity.”[14]
Hillquit, Berger, and their Left-wing critics all drove the SPA to split in 1919, while Debs languished in prison. Multiple communist parties formed, seeking affiliation with Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Third International. Though Debs remained with the SPA, he encouraged his party’s 1920 effort to affiliate as well, and by the early 1920s, Debs’s disagreements with the SPA’s reformist drift were significant. As Debs biographer Ray Ginger writes,
The socialists … were furiously attacking the Russian Bolsheviks, the American communists, and the Third Communist International. They had in effect abandoned the campaign for industrial unionism in favor of a working agreement with the Gompers grouping in the AFL. Their political program had been reduced to the effort to stimulate a broad reform party, based on the craft unions, in which they could recoup their waning fortunes. The theory of the class struggle had disappeared from the Socialist philosophy, and the Party was following the same program of right-wing opportunism which Debs had so heartily condemned in the past.[15]
Still, Debs would not split, and by 1924, the Communists gave up on recruiting him. “You, altho claiming to be a left-wing revolutionary … accept the leadership of the Second International, the … butchers and betrayers of the revolution,” Foster wrote in a public letter to Debs. “The American Socialist Party is cut from the same cloth.”[16] Trotsky’s appraisal was similar. Debs was a “sincere revolutionary,” Trotsky argued, “yet he succumbed to the influence of people who were in every respect his inferiors. Hillquit’s art lay in keeping Debs on his left flank while he maintained a business friendship with Gompers.”[17]
This orthodox view has echoed for over a century. The SPA “was not the needed ‘party of a new type,’” wrote Foster as Communist Party chairman in 1952, “but was patterned after the opportunist-dominated Social-Democratic Party of Germany.”[18] The Trotskyist James P. Cannon concurred. “Debs and Lenin … were divided on the [narrow] question of the character and role of the party,” Cannon wrote. “By including petty-bourgeois reformists and proletarian revolutionists in one political organization, the [SPA] was simply introducing a form of the class struggle into its own ranks. … The eventual breakup of the party, and the decision of the revolutionary elements to launch a party of their own, was the necessary outcome.”[19] The Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist organizations birthed or revived by the New Left, and later by the Millennial Left, have all shared this orthodox point of departure.
The revisionist view is the view from the failure of the world revolution and the consequent stillbirth of the Third International. Lenin’s 21 Conditions diagnosed a period of “acute civil war” which necessitated the removal of all reformist and centrist socialists from party positions and the creation of parallel underground and above-ground organizations.[20] “The Moscow program wants to commit us to a policy of armed insurrection,” Debs cautioned in 1920. It would “kill the party,” he thought.[21] Debs viewed the Third International as “in an experimental stage.” Even from prison, Debs could see that its tactics were premised on a mass revolutionary sentiment that had not, at least in the United States, been sufficiently prepared. As Ginger observes,
The [Communists’] … practical illegality had stimulated in some members a glorification of underground activity, a juvenile posturing in place of decisive action. Their sectarian tendencies, reminiscent in some ways of Daniel DeLeon, had alienated large groups of revolutionary workers. Several of Debs’ close friends … had left the Communist Party because of these errors.[22]
In 1922, James P. Cannon convinced Trotsky, and thereby the Comintern, to force the American Communists to abandon the underground tactics of which Debs was so critical.[23] But Communists like Foster were still basing their strategic outlook on the assumption of “revolutionary ferment among the masses of American workers.” In a 1924 open letter to Foster, Debs’s friend Scott Nearing made a more honest accounting of where this ferment could be found:
The revolutionary sentiment in the United States is strong among certain foreign-born workers — particularly among those of Slavic origin, who have been most emotionally aroused by events in Russia … [It is] strong in certain districts, such as Butte, Seattle, and in parts of New York and Chicago. In most of these cases, however, the strength is in the foreign-born districts … [It is] strong in certain needle trades, railroads, machinists’ and miners’ locals. Again, however, it centers in the Slavic and other foreign-born elements.
… the masses of American-born workers and farmers. … are discontented, but they assume that “times will pick up” … There are, of course, many exceptions — readers and thinkers who have kept up with the world and who have not been fooled by the propaganda. But they are relatively few. … Whatever revolutionary sentiment there is in the country today cannot be described as in any sense “American mass-sentiment.” [24]
The Communists’ failure to gauge mass political sentiment in the American working class drove Debs’s skepticism of the Third International’s ability to exercise strategic leadership of American socialism. The communists reporting to Moscow may have been America’s foremost revolution-ists, but that did not make them America’s foremost revolutionaries.
