The Conquest of Power

THE CONQUEST OF POWER
Copyright, 1937, by Albert Weisbord
LIBERALISM, ANARCHISM, SYNDICALISM,

SOCIALISM,
FASCISM AND COMMUNISM
BY ALBERT WEISBORD
To Samuel Fisher,
Loyal comrade who perished in the class struggle.

SUMMARY
INTRODUCTION........................................................................ 7
BOOK I: LIBERALISM.............................................................. 17
I. LIBERALISM'S ROAD TO POWER.................................... 18

I. THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS............................................... 18
II. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION......................................64
III. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION........................................ 118
II. LIBERALISM’S COMING OF AGE..................................172

IV. UTILITARIANISM, LAISSEZ FAIRE AND
INDIVIDUALISM.................................................................... 172
V. CONTINENTAL LIBERALISM........................................ 222
III. THE WANE OF LIBERALISM.........................................252

VI. WELFARE-LIBERALISM................................................. 252
VII. THE DISSOLUTION OF LIBERALISM........................ 288
BOOK II. ANARCHISM......................................................... 307
I. LIBERAL-ANARCHISM..................................................... 308
VIII. LIBERTARIANISM.........................................................308
IX. MUTUALISM..................................................................... 319
X. AMERICAN LIBERAL-ANARCHISM............................339
II COMMUNIST-ANARCHISM............................................357
XI. COLLECTIVIST-ANARCHISM...................................... 357
XII. COMMUNIST-ANARCHISM........................................ 379
BOOK III: SYNDICALISM......................................................402
I. TRADE UNION REFORMISM...........................................403

XIII. TRADE UNIONISM....................................................... 403
II. TRADE UNION REVOLUTIONISM............................... 441
XIV. FRENCH SYNDICALISM............................................. 441
XV. AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY INDUSTRIAL
UNIONISM............................................................................... 467
BOOK IV: SOCIALISM........................................................... 502
I. FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIALISM.....................................503
XVI. THE BACKGROUND.....................................................503
XVII. SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM.............................................518
XVIII. EARLY SOCIALISTS................................................... 567
XIX. THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL.................................... 599
II. THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL..................................629

XX. REVISIONISM...................................................................629
XXI. SECTARIANISM............................................................. 657
III. COUNTER-REVOLUTION.............................................. 674
XXII. SOCIALISM AND THE WAR..................................... 674
XXIII. SOCIALISM AND THE PROLETARIAN
REVOLUTION..........................................................................702
BOOK V: FASCISM................................................................. 723
I. FOUNDATIONS OF FASCISM..........................................724
XXIV. CHRONIC CRISIS........................................................ 724
XXV. THE AGE OF VIOLENCE............................................ 752
XXVI. FASCIST PROTOTYPES..............................................813
II. FASCISM ARRIVES............................................................ 854

XXVII. THE END OF REFORM............................................. 854
XXVIII. ITALY.......................................................................... 873
XXIX. GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM........................913
XXX. NATIONAL SOCIALISM (CONTINUED)................948
XXXI. THE SPREAD OF FASCISM.......................................990
XXXII. FASCIST TRENDS IN THE UNITED STATES.... 1036
XXXIII. THE FUTURE PHYSIOGNOMY OF AMERICAN
FASCISM................................................................................. 1091
BOOK IV: COMMUNISM.................................................... 1112
I. THE ZIG-ZAG CHARACTER OF THE PROLETARIAN

REVOLUTION........................................................................1113
XXXIV. EARLY COMMUNIST UPRISINGS..................... 1113
XXXV. THE PARIS COMMUNE......................................... 1162
XXXVI. BOLSHEVISM.......................................................... 1182
XXXVII. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1905............ 1224
XXXVIII. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1917...........1274
XXXIX. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (CONTINUED) 1311
II. THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL UNDER LENIN......1374

XL. THE POST-WAR REVOLUTIONARY WAVE.......... 1374
XLI. THE FIRST FOUR CONGRESSES.............................. 1421
III STALINISM........................................................................1490
XLII. THE SWING TO THE RIGHT....................................1490
XLIII. THE CHINESE REVOLUTION................................ 1507
XLIV. SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY............................1555
XLV. ISOLATION AND COLLAPSE................................. 1602
XLVI. ISOLATION AND COLLAPSE (CONTINUED)...1644
XLVII. COMMUNISM IN THE UNITED STATES...........1687
IV. THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL.............................. 1722
XLVIII. THE STRATEGY OF THE FOURTH
INTERNATIONAL................................................................ 1722
XLIX. COMMUNISM AND AMERICA.............................1767
PREFACE
The sign-posts of the nineteenth century are gone. At a

dead end of the road America must now take a new
direction. Which way out shall we choose that will not
mean this way out, that is, which will not spell the rapid
exit of large portions of civilized humanity?
In this outline I propose to give an exposition and critique

of the principal political movements that have arisen
through attempts to solve the modern social antagonisms
which threaten to overwhelm us. That the problems can
and will be solved there can be no doubt. For the problems
themselves cannot arise unless there are present those very
material forces which in turn provide the basis for their
solution. If, then, we study Liberalism, Anarchism,
Syndicalism, Socialism, Fascism and Communism, it is not
merely to understand the world, but to change it. And
precisely for this reason must we comprehend these various
"isms," not simply as systems of thought, but as movements
made up of people fighting for the realization of definite
wants and needs, and expressing the material interests of
particular social classes of a given historical environment
through programs by which they hope to transform the
world.
Such political programs are essentially programs of action.

Whenever these programs change, it is not because the
ideas embodied in them have a life or an evolution of their
own, but because the material factors of the world have
changed, giving rise to new interests and to new problems
reflected by the programs. Ideas, even political ideas, have
no history, no development, no more than do reflections of
objects in a mirror. It is men, it is society, it is nature that
moves, that evolves, and to whose history we must turn.
A word is necessary as to the present writing itself. At first I
contemplated merely a political primer; I soon found the
subject too complicated to be treated so handily, especially
as there was no other single book to which I could refer the
reader. Not a popular digest but a standard treatise was
needed, and I was compelled to change both the material
and the method of treatment. Because the task before me
was primarily that of a pathfinder, the duty of
incorporating the large number of references needed to
support the argument lay heavily upon me. The insertion of
all the reference notes, however, would have so burdened
the text as to have amounted to another book in itself, and
to have made the volume inaccessible to many to whom
this work is addressed. I decided, therefore, to eliminate
many of the notes and references and to simplify the style
as far as possible. Thus I have attempted to strike a balance
between a pedantic professorial tome and a popular
synopsis. I shall be well satisfied if the plain man in the
street understands its purport.
The present work has many defects of which I am all too

painfully conscious. The necessity to compress the material
gathered into two volumes has compelled me to eliminate
important parts: chapters on feminism and pacifism, which
were to go under Liberalism; a chapter on the Jew,
capitalism and communism, which was to be placed under
Fascism; chapters on the present Spanish Revolution and on
the Negro and communism which were to appear in the
last book. Besides' there have been deleted sections on the
early peasants' wars, on the ferment in India, on the Irish
Rebellion, and other material of a similar nature.
In passing, may I say that most of the work was done in the
libraries in New York City and Chicago and in the special
libraries of the University of Michigan and of the University
of Chicago? Especially generous were the Law Library and
the Clements Memorial Library at Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I must express my indebtedness to Vera Buch for her

invaluable assistance in going over the entire work and for
her contributions especially to the part dealing with the
Russian Revolution of 1905. To Murray H. Braun I owe
many thanks for his persistent and capable labors in
checking the notes.
A. W.
THE CONQUEST OF POWER - ALBERT WEISBORD
INTRODUCTION
POLITICS is the science dealing with the State;

revolutionary politics with the overthrow of the existing
State. And by the State is meant the specific social forces
which the economically dominant classes organize to
enforce their will over the people of a given territory. The
State is an instrument by which the ruling classes hold the
power and compel the other classes to remain in subjection.
Tax-gathering and military-police supervision are the
principal activities of the State as such. With the
development of capitalism, the State has performed
increasing industrial and other social functions. This
growth of State activity, far from identifying the State with
society, rather has brought the antagonisms of that society
to a head. In every case the State is the answer to the
question: Through what does the ruling class dictate its will
to the oppressed? From that point of view, every State
signifies the dictatorship of a class over other economic
classes. (*1) America is not exempt, although for a long time
unique circumstances have made it appear otherwise.
At bottom, Democracy, as a type of State, far from being

opposed to Dictatorship, is a mode of Dictatorship. For
example, it has been through a sort of Democracy, which in
essence means the right of a more or less large section of the
population to express its will by the vote and by the
election of officers of the State, that the Dictatorship of the
capitalist class in the United States has been expressed for
generations. Here, highly propagandized Democracy has
tended to conceal the factual Dictatorship. Or, to take a
converse case, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat established
in the Soviet Union has gone hand in hand with an
enormous extension of the franchise. It is the prominence of
the Dictatorship and its openly avowed character which
7
have induced many superficial observers to overlook
Russia's inherent Democracy.
The term "Dictatorship" may be used in two senses: to

designate the essence of the State or to characterize
the form the State takes. Thus, the Dictatorship of the
capitalist class, i.e., the Capitalist State, can be and has been
expressed through a Military Dictatorship, a Fascist
Dictatorship, or through a Democracy, etc. Again, the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, i.e., the Workers' State, at
least as established in the days of Lenin, was expressed in a
form of democratic mechanism by which the proletariat
dictated its will and directly controlled the government.
Open or concealed, Class Dictatorship exists in every State.

Nor does it make any difference whether the State be
republican or monarchical. For that matter, Democracy may
appear under a monarchy (Great Britain) and a Republic
may be anti-democratic. (*2)
This conception of the State renders irrelevant what kind of

government may exist. By "Government" we mean simply
the mechanics, the apparatus, through which the ruling
class functions. By "Administration" we mean the
functionaries and representatives of the State. (*3) Whether
the Administration controls the workings of the
Government in one manner or another, whether the
Government operates within the framework of this
Constitution or that, whether the ruling class rules directly
or indirectly, through its own members or those of another
class, these questions, important enough in themselves and
sometimes even decisive, have to do simply with the
technique of governing. Questions of statecraft, problems of
government, and the art of administration become
important only after the fundamental political question in
society is solved: Who rules whom?
8
We must note, in passing, that the apparatus of the State,
although expressing the will of the economically dominant
classes and acting as their servant, nevertheless can have a
certain independence of these classes. Bonapartism is a
classic example of this situation. Indeed, those in actual
power in the government may be members of another class,
hostile to the interests of the dominant class and yet forced
to carry out these interests.
The various political tendencies struggling for power have

been characterized as reactionary, conservative, reformist,
and revolutionary. In this work, each of these terms will
have an exact meaning. "Reactionary" will be used to
designate that tendency or movement which would turnthe
world backward, that is to say, which would give political
power to social classes already pushed into the discard by
the present capitalist classes. A Royalist movement, for
example, that would make pre-eminent the interests of the
remnants of old feudal landlord classes, that would
supersede science and industry with backward village
economy -- such a movement can be called reactionary in
every sense of the term.
However, it must be borne in mind always that the

remnants of the past are still with us in the present, and
indeed make up part of the present. Capitalism has always
made compromises with the past; Royalty and aristocracy,
for example, still remain in England; the Negroes still exist
as a separate caste in the United States; the economic
category of Absolute Rent still prevails in all capitalistic
countries. (*4)
Hence, even the conservative, who wants things to remain

just as they are, is a reactionary. He is reactionary in a
double sense; first, because he struggles to perpetuate the
compromises of the past, even creating new decadent forces;
9
and second, because he refuses to change with the
movement of events, and, in lagging behind, drags the
whole world backward.
Considering society as actually evolving, we may go even

farther than this and term "reactionary" not merely those
movements which take us backward but also those which
would, in any degree, hinder us from going forward as far
as possible under the circumstances. It is from this point of
view that the Revolutionist properly calls the Liberal, or
"fellow travelers" of all kinds, "reactionary," both for not
advancing society as far as it possibly could go under the
given circumstances and for struggling against those who
would go farther and quicker. Even the Revolutionist can
be reactionary, if his policies and actions are such as to fail
to bring the advancement for which the world is ready. On
this level of social dynamics, all terms are relative: a
Reactionary can be a Liberal Reformer, while a foolish
Revolutionist can also be reactionary.
For the purpose of the present analysis, we will say that a

reactionary movement is one that would return to old and
outworn systems and methods no longer compatible with
the development of the productive forces; a conservative
movement is one that on the whole wants things to remain
as they are; reformism, standing fundamentally on the
ground of things as they are, would like to change the
superstructural social relations so as better to perpetuate
the existing system; finally, revolutionary movements
advocate the building of a really new society from the
foundations up.
Even here classification gets into difficulties. The most

hardened conservative will concede the necessity for some
degree of change, but will quickly add that the needed
modifications are slight and must be brought about slowly.
10
The difference between the conservative and the reformist
tendencies is one of degree rather than of kind; one fades
naturally into the other. Yet these differences can at times
assume a bitter, sanguinary character.
Reformist movements can be subdivided into two principal

streams: reformist movements of a dynamically reactionary
nature (Fascism), and those of a progressive nature
(Liberalism). Here again the reader must be reminded that,
as used herein, these terms have a nice content.
Fascism is considered a reformist movement because

Fascism does not struggle for the abolition of the capitalist
system. Quite the contrary, the changes it accomplishes are
entirely upon the basis of capitalism, in order to preserve it.
The most modern highly developed forms of finance capital
and trustified industry are the powers behind Fascism. If, in
spite of this, we declare that Fascism has reactionary
characteristics, it is because it would destroy certain
productive forces that have been developed under
capitalism, and above all, because it would destroy those
labor organizations which alone can drive the world
forward.
Liberalism is termed a reformist movement of a progressive

nature. Here, too, certain qualifications must be made. In
what sense has Liberalism been progressive? The
contradictory processes of nature work in such a manner
that, within the shell of the old, the elements of the new
appear and develop before they burst forth from their
integument and form a new order. Liberalism is
progressive only in so far as it protects the elements of the
new that are appearing and permits them to grow until
they can fulfill their revolutionary mission of destroying the
old. But that Liberalism which defends the right of free
speech for the Czar in the Soviet Union, or for the Ku Klux
11
Klan in the United States, takes on, indeed, a reactionary
tinge.
Placing both Fascism and Liberalism under the heading of

reformist tendencies. we find that Fascism is reformist,
though reactionary, while Liberalism, though reformist,
may not be progressive.
In the category of revolutionary we place all those

movements which have as their goal the creation of an
entirely new system of society on a political basis calculated
to release the fettered energies of the present. We exclude
from consideration here those revolutionists, "palace" or
otherwise, who agitate for insurrection simply to overthrow
the existing political machine so as to win power for their
own cliques. Of course, it has often happened that the
revolutionarycharacter of a given political program consists
solely in the aim it expresses and in the hopes and wishes of
its adherents. But, after all, the only really revolutionary
program is one that is scientifically verifiable: in short, one
that in practice can lead to victory. Any utopian,
unscientific political trend, even while claiming to be
revolutionary, harbors the possibility of becoming actually
counter-revolutionary.
The revolutionary camps, also, have been divided into two

main branches: the non-Marxian, which includes
Anarchism and Syndicalism (and sometimes forms of
peasant Populism), and the Marxian, including Socialism
and Communism (and sometimes forms of Laborism). This
is not an artificial division; the monumental works of Karl
Marx (1818- 1883) and of Frederick Engels (1820-1895) stand
as a great barrier separating them. Life, however, is more
complicated than any formula. In practice Marxism has
constantly been corrupted by alien elements within the
Marxist camp, sometimes to such an extent that it was the
12
corruption which assumed the name of Marxism, often
leading to split-offs of one kind or another. Similarly, non-
Marxists were forced to borrow from Marxism so that, in
many cases, it became possible for elements within both
camps to approach each other and to work together.
If the State is defined as the instrument of the economically

dominant classes, then the revolutionary movement may be
described as the force of the economically oppressed classes
who wish to rise to power. Generally speaking, it is the
poor sections of the population that support and nourish
the revolutionary organizations and groups. The reformist
movements, on the other hand, are supported by those
propertied classes who have still something to gain from
the present social system. But the line between rich and
poor, between the propertied and the propertyless, is not
always so clear. All sorts of middle elements appear,
blurring distinctions.
Precisely such a middle grouping is Radicalism. The term

"Radicalism" is employed here in the fine European sense
and not as a generic term to cover any sort of revolutionary
movement whatever. In this treatise, Radicalism is the
extreme left wing of Liberalism, standing approximately
upon the same basic theoretical ground as Liberalism, but
organized separately, and made up of poorer class elements
leaning towards egalitarianism, willing to break with
tradition and ready to take extreme measures to insure
victory. Radicals generally are not afraid of the masses or of
violence. Throughout this book the term "Radicalism" is
used in this precise sense.
Radicalism may take the form of a "People's Party." This

was the case with the agrarian "People's" movement in the
United States in the letter part of the nineteenth century. In
Russia, on the contrary, before the War, agrarian Populism
13
adapted itself to definite Socialist and revolutionary
tendencies. Under certain conditions, revolutionary
Populism can ally itself even to Communism.
Just as Liberalism and Fascism filter down from the

propertied classes and may embrace masses of toilers, so
revolutionary movements may become completely diluted
by tendencies belonging to the ruling class. In one country
Liberalism may give rise to Anarchism, in another place, to
Socialism. On the other hand, Anarchism has split into two
parts, one of an out-and-out bourgeois nature, and the other
with a revolutionary character; Socialism has developed a
section so thoroughly penetrated by Liberalism that all of
its so-called revolutionary character has been dissolved.
Communism may be so corroded by alien tendencies as to
become the tool of imperialists to shatter the labor
movement to fragments.
Thus the whole revolutionary movement is unavoidably

one of splits and fusions that bewilder the uninitiated. Yet
these splits are not meaningless, nor are they based merely
upon personalities. They but reflect the dialectical processes
of life that must be understood if we are to become
politically mature.
Liberalism, Anarchism, Syndicalism, Socialism, Fascism,

and Communism influence the lives of tens and hundreds
of millions. Liberalism in England and the United States,
Anarchism in the Latin and South and Central American
countries, Syndicalism in Spain, Socialism in Europe,
Fascism in Italy and in Germany, and Communism in the
Soviet Union carry behind them the weight and momentum
of enormous masses. These "isms" have become powers and
forces that clash for the mastery of the world.
14
Footnotes
1 By classes we mean groups bound together, on the whole,

by common interests springing from their role in the
productive process and in the social distribution of wealth.
Such a class is, for example, the capitalist, subdivided into
landlords, industrialists, merchants, bankers, and others.
Such also is the proletariat, and similar groupings. Classes
change with the mode of production.
No classes, no State. The State has its origin in the class

struggle. The State is marked according to which class
system is expressed through the State power. Thus there is
a Slave State, a Feudal State, a Capitalist State, a Workers'
State.
2 .The Athenian City State in Ancient Greece was an anti-

democratic Republic based on slavery. When the thirteen
colonies formed the United States of America, they created
a non-democratic Republic.
3. The distinction that we make between Government and

Administration is more or less an arbitrary one for the
convenience of American readers. With us it is ordinarily
the Administration that falls, not the Government. In
Europe it is the Government that falls or is changed. The
difference is due to the difference in the development of
capitalism in the United States and in Europe. We have
been accustomed in political theory to separate laws and
the machinery of government from men and classes. Not so
in Europe. Governments and Administrations change
according to the tactical and strategical needs of the ruling
classes.
4. Absolute Rent has been attacked many times in America.

Benjamin Franklin, as a Physiocrat, was for its removal. The
15
largest movement of this kind designed to free the
capitalists generally from the monopoly hold of their
landlord section was the Single Tax movement headed by
Henry George in the late nineteenth century.
16
BOOK I: LIBERALISM
17
I. LIBERALISM'S ROAD TO POWER
I. THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS
PARADOXICALLY, throughout history, Liberals have

initiated revolution and have fought against it. They have
been opposed to democracy, though they have claimed it
for their own. They have fought against republics, though
Republics were formed in their name. They have supported
dictators, although the Dictators have then proceeded to
crush the Liberals. Liberalism, then, is a complex political
activity with the colors of the chameleon; it cannot be
understood abstracted from a given concrete historical
situation.
Liberalism is no eternal spirit generated by immaculate

conception, as some Liberals would have us believe; it is a
flesh and blood movement with a well-defined history in
time and space. Its classic home has been those well-
developed countries where capitalism once and for all
overthrew the domination of feudal economy and rapidly
expanded its markets. Liberalism, at the start, was the
expression of the capitalist class, already triumphant in the
economic sphere, attempting to conquer in the political
field. The strongholds of the movement were -- and remain
today -- England, France, and the United States.
Liberalism, coinciding with the rise and domination of

capitalism, required several centuries to mature and passed
through a number of stages. With the appearance of
merchant capital as a powerful driving force in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries came the Renaissance;
with the development of trade and the rise of manufactures
(hand factories) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
came the Reformation. Modern industry has brought the
period of People's Revolution. The period of the
18
Renaissance and that of the Reformation marked the
inception of that movement which has become known in
the political world as Liberal, although these earlier
developments confined themselves mainly to the cultural
and ethical fields of social life.
The Renaissance could not have been born in the rough,

stable-like structures of the feudal knights. For the arts to
flourish cities were necessary; for cities to be created there
were needed first of all trade and commerce and money. In
the Mediterranean, following the religious Crusades of the
twelfth century, trade became enormously stimulated.
There money-men first came into prominence. Entrenched

behind the city-states under their control, they were able to
develop a culture entirely their own. Traveling far and wide,
burning with curiosity, and fairly shining with ever
increasing knowledge, they were able to rise above the
ignorance of petty provinciality and to envision the
wonderful kaleidoscopic panorama of the entire world as
they then knew it. Such experiences were bound to give to
the men of genius of that time a versatility, a catholicity,
and a profundity that has rightly given the name of
"Renaissance," or rebirth, to the entire period.
Art and science followed in the wake of the money-men of

merchant capital. The consequent upsurge and hegemony
of the Italian cities in the Mediterranean trade engendered a
tremendous social fermentation. Men of intellect in
increasing numbers turned from the land to the sea, and
from the country to the city. They began to revive the
traditions of ancient Rome and of Greece, to point out the
glories that were once of the Mediterranean cities of
antiquity, even menacingly to hint at the republics of the
olden days. And thus the merchants began their struggle
for power with an appeal to the past, with a demonstration
19
that before feudalism was even known, merchants and city-
states had ushered art and science and culture into the
world.
This was the time of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and

a host of others who stand out, not merely as artists of a
given medium, whether painting, sculpture or architecture,
but who shine as craftsmen and scientists as well, who
could move freely from one branch of learning to another.
This was the period, too, of the development of literature,
the time of Bocaccio and Dante. Later there occurred a great
blossoming forth of science in all its branches, from
mathematics to geology. The names of Galileo, Keppler,
and Copernicus are no small ones with which to conjure,
even to this day. Modern languages began to develop.
Historians appeared. A real beginning was made in
political science with such men as Machiavelli. The feudal
coterie was left to rot with its theological disputations, and
if the merchant element could not as yet overthrow landed
interests steeped in the past, it could circumvent,
undermine, and overcast them.
In everything they did, the Renaissance artists bound

themselves closely to the money-men. They broke down the
stern architecture of the feudal castle and constructed light
and airy mansions fit, not for the boorish pugnacious
knights of old, but for merchant princes whose chief
occupations were pursued in sumptuous banquet halls and
boudoirs. The rococo style of the late Renaissance found
favor as eminently fitting the newly acquired luxury. The
art of painting developed to the greatest degree, portrait
painting most of all, for such art is best appreciated by
those more fond of indoor sitting than of outdoor riding.
Naturally, too, under such circumstances, women began to
20
come into their own; they became an object of art as well as
the subject of artists. The era of the salon was at hand.
As the Mediterranean began to lose its importance because

of the opening up of the Atlantic, and as Spain, Portugal,
the Netherlands, and finally France and England were
thrust into the lap of glorious opportunities, the
Renaissance followed in exact order. The brief period of
Spanish-Portuguese hegemony was marked by the
scientific achievements under Prince Henry of Portugal, the
writings of the Spanish Jurist-Theologians, and later the
paintings of Velasquez. However, the shifting currents of
history soon left these countries stranded, gradually
transformed into cultural wastes.
The advent of increased trade to the Netherlands

introduced the period of the Flemish and later of the Dutch
Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, at least half of the
Dutch population was composed of merchants, artisans, or
seamen. It is during this century that the Dutch attained the
highest point in their relative standing and political power.
However, by this time not merely commerce was being

developed, but manufactures as well; thus aesthetic culture
was forced, to share place with practical science, both
natural and social. Art, that crowing cock, found itself
increasingly displaced by the prosaic cackling hen of
science regularly laying its golden eggs. In Holland there
was not only a Rembrandt and a Franz Hals, but also a
Spinoza and a Descartes, both of whom deliberately chose
to make the Netherlands their adopted country. While
Holland was daring to carry out an insurrection that
terminated at first in a non-democratic republic and later in
a constitutional monarchy, practically the first of its kind
where the bourgeoisie was in complete control, the
Dutchman Grotius was laying down a theoretical
21
justification of these developments in an attempt to build a
basis for a body of international law.
With the rise of factories in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries and the spread of new methods of production, the
money-men who had made their wealth through the
circulation of commodities now found themselves
supported by men who had transformed money into capital,
that is, men who actually were producing commodities for
a world market in a factory system based on craftsmen,
skilled in the use of specialized tools and working for
wages. It was indeed time for these capitalists and money-
men to transform culture, art, literature, and science into
custom and morals. However, to change the ethics of a
country it was necessary to reckon with the religious
institutions of the time, particularly with the Catholic
Church, which had frozen the ethics of the older ruling
classes into eternal moral precepts hallowed by God.
It must not be supposed that the Catholic Church had been

impervious to the influence of money
and of personal property as distinguished from land and

real property. Quite the contrary was the case, indeed. We
may confidently declare that the Pope resided in Italy, or
rather that the Roman Bishop reached and maintained his
exalted status of Pope, precisely because Italy had been,
and continued to be, the most developed commercial
country. While it is true that the Catholic Church had a vast
landed interest, in fact repeatedly based its conduct upon
that interest, it is no less true that the Pope, as Pope,
derived his financial might, not from his land estates, but
from the vast drain of gold and personal wealth that
poured in upon him from all parts of Europe. His
emissaries in collecting the tithes due him did not collect in
land or in kind, but in forms of wealth that could be used as
22
money, namely, precious metals and jewels of all sorts. The
Pope was the richest money-man of all Europe.
It was for just this reason that the Catholic Church could
become a catholic church. Land ownership leads to
provinciality, to particularity. Money, however, can move
in every direction and is treated as a universal equivalent; it
is truly a catholic object. Is it any wonder that it was the
Jews, money-men and traders par excellence, who were
able to transcend ancient particularist mythology and arrive
at a belief in but one God? Has there ever existed a
monotheism not concomitant with trade routes and
commercial wanderings?
This dual material basis of the Catholic Church, land and

money, gave rise to grave conflicts both in the relations
between Church and Crown, and within the Church itself.
The strategic positions were held by the Bishops, and the
struggles that arose hinged around the question, who
should control the Bishops, King or Pope? In the Middle
Ages, when money played a very subordinate role to land,
the Bishops felt in no wise inferior; it was they who
controlled the lands in each country. Because the realty
could not be moved to Rome, the Bishops were connected
far more closely with the native aristocracy, from whose
ranks they most often came, than with the Pope. Although
the Bishops were supposed to be elected by the clergy of
the diocese, they soon became entirely subservient to the
temporal rulers whose appointees they really were.
On the other hand, the King was often glad to work closely
with the Bishops. They could sanctify his usurpations; they
were far better government agents than the other nobles;
they were much more literate and cultured and, what was
most important, they were barred from marriage and thus
could not build up family holdings that could threaten the
23
power of the Crown. Thus, in his struggle against the
power of the feudal knights and lords, the King found it to
his interests to favor the Bishops who were already
divorced from ambitions of inheritance and political
domination.
The rise of commerce, however, and the shift of property

from realty to personalty, gave the Pope the material
opportunity to break the hold of the Crown upon the
Bishops. The chief instrument for this purpose was the
Crusades, by means of which the Catholic Church at Rome
increased its wealth and position enormously, not only
because of the re-growth of the importance of the
Mediterranean, but because of the weakening of feudalism
entailed by the Crusades. During this period the Pope freed
himself from the control of the Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empire and declared that only the Cardinals, and not the
temporal ruler, could elect the Pope. It was also in this
period that the Pope broke the hold of the Crown upon the
Bishops and made them responsible to the Church only,
Rome assuming the authority to move them around from
country to country, wherever needed. From now on the
rulers of the Vatican concentrated upon building up a
highly efficient and centralized machine, immensely
superior to all rivals, one which reached its peak with the
truly remarkable organizations of Jesuits, Franciscans,
Dominicans, and Jansenists.
Since the Catholic Church was supported by the business

men of the day, it soon reached out its mighty arm to
protect and foster business and commerce. This could be
done primarily through the workings of the Church Courts
and through Canon Law which, with the rise of the power
of the Church, became the chief instrument of the State in
handling personal affairs and personal property. The
24
business of the Church Courts included all cases in which
clergymen were involved, or in which the persons involved
were connected with the Church, or where the Church
should be called in as protector, such as cases pertaining to
monks, students, crusaders, widows, orphans, the helpless,
etc. They also adjudicated cases wherein the rites or
prohibitions of the Church were involved, such as marriage,
wills, sworn contracts, usury, blasphemy, sorcery, heresy,
etc. This was the place where people could come to have
their personal affairs adjusted, where the merchants
naturally thronged to get justice and settle their differences.
The history of modern legal science begins with the revival
of the study of Roman Law in the twelfth century.
The amount of money which soon began to pass through

the hands of the Church can be deduced from the fact that,
during the Great jubilee of 1300, so great were the
donations of money at Rome that it took two attendants,
working night and day with rakes, to shove away the
money offerings thrown before the altar. Thus was the
alliance between Church and Commerce firmly cemented.
Certain it is that the Catholic Church soon became

thoroughly commercialized. Commercial and financial
leaders became Popes, and the Church became the great
patron of the Renaissance with all its liberal implications.
Does this not account for the fact that so much of the art of
the time is religious in its subject matter? So long as
commerce and money continued to open up the markets of
the world and to develop Western Europe, Catholic
internationalism could not be opposed successfully, and so
long as money was confined solely to the sphere of
circulation and had not yet become money capital in any
large sense of the term, the Catholic Church could remain
supreme in its field. However, later, with the rise of
25
commodity production, of factory owners and wage-
workers, a political economy grew up that was bound to
take national lines and to run counter to the ultramontane
policy of the Catholic Church.
Having utilized the Catholic Church to the utmost, the

nascent capitalists were now prepared to shift their
allegiance from Pope to King, in an effort to build up an
absolute monarchy which could unify the nation behind the
commercial commodity-producing classes of the
country.(*1) The change in the mode of production of
wealth, the shift from feudal self- sufficiency to capitalist
commodity production, meant a change not merely in the
relation of man to natural objects, but above all in the
relation of man to man in the production of the necessities
of life. This, in turn, demanded a change of conduct, of
attitude, of morals, of custom, of ethics. Against these
changes, the Catholic Church, finding itself outmoded,
began to fight with all the power at its command.
Reformation and Counter- Reformation were the result.
Thus it is with the religious texts of the Reformation that

political Liberalism really gets its start. In the course of the
struggle, moral and religious battles soon became political.
Jurisprudence was emancipated from theology. As
capitalist business evolved, and as the period of Revolution
was ushered in, Liberalism emerged as a mature
independent political movement. As a specific political
movement, then, we can say that Liberalism dates generally
from the eighteenth century (seventeenth century among
the English and Dutch) and reaches its maturity in the
nineteenth century.
Liberalism and Revolution-who today would think that

once they were twins! Yet that very period which was
marked by the rise of Liberalism witnessed the "Great
26
Rebellion" of 1640-1660 and the "Glorious Revolution" of
1688 in England. It saw the American Revolution of 1776
and the Great French Revolution of 1789, as well as the
series of European revolutions that culminated in 1848. It
was in the course of these events that Liberalism found its
best expression, came into its own.
Naturally enough, England was the first great land where

the merchant capitalist class and other capitalist interests,
profiting by the country’s favorable geographic position, by
the events in Europe, and by their own advanced social
development, were first able to impress their will through
revolution, and gradually, by a series of compromises, to
seize control of the State. England was favored by the fact
that it could not be invaded easily by outside reactionary
forces because of the strength of its navy defending the
turbulent Channel and because internal dissensions and
wars were weakening its rivals. A study of the English Civil
Wars in the seventeenth century will enable us to trace the
evolution of Liberalism from its very beginning.
That the struggle between the old ruling classes and the
newer ones demanding their place in the pattern of English
affairs could be compromised in England was a result of the
fact that both these country and city interests had been
fusing together for some time previously. On one side,
there remained at the opening of the seventeenth century
only a remnant of the old feudal nobility. The country
estates were being managed on commercial principles, and
a recently ennobled aristocracy, financially close to the city
capitalist interests, had arisen. On the other side, the
merchants and moneyed men, entrenched in the cities, had
waxed quite strong, had penetrated the countryside, and
had formed a rural gentry class of their own. Thus, while at
27
bottom the English conflict was a struggle between a new
capitalist class and the old landlord class, yet the newer
elements were settled in the country as well as in the city,
and against them was a modernized landlord class that had
become thoroughly penetrated by capitalism.
An important clue to the understanding of the relationship

of social forces of the period, a clue that is generally
overlooked yet which explains much, is provided by the
position of the English merchant marine. After the
discovery of America, world history had definitely shifted
from land to sea, and the old lords and knights were left
high and dry. The feudalists might look fine on a horse, but
they did not appear to advantage on a ship.
The nascent capitalists, completely controlling the merchant

marine, were quick to utilize the enormous possibilities in
their grasp. England's greatness rested on her merchant
marine, the backbone of her navy. Through it, she could
attain unprecedented economic power and world
supremacy. For how long could the men behind this
merchant marine be denied the political power in the
country? This question was precipitated when the King
imposed severe taxes on tonnage and shipments.
The English already had the inspiring example of the Dutch.

Holland, as it gained control of goodly portions of the
world's commerce, the Baltic trade, the spice trade to the
East, etc., and as it built up its factories and cities, had been
able to wrest itself free from the feudal grip of Spain,
trouncing that country repeatedly on the high seas. This
freedom, in turn, so unleashed the power of the Dutch that
they became masters of the sea, and the merchants and the
capitalist class of the Netherlands prospered greatly.(*2)
28
In line with this commercial and financial development,
responsive to the modern needs of the times, and led by the
great banking center of Amsterdam, Holland established a
limited monarchy and set the example, not only in politics
but in general culture, for English Liberals. Religious
toleration even of Jews became definitely established. A
great theory of natural law and of the natural rights of man
was worked out by Grotius. From the disciples of Descartes
there developed a regular school of scientific materialists,
while Spinoza in his ethic and politic gives us a viewpoint
extraordinarily close to that of the English.(*3) The
embroidery of these Dutch patterns by the English shows
what an extremely close connection there existed between
the two countries, a connection symbolized by the bringing
over of William of Orange to administer the English
constitutional system of 1688.
The old English rulers represented economic classes no

longer of benefit to society, classes which imposed, rather,
such rules and regulations as to choke economic
advancement. Loss of economic strength had led to social
decay and political parasitism. There was but one class able
to remove the incubus of Absolute Monarchy and to break
the fetters around industry and commerce. In a period
when the proletariat was just being born, and when the city
had to take the lead, that class could be only the one in
control of the new and increasingly dominant forces of
commerce and industry, namely the capitalists.
The English Civil Wars, although caused by the King's

heavy taxation of the bourgeoisie without their consent,
were fought with religious texts, as though religious and
not economic questions were the basic issues. In the
seventeenth century this was the only means by which the
immature capitalist class could express its interests. Besides,
29
this was the traditional approach. A class struggling for
power generally proceeds to the offensive under defensive
traditional slogans and theories. Against the landed
aristocratic classes endorsing the Pope and the Catholic
Church, the business man throughout Europe supported
Calvin, or Luther, or some other Protestant movement
against the Pope. Calvin had complained that the Pope was
making Christianity a business; he, in turn, wanted to make
business Christly. Calvinism took all the virtues of the
capitalist class and turned them into the eternal light of the
Lord.
"Once the world had been settled to their liking, the middle
classes persuaded themselves that they were the convinced
enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle of
order. While their victories were still to win, they were
everywhere the spear-head of revolution. It is not wholly
fanciful to say that, on a narrower stage but with not less
formidable weapons, Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the
sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the
nineteenth, or that the doctrine of predestination satisfied
the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the
universe are on the side of the elect as was to be assuaged
in a different age by the theory of historical materialism."(*4)
In England, the religious Protestant approach was made all

the easier; the quarrel of the English ruling class with the
Pope, a century earlier, had already taken the violent form
of a break with Catholicism and the organization of an
English Protestant Episcopal Church. In religion, as in
economics, the aristocracy had already accepted some of
the formulas of the merchants, and the way had been paved
for the capitalist class to declare that its fight for Calvinism,
for Puritanism, or for Separatism, as the case might be, was
30
but the logical extension of what had already become the
accepted mode of action
Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church, which came in

the sixteenth century, after the Pope had parceled out the
new world to Spain and Portugal, had several results so far
as England was concerned. It operated directly, first, to end
the interference of the Pope in national and international
affairs; second, to transfer the clergy from agents of a
foreign power to agents of English absolute monarchy;
third, to confiscate Church lands; fourth, to accelerate the
process by which the rents were raised, the commons
seized, and the tenants driven off the lands; fifth, to initiate
the struggle against the Catholic powers for world colonies,
counter to the Pope's Bull.
This break with the Church consolidated national economy,

reduced still further the power of the nobility, and aided
the commercial and financial classes. That the break was so
violent, as compared with the struggle between the King of
France and the Catholic Church, was due in part to the
greater power and maturity of English national capitalism,
and in part to the rigid opposition England was
encountering from the papal powers.
In France, two centuries earlier, rising French nationalism

could only compromise, not break with the Catholic Church.
In their temporary victory over the Pope during the
Babylonian Captivity (1305-1377) at Avignon, the French
had prevailed upon the Pope to favor their own national
interests, particularly over those of their rival, England. In
1376 a report was made in the English Parliament that the
taxes levied by the Pope in England were five times those
raised by the King. No wonder the English began to rebel
and to produce such heretics as Wyclif. Thus was the line of
31
English Protestantism drawn from Wyclif to Henry VIII to
Cromwell.
In the struggle against Catholicism-and it was the

threatened return to the Catholic Church by the Stuarts that
sharpened the conflict-the middle class was able to cement
a firm alliance with a large section of the new landlords by
virtue of the fact that these latter feared they would have to
relinquish the stolen church lands and property, were
Catholicism to return. In such event, it is estimated,
ownership of one-tenth of the entire soil of England would
have changed hands. Further, seizure of the Commons and
other lands by large landowners had driven the peasantry
off the land and had provided the necessary proletariat for
the capitalists. This explains the alliance which united the
English middle class with the largest section of the great
landowners, and it is this alliance which essentially
distinguishes the English Revolution from the French,
wherein much large landed property was destroyed by
parceling out the soil.
While there was still a numerous free peasantry in England

at the time, it is none the less true that whereas, under
feudalism, the landlords had tried to bind their serfs to the
soil, by the seventeenth century they were driving them off
the land. Thus it was that the Puritan Revolution remained
so strictly a narrow struggle between the King and the
middle classes, while the mass of poor agrarians merely
stood by, aiding neither side. That the peasants took little
part in the English Civil Wars is amply attested by the small
numbers composing the armies in the field; at Marston
Moor, the King had eighteen thousand men, Parliament
twenty- six thousand; at Naseby the King had but nine
thousand men. Both sides had to conscript and to impress.
32
In 1645, at the height of the war, Parliament had but sixty to
seventy thousand men in all of its armies.(*5)
For many centuries there was no class strong enough to

challenge the Feudal State. The ruling class, therefore, had
enforced not only its legal codes but also its moral
standards. Morals and law had become fused; public policy
and social morality seemed identical. And since, in a
stagnant State, morality and not politics predominates, it
had been quite fitting that the Church should lead and the
State should act as the police officer of the Church. As new
powerful classes arose in the sixteenth century to challenge
the old order, morality gave way to politics; the courts were
taken from the hands of the Church, which became but the
ecclesiastical department of the State.(*6) The early
Protestants did not challenge this state of affairs; in fact,
their early complaint was that the State was not controlling
the Church sufficiently.
It should be borne in mind that it had been the commercial

and financial classes which, emerging from feudalism, had
supported the King in his fight against the feudal and
ecclesiastical robber barons and, for their own purposes,
had aided the rise of Absolute Monarchy. Naturally, these
elements hesitated to attack monarchical authority as such
at the start. Generally, it is easier and safer to attack the
morality of the ruling class than its power of State.
Therefore, classes seeking State power pave the way for the
coup d’etat by a flank attack on the morals and mores of the
ruling class.
In the beginning, then, as the capitalists began their fight

for profits, for free trade and free markets, and as this
conflict drove them to a struggle for a cheap government
and a sympathetic one, their program, the program of
seventeenth century Liberalism, came to grips with the
33
program of the old order. Against the Catholic religion,
Liberalism set up the more urban Protestant one.(*7) It did
not fight religion, but made religious fervor more intense.
Seventeenth-century Liberalism did not separate Church

from State. Rather, what the early Protestants tried to do
was to guide the State, by substituting their church for that
of the aristocracy. The minister thus became their political
leader. This was most clearly exemplified in the Puritan
theocratic State established in New England. Here the
Church- State was carried to its farthest extreme; all
departments of life were supposedly regulated according to
the law of God.
Against the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, religious

Liberalism set up the Calvinist one of Predestination in an
effort to prove to the capitalist that the same eternal laws of
God which the aristocracy claimed for itself were in reality
upon his side. Whereas the capitalist declared the Law
antedated and was superior to the King and called for the
rule of Law as against the rule of Kings, who violate the
Law,(*8) the aristocrat insisted that the Law of the Realm
speaks through the King. In both cases the law of society
depended upon the law of God.
Against the luxuriousness of the Catholic Church there was

set up the asceticism of the Protestant; against the
licentiousness of the aristocracy, the thrift, the discipline
and moderation,' the sobriety and diligence of the
entrepreneurs Both advocated the rule of property, but
whereas the aristocracy, the "elite by birth and talents,"
wanted the minority of the landlords graced by the will of
God to do the ruling, the business man wanted the "elite of
character" to do the leading, and those qualities which
constituted character were precisely the godlike virtues
which he himself possessed in abundance. If the Catholic
34
conceived of the princely Pope as embodying the monopoly
of godliness, the Protestant business man took God from
the bosom of the priest and put Him in his own breast. In
religion, as elsewhere, competition replaced monopoly.
The Liberal Church militantly advanced on all fronts in the

struggle against the old order, of which the Catholic clergy
were but a part. The Catholic Church had banned as usury
the lending of money at interest; this was now permitted.
The old Church had praised charity to beggars; beggary
was now looked upon as a crime.
Protestantism had brought no good to the masses of

English poor, however. With the rise of capitalism their
standards became worsened. In the Middle Ages ". . .
fortunately for the English people . . . their habit, even
under the adverse circumstances of their existence and the
uncleanly ways of their life, was always to subsist on
abundant provisions of naturally high quality. They ate
wheaten bread, drank barley beer, and had plenty of cheap,
though perhaps coarse, meat. Mutton and beef. were within
the reach of far more people than they now are."(*9)"I find
that the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the
sixteenth were the golden age of the English labourer, if we
are to interpret the wages which he earned by the cost of
the necessaries of life. At no time were wages, relatively
speaking, so high, and at no time was food so cheap.(*10)"
Wages were about six pence per day when the weekly cost
of food averaged but six pence. The working day was one
of eight hours. Often the workers were paid for Sundays
and holidays and given their maintenance besides.(*11)
It is with Henry VIII that the sharp change occurred. The

currency was debased, the wages fell, the guilds protecting
the artisans were destroyed.
35
This process was continued under Queen Elizabeth.
Between the middle of Elizabeth's reign and the breaking
out of the Parliamentary war, prices doubled.(*12)
Pauperism greatly increased. Wages were fixed at an
extremely low level. In 1593, "The work of a whole year
would not supply the labourer with the quantity which in
1495 the labourer earned with fifteen weeks' labour.(*13)
The demand for labor was very great, since the markets
were being extended and machinery had not as yet been
introduced. The capitalists declared, with Luther, that
pilgrimages, saints' days, and monasteries were an excuse
for idleness and must be suppressed; vagrants either must
be banished or compelled to labor. Innumerable writers
advanced schemes for reformed workhouses, which should
be places at once of punishment and of training. If, under
feudal traditions, the individual had called upon authority
and social forces to aid him, now he was to rely only upon
his individual will and work. Man, individual man, became
the center of the universe.
As the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century

progressed, new forces began to enter the arena and to
impart a different color to the Liberal movement. The Great
Rebellion began to outstrip its original aims, as the French
Revolution was to do a hundred years later. After the first
Civil War (1642-1646), the Liberals, who in England were
the Presbyterians, took control of the government through
the Long Parliament. These Liberals comprised those
wealthy elements who were discontented with their lack of
political power. They sought to make the King responsible
to them, but by no means did they wish more power than
that vested in them through a Constitutional Monarchy in
which they had the decisive voice.(*14) However, it was not
36
these wealthy elements who had fought the war. The small
and middle property holders had borne the brunt of the
fighting, and already the masses were beginning to stir in
their own right. They attempted to push the Revolution
farther and farther to the Left, and it was they who now
turned Liberalism into Radicalism.
The Radicals had separated themselves from the

Presbyterians, and, since all movements at this time took on
a religious garb, had organized the Independents. During
the Civil War these Independents formed the Party of
Levellers. The Independents, in turn, were divided into
various sects, according to the class position of their
members. To the Right, representing the upper section of
these middle layers, the "country gentlemen," were the
Puritans(*15) (corresponding in religious views to the
Congregationalist Church in the United States, although in
England some retained their presbyters). This upper section
was able to win over many of the nobility and the clergy as
well as strata of the lower orders of artisans and peasants,
and it was this group who dominated. The military and
political leaders of the Puritans were Cromwell and Ireton;
the Puritan element formed the caste of the lower officers in
the Army of Rebellion (the higher officers were mostly
Presbyterians). However, few of these officers were part of
the Levellers, who, as yeomen and city apprentices,
composed the main bulk of the army soldiery.
Among the Puritans there arose a fight on the part of the

common soldiers against those they regarded as the
"Gentlemen" Independents, and the soldiers formed their
own council to which were elected two from each company.
Cromwell's views of the Levellers and his class bias are well
illustrated by the following: "It is some satisfaction if a
commonwealth must perish, that it perish by men and not
37
by the hands of persons differing little from beasts! that if it
must needs suffer, it sh'd rather suffer from rich men, than
from poor men, who, as Solomon says 'when they oppress
leave nothing behind them but a sweeping rain."(*16)
To the Left of the Puritans, made up of still poorer elements,

were such groups as the Anabaptists,(*17) and the
Quakers.(*18) This Left Wing of the Independents, differing
from the Puritans, was called "Separatist" because it desired
the separation of Church and State. Whereas the Puritans
fused morality and law and wanted to make the State moral,
the Separatist Left Wing wanted mutual tolerance, although
those on the extreme left were hostile to the State as such.
The Quakers could be described, in a way, as religious

Anarchists with some Social-Democratic ideas. Living and
dressing simply and by regulation, the Quakers regarded
all Christians, even women, as priests. They refused to take
off their hats to anyone. They advocated the separation of
Church and State and were opposed to all paid clergy, and
to the payment of tithes. Repudiating war, standing for
penal and prison reform, for widest dissemination of
education and science, and opposed to slavery, the Quakers
played a prominent part in the reform movement in the
eighteenth century. Theirs was a religion without ritual,
and they were the founders of middle class philanthropy.
The recognized leader of the Quakers, John Bellers, took the

view that labor was the standard of value by which to
measure all necessaries. He wrote: "If there were no
labourers, there would be no Lords. And if the Labourers
did not raise more Food, and Manufactures than what did
subsist themselves, every Gentlemen must be a Labourer,
and idle Men must starve."(*19) During the days of the Civil
Wars, however, it was not Bellers, whose influence came
38
later, who was the spiritual father of the Quakers, but
Jerrard Winstanley.(*20)
Winstanley was the leader of the extreme Left wing, known

as the "True Levellers" or Diggers. They were called
"Diggers" because they dared to dig on the common lands,
retaking them from the landlords and reclaiming them for
the whole people. In a stirring "Declaration from the Poor
Oppressed People of England: Directed to all that call
themselves or are called Lords of Manor&," the Diggers
boldly averred: "---. the Earth was not made puposely for
you to be Lords of it, and we to be your Slaves. .---.
Therefore we are resolved to be cheated no longer, nor to be
held under the slavish fear of you no longer, seeing the
Earth was made for us as well as for you."(*21)
In his chief work(*22) Winstanley advocates a system of

society where the land shall be worked in common, where
buying and selling, which are the causes of war, are
abolished, where no money circulates, where there exist
common storehouses to which all bring their goods, and
where all have the duty to work. There he staunchly affirms:
"No man can be rich, but he must be rich, either by his own
labors, or by the labors of other men helping him. If a man
have no help from his neighbor, he shall never gather an
Estate of hundreds and thousands a year: If other men help
him to work, then are those Riches his Neighbors, as well as
his; for they be the fruit of other mens labors as well as his
own."(*23)
Under Winstanley's proposed rule there would be no

lawyers or clergymen. Marriage would be based on love.
The Administration of the State would be elected annually,
all voting except those who aided the king, and capitalists
who bought or sold the produce of the land.(*24) Poor men,
39
tested in struggle, would be chosen to lead the
Commonwealth.
Even the most militant of the Levellers, such men as John

Lilburne, shied away from the extreme program of the
Diggers; Lilburne, indeed, expressly disclaimed any
sympathy with their views.(*25)
"On April 16 appeared a new manifesto, in which he

[Lilburne] and his comrades protested against the
application of the term Levellers to themselves, especially if
it was understood to include a desire for the 'equaling of
men's estates, and taking away of the proper right and title
that every man has to what is his own." (*26) Yet, among
the mass of poor people who composed the Party of
Levellers, only the Diggers represented the laboring
interests solely. Many of them were Deists, some Atheists;
later many identified themselves with the Quakers. (*27)
As the first Civil War came to an end with the victory of the
Long Parliament and the Presbyterians over the King, these
Liberals found that the Army had begun to take the theories
of democracy seriously. (*28) The Army Levellers insisted
that since Parliament itself represented only a minority,
Parliament yield to the people. Parliament had retained the
game laws and tithes, had preserved the privileges of the
great trading companies and now, thoroughly frightened,
began to make overtures to the King and tried to disband
the Army. Whereupon, the Army broke into Parliament,
cleaned out the Liberals, and left only the Independents in a
Rump Parliament." (*29) This led to the second Civil War
(1648-1649) in which the King's forces, although now aided
by the Liberal Presbyterians, were decisively crushed. (*30)
From the very beginning the bourgeoisie had been fearful

that the, Civil War would go too far in upsetting the
40
property structure. At first the army of Parliament had been
led by several big Lords but after the defeat of the king at
Marston Moor these officers were mortally afraid not of
being defeated but of beating the king too much. They
therefore sabotaged the further conduct of the War and
Cromwell was forced to bring charges against the Earl of
Manchester. (*31) As the old officers laid down their
commissions Cromwell's Model Army took the lead. In his
turn, Cromwell, too, tried to restrict the composition of the
army. Captain Cromwell told Cousin Hampden, "They
never would get on with a set of poor tapsters and town-
apprentice people, fighting against men of honour. To cope
with men of honour they must have men of religion." (*32)
None the less, in spite of all of Cromwell's efforts, his men
began to get out of hand and to set up their own soldiers
Soviets and their own dual power to Parliament.
The wealthy and middle property holders had defeated the

aristocracy; the middle and poor property holders had
defeated the wealthy Liberals. Now it was the turn of the
middle property holder to feel the pressure of the poorer
classes, comprised of yeomen, apprentices, and artisans.
Under their plebeian pressure, Charles I was executed, and
the Commonwealth proclaimed.
The Levelers, as a Democratic party, stood for manhood

suffrage, for the rights of the soldier as against the officer,
for equal electoral divisions, for biennial parliaments, for a
Republic, for careful restriction of the rights of Parliament
as against those of the people. To these proposals were
added demands for a direct tax according to wealth, and for
measures for the insurance of work and the decent
maintenance of the poor, the aged, and the sick. However,
not even this democratic group would go so far as to urge
that wage earners or paupers should vote. (*33)
41
The attitude of the leading Puritan gentlemen towards the
interests of labor was quite clear. "The eager spirits who
crowded into the House of Commons, the mounted
yeomen who rode with Hampden, the men who fought and
won at Marston Moor and Naseby, thought no more of the
peasant and the workman, had no more care for bettering
him, than the Irish Patriots of 1782 cared for the kernes and
cottiers on whose labours they lived. For in the midst of this
battle of giants --- the English poor who lived by wages
were sinking lower and lower, and fast taking their place in
the contrast with the opulence which trade and commerce
began, and manufacturing activity multiplied, as the
beggarly hewers and drawers of prosperous and
progressive England." (*34)
When Leveller agitation became acute in 1647, the leaders

of the Model Army laid down the law in no uncertain terms.
Cromwell" ... branded the proposal for the universal
franchise as anarchy, and carried a vote dismissing officers
and agitators alike to their regiments. (*35) And "Ireton
developed his theory of the English Constitution, namely,
that it was intended to secure property. To that end it had
limited the suffrage to those who had a fixed stake in the
kingdom. Once extend this franchise to all men on the
ground that by nature they had a right to it, as necessary to
their liberties, and all property was gone; for it could be
argued on the same ground that by nature any man had a
right to any property that he needed for his support." (*36)
When some of the poor soldiers stepped up and asked what
rights did they have since they possessed no property,
Ireton brazenly replied the right to live under the rule of
property.
Just as Parliament had tried to restrict the King, so did the

Levellers try to define the powers of Parliament. In the
42
beginning of their struggle against the privileges of the
Crown, in 1640, the leaders of Parliament had been careful
not to deny that the source of the law lay in the King, but
merely claimed that the law-making powers of the King
were limited by the fundamental law of the land. It was this
fundamental law, indeed, that protected the law-making
prerogatives of the Crown. Later, in 1642, Parliament began
to maintain that it was the sole interpreter of what the law
of the land really was. "The power to interpret the
constitution of the kingdom was the bridge that carried the
Long Parliament from the doctrine of the supremacy of the
law to the doctrine of the supremacy of Parliament." (*37) In
the end Parliament decided to assert that it, and it alone,
could make the law, since, it was declared, Parliament was
the supreme council to the King, whose advice the King
was bound to take. Thus Parliament became like a supreme
court from which there was no appeal and took on the
functions of court, council and legislature.
But "if every regal act on the part of the King could be
supposed to be the result of counsel, and if he were
debarred from accepting other counsel than that of
Parliament, he became a mere automaton to register its
decrees." (*38) Parliament had begun the struggle with the
claim that the King had to listen to the representatives of
the people, it ended up with refusing the King any say
whatever and claiming absolute power not only over the
King but over the people as well.
It was now the turn of the Levellers to point out that it was
ridiculous on the part of Parliament to claim to represent
the nation as a whole when so many were disfranchised. If
the people might on occasion revoke the grant of power
they had made to a king, they could also revoke the grant of
power they had made to their representatives and that the
43
real source of the law lay not in Parliament but in the
people.
The "Gentlemen" Independents, who, under the pressure of

events had joined with the soldiers against the Liberal
Parliament, soon came to blows with their Left Wing. The
leaders of the democrats were shot or jailed. The
insurrectionary move within the army was put down with a
stern hand. The Rump Parliament, now only a handful and
thoroughly futile, was dissolved, (*39) the Protectorate
established, and the Revolution ended. (*40)
"The Leveller constitutional theories, however, have not

vanished from the world. Around the fundamental
principle of the limitation of government by paramount law,
the Levellers developed a body of constitutional and
political doctrines that suggest the main theories of
American constitutional law. The sovereignty of the people,
the inalienable right of the individual, the binding force of
paramount law, the enforcement of political law by judicial
action-all of these are American doctrines." (*41)
Under Cromwell the government did not go beyond

limited Liberal propositions. Every concession was made to
the wealthy classes. Only a small number of the leading
Royalists lost the whole of their estates, the rest merely
having to pay fines ranging from one-tenth to one-third of
the value of their property. Titles were not abolished, and
Church and State not separated, although a good deal of
toleration was permitted, even towards the Jews. (*42)
Liberal reforms took place in the courts, in civil and
criminal law, and in taxation. Civil marriage was
established (*43) at this period, relief of prisoners for debt
was effected, and some care for lunatics was inaugurated.
44
Cromwell laid the basis for the imperialist policy of
England. Under him, the first trade war was begun against
Holland, Nationalism was fostered, the Navy was
thoroughly reorganized, and reaction was defeated. The
United Kingdom was saved, Scotland and Ireland subdued.
Upon these developments, the Liberals hastened to end

their opposition to the Dictatorship of Cromwell. Indeed,
they urged him to take the crown, since to these Liberals
both a republic and a democracy were equally unbearable.
Later, upon the death of Cromwell, this Liberal group was
able to effect the "Glorious Whig Revolution" and bring the
line of William of Orange into England on the basis of a
Constitutional Monarchy and the supremacy of Parliament,
under which the big capitalist elements could control." (*44)
The upper layers of the middle class had emerged

triumphant from the political revolution of the seventeenth
century. But the strain had been a severe one, and they had
been forced to put forth theoreticians who would extricate
politics from religion and attempt to state their position in
scientific terms. Such policies became all the more necessary
as the Liberals attempted to work out a Petition of Rights
for themselves and constitutions for the American colonies.
Attuned to the general advance by science, the Liberal
Whigs were forced to become pioneers in the science of
politics and in constitution-making. From the upper middle
class the modern theorists of Liberalism first arise; Locke
(*45) and Hume, the forerunner and founder respectively of
the Utilitarian school, dominate the scene in England and in
America for over a hundred years.
The wealthy capitalists now coming into power in England

realized clearly that they had arrived at their position only
45
as the result of compromise. In their Liberal way they had
opposed both the old regime and the Revolution. The
progress of the Civil Wars had revealed what a small
proportion of the population they actually constituted.
They hastened, then, to make peace with all possible
elements, whether royalist or democratic. The turmoil of
the Rebellion and the Restoration and the struggles of the
various groups for power had shown them the need for a
new program and a new set of principles.
We have seen that both the Liberals and the Radicals, in

their fight against the Absolute Monarchy, had called for
government by law and not by one man. The law was to be
the law of God as evinced in the traditional customs and
laws of the country, a law which, it was claimed, Charles I
had violated. But the violence of the Revolution had
unleashed, it seemed, many different conceptions of God
and many diverse points of view. If the Liberals were to
establish any sort of stable government, it was vital for
them to compromise with as many of the sects as possible,
and to tolerate them all, except those irreconcilables that
stood for active revolution or counter-revolution. To do this,
it was necessary for the Liberals to drop entirely what
seemed to them the inadequate laws of God and to try to
reach some more enduring, steadier basis for their theory.
To the English more propitious even than the laws of God

were the laws of nature. Nature had been good to the
English. It had placed them in the exact center of world
trade. Nature had created a stormy Channel between them
and their rivals; it had provided them with large groups of
excellent artisans; it was the storehouse for the materials of
their production by which they had built up the strongest
economy in the world. England had long produced the
finest wool. Now the services of Flemish weavers driven to
46
England by the Dutch Wars were available. By the
seventeenth century minerals, too, were being worked. It
followed naturally that England should be a home of
physics, mathematics, invention, science (Bacon, Newton).
Since the laws of Nature were kindly, they gradually
became idealized as eternal, became synthesized into
Natural Law; and from Natural Law evolved the "Natural
Rights of Man."
For centuries before John Locke, various theories of Natural

Law had been propounded. In their struggle against the
temporal powers, the Popes and Catholic Church
theoreticians had often tried to show that God's Law did
not necessarily mean the King's Law. Indeed, the Jesuits
had set forth a regular theory of tyrannicide to apply
wherever the King repudiated God's Law. Under St.
Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, the church
theory was developed that God's Law speaks through
Natural Law, a body of eternal moral principles hallowed
by God and the Church and to be discovered by reason; or,
as St. Thomas Aquinas puts it: Natural Law was a reflection
of the "reason of divine wisdom governing the whole
universe." (*46)
We have already seen that the growth of the power of the

Catholic Church coincided with the breakdown of
feudalism and the emergence of the Renaissance. In setting
up its system of Natural Law above the rules and precepts
of the given States, the Church was in reality reflecting a
new morality and culture that was coming to life with the
money-men. At the same time the Church was bolstering
up its own authority and that of the Canon Law.
We have also noted that by the sixteenth century, with the

rise of the factory system and the growth of the class
struggles within each country, the Church became
47
subordinate to the national State, even in Catholic countries.
And when Spain began to rule Italy and to nominate the
Popes, Church intellectuals, no longer able to dominate the
State, could only try to control it. This the great Jesuit
organization set out to do; for centuries it was eminently
successful in cementing together the interests of Catholic
King and Church.
It was at this time, too, that the Roman Law was being
adopted throughout Europe. When ancient Rome became a
great State, the old regulations of the Twelve Tables, which
had guided the rulers of the old clans or gens, were suitable
no longer for the new conditions, and these old rules, had
been modified by the Jurisconsults, especially as they
affected members of other groups not Roman tribesmen. A
body of law called ius gentium had been compiled,
embracing also principles supposed to be of universal
validity supported by the morality and decency of all
communities. The standards of the ius gentium became
homologous to those of Natural Law. Natural Law thus
became regarded as the law that applied to all humanity,
regardless of the civil laws, and that ought to, apply to an
races and nations in their conduct among themselves.
The ius gentium had been codified under the Christian

Roman Emperor Justinian. Using this Code as a basis and
conforming with the new political developments of Europe
in the sixteenth century, there arose, naturally foremost in
Spain, a school of jurist-Theologians who developed
the ius gentiutn into a body of Natural Law that could act to
restrain states and limit their activities both in regard to
other states (Spain's control over the Vatican?) and in
regard to the relation of State to subject. At the same time
individual activity also could be limited by these principles
of Natural Law.
48
With the rise of the Protestant revolt, and particularly with
the break of the Dutch from both Spain and the Catholic
Church, Jurisprudence and Law were finally divorced from
theology, and the system of Natural Law was conceived as
based, not upon Canon or Church Law or even upon the
Roman Law exclusively, but solely upon eternal reason.
However, with Grotius, the pious belief was also put forth
that it is the will of God to will only reason, and in England,
the same viewpoint was expressed later by Blackstone. (*47)
Thus, according to these thinkers, civil law-the precepts and
commands of the State-is limited by certain principles of
morality which are eternal and superior to State law.
Through this fiction of Natural Law, the new business class
was pressing its own morality and trying to make the law
conform to the new standards necessary to the rising class.
With Grotius, as later with Blackstone, this abstract Natural
Law is translated into the "Natural Rights" of humans that
the law is bound to defend. (*48)
Thus in England, at first, Natural Law was not conceived to

be in opposition to God's Law. Indeed, it was part of God's
Law, the way God's Law worked out. By this device,
however, theory became concentrated upon Natural Law
and evaded God's supernatural Law. We have seen that
Protestantism had brought God from the heavens and
centered Him in man. Religion had become earthly, and the
philosophers now became more and more materialistic.
Soon church law could be ignored. (*49)
Natural Law was substituted not only for God's Law but for
the laws of man. The law of the State had to conform to the
Law of Nature as then conceived. Man was part of nature.
(*50) He possessed natural rights as part of the Law of
Nature. Herein the English differed from the Spanish and
church theologians who had preceded them, in that the
49
English tended to put Natural Law upon the same basis as
any law of science. At the same time, however, the English
identified as far as possible this Natural Law with the
historic rights of Englishmen and the ancient customs of the
country. Just as science was discovering the laws of physics,
mathematics, astronomy, etc, so could man's reason
discover the Natural and Eternal Rights of Man. Once
discovered, these could not be changed by society nor by
any laws of the State, for this would be in violation of the
Law of Nature and could spell only revolution and
destruction.
In previous centuries, in the setting up of an ideal system of

Natural Law superior to State positive law, by no means
had there been an attempt to overthrow the temporal
authority of the State as against its subjects. Indeed, the
doctrines of Aquinas were used as a prop to authority
rather than as a means of shaking it, for the idea that
positive law must conform with Natural Law could always
be used to prove that whatever the civil law, it was in true
conformity with the eternal and immutable principles of
God and Nature. This was essentially the smug position of
Blackstone. The great importance of the English Liberal
theoreticians, however, consisted in the fact that they used
the principles of Natural Law to 'break down the authority
and rules of the State as then existing. With Locke, as later
with Thomas Paine and Rousseau, theories of Natural Law
take on a revolutionary color.
Here, then, was the thesis of the Liberals of 1688 and of the
eighteenth century. It was the inevitable product of their
political position. The Liberals fought the positive religions
of the classes both above and below them with agnostic and
sceptic metaphysics. Against the dogmatic laws, eternal and
immutable, of this or that church which proclaimed either
50
the old aristocracy or the new democracy as rulers, the
Liberals now set up the eternal and immutable laws of
Nature by which they alone might rule. God became more
and more impersonal and finally faded away entirely.
In the seventeenth century, neither one nor the other of the

combatants could achieve an historical, evolutionary point
of view. Material interests and positions of conflicting
classes were forced to take on "eternal" and "inalienable"
forms. With science yet poorly developed, and with the
mass of people illiterate agrarians, this was the most
effective and indeed the sole method open to the Liberals;
they had to find for themselves a "solid" and "eternal" basis
for their rule as reliable as that which the former ruling
classes had possessed.
Between the Royalists and the Radicals, the position of the

Liberals, as the beneficiaries of the Compromise Liberal
Revolution of 1688, forced them into a completely eclectic
and compromising program which borrowed now from
this group, now from that, to justify things as they were.
Atheism and the Catholic Church, Royalty and Democracy,
landlords and plebeians, all factions had to be fought, all
had to be appeased. And as the Liberals balanced one
against the other, it seemed to them that they alone were
tolerant, were fair and impartial, could see both sides to
every subject. Theirs was the common sense, middle-of-the-
road position which to them became the golden-rule
method whereby the greatest amount of steady progress
could be attained.
Here is one difference between Liberals and Radicals; one

speaks in terms of "tolerance," the other of "intolerance." But
as Thomas Paine keenly remarked on this subject,
"Toleration is not the opposite of Intolerance, but is the
counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to
51
itself the right of withholding Liberty of Conscience, and
the other of granting it." (*51) Together with this accent on
toleration goes the emphasis on the force of reason and
persuasion. Yet the intellect can be only a guide and not a
force. It cannot substitute itself for visceral sensations, for
human emotions and passions which alone can drive
people to change the world. The social philosophy of
reasonableness could be adopted only by those who were
especially favored, who could refuse to act too strenuously,
who, in short, represented a small clique who could make
their way by intrigue, but never by fighting, to power. Such,
essentially, were the Liberals.
On the questions of religion and philosophy, eclectic

Liberalism showed itself a veritable artful dodger in
evading issues; it stole piecemeal points from the programs
of now one side, now the other. (*52) God existed. But He
could be known not through logic but only through
intuitive reason. Religion was founded upon faith. But both
faith and religion must correspond to the laws of nature,
which are reasonable. Christianity itself was correct, but
only because it was reasonable. As for miracles and acts of
providence, all these were possible, provided they were
reasonable. However, did not knowledge come from God,
and was not man blessed at birth with different capacities,
of which the nobles had the greater share? No, man was
conditioned by environment entirely. He entered this world
with a blank mind; (*53) all entered equally; all knowledge
(opinion) was derived from sensational experience.
On the other hand, matter or substance, independent of

thought, also really existed, (*54) although it, too, like God,
could never be known. (*55) All we could ever know were
the qualities, the characteristics, the actions of matter or
substance. The views of science were mere changeable
52
opinions. Moreover, matter, existing and acting
independently of man, affected man. Man's will, therefore,
was not free, but determined by environment. (*56) Was
man, then, part of matter; could matter think? Yes, matter
could think. But, matter could not substitute itself for God;
it was simply the way in which God worked.
So much for philosophy. What about politics? The on-

coming capitalist class, in its fight against the entrenched
feudalists, was forced to take other ground than that of
class distinctions to justify its power. To the Status of
feudalism the bourgeoisie counterposed Contract, the term
with which they above all were familiar, and through the
operations of which they had amassed wealth and power.
To the question: "What was the origin and justification of
State power?" these new businessmen answered that the
State had come into existence, not as an expression of God's
unchanging will, but as the voluntary contract through
which men hoped to get liberty .Even a section of the
aristocracy in England, that part which had become
thoroughly bourgeois, had begun to justify its existence on
the basis of the Social Contract. Their new theoretician was
Hobbes, (*57) who declared that man in the state of nature
had preceded man in the social state. To Hobbes, man was
born bad. The state of nature was marked by everyone's
fighting everyone else for material interests. To escape from
this intolerable condition, men had covenanted together to
form a society with a definite hierarchy headed by a
monarch. In this way natural man achieved liberty through
the power of the State. Liberty meant power. Absolute
Monarchy could not be changed; to do so would be to break
the sacredness of the original contract. Moreover, Absolute
Monarchy meant an ordered society which alone could
bring liberty to all.
53
That sections of the aristocracy could utilize "Contract" as a
ground of defense shows to what extent capitalist opinions
had penetrated into the highest strata of English society. In
proportion as the noblemen had to submit to the capitalist
class, their theory had to change from a defense of Status to
a defense of Contract, from reliance on force to dependence
on persuasion and reason, from faith in divine right to
materialist metaphysics. The aristocrats formerly
defended the rigid status of their caste by Divine Right.
Now they were willing to concede that they had not ruled
from the beginning of time, that there had existed a system
of "natural" society antedating theirs. However, the
aristocrats conceded this only in order to claim that their
rule had advanced the material forces of society and
through order and power had brought freedom out of
chaos. It was the defeat the aristocracy was undergoing that
gave such gloominess to Hobbes' views. Certainly man was
bad to the ancien regime. But, for that matter, so were the
material forces of nature, so favorable to the capitalists.
Gradually the Liberals expanded and embellished the

theory of Social Contract to fit their own interests. Their
program also admitted that classes had not always ruled
and that there had been a primitive state of nature. To the
Liberal, however, man in the state of nature had been not
bad, but good. The political State was not necessary to
make man moral. (*58) He had been endowed by Natural
Law with certain Natural Rights. These Natural Rights
were to be found in the Petition of Rights of 1688. They
were founded on the necessity of each man for life, liberty,
and property. In order better to secure these rights, men
had entered into a voluntary covenant to form a society.
This covenant was not eternal. The past could not bind
forever the present and future. When the majority desired
to change the covenant, when they felt their inalienable
54
Natural Rights were being taken away, they had the right to
revolt and to overthrow the State. (*59) Sovereignty resided
in the community as a whole. Thus did Liberalism become
a theory for the justification of revolution, at least of the
Liberal Revolution of 1688.
In politics, as it had in religion, Liberalism used an

individualistic approach which later became the chief
approach. Individual liberty was every man's objective in
society. Nevertheless, since liberty must not mean liberty to
interfere with one's neighbor, who was to decide where one
individual's liberty began and the other's ended? The State
was to be the judge, the State which stood above classes.
Thus Liberalism justified the State, at least the Liberal State
of 1688, and thundered to the rabble that the Revolution
had to end.
In practical politics, the Liberals advocated a monarchy, but

a constitutional monarchy, with the Crown dependent
upon a Parliament wherein the Liberals dominated all
functions, including ministerial responsibility, financial
control, and the army. While the Liberals opposed certain
Rotten Boroughs, in order to secure for themselves a few
more seats in Parliament, they were also against an
enlarged franchise. In order to check the Crown, they were
in favor of the governmental division of powers between
the legislative and executive branches.
In the economic sphere, the Liberals made it plain that it

was the wealthy commercial groups that had won the battle
for power. Here, too, we turn to Locke. According to him,
property was based on labor, and arose when, in primitive
communism, an individual applied his labor to some object.
(*60) Of course, with Locke, the owners of the means of
production, such as the factory entrepreneurs, were also
included among the laborers. Each individual, and
55
especially the wealthy English capitalists, had the full right
to use his property to his own advantage. Locke also fought
for the wealthy to receive full gold coins from the State in
repayment for light coins loaned. (*61) Locke was a
mercantilist. To him, wealth meant gold, and it belonged in
the pockets of his class. He stood against lowering the rate
of interest by law. In foreign affairs, he promoted that
ruthless mercantilist colonial policy which helped to launch
the American Revolution. (*62)
In his attitude towards the actual laborer, Locke was

exceedingly harsh. He advocated compulsory labor for the
Irish linen spinners' children who were to be sent to
"schools" to work. His plan for reform of the poor laws was
to suppress the brandy shops and to compel able-bodied
paupers to work. Beggars were to be sent to government
ships for three years under strict discipline or be punished
by three years in prison. The remainder of the paupers were
to be farmed out to manufacturers under a plan similar to
that advocated for the children of the Irish linen spinners.
(*63)Such was English Liberalism in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
footnotes
1. It is this Kingly support of business that impels historians

to label these absolute monarchs "benevolent," no doubt.
2. It was in connection with this struggle for sea power that

Grotius wrote his work, on The Freedom of the Seas, and, as
Holland invaded the fisheries under English control, forced
the tart reply by the Englishman Selden's book, Mare
Clausum, or The Sea Closed. Later the battle for the freedom
of the seas was to be taken up by the Americans.
56
3. Grotius wrote his chief work, The Rights of War and Peace,
in 1625; Spinoza's works were published in 1670 and 1677.
4. R. H. Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp. 111-

112
5. See C.H. Firth: Cromwell’s Army, p 22.
6. The great philosopher of this change was Machiavelli.
7. "Like early Christianity and modern socialism, Calvinism

was largely an urban movement; like them, in its earlier
days it was carried from country to country partly by
emigrant traders and workmen; and its stronghold was
precisely in those social groups to which the traditional
scheme of social ethics, with its treatment of economic
interests as a quite minor aspect of human affairs, must
have seemed irrelevant or artificial. As was to be expected
in the exponents of a faith which had its headquarters at
Geneva, and later its most influential adherents in great
business centers, like Antwerp, with its industrial
hinterland, London, and Amsterdam, its leaders addressed
their teaching, not of course exclusively, but none the less
primarily, to the classes engaged in trade and industry,
who formed the most modern and progressive elements in
the life of the age." (R. H. Tawney: Religion and the rise of
Capitalism, p. 104.)
8. It was well expressed by Coke to King James in 1612: The

King ought not to be under any man but God and the Law.
But Coke did not fail to add that if the King did do wrong,
not to the courts, but only to God was he accountable. (See
R. Pound: The Spirit of the Common Law, p 61, who, however,
carefully overlooks the second point of Coke's remarks as to
the courts' lack of power. Compare Bracton's Note Book,
edited by F. W. Maitland, 1, 29-33.)
57
9. J. E. T. Rogers: Work and Wages, p.81 (abbreviated edition
of Six Centuries of work and Wages, 1891 Swann
Sonnenschein edition).
10. The same, p. 27
11. The Same, p.28 and following.
12. The same, p.45.
13. The same, p 58.
14. The Liberals desired no taxation except through

Parliament, no arbitrary arrests and high-handed trials, no
quartering of soldiers.
15. Naturally enough, the Puritans looked to Holland and

America for their inspiration. Note that in America the
Puritans and Left Independents, typified by the Pilgrims
and by Roger Williams, were mutually hostile. The latter
were for yeomen, the former for renters and laborers to
settle in their colonies. Democratic Hooker had to leave
Puritan Massachusetts for Connecticut where it was
decided voters did not have to be church members.
16. Cromwell, as quoted in E. Bernstein: Cromwell and

Communism, p. 164.
"To the doctrines of these men -- now beginning to be

known as Levellers --- no one could be more hostile than
Cromwell." (S. R. Gardner: The History of the Great Civil
War, 1642-1649, 111, 216.)
17. In the preceding century, the Anabaptists had been

responsible for the peasants' wars in Germany. They,
therefore, had a Communist tradition.
18. The Quakers were just arising at this time.

