Eugene Debs, Populism, and the Cooperative Commonwealth

• In Event: Populism and the American Left

Abstract

In an era of resurgent populism, what can democratic theorists learn from the original American Populists? One way to evaluate the Populists’ theory and practice of democracy is to examine how sympathetic figures wrestled with the movement’s political vision in light of its compromises and defeats. In this essay, I trace Eugene Debs’ efforts to re-work the ends and means of Populist democracy while staying true to its basic, underlying ambition: a democratic republic based on free cooperation. Rather than assess the merits of a trans-historical theory of “populism,” the essay follows Federico Finchelstein’s call to “return populism to history” in order to grasp the specificity of the Populist legacy for the American Left and to clarify the possibilities of cooperative democracy today.

Populism left an enduring mark on Debs’ vision of socialism. Like the radical Populists, Debs believed that the state could only be democratized only by a popular party that contests the major parties and comes to power via democratic elections; he thought that democratic transformation requires both the economic self-organization and mass political participation of the popular classes; and he believed that economic relationships should enable social cooperation among all citizens, securing both the free exercise of one’s capacities and a fair share of the social surplus. For Debs, socialism was not an abrogation of Populism, but an extension of its critique to the struggle of organized labor. The Populists imagined that their reforms would allow communities to cooperatively take charge of local resources and control a surplus that was confiscated by financiers, merchants, and monopolists. Unlike major Populists, Debs identified how capitalists extracted value from workers as private profit, robbing them of their fair return and undermining social cooperation. While many Populists imagined cooperation as a restoration of the rights of private ownership, only a form of collective ownership could resolve the industrial problem. For Debs, that simply meant a new task for cooperative democracy: re-orienting craft-unionism around an industry-wide model that could form the seedbed of workers’ cooperative agency, preparing them to assume democratic control of industry with the ascent of the Socialist Party to political power.

Today, assessing Debs’ relationship to Populism invites reflections on the failures and defeats of Debsian socialism itself. Social movements are already asking how democratic socialism might win the consent of a popular majority. Like Debs, they also need to conceptualize how that popular majority could come to possess the strategic power and cooperative capacity to democratically and ecologically transform the economy.

Author

• Ed Quish, Hobart and William Smith Colleges