Released from prison to find his party shattered by Wilsonite repression and the socialist movement “divided into petty fragments,” Debs called for united-front action in the economic and political realms.[25] In 1923, he endorsed Foster’s Trade Union Educational League, which coordinated union radicals across political tendencies; but Debs paired this with a call for “political unity” as well.[26] In 1924, when Socialists and Communists both supported the movement for a labor party forming around the Conference for Progressive Political Action, Debs attributed this tendency of “many parties and unions toward unity” to the SPA’s prior 27 years of tireless organizing.[27]
But the 1920s proved confounding for Debs. He may have been the first Second International radical to squarely confront a condition resembling our own: progressive politics predominates; organizations deriving from the Second and Third Internationals cannot escape its gravitational pull; and none prove capable of even beginning to build a mass revolutionary party. Perhaps Debs, who can so easily appear to us as a fossil of the 19th century, was in fact our first contemporary, facing the dawn of our shared century of counter-revolution.
Echoes of Debs’s “revisionist” discontents were heard in the 1950s, when the Debs centennial was followed by the Khrushchev speech. In 1956, the CP’s journal called for a “new united mass party of socialism”[28] that would “unfreeze the situation which has remained solid”[29] since 1919. Followers of ex-Trotskyist Max Shachtmann observed the ensuing debates with interest and defended the revisionists against Foster’s attacks.[30] The Communists’ 1923 program, Shachtman observed, would have been met with Hillquit’s cheerful acceptance in 1919. So, Shachtman asked, was the 1919 split “historically justified?”[31] “No.” Shachtman’s revisionism would inform Hal Draper’s attempt to seek, for the New Left, an alternative organizational model to the “micro-sect.”[32] Meanwhile, James Weinstein would carry the CP’s revisionism into his late-1960s campaign to lead fellow historians Eugene Genovese and Christopher Lasch in an attempt to found a mass socialist party on the Debsian model.[33] More recently, Platypus founder Chris Cutrone called for “socialist unity”[34] and cited the pre-World War I SPA as a precedent for his Campaign for a Socialist Party, of which I am a member.
The progressive view, finally, is the view from revolutionary capitalism triumphant. In 1916, the sociologist Fred E. Haynes surveyed the history of third parties from the Greenback Party of the 1870s and ’80s to William Jennings Bryan’s Populist Party of the 1890s, culminating with Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Progressive Party. In 1924, Haynes expanded his survey to include the SPA. “Minor parties,” Haynes wrote, are a “means of agitation,” an “expression of social discontent.”
It is only necessary to read the platforms of the minor organizations to find the origin of many of the planks that are later prominent in the proposals of the Democratic and Republican parties. … The chief function of third parties has been to bring new issues before the people; they force new policies upon the older parties, and after accomplishing their work, they pass away. … The larger the number of votes cast for a third party, the greater probability that its issue will be adopted by one or both of the great parties rather than that its manifest strength will help it to displace or take a place alongside the established parties … In time, the causes which [minority parties] have the temerity to espouse are taken up by the established organizations when direct appeal to the latter may have proven fruitless.[35]
Haynes interpreted the fate of the SPA in these terms. The “socialization of the Democratic and Republican parties under the leadership of Bryan, Roosevelt, and Wilson,” Haynes wrote, “explains the insignificance politically of organized socialism in the United States. So long as the two major parties and their leaders remain so amenable to permeation from outside, no socialist party will have more than temporary importance or success.”[36]
The SPA did not always fit so neatly into Haynes’s thesis. As the sociologist Daniel Bell would do 28 years later, Haynes faulted the SPA for the “irresponsibility” of its “abstract anti-war position.”[37] Haynes contrasted this to the socialists who left the SPA to form the Social Democratic League in support of the First World War and Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Despite what Haynes and Bell took to be this missed opportunity for socialists to win reforms by supporting the war effort, Haynes could already predict in 1924 that “social democracy … is coming rapidly” as “an orderly progress from one reform to another.”[38]
Twelve years later, SPA presidential candidate Norman Thomas complained that FDR “did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher.”[39] By 1948, however, when the SPA orbited the New Deal Coalition with less than a remnant of its Debs-era strength, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. could plausibly present Debs as John the Baptist to FDR’s Jesus Christ.[40] Claiming that Debs played an “honorable and significant role” in the “fight against the political aspirations of the business community,” Schlesinger channeled the words of an old, Debs-era socialist:
Those years of education forced on the people, in towns big and little (from pulpit, platform and soapbox, by voice, leaflet and books), saved this country from civil war in the depths of depression, and gave Franklin Delano Roosevelt … the understanding public and trained workers for the immediate job he had on taking over.[41]
In 2019, historian Jill Lepore profiled Debs in The New Yorker. “After Debs,” Lepore wrote, “socialism endured … in the New Deal, … in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, by way of [Bernie] Sanders, a Debs disciple, and by way of the utter failure of the two-party system.”[42]
When Platypus was founded in 2006, Chris Cutrone quoted Walter Benjamin’s injunction that “even the dead are not safe.” “Past struggles that failed or were betrayed can be failed and betrayed again,” Cutrone continued, “and needless suffering in the present and future that could have been averted will not be.”[43] Eleven years later, Cutrone declared that “the Millennial Left is dead.”[44] The Millennial Left restored the Democratic Party via the Sanders campaign and anti-Trumpism, and it failed — even worse than the New Left before it — to build a new socialist party out of a once-in-a-generation crisis of capitalist politics. This death of the Millennial Left has rendered Eugene Debs a progressive once again. Now, Debs’s legacy is the capitalist state.
