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Following the re-election of Lincoln as president, Marx wrote to the American people: 

“From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class… [In America] the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.” 

Given the seismic policies of Trump's second term, we ask: 

Does the American Revolution persist today? What is/was the American Revolution? How does it inform the conditions of possibility for the Left today? What tasks, if any, do the Left inherit from the American Revolution? Do we need new interpretations of the American Revolution?

Speakers:

• Edith Fischer (Revolutionary Communist Organisation)

• Chris Cutrone (Platypus Affiliated Society)

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“Thomas Jefferson would scorn to enter a modern Democratic convention. He would have as little business there as Abraham Lincoln would have in a latter-day Republican convention. If they were living today they would be delegates to this [Socialist] convention!” - Eugene Debs

One hundred years since the death of Eugene Debs, it is now worth reconsidering not only his political fate, but also the fates of the two parties to which his life and legacy were so closely bound, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

The SPA understood itself as continuing the radical American tradition. Debs claimed 1776, Jeffersonian democracy, and Civil War-era republicanism as part of its own political inheritance, while also situating itself within the international socialist movement shaped by Marxism and the First International. This self-understanding would frame the conflicts that would later divide it.

The emergence of the CPUSA out of the crisis and split of the SPA has long been treated as either a necessary evolution or as a fatal sectarian disaster. The international revolutionary wave of the post-war years appeared to many American socialists, including Debs, as a moment of revolutionary possibility for the American proletarian movement, yet the subsequent history of the CPUSA raises the question of whether the split of the SPA was a step forward or step backward for socialism. 

Did the Third International offer a resolution to the impasses of American socialism, or restate them in a new form? How should we understand the relationship between the SPA and CPUSA? What is the relationship between the crisis of the SPA and the wider crisis and reconstitution of American and global capitalism experienced in the aftermath of 1918? Finally, what lessons does the life and legacy of Eugene Debs hold for emancipatory politics today?

Speakers:

• Andrea Bauer (Freedom Socialist Party)

• Ed Remus (Platypus Affiliated Society)

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Speakers:

• Ingar Solty (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung)

• Johannes Regell 

• John Garvey (Insurgent Notes)

• Edith Fischer (Revolutionary Communist Organisation)

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Speaker

• John Garvey (Insurgent Notes)

• Paul North (Yale University)

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