Hellraisers Journal: Eugene V. Debs on “The Socialist Party and the Trade Unions,” Part IV

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.
There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found
among millions of working people and the few, who
make up the employing class, have
all the good things of life

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Monday August 6, 1906
From The Worker: Debs on Leaving the A. F. of L.

Eugene Debs, Wilshire's Magazine, Nov 1905

Over the past few days we have been offering the response made by Eugene V. Debs to questions posed by the New York Worker regarding the debate on the relation of the Socialist Party of America to the trades unions. Today’s installment concludes the series.

The Worker introduces what it calls a symposium:

The question of the relation of the Socialist Party to the trade unions having again attracted attention within our ranks, The Worker has inaugurated a symposium to which representative comrades are being invited to contribute, setting forth various points view.

Questions are set forth for the comrades to address which cover the subject of industrial unionism versus craft unionism, working from within the existing trade unions versus forming new organizations, and the last question:

What do you think ought to be the attitude of the Socialist Party, as such, toward the organizations of labor on the economic field?

From The Worker of July 28, 1906:

The Socialist Party and the Trade Unions.-XI.
by Eugene V. Debs
[Part IV]

I have been following with interest the interchange between Comrade Boudin and Comrade Untermann. Comrade Boudin is insistent upon proof, which is quite proper in a controversy, but some things are axiomatic and self-evident, and time spent in furnishing proof is simply wasted.

It seems to me that the essential points in Untermann’s contention for industrial unionism are self-evident. It is true, as Boudin says, that Untermann’s statements are mere assertions, but they are assertions of fact that cannot be successfully controverted.

I think it was Emerson who said that assertion is the highest form of agreement. If I say the sun shines, that is a mere assertion and at the same time a palpable fact. A man may be blind or shut his eyes and say: “Prove your assertion that the sun shines,” but that would have no appreciable effect upon the obvious fact

Ben Hanford comes in for his turn at the I. W. W., but makes no attempt at [it?] and his effort hardly rises to the level of ridicule. Ben is usually clever and original and always interesting, but his last column and a half of nonpareil must have been a keen disappointment to his friends. Of course Ben had to remind us that DeLeon is a “liar” and a “blackguard,” but this added little, if anything, to the tone and force of his weak and ill -tempered diatribe.

It is not infrequent that we hear complaint from our members of DeLeon’s so-called blackguardism, but I observe that these same members are ceaselessly fulminating against DeLeon, and the language some of them use hardly qualifies them to take exceptions to billingsgate [crude language].

The fact is that most of the violent opposition of Socialist Party members to the I. W. W. is centered upon the head of DeLeon and has a purely personal animus and this attitude is so clearly wrong and so flagrantly at war with justice and common sense as to be not only weak, but pusillanimous and utterly indefensible. DeLeon is not the I. W. W, although I must give him credit for being, since its inception, one of its most vigorous and active supporters.

It may be that DeLeon has designs upon the Socialist Party and expects to use the I. W. W as a means of disrupting it in the interest of the Socialist Labor Party, and if he succeeds it will be because his enemies in the Socialist Party, in their bitter personal hostility to him, are led to oppose and denounce the revolutionary I. W. W. and support the reactionary A. F. of L., thereby playing directly into his hands, and if the Socialist Party is disrupted in this clash of trade unions, it will be the result of their own deliberate acts and they will have to bear the responsibility for it.

I know there are members of the Socialist Labor Party who are using the I. W. W. as a weapon to strike the Socialist Party, but they will make little progress along that line unless our attitude is vulnerable and imparts to their blows the destructive force that of themselves are lacking.

I know, too, that there are members of the Socialist Party who would scruple at nothing to destroy the Socialist Labor Party, but we must be carried away by neither of these extremes.

Let us pursue the straight course and stick without wavering to the clear-cut revolutionary movement, and hew to the line of industrial and political unity for the overthrow of wage slavery.

As for myself, I expect to remain, as I have always been, a loyal member of the Socialist Party, but I shall continue to do what little I am able to unite all workers within one industrial union and one political party for the achievement of their emancipation.