Responses
AB: A lot of historians and biographies tried to soften that, saying he was a messenger of Americanism, and the values he fought for were typical Protestant and American values. Which doesn’t ring true at all when you read his own words.
One of the themes in the panel is socialist unity. What does it mean? Is it possible? What we need is socialist collaboration, a willingness of Leftists to work together. And in that process of working together, you can find where you have real programmatic agreement and where you have fundamental disagreement.
Plenty of people think of themselves as socialists in the United States, but we are very fragmented. Part of that is unavoidable because of really serious fundamental differences, but part of it is a process of historic splits and regroupings, divisions that would not be that hard to overcome if we really wanted to.
MB: The split was necessary. Just as Marx characterized socialism as the evolutionary process of society, the Socialist Party of America was a necessary process with the revolutionary socialists like Debs and the Bergers all in one big tent. The Bolshevik party with Lenin and Trotsky showed the way forward, the kind of party ultimately needed to wrest state power from the ruling class. I’m not going to be critical of Debs for not going along with it. He had devoted his whole life to the building of this party. He hated factionalism. He just wanted to go out on the road and win people over, while Berger was doing his reformism. It is what it is.
Debs was able to take Marxism and translate it into the language for the American working class. Our next historical challenge is some form of an independent political party. It needs to be based on the foundation of organized labor, of a revitalized labor movement.
CG: Was the split historically necessary? Both sides had, to some degree, truth on their side. To another degree, what in hindsight would appear as certain presumptions were negative.
Mark, you said you’re not going to fault Debs for staying with the SPA and not accepting the Leninist party model. That’s one of Debs’s limitations, because the Leninist party model is the structure through which the unity he proposes in his 1920 article could be realized. The basis of the democratic-centralist organization is that we debate, we have democratic consultation, but we need unity of action, because if we’re divided on how to act, we’re weak. Once you have that basis, you can engage — with your own sovereignty — with other organizations. This is not unifying yourself into one big group with a bunch of factions, that would just be the SPA. That’s what Debs seems to be advocating for in the quote I brought up: let’s sustain our sovereignty, but let’s work together.
Part of what generated the anxieties of the Right wing of Berger and center with Hillquit, was that the Left wing was so keen on joining the Comintern. Some of its 21 points frightened them, including purging all reformist elements aligned with the Second International. The Second International parties had supported the war and then condemned the Bolshevik Revolution. But the SPA didn’t, alongside the Italians.
Debs wanted to join the Comintern, but his concern was that, in the end, the Comintern decided. So, if there’s disputes within a country, your own party wouldn’t have sovereignty over its actions. That has always been one of the great limitations of the Comintern and Third International. They tried to dictate policy to other countries from Moscow, it precluded other countries from developing their own Bolshevism. It’s not without reason that some of the most successful revolutions of the 20th century came after breaks with that dogmatism: whether it’s the Chinese revolutionary process, which had to sinicize Marxism; or the Communist Party of Cuba whose original party had rejected the 26th of July Movement as ultra-leftist before being reconstituted, without, to borrow Marx’s expression, “the mystical shell.”[45]
The split was necessary and inevitable. I agree with Foster. From the beginning there were class contradictions running deep within the SPA which were bound to lead to something, and all the Bolshevik Revolution did was bring them to light.
In those first ten years, the splitters (the Communist Party), who were forced to split in part by the party Right which feared being purged itself, showed an extreme form of sectarianism comparable to Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party. But the principle they held onto, the Leninist party model, was the rational kernel. It is from Cutrone that I take the idea that Debs is our contemporary precisely because of the split. I read the split as a mistake in that moment, because it almost destroyed the Socialist Party, the Communist Party did not arise as a great sublation of it, and the movement was tremendously weakened. But it was a necessary mistake, one of those errors Hegel talks about that are not simply errors full stop but moments in the process of history’s development. The problem in our case is that the third moment has yet to arise here — like the second communist party in Cuba, or the Sinification of Marxism in China. We have yet to prove, in the eating of the pudding, the necessity of that moment. But we can have faith that it was a necessary split, that created the conditions for something greater to develop later.
ER: Most of us come to Marxism as intellectuals. Debs came to these ideas through politics and his practical decisions as an organizer. I say this in the context of the split because he was particularly sensitive to questions of strategic judgement that were ultimately very political. He saw a fatal overestimation of the immanence of mass revolutionary sentiment in the United States in 1919.
Debs was sensitive to the issue of sovereignty, but I think of it as an almost epistemological question whether Moscow was going to be as cognizant of the political realities in the United States as he thought necessary.
The model is to begin with civil-social organizing or activism of an essentially liberal nature. Ideological agreement would have to be earned. We could only be so lucky as to earn a revisionist dispute, to build a party and a movement so strong that we can earn debates about splitting.
Carlos, one question for you, as we come from very different intellectual traditions: as a Stalinist, as someone who looks up to Mao, what sense do you make of the history of Left unity attempts?
CG: They have almost always been utter failures because of dogmatism and real disagreement over what the principal contradiction is. We’d consider imperialism to be that, though many people here would disagree. That lofty aspiration for unity is why I left the Bernie campaign in 2020 and founded the Midwestern Marx Institute. A few years ago, we thought this was unrealistic, because a lot of organizations fall into this extreme narrowness in the everydayness of their work and just want to reproduce it. Leaders’ resentment toward young people attracting their base turns into rumor mills and sabotage of other organizations. Unfortunately, that is what has happened every time there has been a call for Left unity.
Still, we have to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith and nonetheless call for unity. When I was doing this just as Midwestern Marx, it didn’t really make sense. Now, having a party with over a thousand cadres doing work, it makes more sense, having something concrete to base collaborations on. There are grassroots organizations around the country. Some of their leaders are in the party and a lot of people end up joining the party from it. And that is the sort of unity that we envision. They have total sovereignty to do whatever they want, as does the party, but there’s still the basis to unite.
Q&A
To what degree are Lenin and Debs both right? What might that say about how we actually receive Debs and even talk about him glowingly in terms of a hero? How does that affect how we think about Debs?
ER: In the provocative spirit of my conclusion: they were both wrong. Lenin led to Stalin, Debs led to FDR. That is the reversal. In the present, unless it is made to be otherwise, that is the bleak verdict of history.
AB: In the question of the split, politically, Lenin was right, because a vanguard revolutionary party is necessary, and a socialist party with many different irreconcilable wings is unable to sustain itself.
I don’t think that Leninism leads to Stalinism. The historical circumstances that the Russian Revolution found itself in led to Stalinism after the revolution. That was not a failure of the Bolsheviks, it was due to material circumstances. Lenin was right, but I have a lot of understanding and sympathy for where Debs was at. But that kind of big tent, “variety store” socialist party can’t really help workers get to the point of seizing control of the state.
The era of reforms is over. The capitalists don’t have any breathing space because their system is in so much trouble. Everything is going backwards, from economic reforms to labor reforms, abortions, and voting rights. We really need to make the change, and a Leninist party that can be the vehicle of workers making that change.
CG: Leninism leads to Stalinism, because Stalinism for me is just Marxism-Leninism. I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of just Lenin. Foster is very critical of the early splitters’ sectarianism, and he says that by the time they read Left-Wing Communism[46] and start engaging with Lenin’s critiques of ultra-leftism and sectarianism, especially the critiques of the dogmatists for dual unionism, they begin to change and begin to look for unity across different people.
MB: On the split, Lenin was right, Debs was mistaken. But what is most important is all that Debs contributed to advancing socialism in this country. We are in the belly of the beast, so the socialist revolution in this country is really going to be decisive for the future of humanity. Debs, Lenin, and Trotsky are responsible for James Cannon and Farrell Dobbs, who learns from Cannon. It is important to think of Debs not as some history project. His ideas, what he wrote, and what he said stand the test of time. For a young person who asks me: “What is socialism?” I could give them The Communist Manifesto, but I would rather give them some speech that Debs wrote where he basically translates the Manifesto for a young person or a worker. You can read his work and think, “Yeah, this is right now.”
ER: If my initial answer was “the Left is dead,” then I also have a “long live the Left” answer, which is: what if the world revolution had spread? What if the 1918 German Revolution had been successful? What if it had prompted further revolutionary ferment and mass consciousness in countries like France, Britain, and the United States? What would’ve rendered Lenin and Trotsky correct? Something that was very plausible at that time was that the world revolution would continue. Debs under those circumstances likely might have been the first to see that conditions had changed, and that some different tactics and strategies and maybe even a split would be necessary in the American case. That is how they were both right. At that time, it was not clear what would happen, and they were both expressing a possibility.
AB: The Leninist party is part of the preparation for making a revolution possible. You don’t just hang back until it looks like everybody wants to take the White House and change the system. The revolutionary party is part of that process.
