By Steve Halpern
The other evening, instead of viewing the stark raving lunacy of the so-called Democratic Party Convention, I viewed an Amazon documentary about the life of the socialist Eugene Debs titled American Socialist. Clearly, there were problems with this film, but it succeeded in giving viewers a glimmer of who Eugene Victor Debs was.
Debs was a labor leader who ran for President several times representing the Socialist Party. Many felt that merely listening to Debs speak was a liberating experience. We are all alienated from the capitalist world where we have no control over the fruits of our labor. When Debs spoke, he became one with his audience and exposed the madness workers are exposed to every day.
Then, he showed how the defenders of capitalism work diligently to take the wealth we produce. As his audience began to understand the reality we experience, he showed how we have the capacity to transform the world. His speeches were so powerful, the primary way his presidential campaign raised money was by charging a small fee to attend his speeches. Debs argued that it’s better to vote for who you want and loose, than vote for who you don’t want and win.
In the year 1918, the United States ordered young people to go to war and participate in the world-wide holocaust called the First World War. Woodrow Wilson was the Democratic Party politician who promised that he would keep the United States out of the war. However, bankers in the United States had outstanding loans to the European powers, who were ordering young men to murder the young men who lived in Germany.
So, Wilson sent the ship the Lusitania to Europe loaded with armaments for his allies. Also, on board the Lusitania were passengers who might have been unaware of the armaments on board. A German U-boat sank the Lusitania, and this gave Wilson the excuse he needed to betray his campaign pledge of keeping the United States out of the war.
Because many working people wanted no part of this war, Wilson needed to go on an all-out war drive to stamp out any opposition. In other words, Wilson felt that money for Wall Street bankers was more important than the lives of young workers in this country.
At that time, a doctor in Kansas was writing about the fact that he observed a pandemic that was spreading across the region. Wilson was indifferent to this, and ordered thousands of soldiers to be grouped together in barracks, on railcars, and in ships. These were the perfect environments to spread the 1918 pandemic known as the Spanish Flu. Eventually about 675,000 people in this country died in this pandemic and millions died in the rest of the world.
Even when the war was nearly over, Wilson ordered thousands more troops to be sent to Europe when there was no question that the pandemic was spreading like a wildfire. Those ships that transported the soldiers became floating coffins for many of those on board.
Eugene Debs couldn’t bear seeing young workers from all over the world murdering each other without doing something about it. He gave a speech in Canton, Ohio in 1918 against the war. In that speech, he contrasted the drive to war, to the child labor in this country. He argued that the history of the United States was being written in the blood and bones of children, and that the Junkers of Germany are no different from their counterparts in the United States.
The United States government then flagrantly violated the free speech Amendment to the Constitution and placed Debs on trial for giving that speech. Debs argued that he wasn’t the one who was on trial, but the Constitution of the United States. While he served his three-year prison sentence, Debs ran for President of the United States and won close to one million votes.
Throughout the First World War women in this country didn’t have the right to vote. The suffragette, Alice Paul, organized a demonstration in front of the White House protesting the war. These demonstrators challenged Woodrow Wilson’s absurd statement that this was a “war for democracy.” Alice Paul argued that democracy is not possible when women don’t have the right to vote.
Because of the intensity of the war drive, the police arrested the women who demonstrated in front of the White House. The suffragettes protested their imprisonment by going on a hunger strike. Prison guards then restrained Alice Paul and inserted a tube into her throat to force feed her. These were the conditions imposed on women by a Democratic Party President to prevent them from having the right to vote.
The right to vote
When we look at this history, we might question Democratic Party representative Hillary Clinton’s words the other evening when she stated: “It took decades of suffragists marching, picketing, and going to jail to push us closer to a perfect union.” Thinking about those words, we might also think about the Democratic Party President Woodrow Wilson who ran the government that inserted a tube into Alice Paul’s throat in order to force feed her. Why did Wilson approve of this? There can be only one reason. He felt that money for Wall Street bankers was more important than giving women the right to vote.
We might also think about Fannie Lou Hammer. A plantation owner in the state of Mississippi fired Hammer because she attempted to register to vote. The police then arrested her and she was viciously beaten while in prison.
Hammer then led an African American delegation to the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. We might consider that the Constitution argues that when a state prevents people from voting, that state needs to be denied representation in the federal government. Hammer and her delegation attempted to enforce this part of the Constitution and gain representation for the Black people who had been denied voting rights in Mississippi.
The news media, in effect, served the interests of the racists of Mississippi, and prevented Fannie Lou Hammer’s speech from being televised. However, as a result of the sustained civil rights movement, the government was forced to give Black people the right to vote. Today that right continues to be compromised.
Do things change when we vote?
So, we might summarize all the events that forced the government to give people the right to vote in this country. There was the revolution of the thirteen colonies that freed this country from British feudalism and colonialism. There was the Civil War that ended chattel slavery. There were the suffragette and civil rights movements. Understanding this history, it is only logical to ardently defend the right to vote.
I happen to be sixty-seven years old. I’ve seen Presidents come and go from both parties. My experience is that nothing changed in my life when there was a change of the Presidency. However, for the past fifty years there has been a slow but steady deterioration in the standard of living for workers. So, the question is: Why vote?
