Eugene Debs, perennial standard-bearer and symbolic face of the Socialist Party of America during its heyday, died on this day one hundred years ago. Debs was a leading light among a generation of socialists who faced the violent contradictions of global capitalism more intensely than any before them. His career as a socialist spanned the ascent of the United States as a great power on the world stage and the descent of the old British-led colonial world order into the carnage of World War I. He bore witness as the U.S. militarily occupied Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, invaded Mexico, waded into the slaughter of World War I, and joined a fourteen-nation army to destroy the Russian revolution. His outspoken opposition to his own government’s war aims ultimately earned him three years in prison and a heroic reputation that the Left has cherished for a century since.

Today’s socialist movement finds itself in a very similar global context. The decline of unchallenged American hegemony since the turn of the 21st century has accelerated in the 2020s. As the U.S. empire’s adjuncts and rivals alike attempt to carve out their own spheres of influence within this destabilizing world-system, the international situation is growing increasingly violent, and the threat of world war looms large.

In Europe, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has driven the European Union’s ruling parties into a spree of military buildup spearheaded by Ursula von der Leyen’s “ReArm Europe” plan. In Africa, the petty-imperial ambitions of lesser powers like the United Arab Emirates have stoked spiraling ethnic and sectarian violence in the Horn, Sudan, and the Sahel. In West Asia, the US-Israeli genocide in Palestine has destroyed whatever semblance remained of a “rules-based international order” and drawn the whole Gulf region into a multi-front war that threatens to collapse the entire world economy. And in the Americas, the United States is on a rampage, imposing old-style colonial rule in Venezuela, blatantly massacring civilian fishermen throughout the Caribbean, and threatening war against Cuba and even Mexico.

The Democratic Socialists of America, is the nearest thing to a modern successor to Debs’ Socialist Party, and cannot avoid confronting the growing catastrophe of world imperialism. As DSA’s political clout grows, international questions are becoming less and less abstract for the organization. Of the four DSA candidates elected to Congress since 2018, two have kicked off crises within the organization with votes or rhetoric that ceded ground to U.S. foreign policy’s hegemonic Zionism, while a third was censured by the House of Representatives for pro-Palestine speech after October 7th. All four have, at one point or another, voted for military aid to Ukraine against Russia. Since Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City, DSA has had to reckon with one of our own being in a position to wield direct executive power against illegal West Bank land sales, arms shipments out of major ports, and Israeli officials’ visits to the United Nations, but being either unable or unwilling to do so.

These contradictions will only grow more intense in the years to come. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs for president with DSA’s endorsement in 2028, she will face immense pressure to adopt “pragmatic” (imperialist) foreign policy positions on the campaign trail, to say nothing of what would be demanded of her if she were to actually take office. DSA decided at our last national convention that we are building a party; now is the time to decide what kind of party we intend to be.

Eugene Debs’ internationalism can help show us the way. Debs believed it was any good socialist’s duty as an “international patriot” to oppose all wars but the global war of the exploited against their exploiters. This did not imply a policy of pacifism, nor an absolute equivalence between any two warring powers. What it did mean was an intransigent opposition to the war aims of one’s own government and an unapologetic defense of all toiling people’s struggle against domination, whether by their own bosses and rulers or imperialist invaders. When the Wilson administration sent troops into Mexico in retaliation against a raid on American soil by Pancho Villa’s insurgent army, Debs mounted an audacious defense of the Mexican revolution. Not only was his heart “with the Mexicans—the peons fighting for their independence,” but he proclaimed that “If I had been president [...] I would have sent a punitive expedition into Wall Street,” not Mexico.^[1] While in prison for encouraging draft defiance during World War I, he struck a similar tone about the revolution in Russia, famously declaring that “from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, I am a Bolshevik, and proud of it!” while the U.S. government intervened in the Russian Civil War to destroy the Bolshevik government.^[2]

The three essays republished below are short works by Debs on issues of militarism and internationalism, corresponding to three different eras where imperialism confronted the Socialist Party in different ways.

The first, “Military Murderers” (1910),^[3] was written in the period before World War I. This was the age of America’s debut as a major imperialist power, under three consecutive Republican presidents whose careers were shaped by the conquest of Spain’s Caribbean and Pacific colonies in the War of 1898—William McKinley as the war’s architect, Theodore Roosevelt as a colonel in Cuba, and the incumbent Howard Taft as governor of the bloodsoaked American occupation of the Philippines. To Debs, who saw federal troops used to crush his own American Railway Union during the great Pullman Strike of 1894, the class character of military expansion in this period was obvious. While Debs was probably wildly over-optimistic about the prospect of socialism spreading in the ranks of the army, his ability to square his disgust at military service as a profession with the strategic utility of winning over the rank-and-file to the socialist cause forecasted the decisive role mass mutinies would play in the Russian Revolution seven years later.