There is an interesting speech by W. E. B. Du Bois called “If Eugene V. Debs Returned” from 1956. At the very end, Du Bois ventriloquizes Debs and has him say: “What really I fear for America is not merely loss of freedom, degeneration of schools, failure of the free press or failure of democracy. These, reason in time will combat. Rather I fear the threat of insanity; the loss of ability to reason.” Maybe the question at work in the split is the loss of the ability to reason, that this is maybe the thing that Debs feared above all, and maybe that is the thing he is trying to preserve in maintaining his relationship to the Socialist Party. Is that something Debs would have had on his mind?
AB: There is a lot of insanity today, but it is largely at the top. Was the insanity coming from the splitters? It is really the insanity of the system. The Marxist and Hegelian dialectical idea is that as a system or an entity comes to the end of its life, it becomes more and more irrational, and we are seeing that today. But it is not going to come to the end of its life by itself. We have to make it happen.
ER: From a despairing but triumphant mid-20th century liberal-progressive perspective, it might seem like Debs is a 19th-century fossil. The Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolution carried into the working class through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then came mass society, distraction, propaganda, and suddenly it’s just a question of technocracy, because the people can’t be reasoned with. Imagine the Left today publishing a paper called “Appeal to Reason.” That would seem sort of antiquated. Who reasons today? On what basis would you appeal to people’s reason? But the watchwords of the old Socialist Party were “organize and educate.” Organization came first, education second. Meaning on the basis of more organization, more education and appealing to reason would be possible. That’s not a particularly Marxist insight, it’s a classical proletarian socialist insight. Society has become so disorganized and the Left so unable to organize anyone or anything, that the education and appeal to reason that comes from actually knowing society, interfacing with it, trying to change it and reshape it is gone. Probably no person in this room could approach that. But they actually did.
CG: In the spirit of disagreeing with “the Left is dead,” there is a comment in the Communist Hypothesis[47] that the idea is always going to be alive, because there will always be someone willing to take up the hypothesis. I tried to be specific in my presentation and qualify that the American Left is dead, because the revolution spread to China, Korea, and parts of Africa and Latin America — but not in the West. My friend Haz calls it a translation problem. For some reason, bourgeois Cartesianism kept it from spreading here. The American Left is dead in a structural sense. It doesn’t exist as an independent political entity that can meaningfully exert any weight over existing politics. It also exists in this interregnum of being undead, because on CNN or FOX News, every so often both sides call the other “communist” or “socialist.” There is a hauntology.[48] Socialism continues to haunt the ruling class, even though maybe it shouldn’t, they believe in us more than we believe in ourselves. They’re haunted by our presence, a presence that takes the form of an absence. Now, we’re back to 1848.
ER: Debs is sometimes conceived as a provincially American figure, disconnected from these European questions of socialism, capitalism, and the industrial revolution. He’s made to be Jesus Christ, or he’s just a Populist. On the other hand, Debs does seem to live and breathe the bourgeois revolutionary ideals of the American Revolution. My inner Shachtmanite has to ask: what do you think Debs would think of Cuba or China or North Korea?
MB: Debs supported the Russian Revolution. I’m confident he would be a supporter of the Cuban Revolution. Now with regards to North Korea and other so-called socialist countries with Stalinist leadership, he would uncompromisingly defend them against U.S. imperialism, but he would reserve the right to be intellectually critical.
CG: Debs follows the spirit of 1776, the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law, the logic operative in 1776. It gets back to what Mark praised Debs for: his ability to translate the basic insights of Marxism in a manner that resonates with regular American workers, to Americanize Marxism. Socialism in America is going to look unique, not like Bolshevik Russia or China, but socialism with American characteristics. Debs would have been able to see these projects, whether it was the DPRK, China, or Soviet Russia, as the universal content of socialism taking on national forms. That’s the only way socialism is able to exist, if it is able to attune itself to the larger civilizational and national realities of countries. You can’t just copy and paste what China did onto the U.S. A lot of those things are not what we might want in the United States where we have the legacy of the European Enlightenment. In terms of Cuba, the interesting thing is that Fidel, in “History Will Absolve Me,”[49] cites 1776 quite favorably. He told a delegation of American students that went to Cuba in the 1990s to stop letting the Right take over the American flag. That’s your flag too; it’s the flag of your people. You need to be patriotic and hold the rational kernel of the best parts of your legacy.
Debs says, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.”[50] Dick Fraser also touches on this in a debate within the Socialist Workers Party on the black question and whether black people are an oppressed nation within the United States, but it’s also about revolutionary leadership.[51] The Socialist Workers Party seems to have abdicated the responsibility of leading black people in the United States. With the Second International, people tend to say it was a split over imperialism or the national question or specially oppressed peoples in a position that produces an objectively unrevolutionary leadership. But what if it’s the way that Marxist leadership is conceived that produces these splits? What does it mean to say that Debs and Lenin were both Marxists, despite such different tactical judgements? How do we actually recover these people?
