Historical Reflection

Of all of the historical figures we have studied this year, including—but definitely not limited to—Presidents, philosophers, politicians, leaders, social movement-ers, and the many everyday people that have contributed to American history & culture, who would you most like to run into in college?


I think, that out of the people we have talked about this year, I would most want to run into Eugene  V Debs, an American labor union organizer and a prominent Socialist. 
He would be a TA in a political science class, president of the Young Socialist of America chapter at my school, and have parties to promote the revival of the decadence movement. He would be in grad school studying political theory and philosophy. I would look up to him, still forming my own wavering political ideas, while attempting to organize my own neo-Marxist band of rebels and write a manifesto. I would always try to impress him by carrying around Marx's Das Kapital and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.
He would be idolized by my misfit band of vigilantes, who hung on his every word. He said in the September 11, 1915, in an American weekly called The Appeal to Reason, “I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the regular army of rite plutocracy, but to the irregular army of the people. I refuse to obey any command to fight for the ruling class.... I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make it necessary.” This would satisfy both my anti war and my revolutionary sides while inspiring me to join his group. If he allowed, I would fight alongside him for the rights of the working. And when we end up, locked in prison for trespassing, destruction of private property, and disrupting the peace I will finally have time to free myself of the social classes of the outside world and fully join the true proletariat, and not the idealized 'working class' that I thought I had been promoting. 




"Lenin: Speech Delivered at an International Meeting in Berne, February 8, 1916." Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 16 June 2010. .