58
19. J. Bellers: An Essay for Imploying the Poor to Profit (printed
1723), p.1.
20. "It is almost impossible to read Winstanley's earlier

theoretical pamphlets without being struck by the similarity
in thought and doctrine with those to-day still held by the
Society of Friends, or Quakers, whose original name
amongst themselves, be it remembered, was the Children of
Light." (L. H. Berens: The Digger Movement in the Days of the
Commonwealth, p. 49.)
21. The same, pp.90-91.
22. The Law of Freedom in a Platform or True Magistracy

Restored (1652).
23. The same, p. 12.
24. Thus Winstanley was a forerunner of Lenin's theory of

the democratic-dictatorship of the workers and peasants.
25. G. P. Gooch: English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth

Century, pp. 178-179.
26. S. R. Gardner: History of the Commonwealth and

Protectorate, 1649-1660, 1, 47.
27. The following may clarify the complicated situation

somewhat:
Political Category -- Liberals
Religious View -- Presbyterian
Political Category — Radicals
Religious View — Independent ("Gentlemen" Puritans);

leader: Cromwell
59
Political Category — Radical-Levellers (leader: Lilburne)
Religious View — Independent (Puritans) -- Separatist

(Quakers); leader: Bellers (Anabaptists etc.)
Political Category — "True" Levellers, or Diggers (Social-

Revolutionists) (leader: Winstanley)
Religious View — Theist, Deist or Atheist (some Quakers

and Anabaptists)
28. See "The Agreement of the People as presented to the

Council of the Army, Oct. 28, 1647" in
S. R.. Gardner: The History of the Great Civil War, 1642-1649,

111, 607-609, Appendix.
29. In this attack on the Long Parliament, "Cromwell joined

the army because he wished to prevent the outbreak of
anarchy or civil war." (C. H. Firth- Oliver Cromwell, p.164.)
30. The Liberal Presbyterians held the City of London;

unlike Paris of 1793, Liberal London was against the
Radicals.
31. T. Carlyle: Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, I, 195

(1897 edition).
32. The same, p.128.
33. Under the influence of the Levellers, Harrington wrote

his Utopia, The Commonwealth of Oceana.
34. J. E. T. Rogers: work cited, p.97.
35. T. C. Pease: The Leveller Movement, p.224.
36. The same, p.219.
60
37. The same, p.7.
38. The same, p.20.
39. In 1640 there had been 490 members of Parliament; in

1649 there were only 90.
"The policy of Cromwell had been to establish a

contemptible Parliament. He was successful, and the
Parliament which he had created had become the laughing-
stock of the nation. The day arrived when Parliament,
owning its own unworthiness, resigned its authority to
Cromwell." (Napoleon's Notes on English History, p.111,
published 1905.)
40. The English capitalists were able to stop the Revolution

far more easily than the French a century later. This abrupt
end of the Revolution made all the leading characters
appear thwarted and confined. Oliver Cromwell thus can
be made out as both Robespierre and Bonaparte; John
Lilburne as both Marat and Hebert. Such comparisons,
however, must be guarded against as liable to
misconstructions.
41. T. C. Pease work cited, p. 363.
42. More toleration was allowed the Catholics and Jews

than the Unitarians. However, in the American and French
Revolutions, the principal Liberals were by that time either
Unitarian or Deist.
43. The various religious groups had different policies in

regard to marriage. The Catholics believed in no divorce
whatever; the Anglicans, divorce for adultery only; the
Puritans advocated civil marriage, and divorce for
desertion and cruel treatment. The earlier treatment for
adulterers in Massachusetts (Puritan) was death. Later, it
61
was changed to branding with a hot iron. In Plymouth, the
Separatists were milder. As for the Quakers, they condoned
divorce for all the various reasons given by the Bible.
44. It was no wonder that in 1899 a statue of the regicide

Cromwell should have been erected in Westminster with
the Crown's consent.
45. Locke was born in 1632 and was forced to flee to

Holland in 1683 after the Restoration (1660-1688). He
returned to England in 1689. His principal works were
written between 1689 and 1700.
46. See R. Pound: Law and Morals, p. 8.
"It is therefore evident that the natural law is nothing else

than the rational creature's participation of the eternal law."
(St. Thomas Aquinas: The Summa Theologica, Part II, First
Part Question XCI, Article 2, p. 12, 1915 Translation by
Dominican Fathers.)
47. See, for example, Wm. Blackstone: Commentaries of the

Laws of England, I, 39 (1858 Harper edition).
48. From the authority of Empire and Church as an

international agency, Grotius appealed to Humanity as
furnishing the true law of nations. (See H. Grotius.:The
Rights of War and Peace, p. 9, 1901 edition.)
49. According to Bacon, theological disputations only

hindered the advancement of science.
50. According to John Locke, the moral sense of man came

from God and was part of God's Law. It was given to man
by intuitive reasoning. Thus Locke's morality: Do good (get
pleasure); avoid evil (pain), was based on theology, and
62
differed from the moral basis of Hume and Bentham, who
came later
51. T. Paine: Rights of Man. (Writings, 1896 edition of M. D.

Conway, II, 325.)
52. The Liberal arguments given here are those culled from
the works of John Locke.
53. See J. Locke: An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding, Book I (A. C. Fraser edition).
54. The same, Book II, ch. II, par. 2, p.145.
55. The same, Book II, ch. XXVIII, par. 30, p. 415.
56. Here is where the Englishmen, Hume and Locke, differ

from Immanuel Kant.
57. His chief work was The Leviathan (1651).
58. This seemed to be also the view of the Englishman, Wm.

of Ockam, who wrote his works over two hundred years
before Locke. According to Wm. of Ockam, the moral
development of man had passed through three stages:
(1) The stage before the Fall when all things were held in
common and all men were free and equal;
(2) the stage after the Fall when the laws of Reason were
needed;
(3) the stage of wickedness when the State arose and,

together with it, economic and political servitude. (See M.
Beer: Social Struggles in the Middle Ages, p. 113.)
63
59. J. Locke: Of Civil Government, Two Treatises, Book II, ch.
VIII, par. 95, p. 164 (Everyman's edition); also, ch. XVI, par.
196, p. 217.
This was also the view of Blackstone (See Wm. Blackstone:

work cited, pp- 41-42).
60. The same, Book II, ch. V.
61. See Karl Marx: .A Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy, pp. 93-94.
62. Locke was a Commissioner of the Board of Trade. He

was also one of the original Proprietors of the Bank of
England established by Act of Parliament in 1694.
63. See Fowler: Locke, pp. 96-98
II. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
THE same elements of the Radical middle classes which in

England had been led by Cromwell, defeated in the
Restoration and later, in 1688, forced to turn over
leadership to the Liberal Whigs, in the American colonies
were able to carry through their aims successfully and to
retain leadership to the very end. The American Revolution
is thus the Second English Civil War. just as we saw
Cromwell willing to align himself temporarily with the
Radicals even to the extent of executing the King, so those
of the same type in America were willing to break violently
into Civil War even leading to actual independence. The
lawyers talked; the country gentlemen like Washington
fought.
64
From the earliest colonial days it had been the capitalists
who had entered the New World. Settlements had been
made under the auspices of business corporations such as
the London and Virginia companies, etc. These capitalist
companies had obtained vast powers under their charters;
they could coin money, regulate trade, dispose of corporate
property, collect taxes, manage their treasury, provide for
defense. Each had a constitution and a regular territory.
They were to some extent States within States.
This English development had been quite different from

that of the French or the Spanish. In the case of the French,
colonization had been effected not by chartered companies
operated by financiers, but by the central government of
France itself. The highest level the French could reach in the
New World was that of the hunting and trapping stage. The
French colonists, swamped by the primeval elements,
largely intermarried with the Indian inhabitants and
adopted their pursuits. Spanish colonization was marked
by the export from Spain not of workers but of gentlemen
conquistadors who fastened themselves upon the existing
societies of the Indians of the Caribbean and of South
America, enslaved the general population, and ruthlessly
exploited these countries with neither limit nor mercy. Thus,
capitalist development was barred to the Spanish.
The victory of the moneyed men in England, however, had

created an entirely different situation. Everywhere, and not
only in relation to North America, the leading role of
exploration and colonization had been placed in the hands
of the newer classes. An English Levant Company, a
Muscovy Company, an East India Company, and others,
had been formed; they furnished ample witness to the new
trends of the times. All of these companies had enormous
powers, and it was in the administration of these companies
65
that the capitalists obtained the experience that was to
enable them later to take over so easily the English
government.
As for the colonists themselves: "The colonists were not

conservative, satisfied and prosperous Englishmen; they
were as a rule the discontented and restless adventurers,
the poor, the vagrant, and even those of the criminal class,
or else they were those whose views of government and
religion did not accord with the practices which prevailed
in England." (*1)
"The deportation to the colonies (especially to Maryland

and Virginia) of actual criminals, chiefly non-political too,
was so common as to arouse vigorous protests on both
sides of the Atlantic. Francis Bacon declared that 'it is a
shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people
and wicked condemned men to be the people with whom
you plant' (Essay, Of Plantations); and the Virginia
Assembly in 16l7 prohibited the importation of convicts
(though the prohibition was overruled by the King).
Whatever the total number of criminals foistered thus upon
unwilling colonies, it is known that during the period 1717-
75 there were sent from one English jail alone (the old
Bailey) more than 10,000 convicts. (See Buder's account,
American Historical Review, II, 12 ff.)" (*2)
Thus we may conclude that in reality, by the colonizing

process, the middle orders of England-landed gentry of the
minor rank, merchants and yeomen, with their psychology
and social values-were reproduced in a new environment.
There is this highly significant difference, however; upon
their settlement in the American colonies all these classes
were moved upward (and backward) in the scale of
property interests and social standing. Here, except for the
agents and families of the Crown's direct forces, the Puritan
66
country gentlemen and the upper middle class represented
the topmost layer. Winthrop, Endicott, and Easton of
Massachusetts, William Penn and Lord Baltimore and
many others prominent in American life, were of this
landed gentry group, as Cromwell, Hampden, and Pym
had been.
The free virgin territory of America, and the exceptional

opportunities that went with it, coupled with the
impossibility of strict control by the home country,
militated against the crystallization of rigid class formations.
De Tocqueville considered the soil of America absolutely
opposed to territorial aristocracy, and even the British
General Carlson wrote home that he did not believe the
dignity of the British throne could be supported in the
American forests. Here is one reason why the mass of
plebeians were quite willing to rest their claims to equality
upon the Law of Nature, and to deal with these laws as
though they were the laws of the forest. Nature was a
grateful substitute for society. In the wilderness, at least,
man's inhumanity to man could be avoided.
Freed from that resistance from classes which had weighed

so heavily upon it at home, the country gentleman group in
the colonies rapidly rose to the top and tried to dominate all
the other classes. In some of the New England communities,
for example, statutes were early enacted penalizing all who
displayed adornment or other superfluous trimmings in
dress. Exempt from this ruling, however, were all
magistrates, their families, and military officers, or "such
whose quality and estate have been above the ordinary
degree though now decayed." (*3)
However, not only the Puritan and country gentlemen

groups secured social positions superior to their former
ones in England; all classes experienced the same
67
development and advanced a notch higher. The Yeoman of
England became a farmer in America; the apprentice
became a journeyman and master. In short, apparently,
the whole wheel of social evolution was turning backward;
instead of the peasant's being driven off the land to become
a proletarian, here, in innumerable cases, the European
proletarian was able to become a farmer and to go back to
the land. With the important exception of the slaves and
servants, (*4) social classes apparently no longer existed as
such, and the differences between individuals became
matters of degree and not of kind. Class conflict evaporated
into individual competition.
In all of this development, the vast spaces, the virgin soil,

the deep forests were the decisive factors. The top classes
understood this fact instinctively and made every effort to
block Western colonization. They brought in Negro slaves.
They imported indentured servants. They even stirred up
the Indians against the frontiersmen at times. They did all
in their power to raise the price of land, (*5) and when that
failed they tried to corner the land market.
Thus America became a paradise for real estate sharks. A

veritable mania for land speculation seized the wealthy
classes. One company obtained two and a half million acres,
another one-half million. Later, Congress was to give the
Ohio Land Company, in which George Washington himself
was interested, five million acres. The climax came in the
nineteenth century with the fabulous grants to railroads.
Needless to say, peculation in all legislatures was rife, land
office swindling a matter of course.
But all to no avail! The frontier rapidly moved westward

from the fall line of the eastern rivers to the Appalachian
mountains. And when Britain ruled that there must be no
further expansion west of the Appalachian sources of the
68
rivers, the law was violated, and the western pioneer
became the most enthusiastic supporter of the move for
independence. Behind all stood the pimeval forests and the
resources of nature of an entire continent, ever inviting
exploitation, and fixing the whole pattern of American life.
The slave could look towards Nature as his place of refuge,
the indentured servant as his means of escape, the bankrupt
as his "New Deal," the adventurous and ambitious as his
end of the rainbow. "Go West" was, for both old and young,
the direction for perpetual prosperity.
The domination of the frontier factors in American life for

so long a time gave reality to the illusion that no classes
existed in colonial and early American life. Indeed, class
distinctions were difficult to maintain in the West. Classes
come with property, and there was little property on the
frontier. There was no separation of the means and tools of
production from the direct producer. In the West, labor
came to mean a term including the farmer, the artisan, and
all those who owned and controlled the instruments of their
production. In this respect, the West only continued the
pre-capitalist situation that marked America from the first.
America in the beginning had been far from a capitalist
land; exploitation of man by man had been extremely
limited. Practically all the immigrants had "started from
scratch"; whatever wealth they had gained had been from
the sweat of their brow.
Here, too, a good deal of credit must be given to Mother

Nature. It is not because the American labored harder than
the European that he was able to succeed where the latter
failed. Indeed, American labor was notoriously wasteful as
compared with that in the more developed countries. It was
because in America labor and possession of the products of
labor were joined in the same person, because labor could
69
enjoy its fruits without an army of parasites, because the
untouched soil needed very little extra expenditure besides
that of labor to make it so fruitful that America was able not
only to compete with and to undersell Europe but to afford
its producers comfortable living’s as well. The expression:
"Nature is the mother, Labor the father of all value," could
well be appreciated in this new land of work.
The fact that practically all of the settlers were poor has led
to a sort of idealization in the United States of the poor and
common man. In England one would fain forget his
common stock; not so on this side of the Atlantic. Yet poor
must not be confused with proletarians The mass of
emigrants forming the basic "mother class," a class so large
that it believed no other classes existed, and thus no classes
at all, was composed neither of proletarians nor of
bourgeois but of petty bourgeois middle class elements,
trying to find prosperity and plenty. In the Western
hemisphere, the idea of class was dissolved into its matrix
of mass; that is, there were masses but no classes!
The lack of great capital and the resultant absence of

clearly-defined classes in the West have given many
historians the idea that democracy flourished in the West
from the beginning. This is not the whole truth by any
means. The West has not only given us Democracy; it has
also provided us with a wholesome contempt for all
government.
It must never be forgotten that Democracy is essentially a

type of State in which the people are supposed to control
political affairs, either directly or through representatives.
Democracy includes in its fundamental characteristics not
only the right to vote and to hold office, but also a host of
civil liberties in which the right of free speech, press, and
assemblage are the most prominent. Now, in moving West,
70
the tendency of the pioneer and frontiersman was to move
away from all government and state laws, however mild. It
was not a case of "liberalizing the law"; on the frontier the
hand of the law was not to be found at all. Whatever action
was necessary was effected by a posse made up directly of
the people involved. There were no courts, no police, no
prisons, no armed force of the State, no tax- gatherers. The
original state of the frontier can best be described not as one
of primitive Democracy, but as one of primitive
Libertarianism.
The fact that each individual on the frontier was free to act
almost exactly as he pleased, and that speech, press,
assemblage and such activity, were entirely unrestricted,
has given the impression that these were civil rights, which
has been followed, in turn, by the presumption that where
there are civil rights there must be Democracy. The answer
to this is that there can be no civil rights without the
sanction of the State. On the frontier there was no State at
all. Positive Law had become a code of morals based on the
law of the wild. Democracy means literally the rule of the
people; the pioneer tolerated no rule whatever.
Of course, there was mutual aid and self-help, but one

certainly cannot term Democracy a condition of society
where each man has run away from the State and favors the
elimination of the State. Finally, Democracy signifies not
merely a mass of civil rights; it must include the right of the
people to vote and choose their own officers. On the
frontier there was neither ballot nor officer.
Later on, as the trapper and backwoodsman and pioneer

squatter gave way to the homesteader, a regular State did
arise, even though that State did little but act as policeman,
and touched but lightly upon the farmer. Even with this
change from backwoods to agrarian life, for a long time the
71
sheriff and magistrate were the only State officers to be seen
in large areas of the country, with the exception of
government officials who came to collect payments due
private companies or the government for land.
The State that came to be formed in such Western

communities was looked upon in an entirely different light
than that which prevailed in the communities of Europe. In
the West the State, like Topsy, "just growed." There was not,
as in England, a class contest as to who should control the
State, a State which all respected and feared. In the West, at
first, the mass of small agrarians could protect themselves
without the ballot, and when the democracy of the ballot
did come it was unaccompanied by a Democratic
Revolution.
In European Democratic countries, where the lower orders

had to take drastic measures before the ruling classes
would yield any authority or consent to share the power,
the masses have learned to revere and to respect the State
that has been influenced at such a hard price. In the West,
however, the negligible State inspired not awe but
contempt.
No person ambitious for wealth wanted to bother his head

with politics when so much gold was in "them thar hills"
and forests. Politics was for the weak, the incompetent, the
dishonest. Thus the sheriff was by no means the most
respected man in the community, generally. In the South he
was overshadowed by the planter, whose servile agent he
was. In the West he was most likely a popular failure who
recouped his lost financial standing by pocketing all fees
and State income for himself." (*6)
The Western farmers did not have to pay attention to

politics and the State because they could live well without
72
doing so. Later on, the agrarians of the West were to pay
heavily for their forbears' neglect of politics. Then, in its
battles against the Liberalism of the commercial interests,
the West would be forced to Radical Populism.
During colonial times, the West managed to get along not

by conquering but by evading State power. This attitude of
political evasion and flight has marked the American and
has helped to lead him to a type of pacifism on the one
hand and to criminality on the other. And with flight came
physical speed. This was seen especially on the sea when so
much profit was to be made in rum-running and law
evasion. One author states that the great speed of ships of
the style later made famous by the Yankee Clippers was
due precisely to this necessity of being able to run away. (*7)
The American was no coward, however; running away was
but one of the exigencies of that form of making a living. As
the colonists as a whole ran away from the contradictions
and struggles of Europe, so the most alert and energetic
men on the Eastern seaboard, finding themselves blocked
by growing class differentiations in the colonies, quickly
continued their flight to the West, out of the reach of State
control, thus draining the Eastern masses of some of their
best elements.
Regarding democracy in the more settled communities on

the Atlantic seaboard, since earliest colonial times, land
property qualification had been the one outstanding
universal requirement, the dominating consideration for
almost two hundred years. In New England, when only
company members could vote, strict limitations had been
put upon the right to join the company, and after the
companies had ceased to exist and the colonies became
purely political institutions, equally rigid limitations of the
right to, vote were carried out. So it was that in the original
73
States which formed constitutions in the early years of the
Revolutionary War, very little democracy existed. The
hastily adopted, constitutions embodied the franchise
restrictions already fixed in the colonies and, after the
establishment of independence, these limitations were
continued. A property qualification held in every one of the
thirteen original States, and in five of them the property
had to be in the form of real estate.
With the rise of American capitalism with its commercial

and industrial bourgeoisie came the breakdown of the land
property qualification. The modifications, however, did not
abandon the principle that only property owners were
eligible to vote, but merely substituted one form of
property for another, taxpaying or personal property in lieu
of real estate. These restrictions persisted well into the
middle of the nineteenth century, disappearing for the most
part only with the advent of the Civil War (though retained
by Delaware until 1897).
To understand fully the weight of the restrictions in force in

colonial times, the distribution of the country's wealth at
that time must be delineated. Immediately prior to the
American Revolution, of the nearly two and three-quarters
million population, only a few thousand persons owned
nearly all the land in great estates and vast plantations. At
the same time, about half of the population was made up of
small farmers and craftsmen, most of, Whom barely eked
out a precarious living, although there was a considerable
well-to-do minority. It is probable that about half of the
American people were either of the category of white
indentured servants or ,Negro slaves. (*8) In the South the
number of Negroes generally exceeded the white
population. In Pennsylvania, Negroes comprised 20 per
cent ) of the total population, in New York 16 per cent.
74
These people composed the mass of laborers and owned
nothing, not even their labor power. Slim indeed were their
chances of attaining in their old communities the position of
freeman and freeholder necessary to enable them to take
part in the government.
Of the free working class, very few ever could take part in
the government or cast a vote in the whole course of their
lives. At this time, wages paid free laborers averaged less
than $2.00 a week, farm labor getting thirty cents or so a
day, while carpenters were sometimes paid as much as
fifty-two cents for a day's work. No crime jailed so many as
debt. Children whose parents were unable to maintain
them were bound into forced labor for a period of years,
making virtually insurmountable the wall of restrictions
placed in their path to democracy.
The right to vote once secured, however, did not carry with
it the right to hold office. Thousands of men who could vote
were by law hopelessly barred from ever holding any office,
becoming a judge or legislator, or reaching the position of
Governor of the State. Many States required that office-
holders should be rich. In one State the Governor had to
own 500 acres of land. In a second, he had to have an estate
of $25,000, in yet another, of $50,000. For a seat in either
branch of the legislature of some States, the qualifications
were of a similar nature. In Maryland, Delaware, and New
Jersey, legislative candidates had to be possessed of $15,000
real or personal property. South of Pennsylvania the land
requirement was general. To become a Senator in North
Carolina one had to own 300 acres, while in South Carolina
representatives had to own at least 500 acres and ten
Negroes.
We have dealt with the democracy in the West and in the

East; what of the South? In colonial days, in the South, the
75
"State," so far as the masses were concerned, was the
plantation, (*9) that is, each plantation owner kept his own
police force; the only other forces on hand were the sheriff's
posse made up of the plantation owners and their agents,
and the militia. Very rarely indeed did the actual State
interfere with the concerns of the plantation owner. It left
these slave-holders at complete liberty, practically until the
time of the Civil War, to do exactly what they pleased, not
only with their slaves but, in the main, with the "poor white
trash" as well.
In the South there was no room for any middle elements

between the wealthy plantation owner and the "poor white
trash." The mode of production in the South compelled the
rapid extension of the large scale plantation system and the
driving out of the country of all yeoman and middle farmer
elements. Such elements either advanced to enter the ranks
of the slave-holders or were driven out. People like
Jefferson, John Marshall, and Patrick Henry, were all
frontiersmen of this type, who were gradually enriched by
the development of the South and who assumed places on
the side of the wealthy of their communities. The
capitulation to the ruling slavocracy by these men is
illustrative of the weakness of the class from which they
came. In the end, Jefferson, Henry, and the like were to be
the decoys to entice the Western independent farmer into
the hands of the Southern aristocracy.
Thus we may say that in the South the importance of the

political State existed only in the sphere of foreign policy,
that is, in determining the relations of the slave-holding
class as such to other States, territories and countries. In the
South, internally, there was no Democratic State because
there was no Democracy, and because there was very little
State. With the individual planters, as with the individual
76
frontiersman, every man was a king. Here was a direct
point of contact of the South with the West, a point upon
which the Southern squirarchy capitalized to penetrate the
Western frontier and to win the latter to the cause of the
agrarian South against the commercial North.
Leaving aside, then, the slaves and the indentured servants,

we may say that the great mass of immigrants flooding
American shores in the eighteenth century was composed
of elements who were determined to improve their social
conditions at the time they left Europe and to strike out for
themselves. These elements formed the great mother class --
the class of farmers and artisans who were non-capitalistic
and who combined ownership of the means of production
with full control over their labor. What these people wanted
above all was peace and quiet, so that diligent application
to their work would bring them plenty. It was not unusual,
therefore, that many of them turned Quakers, nor that
many Quakers refused to take part in the American
Revolution. Pennsylvania was the most loyal State of any to
the British Crown. Eschewing militarist activity, Americans
replaced the pomp of conquest with the dignity of labor.
To be dignified, labor had to be independent. With a whole

continent awaiting him, what immigrant would be willing
voluntarily to subject himself to working for someone else?
Every free man worked for himself; working for someone
else was considered to be beneath the dignity of man. Thus
the frontiersman and squatter, for example, regarded the
Negro, working in the interests and for the welfare of his
master, as performing labor fit to be done only by an animal.
The slave, then, was a beast and not a human, since all true
humans work only for themselves. Furthermore, since each
human is born free and equal, as were the Indians, and
since it was the lot of the Negro not to be born so, this was
77
evidence that the Negro was indeed of sub-human stock.
Thereupon was developed, especially in the South, a deep
antipathy between the self-dependent frontiersman and the
servile Negro, a feeling carefully nurtured by the
slaveholding caste.
So far as the "poor white trash" were concerned, they were

sustained in their miserable independence precisely
through the institution of slavery. Had slavery been ended,
their hunting and fishing days would have been over.
These louts had therefore a deep personal interest in
tracking down the slaves, whose bloodhounds they were,
and lynching them.
Under such circumstances, the very concept of a proletariat,

that is, a permanent body of wage-earners, propertyless,
with only their labor power to sell to others who control the
means of production, seemed a foreign, an un-American
idea. It was a practice from which colonists had run away
in the Old World; they fought hard against its resurrection
in the new.
But if all classes had moved upward and backward upon

their settlement in the American colonies, if those who were
middle layers in England were top layers in America, and
those who were workers were now entrepreneurs and
farmers, who remained to perform the labor of the
proletariat? Where would the middle farmer obtain his
hired hands? How could the plantations be run? Who
would take care of the factories? If each one was to work for
himself, how would capital become accumulated?
Here was a dilemma for free America to solve. There was

indeed no one to assume the role of the proletariat. The fact
that America had available virgin soil for everyone made it
difficult in the extreme to obtain and retain hired help. To
78
secure a proletariat it was necessary to enchain one. The
very fact that America was "the land of the free" compelled
it to become the classic home of slavery. The proletariat was
represented, first and foremost, by the Negro slave.
At first the good Christians in Virginia felt they should not

enslave fellow-beings who had been baptized, and so the
first Negroes brought in by the Dutch were made into
servants. (*10) Very soon these scruples were brushed aside.
The treatment accorded slaves is well described by a writer
of the times, Benezet, writing in the eighteenth century:". . .
in Jamaica, if six in ten of the new imported Negroes,
survive the seasoning it is looked upon as a gaining
purchase; And in most of the other plantations if the
Negroes live eight or nine years, their labour is reckoned a
sufficient compensation for their cost." (*11)
Conditions of this vast slave trade handled by the good

Liberals of the day are described by the same author in
another passage:". . . we may, with some degree of certainty
conclude there are, at least, one hundred thousand Negroes
purchased and brought on board our ships yearly from the
coast of Africa.... This is confirmed in Anderson's History of
Trade and Commerce, printed in 1764 where it is said at
page 68 of the Appendix, 'That England supplies her
American colonies with Negroe-slaves, amounting in
number to above one hundred thousand every year.' When
the vessels are full freighted with slaves, they set out for
our plantations in America, and may be two or three
months on the voyage, during which time, from the filth
and stench that is among them distempers frequently break
out, which carry off a great many, a fifth, a fourth, yea
sometimes a third of them;. Hence it may be presumed, that
at a moderate computation of the slaves, who are
purchased by our African merchants in a year, near thirty
79
thousand die upon the voyage and in the seasoning. Add to
this, the prodigious number who are killed in the incursions
and intestine wars.... It is no less shocking to read the
accounts given by Sir Hans Sloan, and others, and the
inhuman and unmerciful treatment, those Blacks meet with,
who survive the seasoning in the islands, often for
transgressions, to which the punishment they receive bears
no proportion. 'And the horrid executions which are
frequently made there upon discovery of the plots laid by
the Blacks, for the recovery of their liberty; of some they
break the bones, whilst alive, on a wheel, others they burn,
or rather roast to death; others they starve to death, with a
loaf hanging before their mouths."' (*12)
The fact that in America the proletariat was represented in

the beginning by the slave has colored the whole life of the
American people. Since the working class was made up of a
slave caste, no one not a slave would recognize himself as
being part of a class with a fixed social status. The brutal
attack upon the Negroes was not considered an attack upon
labor at all. It is only in the nineteenth century, with the
emancipation of the chattel slave, that the Negro is revealed
in his true historical light. Then it is seen that the Negro
represents indeed the typical proletarian and stands for
simple unskilled labor. Then it begins to be recognized that
in America the working class as such starts out mainly as
black; that the Negro is the heart of the labor problem, and
that labor is the heart of the Negro problem. More and
more it becomes apparent that the lynching of the Negro so
sportfully practiced in the United States is but one of the
ways to keep labor in its place. The inherent savage
revolutionary character of American labor's struggle-for
emancipation can be traced in part to the rebellions of the
slave Negro.(*13)
80
2
During the eighteenth century, capitalist development in

the American colonies began to meet resistance from the
Whig government of England. The attitude of these Liberal
Whigs can be observed from the kind of constitution that
was granted to Carolina and drawn up by no other than
John Locke himself. According to this Constitution, land
was to be held originally by a group of proprietors, the
elder to be the Palatine (like an independent prince). The
proprietors were to reserve one-fifth of the land as their
personal property, another large section was to be laid out
into baronies and manors to be held by an aristocracy and
tilled by serfs, the rest were to be freeholds. Politically,
Carolina was to avoid a numerous democracy and become
an oligarchy (though there was to be a popular assembly).
This was the type of society the English Liberals had
planned for America!
Matters between England and America could not have

come to a head before 1763; after that they rapidly did so.
On the one hand, with the termination of the French and
Indian War in 1763, the British government had obtained
full control on the North American continent. No longer
fearing the French nor having to battle with them, the King
and Parliament did not have to cater so much to the
American colonists. Nor did they need further a native
militia. The Indians could now become a force, not of the
French King against the British, but of the British King
against the colonies. With the beginning of the industrial
revolution, too, it was time that a real plan was worked out
whereby America could be most fruitfully exploited for the
benefit of the Liberal businessmen in control of Britain.
On the other hand, the American colonists also understood

the change of relations between the mother country and the
81
colonies after the termination of the War of 1763. During
the war the American colonies had developed and tested
their armed forces; they were satisfied that they could meet
all comers in the new land. In defeating the French they had
proved their superiority time and gain, even over the
British picked troops. Now, too, there was no longer France
to be feared. An open path had been laid for full expansion
to the West which was being blocked by no one but the
British Crown. Indeed, in any struggle against the British
Crown and Parliament the colonists were bound to receive
the aid of their former enemy, the French.
Steadily the Liberal British government began to increase

its pressure upon the dominant economic colonial groups.
The debts of the Southern planters to British factors became
harder to pay, expansion to the West was prohibited,
certain types of manufactures were banned, shipping was
greatly restricted by a mass of onerous rules, taxes were
increased; even the forests became royal preserves with a
ban on cutting down certain trees reserved for His
Majesty's Royal Navy. Within the colonies, British
government agents began to take over more and more
nearly complete control. The issue was becoming ever more
clear: Who were to rule the colonies, the economically
dominant classes in the colonies or the British bourgeoisie?
Essentially, the American Revolution was not the fight of an

oppressed people against a tyrannical king, as has been so
popularly supposed and broadcast, (*14) but was the fight
of the wealthy American merchants, traders, shippers,
planters, and nascent manufacturers to push aside the
obstructions put in their path by a capitalist government
managed by a Liberal (Whig) Parliament.
That the struggle of the Americans was not against the King
but against Parliament was recognized by all the leaders of
82
the Revolution. In their debates and polemics against the
British they pointed out repeatedly that Parliament had no
right to tax them because they were not under the
jurisdiction of Parliament, but directly under the King.
They developed a theory of the British Empire which later
was accepted actually by Parliament and worked into a
system of Dominion Government and Home Rule. Because
they had refused to acknowledge the authority of
Parliament over them, the Colonists, in the Declaration of
Independence, never mentioned Parliament by name at all,
but rather stressed the tyranny of the King whose authority,
though limited by the rights of Englishmen and Natural
Law according to God, (*15) they had recognized always.
As a matter of fact, several times during 1778 King George
wanted to end the War, but was blocked by his Whig
ministry.
In their fight against the British Crown in Parliament, the

American ruling groups could count in their support the
vast new immigration that was steadily pouring into the
colonies. Many of these immigrants either had no traditions
of being subject to the Crown (French Huguenots, Dutch,
Swedes, Germans), or were hostile to Britain (Irish).
American strength was gaining rapidly day by day. Within
the colonies, the driving out of the Loyalists from America
and the confiscation of their lands would be bound to bring
a number of elements over to the side of the Revolution,
elements that had nothing to lose and a lot to gain from a
new distribution of wealth inevitable in any revolution.
Certainly the American revolutionists could depend
entirely upon the West to go along to the end. Indeed, it
was the propertied elements who were closest to the West,
represented by Patrick Henry, Jefferson and such, who
spoke most urgently and forcibly for the break. To keep in
line with the frontier, even Liberals had to talk like Radicals.
83
In England, the struggle of the bourgeoisie for power had
resulted in the Great Rebellion, which was generally
recognized as a civil war. In America, the Rebellion was not
conceived as a civil war at all. Instead of a theory of open
class struggles, we have adopted a concept of a national
war for freedom. Thus there was formed the tradition that
revolution has nothing whatever to do with class struggles.
On the contrary, the American Revolution has been
analyzed as though it were a struggle against the status and
rigidity of classes being superimposed upon American life.
Thus the British came to symbolize class rule and were
regarded as devilishly striving to introduce European
customs and class formations into the pure atmosphere of
America. America's destiny was thereby considered as an
unceasing struggle, not of class against class, but of new-
world classlessness, against old-world classfullness.
According to this theory, the American Revolution was not
an example of class insurrection against an internal enemy,
but a national rebellion against the dark class forces of
Europe.
It is a fact, however, that not only was the American

Revolution itself a classic example of the culmination of the
struggle of classes for power, but the American Revolution
stirred up the lower classes in America, the slave, the
indentured servant, the plebeian, the farmer, to seek to
identify their interests with those of the Revolution and to
start their own class wars to satisfy their particular needs. It
was this very development that the American ruling layers
feared the most and did their best to put down. George
Washington would rather have lost the war than permitted
the lower orders to have triumphed. In the course of the
Revolution, the so-called "patriots" and wealthy
revolutionists, with rare exceptions, ran away and
84
abandoned the cause; the people were left to bear the brunt
of it, and, at the end, it was the French who saved the day.
The colonial wealthy played a shameful role in the

American Revolution. New York City and Philadelphia
were Loyalist to the core. Liberals who previously had not
hesitated to sell arms to the French against their own
brethren in the French and Indian War, did not hesitate to
sell plenty of war materials to the British Army in 1776.
They did little of the fighting; they would not even help to
finance the war. Military expenditures steadily dropped
from twenty-four million dollars in 1777-1778 to ten million
in 1779, to three million in 1780, and to less than two
million in 1781. Had it not been for the generous loans of
the French, all would have been lost to the National Army.
Instead of taxing itself to pay for its war, the bourgeoisie
did its best to shift the burdens entirely on to the backs of
the masses. It put out paper money that rapidly became
worthless; it refused to find means to pay for the soldiers.
The Liberals declined to attend even to the most necessary
duties of government. In the darkest days of the war,
"Congress soon became insignificant in numbers, only ten
or twelve members attending (Ten or twelve members out
of the almost 350 who had been elected!), and these doing
business or idling as suited their whim." (*16)
The fear on the part of the wealthy Americans that they

would lose control of the situation and that the masses
would dominate the Army as they did in Cromwell's time
prevented the "patriots" of the time from building up a
powerful army, or from drawing the masses into the
Revolution. Certain it is that the mass of people did not
fight in the Revolutionary War; the American armies at all
times were very small, about thirty thousand men, and they
were treated abominably.
85
"Thousands of the Continentals were often practically
naked; Chastellux found several hundred in an invalid
camp, not because they were ill, but because 'they were not
covered even with rags.' (*17) During the bleak winter of
1777 soldiers died by the score of starvation. On February 1,
1778, of the total number of seventeen thousand men in the
army, only five thousand were effectives, over four
thousand were unfit because of nakedness, and many
thousands were incapacitated due to foul diseases of all
sorts.
In line with this general policy of preventing participation

of the masses, George Washington at first refused to accept
freed Negroes into the Army; it was only when the British
threatened to free the Negro slaves of rebels and began to
stir up Negro insurrections that Negroes were accepted into
the army. "An official return of the negroes in Washington's
command in 1778 shows an average of 54 negroes to each
battalion." (*18) Soon in the Continental Army there were
upwards of four thousand Negroes. (*19) With the blessings
of Alexander Hamilton, who thought that slavery fitted
men for the army, since the nearer soldiers are to machines
the better, and with the approval of General Greene, who
found the Negroes to be excellent soldiers indeed, efforts
were made to induce Negroes to enlist on considerations of
freedom. The same was done with indentured servants who
were also released from their bonds if they would enlist.
Thus did the bourgeoisie shirk fighting the war themselves.
Washington took the severest measures to keep officers

from associating with private soldiers and at one time went
so far as to dismiss from service, in disgrace, a
commissioned officer for sleeping and eating with privates.
(*20) How different was this from the army of Cromwell,
which had elected its own delegates and had managed its
86
own affairs. No wonder so many soldiers deserted at the
first opportunity!
These considerations lead to the general conclusion that by

no means was the American Revolution a people's
revolution. It was far less of a people's revolution than the
English Civil War had been, more than a century previous.
We have noted that, during the English Civil Wars, the
poor property holders and plebeian mass had formed their
own party of Levellers and Diggers and had put forward
their own demands in their own name. None of this was
done in the American Revolution. What is the reason for
this enormous difference between the two Revolutions?
Why did the people fail to put forward their own demands
in their own parties? The answer to this is not hard to find.
With the exception of the Negro slaves, who were totally

inarticulate, and the indentured and other white servants,
who hoped conditions would improve later, the mass of
common people were better off than they had been in the
old country. Their chief demands were to be permitted to
live their own lives and to cultivate their own ground and
work with their own tools. They were not so desperately
hungry that they were willing to risk their necks in civil
war. People had come to America to escape social struggles,
not to engage in new ones. The frontiersmen, of course,
enthusiastically sponsored the cause of the Revolution, but
they had no special demands to set up, since in spite of
British regulations they had boldly pushed westward and
seized what they wanted.
Naturally, wherever, in a given locality, it was possible to

use the Revolution as an excuse to dispossess the wealthy
and the Loyalists, this was done with a will. Indeed, one
may say that far more serious results accrued from the
terrorism of the guerilla vigilantes than from the regular
87
Continental Army. The Minute Men were made of such
elements, as were the State militia. By the end of the
Revolution, one hundred thousand Loyalists had been
driven from the country and their estates, estimated at forty
million dollars, confiscated. But the ordinary farmer and
frontiersman refused to go out of his way to join the army
or to fight, especially when he realized the conditions
which the soldiers had to face in battling the British. It were
better to stay at home and mind the plow.
The situation may be summed up as follows: The bulk of

the Revolutionary Army was composed of poor agrarian
and plebeian elements; the main part of the officers were of
the well-to-do and wealthy classes. (*21) In the general
relations of society, the picture was different. Only a
minority of the wealthy was on the side of the Revolution,
the principal portion remaining Royalist. Thus, as far as the
upper social strata were concerned, they either fought
against the Revolution, or if they adhered to its cause, they
kept, for the most part, far in the background. However,
there is no denying that the small minority from the ranks
of the wealthy which did play an active role, either as
initiators or controllers through the Committees of
Correspondence and the Continental Congress, or as
officers in the Army, completely dominated the scene.
The American Revolution is one case where the bourgeoisie

itself initiated and led its own Revolution and kept firm
control to the end. To do this, however, it had to see to it
that the people themselves did not become involved too
greatly in the struggle; thus we have the paradoxical
situation where the officers of the Army make rules
designed to prevent the mass of people from entering it and
adopting the Revolutionary cause as their own. The lower
orders could have been won enthusiastically for the
88
Revolution. As it was, the country became about equally
divided as to the justice of the struggle; as a rule the higher
classes in the East went to the side of the King, while the
poorer sections of the population, especially in the West,
sided with the Revolution.
These strata of the poor, however, were never drawn into

the actual struggle. It was not that they were neutral, but
rather that they were forced into passivity by the esoteric
activity of the bourgeois leaders of the Revolution. At the
same time, the people were too concerned with garnering
the wealth that lay at their door and that could be had for
the asking for them to take the initiative and form their own
people's armies, with their own demands and officers. To
this must be added the fact that so far as the mass of slaves
and indentured servants were concerned, there was no
possibility for them to take arms in their hands without the
permission of their masters or the support of the
independent portions of the population.
The farmers and frontiersmen had so little use for the State
that they willingly turned it over to the Radicals, whose
Declaration of Independence, affirming that all men were
created equal and were endowed with certain inalienable
rights which no one could take away, appealed to them
mightily. Why should they worry about the ballot? They
could get land and bread without it. Later, when the farmer
did turn to politics, in the Shays Rebellion and the Whiskey
Rebellion, it was because the now developed State in New
England and elsewhere would no longer let him alone but
was determined to make him pay for the war.
During the Revolution, the ruling oligarchical cliques were

content to let Radicals like Thomas Paine step forward to
stimulate the cannon fodder. Paine indeed spoke honeyed
words, for he was not only a Radical, but he believed in
89
important social reforms. Under the pressure of the
American Revolution and with the events of the French
Revolution unfolding before him, Paine was to go so far,
before his death, as to advocate political democracy, equal
rights for women, abolition of Negro slavery, international
arbitration, rational conceptions of marriage and divorce,
mercy to animals, pensions for the aged, maternity benefits,
subsidy to the children of the very poor, municipal factories
to take care of unemployment, labor unions, compulsory
education, maintenance for widows, graduated income tax,
abolition of expensive and useless rulers, reduction of
armament by international agreement, and similar ideas.
Even a George Washington could employ such a man; he
utilized Paine's revolutionary writings as declamatory
material for the soldiers at Valley Forge, in order to divert
their minds from the treachery of the same ruling cliques
that Washington represented.
At the same time, the Liberal leaders of the Revolution

heartily detested the masses and feared the cities. This was
to come out clearly enough when the Constitution was to
be written. Then Madison could write to Jefferson to the
effect that "to secure the public good and private rights
against the danger of the propertyless or proletarians and at
the same time preserve the spirit and form of popular
government was then the great object to which the
Convention's inquiries were directed." (*22) Others went to
great lengths in attempting to prove that a Republic is not
necessarily a Democracy. John Adams, second to none in
phrases during the Revolution, later has this to say:
"Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as
aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody
than either."
90
"There never was a democracy yet that did not commit
suicide." (*23) Chas. and Mary Beard sum up the matter by
stating that the term "Democrat" in the opinion of the
"founding fathers" was as malodorous as the term
"Bolsheviki" would have been in the polite circles of
Washington in President Harding's day. (*24)
To fight these masses there was established a secret Society

of Cincinnati, formed immediately at the termination of the
Revolutionary War, whose membership was limited solely
to officers who had fought in the War under Washington.
(*25) Taking no chances, the "Father of his Country" himself
became presiding officer. The Society was an hereditary
order and there can be no doubt that its weight was thrown
in most cases on the side of the wealthy Conservatives.
The immediate economic motive for the organization of the

Society of Cincinnati was to secure for the officers the
pensions of half-pay for life which had been promised to
them by the Continental Congress of 1780. Although the
poor soldiers were to be cheated of even their back pay, the
privileged caste of officers did not hesitate to attempt to
make Congress provide for them. The Society, therefore, in
the beginning was principally an organized lobby to put the
officers at financial ease for life.
However, this alone would not have accounted for the

provision of hereditary membership. The officers of the
Continental army, forming the most disciplined and
competent minority group, felt that they were the original
legatees of the special privileges which the aristocracy of
England had arrogated to itself in America. Naturally, this
clique of officers lent itself to ideas of building up an
American monarchy and aristocracy.
91
In this they were seconded by the French aristocrats who
had fought in the American Revolution and who were
given special honored place in the Society. Indeed, it was
one of these French aristocrats who actually drew up the
medal and seal which was finally adopted. The flag of the
Society displayed no red anywhere, but was of white and
blue stripes with the golden fleur de lis of the French nobility
replacing the stars of the American flag. Incidentally, it is
interesting to note that Louis XVI and the Court of France
made much ado about the Cincinnati, large sums of money
being contributed by the French nobility to the organization.
Naturally, when the heads of these aristocrats began to roll
into the baskets under the guillotine during the French
Revolution, the Society of Cincinnati could be counted
upon as the most bitter opponent of French radical
democracy, and France on its side decreed death to every
member of the Society it could find.
The wealthy classes in American society went too far in

believing either that they could establish a new hereditary
aristocracy in the United States, or that the military, as a
group, could play any decisive role in American affairs. The
Society at once became the target of sharp attacks from
Liberals not only in the United States but also in France.
Franklin considered this Society the most serious menace to
the republican and democratic spirit of the New World. (*26)
Mirabeau in his French pamphlet (*27) pointed out that
Rhode Island revoked all the privileges of all its citizens
who were members of the Society, and declared them
incapable of any office. Several of the legislatures passed
acts disfranchising those who joined, Massachusetts being
especially solemn in its condemnation. The American
Liberals saw in the Society a driving force for the
organization of a standing army, and, as these people were
mainly business men and farmers who did not wish to be
92
taxed with the burdens of a military establishment, who
were tired of War and who, above all, did not desire to
become subordinate to a group of military upstarts, they
were quick to denounce and condemn the Cincinnati.
This attitude on the part of many was to change in the

course of the next half decade. The Society, of course, was
for a strong national government, and, as disorders
increased within the States and the bourgeois fear of the
masses heightened, the Society of Cincinnati became a
pillar of strength to "law and order." The constitution of the
Society had included statements that one of the chief
purposes of the organization was to keep the union intact.
Another aim was to honor the American empire, and a
third object was to establish mutual correspondence
whereby could be expressed decisions of the members on
the political and social state of the country. The nature of
these decisions is well exemplified by the resolution of the
Massachusetts Society, passed October 1786, regarding the
popular rebellion led by Shay. "At this alarming period,
when every public and private right is invaded-when our
Constitution of government, that work of labor and of
blood, is shaken to its foundation-it is the duty of every
individual and of every class of citizens, to stand forth in
their defense."
"As citizens and as public creditors, this Society are

interested in the preservation of the Constitution; and so
long as life and attendant blessings, so long as public faith
and private credit are made the sacred object of
government, agreeably to its original institution, this
Society pledge themselves to support it by every means and
by every exertion in their power." (*28)
And if "Public faith" as exemplified in the payment of

pensions, and private credit" as regards payment of debts
93
were no longer "sacred" objects of government, was armed
revolt to follow?
The importance of the Society of Cincinnati has been much

underestimated. That the Constitutional Convention
convoked in Philadelphia, May 1787, was called expressly
to coincide with the Convention of the Society of Cincinnati
is generally overlooked. Is it then false to surmise that the
members of the Society were part of a secret conspiracy that
initiated the illegal acts of the Convention? None of those
who declined to attend or who absented themselves from
the Philadelphia conclave was a member of the Cincinnati.
It is also generally overlooked that fully one- third of the
fifty-five delegates to the Federal Convention were
members of the Society, and that this portion formed the
backbone of the Federalist caucus. Later, the Society of
Cincinnati were to furnish, under Washington, the
Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and three
Secretaries of War, and, under Adams, the Chief justice of
the Supreme Court as well.
The end of the Revolution meant the beginning of civil war.

There broke out in New England a powerful revolt known
as Shays Rebellion, whose object was to push the revolution
forward to a more democratic conclusion. During the
American Revolution, also, in Georgia, there had been two
executives and two legislatures, one representing the rich,
the other the poor. In South Carolina and Virginia a bitter
fight of the same nature flared up.
The Shays Rebellion indeed represented the American

Leveller movement. The farmer rebels stood for democracy,
for free land, for greater equality. They resisted the burdens
of the war which were being foisted on their backs. The
94
debt of Massachusetts, which had been about one hundred
thousand pounds before the Revolution, had risen to almost
three million pounds, of which around two hundred and
fifty thousand was owing to the Soldiers. (*29) Not only
had the soldiers been paid in worthless currency (later
redeemed in full when it had passed into the hands of
unscrupulous speculators), but many had lost their farms
and livelihood. On the other hand, every effort had been
made so that the wealthy could monopolize the rewards of
success in the war.
However, the wealthy classes were equal to the emergency.

Just as they knew how to sneak out of the war, so they
knew how to sneak into power. Under the guise of meeting
to discuss commercial transactions and to revise the
Articles of Confederation that had been established, the
leaders determined to create a powerful new national
government to preserve their class hegemony. The
constitutional convention was held in secret. It was illegal.
It amounted to almost a coup d’etat, but the delegates
emerged with a draft of a Constitution to be rushed for
ratification. (*30)
The delegates had been carefully hand-picked by the State

legislatures which were in turn composed of wealthy
property owners elected by only a small proportion of the
general population. Rufus King, delegate from
Massachusetts, wrote: "If Massachusetts should send
deputies, for God's sake be careful who are the men." (*31)
From the South came slave-owners, planters, and lawyers;
the North sent merchants, bankers, ship owners, landlords
and their lawyers. Rhode Island sent no delegates at all, and
of the sixty-five sent by the other twelve States, ten did not
even attend and sixteen declined or failed to sign the
document which was adopted.
95
This secretly prepared Constitution is crammed with all
sorts of anti- democratic provisions. Fearing the 'rabble'
would control certain States, a strong national government
was set up independent of any of the States. The
governmental apparatus was divided into three mutually
interdependent divisions, executive, legislative, and judicial.
Yet each concentrated a high degree of power in itself. The
President was made a strong executive with powers greater
than those of the King of England at that time, or of any
elected European state officer since. The President could
veto legislation and appoint (concurrently with the Senate)
administrative officials and judges of the Federal inferior
and supreme courts. His election was as far removed from
popular vote as possible. He was chosen by a College of
Electors whose method of election was left to the choice of
the State legislatures. Should the votes of the Electors give
no one a clear majority, the House of Representatives was
given the power to elect the President. "But in choosing the
President the vote shall be taken by States, the
representatives from each. State having one vote." (*32) In
1824, Jackson, and in 1876, Tilden-the "people's choice" for
President-were robbed of the office when the election was
thrown into Congress; the "people" counted for little.
The law-making power was subdivided into a bicameral

legislature with only the House of Representatives chosen
directly by the people. The Constitution itself provided that
only that minority of the population which could meet the
high property qualifications necessary to vote for the State
legislatures could elect Representatives. Thus the
restrictions upon voting then prevalent in the States were
incorporated into the Constitutional law of the land. To
check the responsiveness of Congress to the wishes of the
masses, the Senate was set up. Senators, like the President,
had to be older men and were not to be elected by the
96
people, but were to be chosen by the State legislatures. The
big property owners, elected by little property owners, thus
made doubly sure that they could control the Senate. It took
a century and a quarter and a Constitutional Amendment
to give the people the right to elect Senators. Should the
people wish to remove their representatives from office,
they might have to wait six years to effect it.
Under the Constitution, the Judiciary is appointed for life

by one man, the President, and, like him, they are not
directly responsible to the people. Nor are they removable
from office except through impeachment proceedings
which the Senate alone has the power to bring. Nor can
their salaries be reduced during their tenure. They become,
thereby, Absolutely independent of the will of the people.
Of all the remnants of monarchy, this life tenure of office
given the judiciary was the most flagrant and offensive and
opposed to the democratic principle of responsibility to the
people. Soon an assault took place against the independent
judiciary. Impeachment proceedings were instituted and
for a time "judge-breaking" became widespread. But
nothing came of this protest.
The Founding Fathers also provided that the Constitution,

once accepted, could be amended only with the greatest
difficulty. It required two- thirds of the members of both
Houses of Congress, or the legislatures or conventions of
three-quarters of the States, to put an amendment into force.
So thoroughly undemocratic was the Constitution that it
did not even mention civil liberties, and Alexander
Hamilton argued against incorporating into the document
the right to trial by jury. (*33)
Opposition to the Constitution led to such strife that, in

order to get the Constitution passed at all, it was agreed to
adopt amendments to guarantee civil liberties to the people.
97
In Virginia, where the decisive battle was fought, in spite of
the fact that about one-quarter of the total delegates were
officers who had fought under Washington and who were
all members of the secret Society of Cincinnati, and in spite
of the fact that the Constitutionalists had carefully prepared
and had obtained the selection of their men in ten
constituent districts where the electorate was heartily
opposed to the Constitution, the Constitution would not
have been approved even under these conditions had not
the proponents agreed to adopt twenty amendments,
including such points as: no army or regular troops should
be raised or kept up in time of peace without a two-thirds
vote of both Houses of Congress present; the prerogatives
of the Supreme Court to be reduced so as to render it
almost powerless, etc. However, once Virginia had ratified
the Constitution, these promises were never lived up to,
and barely ten Amendments were finally adopted declaring
(1) that the Federal government could not prevent freedom
of speech, press and assemblage; (2) the right to petition; (3)
the right to keep and bear arms; (4) the right of a speedy
trial by jury upon indictment of a grand jury; (5) and
prohibition of excessive bail or fines and cruel punishments.
Soon, however, these Amendments were severely modified
by judicial decision, by executive action, or by legislation.
Though the Preamble of the Constitution starts off with

"We, the People . . ." not more than five per cent of the
population voted on the question, only one hundred
thousand votes being cast for the Constitution and sixty
thousand against, or with the approval of only two-
thirteenths of the white adult males in the population. The
vast majority of the poor people, the small farmers,
frontiersmen, and craftsmen, and even a great majority of
those who were entitled to vote, were opposed to the
adoption and ratification of the Constitution, while the
98
millions of Negro slaves and indentured servants were not
able to voice their opinion at all. The very sharp class
demarcation for and against the Constitution was
crystallized in the nick-naming of its supporters as
"Washingtonians" and its opponents as "Shayites."
So great was the Federalists' fear that the people would

finally prevail that they immediately began an
unprecedented campaign for its hasty adoption. They did
not hesitate to ally themselves with former Loyalists and
anti-revolutionists. All the wealthy were for the
Constitution and their large financial resources were
thrown into the fight to establish newspapers and to buy
public opinion. Hurriedly they called a number of State
conventions before the general public became aware of
what had been devised in the secret sessions of the
Philadelphia Convention. The feverish haste was well
evidenced by the fact that only twenty per cent of the men
eligible to vote were able to do so. Approval of five States
was rushed through within one month.
Nor were the wealthy above the use of strong-arm methods

to secure their ends. In Pennsylvania, to prevent too quick
approval and to acquaint the public with the situation, the
Antis had remained away from the Convention. To
complete a quorum the Federalists broke into the homes of
the Anti-Constitutionalists and dragged them to the State
House where they were forcibly held in their places.
Business was rushed through and the Constitution was
ratified by a vote of 43 to 23. Elsewhere, the opposition
gained strength as time passed, the vote in the three largest
States being very close: Massachusetts 187 to 168, Virginia
89 to 79, New York 30 to 27.
The Constitution of the United States proved to be an

excellent mechanism through which the few thousand large
99
slave-owners for many years were able completely to
dominate the entire country's policy. This slavocracy
controlled the several hundred thousand small slave-
owners and ruled all the twelve million people in the South
at the time of the Civil War. Being allowed Congressional
representation out of all proportion to their numbers-the
Constitution guaranteed additional Representatives for
three-fifths of all the Negro slaves-and being near the seat
of government Jefferson saw to that -- the Southern slave-
holders were able to take the leading role in the Federal
government. Through this control they were able to spell
the doom of all the middle classes of the western parts of
the Southern States. Through the Missouri Compromise
they maintained in the Senate a voice equal to that of the
North and West combined. These few thousand
Southerners clogged all the pores of the higher apparatus
and they predominated in all three divisions of the
government, executive-administrative, legislative, and
judicial. Most of the Presidents were their henchmen and,
through appointments, they had a majority of the Cabinet
posts and the Supreme Court in which the leading judges
were theirs. Their majority in the high army posts enabled
them to prepare for the inevitable insurrection and to shift
much arms and ammunition secretly to the South. On this
basis they dominated not only the South, but the entire
nation of thirty-two million souls up to the time of the Civil
War.
Thus did the wealthy combine to end the "critical period of

American History" and to build up a new State to crush the
poor and to break up all opposition and interference with
their aims. That the Constitution and the Government of
the United States were established not through Revolution
but through Counter-Revolution could be seen by the type
of government that was set up under Washington and
100
Adams. Under their lead, vast grants of land were parceled
out to real estate sharks, the Revolutionary soldiers were
unconscionably swindled for the benefit of speculators, a
heavy tax was placed on whiskey (the only form by which
grain could conveniently be shipped over the mountains to
the East) affecting the great mass of agrarians, and when
they revolted, stern measures were taken to put them down.
An Alien Act was passed declaring that the President could
order out of the country any alien suspected of
machinations against the government, etc., and in some
cases he could imprison the defendant as long as he wished.
A Sedition Act was also rushed through at the time,
providing penalties for those printing anything malicious
against the officers of the government or with intent to
excite against them the hatred of the people of the United
States. Thus were the people made aware of who won the
War, and the fast-running agrarians of the West were
brought to with a jerk and made to realize that they had
better pay attention to the State because the State was going
to pay attention to them.
The wealthy cliques were able to keep control

fundamentally because there was still too much wealth and
opportunity lying loose for any really social revolutionary
movement to be maintained long. The Shay and Whiskey
Rebellions soon petered out. People could become well-to-
do without bothering about who had State power. (*34) If
the Federal State won it was not because it was strong but
because the decisive mass of the people forfeited the battle.
Washington ended his term and went out of office with the
curses of the people in his ears. The Federalists, however,
did not quit without first having insured that the pattern of
American affairs would be molded irrevocably in their
behalf. In foreign policy they made sure that the United
101
States would give no aid to the French Revolution. The
bloody insurrection of the Negroes in Haiti in 1791 sent
chills down their spine. The Federalists hastened to send
the most ardent opponents to the French Revolution they
could find to be America's envoys to France and to discover
that the American Revolution had to fight the French
people and not ally itself with them.
Instead of supporting the French Radicals, Washington did

his best to rush into a treaty with England and thus, in the
great European conflict that was then raging between the
French Revolution and the English Counter-Revolution,
America was forced to throw its weight on behalf of the
reactionaries. The Jay Treaty was the most humiliating
compact America ever entered into, England securing most
valuable concessions, the Americans practically none. (*35)
However, the chief contribution made by the Federalists to

perpetuity was the establishment of the principle of judicial
supremacy, the power of the courts to nullify Acts of
Congress or of the President and to become the sole
guardians of the Constitution. In order firmly to establish
this principle, the Federalists, before going out of office,
flooded the courts with their members and established
many new judgeships. Slyly they slipped over John
Marshall as the Chief justice, although Marshall was then
Secretary of State, and they had to use the draconic measure
of getting the incumbent Chief Justice to resign.
Up to that time it was by no means clear that the courts had

such power. in England it had already been decided that
the courts could not nullify legislation. It is true, the
colonies had a little different history. From earliest times
the Privy Council, a court of the Crown, had overruled
colonial legislation and other action. This could be no
precedent, however, because the Privy Council was
102
subordinate to the King and Parliament and was merely
carrying out their wishes. Also colonial courts had declared
legislation at times to be in violation of this or that
provision of a charter or constitution. Yet here, too, the
colonial courts were assuming the authority only of
interpreting the meaning of Parliament and the King in
Council. Finally, in some instances, judges had also been
given legislative powers. But this had been by express
legislation. (*36)
Thus, when John Marshall became Chief justice, the whole

question was hotly disputed. The Convention had not
dared to put any provision into the Constitution actually
giving the Supreme Court any such power. Madison and
others at the Constitutional Convention had favored the
creation of a Council of Revision made up of the President
and the Judges of the Supreme Court to pass on the
constitutionality of Congressional Legislation, and to
compel Congress to repass rejected legislation by two-
thirds vote if it were to become the law of the land. This
would have taken the veto power away from the President
alone. It also would have taken the power of judicial
nullification from the courts. The proposal was defeated.
In some States the courts themselves denied that they had

the power to nullify the Acts of the legislature. So, in the
beginning, the Supreme Court had to move very slowly and
carefully. It began with deciding that it could declare the
action of any single State of the Union null and void where
it ran counter to the Constitution of the United States. Only
later did Marshall nullify Acts of Congress. It is a fact that
neither Jefferson, Jackson, nor Lincoln recognized this
power; only after the Civil War was ended did the
bourgeoisie develop the judicial power to its present great
extent. (*37)
103
Since there is no country in the world where judges have
such power as they have in the United States, it would
repay us to make a closer study of the forces in American
life leading to such a situation. The key to the problem lies
in the fact that the American Republic was established
without a democratic revolution. We have already noted
that there had been no decisive insurrectionary struggles of
oppressed masses, no street fighting, no barricades.
Individual contests took the place of class conflicts. These
individual elements might bite and scratch each other as to
what share each was to get, but adjudications of such
squabbles did not require an army. Mere police-court action
was enough.
In other countries, like England and France, which were

constantly disturbed by warfare, internal and external, the
governments had become highly centralized with a strong
executive power which alone could carry out the interests
of the extant ruling class with precision and dispatch. In
such countries courts were plainly subordinate instruments,
and not controllers, of the State. In the United States,
however, with an unbounded wilderness around it, society
had no great need for executive centralization leading a
large military force.
The problem in America was mainly that of creating order

out of the chaotic wilderness. It was necessary for each
agrarian settler to delimit the area which was his. This
spelled business for the lawyer and the land court. As soon
as private property had to be protected it became necessary
to appeal to the magistrate and the sheriff. And in many
parts of the country these were the only two officers of the
government known. In England and in other countries the
main duties of the courts, especially in the beginning, were
to keep the peace. This was not quite so in America. No one
104
knew, often enough, whether murder was committed in the
countryside or not; it was the law of contracts and of real
estate that called forth so many lawyers on this side of the
Atlantic.
It must be remembered, too, that the average agrarian could

not read or write and, even if he could do so, he could not
follow the intricacies of the English common law. As De
Toqueville put it: "The French lawyer is simply a man
extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but
the English or American lawyer resembles the hierophants
of Egypt, for, like them, he is the sole interpreter of an
occult science." (*38)
It was no accident, then, that lawyers, and not soldiers or

ministers, played such a prominent part in American social
life. Later, when British politics had advanced to the science
of constitution-making for the colonies, it was the lawyer
who had to prepare the case to argue before the Privy
Council and other British bodies. Thus in the British courts
there were argued out not only individual rights and duties
but political liberties as well. When the American
Revolution broke out, it was not under a barrage of
religious texts, but with political treatises and legal briefs.
Politics by this time had become thoroughly emancipated
from theology.
To settle national policy by adjudicating the property rights

of an individual plaintiff or defendant, nothing could
illustrate the classlessness and individualism of American
life better than this. Not political but private relations
seemed all-important. In this manner, the court held up to
ridicule the other instruments of the State, and in the case of
businessman John Doe versus the State, has treated John
Doe as though he were a State in himself and as a power
equal to the other side. John Doe's individualism raised to
105
State power, public interests derogated to the standing of
private claims, such has been the classic method of
procedure now thoroughly encrusted in American life. In
the language of the American Liberal, the court has become
idealized as standing between the people and
governmental despotism.
The victory of the Revolutionists in 1783 firmly established

Liberalism, together with its accustomed association with
Radical phrases, as the basic tradition of the country.
Henceforth every group, even the most conservative, that
wanted to take power had to speak in the light of the
Declaration of Independence, in the name of Liberalism and
even Radicalism. Here, then, is a big difference between the
compromising Liberalism of the British and the Radical
Liberalism of the American. In America conservatives must
always pose as Liberal reformists; in England, on the
contrary, Liberal reformists always try to prove they are
conservative and respectable. This difference came clearly
to light at the very time of the Revolution, for during the
whole of the eighteenth century, the Whigs were practically
indistinguishable from the Tories. (The overwhelming
majority of the latter by that time had given up their
Jacobite and Jesuit pretensions.) During the Revolution,
however, a split occurred among the Whigs, some speaking
against the majority's policies.
Naturally, in waging war against the mother country,

American Liberalism had to take on a different emphasis
from the English brand which it was shooting down.
American Liberalism had to be farther to the Left and
appear more Radical. The European colonists in America
did not have to begin history all over again from the very
beginning; they could take over the writings of the
106
European Liberals and improve them. Especially was this
done with the works of John Locke who had set forth the
right of the citizens to overthrow any government that took
property without consent and did not operate according to
reason. To take the English Liberals at their word --- here
was a neat ironic thrust. John Locke, the politician, was
made to fight John Locke, the Mercantilist economist.
American Liberals took to the worship of the laws of

Nature far more strongly than even the English
compromisers had dared to do. One may say that they
deified Nature as they denatured God. (*39) According to
Locke, mankind had not prospered when, in the dim past, it
had lived in a "State of Nature." Mankind needed a social
life without which existence would be hardly endurable.
The Americans emphatically differed with Locke here.
Nature to them was something not far away but very real
and close. Had not the American greatly prospered in this
"State of Nature" and was such a state not better than the
artificial European society that the English Liberal would
impose?
To the English, Natural Law had come to mean the

scientific laws of morality. To the Americans, Natural Law
meant natural science and as great naturalists they
interpreted Natural Rights to mean the rules of conduct to
guide men in their mutual relations in controlling the wilds
of forest and sea. Turning primitive himself, the
Americanized colonist could only idealize primitive man as
being "free as nature."
The American had not much use for either society or the
State. The laws pertaining to geography and botany amply
substituted for social laws and struggles, and the relation of
man to nature became far more paramount in his eyes than
the relation of man to man. The huge extent of the
107
American scene profoundly affected his whole make-up.
(*40) To conquer and control these vast spaces, high speed
and quick tempo were needed. Thus a whole manner of
living was evolved far more adaptable to Radicalism than
to sedate Liberalism. If the British, with Locke, had turned
from revelation to reason, the Americans went from
ratiocination to motor reflexes. Not reason but energy had
battered down the forests. Even Liberalism had to show
some spirit.
Whenever the English Liberals had talked about Natural

Rights, these rights had been merely the duties of
government, since the English Liberals were calling for
those rights of subjects long recognized by the Magna Carta,
such as no cruel punishments, no taxes without law, nor
army without consent of Parliament, trial by jury, free and
frequent elections, right to petition, etc. On the contrary, the
American recognized no duties. The English Rights had
been rooted in tradition; American Rights, in combating the
English variety, had to break away from tradition and to go
straight back to the individual and to nature. The
Continental Congress had made the point, in 1774, that
Americans had the rights belonging to them by virtue of the
unchangeable laws of nature and by the principles of the
Constitution of England. By 1776, in the Declaration of
Independence, this last point of the rights of Englishmen
was dropped, and men were assumed to have inherent and
inalienable rights of life, liberty, and property derived
straight from nature. (*41)
Once the die had been cast for independence, it was

impossible for the Americans to take the ground that their
"Rights as Englishmen" were being impaired. This would
have turned the conflict into a mere family squabble. It
could have made no appeal to the outside world, especially
108
France, whence so much was expected and needed. To
obtain the aid of France, the Colonists had to make it plain
to her they were fighting for independence and not
reconciliation. Otherwise the Revolution would have been
lost from the outset. It is this circumstance more than
anything else that contributed to the belief that the
American Revolution was not a civil war. In a civil war,
revolutionists try to win State power of a country; in the
American Revolution, their aim was to break from the old
State power. Thus could Disraeli say that the Americans
fought, not for liberty, but for independence. (*42)
In America the Law of Nature meant the laws of the present.

