http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/bernie-sanders-socialism-eugene-v-debs-213093 Can Bernie Keep Socialism Alive?
By David Greenberg
Vol. 2, No. 6
09/10/15, 06:09 AM EDT
Before Bernie Sanders was the hot challenger to Hillary Clinton, before he was even an oddball Vermont congressman from Brooklyn, the proud socialist made a documentary film—and a long-playing record—about Eugene Victor Debs.
The 20th century’s most renowned American socialist, Debs has long been a hero to leftists and radicals of many persuasions. Numerous children were named after him; so were a radio station, a town in Minnesota and a couple of beers. In Sanders’ quaint, low-budget 1979 documentary, Eugene V. Debs—issued by the now-defunct American People’s Historical Society of 295½ Maple Street in Burlington—Debs is given the full Howard Zinn treatment, depicted as a fighter on behalf of exploited workers, a fearless critic of ruthless corporate power and a martyr to free speech.
With the insurgent Sanders showing no signs of flagging in the Democratic nomination race, his esteem for Debs—whose picture graces Sanders’ office wall in Washington—highlights the senator’s strong connection to America’s sometimes-forgotten socialist traditions. It remains unclear, though, what kind of impact we can ultimately expect a socialist like Sanders to have in an American election. While Debs clearly serves him as an inspiration, perhaps he should also function as a warning.
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For generations historians have asked why there has never been a major socialist movement in American politics—at least not compared with Western European democracies, where socialist parties have often held power or exerted decisive influence. In scholarly circles, the very question—“Why is there no socialism in the United States?”—first posed by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in 1906, has been asked so often it has become a cliché.
To many scholars, the question lost relevance after communism fell in Eastern Europe and the Western European socialist parties abandoned their statist agendas for American-style platforms of regulating capitalism and correcting its excesses. Yet since the Great Recession, young intellectuals have been rediscovering Marx, and campus politics, fairly left wing to begin with, have veered into ever more radical terrain as movements like Occupy Wall Street have made the battle between the 1 percent and the 99 percent the front line of debate. This resurgence of radicalism—coupled with the excitement Sanders has spawned—has made Sombart’s age-old question newly germane.
While Debs clearly serves him as an inspiration, perhaps he should also function as a warning.
The “Why no socialism?” query has many answers. Sombart wrote that “on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie, socialistic Utopias of every sort are sent to their doom.” The proletariat here in America lived too well to gamble their stake in the status quo. Other historians, studying social mobility, concluded that while Americans might not really have had more opportunities to advance economically than Europeans, they perceived themselves to have such opportunities—and that those perceptions tamped down any revolutionary desires. Alternately, Louis Hartz argued that because the United States, unlike Europe, lacked a feudal history and the rigid class system that followed, its citizens never developed the class consciousness necessary for a robust socialist movement. Daniel Bell has also pointed to the incorrigible utopianism of socialist thought, which kept its followers from accepting the give-and-take that American politics has always demanded.
Finally, some historians have said that Sombart’s was, in essence, a trick question: After all, there has in fact been socialism in the United States. Although never as influential as their European counterparts, American socialist parties won local races in scores of cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and elected the occasional congressman as well. Debs, as their most famous presidential standard-bearer, helped bring the movement’s ideas into the mainstream. It’s fair to say that insofar as socialism has enjoyed success in the political arena, Eugene Debs was as responsible as anyone. It makes perfect sense that Sanders should claim him as a hero.
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For the man who embodied American socialism, Debs had an inauspicious start. He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, into a petit bourgeois family. (His father owned a textile mill and meat market. He was not, alas, as Sanders’ documentary claimed, “from the ranks of the working class.”) For most of his life Debs had belonged to the Democratic Party, widely regarded as the party of the workingman, and he even served a term in the Indiana state assembly as a Democrat.
Despite this foray into politics, though, Debs’ early career was spent mainly on the railroads—most importantly as a locomotive fireman, tending the steam engines. Back then the railroads were industrial behemoths and a major site of labor strife. Debs found himself drawn to union activity, though he was far from a radical. For decades he devoted himself to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, described by one historian as typical of “the elitist, conservative, business unionism deplored by the Left.”
But in time, Debs grew increasingly militant, and in 1893 he helped found the American Railway Union. Unlike the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and other “craft unions,” which were organized according to specific jobs, the ARU aspired to represent all railroad workers in the industry. Only the size and solidarity of an industrial union, its advocates argued, could counter the might of the big railroad corporations.
In 1894, the ARU took up the cause of the workers for the Pullman Palace Car Co. outside Chicago. In what became known as the Pullman strike, 125,000 workers refused to labor on Pullman cars in a bid to secure better wages and treatment from management. When Grover Cleveland’s administration obtained a court order enjoining them to resume work, Debs was arrested for defying it and jailed for six months.
