Real Reds

It's sad that so many people take the silly back and forth about President Obama's alleged "socialism" seriously. If the name Eugene Victor Debs was as well known as it should be, such nonsense would be recognized for what it is. Nick Salvatore is the author of Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (University of Illinois Press, 2nd edition 2007), a fascinating and engaging biography of the socialist leader and presidential candidate and a detailed history of the early radical American labor movement. Lenny Flank edited Writings of Eugene Debs: A Collection of Essays by America's Most Famous Socialist and Reds,White and Blue: An Anthology of American Socialism and Communism 1880-1920 (Red and Black Publishers, 2009). Both generously took the time to answer some questions about their books. GR: How did Eugene Debs define socialism and how much was his vision influenced by Marx and the European movements? Nick Salvatore: EVD read Marx and some of the more popular European socialists, but they were never a driving force for him. His understanding of socialism for America owed more to an effort to maintain American democratic values in an era of industrial corporate development. GR: In your book, you emphasize how much Debs's identity and evolution as a radical was linked to his Mid-Western origins during the emergence of industrial capitalism. The Mid-West is not known these days as an incubator of radical leftists. What happened between Debs's days and our own? NS: The answer to this is really book length. But part of it has to do with dissenters not necessarily being in the majority, and the low votes he received in his electoral runs suggest this. Where socialism did better, in Milwaukee, for example, was a socialism that was hard to distinguish from Progressive reform. This was not necessarily bad, but suggests the problem socialism had in grounding itself in American political culture. GR: In many ways, Deb's biography is a story of defeat. Thousands of people joined the Debs's Socialist Party and millions voted him for President, even when he was in prison. Socialists held elected office across the US. Now, the largest US socialist organization -- the Democratic Socialists of America -- claims only around 10,000 members. Why have socialist and labor parties failed to thrive in the US? NS: It is very difficult to maintain a socialist perspective in light of the collapse of the old Soviet Union and the turn to capitalism in China. Perhaps that particular alternative to capitalism has run it race. Certainly the democratic socialism of the European type has, even in its former stronghold in Scandinavia. GR: Do you see continuity with Deb's work anywhere today? NS: I think wherever people struggle for justice, in political life as in the economic sphere, his spirit lives in a way. But, fundamentally, as I said in the book, Debs' strength was not as a planner, a strategist, a systematic thinker. Thus, he can be a model of dissent within an American tradition, but precisely due to that absence, his specific example is limited to his era. But then very few can both strive for contemporary relevance and simultaneously achieve an overarching, lasting analytical vision.

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GR: How did you go about selecting writings for these books? I wanted as wide a variety of views as possible, to show the wide range of leftist thought that has existed in the US. We've had everyone from mild reformist election-oriented Socialists like Norman Thomas to Christian Socialists like George Herron to open revolutionaries like Big Bill Haywood to wild "dynamiters" like Johann Most. And I also wanted to show the wide range of different types of people who held leftist beliefs -- some were immigrants, some were native-born Americans, some were poor and unschooled, some were highly educated. Like America itself, American socialism comes in many faces. People today tend to think of socialism, communism and anarchism as "foreign" ideologies that have no place or meaning here. They are wrong--leftist politics have always been as American as baseball and apple pie. It's been with us since the beginning. Thomas Paine's ideas about distribution of wealth and human equality were so radical that all the other Founding Fathers hated him, and even today he remains the only major figure from the American Revolution who has no monument anywhere in Washington DC. (I guess I should have included one of Paine's pamphlets, but it's already a pretty long book.) For the Debs book, I wanted to show the remarkable depth of his thinking. When most people in the Socialist Party argued bitterly with the IWW and vice versa, for instance, Debs staunchly supported both, recognizing that, when we are all fighting the same enemy, arguing with each other is . . . well . . a really dumb idea. GR: Reds, White and Blue concludes with anarchist Emma Goldman's expose of the horrors of Bolshevik Russia, preceded by essays documenting the establishment of the US Communist parties. Why did you end the book with this piece by Goldman? LF: There were several reasons why I chose to end with that selection. The preceding essays not only documented the history of the Communist Party, but also documented how it was transformed from an American political organization with pretty widespread support, into a mere mouthpiece for the USSR (as some wags used to put it, when it rained in Moscow the American CPers all carried umbrellas). Emma's indictment of the USSR presaged the inevitable result. The USSR has always been the anchor around socialist necks--the Leninists turned the very names "socialist" and "communist" into hated symbols of repression, and I wanted to show that there were many leftists who saw the horror of the Bolsheviks early on, recognized that any socialism that was not democratic was doomed to failure, and tried to fight against it. Alas, most of the American leftist groups in existence today are still either Leninists, Trotskyists or Maoists -- all representatives of a strategy that failed utterly. We need to reject the entire non-democratic state-and-party-centered model and turn socialism away from a regimented work camp, instead embracing a celebration of freedom and democracy, as Emma did. Much of the American Left today is still mired in the arguments and issues of Asia in