The Last Marxist

Chris Cutrone

Presented on a panel, “The radicality of the American project,” with James Vaughn, moderated by Spencer Leonard, held at the 4th Biennial conference of the Caucus for a Critical Political Science, South Padre Island, Texas, February 23, 2025.

Let me begin by reading a short article written by the Russian revolutionary social democratic Marxist Vladimir Lenin on the 1912 general election in the U.S. and its results:

The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections

Published: Pravda 164, November 9, 1912

Wilson, a “Democrat”, has been elected President of the United States of America. He has polled over six million votes, Roosevelt (the new National Progressive Party) over four million, Taft (Republican Party) over three million, and the Socialist Eugene Debs 800,000 votes.

The world significance of the U.S. elections lies not so much in the great increase in the number of Socialist votes as in the far-reaching crisis of the bourgeois parties, in the amazing force with which their decay has been revealed. Lastly, the significance of the elections lies in the unusually clear and striking revelation of bourgeois reformism as a means of combating socialism.

In all bourgeois countries, the parties which stand for capitalism, i.e., the bourgeois parties, came into being a long time ago, and the greater the extent of political liberty, the more solid they are.

Freedom in the U.S.A. is most complete. And for a whole half-century — since the Civil War over slavery in 1860–65 — two bourgeois parties have been distinguished there by remarkable solidity and strength. The party of the former slave-owners is the so-called Democratic Party. The capitalist party, which favoured the emancipation of the Negroes, has developed into the Republican Party.

Since the emancipation of the Negroes, the distinction between the two parties has been diminishing. The fight between these two parties has been mainly over the height of customs duties. Their fight has not had any serious importance for the mass of the people. The people have been deceived and diverted from their vital interests by means of   spectacular and meaningless duels between the two bourgeois parties.

This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.

And now the bipartisan system has suffered a fiasco in America, the country boasting the most advanced capitalism! What caused this fiasco?

The strength of the working-class movement, the growth of socialism.

The old bourgeois parties (the “Democratic” and the “Republican” parties) have been facing towards the past, the period of the emancipation of the Negroes. The new bourgeois party, the National Progressive Party, is facing towards the future. Its programme turns entirely on the question whether capitalism is to be or not to be, on the issues, to be specific, of protection for the workers and of “trusts”, as the capitalist associations are called in the U.S.A.

The old parties are products of an epoch whose task was to develop capitalism as speedily as possible. The struggle between the parties was over the question [of] how best to expedite and facilitate this development.

The new party is a product of the present epoch, which raises the issue of the very existence of capitalism. In the U.S.A., the freest and most advanced country, this issue is coming to the fore more clearly and broadly than anywhere else.

The entire programme and entire agitation of Roosevelt and the Progressives turn on how to save capitalism by means of bourgeois reforms.

The bourgeois reformism which in old Europe manifests itself in the chatter of liberal professors has all at once come forward in the free American republic as a party four million strong. This is American style.

We shall save capitalism by reforms, says that party. We shall grant the most progressive factory legislation. We shall establish state control over all the trusts (in the U.S.A. that means over all industries!). We shall establish state control over them to eliminate poverty and enable everybody to earn a “decent” wage. We shall establish “social and industrial justice”. We revere all reforms — the only “reform” we don’t want is expropriation of the capitalists!

The national wealth of the U.S.A. is now reckoned to be 120 billion (thousand million) dollars, i.e., about 240 billion rubles. Approximately one-third of it, or about 80 billion rubles, belongs to two trusts, those of Rockefeller and Morgan, or is subordinated to these trusts! Not more than 40,000 families making up these two trusts are the masters of 80 million wage slaves.

Obviously, so long as these modern slave-owners are there, all “reforms” will be nothing but a deception. Roosevelt has been deliberately hired by the astute multimillionaires to preach this deception. The “state control” they promise will become — if the capitalists keep their capital — a means of combating and crushing strikes.

But the American proletarian has already awakened and has taken up his post. He greets Roosevelt’s success with cheerful irony, as if to say: You lured four million people with your promises of reform, dear impostor Roosevelt. Very well! Tomorrow those four million will see that your promises were a fraud, and don’t forget that they are following you only because they feel that it is impossible to go on living in the old way.

