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What to make of the Paris Commune? At the end of the nineteenth century, this was one of the key questions facing socialists. While the Commune had ended in a terrible defeat in May 1871, the executed Communards were celebrated as martyrs who had fallen in the front line of struggle. And in the decades after its crushing, socialists and anarchists reached for lessons from what they took for a unique practical experience.

In late nineteenth-century France, both survivors of the Commune (Louise Michel, Benot Malon, douard Vaillant) and those who supported it from outside Paris (like future Socialist leader Jules Guesde, in Montpellier during spring 1871) played a major role in shaping the multiple tendencies of French socialism. But the Communes memory was also kept alive by militants far beyond French shores, with March 18 commemorations each year celebrating the Communards glorious actions. From Berlin to Moscow, from London to Budapest, and soon even in Tokyo and Shanghai, the word Commune meant the Paris revolution and the heroic Communards who had fallen in combat.

The anniversary of the Commune was marked with particular ceremony in Germany, where the Social Democrats (SPD) had by the 1880s become Europes most strongly rooted workers party. In fact, this date had a rather particular meaning in Berlin. The Paris Communes own history was inextricably linked to the Franco-Prussian War; most Communards had made their patriotism clear, with the call to defend France, and Paris itself, mixed in with more properly social objectives. This international conflict made German displays of solidarity with the Commune as organized by Social Democracys founding fathers Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel all the more heroic.

Coincidentally, March 18 invoked not only the start of the Paris uprising in 1871 but also the barricades erected in Berlin back in 1848. This date thus provided militants an opportunity to celebrate the two countries shared revolutionary heritage. Each of these insurrections had ended in defeat and victory for the counterrevolutionary forces. But they also marked out a path to the future and the bases of a new society.

In an era where both countries ruling classes were cultivating a harsh chauvinism, the celebration of this both French and German anniversary was one of the first concrete attempts at building an internationalist culture. This was no merely theoretical proposition: the gigantic marches that the German and Austrian Social-Democrats organized in Berlin and Vienna (and many other industrial towns) in 1898 to mark the half-centenary of 1848 also honored the French experience.

Such events show how attached militants were to this shared memory. Yet, it would be wrong to consider these demonstrations as a simple appeal to put up barricades like in 1871. For the Paris Commune also provided an experience of defeat, from which socialists had to learn.

In The Civil War in France, Marx had hailed the Commune as a political experience of a new type. His solidarity was all the more keenly felt given that the Communards had just been mercilessly crushed (he wrote this text just after the end of the uprising). But, while the Communards contribution was not in doubt, once the flames had been snuffed out Marx and Engels also showed themselves prepared to express criticisms of some of the Communes methods.

For instance, on January 14, 1871, Engels wrote to Italian Bakuninite Carlo Terzaghi (later found to have been a police informant) that If there had been a little more authority and centralization in the Paris Commune, it would have triumphed over the bourgeois. And when people tell me that these are two things to be condemned outright, it seems to me that those who talk like this either do not know what a revolution is, or are revolutionaries in name only. In this sense pushing back against some of the passages in The Civil War in France which most leaned in the direction of decentralization, Engels insisted that any political revolution lacking a centralized authority was doomed.

A few years later, Marx himself offered a critical examination of this experience. On February 22, 1881, he wrote to the Dutchman Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis: Apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a town under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it be. With a small amount of sound common sense, however, they could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people the only thing that could be reached at the time. The appropriation of the Bank of France alone would have been enough to dissolve all the pretensions of the Versailles people in terror, etc., etc.

In an October 29, 1884 letter to Bebel, Engels was even more abrupt: While the Commune was the grave of early specifically French socialism, it was, for France, also and at the same time the cradle of a new international communism. Yet, in other texts, the Commune was still taken for an example. In an 1891 preface to The Civil War in France, Engels concluded that the Commune had been an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat the dictatorship of the majority over a minority of exploiters. So, the Commune was doubtless something to be celebrated. But was this a model, or an experience that socialists had to go beyond?

Ten years after this preface (and following Engelss death in 1895), in 1901 Marxs son-in-law Charles Longuet (husband to Marxs daughter Jenny) published a new edition of Marxs text, with a telling change of title: The Civil War in France was now The Paris Commune. Longuet clearly sought to avoid the reference to civil war and instead promote a gradualist perspective within socialist ranks.

Indeed, at this point a major trend in several socialist parties was raising questions over the revolutionary road to socialism which most had previously pursued. The leading representative of this current was the German Eduard Bernstein, whose 1899 text The Preconditions of Socialism had bemoaned the popularity of the Blanquist tradition (named after Louis Auguste Blanqui, with whom many of the Communards had close ties). Bernstein also mounted a wider attack against the French revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1871; he held that it was time to put an end to a certain insurrectionary spirit that, he claimed, undermined the gradual development of organized socialism.

