Our Story
One of the enduring legacies Eugene V. Debs left for those committed to building a revolutionary socialist party in the United States of America remains the development of a radical political and social view that went hand-in-hand with a mass movement of organized working people. In a sense, Debs helped define socialism in America as a simple one: a society built of, for, and by workers. No vanguard was needed, nor a cadre to seed itself among the lower workers. Working people had only to rely on what they felt and experienced for the raw material of revolution.
As Debs famously stated: “I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves."
The landscape of labor today, organized or not, is clearly wildly different from what Debs and others were confronted with during the back portion of the industrial revolution in the late 19th Century. In particular, the unleashing of capitalism across the globe and the deeply connected rise of advanced technology has created an American workforce that relies far less on industrial wage labor to survive than it does on engaging in some form of service of or to the capitalist class’s interests.
Yet this doesn’t obviate in any way the fundamental lessons Debs and other early socialists sought to instill going forward. Without a mass movement of radicalized working people the prospects of a socialist future are dim.
These and other similar issues were the considerations that served as motivation for the creation of SPUSA’s Labor Rising project a year and a half ago. Born out of conversations among the Labor Working Group ahead of a potential summer of labor rage in 2023, Labor Rising sought to create a nexus of labor organizing and activity around which SPUSA members could engage with, while providing a forum for thinking about how we as Debs’s heirs do our part in building that workers’ movement today.