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Saturday July 23, 1904
From the Appeal to Reason: Eugene Debs Has a Word With the Workingman
The entire article can be found below this fine piece of artwork by Ryan Walker, found also in today's
The present system of private ownership must be abolished and the workers themselves must be made the owners of the tools with which they work, and to accomplish this they must organize their class for political actions, and this work is already well under way in the Socialist Party, which is composed of the working class and stands for the working class on a revolutionary platform which declares in favor of the collective ownership of the whole people.
What intelligent workingman can hold out against the irresistible claim the Socialist movement has upon him? What reason has he to give? What excuse can he offer?
None! Not one!
The only worker who has an excuse to keep out of the Socialist movement is the unfortunate fellow who is ignorant and does not know better. He does not know what Socialism is. That is his misfortune. But that is not all, nor the worst of all. He thinks he knows what it is.
In his ignorance he has taken the word of another for it, whose interest is to keep him in darkness. So he continues to march with the republican party or shout with the democratic party, and he no more knows why he is a republican or democrat than he knows why he is not a Socialist.
It is impossible for a working man to contemplate the situation and the outlook and have any intelligent conception of the trend and meaning of things without becoming a Socialist.
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Consider for a moment the beastly debasement to which womanhood is subjected in capitalist society. She is simply the property of man to be governed by him as may suit his convenience. She does not vote, she has no voice and must bear silent witness to her legally ordained inferiority.
She has to compete with men in the factories and workshops and stores, and her inferiority is taken advantage of to make her work at still lower wages than the male slave gets who works at her side.
As an economic dependent, she is compelled to sacrifice the innate refinement, the inherent purity and nobility of her sex, and for a pallet of straw marries the man she does not love.
The debauching effect of the capitalist system upon womanhood is accurately registered in the divorce curt and the house of shame.
In Socialism, woman would stand forth the equal of men-all the avenues would be open to her and she would naturally find her fitting place and rise from the low plane of menial servility to the dignity of ideal womanhood.
Breathing the air of economic freedom, amply able to provide for herself in Socialist society, we may be certain that the cruel injustice that is now perpetrated upon her sex and degradation that results from it will disappear for ever.
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Consider again the barren prospect of the average boy who faces the world today. If he is the son of a workingman his father is able to do little in the way of giving him a start.
He does not get to college, nor even to the high school, but has to be satisfied with what he can get in the lower grades, for as soon as he has physical growth enough to work he must find something to do, so that he may help support the family.
His father has no influence and can get no preferred employment for him at the expense of some other boy, so he thankfully accepts any kind of service that he may be allowed to perform.
How hard it is to find a place for that boy of yours!
What shall we do with Johnnie? and Nellie? is the question of the anxious mother long before they are ripe for the labor market.
"The child is weak, you know," continues the nervous, loving little mother, "and can't do hard work; and I feel dreadfully worried about him."
What a picture! Yet so common that the multitude do not see it. This mother, numbered by thousands many times over, instinctively understands the capitalist system, feels its cruelty and dreads its approaching horrors which cast their shadows upon her tender, loving heart.
Nothing can be sadder than to see the mother take the boy she bore by the hand and start to town with him to peddle him off as merchandise to someone who has use for a child slave.
A Little Hand
To know just how that feels one must have had precisely that experience.
The mother looks down so fondly and caressingly upon her boy; and he looks up into her eyes so timidly and appealingly as she explains his good points to the business man or factory boss, who in turn inspects the lad and interrogates him to verify his mother's claims, and finally informs them that they may call again the following week, but that he does not think that he can use the boy.
Well, what finally becomes of the boy? He is now grown, his mother's worry is long since ended, as the grass grows green where she sleeps-and he, the boy? Why, he's a factory hand-a hand, mind you, and he gets a dollar and a quarter a day when the factory is running.
That is all he will ever get.
He is and industrial life prisoner-no pardoning power for him in the capitalist system. No sweet home, no beautiful wife, no happy children, no books, no flowers, no pictures, no comrades, no love, no joy for him.
Just a hand! A human factory hand!
Think of a hand with a soul in it!
In the capitalist system the soul has no business. It cannot produce profit by any process of capitalist calculation.
The working hand is what is needed for the capitalist's tool, and so the human must be reduced to a hand.
No head, no heart, no soul-simply a hand.
A thousand hands to one brain-the hands of workingmen, the brain of a capitalist.
A thousand dumb animals, in human form-a thousand slaves in fetters of ignorance, their heads having run to hands-all these owned and worked and fleeced by one stock-dealing, profit-mongering capitalist.
This is capitalism!
And this system is supported alternately by the republican party and the democratic party.
These two capitalist parties relieve each other in support of the capitalist system, while the capitalist system relieves the working class of what they produce.
A thousand hands to one head is the abnormal development of the capitalist system.
A thousand workingmen turned into hands to develop and gorge and decorate on capitalist paunch!
This brutal order of things must be overthrown. The human race was not born to degeneracy.
A thousand heads have grown for every thousand pairs of hands; a thousand hearts throb in testimony of the unity of heads and hands and a thousand souls, though crushed and mangled, burn in protest and are pledged to redeem a thousand men.
Heads and hands, hearts and souls, are the heritage of all.
Full opportunity for full development is the unalienable right of all.
He who denies it is a tyrant; he who does not demand it is a coward; he who is indifferent to it is a slave; he who does not desire it is dead.
[photographs and emphasis added]
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