What could explain such a turn? First, it is worth emphasizing that a large share of the workers movement rejected Bernsteins perspective, from Jules Guesde to Rosa Luxemburg. But doubtless, since 1871 the political context had changed a great deal. By the turn of the twentieth century, the workers movement had built up its own parties, union organizations and co-ops. Male universal suffrage had been enacted in several European countries. So, would it be possible to conquer power by other, legal means?

One telling example was Jean Jaurs, alongside Guesde the main founder of Frances unified Socialist Party in 1905. He was unabashed in celebrating the Communes achievements, in particular its social and political measures. But upon the March 18, 1907 anniversary, in his column for lHumanit (titled Yesterday and Tomorrow) he argued that even if the Paris Commune had been victorious it would not have been able to fundamentally transform society it could perhaps have advanced the development of the Third Republic by ten years, but it could not have made socialism spring from the ground.

Jaurs emphasized that socialists now had to take two other major realities into consideration: universal suffrage (allowing the Socialist Party to conquer positions within the existing society) and the general strike (one of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) unions main means of action, which allowed the proletariat to mount a coordinated offensive action that nonetheless stood distant from a desperate insurrection). In short, while Jaurs hailed the Communards heroic efforts, it was necessary to find other ways forward.

Some former Communards, like Benot Malon, were themselves among the originators of socialist reformism. Ten years after the Paris events, in 1881 Malon invoked the Paris Commune in order to exalt the concrete politics that could be done at the municipal in French, communal level: [s]een in these terms, the communal question is more than half of the social question.

And after him, a whole current of French socialism including Albert Thomas, future Armaments Minister during World War I placed their hopes in this municipalist perspective. Through such men, a reforming socialism took shape, with the rise of an idea of a Republic that provided public services. They mourned the insurgent Communes martyrs but took only a few concrete measures from this experience thus hollowing out its more properly subversive content.

Whatever the differences between socialist currents, they all more or less agreed that they needed organization, in order to allow them to overcome the Communes shortcomings.

This fact should not be taken lightly. Indeed, put in its proper context, the success of the party-form in the late nineteenth-century socialist movement owed a great deal to the lessons drawn from the Commune. The Paris revolutionaries of 1871 were honored for having shown the way. But it was also urgently necessary to go further than the Commune had, and take a different approach that could avoid fresh defeats. If it had not been for the trauma of 1871, it is far from clear that socialist currents like the Russian Bolsheviks or the French Guesdists would have theorized and put into practice such structured and hierarchical forms of organization.

Bolshevism in particular probably would not have taken the form it did if it were not for the Communards experience. While in the 1880s some had drawn the lesson that it was necessary to avoid any violent rupture, others instead insisted on the need to conquer the state apparatus and turn it against the enemies of the revolution. The Communes example thus molded the identity of the left wing of the international socialist movement.

Lenin showed his intense admiration for the Communards bold attempt. But he wanted the future dictatorship of the proletariat (of which Marx and Engels have spoken) to adopt means adequate to its revolutionary politics, in order to avoid fresh Bloody Weeks and further proletarian defeats. Yet while he was critical of the Communes methods, he also drew on this experience to define proletarian democracy in his State and Revolution, written a few months before the insurrection of October 1917. From Marxs The Civil War in France he took the idea of smashing the state in order to fight against bureaucracy:

Let us learn revolutionary boldness from the Communards; let us see in their practical measures the outline of really urgent and immediately possible measures, and then, following this road, we shall achieve the complete destruction of bureaucracy.

When Soviet power had lasted one day longer than the Paris Commune, Lenin celebrated the passing of a key threshold for the Russian Revolution. The Parisian experience was widely discussed and studied in the young Soviet Russia: for all its limits, hadnt the Commune shown the way, in many fields?

The young communist movement adopted themes from the Commune like proletarian democracy, workers control, educational progress, and the fight against religious obscurantism. From 1917 onward, the Commune was all the more keenly commemorated because it appeared to whole generations of militants, of all tendencies, as the event which had heralded the new times.

It is rather less clear which aspects of the Commune continue to inspire the socialist movement today, and which are instead considered out of step with our contemporary realities. In this sense, the strategic debates which Jaurs and Lenin launched centering on the Commune, the state and the forms of social and political change are still ongoing. Indeed, they complement the reflection and the insights of the actors from the period that immediately followed the Commune.