As usual, the dialectic of Lenin’s argument is subtle and easily overlooked but unmistakable once noticed. It is the contradiction of freedom and capitalist political domination.

It is important to note how Lenin regarded Progressivism — in this case, that of Theodore Roosevelt’s breakaway Progressive Party in the 1912 election — as expression of the depth of the crisis of capitalist politics and as a response to the proletarian socialist movement and its political parties. Indeed, for Lenin, the crisis of capitalist politics was itself a result of the rise of socialism as a political force.

Lenin understood the electoral results for Debs’s Presidential candidacy as at least potentially representing far more than the actual vote tally — which, was proportionally the highest percentage the Socialist Party of America ever received, although it received a greater raw number of votes later. It was not necessary an indication of civil-social organizing strength, in labor unions and other formations of working class power “on the ground” outside the formal political sphere. The Socialist Party called for workers to vote their interests and conscience, which according to local as well as national issues might vary from the more symbolic expression of voting for the Socialist candidates in any given electoral contest. The Socialists did not aim to achieve governing power, especially at the national level, through election, but rather used voting as a suggestive measure of potential popular support as well as electoral campaigns as platforms for propagandizing the cause of socialism.

Outside the U.S., it is significant that 1912 was generally a high water-mark of socialist electoral strength, for instance in Germany when the SPD became the largest single political party in the national Reichstag elections. Indeed, it was in response to this electoral triumph that the Prussian Imperial government began considering launching a war to potentially divide and thus stem the growth and possibly even smash completely the SPD– eventually a factor helping lead to the outbreak of WWI two years later in 1914.

For Lenin, political events in such disparate places as the U.S. and Germany were integral aspects of a world-historical situation of capitalism in which the working class’s movement for socialism was not merely responding to but actively shaping developments. This has not been the case in the same ways during the last hundred years, despite the Cold War and other phenomena of the 20th century. The reason is simply that the socialist movement in the core advanced capitalist countries has bever been as strong as during this era leading up to WWI, as expressed in the parties of the Socialist International.

While it is familiar and indeed a banal commonplace now for the Left to claim credit for any and all actions in capitalist politics as somehow a response and attempt to counteract or block its own efforts, this is a gross abuse of the kind of judgment Lenin exercised in his interpretations of contemporary political events.

So what was the basis for Lenin’s analysis of American politics in its moment? I would like to address what Lenin had to say about Eugene Debs as exemplar of American socialism, in order to try to understand Lenin’s criteria for socialist politics more generally. I will move backwards historically, from how Lenin evaluated prospects for socialist politics in the U.S. through the figure of Debs as this developed towards the crisis of the Marxist movement that unfolded in the first world war and the revolutions that broke out in its aftermath, in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy, and threatened to spread beyond.

Lenin considered Debs and the tendency he represented in American socialism as potential participants in the fledgling Third or Communist International that arose from the crisis of the Second or Socialist International in the war but was polarized definitively in the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917.

In 1919, at the time of the formation of the new Communist International, in response to the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the famous leaders of German Marxism, Debs wrote, in “The day of the people” that,

In Russia and Germany our valiant comrades are leading the proletarian revolution, which knows no race, no color, no sex, and no boundary lines. They are setting the heroic example for worldwide emulation. Let us, like them, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromisers within our own ranks, challenge and defy the robber-class power, and fight it out on that line to victory or death!

From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it.

“The Day of the People has arrived!”

Several years earlier, in 1915, the first year of the World War, Lenin had written to Alexandra Kollontai to instruct her investigation of American socialists, before the U.S. had entered the war and was still officially neutral. To Kollontai he wrote,

As regards the New York Volkszeitung, Grimm assured me today that they are quite Kautskian! Is that the case? I think our German pamphlet might help you to determine the “strength” of their internationalism. . . .

