THE COMMUNIST An Open Letter To Eugene Debs.
Dear Comrade Debs:A year ago you were taken from our midst by the enemies of the working class and thrust into Atlanta Penitentiary with head unbowed hurling defiance at the Capitalist Government the very incarnation of the proletarian revolution in America.
All through the war, while the leaders and officials of the Socialist Party were betraying the class struggle and making a hollow mockery of the St. Louis Resolution, you stood like a rock for International Socialism and against the capitalistimperialist world war. Later, when the Bolsheviki conquered power in Russia and set up a dictatorship of the workers and peasants, you, Comrade Debs, came out for them in ringing words while the officials and leaders of the Socialist Party were busy discrediting the idea of proletarian dictatorship as the means of overthrowing capitalism. You also came out openly for the LiebknechtLuxemburg Spartacan revolt against the Ebert Sheidemann bourgeois Government, while the official Socialist Party was, and is, defending those traitors and their government as Socialist All your life you had championed the cause of the working class all your life you had espoused the class struggle and the principles of International Socialism. Not without reason did the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviki) in issuing the call for the formation of a New International, invite the left elements of the Socialist Party of America under the leadership of Eugene Debs to send delegates to Moscow.
Before the prison gates closed upon you, you must have known of the long list of compromises and betrayals of which the leaders and officials of the Socialist Party had been guilty in the past. You must have known of the growing resentment of the rank and file within the party, which smouldered fiercely for two years and eventually burst forth into a conscious revolt against the official machine.
Your article in the February 1919 Class Struggle. one of the organs of the Left Wing, of which you were one of the editors THE DAY OF THE PEOPLE one of the factors aiding this revolt. We shall quote the last part of it in order to refresh your memory: The reign of capitalism and militarism has made of all the peoples inflammable material. They are ripe and ready for the change, the great change which means the rise and triumph of the workers, the end of exploitation, of war and plunder, and the emancipation of the race. Let it come! Let us all help its coming and pave the way for it by organizing industrially and Issued by the Central Executive Com of a Communist Party of America.
mittee of the Communist Party of Together with the Communist Labor America.
Party, these two parties absorbed all the really revolutionary elements in the old party. Not more than onepolitically to conquer capitalism and fourth remained in the Socialist usher in the day of the people. In Party, notably the large Finnish FedRussia and Germany our valiant eration. The Finnish Communists comrades are leading the proletarian have not yet split off from the Finrevolution, which knows no race, no nish Socialist Federation. The becolor, no sex, and no boundary lines.
trayers of Socialism, the cowardly They are setting the heroic example compromisers. as you called them, for world wide emulation. Let us, like remained in the Socialist Party, and them, scorn and repudiate the even now lead and shape its policies cowardly compromisers within our and tactics.
own ranks, challenge and defy the In the recent hearings on the ouster robber class power, and fight it out of the five Socialist Assemblymen at on that line to victory or death! From the crown of my head to the soles of Albany, we have the last word of the highest Socialist Party my feet am Bolshevik, and proud spokemen of it. The Day of the People has on just what that party now stands arrived!
for, and just how it intends to attain Thus spoke the man whom the its aim. The entire defense of the Socialist Party at Albany was concapitalist class placed behind prison bars last year.
stitutional regularity as the limit of To day, after a long tomb like party purposes and actions. They silence, comes the announcement of accepted unreservedly the existing your acceptance as presidential canform of capitalist government, based didate on the corrupt Socialist Party upon the Constitution of the United ticket.
States, as the form upon which to build the future society. They insisted We presume, Comrade Debs, that that the Socialist Party did and alyou are ignorant of the facts and ways would conform to the State and unacquainted with all that transpired within the Socialist movement this National Constitutions and laws. Not the least mention was made of the last year, else you might not have class struggle.
accepted a nomination which can only Instead, patriotism and loyalty was painfully and somelead to a parting of the ways between the class conscious what ludicrously stressed. The class revolutionary workers and yourself, their one time character of American Government could hardly be mentioned since the leader.
What made you accept the nomiSocialist Party boastingly proclaimed nation we know not. We can only itself the arch defender of representinfer that the political charlatans, ative democracy and of constituthe cowardly compromisers. who tional integrity.
have not hesitated to lie to you in The St. Louis Platform, upon which the past, have done so again.
you and others were convicted and We address this open letter to you sentenced to long prison terms, was because we desire to place the facts brushed aside as a scrap of paper squarely before you. Your lifelong and as of no moment. Whatever was devotion in the cause of the working vital and revolutionary in it, even class, your attitude toward Bolshe though moderately expressed, was vism and the heroic Communist lead twisted and distorted to rob it of its ers, Lenine and Trotsky in Russia, meaning and significance, and the and Liebknecht and Luxemburg in witnesses all insisted upon their exGermany, your scorn and repu emplary loyalty and patriotism diation of the betrayers of Socialism during the war. In several other resand the class struggle, make it im pects, in which the party declarations perative that we acquaint you with might seem to have offended bourgeois the type of party and men you, in respectability. the defense was that your ignorance of the facts, are the party never did anything of the aligning yourself with.
kind, no matter what it said, ConDuring this eventful year, while trol of legislative representatives by you have been kept behind prison resignations, required by the party bars, without chance of interconstitution, was declared a dead communication, the Communist Inter letter. The obligation not to vote for national has extended itself to military appropriations was reevery part of the word.
pudiated. Instead of insisting upon During this year, revolutionary So the propriety of alien membership in cialists of practically all countries a working class political party, the have decisively cut themselves off Socialist Party introduced false figfrom association with the old parties ures to prove the Americanism of of the Second International and have the party membership.
formed new Communist parties. In In spite of the achievements of the this country the rank and file revolt Russian Communists, in spite of the led to the formation of a Left Wing impending Communist revolutions in movement within the Socialist Party, other European countries, the chief which culminated in September of spokesman of the Socialist Party at last year at Chicago in the creation Albany characterized the Communist was