Debs turned the resonant language of republican political thought against bosses and the whole system that sustained their power. Like republicans of old, he warned of a fatal dependence on the arbitrary will of others. But rather than attacking the untrammelled authority of a king or overseas legislature, he adapted this analysis to the conditions of a rapidly industrialising capitalist economy. There could be no political equality when workers were dependent on capitalists who owned the resources, tools and machines needed to make a living. Debs would conclude that: ‘No man is free in any just sense who has to rely upon the arbitrary will of another for the opportunity to work.’ But that unfreedom was the reality for most working people, who laboured and therefore lived by the permission of bosses.
Control became key to how Debs understood work under capitalism. The long hours, unsafe conditions and exhausting nature of much of this labour was not lost on him. As a former locomotive fireman, shovelling coal into the fire-box of a rail engine, Debs knew what gruelling work meant. Nor did he have any illusions about the bleak conditions among the mills, factories, mines and farms where, day after day, workers slogged their guts out for a meagre reward. But Debs’s complaint was more fundamental than poor working conditions or even low wages – it took aim at the lack of freedom at the heart of the economy.
Republicans want to eliminate arbitrary power, not entrust it to wise and kindly rulers. In this spirit, Cicero remarked that ‘freedom consists not in having a just master, but in having none.’ Sidney would add: ‘[H]e is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands, and depends upon his will.’ Debs saw that this was the plight of those workers who desperately needed a wage and could not buck the strenuous discipline of employers that came with it. Such a life was lived at the mercy of others, whose favour or displeasure could determine whether families could eat or put a roof over their head. To be so squarely under the thumb of a class who could see that you starved – and so to have many masters rather than a solitary owner – is to begin to taste at least some of the characteristic unfreedom of the slave.