Tradition did not have great significance; indeed, in some
respects it was hateful. Since immigrants from countries
other than England were pouring in, customs were
becoming mixed and blurred. And besides, America was
emerging as a nation herself. The abstract theory and rigid
rules of Europe could not compete with the empirical
practice of the American successful farmers and propertied
elements. (*43)
The refusal of the Americans to kowtow to tradition is seen

embodied, not only in such actions as the abolition of
primogeniture and entail, but in direct provisions in the
Constitution where, looking neither forward nor backward,
but emphasizing only the present individual before it, it is
provided that no titles of nobility shall be granted, no ex
post facto laws adopted, and "no attainder of treason shall
work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the
life of the person attainted." (*44)
As for the atrophied development of such ideas as legal

duty and social obligation, such a condition was the
inevitable product of American life. The gap between rich
and poor was not so wide as in England. Neither classes
109
nor the pressure of government existed to a great extent in
the new country, except as both were embodied in the
demands of European powers. The country was vast and
habitually had been not only remote from England's
management, but poorly controlled within. Thus, on the
surface, the program of the American Liberals was more
like that of the English Levellers than that of the English
Liberals. With no feudal classes to fear, with no great class
pressure from below threatening to substitute another
system, the American Liberal could take his Liberalism
"liberally" and make certain gestures toward
Radicalism.(*45)
Here, with a whole continent for a backyard, and with the

fullest freedom of motion and locomotion, it was but
natural that liberty should be the aspect stressed rather than
better government, and that liberty of action, freedom from
control, direct representation and action, were so highly
prized.
While the English Liberal wanted to control the State, the

cry of the American was to be freed from the State. Against
the Monarchy of the English, the Americans posed the
Republic. To the centralized State, they counter-posed
decentralized social groups. Instead of making a demand
for the legal quartering of troops, they tried to do away
with the standing army. For that matter, the government
became for a time a mere policeman and not a very
powerful one at that. Jefferson's view was that government
is best that governs least. Government is only to restrain
men from injuring each other and to protect them from
mutual interference. (*46)
The English had admitted the Right of Revolution; the

Americans not only placed it directly in the Declaration of
Independence, but with Jefferson, called for revolution
110
every twenty years. (*47) But if the revolution was to be a
permanent thing in America it was only because action was
perpetual. Such a philosophy of revolution every twenty
years was perfectly pertinent in a country evolving so
rapidly that a single generation could see pass before its
eyes the entire evolution of the human race from the
hunting and fishing stage to machinofacture, where
children, returning home after twenty years, could no
longer recognize their birthplace.
The American Revolution broke the back of the Mercantilist

School of economists. A new school, the Physiocrats, was
arising in France and from there was to spread to America,
expressing the new events and interests. Benjamin Franklin,
one of their leaders, was one of the first to begin to place
political economy upon a scientific basis. The Physiocrats,
differing from the Mercantilists, declared that all wealth
came from production and not from circulation, but that the
sole real productivity was that of agriculture. That all
wealth came from agriculture was naturally the conclusion
first reached by the capitalists of agrarian countries. The
Physiocrats advocated international free trade. In this
Franklin agreed with Adam Smith, leader of the English
Classic School of Economists. But while Smith put free
trade as a matter of justice, Franklin called for it as a matter
of expediency. Franklin thus not only anticipated a good
deal of modern political economy, (*48) but was among the
first to drive home the basic principles of the utilitarian
school of politics then only being founded in England. The
Industrial Revolution was at hand.
footnotes
1. T. V. Smith: The American Philosophy of Equality, p. 10,

citing E. B. Andrews: The Colonial Period
111
2. The same, p 10, footnote.
3. See Weeden, Economic and Social History of New

England, 1620-1789, I, 288-289.
4. The term "servant" was used to designate anyone who

rendered service, the laborer as well as the household
servant.
5. The pinch of high land prices began to be felt in the 18th

century. In 1732 the Penns raised the price of their lands
from 10 lb’s. for 100 acres and 2 shillings quitrent to l5 ½
lb’s. and a half-penny per acre; and in 1738 Lord Baltimore
raised his from 2 lb’s. for 100 acres to 5 lb’s." (E. C.
Kirkland. History of American Economic Life, p. 35.)
When the great chunks of Western lands were seized (for

example, by the Ohio Land Company), there were no small
parcels sold but only lots of 640 acres at $1 an acre and later
$2 an acre. Thus were the poor kept out.
6. For example, "In 1839, it was reported in Mississippi that

ninety per cent of fines collected by sheriffs and clerks were
unaccounted for." (W. E. DuBois: Gift of the Black Folk, p.
228.)
7. E.C. Kirkland, work cited, p. 241.
8. The categories adopted in Virginia at the time were:
1. white indentured servants
2. white servants without indentures
a. those who came voluntarily
b. those who came involuntarily
112
(1) those spirited away
(2) those sent away for their country's good
(3) probably also the 'Duty boyes
3. Christian Negro servants
4. Indian servants
5. Mulatto servants (whose servitude was the penalty for

having a white mother and an Indian, Negro, or Mulatto
father, or, after 1723, for being descended in the maternal
line from such a combination of ancestors)
6. Indian slaves
7. Negro slaves
(Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the

Negro, edited by H. T. Catterall, I, 53-54. 9. The private
mansions of wealthy planters frequently impressed
observers as though the buildings had a State character
10. Catterall, work cited, pp. 56-61.
11. Citation given in A. Benezet: A Caution and Warning to

Great Britain and Her Colonies, p.10 (The best edition appears
to be the second American, issued by D. Hall & W. Sellers,
Philadelphia, 1767.)
12. The same, pp. 41-43.
13. Interesting evidence of Negro revolts can be found in

John R. Commons and Associates: Documentary History of
American Industrial Society, II, 75-125.
14. Even V. 1. Lenin (Ulyanov), leader of the 1917 October

Revolution in Russia, was taken in by this American
113
propaganda. See his "Letter to American Workingmen"
where he repeats these popular pleasantries.
15. See C. Becker: The Declaration of Independence, especially

pp. 131-132.
16. A. J. Beveridge: Life of John Marshall, I, 124.
17. Beveridge: work cited, I, 86.
18. R. H. Belcher: The First American Civil War, II, 10.
19. W. E. B. Du Bois: Gift of the Black Folk, p. 94, citing from

W. B. Hartgrove- Journal of Negro History, I, 125-129.
20. Beveridge, work cited, I, 120.
21. According to General Greene, the rank and file soldiers

behaved much better than their officers. (See C. K.
Bolton: The Private Soldier Under Washington, pp. 134-135.)
22. See J. Madison: "Letter of Oct. 24, 1787," Works, I, 351-353.
"Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny is, under

certain qualifications, the only policy by which a republic
can be administered on just principles." (The same, I, 353.)
23. J. Adams: Works, VI, 483-484.
For the views of other delegates to the Constitutional

Convention, see J. Madison: The Debates in the Federal
Convention of 1787, p. 32. (Gerry); p. 34 (Randolph); p. 115-
118 (Hamilton). See also pp. 167-168 for another illustration
of Madison's views.
24. C. and Mary Beard: Rise of American Civilization, I, 372.
25. It should be kept in mind that many of the officers had

received their titles and commands not through military
114
experience but through their wealth and ability to raise a
force of recruits. Nepotism was rampant. (See C. K. Bolton:
work cited, p. 129.)
26. This attitude, however, did not prevent Franklin from

accepting an honorary membership in the organization in
1789.
27. "Considerations on the Order of Cincinnatus." This

pamphlet is really a copy of A. Burke's attack against the
Society.
28. The Boston Magazine, 1786, p. 368.
29. See G. R. Minot: The History of the Insurrections in

Massachusetts, pp. 5-6.
30. For a good analysis see C. A. Beard: Economic

Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.
31. R. King: Life and Correspondence, I, 201; also given in J. T.

Austen: The Life of Elbridge Gerry, I, 4.
32. Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 1.
33. See The Federalist, No. 83.
34. Not until long after the Declaration of Independence did

Jefferson commit himself to the dangerous doctrine of
manhood suffrage. As for the Liberal Franklin, at first he
was against universal suffrage. "As to those who have no
landed property in a county the allowing them to vote for
legislators is an impropriety." (Franklin: Bigelow Edition, III,
496.) Franklin did not oppose the English Rotten Borough
system. Only during, or, rather, after the Revolution, did
Franklin say franchise was the common right of freemen.
(Franklin, Smythe Edition, IX, 342.) But he specifically
115
excluded "minors, servants (that is, workers) and others
who are liable to undue influence." (Franklin, Bigelow
Edition, VIII, 411.) At the Constitutional Convention,
however, Franklin was part of the more democratic wing as
opposed to Hamilton.
35. A. J. Beveridge: Life of John Marshall, II, 114.
36. In the Northwest ordinance of 1787 the judges had this

power with the Governor.
37. See C. G. Haines: The American Doctrine of judicial

Supremacy.
38. A. de Tocqueville: Democracy in America, I, 282. (Colonial

Press Ed, 1899-1900.)
39. For this expression see C. Becker: Declaration of

Independence, p. 51.
40. To this day Americans are far more interested in scenic

effects (Niagara Falls, Yellowstone Park, etc.) than they are
in monuments of history. And one would be absolutely lost
in many large American cities such as in Chicago if one did
not always remember, like a traveler wandering in the
wilderness by compass, which was North, East, South and
West. In Europe, on the other hand, avenues are named
after social events and historic characters.
41. See G. Jellinek: Declaration of Rights of Man, pp. 27-28,

also p. 48.
42. Disraeli, The Younger: Vindication of the English

Constitution, p. 59 (1935 edition).
43. According to M. J. Bonn, the distinctive features of

America are its methods, which are characterized by its
116
complete disregard of established traditions, by sudden
change of fronts, by utter unconcern over remote
consequence and by "cocktail" eclecticism. (See Preface: The
American Experiment, by M. J. Bonn.)
"I think in no country in the civilized world is less attention

paid to philosophy than in the U. S. . . . To evade the
bondage of system and habit, of family maxims, class
opinions, and, in some degree, of national prejudices; to
accept tradition only as a means of information, and
existing facts only as a lesson used in doing otherwise, and
doing better; to seek the reason of things for one's self, and
in one's self alone; to tend to results without being bound to
means, and to aim at the substance through the form; such
are the principal characteristics of what I shall call the
philosophic method of the Americans." (De Tocqueville,
work cited, II, 3.)
44. Article II, Section 3.
45. Besides, the American Liberals learned a great deal later

from the French Radicals. Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine
spent years in France. Under Jefferson, the Liberals came
out for the end of primogeniture and entail, and for a
reform of the penal laws. Note, however, that Jefferson
organized, not a Democratic Party, but a Republican Party.
46. See "Jefferson's First Inaugural Address," March 4, 1801,

Writings, VIII, 4 (Ford edition). See also, "Jefferson's First
Message to Congress," Dec. 8, 1801, VIII, 123.
47. If Jefferson was for Revolution; however, he was for a

revolution of the country over the city. If he expressed
himself favorably to the Shays Rebellion, it was after the
Rebellion was defeated and also because it was a struggle
against the Northern capitalists. If he posed as a Democrat,
117
it was because the Southern planter was making his alliance
with the West against the North and East.
See "Letter to William S. Smith," November 13, 1787,

Writings, IV, 467. Also, "Letter to James Madison,"
December 20, 1787, IV, 479-480.
48. Franklin was among the first to see that labor is the
source of value, and to understand the uses of money as a
medium of exchange, and to believe that all commerce is
cheating. (See. L. G. Carey: Franklin's Economic Views, pp.
41-43; see Karl Marx: Capital, I, 59, footnote Kerr Edition.)
III. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
THE victory of capitalism in France came painfully and

hard. Its delay only accentuated the force with which
bourgeois economy burst its fetters. Heroic measures were
necessary, measures far beyond the capacity of the French
Liberals. French Liberalism could only initiate the events; it
was necessary for an extreme Radicalism combined with
elements of Anarchism and Communism to achieve victory.
Nevertheless, though the French Revolution was Radical,
its fruits fell into the hands of the Liberals. In short, in order
to attain political revolution, French capitalism opened the
way to social revolution. It was the barbarians within the
gates, the sansculottes and Jacobin Radicals, who carried the
revolution to the walls of Moscow and dealt the ancien
r’egime an irreparable blow. The French Revolution went as
far as a bourgeois revolution could go and yet retain its
capitalist character. In the course of that Revolution the
most extreme Radicalisms of England and America paled
into insignificance.
118
By means of the French Revolution, world capitalism was
advancing the attack from the periphery to the center, from
the "tight little island," England, and from far-off American
colonies, to the very heart of the old order itself. (*1) It was
capable of so doing, for by now the hands of the merchants
and manufacturers were being strengthened by the
introduction of machinery, i.e., by the industrial revolution.
In the light of this new development, the throttling of the
world's productive forces by the old feudal order had
become intolerable.
For a long time capitalism in France had been trying to free

itself. Superior even to the English in the fourteenth century,
(*2) French capitalism had supported an Absolute
Monarchy in order to end the feudal system. However, the
feudal orders could not be broken. Through the Babylonian
captivity, France forced the Pope to become a Frenchman,
and, at Avignon, three-quarters of a century later, when the
Pope had returned to Rome and the schism was over,
compelled the Pope constantly to respect the integrity of the
French Absolute Monarchy. (*3) This served only to
entrench both the Catholic Church and the aristocratic band
that adhered to it. France thus evaded the Reformation.
Later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, capitalism

in France, envious of the victory of the Reformation
capitalists elsewhere, tried again, through the Huguenots,
to make itself heard. To support their interests, the
Huguenots declared that the State was the result of a Social
Contract (not, however, of one man with another, but of
subjects with their rulers), and that the King must not
violate this contract, hallowed by God's will. The King must
not violate tradition, especially the early French tradition
that the political chief must be guided by Parlement. In
order to preserve themselves, the Huguenots supported a
119
Protestant King against a Catholic; they seized important
parts of France and held them for nearly a century. They
forced the feudal orders to make concessions granting them
toleration. But in the end their efforts collapsed.
The French Huguenots succumbed at the very time when

the English capitalists were becoming successful through
the Civil Wars and, indeed, partly because the English were
successful. French capitalism was being choked by the
success of the English in driving French trade off the seas.
On the other side, it was being crushed by the great weight
of European reaction. Thus did the situation between
France and England in 1688 reverse the situation between
England and Holland in 1648. Then, the English rebels were
aided by the Dutch, who later even supplied them with a
King, William of Orange. In France, however, the
Huguenots could not but suffer because of English attacks
on French interests. And with the Huguenots' defeat,
French capitalism was set back still farther. Many tens of
thousands of them were driven out of France into England
and into the English colonies, there still more to enrich the
English and to prepare for the day when the English would
further reduce the French. To a considerable degree the
draining of the Huguenots from France had the same effect
upon that country as had the exile of the Jews and Moors
upon Spain. The progressive forces were cut to pieces. The
huge incubus of the decadent and parasitic feudal state
grew heavier and more settled.
But if world capitalism could not remove the French rulers

from within, it could and did begin to loosen their grip
from without. The victory of the English capitalists had
released greatly the English productive forces. All the
important French colonies-Canada, India, the West Indies-
were being taken by the English. The French State was
120
rapidly becoming bankrupt. All around France, England
was able to buy supporters who constantly harried the
French Monarchy through incessant wars. These wars were
all the more inevitable, since the only solution for the old
landed orders was to secure more land. In this respect, too,
the superiority of money and merchant capital over landed
property made itself manifest.
By the latter part of the eighteenth century, matters had

evolved to an intolerable situation throughout whole
portions of Europe and especially in France, the head of the
European continent." (*4) A century earlier, French
capitalism had been enormously strengthened by the
change in rent payments from payment in kind to money
payment. This change in rent payments, accomplished
under Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, greatly
accelerated the break-up of the old social relationships on
the countryside. The poor peasantry was driven into the
hands of the usurer. The old village commons were broken
up.
Simultaneously, the break-up and bankruptcy of the older

order caused the pressure to become more severe than ever
upon the lower nobility, who began to harass the peasantry
with the greatest viciousness.
In the English Civil Wars, the large aristocrats had lived on

the countryside and had taken a patriarchal attitude
towards "their" peasants. This helped to neutralize the mass
of poorest peasantry in England. On the other hand, in
France, with the exception of the Vend’ee, almost all the
estates were run by absentee landlords who resided in Paris
and at the court.
During this time there emerged in France capitalist farmers

and peasants who produced for a wide market. This event
121
had a tremendous import, for the growth of agrarian
capitalism meant that now not the feudal lord but the city
capitalist could lead and represent the peasant. In the van
of the peasantry as a whole was the more prosperous group
of capitalist farmers. It was this group and not the
bourgeois country gentlemen that led the agrarian masses
in the French Revolution. At the same time, the bankruptcy
of the ruling class was causing the State greatly to increase
its tax burdens upon those producing wealth. In utter
confusion, the aristocracy had been compelled to call in the
very leaders of the capitalist economists and bankers to
help them extricate themselves from their difficulties. Thus
the leading capitalists became the saviors of society and the
intellectual leaders of the day. These were the French
Liberals.
At this historic juncture, the American Revolution broke

out. French Liberals hastened to side with the Americans,
throwing the full weight of France into the fray. The result
was decisive, not only for the English but for the French. If
England were to lose her colonies, Louis XVI was to lose his
head. The intervention in American affairs cost the French
King heavily and brought nearer the financial collapse and
general bankruptcy of the State. At the same time, French
capitalism could feel emboldened by the relative weakening
of the English to step forth in its own right and seize the
control of the State from the palsied hands of the old order,
not only to effect internal reforms, but to lay the basis for
regaining the world hegemony which the ancien r’egime had
lost. The victory of the conservative Federalists in the
United States, with the adoption of the Constitution and the
formation of a National Government, spoiled the plans of
the French Liberals and Democrats for an alliance with
America. Under Napoleon, French capitalism was to make
its most heroic efforts for world power, but, by that time,
122
allied no longer to the people but rather to the despots of
Europe, it was doomed to failure.
French Liberal reformers had two principal sections. One

division was composed of literateurs and scientists. These
did not attack the Monarchy itself, but its allies, particularly
the Church, and the latter not as an embodiment of religion
but as an intolerant institution.
The principal spokesmen of this group had been in England,

or were able to read and speak English.' (*5) Locke was
their chief philosopher. In substituting Deism and
Scepticism' for the dogmas of the Church, in discrediting
the prevailing morality, in praising the scientific empiricism
(*6) of the English, in calling for complete intellectual
freedom, these elements prepared the way to some extent
for the events that were to follow. However, these Liberals
had no influence among the masses whom they despised.
(*7) As Voltaire stated the situation, he "would rather be
ruled by one lion than by one hundred rats."
Most of these idealists protested the gloomy church

doctrine that misery was an inevitable part of life. They
claimed it was possible to be happy on this earth-nay,
happiness was the goal of man. But to most of them,
happiness merely meant freedom in the social class to
which one was born. Social equality was a pure utopia.
However, among this group a left wing was forming which
conceived of happiness as being found in virtue. Virtue
came through social justice, and social justice meant liberty
for each and all; this in turn presupposed equality, and
rested on the fraternity of man. Emphatically, the French
were learning from the American and English Revolutions,
where similar beliefs had won out. (*8)
123
Here, on the question of democracy, the Left Wing Liberal
literati began to break from the Right Wing, such as the
Encyclopedists. "The Encyclopedists made no attack upon
any of the received political institutions of their time. It was
absolutism, obscurantism, and formalism that they opposed;
they never came near enough to reality to trace any
connection between the false prejudices they hated and the
fundamental political institutions of the society they knew."
(*9)
On the other hand, the Left Wing believed that not the King
was sovereign, but the Nation. Sovereignty rested in the
people, in society as a whole. The works of Rousseau, (*10)
most widely known leader of this opinion, became the bible
for future intellectual revolutionists of both the Girondist
and Jacobin variety.
Rousseau maintained that the true Legislator was the whole

people, and that only such legislation could express the
general will so as to be obeyed as a matter of right rather
than of society. The sovereignty of the people, their power
to legislate, was inalienable, absolute, indispensable, and
indestructible. (*11) He who usurped the sovereign power
was a despot who could rule only by force and who could
not legitimately prevent revolutions to restore proper social
relations.
Rousseau's ideas were interpreted by many of his readers

as exceedingly revolutionary. Quite the contrary was
Rousseau's own understanding. When he wrote, "Man is
born free; and everywhere he is in chains," his very next
sentence stated, "One thinks himself the master of others,
and still remains a greater slave than they." (*12) In short,
masters were greater slaves than their subjects and there
was no escape for anyone. Furthermore, Rousseau's task
was not to explain this change from freedom to slavery, nor
124
to protest against nor to show how to end this slavery, but
merely to find out what made it legitimate. If the change to
universal slavery could not be legitimatized, then
revolution was inevitable. Revolution was just what
Rousseau wanted to deny. To Rousseau, the "social order is
a sacred right. (*13)
Rousseau found that the slavery of mankind was inevitably

connected with the inherent nature of every social order
and was legitimatized by a social compact which isolated
and brutish man in the state of nature had formed in order
to obtain the benefits of social life. In cementing the social
contract, isolated man gave up his natural liberty but
obtained civil liberty and morality.
With the French, there always lurked in the background the

feeling that man is by nature a social animal and that he
does not really become man until he is part of society. With
Locke, on the contrary, man was moral and enjoying
inalienable rights before he joined society. Rousseau here
also contested the ideas of Hobbes, who thought man
originally was immoral and needed government to correct
him. To Rousseau, primitive man was neither good nor bad
but just a simple, unmoral brute. Only as man lost his
natural liberty in joining society did he gain a moral liberty
and become truly master of himself.
Thus, principles of morality flowed directly from the social

order, as much so as the stream of rights protected by the
State. Natural man had no rights; it was society that
endowed him with whatever rights he had and
transformed possession into property. But if property came
only through the good graces of the social order, it could
also be taken away by that social order whenever necessary.
Hence the State was the master of all goods;... the
community, so far from despoiling them, only assures them
125
legitimate possession and changes usurpation into a true
right and enjoyment into proprietorship." (*14)
When an individual joined the social order, he put his

person and all his power under the supreme direction of
the general will. The general will was always right, even if
it had to compel the recalcitrant to obey. "This means
nothing else than that he will be forced to be free; for this is
the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country,
secures him against all personal dependence." (*15)
Rousseau's assertion that the Nation was sovereign, that all

must obey the general will, did not mean that he necessarily
favored democracy. On the contrary, he wrote, "Were there
a people of gods, their government would be democratic.
So perfect a government is not for man." For "It is against
the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be
governed." Rousseau himself, following Montesquieu,
favored a monarchy for France, and this he could do,
despite his theory of Popular Sovereignty, on the ground
that "It is not good for him who makes the laws to execute
them. . .." (*16) Since, presumptively, the people made the
laws, there was needed someone to carry them out. In a
large and powerful State this could be only by a Monarchy,
and by an Absolute Monarchy at that.
To Rousseau, "Neither lot nor vote has any place in

monarchical government." (*17) Nor was a parliament any
better. Since sovereignty could not be alienated and was not
divisible, the deputies in parliament could not be the
representatives but merely the stewards of the general will.
Parliamentary representation, idealized by Locke as the
essence of democracy and feared by Hobbes for the same
reason, was ridiculed by Rousseau as having nothing
whatever to do with real democracy. Such people as
Cromwell were but self-seekers or hypocrites. (*18) Thus, if
126
the general will needed to be expressed through an
Absolute Monarchy, Rousseau favored it. There could be no
revolution against the general will and thus no revolution
against its agent, the Absolute Monarchy, carrying out its
laws.
On no account must we understand the theory of the

general will to mean necessarily majority rule. The general
will did not coincide with even the sum total of individual
wills. The "general will" meant the will representing the
common good, something equivalent to the term "public
spirit." The French, in contrast to the Americans, had long
established social traditions not easily broken by the new
capitalist order. The "common good" did not necessarily
mean the good of the majority of individuals in society,
because society was not to be considered as an aggregation
of individuals. This idea was for the English and, above all,
for the Americans later to develop. It could not have been
the theory of the French Liberals before the Revolution.
The objective of the general will was the good of all. "If we
ask in what precisely consists the greatest good of all,
which should be the end of every system of legislation, we
shall find it reduce itself in two main objects, liberty and
equality. . . ." ". . . by equality, we should understand, not
that the degrees of power and riches are to be absolutely
identical for everybody; but that power shall never be great
enough for violence, and shall always be exercised by
virtue of rank and law; and that, in respect of riches, no
citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and
none poor enough to be forced to sell himself. . . ." (*19)
Thus the State should allow neither rich men nor beggars.
Thirty years later this was to become the ideal of many
Jacobins.
127
Rousseau, like Locke and the Americans, had started from
the premise of a social contract. To the English Liberal this
implied the right to break the contract whenever the
majority decided; to the American it signified the right of
each individual to decide for himself whether to take part
or not; to both, society existed to provide individual liberty
and equality. To the Frenchman, all right of individual
decision had long been abandoned; not even the majority
could dissolve the social contract. In this Rousseau was at
one with Hobbes; mankind was bound forever, not to the
State as Hobbes would have it, but to society.
The peculiar conditions existing in America made the

Liberals there attempt to deny the existence of classes. This
itself was a good class theory for the capitalists. In this
denial of the existence of classes, the American bourgeoisie
was able to point out to the lower orders that any man
could become a capitalist, and thus to direct all hatred
solely against those feudal remnants who ruled on the
ground of class superiority. In France, on the contrary, it
was necessary not to deny the existence of classes, but to
stress their equality and to demand a hearing for all, and to
stress the superiority of the Nation over all classes. Despite
the fact that Rousseau himself may have expressed the
yearnings of the French peasantry, his ideas ultimately
aided the bourgeoisie, to whom incidentally the peasant
had to turn for leadership. For the French capitalists to be
treated equally as, a class meant for them to win, inasmuch
as they had all the forces of history on their side. This was
clearly seen in the course of the French Revolution itself.
In any event, whether in France, America, or elsewhere, a

class that is fighting for power must fight in the name not
only of its own class but in the name of the entire nation, in
the name of humanity as a whole. Only when it is assured
128
that it is fighting for the progress of humanity as a whole
can it win those allies and establish that morale which
enables it to conquer. There can be no doubt that at that
time the capitalist class was the only one that could really
represent the interests of the nation. The Nation as
Sovereign could mean only that the capitalist class was
sovereign.
Rousseau's analysis of primitive man had led him also to

the conclusion that "All men are born equal"-but not in the
psychological sense of the Englishman Locke that all started
out into the world with a blank mind to be molded by
environment. In France and in America it came to mean
that all originally came into the world under equal
conditions, facing equal natural forces. Certainly this was
true both of the mass of French agrarians and of the
American immigrants. But whereas the French theory
implied that this had been so in the dim past before
mankind had formed a compact to establish a social order,
but had changed during the social order, in America it was
a question of the actual present. The French, like the
English, recognized the social order; in America the social
order had to be created. While the French stressed the point
that similar environment brought similar rights to all
classes, to the Americans similar environment meant equal
opportunities for advancement to all individuals.
In the last chapter of his Social Contract, Rousseau called for

the setting up of a State religion, a civil profession of faith
of which the Sovereign should fix the articles not as
religious dogmas but as social sentiments. The State was to
be also the Church, and the Prince, the Pontiff. The dogmas
of this civil religion were to be very simple, such as,
acknowledgment of the existence of the Divinity, the
happiness of the just and the punishment of the wicked,
129
and the sanctity of the social contract and its laws. There
was to be no intolerance. This was the type of religion that
Robespierre later was to attempt to carry on.
Thus, it can be seen that it is hardly accurate to judge

Rousseau as a revolutionary. Indeed, even in his
supposedly most revolutionary essay, his "Discourse on
Inequality," Rousseau called on the people to respect the
sacred bonds of their respective communities, scrupulously
to obey the laws and all who made or administered them,
etc. (*20)
In what, then, could the revolutionary implications consist,

that they should be believed in so fervently by all the
firebrands to come? First of all, Rousseau showed the
corruptness of the society of the times and constantly
branded the feudal ancien r’egime as iniquitous, always
returning to the Republics of Greece and Rome for models.
Second, there was Rousseau's argument that no rights were
holy or divine, but all originated from society, which could
take them back again at will. Third, there was his theory
that real inequality arose not in nature but in the social
order. The very foundation of the social order and of law
lay in the inequality of possession, which they in turn
perpetuated. Fourth, there was his fundamental doctrine of
the sovereignty of the people to which was subordinated
even the Prince or King, the Monarchy tolerated not by
divine right but as a convenience appropriate to certain
material conditions existing in large nations. In all cases, the
government was but an intermediate body set up between
subjects and sovereigns to execute the laws and maintain
liberty.
Finally, there were the philosophical aspects of Rousseau's

writings in which, repelling the dry intellectualism of
the "Philosophes," Rousseau rejected rationalism for the
130
viewpoint that it is warm-hearted feeling alone for one's
fellow man that moves the world. This was an attitude that
colored deeply all his writings and that endeared him to all
the Radicals of the French Revolution who were to follow
him. It was not only the pedantic Encyclopedists whom
Rousseau fought, but the fawning bourgeois Physiocrat
economists as well, who in the name of "science"
symbolized only the waste and luxury of the wealthy
parasite. (*21)
Of all the great French writers of the day, Rousseau alone

saw that the main problem was to adjust the social order to
the needs of the peasantry. Again and again he ridiculed
the artificial society of the ancien r’egime and called for a
return to the simple rustic life of the countryside. (*22) The
"back to nature" call of Rousseau by no means implied a
return to the pre-social state of nature, but only a return to
the life that was natural to the peasant. "Remember that the
walls of the towns are built of the ruins of the houses of the
countryside. For every palace I see raised in the capital, my
mind's eye sees a whole country made desolate." (*23) His
whole moral and political theory was one that would
appeal tremendously to the peasantry.
Rousseau's idealization of the peasant life went hand in

hand with the claims of the peasant to be let alone, to be
free to sell his product and to buy and sell his land. Yet,
would not all such practice overthrow the very foundation
of the old order? We have seen that it was only when
capitalism had penetrated the countryside, there to affect
every peasant and to any each peasant with the city
capitalists, that capitalism could become strong enough to
challenge the ancien r’egime of Europe. French capitalism
could well use the phrases of Rousseau, not in order to
make the peasant supreme, but to chain him to the war
131
chariot of the rising capitalist class that was calling for the
end of interference with the "Natural Laws" of political
economy.
The second principal section of the French Liberals was

composed of the Physiocrat economists. To them, Natural
Law meant the law of economics, and therefore, as they put
it, the end of government was not happiness but science, or
truth. It is in truth that happiness lies. Society to them was
founded upon well-being. The guide to well-being was not
morality, that was too variable and relative, but nature, the
working out of natural social laws.
The spokesmen for such views knew all too well that
capitalism in France lagged far behind that in England, and
that it was necessary to catch up. It was necessary to
develop science, to improve the arts, to spread knowledge,
whereby more goods could be produced to serve the needs
of man. This was, in a way, the opposite yet complementary
point of view from that of the Left literati who, orientating
themselves to the peasant, had stressed the need for the
simple rustic life and sparing economy. While the literary
men urged abstinence, the Physiocrats were urging the
increase of production.
The French Physiocrats were the first to understand that for

their capitalist economy to surpass that of England it was
necessary to have complete freedom from restrictive State
regulation. The English Civil Wars had begun over the
question of taxation; the Americans had raised the question
of free trade, but in the guise of a struggle against taxation.
It was left to the French to extend this struggle and,
followed in part by the Americans, to launch the
slogan laissez-faire, let be. Liberty of trade, liberty of
industry, free trade within France, the end of all the feudal
restrictions that hampered production, abolition of the
132
internal tolls, abolition of the corve'e, abolition of forced and
statute labor, greater recognition of the third estate, these
were the demands of the Physiocrats. (*24)
In justification of their claims, the Physiocrats pointed out

that all value devolved from agriculture, and that all the
rest of France was supported by the labor of the agrarian.
Here again the Physiocrat loaded himself upon the peasant,
(*25) and, as at this time the proletariat had not as yet arisen
as a class in its own right, it was the capitalist, as the only
articulate section of industry, that presumed to speak for all
labor.
The French Revolution unfolded itself in the proportions of

an awe- inspiring Niagara. Not a thousand Shakespeares
could have invented the climaxes that piled up one upon
the other as that great drama played itself out upon the
stage of history. For the first time it is the entire Nation, the
People, who speak. It is this that separates the French from
the American and the English Revolutions. It is this that
strikes fear into the hearts of an Edmund Burke (*26) or a
Thomas Jefferson. It is this that moves Thomas Paine
towards the guillotine. (*27) It is the peasants' war. The
toiling mass now raises its mighty hand to strike. And,
further, it is the toiling mass at whose head stands the city
and the paramount city of all-Paris.
We have seen that in previous revolutions, the revolting

class itself had its roots in the country, through the
bourgeois country gentleman. It was the country gentleman
who aroused the yeoman and the apprentice. But in France
the country gentleman had no strength. It was not he, but
the successful wealthy and middle peasant (the "kulak" as
the Russians call him) who represented the city classes.
133
Now the kulak was not a polished gentleman, not a city
bourgeois. The capitalist spoke directly from the city, and
the country kulak and peasant had to follow in their rough
way as best they could.
Throughout the whole course of the Revolution, the Nation

could not escape the program of the bourgeoisie. All the
Liberals, whether of the Right or of the Left, all the literati
and economists, politicians and jurists, believed in the right
of private property. This was the idea of Voltaire, of
Rousseau, of Danton, of Robespierre, Marat and Hebert, all
of whom played different variations upon the same tune.
(*28) "Both Gironde and Mountain were altogether middle
class parties, and the Convention contained perhaps no
member of the proletariat." (*29) If we see the Moderates
give way to the Girondists, and the Girondists wiped out
by the Jacobins, and then the Jacobins destroyed by the
Emperor, it is not because of a quarrel over the abolition of
private property in land and in the means of production,
but one over who should get this property. As the
Revolutionary guillotine moved on, Royalists might turn
Republicans, Republicans might turn Democrats,
Democrats might turn Anarchists, but none could escape
from the framework of capitalism. The Revolution, though
at times carried on without and even against the
bourgeoisie, remained bourgeois to the end.
Without exception, all the "Philosophers" were monarchists.

Some of them did not advocate even a constitutional
monarchy. They wanted simply a reformed monarchy, one
that would listen to the prayer of the capitalists more
closely. (*30) Physiocrat advisers of the King did not seek
the overthrow of the social order. They desired only a
scientific despotism rather than an unscientific, chaotic line.
It was not these elements that caused the Revolution.
134
Since 1614 no Parliament had been called in France. Now it
was necessary to do so. The Three Estates were called
together. The capitalists were out-voted two to one, but
decided that all Estates must merge in one Estates General
(*31) where they would be able to win the majority of the
individual delegates. The Moderates or Liberals were in
control. The Third Estate, with the pressure of the masses
behind it, organized the National Assembly, and as the
King vacillated between recognition or non-recognition of
the capitalists, the masses of Paris went into action and
stormed the symbol of the aristocracy, the Bastille.
Barricades were erected in the streets. Up to now the

Liberals had wanted simply regular meetings of the Estates
and a Constitution for the Monarchy. They had wanted
elective judges and greater consideration for the capitalist
interests. Now, thoroughly frightened, the bourgeoisie met
with the nobility for the abolition of feudal rights. However,
it was not the essential rights that were thus given up; it
was only the special feudal services irksome to the
peasantry that were yielded. As to the others, they were to
be bought from the nobility at thirty times their annual
value. Nevertheless, the peasants were still land hungry;
the city masses were still starving. As the wealthy
congregated in their salons and the Moderates in their cafes,
the poorer elements flocked into the Jacobin clubs and the
masses poured into the, streets. The bourgeoisie found itself
more and more a prisoner of the revolutionary masses, and
the Declaration of the Rights of Man was passed.
This Declaration of 1789 declared that the aim of all political

association was to assure the natural rights of man-liberty,
property, security, and resistance to oppression. Liberty
was defined as the power to do anything that does not
injure others, the law to determine the limits of "anything"
135
and "injure." Sovereignty resided in the nation. There was
to be free speech and press, but while all religions were to
be tolerated, the Catholic religion should remain as the
State religion. A separation of powers of government was to
be established. Notice that the rights of public meetings and
associations were not mentioned. On the other hand, the
right of property was declared inviolate and sacred, and
expropriation should take place only in dire need of the
nation and when the owner is properly indemnified. When
the Declaration stated that men are born and live free and
equal under the laws, it also said that social distinctions
may be established but "only on grounds of common
utility." Classes were sharply recognized in this Liberal
document, and it was not until 1791 that Church and State
were formally separated.
Peasants began to seize the large estates; in the city, the

masses looted for bread, the nobles fled the country, and
the King was left alone with the Liberals who now rallied
around him to prevent the Revolution from going farther.
The Liberals, in spite of their Declaration of the Rights of
Man, now passed a law dividing citizens into two sections,
the "actives" and the "passives." The "actives" were the
middle and wealthy property holders, the "passives," the
poor.
Only the "actives" could take part in the government. The

mass of people were disfranchised. The electors of the
National Assembly were required to be property holders;
they were to meet once and then disband.
This ruling came just in time, for the masses had already
marched on Versailles and had brought the King and
National Assembly both to Paris where the Assembly could
convene only under close surveillance. This second action
of the masses forced the Liberals to move farther to the Left.
136
They accordingly acted to confiscate the estates of the
Church, and thus made of the clergy the most bitter
enemies of the Revolution.(*32) They modified the laws of
inheritance so as to democratize property. They abolished
all titles; they reorganized the army so as to make it serve
the capitalists. They laid the foundations of a more nearly
equal basis of taxation and removed the previous
exemptions. They allowed a certain amount of local self-
government to the cities and communities in the provinces.
They confiscated the property of the ‘emigr’e nobility. They
framed a new high- sounding Declaration of the Rights of
Man. In short, the bourgeoisie did its best to throw the
privileges of the nobility and of the clergy to the masses, so
as to stop the Revolution and save it for the Liberals.
However, all of this was on paper; in reality, very little of
the ambitious program was actually carried out by the
Assembly. (*33)
From 1789 to 1791 it was the wealthy moderate Liberals

who held power and the nobility who now counter-
attacked. After all, the whole power of Europe was behind
the dispossessed nobility. The King had attempted to flee
the country, (*34) in order to meet the ‘emigr’e nobles and
invade France.
With this, the royalty was doomed. Up to this time, even

the Jacobins had been in favor of a king. Had not even
Danton taken an oath to support a Constitutional Monarchy?
And was not the pretender to the throne, the Duc d'Orleans,
actually a member of the Jacobin Club, actively intriguing
with the members?
But it became more and more difficult to put down the

people, who now' turned, not only against the King, but
against the "Patriots," the bourgeoisie, as well. No sooner
was a Constitutional Monarchy established than the old
137
order invaded France, and France was forced to declare war
against Austria. No English Channel nor Atlantic Ocean
barred the way. To cap the climax, the English capitalists
were now behind the ancien r’egime in an effort to help
crush the rising French capitalist class.
It now became war. "But in the minds of the French

revolutionaries it was a new kind of war. It was a war to
make the world safe for democracy and nationalism. It was
a war, not between dynasts or between peoples, but
between despots and nationalities. It was a war, not for
material gain, but for the welfare of humanity.
Accompanying the formal declaration of hostilities was this
remarkable proclamation: 'The National Assembly
proclaims that the French nation, faithful to the principles
consecrated by its constitution, "not to undertake any war
with a view to conquest nor ever to employ its forces
against the liberty of any people" only takes up arms for the
maintenance of its own liberty and independence; . . . that
the French nation never confuses its brethren with its real
enemies; . . . that it adopts in advance all foreigners who,
abjuring the cause of its enemies, shall range themselves
under its banners and consecrate their efforts to the defense
of liberty, and it will promote by all means in its power
their settlement in France. . . ." (*35)
War! The Germans were at the very gates of Paris. This

entirely changed the relationship of forces and exacerbated
all movements; in the face of this national crisis, the whole
Nation was forced to act in self- defense. (*36) The Liberals
and their National Assembly were now pushed aside. The
masses marched on the Tuileries and imprisoned the King.
The massacres of September, 1792 took place to rid Paris of
counter-revolutionary elements. (*37) Elections became free
to all. The two-chambered Legislative Assembly now gave
138
way to the one-chambered Convention. It was the turn of
the old Moderate Liberals to flee the country. In the new
Convention, the new Liberals, the Girondists, more Left
than the old, took the lead. They who had occupied the
extreme Left Wing in the old Assembly were far to the
Right in the new Convention. The Left Wing remained
occupied by the Mountain, former Liberals, now turned
Radicals, who knew that the sole salvation of France lay in
reliance upon the masses, and who meant to save the
Revolution at no matter what cost.
Soon the Girondists or Left Liberals began to lose control

over the situation. The King had been executed. The
Republic had been proclaimed in 1793. This idea of a
republic was no new one. True, it was no part of the
philosophical program of the eighteenth century in France
to regenerate humanity by hoisting the republican flag over
the capitals of Europe, yet from the earliest days of the rise
of capitalism the idea had been popularized. The
Humanists and publicists of the Renaissance period had
called attention to the achievements of the Greek and
Roman republics of antiquity, and "There is a famous
lament in Hobbes' Leviathan to the effect that the civil
troubles in England in the seventeenth century were due to
the study of the Greek and Latin classic." (*38)
The Italian city-states, Switzerland, and the English

Commonwealth, had already set the example of republics.
According to Montesquieu, these precedents merely
showed that for a republic there was needed a small
territory (*39) and an absence of luxury and large fortunes
coupled with a large supply of public virtue. The victory of
the American Revolution finally blasted this piece of
political wisdom and demonstrated the feasibility of a
republic even in extensive countries.
139
But what sharply separated the French experiment from all
preceding ones was the great fact that all other republics
had been oligarchical and dictatorial, certainly non-
democratic. It is true the French revolutionaries often
covered their innovations with appeals to the traditions of
Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, this was but another case
of the rule that social innovations are often ushered in
under the guise of being but old customs again renewed. In
fact, contrary to all previous examples, the French Republic
was destined to go down in history as the greatest attempt
to achieve "pure" democracy of which capitalism is capable.
The flight of the traitor-king compelled the masses to

realize that France could exist without a royalty, and led to
the establishment of the Republic. And with the Republic
came the War with England, for nothing more infuriated
the Whig Liberals of England than the fact that the King
had been deposed and later executed and a democratic
republic set up. The Liberal, Pitt, stated the matter very
clearly in his speech, 1793: "They had seen within two or
three years a revolution in France founded upon principles
which were inconsistent with every regular government,
which were hostile to hereditary monarchy, to nobility, to
all the privileged orders." (*40) Pitt knew well the difference
between the American and French Revolutions.
In France, a new constitution and still another Declaration

of Rights were now worked out in an attempt really to
introduce democracy to the nation. As the Liberals went out,
Democracy came in. "This celebrated Constitution of '93, for
long regarded as the sheet anchor of Sansculottism, is
probably the most thorough-going scheme of pure
democracy ever devised. It not only formally recognized
the people as the sole primary source of power but it
delegated the exercise of that power directly to them. Every
140
measure was to be submitted to the primary assemblies of
the 'sections' of which there were forty-four thousand in all
France. The magistrates were to be re-elected at the shortest
possible intervals by simple majority. The central
legislature was to be renewed annually, consisting of
delegates from the primary assemblies, who were to be
furnished with imperative mandates." (*41) In this way the
Clubs triumphed over the Salons and the Cafes. The
Jacobins accomplished what the Levellers could not.
However, before this Radical Jacobin Constitution could be
put into effect, the whole population was forced under
arms.
The Jacobin Mountain vigorously attacked many problems

which the Left Liberals had refused to solve. Feudal dues at
last were really abolished and the peasants were urged now
to seize and to hold the land of the big estates. However, it
should be noted that the action of the previous Liberal
Assembly in turning over the village common land seized
by the aristocracy, not to the commonalty of the village but
to be parceled out to individuals, was allowed to stand. (*42)
The price of bread and necessities had gone sky-high. The
Radical Jacobins placed a maximum price on necessities.
Further, in order to pay for the war and to put down the
counter-revolution that was springing up in the four
quarters of France, the Jacobins had decided to confiscate
some of the property of the wealthy. A forced loan of a
billion francs was made.
The Revolution had started under the slogan: Liberty,

Equality, and Fraternity. The wealthy Liberals had stressed
Liberty. The desperate little property-holder, turned
141
Radical, stressed Equality. ". . . the owner must not be rich
and all must be owners. That is the distinguishing feature
of Jacobin theory." (*43) Under the stress of civil and
national war, the Jacobin was forced to recognize that the
right of society was greater than the right of the individual
and the Liberal who believed that property was an
individual right was soon informed by the Jacobin that it
was a social power and that the State could be the protector
of the many at the expense of the few.
The old Liberals of the Encyclopedist school had believed

that all property belonged to the State, but the King was the
State. The only proviso was that the State should be
reasonable. The Physiocrats had declared that property was
an inherent individual right. Those more to the Left, like
Rousseau and Morelly and Mably, had declared that
property belongs to the State, but the State was the Nation.
Morelly and Mably built communistic utopias. After 1791,
the idea of property as a social interest rather than an
individual right took hold. While the peasants wanted the
State to seize and rationalize the land, they laid down
conditions that the State was not to hold the land, but to
redistribute it among the peasantry.
The Jacobins had their origin as a caucus of the National

Assembly, the clubs having been organized to watch and
control the local governmental bodies. At first, almost the
entire membership was made up of middle class persons,
many of them Masons, (*44) and only as the Revolution
advanced were the dues lowered and poorer elements
admitted. This body, containing from 2 to 4 per cent of the
town population (in the villages, 8 to 10 per cent), and
during the height of the Terror totaling no more than about
five hundred thousand of whom only 10 to 15 per cent were
"actives," did for the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie in the
142
French Revolution what the Communist Party did for the
proletariat in the Russian Revolution of 1917. It acted as a
general staff and driving-force for revolutionary capitalism,
both against the aristocracy and against the poor masses.
Contrary to the generally accepted concept, the Jacobins, far

from being dissolute beasts, were rather puritanic in their
morals. They considered drunkenness, gambling, and
prostitution sins (most prostitutes were notoriously
Royalist). They became fanatics of the "religion of
humanity." Their aim was proclaimed as a virtuous hard-
working society, without luxuries and without vices, where
the individual conformed to standards of middle class
decency.
Clearly, then, the Jacobins were not of the breed of

Spartacus or of Karl Marx. When the Jacobins were in
power, all the government officials were members of the
Clubs and delivered their arguments there first. More and
more the Jacobins became separated from the people. In
many Clubs, workingmen were admitted only during a
brief period at the height of the Terror and then only under
pressure. (*45)
The leaders of the petty bourgeois Jacobins were Danton,

Marat, and Robespierre. The Right Wing was upheld by
Danton. He advocated a more moderate, briefer terror; he
did not pursue the enemies of the Revolution with the same
implacability. His labor views were extremely limited: he
went only so far as to propose the abolition of long
apprenticeships and to advocate a wage sufficient to allow
one, after three years, to enter into business oneself. (*46)
Marat was assassinated in the course of the Revolution by

the counter- revolutionary Charlotte Corday. At first Marat
was a Liberal; he was against the Republic and distrusted
143
the people. He later moved steadily to the Left. It was he
who really built up the Jacobin Club control, who
established the Revolutionary Tribunal, who advocated the
drastic dictatorship that consolidated the revolution under
the guise of Committees of Safety and Public Welfare. He
was the real watchdog of the revolution. Marat dressed
deliberately in imitation of the lower classes, but his appeal
was to the middle class. "One might say," declared Jaur'es,
"that he called the proletariat to the rescue only in despair
at seeing the normal plan of the Revolution disrupted by
the stupidity of the moderate bourgeoisie." (*47) Marat was
the great practical revolutionary. He was for the arming of
the people, for the disarming of the court, for the beheading
of the leaders of the counter- revolution, for the Terror in its
heaviest form.
Between Marat and Danton was Robespierre who was the

chief leader because, indeed, he knew best how to follow the
events which he came to symbolize. Like the other
Montaignards he wanted to create the Republic first, and
then consider social reforms. If Danton was conservative
enough to be married in the Catholic church, Robespierre
was radical enough to proclaim the official religion to be
Deism.
As the petty bourgeoisie, under the leadership of the

Jacobins, pushed aside the Left Liberals, it was now the
turn of the lowest sections of the toiling masses, the artisans
and plebeians mobilized in the streets, to put forward their
own demands. Against the Convention they counterposed
the Commune.' (*48) They desired the confiscation of all
goods above the barest necessities for each individual. They
advocated the sternest measures against the counter-
revolution, or against any tendency conciliatory to the
144
counter- revolution. These were the Enrag’es led by Hebert,
Chaumette, Roux and others.
To the right of these was Hebert. He wished the Commune

to dominate over the Convention from which the
Girondists had been expelled, but did not stress the
question of food, land, and labor. On the other hand, Roux,
Chaumette, and others did not respect private property, yet
could not go along with the Communist Baboeuf, as they
wanted a democracy and not a dictatorship of the workers.
With these people, therefore, there was a marked trend
towards Anarchism. Hebert and the others were also
Atheists who wished the State to declare war on all religion.
It should be noted, too, that as the revolution proceeded,

the church had split into a constitutional church and an old
church. Under the Convention, all churches had been
attacked, even the Protestant ones, and Sundays had been
eliminated when the new calendar had been established
under pressure from the Left. On November 24,1753, the
Paris Commune decreed: " (1) that all churches and temples
of whatever religion or sect- has existed in Paris shall
immediately be closed; (2) that all priests and ministers of
any religion whatsoever shall be held personally and
individually responsible for all disturbances of which the
cause shall proceed from religious opinions; (3) that
whoever shall demand that either church or temple shall be
opened shall be arrested as a suspect; (4) that the
revolutionary committees shall be invited to keep a close
watch on all priests; (5) that the Convention shall be
petitioned to issue a decree which shall exclude priests
from the exercises of public functions of every kind and
from all employment in the national factories." (*49)
It was with this entire egalitarian program that Hebert,

Secretary of the Paris Commune, moved against the
145
Convention. Already a Communism, albeit fragmentary
and partial, had arisen in the course of the Revolution. The
dominating idea of the Communist movement in the
countryside in 1793 was equality in land, the land to belong
to the whole nation, and means of existence to be
guaranteed to each. In the cities, as in Lyons, already the
workers were demanding a living wage, nationalization of
the mines, and the working of abandoned factories. Under
the desperate situation which faced them, even the Jacobins
had to socialize the exchange of produce and end all
freedom of trade.
Under the pressure of events, the Commune had fixed

wages and prices. The bourse had been closed and
speculation ended. Assignats were issued as currency. Free
education was established. The Commune also granted a
free allowance of bread for each family.
In order to carry out the aims of the Commune, the mass of

people would have had to progress along the direction of
the abolition of private property and the socialization of the
means of production. But such a program was unthinkable
in those days, as far as any great number of people was
concerned, for the means of production did not lend
themselves to socialization and there was no genuine
proletariat. Thus these ideas did not arise; private property
had to continue, and the encroachment by the "mob" was
only temporary. (*50)
It was now the turn of the petty bourgeois Jacobin radicals

to block the revolution. Any advocacy of the agrarian law,
of agrarian communism, became punishable by death.
Unions were prohibited and strikers were sent to the
guillotine. The Jacobin clubs entered into a bitter fight
against the sections of the Commune.
146
First the Commissars and the special army of the Commune
was attacked. Robespierre caused the execution of, first,
Hebert and Clootz of the Commune, and then of Danton,
thus making himself supreme; complete dictator, he
instituted wholesale executions. "It would be a mistake to
suppose that it was chiefly the well-to-do that suffered. On
the contrary, out of 2,750 victims of Robespierre's, only 650
belonged to the upper or middle classes. The tumbrils ...
were largely filled with workingmen."(*51)
The destruction of the forces of the Paris Commune by

Robespierre in turn removed the very base from under the
revolutionary Jacobins. The Jacobins had come to power
precisely because they had attached themselves from above
so firmly to the masses. Now, as the Jacobins turned their
hand against the poorest strata of the toilers, they found
themselves isolated from their former supporters, while
their reactionary enemies surrounded them on all sides and
dealt the Revolution blow after blow.
The first blow was the execution of Robespierre himself,

who, believing himself firmly ensconced at the heart of the
Terror which he had developed into an unconscionable
system, had so lost touch with reality that he imagined he
was still the idol of the masses, who now detested him. The
reactionaries knew better, however, and hurried him off to
his death, July :27, 1794 (Thermidor).
Robespierre, indeed, had lost his historic usefulness to

France. Republican France had been able to defeat her
continental enemies, to beat off the English and to unite
with Belgium. The very reason for the Terror which was
draining so much blood-revolutionary blood at that-had
now disappeared. Like Danton, whose opportunism had
147
been useful so long as his attempts to prevent war with
England by negotiating with Fox had a chance of success,
and whose temporizing policies were doomed the moment
Fox lost to Pitt and war was declared, so Robespierre, now
that France needed not the Terror but the consolidation of
all classes behind the new victorious bourgeoisie,
represented only the scaffolding of history that had to be
torn down.
With Robespierre, the French Revolution had developed as

far as it could possibly have gone under the circumstances.
We have seen that "The Revolution was strongly and
consistently individualistic. Socialist theory had played no
part in its preparation and socialist theories played no part
in its scheme of reconstruction. All the statesmen of the
Revolution thought it necessary to emphasize their
adhesion to that article in the Declaration of Rights which
declares that property is an inviolable and sacred right, and
when in 1796 a socialist movement made itself apparent in
Paris it was promptly and ruthlessly crushed." (*52)
The French Revolution had never been, essentially, a

Revolution of the property-less, but a Revolution for the
unleashing of the productive forces of property. Above all,
the French peasants wanted the end to the century old
obstacles to the free development of their land. In this
respect, the French Revolution could be sharply contrasted
with the English Civil Wars. In France there was a large and
steadily increasing body of free peasant proprietors. The
agrarian history of England, on the contrary, might be
summed up in the phrase "elimination of the yeomanry."
The French peasant had now become satisfied. Above all he

now wanted security in his new possessions and stability of
government with an end to civil war. So long as Paris
represented the peasant's war and the defense of the land
148
seizures against foreign invasion, so long would the
peasants follow the lead of Paris; beyond that they would
not go. And when Paris sought to transfer the revolution
onto tracks leading to Communism, the peasants were
ready for a ruthless struggle against Paris to the bitter end.
What was lacking in the Robespierre dictatorship was that

it could not create the order and stability needed by the
property-owners newly enriched by the Revolution. The
political regime of Robespierre could not handle Paris; nor
could it ensure proper relations between Paris and the
countryside; nor did it sufficiently recognize that new class
of speculators, financiers, and stock-jobbers of all sorts
which had arisen in the course of the Revolution and
foreign war.
It was this nouveau riche class which was destined to play

the decisive role in the next period. Unlike the staid
bourgeoisie under Louis XVI, these parvenus knew how to
play with revolutionary phrases, to become expert
demagogues, and to win their way into the highest posts of
the Revolution and Jacobin Party. The Socialist Jaur’es, in
his study of the French Revolution, exposes the Convention
as a thoroughly bourgeois assembly, composed for the most
part of professional men consumed with envy of the
nobility but filled with a prosaic passion for rents and
dividends. These were the men who conspired to bring
Robespierre to the guillotine and who formed the Directory
after him.
After Thermidor, "It was determined then that the

Directory, should be chosen, not by primary assemblies but
by the Legislature of France. This body, ...was to consist of
two Councils, renewable by a third every year.... Universal
suffrage was abandoned for a scheme which was both
limited and indirect; the large towns were broken into
149
manageable districts; the clubs and armed assemblies ....
peremptorily forbidden. It was the general design that
power should be transferred from the democracy and
lodged in the hands of the enlightened middle class." (*53)
As the Thermidoreaus drove out the petty bourgeois

Jacobins from Parliament, the Right, representing elements
of the ancien r’egime. began to muster their forces for a
new coup d'etat against Parliament. In fright, the Directory
called on Napoleon, who had already shown his teeth at
Toulon against the English, to defend Parliament and the
Directory (Vend’emiaire, 1795). Thus, a few shots of grape,
mostly to frighten, dispersed the Royalist rabble.
Parliament was saved, but it owed its life now, not to the
masses, but to Napoleon.
In the meantime, war with the ancien r’egime of Europe had

turned into an extremely serious affair with the entrance of
England into the field. The English had declared war as
soon as the French had gone into Belgium and had aided
the democrats of the Netherlands in driving out the old
order. English Liberalism was not to desist until over a
score of years of war had rolled by and made the
Netherlands fair prey of English Imperialism once again.
Thus, English Liberalism proved to be the main support for
Continental Feudalism and became chief defender of the
Czar.
France found it relatively easy to deal with the ancien

r’egime alone, but England was another matter. To meet the
new danger, French revolutionary capitalism first
attempted, through the Right Winger, Carnot, to induce the
former Royalist elements to fall in line behind it and thus
recognize the fruits of the Revolution, and Carnot was able
to get passed laws relaxing the severity of treatment
hitherto accorded priests and ‘emigr’es.
150
In the midst of this strengthening reaction, there took place
the only Communist uprising, that led by Baboeuf in 1796,
which was put down. Before that, a frightful White Terror
had been raging. At Lyons, for example, three hundred
Jacobins had been enclosed in a shed surrounded by a
cordon. The shed was then fired, and the Jacobins
consumed to a man.
Baboeuf foreshadowed many of the foremost principles of

Communism. He was the first man to rest his doctrines
upon the proletariat alone, and to preach class war, the
failure of reform, the necessity of the dictatorship of the
workers, and the realization that only a social revolution,
based upon the art of insurrection, could solve the
problems of the masses. Far from believing the revolution a
thing of the future, he considered it to be very near,
carefully prepared for it, and showed himself very skillful
in propaganda. (*54)
At the same time, the Left Wing of the Directory, under

Barras, sent out Napoleon to meet the Austrians in Italy. In
a series of brilliant marches and engagements, Napoleon
forced Austria into the peace of Campo Formio (1797) in
which at last the Hapsburgs were compelled to recognize
the French Revolution as well as its annexation of the
former Austrian Netherlands (Belgium).
With this victory accomplished, parvenu finance capital

was enabled to call upon Napoleon to crush the Right Wing
then in charge of Parliament, and with the help of
Napoleon (18 Fructidor, 1797) the Directorate of Barras
made itself independent of Parliament, but completely
dependent on Napoleon. On 18 Brumaire, 1799, Napoleon
destroyed the power of the Directorate to become the First
Consul. "The corner-stone of the central administration was
the First Consul, assisted by the Council of State, a body to
151
whom was entrusted the initiative in legislation and the
supreme appellate jurisdiction in administrative causes. . . .
A small body of a hundred Tribunes permitted to debate
but not to vote, a Legislative Assembly permitted to vote
but not to debate, a Senate named by the head of the State
endowed with the function of safeguarding the principles
of the Constitution and of naming the Tribunes and the
legislators from lists submitted to them, after the popular
will had been strained through an elaborate succession of
sieves-such were the hollow compliments paid-to the
democratic principle. By degrees portions of the disguise,
becoming inconvenient, were modified or suppressed." (*55)
Yet, in spite of this system of government, or perhaps rather

because of it, Napoleon was not without the enthusiastic
support of French Liberalism. To such Liberals it was clear
that "The needs of France were such that only the highest
powers of technical administration were adequate to meet
them. Ten years of anarchy had broken up the roads,
disorganized the hospitals, interrupted education, and
thrown all the charitable institutions of the country out of
gear. Forty-five of the departments were reported as being
in a state of chronic civil war. Robber bands two, three,
eight hundred strong, scoured the country, pillaged the
stage-coaches, broke into the prisons, flogged or slew the
tax-collectors. The greater part of the clergy was in open
rebellion against the State. No one obeyed the law.
Conscripts refused to serve; the mobile columns who were
entrusted with the duty of policing the disturbed regions
had to forage for themselves and lived on rapine.
Commercial credit had disappeared, for the currency had
been depreciated, the State had declared partial bankruptcy,
and English cruisers had long since interrupted foreign
trade.... The government was in the hands of . . . second
152
class revolutionaries whose names carried no prestige and
whose characters did not bear close scrutiny." (*56)
Bonapartism was the realization of the victory of Liberal-

Radicalism in the only form that France could create at the
time. The Jacobins with an iron broom had swept out
the ancien r’egime within France and together with them
those capitalist Liberals and their agents of the old school
whose life had been tied up with the old regime, its laws, its
property relations, its customs, its ideology, which these
schools wanted to reform but from which they could not
break. At the time such a violent break was vitally essential
for the welfare of France. Both the industrial Revolution of
France and the ferocity of the feudal counter-attack
imperatively demanded it.
To use the iron broom, the Jacobins had early resorted to a

fractional dictatorship. Indeed, Marat early had seen the
need for such a dictatorship and had proposed Danton. But
Danton had worked with the House of Orleans and it was
Robespierre who formed the head of the Jacobin
dictatorship. We have already noted why the Jacobin
dictatorship could not render the victory of the new
capitalism stable and secure. It had become necessary to
take the main forces of the Revolution out of the hands of
the city and put them in the hands of the country, to be
dominated only indirectly by leading bourgeois elements of
finance and industry.
This was done by giving power to the Army-made up

mostly of peasants lifted up by the Revolution at the head
of which stood Napoleon. The nouveaux riches were too
weak to govern themselves. The ancien r’egime was too
weak to challenge the new order. The proletariat and city
153
masses had been crushed. The bourgeois revolution was at
last to be bequeathed to the radical bourgeoisie itself whose
interests were so entirely entrusted to the hands of that
excellent representative, Napoleon.
Napoleon understood well he was the child of the

Revolution. He also had a clear comprehension of its laws.
Later on, in exile, he revealed his understanding in such
statements as: "My great principle was to guard against
reaction, and to bury the past in oblivion." (*57) "General
rule; no social revolution without terror.... How, indeed,
can we understand that one could say to those who possess
fortune and public situations 'Begone, and leave us your
fortunes and your situations!' without first intimidating
them and rendering any defense impossible!" (*58) "My
object was to destroy the whole of the feudal system, as
organized by Charlemagne. With this view, I created a
nobility from among the people, in order to swallow up the
remains of the feudal nobility. The foundations of my ideas
of fitness were abilities and personal worth; . . . I sought for
true merit among all ranks of the great mass of the French
people and was anxious to organize a true and general
system of equality." (*59)
The Radical bourgeoisie under Napoleon took pains to

guarantee to the peasants the gains of the revolution.
Napoleon himself was careful to make himself supreme
only through the democratic method of the plebiscite. "I
have always been of opinion, that the sovereignty lay in the
people. In fact, the imperial government was a kind of
republic. (*60) Thus the land seizures were affirmed; a new
Civil Code was laid down; a complete reorganization of
political life was worked out.
At the same time, every effort was made by Napoleon to

win over sections of the former ruling class and reconcile
154
them with the new rule of Capital. A Concordat was
worked out with the Pope; Catholic churches were
reopened; but Catholicism was not the State religion. The
State decided to recognize equally Protestant and Jew and
Catholic, and with the idea that the people must have
religion and religion must be controlled by the State,
undertook to support by State funds not only priest, but
minister, rabbi, and mullah as well. Thus could Napoleon
boast, "My system was to have no predominant religion,
but to allow perfect liberty of conscience and of thought, to
make all men equal,...I made everything independent of
religion." (*61)
Simultaneously Napoleon granted amnesty to

the e’migr’es and induced one hundred and fifty thousand
of them to return to serve bourgeois France. He reinstalled
the traditional calendar. He formed a new titular order- the
Legion of Honor-and did his best to bring the best talents of
the old and new under his flag. It followed naturally, then,
that during the first Consulate the French Government
securities nearly trebled in value (*62) to the great
advantage of speculator and stock-jobber.
Military unification of all forces had become a categoric

imperative for France. Let us never forget that Napoleon
had to fight not only the decayed social order of Feudalism
but the superior economic system of English capitalism
whose industrial monopoly would be utterly ruined were
the new French system to succeed. It was for this reason
that English Liberalism threw itself so desperately against
French bourgeois Radicalism. During the Napoleonic Wars,
the industrial revolution in England proceeded furiously
apace so as to overcome French resistance. (*63)
On the other side, Napoleon was fighting for the spread of

capitalist culture. It was in his reign that the manufacturing,
155
especially the chemical, industries were much expanded,
that France greatly advanced, that talent of all sorts
developed. A highly improved system of weights and
measures was set up and spread over all Europe. Bridges,
highways, canals, boulevards, and a host of public works,
etc., were constructed. As Napoleon affirmed, "I have
staked all the glory of my reign on changing the appearance
of my Empire." (*64) Patents, which had jealously
prevented the continent from sharing in England's technical
advance, were stolen from England and were utilized
everywhere.
Thus did Napoleon close "the romance of the Revolution"

and try to secure its conquests. It was his boast that he did
not belong to the race of the "ideologues," but that he came
to substitute an age of "work" for an age of "talk."
The necessity of uniting all forces in the struggle against

England had driven the Napoleonic government to adopt a
paternal theory of State that spelled an end to certain
measures of
laissez-faire that had been proposed. Already, even before

Napoleon, the French Revolution had to consider the
question of complete control of prices and wages. The
Girondist had stood for free trade, the Jacobin for
Protectionism in foreign affairs, and the Paris Commune
itself had thrown its heavy hand on the matter. The
commercial system of Napoleon I thus could be said to
have its roots in the restrictionist legislation of the National
Convention. (*65)
There was no extent to which the Radical bourgeoisie of

Napoleon would not go to maintain itself. The State
undertook to form the morals of the people, to monopolize
education, to dominate the press. A huge censorship was
156
set up. The government did not hesitate to expropriate
property for purposes of public utility. National industry
was protected from competition. The food supply was
subjected to severe regulations; the butchers and bakers of
Paris were compelled to become members of state
corporations, enjoying an official monopoly of supply upon
conditions determined by the Government.
In its struggle against the old order, French Napoleonic

Radicalism stimulated the people of Europe to overthrow
their despots. All sorts of Republics were formed by
Napoleon, Batavian, Helvetic, Cisalpine, Legurian, Roman,
Parthenopean, Italian. After Marengo, a new map of Europe
was created. The. old order was overthrown, never to
regain its strength again. In Italy, the idea of Italian unity
under a Republic was sown and took root. In Prussia, the
serfs were liberated and the land question settled somewhat
in favor of the masses. Napoleon was hailed by the people
even in Vienna, center of Hapsburg influence.
Everywhere Bourbonism crashed to earth. A degenerate

line of rulers was wiped out in Spain, in Italy, and
elsewhere. Poland was wrested from the Czars; the Holy
Roman Empire smashed to bits; Prussia became
revolutionized; German unification was begun. From these
blows the old order never recovered, and even during the
Restoration, from 1820 to 1848, the numerous risings in
Europe all had for their objects constitutional government
and a return to the Code Napol’eon. A new deal had been
given Europe.
The change in 1804 from First Consul to Emperor by

Napoleon marked the complete liberation of the French
Revolution from democratic petty- bourgeois vestiges. The
bourgeoisie now took to itself the titles of the aristocracy. A
new nobility was created not only to give full honors to the
157
victors, but to show the old regime of Europe that the new
rule was stable, that the dominance of its property interests
was secure and that, if the old aristocracy was to exist at all-
and Napoleon's execution of the Duc d'Enghien was a
threat to all who dared to conspire against the new order-it
must make peace with Revolutionary capital. And after
Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, there were few of the
ancient families which did not willingly form alliances with
the new Dukes. In 1810, Napoleon married Marie- Louise of
Austria to consummate the victory of the new order.
As Emperor, Napoleon was now forced to repress and not

merely develop the productive forces. In his struggle with
England he tried to cut oft world trade and choke the
development of whole peoples. To carry on his wars he had
to impose a crushing peace on the Prussians; he had to
drain Europe of its wealth; he had to crush the aspirations
of the peoples demanding emancipation. It was the people
of Spain, of Prussia, of Santo Domingo, who destroyed the
flower of his army. (*66) Not England united with the
despots, but England united with the peoples of Europe
triumphed in the end ... though the despots took their
thrones again for the nonce.
The return of Louis XVIII, in 1815, by no means restored the

old order in France. A constitution was formed after the
English model. The King was forced to give assurances of a
free press, of religious toleration, of liberty of the subject, of
the land titles of the Revolution. Louis XVIII retained the
codes, the University, the Legion of Honor, the Bank, the
Prefects, the Imperial Nobility of Napoleon. And when the
Bourbon Charles X attempted to discard these things he
was deposed and French Liberalism crowned its efforts in
the Revolution of 1830 with Louis-Philippe.
SUMMARY
158
The victory of Liberalism, though obtained by a small
minority of the population, is yet no mere palace tumult,
but a genuine revolutionary upheaval. Our analysis, then, is
limited to a study of how a class can stage an actual
revolution and take power although remaining a minority.
What are the forces that focus to produce such a result?
The old ruling class is reduced to a patently parasitic clique,

obviously obstructing the wheels of progress. Thus, it
cannot count upon the support of the mass of people, and
becomes isolated. Where the majority of the population
stands aside, as in England and America, the fight becomes
one solely between two minorities of the nation, the
modern elements ever winning more support.
Springing from new relations in the production and

distribution of wealth come fresh morals and ideals and,
finally, novel ideas. Basing itself upon these more modern
mores, the bourgeoisie permeates the bodies of its
opponents with the ether of its ethical codes and prepares
the struggle for political power by an all-rounded attack,
flank and rear, on the questions of morality. Furnishing the
material weapons to the bourgeoisie to criticize and chastise
the old order, history also gives the capitalists the weapon
of criticism to demoralize their enemies. The wealthy
bourgeois must sneak up to spring; but before the attack,
there is the disarming word.
As the government becomes isolated from the people, its

power becomes further reduced by the fact that it has.
permitted the newer classes to enter into its ranks and to
share a certain amount of the authority. When these
bourgeois groups now abandon the government or remain
neutral, the State apparatus is left in chaos in many of its
departments, especially that of the exchequer. The parasitic
older orders who have relied upon the loyalty and ability of
159
the financier and capitalist, are thrown into complete
confusion when their bourgeois servants seek to become
masters of the house. This confusion results in further
centrifugal action, scattering the ruling groups into
fragments-clergy, lower nobility, aristocracy, landlords,
royalty, etc --- which may then be crushed separately.
The resistance of the aristocracy is lowered by the

bourgeoisie in a number of ways. In England, the moneyed
elements infiltrated into the landed classes, corrupting them
and buying them over. The important intermediary group
here was the country gentlemen who met the aristocracy on
its own ground and defeated it, while representing the new
order. In England the fight could be compromised quickly,
and the people hid no occasion to get into action in
considerable masses on their own account.
In the American Revolution, the old masters lost their

control due to different factors. --- first, the immense
distance and cost involved in the struggle; and second, the
pre-occupation of those rulers in European conflicts which
claimed their attention, powerful European nations
hastening to aid the American rebels. The American
colonies had grown too strong in relation to the mother
country and broke away to form their independent nation.
In France the situation was still otherwise. Here the

bourgeoisie was relatively too weak to make a frontal attack
on the government in order to take control. The people,
aroused by the anachronisms of a bankrupt government
which had succeeded in arousing the deepest hatred of the
masses, were forced to act. In England and America the
people were neutral or were not directly involved; in
France they remained the only competent force. The French
Revolution, then, was the first great People's Revolution in
history.
160
Several factors must be noted here as of great importance.
First of all, it was the masses of people who acted, led by
the petty bourgeois Jacobins. This gives an extremely
unstable character to French history, since what the people
have done once they believe they can do again. The poor
assume an immense prestige; nothing can drain the creative
flood of initiative and ambition current among the masses.
The bourgeois minority prevails only because the toilers are

not ready for any other system of property relations but the
capitalist one; that is to say, while the English and
American wealthy crashed to power, the French won by
default, by the inability of the people to change the social
order for their own benefit. None the less, it is not the old
bourgeoisie that rises to power after the populace has
beaten its head against the walls of the system and has
fallen exhausted, but a new bourgeoisie that caters to the
masses and works within their slogans.
Once in power, this small portion of the population, the

bourgeoisie, inherits the complicated problem of inducing
the old ruling forces to give up their struggle and of
preventing new elements from challenging their rule from
below. In England, the bourgeoisie made great concessions
to the aristocracy, allowing the latter to retain important
posts and filling up the ranks of the nobility with new
members from the wealthy classes. In America, no such
problem existed, since the aristocracy fled the country. In
France, the bourgeoisie tried hard to ally itself to the older
forces, through Napoleon and Louis Philippe, but each time
their alliance was broken by the action of the people. Only
in 1871 did the French bourgeoisie, as a whole, really take
power in its own name, and even then it was the
proletarian Paris Commune which routed the Royalists.
161
In all cases, the bourgeoisie is forced to solve the problem:
How can a capitalist minority keep the power and prevent
the people from driving it out? Fundamentally, the new
cliques can preserve their power principally because the
nation generally is prospering under their regime. When
the contradictions of capitalism at last compel the petty
proprietor to speak out in his own name, there is no
gainsaying him. In the United States, in fact, he took over
the government completely; but no startling results
occurred since the middle class was content to let the
wealthy alone as it, too, was sharing the wealth. Only later
did the significance of the rule of the petty- bourgeoisie
burst forth in the mighty Civil War. In England and France,
the lower middle classes were given parliamentary
representation but never obtained the capacity to
dispossess the top layers. In each case the big and little
property owners were able to form stable alliances.
Both in France and in America, the dominant philosophy

tends to be Radicalism rather than Liberalism. In France,
this is due to the fact that the power of the bourgeoisie is
really the work of the people headed by the desperate
elements of the lower middle class. In America, Radical
phraseology is a necessary part of the apparatus by which
an insignificant and weak portion of society can dupe and
seduce the people, since Radicalism is the appropriate
expression of the middle classes who dominate politics.
With the ousting of all the social layers representing the old
feudal order, in America the bourgeois conservatives
naturally turn into Liberals, while the petty bourgeoisie
takes to extreme Radical phrases. There is nothing more
conservative in the United States than Liberalism, for, with
the deposing of the aristocrats, there remains no class above
the Liberals. As each class moves up a notch materially, it
shouts louder for its political rights. [During the American
162
Revolution, only the proletarians remained silent, as they
scarcely existed except as dumb slaves and indentured
servants.]
The bourgeois, having done a good job in exposing the old

rulers as a tiny clique unfit to have power, now has to show
why it, another social speck, should retain this power in its
own hands. As Disraeli declared: "The House of Commons
is no more the House of the People than is the House of
Lords; and the Commons of England, as well as the Peers of
England, are neither more nor less than a privileged class,
privileged in both instances for the common good, unequal
doubtless in number, yet both, in comparison with the
whole nation, forming in a numerical estimation, only an
insignificant fraction of the mass." (*67)
Setting out to solve just this problem of justifying the rule of

the new minority, Liberalism becomes a movement that is
designed to make the minority appear as though it were the
whole people and lays down those rules by which only the
bourgeoisie can conquer.
Here are the political tricks in the game of Liberalism: To

stress parliament rather than the people; to recognize
elections but to restrict the vote; to build a constitution but
to block the will of the majority; to talk democracy but to
practice oligarchy; in general, a substitution of one system
of fraud and coercion for another. Once in power, the
Liberals preach peace, tolerance, fair-play, golden-rule,
middle-of-the-road, see-both-sides, live up to the rules laid
down by us, etc.
But the capitalists have let loose forces which they cannot
control. Only for a moment can they stop the revolution
which steadily unfolds. Thus, the rule of the bourgeoisie is
a record of constant turmoil, change, and revolution which
163
cannot cease until the lowest class of all, the working class,
is finally able to seize power and make the revolution
permanent by bringing it to its ultimate conclusion.
Footnotes
1. The population of England, Wales, and Scotland in