Today, historians tend to look back to the Commune as an experience unto itself, distinct from the wider course of the revolutionary movement. This is a perfectly legitimate approach allowing us a closer understanding of the Communards as actors, and their motivations. Yet it would be mistaken to overlook the interpretations and disputes that raged in the workers movement of subsequent decades, taking 1871 as a point of departure. For the debates around the Commune posed major political questions facing any project of social transformation problems that are still far from resolved.

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The Communards Were More Than Just Beautiful Martyrs - Jacobin magazine

A new point-in-time report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shows that homelessness increased significantly during the Trump administration. The report includes a detailed snapshot of the state of homelessness in the US in January of 2020just before the COVID-19 pandemic set inand compares it to figures from previous years.

It stands as an indictment of the Trump administration and begs the question of exactly how many more people have become homeless over the last year as millions lost their jobs and fell behind on their rent or mortgages.

The report found that essentially all major metrics of homelessness are on the rise. At the beginning of 2020, there were over 580,000 homeless people in the US, or just under one in 500. Last year was the fourth consecutive year of growth in the homeless population in the country.

While the homeless population under the Trump administration increased by some 30,000 people, or about five percent, the number of unsheltered homelessthose who lacked any sort of nighttime shelter at all, for example, a carincreased by 28 percent. Moreover, the number of chronically homeless people, those who have been homeless for over a year or who are consistently in and out of homelessness, increased by a massive 40 percent, reaching levels last seen only in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis.

The growth in homelessness was distributed across both red and blue states, those traditionally controlled by the Republicans and Democrats respectively, though Democratic stronghold states tend to have much higher homelessness rates. California has the largest single state homeless count at 130,000, and percentage-wise is only behind Washington D.C., New York and Hawaii. In President Joe Bidens home state of Delaware, an infamous tax haven, homelessness increased by 26 percent between 2019 and 2020.

But the report only describes the prevailing conditions that existed before the pandemic.

From the beginning the World Socialist Web Site has characterized the COVID-19 pandemic as a trigger event. That is to say, the pandemic has not created a nightmare out of a good situation, but that the preexisting social setup laid the foundation forif not the pandemic itselfits fallout, including mass deaths and economic destitution.

The HUD will not release a similar report for January 2021 until early 2022. But until then, a study of some key events of 2020 allows for an informed guess as to how these figures have risen still further over the course of the pandemic. While the pandemic changed everyday life in many ways, it did not change either the basic policies of the ruling class or its attitude towards the working class.

Almost immediately after the stock market crash in March 2020, unemployment in the country skyrocketed to over 15 percent. While it has since fallen back down, the current official figure of six percent is still higher than in previous years and is an underestimation of the real level.

When lockdowns were first instituted in March of last year, some 22 million jobs were lost. There has not been one week in the last year in which combined state and federal jobless claims did not total more than one million.

In September of last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Trump implemented a freeze on evictions as an emergency measure to fight the pandemic. From the beginning, however, the moratorium was laced with conditions that were stacked in favor of landlords. Residents had to prove that they were impacted by the pandemic, that their income was below a certain threshold and that they had lost income in order to be protected.

Under Biden, the CDC has since adopted decidedly antiscientific policies. Most recently it has recommended reducing social distancing from six feet to three feet as a means to help the ruling class reopen schools. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put it, Science evolves. In other words, the CDCs policy is to be subordinated to the prerogatives of the ruling class. One can expect the ban on evictions to evolve along similar lines.

When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017 and left 50,000 people displaced, Trump made a spectacle of tossing paper towels to the audience at a press conference on the island. Bidens response to the victims of the Texas catastrophe last month was different only in that it was better stage-managed. The federal aid given to Texas was equally threadbare as that given to Puerto Rico, and little is being done to help those bankrupted by five-figure electric bills after the storm.

The CARES Act eclipsed the 2008 bailout of the banks by making trillions of dollars of virtually free money available to the financial elite. In the same year that the wealth of the worlds billionaires grew to new heights, with figures like Bezos, Musk, Gates and Zuckerberg seeing their net worth surpass $100 billion, the working class lost their jobs, housing and quite frequently their lives.

The much-touted American Recovery Act will provide limited and temporary aid to millions of workers in desperate need. Called the most progressive bill since the New Deal, it establishes no new social programs, implements no taxes on the rich and all of its provisions will expire before the end of the year.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy summed it up well, Almost everything in this bill is simply an extension of the programs that Republicans were wildly enthusiastic about back when they were in charge of the White House and the Senate.

Although Trump is out of office, the Biden administration is continuing his most important policies. His administration is continuing and even accelerating the aggressive maneuvers against China and is carrying out the same xenophobic attacks on immigrants.