AB: I don’t feel the need to recover them, because I don’t feel like they’ve ever been lost. The leadership a party or a movement produces is partly a question of the times. There is also a question of the degree that a leadership can be ahead of their times and think forward. Debs did change his perspective on the black struggle in the United States and come to a more rounded appreciation of what African Americans were facing.
MB: I’ve seen that quote used recently to imply Debs had some closeted racism, but he was a champion against racism. All he was saying with that particular quote at the time was that we’re equal, thus no special preferences. The most oppressed nationalities are entitled to special demands to rectify the history of said oppression. But Debs gets knocked for that quote unfairly. Debs and Lenin were both Marxists. Debs translated Marxism to the American worker; Lenin translated Marxism to the Russian worker. Lenin developed the concept of the vanguard party as necessary to overthrow capitalism.
ER: Bonapartism is a central preoccupation of Marx and Marxism. The regime of Napoleon III addressed the grievances and discontents of the working class through the expansion of state power. Some historians have characterized his regime as the first New Deal. Lenin recognized that insofar as the Second International is successful, it raises the prospect of Bonapartist tendencies within itself, vis-à-vis the capitalist state, with the German Social Democratic Party sort of losing control of the labor movement to a Bonapartist state-capitalist dispensation. Certainly, the First World War seems to validate that prognosis. Debs is equally critical, and that’s precisely why the progressives for the past hundred years have been critical of Debs. You might think that the race-gender-class framework comes out of the McGovernite coalition of the New Left, but it’s actually older. It comes out of the Communist Party model of organizing and incubating social movements of the 1930s, arguably older still, from Woodrow Wilson. W.E.B. Du Bois, Margaret Sanger, and Mother Jones all decided that they were going to get a better deal, whether on race, gender, or class terms, from a progressive Democratic Party. Debs doesn’t agree; that’s not his politics.
The concept of organizing civil society is a liberal concept; you don’t need Marxism or socialism for this. What is the necessity of Marxism? Why can’t we just acknowledge a liberalism that is the limit of our current politics? Are we premature in talking about Marxism?
MB: In the same way a mechanic disassembles an engine to understand how it works, down to every last nut and bolt, that’s how Marx analyzed capitalism. In doing so, he explained why it’s doomed to implode. If you can’t accurately diagnose the source of the disease, how are you going to find the cure? I don’t have a half hour to list everything that is wrong in society, but every one of them comes down to capitalism, and that’s why Marxism is essential to understand. That’s why Debs is so important as one of our best teachers.
AB: With Marxism, it’s not a question of whether it’s too soon to talk about it. It’s there as an inheritance. There is an underestimation of what ordinary working and oppressed people think and feel about the system. They may not have words for it like capitalism, socialism, and Marxism. But it’s definitely not too soon to introduce those words and those concepts, because it will help people who already have that gut feeling realize the necessity for collective action, not just individual solutions like lifestyle adjustments. We need to have confidence in ordinary people.
CG: That’s a very important question every Marxist should be asking themselves: What is Marxism good for in our day? It provides clarity. Try to understand any major event in geopolitics or national politics without seeing the background of class struggle, the battle of economic interests between classes, the systemic perspective, or the ultimate ends of the capitalist system.
I’m a professor at a community college, so I speak to students who come from a working class background, and they just get it. Marxism is intuitively understood. I made this one provocative statement in Chicago last summer: “all Americans are already Communists; they just do not know it yet.”
Is the problem in ideas? Is the problem that people have this false consciousness where if only we educate them more we could fix their ideas? When we talk to them, they already kind of agree with us irrespective of what background they come from. They all hold this cynical distance to official narratives. Only 11% of the American people trust the mainstream media. I’m very much a Žižekian on the problem of ideology.
So the practical question of organizing for the ACP is: how do we build dual power? It’s not just a framework of ideas, but a new institutional basis for actions and practices. We are trying to delink people from the sorts of institutions, practices, and rituals that reproduce the ruling order even if they sustain a cynical distance at the level of explicitly formulated thought. This is the problem of bourgeois Cartesianism, reducing the human being to a cogito, a thinking substance. The human being is not a thinking substance. You can change the ideas, but if the same fundamental practice is sustained, you’re not going to change the outcome.
I want to push against the idea of the American Revolution as the American people’s revolution, because it sequesters it to a confined geopolitical region and undermines the fact that it was unleashed onto the world. It is ongoing, whether we like it or not. What would Debs say about Fidel Castro holding up the American Revolution as the model for the Cuban Revolution?
MB: Thomas Paine is somebody that I can identify with as a revolutionary of that time. We need to take the spirit of rebellion and fighting tyranny and injustice, regardless if we relate to the Founding Fathers or consider revolutionaries by our standards. We should take that as our own and not concede that to the Right.
