Shawn Gude
@shawngude
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@jacobin editor (on leave). Writing a biography of Eugene Debs. "No servants underfoot, no bosses overhead."
Joined January 2010
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Beyond thrilled, and bowled over, that my Debs biography will be published by Simon and Schuster. Now I just have to write the thing!
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Say coup, you fucking cowards
Breaking News: President Evo Morales of Bolivia has announced his resignation after the military called for him to step down in the face of huge protests set off by a disputed election.
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"A people poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings — capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships, and the docks."
–James Connolly, Irish socialist
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Bernie absolutely should not drop out.
With economists floating the possibility of 20 percent unemployment, we need as many people as possible with a national platform to push for a just response.
And Joe Biden and the Democratic leadership are not up to the challenge.
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IMO, we need way more socialists thinking about, and training to become, left-wing bureaucrats. That’s part of taking state power too
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Keynes thought we'd be working 15-hour workweeks by now. The absolute decline of the liberal imagination.
I'm sure I'm opening a giant can of worms here, but uh it seems fine to raise the retirement age very slightly in nations where populations are healthier and living longer?
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Ida B. Wells's 1916 letter to Eugene Debs, praising his opposition to Birth of a Nation.
"Of all the millions of white men of this country, you are the only one I know that has had the courage to speak out against this diabolical production."
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The Socialist Party’s platform in 1920, the year Eugene Debs ran a fifth and final time, was very good.
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An anonymous socialist complained to Eugene Debs in a 1903 letter that “you will jeopardize the best interest of the Socialist Party if you insist on political equality of the Negro.”
Debs's response was withering.
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There's still 14 percent out in Iowa, but this seems clear:
Bernie Sanders won the popular vote on both the first and final alignment, he'll get as many national delegates as Buttigieg, and he's shown once again that his base is the multiracial working class.
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A basic point about the protests in Minneapolis:
In protests abroad, like in Egypt during the Arab Spring, torching a police station was widely viewed as a nonviolent act of resistance because it didn't result in human harm.
We should apply the same standard here.
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Alright, I've decided I'm going to write a biography of Eugene Debs.
There hasn't been a new biography of him in decades, and we could use an accessible one in this political moment that also makes the case for a Debsian politics of the 21st century.
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Socialists' north star:
Eugene Debs's declaration that he would not rise from his class but with his class.
Because individual advancement that rests upon the exploitation of others is a repudiation of democracy, dignity, and humanity.
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Meagan Day is an unmitigated good for the socialist left, fuck the haters
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My favorite tactic of 19th century railroad strikes is when strikers soaped the rails so trains couldn’t move lol
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What's so enraging about supporters of the Bolivian coup wrapping themselves in the cloak of democracy is that Morales's administration brought indigenous people — long scorned by the racist elite — into the political process, where they could hold their heads high as equals.
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I never really liked that "is your hate pure" line from Alexander Cockburn. This, from Debs, is more to my liking.
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As socialists, one of our best moves, both rhetorically and normatively, is to argue that democracy should be deepened in the political realm and extended into the social and economic realms — and force our opponents to explain why they don't support it.
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lol, salty Debs:
"The last surviving member of the jury which convicted John Brown died a few days ago. I had never heard of him."
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The level of repression during World War I was astonishing. Totalitarian stuff.
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The turnout rates among young ppl, poor ppl, and working-class ppl should be treated as a crisis for American democracy.
Instead they’re treated as an immutable fact, and Very Serious People ridicule the candidate with the gall to base a campaign around boosting participation.
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What has happened in Bolivia is truly astounding.
A rebuke not just to the coup-makers, not just to Washington & other opponents of leftist governments, but to the pundits and thinkers who associate democracy with the State Department & enlightened elites rather than the masses.
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What's so absurd and infuriating about these attacks on Sanders as a dictator-coddling authoritarian is that he easily has the most distinguished record of fighting for democracy — at home and abroad, at the ballot box and in the workplace — of any candidate.
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To be more explicit: when left-wing administrations come to power, they need tons of people to staff their bureaucracies. We need to build up our bench. High-level appointments, yes, but also experienced people that aren't your garden variety career bureaucrats.
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For much of the quarantine, I've been working on a big project on Eugene Debs. Here's the first major product of that: a 6,000-plus word essay I wrote on the famed socialist's life, legacy, and continuing relevance.
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People who are politically committed, but who also have technical proficiency and a non-technocratic view of public administration. The point, after all, is to *democratize* the state, not merely to plug the holes of the existing bureaucracy.
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Lol, Debs in 1926, in one of his final columns, after detailing the crimes committed against American Indians:
"The moral of it all is that the White Man's 'Burden' is himself, and that surely is some burden."