Cromwell's time was about five and one-half million, that
of the American colonies in 1776 less than three million; in
1789 in France there were twenty-five million
2. The conquest of the Flemish towns, weaving centers

(1328), not only upset the balance between England and
France in France's favor, but threatened seriously to disrupt
English economy. The Hundred Years War followed. The
temporary victory of the English threw France into disorder
and led to the first peasant revolt, Jacquerie (1358). The final
loss of France by the English led to the Wars of the Roses
and the decimation of the entire old nobility of England and
to repeated revolts of the English peasantry (1381, 1450,
1500). All of this only accelerated the forces breaking up the
feudal order and causing the rise of Absolute Monarchies.
3. This was the period of the Renaissance. At this time, a

break with the Catholic Church was not tenable; what
commercial and money capital tried to do was to win its
support. France, as the strongest and most highly
developed, was the first to make the attempt and for awhile
actually succeeded. It was this that greatly sharpened the
Hundred Years War and led directly to the Protestantism of
the English, just as later the Pope's subservience to other
nationalist powers led to the German Reformation and to
Machiavellian Scepticism. Pope and Church were being
auctioneered to the highest bidder.
164
4. The tension was expressed in the revolts in the Austrian
Netherlands and Poland, as well as in the reforms
inaugurated by the "enlightened" despots of Russia, Prussia
and other countries.
5. Helvetius, Lafayette, Voltaire, Roland, Mirabeau, Brissot,

Rousseau, all had lived in England and spoke English. All
knew the works of Locke and Newton. (See C.
D. Hazen: French Revolution, I, 93-94.) Montesquieu
considered England the freest country in the world. He
stood for a constitutional monarchy with separation of
powers between legislative and executive departments.
Civil Liberty was to be granted gradually as men became fit
for it. Montesquieu advocated a reform of the penal laws,
and opposed primogeniture; he favored a breakup of the
big estates, a progressive tax, sumptuary laws, and the
greater emancipation of women.
6. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau were all Deists. Voltaire,

however, desired, not the separation of the Catholic Church
from the State, but rather a controlled church (like the
Anglican). Rousseau, too, favored a State religion. Many of
the Encyclopedists also were Deists. (As later in the
nineteenth century were Proudhon, Fourier, St. Simon, and
Louis Blanc.)
7. Lafayette is a good example. "Lafayette had no faith in

the masses as being fined for citizenship, and like his
contemporaries, he believed that only the bourgeois class
should share in the elections and take part in the
government." (J. S. Penman: Lafayette and Three Revolutions,
p.119.)
8. "Already in 1778, Turgot . . . writes that America is the

hope of the human race and may become its model; . . ." "In
1783 the Duc de la Rochefoucauld with his own hands
165
translated all thirteen of the constitutions of the American
states, publishing them anonymously; while Mercier, in
1791, states distinctly: The emancipation of America gave
us the thoughts and presently the voice of free men; it made
us see the possibility of resistance and the need of a
constitution." He tells us that the troops sent across the
ocean had come back as if electrified." (E. F.
Henderson: Symbol and Satire in the French Revolution, pp. 4-
5.)
9. J. Peixotto: The French Revolution and Modern French

Socialism, p. 47.
10. Rousseau's chief works were written between 1750 and

1762.
11. See J. J. Rousseau: Social Contract, Bk. 11 (Everyman's

Edition, translated by G. D. H. Cole.) 12. J. Rousseau: Social
Contract and Discourses, Bk. I, Ch. I, p.5.
13. The same, p. 6.
14. The same, Bk. I, Ch. IX, p. 21.
15. The same, Bk. I, Ch. VII, p.18
16. The same, Bk. III, Ch. IV, pp. 58-59.
17. The same, Bk. IV, Ch. III, p. 96.
18. The same, Bk. IV, Ch. VIII, p. 119
19. The same, Bk. II, Ch- XI, p. 45.
20. See Rousseau: "A Discourse on the Origin of

Inequality," work cited (Everyman's Edition), p.246.
166
21. See Rousseau: "A Discourse on the Arts and
Sciences," work cited. Also, see Introduction by Editor
Vaughan in Political Writings of Rousseau, 2 Vols. (1915
edition).
22. See Rousseau: E’mile or Education (Everyman's edition).
23. Rousseau: Social Contract, Bk. III, Ch. XIII, p. 81.
24. See Gide and Rist: History of Economic Doctrines, for the
views of the Physiocrats.
25. The Physiocrat did not hesitate to draw the conclusions

from his theory that since only the agrarian produced value,
only he should be taxed!
26. The English Liberals, William Pitt and Edmund Burke,

were violently opposed to the French Revolution. As the
English Liberals fought against the American Revolution,
so, even more viciously, did they fight the French.
27. It is recorded that Paine was saved from the Guillotine

only by a mistake of the jailer. Paine was a Girondist, and
opposed the execution of the King. His book, Age of Reason,
was directed against the Atheism of the French Radicals.
28. As it had been for the Lockes, the Cromwells and

Lilburnes, the Franklins, Jeffersons, and Paines, and all the
other chief leaders in England and the United States.
"Neither in the cahiers nor in the pamphlets which resulted

from the summons of the States-General is there any
important or general Socialist doctrine." (H. J. Laski. The
Socialist Tradition in the French Revolution, p. 7.)
29. G. Elton: The Revolutionary Idea in France, 1789-1871, p. 61.
167
30. Turgot, Necker, Mirabeau were of this type. Mirabeau
became a paid agent of the King.
31. The Liberal Necker was opposed to this.
32. It is the tragedy of the clergy; they were the first to be

sacrificed by the bourgeoisie, as they were by the
aristocracy.
33. "It must not be forgotten that for more than two-thirds
of the fundamental laws made between 1789 and 1793 no
attempt was even made to put them into execution." (P.
Kropotkin: The Great French Revolution, 1789-1793, p. 216.)
34. The King was protected from the masses by the Liberal
Lafayette, who massacred the people gathering on
the Champs de Mars. Later, Lafayette treacherously went
over to the side of the foreign invaders.
35. C. J. H. Hayes: The Historical Evolution of Modern

Nationalism, pp. 39-40.
36. It is estimated that nearly a million and a half men

served in the French Revolutionary Armies.
37. Regarding the September massacres, Napoleon I has

made this interesting remark: "Their energy had an electric
effect, by the fear with which it inspired the one party, and
the example which it gave to the other: one hundred
thousand volunteers joined the army and the revolution
was saved." (The Opinions and Reflections of Napoleon
I, edited by L. C. Breed, p. 447.)
38. H. A. L. Fisher: Republican Tradition in Europe, p. 58.
168
39. See Baron de Mantesquieu: The Spirit of Laws, I, Book
VIII, 130 (Bohn's edition, 1878); also I, Book V, 44 and
following.
40. Quoted in F. W. Hirst: The Political Economy of War, pp.

51-52.
41. E. Belfort Bax: The Story of the French Revolution, p. 69.
42. Kropotkin gives this as one of the reasons for the

Vend’ee counter-revolution.
43. H. J. Laski: The Socialist Traditions in the French

Revolution, p. 20.
44. R. F. Gould asserts that the French Lodges prospered

greatly in 1788 and 1789 as the revolutionary storm was
brewing, although he also affirms that many members fell
victims to the guillotine. See his History of Freemasonry
Throughout the World, III, 49-50 (1936 edition).
See also Haywood and Craig (A History of

Freemasonry), who attribute the break that occurred between
the French Grand Orient and the British Grand Lodge to the
fact that the former no longer insisted upon a belief in God
and the immortality of the soul as a condition precedent to
membership, and instead adopted the principle of "absolute
liberty of conscience and human solidarity" in its
constitution (p. 295).
E. Cahill (Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian

Movement) argues that the two basic principles of
Freemasonry are first, indifference in matters of religion,
and second, a tendency to cosmopolitanism or
internationalism (pp. 6-7), and declares, "Freemasonry is the
central enemy of the Catholic Church" (p. viii).
169
Listed as members of this bourgeois secret order are Marat,
Danton, Robespierre, and other prominent French
revolutionaries.
45. See C. Brinton: The Jacobins.
46. ". . . Danton was not a Republican. . . . Never, even in

1790, had he dreamt that France could be a republic. Up to a
given point he was a democrat, but there was a certain
social conservatism about him too; his habits were the
habits of the middle class. . . ." ". . . a Louis Philippe would
surely have been the best of republics' in Danton's eyes; and
if the worst came to worst, he would have been well
content with Louis XVI, protected from counter-
revolutionary influences, and held in tutelage by the
Assembly." (L. Madelin: Danton, pp. 77-78.)
47. Quoted by L. R. Gottschalk: Jean Paul Marat, p. 51.
48. The Commune was the people organized in the

"Sections" of the city. From August 10, 1792, to the time of
the Convention, September 21, the Commune under
Danton had the power. From that time till June 2, 1793, it
was the Convention under the leadership of the dictatorial
committees that carried on. From June, 1793, to December,
the Commune under Hebert dominated the scene only to
give way to Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety till
July 27, 1794 (Thermidor). (Compare E. Belfort Bax: The
Story of the French Revolution, p. 71.)
49. Given in C. J. H. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of

Modern Nationalism, p. 74.
50. See G. Pickhanov: The Bourgeois Revolution, pamphlet.
51. E. Belfort Bax, work cited, p. 86.
170
52. H. A. L. Fisher: Bonapartism, p. 17.
53. H. A. L. Fisher: Republican Tradition in Europe, p. 132.
54. Baboeuf's tradition is carried on in the nineteenth

century, especially by the French.
55. H. A. L. Fisher, Bonapartism, pp. 30-31.
56. The same, pp. 25-26.
57. Opinions and Reflections of Napoleon, edited by L. C. Breed,

p. 464.
58. The same, p. 448.
59. The same, p. 467.
60. The same, p. 496.
61. Opinions and Reflections of Napoleon, p. 273.
62. See F. P. Stearns: Napoleon and Macchiavelli, pp. 16-17.
63. According to Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery, p. 37,

quoted by J. H. Rose: Napoleonic Studies, p. 195, so great was
the improvement in machinery and lowering of costs that a
bolt of cloth which in 1795 cost 39s. 9d. cost but 15s. by
1810.The drop in cotton yarn No.100 was even greater,
falling from 38s. in 1786 and 19s. in 1795 to 6s. 9d. in 1807
and to 2s. 11d. in 1832. (See Gaskell, the same, p. 344.)
64. The Corsican: A Diary of Napoleon's Life in His Own

Words, pp. 281-282. (R. M. Johnston, editor.)
65. See F. L. Nussbaum: Commercial Policy in the French

Revolution.
171
66. Napoleon sent an army of thirty thousand picked
soldiers (four times the size of the Army of Cornwallis at
Yorktown) to defeat the Negroes at Santo Domingo.
Napoleon wanted to create a great domain in Central
America and build up a strong Negro army for himself. The
Jacobins, as against the policy of the Liberal Girondists, had
freed the slaves; Napoleon had reimposed slavery, and had
actually advocated polygamy as a way out for the new
world. All these dreams were burst by the victory of the
Negroes under Toussaint L'Ouverture. The birds of prey
picked the bones of the French army clean. (Compare E. L.
Andrews: Napoleon and America, pp. 27, 29.)
67. Disraeli the Younger: Vindication of the English

Constitution, p. 67.
II. LIBERALISM’S COMING OF AGE
IV. UTILITARIANISM, LAISSEZ FAIRE AND

INDIVIDUALISM
LIBERALISM had conquered in three important countries

and had become an important force everywhere. How did
Liberalism act, now that it had won supremacy? Under the
control of the Whigs in the eighteenth century, England had
entered upon a period of enormous prosperity, expanding
into a great imperialist power. All the propertied classes
had become reconciled to the 1688 compromise. (*1)
Liberalism grew more skeptical, more conservative.
Eighteenth-century Liberalism found a true spokesman in

David Hume. To Hume, all abstract beliefs were mere
prejudice. It was impossible to state, neither was it worth
arguing about, whether God existed or not, (*2) whether
thinking was a function of matter, or matter merely an idea.
With Locke there had been active speculation about God
172
and matter, both of which, although unknowable, existed.
With Hume, Liberalism, now tired of strife and more secure
in its social position, became negatively critical. It was
impossible to prove philosophically that anything existed,
even oneself. Hume thus became the expression of the
purest zero.
The theory of Social Contract had been useful to the Whigs

so long as they were seeking power. Now this very theory
was being used by the American Revolutionists, by
Rousseau, by Thomas Paine, to justify the new revolutions
against which the English Liberals were fighting.
By the eighteenth century, English Liberalism could well

afford to drop the theory of Social Contract. Within the
nation it was no longer needed since the rapid industrial
development of the country had, established the Whigs so
securely on top that the old rationalization was antiquated.
Besides, the Jacobite Tories always had been opposed to
this theory since it had led to dangerous revolutionary
conclusions. Thus, in abandoning the concept of Social
Contract, Hume and the Liberals of his type again
emphasized their conservative character; they tried to
forget their revolutionary past and the democratic
tendencies they had evoked.
Since the Social Contract theory was only a part of a system

of everlasting truths, under these circumstances English
Liberalism no longer could speak in the name of "eternal"
truth. Contrariwise, it was now the duty of English
Liberalism in control of the State to point out that no truth
was eternal, but all was mere opinion, and all opinions
were prejudice; to Hume truth depended on the point of
view.
173
Against the theory of Social Contract, Hume pointed out
that government was founded solely on usurpation and
conquest (*3) and not on the voluntary subjection of the
people. Locke had based property on labor; Hume founded
property on seizure., (*4) Possession is nine-tenths of the
Law. Cynical Liberalism!
Under Hume, the Utilitarian school was founded.

According to him, all that we knew were our senses. We
acted to obtain pleasure and to avoid pain according to our
selfish needs. We experimented to find out which
experiences would bring us the greatest good. And that law
was the best which brought the greatest happiness to the
largest number of people. All ideals were here dissolved
into a sensationalist, sensualist approach in which the only
binding nexus was self-interest and cash payment. In this
way Liberalism tried to justify its rule, not from the aspect
of good morals, but from the angle of whether it paid good
dividends. The entire emphasis was placed on individual
egotism.
Nevertheless, the right of Liberal capitalist egotism to

dominate remained on the foundation of utility to the
nation. Nor could there have been a stronger justification
for capitalist egotism in the eighteenth century than the fact
this motivation was bringing prosperity to the people.
Under the Whigs a great industrial revolution was taking
place. Industry was bringing into the world unheard of
wealth, realizing unprecedented achievements,
transforming the whole social order. Industry was making
England supreme. It would bring Napoleon to his knees.
Utility was indeed the keynote of England's capitalist class,
its very raison d' etre.
To these efforts of the anti-democratic Utilitarians must be

added the historical arguments of Edmund Burke. With the
174
exception of Montesquieu, previous Liberal leaders had not
taken an historical approach. Locke, Hume, Paine, Jefferson,
had argued from the logic of abstract eternal laws to be
ascertained by reason. Only Rousseau had abandoned
rationalism to appeal to the emotions. It is Burke (and in
Germany later Hegel) who goes back to history, not indeed
to show us the laws of evolution and of change, but in order
to justify the status quo and tradition and custom generally.
To Burke, the traditional had existed because it had been
useful and therefore should not be lightly overthrown. The
Liberals Burke and Pitt became the chief enemies of the
French Revolution. (*5) There was no room even for
Thomas Paine in England. (*6)
Burke was opposed to the abolition of Rotten Boroughs; he

was against a shorter Parliament. He protested lowering the
qualifications for suffrage. He declared Parliament was as
nearly perfect as possible. He was a real English Liberal of
the times, that is, he was no democrat. Hume, Adam Smith,
Bentham, were against the American Revolution, while
Burke tried to prove that the Revolution of 1688 was not a
democratic revolution at all, but a revolution of stability to
defend a threatened aristocratic tradition. (*7)
We have seen that in the eighteenth century, during their

struggles against the old order, everywhere the capitalists
had asked the government to keep its hands off business.
"That government is best that governs least." Whether in
complaint against heavy taxation, whether in a fight against
government monopoly and business restrictions, or
whether to abolish the old feudal dues and internal tariffs
in order to establish free trade within the country, the
Liberal capitalists had raised the slogan "Laissez faire"- Let
us alone. It was the American Revolution that most
dramatically enforced the dictum of free, trade, free
175
markets, no governmental interference. And what the
Americans did in practical Political Science, the English at
the same time, with Adam Smith, began to do in theoretical
Political Economy.
With the Industrial Revolution it was not the merchant

capitalists who rose to the top, but the owners of factories,
the manufacturers of goods, the industrialists. Agrarian
England had become industrial England. These
industrialists were interested in low costs of production
and, to secure them, had to fight the older capitalist orders,
the landlords and the merchants. The abolition of the tariff
was no evil in a country where the industrialists could meet
and beat all competition. As the markets increased and the
profits of the industrialists rose, these capitalists emptied
the orphan asylums to exploit the frail bodies of little
children; men and women were driven helplessly into the
jaws of a Moloch that devoured them at a frightful rate; the
cesspools of the city slums and the sweatshops of industry
cried to heaven. The stamina of the whole English race was
threatened. (*8)
How could all this be justified? The answer was laissez faire.
The Classic School of economists, headed by Adam Smith,
(*9) attempted to prove that the laws of free business are as
eternal as Natural Law itself. (*10) Turning to the merchants,
bankers, and landlords, the industrial capitalists set about
to demonstrate that all value is labor embodied in
commodities, that value is produced in the factory and not
in the sphere of circulation or finance, that other sections of
the capitalist class must subordinate themselves to the
industrialist, who alone is productive, who alone is the
backbone of the nation, the sole source from which the
others draw their income, that it was to the interest of the
whole nation that the industrialists be allowed an entirely
176
free rein. (*11) Utilizing the energies of the proletariat
which they had called into being, the industrialist Liberals
were able to enforce their will upon the other capitalist
sections.
Concurrently, the meaning of the term laissez faire had

become greatly extended. It now became the theory with
which to fight any social legislation that might aid the
poorer classes, especially the workers, at industry's expense.
The manufacturers were casting a big burden upon society
in the shape of slums, criminals, prostitutes, degenerates,
diseased, disabled unemployed, paupers, etc, and just as
Malthus undertook to prove the poor would be always with
us, the Utilitarian Liberals and the Classic Economic School
undertook to show that all this was for the best good of the
nation, and that, in the long run, the nation would benefit
more if these matters were not regulated. Thus did the
Utilitarians fight the Democrats, and Utility become
opposed to the Rights of Man. Laissez faire was the bitterest
opponent to social reform.
The program of laissez faire brought other principles in its

train. It meant for one thing that the industrialist had no
responsibilities to society. But it was not necessary for him
to defend his interests so narrowly. He could go farther and
argue that each citizen had to stand on his own feet and
take care of himself. This was most convenient for the
capitalist; he was expanding his business, defeating all
competitors, and growing enormously wealthy; let the
worker who brought up the rear of the procession look out
for himself!
To the Liberal capitalist, the proposition that there were no

classes in society, but simply an aggregate of individuals,
was very convenient. It was an excellent theory for a class
in control of the government, and fearing no individual
177
attacks, to tell the lower orders not to band together in
groups or classes. How appropriate for the consumption of
the world at large was the program that the only true
interests were individual interests, when the capitalist alone
of all individuals was the most able to take care of himself.
(*12) To say that man was motivated only by egoistic
interests was but another way of idealizing the brutal
piggishness and irresponsible criminality by which the
industrialists had crashed the gates to power.
The industrialists, however, were only aping their betters,

the landed aristocracy. Between 1760 and 1844 about seven
million acres of common lands were privately seized by
acts of Parliament. (*13) This was perhaps the greatest land
steal in British parliamentary history. In 1875 half of the
total agricultural land in England and Wales was owned by
two thousand persons. Seventeen hundred people owned
nine-tenths of all Scotland.
The French Revolution had given English capitalists a great

scare. So long as the war against Napoleon was on, all
sections of the ruling class united to stamp out any signs of
Radicalism the moment they appeared. And yet, no sooner
was Napoleon out of the way than the consequences of the
war increasingly made themselves felt on the British social
system.
The old equilibrium was definitely broken. On the one

hand there was a great growth of the national debt,
concurrent with a large increase in taxation, and a huge
State apparatus honeycombed with the most flagrant
corruption. On the other hand, a new class of industrialists
had arrived who had profited greatly from the war, who
refused to pay for it, and who demanded their place in the
political sun of the British Parliament.
178
On the third side, a large petty-property class was being
uprooted from its old conditions and greatly buffeted about
by the contradictions of capitalism. With William Cobbett,
these old elements "hated a stock-jobber worse than a
Duke," (*14) and under his leadership they tried to fuse
their interests with those of the Monarchy. They called for a
return to the days of "Old England" and at the same time
demanded a Reform Bill that would allow them to vote and
to express their interests. Counter to this group were the
new sections of petty proprietors clustered around the
booming industries, whose whole future was tied up with
the large factories in the cities. This branch of property, too,
was clamoring to be heard.
Finally, and above all, a great working class was stirring

uneasily. The Napoleonic Wars had caused the workers
great suffering. They had been dragooned into the army
and shanghaied into the navy. The cost of living had gone
sky high. They, moreover, were also the worst victims of
the social maladjustment which had marked the feverish
advance of capital. After the Napoleonic Wars the costs of
the further readjustments necessary were thrown heavily
on these people. A great many workers were dumped on
the streets. Other large numbers of them were demobilized
from the armed forces. The unemployed, treated as
criminals, were seized by the police and hired out in gangs
like slaves. Strikes and riots broke out everywhere.
Here was a force, the proletariat, which, if allowed to go

uncontrolled, could blow up the whole social order. On the
other hand, if maneuvered by some other group, it could
supply the necessary explosive energy to reach political
power. At once the older classes of landlords, merchants,
and financiers made advances to the workers. They
denounced the industrialists high and low. William Cobbett
179
spoke for the right of workers to organize and to strike, (*15)
and even defend the right of insurrection (although he was
vehemently against all violence). Following such a policy,
Parliament made a faint beginning in social legislation
regulating factory conditions on behalf of working children,
and wiped out the law holding trade unions as illegal
conspiracies. This law was soon restored, however.
In the long run, such measures could not defeat the

industrialists, but could only drive them to more radical
extremes. Aiming to end the tariff on grain, the
industrialists exposed the huge profits that the landlords
were seizing for themselves from their monopolies. Now
deadly in earnest to wipe out the Rotten Boroughs, the
factory owners began to talk of democracy for all. Their
intellectuals formed a school of philosophic Radicalism.
(*16)
These Radicals, such as Bentham, warned Parliament that

there must not be too great a gap between law and morals,
and that the social problems of the day had to be solved by
legislation. Bentham did not turn to Natural Law as the
French had done, for the French Revolution was entirely
too fresh in mind. He looked for remedies within the
narrow framework of the State itself. This was most normal.
By this time, English law had thoroughly absorbed into
itself the business principles of the law-merchant and
equity. With Bentham and John Austin, the cold Analytical
school of jurists refused to modify their legal precepts by
appealing to the new customs and morals arising, but
waited for new legislation to instruct them that the law had
been changed.
Thus, when it was to their interests to bring their own

practices and morals into the law, the capitalists were able
to get judges to modify the law by "discovering" new
180
principles, by inventing fictions, by new "interpretations"
and by even setting up a new court--Equity. The appeal to
equity was an appeal from law to justice. When, however,
the lower orders, not in control of the State, pressed
forward their own claims and interests, the judges decided
that law could not be "discovered," but must come into
being by legislation rather than by courts. Law was no
longer to be fused with morals. Law had nothing to do with
justice, (*17) or rather, so far as the prisoner was concerned,
the court of law was his court of justice.
The attitude of the British courts was but added evidence

that the battle was being fought, not under the guise of
private claims of property, but as an affair of mass political
interests involving pressure on Parliament. From this was
easily drawn the conclusion by Bentham that parliamentary
legislation had to be not for a clique but for the greatest
happiness to the greatest number. Thus did Bentham
continue the Utilitarian school of Hume under new
circumstances. To achieve this happiness, the legislature
had to provide for security, subsistence, abundance, and
equality for all, in the order named.
In Bentham's scheme, security came first, equality last, and

liberty was not even mentioned except as a subdivision of
security. To effect security it was not necessary to give
equality to all. That might be an ultimate goal, but what
was needed immediately was the recognition that
Parliament had to be reformed and that the petty
bourgeoisie mobilized behind the industrialists were to be
given the vote. Bentham put subsistence ahead of
abundance but this was a general principle only. It must not
be supposed that Bentham advocated the subsistence of all
before abundance to a few as a tenet of legislation.
181
There was also affirmed as basic the principle that, though
the State may be called on to secure happiness-here
Bentham and Adam Smith were at odds-the greatest good
to the greatest number could be attained by letting each
man follow his egotistic instincts which would lead him to
find pleasure and to avoid pain. In Bentham's rationalistic
scheme, not reason, but force, was the ultimate desideratum
in society. Balance the interests; yield to the stronger and
most utilitarian.
The French Revolution of 1830 greatly sharpened the

Radical movement in England. The workers began to take
matters into their own hands. Thrashing machines and
other new implements, the introduction of which brought
about unemployment, were destroyed; ricks, barns, and
other property of unpopular landlords were burned.
Reduction or the abolition of tithes was demanded, also
higher wages and reductions in rents. Unpopular overseers
were driven from the counties. Rich men barricaded
themselves. "For a time large tracts of the countryside
passed into the possession of the labourers." (*18)
Under such circumstances, there was nothing else for the

conservative coteries in Parliament to do but to yield. The
Reform Bill of 1832 was passed. The Rotten Borough system
was ended. Manchester and other manufacturing towns
were given better representation, sections of the urban
petty bourgeoisie were enfranchised. Only the workers
were cheated completely of any gains.
Under Cobden and Bright, the Manchester School pushed

forward to full victory. Nothing less would do for them
than full free trade, and a complete relegation of
government officiousness to the background. Factory
legislation was reactionary. (*19) Unions were seditious.
182
Absolutely nothing must interfere with business and profits,
and since Cobden regarded war as interfering with
Manchester business, war was considered immoral, as well
as the loans and legislation that led to war. "Protective
tariffs and other trade impediments were condemned, not
merely or mainly because they made food dear and
otherwise impaired the production of national wealth, but
because they interfered with the free and friendly
intercourse of different nations, bred hostility of interests,
stimulated hostile preparations, and swallowed up those
energies and resources of each nation that were needed for
the cultivation of the arts of peaceful progress." (*20) Sir
Robert Peel also had pointed out that increasing military
expenditure meant taxation, and increased taxation meant
revolution.
At the time Cobden and Bright were declaring themselves

opposed to war, Britain was waging a progressive war in
the Crimea against Russia (1854). However, when the
British aristocracy were about to help the South break the
blockade of the North during the American Civil War, the
British Liberal firm of Cobden and Company aided the
South by seriously proposing the abolition of blockades in
time of war (Perish the world, let business go on!). Cobden
thought the North foolish and openly stated, "But at what a
price is the Negro to be emancipated! I confess that, if then I
had been the arbiter of his fate, I should have refused him
freedom at the cost of so much white men's blood and
women's tears." (*21)
The Liberalism of the Manchester School was that of the

smug "Little Englander" which refused to adapt itself to the
new conditions which the Crimean War on the one hand,
the American Civil War on the other, and the Paris
Commune on the third, had placed before the British ruling
183
class, driving it to World Imperialism. Imperialism could
lead only to unceasing wars and to ubiquitous
governmental collectivity. (*22) On the contrary, the
Manchester School insisted that individual liberty, free
trade, free contract, and the maximum liberty of the
individual to exploit his fellow possible under the
circumstances should be allowed; that the State should be
but an inexpensive policeman whose sole role, in the words
of Cobden, was to maintain order, restrain men from
violence and fraud, to hold them secure in person and
property against foreign and domestic enemies, and to give
redress to injuries.
The Liberal actually did not want the government to let him
entirely alone. Soon enough he would come screaming for
injunctions against labor. Soon enough he would call on the
armed forces of the nation to support his foreign
investments. Soon enough the Liberals would thunder to
the proletariat about its social duties and responsibilities.
Soon enough, as conditions grew worse and they were
faced with an aroused mass of people, the Liberals would
avow that the State was not a necessary evil but an
inestimable blessing.
In America the program of individualism became far more

intensely developed and far more generally accepted than
in England. It embraced the widest mass of people.
Individualism became, so to speak, the National Program.
Here, again, paradoxically enough, the United States could
be both more and less advanced than England. In France,
Utilitarian individualism met its superior in the power of
the Nation. On the Continent, it was overwhelmed by the
domination of Social Classes. Only in England was
individualism, supported by Utility, able to dominate,
184
temporarily. However, in America, individualism did not
need a Manchester School, but had become the
fundamental way of life.
The weightiness of this difference with England lay in the

fact that America's might was derived from its natural
resources and raw materials, rather than from its useful
manufactures. Pioneers, frontiersmen, farmers, planters,
practically the whole population had been compelled to
combat the forces of nature in an individualistic manner.
Social forces were still secondary to natural forces (*23). The
State hardly existed; in many places classes hardly existed.
What feeling of responsibility could the Americans owe to
society or society to them?
The State, it is I," said the Benevolent Despot. "It is Natural

Law," asserted the early Liberals. "It is the Nation,"
declaimed the French. "It is Society," affirmed the English.
"It is the Individual," said the American. In each case we
have an abstraction from reality.
Like the French Radicals, the Americans felt that all should
be individual owners. But here, unlike France, all the
owners had the opportunity of becoming rich. It was this
fact which gave the individualism of America such a
democratic character, embraced as it was by such large
strata of the population. America, as opposed to Europe,
was a fairyland, a brand-new world, a petty bourgeois
utopia where each could reach success by his own direct
action.
The possibilities and opportunities of becoming rich in

America seemed limitless. An unending frontier beckoned.
A continent was to be had for the asking; it was not
necessary to seize anything from one's neighbors. All that
was needed to obtain the El Dorado was liberty of action,
185
freedom of motion and locomotion. Individual motion thus
took the place of social movement.
The possibilities of becoming rich in America seemed

unlimited in the broader economic sense as well as in the
territorial. Wealth and productivity were increasing at a
tremendous tempo. New markets, new fields of conquest
opened everywhere. Old Europe was beginning to
recognize the supremacy of America. The old social orders
and classes began to feel the power of the American's
individualist effort, America had pushed aside the feudal
order with such ease, capitalism had such a free and
unrestricted development, that American prosperity and
success could only accentuate the rampant individualist
program.
The best philosopher of this style was Ralph Waldo

Emerson. Emerson felt America could learn little from
Europe. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship
to the learning of other lands, draws to a close." (*24) Over a
half century before him Thomas Paine had advocated the
separation of the American colonies because here a new
world could be built up entirely different from the old.
Success seemed to come from the evasion of the State. The

State meant burdens, restrictions on Liberty. Differing from
England, where individualism was justified as equivalent to
the welfare of society and the State, in America the
individual was counterposed to the State. The individual
became an end in himself. This position was emphasized by
the Concord School of Emerson and Thoreau (*25)
And with the tremendous rise of industrial capital after the

Civil War, Liberty became assimilated to the English
doctrine of 'laissez faire in the name of which the
government became the complete handmaid of the
186
industrialists. Theoretically limping after England, it was
only in the late nineteenth century that American
Individualism, dropping the theory of "Natural Rights,"
was supported by the arguments of the Utilitarians. By this
time, America, too, had become a leader in the manufacture
of finished articles, and was beginning to challenge
England for world power.
In England, Liberty was conceived simply as a means to the

end of happiness; in America, Liberty, abstracted from
Society, became an end in itself. As late as 1883 an
American could write: "The notion of civil liberty which we
have inherited is that of a status created for the individual by
laws and institutions, the effect of which is that each man is
guaranteed the use of all his powers exclusively for his own
welfare. It is not at all a matter of elections, or universal
suffrage, or democracy.... It is not to be admitted for a
moment that liberty is a means to social ends, and that it
may be impaired for major considerations. (*26)
Liberty meant individualism. If democracy or social

institutions were to exist at all, it must be for the sole
purpose of guaranteeing independent individualism.
Democracy was not for the hired laborer, for the indentured
servant, or for the Negro slave, but only for those who were
independent small property holders. This was
understandable in a country where democracy had been
won, not by a social revolution of the people, but through a
political revolution engineered by oligarchical cliques
whose relative weakness compelled them to share the
wealth of the country with certain others.
Up to the nineteenth century, individualism could run

away from the State. From then on, it had to face the State
and conquer it. The Liberal State was catching up with both
the farmer and the frontiersman. Slavery, too, was pressing
187
its spurs into the independent small owner. Representing
agrarian individualism, a vast democratic movement arose
among the lower propertied elements especially of the West.
In its fight against the State, the democratic West found

friends among the Southern plantocracy. Having spurned
as allies the hired laborer and slave, the West could turn
nowhere else for better support. On its side, too, the
Southern slave-holders could here play a profitable game. It
was losing out in its economic struggles against the
Northern capitalists. It needed the West for its aims of
Western expansion. It could use the West in joint battles
against the North and East. At the same time the Southern
oligarchy did not fear democracy. In the vast domains
under its control there was a slavery which no one yet had
dared to challenge.
It was to cement this alliance that the South could tolerate

Jeffersonian Democracy. "Jeffersonian Democracy did not
imply any abandonment of the property, and particularly
the landed qualifications on the suffrage or office holdings,
it did not involve any fundamental alterations in the
national Constitution which the Federalists had designed as
a foil to the leveling propensities of the masses; it did not
propose any new devices for a more immediate and direct
control of the voters over the instrumentalities of
government. Jeffersonian Democracy simply meant the
possession of the federal government by the agrarian
masses led by an aristocracy of slave-owning planters, and
the theoretical repudiation of the right to use the
Government for the benefit of any capitalistic groups, fiscal,
banking, or manufacturing." (*27)
Thus, too, at the time of the Missouri Compromise, when

the cry of the Abolitionists was already loud, the
"Democrat" Jackson could suggest that Congress pass "such
188
a law as will prohibit under severe penalties the circulation
in the Southern States [of] incendiary publications intended
to instigate the slaves to insurrection." (*28) This was the
price the West paid for its Southern connections.
By the time of Andrew Jackson, however, the West, with its

frontier now at the Mississippi, was beginning to find its
voice. It could not be coerced; it would have to be duped.
Larger concessions had to be made to these rough
Westerners if the South was to maintain its control. Under
Andrew Jackson (*29) the Jeffersonian name of
"Republican" was changed to "Democrat" and the franchise
was extended, the old "rascals" were cleaned out of political
office and the Westerners were allowed temporarily to taste
the bribes of government.
In comparison to this rough democratic movement,

Emerson's Liberalism was of a timid variety. Writing in
1844 he declared, "The spirit of our American radicalism is
destructive and aimless: It is not loving; it has no ulterior
and divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred and
selfishness." (*30)s The Concord School of thinkers headed
by Emerson and Thoreau tried hard to run away from the
rough reality. They built little utopias. They became mystics,
transcendentalists, believers in oriental philosophies. They
succeeded in escaping reality so well that as late as 1859
Emerson could write: "No man living will see the end of
slavery."
The alliance between Western individualism and the slave

power could not last long. The future of individualism lay
in Northern competition and not in the Southern slave
camps. By means of canals and water routes the West was
being bound up firmly with the eastern cities. Hitherto
Western products had been shipped down the southward
flowing rivers to New Orleans. Situated on these rivers,
189
Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, became great traffic
centers and were hooked up with all Southern markets. But
in 1825 the Erie Canal was completed and freight rates
dropped from $100 a ton to $15 or $25. Rapidly there arose
a whole network of canals in the Northwest territory,
connecting Ohio, Michigan, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati
directly to the East. (*31)
The second blow in prying the West from the South came
simultaneously with the canal network. The West, from the
Appalachians to the Mississippi, had become the great
granary of the world. In 1840 the West produced 7.4 per
capita, in 1860 13.3 bushels. Self-sufficient farming
disappeared and in its place arose capitalist commercial
farming. While the time of this shift varied for different
portions of the Western farming area by 1830 Ohio had
generally completed this adjustment and by 1850 it was
joined by the states farther west, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan,
and a part of Wisconsin.
With specialized farming came machinery produced in the

North and East. In 1840 wheat was generally broadcast by
hand; by 1860 the drill was rapidly coming into use and
much of the wheat in the Mississippi Valley was now sown
by machine. In the early '40's wheat was reaped with a
cradle; after 1860 the use of the reaper swiftly increased. By
1850 most of the threshing also was done by portable
machinery.
The final blow in tying up the West with the East was given
by the railroads, running East and West and not North and
South, that signalized the great railroad boom period of
1850-1860. The effects were immense. In the three years
ending 1852, Cincinnati shipped 1,091,000 barrels of flour to
the South and 37,000 to the East. By 1860, the three-year
total had changed to 300,000 barrels shipped South and
190
1,376,000 shipped West. Nor was this all. Entirely new
centers were being built up far superior to the Southern
ones. In 1836 Chicago had shipped 78 bushels of grain, in
1850, 1,831,000 bushels, and in 1860 31,109,000 bushels.
Already by 1850 the number of hogs packed at Chicago had
exceeded the number packed for the Southern market.
Not only Chicago, but innumerable Western towns became

absolutely dependent for their livelihood on the railroads
and on Eastern capitalism. Far from attacking the railroads,
Western states did their utmost to bring them in. Every
professional politician and lawyer who could do so tried to
get into the pay of the railroads, which, in turn, were only
too glad to link themselves up with the legal and political
lights of the times.
Abraham Lincoln was no exception to this general trend.

"As a green legislator in Illinois he helped to promote the
vicious legislation which went into the laws of the state, for
excessive and unwise railroad building. As a rising lawyer
some of his best clients were the railroads; although at
times he appeared against them. He ‘chalked his hat,’ or
traveled on passes habitually. He was tempted with an
offer from the New York Central, which, if accepted, would
have changed his entire political career. He was a guiding
spirit behind the first line to the Far West-the Union Pacific-
and he helped determine its gauge, which became the
standard gauge of the country. In the famous Rock Island
Bridge case, he enunciated a right for common carriers
which has become an accepted doctrine." (*32)
Thus in this tug-of-war between North and South for the

West, the North had to emerge victorious. The discovery of
gold in California hastened the need for complete victory.
Now the North could afford to play its trump card, a card
191
which the South could never match, namely, a free
homestead to every man.
We have seen that even in the early days of the eighteenth

century the pinch of high land prices had been felt. Now
the enclosure of the common lands in New England, the
relentless drive of the southern plantations, and the rapid
growth of the country had created an ever-present land
hunger which, in the light of the vast continent that
stretched before the Americans, created an absolutely
intolerable set of contradictions. The commercialization of
agriculture and the discovery of gold had raised all land
prices and had caused a land dearth greater than ever. This
only accelerated westward expansion and sharpened the
demand for free land. Finally, there was the new powerful
force, calling for rapid capitalist cultivation of the West,
namely, the railroads backed up by the new metal
machinery factories. Eastern railway and finance capitalists
could now unite with the Western farmers to push the West
to the limit.
Thus the slogan for a free homestead for every man took on
such momentum as to become irresistible. With this slogan
the East was able to split the Middle West away from the
Southern squirarchy to which it had been wedded so long,
and to build a new Republican Party, in 1856.
To the Northern capitalists, the opening up of the West was

needed for another reason. The Revolutions of 1848 in
Europe had driven many revolutionary elements to these
shores. These Irish, German, and other colonists were far
from docile. Settled in the new land they at once began to
organize political societies and unions. The '50's were
marked with strikes and in the great Crisis of 1857, the
misery of the masses in the midst of plenty led to a
dangerous situation. The Homestead Act was thus a
192
measure calculated to stave off the Labor Problem, which
was becoming increasingly pressing in the Eastern cities. As
the Beards put it, "Energies which in the normal course of
affairs would have been devoted to building up trade
unions and framing schemes of social revolution were
diverted to agitation in favor of a free farm for every
workingman whether he wanted it or not." (*33)
The economic. battle having been won so peacefully, it

seemed that all that was necessary was to wait. But for this
very reason the South could not wait. Up to 1860 it had
dominating control of the Federal Government. Desperately
it was trying to maintain this control and steadily it was
losing out.
It has been popularly propagated by some historians and

publicists that the Civil War was a struggle between a pre-
capitalist slave system and modern capitalism. In this way
two ideas are emphasized: first, that slavery is incompatible
with capitalism, and second, that the Liberal capitalists
freed the slaves. Here, then, is another myth that has to be
exploded.
The fact of the matter is that Negro slavery formed the very
basis of the capitalist system in the United States. As we
have seen, it was the only way to get the laborer to work for
another's profit. It is estimated that about twelve million
Africans were brought here in chains, not counting the
untold millions killed in Africa or on the passage over.
During the Revolutionary War, Virginia Liberals and

Pennsylvania Quakers declared against the slave trade and
tried to stop further lawful importations. It was hard to
maintain the principle of Slavery and the Declaration of
Independence at the same time. (*34) Besides, the British
were trying to stir up the slaves to rebellion. The new
193
imported Negroes were always the most recklessly militant
and more time had to be allowed for their assimilation. The
end of the slave trade, too, was calculated to deal a great
blow to England and her West Indian colonies.
Ultimately, the deciding factors were economic, not

political. The chief crop at the time, certainly in Virginia, the
key State, was not cotton, but tobacco, and here white labor
was decidedly superior. Besides, the slave market was
glutted. Already the South had become divided into regions
in which the role that had been assigned to such States as
Virginia and Maryland was that of a slave breeder. Thus
the struggle to stop the slave trade was at bottom a struggle
to wipe out Virginia's and Maryland's foreign competition.
And it was the New England States, particularly that most
Liberal of all, Rhode Island, which blocked Virginia's move.
In the end Virginia prevailed. With the termination of

foreign competition, Virginia was able to give some basis
for its tradition of treating slaves well. To feed the slaves
well and to bring them together so that they could produce
plenty of slave children was a basic point in Virginia
economy. And if the Negroes themselves would not
produce enough children, the master could always call in
the Negro women and either turn them over to his foremen
or do the job himself. The Southland, proud of its traditions
of Southern chivalry, nevertheless organized the greatest
system of rape known to history.
In the ancient world where slavery was part of a self-

sufficient economy, and everything had to be produced on
the place, the slave was often an educated craftsman. He
was treated well and sometimes taken into the family. Such
was not the slavery of the one-crop South where cotton
ruled. Education was forbidden. Conditions were fearful.
194
Torture and terror were constantly applied (*35)There was
no redress save insurrection.
With the invention of the cotton gin, when great quantities

of cotton could be shipped out on the world market-in
other words, when the plantation system of the South
became linked up with the capitalist system of the rest of
the world, slavery became highly profitable and the
number of slaves rapidly increased. The South became
wedded to its "peculiar institution."
But it was not only the South that benefitted. The

Napoleonic Wars had accelerated the industrial revolution,
particularly in cotton textiles. Cheap cotton became the
very life food of British industries. It built up New England
factories. It formed the basis of countless fortunes in every
walk of life. As English cotton consumption jumped from
13,000 bales in 1781 to 3,386,000 in 1860, Southern
production leaped to 5,000,000 bales. Slavery made cotton
King.
Here was the basic reason for the terrific hostility to the
Abolition movement on the part of certain elements in the
Northern cities. These were the elements that were to
sabotage the cause of the North. Now we can also better
appreciate why so many British Liberals refused to aid the
North in the Civil War. Gladstone wanted France and
Russia to unite with England to stop the Civil War and thus
recognize the South. (*36) Cobden argued that the South
was more Liberal than the North since it believed in free
trade! Bright believed that the South would be able to
secede (but he didn't want war with the United States),
while Cairnes was sure that both the occasion and the
moral feeling of Europe demanded that the South should be
allowed to secede, as this also would be better for the North!
(*37) All these gentlemen had built their pyramids on the
195
backs of Negro slavery and they were afraid their whole
civilization would crash to earth.
Yet, by 1860, despite all, the South had come to the end of
its rope. Slave labor was wasteful; for it to be profitable
there was needed an abundance of fertile soil and a crop
which demanded a steady combining of labor. Thus there
had arisen large plantations that could be devoted solely to
cotton, for only cotton permitted large numbers of people to
be used ten months in the year.
As the fertile soil became worn out, two methods were

open to the Southern planter, namely, either the renewal of
the soil through scientific methods of fertilization and use,
or abandonment of the old plantation and utilization of
fresh lands. The first alternative was completely closed to
the Southern planter by the very institution of slavery.
Slavery meant sparsity of population. It spelled the absence
of towns and community isolation. It frowned on good
highways and easy methods of communication. It meant
dense ignorance. Only the coarsest and crudest tools could
be given the slaves. The more machinery took hold in the
grain belt, the more reactionary became slavery in the
cotton belt.
Frenetically, the South took to the second alternative,

territorial expansion. In spite of the sparsity of population,
a ferocious land hunger made itself felt, forcing the South to
push on towards the West. Slavery took Florida. It took
Louisiana. It took Texas. It sent marauding expeditions into
Mexico, into Cuba, into Nicaragua. Crowding behind the
Mason-Dixon line, the South turned its attention to the
North. It sent its "poor white trash" into Kansas and
Nebraska as Border Ruffians to terrorize the countryside.
But the Border Ruffians were met by the John Browns.
Finally, through its mouthpiece, Chief Justice Taney, it
196
decided in the Dred Scott Case that any territorial limits to
slavery would no longer be recognized. By 1860, the issue
had become clear-All or nothing: either unlimited
expansion, or the South would be choked to death by the
operating law of diminishing returns. Feverish foreign
policy became choleric domestic policy. The irrepressible
conflict was at hand.
As the South pursued its inexorable course, corresponding

changes took place in the attitude of the North. With the
great growth of the cotton industry and its enormous
significance to capitalism both North and South, the
prevailing opinion in the North was well expressed by the
Liberal Whigs of the time headed by Henry Clay and
typified by Abraham Lincoln. Their policy was to restrict
the institution of slavery solely to the South. The Missouri
Compromise was their crowning achievement. Lincoln
articulated their views when, as legislator in Illinois, in 1837,
he brought in the following protest declaring that the
signers ". . . believe that the 'institution of slavery is
founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the
promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase
than abate its evils. They believe that the Congress of the
United States has no power under the constitution to
interfere with the institution of slavery in the different
States. They believe that the Congress of the United States
has the power, under the constitution, to abolish slavery in
the District of Columbia, but that the power ought not to be
exercised, unless at the request of the people of the District."
(*38)
It is true that later, in 1849, when he was in Congress,

Lincoln did announce his intention to introduce a Bill for
the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia with
compensation to the owners but attached to the bill was a
197
rider calling for the most stringent enforcement of the
fugitive slave law. (*39) In Congress "Apparently Lincoln's
closest associates were Southern Whigs like Stephens and
Toombs," (*40) with whom he was so closely bound up that
he went "so far as to vote, with all Southern members and
in opposition to most Northern members, against
permitting Palfrey to introduce a bill to repeal all laws
'establishing or maintaining slavery or the slave trade in the
District of Columbia." (*41)
Although Lincoln expressed fear of what he called the

mobocratic spirit, he did not protest when the Abolitionist
Lovejoy was lynched. On the contrary, he took the trouble
to tell his audience in Worcester, Massachusetts "I have
heard you have abolitionists here. We have a few in Illinois
and we shot one the other day." (*42) It is no wonder that
Wendell Phillips called Lincoln the ''slave hound from
Illinois." (*43) When the Free Soil Party was formed in 1848
with a platform of free labor, free soil and free press and
was obtaining the adherence of such bourgeois democrats
as Charles Sumner, then Lincoln's mentors, the Whig
leaders, "were even more virulent toward the Free Soilers
than they were toward the Democrats," (*44) on the ground
that the Free Soil Party was giving a foothold to the
principles of Abolitionism.
Lincoln's views on the question of the Negro are well

summed up in his statement made not long before he
became candidate for President: "I will say then that I am
not, nor ever have been in favor of making jurors of negroes
nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with
white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a
physical difference between the white and black races
which I believe will forever forbid the two races living
together on terms of social and political equality. And
198
inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain
together there must be the position of superior and inferior
and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the
superior position assigned to the white race.... I will to the
very last stand by the law of this state which forbids the
marrying of white people with negroes." (*45)
Lincoln was against the extension of slavery into the North

on the ground that this would have to lead to intermarriage
between white and black, as it had done in the South, to
which miscegenation he was deadly opposed. He
advocated the shipment of all Blacks back to Africa. In
practice he was for the gradual emancipation of the
Negroes although ". . . for their tardiness in this, I will not
undertake to judge. our brethren of the South." (*46)
Lincoln objected to any interference with the institution of
slavery in the South; he declared that Congress, too, had no
power to act but that only the people of the States
themselves could decide on these matters themselves
without dictation from the Federal Government.
The timid character of Lincoln's views stands out in bold

relief when they are contrasted to the opinions even of
bourgeois Radicals such as Charles Sumner. Contrary to
Lincoln, Sumner came out plainly for Negro suffrage and
full equality for the Negro people. He ". . . denied to judicial
tribunals the power to dictate to Congress an interpretation
of the Constitution or to bind the individual conscience."
(*47) Regarding the Fugitive Slave Act, Sumner boldly
declared: ". . . by the Constitution which I have sworn to
support, I am bound to disobey this Act." (*48)
The feverish capitalist development of the North, the rise of

the demands of the West as denunciated in the platform of
the Free Soil Party and the relentless drive for more land by
the South, toppled the old Missouri Compromise, and with
199
it the Whig Party, to the earth. Lincoln found himself out of
Congress and in a defunct party. The struggle had entered
into the higher plane of "squatter sovereignty" where the
classes fought it out directly with weapons in their hand.
With the Dred Scott decision that gave the South a free
hand to enter into all the regions of the North with its
slaves, large numbers of moderate elements began to
gravitate towards the Free Soil movement. Out of these
elements there was born the Republican Party. It was not a
party of war. (As a matter of fact, no large organized group
in the North wanted war or even suspected it was so near.)
It was not a party of Abolition but one that merely stood
against the extension of slavery. The other demands put
forward, such as Free Homestead, Protective Tariff, and a
Pacific Railway, clearly demonstrated the petty bourgeois
Liberal character of the organization. To keep the peace,
these Northern Liberals were willing to bend backward, if
necessary, in their obeisance to slavery. They renounced the
term "Democracy" and went back to the idea of the
Republic (Union). They were willing to take in such people
as Lincoln, who, moreover, did not agree with the platform
of the Republican Party.
In his famous debates with Lincoln, Douglas of Illinois

pointed out that the platform of the Republican Party
included planks advocating the abolition of slavery in
territories and in the District of Columbia, the rejection of
all future slave states into the union and the repeat of the
Fugitive Slave Acts. Douglas then taunted Lincoln with the
fact that the latter had been against this platform all his life.
Lincoln replied: "The plain truth is this ... in our opposition
to that we did not agree with one another in everything.
The people in the North end of the State were for stronger
measures of opposition than we of central and southern
portions of the State." (*49) In short, Lincoln was not for
200
these parts of the Republican program and he plainly stated
that he would vote for admission of slave States into the
union in the future. It was in this spirit, too, that he fought
the Civil War, namely, with mercy and charity to the slave
owners.
The chief aim of the Republican Party was the preservation

of the Union at all costs. Fundamentally, the issue between
the Republicans and the extreme wing of the Southerners
who wanted to secede from the Union was that the former
wanted to keep slavery in the union and the latter wanted
to take it out of the union. (*50) Lincoln stated the views of
the Republicans accurately when he declared that if he
could save the Union by abolishing slavery, or by keeping
slavery, his object was the maintenance of the Union.
Indeed, had the Southern States seceded, in what a plight
Northern capitalism would have been!
Whatever Radicalism existed was contained in the ranks of

the Abolitionists. These consisted of two principal wings.
One, headed by William Lloyd Garrison, was made up of
petty bourgeois elements to whose morality of Liberal
individualism slavery had become deeply abhorrent.
Garrison himself had no definite scheme for the realization
of Abolition. He took no interest in politics, none in the
ballot, nor in revolution. Like most of the anti-slavery men
and women, he was deeply religious. Garrison would do
nothing to further slave insurrections. (*51)
What separated these people from the Republican Party

was that to them the chief issue was Slavery and not the
Union. If the Left Wing of the Republican Party wanted
Liberty and Union, the Abolitionists insisted that Liberty
must be achieved even if the Union had to be destroyed.
Garrison denounced the Constitution as a covenant with
201
death and with hell, and demonstratively tore copies of it to
pieces.
Thus Garrison appealed to the Bible as against the law. A

section of the Abolitionists violated the law and formed a
system of "underground railways" to aid the fugitive slave
escape. They called for secession or expulsion of the
Southern states from the Union. The South, too, called for
secession in the name of the Bible. Liberal Lincoln believed,
not in the Bible, but in the Constitution. In this way,
tolerant of both sides, he could defend the Union and
severely punish the Abolitionists for helping the fugitive
slaves.
The second wing of Abolitionists has become symbolized

by John Brown. These had their fill of the Border Ruffians
in "Bleeding Kansas." The bitter struggle of these Western
agrarians to hold their own against slavery in the no-man's
land of the prairies had determined them to take matters in
their own hands. These Radicals did not know fear of the
law. They did understand, however, the necessity of
goading people into physical collision with the institution
of slavery. They stood for violent action and slave
insurrections. (*52) Their monumental achievement was
Harper's Ferry. While Garrison was vehemently urging the
North not to fight and strongly denouncing John Brown's
raid, everyone knew matters had taken a decisive turn.
Willy-nilly, Harper's Ferry became the campaign issue of
1860. To the South the "Black Republicans" were tarred with
the same stick as "Nigger Lover" Brown.
In vain Lincoln affirmed that Republicans were not Radicals

and that, in declaring the right to control slavery, were only
carrying out the procedure of the "Founding Fathers." In
vain he proclaimed to the South that it was not Republicans
who stirred up insurrections among slaves. "John Brown
202
was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a
single Republican in his Harper's Ferry Enterprise." (*53)
And again.- "Republican doctrines and declarations are
accompanied with a continual protest against any
interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about
your slaves. Surely this does not encourage them to revolt."
(*54)
Nevertheless, even Lincoln had refused to recognize the

Dred Scott decision as final law, and the election of Lincoln
did mean the sweeping out of the South from its political
control of the head of government. It meant that the old
equilibration of forces was definitely ended, the old balance
of power destroyed. Politics had begun to catch up with
economics. The Slavocracy was doomed. And when Lincoln
was elected with 1.9 million votes Out Of 4.7 million, the
South decided to secede and fight. The die was cast.
As in the Revolutionary War, so in the Civil War the

Liberals did their best to prevent the masses from taking
matters into their own hands. When the War first started, a
tremendous enthusiasm was shown by the people who
knew that the freedom of the slaves would mean an
enormous step forward for democracy. Great crowds of
recruits flocked to the enlistment stations only to find that
the government had made no preparations to receive them.
They were sent home as too numerous to handle and as
superfluous. Cold water was thrown on their enthusiasm
while recruiting was officially discouraged. The enlistment
stations were not reopened until June 1862. (*55) But it was
then rather late and a year later conscription was necessary.
203
As soon as the call came for volunteers, free Negroes
everywhere offered their services and everywhere their
services were declined. It was only in September, 1862, that
a regular Negro regiment was formed. All in all, 180,000
Negro’s were accepted. But only under the meanest
conditions. Even when giving their lives for the Union-and
68,000 Negroes were lost -they were allowed only half the
pay the white soldiers got, or $7.00 a month.
It should have been a most elementary duty on the part of

Lincoln and his government not only immediately to have
freed the slaves of all those in actual rebellion to the United
States, but to have started a movement of the Blacks to
initiate a slave insurrection in the rear of the Southern
armies. Instead, everything possible was done to prevent
the slaves from rising on their own account. When
Cameron, Secretary of the Treasury, urged the arming of
the Negroes in his report in 1861, Lincoln recalled the
report by telegraph.(*56) "The constant charge of Southern
newspapers, Southern politicians and their Northern
sympathizers, that the war was an abolitionist war met with
constant and indignant denial. (*57) "Repeated appeals
were made to the slave-holders that if they desisted they
could keep their slaves or adequate compensation would be
made. It was forbidden to sing "John Brown's Body" in the
army. In his first Inaugural Address, President Lincoln
pledged himself anew to carry out in full the provisions of
the Fugitive Slave Law. The Commander-in-Chief of the
Northern forces in the field, General McClellan, had openly
stated that he would take the side of the masters against the
slaves, were the issue one of slavery rather than of the
Union. (*58)
When masses of Negroes flocked into the camps of the

Northern armies, not only were they rejected as soldiers,
204
but the Union generals were informed they had to keep the
Negro’s intact as slaves for their masters. Lincoln
repudiated the action of General Fremont in freeing the
slaves in Missouri, although it had become clear that the
Union armies were advancing most easily in precisely those
areas where the Negroes were densest.
But such a situation could not long endure and when

General Hunter faced Lincoln with the accomplished fact of
numbers of slaves set free and armed, the bars were let
down to Negroes entering the army and helping the Union
cause. To the very end, however, no slave revolt was ever
encouraged, and the South was able to free all her man
power for fighting at the front. Only reluctantly, and after
waiting till the last moment, when the cause of the North
was at its lowest ebb and England was about to recognize
the South, did Lincoln issue his Emancipation Proclamation.
The net result of all this "Liberalism" of Lincoln was
fearfully to protract the war and to raise its toll to ghastly
heights.
It was no wonder that Wendell Phillips could exclaim: "I do

not say that McClellan is a traitor, but I say this, that if he
had been a traitor from the crown of his head to the sole of
his foot, he could not have carried on the war in more exact
deference to the politics of that side of the Union. And
almost the same thing may be said of Mr. Lincoln,-that if he
had been a traitor, he could not have worked better to
strengthen one side and hazard the success of the other."
(*59)
If Lincoln was Liberal to the slave-holders, good railroad

lawyer as he had been, he was not forgetful of the Rights of
Big Business either. (*60) This was the period of the rise of
many great American fortunes, (*61) but none zoomed so
spectacularly as those of the railroads. Corruption and graft
205
were rampant, and the Republican Party lived up to its
platform handsomely. Not only were charters granted to
the Pacific railroads, but cash loans were made running as
high as $16,000 to $48,000 per mile of road, and stupendous
grants of the very best land, to the total of 129 million acres,
were given away. Thus, when the Homestead Act was
finally passed and a settler could get a "free" farm, very
little good land was left. Big Business had locked the
frontier and cornered the market.
Tragically the Western farmer had fought the War to

guarantee free competition and individual liberty. For this
he gave his life unstintingly during the War. At the end, not
the farmer of the democratic West, but the oligarchic Trust
dominated the scene and took control; the farmer had been
duped.
If Republican Liberalism was easy on Northern capitalists,

it was not so easy on labor. The Civil War had the
immediate effect of destroying the rising labor movement
in the United States. Strikers were regarded as hostile to the
Union and guilty of treason. Strikes were deemed illegal
and were broken by the military. Often Negro workers
were used as strike- breakers.
As the War continued, the misery of the working class

greatly increased. As in the Revolutionary War, so in the
Civil War the moneyed men tried to throw the entire cost of
the War on the backs of the people. Currency inflation
became general, and in 1862 the government began issuing
irredeemable legal tender notes commonly called "green-
backs" which soon fell greatly in value. Thus, the rise in the
prices of necessities, due to the War, accompanied by the
fall in the purchasing power of money, due to inflation,
resulted in a tremendous fall in the standard of living of the
workers. At the same time, Big Business refused to tax itself,
206
issuing 7 per cent bonds instead, which bonds could be
bought in depreciated green-backs. Meanwhile, the tariff
was raised from 19 per cent to 47 per cent.
These rough economic measures against the common

people coincided with rough political measures. The writ of
habeas corpus was suspended, freedom of press denied,
and, to cap the climax, Congress passed the Conscription
Act, the first time universal conscription had been decreed
in the United States. This Conscription Act had the
infamous provision that those who could procure a
substitute or Pay $300 in cash would be exempted from the
draft. Thus could the blood-tax which the War demanded
be shifted onto the shoulders of the poor entirely.
Such unprecedented class legislation had its immediate

reaction in the bloody draft riots of 1863 in New York City.
The working class of the cities by this time had become
thoroughly disillusioned with the conduct of the War. Not
only did they now refuse to enlist, despite the inducement
of bounties as high as $1,500 to volunteers, but when they
realized the dispensations being granted to "Big Business,"
they decided actively to resist the draft.
For four days in New York City were conducted violent

and bitter struggles. Business came to a standstill. Over fifty
buildings were burned; two of them were police stations,
three were draft lottery offices, one was an arms factory. An
entire block of houses was consumed in flames.
Newspapers especially were the objects of the fiery wrath
of the workers. In general, homes, factories, and stores were
wrecked and looted, and property estimated at more than
$11,200,000 destroyed. The toll taken among the workers is
not known definitely, but unofficial counts total more than
1,200 killed or dying as the result of their injuries.
207
In the course of the fighting, the workers were able to win a
good many of the returned soldiers over to their side. The
volunteer fire companies also were strongly sympathetic;
for this reason, New York City quickly abolished its
volunteer fire organization and substituted a well-paid
professional department.
Other cities in the North reacted sympathetically to the riots

of New York. Riots broke out in Hartford, Boston, and
Newport, also in Jersey City, in Albany, in Troy, and
elsewhere in New York State. In the end, all the riots were
put down by the stern action of the Liberal Government in
Washington.
These draft riots were the first indications that the struggle
between North and South would soon give way to the
struggle between capital and labor. The New York City
riots against the Conscription Act stand as one of the
harbingers of the proletarian revolution and are a direct
forerunner to the Paris Commune of 1871.
It has been said, even by socialistic historians, that the draft

riots were really reactionary manifestations. These
historians, point out that the rioters assaulted Negroes.
They also show that the riots worked objectively against the
progressive Northern forces and with the Copperheads of
the North. The action of the New York workers is also
contrasted with the friendly attitude of Karl Marx to
Abraham Lincoln, and the decision of the First International
to mobilize the English working class for the North as
against the South. These historians fail to analyze the real
dynamic processes at work. Had the workers won in New
York City, their victory would have precipitated a workers'
revolt throughout the Union which, far from ending the
Civil War, would have carried it out in a much more
Radical manner and would have attempted to complete the
208
democratic revolution which ended up by freeing the
chattel-slaves, with a proletarian revolution to end wage-
slavery.
With the termination of the Civil War, Republican

Liberalism was faced with the double task of keeping down
both the Negro and labor. The question immediately arose,
should the Negro be given the vote? The opinion of Lincoln
was to limit the suffrage on the conquered territory to only
"the very intelligent." However, with the assassination of
Lincoln, the problem became far more acute. "Some
planters held back their former slaves on their plantations
by brute force. Armed bands of white men patrolled the
country roads to drive back the Negroes wandering about.
Bodies of murdered Negroes were found on and near the
highways and by-paths. Gruesome reports came from the
hospitals-reports of colored men and women whose ears
had been cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows,
whose bodies had been slashed by knives or lacerated by
scourges." (*62)
Liberal Washington soon was faced with three alternatives.

(1) either to give up the fruits of War, or (2) to keep a
Freedman's Bureau for a generation, or (3) to use the Negro
vote as the only force it had at hand to reconstruct the
Southern states. Thus Negro suffrage was forced to the
front, not as a method of humiliating the South, not as a
theoretical and generous gift to the Freedman, not
according to any preconceived plan, but simply because of
the grim necessities of the situation. Only the Negro
favored the North.
Having the vote at their disposal, Negroes were elected en

masse to the State Legislatures in the South. As to
Liberalism and the democracy of the Negro, judge A. W.
Tourgee has this to say: "They obeyed the Constitution and
209
annulled the bonds of states, counties and cities which were
issued to carry on the War of the Rebellion and maintain
armies in the field against the Union. They instituted a
public school system in the realm where public schools had
been unknown. They opened the ballot-box and jury-box to
thousands of white men who had been debarred from them
by lack of earthly possessions. They introduced Home Rule
in the South. They abolished the whipping-post, the
branding iron, the stocks, and other barbarous forms of
punishment which, up to that time, prevailed. They
reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three.
In an age of extravagance, they were extravagant in the
sums appropriated for public works. In all that time no
man's right of person was invaded under the forms of law.
Every Democrat's life, home, fireside and business were
safe. No man obstructed any white man's way to the ballot-
box, interfered with his freedom or boycotted him on
account of his political faith." (*63)
What was the effect of the victory of Liberalism in the Civil

War upon the growth of democracy in the United States?
As far along as in 1824, when Jackson and Adams ran for
President, Only 3 per cent of the population voted. With
Jackson's victory, the number exceeded the million mark for
the first time and the percentage jumped to 9.1 per cent.
From that time, notwithstanding the rapid growth in
population generally, the voting percentage increased but
slowly, being but 12 per cent up to the Civil War.
From the Civil War to the first two decades of the twentieth
century, this average was improved by only 5 per cent,
going to 17 per cent, and it was only after the adoption of
the Nineteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution in
1920, granting the right of suffrage to the women of the
country, that the voting percentage jumped to 25 per cent of
210
the whole population. Since then, each Presidential election
has seen a slight increase, the percentage for 1932 being 31.9
per cent and the number voting reaching about forty
million, a record number for the United States.
Standing alone, these figures are impressive; compared to

other democratic countries, however, their relative
importance sharply drops. For example, in the British
elections of 1931, 56 per cent of the population voted. In the
German election November 1932, 54 per cent voted, and
four months later, in the special election held, 62 per cent of
the population went to the polls, close to forty million votes
being cast, a total equal to that of the votes cast in the
United States, a country with double the population. (*64)
The reason for the slow growth in ballot-box democracy in

the United States has been two-fold. First, large masses of
people have been disfranchised; second, large sections of
those eligible to vote have taken other methods to secure
their ends. A study of the election returns makes it amply
evident that most of those who vote are not workers and
most of the proletariat does not vote. The greatest target of
direct attack has ever been the foreign-born and the Negro.
Before the Civil War, slavery prevented the Negroes from

'voting. Afterwards, they were violently excluded from the
ballot by organized terror, by manipulation of the ballots,
by sudden removal of the polls, illegal arrests the day
before election, etc. To the violent methods indulged in
immediately after the Civil War soon was added a whole
system of legal methods preventing the Negro from voting,
including complex election laws, disqualification if ever
sent to jail (which embraces a large number of Negroes in
the South), heavy tax requirements, education or literacy
tests, grandfather clauses, abolition of a great number of
211
elective offices making them appointive by the governor,
etc.
Even in the North the Negro had a hard time to win

suffrage. The experience of New York is typical where, as
late as in 1867, equal rights for the free Negro were defeated
in a referendum. Only in 1874 were the special barriers
disfranchising the Negro lowered and most of the Negroes
permitted to qualify as voters. Even if the Negro is eligible
to vote, he is very often barred, as in the South, from the
primaries of the political party, in many cases the only
significant process in the election of candidates. This bar
has been recently sustained by the Supreme Court of the
United States. Only now is the case in regard to jury service
being fought for the Negroes.
There are other ways, too, in which citizens are barred from
voting, including minimum voting age, residence period,
literacy and understanding tests, property and tax-paying
requirements, disqualification of paupers and delinquent
taxpayers, etc.
Since 1919, the voting age of men and women in Germany

has been set at twenty years, while in Russia all citizens
over eighteen years of age, except those especially
disbarred, have the right of suffrage. The minimum age
limit of twenty-one years universal in the United States bars
several million working youths from participation in the
government. (*65) Today thirteen States have a property-
ownership qualification for voting, require payment of
general or poll taxes, bar delinquent taxpayers, or
disqualify non-taxpayers.
The poll tax, too, has been found increasingly difficult to

meet on the part of masses of poor workers and toilers.
Millions of unemployed workers, dependent upon State
212
Relief, which makes no provision for the payment of the
poll tax, are thus very neatly deprived of their democratic
right to participate in the government. Alabama, for
example, specifically requires that voters be engaged in
some employment, thus barring not only the unemployed
but many thousands who are only seasonably employed.
Other states have openly denied the vote to citizens who
have received relief.
Every one of the forty-eight States requires a previous

residence period for voting; six require two years in the
state, the others a year or less, with a proportionate time
requirement in the county and election districts. For the
seasonal worker and those who, because of unemployment
or other reasons, are forced to lead a migratory existence in
search of work, it is very difficult to meet 'the residential
voting requirements. We must not forget, too, that in
Washington, D. C., the half a million people living there
have no vote whatever.
Property qualifications not only bar workers from the ballot,

but also often keep them from holding office. This applies
even to such matters as service on juries, where the juror
must fill out a blank swearing that he owns a certain
amount of property free and clear. This no doubt is a
guarantee that the propertyless worker will be assured a
trial "by his peers."
The necessity to own property applies not only to petit or

trial juries, but especially to grand juries, which usually are
hand-picked and are nearly always well-to-do friends of the
politicians. Of all the nearly two million people in New
York County who might be eligible, there are no more than
five hundred names on the Grand Jury list. The role of the
Grand Jury is far more important than the layman may
imagine. In all felony cases, and in some misdemeanors,
213
after a person is held by a police magistrate to answer for
the crime, the Grand Jury investigates the facts of the
occurrence. If it feels that a crime has been committed, it
indicts, charging a specific person with a specific crime.
Since matters are left to its discrimination, a Grand Jury
composed exclusively of wealthy men frequently may act in
a partisan and class-discriminatory manner.
If we sum up the situation after the Civil War and compare

the three important sections of the country, we may declare
that in the South there never was even the pretense of
democracy; in the West, the democracy that was developed
was a democracy for the small property holder only, and
yet, since most of the settlers were small property holders,
this included the main part of the people; in the East there
was only the semblance of democracy, the mass of the
people, wage laborers and non-property holders, being
disbarred.
From Jackson's day on, mechanics and artisans, and, later in

the nineteenth century, skilled workmen are able to obtain
the franchise. As regards the great mass of general laborers,
they were disfranchised at first, because they were
indentured servants, later, because they were immigrants,
and last, because they could not meet the host of
requirements laid down. If, in spite of that, in the East and
throughout the country there has existed so strongly the
illusion that America has been a democracy, all this illusion
was created by the fact that, first of all, many workers did
and could rise in the social scale, acquire a little property
and vote; second, many of the rebellious elements who
were discontented and disfranchised were drained off to
the West; third, the general standard of living was often
high enough to prevent those not voting from worrying
about it. The disfranchised relied on their own personal
214
resources for economic security rather than looked to the
State.
To the enumerated qualifications which have reduced so

considerably those eligible to vote we have to add the
equally important fact that traditionally the American has
trusted his own strong hands and individual might to solve
his problems. This has been true not only for large sections
of the farmers, but for workers also. We have already
stressed the point that the State did not appear prominently
upon the American scene until relatively late, and that in
large sections of the country hard and fast classes did not
exist. Rampant American individualism did not conceive it
necessary to satisfy its needs through the intermediation of
the State apparatus. It went after things directly. This is
seen on all sides, whether we turn to the tradition of lynch
law, to the organization of the IWW, to the exaggerated rate
of crime prevailing in the United States, or to the general
opinion, held even to this day, that nothing good can come
of anything that the politicians once get hold of, etc.
Traditions of ballot-box democracy are indeed not too
strong in the United States.
Footnotes
1. As an example of this reconciliation we can note how, in

his History of England, Liberal Hume defended the Stuarts.
He feared all disturbances, but feared the "real"
revolutionaries far more than the "Whig or government
revolutionaries."(See E. Halevy: The Growth of Philosophic
Radicalism, p. 141.)
2. Contrary to Locke, Hume affirmed: "Out most holy

religion is founded on Faith, not on reason; and it is a sure
method of exposing it to put it to such a trial as it is, by no
means, fitted to endure." (D. Hume: An Enquiry Concerning
215
Human Understanding, p. 137 1900 Open Court
edition, reprint of 1777 edition.)
Hume also denied the idea of miracles being reasonable

and ridiculed it as a basis of any religion. (The same, p. 122.)
3. See D. Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, pp.

