Eugene Debs: ‘Capitalism breeds poorhouse and prisons’

Below is an excerpt from Eugene V. Debs Speaks , one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for May. It is a reprint from Debs’ book Walls and Bars, describing his prison experiences, written upon his release from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. In 1919 the U.S. rulers threw Debs in prison for speaking out against Washington’s imperialist aims in World War I. He ran as the Socialist Party candidate for president from prison in 1920, getting almost 1 million votes. Debs supported the Russian Revolution and called for workers in the U.S. to emulate that example and take political power. Copyright © 1970 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY EUGENE V. DEBS

There is an intimate relation between the poorhouse and the prison. Both are made necessary in a society which is based upon exploitation. The aged and infirm who remain docile and submissive through the struggle for existence, to whatever straits it may reduce them, are permitted to spend their declining days in the county house and to rest at last in the potters’ field.

But they who protest against their pitiless fate rather than yield to its stern decrees, they who refuse to beg, preferring to take the chances of helping themselves by whatever means seem most available, are almost inevitably booked for the jail and the prison.

Poverty has in all ages, in every nation, and under every government recorded in history, been the common lot of the great mass of mankind. The many have had to toil and produce in poverty that the few might enjoy in luxury and extravagance. But however necessary this may have been in the past, it need no longer be true in our day.

Through invention and discovery and the application of machinery to industry, the productive forces of labor have been so vastly augmented that if society were properly organized the great body of the people, who constitute the workers and producers, instead of being poor and miserable and dependent as they now are, would be happy and free and thrill with the joy of life.

There can be no question about the simple and self-evident facts as here set forth:

First, here in the United States we live in as rich a land as there is on earth.

Second, we have all the natural resources, all the raw materials from which wealth is produced in practically unlimited abundance.

Third, we have the most highly efficient productive machinery in the world.

Fourth, we have millions of workers skilled and unskilled not only ready, but eager, to apply their labor to the industrial machinery and produce a sufficiency of all that is required to satisfy the needs and wants of every man, woman and child under a civilized standard of living.

Then why should millions be idle and suffering, millions of others toiling for a pittance, and all the victims of poverty, and of a bleak and barren existence?

The answer is, that capitalism under which we now live has outlived its usefulness and is no longer adapted to the social and economic conditions that today confront the world. Profit has precedence over life, and when profit cannot be made, industry is paralyzed and the people starve.

Here let it be said again, and it cannot be repeated too often nor made too emphatic, that poverty and ignorance, with which poverty goes hand in hand, constitute the prolific source from which flow in a steady and increasing stream most of the evils which afflict mankind.

It is poverty from which the slums, the red light districts, the asylums, the jails and the prisons are mainly recruited.

It was in the so-called panic of 1873, which lasted five years and during which millions were in a state of enforced idleness due to “overproduction,” that the “tramp” made his appearance in American life. The industrious workingman, turned by his employer into the street because he had produced more goods than could be sold, became a tramp; the tramp in some instances became a beggar and in others a thief and criminal. From that time to this the tramp has been a fixed institution in American life, and epidemics of crime are reported with regularity in the daily press.

Poverty breeds misery and misery breeds crime. It is thus the prison is populated and made to prosper as a permanent and indispensable adjunct to our Christian civilization. The most casual examination of the inmates of jails and prisons shows the great majority of them at a glance to be of the poorer classes.

When, perchance, some rich man goes to prison the instance is so remarkable that it excites great curiosity and amazement. A rich man does not fit in prison. The prison was not made for him. He does not belong there and he does not stay there. The rich man goes to prison only as the exception to prove the rule.

The social system that condemns men, women and children to poverty at the same time pronounces upon many of them the sentence of the law that makes them convicts. And this social system in the United States rests on the foundation of private ownership of the social means of common life.

Two percent of the American people own and control the principal industries and the great bulk of the wealth of the nation. This interesting and amazing fact lies at the bottom of the industrial paralysis and the widespread protest and discontent which prevail as these lines are written. The daily papers are almost solid chronicles of vice and immorality, of corruption and crime.

In the city of Chicago the authorities frankly admit being no longer able to cope with crime and, happily, Judge W. M. Gammill, of that city, comes to the rescue by recommending the re-establishment of the whipping post as a deterrent for the crimes and misdemeanors committed by the victims of a vicious social system which Judge Gammill upholds. The distinguished judge’s Christian spirit as well as his judicial mind are vindicated in his happy and thoughtful suggestion which is finding ready echo among ruling class parasites and mercenaries who, no doubt, would experience great delight in seeing the poor wretches that are now only jailed for the crimes that the injustice of society forces them to commit, tied to a post and their flesh lacerated into shreds by a whip in the hands of a brute.

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