When we look at the titanic battles that took place to give people the right to vote, we see that this is a powerful idea. Workers want to feel that we have at least some control over who heads the government. Without the right to vote, people would feel completely powerless. However, when we see the limitations of voting, we begin to see that in order to bring about a truly democratic nation, we need to have a completely different political economic system.
So, why is it that politicians aren’t able to feed hungry people in this country when about 30% of the available food is thrown out? The revolutionary, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin argued that if capitalism were to feed people, it wouldn’t be capitalism.
For me, the problem is that we do what we are told when we go to work every day. However, after work we go home, and capitalists have control of the wealth we produced. Although workers produce all wealth, we have absolutely no control over the vast amount of wealth we produce. This is the essence of the problem with capitalism, and why there can be no genuine democracy with this system.
When we study the reality of capitalism, we see that those who have power are involved in a course that can only lead to total disaster. Routinely, they need to be completely obsessed with cutting costs, selling more and more commodities, and going into astronomical debt. These are the forces that created the crisis we’re experiencing today. However, the question remains: Why isn’t the government, the media, or the educational system raising any of these issues?
To begin to answer this question we might look at the history of the United States government during the twentieth century. In the early years of the 20th century, the U.S. government joined forces with fourteen nations in an effort to militarily overthrow the revolutionary government in the Soviet Union. Then, the government sent the socialist Eugene Debs to prison for three years for giving a speech against U.S. participation in the First World War.
Then, the government sent eighteen members of the Socialist Workers Party to prison for their opposition to U.S. participation in the Second World War. After that war, members of the Communist Party and others were blacklisted, and some went to prison because of their socialist views.
The United States went to war against Korea and Vietnam in an effort supposedly to fight against communism. Then, President Kennedy threatened the world with nuclear annihilation in response to aid the revolutionary socialist government of Cuba received from the Soviet Union. To this day, the U.S. government has maintained its sixty-year trade embargo against Cuba. This is in spite of the fact that today Cuba is sending its doctors all over the world to battle against the pandemic.
So, when we think of this entire history, one thing becomes clear. One of the top priorities of the United States government during the entire twentieth century has been to viciously suppress anyone who advanced the cause of human needs before profits. Yes, but how have they been able to get away with this for so long?
When we enter a library, we see a literal sea of books where only a tiny percentage of those books challenge capitalism in any way. Dr. Richard Wolf is an economist who spent a decade studying in the universities of Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. He says that during all those years he had only one professor who was critical of the capitalist system, and even mentioned the name Karl Marx.
When we think of the mainstream news media, do we ever see even one article arguing that it is wrong to prevent workers from having control over the wealth we produce? Do we ever see even one article arguing that it might be a good idea to give workers the right to democratically decide if and when we go to war? Thinking about those questions, we also might ask: How have people who have power been able to maintain capitalism when this system routinely compromises the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population?
Back in the 1930s there was a depression in this country. Before the depression, workers routinely lived in poverty and the depression made things a lot worse. In those days, communists argued that the only way for workers to ultimately advance was to organize unions and go on strike. This was the only way employers would ever improve working conditions.
Millions of workers became convinced of that perspective and unions carried out struggles that forced employers to grant significant concessions. The Civil Rights movement also erupted and forced the government to do away with the Jim Crow laws that denied Black people citizenship rights in this country. So, by the 1970s the standard of living for workers had reached its zenith.
Then, because corporations are driven to maximize profits, they began to move factories to nations where wages are between $1 and $10 per day. This, in part, explains the phenomenal economic growth of China where about 260 million people became industrial workers.
So, the huge amount of surplus derived from the labor of workers all over the world was turned into the skyscrapers that sprouted in all the major cities. Those skyscrapers housed the enterprises of banking, insurance, advertising, corporate law, as well as the headquarters of corporations. None of these enterprises directly produced the goods and services we all need and want that include: housing, transportation, communication, food, clothing, health care, education, and exposure to the cultural activities of music, art, dance, literature, theater, sports, and dancing.
However, for literally decades workers no longer felt that their only way to advance was through unions. Now, they felt that families could support a college education for their children. The idea was that a college diploma was the ticket to a home in suburban communities where relatively comfortable lives were a real possibility.
However, the pandemic made something crystal clear to an entire generation of young people. The idea that a college education is a ticket to a better life is over. Now people are seeing how we need to demonstrate in the streets in order to force the government to change their policies of favoring corporate profit. That sentiment exploded with the demonstrations demanding that the police officers who murdered George Floyd be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
So, when the Democratic Party Vice-Presidential nominee, Kamala Harris claims that: “When we vote, things change,” we can respond with a different message. We are going to build a movement that will move this country in an entirely different direction, from the political course of the Democratic and Republican Parties. That course will make human needs and not corporate profit the fundamental priorities.
This course has an entirely different political legacy. We can cite the many names in our history that have advanced this same goal. There was Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, Celia Sanchez, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Nelson Mandela. Learning the political legacy of all these leaders will give us more confidence that a better world is indeed possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment