Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Debs argues that workers can achieve economic independence just as they achieved political rights, and both are required for true freedom.
In plain terms
Industrial freedom is just as possible as political liberty, and both are needed for a free nation.
What can you take from it?
True freedom requires both political rights and economic independence.

Where it applies

  • labor movements
  • political campaigns
  • economic reform

Putting it to work

  • organize unions
  • vote for economic rights
  • advocate for workers

Questions to consider

  • What does industrial freedom look like today?
  • Are political rights enough without economic security?

Another view

Economic freedom may not follow political freedom automatically.

More from Eugene V. Debs

  1. First of all, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles W. Fairbanks, candidates for President and Vice-President, respectively, deny the class struggle and this almost i…

    Permalink to quote #28
  2. The hand tools of early times are used no more. Mammoth machines have taken their place. A few thousand capitalists own them and many millions of workingmen us…

    Permalink to quote #30
  3. The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties - differing only in being committed to different sets of capitalist interests - they have th…

    Permalink to quote #27

Related quotes

  1. We may say with truth and meaning that governments are more or less republican, as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in the…

    Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson quote #86
  2. Still one thing more, fellow citizens - a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free…

    Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson quote #157
  3. For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

    Ralph Waldo EmersonRalph Waldo Emerson quote #232