Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States.

Early in his political career, Debs was a member of the Democratic Party. He was elected as a Democrat to the Indiana General Assembly in 1884. After working with several smaller unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs led his union in a major ten-month strike against the CB&Q Railroad in 1888. Debs was instrumental in the founding of the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the nation’s first industrial unions. After workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company organized a wildcat strike over pay cuts in the summer of 1894, Debs signed many into the ARU. He led a boycott by the ARU against handling trains with Pullman cars in what became the nationwide Pullman Strike, affecting most lines west of Detroit and more than 250,000 workers in 27 states. Purportedly to keep the mail running, President Grover Cleveland used the United States Army to break the strike. As a leader of the ARU, Debs was convicted of federal charges for defying a court injunction against the strike and served six months in prison.

In prison, Debs read various works of socialist theory and emerged six months later as a committed adherent of the international socialist movement. Debs was a founding member of the Social Democracy of America (1897), the Social Democratic Party of America (1898) and the Socialist Party of America (1901). Debs ran as a Socialist candidate for President of the United States five times: 1900 (earning 0.6 percent of the popular vote), 1904 (3.0 percent), 1908 (2.8 percent), 1912 (6.0 percent), and 1920 (3.4 percent), the last time from a prison cell. He was also a candidate for United States Congress from his native state Indiana in 1916.

Debs was noted for his oratorical skills, and his speech denouncing American participation in World War I led to his second arrest in 1918. He was convicted under the Sedition Act of 1918 and sentenced to a 10-year term. President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921. Debs died in 1926, not long after being admitted to a sanatorium due to cardiovascular problems that developed during his time in prison.

Biographies, Critiques, Criticisms, Sketches, Autobiographies, Obituaries and Memoirs of Eugene V. Debs iww

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  • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    Many of you already seen’t this but Pop Culture Detective put out a nice video on the Alpha Male nonsense.

    Cognito hazard warning for tons of actors putting on the smuggest persona possible while reading pseudo-science dialog written by redditor-tier writers.

  • burner_herzog [none/use name, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    goddamn back to smoking weed in the morning before work again. funny thing is it helps with anxiety in the same amount it increases my baseline. whatever. i used to care about work and have a good ethic and all that in the shittiest jobs for the shittiest people and for lousy wages, and now that i have somewhat stable work for not quite as bad but still could be better pay doing something considerably more chill and maybe less explicitly evil i only complain. grass is always greener, sure, but when work is coercive it can’t help stink like a raw deal, even if it’s the good shit

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    8 days ago

    One interesting thing no one talks about is how the image we are sold of jobs in the capitalist West are completely different from what they really are. The idea of a Farmer working in nice green field with a small herd of happy cows. The Baker that bakes the bread he sells that day, these aren’t jobs normal people have anymore.

    You see it a lot in advertising. The ads for Cadbury’s chocolate that show a chocolatier stirring a big vat of chocolate and making the batch himself, for example.

    Most products aren’t made with any passion. They’re made on an assembly line by desperate, sad people that wish they could be doing anything else. Yet, we’re constantly bombarded with this outdated image of the happy artisan. How can this be anything else than propaganda?

    • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      7 days ago

      Public relations and advertising are always propaganda. Anglos just reserve the scary P word for nations or people they want you to villify.

    • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago
      CW: Meat

      It’s extra upsetting to me because I’d totally pay the extra $8 at the right place. People that actually know how to make a burger good enough to charge the extra $8 for are far and few between. And charging that much for smashburgers is just criminal, they shouldn’t even be in that conversation.

      Best burger I ever had was from a food truck that just did pub style burgers. Guy grounded his own mixture of Chuck and brisket, bought Tillamook cheese, bought tomatoes from the farmers market, sliced the onions super thin and let them sit in the steam well all day so they were super jammy. Martin’s potato rolls too. And he didn’t cheap out on the fries, he got battered Simplots which are my favorite fries, VERY expensive though. It was $20 for an 8oz burger and 7oz of fries, which as someone that orders for restaurants, fairly reasonable price for the quality of ingredients he had

  • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    24·
    9 days ago

    Lenin got shot at, thrown in jail, then shot at AGAIN all in the same day, no wonder mf was authoritarian

    Actually almost finished with my book and I’m stoked to finally read a bunch of Lenin’s theory and to be able to connect it to its historical context. My brain is enlarging at an incredible rate!

      • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        9·
        9 days ago

        “Lenin” by Robert Service. The author also wrote books on Stalin and Trotsky. Author is a lib but it feels like he does a very good job of giving a balanced characterization of Lenin so far. I’m up to 1921, and his accounts of the October Revolution and how he wrote about it were so exciting. He got access to a bunch of archives that were sealed up until the 90s so there are quotes from journals and correspondence from Lenin, his wife, comrades, family etc. You can find it on Anna’s Archive

  • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    8 days ago

    I’ve decided the worst part of my job as an amazon worker ant is that every morning I find out if I’m clocking in at 11 or 10:40 or hey amazon cut your route stay home. I find out that morning. And if it’s 10:40 then I have to leave at 9:40. And every day they send out the mass text message somewhere between 9 and 10. This is relatively new as of the last few months. One time a couple weeks ago they had me come in at 10:40 and told me at 9:56. I hit traffic and got there exactly on time if it were 11. I yelled at my boss about it the second he said something to me about being late.

    These evil motherfuckers found a way to take away another half hour of my day. Even if I have to leave at 10 I have to wake up as if I’m leaving at 9:40. They have me on call for 20 minutes they’re not paying me for.

    Anyway, been kinda lame over here.

  • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    8 days ago

    goddamn, google has gotten so unusable it’s actually giving me a headache

    I searched “are fleas beetles” and every fucking result is talking specifically about flea beetles