540-556, and following (1896 Selby Bigge edition).
4. The same, p 505 and following. See also Wm.

Blackstone: Commentaries of the Laws of England, II, 8-9.
5. Burke justified his actions in defending the American

Revolution by declaring that the Americans, unlike the
French, overthrew no traditions, but only did what the
English did in 1688.
Moreover, what helped to guide Burke in 1776 was his fear

that if the Americans lost, the King would dominate
Parliament. (Compare J. Morley: Burke, pp. 86, 87 [1923
Macmillan edition].)
6. Paine had been elected to the French Convention and had

stood for a capitalist republic. In England the Liberals
under Pitt had indicted Paine. Both Pitt and Burke fought
against the repeal of the Test Act and were violently
opposed to freeing even the Unitarians from special
disabilities under which they labored at the time. The
Liberal forces split, with Fox opposed to Burke and Pitt.
7. See E. Burke. Works, II, 290 and following (1894 edition).
8. See Friedrich Engels: Condition of the Workingclass in

England in 1844. See also J. C. Cobden The White Slaves of
England (1854).
216
9. Adam Smith's principal work was An Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776.
10. "M. Mantoux remarks with much justice that it was the
American War rather than Smith's writing which
demonstrated the decay of the ancient political economy
and compassed its ruin. The War of Independence proved
two things: (1) the danger lurking in a colonial system
which could goad the most prosperous colonies to revolt; (2)
the uselessness of a protective tariff, for on the very morrow
of the war, English trade with the American colonies was
more flourishing than ever before."' (Gide and Rist: History
of Economic Doctrines, p. 103.)
11. Ricardo in his Principles of Political Economy and

Taxation took this position far more clearly than did Adam
Smith.
12. "The community is a fictitious body, composed of the

individual persons who are considered as constituting as it
were its members. The interest of the community then is,
what? --- the sum of the interests of the several members
who compose it." (J. Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation, I, 4 [1823 edition].)
13. P. W. Slosson: The Decline of the Chartist Movement, p. 35.

Compare A. Johnson: The Disappearance of the Small
Landowner, p. 90.
14. G. D. H. Cole: The Life of William Cobbett, p. 11. "Cobbett

represents and symbolizes a phase of the dissolution of old
England." (The same, p. 13.)
15. Although he was opposed to the strike itself and, like

Benjamin Franklin, believed all strikes for higher wages
futile.
217
16. The term "Philosophic" meant that these were not "real"
Radicals, that is, Radicals in activity, but were only Radicals
in talk. Such people were safe and could be accepted in the
best society.
17. See J. Austin: Lectures on jurisprudence, especially

Volume I.
18. Cole, Work cited, p. 361.
19. John Bright bitterly opposed all protective factory

legislation for adults. (See G. M. Trevelyan: The Life of John
Bright, p. 154 and following.)
20. J. A. Hobson: Richard Cobden, p. 9.
See also, J. Morley: The Life of Richard Cobden, pp. 69-70

(London, 1883 edition).
Previously both Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant had

put forward plans for a "universal and perpetual peace."
21. J. A. Hobson, work cited, p. 370.
22. Bentham had argued, indeed, that England should give

up her colonial dependencies
23. "in society you will not find health but in nature."
(Henry Thoreau: Letters, p. 199.) Thoreau was the finest
expression of the doctrine of back-to-nature in America. Of
him Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. "Few lives contain so
many renunciations. He was bred to no profession; he
never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he
never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no
flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco."
(R. W. Emerson: Complete Works, X, 454 [Houghton Mifflin
1904 edition].)
218
24. Speech at Phi Beta Kappa meeting, quoted in Van Wyck
Brooks: Life of Emerson, p. 75.
25. The difference between the Englishman Paine and the

American Emerson here is interesting. To Paine,
government was an evil, but necessary. He had justified the
attack on the British government in the name of society.
With Emerson, however, "Every actual State is corrupt.
Good men must not obey the laws too well." ("Essay on
Politics," Complete Works, III, p. 208 [Houghton Mifflin Co.
edition, 1904.) In his essay on "Self Reliance," in his various
preaching’s to the effect that each man was to mind his own
business, Emerson became the chief exponent on the
American attitude towards individualism that prevailed in
the middle nineteenth century. Emerson was also a close
friend of the reactionary romanticist, Thomas Carlyle.
26. W. G. Sumner: What Social Classes, Owe to Each Other, p.

34. The emphasis is Sumner's.
27. C. A. Beard: Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, p.

467.
28. See S. B. Leacock: Lincoln Frees the Slaves, p. 66.
29. Incidentally, Jackson was the first United States

President to be a church member. All the others had been
free thinkers.
30. R. W. Emerson: Complete Works, III, 210.
31. See Bidwell and Falconer: History of Agriculture in the

Northern United States, 1620- 1860, p. 306 and following.
32. W. Starr, Jr., Lincoln and the Railroads, p. VII.
219
33. C. A. and Mary Beard: Rise of American Civilization, p.
648.
34. Later the South was to denounce the Declaration of

Independence.
35. See C. G. Parsons: Inside View of Slavery, pp 45, 156 and

following.
36. J. Morley: Life of Gladstone, II, 75-76.
37. J. E. Cairnes: The Slave Power, Chapter IX.
38. Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works, I, 15.
Lincoln knew that the majority of the population of the

District of Columbia at that time would never consent to
abolish slavery.
39. Section five of the Bill declared: "That the municipality

authorities of Washington and Georgetown within their
respective jurisdictional limits are hereby empowered and
required to provide active and efficient means to arrest and
deliver up to their owners all fugitive slaves escaping into
said District." (The same, p. 148.)
40. See A. J. Beveridge: Abraham Lincoln, I, 433.
41. The same, I, 480.
42. The same, I, 473; see also S. B. Leacock: Lincoln Frees- the
Slaves, p. 82.
43. A. J. Beveridge: Work cited, I, 482; S. B. Leacock: Work

cited, p. 82.
44. A. J. Beveridge. Work cited, I, 467. Speech, September 18,

1858.
220
45. Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works, I, 369-370.
46. Lincoln: Works, I, 288.
47. G. H. Haynes: Charles Sumner, p. 180.
48. C. Sumner: Works, III, 178, Speech of 1852.
49. The same, I, 330, 332.
50. This was the opinion of Frederick Douglass. See W. E. B.

Dubois: Black Reconstruction, p. 61. 51. "It is a fact that he
had never sent or caused to be sent a single paper south of
Mason and Dixon’s line." (Mrs. Child: An Appeal in Favor of
That Class of Americans Called Africans, p. 151.)
52. Frederick Douglass, foremost Negro of his day, also

urged slave insurrections, as did Wendell Phillips.
53. "Lincoln's Cooper Institute Address," Feb. 27, 1860, Old

South leaflets, Vol. V, No. 107, p.152. 54. The same, p. 153.
55. See G. G. Coulton: The Case for Compulsory Military

Service, pp. 135-136.
56. See W. E. B. Dubois: Black Reconstruction, p. 63.
58. The same p. 101.
59. Wendell Phillips: Speeches and Lectures, p. 450. (1862)
Wendell Phillips estimate of Lincoln was: "I will tell you

what he is. He is a first rate second rate man."(The same, p.
457.)
60. It is generally forgotten that Lincoln had become a

rather well-to-do man. For one of his railroad cases he
221
collected $5,000 --- a really extraordinary amount at the
time. The New York Central Railroad offered him $10,000 a
year to retain him as Counsel.
61. See G. Myers: The History of the Great American

Fortunes; also C. E. Russell: Stories of the Great Railroads.
62. W. E. B. Du Bois: Gift of the Black Folk, quoting "Carl

Schurz Report," p. 201.
63. "The Negro Government," Article in Chicago Weekly,

December 26, 1890.
64. We do not count such "votes" as the ones taken by Hitler

on March 29, 1936, when, of a total of 45.5 million qualified
voters, approximately 45 million voted, only 1/2 million
persons qualified to vote not exercising the franchise.
65. In Missouri, as far back as 1820, a fruitless effort was

made to reduce the age limit to eighteen, the proponents
arguing that every such person had to do a man's work and
boys of eighteen were already householders and
independent.
V. CONTINENTAL LIBERALISM
THE victories of Napoleon, and later, in 1830, the

consolidation of Liberalism in France, together with the
rising capitalism in Middle Europe, enabled European
Liberalism to raise its head, But alas, in the countries of
Germanic Europe modern capitalism had come too late into
the field. It could not raise its head without the specter of
Communism appearing before its eyes. Cowardly, it shrank
from the French Revolution. It feared the masses. It ran to
the Prussian militarists for protection. Its Liberalism thus
222
took on a police character. It looked with envy upon the
free capitalists of England, France, and America. Unable to
achieve actual power, it substituted the wish for the reality,
the idea for the substance. German Liberalism thus
assumed a mystical mask. Lacking science, it dragged from
the lumber room of metaphysics eternal principles and
cosmic systems as the scaffolding for its "castles in Spain."
All that was simple in the English, direct in the American,
and clear in the French, became laborious and profound in
the German, covered with an impossible linguistic
gibberish.
The tardy development and thwarted character of German

capitalism has inextricably woven its traces into the very
warp of German history. Landlocked from all sides, save
the Baltic, open to invasion from hordes of Huns and Slavs,
dominated by the superior forces of Western and Southern
Europe, Germany up to the very end of the nineteenth
century has had its history made for it by other nations,
rather than by itself. The shift of the trade routes in the
fifteenth century caused everything in Germany to stagnate
and in turn led to social catastrophes of frightful
proportions.
At a time when both England and France had destroyed the

robber barons and princes of feudalism and were
centralizing their monarchies and developing their
corresponding capitalist nationalisms, what is now
Germany was but a geographical symbol, a veritable maze
of petty principalities dominated by foreign Pope and
foreign Emperor, both of whose sole centralizing activities
consisted in their machinery for draining the country of all
wealth. The backward character of German capitalism
prevented it from overthrowing the feudal weights upon it,
and from accelerating the growth of a centralized monarchy
223
that would have, on the one hand, reduced the princes and
robber barons despoiling trade and industry, and, on the
other hand, have rid itself of tribute to Pope and Holy
Roman Emperor. The failure of the German capitalists to
take even the first steps forward in their emancipation
threw them back still farther in comparison with those of
the other countries and in relation to other classes.
As the pressure of Princes, Pope, and Emperor grew

unbearably severe, the impotency of the capitalists
compelled other classes to seek a way out. The lower
nobility, made up of the knights, was the first class to enter
into battle. These petty knights had been ground between
the Princes and an advancing European capitalism that was
eating its way into the feudal tenures of Germany and
giving strength to the cities to defeat them with gunpowder,
printing press, mercenary armies, etc. Their privileges had
been taken away, and they had been hard put to meet the
great increase in prices of necessities that marked the
sixteenth century. Had these knights received the support
of some king, the Princes might have been reduced and
German unity achieved. As it was, the knights were erased
from German history.
The only other class left to carry on the fight was the
peasantry and, from the close of the fifteenth century to
1525, Germany was forced to experience one peasant war
after another. A portion of the knights went with the
peasants, others with the Princes. That the peasant wars
were so protracted was due to the weakness of the ruling
Princes. Wherever the peasants were supported by a
general capitalist development, as in Lombardy and to
some extent in Bohemia, they were able to win some
concessions. But elsewhere they were defeated and
224
ferociously hunted down. From then on, German unity
could come only from without.
The peasant revolts, quickly put down two centuries earlier

in England, had only aided the monarchy. In France, the
peasant jacqueries, a century later stamped down with so
much fury, also helped eliminate the power of the feudal
elements standing in the way of absolute monarchy. In each
case the peasants could link up their struggle with the
welfare of the nation. The German peasants, however,
could be aided by neither the city nor the King. Unable to
advance from serfdom to capitalism, the peasants were
forced to turn backward to primitive communism backed
with religious texts for their ideals and aims. In punishment,
the Anabaptist peasantry was driven down to unheard of
levels of serfdom. The position of the peasantry grew
immeasurably worse.
The only class that gained was the Princes. To this class the
city capitalists attached themselves. For this class Luther
hurled his thunderbolts. Only the Princes appeared as an
historical force of any importance.
To this plight Germany was condemned for three hundred

years. Germany could overthrow the domination of Rome
by the Reformation only to be divided by the Imperial
forces of Vienna. The weakness of Germany made it the
battleground for all Europe. After the terrible Thirty Year’s
War, in the course of which the population was so reduced
that cannibalism was not uncommon, the whole country
was exhausted. At the time of Frederick the Great it was
estimated that three-quarters of the population of Prussia
was of foreign stock attracted there by the policy of the
ruling class to repopulate the country by giving grants of
lands to immigrants who would settle there.
225
In all this turmoil there remained no class strong enough to
change the status quo. It was the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars that freed the German peasantry from
serfdom, that emancipated capitalism from its fetters, and
led to the national unity of Germany. In freeing itself,
French capital was forced to liberate the German as well.
The fact that the leading role in German history was

relegated to the anachronistic class of Princes and Junkers
left an indelible mark upon the social relations of that
country. Rising nationalism had to operate through the
Princes themselves, gradually evolving a leadership under
the King of Prussia, who, stimulated by the advancing
capitalism of the nineteenth century and the events abroad,
was able to form a federal empire, to eliminate the influence
of Austria and, after the Franco-Prussian War, to begin the
great task of centralization and unification.
In all of this period, capitalism and its Liberalism could

serve only as the handmaidens for the Junkers.
This is interestingly illustrated in the religious field. Instead

of following Calvin, who really represented the interests of
the business cities and who, naturally enough, made use of
the Jewish ethical teaching, German business men were
content to follow Luther, Apostle for the Princes, and one
who attacked money-interest. Unlike the English, the
German capitalist indeed could find use, not for the heroic
doctrine of predestination, but only for the doctrine of
original sin!
By the time the capitalists grew strong enough to challenge

the old aristocratic sections, the masses of toilers had so
developed as to cause fear that a revolution begun by the
226
Liberal capitalists could terminate only in a socialistic
republic or Communist society. It was only after the French
Revolution of 1830 that Liberalism began to flourish in
Germany; it was only in 1848 that it was driven to take the
first steps forward; but in the course of the Revolution, it
revealed its utter bankruptcy and futility.
Under such circumstances, all of German society should

have been colored with a peculiar conception of the role of
the State and of its relations to individuals. To the English,
freedom consisted primarily in the absence of restraint; to
the Americans, freedom was not only negative, the absence
of restraint, but also positive, namely, independence and
self expression. According to the German Hegel, however,
freedom consisted, not in the absence of restraint, but only
in self-determination. Restraint and freedom were perfectly
compatible. (*1) In this way the Hegelian reactionaries
fought the Liberalism then just sprouting as a result of the
French Revolution. And it was this reactionary position that
caused the younger elements to split away and form the
Neo-Hegelian group that sympathized with a democratic
program rather than with the Junkers.
"Freethinking in religious matters instead of ecclesiastical

dogma, scientific investigation instead of philosophic
speculation, economic enterprise instead of State
regulations, a liberal constitution in place of personal
monarchy, national unity in place of provincial dispersion-
such was the program of the German middle class as from
about 1830." (*2)
Torn between the authority of the Prussian Junkers and the

pressure of the masses, German Liberalism took on, in a
German manner, the vacillations and compromises that had
generally marked Liberalism. Logically enough, it was not
the minister as in England, or the lawyer, as in America,
227
who took the lead, but the Herr Professor, the Herr Doktor,
whose chief representative was Immanuel Kant. Sitting in
its study, German Liberalism, not able to conquer even
Pomerania in fact, conquered the whole universe in
philosophy.
The English had turned to philosophy in order to escape

religion and to aid the empirical method of science. The
German, unable to escape the Landgrafs, could not escape
religion; with them the purpose of philosophy was to justify
religion, and to struggle against the sensationalism and
naturalism of science. Kant's attempt to found a "Science of
Metaphysics" was not in order to advance science but to
carve out a realm for "pure reason" entirely unconnected
with empirical experience. Thus Kant labored to answer
Hume's Scepticism, for, as he aptly expressed it, "Scepticism
is thus a resting place for human reason, where it can reflect
upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the
region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may
be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no
dwelling place for permanent settlement." (*3)
The idealism of Kant was not a denial of the reality of

phenomena, of material objects and processes. What Kant
wanted to prove was that space and time were concepts not
derived from experimentation; that the principles of
causality and of permanence anticipated experience and
that thus it is only in the field of a priori reasoning that
phenomena may be interpreted. According to Kant, the
principles which lie at the basis of our knowledge are
synthetic and have no intrinsic necessity and cannot
Possess the absolute authority ascribed to them by the
rationalists. The character of a priorism, being itself
synthetic, was also incapable of independent proof, but was
as factual as the experience which it conditioned.
228
With the English, whether they admitted matter to be "real"

but unknowable by the senses, or whether they declared it
impossible to tell whether materiality really existed, it was
always in order to turn from abstract concepts to concrete
experimentation; it was always, so to speak, in order to
evade philosophy. With the Germans, the end was always
to prove that matter was merely an idea with which no real
object corresponded and to prove, not that reason could
explain nature, but that nature was beyond reason, that
reason had its limitations. (*4) With the English,
the ,recognition of the defects of the senses in the discovery
of truth led to a consideration of concrete, physical man-to
biology and psychology. To the Germans, man became the
embodiment of an abstract force. All that was progressive
in English Liberalism became with the Germans reactionary.
German Liberalism could be responsible, not for revolution,
but only for counter-revolution. (*5)
It is true, however, that Kant, profoundly affected by

French revolutionary events, was the philosophic founder
of a school of German democracy, such as it was. His
universal law, "Accordingly the practical imperative will be as
follows: So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person
or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as
means only," (*6) lent itself to democratic interpretation.
Kant himself was affected by Rousseau in his moral
philosophy and he acknowledged: "There was a time when
I believed that this [thirst of knowledge] is what confers
real dignity upon human life, and I despised the common
people who know nothing. Rousseau has set me right. This
imagined advantage vanishes. I learn to honor men, and
should regard myself as of much less use than the common
229
labourer, if I did not believe that my philosophy will restore
to all men the common rights of humanity." (*7)
If necessity governed this material world, freedom was the

essence of Kant's realms of pure and practical reason. To
Kant, moral laws were laws of freedom. (*8) But this
freedom was not a freedom which permitted one to do as
he pleased-how could a respectable German of those days
reach such a daring conclusion?-there were iron laws
governing this freedom, laws of duty. (*9)
Kant laid down the universal rule that each one had to act
to free his will. This was a categorical imperative. The
existence of this free will, it is true, could not be proved
except in the ethereal regions of a priori reasoning, but it
was as well established as the immortality of the soul and
the existence of God. (*10) Because each man's will was free,
he was his own legislator, making laws for all, but these
laws of freedom bound him to obey all laws as well.
It is interesting to contrast the German Liberals with the

English. With the English, as we have seen, the will was not
at all free but determined by environment. This was the
view of Herbert Spencer, too. With Hume, that which
brings "good" (pleasure or happiness) is the primary thing
and what is "right" depends on whether it brings "good."
With Kant, however, a good man is one who acts rightly,
and that depends on doing one's duty. (*11) With Bentham
self-interest and duty were identical. To Kant, they were
opposed. "The empirical self must be constantly sacrificed
in order to bring one's actions in accord with a universal
law of right." (*12) Kant's universal law was absolutely
binding without any connection with utility.
Thus German Liberalism, tied hand and foot to the police,

started not from rights, but from duty, from authoritative
230
imperatives, Only, the imperative was to come not from the
State but from universal law. Also, the duty was not to the
State but to universal law. It was from the universal law of
will that the State came to be the embodiment of general
will.
The emphasis on will came from the fact that with the
Germans there was only will, only wish. (*13) The State
existed, according to the German Liberals, to protect and
develop that will. Thus the individual will was to be
developed not contra to the State but through the Law.
Under no circumstances must the people disobey the Law.
According to Kant, if the ruler acted in violation of the laws,

the subjects might complain but never rebel. It was a duty
to obey the law of the existing legislative power no matter
what its origin might be. "Hence there is no Right of
Sedition, and still less of Rebellion, belonging to the People.
And least of all, when the Supreme Power is embodied in
an individual Monarch, is there any justification, under the
pretext of his abuse of power, for seizing his Person or
taking away his Life."
(*14)
In practical politics the Liberals advocated a monarchy,

with the king expressing the general will and the people
advising him through a press that was to be free. Of course,
Kant was against votes for such men as work for masters.
Bowing and scraping before the pressure of both king and
people, the German Liberal believed that the essence of
ethics lay in the "good will." Having no will of their own
that could be realized, their task was to propitiate those
wills that alone had power. (*15)
231
With the Germans, the theory of freedom of the will was
the reaction to the material reality that physically their
capitalism was in chains. The will was divorced from the
body, or rather became the essence of body and free from
physical laws. It was its own law, free from the trammels
even of reason. Thus did German Liberalism substitute the
opiate of free will for its sanity. (*16)
In the course of the nineteenth century, the theory of Free

Will, and of will as the essence of the world, was very
convenient to the capitalists and their professorial
apologists. It was used to demonstrate that since one can-
not know absolute truth, therefore one cannot determine
the future. With this theory, the capitalists were able to
combat the dialectical materialism of the working class that
proved that inevitably the capitalist world would have to
give way to a socialist one. Later, when the workers made
bold to express their own will, Kantian Liberalism
condescended to explain to them that free will meant
capitalists' will and that workers' will was capricious
willfulness.
The doctrine of Free Will served also as a metaphysical

buttress to Utilitarianism in its protest against the States
taking any measure of social reform that would bridle the
irresponsible will of the capitalists. The only good was the
good will, and with this the capitalist countered social
reform with private philanthropy.
In America, the theory of Free Will, just as with the concept

of Liberty, took on a more positive character. We have
noted that with the English, Liberty was negative; with the
German it was part of law and duty; with the American it
was positive, it was self-development. In the United States,
as Liberty had become an end in itself, so would Free Will,
If in any place the individual capitalist will had been free, it
232
was in America. It was easy enough for the American to
imagine that his actions were in accordance with universal
law, because he had always imagined himself to have
founded a model world, upon which the eyes of all the rest
of humanity were longingly fixed.
Capitalism now reaching its maturity in the late nineteenth

century, victorious in its world battles, unchallenged in its
supremacy, of course felt its will was free. The capitalists
looking about them believed themselves to be creators of a
civilization far higher than anything that had gone before.
Their will had been the creative force. The material forces of
production, the labor of the working class, all had been
subordinate to their will. If this was so for capitalism
generally, it was exceptionally true for American capitalism,
both little and big, that had transformed a continent
literally from a wilderness to the most powerful nation
before the eyes of modern man.
Self-reliant, the American Liberal translated free will to

mean self- development. To develop the individuality of
each to the highest point became the goal of education. But
in America, the land of inventions and experiments, where
concrete results took the place of theory, and action the
place of evolution, this neo-Kantianism became Pragmatism,
and as American industry, scientific management, and
engineering developed, it became Instrumentalism. (*17)
Instrumentalism becomes American Liberalism's nearest
approach to Socialism. (*18)
The Liberalisms of the other European countries, Italy,

Hungary, Poland, all bore the stamp of the fact that these
countries were not only backward economically, but
subordinated and dominated by other powers that had
233
conquered them. It was only natural, therefore, that these
Liberalisms should stress not individual liberty and
freedom so much as national independence. It was against
the Holy Alliance whose chief bulwark was the Austrian
Emperor and the Russian Czar that these Liberalisms had to
fight.
The struggle for the national independence of Poland was

extraordinarily protracted and has not been definitely
solved to the present day. The same period that saw the
breaking out of the American Revolution witnessed the
partition of the ancient kingdom of Poland, when large
slices of territory were taken by Prussia, Austria, and
Russia. Faced with the prospect of being completely
swallowed up by these three powers, the landed gentry of
the country commenced a series of reforms to reinvigorate
the body politic.
Unlike Germany, where the rulers were the Princes, in

Poland the decisive element of the ruling class was made
up of nobles whose estates had shrunk to the size of petty
property. These impoverished nobles felt themselves
steadily reduced under the pressure of the great
monarchies around them. In Poland, too, there was a
considerable capitalism developed in the towns. Under the
impact of the French Revolution, the petty nobility and city
leaders combined to force the Reform Constitution of May 3,
1791, whereby the burghers were granted equal civic rights
with the nobility.
At the head of this reform movement was Kosziuscko.

Kosziuscko had taken notable part in the American
Revolution and had returned with definite Liberal ideas.
When the King of Poland decided to yield to the Russian
invasion in 1792, Kosziuscko resigned his army command
and went to Paris. There he witnessed the stirring days of
234
the Terror and the execution of Louis XVI. Typical
aristocrat as he was, the execution filled him with
abhorrence and he refused to have anything to do with the
Jacobins.
From his reactions we can gather the nature of his

conspiracies leading to the actual uprising in Poland of 1794.
Kosziuscko, however, had not witnessed the Revolution for
nothing. From the Americans he learned how to compose a
Declaration of Independence; from the French he learned
the necessity for winning the people to his cause and for
arming the peasantry to fight his battles. To win the
peasantry Kosziuscko proposed such reforms as reducing
the corv’ee labor of the peasant by half and granting him
protection of the law.
It never occurred to the Liberalism of Kosziuscko to permit

the peasant to vote. And how inadequate were his reforms
can be seen from the fact that it had been only in the year
previous that the Liberal Catherine the Second, Empress of
Russia, in the final partition of Poland, had reduced a large
number of free Polish peasants to serfs (handing them over,
incidentally, to Polish knightly landlords). Kosziuscko's
reform would not have restored these serfs, not even to
their former status of peasants.
It was no accident, therefore, when Polish Liberalism in

1794 appealed to the Committee of Public Safety in France
for aid, that the Committee should have put the following
questions to their representative: "How is it that your
Kosziuscko is a popular dictator and yet suffers a king
alongside of him, who, moreover, as Kosziuscko must be
aware, has been put on the throne by Russia? Why does
your dictator not dare to carry out the mass mobilization of
the peasants, for fear of the aristocrats who do not want
'hands' to be withdrawn from labour? How is it that his
235
proclamations lose their revolutionary tone in proportion to
the distance which his line of march removes him from
Cracow? Why did he immediately punish the people's
insurrection in Warsaw with the gallows, while the
aristocratic 'traitors to their country' wander freely about or
are sheltered behind the lengthy formalities of a trial?
Answer!" (*19) To which the Polish citizen could only
remain silent.
Although Kosziuscko's Liberalism was not able to win

national independence for Poland, certain Polish elements
maintained their Liberal- Radical activity throughout the
nineteenth century. A hundred thousand Poles had served
in the armies of the French Revolution under Napoleon;
Many of them had helped Italy in 1848, in the Hungarian
Uprising in 1849, in the Garibaldi movement later, and
some Poles were even to distinguish themselves in the Paris
Commune.
With the breaking of the ancien r’egime by Napoleon, social

conditions became rapidly transformed in Poland.
Napoleon had abolished serfdom and replaced the old laws
of Poland with the Code Napoleon. He had wrested Poland
from the grip of the Czar and had formed it into an
independent Duchy. To retrace all these steps was now
impossible. In the kingdom of Poland proper, serfdom
could not be restored, although the peasant could be
coerced to labor and beaten if he refused. Forced labor was
finally abolished in 1815 in Prussian Poland. The Bank of
Poland was established in 1825. German business men
migrated into Poland and began to build up numerous
factories.
With such additional support, the petty nobility of Poland

in 1831 attempted another rebellion. However, these
gentlemen made absolutely no bid for the support of the
236
peasantry and did nothing to improve their lot. Thus it was
that noble Polish Liberalism, idealized so poignantly by
poems flavored with nostalgic romanticism, received its
second blow. With this second defeat a period of dark
repression set in. In their failure to rally the Polish peasant
to their cause, the Liberal nobles were being repaid for their
role as chief instigators of the cruelty and oppression
common in the countryside. The peasants never much
supported the revolutionary movement for independence,
neither in 1831 nor in 1863. Indeed, in 1846 the Austrian
ruling class was able to instigate the Polish peasant to
massacre thousands of these country gentlemen.
With the abolition of serfdom in Hungary in 1864, and in

Austrian Poland in 1847-48, the situation in that part of
Poland controlled by Russia became more precarious.
Capitalism, too, was now making greater strides. Railroads
had been built from Warsaw to Vienna and Berlin; in order
to pay for their upkeep, travel had to be encouraged, and,
accordingly, passports were reduced from 700 rubles to 10.
Polish intellectuals, mostly declassed nobles and students of
the rising bourgeoisie, began to travel in large numbers
throughout Europe and to come back discontented with the
old system. In retaliation to the rising discontent among the
middle classes, the Czar instituted, in 1863, a general
conscription and recruitment into the army that amounted
practically to a national proscription.
With the victorious Italian struggles for independence fresh

in their memory, the middle class of the towns of Russian
Poland and the petty nobility made their last attempt at
insurrection in 1863. Their first act now was to give land to
the peasants without rent, yet the peasantry remained
neutral, even hostile to the whole movement. The gesture of
liberation had come too late. Already even Russia in 1861
237
had liberated its serfs and had "given" the peasants land;
the peasants were finding out under what onerous
conditions they had been liberated and were beginning to
realize that soon their sufferings were to increase even more
than under serfdom.
Although none of the big landed estates took part in the

movement of revolt, the Radicals did not attempt in the
least to confiscate the big landed estates or to urge the
peasants against the Polish ruling class. Only such a
movement would have enabled them to win the peasantry
and would have given Polish independence a chance of
success. This lack of enthusiasm among the poor agrarians
was counteracted in part by the prominent part the towns
took in the movement.
The Revolt of 1863 was thus summed up by an eye-witness:

"The last political insurrection was in some respects more
formidable than any that have preceded it. For the first time
the working classes in the Polish towns took up arms of
their own accord without any active personal
encouragement from the aristocracy, indeed, in the first
instance, in spite of the aristocracy." (*20) In the militant
action of the working classes who participated, the towns
furnished to the Czar the first taste of 1905 and 1917.
After 1863, Polish Liberalism was played out as the chief

historical social force. In Prussian Poland, the Poles,
overwhelmed by the might of German industry and by the
policy of colonization, became Germanified. In Austria in
1867, Galicia was given a complete system of self-
government with jobs for the Polish petty aristocracy, who
were made supreme in the region, and who thereafter
wholeheartedly supported the Vienna government. In
Russian Poland, due to the tariff and subsidy policy of
Russian Absolutism, a tremendous growth of business took
238
place, Warsaw becoming one of the foremost capitals and
Lodz one of the chief manufacturing centers of Europe.
Coupled with this bourgeois development went a ruthless
policy of Russification on the one hand, and the rise of a
revolutionary Socialist movement among the workers, on
the other. Torn between these forces, Polish Liberalism
gradually expired. The social struggle was then continued
as one between the Polish Revolutionary Radicals and
Socialists, on the one hand, and the Czar, on the other.
We sum up this section on the Liberal movement for Polish

national independence with an interesting statement by
Engels to Marx: ". . . The more I think over the business the
clearer it becomes to me that the Poles as a nation are done
for and can only be made use of as an instrument until
Russia herself is swept into the agrarian revolution. From
that moment onwards Poland will have absolutely no more
reason for existence. The Poles have never done anything in
history except play at brave, quarrelsome stupidity. And
one cannot point to a single instance in which Poland
represented progress successfully, even if only in relation to
Russia, or did anything at all of historic importance. Russia,
on the other hand, is really progressive in relation to the
East. For all its baseness and Slavonic dirt, Russian
domination is a civilizing element on the Black Sea, the
Caspian Sea and Central Asia and among the Bashkirs and
Tartars, and Russia has absorbed far more civilizing and
especially industrial elements than the Poles whose whole
nature is that of the idle cavalier." (*21)
Liberalism in Hungary was of major importance only

during the period of the 1848 revolutions, when Hungarian
Liberal-Radicalism under Louis Kossuth decided to revolt
to form an independent Hungary. Kossuth was one of those
intellectuals who, with so many others of his type, had felt
239
the changed social conditions in Europe after the French
Revolution; his family had been sympathetic to the Polish
Revolt of 1831. The Hungarian people only reflected the fact
that Hungarian capitalists were being choked by the
reactionary politics of the Holy Alliance. To improve their
position, Kossuth helped to organize a society for the
support of Hungarian manufacturers and, together with the
agrarian aristocrats, built up a nationalist movement.
Kossuth himself hoped that the Archduke Francis-Joseph
would be induced to lead the movement. But when the
Revolution of 1848 reached Vienna and paralyzed the
repressive center of the Empire, Kossuth felt that the time
was ripe to organize a provisional government. He became
President of the Committee of National Defense. In his
struggle against the system of Metternich, Kossuth was
forced to stronger and stronger action, leading to a
Declaration of Independence of Hungary. Kossuth's
Hungarian Liberalism was not able to last very long,
however. He himself was soon driven to exile, where he
collaborated with Mazzini, and where he gave out
statements repudiating his proclamations which had called
for revolution.
Only in Italy did the movement for national independence

succeed. "In Italy, where capitalistic production developed
earliest, the dissolution of serfdom also took place earlier
than elsewhere. The serf was emancipated in that country
before he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil.
His emancipation at once transformed him into a free
thinking proletarian, who, moreover, found his master
ready waiting for him in the towns, for the most part
handed down as legacies from the Roman time. When the
revolution of the world-market, about the end of the
fifteenth century, annihilated Northern Italy's commercial
supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set in. The
240
labourers of the towns were driven en masse into the
country and gave an impulse never before seen, to the petite
culture, carried on in the form of gardening." (*22) Italy's
sailors formed some of the best mariners of other countries.
By the time of the nineteenth century, Italian capitalism had

sufficiently revived from its many centuries of stagnation to
attempt to overthrow the incubus that the past had
weighted upon it. The task of independence and unification,
however, was entirely too much for the backward Italian
capitalists. It was a job that could be done only by the mass
of people themselves. As in Germany, the capitalists in Italy
had arrived too late in their bid for emancipation; no longer
could people be trusted to restrict themselves to the
interests of the wealthy. The masses, therefore, had to take
matters into their own hands, while the bourgeoisie fled
into the courtyards of the royalty. Like the Germans, whose
progress had also been thwarted and choked for a long time,
the Italians were divided into petty principalities, and thus
keenly felt the immediate need for the unification of the
nation. It was this need for unification, coupled with the
despicable role of the Italian capitalists, that led the Italian
nationalists to fight the classic Liberalism of the French,
English, and American types. Unlike France and England,
Germany and Italy had missed the period of centralization
which in turn had developed the capitalism that led to the
period of revolution. It was not a struggle against
centralization but a struggle for it, that both these countries
had to make.
To those who were coming late into the world market and
who, in order to catch up, were struggling for the
establishment of a centralized control, it was impossible to
accept the theories of the advocates of laissez faire. The
theories of laissez faire could lead only to the derogation of
241
the State, whereas to both the Germans and the Italians
only the development of the national state force could end
the backward chaotic conditions that prevailed. It was for
this reason that Germans such as Hegel and Italians such as
Mazzini could repudiate individualism in favor of the State.
To Hegel the State was the true self in which the mere
individual was absorbed. This was the cornerstone of moral
and political obligation; man could be free morally only
when his actions conformed to his real will, that is, the
general will embodied by the State. (*23)
Whereas Hegel, the reactionary, talked of the State, Mazzini

talked of the Nation, To him the Nation was the individual
writ large, and its own independence was the primary
condition for its internal life and indeed of its freedom. For
that reason it imposed an absolute sacrifice upon the
individual when it was necessary to overthrow the power
of Austria. In Germany, the Prussian State could oust
Austria. In Italy the only power to do this was the people,
that is, the Nation. Thus, as in Hungary and Poland, only
Radicalism proposed to overthrow the old order.
Liberalism shrank back from the only solution possible,
revolution. In Italy, especially, the capitalist class could not
unify the nation. Made up primarily of merchant capitalists,
each group specially privileged in its own city, state and
petty province, these elements stood more to lose than to
gain immediately by any fusion of all the principalities into
one nation. Like the Junker Princes in Germany, there had
been established a veritable merchant aristocracy,
intimately tied up with the ruling cliques of these petty
States. By this time, too, the history of England had amply
shown that the interests of the people were not identical
with those of the capitalists adopting criminally
irresponsible individualism. Finally, for the Italians, the
French Revolution had, after awhile, lost its original luster,
242
particularly when they saw Napoleon III bombard the
democrats and restore the Pope in Rome in 1848.
The creed of the Italian Liberal capitalists, organized as the

Moderates, may be summed up as follows: "they believed
that small risings were useless and that large risings were
impossible for the time being; that such sporadic outbursts
merely resulted in bloodshed and suffering; that it was
better to work peacefully and try to convert the princes to
their views; to agitate if necessary for Liberal institutions,
and thus to capture and use the Italian governments-
instead of following Mazzini's impracticable plan of trying
to destroy them all simultaneously." (*24) There Liberals
wanted a consultative assembly, unification by federation
and not by fusion, with the Pope as the head.
The presence of the Pope in Italy had gravely complicated

matters for the Radicals striving for unity and national
independence. On the one hand, both in theory and in
practice, the Pope's temporal influence had to be fought and
overthrown. On the other hand, the Papacy, during its
many-centuried history, had brought untold wealth into
Italy. Indeed, it had been with the aid of the Pope that Italy
had been able, first of all, to attain that supremacy which it
enjoyed and to develop so early its capitalism. Whatever
political policy the Pope had carried out, economically the
wealth of the Vatican could redound only to the increased
welfare of the Italian propertied interest. Was it not good
policy to keep the Papacy in Italy and yet defeat the
temporal interests of the Pope in Italy by all the more
stressing the religiosity of the rebellious movement?
Here, then, were the limits within which Mazzini could

build the program of his new movement, "Young Italy."
With his slogan, "God and the People," and with his banner,
on the one side, "Unity and Independence," and on the
243
reverse side, "Liberty, Equality, Humanity," Mazzini
advanced to the battle. But on whom could such a
movement be built? The proletariat was as yet entirely too
weak. Building it upon agrarian toilers, plebeian masses,
and petty bourgeois elements in the city necessitated an
understanding with the native rulers of Italy. Since the first
job was to overthrow the power of Austria, every effort was
made to form an alliance between all the Italian forces,
under the direction of the King of Piedmont.
In this respect, Mazzini was only continuing the policy of

the Carbonari, that secret sect organized in 1812 which had
taken part and stimulated all the revolts in Italy until 1831.
The Carbonari was the work of the well-to-do and educated,
stimulated by the French Revolution, and not, at all of the
people. After the failure of the Carbonari, Mazzini decided
to add the religious features to his movement, Young Italy,
organized in 1832, and to make an appeal directly to the
King of Piedmont to lead the struggle for independence. It
was only when the King failed to respond to his letter,
written in 1831, that Mazzini turned to the idea of a
republic, although his chief aid, Garibaldi, remained
monarchist to the end.
Instead of Liberalism with its laissez faire, Italian

Nationalism developed a sort of spurious Socialism to
which were tacked on certain reactionary features that
made the people do the fighting but the ruling class remain
the beneficiaries. As Mazzini put it: "There is but one sole
virtue in the world-the eternal sacrifice of self." (*25) The
masses were to do the sacrificing.
If in the middle of the nineteenth century the masses of

Europe were beginning to turn to Socialism, all that
Mazzini could offer them was some sort of reactionary
substitute. First of all, a slashing attack was made upon
244
Liberalism. To Mazzini, as to Kant and Hegel, liberty did
not in the least imply the negation of authority. On the
contrary, it was not the Rights of Man that had to be
stressed, but the Duties of Man. (*26) The former could lead
only to spurious liberty, to individualism, to poverty and
misery for the masses. Liberalism had failed, for it provided
no obligations for the rich who could do as they pleased.
Laissez faire individualism could lead only to rank
materialism; to the Benthamite theory of happiness as an
aim of life could produce only egoists.
At the same time Mazzini's movement, tied to King and

Pope as it was, excoriated Communism with its transient
victory of the proletariat in the Paris Commune of 1871. (*27)
It seems that both Mazzini and Kropotkin, the Anarchist,
saw in the Commune essentially the same features, and
each praises what the-other condemns. Mazzini condemned
the Commune as retrograde and immoral and as a
reversion to the Middle Ages; its federalism would defeat
modern nationalism. The Commune was only a logical
extension of individualism, for both capitalism and the
proletariat hate the fatherland, holy to all the nation. And
finally, the Commune was French, and it was impossible to
believe that France, which had uttered the last word of an
exhausted epoch, could be the one to proffer the first word
of the succeeding epoch.
The principle of property was eternal and, instead of the

class struggle, the way out was the union of labor and
capital in the same hands, namely, in the form of peasant
proprietorship and co-operative association. Thus to the
individualistic capitalist, Liberalism with its communist
proletarian offspring, Italian Nationalism, counterposed
reactionary national co-operation and a religious socialistic
utopia in behalf of which all the flotsam and jetsam of ideas
245
from the Utopian Socialists and Anarchists were gathered
together into one jumble and offered as a program.
Grandiosely, Mazzini made the claim that the Italian
movement was far superior to the French Revolution
because, while the French Revolution had established the
liberty of individual man, the nineteenth century would
establish free nations, so that later all mankind would be
organized in a vast association of free nations in which Italy
would have led the way.
Mazzini advocated free trade, free state banking, easy land

sales and transfers, and the transference of all church
property eventually to the State; but he was against
Liberalism. He was for the legalization of associations, but
against unions and strikes. He favored concessions of
public works to workingmen's associations (co-operatives),
the transference of unclaimed land and the profits of
railways and public utilities to the State, and giving the
common lands to the State for the poor; his program called
for one tax to come from incomes, and also for a national
fund of credit to be distributed to workingmen's
associations (compare with Louis Blanc), but he opposed
Socialism. He was for insurrection of the people, but against
the Paris Commune. As a Catholic, he was against the Pope;
as a republican, he was for the King; as a democrat, he was
a forerunner of Fascism. in many respects Mazzini
foreshadows Mussolini.
Here, again, is illustrated a classic example of the law of

combined development in social history, by which is meant
the drawing together of different stages of the journey, a
combining of separate steps, an amalgam with more
contemporary forms. In order to accomplish their
unification and independence, the Italian masses had to
organize their Radical Party and engage in insurrection at a
246
time when Liberalism already was exposing its inherent
weakness and Socialism was rapidly rising as a force. Since
Liberalism had turned anti-democratic, the Italians were
anti-Liberal democrats. Unable to turn to Republican
Socialism, the Nationalist movement was forced to turn
backward to King and to Catholic Church, and to compel
the development of capitalism in spite of King, Church, and
capitalist who in the end could only ride on the shoulders
of the movement and take full advantage of it for their own
particular interests. The independence of Italy was soon
followed by its unification. In the end, in Italy, as elsewhere,
it was capitalist Liberalism that triumphed, while the
Garibaldi movement faded away into the newly growing
Socialism.
The defeat of Russia in the Crimean War of 1854-56

revealed to everyone the economic inferiority of Russia and
the necessity for certain liberal reforms. Already, in 1825,
influenced by the French Revolution, and of the same stripe
as the French Encyclopedists and Enlighteners, a group of
officers had begun a rebellion. The program of these
Dekabrists was: the emancipation of the peasants, the
confirmation of the rights of individuals by stable laws, the
establishment of representation of the people in the
government. (*28) The revolt had been severely crushed.
But the events of the Crimean War compelled the Czar to
change his course. The first result was the emancipation of
the serfs, and the enormous acceleration of the growth of
capitalism within the country.
However, from the very beginning, the capitalists shrank

from making any move for power, and even the Revolution
of 1905 amply demonstrated that, while the Liberals in
other countries might be willing to stand by and let the
people do the actual work for them, and after the barricade
247
fighting was over, to come down from their high windows
from whence they had watched the battle and claim the
rewards for themselves, in Russia the Liberals positively
hated power. (*29) For in Russia it was crystal clear that the
only power capable of replacing the Czar was the power of
the peasantry, led by the proletariat. In the Polish revolt of
1863 the Russian Liberals had turned their backs on the
Poles.
Completely skipping Liberalism, Russian Populism was

forced to take on Socialistic characteristics. The Narodnaia
Volia (Will of the People) Group in 1879, for example,
adopted the following program: Popular republic, universal
suffrage as the supreme authority, large local autonomy
and election of all offices, independence of the Mir, as an
economic and administrative unit, nationalization of the
land, measures to bring factories into the hands of the
workers, complete civil liberty, and the end of the standing
army. (*30)
It was this section from which evolved a group of terrorists,

the Nihilists, that struck fear into the hearts of the entire
Russian aristocracy, and from which there eventually
emerged the leaders of both the Marxist Socialist Party and
the Socialist Revolutionary Populists. Liberalism remained
entirely bourgeois and divorced from the masses. By the
time it could arise, the people were ready for a collectivist
socialistic program. (*31)
Footnotes
1. See L. T. Hobhouse: The Metaphysical Theory of the State, p.

33 and following.
2. M. Beer: Social Struggles and Modern Socialism, p. 18.

248
3. I. Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, p. 607 (N. K. Smith, 1929,
edition).
4. The difference is exemplified by the works of Herbert

Spencer when compared with those of Kant.
5. This was true in 1918 also. In fact, Germany passed ever

Liberalism in the State as France passed over the
Reformation.
6. J. Kant: "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of

Morals" in Critique of Practical Reason.
p. 49. (T. K. Abbott edition, 1898.)
7. Given in N. K. Smith: Commentary to Kant's Critique of

Pure Reason, p. ivii.
8. J. Kant: "Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals,"

in Critique of Practical Reason, p. 269.
The moral law of Kant admittedly did not coincide with

real life; it stated not what is, but what should be.
9. The same, pp. 280, 282.
10. For the necessity of these conceptions of soul

immortality and of God, see J. Kant: Critique of Practical
Reason, pp. 218, 220.
11. See C. D. Broad: Five Types of Ethical Theory, p. 116 and

following.
To Kant it was a duty to maintain one's life, to secure one's

happiness. It was not enough to have joy of living, to have
moral worth, all actions had to derive from a sense of duty.
249
12. Williams: The Concept of Equality in the Writings of
Rousseau, Bentham and Kant, p. 40.
To Kant, man was by nature bad.
13. With Schopenhauer the will becomes the only reality in

a world of appearances and mere images of the brain.
14. Kant: The Philosophy of Law, pp. 176-177 (W. Hastie 1887
translation of Kant's Science of Right).
15. How different Kant was from Rousseau!
16. Kant drew a principal distinction between

understanding and reason; reason was allegedly divorced
from sense. (Compare M. Storrs: The Relation of Carlyle to
Kant and Fichte, p. 38.)
One of the most recent variations of Kantianism is

Vaihinger's Philosophy of "As If."
17. "In modern Pragmatism, the true Kant has been

resurrected; indeed has been for the first time really
discerned." (G. Stanley Hall: "Why Kant is Passing," The
American Journal of Psychology, Vol. XXIII, p. 386 (July, 1912).)
The father of American Pragmatism may be said to be

William James (who gives credit to Pierce); of
Instrumentalism, John Dewey.
18. For a full discussion and comparison with Dialectical

Materialism, see below, Book IV, "Socialism."
19. The Correspondence of Marx and Engels (International

Edition), pp. 95-96.
20. H. S. Edwards: The Private History of a Polish

Insurrection, I, 5.
250
21. Correspondence of Marx and Engels (international Edition),
p. 37.
22. Karl Marx: Capital, Kerr Edition, I, 787-788, footnote.
23. See L. T. Hobhouse: The Metaphysical Theory of the State.
24. G. F. Berkeley: Italy in the Making (1815-1846), I, 139-140.
25. J. Mazzini: "Thoughts Upon Democracy" (pamphlet). It

is here that Mazzini develops the idea that there are two
schools of democracy, one of Rights, The Individualist
School, and one of Duties, The Collectivist.
26. See J. Mazzini: "An Essay on the Duties of Man-

Addressed to Workingmen," written 1844.
27. See J. Mazzini-. "The War and the Commune"

(pamphlet).
28. L. Tikhomirov: Russia, Political and Social, II, 149.
29. L. Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution, I, 162.
30. L. Tikhomirov, work cited, II, 145.
31. Space limitation forbids us to treat even sketchily the

relatively puny Liberal movements in Asia, whether in
India, China or Japan. Nor can we deal with the very
interesting variations in the Britannic States, particularly in
Australia and New Zealand.
251
III. THE WANE OF LIBERALISM
VI. WELFARE-LIBERALISM
As industrialism comes to dominate capitalist society, by

the middle of the nineteenth century Liberalism is driven
forward along two lines. First, Liberalism must depart from
laissez faire individualism to adopt an increasing respect
for social obligations. More important than individual
rights becomes the general social well-being. Second,
Liberalism is forced to acknowledge that the world does
progress, and that evolution precludes the possibility of
maintaining eternally any given system of society. Social
systems are seen to have beginnings and ends. For the first
time Liberalism becomes conscious of its historical
limitations. and feels the shadow of death upon it as the
specter of Communism appears.
As they struggled to obtain political leadership, the English

industrialists did not hesitate to take advantage of the
restiveness of the masses and to proclaim a program of
extreme democratic individualism in which each person
was to count for one, no one for more than one, with each
equal before the law. The end of social legislation was to be
the greatest good to the greatest number. Thus, speaking in
the name of all humanity, the industrialists hoped to win
the lower middle classes to their side.
This was a period when bourgeois ideologists concocted

fantastic humanitarianisms of all sorts. Robert Owen and
Saint-Simon spun out socialistic schemes in which the
industrialist at the head dictated to all for the benefit of
humanity. Others took the lead from Ricardo to develop
variegated plans of plenty for all. So long as they were kept
252
out of power, the industrial capitalists were model
humanitarians.
The situation rapidly changed once power was theirs.

Victory was not achieved simultaneously in England,
France, and the United States; but in each of these countries,
from about the middle of the century onward, the industrial
bourgeoisie began to repudiate its Radical attitude and to
rest content to limit its political struggle against the older
ruling groups within the confines of Parliament. By the end
of the second third of the nineteenth century, everywhere
industrial capitalists were succeeding in assuming
leadership within the Liberal Parties.
As big industry abandoned small property, the petty

bourgeoisie was compelled to form its own parties and to
take the lead in protest movements. By now, large sections
of the lower middle classes had become completely upset.
Periodic crisis, 1825, 1837, 1847, etc., weighed upon them
heavily. Coincidentally, nevertheless, they had been the
beneficiaries of a spread of education and a far easier
communication of ideas. A considerable number had
improved their material lot also, these improvements even
filtering down into the ranks of the artisans and skilled
workers in the factories. In other words, in spite of all its
contradictions and antagonisms, capitalism had yet been
progressive, raising social norms generally.
During this period the petty proprietor was very close to

the laboring classes. Many of his group had raised
themselves but recently from the ranks of the workers,
while at the same time others of his type had been falling
into the working class. On the side of the proletarians,
capitalism had bred the hope that they too might be able to
improve their standards and perhaps even to rise into the
ranks of the middle bodies.
253
Thus it was now the turn of the petty-bourgeoisie to gain
the confidence of the workers and to speak in the name of
all humanity. It seized hold of the dictum that happiness to
the greatest number is the aim of social legislation and
ardently maintained that, since it comprised the people and
therefore the greatest number, legislation must be for it and
by it.
Standing by himself, the British petty bourgeois could not

go beyond the concept of democracy. On the whole, English
life was still tolerable to him. True democracy would give
him a chance to express himself within the framework of
the capitalist State and even to dominate it. That was
sufficient; he wanted neither revolution nor violence, and
he made this very plain to his working class allies. Indeed,
parliamentary democracy to him was the exact antidote to
the surging poison of proletarian revolution. However, as
the "little man" needed the proletariat to fight his battles for
him, he was willing to go beyond mere democratic
demands and tolerate some claims for social reform.
This situation was illustrated very clearly in the Chartist

movement. Chartism took form as a result of the bad times
of 1837 and of the general miserable conditions extant in
both city and country. The people were angry, too, over the
restrictions in the Reform Bill of 1832, (*1) and with the
Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.
Petty bourgeois domination made sure that the principal

Chartist demands were purely parliamentary, namely:
1. Equal representation in Parliament.
2. Universal suffrage.
3. Annual Parliaments.
254
4. No property classifications for voting or office-holding.
5. Vote by ballot.
6. Parliamentary sittings regulated with payments to

members. Nevertheless, Parliamentary activity was not
conceived as an end in itself. The various elements in the
Chartist movement emphasized it simply as the sole
method of effecting some lightening of their burdens.
The prominent position which these Parliamentary

demands had among the workers can be explained by the
fact that "the adherents of Chartism belonged, as a rule, to
the better paid and mentally active sections of the working
class. This was primarily the case in the years from 1836 to
1842. Contemporary evidence leaves no doubt that it was
not a movement of the lowest strata of society. . . ." (*2)
These higher paid laboring elements could not divorce
themselves completely from the petty proprietor, and it was
through such that the latter dominated the scene. The
workers' section of Chartism allowed itself to be headed by
petty bourgeois reformers like William Lovett, or Irish
peasant representatives like Feargus O'Connor and J.
Bronterre O'Brien. The time was not yet ripe for a strong
revolutionary movement of labor in England.
It was not only Chartism that gave evidence to the

awakening of the lower middle classes. All political parties
of the time were being penetrated by their economic
programs which stressed humanitarianism and the welfare
of the people and tried to combine individualism and
collectivism through the establishment of voluntary co-
operatives. Voluntary co-operation became the great
nostrum for all social ills. It was the panacea by which
society would be peacefully transformed into the paradise
of the petty proprietor, who would thus be able to keep
255
both historic initiative and property and stave off both the
trusts and nationalization. Co-operative obsessions
dominated everything the petty bourgeoisie controlled,
whether Liberalism or Anarchism, Socialism or
Communism. Such ideas formed a leit motif, for William
Lovett, for Louis Blanc, for Proudhon, as they did for the
Rochdale experimenters. The Trades-Union Chartists made
this their key principle. Even the Left Winger, O'Connor,
wrecked himself in a disastrous co-operative venture.
To the petty bourgeoisie, co-operation was not only

individualism "mutualized," it was also the antithesis to
overbearing proletarian Communism. O'Connor, for
example, declares, "I have been, and I think I ever shall be,
opposed to the principle of Communism.... I am,
nevertheless, a strong advocate of co-operation, . . .(*3)
Bourgeois utilitarianism had laid down the principles that

liberty was the means that would bring about the end,
happiness, and that the resultant happiness would be not a
mere individual affair but necessarily a social affair.
Democratic Liberal-Radicalism now pointed out that liberty
under the Liberal Whigs was not bringing happiness to the
greatest number. Furthermore, they asked, what sort of
liberty was there for the disfranchised and the proletarian
anyway --- the liberty to be unemployed, to starve, to be
dispossessed, to pay taxes for capitalist wars? (*4)
Moreover, on the extreme Left there was being heard the

argument, since liberty was but a means and not an end in
itself, would it not be just to control and regulate this
bourgeois liberty in the name of the happiness of the
greatest number? Means were to be changed whenever the
realization of the end should demand it. Involved here was
the further question, suppose capitalism would not
recognize its social obligations, what then? The proletarian
256
section answered by advocating force to obtain the Charter
if peaceful persuasion did not succeed.
On this question of the use of force, the Chartist movement

split wide open. The Right Wing, led by William Lovett,
who moreover managed to control the weak trade union
movement, insisted on the use only of moral force,
education, and legal agitation. The extreme Left Wing,
under Harvey and Jones and, to some extent, O'Connor,
prepared for violence. At first, the Right Wing prevailed
and huge petitions were sent to Parliament, only to be
rejected. The labor Chartists then tried the effect of a wide
strike movement and as this method, too, failed, and as
conditions grew immeasurably worse with the famine and
depression of 1847, plans were laid for insurrection.
England moved toward civil war.
In the end the Chartist movement collapsed. Labor was

entirely too weak to overthrow capitalism. Chartists were
united against the heavy taxation of the poor and against
the pressure of the national debt, and they were opposed to
land monopoly and primogeniture, yet the two different
groups of labor and small business could not agree on a
positive economic program. They were caught in the
quarrel over free trade or protection. They were stirred up
over the land question, whether the solution was to be
peasant proprietorship or nationalization of land, although
many on both sides favored a back-to-the land movement
with small farms as the basis. They fought over whether
they should adopt a program of voluntary co-operatives or
State ownership of industry. Questions of labor unions, co-
operative stores, temperance, and Owenism also divided
them.
"To William Lovett the Charter was but one element in a

general program of social amelioration by voluntary effort
257
and popular education. To Feargus O'Connor it was the
political counterpart of a new peasantry re-established on
the land stolen from their forefathers and removed forever
from the factory towns. To the Reverend Joseph Stephens
and to John Frost and many of the other early leaders
Chartism meant the repeal of the Poor Law. To J. Bronterre
O'Brien it meant currency reform and the nationalization of
land rents. To Ernest Jones, Chartism was proletarian
Socialism."(*5)
What was decisive for the collapse of the revolutionary

Chartist opposition was the speedy termination of the
depression of 1847. From then on, general conditions for the
laboring classes improved steadily. Further, the ruling
groups were ready, in the light of the general properity, to
make a number of concessions to the masses.
The first task of the Liberal State was to separate the violent
proletarian elements from the petty bourgeoisie. To
appease the workers, bills were passed limiting hours of
certain factory labor to ten, reducing the price of bread by
repealing the Corn Laws, and beginning a series of factory
laws regulating conditions of labor. Poor Law regulations
also were made to operate less stringently.
In adopting such a program, all capitalists were obliged to

admit that laissez faire individualism was gone forever. The
violent measures of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe and
the extent to which the Chartists had threatened authority
helped mightily to make all wealthy groups understand the
value of the State apparatus. To stop the Chartist
demonstration in London in 1848, 170,000 special constables
had been enrolled (including William Gladstone and Louis
Napoleon), besides the mobilization of the regular police
and the standing army under the Duke of Wellington. Big
Business now appreciated the stringent necessity to cease
258
agitating the masses. The Philosophical Radicals and the
elder Whig groups turned to each other for mutual support
and closed their ranks. Under the leadership of Gladstone
and Bright, the old Whig Party dissolved to give rise to a
new Liberal Party, embracing the principles of franchise
extension and some of the parliamentary planks of the
Chartist’s. To political shifts were thereby accomplished.
The industrialists became the leading group among the
Liberals in fact and the petty entrepreneur was retained
within the Liberal camp.
The danger of allowing the lower middle classes to separate

themselves from wealthy property had become quite
apparent. It was imperative to bring them into the Liberal
Party and to control them. This could be done only by
openly recognizing the principles of democracy, of social
welfare.
Under the pressure of these new developments, a second

Reform Bill was passed in 1867 which granted the franchise
to practically all elements of the petty bourgeoisie and the
upper strata of workers. This was a final step in the strategy
of dividing workers from small property owners.
Politics must belong to property, not to labor. As big and

little capital united in Liberalism, the workers were induced
to turn away from politics to the trade union field. Trade
unions were now allowed and to some extent even
encouraged.
At this point it cannot be said that English Liberalism had

changed from a theory of individual rights to one of social
duties. Rather was it a question of better recognition of the
rights of the poor. The individual liberty of the lower orders
was better appreciated. Gladstone and Bright arrested their
development here.
259
It was the older ruling groups, particularly the landed
aristocratic elements, who preached the need of disciplining
the industrialists to make them recognize their sociality. In
a desperate effort to retaliate upon the industrialists and to
win the lower orders to their side, the Tory Party later
changed into the Conservative, initiated a good part of the
factory legislation. "If the Liberals carried free trade, the
Tories gave the trade unions their charter of emancipation.
If the Liberals were responsible for the Reform Act of 1832,
the Tories carried that of 1867; and 1884 was a compromise
between them." (*6)
It was not only in England that rulers were absorbing the

idea of welfare. In France, Napoleon III was calling himself
the "Social Emperor." In Germany, while the National
Liberals were bitterly fighting all labor legislation, Bismarck
and the Conservatives were prompted by the threat of
Socialism to enter into an elaborate scheme of social
insurance. In all these countries, writers were denouncing
the reckless criminality of the industrialists. (For example,
in England, Southey, Coleridge, Carlyle, Kingsley, and
others.) These intellectuals developed a sort of reactionary
Socialism in which the order of the Middle Ages contrasted
favorably to modern industrial anarchy. Some of their
theories became embedded in programs of Guild Socialism,
Christian Socialism, State Socialism, and similar
movements which can be designated as legitimate
precursors of the Fascism of today.
The Philosophic Radicals had moved away from the

position of Adam Smith (*7) to admit that the uncontrolled
operation of economic laws could not bring justice and
happiness into the world, but that the State had to be called
in to modify or supplement economic laws. Thus legislation
became the source of justice, and good morality was made
260
identical with "scientific" principles of legislation. The
people must not appeal against the State, but rather must
work through and under it. Far better was moderate change
from above than compulsory radical change due to
pressure from below.
This renovated program permitted the industrialists to ally

themselves with the country gentlemen group and together
to form the new Liberal Party represented by Gladstone.
"The rise of this middle-class is the key-note of Victorian
England, and incidentally that of the political career of
Gladstone. But it would be a mistake to regard him as the
peculiar representative of that class.... The secret of
Gladstone's power lies in the fact that the middle-class
never gained complete control. What really happened was
that a section of the country gentry shared political power
with the middle-class. (*8)
At first Gladstone had been a mild Tory; he later became a

mild Liberal, and even then his desire was to be on the
Liberal side of the Conservative Party rather than on the
Conservative side of the Liberal Party. His early record had
not been a very happy one to win the confidence of the
masses. He had advocated the worst clauses in the Irish
Coercion Bill; he had opposed the admission of Jews to
Parliament and the abolition of tests to Dissenters; he had
voted for the Corn Laws, had taken a stand against the
abolition of State sinecures, had resisted the abolition of
flogging in the army, etc.
The new Party, on the initiative of Bright, pressed for an

extension of the franchise to take in the skilled workers of
the city who would undoubtedly support the industrialists.
The democratic movement in Europe and the United States,
in 1860-1870, emphasized the timeliness of this program. At
the same time Gladstone tried to succor the small
261
landowner. Just as the Conservative element did its best to
win the urban poor, so did the new Liberals strive to win a
base in the countryside. They defended the Catholic
agrarians, had the Bill disestablishing the Irish Church
passed, and helped to do away with the parliamentary
disabilities of Catholics. Liberalism then proposed a whole
series of acts to aid the tenant on the land, especially in
Ireland, and culminated its program in 1886 with
Gladstone's proposal for Home Rule for Ireland.
This solicitous care for Ireland was a profound recognition

of the fact that the matter of Empire had already become
the chief and all-engrossing question of the day. The
tremendous industrial advance of Germany after the
Franco-Prussian War made English Big Business completely
change its laissez faire policy. An Empire had to be created
and held together, an Empire that would keep German
goods out and maintain British supremacy over the seas.
The Liberals, with their Home Rule Bill, with their not too
aggressive foreign policy and "Little England" traditions,
were becoming passe. New conditions demanded that the
large-scale metal industrialists of the Birmingham School
quit the Liberals and join forces with the Conservatives to
maintain the compulsory union of England and Ireland and
to advocate for the first time a protective tariff policy. Later,
under the leadership of Bonar Law, these industrialists
were to capture the Conservative Party from the older
aristocratic elements of Balfour. A full fledged modern
Imperialist policy now became born.
Thus, the limited program of Bright and Gladstone,

embracing principally a tenant land policy and extension of
the franchise, soon became inadequate. Further, a vigorous
labor movement was springing up. For a time the Liberals
had been successful in winning workers to their side and
262
preventing separate labor representation, but the Paris
Commune and the growth of the Socialist parties of Europe
had shown clearly that labor was bound to have its own
organizations and banners. Once classes became conscious
of their separate existence and interests, they were certain
to express themselves in independent forms.
The drastic changes transforming the character of

Liberalism may be summed up by comparing the Liberal
platform of the early nineteenth century with that of the
late. The former had been anti-democratic; the latter made
many democratic concessions. The first was individualistic,
believed in the minimum State, and recognized no classes.
The second proceeded through the medium of
individualism and announced that the masses also had
individualist rights, which could be protected, however,
only through the development of the State power. Still later,
Liberal theory was forced to recognize the existence of
classes, but denied the class struggle and asserted a theory
of class harmony and collaboration. The State was to be the
mechanism to effect this harmony of diverse interests. Early
nineteenth-century Liberalism stressed individual liberty as
the sole means. Middle nineteenth-century Liberalism
emphasized the need of State intervention to insure liberty
to the lower orders and talked of protecting the labor
contracts of women and children, etc. Late nineteenth-
century Liberalism began to recognize that liberty after all
was merely a means to an end and as such could be
restricted to obtain social happiness and harmony for all.
Thus Liberalism advanced to ideas of social insurance and
social responsibility.
By the time of the twentieth century, it was manifest that

the sole way to win over labor was through a thorough-
going system of social reforms. This change in front
263
necessitated a new internal struggle within the party of
Liberalism, but in the end the elder faction, under Asquith,
was defeated by Lloyd George. The change was
exemplified in the stand of the Party on taxation. Whereas
in 1874 Gladstonian Liberalism had put forth a program of
abolition of the income tax, by the twentieth century
Liberalism was advocating a progressive tax, etc.
In the end, Liberalism came to harness a program of

Socialism to its cart and to promise labor the possibility of
eventual Socialism through social reform and social reform
through Liberal activity. Capitalism had now entered into
its period of imperialism with super-profits wrung from the
hides of the colonial masses large enough to enable the
capitalists to separate the skilled workers from the
unskilled, to bribe off the upper layers of the laborers, and
to interest these privileged workers in the advances of
Capitalism.
The tendency of Liberalism towards Socialism is witnessed

in the writings of John Stuart Mill. Mill's attempts, however,
were exceedingly timid. In reality he feared the masses and
at heart was for a government by experts and not by
popular assemblies. To him majorities could also be
tyrannies. Yet he came out for complete civil liberties, for
women's suffrage, for restriction on inheritance, taxation of
rent, etc., and supported collective action in voluntary co-
operatives or trade unions. With all his leanings towards
Socialism, Mill, like Gladstone, (*9) belonged
fundamentally to the individualist school. He admired the
French frugal peasantry and ardently supported the Small
Holdings Act in England. At the same time, Mill could
actually write, "If the choice were to be made between
Communism with all its chances, and the present (1852)
264
state of society with all its sufferings and injustices, . . . if
this, or Communism, were the alternative, all the
difficulties great or small of Communism would be as dust
in the balance." (*10)
Mill was not unaffected by the appeal to the past. An

eclectic thinker, he borrowed ideas both from the Saint-
Simonians and Auguste Comte in France, and from Carlyle.
For that matter, Carlyle, Comte, and Saint-Simon had much
in common and each was planting seeds of what would
later be Fascism. Thus the collectivist tendencies of Mill's
Liberalism were not wholly socialistic. Mill, for example,
was prepared to disfranchise those who failed of a certain
intellectual capacity. He defended the right of the State to
forbid marriage unless the parties could show that they had
the means of supporting a family. In these ideas Mill was a
part of the stream of welfare workers and slum-going
philanthropists of all parties and shades who were
espousing welfare schemes for the poor.
The rise of the middle and proletarian classes in the middle

of the nineteenth century and the struggles of 1848 and
1860-1871 had called the attention of all groups, ruling and
ruled, to the need for studying social phenomena. First to
perceive this were the French, who led the way through the
works of Auguste Comte. A product of the revolutions of
1830 and 1848, Comte's system rationalized as ideal the
conditions he found under the "Social Empire." He declared
the value of the French Revolution and of the eighteenth
century producing it had been only negative and critical.
Like Saint-Simon, Comte believed the nineteenth century
was to synthesize the achievements of both the Middle
Ages and the French Revolution. To do this, social study
must free itself from both feudal theology and eighteenth-
century metaphysics and become a positive science.
265
Enough of eternal, religious, and metaphysical truths! All
truths were relative. The Middle Ages, for example, were to
be neither so mercilessly condemned as by the Jacobins, nor
so unstintingly praised as by the Bourbons. The middle
ground evidently was the Bonapartist one. Comte
conceived his job as carrying forward the old into the new,
thus turning away from non-social absolutisms into the
relativism of social science.
To Comte, the French Revolution had spelled a revolt of the

head against the heart. It was time to end this revolt. Mind
was but an epiphenomenon. Affection came before reason;
feelings were superior to the cognitive process. Practical
activity came last. Comte denounced the eighteenth-century
schools of rationalism as failures, not only because they did
not deal with life, but because they were held responsible
for the Revolution. In the course of the Revolution, the
masses had brutally destroyed all idyllic sentimentality for
the past. The people must be brought back to their senses,
that is, they had to be made to understand they must have a
heart. Chivalry had been the cardinal principal of the
Middle Ages; society must return to it. And, incidentally,
had not Napoleon, The Little, appealed to the traditions
and sentiments concerning Napoleon, The Great? In his
whole rationale, therefore, Comte broke from the
democratic tendency in France and expressed that resultant
of social forces which had create the Bonapartism of
Napoleon III. The school of which Comte led the way was a
typical offspring of French social paternalism.
Positivism became an expression of the smug governmental

urban "salariat" and intellectual functionaries of France.
They liked his theory that the people, as representing
practical activity, were not fit to govern but had to be
subordinated to philosophers (themselves) who in turn
266
yielded to the charms of women. They heartily agreed that
"The right view is well expressed in the motto, 'Liberty and
Public Order,' which was adopted spontaneously by the
middle class at the commencement of the neutral period in
1830." (*11)
Philosophically, Comte's positivism asserted that man must

be content to gain such a limited knowledge of the world
and of human life as will enable him to make use of nature
for the perfecting of society. To the absolute truths of pure
idealism or materialism, positivism counterposed a
relativism that combined both elements in a theory of
anthropocentrism. Since man was the center of science, the
criterion of truth ought to be experience. This experience,
however, was not merely individual, but social. Moreover,
it assumed the existence of both mind and matter since it is
precisely this combination that makes up the essence of
experience. At the same time, it was not necessary to yield
to either of these two elements as absolute. (*12) In his
emphasis on the positive nature of experience, Comte was
led to accord the largest influence to environment in
biology, and in his sociology made the individual the
resultant of his social conditions.
Although both Comte and Mill had been closely connected

with the Saint-Simonians, they developed entirely distinct
systems. Saint-Simon had broken from Comte because the
latter had refused to give over the leadership of, the new
social system to the industrialists, but rather had insisted on
the superiority of scientific functionaries. Also, Comte had
refused to develop a new Christianity. These defects were
soon remedied. Comte deliberately constructed a new
positivist religion, a religion of humanity, of which he was
to be the Head Priest. The basis of his synthetically
constructed religion was to consist of three points:
267
1. Reverence, to those above.
2. Love, to those who help.
3. Benevolence, to those below.
Just as, in his appeal to the heart, Comte had expressed that
passionate emotionalism that makes the French such
supreme lovers of love, so, naturally, in his religion of love,
women were to be deified, although not for a moment were
women to be considered intellectually equal to men. Their
place was in the home at the head of the family, which was
the primary social unit. (*13)
The Catholics had made the system of theology the chief

element of their religion. The Protestants had turned to the
Holy Bible as their foundation. Liberalism had gone to a
metaphysical agnosticism or Deism which took them far
away from mankind. To turn all such thinkers back to their
social connections, Comte felt it necessary to create a new
humanitarian theocracy without a theology. Unfortunately,
he did not realize that an artificial religion is no substitute
for the real thing, and that "Relative religion is no religion."
(*14)
Comte's philosophy, like Mill's, was experiential. But

experience had taught him that the best arguments of
intellectuals could not stop the moving of masses. Life came
above mind. When we turned to social groups and away
from the individual, we turned away from psychology to
social physics. Strictly speaking, there was no social mind;
there were only independent social laws to which the
individual is entirely subordinate. Comte went further and
declared that individual man was an abstraction; man
could not be considered as even human except in relation to
society. As can be seen, in many respects Comte was very
268
close to Rousseau; nothing was real but humanity. Man was
posterior, not prior to society. To Comte, principles of
morality flowed from sociology, and thus morality was the
latest and highest fruit of civilization. The supreme ethical
principle was love, or altruism; the supreme precept was
"live for others."
Comte's ideas led to the idealization of "blind" feelings, or

feelings for their own sake, an approach which later guided
Bergson in his theory of "Creative Evolution" where life
flows on regardless of brain and one reaches freedom only
in this blind lifestream. Faced with the insurrections of
Communism, French Voluntarists evidently feared to think
any longer. Comte, for example, counterposed his
positivism to Communism and called for moral rather than
State control over capital. Thus French philosophy turned
violently anti-intellectualist. So generally did this anti-
intellectualist orientation pervade French philosophy that
even supposedly subversive philosophers like Sorel could
praise syndicalism as a movement essentially of "action for
its own sake" and, as such, deadly opposed to intellectualist
parliamentary socialism. (*15)
Mill was just as English as Comte was French. To Mill, as to

all such Englishmen, the individual human being had
existed and had grown to full stature as homo sapiens before
he combined with others to form a society. While Mill also
stressed altruism and the need for living for others, he
reached these conclusions, not through any warm-hearted
religion, but through the cold calculations of utilitarianism.
Altruism was to be adopted as a good paying policy of
egotism and put on a practical cash basis, subject to reason
and debate. Actions must be tested empirically, and
feelings must be controlled by the head. The English had
never experienced a revolution such as had the French.
269
In politics, "For Comte, the way to the ideal order is
henceforth through a series of dictatorships. Democracy as
a permanent system is anarchical." (*16) It is true that he
believed that dictatorial powers at first should be held by
the workers, since they composed the most peaceful and
internationalist elements, but this workers rule was to be
temporary only and held in trust for the wealthy classes,
who were morally not yet ready for power. Ultimately,
however, "political power will fall into the hands of the
great leaders of industry." (*17)
Mill, on the other hand, stood firmly for parliamentary

representation. His difference from Comte illustrated the
difference in national conditions that faced similar classes
in the two countries. From the earliest days of the theory of
social contract, English Liberalism had made both State and
society the product of individual action. With the French,
on the contrary, as exemplified in Rousseau's theory of
general will, the Nation had always been superior to both
State and the individual. To the German theoreticians, only
the State existed; neither the individual nor social group
counted. Finally, to the American, the individual was as
supreme as the State was to the German. It was the
different class relations, developed nationally, that
accounted for these divergent views. In Germany it was the
princely aristocrats, not the middle class, who bore political
initiative; in England and France, the bourgeoisie; in
America there were no conscious classes at all. To the
middle class Frenchmen of the day, the national security
that was paramount in his eyes had been established only
under dictatorships. These dictatorships had carried out the
general will of the French peasant and storekeeper. For Mill,
however, not living under Napoleon, parliamentary rule
and democracy were the only way to express the
270
harmonious relationship of individualism and social
welfare.
Hitherto, in his laissez faire argument, the English Liberal

had stressed the point that the State was but an impartial
policeman recognizing no classes. Now, with the rise of
class struggles, Liberalism could afford to change its theory
and to foster in the masses the illusion that the capitalist
State could legislate happiness to the majority, that it could
really satisfy the interest of the toilers who could capture
the State for their interests. For the first time in history,
declared Liberalism, force was no longer necessary to win
the State, because, under Liberalism, the State itself had
opened the way for the masses to take it over.
Similar theories developed in America at the end of the

nineteenth century, although the government was urged to
assume a different role. In the conflicts that broke out in the
United States, industrial Liberalism vigorously protected
the individual rights of the poor, especially the scab and the
strike-breaker. In the name of Liberalism, the courts could
issue injunctions against strikes, or prevent systematic
boycotts. (*18) Later, the State assumed the role of arbitrator
in the disputes, and the United States Labor Department
hired a whole staff of labor conciliators. There was even
talk of compulsory arbitration. But in all of these actions,
nowhere did American Liberalism prominently put forth
the theory that labor could "capture the State."
Theories of classlessness in America had taken two forms.

