Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. DebsDebs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
History
Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs
Debs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
Labor -- United States; Socialism -- United States; Socialist Party (U.S.); Working class -- United States
To me Jesus Christ is as real, as palpitant and pervasive as a historic
character as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln or Karl Marx. He has persisted
in spite of two thousand years of theological emasculation to destroy
his revolutionary personality, and is today the greatest moral force in
the world.
The vain attempt persisted in through twenty centuries of ruling class
interpolation, interpretation and falsification to make Jesus appear the
divinely commissioned conservator of the peace and soother of the
oppressed, instead of the master proletarian revolutionist and sower of
the social whirlwind--the vain attempt to prostitute the name and
teachings and example of the martyred Christ to the power of Mammon, the
very power which had murdered him in cold blood, vindicates his
transcendent genius and proclaims the immortality of his work.
Nothing is known of Jesus Christ as a lad except that at twelve his
parents took him to Jerusalem, where he confounded the learned doctors
by the questions he asked them. We have no knowledge as to what these
questions were, but taking his lowly birth, his poverty and suffering
into account, in contrast with the riches of Jerusalem which now dazzled
his vision, and in the light of his subsequent career we are not left to
conjecture as to the nature of the interrogation to which the
inquisitive lad subjected the smug doctors in the temple.
There are but meagre accounts of the doings of Jesus until at a trifle
over thirty he entered upon his public "ministry" and began the campaign
of agitation and revolt he had been planning and dreaming through all
the years of his yearning and burning adolescence. He was of the working
class and loyal to it in every drop of his hot blood to the very hour of
his death. He hated and denounced the rich and cruel exploiter as
passionately as he loved and sympathized with his poor and suffering
victims.
"I speak not of you all; I know whom I have chosen," was his
class-conscious announcement to his disciples, all of whom were of the
proletariat, not an exploiter or desirable citizen among them. No, not
one! It was a working class movement he was organizing and a working
class revolution he was preparing the way for.
"A new commandment I give unto you: That ye love one another; as I have
loved you, that ye also love one another." This was the pith and core of
all his pleading, all his preaching, and all his teaching--love one
another, be brethren, make common cause, stand together, ye who labor to
enrich the parasites and are yourselves in chains, and ye shall be free!
These words were addressed by Jesus not to the money-changers, the
scribes and pharisees, the rich and respectable, but to the ragged
undesirables of his own enslaved and suffering class. This appeal was to
their class spirit, their class loyalty and their class solidarity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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