In prison, at nearly 40 years old, Debs turned to the doctrine of socialism. In confinement, he read extensively, notably the works of the Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky. Previously, Debs had seen his mission as simply fighting to secure a decent living for workers, but now he concluded the only hope was to overturn the oppressive system of industrial capitalism itself. As he said later, “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”
Debs became a leader in a new socialist party. From 1900 to 1920 he ran for president five times under its banner. (He technically ran with two different parties. From early on, the socialists succumbed to the fractiousness for which the far left became known, and there were often multiple factions claiming the socialist mantle.) Debs, arguing that unity was the key to labor’s success, held a middle position between the revolutionary and evolutionary wings of the movement—those seeking immediate radical change and those hoping for more gradual change within the system.
Equally important to Debs’ appeal was the proudly American idiom he employed. At a time when many of his compatriots distrusted socialist ideas as too European, too alien, Debs spoke about them in a familiar language that appealed to native-born laborers in the heartland as well as immigrants in the cities. He cited the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln, American revolutionaries and Civil War abolitionists. He avoided the European penchant for abstract argument, preferring a more typically American pragmatic approach.
Debs’ peak success came in 1912, when, running against Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and the incumbent William Howard Taft, he took 6 percent of the vote nationally. He never harbored illusions that he would win the presidency. But under his leadership socialists exerted an influence on political debates and won victories in their own way. They pushed for labor reforms like the eight-hour workday, economic reforms like old-age pensions and political reforms like the direct election of senators—all of which were taken up by mainstream progressives and eventually became law.
Debs also spoke out against World War I. Many progressives shared President Wilson’s view of the need to respond to German aggression against American ships and his hope that intervention would usher in a brighter future for Europe. But other radicals opposed the war on pacifist grounds, and still others subscribed to the conspiracy theory that the conflict was all being waged at the behest of financiers and arms makers. In June 1918, Debs gave a speech urging citizens to defy the newly instituted military draft—thus running afoul of the 1917 Espionage Act, which forbade interference with conscription.
Arrested, tried and convicted, Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison. An appeal to the Supreme Court failed, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that Debs’ case was essentially similar to the recent conviction of Charles Schenck, another socialist leader who had also been found to have undermined the war effort by promoting draft evasion.
After the war, public opinion rapidly turned against the Wilson administration’s civil liberties restrictions. First Amendment jurisprudence soon underwent dramatic revision, and, in 1921, President Warren Harding commuted Debs’ sentence. Thereafter, an aura of martyrdom came to surround Debs.
That martyrdom was one of several reasons Debs passed into legend so quickly after his death in 1926. At least as noteworthy, though, was Debs’ rare ability to speak to so many of the radical left’s factions—the trade unionists and the political activists, the evolutionists and the revolutionists. Within a fractured movement, he spoke in a language of unity. Perhaps most critical, in espousing ideas seen as foreign and subversive, Debs connected them to traditional American symbols and ideas that workers could trust and support.
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In the end, the most radical ideasespoused by Debs and his fellow socialists—the abolition of capitalism and its replacement with a planned economy—never came to pass. But more targeted reforms they advocated proved popular and became national policy. It’s here that we find one final answer to the “Why no socialism?” question: While our two-party system has rarely made room for long-lasting third parties, it has proven flexible enough to incorporate those parties’ best ideas. Reforms such as ending child labor, making taxation progressive and funding public works were championed by socialists but quickly came to be understood as liberal ones.
Some dyed-in-the-wool socialists still scorn Sanders as a pale copy of a real radical.
The same phenomenon seems to be happening today. Sanders, an independent, is not running on a third-party ticket as an actual socialist, even though there is still a Socialist Party that nominates candidates for president. (The last one to make some news was the well-known anti-Vietnam War activist David McReynolds, who appeared on the infamous butterfly ballot of 2000 and cost Al Gore 2,908 votes.) Sanders doesn’t want to cost Democrats the White House, as Ralph Nader arguably did in 2000, and do harm to his progressive causes—he wants to push the party instead to embrace his beliefs. Sanders is running as a Democrat because he understands that his hopes lie not in creating an alternative to the Democratic Party, but rather in getting the party’s leaders, including likely nominee Hillary Clinton, to embrace the left-liberal policies he favors. It’s significant, too, that rather than offering grand plans to nationalize private industries or impose confiscatory taxes, Sanders is pushing what are essentially liberal policies like breaking up big banks, funding infrastructure and taxing financial transactions. After years of Republicans complaining about Barack Obama being a “socialist,” Sanders is making clear just how moderate the incumbent administration is.
Some dyed-in-the-wool socialists still scorn Sanders as a pale copy of a real radical. And it’s true that compared to Debs, who spoke openly about ending capitalism altogether, Sanders’ platform is hardly revolutionary. But in 2016, this may be a brilliant strategy. Sanders’ best hope today is to do precisely what Eugene Debs did a century ago: to win by losing.
