Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of Appreciations

by Eugene V. Debs

Let me say to you, my fellow workers, that the hour has struck for a great change in the world of organized labor. Long enough have we been divided into quarreling factions. Long enough have we suffered ourselves to blindly and stupidly follow a leadership that has misled and deceived and betrayed. Long enough have we been clubbed by the police, and it may be pertinent to observe that when the club of a policeman descends upon the head of a workingman he hears an echo of the vote he cast at the preceding election.

It is only necessary for us to do a bit of serious reasoning on our own account to satisfy ourselves that the Industrial Workers is the only working class organization in the field. It requires but little intelligent reflection to satisfy ourselves that we have got to build up this organization, unless we have given up in the struggle and succumbed to defeat and despair. Is it possible that we could for a moment make up our minds that we and those who are to come after us are forever doomed to wage slavery? The very suggestion is abhorrent to every worker with a spark of manhood, with a drop of manly blood coursing in his veins. Why, you men, you workingmen, are more than the salt of this earth. Without you society would perish. Society does not need the idle capitalists. They are parasites. They are worse than useless. They simply take what you make, leaving you in poverty; thousands of you idle; if not now, when the times become hard. And every few years the times become hard in the capitalist system, for reasons you can easily understand, but I have not the time to fully explain this evening.

A panic comes, industry is paralyzed, because with machinery you can produce so much more than your paltry wage will allow you to consume. You make all things in great abundance, but you do not consume them. You can only consume that part of your product which your wage, the price of your labor power, will buy. If you cannot consume what you produce, it follows that in time there is bound to be overproduction, because the few capitalists cannot absorb the surplus. The market is glutted, business comes to a standstill and mills and factories shut down.

At such a time Chicago is hit, and hit hard; and you workingmen find yourselves out of employment, a drug on the market. Nobody wants your labor power, because it cannot be utilized at a profit to the capitalist who owns the tool, and when he cannot use your labor power at a satisfactory profit to himself he doesn’t buy it. And if he doesn’t buy your labor power you are idle, and when you are idle you don’t draw any wages, and you can’t buy groceries and pay rent; you can’t buy clothing and shoes, and you begin to look seedy and shabby. By degrees you become a vagrant and a wanderer and lose what little self-respect you had. And then you hear that your wife has been evicted, and that is a thing that happens every day in the week. Your child is now upon the street and your former cottage home is deserted and you start out on what proves to be a never ending journey. The road you are now traveling stretches wearily on, and from the hedges bark the dogs of civilization. You are a tramp.

Are there not thousands and thousands of tramps all over this country today? There were none half a century ago. There is a great army of them now. They have been recruited in capitalist society; they are the products of the capitalist system.

A man is out of work a good while and he gets hungry; he still has a little self-respect and steals rather than beg. That is how men become tramps and thieves and criminals; that is why we have an army of tramps; that is why all the penitentiaries are crowded; why the insane asylums are overflowing and why thousands commit suicide. All these shocking evils are the outgrowth of the capitalist system, to which the Industrial Workers proposes to put an everlasting end.

If you think that these horrors ought to be; if you, as a workingman, think that you ought to have a master—just as the ignorant chattel slave on the plantation in the South used to think that he had to have a master to rob him of what he produced—if you think that you are so helpless that you would die unless you had a master to give you a job and take from you all except just enough to keep you working for him; if you think that workingmen ought to fight each other; if you think that unity, the unity of the working class, would be a bad thing for the working class; if you think that your interest is identical with the interest of the capitalist who robs you; if you think that you ought to be in slavish submission to the capitalist who does nothing and gets what you produce; if you think that, then certainly you ought to stay in the old trade union and keep out of the Industrial Workers.

But if you have a bit of intelligence, just enough to realize that you are a workingman, and that, as a workingman, you are a human being; if you are capable of understanding that you have the inherent power of self-development, that the brain you have can be developed so that you can think clearly for yourself; if you will use that intelligence just enough to satisfy yourself that you ought to be the master of your own job; then, instead of being a wage slave, you will soon be a man among men, and if you have intelligence enough to conceive and to express that thought, then let me say to you, a revolutionary light will be kindled in your eyes and you will feel the thrill of a new-born joy, and for the first time in your life you will stand perfectly erect and know what it is to be self-reliant and touch elbows with your fellow-workers throughout the world.

Remember that no matter who or what a worker may be, if he works for wages he is in precisely the same economic position that you are. He is in your class; he is your brother; he is your comrade.

As an individual worker you cannot escape from wage-slavery. It is true that one in ten thousand wage-workers may become a capitalist, to be pointed out as a man worth a million who used to be a clerk, but he is the exception that proves the rule. The wage worker in the capitalist system remains the wage worker.