One can be sure that on the question of housing, Biden will adopt the same manner of anti-working class policies as his predecessor, and that the horrific rise reported on conditions during the Trump administration will continue under Bidens. Combating this requires a decisive break with both parties of capitalism and the fight for socialism to reorganize society to meet the needs of humanity.

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Homelessness in the US exploded before the pandemic - WSWS

Throughout his life, Eugene Debs was smeared as an enemy of the American nation. During the 1894 Pullman strike, Harpers Weekly attacked Debss leadership of the uprising as equivalent to Southern secession, claiming that in suppressing such a blackmailing conspiracy as the boycott of Pullman cars by the American Railway Union, the nation is fighting for its own existence. Thirty years later, when Debs was imprisoned for speaking against World War I, President Woodrow Wilson denied requests to pardon him, refusing to show mercy to a traitor to his country.

Debss sympathizers have often defended him against allegations of treason by highlighting his authentic Americanism. Rather than a traitor, they claim, Debs was a true patriot who stood up for nationally shared ideals like freedom and democracy while imbuing them with socialist values. Historian Nick Salvatore, for instance, argues in his landmark 1982 biography that Debss life was a profound refutation of the belief that critical dissent is somehow un-American or unpatriotic. Inspired by Debss example, socialists today might occupy the left flank of a progressive patriotism, pushing the United States to make good on its democratic promise in a way that liberals and centrists cannot do on their own.

Despite some intuitive appeal, this nationalist strategy is a dead end for the Left. At a basic level, democratic nationalism presents the nation as bound by a shared identity and shared interests, uniting different classes behind a common project domestically and internationally. In the United States, this project has only ever been a variant of capitalist empire that, even when grafted to the cause of democracy, has been deeply inhospitable to the strategic thinking and moral fiber that can sustain the Left.

In his own time, Debs rejected that kind of nationalist project, making his politics more than the radical edge of common sense Americanism. When Debs called out the absurdity of the wartime view that patriotism means dying overseas for capitalist profits while treason consists in defending workers everywhere, he showed us the proper response to nationalist ideology: not to try to hijack it for progressive ends, but to liberate us from its obfuscations.

Today, when the Left is often conscripted into a project to defend democracy rather than re-create it, Debs can still offer us guidance. Recalling what Marxism taught Debs can show us how the dominant themes of American democratic discourse especially its conceptions of property, freedom, and self-rule do not provide a foothold for a democratic left. Instead, they obscure our path toward a just society at home and abroad.

In 1948, at the outset of the Cold War, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr edited an anthology of Debss speeches and writings. No socialist himself, Schlesinger wanted to establish Debss place within an American democratic tradition weaponized against Marxism.

In his introduction to the volume, Schlesinger argued that the source of Debss unique popularity as a radical leader was not socialism, but democratic nationalism. He emphasized that when Debs agitated for socialism, he did so in a spirit so authentically American so recognizably in the American democratic tradition that under his leadership the Socialist movement in this country reached its height. American workers were not inspired by Debss condemnation of wage slavery, but were swayed by his homespun oratory, which expressed a profoundly intuitive understanding of the American people nurtured by his small-town Indiana upbringing. Men and women loved Debs, Schlesinger asserted, even when they hated his doctrines.

According to Schlesinger, the popularity of an Americanized socialist like Debs shows that progressives have nothing to lose by rejecting class struggle, inhabiting the cultural mainstream, and working within the two-party system. Through the ordinary electoral process, a liberal party could fulfill working-class demands by curbing the political power of business, defending democratic rights and freedoms, and guiding capitalist growth according to an inclusive sense of the public good.

Most of all, Schlesinger sought to show that Marxism was as foreign to Debs as it was to America. Among the US left, he singled out Debs for praise because, in his view, Debs was always closer to liberal democratic Americanism than Marxist totalitarianism. Debss inveterate patriotism made him avoid the syndicalist terrorism of the I.W.W. or the conspiratorial disloyalties of the American Communist Party. Rather than threaten the nation, Debs stood before a jury of his peers to defend freedom of speech when liberal governments had sacrificed their true principles in a moment of wartime fervor. And as an inveterate democrat, Debs could never accept the revolutionary Marxist program of proletarian class rule, nor could he sacrifice immediate associational freedoms for the sake of historical progress, both of which threatened a totalitarian takeover of democratic institutions.

Ultimately, Schlesinger saw Debs as a useful figure to make a broader argument about the place of the Left in progressive politics. Like Debs (or so Schlesinger imagined), leftists should accept the basic justness of American democratic institutions, inhabiting a position of critical dissent that holds liberals to account without ever exercising real independent power.