At first, every capitalist was or had been a worker. Later,
the theory was changed to the effect that every worker was
actually or potentially a capitalist. In either case there were
no classes. Then, when classes had to be recognized, capital
and labor were theoretically to be allowed to fight out their
differences outside Congressional walls, with the State as
271
impartial arbitrator. The State was still considered an
insignificant social factor as compared to the prime moving
forces, supposedly individual aggregates in unions and
corporations. True action was economic and not political.
Finally, as the State constantly increased its power of
intervention, Liberal theory declared the State was neutral
and above class interests. Thoroughly under the control of
Big Business, American Liberalism could well afford to tell
the workers in all cases to leave the State alone.
In England, on the other hand, the theories of Mill and

Welfare Liberalism could only reflect the fact that the labor
movement was definitely on the road to politics. With such
welfare programs, labor could be diverted from taking
power for the moment.
As Comte had turned to religion, so Mill had turned to

economics where he had become profoundly impressed by
the two fundamental principles enunciated by the Classical
School. The first was the proposition of Malthus that
population presses upon food, thus leading to the corollary
that the poor, starvation and misery must always be with us.
Mill accepted Malthus' basic proposition, but argued that,
although the laws of production were fixed by nature and
could not be changed, yet the laws of distribution were
subject to social control. By a better wealth distributive
system, by raising the standards of living gradually, and by
birth control, the evils analyzed by Malthus could be
avoided. Mill, therefore, joined the ranks of the Meliorists
who were affirming that society could evolve into better
and better standards day by day. This philosophy of
Meliorism is to color the entire attitude of Welfare-
Liberalism to the very end. In pursuit of his Meliorism, Mill
himself timidly came out for State action on public works,
272
colonization, charity, laws of labor, endowment of research,
etc.
The second economic principle to influence Mill was the

supposed law of diminishing returns which was held to
apply both to land and to industry. Mill accepted this law
as fundamental, and thus was led to believe that at the end
of the road lay a stationary social State. (*19) Like Comte
and the other thinkers of the time, Mill adhered to the
theory of change, but while with Comte it took the form of
ecstatic relativism, with the English it took the form of a
gloomy theory of evolution. Whereas Comte ended up with
a complete unified orderly system of positive religion with
everything in its place, on the style of the French frugal
peasant or boutiquier, Mill's evolution terminated in a
swamp of stagnancy, and Spencerian sociology ended with
a new slavery.
Theories of evolution and of change were an inevitable

product of nineteenth-century industrial life where free
competitive capitalism was amply proving that change was
the only thing changeless. Everything was a flux. Fortunes
came and went; crises alternated with booms. Industrial
technique, technology, and science were taking enormous
strides forward. In Germany, this process had been
obtusely reflected in metaphysical philosophy through
Hegel's idealistic dialectic. In France, with Bergson, matter
would be reduced to motion, and space to time. In England
the result was rather a scientific philosophy of evolution. In
all these countries, such systems invariably ended up in
closed circles. Only the revolutionary Marxist, representing
a class yet to come to power, could work out a materialist
philosophy of evolution that was not a closed system, but
an open spiral.
273
The opening up of backward portions of the world in the
nineteenth century had occasioned the rise of a whole set of
social sciences. Anthropology, ethnology, comparative
philosophy, all were giving students a better perspective as
to the eternity of capitalism. The researches of Morgan and
of the Historical School added their bit to the conclusion
that there had been a steady evolution in social life. That
society was evolving was brought home vividly, too, by the
tremendous rise of the proletarian movement and its
acceptance of the revolutionary implications involved in the
materialistic dialectics of Marx and Engels and others.
It was at this moment that the discoveries of Darwin were

published, and his theories of biological evolution, the
descent of man, and the survival of the fittest, were
enunciated. At first these theories were seized upon by the
English Liberals to prove that free competition with its
irresponsible characteristic, "the devil take the hindmost,"
was but part of the natural law of the survival of the fittest.
Darwinism was to justify the transformation of society into
a jungle. The war of the jungle, the law of tooth and fang,
were to be applicable to social as well as to animal life.
However, such theories could prove dangerous. Could they

not be used by the criminal to justify his actions? In
America, classic land of crime as of Liberalism, such ideas
formed the open philosophy of the criminal's life. The
howling wilderness of America from the start had been the
dumping ground for European criminals to practice the law
of tooth and fang without hurting the old social order. How
many Americans could trace their ancestry to the jails of
England and of the Old World! (*20) Indeed, the law of the
jungle had been the true law of nature for all those
Americans who amassed wealth and power. Jungle rule
had dominated the rich as well as the criminal. (*21)
274
How thin is the line between industrialist and politician on
the one hand and gangster and racketeer on the other is
seen by the voluminous official reports connecting them
intimately together. (*22) And is it not touchingly
significant that Al Capone, Chicago's notorious racketeer
and gangster, should be arrested, not for his murders, but
for failing to pay an income tax on his loot, as every big
business man should?
Darwinism could be used as a double-edged sword also by

the proletariat. Darwinism did not preclude fighting in
packs and masses as well as individually. The law of the
survival of the fittest could also justify the use of force and
violence. Finally, Darwinism assumed that the only test of
who was fittest was based on survival and conquest.
Communists could abide by such a test. Thus, such theories
played directly into the hands of revolutionists as well as
capitalistic industrialists.
In England the laws of evolution were seen to be working

against the capitalists. On the international front, both
Germany and the United States were taking away British
markets. Within the country the working class and
socialism were appearing constantly stronger. Liberalism
was, therefore, soon forced to change its tack. Evolution no
longer meant fight, violence, and extermination of the unfit;
it now came to be the antithesis of revolution. Evolution
was to signify only gradualness and peacefulness. Sudden
violent changes were out of the question. Only step by step
would the toilers be allowed to improve their lot.
This modification of Darwinism by sociology was the task

of Herbert Spencer, who, borrowing the idea from Comte,
undertook with great pains to demonstrate that society had
moved from military violence to industrial peacefulness
and that nobody must ever disturb this eternal law of social
275
evolution. The Liberals thus became the champions of
evolution, provided that it was sufficiently slow and
gradual. Freedom of speech, of press, of personal liberty, or
assemblage and organization, in short, peaceful means,
were the sole methods by which growth and development
could take place in society. "Survival of the fittest" gave
way to "mutual aid."
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, English

Liberalism could terminate its studies of evolution only
with deep foreboding. Pessimism penetrated its whole
outlook. A sort of cosmic "after me the deluge" attitude
became scientifically fashionable. In his cosmology Spencer
found it necessary to come to the conclusion that after every
evolution there must be a devolution, a smash-up that
proved there was no purpose in the universe but only blind
law, and that the ultimate end was to start all over again
from the beginning: endlessly moving around from star-
dust to star-dust. In his sociology, Spencer tried as hard as
he could to defend capitalist individualism as the summum
bonum, castigating the new system arising as one of a
coming slavery, a new Toryism, a new feudalism, etc. None
the less, he was compelled to state the law that society was
moving from agriculture to industry, from being dominated
by nature to control over nature, from ignorance to science,
from the simple to the complex, from discrete
amorphousness to integration, from homogeneity to
heterogeneity. Such theories of evolution unmistakably
pointed towards social control and internationalism.
Proletarian thinkers insisted that they also pointed toward
world socialism, and that the discovery of the laws of
evolution dove-tailed with the claims of labor that society
must evolve from capitalism to something higher.
276
Thus the theories of evolution and of the greatest good for
the greatest number definitely let down the barriers of
Liberalism in a socialist direction. Socialists could welcome
all theories urging the freedom of speech and press, since
with this freedom they could broadcast their views on the
superficiality of capitalist liberty and the necessity for a
complete social change. While sections of Liberals were
expressing their sympathy for the poor and downtrodden,
labor was using this sympathy to wrest from the State
measures of social reform.
By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the skilled

worker was coming into his own and taking leadership
upon himself, not only of the rest of the workers, but of
certain elements of the petty bourgeoisie. Such skilled
workers could accept theories of evolution and gradual
change all the more readily as they had a stake in society
and wished, not revolution but favorable social reform.
Whatever socialist ideas such workers could attain had to
be heavily diluted with doses of Liberalism. Here, then, was
a basis for the alliance of labor with Welfare-Liberalism.
The joint program was not one hailing social democracy,
but rather one advocating the present democracy fringed
with social reforms. From the point of view of the skilled
workers, this represented a reformed capitalism which
could easily be moved onto the tracks of social democracy
later if need be.
In England, this Liberal labor alliance was given the very

name Lib- Lab. In France, the Radical Socialists were able to
get the support of some skilled workers by developing a
"solidarist" program which was to procure the solidarity of
the whole nation and consisted in:
1. The free education of all.
277
2. A minimum of the means of existence for everybody.
3. Insurance against the risks of life. (*23)
In America, the alliance of labor and the middle class

created a number of Farmer-Labor groupings, exemplified
in the support which the Knights of Labor gave to the
People's Party in the nineteenth century and in the
LaFollette and other movements in the twentieth century.
Far more than in other countries, in the United States it was

the farmer and middle class that led the way and not the
worker, for the workers had never formed their own strong
independent political parties. Traditionally the initiative in
political action had always been taken by the middle classes,
labor always following in their wake. While the "little
fellow" was squealing that Big Business was squeezing him
out and bent his efforts to realize all sorts of political
nostrums, labor as a distinct class was not only new, but
had not much faith in politics.
As the chief beneficiary of the Civil War, modern Big

Business had grasped the principal profits for itself and had
rudely shoved aside the middle man and farmer, not only
in the East, but in the West, where the main wealth
gatherers were the railroads, mortgage sharks, and their
satellites. Outrageous freight-rate discrimination and
ruthless operation of the slogan, "charge all that the traffic
can bear," marked railroad activities, while wholesale
cheating by grain elevator men, unconscionable speculation
in mortgages, and complete anarchy and chaos in the land
settlements, completed the picture.
With the first economic crisis following post-war

adjustments, the farmer who had gone West to the "free"
278
homestead soon found that under no circumstances could
he maintain himself. "Fully half of the people of Western
Kansas left the country between 1888 and 1892.... In the
single year of 1891 no less than eighteen thousand prairie
schooners crossed from the Nebraska side to the Iowa side
of the Missouri in full retreat from the hopeless hard
times.... Disappointed pioneers handed over their farms to
the loan companies by which they had been mortgaged or
abandoned them outright." (*24) This was but one example
out of many. In Kansas alone twenty entire towns, new and
well built, were left without a single inhabitant; some of the
places abandoned included an opera house that had just
been constructed at the cost of $30,000, a school costing
$20,000, and similar properties.
It is almost impossible to conceive of the tremendous

wastefulness in the rampant individualism of American life.
Hardly was the farmer given the land and allowed to settle
down than he was driven off the farm and into the cities
and forced to abandon his property. Criminal wastefulness
marked the handling of all natural resources whether
minerals or metals, forests, animal life, etc. Peacetime waste
was as large to America as the cost of war was to other
countries. Yet, paradoxically enough, like the wars of the
nineteenth century generally, so with the tremendous waste
in American economy, even these items had their
progressive aspects. Had it not been for the waste of the soil
by Southern planters, it is a question whether there would
have taken place such a terrific expansion to the West,
impelling a country with such a small population to drive
with such frenzy from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from
the Great Lakes to the Caribbean.
The waste in American life was only the counterpart to the

feverish production and inventiveness of the Americans.
279
After all, consumption is but the final act of production.
Only unprecedented productivity could have tolerated such
waste, indeed, have caused it. On the other hand, without
American style consumption there could not have been
American style ,production. The tearing down of the forests,
for example, helped to speed on the steel industry and
rapidly develop it, changing the entire framework of our
architecture, terminating the era of the wooden house and
inaugurating one epitomized in the great skyscrapers of
New York City.
The great wear and tear of all products and the constant
need for renovation imposed a greater aptitude for the
introduction of the new and induced a periodic change of
American customs. Such a mode of life on the one side
facilitated inventions and better methods of production; on
the other side, it led to a derogation of quality of goods and
a wholesale adulteration of products. Since methods and
products changed so rapidly it did not pay to invest in too
durable goods.
Serious social maladjustments were bound to flow from this

turmoil. Men cannot be thrown around and away so dizzily,
without a protest arising from the victims. In the late
nineteenth century, among the farmers of the middle west a
Populist movement began to cry out for a greater
recognition of the rights of the common people. These
middle class Radicals, it is true, restricted their demands to
such items as the Australian ballot, direct election of
senators, direct primary elections, women's suffrage, and
direct legislation by initiative and referendum. "The
connecting link between the older liberty and the new is
found in William Jennings Bryan, who throughout his
political career struggled for democratic ideals." (*25)
Populism was a transition belt in many communities to
280
break up the hold of the rampant individualism of the
Republican Party.
And later other Radicals appeared to demand curbs upon

big business and some degree of national control.
Conservation of resources, nationalization of railroads and
telegraphs, "busting" of trusts, money schemes to favor the
"little man," better government supervision --- these were
items that took up the attention of the Radicals and found
some belated expression also among the Liberal elements
within the camps of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow
Wilson.
In America, where the proletariat was not yet a political

force in its own right, the chief burden of social Liberalism
was the welfare of the individual entrepreneur in the
middle class. Welfare-Liberalism declared its intention to
enact laws to preserve the middle class individualism
which was being pushed out by the individualism of the
big industrialists. The Liberal Woodrow Wilson put the
matter succinctly in his New Freedom: ". . . the middle class is
being more and more squeezed out by the processes which
we have been taught to call processes of prosperity. Its
members are sharing prosperity, no doubt; but what alarms
me is that they are not originating prosperity. No country
can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small
Controlling Class." (*26) And again, "The government,
which was designed for the people, has got into the hands
of bosses and their employers, the special interests. An
invisible empire has been set up above the forms of
democracy." (*27) Still further: "A trust is an arrangement to
get rid of competition, and a big business is a business that
has survived competition by conquering in the field of
intelligence and economy. A trust does not bring efficiency
281
to the aid of business; it buys efficiency out of business. I am
for big business, and I am against the trusts. (*28)
One might say the theory of Wilsonian Liberalism was the

theory of perpetuum mobile, perpetual motion. He gloried in
the singular fact that nothing in this country is done in the
present as it was done twenty years ago. In America the
present was always breaking with the past, always
"smashing records" and making new ones. This was the
only way to keep up with the present. "In America there is
no 'good old time' in the European sense of the word." (*29)
To the Frenchman, America knows no such thing as true
contentment. (*30)
Wilson, like Spencer, was frightened at the tendency of the

trusts to cause economic stagnation and social classes. He
stated, for example, "If you want to know how brains count,
originate some invention which will improve the kind of
machinery they are using, and then see if you can borrow
enough money to manufacture it. You may be offered
something for your patent by the corporation, which will
perhaps lock it up in a safe and go on using the old
machinery; but you will not be allowed to manufacture. I
know men who have tried it. . . ." (*31)
Wilson wanted the law to take care of men "on the make"
and not those already "made." He advised the young
gentlemen of the rising generation to be as unlike their
fathers as possible. Thus, emphasis on the present meant
emphasis on youth. The present was the realm for
perpetual youth. Not only was he youthful who lived
always in the present, but only the youth could master the
present. Hence, youth was wiser than age and better fitted
for life. Appropriately enough, if the parents must cling to
the methods of the child, the child must disrespect those of
282
the parents. Is there any capitalist country save America
that could elaborate such a philosophy?
If stagnation came from trusts, then progress came from

"the people." Thus, Wilsonian Liberalism took great care to
praise the common man and to point out that a nation is as
great and only as great as her rank and file. And in arguing
against the permanent rule of any race or group of men, he
found it fitting to exclaim, "It is one of the glories of our
land that nobody is able to predict from what family, from
what region, from what race, even, the leaders of the
country are going to come." (*32)
And to maintain this constant melange with its tradition of

"from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,"
Wilson would use all the power of the government. He
complained, "Centralized business has built up vast
structures of organization and equipment which overtop all
states and seem to have no match or competitor except the
federal government itself." (*33) Thus the government,
freed from trust control, was to be enhanced as the bulwark
to maintain the individualism of those "on the make."
"Build the government to save individualism" was no worse
than Wilson's later slogan of "Make war to end war." In
many of his phrasings. Wilson, like Theodore Roosevelt
before him, borrowed wholesale from the Socialists.
Welfare-Liberalism in the United States found in the

sociological writings of Lester F. Ward, an American
variation of Comte, a mass of arguments to further its case
of national control and social meliorism. Ward's opinions, it
is true, have much that would heartily commend them to
Fascists today. But it is not with those possible
interpretations that we shall deal now. There were at the
time no elements in the United States that could reach these
Fascist conclusions, and it was not the conservative but the
283
ordinary Liberal city petty bourgeoisie that drew comfort
from his writings. Against the slogan Laissez faire Ward
proposed that of Faire marcher. (*34)
Lester Ward made a systematic attack against the dominant

reckless utilitarian individualism, itself an expression of the
gigantic private trusts in charge of American economic life.
In his Psychic Factors of Civilization, for example, Ward
gives the following economic paradoxes among others:
1. The poor do not always have to be with us. Malthus was

wrong, and subsistence increases instead of diminishes
with the population.
2. There is no such thing as a constitutional "wage-fund"

and an increase of wages can be attained with an increase in
profits.
3. Prices may fall as wages rise, and diminished hours of

labor bring increased production.
4. Free trade and individual competition is not always for

the best. Competition raises prices and rates, while
combination often lowers them. Production may reduce the
price of the commodity protected not only in the protecting
country but even in the importing country. (*35)
5. Free competition is possible only under social regulation

and private monopoly can be prevented only by public
monopoly.
6. The hope of gain is not always the best motive to

industry, and public service will secure better talent than
private enterprise for the same outlay, while private
enterprise taxes the people more heavily than does the
government.
284
With Ward and Wilson and Roosevelt, we are aware of the
fact that Liberalism has entered the twentieth century in the
United States.
Footnotes
1. The Reform Bill actually restricted suffrage in some

boroughs. Gilbert Slater is even of the opinion that, as a
result of this disfranchisement, the proportion of British
working men eligible to vote after 1832 was smaller than it
had been before. (See G. Slater: The Making of Modern
England, p. 97.)
2. M. Beer: History of British Socialism, II, 4.
3. Cited in R. W. Postgate: Revolution from 1789 to -

1906, Document 64, p. 133. And again, O'Connor: "I am
even opposed to public kitchens, public baking-houses, and
public wash-houses. In fact, I am for the principle of MEUM
and TUUM, MINE and THINE." (The same, p. 134.)
4. "Even as late as 1834-this is an estimate of Arnold

Toynbec-half the laborers wages went in taxes." (F. W.
Hirst: Political Economy of War, p. 69.)
5. P. W. Slosson: Decline of the Chartist Movement, p. 146.
6. H. J. Laski: Democracy in Crisis, p. 33-34
7. Views like Adam Smith's were also shared by the

historian Buckle, who states, "Seeing, therefore, that the
efforts of government in favor of civilization are, when
most successful, altogether negative, and seeing, too, that
when those efforts are more than negative they become
285
injurious-it clearly follows that all speculations must be
erroneous which ascribe the progress of Europe to the
wisdom of its rulers." (Cited in W. R. Browne: Man or the
State? p. 51.)
8. W. P. Hall: Mr. Gladstone, p. 17.
9. Mill disagreed with Gladstone on the question of Home

Rule for Ireland. (See J. S. Mill: Autobiography, p. 294, 1874
edition.) Mill also favored the cause of the North against the
South, despite the fact that "nearly the whole upper and
middle classes of my own country, even those who passed
for Liberals, [went] into furious pro-Southern partisanship."
(The same, p. 268.)
10. J. S. Mill; Principles Of Political Economy, I, 253-259 (Third

edition).
11. A. Comte: A General View of Positivism (Summary

Exposition), p. 88.
12. "Positive philosophy demands nothing absolute.

Determinism, like free-will, is a metaphysical thesis, Comte
is not compelled to take sides either with one or the other;
he leaves them to mutually refute each other." (L. Levy-
Bruhl, The Philosophy of Auguste Comte, p. 268.)
13. Comte attempts to prove women's inferiority on

biological grounds. The English Liberals, like Mill, treated
women as intellectually equal, although Mill's
book, Subjugation of Women, evades the problems of biology.
14. This phrase comes from J. Watson’s Comte, Mill and

Spencer, I believe.
15. See G. Sorel: Reflections on Violence.
286
16. T. Whittaker: Comte and Mill, pp. 67-68.
17. A Comte: A General View of Positivism, p. 147, Summary

Exposition, 1848.
18. Compare the advice of the American Liberal that labor

should go into court for injunctions against violations of
civil liberty. (See Wood, Coleman and Hays: Don't Tread On
Me.)
19. See J. MacCunn: Six Radical Thinkers, pp 39-87
20. "We may all remember the Time when our Mother
Country, as a Mark of her parental Tenderness emptied her
jails, into our Habitations, 'for the BETTER Peopling,’ as she
express'd it,'of the Colonies. . . . The Felons she planted
among us have produc'd such an amazing Increase, that we
are now enabled to make ample Remittance in the same
Commodity." (B.Franklin: Works, IX, 628 (Smythe edition].)
21. See, for example, Upton Sinclair's novel, The jungle.
22. See, for example, the Illinois Crime Survey, published by

the Illinois Association for Criminal justice in Cooperation
with the Chicago Crime Commission, 1929, ed. John H.
Wigmore.
23. See Gide and Rist, History of Economic Doctrines, pp. 596-
597.
24. J. D. Hicks: The Populist Revolt, p. 32.
25. C. E. Merriam: American Political Ideas, p. 60.
26. W. Wilson: The New Freedom, p. 17.
287
28. The same, p. 180.
29. M. J. Bonn: The American Experiment, p. 85.
30. See P. Collier: America and the Americans, p. 79.
31. W. Wilson: The New Freedom, pp. 173-174.
32. The same, pp. 83-84.
33. The same, pp. 187-188.
34. See L. F. Ward: Applied Sociology, p. 17.
35. Republican Party individualism would agree with the

necessity for protection, but would certainly differ with the
social motive Ward would put behind high tariff.
VII. THE DISSOLUTION OF LIBERALISM
As the social problem arises in all its terrible portent,

Liberal individualism, whether egoistic or humanitarian,
becomes liquidated by the forces generated in an era of
imperialism and simply melts away in the hot furnace of
class conflicts.
In all the main countries, big industry had already

separated itself from Welfare-Liberalisms. In the United
States it found refuge within the Republican Party; in
England it joined hands with the aristocracy of the
Conservatives. These industrialists were members of
precisely those large corporate groups in the basic heavy
industries where competition had given way to cartels,
syndicates, and trusts. If there remained some big capitalist
288
elements in the Liberal movement, they were rather
merchants or manufacturers engaged in light industry,
where to a considerable extent competitive conditions still
remained. The vocation of these elements within Liberalism
was to keep the movement under the control of capital. On
the whole, the petty bourgeoisie was left to "hold the bag."
The dissolution of Liberalism had become apparent the

moment it called in the government to protect the interests
of small property. This was a sign that Liberalism was no
longer the master but rather the victim of the new economic
forces. Liberalism's hold on politics could not long endure
after its loss of control of economics. On every side the little
business man was being driven into dependence on trusts
or into the ranks of labor. In the first instance, he tended to
support the parties of imperialism, in the second, the
parties of Labor. In the end the Welfare-Liberals could
represent only historically dead material.
During this period it must not be supposed that welfare

was a Liberal monopoly. We have already pointed out that
in Europe this was far from being the case. In Germany, as
far back as the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great
could polemicize against Machiavelli and point out that
even the benevolent despot had duties to the State. In all
countries in the late nineteenth century, public officials and
governmental publicists were arguing for complete social
control and for a recognition of the supremacy of public
interest and public property, and stressing the duty of the
State to care for all its subjects.
Contrary to the Welfare-Liberals, these proponents of State

supremacy took great pains to demonstrate that social
responsibility, far from flowing from individual duty, was
entirely distinct from it, and that the command of the State
for social order had nothing to do with humanitarianism.
289
For example, social reform and protection of the masses
were being introduced by the government from the
standpoint of procuring better soldiers for the army; and in
proportion as the army expanded to take in the whole
people, so did the State's obligation increase to insure a
healthy, strong general' population. Militarism could work
for social reform as well as pacifism, and compulsory
military training could usher in an equalitarian spirit as
well as political freedom of speech.
That Big Business, distinct from Liberalism, could be

interested in welfare was amply demonstrated in the
United States by the measures taken by large industrial
concerns. These concerns initiated departments of
personnel administration to systematize matters of
employment and discharge, job analysis and specifications,
transfers and promotions, and to look after such matters as
grievances, health, comforts and conveniences, safety-first
campaigns, recreation, vacations, and welfare services for
their workers. Simultaneously they indulged in profit-
sharing schemes, giving to their employees bonuses either
in cash or deferred payments, and special issues of stock
dividends. They spurred industrial education, vocational
guidance, and set up a system of corporation schools and
apprenticeships. They even introduced systems of co-
operative partnership with the workers. (*1)
Under such circumstances, the practical distinctions

between the social reforms of Big Business imperialism and
those proposed by petty business Welfare-Liberalism
tended to disappear. There did remain differences of
rationale and approach. In the eyes of the conservatives, the
State was an instrument to crush the class struggle, to put
labor in its place. The State thus became supreme as the
only mechanism to preserve capitalist society and to exact
290
obligations from all classes. To imperialists, social reform
was not a result of individual rights, but an act to maintain
the social order.
With the Welfare-Liberals, the State was the instrument to

harmonize classes. The State functions therefore were a
secondary result of the need of class harmonization. With
the Conservatives, however, the classes functioned only as
part of the workings of the State. They existed as part of the
social order. The State was no mere policeman, but the total
of all classes and an end in itself. Complete fruition of such
ideas is to arrive under Fascism, when the last preachers of
Liberalism are thrown out with kicks and blows.
The need for social control developed also in the law courts
definite trends unheard of in the early nineteenth century.
Courts began to talk of the limitations on the use of
property where this is anti-social, of limitations on the
freedom of contract and on the right to do what one pleased,
of limitations on the power of the creditor to exact
satisfaction, of a theory of liability without fault and
responsibility for the acts of agents employed. They
transformed rights that belong to all or "to none" into
"public rights." They tended to hold that public funds
should respond for the injuries to individuals by public
agents. They enunciated a theory of social interest in
dependent members of the household, etc. (*2)
In connection with these changes there arises a whole

school of sociological jurisprudence, whose program is to
study the actual social facts of legal institutions, legal
precepts and legal doctrines, who insist on a sociological
preparation for law-making and a complete study of the
means of making legal precepts effective in action and of
the elements of law in society. This school advocates, in
291
English-speaking countries, the formation of a Ministry of
justice to carry out its program.
With their appeals to the government, naturally, Welfare-

Liberals were not averse to getting State jobs, and when
once on the payroll gradually tended to the view that the
State was the highest blessing of mankind. Government
functionaries, whether Liberal or not, strove to increase
their power. In this respect differences among them could
be but secondary. Both groups of officials, for example,
were forced to interest themselves in the matter of crime, its
causes, prevention and cure, and in the administration of
the law and in principles of penology. The Liberal took the
stand of being interested in the person of the criminal,
calling for individual psychological study and
individualization of punishment with attention paid to the
matter of parole; the others claimed to be interested mainly
in the social interest to be preserved, the punishment to be
meted out in accordance with the seriousness of the social
damage done, and whatever rehabilitation of the prisoner
was effected was to be with the view of reestablishing him
as a docile subject of the State. Whatever their differences,
however, both groups put forth series of reforms in the
criminal law that tended to make the State more ubiquitous
than ever.
Similarly, on the question of prohibition and temperance,

both the Conservatives and the Liberals tended to agree on
governmental regulation, even to the extent of complete
prohibition. Their differences became merely
argumentative. In the United States it was the Democratic
Party, the Liberal Wilson, who put over the Prohibition
Amendment during the War. Primarily, his theory was to
conserve national resources to win the War, but after the
War it became a program to conserve the laborer against
292
himself. Thus, while conservation of resources had been
urged for the welfare of all the people, it now became a
conservation of the lives of the people from their own
reckless conduct, in violation of their former individual
rights. In this way American Welfare-Liberalism, in its
attempts to save mankind from itself, joined forces with
Conservatives who had always maintained that public
interest should control the most intimate personal life of
every individual.
Big Business had always been of the opinion that the

laborer was only a "hand," that is, another type of machine,
that the laborer lived for the factory and that it was his duty
to maintain himself in a state of productive efficiency. If the
laborer would not take care of his labor power adequately
enough, then the law would step in to compel him. The
manufacturer thus developed his philosophy to include the
theory that he should control the worker not only while at
work but during the whole twenty- four hours of the day
and regulate his consumption as well as his production.
These efforts of the industrialists were buttressed by the
humanitarian urging of the Temperance Societies who
called attention to the social evils of alcoholism, especially
its relation to the breaking up and brutalizing of the home,
vice, prostitution, gambling, crime, etc. Like opium, alcohol
and even smoking were harmful to the people. To prevent
these effects the State was to be the instrument to enter into
the homes of the people with an elaborate set of
prohibitions.
It was the working class which took up the cudgels that

Liberalism abandoned in the question of Prohibition. And
this the workers in the United States did, not only because
they were still affected by arguments of the individual's
right to do whatever he pleased, at least with himself, but
293
also from profound social and class reasons. It was
necessary to fight the industrialists who insisted that Labor
must keep itself efficient for factory work and their
dictation to labor what it should do.
Prohibition was also construed as an attack against the

standard of living, since it implied that certain things were
necessities and others luxuries with which labor could
easily be compelled to dispense. It made no difference that,
in the beginning of Prohibition, wages did not fall but even
rose, or that labor could spend its money on other goods
instead of alcoholic beverages. What labor struggled against
was the precedent for dictating to it what it should have
and what it should not have.
The Prohibition Amendment also meant an increase in the

police and revenue officers of the capitalist State. These
armed forces could be applied not only to end alcoholism,
but also in time of need to break up strikes and unions.
Further, Prohibition entailed a tremendous increase in the
possibilities of bribery, blackmail and frame up by
governmental officials, and of their power in everyday life.
Labor pointed to the immense number of arrests that took
place under Prohibition, a flood dragging many workers
into the maw of the prison system. Vagrancy and
Prohibition were the two divisions of the criminal law
bringing to the State a huge number of working class
prisoners, providing the chain-gangs and prison sweat-
shops with their forced labor. Prison work and peonage
substituted for chattel slavery as a means of getting cheap
labor.
These wholesale arrests could result only in giving the

victims a greater hatred for the State and its coercive
apparatus. For every worker broken over the wheel by
prison discipline, there were many more who emerged with
294
a more rebellious spirit and bitter understanding of the
class nature of the State. Some of them helped to swell the
ever-increasing total of professional criminals; others were
to save their resentment for political action. In the end, the
Prohibition Amendment was repealed in America as too
costly a social experiment and too dangerous to the social
order.
On all the other important questions of the day, under

imperialism, Liberals lost their distinguishing differences
from the older ruling groups. In England, for example, the
Liberals formed a coalition with the Conservatives to carry
on the war and joined hands with them on the question of
its conduct. They enforced conscription. They introduced a
"Defense of the Realms Act" which aggressively attacked
the rights of democracy. After the war they agreed to tariff
legislation of a protective character, and in 1932 Great
Britain became definitely Protectionist. The Liberals
vigorously put down the rebellion in the Irish Free State
and in India. They joined wholeheartedly in the movement
for the building up of the Empire. They became responsible
for the hated Versailles Treaty, which, in turn, only bred
Fascism and further conflict throughout the world.
If big business abandoned Welfare-Liberalism on the one

hand, labor was to do so on the other. As the line-up
between labor and capital grew more severe, all middle-of-
the-road groups lost their importance, became impotent
and bankrupt. The class struggle permitted no neutrality.
The decadent middle class, not able to stand on its own feet,
followed now one side or the other. Under the blows of
modern industry, labor had organized its own parties.
295
Theories of the harmony of classes had been appropriate so
long as the skilled worker remained the only mature section
of labor; but congested masses of unskilled laborers, poorly
paid, foot-loose, and bitterly exploited, came into being,
and as the international competitive struggle for markets
grew more intense, tending to decline the rate of profit and
making social reform increasingly difficult to attain, labor
became more and more belligerent and aggressive. In
England, Lib-Labism gave way to out-and-out laborism. A
Labor Party was now formed that definitely rested upon
the trade unions and separated labor sharply from all
propertied representatives, including the Liberals.
Before the World War, however, Laborism could not break

entirely from Liberalism in England. In a sense, Laborism
was a triumph of Liberalism in the camp of labor, since,
contrary to that of Communism, the whole Laborite camp
was thoroughly corrupted with Liberal ideas, denying the
inevitability of class struggle and appealing for close class
collaboration. This program was accompanied by an
illusion that a capitalist State could be progressively
reformed until it became transformed in the interests of
labor.
Both Laborites and Socialists argued for a victory of labor

from the point of view that only through labor's triumph
would individualism really be protected and maintained.
The trusts were crushing the individualism of the masses;
Socialism or Laborism would restore it. The Laborites and
Fabian Socialists stressed the fact that the Liberal slogans of
liberty, democracy, equality, fraternity, etc., could be
obtained only through Laborism or Socialism. These people
took warmly to their hearts the entire theory of Meliorism,
of a gradual improvement and betterment of the human
race.
296
However, the contradictions of an imperialist era, with its
cataclysmic World War crashing over the heads of all, soon
ended this honeymoon period between the Labor Party and
Liberalism. After the War, the Labor Party abandoned the
principle of gradualness, declared a compromise with
capitalism impossible, and demanded the immediate
nationalization of the key industries with the slogan
"Socialism in our time." Caught between the fires of
imperialism and labor, Liberalism terminated its career in
England, unwept and unsung. One section became the tail-
end of the Labor Party; another section was swallowed up
by the Conservatives.
Only in America does Welfare-Liberalism still play an

important role. Before the World War it was concerned
primarily with the claims of the interests of small property.
After the War, the social problems of labor engrossed its
full attention. Unemployment and social insurance,
minimum wage standards and prices, old age pensions,
and wealth distribution schemes become its care.
American Liberalism endures only because American labor

has not as yet organized itself. Preceding the War, the
skilled workers, the only ones considerably organized in
the trade-union field, considered themselves as little
business men and carried out their politics as the tail-end of
the middle class Liberal. They could not reach even the
stage of English Lib- Labism. And so closely did they follow
their employers that, while they were content with the
meager federal legislation protecting women and children,
they actually fought against legislation for social insurance
and minimum wages for men on the ground that they were
able to take care of themselves without the help of
governmental interference.
297
Following the War, organized labor still refused to organize
its labor party. Social concessions it left to the Liberals to
enact. Yet this inactivity by no means implies that the
American working man does not understand the true
situation. Should the social concessions not be forthcoming,
there is no doubt but that American labor would at once
step forward in mighty revolutionary formations. If it
refuses to form a labor party, it is not only because the
American worker is more backward than the English, but
also because he is more advanced. In the fourth decade of
the twentieth century he has become thoroughly aware of
the futility of the Liberal methods of the Labor Party. When
the American worker organizes his class politically, it will
be to break out with immense violence for the seizure of
power.
That the petty bourgeoisie can swing to the Right is

illustrated by the manner in which Liberalism paves the
way for Fascism in the post-war period, both in theory and
in practice. Both Liberalism and Fascism get their
supporters from the same class, the petty bourgeoisie. If
Liberalism is the philosophy of hope in a competitive
period when capitalism is going up, Fascism is the
philosophy of despair of the same elements now harnessed
to the chariot of industrial imperialism. Class roots being
the same, mutual connections cannot be far apart.
Nineteenth-century Liberalism had believed in free

competition whereby the winner, the stronger, got the
spoils and the loser, the weaker, was eliminated. With free
competition went individualism, and the Liberal had
worshiped the strong individual capitalist who could win
in free competition. He could easily change this worship to
one for a strong political hero of the type of Hitler or
Mussolini. The Liberal had never objected to the
298
dictatorship of the capitalist within the factory. This made it
easier for him to agree to the dictatorship of the capitalist
agent in the State, particularly when shop and State were
more and more fusing into one.
Liberalism had often translated the term "liberty" to mean

"cheap government," or lessened taxation. Cheap
government is one of the principal reasons for the victory of
Fascism, which strives hard to wipe out the heavy costs of
social insurance and high wages. Fascism thus attempts to
realize the dream of the Liberal, the cheap State, at the
expense of the workers and poor toilers generally. As for
"liberty," indeed it is only through Fascism that the
capitalist can retain his liberty and independence and stave
off the demands of the workers.
Welfare-Liberalism had urged class peace and fought the

doctrines of Marxism. The same principle motivates the
Fascists, with this difference, that whereas the Welfare-
Liberal worked in the name of peace, Fascism proceeds
violently. Yet the difference is of not too antagonistic a
nature, for Liberalism's inaction is meant to paralyze the
lower orders, while Fascist militancy is designed to destroy
the activity of the workers whenever it arises.
The Liberal believes in seeing both sides to every case. He

cannot, therefore, refuse to see the side of the Fascists. Since
there are two sides to every question, there must also be a
good side to Fascism, which can be recognized in
proportion as one is truly free and impartial, that is, Liberal.
Believing abstractly in free speech and liberty for all, the
Liberal cannot deny these blessings to the Fascists who
actively oppose such liberties and threaten to terminate
them for the Liberals as well. Here, then, is an outlook on
life that can easily transform Liberalism into a "maedchen
fuer alle."
299
The sense of losing one's way and the realization of the
petty bourgeoisie that it has no future and that it can lead
no one, not even itself, is prettily illustrated in the American
philosophy of Pragmatism. Pragmatic eclecticism fits in
exquisitely well with a movement that knows not what will
happen from day to day and that is whipped, now to one
side, now to the other, by overpowering events.
Pragmatism is but another word for "no perspective," and is
a philosophy of purposeless action. Peaceful Pragmatism
thus could well become the philosophy of Mussolini as it
may yet be the philosophic link to connect Liberalism with
American Fascism when it appears.
Paradoxically, it is the Communists who, as Liberalism

disappears, adopt the slogans of Liberalism and use them
for revolutionary purposes. Where colonial peoples are
struggling against imperialism and are building up
democratic nationalist movements, as in India, China, and
elsewhere, the Communist works hand in glove. with the
revolutionary democrats. He uses the slogan of national
independence and self-determination for the colonial
peoples (or for the Negroes of the United States), not
because he believes in the efficacy of these slogans as ends
in themselves, but because by means of them he can rally
the people to a struggle against world imperialism which is
the central obstacle on the road to Communism.
To the peasants in the agrarian countries, the Communists

carry the Liberal slogans of individual ownership of land in
order to mobilize them against their landlords and to ally
them to the workers.
In the industrial countries, the Communist does his utmost

to show that imperialism cannot co-exist with real
democracy, that the masses are in fact disfranchised, and
that democracy is and can be only a sham. He who controls
300
the job controls the vote, and those in possession of the
means of life control the politics of the nation. In the name
of democracy, therefore, the revolutionist tries to mobilize
sections of the lower middle classes to overthrow the
wealthy. Even where democracy has been the widest
possible under capitalism, the Communist takes advantage
of the democratic opportunities opened to him to expose
the limited nature of democracy and to put forth the larger
democracy of the rule of labor.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat itself can also be placed

in a democratic light by the Communist, if need be, in order
to win over middle class elements. The Communist points
out the wide extension of the franchise that will be given to
the mass of people and how the termination of the liberties
of the capitalists to exploit others must mean the realization
of liberty for humanity.
Not only in his general strategy, but in his day-to-day

tactics, the Communist cleverly uses democratic middle
class Liberal ideals and traditions for labor's own use. He
takes his side with the movement for the payment of a
bonus to the war veterans in order to further his plan for
weakening the concentrated wealth of capital and to ally
the soldiers to his cause. He steps forward in periods when
banks are locking out depositors, with demands that the
owners of small accounts should be paid in full at the
expense of the large depositors. In all taxation schemes he
fights against the taxes being placed on the lower orders
and insists that they be concentrated on the higher brackets.
In the foreclosure of homes, he helps to make up the groups
that resist the sheriff and prevent the dispossession. In a
thousand and one ways, therefore, he connects the
principles of middle class Liberalism with his principles of
Communism.
301
And this he can do precisely for the basic reason that
capitalism cannot hold to itself indefinitely all the layers of
the lower middle class. Some of them are bound to find
their aims and aspirations closely linked up with those of
labor. Or, to restate the matter in political terms, capitalism
in its evolution cannot realize the democratic ideals which it
called forth. The development of capitalism does not lead to
the goals of democracy, prosperity, opportunity, private
ownership for all, and a general classlessness which it
pretended to secure. Thus, it is not only the proletarian
revolution that must be accomplished; it is the democratic
revolution that remains to be completed. And the
Communist is astute enough to proclaim that only the
proletariat can complete the democratic revolution and
make it permanent!
SUMMARY OF BOOK ONE
The victory of capitalism was preceded by a long prenatal

period. Capitalism first flourished in the interstices of an
agrarian society formed by a fusion of the barbarians with
the culture of ancient civilization. It was the Catholic
Church that carried within its bosom the arts and crafts of
the old and introduced its superior technique everywhere
as a method of proving the superiority of Christianity over
the old pagan religions. With the development of this
Church praxis there slowly sprang into being a surplus
product that became the object of trade and of wealth.
Naturally, the Catholic Church concentrated this moveable
wealth into its hands and disposed of it in such a way as
greatly to expand and intensify the circulation of
commodities. The Crusades marked the high point of this
process and raised the prestige and power of the Catholic
Church to unprecedented heights.
302
The torch of progress was then handed to the merchants
and money- men who spread trade everywhere, making it
an indispensable part of the civilized world. They brought
in the inventions of the East, gunpowder, compass, etc. The
clock and printing press appeared with the rise of towns
and cities. At first the center was the Mediterranean Sea,
but, with the rise of the factory system, especially of
weaving, another center opened up in France which then
became the battleground upon which the forces of progress
fought their way. The weaving centers became the object of
long wars between France and England.
The rise of commerce led to the commercialization of the

world, of labor relations, of land, of the church. Humanism
was the first expression of these new elements who, within
the Catholic Church, timidly stressed the past of Rome and
Greece rather than openly preaching revolt. The
Renaissance followed, with its joyous opening up of new
paths and breaking from the old. As the capitalists grew
stronger, they supported the Absolute Monarchy against
the Church, they laid the basis for nationalism, and
developed their national languages. As trade shifted to the
Atlantic, the importance of the Mediterranean withered
away and new centers opened up. With the advance of the
merchants and traders in the sixteenth century, there
occurred a great growth of the factory system, and the
manufacturer grew to great importance side by side with
the merchant.
The development of manufacturing in the sixteenth century

dealt the death blow to those countries, like Spain and
others, who relied merely upon seizure of gold mines in the
New World. It also caused the trade shift to the Atlantic to
become a permanent one and made possible the utilization
of the raw materials of the new continents discovered by
303
the Western nations directly. As France, Holland, and
England advanced, the interior of Europe, to the North and
East, further decayed, a process accelerated by the advance
of the Turks following that of the Tartars.
In Germany, two classes reacted to the increasing decay: the

peasantry, striving for a return to the old Communistic
regime, and the Princes, who freed themselves from the
Catholic Church and, with the help of the West, carried
forward the Reformation in Central and Northern Europe.
In England and Germany, the struggle for nationalism led
to a break with the Catholic Church, but in France this was
effected within the folds of that church and, therefore, the
Huguenots were not able to succeed in linking up the
claims of commerce and business with the claims of the
Reformation.
The seventeenth century saw the victory of England on the

seas, and this country now became the most highly
developed in the modern sense. The dominance of the
merchants and business men in economics compelled a
revolution in politics, and the Great Rebellion and Glorious
Revolution, with their Liberal philosophy and movements,
were the results. By the eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie
energized the social scene as the most active historical class,
especially when in the middle of that century there took
place the start of the industrial revolution. Liberalism also
took hold in America and France through the Revolutions
in those countries.
The nineteenth century was a period of mighty unfolding of

the revolution. The old Liberalism of merchants and traders
was now insufficient in two directions. In the first place,
there were the new industrialists who were becoming far
more important economically but who had no place in the
scheme politically. They turned to a sort of "Philosophic
304
Radicalism' in England and headed a number of
discontented movements. Bourgeois ideals dominated
Radicalism, Anarchism, and Socialism in this period.
By this time the petty bourgeoisie was becoming articulate

and arising to stress its claims. It linked up its forces with
those of the industrial bourgeoisie and entered the Liberal
movement. The industrialists were able to force the other
ruling sections of big property to make way and give to
industry its political due, but no sooner was this done than
the petty bourgeoisie was left abandoned. Now the latter
must stand alone in opposition to the wealthy groups.
This result led to an efflorescence of petty bourgeois

ideology and claims which came to a head in the middle of
the nineteenth century. The petty owner now dominated
Liberalism, turning it into welfare-Liberalism, or
Anarchism, changing it into mutualism, or Socialism,
transforming it into schemes for democratic social reform
and co-operation. The lower middle classes took the
workers under their wing and developed them as
independent forces. The little owners went in heavily for
Radicalism and threatened revolution. In the end, the
bourgeoisie was forced to share the power with the "little
men" and Liberalism took on a social character.
By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become the turn

of the skilled workers to speak up and demand their share.
At first they were part of the petty bourgeois movements
but, as these latter were taken into the bourgeois Liberal
camp, the skilled workers built their own movements. They
took over Anarchism and Socialism and gave such a
threatening character to Liberalism that the bourgeoisie
began to flee the Liberal camp so that, with the opening
period of imperialism, the industrialists joined forces with
the conservatives and abandoned Liberalism to the middle
305
class. However, these "middle bodies" could no longer
operate alone but were reduced to following either the big
employers or the workers and, as the workers took to
Socialism and the bosses to Conservatism, the Liberals
faded out. With the turn of the century, the lower middle
classes began to penetrate the labor movement; although
they secured places in the bureaucratic apparatus then set
up, yet the movement remained dominated by the skilled
workers. Liberalism, under the pressure of these workers,
became Laborism, individualism was displaced by
collectivism, Anarchism was abandoned and gave way to
Syndicalism.
One final party remains to be heard, namely, the unskilled

workers in the heavy, basic industries of the country. As
Socialism and Syndicalism broke down with the World War,
the unskilled took to Communism and began to enmesh the
skilled workers in their train. The bourgeoisie turned to
Fascism; the petty bourgeoisie vacillated between the two,
going to Fascism only when labor could not achieve
Communism. The future holds in store a battle for power
between these two final forces, Fascism and Communism.
Footnotes
1. See G. S. Watkins: An Introduction to the Study of Labor

Problems.
2. See R. Pound: Outlines of Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp 25-

28. (1928 edition)
306
BOOK II. ANARCHISM
307
I. LIBERAL-ANARCHISM
VIII. LIBERTARIANISM
ANARCHISM was really born in the French Revolution. It

is true that, even earlier, Anarchism had appeared in the
Middle ages in a religious guise as part of the general
discontent coincident with the breaking down of feudalism
and the rise of capitalism. Like the early Communist
organizations, it had then been entirely a movement of the
people. In the Peasants' Wars in Germany and elsewhere in
the sixteenth century, many of the Anabaptists could have
been described as peasant Anarchists. Also, in the English
Civil Wars, we have seen how the Left Separatists (Quakers
and such) really were Anarchistic. But it was not until the
French Revolution when, under Hebert and others,
the Enrag’es stepped forth in their own right and attempted
to go beyond Liberalism and even Radicalism, that
Anarchism emerged as a clear-cut revolutionary political
movement. The Hebertist leadership, unbalanced Radicals,
and enraged petty bourgeois, enfettered by their general
doctrines of private property, were not able to move the
Revolution forward, but succumbed to the Terror.
It was only after the French Revolution, with the eighteenth

century, when Liberalism, turned conservative and
sceptical, was firmly ensconced in the saddle, that
Anarchism began to evolve its theoretical spokesmen. The
inchoate Anarchism of the French Revolution developed
from Jacobin Radicalism and was a product of that period
when the people, especially the small property holders,
were advancing their own interests. On the contrary, the
Anarchism of the early nineteenth century, as elaborated by
Godwin and Stirner and Proudhon, was a distinct reaction
from the French Revolution. These people formed the
school of individualist, Liberal-Anarchism. Later a second
308
group came onto the scene, played a powerful role in the
revolutions of 1848 and in the Paris Commune of 1871,
grew into the Communist-Anarchist movement, and,
finally, split off into Anarcho-Syndicalism. The fact that we
must deal with Anarchism as Liberal-Anarchism and
Communist-Anarchism shows us that Anarchism, by itself,
is merely negative and critical; only when linked to other
movements does it take on a constructive, positive aspect.
It was with the Englishman, William Godwin, (*1) that

Liberal-Anarchism first made itself heard. By this time the
"evil" side of capitalism was becoming well known. English
capitalism, in its mad lust for gain, was threatening to
destroy the very flower of the English stock and uproot the
entire English people. The victory of Liberalism over the
government had not brought relief to the masses. On the
contrary, frightened by the French Revolution, English
Liberalism was tightening down on all civil liberties; the
condition of the people was steadily growing worse. To do
away with the Liberal government and yet retain Liberal
society was the problem Godwin wanted to solve.
Theoretically, Godwin opposed all government, even

democratic government, although he did venture to
approve English Democracy as compared with French
Dictatorship. His hatred for all government led him to such
extreme conclusions as to advocate the abolition of all
pensions, and to oppose any system of national education
as bolstering up the State. (*2)
Godwin was both a reaction and a reflection of the French

Revolution. The French Revolution spoke in the name of
patriotism and nationalism. Godwin believed patriotism
and nationalism to be but specious illusions. In ridiculing
Rousseau's idea of Social Contract, Godwin was very close
to Jeremiah Bentham and the hard, Analytical School of
309
Jurists then maintaining law and order in England. The
French Revolution spoke as the voice of the people; to
Godwin the majority could be as tyrannous as the minority.
(*3) The French Revolution stood for violence; Godwin
repudiated the very name "anarchy" because of its
connotations of violence. (*4)
The French Revolution typified action, rapid change.

Godwin pleaded for the omnipotence of discussion and
education, for reform of government now and its abolition
later. Godwin's theory was that revolutions are not good.
We must not be in haste to overthrow the usurped powers
of the world. Even though it is true that governments exist
to enable some people to take away the product of another's
toil, nevertheless we must not use force to prevent this.
Naturally, Godwin was opposed to the policy of the French
Revolution which carried on aggressive war against
Europe's ancien regime.
As opposed to Adam Smith, who had advocated

professional standing armies, Godwin, after the French
Revolution, proposed a Citizens Militia as being better than
a standing army. In respect to his other views on
government, Godwin declaimed against large national
States and urged the parish as the governmental unit,
although he was prepared to admit reluctantly, the wisdom
of instituting a single chambered National Assembly to
manage the common affairs of the parish, to provide for
national defense and to arbitrate the disputes of the people
until such time as they became educated sufficiently to
permit doing away with governments and States. (*5)
To the nationalism and centralization of the French,

Godwin counter-posed extreme individualism and
federalism. So rash was his individualism that he declared
all labor co-operation a necessary evil to be done away with
310
by machinery. He was even against social co-operation to
the extent that he opposed musical organizations and one
man's playing the composition of another. Cohabitation
was also an evil; family life spoiled the individual, as did
marriage in general. Needless to say, Godwin did cohabit,
and had a child born to him; he also wound up his days
with a government sinecure. (*6)
Godwin belonged to the same school as Adam Smith,

although of its left wing. Like Smith, he too advocated
individualism and the competitive system. But Godwin was
beginning to realize that the competitive system was
leading to "unjust" results, to insecurity, to wars, to poverty
and misery. Thus, starting as he did from Adam Smith,
Godwin yet could reach conclusions of egalitarianism, the
only form of egalitarianism that the English "Jacobins" of
the time could embrace.
In essence, Godwin was only carrying farther the ideas of

John Locke, Thomas Paine, and of the Utilitarian School
generally. We have noted that as Liberalism had turned
conservative in England, the Utilitarian School had
dominated all others. With Utilitarian arguments, Burke
had even fought for the maintenance of the traditional; with
Utilitarian arguments, Bentham had advocated the need of
legislative change.
Godwin could not escape from Utilitarianism,

individualism, and British bourgeois ideology. He spurned
the French Revolution because of its decrees interfering
with the right of the individual to do what he pleased, such
as in making private bequests and inheritances. Although
he disagreed with Locke on the question of Social Contract,
he was quite ready to concur that mind is not free but
plastic, acted upon by circumstances of heredity and
environment. This agreement, however, only enabled
311
Godwin to affirm that, since man has no free will, the State
must abandon all punishments of the criminal and acts of
force against the people. Thus was Utilitarianism being
turned against the Utilitarians, and Liberalism's appeal to
Reason becoming Anarchism's creed.
Both Jeremiah Bentham and Godwin were disciples of

Helvetius, who in turn stemmed from Locke. With
Montesquieu, the thesis that man was molded by
environment had led him to a physical and almost
geographical determinism in which man responded almost
automatically to those forces. With Helvetius, however,
man was less the product of geographical than of social
circumstances. Thus man was a creature of conditions, but
primarily of those conditions which he might hope to
modify. While Bentham stressed the need for further
legislation, therefore, and turned the legislator also into a
moralist, Godwin emphasized education rather than
compulsion. Since man obeyed reason, why trust to laws?
As a Utilitarian, Thomas Paine had fought for the Rights of

Man and, in the course of his leftward moving Radicalism,
had pointed out the great distinction between government
and society. He had written: "Society is the product of our
wants, government of our wickedness; society promotes
our happiness positively by uniting our affections,
government negatively by imposing restrictions on our
vices. Society encourages intercourse, government creates
distinctions. Society is a patron, government a punisher.
Society, in every state, is a blessing; but government even in
its best state, is but a necessary evil. Now of all political
regimes democracy is the nearest approach to a society
without government." (*7)
Godwin merely went one step farther than Paine and called
for a society without any government. Thus "Godwin's true
312
role, in the history of the formation of Philosophic
Radicalism, is to have brought about the fusion between the
Utilitarian and the democratic ideas." (*8) Godwin was a
classic case of the Liberal-democrat turned Anarchist.
Typically German as Godwin was typically British in his

Libertarianism was Max Stirner. (*9) Constantly brooding
and envious of the economic advance of English economy,
the German petty bourgeois, imprisoned in the Prussian
system, could only substitute ideals for ideas and wishes
for reality. This gap between theory and practice was often
the comedy and sometimes the tragedy of German ideology
during the whole period of capitalist growth, when
Germany was limping so far behind the other countries. If
the German petty bourgeoisie was divorced from the real
benefits of modern capitalism, there was nothing to prevent
its taking the thoughts of the English, since it could not take
the machinery and the markets, and improving upon these
thoughts in the German manner that is, to extract
everything from their historic content, to make everything
absolute, mystical, and eternal, and to twist reality to its
ideas.
To the English, individualism was backed by all the

considerations of utility to English society, and was the
result of an economic system of laissez faire; to the
Germans, individualism came from the Holy Ghost, free
will, and was put in its most dogmatic and categoric form.
To the German philistine, individualism could mean only
egotism; social welfare was entirely beyond his ken. In his
wild lunge for profits, the German petty bourgeois, just
awakening to the competitive struggle, could say nothing
else but "A race of free men is necessarily a race of egotists,"
(*10) and that the only rule for each was "If it be right for
313
me, it is right!" Repressed by the superior might of the
Prussian Junkerdom on the one hand, and impressed by the
power of the English in free competitive struggle, no
wonder a Stirner could declare, "Freedom cannot be
granted it must be taken," and "One is free in proportion as
one is strong." Evidently the right of the Prussian noblemen
to carry on their sporting duel and to sigh for their ancient
custom of "private wars" was not without some effect upon
the aping petty proprietor. And after all Stirner was only
repeating the words of Frederick II, "One takes when one
can, and one is wrong only when obliged to give back"; or
"If there is anything to be gained by it, we will be honest; if
deception is necessary let us be cheats." (*11)
Godwin had called for the end of government in order to

make way for the general welfare. Stirner called for the end
of government to make an end of all social relations except
those which could be established through a Union of
Egotists which would do away with division of labor and
wherein the law of the jungle and survival of the fittest
alone would prevail. Not that Stirner actually fought the
Prussian government. This teacher in a girl's school in
Berlin who dedicated his ferocious book to "My darling
Marie Doehnhardt" was really only playing around with
wishes, with verbalisms. Far from dealing with such hard
realities as the Prussian police, Stirner's Egotism was a mere
corollary of the doctrine of Free Will which was his starting
point and from which he spun out his absolutes and his
categoric imperatives.
Since free will could be reduced so easily to solipsism (i.e.,

nothing exists save ME), how easy it was for the German
philistine, believer in free will, to change the eighteenth-
century Declaration of the Rights of Man to the nineteenth-
century Declaration of the Rights of Me and Mine, to
314
thunder out: "Freedom means for ME to be free! I am
entitled to everything which I have power to take or to do."
Evidently the German Revolution of 1848 was nigh at hand
by which the rulers would be faced directly by these people
and wherein, in proportion as the middle bourgeois layers
of Liberalism became impotent, the petty bourgeoisie
would be compelled to assume a ferocious ideology.
From this abstract point of view Stirner approached all

social questions. Although he polemized against abstraction
and the domination of individuals by an "abstract" idea,
German that he was, he could not get away from
abstraction himself. To Stirner, an "abstraction" meant
anything outside of himself. Thus Stirner "subtracted"
society and made an "abstraction" of himself and his ego.
To Stirner, every State was a despotism: the Prussian State,

of course, since it was not operated for the German petty
businessman; the English democratic State, also, since it
also was taking wealth away from the petty owner. States
in general, democratic as well as dictatorial, did not exist
for the protection of the "little fellow" who was constantly
being used to fight others' battles, but who, in turn, was too
impotent to dominate anybody else. Also, Communism was
despotism, since Communism meant the rule of the
proletariat and the socialization of the property of the small
burgher. "The dispute about the right of property is
violently waged. The Communists maintain that the earth
belongs properly to him who cultivates it; and the products
of the same to those who produce them. I maintain it
belongs to him who knows how to take it." Thus spake
Lehrer Zarathustra-Schmidt.
Yet Stirner was not oblivious to the great upheavals taking

place around him, the first stirrings of the German
proletariat, the Chartist movements, the rumblings of the
315
revolution of 1848 that was soon to break out. In opposition
to Weitling's Communist authoritarianism, he wrote: "The
laborers have the most enormous power in their hands, and,
if they once become thoroughly conscious of it and use it,
nothing would withstand them; they would only have to
stop labor, regard the product of labor as theirs and enjoy it.
This is the sense of the labor disturbances which show
themselves here and there. The State rests on the slavery of
labor. If labor becomes free, the State is lost."
Since labor was trying to become free, and since the State
was disintegrating, why should not the petty bourgeoisie
try to imitate labor? Why should not they too become "free"
of the State? Yet, to the petty proprietor, "freedom" could
not be conceived as outside, but only as entirely within the
framework of individualism. Choked as he was by all the
historical forces around him, he could not help but wish: If
only I were let alone!
To the bourgeois Liberal, in control of State power,

individualism, while real, was not an end in itself, but only
a means of securing his power, and only a means to
"freedom." To the desperate petty bourgeois, who was
losing the market and yet was bound to the market, it
seemed that it was not individualism in general that was
beating him down, but the monopolies and privileges that
had no place in "ideal" and "genuine" individualism. His
struggle for bread and security took on the form of a
struggle for "genuine" individualism. Even "freedom," that
is, State power, was only a means to achieving that
individualism which would guarantee that his property
would not be taken away.
Thus, Stirner was quite ready to sacrifice "freedom" to

attain individualism. For that matter, the petty bourgeois in
Germany could not obtain real political freedom. This is
316
one reason why, under the police laws, he did not dare
stress seizure of State power for himself, but only
individualist egotism. In spite of all his reckless words,
what Stirner asked for was merely such a reform of the
Prussian society as to allow the "little man" a better
distribution of the national income.
German intellectuals of the day evinced an excited interest

in the works of the semi-materialist, Feuerbach, who had
refuted the idealistic dialectic of the Hegelians and had
substituted for it a sort of materialism in which Man,
humanity, was made the center of things. The materialism
of Feuerbach was itself of an idealistic nature, however, in
which he dealt not with Man concretely, but with Man
abstractly. In actuality, Feuerbach had devised a new sort of
warm-hearted religion in which the welfare of humanity as
a whole was the goal of the activity of each person. To those
who substitute the vague concept "people" for the exact
idea of "class," such a theory is convenient and even
necessary.
Stirner, as the representative of the "little man" in Germany,

was able to fit in with this stream of thought. Yes! Man was
the center of- things; not man in general, but the individual
man in abstract. To abstract humanity, Stirner counterposed
the abstract Ego. Whereas Feuerbach, like the ordinary
Liberal, was essentially a moralist; to Stirner, no set of
morals save that which would benefit the particular Ego
could be considered by an individual. And with the slogan
"We must not erect any truth into a master over ourselves,"
Stirner erected his own theory of the unmorality of the Ego
and its isolation from social forces.
In this respect, too, the Neo-Hegelian Stirner goes beyond

Kant. Starting from Kantian Free Will, Stirner abandoned
the cautions, the morality, and ethics of Kant. Thereby the
317
Anarchist broke violently from the Liberal who was
constantly mouthing the need of ethics and social control.
Stirner was able to see and to denounce the hypocrisy of
those who, with the words "ethics" and "morality," are but
the agents of the ruling powers to keep the masses down.
Had Stirner been in the position of the Liberals rising to

power, like them, he would have tried to show the superior
morality of the class coming to power, and, by means of the
arguments of morality, have tried to lay the base for the
seizure of power. It is typical of the hopelessness of the
cause of the petty-bourgeoisie that the arguments of
morality were given up entirely. The proletariat, on the
contrary, has ample use for the moral argument to expose
and to denounce the morals of the ruling class and thus to
prepare the way for its own rule.
In this lack of morality, in this "duty" of each person

ruthlessly to brush aside any one that stands in the way of
his individual ego, we can note in passing a superficial
resemblance between Stirner and Nietzsche, and the
connection between the Anarchist and the East Pomeranian
Junker and Prussian Fascist whose representative and
forerunner respectively Nietzsche was. (*12)
Footnotes
1. Born 1756; wrote An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,

1793.
2. Godwin, work cited, II, 138-144 (1926 Knopf edition).
3. Here Godwin agreed with the anti-democrat Burke

whom he praises in the third edition of his work. See An
Enquiry Concerning Political justice, II, 291, footnote.
318
4. "The nature of Anarchy has never been sufficiently
understood. It is undoubtedly a horrible calamity, but it is
less horrible than despotism. . . . Anarchy is a short-lived
mischief, while despotism is all but immortal." (Godwin,
work cited, II, 48.)
It was Proudhon who first used the term "An-archism" to

signify the body of doctrines espoused by such as Godwin.
5. C. H. N. Brailsford: Shelley, Godwin, and Their Circle, p. 87

and following.
6. W. Godwin, work cited, II, 269, 271.
7. Thomas Paine: Writings, I, 69 (M. D. Conway edition).
8. E. Halevy: The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, p. 202.
9. Stirner, whose real name was Caspar Schmidt, lived from

1806 to 1856.
10. This and the following quotations are from Stirner's

book: The Ego and Its Own (1844)
11. Quoted by Munroe Smith: Out of Their Own Mouths, p. 1.
12. It is P. Kropotkin, no less, who calls Nietzsche an