In a few days we are publishing here . . . a little pamphlet on behalf of the Zimmerwald Left. Under this name we should like to launch into international circulation, as widely as possible, our Left group at Zimmerwald (. . . [including Luxemburg’s] Polish Social–Democrats) . . . with its draft resolution and manifesto. . . . We rely on you to publish it in America in English too (for it is hopeless to do this in England: it has to be brought there from America) and, if possible, in other languages. This is to be the first publication by the nucleus of Left Social-Democrats of all countries, who have a clear, exact and full reply to the question of what is to be done and in which direction to go. It would be most important if you could succeed in publishing this in America, circulating it as widely as possible and establishing firm publishing links (Charles Kerr [in] Chicago; the Appeal to Reason [in] Kansas, etc.). . . .

Try establishing contact with them — if only in writing, should you not get to Kansas. Their little paper is sometimes not bad. Be sure to sound them out with our resolution of the “Zimmerwald Left”. And what is Eugene Debs? He sometimes writes in a revolutionary way. Or is he also a wet-rag à la Kautsky?

I never doubted that [Morris] Hillquit would be for Kautsky and even to the right of him, because I saw him at Stuttgart (1907) and heard how afterwards he defended the prohibition against bringing yellow people into America (an “internationalist”!).

When assessing the prospects for the formation of the Communist international in 1918, Lenin had written that he included Debs among those “groups and currents within the social-patriotic parties more or less close to Bolshevism”: “the ‘League’ in the United States (or followers of Debs?).”

Lenin had read Debs’s declaration of opposition to the war:

Look at America — apart from everything else a neutral country. Haven’t we the beginnings of a split there, too: Eugene Debs, the “American Bebel” [analogue to the leader of the German SPD prior to WWI], declares in the socialist press that he recognises only one type of war, civil war for the victory of socialism, and that he would sooner be shot than vote a single cent for American war expenditure

Debs had written:

I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the regular army of rite plutocracy, but to the irregular army of the people. I refuse to obey any command to fight for the ruling class. . . . I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make it necessary. . . .

To which Lenin responded:

This is what Eugene Debs, the American Bebel, the beloved leader of the American workers, writes to them.

This again shows you, comrades, that in all countries of the world real preparations are being made to rally the forces of the working class. The horrors of war and the sufferings of the people are incredible. But we must not, and we have no reason whatever, to view the future with despair.

Lenin considered the revolutionary tradition strong in America. In his “Letter to American workers” in 1918, he wrote that,

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.

About 150 years have passed since then. Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxurious fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated nations in level of development of the productive forces of collective human endeavour, in the utilisation of machinery and of all the wonders of modern engineering. At the same time, America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism. The American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of “liberating” them.

Lenin continued:

I am not surprised that Wilson, the head of the American multimillionaires and servant of the capitalist sharks, has thrown Debs into prison. Let the bourgeoisie be brutal to the true internationalists, to the true representatives of the revolutionary proletariat! The more fierce and brutal they are, the nearer the day of the victorious proletarian revolution.

Lenin recognized Woodrow Wilson, today considered a “progressive,” as an entirely conservative-reactionary political figure, representative of the Democrats as the conservative party in U.S. politics of the time, by contrast with the Republicans who had dominated American national politics since the Civil War. Indeed, if the Republican vote had not been split between Roosevelt and his former Vice President Taft, divided on the level and pace of progressive reforms of capitalism to be effected, then Wilson would never have won the Presidency in 1912. Wilson used his victory to racially segregate Washington DC and the U.S. military, in a bitter triumph for the Jim Crow Redeemer party at the national level.

As regards the 1912 election itself, when the world crisis of war and revolution was visible emerging on the horizon but not yet dawned, for his part, Debs considered Roosevelt’s reform effort to rationalize capitalism in 1912 to be “psychotic” — he considered its prospects not only dim but delusional. The fact that what Roosevelt proposed in 1912 was implemented 20 years later by his nephew-in-law FDR’s Administration, in a massive realignment of American politics that reversed the roles of its capitalist parties, should not be assumed to retrospectively validate Roosevelt’s perspective in 1912, since it was a very different moment, especially politically: not yet the Great Depression-era  crisis that led to fascism and world war. Indeed, Roosevelt did not necessarily anticipate world war in 1912 as, by contrast, the socialists of the Second International certainly did, in their understanding of the crescendo building of the imperialist height of world capitalism. | §