Schlesingers story distorts the historical record. Debs was a democrat, but he was also a Marxist and an internationalist. He believed that working-class democracy was only possible if workers controlled the capital infrastructure they set into motion, operating it according to social principles entirely different from those of the profit-seeking capitalist market.

Yet despite these elementary facts of Debss politics, reigning discussions of his life remain deeply Schlesingarian. Salvatores biography downplays Marxisms formative influence on Debs, arguing that the roots of his own social thought remained deeply enmeshed in a different [American] tradition namely, Protestant Christianity and the egalitarian settler individualism of Jefferson and Lincoln. In a 2019 essay in the New Yorker that draws on Salvatores account, historian Jill Lepore portrays Debs as an honorable figure because his politics had less to do with Karl Marx and Communism than with Walt Whitman and Protestantism.

So why did Debs become a Marxist? Anyone familiar with Debs lore knows that he probably encountered Marxist theory for the first while imprisoned for his leadership of the Pullman strike. Milwaukee socialist Victor Berger delivered Debs The Class Struggle, by Karl Kautsky, and Marxs three volumes of Capital.

But theory alone would not have brought Debs to socialism if it did not clarify his experience in the labor movement. When Debs claimed that the Pullman strike was his first practical lesson in Socialism, though wholly unaware it was called by that name, he did not refer to his prison reading, but the strike itself: in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. At the same time, Marxism provided the intellectual framework that Debs used to make sense of this experience, liberating him from strategic misconceptions and giving new meaning to the struggles that defined his life.

Debs was introduced to the labor movement through the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF), a trade group that was as much a workers civic organization as a trade union. While it helped workers exercise some control over their employment (for instance, by regulating hiring and firing), it often collaborated with management to prevent strikes and spread a culture of workplace discipline. When BLF workers joined the countrys first national strike wave in 1877, the organization quickly condemned their lawlessness.

Over the course of a decade in the BLF, Debs became impatient with the organizations division of workers into isolated trades and its antipathy to strikes. Debs came to believe that workers demands could only be met if all railway workers united in a single industry-wide union that could bring recalcitrant employers to the bargaining table through disciplined industrial action. In 1893, Debs helped found the American Railway Union (ARU), with the hope that an industrial union of all the nations railroad workers could ensure workplace safety, good wages, and real opportunities for participation in decision-making on the job.

At this point, Debss hopes for industrial unionism represented the radical edge of an emerging national consensus about the relationship between capital and labor. According to this consensus, capital referred to the tools used by labor. If this was true, capital and labor needed each other: capital would be idle without labor, and labor powerless without capital. The key to the labor problem was therefore uniting both parties around common interests and protecting the rights of each solidifying protections for private property while allowing workers a measure of associational freedom. For his part, Debs insisted that he was not engaged in any quarrel between capital and labor. There can be no such quarrel unless it is caused by deliberate piracy on one side and unreasonable demands on the other.

According to Debss early theory, the reason why capital so often dominated labor (and why labor was unable to exert control over capital) was that workers were too disorganized on the job and in politics. En route to supporting the Peoples Party, Debs came to believe that labor should not only organize industrial unions, but also organize politically in a working-class party to defend against elite capture of the nations democratic institutions, restoring power to the sovereign people.

The Pullman strike began to undermine Debss belief that capital and labor had common interests and that capitals political power could be overcome by working-class organization within the capitalist state. After workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company south of Chicago went on strike and sought out the ARU in a desperate plea for assistance, Debs and the union organized a sympathy boycott of Pullman cars around the country, refusing to hitch the luxury sleeping cars to trains or receive trains under Pullman control. Commerce radiating out of the Chicago metropolitan area ground to a halt, triggering a national crisis.

The specter of an industrial union controlling what could be shipped on the rails while claiming to be the true representative of the countrys railway workers was too much for the American capitalist class and the American state. Rather than treat workers as parties to a contract trying to enforce their right to jointly set its terms, the press blasted them as seditious rioters and called for Debss immediate arrest, denouncing him as an aspiring dictator trying to subject the railways to his personal will.

A coalition of railway owners conspired with the attorney general to issue a federal injunction against the strikers (an unprecedented tactic that the Supreme Court only ruled legal after the fact), the Democratic administration called in the national guard against the strikers, and Debs was sent to jail.

The episode showed Debs that when workers exercise control over both capital and their own labor at the industry-wide level, it is regarded as an overwhelming crisis, not the assertion of democratic bargaining rights. Without realizing it, the ARU was not striking for equal rights within a democratic state but at the core of capitalist power: its command of labor backed by the right to private property.