Anarchist. See his Modern Science and Anarchism (reprinted
in Vanguard Press Edition under title Revolutionary
Pamphlets of Kropotkin, (1927). This is also the view of
William Bailie in his Josiah Warren, p. xxxii.
IX. MUTUALISM
NEITHER Godwin nor Stirner had any considerable

organized following. This was not the case, however, with
319
the "father" of French Anarchism, Proudhon. (*1)
Proudhon's influence lasted from the Revolution of 1848 to
the Paris Commune of 1871, and marked a transition from
the Liberal-Anarchism prevalent before 1848 to the
Communist-Anarchism that dominated the field later.
The revolutions of 1848 in Europe were decidedly

exemplary of the law of uneven development. In France, it
was the proletariat, immature and confused, that carried
forward the traditions of the French Revolution of the
preceding century and forced the establishment of the
Second Republic. In Germany and Middle Europe, it was
the mass of toilers, the inchoate party of plebeians and
small property holders from whom the proletariat had not
as yet definitely separated so as to form a decisive element,
that bore the brunt of the fighting. In the revolutions of 1848
we first see the complicated interrelations between the
proletarian and the democratic revolutions classically twine
themselves together.
In the preceding centuries, it had been the bourgeoisie itself

that had helped to take the lead in initiating and giving
theoretical direction to the forces tending towards
revolution. After 1848, it was the people who had to initiate
the revolutionary movement even against the bourgeoisie,
though that revolution might ultimately be only bourgeois.
In 1848, in the countries of Middle Europe where modern
capitalism was beginning to show its power, it was the
lower middle classes, aided by the modest beginnings of a
proletariat, that took the lead and from the very beginning
attempted, not only to defeat the old feudal remnants, but
immediately to introduce that democracy into bourgeois
rule that would give control to the small owners, the small
agrarian, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the handicraftsman,
320
the small entrepreneur and such. And it was from these
economic classes that Anarchism drew its life.
The European revolutions of 1848 were extremely

important, if only from the point of view of the relations
between proletariat and peasantry. In these revolutions the
modern proletariat appears for the first time as an
independent force mobilized in its own parties and
articulating, in England, France, and Germany, its own
interests and aims with its own slogans. While the
advanced workers in one place might be willing to ally
themselves with the Liberal bourgeoisie in their struggle
against Feudalism, they never ceased for a single instant to
instill into the working class the clearest possible
recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie
and proletariat. In another place, the workers might join
with the democratic petty bourgeoisie against both
bourgeois and aristocrat. And yet, in all their struggles, the
proletarians were able to draw the lessons of the differences
between proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. In the
insurrections it was the working classes of the towns that
made up the real fighting bodies. They found the small
property classes great in boasting but futile in action, and
very reluctant to jeopardize any part of their little property.
In the course of these revolutions, the working class became

aware that it was the fate of all revolutions that any union
of different classes could not subsist long, and that no
sooner was the victory gained against the common enemy
than the victors became divided among themselves into
different camps and turned their weapons against each
other. The proletariat watched its ally, the petty bourgeoisie,
as it would an enemy. And it was in the course of these
revolutions that it was able for the first time in history to
321
organize a Communist League, at the head of which stood
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The revolutions of 1848 were the first signs that capitalism

was indeed now world-wide, bringing in its train world-
wide crises and convulsions, more or less sharp according
to the law of uneven development in the respective
countries. The world economic crisis of 1847 was the basic
cause for the heightening of all social antagonisms to the
breaking point, although each country was affected
differently.
In England, a virile Chartist movement was organized. This

Chartist movement, however, was handicapped by the
superior power of the English bourgeoisie and was diluted
by a large number of petty bourgeois democratic elements,
headed by the industrialist capitalists, who wanted to
extend the franchise so that they could dominate the other
sections of the ruling classes. Thus Chartism was not able to
advance beyond Radical Populism. The proletariat was not
so desperate as to turn to Communism, nor the small
propertied elements to Anarchism. It was Liberalism in a
more extreme form that prevailed throughout the
movement, save for a small Left Wing which was
communistic.
In France, the crisis of 1847 was but the last of a whole

series of events that had put a tremendous strain upon the
government of Louis Philippe, itself a product of the July
Revolution of 1830. Preceding the crisis there had taken
place in 1845-46 great potato and crop failures which had
forced a rise in prices and a large increase in business
failures and general business risks on the Continent. To this
must be added the fact that the French State, manipulated
by a shameless clique of financiers and plunderers, was
heavily in debt, with the curt brazenly flouting its luxurious
322
orgies before the masses. From all sides, therefore,
especially as the government did not represent the entire
French bourgeoisie but only the aristocracy of finance ---
the manufacturing elements, the petty bourgeoisie and the
proletariat being wholly outside the government --- there
issued a demand for a cheap government and a more
democratic one. The poorer elements, in addition, came out
for the end of the Monarchy and the establishment of a
Republic, the workers on the extreme Left stressing the
point that the Republic must decide as its first task what to
do with the new offspring capitalism had left on the
doorsteps of France, namely unemployment.
Up to about 1833, only handicrafts and little workshops had

existed generally in France. But under the bourgeois King
Louis Philippe, industries speedily developed, to the great
detriment of domestic industry. By 1866 there were about
eleven million persons, or 29 per cent of the total
population of thirty-seven million, who were dependent
upon industry for a living. (*2)
In the countryside, in 1850, of a population of thirty-six

million in France, twenty-four million were occupied with
agriculture; in 1860, almost 1 per cent of the landowners
(50,000) were large holders, 90 per cent (5,000,000) were
small and only 9 per cent (500,000) medium or average.
The revolution of 1848 was the first in which the modern

development of over-production coincident with increased
pauperization and unemployment of the masses became a
paramount issue. Capitalism was driving the petty
bourgeoisie from direct ownership of the means of
production; it was locking the workers out of the factories.
Under such circumstances it was no wonder that the

masses began to revive the traditions of the Jacobins of the
323
French Revolution and to call for a sort of egalitarianism, i.
e., that none should have a surplus while others starve; that,
in a country where the petty bourgeoisie weighed so
heavily, both in the city and in the country, this
egalitarianism should predominate in all sections of the
toilers. This philosophy induced the slogans "The right to
work" and "unemployment insurance," and led both
Proudhon and Louis Blanc to formulate schemes whereby
the government would be but the agency of the lower
classes.
The French working class was too weak to carry through its
own revolution and to formulate clearly its demand for the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It is true that, following its
demand for a Republic with social reforms, it did attempt to
storm the citadels; the terrible June Days, provoked by the
ruling class, resulted. The proletariat received a decisive
defeat, and in the end was forced to allow the petty
bourgeoisie to take the lead and to carry on the struggle.
This independent attempt on the part of the working class

of Paris brought into sharpest relief the difference between
the situations of the manufacturing capitalists in England
and in France. Compared with their British rivals, the
largest French manufacturers were really petty bourgeois.
In England, manufacturers like Cobden and Bright, fighting
for the domination of industrial as against merchant and
finance capital, could be found at the very head of the
crusade against the bank and stock exchange aristocracy.
This state of affairs could not prevail in France, since in
France it was not industry but agriculture that was
dominant. To enforce their interests, the French
manufacturers were too weak to take the leadership of a
movement and dominate it like the English; soon after the
February, 1848 revolution in France, they realized this all
324
too well. They quickly perceived they could not control the
government. In June, they were forced to witness the
proletariat, the very workers from their own shops, make
their first glorious attempt to seize the power of the entire
State apparatus of France. "The manufacturer, in France,
necessarily became one of the most fanatical members of
the party of order. The impairment of his profit by high
finance, what is that as compared with the elimination of
profit by the proletariat?" (*3)
Thus, as the French bourgeoisie swung violently to the

Right and refused to fight even for the bourgeois revolution,
the petty bourgeoisie was forced to do what might ideally
have been conceived as the task of the bourgeoisie.
Similarly, the French workman, swamped by the petty
bourgeoisie, could do only that which, normally, would
have been the job of the petty bourgeoisie to accomplish.
Thus there was no class that could pose the task of the
proletariat itself, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The
Revolution of 1848, therefore, did not solve, the problems of
labor and capital; it only cleared the ground, wiped out all
illusions, and posited the struggle between labor and
capital as the question of the future.
Anarchism, Socialism, and Communism, as great mass

movements, all spring from these historic days of 1848 and
color all the Populist movements of the time. At least so far
as Continental Europe was concerned, the people were
forced to break violently from Liberalism, and although
Liberal ideas continued to pervade strata of the poor, more
and more the masses were forced to take a different
orientation and a different direction. In this period,
Anarchism in Europe lost its last vestiges of open Liberal
connections, so far as its masses of followers are concerned.
325
In Germany, too, this shift away from Liberalism was very
apparent. There the feudal system of tenure still prevailed
to a considerable degree, the feudal classes officering the
army, and ruling the government as a special non-taxed
group. The German bourgeoisie was neither so rich nor so
concentrated as the French, since French and English
competition had destroyed the old manufactures of
Germany and the new manufactures had not yet become
strong. It was only after the Napoleonic wars that modern
capitalism began to grow in Germany; it was only in 1844
that the first great strike of workmen broke out. Germany
had no large manufacturing and trading centers like
London or Paris, etc. The great mass of the nation were
small traders and shopkeepers, working people and
peasants. Of this mass in the cities, the small trading
elements were exceedingly numerous and important. With
the lack of big industry, dependent as the towns had been
upon the trade of the courts, these petty bourgeois elements
made up the majority in the larger towns. The workers
themselves were exceedingly backward and could not
attain the independent position that had been taken by the
French. (*4)
Just as the emancipation of the German peasantry had to

come from without, from the French Revolution, so the
emancipation of the German workers, in this period of
history, could come only from without --- from the June
Revolution in Paris, 1848. With the decisive defeat of the
proletarians in Paris, the proletariat all over Europe had to
retreat; it made no further general attempts to lead the
Revolution, but had to follow the petty bourgeoisie as best
it could.
In Germany a people's "Democratic" Party arose. Its Right

Wing wanted a democratic monarchy, its Left Wing, a
326
federal republic. The proletariat, whose advance guard was
organized in a separate proletarian party, proposed the
demand for a unified republic as the first step towards a
workers' rule in Germany. The conscious working class
elements in Germany knew from the very beginning that
they were taking up arms in a struggle which directly had
nothing to do with the abolition of the wages system, but
they followed the effective policy of supporting the
democratic elements wherever they could.
Between the two groups, however, there was a great schism,

as large, in a sense, as the gap between Anarchism and
Communism. This was classically examined by the
Communist League under Karl Marx. We give here an
extended quotation of the views of this body because
nowhere else has the case been so well put and the
Communist line of action so well distinguished from that
proposed by Proudhon and the Proudhonists of the period.
"The petty bourgeois democratic party in Germany is very

powerful. It embraces not only the great majority of the
town population, the small traders and craftsmen, but also
the peasantry and the agricultural labourers insofar as the
latter have not yet come into contact with the proletariat of
the towns. The revolutionary working class acts in
agreement with the party as long as it is a question of
fighting and overthrowing the Aristocratic-Liberal coalition;
in all other things the revolutionary working class must act
independently.
"The democratic petty bourgeoisie, far from desiring to

revolutionize the whole society, are aiming only at such
changes of the social conditions as would make their life in
existing society more comfortable and profitable. They are
for a reduction of national expenditure, a decrease in
bureaucracy, taxation burden to be placed upon the
327
capitalists and landlords, usury to be wiped out, state banks
and cheap credits to be established, feudal land remnants to
be abolished and a democratic constitution organized, for
reform of inheritance and legacy laws, etc. Some may even
desire the nationalization of public services and many
industries.
"As to the workingmen-well, they should remain wage

workers; for whom, however, the Democratic party would
procure higher wages, better labour conditions, and a
secure existence. The democrats hope to achieve that partly
through State and municipal management and through
welfare institutions. In short, they hope to bribe the
working class into quiescence, and thus to weaken their
revolutionary spirit by momentary concessions and
comforts.
"The democratic demands can never satisfy the party of the

proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeoisie would
like to bring the revolution to a close as soon as their
demands are more or less complied with, it is our interest
and our task to make the revolution permanent, to keep it
going until all the ruling and possessing classes are
deprived of power, the governmental machinery
occupied. . . With us it is not a matter of reforming private
property, but of abolishing it, . . ."
"It is a matter of course that in the future sanguinary

conflicts, as in all previous ones, the working men by their
courage, resolution, and self- sacrifice will form the main
force in the attainment of victory. As hitherto, so in the
coming struggle, the petty bourgeoisie as a whole will
maintain an attitude of delay, irresolution and inactivity as
long as possible, in order that, as soon as victory is assured,
they may arrogate it to themselves and call upon the
workers to remain quiet, return to work, avoid so-called
328
excesses, and thus to shut off the workers from the fruits of
victory. . . . The workers must not be swept off their feet by
the general elation and enthusiasm for the new order of
things which usually follow upon street battles; they must
quench all ardour by a cool and dispassionate conception of
the new conditions, and must manifest open distrust of the
new Government.
"Beside the official Government they must set up a

revolutionary workers' Government, either in the form of
local executives and communal councils, or workers' clubs
or workers' committees, so that the bourgeois democratic
Governments not only immediately lose all backing among
the workers, but from the commencement find themselves
under the supervision and threats of authorities, behind
whom stands the entire mass of the working class. In short,
from the first moment of victory we must no longer direct
our distrust against the beaten reactionary enemy, but
against our former allies, against the party who are now
about to exploit the common victory for their own ends
only."(*5)
Only by keeping in mind the stirring events in the middle

of the nineteenth century and the evolution of class
relationships in the respective countries, can we understand
the background and the development of the Anarchism of
Proudhon. In this environment Proudhon lived and worked.
Standing entirely upon the foundation of Adam Smith,

Ricardo, Sismondi, and the other bourgeois economists,
Proudhon undertook to show the inhumanity of the
capitalist system. The bourgeoisie had constantly affirmed
that they rested their economic structure upon the principle
of free contract. Proudhon exposed the fact that nowhere is
329
the contract free, although it should be free. Wages were
supposed to be freely contracted for; in reality they were
determined by external laws. Buying and selling, trade in
general, were supposed to be free; in fact, they were
interfered with by those who had property. By private
property, Proudhon meant the ability to enjoy monopoly
and privilege. Proudhon was not against private property-
his famous statement that "property is robbery" simply
meant that privilege was robbery, that property had come
to mean not only mere possession but monopoly privileges.
The private property of privilege called forth and
commanded the State and the government and, in order
actually to establish free competition, free trade, and free
contract, the government itself, instrument of privilege and
monopoly must be abolished.
This fear of privilege and monopoly, so characteristic of the

middle class, was the essence of Proudhon's Anarchism. Its
progressive element was his hatred for the growing large-
scale bourgeoisie whose chief instrument was the State and
government. Its reactionary element was his hatred for the
proletariat and for revolutionary socialism. His attempt to
purge capitalism of its "evils" forced him to flounder,
hopelessly entangled in his own contradictions.
By this time, the bourgeoisie had also turned to "socialism."

The utopian Socialists (Owenites, Saint-Simonians) were
criticizing strongly the present competitive capitalist
system, and urging the peaceful end of competition
through widespread co-operation of the workers. Peaceful
co-operation would be able to conquer monopoly privilege.
The co-operative movement would regenerate the workers,
give them jobs, and move the world to socialism. Nor
would such a movement necessarily be forced to disdain
the State; it could even call upon the State to grant it
330
subsidies so that it could be launched properly and put
upon a firm basis. Such was the proposal of Louis Blanc, for
example.
The bourgeoisie had won power in the name of "liberty"

and in the interests of all humanity. Why should not the
appeal be made to the bourgeoisie to change the system so
that humanity should really benefit and "liberty" really be
obtained? Alas, the revolution of 1848 put an end to all
naive illusions! The French government took up the plans
of Louis Blanc only to use Blanc to behead the revolution.
According to Louis Blanc, the State was to control
production, organize social workshops, and end
competition. The shops themselves were not to be owned
by the State, but were to be established through loans, the
State merely to guarantee the interest. Instead, the French
bourgeois government organized National Workshops in
which the unemployed were put to work in unproductive
enterprises and in which the government tried to win over
the unemployed as a governmental paid force against the
rest of the workers generally. The formation of these
governmental shops was for the sole purpose of
discrediting the whole idea of socialization and co-
operation, and was part of the government's own counter-
revolutionary program.
The petty bourgeoisie completely swallowed these utopian

proposals to end competition while allowing private
property to remain in the means of production. They thus
showed themselves incapable of emancipating themselves
from the ideology of the bourgeoisie. On all sides they were
beginning to realize (with Louis Blanc and Proudhon) that
competition was leading to monopoly. And they wept over
their impending ruin. (*6) The way out was to end
monopoly and the way to end monopoly was, economically,
331
through the formation of mutual voluntary co-operative
efforts, and politically, through the end of all privileges and
the abolition of all government which could be only the
instrument of privilege.
Typical of these petty bourgeois, Proudhon saw the key to

the economic structure of society not in the productive
process but in the process of distribution and of circulation.
The chief enemy was the banks, and the chief task was to
destroy the monopoly of banking. This was easy to
proclaim in a country where the factories were not large
and the dominant ruling clique was made up of the
financial elements of the country. To blame finance and
money and not capitalism generally was peculiarly
appropriate for the Frenchmen at this time.
In order to counter the banking monopoly, Proudhon

advocated "free banking." Instead of the State's giving the
right solely to certain individuals to issue the circulating
medium, Proudhon affirmed the unlimited right of each
individual to issue notes on the basis of the goods that he
might have and to use these notes as currency. Proudhon's
plan consisted of the formation of an Exchange Bank which
would issue notes equal to the value of the goods turned in,
notes which would circulate as far as possible as currency.
Because each person could get unlimited credit by the
simple means of giving his goods as security, Proudhon
thought in this way the "little man" could rid himself of that
nightmare, interest; with the abolition of interest would fall
rent and profit, as well. Thus the class struggle would be
liquidated peacefully.
The question would arise, of course, how to arrive at an

estimate of the value of the goods turned in by each person ?
If goods were to sell at their value, according to Proudhon,
who, following Ricardo and the utopian Socialists, defined
332
value as labor, then one would have to find out how many
hours of labor the goods cost and pay in notes that would
enable the person to buy goods worth an equivalent
number of hours. Thus every man's labor time would equal
every other man's labor time. Here, then, was a scheme, like
the scheme of Robert Owen and the other utopians, of
doing away with money or the monopoly of money, and
substituting, instead of the hard reality of gold and silver,
the paper dreams of labor notes.
It is precisely the advance of capitalism, the rise of big

industry over backward inefficient industry, that constantly
brings home the lesson to the little fellow that his days are
numbered, that his hard arduous toil does not equal the toil
of other far more efficient organizations embodied in large
corporations and trusts. Big industry crowds out little
industry. Little industry cries out in pain; it strives to
prevent the victory of monopoly, that is, the squeezing out
of the little fellow by the stronger big fellow; it denounces
privilege and declares that "competition must be preserved
at all costs." Gold becomes the root of all evil, and it is the
cross of gold that must be destroyed. Certainly, the little
fellow is crucified upon the cross of gold, but to destroy
gold as the measure of value or as the medium of
circulation would be to destroy the commodity market
itself, and to destroy the market would be to destroy
capitalism. To try to retain capitalism and yet destroy the
market, this was the Sisyphus task attempted by the
utopians.
To make every man's hour equal to every other man's hour

would be to destroy competition; there would be then no
way for one person to underbid or to undersell another and
thus win the market for himself. If each person could obtain
money or credit notes equal to money for the articles that
333
he possessed, without the necessity of selling them, then it
would follow that any person could manufacture anything
and, so long as it cost labor to create it, he could demand
recompense for it. Only through the anarchy of the market,
however, do independent producers become aware that
society has produced a surfeit of this or that article. The
fluctuations of the market, the hectic price ranges, the
feverish prosperity and panics, these are the only
instruments by means of which society as a whole can
ascertain whether it should change to this or that
productive process. This anarchy of the market, which is
the decisive social regulator under capitalism, presupposes
that before individual labor is able to become socially
necessary labor, the goods embodying this labor must be
sold and sold for the universal equivalent, the social
measure of all value, i.e., money, gold.
The utopia of Proudhon was the cry of the French petty

bourgeois for an "ordered capitalism," an "ordered"
competition, a capitalist world without the economic chaos
which was leading to the political and social upheavals
which the petty bourgeois feared and hated and by which
he realized he would be destroyed.
In Proudhon's ideal system, all were petty bourgeois and all

petty bourgeois were successful and secure. Just as the
proletariat declares that under socialism all will be workers
and thus the class struggle will be abolished, so did the
Anarchist declare all will be petty owners and thus the class
struggle ended. Proudhon here is but the logical
continuator of the Enrages, Jacobins gone mad.
All were to be individual owners. Following this line,

Proudhon was led to attack absentee landlordism and to
propose the taking over of land not actually used. Not that
Proudhon stood for expropriation without compensation.
334
On the contrary he advocated payment to the owners of the
full value of the land, the value to be calculated by
assuming that the rent collected annually equaled five per
cent of the total value. (*7)
To Proudhon, the real representative of the laboring class

was the individual producer; in his fight to prevent the
individual owner's being crowded from his shop or farm,
Proudhon thought he was fighting for labor as a whole.
This was understandable in a country where the proletariat
was small, where the laborer in fact was the handicraftsman,
the artisan, that is, an individual possessor to a large degree.
And it is true, as we have seen, that the proletariat was
intimately allied to that group which was so much the
larger mass in the continental countries, the petty bourgeois.
Further, no one could help but be impressed with the hard
toil that the individual small property holder had to expend
constantly in order to retain his property. However, instead
of realizing that the small property holder's day was done,
Proudhon and Anarchists of his type believed that they
could reverse the wheels of progress so as to transform both
proletariat and trustified capital into the little industry and
shop once again.
Picturing the hard-working petty proprietor of France,

especially the farmer, Proudhon naturally attacked the
Communists for wanting to socialize the means of
production. In all of their programs, the Communists had
drawn a sharp distinction between the means of production
and the product, and had declared that not the latter but
only the former was capital. Proudhon, like the French
peasant, however, asserted that the product was also capital;
thus he was forced into the definition of Adam Smith that
capital is only stored-up labor and does not involve the
element of exploitation.
335
In his defense of the individual owner, Proudhon had to
make a severe attack against all associations. Trade unions
were anathema to him. Strikes should not be permitted.
Proudhon developed the thought that no permanent gain
could accrue to strikers from striking, since a wage increase
would simply mean that general prices would rise to take
up the increased costs. Proudhon had no conception of the
fact that the interests of capital and labor are antagonistic,
that profit comes from unpaid labor, the unpaid product of
the laborer, and that the more the worker is paid, generally
speaking, and all other basic conditions remaining the same,
the smaller will be the profit. While opposed to trade
unions, Proudhon preached the organization of voluntary
co-operatives and of mutual aid; he constantly stressed as
the only tolerable associations, co-operatives among the
producers, city and country, and free banking credit
schemes for the possessor generally.
Attacking the proletariat, attacking monopoly, Proudhon

was led to attack all authority, whether autocratic,
democratic, or communistic. As for democracy and
universal suffrage, he wrote, "What need have I of proxies,
any more than of representatives?" "I reject all presumptive
authority, all indirect solutions; I recognize no star-chamber;
I desire to negotiate directly individually, for myself;
universal suffrage is in my eyes nothing but a lottery." (*8)
The rise of the proletariat and the terrible June Days had
frightened the petty bourgeois, and we can understand
Proudhon's fear of democracy. He realized that from now
on democracy would be only an arena for the intensified
fighting of the historic social classes. Furthermore, just at
this time democracy had given way to Napoleon III, who,
peculiarly enough, had become dictator and Emperor
precisely through the mechanism of democracy and the
336
mandate of the people. In the light of the ignominious end
of the revolutions of 1848, it was natural for Proudhon to
lose faith in the people themselves and in the possibility of
democracy as a progressive type of State.
Proudhon was no revolutionist. What he wanted was the

peaceful suppression one after the other of all functions of
government. In a letter to Marx, May 17, 1846, he confesses
his antipathy to revolution and his desire to fight it. (*9)
After the revolution of 1848 was definitely over and
Napoleon III had taken the helm, Proudhon turned more
and more to the Right. He became a Mutualist, preaching
voluntary co-operation in economics and federalism in
politics. His idea of "ordered Anarchism," he confessed, was
but an ideal which could not be realized; and the next best
goal was local autonomy. So Proudhon, like Godwin,
constantly seeking "justice" and finding it in the middle
class, degenerated into the mere Liberal- Radical. And here
we must leave him. (*10)
Footnotes
1. Proudhon born 1809, died 1865. He wrote What is

Property? (1840-1841), Philosophy of Misery (1846), and other
works.
2. See Y. Lu: The Political Theories of P. J. Proudhon, p. 21
3. Karl Marx: Class Struggles in France, p. 155 and following.

(Henry Kuhn translation, 1924.)
4. See Karl Marx: Revolution and Counter-Revolution.

Friedrich Engels wrote most of this.
5. This quotation and the preceding ones are from Karl

Marx's "Address to the Communist League (March, 1850),"
reprinted in pamphlet form under the heading Two
337
Speeches and also to be found in Labour Monthly, Vol. III, No.
2 (September, 1922).
6. Or as Proudhon put it: "I have wept over the poor

workman, whose daily bread is already sufficiently
uncertain and who has now suffered misery for many
years. .. . . I have mourned over the bourgeois, whose ruin I
have witnessed and who has been driven to bankruptcy
and goaded to opposition of the proletariat. My personal
inclination is to sympathize with the bourgeois but a
natural antagonism to his ideas and the play of
circumstances have made me his opponent." (See Gide and
Rist: History of Economic Doctrines, p. 307.)
7. P. J. Proudhon- General Idea of the Revolution in the

Nineteenth Century, pp. 194-197.
8. The same, pp. 140-141.
9. See Gide and Rist, work cited, p. 320, footnote.
10. "Nevertheless his attacks on religion, the church, etc.,

ere of great merit in his own country at a time when the
French socialists thought it desirable to show by their
religiosity how superior they were to the bourgeois
Voltaireanism of the eighteenth century and the German
godlessness of the nineteenth. If Peter the Great defeated
Russian barbarism by barbarity, Proudhon did his best to
defeat French phrasemongering by phrases. His work on
the coup d’etat, in which he flirts with Louis Bonaparte and,
in fact, strives to make him palatable to the French workers,
and his last work, written against Poland, in which for the
greater glory of the tsar he expresses the most imbecile
cynicism, must be characterized as not merely bad but base
productions; of a baseness which corresponds, however, to
the petty bourgeois point of view." (The Correspondence of
338
Marx and Engels (International Edition), p. 175.) If Louis
Bonaparte was Napoleon, Proudhon was Rousseau-Voltaire.
X. AMERICAN LIBERAL-ANARCHISM
THE classic land for the efflorescence and experimentations

of bourgeois Liberal-Anarchism was America. If bourgeois
Anarchism called for free land, free capital, free labor, and
free exchange, what country could appear more favorable
than the United States? (*1) Indeed, in a country where
Liberalism could afford to appear as Radicalism, could
there be a sharp line drawn between Liberalism and
Liberal- Anarchism? The conditions of American life not
only had forced men into a certain pattern of individualism,
but had also compelled them to idealize this individualism
and to make it an end in itself. It was in the United States
that the development of State versus Individual had
reached its sharpest point. Liberalism and Liberal-
Anarchism could well blend into one another.
With Godwin, Anarchism had been argued for social

reasons, for the welfare of society. With Stirner, Anarchism
had been turned into more philistine egotism under a
metaphysical guise. With the Americans, Anarchism turned
practical and was actually put to work as a doctrine of
individualism. Anarchism became the very apotheosis of
individualism. Its credo was the "Sovereignty of the
Individual," a sovereignty which was being encroached
upon by State, Law, and Government. Significantly enough,
only after the first real capitalist economic crisis did
Liberalism begin to feel the need to turn into Liberal-
Anarchism. The devastating crisis of 1837 which caused
such acute distress was the first sign that America would
not escape the cataclysms of Europe and that the "little
339
man" here, too --- and America had been the classic happy
hunting ground of the "little man" for so long a time --- was
doomed to go. With the first pinch of world competition,
the petty bourgeoisie began to fear that their labor
inevitably would be deemed inefficient and that they
themselves were destined to become discarded. This
realization only drove them all the more to attempt to
defend whatever "sovereignty" was left to them, namely,
the sovereignty of individualism.
Among the very first theoreticians of the sovereignty of the

individual was Stephen Pearl Andrews (*2) who deduced
his conclusions from a study of "Natural Law." In his case,
this meant a study of the actual wilderness and the natural
forces around him. To him, "The doctrine of the Sovereignty
of the individual---in one sense itself a principle---grows
out of the still more fundamental principle of Individuality,
which pervades universal nature. Individuality is positively
the most fundamental and universal principle which the
finite mind seems capable of discovering, and the best
image of the infinite." (*3) Thus individuality became the
essential law of order, conformity became absolutely
impossible, and all government would have to pass away.
To support individualism by the Law of Individuality in
Nature---could anyone have done this better than an
American?
It is to this same type of Anarchism that Thoreau adhered.

As a profound naturalist, a true son of this immense
continent where sheriffs and police of the State had only
just now set foot and defiled the land, or so it seemed,
Thoreau could not fail to be impressed with the smallness
of society as compared with the vastness of nature. Not
only in comparison with geography but also in comparison
with the individual, the State seemed insignificant. The
340
individual had existed before the State, was suffering under
the State; his soul, as the concrete embodiment of the
infinite, the State would never possess.
America, be it remembered, was a land of abundance. Any

man expert in the wiles of nature could prosper easily,
provided he was let alone. Thoreau could manage. A
skilled mechanic and naturalist, Thoreau did not have to
work hard to live. Why should he work, then, for others?
What duty did he owe to others? Why should he pay
allegiance to the State and submit to all the horrible crimes
which he could see so clearly the State was committing
upon the people? Like Walt Whitman, he represented the
care-free spirit of American youth. In his own Liberal-
Anarchistic way he declared war upon the State.
He turned over the following statement to the selectmen of

his town: "Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry
Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any
incorporated society which I have not joined." (*4) "I simply
wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and
stand aloof from it effectually.... In fact, I quietly declare
war with the State, after my fashion, though I still make
what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in
such cases." (*5)
An open declaration of war against the State! Not with the

bomb and not through revolution, but only through
withdrawal not only from the State but from wicked society
as well. A voluntary poverty, a voluntary asceticism,
reducing his standards to that of the Indian, marked his
life, .not because he desired to immolate himself to a cause
or believed in asceticism for itself, but because he had
turned partly Indian, because he had reverted to "primitive
man" and was in that unique situation where Rousseau's
"Back to Nature" and primitiveness actually could be both
341
idealized and practiced. Thoreau's Anarchism was
accomplished through renunciation, through pacifism,
through running away from the struggle. This was no
cowardly running away, however, but a deliberate retreat
into the wilds of that nature which he loved and to which
he was so thoroughly attuned. Thoreau was a high-type
example of the "American Savage." (*6)
And what country in the world would have treated this

declaration of ,war in the way Massachusetts did? There
was no howling of "subversive tendencies," there was no
campaign of destruction against the Anarchism which
Thoreau not only was talking but trying to live. It was with
the deepest regret that the sheriff jailed him for a day for
non-payment of taxes. And there were many friends to get
him out and to pay his tax for him, despite his protest. True,
the childlike Anarchism of Thoreau could not possibly be
harmful to American society; it was also true that the theory
of "Sovereignty of the Individual" had been embedded
entirely too long in the social consciousness for anyone in
this country to become excited over its enunciation and its
attempted practice.
Indeed, there was plenty of patriotic precedent for the

views of such Anarchism. The Liberal had declared: "The
best government is that which governs least." The Anarchist
merely added: "The best government, then, is no
government." The American Revolution had recognized,
both theoretically and practically, the Right of Revolution.
This implied the superiority of moral law to government;
and, using his conscience as his guide, Thoreau declared his
own revolution. The American Revolution, then, was the
great inspiration for early American Anarchism! Nay, more.
Anarchism could be said to stem from the early settlers
themselves. Were not Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and Mary
342
Dwyer in the seventeenth century perhaps the first
Anarchistic persons to set foot upon this country? And
what of the Quakers? In the nineteenth century, American
Liberal-Anarchism simply broke its religious ties and
stepped out in its own right.
Thoreau's love of nature and his advocacy of Anarchist

doctrine was far more than an accidental combination. Just
as, in America, Nature took the place of society and
"freedom" meant nature, as "restraint" meant State and
Society, so have many Anarchists proved that their hatred
of the State was really the hatred of artificial society and but
another side of their love of nature. Between certain types
of American Anarchists and "Friends of Nature" there is
very little difference.
The American Thoreau thus was quite different from the

Englishman Godwin who was living in a far more
developed society. The Englishman had ridiculed the
rationalization of "Natural Rights" and "Natural Law"; the
Americans, like Thoreau, were still using the
argumentations and the beliefs of the eighteenth century.
The Englishman had carefully separated the concept of
society from that of State and government; with Thoreau,
society itself had disappeared and only the naked
individual remained in all his "sovereignty." Both Thoreau
and Godwin stemmed from Liberalism, but how different
were their Liberalisms! As different as the English
bourgeois was from the American. Here, again, we see that
Anarchism or at least Liberal-Anarchism was but the
negative shadow that a solid bourgeois Liberal world was
casting before it in its march.
The Anarchism of Thoreau, however, soon came into

collision with the great forces leading to the American Civil
War. He had opposed the Mexican War and had been
343
against the institution of slavery, and, as the conflict of the
Civil War became to all thinking persons more and more
inevitable, Thoreau took his side with the Abolitionists.
Prior to the civil War, he had written "On Civil
Disobedience." Now he wrote, "But, to speak practically
and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-
government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but
AT ONCE a better government," (*7) and in his plea for
Captain John Brown he wrote: "I do not wish to kill nor to
be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both
these things would be by me unavoidable." (*8) Just as in
many a critical moment Liberalism turned conservative, so
did American Liberal- Anarchism turn into Liberal
governmentalism.
The struggle of the Abolitionists taught Thoreau that he

could not run away from society nor the struggle. And
while he could write, "The remembrance of my country
spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State and
involuntarily go plotting against her," yet did he defend
that State in its struggle against chattel slavery. (*9)
Native Americans never were able to break away from this

basic approach. Even in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, Lysander Spooner could reach the conclusion,
from a study of eternal "Natural Law" (*10) and the "Science
of justice," that all legislation whatsoever is an absurdity, a
usurpation and a crime. From the Liberal institution of trial
by jury Spooner could deduce that the trial by jury gives the
right of each person to evade the law and that the jury as
the palladium of liberty is the stronghold of the minority
against the tyranny of the majority.
344
In America, as in France, there was developed a mutualist
or rather a co-operative Anarchism. However, different
from the French, the Americans not only had evolved a
theory of a future state of society; they began to practice
what they believed. Further, in contradistinction to
Proudhon's bank, the voluntary co-operation of the
Americans had nothing whatever to do with the State.
Finally, the whole orientation of the mutualism of the
Americans was entirely distinct from that of the French.
The French, driven as they were by the evil effects of
competitive capitalism, had turned to mutualism. The petty
bourgeoisie, seeing the handwriting on the wall, were in
this manner attempting to strike back. At all times, and in
spite of Proudhon, the mutualism of Proudhon yet spoke in
the name of the French Nation and allied itself with those
forces which could not help but be considered subversive in
French bourgeois society.
Nothing at all like this was apparent in the practical

panaceas of Americans like Josiah Warren. (*11) In America
the sky, not the dungeon, was the limit. Josiah Warren was
simply an unterrified democrat who carried democracy to
its logical conclusions in the name of "Sovereignty of the
Individual" and who believed that the individual was so far
superior to the State that the State was not necessary.
Whereas Proudhon was forced to struggle against the
powers that be, Warren was simply building an utopia, one
of the many that were being constructed at that time. This
utopia was to illustrate that America was the cure for all the
ills of Europe, was a country where inventions and patents
which developed so freely in other sciences could arise in
social science as well. Warren was an inventor, and
America was known for its great inventors. Why could not
Americans invent mechanical social schemes as well?
345
With Proudhon, Anarchism evolved from below as a result
of the pressure from above. With Warren, Anarchism arose
as a result of lack of pressure from the State and
government. In France the mass of agrarians were
oppressed. In America, they were controlling the West and
the frontiers and wished to make their interests dominate
forever. In France the petty bourgeoisie had never tasted
power; in Western America, they were in power. America
itself had become the petty bourgeois utopia, giving hope
to all. French Anarchism was the antithesis of French
tyranny and English victories of the market; American
Anarchism was but the development of individualism to
the highest point because there was no force capable of
restraining it. That is why Americans like Warren could
attempt to put into practice peacefully what Proudhon
could have hoped to accomplish in France only through
revolution.
And yet, just as there was much in common between the

French and American agrarian, so was there considerable in
common between Warren and Proudhon. Both identified
labor with the agrarian toiler or handicraftsman who,
although a petty owner, worked directly at his own means
and tools of production. And if both wanted labor to come
into its own, it was because labor to them was the petty
bourgeois toiler and not the wage earner. Since to both
labor was the measure of price, the main question was how
to regulate affairs so that laborers would not be cheated and
the petty bourgeois toiler really would receive the
equivalent in price for his labor embodied in his goods. To
both, the problems became how to insure the freedom of
competition and to guarantee equal exchanges.
Both Proudhon and Warren stood against monopoly in

money, land, tariffs, and patents; against both, naturally
346
enough, stood the monopoly in money. But whereas, to
Proudhon, the oppression of the poor was symbolized in
the Bank of France, which he advocated transforming, with
the help of the State, into the People's Bank of Exchange, to
Warren the monopoly that most affected him was the
monopoly of the merchant in the rural communities, the
merchant who paid the lowest price for farm goods and
charged the farmer the highest price possible for
manufactured goods in return. In this period of American
History, in the West especially, not finance capital nor even
industrial capital was the dominant factor, but merchant
capital. (This situation, of course, changed after the Civil
War.) Warren's struggle, therefore, was primarily in the
sphere of circulation and more specifically against the
monopoly of the merchant.
With this in mind, Warren brought forth his social

invention. This was in the form of a "Time Store" or "Equity
Store" where goods were to be sold at cost, plus the time of
the trader to be paid for by the time of the buyer. Western
rural life had been familiar with exchange by barter, and
many country stores had adopted a system whereby
trappers and farmers could bring in their products and
exchange them for different products equivalent in value.
(*12)
Warren's Equity Store, therefore, was really nothing but a

project designed to carry further an old American practice
born of necessity. The peculiar feature of Warren's
experiment, however, was that the store was to issue labor
notes for goods received, and the possessor of these notes
could buy any goods similarly marked in the store. This
was to put into effect Robert Owen's "Labor Notes" scheme
to establish justice and equity and to do away with money.
Indeed, Warren had been in the Robert Owen colony of
347
"New Harmony" but had objected to its rigid suppression
of the individual, its lack of initiative and responsibility.
Instead of a communistic utopia, Warren established on the
very site of New Harmony his own Anarchist utopia. If
Owen was the pale bourgeois reflection of the needs of the
proletariat, Warren was their extreme antithesis.
The Equity Stores which Warren stimulated, operated for

some time and, having been successful with a store, Warren
branched out with an utopian colony. This was an
individualistic form of co-operation that could attract many,
and which was different from the phalanstaries of Fourier
or the communistic experiments of Owen and others. "Each
owned his house and land, and by mutual understanding
political authority was dispensed with. None felt
responsible for the behavior of his neighbors, and only
aggressive or invasive conduct was resented by combined
action." (*13) Alas, however, these fine utopian colonies
failed and, by the time of the great panic of 1857, the great
invention of Warren and his colony, founded on his system
of the Sovereignty of the Individual, had come to an end.
In spite of his mutualism, Warren was far nearer to

Liberalism than to the Anarchism of Proudhon. His
denunciation of government was simply an extreme
formulation of typical American Liberalism, and his reason
for opposition to government was the belief that "There is
no service undertaken by government that could not be
more efficiently and more economically performed by
associated or individual effort....." This was rugged
individualism running rampant indeed.
Warren opined, "A piece of land set apart for each person
who desires it, is I think, the first step in Civilization; and
the undisturbed and exclusive control of it is as necessary to
Security of Condition as the land itself." With such an idea
348
it was natural that Warren should have fought the slogan:
"restore all existing wealth to its proper owners."
Warren did not conceive the world as clash and conflict, or,
if he did, he wanted, like Thoreau, to run away from such a
world --- especially since the vast expanse of America could
allow him to do that temporarily, at least. To the bourgeois
socialists of the time, the problem of life was to achieve
harmony. Communism meant harmony and harmony was
the aim of life. Warren sincerely believed that he could
secure the harmonious results aimed at by the Communism
of a Robert Owen through "equity" and individualism.
Bourgeois individualistic Anarchism lasted throughout the

nineteenth century in the United States, although by the
third quarter of the century it had given way in Europe to
Communist Anarchism. The leading disciple of this old
Liberal-Anarchism was Benjamin R. Tucker (*14) who,
however, could not preserve the naive freshness of Thoreau
or Warren. Tucker's ideas were but the counterpart of those
of Herbert Spencer, whose disciple Tucker was. If Warren
was an "unterrified Jeffersonian," Tucker was a dauntless
Spencerian, following pure "science" as the former followed
practical utopias.
"The Anarchists are not only utilitarians, but egoists in the

farthest and fullest sense." (*15) With this as his credo,
Tucker came out for free banking, for free trade, for free
land, land going only to the user, for capitalism and against
all patent rights, for free love, and the abolition of any
external will over the individual. Government was but "the
subjection of the non-evasive individual to a will not his
own." (*16)
349
"Nor does the Anarchistic scheme furnish any code of
morals to be imposed upon the individual. 'Mind your own
business' is its own moral law. Interference with another's
business is a crime and the only crime, and as such may be
properly resisted. In accordance with this view the
Anarchists look upon attempts to arbitrarily suppress vice
as in themselves crimes. They believe liberty and the
resultant social well-being to be a sure cure for all vices. But
they recognize the right of the drunkard, the gambler, the
rake and the harlot to live their lives until they shall freely
choose to abandon them." (*17) "Anarchism implies the
right of an individual to stand aside and see a man
murdered or a woman raped." (*18)
By the time of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

bourgeois Anarchism had a value only as a weapon against
Communism. Against the government Tucker did not wish
to use force for, according to him, violence would not
accomplish its purpose. As against the Liberal (and the
Tolstoyan-Anarchist) theory of non-resistance to State
taxation on the one hand, and the Communist theory of the
overthrow of capitalism by force, Tucker opposed his ideas
of passive resistance.
The real method of Anarchists was declared to be defying

tax collection and inaugurating general passive resistance.
"An insurrection is easily quelled; but no army is willing or
able to train its guns on inoffensive people who do not even
gather in the streets but stay at home and stand back on
their rights." (*19) Tucker, while opposed to force employed
against the government, was also against the use of the
ballot, since he was also against democracy as a State. To
him, neither the ballot nor the bayonet was to play any part
in the coming struggle.
350
But his attitude towards the workers was quite different.
Labor must not make extravagant claims. The job,
according to him, was to end monopoly, although
Anarchism did not want any anti-trust legislation, but if,
monopoly ended, "any laborers shall interfere with the
rights of their employers, or shall use force upon
inoffensive 'scabs,' or shall attack their employers'
watchmen, whether these be Pinkerton detectives, sheriff's
deputies, or the State militia, I pledge myself that, as an
Anarchist and in consequence of my Anarchistic faith, I will
be among the first to volunteer as a member of a force to
repress these disturbers of order and, if necessary, sweep
them from the earth." (*20) Gone was the peaceful language,
now. Beneath the formula of "Anarchism" was revealed the
frightened white-collar scab, ready to turn vigilante.
Tucker, like Proudhon, but without Proudhon's French

environment, was bitterly opposed to unions as a form of
monopoly, and, therefore, was in constant struggle against
the later development of Anarchism known as Communist-
Anarchism and its offspring, Anarcho-Syndicalism. Against
Communism and against the Communist-Anarchism of
Kropotkin, Tucker advertised his "Anarchistic Socialism."
Note the use of the term "Socialism." By this time Tucker
had to put an end to the identity of state and society and
the criticism against both which Anarchists such as Thoreau
had conducted. Tucker now spoke of the value of a society
(and thus of a form of "Socialism") where the aim was "Not
to abolish wages but to make every man dependent upon
wages, and secure to every man his WHOLE wages. . . ."
(*21)
According to Tucker, "liberty" was to be obtained not

because it was a natural right but because it was the mother
of order, while the State was the mother of violence, even
351
when the State was run by the majority. His break from
natural rights showed the influence of Spencer and also
showed that America had grown up since the Civil War.
But to appeal to Anarchism as the mother of order made
Tucker the ideal bourgeois Anarchist.
Between his "Anarchistic Socialism" and Karl Marx's

Communism, Tucker found the following oppositions:
Marx's Socialism was communistic and dictatorial; it was
metaphysical (that is Hegelian) and dogmatic, emotional
and destructive; Tucker's Socialism, on the other hand, was
solidaritarian (mutual banking), libertarian, positive and
scientific (in the sense of Spencerianism), reflective and
constructive. Communism wanted happiness for all;
Anarchism wanted each to be happy in his own way.
Under Communism there would be a State (proletarian
dictatorship) which would have special rights, where
monopoly would be the rule and where a class will would
dominate. Under Anarchism, the State would be merely an
association; there would be no sovereign, no monopolies,
no classes. Communists advocated revolution, Anarchists
declared that violence was useless; while the Anarchist
pointed out that repression alone turned evolution into
revolution, Marxism put forth its faith in cataclysms.
Tuckerism called for social progress by the free play of
individual efforts. Under Communism, all would be
proletarians without property; under Anarchism all would
be proprietors. Despotism, governmental control, and social
war, under Communism, all would give way to liberty, self-
control, and peace, under Anarchism. If Communism stood
for equality by lowering heads that were too high,
Anarchism would create equality by raising heads which
were too low; if Communism would bring equality through
the common yoke, Anarchism would achieve equality
through liberty; if under Communism everyone was to be
352
supported, under Anarchism everyone was to support
himself. Communism demanded that resources, tools, and
products go to the State. Anarchism raised the slogan: land
to the cultivator, mine to the miner, tool to the laborer,
product to the producer. Thus, while Communism was
intolerant and frightening, Anarchism was tolerant and
reassuring. Such was Tucker's analysis.
Like Tucker's bourgeois Anarchism, the Mutualist

movement that still drags along in America, also has as its
chief function the struggle against Communism. "The
Mutualist standards are: INDIVIDUAL: Equal freedom for
each-without invasion of others. ECONOMIC:
Untrammeled reciprocity, implying freedom of exchange
and contract---without monopoly or privilege. SOCIAL:
Complete freedom of voluntary association---without
coercive organization." (*22) As against the method of strike
they would use the boycott, against insurrection, the means
of passive resistance; for the seizure of government, they
would substitute utopian colonies where their mutual
banking schemes could be carried out. Their article of faith
on the matter of property reads: "One of the tests of any
reform movement with regard to personal liberty is this:
Will the movement prohibit or abolish private property? If
it does, it is an enemy of liberty. For one of the most
important criteria of freedom is the right to private
property in the products of ones labor. State Socialists,
Communists, Syndicalists and Communist-Anarchists deny
private property." (*23) Up to this point and no further has
"native" American Anarchism advanced.
353
We are now ready to summarize the position of the early
Liberal-Anarchists. We have seen that Anarchism does not
mean anarchy or chaos, but that it is a social movement for
the abolition of all authority, of any power of coercion of
one person over another. Anarchism is anti-
authoritarianism and as such is outside the pale of
Liberalism, which has always recognized the need of the
State and some authority. While the Liberal would limit the
power of authority, the Anarchist would overthrow and
abolish it. Thus while the first may be deemed petty
bourgeois reformism, the second can be not more than
petty bourgeois revolutionism.
The early Anarchists, not yet broken from Liberalism, stood

on the basis of individual competition and agreed with the
slogan: "Each for himself and the devil take the hindmost";
nevertheless, they could not but view with alarm the fact
that they themselves were becoming the hindmost.
Competition was eliminating competition by breeding
monopoly. To prevent competition from destroying itself
was the task which the Anarchists set for themselves. The
existing capitalist competitive order means the rule of the
anarchy of the market. In this sense, indeed, Anarchism
does have some connection with anarchy. Under capitalist
competition there is no order, no plan, no authority in the
market to control it. The Liberal-Anarchists wished to
perpetuate this condition and idealized it. These very
people who were the first to feel themselves victims of this
rule of disorder were the first to fight, not against the
disorder, but against the rules. In the name of disorder and
free competition, what the Anarchist objected to was the
rules under which he was forced to play the game and
which dominated him. The first Anarchists did not disown
competition, but they objected to the fact that far from their
dominating competition, competition was authoritatively
354
dominating them. It was this rule, this authority, this power
which was driving them out, against which they so
strenuously protested.
Footnotes
1. See D. D. Lum: Economics of Anarchy.
2. Lived 1812-1886; wrote The True Constitution of

Government in the Sovereignty of the Individual, also called
the Science of Society.
3. Quoted by Sprading: Liberty and the Great

Libertarians (Anthology), pp. 236-237.
4. Works, X, 151, (Houghton Mifflin edition, 1893).
5. Works, X, 161-162. Compare the action of the town of

Cornwall, Connecticut, which ostensibly refused to enter
the Union after the Revolution.
6. As a civilized man, Thoreau reconciled his position

through an Orientalist philosophy. "My most essential
progress must be to me a state of absolute rest." (.Autumn, p.
122.) (Also see H. A. Snyder: Thoreau's Philosophy of Life with
Special Consideration of the Influence of Hindoo philosophy.)
Both in his retreat to the primitive (although to Thoreau this
meant the woods and not the farm lands) and in his dislike
of society, Thoreau resembles Tolstoy. Tolstoy, too,
declared against slavery of all kinds and that people should
not take part in government. As a decayed Russian Czarist
emissary, Tolstoy preached a pacifism that urged people
not to refuse to pay taxes and espoused a Christian love
that wanted to divert the rising revolutionary indignation
against the Russian aristocracy on the part of the peasantry
and workers into the care of vegetables.
355
7. Works, X, 133.
8. Works, X, 228.
9. Works, X. 195. Yet Emma Goldman, so-called

"revolutionary" Anarchist, could write in her
book, Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 62, that Henry Thoreau
was the greatest American Anarchist.
10. Lysander Spooner: Natural Law. See also his "Free

Political Institutions" which is an abridgement of his
work Trial by Jury.
11. Josiah Warren, who lived from 1798 to 1874, was the
first man to use the term "Sovereignty of the Individual,"
according to both J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer.
12. See E. C. Kirkland: History of American Economic Life, p.

95.
13. This and the following quotations are from William

Bailie: Josiah Warren, pp. 77, 104, 105, 130. At one time
Warren was editor of a paper, The Peaceful Revolutionist.
14. Born 1854 of Quaker parentage. Was editor of

paper, Liberty, from 1881 to 1908.
15. B. R. Tucker: Individual Liberty, p. 23. This book is an

abridged compilation of articles that had appeared in his
paper and had been originally published under the title
"Instead of a Book."
356
20. The Same, pp. 260-261.
21. The same, p. 263. Tucker was violently opposed to the

1905 Russian Revolution.
22. C. L. Swartz: What is Mutualism? p. 46.
23. The same, p. 194.
II COMMUNIST-ANARCHISM
XI. COLLECTIVIST-ANARCHISM
UP TO the time of the Revolution of 1848 it may be said

that Anarchism was chiefly a theoretical program and not a
mass movement. In each country it had arisen because of
different reasons and with different motives. Neither in
England, Germany, nor the United States did it attain a
mass base. What was toyed with theoretically in these two
European countries was toyed with practically in America.
Only in France did Anarchism develop into a mass
movement of some strength. And the reasons for this
situation are not hard to find.
Differing from Liberalism, Anarchism did not come into

being in those countries where capitalism was steadily on
the rise, conquering new markets, transforming little
business men into big business men, industrializing the
country, and, by means of social reforms, bribing sections of
the working class. On the contrary, Anarchism arose in
357
countries where the proletariat was not well developed,
where it was swamped by peasant and petty- economy
individualism, where the intellectual found himself choked,
where the nation was not expanding rapidly but rather was
stagnating or being pushed down into subordinate
positions in the international competition, where big
business men were losing their markets and little business
men, far from prospering, were being ruined by
competition. If Liberalism is the ideology of the hope of the
middle sections of the population, Anarchism is the
ideology of their desperation.
Even when Anarchism was not a mass movement, as in the

days of Godwin or of Stirner, it is noteworthy that when
these men were writing, England was in a life-and-death
struggle with the French Revolution, capitalism in France
had shown its tremendous and violently destructive force,
the middle classes in Germany were feeling the pressure of
international capital, and even in England the poverty and
misery that was being brought into existence by capitalism
was crying to heaven for vengeance. That is, even in those
countries growing like England, which were predominantly
Liberal, philosophical Anarchism could arise because the
dark sides of capitalism were becoming ever more apparent.
Of course, neither in England nor in the United States could
Anarchism flourish as a great social movement, since
tremendous advances were being made by these countries,
and only optimism and hope could prevail. In Germany,
Anarchism could not develop for the same reasons that
Liberalism could not develop. As Germany passed through
Liberalism it had to pass through Anarchism, its shadowy
counterpart.
In France, on the contrary, Anarchism appeared as but the

natural extension of Jacobinism, as the Commune had
358
appeared to the National Convention in 1794, and thus,
both as Jacobinism and in its own right, Anarchism had
played a role in the French Revolution and in the traditions
and life of the French nation. Further, by the middle of the
nineteenth century, France was developing its industrial life
at a sharp pace. The whole nation was now conscious of its
backwardness as compared to England, how much power
victorious competition could have achieved, and how little
competition actually had brought. English goods, English
factories, were battering down the French on the industrial
field as American grain was battering down the French
farmer on the agricultural. France, essentially a nation of
small proprietors, had to fight for the life of the small
proprietor both against big capital within the country and
against international competition.
The Revolution of 1848 witnessed two great events. In the

first place, it categorically demanded throughout Europe
that the small proprietor take the lead in the revolutions to
wipe out the remnants of feudalism. So far as middle
Europe was concerned, there was no other class that could
possibly do this. Therein lay the necessity for the petty
bourgeoisie to develop a theory that would idealize the
small man and restrain monopoly. Anarchism was the
extreme reflection of its necessity.
The fact is that the petty bourgeoisie everywhere failed

miserably to fulfill its mission. Cowardly it left the fighting
to the workers in the city and itself pitifully ran away. Thus
it could not but feel itself bankrupt. Anarchism was the
reflection of its hopeless plight. Oppressed by the
contradictions of capitalism and wanting to halt the forces
which were ruining them, in the absence of a strong
proletariat, these petty bourgeois elements could only
359
embrace an Anarchism which, at first individualist, more
and more turned into a collectivist type.
In the second place, at least in France, the proletariat not

only supported the middle class but boldly took the
leadership from the lower proprietors, and enunciating
their communistic and socialistic theories, actually stormed
the existing government and made an attempt for power.
Here was a new class, a class that was not only against the
big bourgeoisie but also against all forms of private
property in the means of production. The lower middle
classes, while in part allied to the proletariat, had to shrink
from it and to separate themselves from the workers.
Insofar as the petty bourgeoisie had to lean upon the
workers for support, it could turn to collectivism; insofar as
the workers actually took the lead and forced the middle
class in their train, its Anarchism would be required to
include communistic tendencies (and this is what actually
developed in France); but insofar as the proletarian
attempted to abolish all private property, he was forced to
enter into opposition to the petty bourgeoisie, and
Anarchism was compelled to engage in a bitter struggle
with revolutionary Communism.
The Revolution of 1848 proved to be the swan song of the

petty bourgeoisie, as a leading force. As the masses were
constrained to break sharply from the bourgeoisie, Liberal
Anarchism disappeared as hopeless, able to attract only a
few literati and "philosophers." In France, the masses, now
opposed to capitalism as it was developing, were impelled
to include in their Anarchism a hostile and collective
character. Certain elements, hoping to outflank capitalism,
thought that success lay in the co-operative movement.
These groups merely echoed such theories as were being
expressed by those then engaged in the Liberal Rochdale
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co-operative experimentation nursing the co-operatives of
England into life, or in the similar movements in Germany
and in France. Other groups moving closer to the
proletariat imparted to their Anarchism a communistic and
insurrectionary color.
Throughout the whole period from 1848 to 1871 the lower

middle class still labored under the delusion that it
was the class of the nation and that all other groups had to
rally 'round it and support it. The Paris Commune of 1871
marked the definite end of this period. From then on
everyone knew that it was the proletariat and the
proletariat alone that could challenge the ruling class and
end the destructive effects of the capitalist system. The
petty bourgeoisie was now forced to rely openly upon the
working class, to enter the workers' ranks and to try to give
the toiling masses the impress of its own interests and
ideology. It was when Communist-Anarchism penetrated
the ranks of the working class that Anarchism was able to
reach its highest influence in Anarcho-Syndicalism. And in
entering into the ranks of the proletariat, Anarchism was
able to capitalize heavily upon the opportunist sins of the
more privileged sections of the workers.
France foreshadowed the history of other countries. There

were other countries that were becoming capitalistic and
yet were being choked by capitalism; there were other lands
where the petty bourgeoisie was being driven into
desperate action against the ruling class and in masses were
entering the Anarchist movement. If Anarchism has
remained prominent in such countries as Italy, Spain, the
Balkans, Latin-America, etc. (and to some extent has arisen
even in India and China) this has been because these
countries have not developed basically beyond the 1848-
1871 stage. There the proletariat is still relatively
361
insufficient and is swamped by a petty bourgeois ideology
and movement which are all the closer to it as the petty
bourgeoisie itself becomes more revolutionary.
The collapse of the Revolution of 1848 marked a complete

change of front on the part of Anarchism. The advance of
the proletariat and the institution of the Communist
movement had shown the middle class that either it must
end its revolutionary career or ally itself closely to the
workers. However, the workers had received a crushing
defeat in the June Days. It had become crystal clear that if
the workers fought alone they could not hope to win,
especially in such countries as France where they were but
a minority of the population. 1848 proved with iron logic
the necessity of a close alliance between workers and petty
bourgeois elements. But within this alliance who should
lead? All tradition and history stood on the side of the
middle class, peasantry, handicraftsman, plebeians who
had fought in so many revolutions since 1789. It was
natural, therefore, for the French to conclude that in this
alliance the petty bourgeoisie must still have the dominant
voice. At least, this was the opinion of many intellectuals
and of the petty bourgeoisie itself, and was backed up by
sections of workers who had only just emerged from the
country into the city or from handicrafts into industry, or
who, with the advance of capitalism, had been petty
bourgeois themselves but recently turned proletarian.
In France contrary to England, certain sections of the

working class with little difficulty could become receptive
to anarchist tendencies. They could be highly skilled
workers and handicraftsman whose conditions under
capitalism were growing worse steadily. Or they might be
workers in certain stagnant branches of luxury industry
362
catering to the whims of the wealthy where production was
on a small individual scale. Or they might be store clerks,
porters, and such. (To these groups could be added certain
white-collar employees.) Where the country was generally
backward, the path of such workers to Anarchism was
easier. Under other conditions, as in rapidly advancing
industrial countries, such workers might turn to socialism
(as they did in Germany). Austria furnished a classic
example of both tendencies developing simultaneously. In
the beginning of the workers' movement there, in the
middle and latter half of the nineteenth century, the
Communist-Anarchists were strong; later the Socialists
absorbed most of the Anarchists and practically liquidated
the other movement.
Under the pressure of the necessity of the alliance between

the workers and the lowest sections of the property owners,
Liberal-Anarchism, which in France already had turned
into a sort of petty bourgeois Socialistic- Anarchism,
rapidly became, under Bakunin, Communistic
("Collectivist") Anarchism. Bakuninism flourished in the
period between 1848 and 1871, that is, in the period
between the great failure of the petty bourgeoisie, as a mass,
to conquer power, and the first victory of the immature
proletariat of France in taking and holding power in the
Paris Commune. Within this same period, bourgeois
democracy had gained decisive successes and had
consolidated its power. The successful termination of the
Italian Wars of Liberation and, before that, the defeat of
Russia in the Crimean War, coupled with the later
emancipation of the serfs, the American Civil War, and the
Polish insurrection of 1863, all showed that the time was
ripe for the placing on the international order of the day the
struggle between capital and labor.
363
Labor was stepping close upon the heels of the
industrialists. In 1864, the International Workingman's
Association (the First International) was organized with
Karl Marx at the head. Although from 1864 to 1867 it was
the English Trade Unionists who carried the day within the
executive councils, whilst in the congresses themselves the
Proudhonists of France had the majority, by 1868 Marx was
able to assert his great authority. At once the First
International assumed an increasingly militant character.
In the meantime Bakunin, militant democrat in 1849, had

become so impressed with the movement of the workers
that he had swung violently to the Left. In 1864 he was in
Italy preaching materialism, popular revolution, and free
communes, and organizing his "International Brotherhood."
By 1868 this had expanded into an International Alliance of
Social Democracy, and in 1869, after winning influence in
Italy, Spain, and Portugal, he applied for admission into the
First International. It was then that Bakunin averred in his
letters that he had become a Marxist, but a Marxist in
"economics" and not in "politics."
Bakunin was the real heir of Hebert and the French Enrag’es,
of 1793- With the same detestation as that of Hebert, he
railed against Robespierre and the Jacobins as having been
the head of the doctrinaire State which had killed the
Commune. (*1) Between the revolutions of 1848 and 1871,
some Jacobins turned to Communism and, under Blanqui,
were carrying forward the traditions of Babeuf. Bakunin,
therefore, was forced into a struggle against Blanquism as
part of his struggle against the Jacobin tradition.
Bakunin was far from being an internationalist proletarian

revolutionary. He never lost the bias of a Russian aristocrat.
Although he fought in the Revolution of 1848-1849 in
Dresden and for Bohemian independence, he did so as a
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Pan-Slavist and in the pay of the Pan-Slav parties, with a
bitter hatred for the Germans. When he advocated the
formation of Communes in Italy, it was precisely at a time
when progressive Italian forces were laboring so hard for
unification and when the isolated city-state in Italy was
playing right into the hands of the merchant princes and
corrupt oligarchies prevailing there. As with Proudhon's
Federalism in France, Bakunin's Communes in Italy could
only imply a step backward.
It was quite natural that Bakunin should win support

among sections of the workers in the Italian towns. In Italy
and in Spain, among the toilers there dominated precisely
those sections which could easily turn to Anarchism.
Traditionally bound to their particular city or locality,
where economy had stagnated for centuries, stimulated by
the roles of the proletariat in France and in England, and
understanding well that they were the class of the future,
bitterly ground down as were even the best of them, these
workers were eager and ready for the struggle. They did
not wish to win over the majority of the country. In fact, it
were better for the proletarian if he separated himself from
the rest of the country which was still dominated by
agricultural interests, which he despised, and of which the
main representative was the peasant whom he considered a
doomed dolt. It is easy to see how these impatient sections
of a working class, still too weak to take power and yet
believing that the proletarian revolution was the order of
the day, would look with alarm at the movement to
centralize the government and would consider it a step
which could only consolidate the power of the enemy
against them. It was possible to defeat the capitalists and
oppressors of a single city far more quickly than to
overthrow the ruling class of an entire country. And later
the Paris Commune itself seemed to bear them out.
365
Further, at a time when the mass of petty bourgeois
elements in Italy appeared carried away by Garibaldi and
Mazzini and were fighting under the banner of Cross and
Crown, it was extremely easy for the advanced sections of
the proletariat to draw away from such reactionary
manifestations and to react in just the opposite manner, that
is, to raise the banner of atheism and popular revolution
against the State. Unable to defend the local State as an
instrument of oppression, the weight of which they had
fully experienced, and thoroughly hostile to the central
State, these elements were forced to declare their open
hostility to all States and to demand their immediate
abolition. In Italy, Anarchism was not so much a
development of Liberalism, as it had been in America, for
example, but a reaction against it. When, through Mazzini,
even Liberalism was showing certain Fascist characteristics,
it was not for proletarian Anarchism to go along a Liberal
direction. And at a time when even Liberalism was
preaching the coup d'e'tat and insurrection, Anarchism
could not remain far behind.
So was it with Spain. There the protracted struggle to rid

the country of the Moors, the extremely sharp turn in the
fortunes of Spain leading to decay and desuetude, coupled
with the fact that capitalism was reviving again in the
nineteenth century, had made the field very ripe for
federalist propaganda for local autonomy and Communes
in which the proletariat would control. In both Italy and
Spain, Bakuninist Anarchism, however, could play
ultimately only into the hands of the reactionaries.
With Bakunin, Anarchism took upon itself the task of the

immediate abolition of the State by means of violence.
Having no firm class at hand with which to make the attack,
366
Bakunin conceived that it was not necessary to wait until
such a class should be formed by the development of
capitalism itself, but that a small "militant minority," a
group of the "e'lite," could form a conspiracy and
overthrow the State and thus abolish force and coercion of
man over man once and for all. With Bakunin appears the
Anarchist of "the deed." "War against the State" became the
battle-cry, and Bakunin and his fellow idealists waged a
life-long struggle for the abolition of the State in order to
establish a collectivist society.
Here, then, was the difference between Bakunin and

Proudhon, a division marked by the Revolution of 1848
itself. Proudhon was religious, Bakunin was atheistic;
Proudhon advocated peaceful evolution, Bakunin appealed
for immediate violent insurrection; Proudhon relied upon
the middle class, Bakunin tried to rely upon sections of the
workers; Proudhon preached producers' co-operative and
mutual harmony of all propertied interests, Bakunin spoke
against private property and for Communist collectivism;
Proudhon calculated on using the State for his Bank,
Bakunin demanded the State's immediate abolition; while
Proudhon denied the value of any organizational discipline
whatsoever, Bakunin organized a tightly disciplined
conspiratorial clique for the seizure of power.
In the early nineteenth century, Anarchism had been

bourgeois, and in the middle of the century, petty
bourgeois. With Bakunin it was the proletarian close to the
petty bourgeois who was to be the controlling factor.
Although garnished with Communist phrases, the

revolutionary movement led by Bakunin was really Liberal-
Radicalism turned upside down. Like the Liberal-Radical
and directly contrary to the Marxist, the Bakuninist was
absolutely unable to distinguish between primary and
367
secondary causes, between the basic structure of society
and the superstructural framework built upon it. The
elements behind Bakunin were unable to perceive the laws
of evolution and their contradictory results. They became
hopelessly lost. Instead of understanding that political and
social conflicts flowed from the economic system of
capitalism, they tried to overthrow the effects of capitalism,
before capitalism itself had become historically exhausted,
and before it had produced its proletarian grave-diggers.
Bakunin wanted to overthrow the tyrant, the State, which to

him became a veritable B’ete-noir. Linked to the State was
the Church, with its ideology of religion, and the whole
system of authority by which the masters ruled over the
masses. The problem became: How to overthrow those
social forces produced and supported by capitalism when
one could not overthrow capitalism itself? It was this
problem that the proletarian elements, swayed by petty
bourgeois revolutionary Anarchists, could never solve.
Thus, while posing as materialists and uttering bitter
invectives against God, religion, and prevalent morality, the
Bakuninists proved themselves to be but idealistic
rationalists, inventing their own dogma and religion.
We have seen that Liberalism had brought God down from

the heavens and sheltered him in the breast of man. Petty
bourgeois Liberalism had even reached a materialism in
which, instead of an eternal God, there was Humanity, and
everywhere religions of Humanity had sprung up. Of this
Humanity, the individualist Anarchists, like Stirner, had
made merely an aggregation of many egos, each one a god
unto itself. In this respect both the Anarchists and the
democratic Liberals were at one in agreeing that orthodox
religion could be fought "with one's head," i.e., by means of
reason. Like the priest or minister, the Bakuninist believed
368
that people acted and history was made because of
religious motives. But whereas to the priest or minister,
religious motives were "good," to the Anarchist, religion
and the church had to be abolished as "bad"; whereas, to the
one, religion had to be conserved, to the other, it had to be
destroyed as the main enemy of mankind, together with the
State.
In believing that mankind was moved to act not by

materialist interests but by religious motives, the Bakuninist
exposed himself as the inverted Liberal rationalist that he
was. Thus, to Bakunin, the masses were oppressed because
they were ignorant, and if their ignorance were wiped out,
all injustice would be abolished. If only the people were
enlightened by "Reason"! The Bakuninist did not agree that
mind was controlled by economic desires. But if mind is not
so controlled, have we not here the theory of the superiority
of mind over matter, of spirit over body, the basis of all
religion? The atheism of Bakunin thus, in spite of the man
himself, allowed religion to creep in. The Anarchist
Bakuninist was after all, then, only a religious atheist.
Similarly with the Bakuninist's ethical views. He was

against dogma and authority in general, but he set up his
own dogma and authority. He scorned all ethics and all
morality except those in the name of "true justice," "true
ethics" and a "morality" of his own as eternal and
unchanging as the ones he wished to overthrow. Here the
Anarchist was simply an unmoral moralist. To the
Anarchist "property is robbery," something wrongfully
acquired, something thus immoral. The Anarchist wanted
to right this wrong and to end this immorality. But what
was this but a new system of morality? Thus, whether
examining Proudhon, Bakunin, or Kropotkin, we must
iterate that the petty bourgeois --- whether reformist-Liberal
369
or Anarchist-revolutionary, whether prosperous or ruined -
-- remains a petty bourgeois to the end and can escape
neither from religion, idealism, individualism, nor from
morality.
When the Liberal, like John Stuart Mill, announced a theory

of the necessity of change, he wanted change to come
slowly; the Anarchist wanted a revolutionary change at
once but never raised a theory of change. The Liberal could
at least follow Hegel and declare that ideas undergo an
evolution. With Proudhon, there was not only no evolution
of ideas, there was no idea of evolution; with Bakunin,
nothing evolves, but only changes take place. In short,
while with the Liberal there was announced a theory of
evolution without change, with the Anarchist there was
announced a great change without evolution, motion
without movement. Philosophic "revolutionary" Anarchism
and American pragmatism had much in common.
Considering the philosophic method of revolutionary

