MEMBER VIEWPOINT
Making Noise and Building Power
by Eric Limer
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It's a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1914 and Madison Square Garden is teeming with socialists. Some twelve thousand workers fill the arena and the atmosphere is electric. They cheer for ten minutes straight and keep going. Red flags wave in the crowd.
On stage stands the bespectacled Meyer London, second card-carrying Socialist to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and the only one who will be serving when the 65th Congress convenes. A Jewish immigrant from the Russian Empire, London rides a red wave like the nation has never seen. Two years prior, 900,000 ballots were cast for a President Eugene Debs–six percent of voters, which will stand for a century and more as a record socialist high. "This is a big demonstration, a sort of noise making affair" London says, talking over the hoots and hollers. "But mere noise does not make for victory or for practical accomplishment. We must stop noise making if we want to do things."
His tenure will prove complicated and frustrating. He will vote against joining The Great War, but support it nonetheless when it happens despite him. He will cast a lone but fruitless vote against the Sedition Act of 1918. He will incur the wrath of his comrades when he telegraphs revolutionary Russia not in solidarity, but to criticize its retreat from the imperialist quagmire. "I wonder," he will later muse, "whether I am to be punished for having had the courage to vote against the war or for standing by my country’s decision when it chose war."
His support will crumble under attacks from his left and his right. During the Red Scare, he'll narrowly lose to a candidate backed by a rare union of Democrats and Republicans. Six years later, on another Sunday afternoon in 1926, he'll be hit by a car as he crosses Second Avenue. He will die that same evening. Half a million people will mourn the loss in the streets, out windows, from fire escapes. The United States will roar on, unabated, towards October of 1929.
A century later, our challenges have crystallized while our advantages have melted away. Congress remains dominated by the same two bickering wings of capital united only in their disdain for the left, but we have no party of our own to turn to. The campaign that brought London to office–one of international peace and monopoly nationalization–is beyond the pale of the politically viable today, thanks to decades of evermore casual imperialism and reflexive anticommunist rhetoric.
And even in far more favorable conditions–some of the most favorable to socialists in our country's history–London's legislative gains are literally nonexistent. His legacy is of protest votes, with no practical, material effect. Worse, ones that galvanized his opposition against him along the entire spectrum of liberalism, compromising his already precarious political position. But his service was far from aimless, and his votes were not in vain. The sole socialist in Congress, when he displayed the courage of his convictions, espoused the existence of another way. He used the House floor to challenge bourgeois conventional wisdom. War is not a necessity. Dissent is not a crime. Immigration is not a danger.
As socialists riding our own red swell, it's vital we remain clear-eyed to the limitations of any given tactic in its best-case scenario. Bernie Sanders' campaign was extended--and crucial--noise making affair. But, as Sam Gindin points out, there is “no party without a base, no base without a party.” Our wave will require a broad base of socialist support we still need to construct with unglamorous but crucial issues-based organizing and political education. To the extent we look for electoral gains, we should focus our limited energies on the most ardent and militant of socialists, those who will stridently refute the false assumptions and artificial limits of "political realism" as we know it today and will not become captives of the system we strive ultimately to replace.
Looking back on that Sunday in 1914, we can ask ourselves who is the best person we can feasibly put on that stage today. But more importantly, how will we gather the hundreds, the thousands, the millions we need to fill the stadium–and the streets–with cheering crowds and red flags.
Related reading:
A 1914 account of the London’s post-election rally
A 1921 speech London gave on immigration
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