In his early years, Debs had accepted the sanctity of private property while insisting that labor had an equal right to shape how property was used. When Debs became a Marxist, he abandoned what is perhaps the cardinal myth of American nationalism: that private property and freedom are intimately connected. According to the dominant political narrative one deeply shaped by the United States settler colonial origins a free person is someone who has private access to the economic basis for personal independence. In early America, the surest route to this kind of republican freedom was private ownership of land or small capital. With open access to private property, every settler would have an equal chance to acquire property and bargain with others, creating a nexus of voluntary agreements among free and equal partners. In these circumstances, the right to private property was a sacrosanct protection against domination, since it protects the material basis of an individuals free independence.

After his encounter with Marxism, Debs came to view the right to private property not as the basis of liberty, but a title to despotism. In his speeches and writing, Debs began to integrate Marxs understanding that capital is not merely a useful object machinery and tools but a form of social power over labor. As Marx put it in a widely circulated address to the International Workingmens Association (which Debs quoted in a 1904 pamphlet), Capital does not consist in accumulated labor serving living labor as a means for new production. It consists in living labor serving accumulated labor as a means of maintaining and multiplying the exchange value of the latter. In other words, the capital infrastructure that workers use to produce commodities is not merely a valuable set of tools that they use to satisfy societys needs. Under capitalism, the labor process that makes capital productive is designed so that the investment it represents returns a profit.

In Marxs view, capital and labor do need each other, as Debss early theory held: capital can only become productive through collective labor, and workers with nothing but their labor to sell rely on wages to meet their needs. The young Debs also intuited the right goal: labor should control capital, not the other way around. But if Marxs analysis is right, then labor is not dominated by capital because of disorganization, but because of capitalisms inherent features: private ownership of capital, production for the market, and property-less wage labor structure basic economic relationships to the disadvantage of the working majority. If labor really wanted to control capital in the general interests of society, workers needed to challenge the institution of private property outright.

While strong unions can increase labors share of the economic pie and institutionalize a form of industrial democracy, Marxism helped Debs see that unions alone cannot remove labors dependence on capitalists for access to work, a dependence that, in the context of market competition, capitalists inevitably use to ratchet down wages and working conditions. To transcend this domination rather than limit ourselves to perfecting wage servitude, as he once put it workers must dispense with the illusion that private property rights in a capitalist society protect universal freedom, as the early settler vision held. In capitalism, private property primarily protects domination, not liberty.

When Debs rejected the traditional American ideal of propertied individual independence, he came to think of freedom as rooted in the shared enjoyment of socially produced wealth. In Debss mature view, comprehensive security should be provided to all as a matter of right, with everyones living standard raised equally in proportion to technological progress. Economic liberty would not be realized in the pursuit of individual advantage but through collective self-government: participating in democratically planned production and distribution according to need.

After his encounter with Marxism, Debs was adamant that capitalist society could never be made just. No justice was possible in a society where workers were robbed of the fruit of their labor in exchange for access to work, and where they were kept artificially poor amid rising abundance. Seized by the conviction that anything short of capitalisms overthrow was compromise with injustice, Debs became a strident revolutionary.

Debs often discussed revolution as the realization of democracy, making its promise of popular sovereignty real. For some interpreters, this emphasis on popular sovereignty places Debs within a distinctly American consensus. The Constitutions preamble, after all, begins with We, the People, and the Declaration of Independence establishes its claims on the basis that the people are the ultimate authority in politics.

But popular sovereignty is an easy ideal to abuse, making this supposed consensus too contradictory to be coherent. The Supreme Courts majority opinion in the In re Debs case, which justified sending Debs to prison without a trial by jury during the Pullman strike, argued that suppressing the strike had defended the people from the disruption of a lawless minority. Calling in the National Guard to break the strike should serve as a lesson which cannot be learned too soon or too thoroughly that under this government of and by the people the means of redress of all wrongs are through the courts and the ballot box. Woodrow Wilson justified entering World War I to make the world safe for democracy, presenting American institutions as a bulwark of democratic freedom in a world of authoritarian threats. Suppose every man in America had taken the same position Debs did, Wilson declared. We would have lost the war and America would have been destroyed.

In Debss estimation, these claims about democracy emptied the ideal of its true substance: popular power through collective action. When workers in Pullmans company town bucked their rulers, that was self-government in action, not the assertion by unelected judges that commerce must continue, whatever its social costs. And if democracy means that the people rule themselves collectively as equals in all dimensions economically and politically, at home and abroad then democracys foes are much more comprehensive than Woodrow Wilsons concern about political authoritarianism. Democracys enemies include all the ways that our capacity for free cooperation in self-government is hampered. Were workers in democratic America no less the slaves of their capitalist masters than workers in authoritarian Germany?