the 50's. We need to move on. And finally, I also wanted to contrast the early history of the Communist Party, which was so full of energy and hope and which sincerely viewed the Bolshevik Revolution as a wonderful new beginning, with the degeneration of the USSR itself into a police state which crushed everyone's hopes. And yet even after that betrayal and disillusionment, Emma continued to fight on. Hope always springs back to life. GR: Why do you think socialism has never caught on in the US as it has elsewhere in the world? LF: Well, the glib answer would be that it never caught on because the US has always arrested all the socialists. A better answer, however, would be that it DID catch on. Few Americans today realize how large and active the socialist/communist movement was in the first few decades of the 20th century. The list of well-known Americans who were Socialists or Communists is very long. In the social sphere, the labor movement was a powerful force, particularly during the years of the CIO -- a large proportion of whose organizers and pamphleteers were socialists and communists. It was also the leftists who first began agitating for racial equality and the equal rights of women--for years, the IWW was the only union in the US that had racially integrated locals. Even the first gay rights group in the US, the Mattachine Society, was formed by a member of the Communist Party. In the political sphere, the Socialist Party, particularly under Eugene Debs, did better in American elections than any other third party has done since, and was even able to elect members to the US Congress and to various state legislatures. The leftist movement in the US was so powerful and popular back then that it required the full resources of the US government (and lots of illegal repression) to crush it. Even FDR's New Deal was a direct attempt to defang the leftists and take some wind out of their sails by co-opting some of their own goals, in an attempt to avoid the social revolution that Roosevelt feared was coming. Two things, I think, ended the power of the socialist/communist movement back in the 40's and 50's. The first was the total domination of the American Left by the Soviets (and even the anti-Soviet leftists were mostly Trots or Maoists, whose orbit was around the USSR, not around the US). The American movement had thrived precisely because it was American, built on conditions and issues that Americans cared about. Once the CP became nothing but a tool of a foreign power, though, it lost all its appeal, and dragged the rest of the movement down with it in a sea of McCarthyism and Cold War. The second thing that crippled socialism was America's postwar economic position. Everyone else had been bombed into oblivion--the US, unscathed, was on top, with unquestioned power and virtually free-flowing wealth. The newly-emerging corporate class was able to in essence buy off its leftist opponents--the labor movement grew fat and well-fed, and lost its militancy, the CIO kissed and made up with the AFL, and both hopped in bed with the corporados. (The leftist movement was, of course, still there under the surface, and it is significant that the one time it broke into the open again, during the 60's, was when the counter-culture and the New Left rejected the whole goal of consumerist materialism, and proved itself unable to be bought off). By becoming a world power, the US was, like Rome, able to import enough wealth from overseas to provide bread and circuses for its own population, keeping it satisfied and docile. Today, of course, the US is losing its economic power and its ability to buy social docility, and the rebellion will inevitably begin again. Socialist and communist movements spring from the economic realities of the society we live in. They will not ever go away so long as that society exists. GR: What do you feel contemporary activists can learn from early 20th century radicals? LF: The leftist movement tends to refight the same battles over and over and over again. If you listen to today's leftists, the things they tend to argue with each other over -- reform or revolution, centralized state or decentralized collective, utopian idealism or economic practicality, individual militance or mass action, support the war or oppose it -- are the very same things the leftists were fighting with each other about over a hundred years ago. Eugene Debs and Daniel DeLeon would be perfectly able to follow along in any modern debate. So one thing we need to recognize is that none of the theoretical things we are arguing over today is new -- it's all been done to death before. Activists today, however, are reduced to the position of basing their programs and wish lists on the realm of pure idealistic theory, since we unfortunately do not have any functional leftist movement today in the US. Back in the early 20th century, however, the debates were real. They weren't just debating in theory how to bring about a movement--they already had one, and their problem was how to win with it. Any theoretical ideas they had back then could be tested in cold hard reality. The IWW didn't just talk about the theoretical need for syndicalist unions--they went out and built them. The Socialist Party didn't just debate about the best way to win electoral support--they had to slug it out in real elections. The Communists in the CIO didn't debate abstract theory about how to organize workers--they ran real strikes with real workers against real companies who were using real strikebreakers. And there's a lot we can learn from them about that. There's no need for us to reinvent the wheel--our grandfathers and great-grandfathers knew how to run strikes, how to organize people, and how to fight a good fight. Sure, there are circumstances existing now that didn't exist back then and we will have to figure out for ourselves how to deal with them, but the basics of organizing are eternal, and they did them well. We can learn from their successes and, just as importantly, from their mistakes. Although we live in a different century, there is still a continuity -- we and they are part of the same fight. The things we have today, we have because they were successful in fighting for them -- and we are the ones who must successfully fight for whatever things our grandchildren are to have. Nick Holt's website is Grits and Roses.