Jesus, the Supreme Leader. by Eugene V. Debs

[Ichingcarpenter]

Hey its Easter


published in Progressive Woman, March 1914. Reprinted in Labor and Freedom:


The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs. (St. Louis: Phil Wagner, 1916), pp. 22-29.

It matters little whether Jesus was born at
Nazareth or Bethlehem. The accounts conflict, but
the point is of no consequence.

It is of consequence, however, that He was
born in a stable and cradled in a manger. This fact
of itself, about which there is no question, certifies
conclusively the proletarian character of Jesus
Christ. Had His parents been other than poor
working people — money-changers, usurers, merchants, lawyers, scribes, priests, or other parasites
— He would not have been delivered from His
mother’s womb on a bed of straw in a stable among
asses and other animals.

Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as
every other babe eve born into the world. He was
of miraculous origin the same as all the rest of
mankind. The scriptural account of his “immaculate
conception” is a beautiful myth, but scarcely
more of a miracle than the conception of all other
babes.


Jesus was not divine because he was less human
than his fellowmen but for the opposite reason
that he was supremely human, and it is this of
which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection
of him as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual
being.


The chronicles of his time and of later days
are filled with contradictory and absurd stories
about him and he has been disfigured and distorted
by cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and
by ignorant idolators to give godly sanction to their
blind bigotry and savage superstition, but there is
no impenetrable myth surrounding the personality
of Jesus Christ. He was not a legendary being
or an allegorical figure, but as Bouck White and
others have shown us, a flesh and blood Man in
the fullness of his matchless powers and the completenessof his transcendent consecration.

To me Jesus Christ is as real, as palpitant and
persuasive 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 bythe 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 the 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.

Centuries later Karl Marx embodies the appeal
in his famous manifesto and today it blazes
forth in letter of fire as the watchword of the worldwide

revolution: “Workers of all countries unite: you
have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world
to gain.”

During the brief span of ................... much more

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1914/0300-debs-jesussupreme.pdf

[safeinOhio]

1. Eugene Victor "Gene" Debs

was an American unionleader, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies),

The Wobblies had a song.

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. Thanks for the song.. I know them well