The strategic question of how a movement for socialism can make good on the promise of popular self-rule deeply divided Marxists in Debss day. Debs himself often tried to appease different factions in the socialist movement to preserve internal unity, so retrospectively, it can be easy for various camps to claim him as their own. Cold War liberals like Schlesinger can point to Debss refusal to join the Communist Party as evidence of his democratic Americanness. Social democrats can appeal to the Socialist Partys municipal successes under his national leadership. Revolutionaries can highlight his praise of the Spartacist uprising in Germany and the Bolshevik revolution.

Any honest account of Debsian democracy should emphasize that Debs believed in a democratic revolution that would fundamentally remake American political and social institutions. If capital and the state formed part of an integrated social system, it was an illusion to think that the forms of democracy permitted by American institutions could be radically weaponized against capitalist power. Instead, a democratic power that might overcome capitalism had to spring from organizations substantially outside them.

Thats why Debs celebrated the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World as the Continental Congress of the working class and why, in 1912, the Socialist Party insisted their platform could only be realized alongside a constitutional convention. Rather than simply reference American historical anecdotes, Debs and other socialists announced a future rupture in historical time, where the basic terms of political legitimacy would be refounded. The basic logic of production and distribution would have to be organized along egalitarian lines, pushed forward by large-scale industrial unions working alongside the Socialist Party.

In the democratic America of his time, when the people were sovereign in name only, Debs saw institutions of class struggle as the primary site where workers could start to see that a more rational, self-determining society was possible and develop the capacities to create one. Through their own independent organizations, workers could begin to build a state within a state that could contend for power with the ruling class during capitalisms inevitable crises.

The term socialism is more popular in American political discourse today than in decades. While this popularity is shallower than it is deep, we have a chance to dispense with Cold War myths and recall Debss politics fully and clearly, renewing the core of his political vision without the nationalist packaging.

From a Marxist perspective, the call for internationalism is not simply an ethical exhortation that we should care about others around the world, just like we care for those close to us. Instead, its rooted in awareness of the real social interdependence that unites workers everywhere. This global interdependence, which has only intensified in the past century, is overladen with social misery even as it produces the possibility of a higher form of life, one that moves beyond myths of race and nation to grasp the collective power of humanity in making our world and controlling our common fate.

Today, that collective sovereignty often appears inconceivable in a world riven by crisis and fear. Debs was well-acquainted with both. Rather than acquiesce or seek shelter behind established power, his politics turned that fear on the ruling class. For the crises of their order might produce true democrats, like Debs, who would rob them of the might they mask as right.

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The Cold War Is Over. It's Time to Appreciate That Eugene Debs Was a Marxist. - Jacobin magazine

North Korean authorities recently held a lecture for people in the Sino-North Korean border region that officially announced the creation of an agency that will monitor and control non-socialist and anti-socialist behavior while calling on everyone to participate in an operation to sweep away such elements.

A political lecture was held for people along the [Sino-North Korean] border in Hoeryong on Mar. 7, a North Hamgyong Province-based source told Daily NK yesterday. The lecture emphasized that everyone needs to participate in the struggle to suppress and eliminate anti-socialist and non-socialist acts.

The lecturer claimed that mercilessly sweeping away all sorts of anti-socialist and non-socialist acts that are appearing with intensity throughout society is a vital and serious socio-political issue that is key to protecting the socialist system, according to the source.

The lecturer noted that a combined command had been created after the second plenary meeting of the Eighth Party Congress as part of efforts to thoroughly rid the country of anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior. In short, the lecturer made clear that this new organization would monitor such activity and deal out punishments in order to protect North Korean-style socialism.

According to the source, the lecturer further claimed that there has been a dramatic rise in anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior in the midst of the country facing disorder in its legal system, and proceeded to list anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior found recently throughout the country.

Along with the prevalence of drug use and adherence to superstitions, the lecturer claimed that there have been cases of people who have committed crimes after being seduced by religion and superstition. The lecturer also claimed that there has been a drastic rise in murders and burglaries, which have damaged societys development and tarred public sentiment.

The lecturer went on to claim that there has been a deeply concerning increase in criminal behavior among women and minors, and that anti-socialist and non-socialist behaviors are polluting the new generation and putting [our] future at risk.

