Eugene Debs and the Socialist Republic

Abstract

I reconstruct the civic republican foundations of Eugene Debs’s socialist critique of capitalism, demonstrating how he uses a neo-roman conception of freedom to condemn waged labour. Debs is also shown to build upon this neo-roman liberty in his socialist republican objections to the plutocratic capture of the law and threats of violence faced by the labour movement. This Debsian socialist republicanism can be seen to rest on an ambitious understanding of the demands of citizen sovereignty and civic solidarity. While Debs shares some of the commitments of earlier American labour republican critics of capitalism, he departs from them in his thoroughgoing commitment to common democratic ownership of productive property. His socialist republicanism remains valuable today for its ability to illuminate features of plutocratic control, judicial autocracy, and the regime of property best suited to suppressing economic domination. I conclude that Debs not only deserves a prominent place in an emerging radical republican canon but presents a distinctive contrast with many of his Marxist contemporaries and offers a compelling challenge to recent liberal, plebeian, and socialist forms of republicanism.

An Egalitarian Case for Class-Specific Political Institutions

“… 9. For example, there are good studies showing that radical democratic innovations need to be supported by progressive social movement to be effective (Felicetti and Della Porta 2019). Others – plausibly republicans of a more socialist sort (e.g., O’Shea 2020a, 2022; Vrousalis 2019) – might argue that, if practices of democracy redistributing power in the economic sphere are not already in place, CSIs might be toothless against fighting oligarchization. While I do see the appeal of these points, I also believe that they run the risk of engaging in a chicken-and-egg mode of thinking that is problematic in the context of discussing egalitarian social change.…”