CG: You can’t have a revolution that’s not popular. Even the bourgeois revolutions were popular. They had to tap into certain contradictions between the popular sectors and the ruling order. That’s why it had to employ this language and phraseology in its political philosophy about commonwealth, community, public, and very universalistic discourse to defend particular very narrow bourgeois interests. If it was just the bourgeoisie carrying it out, it would be very few people. The American Revolution was the first anticolonial revolution in the hemisphere and inspired both the French and Haitian revolutions. The American Revolution is more Left than where we’re at today, more revolutionary than a Left that doesn’t currently exist in the U.S. Imagine a document today asserting not just a right but a duty to overthrow an oppressive government. You’d be called a jihadist and arrested.
We have to recapture that revolutionary spirit of 1776 and attune it to our own time. This is something the far Right has been extremely successful at. How can we recover the American Revolution for a revolutionary project in the present, disarticulated from the dominant framework, ideas, institutions, and political alignments currently attached to it?
AB: The American Revolution of 1776 was contradictory, with the idea that you could talk about all men being created equal at the same time that most of the people that you were speaking to were not included in the rights of the new country. The working people were most responsible for the most progressive parts of the new republic, like the Bill of Rights. The American Revolution has to be an international revolution. We have to be conscious that we have exported everything that goes along with America to the rest of the world, and a lot of that involves bloodshed, oppression, and our own colonialism. The best thing we can do for other revolutionaries in the world is to make the revolution here, but we can’t do it alone.
ER: I dissent from the idea that Debs would’ve supported national roads to socialism. He never supported the abrogation of bourgeois rights, such as speech, assembly, and press, on the grounds that it was consonant with some national culture. I’ll give three examples. First, the Dreyfus Affair, a member of the “Epstein class” stood falsely accused and some socialists supported denying him a fair trial. Debs, alongside Jean Jaurès, clearly critiqued that. He could have easily said antisemitism was just part of French culture, but he didn’t. Second, he was critical of the Bolsheviks’ execution of the Socialist Revolutionaries, rather than dismissing it as mere Russian ruthlessness, even while granting that certain things might be necessary in wartime or revolution. Third, the American South: he never approached the logic that segregation was simply regional culture, a kind of Black Belt nation justifying its own distinct path. Debs consistently upholds these bourgeois rights and principles. |P
Transcribed by D. L. Jacobs and Moritz Schiffmann
[1] Video of the panel is available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Pqatom0no>.
[2] Eugene V. Debs, “Speech of Acceptance of the Presidential Nomination of the Socialist Party” (May 6, 1904), <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1904/0506-debs-acceptancespeech.pdf>.
[3] Eugene V. Debs, The Class Struggle, February 1919, Vol. III, No. I, reprinted in the International Socialist Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, March–April 1968, 55–57, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1919/daypeople.htm>
[4] Ibid.
[5] James P. Cannon, “Eugene V. Debs: Hail and Farewell,” International Labor Defense statement of October 20, 1926, published in The Daily Worker (Chicago), vol. 3, no. 239 (October 22, 1926), 1, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1926/1022-cannon-eugenevdebs.pdf>.
[6] Debs, “Why Are We Not Stronger?” (1920), The Socialist World [Chicago], vol. 1, no. 5 (November 15, 1920), 17–18, <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1920/1115-debs-whynotstronger.pdf>.
[7] Karl Liebknecht, “The New ‘Civil Peace,’” in The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1986), 84.
[8] Eugene V. Debs, quoted in Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
[9] James P. Cannon, “E.V. Debs” (1956), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1956/debs.htm>.
[10] cf. Eugene V. Debs, “Industrial Unionism” (1905), speech delivered at Grand Central Palace, New York, December 10, 1905; published in Industrial Union Bulletin [Chicago], vol. 1, no. 36 (November 2, 1907), 5, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1905/industrial.htm>.
[11] See Kenneth Ackerman, Trotsky in New York: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution (Counterpoint, 2016).
[12] Manifesto and Program of the Left Wing Section, Socialist Party, Local Greater New York (1919), <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1919/0200-lwmanifesto-ohio.pdf>.
[13] As reported in Louis Fraina, “They are not Dead, O Comrades!,” The Revolutionary Age, vol. 1, no. 16 (February 1, 1919), 1, <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/revolutionaryage/v1n16-feb-01-1919.pdf>.
[14] “Foster in Plain Talk to Debs: Communist Standard Bearer Tells Socialists’ Chairman Position of Workers Party,” The Daily Worker vol. II , no. 114 (July 31, 1924), 1, <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v02a-n114-jul-31-1924-DW-LOC.pdf>.
[15] Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 419-420.
[16] “Foster in Plain Talk to Debs,” 1, 3.
[17] Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (1930), ch. 22, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch22.htm>.
[18] William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party of the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1952), 169.
[19] James P. Cannon, “E.V. Debs: The socialist movement of his time—Its meaning for today,“ in Eugene V. Debs Speaks, ed. Jean Y. Tussey (Pathfinder Press, 1970), 37-39.
