The negro workers

by Eugene V. Debs

The race question as we come to understand it, resolves itself into a class question. At bottom it is a class question. The capitalist cares no more about the white worker than about the black worker. What he wants is labor power—cheap labor power; he does not care whether it is wrapped up in a white skin or a black skin.

Has he one bit more consideration for the white slave than he has for the black slave? No, not at all; they are all the same to him regardless of color; they are all in the working class; they are his legitimate prey. He owns the natural resources; he owns the tools; they have got to produce for him.

Under chattel slavery, the colored man seized with the aspiration to be free, ran away from his master. You do not run away from yours; when you run it is not away from but toward the factory whistle; you are afraid you won’t get there soon enough. You work for your master and he becomes rich, and he does not know you; and why should he? He belongs to the upper class; you are in the lower class. He is useless and that is why he is in the upper class. (Laughter and applause.) Parasites all go to the top; they all float on the surface.

But now comes an election! That is the season of the year when their politicians come before you white and black workers. They do not discriminate against you colored people then. On the contrary they are glad to look into your intelligent faces and tell you that the beads of honest sweat that glisten on your manly brow are more precious than the jewels that blaze and flash in the coronet of a queen. (Laughter.) That is the one kind of jewelry—the one monopoly you absolutely control. They tell you that they are so greatly impressed by your intelligence and so proud to stand in your presence. But after the election is over they fold up their tents and like the Arab, they silently fade away. They do not associate with you; you do not belong to the same clubs they do. You do not play golf with them on their links; you don’t wear the same kind of clothes they do nor live in the same houses, nor eat the same kind of food. No; they are in a class of their own, notwithstanding you are all supposed to be absolutely equal before the law.

This is capitalism under which an insignificant minority of our people own and control the Nation’s industries—all the sources and means of our common life. They would if they could own the sunlight and have a meter on every sunbeam. They have taken possession of about everything else. You are at their mercy. When you work it is by their consent; when you work it is for them; when you work it is primarily to produce profit for them; not to enable you to support your wife and children; that is purely incidental.

Under this system you workers white and black are scarcely above the animal plane. You work and produce like the silkworm; like the coral insect that builds islands and continents and perishes as it builds; and when you die you leave no trace behind that you were ever upon earth.

You are not hired to think but to work. That is why they call you “hands.” You will hear them say: “I work a hundred hands”; I work fifty “Niggers.” Black “hands”; white “hands”; all “hands” (laughter); not men, but “hands.” The capitalist calls you his “hands”; he himself is not a hand; he is a head; he lives in a palace and you are his “hands”; and the “hands” vote on election day to perpetuate the system under which he is the head and they are the hands; in which he is at the top and they at the bottom; and that is why the “hands” are told that this is the greatest country on the face of the earth—the one country in which all enjoy equal liberty.

The time has come for you to open your eyes and to stand erect and to realize that you have a head as well as hands; that you can think as well as work; and if you will but unite and think and act in accordance with your intelligence, you need no longer to deform your hands in the interest of the parasites that hold you in contempt. They are an insignificant minority and yet they rule in every department of this Government, and they rule through your ignorance, and the Socialist is frank enough to tell you that you are ignorant that you may become intelligent.

We do not flatter you and call you intelligent to keep you ignorant. We would have you understand that your masters rule because of your ignorance, because you still insist upon remaining in the Republican party or the Democratic party—and they are equally corrupt, only more so; both are financed from the same source, and our Comrade Chairman quite aptly quoted Sinclair, the oil king, in confessing to the United States Senate Committee investigating his deals that he contributes to both Republican and Democratic campaign funds. And why should he not? They are both his parties; both stand for his system; for the private ownership of this nation’s industries; for the exploitation of the working class; for wage-slavery, and if that is what you want, stay with them; they will fulfill that program to your heart’s content.

But have you not within you the holy spark of freedom, the glowing aspiration to be a man?—not a slave but a MAN! You must know what that is—a being with a soul that throbs with a desire and aspiration to know life. The working class do not know life. They are absorbed in maintaining an existence and that is not life; and while they are engaged in the endless struggle that taxes their energies, devitalizes and ages them prematurely, wears them out and casts them on the scrap-heap, they are not living. They are not permitted to know what life is in its larger, nobler and diviner meaning. They are never thrilled with those higher and holier emotions that put them in touch with all that lifts up and elevates men and women until they can, from the loftiest altitudes, sing to the stars. They do not know what music is. And the capitalists themselves are not very much better off. How wholly undeveloped they are in that higher intellectual, moral and spiritual sense! I have met many of them. I have been amazed at their ignorance. They are shrewd, to be sure; they are cunning; they can instinctively see an opening for profit; oh, they have a marvellous faculty for seeing a chance to skin somebody, and especially each other. (Laughter.) They belong to the same church; they go to the same prayer meeting but when they approach the edge of a “business” transaction, oh, how keenly they eye each other; not because they do not know each other, but because they do. Each is a good Christian and each is trying to avoid just what he is trying to do to the other. (Applause.)