The lecturer further stated that, most of the time, young people are the ones who are becoming seduced by bad propaganda publications and are either using the way of speaking of the puppets [South Korea] or imitating such a way of speaking. According to the lecturer, there are many cases where young people are committing various crimes, including murders and burglaries, and using illicit drugs.

The lecturer further stated that anti-socialist and non-socialist behaviors including gambling, family in-fighting, the production and illegal sale of counterfeit currency, loans with excessively high interest rates, the production of medical products and other products, illegal medical treatments, and people selling goods out of their vehicles have emerged in almost all areas of life in North Korea.

The lecturer concluded by saying that people should clearly understand that committing anti-socialist and non-socialist behaviors will lead you to act against the Party and motherland, which birthed and nurtured you, and thus should never engage in such acts.

Daily NK understands that the activities of the anti-socialist and non-socialist combined command are taking their cue from the anti-reactionary thought law passed in December of last year. The combined command appears to be focused on implementing a variety of measures to prevent people from breaking away ideologically through contact with foreign culture, including South Korean movies, dramas and music.

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North Korea holds lecture in border region highlighting need to eliminate anti-socialist acts - Daily NK - DailyNK

On March 19, 2019, I wrote an opinion piece in the Standard-Examiner about the fear espoused by former President Trump and Utah Rep. Chris Stewart of the emergence of socialism, when Sen. Bernie Sanders talked about his philosophy of democratic socialism. Even though I am not impressed by Sen. Sanders philosophy, I do think that there are certain areas of social and economic activities that require government involvement. It appears that this fear of socialism is raising its ugly head again in the political arena. Many GOP politicians, who we expect to be more educated to know the difference between capitalism and socialism, are trying to convince voters that the vote for politicians in the Democratic Party will bring about socialism in the country. This threat is repeated every time some GOP politicians have the occasion to speak to the media and their supportive crowd.

Let me first clarify the confusion some of the GOP politicians have about socialism and capitalism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that under socialism and capitalism labor has control over their labor services, but in socialism, as opposed to capitalism, production workers control the means of production and the output of goods and services, and their allocation. We have nothing even close to this feature in the U.S. economy. In capitalism, capitalists control the means (inputs) of production and their allocation, and markets are used to distribute the output. This is the dominant feature of the U.S. economy. Also, there is a class division between workers and capitalists, and capitalists are entitled to the profits they earn and their allocation.

Some GOP politicians and former President Trump, who are constantly blaming Democratic politicians for advocating socialistic ideology and policies for supporting government expenditure programs, have themselves not done away with many such programs. Similar to past decades, total government expenditure from 2016 to 2019 in the Trump administration had remained somewhat more than one-third of the value of the output (GDP) of the economy. In 2020, it increased to 44% due to the COVID-19 pandemic emergency and severe recessionary mass long-term unemployment, especially among women and minorities. The government, since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has taken an active role in the recovery process of the economy, and it is implementing the same policies now. I am sure that GOP politicians, who are always pushing for supply side tax policy, despite its failures, do not think about socialism when implementing those policies which have primarily benefited high-income earners.

GOP politicians do not question the fact that close to two-thirds of the mandatory spending is on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. However, discretionary spending can be controlled. This type of spending is for subsidies such as those to oil companies, farmers and ranchers, and corporations such as Boeing, Alcoa, Intel and Nike (some call it welfare to corporations). However, when it comes to spending on some programs to help low-income and working-class Americans, there is an outcry of socialisms threat. This duality of thinking fails the logic test.

In a market economy, the government has an important role in the provision of public goods, such as national defense, environmental quality and education, including early childhood education affecting the development of human capital. Early remedial investment in education and child care (especially emotional nurturing) pays higher dividends in the future development of cognitive and noncognitive abilities of disadvantaged children, thus leading to success in socio-economic adjustment and in the labor market in adult life. Continuing this investment in later stages of life keeps its effectiveness (see F. Cunha and J. Heckman, American Economic Review, May 2007). Human capital has spillover effects, hence its development requires government involvement.

To increase productivity of the economy, the government, in cooperation with the private sector, must also encourage the development of new technologies. In fact, it was the government that was instrumental in the development of the internet that has produced the remarkable growth in the technology sector of the economy. Mr. Trump, who was addicted to the use of Twitter, an outgrowth of the internet, for his communications, should be thankful to the government. I wonder if he ever thought about socialism while using Twitter.

Deceptive information on socialism is divisive and distracts from policy debates. Efforts should be made by all politicians to implement policies that increase the productivity of the economy and to make sure all Americans share in it.

Vijay Mathur is a former chairman and professor in the economics department at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. He resides in Ogden.

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Guest op-ed: Rhetoric of socialism is raising its ugly head again - Standard-Examiner