‘Dispossessing Our Dispossessors’ by Eugene V. Debs from American Socialist. Vol. 1 No. 38. April 3, 1915.

IT IS the declared purpose of socialism to dispossess the expropriating and exploiting class that is now dispossessing the people.

But in dispossessing our dispossessors it will be to emancipate them, along with the working class and the rest of humanity. Property under capitalism is the itch of civilization.

Private ownership has become the ruling passion, the mania of the race.

Property is the hog-pen science of hogging things.

The human being, although civilized, or possibly because of his civilization, does not yet know enough to know that when no man is allowed to own a square inch of God’s earth every man will hold a clear title to the whole earth.

It is purely because of its private ownership and the enslaving, brutalizing toll exacted from the people by its private proprietors that this earth is to-day a hell of horrors instead of a paradise of delight.

In dispossessing the dispossessors of the people socialism will render an infinite service to humanity, including the dispossessors themselves, for after all it will but take from them the power to rob their fellow-men, and when they are stripped of that iniquitous power, the curse of all the ages past, they will for the first time have the chance to be just to themselves.

It is only true in a narrow sense that even the ruling class. will be dispossessed when the power is taken from it to keep the human race in misery.

The proprietors of things the things without which the people cannot live will for the first time become the proprietors of themselves.

Man inevitably becomes a part of his possessions. The hoarder of gold changes by degrees into karats. The heart of a usurer turns into flint. The landlord who hoists his flag of private ownership over an atom and calls it his own is reduced to an insect. He cannot understand that by letting go of the atom, to which he clings with the desperation of a drowning man to a straw, he would come in possession of the earth.

He who fences himself in by fencing humanity out, withers at heart and in mind as certainly as does a tree uprooted by the elements. He is no longer rooted in the soil of humanity and not only does he shrivel in soul but the generations that succeed him bear all the marks of degeneration.

Dispossession of the power of the few to enslave and rob the many through fictitious and fraudulent titles of private ownership, is the mission of the socialist movement, and when that mission has been fulfilled the human race will for the first time be in possession of the earth and in full enjoyment of all its bounties.

The American Socialist, edited by J. Louis Engdahl, was the official Party newspaper of the Socialist Party of America in the years before World War One. Published in Chicago starting in 1914, the Appeal continued the semi-internal Socialist Party Official Bulletin founded in 1904 which became Party Builder in1913. The American Socialist closely followed the SP’s electoral challenges, Engdahl was often an SP candidate in Chicago as he edited the paper, and took an early and prominent anti-war position. With a circulation of around 60,000 the paper was one of the leading anti-war voices in the run up to US entry into World War One. The paper was suppressed by Federal authorities, along with much of the anti-war left, in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/american-socialist/v1n38-apr-03-1915-TAS.pdf