The second piece, “So-Called ‘Preparedness’ Invites War” (1915)^[4], was a short telegram Debs sent the New York Sun in response to a speech by fellow socialist Charles E. Russell on the question of “preparedness.” The Wilson administration’s “preparedness” doctrine was the main issue confronting the Socialists during this period between the start of World War I and U.S. entry into the conflict, and Russell, initially a frontrunner for the party’s nomination for president in 1916, was one of several high-profile Socialists who endorsed the military buildup as long as it was purely for “national defense.” Amidst the ongoing interventions in Mexico and the Caribbean and the use of federal troops in the recent Colorado coal wars, Debs argued there was no such thing as “defensive” militarization. Socialists confronting “defensive” aid to Israel and Ukraine or “defensive” rearmament in Europe would do well to remember the lesson.

Lastly, “Views on the Double Attack on Russia” (1918)^[5] was Debs’ full-throated defense of the Russian Revolution as the world’s imperial powers joined forces to try to strangle it in its cradle. Debs greeted the Bolsheviks as heroic crusaders for “real democracy” and a just peace, and excoriated the Allied powers for conspiring against them. But most of all, he condemned the German socialists whose pro-war turn in 1914 and quietism on their country’s crime against Russia had made them accomplices in the global counterrevolution. His warning of the “soul-destroying” consequences for socialists who accommodated the foreign policy of their ruling classes for political expediency should weigh heavy on our minds in the coming years.

Military Murderers (1910)

Soldiers under capitalism are workers hired by capitalists to murder their fellow workers for a pittance that would put a scab to shame. And this the capitalists, for very good reasons to themselves, pronounce “patriotism” and hail as military glory; and the gruesome game has worked like a charm for many years.

But at least these hireling soldiers are catching on. And no wonder. At army posts and in camps the officers are strutting tsars and the common soldiers cur dogs. The brutal treatment they are subjected to by the snobs and upstarts who lord it over them as their “superiors” I have heard from their own lips and it is revolting to the last degree.

Only a fool, a stupid, besotted fool, would submit to such brutality for such a pittance unless indeed he were a pervert and halfwit and gloried in his own degeneracy.

“Military glory” under capitalism has had its day. Its sun is setting. The suckers have about quit biting.

Special orders have just been issued by the war department at Washington to all the recruiting stations to increase the pressure and offer all possible inducements to secure recruits. The most glittering and highly colored pictures, displaying the dazzling and attractive beauties of camp life, cover billboards wherever a recruiting station is located. In these pictures soldiers are in clover as deep as they are in hell in the real thing.

Lolling back in easy chairs, smoking fragrant cigars, and surveying with field-glasses the surrounding landscape of ravishing beauty, a soldier’s life at $13 a month is made to appear a symphony of rapture that would excite the envy of the gods, but when he has enlisted and is securely harpooned the illusion vanishes. He sups on embalmed jackass and moldy beans, and a two-by-four “superior” spits on him for dessert. And to desert this dessert is a crime punishable by imprisonment.

Last year, according to the official report of the adjutant general, there were over 4,000 desertions from the army of the United States. The total number of desertions for the ten years ending with the report just issued is not quite 50,000, an average of a trifle less than 5,000 a year.

Think of the supreme significance of 5,000 desertions from the United States army every year! Over 400 a month or about 15 a day for every day of the week.

How is this for an exhibition of patriotism and military glory by the soldiers of the United States army?

A soldier has just told me that these unparalleled desertions are super-induced mainly by the teachings of socialism and the influence of the socialist movement. Thousands of soldiers have studied and understand more or less clearly the economics of militarism and they appreciate keenly the position they occupy and the model degradation it entails, as well as the sickening service they are required to render as their “patriotic duty,” and there will be no unnecessary delay on their part in transferring their allegiance from murderous militarism to revolutionary socialism.

So-Called “Preparedness” Invites War (1915)

Replying to your inquiry, Charles Edward Russell has high standing in the socialist movement, but if he is correctly quoted in his Philadelphia speech in reference to war, I do not at all agree with him, and his views are at variance with the attitude and principles of the Socialist Party. It is my conviction that we can keep out of war, but not by pursuing the course indicated by Mr. Russell.

Europe is today a glaring example of what preparedness for war means to a civilization. A large standing army, a powerful navy, and a stupendous military armament, such as President Wilson, with the backing of Wall Street, proposes means a military autocracy, and it can mean nothing else. If the American people acquiesce in such an obviously plutocratic program they must not be surprised if other nations treat it as a challenge to war, and if they are themselves conscripted, to fight and die to maintain plutocratic supremacy in the United States. If the peace of the world can be maintained only by a race of armed murderers, then the race should perish from the earth, for it is not fit to survive.

Socialism means internationalism, and socialists, if they are true to the fundamental principles of their cause, are opposed to war and to “preparedness” as that term is understood in the present discussion. It is the ruling class which instigates and declares war without consulting their subjects and so far as the socialists are concerned the aristocrats, bureaucrats, and plutocrats who are responsible for the war may also fight the battles. We are living in the twentieth century, but the ruling class still has the barbarous spirit of the Middle Ages.

