Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
(COMMON DREAMS) Jake Johnson, September 23, 2016 — Eugene Debs became a socialist in prison.
After being arrested for his leadership role in the Pullman Strike of 1894 — for which he was deemed “an enemy of the human race” in the New York Times — Debs took to studying intensely the classics of socialist thought, from the utopian vision of Edward Bellamy to the analytical works of the influential Marxist Karl Kautsky.
But, of course, the critical groundwork for Debs’s conversion was already laid; as he recounted in an  detailing his ideological transformation, the brutality with which striking workers were treated by the forces of the state in defense of the capitalist class was “his first practical lesson in Socialism” — “in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle,” he wrote, “the class struggle was revealed.”
While still in prison, Debs granted interviews to multiple news outlets, making his newfound ideas known while skewering the then widespread faith in what he termed “the competitive system.”
“The competitive system has had its day,” he told a correspondent for the Cincinnati Enquirer. “[I]t has blotted out all the stars of hope; filled the world with groans and reduced humanity to slavery. The strong have devoured the weak. The highways of the centuries are strewn with the bones of countless victims.”
Almost immediately upon his release, Debs began his rise within the ranks of America’s radical circles, a rise that coincided with the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World and America’s Social Democratic Party, which shortly thereafter became the Socialist Party.
The fact that Debs would, in the next two decades, launch several failed yet still prominent presidential runs deserves less attention — as he himself emphasized — than his role as America’s conscience in the midst of a class structure that seemed unshakable. As Debs acknowledged in 1898, “The few have come in possession of all, and the many have been reduced to the extremity of living by permission.”
Child labor was commonplace through the early years of the twentieth century; workers toiled in dangerous conditions, to which Upton Sinclair called attention in his novel The Jungle; and public policy was dictated by the interests of capital.
Debs also confronted what he saw as an inevitable outgrowth of the expansion of industrial capitalism: Military conflict.
“Wars and rumors of wars are of universal prevalence,” Debs wrote in 1900, pointing to America’s brutal occupation of the Philippines.  “The picture, lurid as a chamber of horrors, becomes complete in its gruesome ghastliness when robed ministers of Christ solemnly declare that it is all for the glory of God and the advancement of Christian civilization.”