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Not to put too fine a point on it, but my parents—after working for decades in public schools—were able to retire a couple years early. Now they can see much more of their grandchild, who lives halfway across the country. This is what these people are trying to take away, sorry
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Getting some pieces ready for the March on Washington anniversary next week, and came across this MLK speech, in 1962, to the National Maritime Union.
He ends it with a long Debs quote.
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Essential reading today:
Ralph Miliband on the 1973 Chilean coup and the bloody hypocrisy of elites who speak in the register of democracy
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Seriously, this should not be hard to understand: pointing out that anti-lockdown sentiment could spread beyond the Trumpian minority if the gov doesn't start putting money in workers' pockets is not the same as hailing the Trumpian minority
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Eugene Debs, 1920: "I have no stomach for factional quarreling, and I refuse to be consumed in it. If it has to be done others will have to do it. I can fight capitalists but not comrades."
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This kind of rhetoric is very dangerous, and will be used to criminalize the Left just the same.
The post 9/11 era is over. The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The threat of domestic terrorism. The polarization that threatens our democracy. If we don't reconnect our two Americas, the threats will not have to come from the outside.
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Anyone who says anything bad about the CTU strike is dead to me
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Helen Keller's 1919 letter to Eugene Debs after the Supreme Court upheld his conviction and left him to languish in prison.
"Once more you are going to prison for upholding the liberties of the people... I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war."
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'Biden... does not appear to have won any of the mostly-African American precincts that are reporting right now. Sanders carried most of those.'
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Classic robber baron stuff here: union-bust, plunder the public purse, degrade workers, and then — poof — masquerade as a great humanitarian (while still deciding, unilaterally, who gets the pilfered funds and under what terms)
Jeff Bezos pledges to donate majority of his $124 billion fortune to fight climate change and unify humanity.
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Everywhere you look, the language of pragmatism is used to dress up centrist ideology as hard-headed realism. It’s almost always nonsense.
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There's only one candidate who voted against Iran sanctions and the Iraq war.
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What's happening in Sudan is so inspiring.
Protesters rise up against a murderous leader, force him to step down.
A general replaces him, the gov massacres protesters, still the demos continue.
The movement wins a transition to civilian rule.
This is what democracy looks like
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This is dope:
Eugene Debs on the cover of Di Tsukunft (The Future), a Yiddish language socialist monthly magazine published by the Forward Association.
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Pretty strong statement here:
"Minnesota AFL-CIO Calls for Minneapolis Police Union President Bob Kroll’s Immediate Resignation"
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Read the whole article here, just reprinted at Jacobin:
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if I started a Eugene Debs-related substack would you subscribe
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Very dope new book from the excellent historian Chad Pearson.
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Bloomberg's campaign alone is a dispositive argument for a massive wealth tax.
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Crucial point, and this goes for the rest of the welfare state too. Should we be more concerned that not a single person "scams" the system or that not a single person falls through the cracks?
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bErNiE cAn’T pLaY tHe InSiDe GaMe
He did it. Bernie just saved millions of people.
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One of my favorite pieces in our archive:
"In 1940s North Carolina, a Communist-led union of tobacco workers fought to bring democracy to the Jim Crow South."
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A Jacobin call to writers and scholars:
I’m looking to publish way more on Southern labor history and left history in the region more generally. Pitch me: shawn.gude
@gmail
.com
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I think the best way to honor Michael Brooks and Leo Panitch is to carry forward their political projects: building a working-class internationalism and democratizing the state while, as Leo would put it, consciously fostering workers' democratic capacities.
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Seems to me we tend to overlook what left critics and left defenders of Cuba can agree on: its socialist experiment could have turned out very differently, and been much more democratic, if not for the all-out, decades-long, assault by the US.
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Working on this Eugene Debs biography has me thinking more about how socialists should think about icons and leaders. Debs's words are a good place to start.
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Eugene Debs on capitalism and prisons 🔥🔥🔥
(From his only published book, the posthumous Walls and Bars.)
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Sorry, just have to post this again...
WEB Du Bois's glowing obituary of Eugene Debs (The Crisis, Dec. 1926)
(h/t
@mattnichter
)
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Your periodic reminder that this is the best presidential campaign video of all time
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Worker-employer should be the central divide in US politics, but too often it’s urban-rural.
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Interesting quote from Eugene Debs in 1926, the last year of his life:
"There has never been the kind of socialist movement in this country [that] there should be and would be if it were rooted in American traditions, American history and American conditions."
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What an absolutely wild front page (this is during the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, in West Virginia).
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Whether you agree with him or not, one of the great things about
@MattBruenig
is he isn't the same personality type as many leftists—so you get takes like this instead of takes built on assumptions that everyone else has the same subjective preferences.
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Alright, I went ahead and made a Debs-related Substack. Most posts will be free, but any paid subscriptions will help me write my Debs biography!