The United States government is today in a position to strike a death blow to war, but under the present control it may not avail itself of the supreme opportunity. If in the presence of the appalling conflagration that is now destroying the Old World the government of the United States were to prove in good faith that it is opposed to the barbarism and butchery of war by issuing a proclamation of peace—itself setting the example of disarmament to the nations of the world—its preparedness would be not only in accordance with its vaunted ideals, but a thousandfold greater guarantee to the respect of its neighbors and to its own security and peace than if it were loaded down with all the implements of death and destruction on earth.

Views on the Double Attack on Russia (1918)

The revolution in Russia is now in its most critical stages. The near future will determine whether or not the Bolsheviki can maintain their supremacy. They represent the peasants, the workers, and the soldiers—the great bulk of the population. Their demand is the land to the peasants who till it and the tools to the workers who use them. This means real democracy, for which the Russian people alone are fighting in the present war.

Colonel William B. Thompson, the American multimillionaire who recently returned from Russia, has contributed a million dollars to the Bolsheviki and has openly declared that they stand alone in the fight for genuine democracy.

Professor Edward A. Ross, eminent sociologist and psychologist of the University of Wisconsin, who has spent several months in Russia, has said the same of the Bolsheviki, to which he has added, “When I left this country, I was convinced America was a great democracy; but now I am sure America is a capitalist republic.”

President Wilson, to his eternal credit, attempted to pave the way to the recognition of the Bolsheviki and back them up in their struggle to crown their revolution with victory. But alas! He stood alone in that position and not a word of recognition from the belligerent powers on either side was vouchsafed to the Russian people in the hour of their supreme trial.

The invitation extended to the people of all nations by the Bolsheviki to have their representatives meet in conference to arrange the terms of a democratic and permanent peace was ignored by them all except imperialistic Germany, which took prompt advantage of the opportunity to further its own malevolent designs. The Bolsheviki, thus ignored and deserted, treated with contempt and left to their fate, present a melancholy spectacle to the world. And now, to crush their last hopes, the military hordes of Germany are pouring across the borders to complete their work of treachery and betrayal. This invasion and conquest, in spite of treaty stipulations submitted to by a helpless people, constitutes one of the crimes of history.

But this is not all, nor is imperialistic Germany alone in seeking to crush the Bolsheviki and rob the Russian people of the fruit of their revolution. We now see Japan, one of the Allied Powers, preparing to swoop down upon and take possession of Siberia upon the pretext that large stores of munitions and provisions along the line of the Siberian railway may fall into the hands of the Bolsheviki, the representatives and the only representatives of real democracy in Russia. In other words, Germany, on the part of the Central Powers, and Japan, on the part of the Allies, are cooperating harmoniously—deadly enemies though they pretend to be—to destroy the Russian revolution and force the Russian people back into bondage.

It is a thousand pities from my point of view that the Allies failed to lend a hand to the Bolsheviki in the hour of their crucial need and when the fruit of their revolution could have been saved to them, and I think this will be the verdict of history. Instead of this, however, all the nations of earth, Allies as well as Central Powers, have sought either openly or covertly to discredit, defeat, and destroy the Bolsheviki and prevent the rise of the Russian people. The reason for this is obvious enough. If the Russian people could at one stroke rid themselves of their landlords, their capitalists, their exploiters, and their profiteers of all description, the people of all the other countries would speedily follow their example.

As for the German invasion, my hope is that the Russian people will resist it by all means in their power and that they will not rest until they have driven these ruthless barbarians from their borders. The shame of this invasion is not so much that of the Kaiser and the junkers as it is that of the majority socialists. In standing for this crime, they cap the climax of their betrayal and disgrace of the socialist movement. In standing for this, the majority socialists of Germany prove finally that they will stand for anything except socialism and democracy.

The Austrian socialists have threatened to rise in revolt and have compelled their emperor to renounce any part in or responsibility for the invasion. But the German majority socialists are so thoroughly Prussianized, so completely subjected to the iron will of their military despots, that all they know is to obey orders, even to the extent of becoming the rankest of kaiserites, being used as willing hirelines to stamp out the aspirations of other people to be free.

Thus do we see the meaning of militarism in all its naked horror. And the lesson the Bolsheviki are now being taught by the Prussian hordes may well be taken to heart by the people of all the nations, America included, that is, to beware of the insidious, degrading, body-enslaving, and soul-destroying curse of militarism!

1. “Debs Flays Judge Anderson.” American Socialist. October 14, 1916 (p. 3). https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/american-socialist/v3n14-oct-14-1916-TAS.pdf.

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2. “The Day of the People.” The Class Struggle. October 1919. https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1919/daypeople.htm.

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3. “Military Murderers.” Appeal to Reason. December 31, 1910. https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1910/101231-debs-militarymurderers.pdf.

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4. “Russell Plan, Says Debs, Invites War.” New York Sun. November 30, 1915. https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1915/151129-debs-preparednessinviteswar.pdf.

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5. “Views on the Double Attack on Russia.” The Eye Opener. March 16, 1918. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1918/0316-debs-russia.pdf.

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