The Future of Socialism

Is the future of socialism playing out in the streets of French cities and towns? Store owners, some of them Jewish, were seen outside their broken store windows literally begging rioters and looters to leave their hard earned merchandise alone. The looters pushed the owners aside and helped themselves to the cache of goods laughing as they went. No police presence was seen.

France, like Greece and Italy before it and many South American countries, is paying the price for Socialism.

Empty promises from crass government promises to make everyone rich. This, combined with Third World values, is a toxic mixture. In every country where socialism has triumphed, inflation becomes rampant while the government becomes demonic. The competition for ideas and electoral votes fades quickly in the background while mob rule takes over.

We have also seen the excesses of capitalism. Out of control capitalism can, and at times, has morphed into fascist control over the means of production. Workers are exploited and the rich get richer. In the fascist scenario, as in socialism, government becomes the enemy of the people and the friend of the ruling elite.

The name Eugene V. Debs has recently resurfaced. I remember that name from stories my father told. He claimed that Debs, a well known socialist who ran repeatedly for President of the United States, was my grandfather Leo’s favorite. Although Leo was an accountant and worked in the business community, he saw the plight of the working man and was sympathetic to the right of labor to organize for better wages and working conditions. Those were the days of sweatshops and cannibalistic big business controlling everything from the railroads and oil fields to the dirty inhumane factory conditions witnessed in America’s major cities.

At the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th, Gene Debs rode to the rescue.

Debs began his career as a capitalist and friend of business. When he saw the horrendous conditions faced by laborers in the United States, he was quickly won over to a different point of view.

Debs, according to my father’s telling, not inconsistent with internet research, attracted a hardcore following of those who had given up on capitalism but were not yet ready for the Bolshevik Revolution boiling up in Russia. While Debs spoke the language of workers versus business tycoons, his main interest was in seeing an improvement in the conditions of blue collar workers and payment of fair wages.

A Democratic president was Debs undoing and a Republican came to the rescue.

Woodrow Wilson, the former elite college president, widely viewed by modern educators as a “liberal,” enforced World War I anti-free speech laws against many people including Debs. The fact that Eugene Debs opposed World War I landed him in prison. The socialist was imprisoned, flat out, for unpopular free speech. Wilson, who was a bigot, anti-woman, and an antisemite, was all too ready to see Debs rot in jail. Contrary to what we were taught in school, Wilson was the antithesis of a liberal, although he played the part well and quite dishonestly.

Modern historical analysis of Woodrow Wilson shows him to be the creep that he was.

Eugene Debs received a 10-year sentence for violating the Espionage Act. A 10-year sentence, even in the days of Eugene Debs and the Russian Revolution was a long time.

Warren Harding, a Republican President, gets virtually no credit from historians for being either competent or decent. It was Warren Harding who commuted Eugene Debs’ time in jail so that he could live in peace until his death in 1926. If my father’s retelling of history was correct, Debs ran for president yet again while he was still in prison. The posters and lapel labels announcing Debs’ run for the presidency had part of his prison number beneath his picture. In one election, the last one in which he ran for president, Debes received 900,000 votes.

After the demise of Debs and American knowledge about the excesses of the Russian Revolution, the Socialist Party in the United States disintegrated. By 1932, Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party adopted many of the ideas of the Socialist Party essentially letting the air out of the balloon which propelled the worker movement in America.

In the last 50 years, the 90% tax rates for the highest earning Americans, dropped to 70%, 60%, and to the rate that it is at today.

There is little question that the upcoming election in America will see a new day dawning for the Democratic Party and those on the extremist ends on the party’s coattails. Eugene Debs will be resurrected or brought back from the grave, and his principles of worker versus boss will rise like the Phoenix of ancient times.

The question is whether the Democratic and Republican Parties will adopt to the new reality. Will the excesses of capitalism be controlled and will the dangerous extremes of socialism become widely understood?

In Eugene Debs’ lifetime, the propaganda and manipulative power of the press was not yet in high gear. It would take the rise of Nazi, Germany to demonstrate to the world the danger of demagogy. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, and Roosevelt perfected the technique of leadership that makes the power of the internet look meek by comparison. The new demagogs are waiting on the sidelines. Instead of using movies and broadcast speeches as manipulative tools, modern demagogs have the internet. The abuse of power in the interest of extremist control is not new and has not been terminated by the horrors of past wars.

It will be up to Americans in the middle, those who receive the least attention but are the most numerous, to demand a just society which rewards individual work ethics and family responsibility in creating a safety net which is both affordable and fair. Both Republicans and Democrats have failed to create sustainable capitalism or workable socialism.

Meanwhile, American voters are thrown from pillar to post and back again with empty ideas, false promises, a lack of candor, and a complete abdication of responsibility to achieve a workable balance in our economic system.