Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) was a socialist agitator as well as a militant trade union leader and pioneer fighter for industrial unionism. A founder of the Socialist Party in the United States, he ran for president four times as that party’s candidate, the last time in 1920 while serving a 10-year sentence for a speech two years earlier in Canton, Ohio. In that speech Debs had spoken against the U.S. government’s entry into the first imperialist world war, and in unqualified support of the 1917 Russian Revolution. He had also explained his conviction that workers and farmers in the United States needed to emulate the Russian example. Debs received almost 1 million votes in that election.

Debs remained true to those revolutionary convictions even as an increasing majority of the leaders of the Socialist Party advocated accommodation with capitalism, and the pursuit of reforms instead of revolution. His work to win thousands of working people to socialist ideas played a formative role in the development of the early revolutionary workers movement in the United States.

“I believe that my enemies as well as my friends will concede to me the right to arrive at some conclusions with respect to prisons and prisoners by virtue of my personal experience,” Debs wrote in Walls and Bars, “for I have been an inmate of three county jails, one state prison and one federal penitentiary.”

In his introduction to the book, he said, “I have undertaken to show that the prison in our modern life is essentially a capitalistic institution, an inherent and inseparable part of the social and economic system under which the mass of mankind are ruthlessly exploited and kept in an impoverished state, as a result of which the struggle for existence, cruel and relentless at best, drives thousands of its victims into commission of offenses which they are forced to expiate in the dungeons provided for them by their masters…. It ought not merely to be reformed but abolished as an institution for the punishment and degradation of unfortunate human beings.”

Eugene V. Debs Speaks is copyright ©1970 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

Private appropriation of the earth’s surface, the natural resources, and the means of life is nothing less than a crime against humanity, but the comparative few who are the beneficiaries of this iniquitous social arrangement, far from being viewed as criminals meriting punishment, are the exalted rulers of society and the people they exploit gladly render them homage and obeisance.

The few who own and control the means of existence are literally the masters of mankind. The great mass of dispossessed people are their slaves.

The ancient master owned his slaves under the law and could dispose of them at will. He could even kill his slaves the same as he could any domestic animal that belonged to him. The feudal lord of the Middle Ages did not own his serfs bodily, but he did own the land without which they could not live. The serfs were not allowed to own land and could work only by the consent of the feudal master who appropriated to himself the fruit of their labor, leaving for them but a bare subsistence.

The capitalist of our day, who is the social, economic and political successor of the feudal lord of the Middle Ages, and the patrician master of the ancient world, holds the great mass of the people in bondage, not by owning them under the law, nor by having sole proprietorship of the land, but by virtue of his ownership of industry, the tools and machinery with which work is done and wealth produced. In a word, the capitalist owns the tools and the jobs of the workers, and therefore they are his economic dependents. In that relation the capitalist has the power to appropriate to himself the products of the workers and to become rich in idleness while the workers, who produce all the wealth that he enjoys, remain in poverty.

To buttress and safeguard this exploiting system, private property of the capitalist has been made a fetish, a sacred thing, and thousands of laws have been enacted and more thousands supplemented by court decisions to punish so-called crimes against the holy institution of private property.

A vast majority of the crimes that are punished under the law and for which men are sent to prison, are committed directly or indirectly against property. Under the capitalist system there is far more concern about property and infinitely greater care in its conservation than in human life.

Multiplied thousands of men, women and children are killed and maimed in American industry by absolutely preventable accidents every year, yet no one ever dreams of indicting the capitalist masters who are guilty of the crime. The capitalist owners of fire traps and of fetid sweating dens, where the lives of the workers are ruthlessly sacrificed and their health wantonly undermined, are not indicted and sent to prison for the reason that they own and control the indicting machinery just as they own and control the industrial machinery in their system.

The economic-owning class is always the political ruling class. Laws in the aggregate are largely to keep the people in subjection to their masters.

Under the capitalist system, based upon private property in the means of life, the exploitation that follows impoverishes the masses, and their precarious economic condition, their bitter struggle for existence, drives increasing numbers of them to despair and desperation, to crime and destruction.

The inmates of an average county jail consist mainly of such victims. They also constitute the great majority in the state prisons and federal penitentiaries. The inmates of prisons are proverbially the poorer people recruited from what we know as the “lower class.” The rich are not to be found in prison save in such rare instances as to prove the rule that penitentiaries are built for the poor.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home