Due to limitations of time and resource, which are presently being properly absorbed by the world like a sponge in my gut, I will keep our third edition of Socialism Sunday rather simple by sharing an excerpt from the infamous socialist publication Appeal to Reason.
This is ‘Dare to Think’ written by one of the most notable socialist figures in the history of the United States, Eugene Debs in 1912, published in Appeal to Reason No. 862 on June 8th of that year.
—Dare to Think—
Are you one of the many who feel that they need a master and are willing therefore to allow that master to do your thinking? If so you are a pitiable excuse for a man. You may have a good job and you may be a good slave but there is nothing else good about you. It is not possible in such a situation that you have any respect for yourself if you are capable of even the slightest independent thinking on your own account.
The man who does not think or try to think for himself is lacking in the essential quality of true manhood. He may have all else, but he is not a man. He may be dressed up, enjoy ease and luxury, be known as eminently respectable, but if he allows any other to do his thinking that other is his master and virtually his owner and he can never rise to the dignity of a man.
Millions of workers have been deprived of early advantages and flung out into the world with scarcely knowledge enough in the way of education to repeat the alphabet. This condition of ignorance which has been transmitted through countless generations accounts for the enslavement of these workers. If they were intelligent enough to understand their interests and to be conscious of their power as a class, they would not be in slavery another hour.
The salvation of the working class lies in its capacity to think and to act in accordance with its intelligence. The average capitalist thinks the worker needs a master because he is not fit to take care of himself. This is a libel upon every man who works for a living. It is not true that a worker needs a master unless he himself insists upon it and then he can hardly blame the capitalist for riding him through life.
We appeal to the workers, the producers, the real supporters of society, to dare to think for themselves. Now is the time to make the beginning, the whole world is waking up and the labor question is the supreme question of this age.
The workers are beginning to think and the foundations of wage slavery are beginning to quake.
Wake up, you workers, stand erect, be men, join together in the union of your class and in the party of your class and the day is not distant when you will overthrow capitalism and give society a new birth and humanity a new destiny!
Eugene V. Debs
Appeal to Reason, 1912
-Republished by the Shultz Report-
God bless and good luck,
-M. Shultz