[20] “Instructions from Moscow,” The Socialist World 1, no. 4 (October 15, 1920), 14, <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-world/v01n04-oct-15-1920-Soc-World.pdf>.
[21] As reported in William M. Feigenbaum, “Debs to the Socialist Party,” The Socialist World, vol. 1, no. 4 (October 15, 1920), 17, <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-world/v01n04-oct-15-1920-Soc-World.pdf>.
[22] Ginger, The Bending Cross, 420.
[23] James P. Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant (Pathfinder Press, 1973), 86-90.
[24] Scott Nearing, “Scott Nearing on Party Policy,” The Daily Worker [Chicago], vol. 2, no. 46 (May 10, 1924), 1-3, <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v02a-n046-supplement-may-10-1924-DW-LOC.pdf>.
[25] Eugene V. Debs, “The World is Waiting!”, Debs’ Magazine , vol. 1, no. 6 (February, 1922), 4, <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/debs-magazine/v01n06-feb-1922_Debs.pdf>.
[26] Eugene V. Debs, “Getting Together,” The Labor Herald [Chicago], vol. 2, no. 2 (April 1923), 2, <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/unions/tuel/1923/0400-debs-gettingtogether.pdf>.
[27] Eugene V. Debs, “A Supplementary Word,” The Socialist World, vol. 5, no. 7 (July, 1924), 6, <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-world/v05n07-jul-1924-Soc-World.pdf>.
[28] Nemmy Sparks, “Towards a United Party of Socialism,” Political Affairs, vol. XXXV, no. 7 (July, 1956), 53.
[29] Steve Nelson, “On a New United Party of Socialism,” Political Affairs, vol. XXXV, no. 11 (November, 1956), 62.
[30] See, for example, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (Praeger, 1962), 555-571.
[31] Max Shachtman, “American Communism: A Re-Examination of the Past,” The New International: A Marxist Review, vol. XXIII, no. 4 (Fall 1957), 229. See also Albert Gates, “The Case for Socialist Regroupment: For a New Movement in the Debsian Tradition,” The New International: A Marxist Review, vol. XXIII, no. 2 (Spring 1957), 71-80.
[32] Hal Draper, “Anatomy of the Micro-Sect: A Position Paper” (1973), Independent Socialist Committee, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1973/xx/microsect.htm>.
[33] See Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 229-273; Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 475; James Weinstein, “The Meaning of Debsian Socialism – A Reply,” Radical America vol.2, no. 1 (January-February 1968), 51-56.
[34] Chris Cutrone, “Socialist unity!” (July 29, 2025), Sublation Magazine, <https://www.sublationmag.com/post/socialist-unity>.
[35] Fred E. Haynes, Social Politics in the United States (Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 152-154.
[36] Ibid., 20.
[37] Ibid., 273, 283. See also Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1967), vii-x, 116.
[38] Haynes, Social Politics, 20.
[39] Norman Thomas, “Is the New Deal Socialism? An Answer to Al Smith and the American Liberty League” (1936), <https://newpol.org/is-the-new-deal-socialism-by-norman-thomas/>.
[40] This formulation is borrowed from William A. Pelz, “Editor’s Preface,” in William A. Pelz (ed.), Eugene V. Debs Reader: Socialism and the Class Struggle (Merlin Press, 2014), 27.
[41] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Debs, The Popular Socialist,” in Ronald Radosh (ed.) Debs: Great Lives Observed (Prentice-Hall, 1971), 149.
[42] Jill Lepore, “Eugene V. Debs and the Endurance of Socialism,” The New Yorker, February 11, 2019.
[43] Chris Cutrone, “Introducing Platypus” (September 11, 2006), Platypus Affiliated Society, <https://platypus1917.org/2006/09/11/introducing-platypus/>.
[44] Chris Cutrone, “The Millennial Left is Dead” (October 2017), Platypus Review 100, <https://platypus1917.org/2017/10/01/millennial-left-dead/>.
[45] This is a reference to Marx’s foreword to the second German edition of Capital Vol. 1, in which he talks of a mystical shell to the Hegelian dialectic which covers a rational kernel. Karl Marx, “Afterword” in Capital Volume 1 (1873), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm>.
[46] V. I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/>.
[47] Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010).
[48] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
[49] Fidel Castro, “History Will Absolve Me” (1953), trial defense speech, October 16, 1953, available at <faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/documents/dabsolve.htm>.
[50] Eugene V. Debs, “The Negro and the Class Struggle,” The International Socialist Review 4, no. 5 (November 1903), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1903/031100-debs-negroandclassstruggle.pdf>.
[51] Dick Fraser, “Two Lectures. November 1953,” Dick Fraser on the Black Question in America: The revolutionary integrationist perspective (August 1954), <https://www.bolshevik.org/history/Fraser/Fraser01.html>.