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The people who raise such a stink about family backgrounds don’t actually want to build working-class power. My parents are lifelong public school educators, other jacobin editors have similar backgrounds, often more modest.
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It’s the worst kind of purity politics on the left, often motivated by the accuser’s own insecurities. And at the end of the day, it’s useless if your goal is actually creating a more democratic society
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I wrote a piece ahead of the caucus today (and couldn't resist opening with WEB Du Bois's Black Reconstruction).
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Eugene Debs, 1918:
"The negro is entitled to exactly the same rights that the white man has, and until these are fully recognized and freely accorded all our talk about democracy and freedom is a vulgar sham and false pretense."
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Passing through DC, and can never get over how dope it is that A Philip Randolph is memorialized at Union Station.
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Add “civil rights unionism” to the list of things the Old Left got right, was buried over the decades, and should be revived today.
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Maybe an unpopular opinion, but we need way more wonks. Imagine if Bernie had been elected: who would have staffed his administration? We say the problems aren't technical but political, but you still need committed leftists w/ the know-how to figure out the technical stuff too.
The left needs to ditch the wonky technocratic cautious approach and adopt the principled crusader brute force public pressure approach to politics
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We at Jacobin, a much poorer organization than TYT, have a union.
NEW: In a tense all-hands meeting, Cenk Uygur urged staff at The Young Turks not to form a union, arguing the progressive network couldn't sustain one. "The reality is we're in a precarious position," Cenk told me.
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With the results of the Iowa caucus finally (sort of) in, I wrote a longish piece on Bernie Sanders capturing the support of the state's increasingly diverse working class.
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Well, this was prescient, published the day of the election: "Regardless of the results of today’s election, we can expect future eruptions of vigilantism, police violence, and state coddling of right-wing thugs."
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Thought I'd share this with the world:
Eugene Debs's Never-Published 1908 Eulogy to John Brown at Harpers Ferry
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Eugene Debs's ode to John Brown, as it appeared in Appeal to Reason, November 23, 1907
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I'm putting the finishing touches on a long piece about the life, politics, and continuing relevance of Eugene Debs.
Should be out this week.
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Absolutely disgusting.
Obama describes Lula in his new memoir as "having the scruples of a Tammany Hall boss."
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I've already been hyping this way too much, but I'll do it again, because I just finalized it:
My 6,000+ plus word piece on Eugene Debs's life, politics, and continuing relevance will be up on Jacobin tomorrow morning.
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Massive news, and a story that would be dominating the news cycle if we had a truly working-class media.
In a stunning upset in the UAW leadership election, reformer Shawn Fain is set to win the presidency. Fain is part of a reform slate that will now control the UAW after vowing to bring democracy and militancy back to the long-calcified union.
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Eugene V. Debs addresses the founding convention of the Social Democracy of America, Uhlich's Hall, Chicago, June 15, 1897
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Eugene Debs in 1916, amid WWI:
"The socialists who set the 'fatherland' of their masters above the whole earth and above all the workers of the world, are not socialists at all but either mild and harmless capitalist reformers and stoolpigeons or traitors to the cause."
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Any “orthodox” democratic socialist should read Conversations With Allende. Identifies himself more with Cuba than European social democracy, lays the bare the conundrums of different socialist paths in different contexts.
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The Florida Socialists in Debs's day were extremely dope. I wrote about them here.
May Day is not a holiday for Florida governor Ron DeSantis, much as he might pose as a working-class champion. For a more robust vision of freedom, we can look to the Florida Socialists and Tampa cigar workers of Eugene Debs’s day.
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Sort of wild we don’t hear more about the 1877 St Louis General Strike — first genuine general strike in an industrial city in the US, contemporary newspapers compared it to the Paris Commune.
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This interview is excellent. The Right’s conception of freedom has always been about upholding private tyranny
The roots of the modern US right lie in the California fields of the 1930s, where large growers ferociously resisted farmworker organizing. It’s a reminder that opposing working-class power has been central to the US right from the very beginning.
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Coming up on three months of not drinking. Pretty proud of myself, wasn't sure I could do it.
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The work everyone has been doing on the PRO Act has been amazing, but I also feel gaslit most of the time it’s talked about. Like, this is arguably the most radical bill since the civil rights bills of the 1960s. The filibuster is not the main impediment to getting it passed.
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Nov 5 is a very special day on the red calendar!
Today is both Eugene Debs's birthday and Karl Marx's half-birthday.
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.
@micahuetricht
gets a lot of hate on this website for supposedly being a self-interested careerist, but the haters don’t see all that he does behind the scenes to pump other people up.
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Exceptional reporting here from
@alexnpress
on one of the most important developments in US politics, bar none.
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