Debs. the revolutionary proletarian internationalist, denounces the imperialist World War and all those who would aid and abet it.

‘Preparedness and the Working Class’ by Eugene V. Debs from The National Ripsaw. Vol. 13 No. 3. May, 1916.

Preparedness is the word. It is seen everywhere. A year ago it was rarely heard. Today the public prints are filled with it.

The seizing upon this word to express a certain idea marks the beginning of the militaristic propaganda in the United States and now preparedness has come to mean a very definite thing about which those who favor it may differ in degree but not in kind.

Preparedness simply means the arming to the teeth of the political state of capitalism in the United States so that it may take its rank and cope with the military despotisms of the old world. This is all there is to it–and it is enough. Of course its advocates are for peace. Not one among them favors war. According to them peace can only be secured by preparing for war and therefore the only way of provoking war is to prepare for peace. Strange logic!

The truth is, as all history attests, that military preparedness is invariably the first stage of war. Without such preparedness there could be no war. But each capitalist nation conveniently charges the rest with being responsible for its preparedness. President Wilson, who but a few brief months ago was an apostle of peace has become a rampant militarist. He declares that the world is on fire and that a spark may communicate the flames to our shores. Therefore we must have our powder dry.

President Wilson is still a man of peace and it is only because other nations carry guns that he wants Uncle Sam to strap on his six-shooters.

The security and honor of the NATION demand preparedness, they tell us, but they do not add that the NATION is the CAPITALIST CLASS. The advocates of preparedness do not intend to join the army and camp at the barracks themselves. They do the advocating and rely upon the working class to furnish the soldiers and later on the cripples and corpses.

Did you ever see a millionaire who had his legs shot off in war? I never have and do not expect to. Millionaires reap the golden: harvests of war while poor fools die like hogs at slaughter on fields of battle.

The present scheme of preparedness has several objects, one of which is to militarize this nation and all of which are for the benefit of the capitalist class.

This infernal scheme was hatched in the brain of capitalist imperialism. The whole world is to become an armed camp. The ruling classes will of course control all the armies and navies and these are to expand under the influence of plutocratic “patriotism” to their maximum capacity.

The workingman who favors this program either directly or indirectly, either wholly or in part, is an enemy to himself and to his class. Capitalist preparedness means nothing for the working class but a standing army in which they may fight and bleed and die in time of war and by which they may be kept in slavery in time of peace.

And it does not matter in the least what kind of an army it is, how officered or how recruited or regulated, it will still be the army of the capitalist state and in control of the capitalist class, as all armies are, and its guns will be trained on starving wage-slaves and their wives and children when they are driven to revolt by starvation wages.

It is an unfortunate fact that the Socialist party has never taken a definite, clear-cut position on the question of militarism and war. At each international congress the question has been raised but to be postponed, evaded or dealt with in ambiguous terms and left in doubt. Wars of defense were justified as if the working class owned the countries they were enjoined to protect with their lives. Then, too, every war, according to its ruling class, is a war of defense and as long as a war of defense waged by the ruling class is justified and the workers are encouraged to be slaughtered on its battlefields, war in general is justified and socialists cannot claim with truth that they are opposed to war. Dearly are the socialists of Europe paying today with their hearts’ blood for their failure to meet the issue of war squarely and take their stand against it like a granite wall in accordance with the fundamental principles of working class internationalism. War is war and if waged by the ruling class it is suicide for the working class to fight and die in it.

To quote what Marx said about war half a century ago is beside the point. A totally different condition than that with which Marx dealt confronts the working class of the world today.

The war in Europe is a war of capitalist nations in which the working class, socialists included, are committing the criminal folly of slaughtering one another with the ferocity of fiends at the command and for the profit and glory of their masters. The socialists at least should never have permitted themselves to be swept into that maelstrom of hell nor would they if they had not clung to their bourgeois traditions of a fabled “fatherland,” and their movement had boldly proclaimed and unflinchingly maintained their allegiance to the International and to the working class of the world.

It is either nationalism or internationalism; it cannot be both. The patriots who rush to arms when the cry of danger to the “fatherland” is raised by the autocrats, aristocrats and plutocrats who own it are not socialists. They belong to the ruling class as its willing hirelings and the sooner every mother’s son of them is out of the movement the better it will be for the movement.

When the International is reorganized as it is certain to be, its attitude toward ruling class war must be defined in unmistakable terms and the party committed unequivocally against the working class participating in any such war under any circumstances. Let the ruling class which wages all wars also fight its own battles and itself rot in the infernal trenches!

Preparedness for the working class is an entirely different matter. Preparedness, not to be slaughtered as capitalist hirelings, but to fight the battles of labor is the supreme demand of the working class of the world. The class war is the only war in which the workers have any business to fight. They have no quarrel and can have no quarrel with the workers of any other nation. Their fight is with the capitalists of their own nation and in that fight they will have sufficient opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism, their true patriotism, which finds expression in their unwavering loyalty to their own class.

The very moment we depart from the fundamental principle of the socialist movement that the workers of the world have common interests, that they have a world to gain and nothing to lose but their chains, we are lost. If we sanction any capitalist war whatever we may again expect to be swept from our moorings into the red cataclysm of horror and destruction, our movement torn asunder, and the name of socialism held up to the scorn, of the world.

Preparedness for the working class means preparedness to fight its own battles and to achieve its own emancipation. It means sound education, thorough organization, self-imposed discipline; it means the development and exercise of all labor’s powers, that it may conquer all labor’s rights and take possession of the world in the name of the emancipated workers.

The National Ripsaw, a Free-Thinking, Socialist magazine that, in the 1910s, included the O’Hare’s and Debs on its board. The paper under the O’Hare’s was a voice of the Party’s anti-war wing and became a main literary vehicle for Debs before it, like all of the anti-war Left press, was banned from the postal services. In it’s previous incarnation, The Rip-Saw was an openly racist, exclusionary “Socialist” magazine under editor Seth McCallen from 1903 until 1908 when the paper was taken over by Phil Wagner and the politics of the paper changed. Thereafter it was a leading anti-war voice, changing its name to Socialist Revolution before its banning.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/national-ripsaw/160500-nationalripsaw-v13n03w147.pdf