Anarchism, we can state, to sum up the contrast between it
and Liberalism, that all the factors which Liberalism
considered important and would preserve, Bakuninism also
considered important but would abolish. Bakunin's was no
fundamental critique of the powers that be. He saw but the
"bad side" of what the Liberal saw the "good side"; he was
but the mechanical reaction to the action of the other. Thus,
in respect to the programmatic method, the revolutionary
Anarchist could hardly be called revolutionary. His
Anarchism was merely an antithesis, an opposition.
The Anarchist considered the State his enemy, but he never

analyzed the origin, role and character of the State. This
was left for the Marxists to do. This difference was well
elucidated by Friedrich Engels in a letter to Theodore Cuno:
"Bakunin has a peculiar theory of his own, a medley of
370
Proudhonism and communism, the chief point of which is
in the first place that he does not regard capital, and
therefore the class contradiction between capitalists and
wage earners which has arisen through social development,
as the main evil to be abolished --- instead he regards the
state as the main evil. While the great mass of the Social-
Democratic workers hold our view that state power is
nothing more than the organization with which the ruling
classes, landlords and capitalists have provided themselves
in order to protect their social prerogatives, Bakunin
maintains that it is the State which has created capital, that
the capitalist has his capital only by favor of the state. As,
therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the state
which must be done away with and then capitalism will go
to hell of itself. We, on the contrary, say: do away with
capital, the appropriation of the whole means of production
in the hands of the few and the state will fall away of itself.
The difference is an essential one. Without a previous social
revolution the abolition of the state is nonsense; the
abolition of capital is in itself the social revolution and
involves a change in the whole method of production." (*2)
Bakunin's view of the State as a creator of capital was not as

wild as it might appear to a Western Marxist, for it is a fact
that such a situation actually did prevail in Russia. After the
Crimean War it was the Russian State that introduced and
hastened the development of modern industrial capitalism.
(*3) Bakunin was here again only exposing his Russian
national limitedness.
The Bakuninists naively believed that they could abolish

the State at one blow. This led to a wrong strategy and
tactics. The revolutionary Anarchists saw the State as a
small minority oppressing the vast number of other
individuals. What else was necessary, then, but to organize
371
a conspiracy to overthrow the existing State and to
proclaim freedom for all? For revolutionary Anarchism it
was always time to "abolish the State."
In this manner, these desperate, ruined elements and

immature proletarians, unable to wait until the proletariat
could firmly arise and become a decisive factor in the
revolution, impotent to conceive of a revolution actually
made by the proletariat as a class, but with firm faith that a
revolution could be made for the proletariat, lost all sense
of proportion. They relied upon student adventurers and
declassed groups of all sorts (sometimes not unmixed with
the slum elements of the city), completely failing to
understand the connection between politics and economics,
between a given material environment and the State and
Church produced by such an environment. Fighting
Church and State with the head, that is, with "Reason," they
could only lose their heads. The limit of their horizon was
the conspiracy leading to the coup d'e'tat.
To these people, believing in the coup d'e'tat, the masses

were not necessary. The ruling class was but a minority,
why could not the suppressed classes produce another
minority, a militant elite, intelligent and brave, perhaps
made up of the sporting student, who could pull humanity
up to its level, even if it had to do so by the hair?(*4)
Strange as it may seem, this theory of contempt for the

masses, borrowed from the master class, had a side very
appealing to certain groups of workers, namely to those
workers who saw clearly the necessity for a revolution and
who did not desire to wait any longer. "Wait," always
"wait"; had they not waited long enough for their
emancipation? It was this revolutionary impatience which
was embodied in the Communism of Auguste Blanqui and
was exemplified in the Commune of 1871 in Paris and in
372
Carthegena, Spain, in 1873. It was the same with the
Bakuninists. There is here no question of the bravery and
revolutionary ardor of these men and of the contribution
that they made in their day.
Connected with all this was the practice of individual terror,

bomb throwing, assassination, etc., against officials who too
monstrously expressed the brutality of the State forces of
repression. (*5) The policy behind these actions was best
enunciated by the Russian disciple of Bakunin, Netschajeff:
"Without sparing our lives, we must break into the life of
the people with a series of rash, even senseless, actions, and
inspire them with a belief in their powers, awake them,
unite them, and lead them on to the triumph of their cause."
(*6) But to this desperate method of stimulation there was
also combined the hope that, by means of individual terror,
the ruling class could be frightened to yield its hold, and
historic forces could be stopped by the action of the
individual hero. Here, too, we cannot deny that some
extremely heroic and intelligent men and women went
down in the defeat of this program.
In many places, with terrorism went banditry in the name

of the fight against the State and the master class. Having
raised the slogan, "Property is robbery," it was perfectly
justifiable for the Anarchists to expropriate the
expropriators and to rob the robbers. This was triply true
where the robbery was directed against the State for the
purpose of aiding the treasury of the conspiracy. But it was
also correct where it was directed against the individual
bourgeois, and this theory was directly connected with
Bakunin's implication that the robber and slum proletarian
could be made into elements to compose his group.
Certainly it is true that "crime against property" (robbery,

etc.) is a reflection of the class struggle in the sense that it is
373
often the sole way taken by the backward but aggressive
worker to strike back at his exploiters. The "crime" often
shows a spirit of revolt, of protest, a desire to break the
chains of slavery, but the result is such as to lead to the
fastening of the chains ever more tightly. The practice of
such a "criminal" is but the crude expression of the theory
of individual protest of the Anarchist.
The whole political strategy and tactics of the Anarchists,

even the most revolutionary ones, were linked up with
their denial of the theory of classes. There existed, to be sure,
oppressors and oppressed, but not exploited and exploiters.
The revolutionary Anarchist, tolerating no authority, could
not tolerate the authority and discipline of classes, either. If
the Liberal would harmonize classes, the Anarchist would
blow them to individual atoms. Capitalist, worker, farmer,
banker, exploiter and exploited, all of them could equally
represent Anarchism and take part in its activities. It was
only when the working class grew to great size as a matter
of fact, developing powerful socialist parties and causing
the minute efforts of the Anarchists to look ridiculous that
the Anarchists began to turn into Anarcho-Syndicalists, to
enter into the trade unions of the working class, and to
favor the general strike. But this was beyond the pale of the
Bakuninists.
In spite of the fact that the International Alliance had

adopted the following program: "The Alliance declares
itself atheist; it desires the definitive and entire abolition of
classes and the political equality and social equalization of
individuals of both sexes. It desires that the earth, the
instrument of labor, like all other capital, shall become the
collective property of society as a whole, shall be no longer
able to be utilized except by the workers, that is to say, by
agricultural and industrial associations. . . States . . . must
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disappear, . . ." (*7) the entrance of Bakunin was bitterly
fought by Marx, who well understood the nature and
character of that organization. It was only upon the
dissolution of the Alliance, as such (although it was secretly
kept up by Bakunin), that the individual sections were
taken into the First International. Soon a bitter struggle
broke out within the First International between the
Marxists and the Bakuninists, culminating, after the defeat
of the workers in the Paris Commune and the weakening of
the First International, with the expulsion of the Bakuninist
section and the gradual dissolution of the International
itself. The Bakuninists never recognized the power of the
body to expel them, and carried on their own congresses up
to that of 1878, the last congress until the one revived by
Kropotkin in 1881.
Between Bakunin and Kropotkin stood the Paris Commune

of 1871. Like a mighty flare lighting the road for the weary
and footsore proletarians and toilers of the world, the
Commune became a beacon signal for all revolutionaries,
scattering its sparks in all directions. It raised as its chief
demand the absolute autonomy of the Commune to be
extended to all the localities of France, insuring to each its
rights and to every Frenchman the free exercise of his
powers as man, citizen, and laborer. To assure the unity of
France, all of the Communes were linked together in a
common association. The inherent rights of each Commune
were to be: responsibility for the municipal budget and
taxes; administration of all local services and the property
of the Commune; the organization of the courts, police, and
education; the election, control, and recall of all judges and
functionaries; the absolute guarantee of individual liberty
of conscience and freedom to work; the control over co-
375
operation of citizens; and finally, the organization of the
defense of the city and of the National Guard, which was to
elect its officers and which alone was to be responsible for
order. (*8)
Unlike the Italians, the French had suffered greatly, not

from lack of unity, but from the over-centralization of the
bourgeois regime. By means of this excessive centralization,
Paris had been politically subordinated to the countryside;
in reaction to this, the program of the Paris Commune,
while affirming the emancipation of Paris, had failed to
state the obligations that each city was to have to the nation
as a whole. This was a great blunder, as it gave the
opportunity to the Versaillese to raise the cry that the
Communards were trying to separate the cities from the
Fatherland and that Paris was trying to abandon France.
While it was true that the countryside had to be guided by
the towns, and the towns by Paris, the immature proletariat
of Paris showed by its program that it had not as yet fully
appreciated the necessity of finding allies in the countryside
under penalty of defeat. (*9)
These actions of the Commune played directly into the

hands of the Collectivist Anarchists, the Proudbonists, and
Bakuninists. Indeed, the Proudhonists played a very great
role in the Paris Commune and, as members of the First
International, were able to unite with the Blanquist
Communist intellectuals (who were outside the
International) and to cover themselves with immortal glory.
In the latter years of the Second Empire, while Proudhon
himself had been moving rapidly to the Right, the
Proudhonists had grown in influence, had steadily
gravitated to the Left, and, under the guidance of Marx, had
become more and more revolutionary, even though they
remained confused and muddled to the end. After the
376
defeat of the Proudhonists as leaders within the First
International in 1868 by Max, and their yielding to Marxism,
the International had grown so rapidly that two hundred
thousand Frenchmen had become members, most of them
in Paris itself.
As noted, Proudhon had preached a sort of socialism which

had become very attractive to the French workers. The
opposition of Prudhon to unionism and to strikes was not
regarded as thoroughly vitiating his ideas. In the final
analysis, Proudhon’s attack on the trade unions had been
only a reflection of the condition in France. It was in France,
above all, where the workers had many political traditions
but few strikes, that the class struggle had been enunciated
so sharply and dramatically in actual insurrections, yet
where modern industry had arisen so belatedly that the
workers were only just beginning to adopt trade unionism.
The limitations of a trade unionism based upon craft
divisions, whose origin was mutual aid associationship,
were clearly seen by those whose fathers had given their
lives upon the revolutionary barricades and whose
immediate problem was the extrication of the nation from
the havoc of the Franco-Prussian War. After all, Proudhon
himself had behaved well and with honor in the actual
revolution of 1848 and this the French proletariat would
always remember.
To the Proudhonists, the Paris Commune was the

exemplification of that collectivist individualism and
federalism which they had been advocating so long. To the
Bakuninists, it illustrated the necessity for the coup d'etat
and insurrection.
377
Footnotes
1. See Bakunin: God and the State, pp. 79-80 (1915 edition).
Significantly enough. however, Bakunin had great praise
for Mazzini.
2. The Correspondence of Marx and Engels (International

Edition, p. 319).
3. See L. D. Trotsky: 1905 (no English edition available) for

an interesting analysis of this Russian development.
4. "Revolutions, we must remember, are always made by

minorities, and even when a revolution has begun, and a
part of the nation accepts its consequences, there is always
only a very small minority who understands what still
remains to be done to assure the triumph of what has been
obtained, and who have the courage of action. This is why
an Assembly, always representing the average of the
country, or rather something below the average, has always
been, and will always be, a check upon revolution; it can
never be an instrument of revolution." (P. Kropotkin: The
Great French Revolution, I. 260-261.)
So, Down with the Assembly! up with a new "eternal"

reason, not only because the Assembly checks the
individual but because it checks the revolution!
5. We must keep in mind that the Terrorism of all those

who are against the State does not necessarily have
anything to do with Anarchism. Russian Nihilism, for
example, was not Anarchism, but part of the revolutionary
populist movement in that country flourishing in the late
nineteenth century. Germany has given us many examples
378
of Fascist terror against State officials, and Japan, militarist
terror.
6. Quoted by Zenker: Anarchism, p. 169.
7. Given in Bertrand Russell: Proposed Roads to Freedom, p. 44
8. See E. S. Mason: The Paris Commune, pp. 257-258.
9. See Lissagaray: History of the Commune of 1871, for

criticism of this program.
XII. COMMUNIST-ANARCHISM
THE defeat of the Communes in Paris, in Carthegena and

Barcelona in Spain, and in some cities of France, gave the
working class movement a severe setback. In compensation,
it also wiped out forever the leadership of the petty
bourgeoisie in any revolutionary movement in countries
where capitalism had developed. It became clear that the
defeat of capitalism was not for the adventurous or
desperate little group, but the task of the whole nation
rallying around a national and international proletariat. For
the moment, the workers dug in deeper, and, in sullen
determination, retreated to sharpen their weapons in
secondary struggles, to reorganize their forces, and to bide
their time, while allowing capitalism to develop its
contradictions still further. Capitalism in Western Europe
began a steady, relatively peaceful, organic growth; with
big industry triumphant and turning imperialist, with the
middle class absolutely bankrupt as a revolutionary force,
and with the labor movement not yet ready, but girding
itself for battles anew through the trade union and socialist
379
movements, Anarchism entered into its period of decline
and decay.
This period of decay is marked by the Communist-

Anarchism of Kropotkin. (*1) After the Commune, no
revolutionary movement could live long without
proclaiming Communism as its end. The Anarchists were
forced to change their titles from "Collectivist," "Mutualist"
and "Socialist" Anarchism to Communist-Anarchism. But
this change was made by Kropotkin, Russian prince turned
revolutionary, not so much in order to fight for the
immediate establishment of Communism as to wage a
bitter attack against the Marxian Communism then arising
to influence.
This attack against Marxism was made all the easier by two
events: first, by the liquidation of the First International
after the defeat of the proletariat in the Paris Commune;
and second, by the fact that the socialist parties then
zooming up and utilizing the name and theories of Marx
were becoming more and more corrupted by rank
opportunism. Beneath the few Marxian formulas of the
social-democratic parties there was revealed their actual
program which catered to national prejudices, hailed the
permanency of the State, idealized bourgeois democracy as
an almost perfect system needing only slight improvement
to transform it into socialism, and in every respect showed
itself interested, not in the revolution of the workers, but in
partial reforms and palliatives by means of which the
workers could be chained still closer to the wheels of
capitalism- imperialism. Anarchism was the punishment
which the workers had to undergo for their opportunist
sins.
While the Anarchism of Bakunin had been of the reckless

and irresponsible sort, a reflection of the desire of the
380
masses to test out their strength in actual battles, the
Anarchism of Kropotkin, on the contrary, was of that sedate
professorial type which, in reality taking a step backward
towards Proudhon in a period when Proudhonism had lost
its last vestiges of progressiveness, tried in an eclectic
manner to harmonize the activities of all the Anarchists,
both individualist-bourgeois and proletarian, and to
organize them into a grand Anarchist International. (*2)
Here was Herbert Spencer's "synthetics" transferred to
Anarchism.
We have already mentioned that Bakunin, upon his

expulsion, had organized in 1873 another International
which, having as its strongest member the Jurassic
Federation (French and Swiss skilled workers, watchmakers,
and such) soon numbered about fifteen thousand in France
alone. At the head of this stood Paul Brousse, soon to
become a renegade. Swamped by the period of reaction
after the Paris Commune, the French Anarchists went
steadily backward. In 1876 they had declared against the
Paris Commune and had repudiated it as only another
example of authority. As Kropotkin put it, the reason the
Paris Commune fell was because it had a government. "We
know that revolution and government are incompatible.
One must destroy the other no matter what name is given
to the government, whether dictatorship, royalty, or
parliament." (*3) Not only did Anarchism repudiate the
Commune, it repudiated democracy as a tyrannical State as
well, and in its International Congress in 1878 came out
strongly against universal suffrage at the very time when
the masses of all Europe were in arms against the
restrictions of the suffrage and the limitations upon
democracy imposed by the ruling cliques of Europe.
Beneath all the revolutionary phrase-mongering of
381
Kropotkin, a deeply reactionary policy of typical declassed
elements could often be discerned.
The program of the French Anarchists was well illustrated

by the Manifesto adopted at the Geneva international
Congress in 1882, after the Congress had been reorganized
in 1881 in London under Kropotkin. The Manifesto
declared:
"Our ruler is our enemy. We Anarchists, i.e., men without

any rulers, fight against all those who have usurped any
power, or who wish to usurp it. Our enemy is the owner
who keeps the land for himself, and makes the peasant
work for his disadvantage. Our enemy is the manufacturer
who fills his factory with wage-slaves; our enemy is the
State, whether monarchical, oligarchical, or democratic with
its officials and staff of officers, magistrates, and police
spies. Our enemy is every thought of authority, whether
men call it God or devil, in whose name the priests have so
long ruled honest people. Our enemy is the law which
always oppresses the weak by the strong, to the justification
and apotheosis of crime. But if the landowners, the
manufacturers, the heads of the State, the priests, and the
law are our enemies, we are also theirs, and we boldly
oppose them. We intend to reconquer the land and the
factory from the landowner and the manufacturer; we
mean to annihilate the State, under whatever name it may
be concealed; and we mean to get our freedom back again
in spite of priest or law. According to our strength, we will
work for the annihilation of all legal institutions, and we
are in accord with every one who defies the law by a
revolutionary act. We despise all legal means because they
are the negation of our rights; we do not want so-called
universal suffrage, since we cannot get away from our own
personal sovereignty, and cannot make ourselves
382
accomplices in the crimes committed by our so-called
representatives. Between us Anarchists and all political
parties, whether Conservatives or Moderates, whether they
fight for freedom or recognize it by their admissions, a deep
gulf is fixed. We wish to remain our own masters and he
among us who strives to become a chief or leader is a traitor
to our cause. Of course we know that individual freedom
cannot exist without a union with other free associates. We
all live by the support one of another, that is the social life
which has created us, that is the work of all which gives to
each the consciousness of his rights and the power to
defend them. Every social product is the work of the whole
community, to which all have claim in equal manner. For
we are Communists; we recognize that unless patrimonial,
communal, provincial, and national limits are abolished,
the work must be begun anew. It is ours to conquer and
defend common property and to overthrow governments
by whatever name they may be called."' (*4)
The Anarchists wanted to overthrow all rulers but refused

to designate the class to do the job, or to indicate how. Not
representing the interests of the proletariat of large-scale
industry and not rooted in industrial countries, the
Anarchists refused to see that rulers could be overthrown
only in the course of the class struggle; that the logic of the
class struggle led to insurrection and the establishment of
an armed force of the proletariat and its allies to meet the
armed force of its enemies; and that this armed force, not
being able to defeat the capitalists in one blow all over the
world, would have to establish in the interim, as a
transition, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Moreover, it
was precisely dictatorship against which the Anarchists
fought, so that, as the workers began to set up their own
authoritarian centers to meet the impact of the bourgeois
State, it was against the workers that the Anarchists
383
increasingly had to fight; and in proportion as the world
became ripe for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, so did
the Anarchists expose their reactionary character.
It was not merely the actual Dictatorship of the Proletariat

against which the Anarchists fought, but any step forward
whatever in that direction. In the late nineteenth century
these steps consisted in the struggle for democratic
concessions for the workers. By wringing these concessions
from the ruling class, the workers were able to utilize the
opportunity by organizing their forces; circulating their
ideas, testing out their strength. While thoroughly
recognizing the limitations of capitalist democracy, and
while understanding well that it was through this
democracy that the dictatorship of the capitalist class
manifested itself, nevertheless, the workers would have
been guilty of criminal folly not to have fought for
universal suffrage, for civil liberty, for the right to organize,
etc. Besides, in the course of this fight for democracy, the
workers were able to rally around themselves important
sections of the lower middle classes and to tear these latter
groups away from the rulers.
Furthermore, according to the Anarchists, the exploiters

and oppressors of the world, and all their henchmen, could
be overthrown without even a party or an organization.
Even among the petty propaganda circles that were to be
established there was to be no leadership, no differentiation
and discipline. Thus, against the trained troops and iron
discipline of the State armies, the masses were called upon
to march as a spontaneous rabble and mob. Is it surprising
that the mass of workers, growing more revolutionary and
more disciplined and industrialized by capitalism itself
should turn away from these phrase-mongering circles
384
typical of decayed petty industry and declassed
adventurism?
The fact is that the whole struggle of the Anarchists under

Kropotkin was essentially a struggle against Marxism.(*5)
Against Marx he posed Herbert Spencer, against the
dialectic he set up his "scientific" eclectic method, and like
Herbert Spencer, his aim was "to construct a synthetic
philosophy comprehending in one generalization all the
phenomena of nature-and therefore also the life of
societies." (*6) Instead of analyzing the laws of motion of
capitalist society and its concomitant contradictions
intensifying unto the breaking point, when they are solved
on a new plane of development by forces produced within
the society itself, Kropotkin would make use of the time-
honored utopian method of "working out a plan" and
would persuade (or compel) the rest to follow it. First of all
he would work out "what are the needs of society?"; then he
would work out "how we can satisfy them?"; by then he
would have evolved a "scientific" political economy by
means of which he could present a program to the people.
Here Kropotkin only shows himself to be another Liberal
utopian rationalist of the type of Bentham or Spencer, who
would carefully eliminate all reference to the class struggle.
In the field of economics, as against Marxism, "anarchism

has come to the conclusion that the root of modern evil lies
not in the fact that the capitalist appropriates the profits or
the surplus-value, but in the very possibility of these profits,
which accrue only because millions of people have literally
nothing to subsist upon without selling their labor-power at
a price which makes profits and the creation of 'surplus
values' possible. Anarchism understands, therefore, that in
political economy attention must be directed first of all to
so-called 'consumption.’" (*7)
385
Thus, against control of production, Kropotkin would call
attention to the need of controlling consumption; against
the profit system bred by capitalist control over the means
of production, Kropotkin would substitute, not the seizure
of those large-scale factories, but the reversion, like
Proudhon and the Anarchists generally, to small-scale
factories and petty industries. (*8)
As against the art of insurrection, Kropotkin threw in heavy

treatises on "mutual aid" and "ethics," and volumes
intended to prove that city and country will some day be
fused together and to show wherein the co-operative
movement is far better than any other means for the
advancement of humanity. (*9) Try as he would to become
revolutionary, Kropotkin remained nothing more than a
perverted Spencerian and, like his disciple Elisee Reclus
who was against any violent action of "the deed" whatever
("He who calls himself an Anarchist should be one of a
good and gentle sort"), Kropotkin found himself closer to
Proudhon and even Tolstoy than to Bakunin.
Essentially a Russian nationalist, Kropotkin could not help

but be affected by the Radical and socialistic Populist
movement in Russia at the time. In the fight against the
Czar, the poor people in Russia were forced to separate
themselves from the Liberals. Popular movements had to
take on a violent and revolutionary color. On the other
hand, many who called themselves "Socialist
Revolutionaries" were merely Russian Radicals who
dreamed of "Russia's mission." To the intensely nationalistic
Russian revolutionaries it seemed that the whole Western
world had taken a false direction and that it would be the
Russian Commune, the Mir, that would show the way for
the emancipation of the entire world. All that was needed
was the overthrow of the Czar and the enlightenment of the
386
people, and Russia could vault the stage of capitalism and
return to the Communism of the people so well illustrated
by the Mir. Clothed in European language, these were
essentially the theories of Kropotkin as well. No matter how
glittering they were to the benighted democrats of the
backward countries such as Russia, they could prove only
ludicrous to the modern proletariat of the machine age.
In spite of everything, the Anarchist congresses were forced

to make concessions to the working class, just as they had
been forced to take on the name "Communist-Anarchist." In
veritable self-preservation, Anarchists had to enter the
trade unions and even the socialist movement. But, as
Liberalism had perished in turning to labor, so did its
counterpart, Anarchism. And no matter how much
Anarchism may have infected this or that particular labor
organization, the turning towards and entrance into the
ranks of the proletariat, and the participation in their
struggles as a class, marked the dissolution of Anarchism as
a separate revolutionary force.
The French and Spanish Anarchists led the way towards

the trade unions; in France, because the disaster of the
Commune had crushed all movements aiming for political
power, leaving only the primitive trade union organizations
to carry on the day-to-day struggles; in Spain, because
conditions as yet were not ripe for the creation of a
revolutionary workers' party of any proportions. In both
France and Spain, a struggle ensued between the trade
unionists who were Anarchists and who had turned to
Anarcho-Syndicalism, and the "pure" Anarchists. The point
of view of the pure Anarchist is well expressed by the
following citation: "The organized labor movement
throughout the world is by its very nature and purpose a
387
protective barrier against any spontaneous revolutionary
action that may arise from among the exploited toilers. This
applies as much to the conservative pure and simple Trade
Union movement of America as it does to the Syndicalist
movement of France, or to the Anarcho-Syndicalist
movement of present-day Spain." (*10) We shall deal with
Anarcho-Syndicalism at length in the next portion of this
work.
While in Spain the Anarchists were the first to organize

mass unions and had great success, (*11) in Italy the work
of the Anarchists in this direction was far more difficult,
since in the industrial cities, Milan, Turin, etc., the workers
had turned to socialism. Still, it was these Italian and
Spanish elements who, working together, were able to
create a powerful revolutionary movement in South
America.
Exceedingly ripe both for Anarchism and for Anarcho-

Syndicalism was the situation in the Latin-American
countries of South America. Although South American
countries possessed all the potentialities of North America,
capitalism, nevertheless, developed far too late for them to
be anything but colonies or semi-colonies of the stronger
imperialistic countries. The independence of these South
American countries from Europe politically could not free
them from economic bondage to imperialism.
In the beginning, the native Indians were conquered and

transferred bodily from their primitive communism to the
status of slaves and, later, agricultural proletarians. Under
such a system of class-slave rule, Liberalism could find no
fertile field among the masses and certainly could not
compete with the Communist-Anarchism brought over
from Italy and Spain by the modern proletarian
immigration there. With the development of capitalism,
388
great modern plantations and ranches grew up on the one
hand, and revolutionary proletarians developed on the
other.
Under such circumstances, what could develop but

Communist- Anarchism, either of the Bakunin or of the
Kropotkin variety? Liberalism in North America was the
result of hope fulfilled; Anarchism in South America was
the effect of possibilities never realized and El Dorados
tantalizingly beyond reach. In view of the weakness of the
rule of the economically dominant classes and their
separation from other bourgeois centers, to which must be
added the severe despotism of the camarilla in the Palace
and the recurring Palace revolutions, stimulated by this or
that imperialist power desiring to control the country for
itself, all the forces which we have described above could
operate only to produce in the sharpest manner a
revolutionary tendency whose direction, at least in the
beginning, had to be a variation of revolutionary
Anarchism.
In German Austria, however, through the activity of Johan

Most, Communist-Anarchism tried its hand within the
Socialist parties themselves. Torn between industrialized
Germany, with its strong theories of collectivism and its
masses taking rapidly to socialism, and agrarian Italy and
Southern and Eastern Europe, where Anarchist Populism
was rooting itself, the Austrian movement presented
peculiarities of its own. At first the masses were inclined to
Communist-Anarchism. Eventually the socialists won the
day. In the meantime, in the person of Johan Most, there
was an attempt to reconcile the two tendencies and to fuse
them together.
Reacting against the law passed in 1878 declaring socialism

illegal in Germany, Johan Most, through his paper, declared
389
war against the German government, and called for the
arming of the socialists, secret agitation, and revolutionary
acts. Upon his expulsion from the Socialist Party in
Germany, Most was able to win the majority of the German
clubs in Switzerland to his point of view and to develop a
large movement in Austria and Hungary (under the name
Socialist). Driven out of Europe, Most came to the United
States, where he edited a paper, Freiheit.
In America, the authoritarian socialistic aspect of his views

was stressed more than ever. Although he was willing to
declare that he agreed with Kropotkin, yet he had great
praise for the class struggle theories of Karl Marx and wrote
that to go back to small-scale industry was impossible. (*12)
On the point that revolutions are necessary, Most raised the

question whether revolutions could be "made" and
answered, unlike Bakunin, "Certainly not, but they can be
prepared for. . . ." (*13) Although supporting the Anarchist
congresses, Most had organized a central committee and
had proposed that some sort of organization and leadership
be set up (backed up in this ten years later by Malatesta,
Italian Anarchist) (*14); in furtherance of this proposal he
was able to write: "Revolutionary committees must be
constituted. These execute the decrees of the revolutionary
army which, reinforced by the armed workingmen, now
rule like a new conqueror of the world." (*15) Here was a
statement entirely authoritarian, leading, in fact, to the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat itself.
From all this we can gather that of all the Communist-

Anarchists, Johan Most was by far the closest to Marxism. If,
then, Most behaved in part like Bakunin and wrote books
on the construction of bombs and poisons (up to that point
he went with Netschajeff), we may say that in his mind this
was merely for the revolutionary instruction of the
390
American working class, to be used when the time came,
and not necessarily part of any Bakuninist theory of the
coup d'e'tat by a small minority.
Johan Most had a marked influence upon the revolutionary

history of the United States. That Anarchism was a force to
be feared here easily can be seen from the fact that the first
great "class" trial in this country was the trial of the
Haymarket "Anarchists" (Parsons, Spies, et al.) in Chicago
in 1889; that many of the most prominent Anarchists of the
twentieth century, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman,
Malatesta, spent their active lives in America; and even in
recent years, the famous trial of Sacco and Vanzetti called
attention to the influence of the revolutionary Anarchists.
The first laws directed against revolutionary political
immigrants were those directed against Anarchists, and so
widespread was the belief that Anarchists were most
dangerous revolutionists that it was under the heading of
"Criminal Anarchy" laws that the attacks against all
workers organizations were first launched in the early part
of the twentieth century and have been carried on even up
to the present.
Although the United States was the classic land for the
petty bourgeoisie, capitalism in America had had enormous
room, not only for artisans, handicraftsman, tradesmen,
and petty capitalists, generally, it had not only turned
workers into small business men and developed small
business men into big ones, but particularly after the Civil
War, it had turned big business into trusts, ruined vast
layers of petty businessmen, closed the frontiers, driven
artisans and farmers into factories and skilled workers into
the ranks of the unskilled. The culminating period of
American Liberalism was the American Civil War; the
391
generation following saw the rise of militant Anarchist
influence.
Up to the time of the Civil War, American Anarchism had

been of the naive, indigenous variety characteristic of
American utopian individualism. After the Civil War, the
utopian character of bourgeois Anarchism had given way
to the more reactionary type represented by Benjamin
Tucker. But with the arrival of Most, with the decay of the
First International and the rise of the Anarchist
International in this country after 1880, Anarchism, finding
a completely free field among the workers, and having as
opposition only sectarian German socialist groups who
were impregnated through and through with philistine
prejudices and parliamentary illusions of the crassest type,
became a force to be reckoned with. Even some
workingmen began to take up the doctrines of Anarchism
as preached by Most.
The termination of the Civil War between North and South

had opened up the field for the civil war between labor and
capital. With seven-league boots the slogan of the eight-
hour-day, first raised by the Communist League in 1848,
was being carried from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The big
strike wave in the '70's was being followed by an even
greater attempt to achieve a national general strike in the
'80's. The culmination of these trials came in the Haymarket
riots of 1886 in the midst of the big strike movement
engulfing Chicago. In all of these strikes, violence and the
direct action of the masses had played a considerable part.
And in the midst of the Chicago affair were found the
disciples of the Anarchist International, first and foremost
the American Albert Parsons. The trial of these
revolutionaries focused attention upon the doctrines of
Johan Most and became a dramatic signpost of the
392
industrialization of the United States and of the rise of the
class struggle.
With the exception of Albert Parsons and some of his

comrades in this early period of modern union struggle, the
revolutionary Anarchists were not able to penetrate into the
older American sections of the population. Quite the
contrary, it was only through the vast flood of immigrants
that washed the shores of this country in the latter part of
the last century and the first decade or so of the present one,
that revolutionary Anarchism became reinforced. Unable to
take part in the political life of the country, bringing over
from their non-industrial motherlands the many illusions of
petty industry, thrown suddenly into the maw of large-
scale industry and totally abandoned by the extant labor
organizations native to the United States, such as the
American Federation of Labor, taking no part in
parliamentary elections, and disgusted with the petty
bourgeois character of the socialist parties here, feeling
withal only the enormous pressure of the capitalist State
upon them and the open, cynical corruption of the State
apparatus itself, many of the more conscious elements of
these immigrants naturally turned to revolutionary
Anarchism. They had left their old country to escape the
conflicts there. When they arrived in the promised land and
found capitalist antagonisms even more brutally and
nakedly developed, was it any wonder that in desperation
they should press forward their revolutionary aspirations
in the Anarchist movement?
Nevertheless, Anarchism could not remain attractive to

these immigrants for long. The whole industrial
environment in which they were placed turned them in an
authoritarian direction. It was not the individualism of the
pioneer, of the frontier, of the farmer and petty business
393
man which was part of them, but rather the collectivism
and the caesarism within the huge plants and tremendous
cities that were springing up all around them. Most and
Parsons had been members of Social-Democracy and,
especially Parsons, had never abandoned their
authoritarian leanings. If Anarchism was to thrive in the
United States, it could thrive as a national movement only
within the ranks of the trade unions. More and more the
"pure" Anarchist groups became reduced to miserable little
sects so totally out of touch with reality in this country as to
be ludicrous.
If the rise of imperialism, at the turn of the twentieth

century, gave Anarchism its death blow, the Russian
Revolution of 1917 placed the tombstone upon its corpse.
At first, during the February Revolution, the Anarchists
were able to grow greatly in strength --- naturally enough
in the Russian environment --- and a considerable number
even participated in the October Revolution, when the
Bolsheviks took power. But when the Bolsheviks began to
establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and to complete
the democratic revolution by the proletarian one, when a
new type of State arose and control became centralized,
when the Red Army became organized and the honeymoon
period gave place to the grim realities of a class struggle
taking place in cataclysmic proportions, then the Anarchists
also declared war on the Bolshevik proletarian State. (*16)
Against the plan of the Bolsheviki for controlling all

factories through one center, for socializing the production
of the entire country, and nationalizing all industries, the
Anarchists raised the slogan, "The factory to the workers
and land to the peasants" in the most literal and demagogic
sense. They declared that each set of workers that worked
394
in a given factory and had taken possession of it should
keep that factory as their own. They were to determine their
own wages and their own conditions, not at all subject to
the control of the working class of Russia as a whole. For
the large-scale national industry planned by the Bolsheviks,
the Anarchists substituted the petty industry and chaotic
forms of the pre-capitalist commune. The Anarchists
bitterly attacked the Bolshevik commissars as new bosses,
new bureaucrats, new oppressors.
When, under the Bolsheviki, the land was nationalized, the

peasants being given only the right to use the land, the fact
that the estates of the nobles had been seized and
partitioned off to the rest of the peasantry, particularly to
the poorer peasantry, made no difference. The Anarchists
raised the demand of petty private ownership of the land
by each peasant and the right to do with it as he pleased.
These views could only reflect the influence and interests of
the kulak (wealthier peasant who hired labor) and
significantly enough, it was when the kulak also began to
be attacked and taxes were laid upon him, as the October
Revolution drove deeper and deeper uprooting the old
social relationships, that the Anarchists rose in militant
rebellion against the new tax-gatherers, the new dictators.
To the highly disciplined, centralized, and effective Red

Army which had been forged in the course of the Civil War
following the Revolution, the Anarchists counterposed a
demand for a return to the voluntary guerilla militia, the
old Red Guard, which had been adequate for the
Revolution itself, but was absolutely incapable of resisting
the armed forces of the capitalist intervention. To
Anarchists the Red Army only meant a new State, a new
Terror, and a new discipline.
395
Against the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the
revolutionary Anarchist tried to oppose the independent
and "free" Commune, and covered up this essentially
reactionary idea with phrases even more revolutionary than
those of the Bolsheviki. Not only "Down with the Czar," but
"Down with all States." They wanted no stages of
development, no transition periods, no waiting. The whole
program now! No exigency of the class struggle could
excuse such monsters as Army, Secret Police, Tax-gatherers.
The final blow to the Russian Anarchists came when they

discovered that they would win their struggle even
temporarily only by abandoning their own principles.
Having entrenched themselves in peasant armies in the
Ukraine, the Anarchists under Makhno were forced to raise
the slogan of "State government," to form Soviets, to have
elections, to create officials, to exact discipline by terror, etc.
Standing between the Red and the White armies, this petty
peasant nationalism was doomed to be crushed to pieces. In
spite of himself, Makhno objectively aided the most rabid
enemies of the Revolution. The Anarchists thus only
brought upon themselves a terrific defeat and annihilation.
They could no more defeat the proletariat than they could
the Czar.
A similar disaster awaited them throughout the world. Face

to face with a war embracing world forces of titanic power,
all that the "pure" Anarchist could offer was the program of
religious pacifism --- conscientious objection!
In the struggle against Fascism during the revolutionary

period immediately after the World War, the Anarchists,
like the Italian Malatesta, revealed themselves as utterly
bankrupt. In 1920 in Italy, Malatesta and his following, then
in a strategic position with wide influence over sections of
the revolutionary working class, proposed to support the
396
governmental socialists if the latter would unite with the
Anarchists and dispossess the capitalists of their property.
The new government was to guarantee democratic civil
liberties that would permit the Anarchists to convert the
majority of the people to the Anarchist ideal.
This proposal was similar to the tactics of the Bolsheviks

towards the Russian Socialists in 1917, although Lenin, as a
realist, had never posed as a condition that the Socialists
should take the possessions of the factory owners. What
had happened in Russia reoccurred in Italy; the Socialists,
not desiring any revolutionary action, rejected all co-
operation on such terms. But Malatesta was no Lenin. To
dispossess capitalism, Malatesta needed the aid of the
strong Communist group in Italy, but he discovered he
could not address himself to the Communist Party because
the latter was against bourgeois democracy and for the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Not being able, then, to unite
with either Socialists or Communists, Malatesta refused to
participate in the Revolution at all. (*17) In the choice
between capitalism and Communism, the Malatesta
Anarchists deliberately chose capitalism, even though the
issue was clearly seen no longer to be bourgeois democracy
versus Proletarian Dictatorship, but Fascist Dictatorship
versus workers' control over production.
The actions of the Anarchists in Russia complicated matters

for the Anarchists in Italy. In the beginning of the October
Revolution, the Bolsheviks had permitted the Anarchists to
advocate their views freely so long as no overt acts were
committed against the new State. The Italian Communists
no doubt would have agreed to do likewise. However, by
the time events were maturing in Italy, the Russian
Anarchists were supporting Makhno with arms in their
397
hands. The war between Anarchism and Communism was
on to the end.
The recent revolutionary events in Spain have exposed the

futility of Anarchism so clearly that, even in this last
stronghold, the entire essence of Anarchism has
disappeared into thin air. Today, in Spain, the Anarchists
have actually become part of the government and are now
ardently supporting the policy of a centralized and
disciplined Army to fight the reactionaries. Anarchists as
governmental officials enforcing the centralized authority
of a capitalist government: can anything show us more
clearly the complete breakdown of the old Anarchist
shibboleths?
As it had done with Liberalism, so did it do with

Anarchism; the authoritarian battles of the classes simply
erased nineteenth century Anarchism as a virile movement
of today.
Footnotes
1. Lived 1842-1921.
2. Using Spencerian synthetics, no doubt, this

"revolutionary Anarchist" could declare, on the one hand,
that Godwin had stated in 1793 the political and economic
principles of Anarchism, and, on the other hand, could
write that Bakunin was a very "Moral man." Following
Kropotkin, Emma Goldman also stated that the "real
founder" of Anarchism was Godwin, and after Godwin,
Proudhon.
3. P. Kropotkin: "Revolutionary Government," Essay

printed in Revolutionary Pamphlets, Vanguard Press Edition,
p. 243.
398
4. Reprinted in Zenker: Anarchism, pp. 288-290.
5. According to Kropotkin, Marx plagiarized from

Considerant, although this did not prevent Marx’s whole
philosophy from being tainted with German nationalism;
and as Kropotkin, turning chauvinist himself in a most
rampant manner, hated anything German, this was enough
to damn Marxism in his eyes forever.
6. See his "Modern Science and Anarchism," in Revolutionary

Pamphlets, p. 150.
8. It was with this purpose that Kropotkin wrote his

book, The State, in which he pours unmitigated praise upon
the Communes of the Middle Ages. In this book he makes
the most bizarre statements, such as that the Communes of
the Middle Ages "were the centers of opulence and
civilization such as we have not seen since," that the city-
states of ancient Greece were "free cities" and not States at
all, that the State as such dates only from the sixteenth
century, etc., etc. This balderdash was peddled as new
science!
9. See Kropotkin’s Anarchist Morality where he speaks about

the social laws governing human sympathy, the need for
altruism and the golden rule, etc. See also his Ethics,
his Mutual Aid, his Conquest of Bread and his Fields, Factories,
and Workshops.
10. Taken from the Anarchist paper. "Man!" (published in

San Francisco), Vol. II, No. I, p. 4 (January, 1934).
11. In 1883, in the Congress of Seville, the Spanish

Federation had 254 delegates with 200 local unions and
50,000 members attached. According to Postgate, as far
399
back as 1872 the Spanish movement inspired by Bakunin
had had 80,000 members centered in Madrid, Barcelona,
Cadiz and Palma. All were sections of the First
International organized as unions. (See R. W.
Postgate: The Workers International, p. 55 [1920 edition].)
12. See J. Most: The Social Monster, p. 6.
Previously Most had published in Germany a popular

version of Capital and had also put out a second edition
supervised by Marx and Engels themselves.
13. J. Most: The Beast of Property, p. II.
14. Malatesta's proposals were voted down by the

Congresses. Malatesta (born 1853) can be said to be an
organizational Anarchist although earlier he had written,
"The party has no head, no authority; it is entirely founded
on spontaneous and voluntary agreement amongst those
who are fighting for the same cause." (E. Malatesta: A Talk
Between Two Workers, p. 30.)
15. J. Most: The Beast of Property, p. 12.
16. Symbolic of the decay of "Revolutionary" Anarchist

literature are the works of Emma Goldman and Alexander
Berkman, written after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Heaping great praise upon Makhno, Emma Goldman
denounces the Russian Revolution as not being ethical! (See
her books: My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further
Disillusionment in Russia.)
According to Alexander Berkman, the Bolsheviks not only

stole all their important ideas from the Anarchists, but
established, under Lenin, the worst despotism in Europe
outside of Italy. (See his book: Now and After, the A.B.C. of
400
Communist Anarchism.) Coming after Bakunin, these people
can truly be called only degenerated Anarchists.
401
BOOK III: SYNDICALISM
402
I. TRADE UNION REFORMISM
XIII. TRADE UNIONISM
THE revolutions of 1848 mark a great turning point in the

history of class struggles. Prior to this time, the conflict
between labor and capital had lain more or less deep in the
womb of capitalist society. It was small property that was
dreaming of conquering political power and emancipating
itself from the inevitable thralldom of capital and was
busily working out its little utopias and co-operative
schemes of all sorts. The co-operative was the petty
bourgeois' own joint stock company to counter the joint
stock company of big capital, and became idealized as the
sole way to restore harmony to the anarchic chaos
everywhere. Without all the horror of violence and
bloodshed, capitalism would be transformed into the
ordered Garden of Eden for the direct producer. In this
period, Anarchist, Liberal, and Socialist were all still
harnessed directly to bourgeois ideas and dominated by the
one obsession of retaining peace and order and avoiding
the turbulence of civil war.
In the meantime, deep within the bowels of the productive

process, the modern proletariat was taking form. Despite all
the phrases of peace and co-operation, a hidden, yet bitter
and sanguinary battle of the classes was making itself felt.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the introduction of
machinery had operated as a devastating cataclysm upon
the old craftsmen who had worked in the petty and home
industries and who had resisted excessive exploitation in
the factories up to this point. The mutual aid societies of the
403
craftsmen (in part survivals of the old guild formations of
feudalism, such as the French compagnages) became entirely
inadequate for their protection. In self-defense the workers
had to turn the mutual aid organization into a wage-
worker's union.
Unions represent the lowest form of conscious protest

against the increasingly intolerable conditions existing in
the various trades and industries. When the capitalists first
introduced machinery into the factory, the skilled craftsmen
took revenge upon the machine. The machine and not the
owner or the system was considered the root of all evil.
With the triumph of the machine and the rapidly increasing
misery of the toilers, the protest took other forms, such as
individual grumbling, individual fights with the foreman
and employer, spontaneous quitting of employment, large
labor turnover, etc. These forms of protest were entirely
lacking in any consciousness of social forces on the part of
the workers involved, and merely indicated that the
workers believed they suffered from some accidental and
exceptional state of affairs, introduced by this or that "bad"
foreman or employer. All industrial relations were in a sort
of patriarchal state in which not politics but ethics was the
rationale dominant in the minds of all.
It was only when craft or trade unions were established that

the protest took on a socially conscious form, for only then
did the workers independently group themselves together
as part of a class and conceive that their interests were
opposed to those of their employers. Starting as craft clubs,
these rudimentary unions soon engaged in the fight for
better conditions of labor, shorter hours, higher pay. Strikes
were called; and in striking, the workers' associations
became true craft unions. Thus the union, from its very
404
inception, was an organ of struggle, of protest, and as such
is entirely different from the co-operative.
As capitalism rapidly developed, compelling some crafts to

disappear, skilled workers to become unskilled, the skilled
of one factory to replace the skilled of another, the
employers to co-operate one with the other, etc., these local
craft unions were forced to broaden out into trade unions,
embracing all those of their craft throughout the country, or
taking in others besides their particular craft, either directly
into their own local, or into other locals affiliated with them.
As small business gave way to large trusts, the workers
attempted to match the combine of capital by efforts to fuse
together all the trades of a given industry into an industrial
union and to band all the industrial unions into one central
organization.
In all this development, the trade unions were merely

primitive, spontaneous organizations used by the workers
for defensive and reformist purposes only. Loose, broad
associations, embracing all the workers of a given craft, or
trade, or industry, trade unions were formed solely for the
concrete purpose of immediate self-interest and simply
because only in this way could the workers resist the
encroachment of the employers or improve their standard
of living. Both in its origin and in its growth, the union
functioned, not as an instrument for a frontal attack upon
the entire capitalist system, but at best as a tool to carry on
the day-to-day fight against this or that section of the
employers on behalf of a similarly limited section of the
workers. Unions were not adapted for revolution but rather
for reform. Their primary object was to mobilize masses of
men interested not in the ultimate struggle of their class but
in the day-to-day improving of the capitalist system so that
their particular share of the total product would be greater
405
and their present lot ameliorated. In fighting for higher
wages, shorter hours, and better conditions, the unions, of
course, were contesting merely for reforms.
This character and role of the trade unions made them

purely practical bodies. Extremely limited, such unions
could not comprehend the capitalist system as a complete
entity, nor the entire national or international social
relations, nor even the generic interests of their own class.
Workers, exhausted by toil, found it difficult to obtain the
leisure and the opportunity to cultivate theory, science, and
class consciousness. This limitation was accentuated by the
fact that the trade unions, taking in only actual workers,
barred the intellectual, the student, and the scientist.
Although the trade unions, in composition and historical

import, were class organizations, the workers could not
ascertain through them alone the problems of their entire
class nor wage a class fight. Engaged in the battle against
their employers, the trade unions avoided the struggle
against the State, that is, the political and general force of
the employing class. involved in strikes, the union
organizations put aside the question of revolution. The
strike represented a clash of only part of the working-class
against a corresponding part of the employing-class.
However, when the State acted in the strike, the central
agency representing the capitalist class as a whole was
brought into play.
It is true, too, that in the course of their strikes, with mass

arrests, injunctions, etc., taking place, the union members
were compelled to see more and more clearly the role of the
State as the central instrument of an enemy class used
against them. Their attention was drawn to the necessity of
reforming, transforming, controlling, or shattering the State.
Gradually the trade unionists admitted they must attempt
406
to transform the whole capitalist system. This led them to
politics.
Under the capitalist system, the unions could not play more
than a subsidiary inadequate role. They could strike for
higher wages, but wages depend upon profits and not vice
versa. Should higher wages ruin the profits of an employer,
he can sell out and enter another line of production; his
capital takes flight to other fields of investment. What can
an ordinary strike accomplish when the employer shuts
down, sells out, or moves away? The only action left is to
take over the factories. But this again is a political task. For
it is an attack against private property, capitalist property,
and property is a relation backed up by all the sanction and
power of the State.
Thus, in the course of trade union evolution, a tendency

developed for the trade unions to burst the narrow
integument of their practical activity, and they at times
became training fields for revolutionary propaganda just as
their strikes themselves became rehearsals for the
revolution. As the crisis deepened, the trade union
movement formed in some of its sections an arena of
activity for subversive tendencies. Trade unionists then
raised the question: "Can the union be a revolutionary
instrument?" The Syndicalists replied: "It is labor's sole
weapon!"
As England and the United States were the first to develop

modern capitalism, it was natural that these two countries
should first show the rise of craft and trade unions. In
England, the unions began to come into their own as far
back as the Chartist movement. In 1834, the Grand National
Consolidated Trades Union was organized and grew in a
407
few months to half a million members. In spite of the fact
that it was dominated by the utopian Owen, who gave it a
program calling for the organization of co-operatives
through which the workers were to change the capitalist
system, yet it became thoroughly symptomatic of the
discontent and militancy of the workers. It is true that in a
short while the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union,
unable to throw off the incubus of Liberalism which had
been foisted upon it by a mighty British bourgeoisie, and
handicapped by illusions of harmony of classes, fell to
pieces. Nevertheless, a step forward had been made. It was
in the course of the Chartist union movement that union
men for the first time seriously conceived of organizing
unions for the purpose of insurrection.
"If any one individual can be called the originator of the

'general strike' idea in Great Britain, and perhaps, therefore,
in Europe also.... it is William Benbow, radical, agitator and
pamphleteer." (*1) Under the guise of carrying out a
"National Holiday," the unions were to plan for a general
strike and insurrection. Committees were to be prepared in
each locality. Food was to be laid in for a week, and the
workers were to put down all disorder and drunkenness in
their own ranks with a stern hand. By 1839, when Chartism
had attained a great intensity, Benbow's pamphlet had
reached an enormous sale. With such agitation prevalent, it
was no wonder that violence broke out in 1842 when, to the
economic demands of the strikers for higher wages and
shorter hours, political demands for a democratic charter
were also added. For a whole week the workers remained
in possession of the city of Manchester. There was no
plundering, however. After a month, the strike wore itself
out and, with the desertion of many of its leaders, collapsed.
408
During the Chartist movement, the English unions adopted
as their program the idea of changing fundamentally the
present social and commercial system through co-operative
association. These co-operatives asked the State to do
nothing more than stand aside and give them a fair field in
which to do their own work in their own way. They wanted
no State aid; they did not advocate Socialism; all they
wanted was that they should not be hindered from
obtaining for themselves new wealth through the co-
operatives. Here we can see the influence of Liberalism
upon the craft unionists of the time. (*2)
During the whole of the nineteenth century, the British

trade union movement could not escape from Liberalism. It
is true that for a time some of the English trade unions
joined the First International, but, frightened by the Paris
Commune, they soon withdrew. Only towards the latter
part of the century, with the rise of British imperialism, did
labor form the Liberal-Labor Alliance that gradually
developed into Laborism. Differing from Syndicalism,
Laborism advocated the entrance of the trade unions into
parliamentary politics with their own Labor Party through
which they, in a legal and reformistic manner, could
gradually extend the prevalent democracy so that the
workers would obtain an increasingly larger share of it.
In many respects the American Civil War was to the

Americans what 1848 was to Europe; that is, it cleared the
decks for the struggle between capital and labor. As the
American Revolution had sounded the tocsin for the
European bourgeoisie, so the American Civil War sounded
it not only for the European working-class, but for the
Americans as well.
409
No sooner had the Civil War ended than the National
Labor Union was formed in 1866 in the United States. The
program of the National Labor Union contained such mild
points as arbitration instead of strikes, the regulation of -
apprenticeships, the establishment of a federal bureau of
labor statistics and a department of labor. It also protested
against the contract system of prison labor. Although its
program was but a Liberal one and expressed the interests
only of the skilled mechanics, yet it marked a great advance
for American labor. The National Labor Union did come
out for the eight-hour-day and, further, actually sent its
President, Sylvis, to the congress of the First International in
1869. (*3) Nor was it averse to political action. This first
successful attempt on the part of the mechanics to organize
themselves nationally, however, soon came to an end.
The panic of 1873 liquidated the National Labor Union. On

its heels came the Knights Of Labor, organized nationally in
1878. Like the English unions, the Knights of Labor was
socialistic in sentiment, although opposed to Socialist
politics; unlike the English, it condemned craft and trade
unions as too narrow in scope and spirit, and proclaimed
the need for a universal organization of all workers, skilled
and unskilled, on the principle that "an injury to one is the
concern of all."
Nor did the Knights of Labor last very long. It made the
mistake of basing itself on trade and industrial divisions as
well as on geographical lines. Taking in not only working-
class elements but also layers of the petty bourgeoisie, it
became more of a labor party with trade union
characteristics than a trade union. In a country where the
labor movement nationally was still made up of
journeymen mechanics and craftsmen groups, and where
these workers were but recently emancipated from the farm
410
and village and were still close to all sorts of small property
layers, this confusion was quite natural. Moreover, in an era
when the craftsman was being transformed into the modern
skilled worker, it was no longer possible for the
journeyman-craftsman to solve the problems of the day and
take upon himself the leading role.
The Knights of Labor rapidly went through four stages of

development. In its beginning it was a secret organization,
like a lodge, with all sorts of mystical symbols. This
abracadabra was soon dropped, in its second phase of
development, as the organization grew more powerful and
came into the open as a bona-fide union with a militant
strike policy. In its third phase, after 1883, its leadership
opened fire on the strike as a weapon. "The constitution
governing local assemblies was modified containing the
following clause --- 'While acknowledging that it is
sometimes necessary to enjoin an oppressor, yet strikes
should be avoided whenever possible. Strikes, at best, only
afford temporary relief; and members should be educated
to depend upon thorough organization, co-operation and
political action, and, through these, the abolishment of the
wage system."' (*4)
The culmination of this anti-strike policy came in 1886

when the Knights of Labor made the fatal mistake of
opposing the eight-hour-day general strike move and of
allowing their officers to attack the Haymarket Square
victims. (*5) After 1890, the Knights of Labor entered its last
period of rapid decline. (*6)
As the lot of the members of the Knights of Labor grew

steadily worse, in desperation they attached themselves to
the Radical People's Party of the Middle West, which
advocated such propositions as the nationalization of
railroads and telegraphs, national income tax, labor
411
legislation, and free coinage of silver. (*7) In 1894 the great
American railway strike broke out and was endorsed by
both the Knights of Labor and the Farmers Alliance.
However, bitterly attacked by all the power of the
government, and viciously fought by the American
Federation of Labor, the whole movement collapsed. The
Knights of Labor disappeared from the scene.
As in the case of the local union organization formed before

the Civil War and the National unions created afterwards,
the dominant Liberal ideology made it impossible for
native workmen to avoid parliamentary illusions. They
attempted to enlarge and to capture democracy for
themselves. The result, in these early days of the union
movement, was a blurring of class lines and an intolerable
tactical and organizational confusion that could result only
in failure. Trying to build both a party and a trade union,
the early labor men could build neither.
The next step had to be taken, not by the journeymen-

craftsmen, but by the modern skilled factory workers. Like
their British brethren, the skilled factory workers in the
United States were able to build at least national crafts and
trades unions through the American Federation of Labor,
organized in 1881. However, the A. F. of L. was far behind
the British in many respects, in spite of the fact that the
program of that body declared "that a struggle between
capital and labor was going on in the nations of the
civilized world which would work disaster to the toiling
millions unless they combined for mutual protection and
benefit." (*8)
In England, class lines always had been drawn very clearly.

Not so in America, where every laborer seemed to have a
little property and every little property owner had worked.
The emancipation of labor had appeared to the Knights of
412
Labor as the emancipation of all humanity in the most
literal sense. It was due to this general classlessness that
professional men, storekeepers and what-not had joined its
ranks and had been accepted on equal terms. It was these
elements that, in the very beginning, had led the Knights of
Labor to oppose strikes.
The American Federation of Labor from its very inception

established a definite class line. In this respect it made an
immense step forward in contrast to the Knights of Labor.
Petty business men, lawyers, doctors, and other non-
workers were strictly kept out. As Samuel Gompers put it,
workers alone must control the movement. "It will not be
dominated by the so-called intellectuals or butters-in. The
working class movement to be most effective must be
conducted by the workers themselves." (*9)
On the other hand, the American Federation of Labor

deliberately restricted itself to the skilled workers only. The
prevailing general classlessness had allowed the Knights of
Labor to heap together all workers, skilled and unskilled, at
a time when the gap between the two strata was still sharp
and clear and was becoming further aggravated by racial
and nationalist differences.
This was a period when the skilled workers everywhere

were aggressively elbowing their way to a secure place in
the social scheme of things. They felt they could arrive
sooner if they dumped their excess baggage, the inarticulate
unskilled workers, and shifted for themselves. Thus, they
limited themselves almost exclusively to craft and trade
unions of the skilled, while setting up high dues and
initiation fees to bar the others. What they wanted was
recognition and job monopoly.
413
However, the recognition that the skilled workers desired
could not be won without a struggle. In the course of the
hurly-burly social conflict, the A. F. of L. could reach an
agreement with employers only by repeatedly
demonstrating that it knew how to fight and could rally
masses of unskilled as well.
The American Federation of Labor was born in the midst of

a strike period unprecedented in the history of this country.
To the great railway strike of the '70's was added the big
strike wave of the '80's. The unions actually began to
threaten to take matters into their own hands and to utilize
the good old American custom of lynching in their own
behalf for a change. For example, in 1883 the Central Labor
Union organized a big parade in New York City in which
they went so far as openly to raise the slogan: "Jay Gould
must go." "Which shall it be, the ballot or judge Lynch?"
(*10)
In such a period it was no wonder that the A. F. of L. put

forward men such as Strasser and Gompers who had been
trained in socialistic thinking. Gompers had been intimately
connected with the leaders of the First International in
America, so much so that even when ejecting the Socialist
Labor Party from the A. F. of L., Gompers took the trouble
to write letters both to Friedrich Engels in England and to F.
A. Sorge in the United States to explain the situation. (*11)
The A. F. of L. as a whole, however, could not adopt the

Socialist position. The working class was not ripe enough
nor was the class struggle sufficiently advanced in this
country for unions of skilled workers to have enunciated
Socialist politics.
In its battle for recognition the A. F. of L. threw itself behind

the demand for the eight-hour day, which was stimulating
414
workers everywhere to active struggle. The eight-hour-day
movement embraced and indeed, to a considerable extent,
was initiated by the skilled workers of American stock. This
tendency was accelerated as the American farmer was
driven into the city factories, and as exploitations became
more intense in a country where profits were enormous and
the masses had illusions of governing themselves.
The skilled workers were very well prepared for strike

action and for union discipline. Small in numbers, capable
of dominating the productive process, bound together by
their skill and disciplined by the factory itself, able secretly
to convene together, and having some training and
education, the skilled workers, better than all the others,
were able to form their unions and to prevent the
employers from continuing their production. In addition,
the skilled workers had reserve funds to continue the
struggle for a great length of time. At the same time, in this
period of industry in the United States, skilled labor was in
great demand. Profits were high and Big Business had not
yet overwhelmingly dominated the scene. Thus the
resistance of certain employers was weakened.
Taking advantage of the situation in the '80's, these practical

and yet extremely limited leaders of the American
Federation of Labor, fighting hard against the Knights of
Labor as a rival organization for the winning of the masses
of skilled workers, put out a national call for an eight-hour
day and declared May 1, 1886, as the last date to be given
the employers to comply with the demand of labor.
Little did the narrow-minded specialists at the head of the

American Federation of Labor dream what the response
would be. Spontaneous strikes flashed all around them, and,
much as the American Federation of Labor leaders desired
to delay the movement and, in deadly fear of the
415
revolutionary consequences of their actions, tried to hack it
to death, throughout the country the masses of workers
themselves, partly stimulated by revolutionary elements,
took the initiative and carried all before them. The Chicago
Haymarket affair was the climax of the events.
Even though the eight-hour-day agitation eventually

petered out, this whole movement taught the employers the
necessity of keeping separate as long as possible the skilled
from the unskilled workers. The A. F. of L. began to be
recognized by the employers, not only because of its
intrinsic strength, but also owing to a conscious policy to
corrupt and to bribe the skilled workers, the only ones that
possibly could articulate and enforce their interests at this
time. What mattered it whether the skilled workers were
given concessions and special privileges if in this way the
unskilled could be exploited still further? Whatever the
members of the American Federation of Labor gained was
at the expense of the underprivileged.
Thus by the last decade of the nineteenth century the skilled

factory workers had won their points. Traditionally, the
vast expanse of the American continent and the
backwardness of American economy had permitted to a far
greater extent than in England the existence of old
handicrafts and petty industry, thus allowing the
mechanics to play a dominant role in the labor movement.
This domination they meant to retain. When the last
remnants of the Knights of Labor disappeared from the
scene, the A. F. of L. remained undisputed in the field.
In proportion as its place in the economic sun was secured,

the A. F. of L. adopted a policy calculated to retain the
goodwill of the employers. Both in structure and function
the A. F. of L. would amply demonstrate that its days of
struggle were behind it.
416
Within the A. F. of L. the solidarity of the workers was
impeded by the failure to establish any central discipline.
Each international craft and trade union was a complete
authority unto itself. Thus, the A. F. of L. was declared to be
not an organization but a federation of organizations. (*12)
Strikes were looked at with increasing aversion.
Conciliation and arbitration became the accepted mode.
Long term contracts were signed and when locals were
urged not to scab, they could always appeal to the sanctity
of their agreements and the honor of their given word.
At the start, the A. F. of L. concentrated on the skilled

workers simply because they were the most easily
organizable elements; later, as the skilled worker began to
fear the loss of his job through heightened competition, the
separation between the skilled and the unskilled became
widened deliberately. At first the A. F. of L. pretended that
an increase in the pay of the upper organized stratum of
labor would ultimately result in a rise in the pay for all
labor. Later, toward the end of the century and with the rise
of the activity of the unskilled in their own behalf, the A. F.
of L. officials were made to realize more clearly that the
extra-high pay accorded the skilled craftsmen could be
possible only because the money was taken out of the pay
envelopes of the unskilled.
From then on the A. F. of L. turned its back on the unskilled.

Tied hand and foot to the employers by special privileges
and opportunities which were accorded the native workers
but not the Negroes and foreign-born, the American
Federation of Labor was induced to take a strong stand
against the unskilled workers, refusing them admittance,
drawing the color line, trying to build for itself a little job-
trust under its own control.
417
Against the strikes of 1892, against the American railway
strike of 1894, against the proposal of a General Strike, more
and more the American Federation of Labor officials stood
as agents of the employers, willing to scab on any strike not
"A. F. of L." and refusing to fight in the slightest for the
interest of the poorest layers of the workers. Coining the
phrase, "pure and simple trade unionism," the officials
threw the whole weight of their organization against the
revolutionary elements arising in the country.
In line with the changed situation, the A. F. of L. officers

opened a ,sharp fire against the Socialists. Unceremoniously
they threw out the Socialist Labor Party, which had been
affiliated to the New York Central Labor Union, and
rejected all advocacy of the collective ownership of the
means of production. It was this attitude that influenced the
S. L. P. to organize its separate Socialist Trade and Labor
Alliance in 1895. Thus did the American organized labor
movement fall behind that of England and of the continent.
The Americans were not even at the level of Lib- Labism,
not to speak of laborism. If even the most conservative
British unionist could agree with the Welfare-Liberalism of
John Stuart Mill, the American was still content with the
rugged individualism of Cobden and Bright. The A. F. of L.
declined to enter politics at all.
The conservative character of the A. F. of L. induced the

militant Western Federation of Miners to withdraw from
the Federation in 1897 and to try to build a Western Labor
Union of its own. In this period, it was the Western
organizations which were the most militant, particularly
the metal miners. "The hardy miner of the Rocky Mountain
region, self- assertive and daring, impatient under restraint
and violent in mood, skeptical of property rights in a
country where riches were often the result of mere luck,
418
and not much given to respect for the social distinctions of
a settled community, was inclined to follow leaders with
radical programs." (*13)
From this latter movement there evolved the American

Labor Union, which was quite different from the Socialist
Trades and Labor Alliance. The S. T. and L. A. was
dominated entirely by the Socialist Labor Party. It did not
press the principle of industrial unionism, but was content
with craft organization. At the same time, it took a rather
derogatory view of the efficacy of pure economic action.
The American Labor Union, on the other hand, while
endorsing the idea of socialism, was controlled by no
political party, and embraced all workers on an industrial
basis. The American Labor Union was a true forerunner of
the Industrial Workers of the World.
No doubt, at the start, there was ample historical

justification for the refusal of the A. F. of L. to support any
political party. In every preceding case this had led to
blurring the interests of the workers. The history of the
labor movement in this country had been strewn with the
wreckage of organizations that had gone into politics and
had been captured by this or that bourgeois political
movement. Not strong enough to form a class party of their
own, the workers generally, through their skilled section,
perceived the necessity of remaining aloof from all separate
political activity, at least for the while.
It was not that the A. F. of L. members were opposed to

political action "on principle." Indeed, they were opposed to
nothing "on principle," since they had adopted the
pragmatic program of having no "principles." It was simply
that the skilled worker in the United States was in such a
relatively favorable position that he did not feel the need of
forming a special political movement. Adapting itself to the
419
laissez faire, rugged individualist policy of the employers,
the trade union officials looked askance at all State
interference and stood for a policy of self-help.
Accordingly, the A. F. of L. could declare: "The A. F. of L. is

not in favor of fixing, by legal enactment certain minimum
wages. The attempts of the government to establish wages
at which workmen may work, according to the teachings of
history, will result in a long era of industrial slavery." (*14)
And again, it pointed out: The A. F. of L. ". . . does not favor
a legal limitation of the workday for adult men workers.
(*15) These declarations were made, not only because such
additional powers of the government could be used against
the workers, if the necessity therefor should arise, but
because the workers must be trained to stand on their own
feet and win these demands themselves.
To sum up the situation in the nineteenth century, we can

say that, like the English, the American organized working
men still remained in the camp of Liberalism. If the English
empirically began to move to programs of Socialism as
expressed by Laborism, the American, less bound to the
unskilled and with less class consciousness, used the
pragmatic approach to decry all theories. "Theories" meant
attempts to understand laws of motion, but this the skilled
worker and the labor bureaucrat of the A. F. of L. did not in
the least desire to do. Such an understanding would have
led them to considerations of the effect of machinery on the
skilled trades, of the growth of the unskilled sections of the
proletariat, and of the inevitability of a new social order.
The "practical" trade Unionist dominating the labor world
did not care to look too closely about him.
420
By the turn of the century the skilled workers had begun to
lose all their historic progressiveness under the deadening
influence of imperialist bribery. The unskilled carried the
banner forward; the old craft and trade unions could act
only as a brake retarding the whole movement. The
degeneration of the old trade union movement can be seen
in the further evolution of the A. F. of L. which may be
conveniently divided into the following periods:
1. From the time of the great general strikes culminating

with the American Railway Strike of 1894 to the World War.
2. From the World War to the depression of 1929.
3. From the economic crisis to the present.
With the rise of imperialism at the turn of the century a

different economic situation faced the workers of America.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century there had been a
tremendous need for skilled workers, so much so that the
employers had thrown down the barriers to public school
education for the wholesale training of such workers. This
was the day of the skilled worker who was able to enforce
his demands by strikes that were on the whole merely local,
petty, and episodic.
With the domination of the big trusts under imperialism,

the demand was no longer for skilled but for unskilled
labor. Now if labor were to enforce its demands, it could do
so only by means of large-scale strikes that could paralyze a
whole trust. Such strikes could no longer be petty and
peaceful. Increasingly they would have to take on a violent
character and become a sort of miniature civil war. The
skilled workers could not dominate such battles; the
unskilled would have to fight them out.
421
But at this period the unskilled were totally unable to take
care of themselves independently. They were, in the main,
newly arrived immigrants or Negro laborers, too raw as
workers in industry to organize by themselves and solve
their problems. The unskilled often did not know the
language and customs of America. They came from the
farms of Europe where their standards of living had been
lower than here and political oppression had been greater.
They were full of illusions about the United States and were
willing to work hard to get ahead. When advanced
elements did learn the true situation, they were
handicapped by the fact that other workers around them
did not understand their language and by the fact, too, that
the skilled workers had organized themselves separately
and had abandoned everyone else. On the other hand, the
skilled American organized workers looked with the
greatest contempt upon this huge bulk of American
workers, helpless, doubly oppressed, inarticulate, and
unorganized.
The strikes of the unskilled, therefore, that broke out in this

period, were bound to have a blind, chaotic, as well as
violent, character. They marked the first independent
gropings of the unskilled and the first move towards
genuine industrial unionism. That the strikes would be
sharply fought out was inherent in the situation. Employers
can easily grant demands when a small handful of workers
present them, but when the entire mass desires to raise its
standards, an increase in costs which they cannot easily
bear is imposed upon the industrialists, and thus they must
fight it out to a finish. The demands of the unskilled cannot
be thrown upon the backs of any lower strata; they can be
taken only from the profits of the employers.
422
The struggles of the unskilled in this period from the last
decade of the nineteenth century to the time of the World
War, reflex actions as they were of the changed industrial
relations, impelled the A. F. of L. to terminate its
progressive character and to become closely allied with the
employers. This it did at first apologetically, then more and
more brazenly.
The first President of the A. F. of L., Samuel Gompers,

affirmed: "From my earliest understanding of the
conditions that prevail in the industrial world I have been
convinced and I have asserted that the economic interests of
the employing class are not harmonious. That has been my
position ever since-never changed in the slightest. There are
times when, for temporary purposes, interests are
reconcilable; but they are temporary only." (*16)
Thus we may say that in the beginning the A. F. of L. had

endorsed the class struggle in theory as well as in practice.
Gompers could indignantly deny that strikes were called
only as a last resort; he also affirmed that they were
promptly initiated whenever they could be effective to
remedy a wrong.
In effect, however, the A. F. of L. increasingly avoided

strike action whenever possible and attempted conciliation
and arbitration with the employers. For this purpose it
actually joined an employers' association, the National
Civic Federation, organized in 1900 in Chicago. In
justification of this action, Gompers asserted that he would
appeal to "the devil and his mother-in-law" to help labor, if
labor could be aided thereby. But that which was at first
represented as but a temporary reconciliation of labor's
interests with those of the employers grew steadily until it
became a permanent feature of the policies of the A. F. of L.,
423
and Gompers' class struggle turned into open class
collaboration.
Within the union organizations a corresponding change

toward conservatism became manifest in the relations
between members and leaders. As the employers tended
increasingly to defend the A. F. of L. as a counter weight to
more militant labor organizations such as the I. W. W., etc.,
there developed within the A. F. of L. an extremely
powerful, highly-paid bureaucracy. The original pay of the
leaders of the A. F. of L. had been modest, but, by the time
of the World War, the salaries and expansions of these
officials rivaled those of the administrators of powerful
corporations. In fact, the trade unions were being
administered by the A. F. of L. bureaucracy as corporations
were run by business men.
It must not be supposed that this period was one of reaction

only. It was also a period of growth. The A. F. of L.
membership increased to almost three million. Careful
examination of the statistics of membership show, however,
that this growth was primarily a growth of workers in
industries related to the soil, such as the building trades
and coal mining, where the employer could not move his
enterprise away, and where he was particularly subject to
the local conditions that favored organization of workers.
Dependent upon the unique circumstances of a given
locality, the employer often would have to yield to the labor
pressure of the residents and recognize workers' unions.
In the case of the miners' union, the workers were forced

into bitter struggles. Unlike the building trades, many of
the laborers of the mines were unskilled. On the other hand,
the mines were in the hands, not of local petty contractors,
but of the most powerful concerns in the United States.
Under such circumstances the employers would not yield
424
without a struggle. The United Mine Workers of the A. F. of
L. were forced therefore into violent conflicts in the course
of which they were compelled to organize their union on an
industrial basis, taking in all the workers who worked in
and about the mines.
Thus, the United Mine Workers Union became a section of

the A. F. of L. that to a considerable extent reflected the
views of the new industrial unionism arising outside the
organized trades. Some of the locals of the United Mine
Workers actually joined the I. W. W., but this was a
temporary aberration. Controlled by the skilled workers,
the unskilled miners' helpers and laborers remained in the
A. F. of L. during all this period. The great growth of the
United Mine Workers, far from causing a split in the A. F.
of L., imparted to the A. F. of L. a certain militant prestige
and allowed the officials to declare that the policy of the A.
F. of L. was flexible to the extent that it could meet all
situations And include all bodies of workers.
In the political field, too, the A. F. of L. changed its position.

While denouncing the Socialists for their disruption, the
officials of the A. F. of L. engaged in parliamentary
campaigns to support this or that individual on this or that
particular question. In this respect, trade union officialdom
was but limping behind employers who had also
abandoned old laissez faire Liberalism to adopt a policy
whereby the trusts were rushing to Congress for special
pieces of legislation; as the corporations created their
special lobbies in Congress, the A. F. of L. in 1906
established its own lobby to influence Congressmen. To
convince Congressmen, the A. F. of L. adopted a policy of
rewarding "friends" and punishing "enemies" (*17) just as
the A. F. of L. was content with the continuation of the
wage system, so was it satisfied to drag along as the tail end
425
of the two old parties of capitalism-Democratic and
Republican.
Under the guise of being "just plain workingmen," the

officials of the A. F. of L. worked out a subtle philosophy to
justify their position, in which on the one hand they bitterly
fought the revolutionary elements and unskilled workers,
and on the other hand did not preclude the possibility of
becoming themselves more radical at some future time. The
present was comfortable, but should the future prove worse,
they would not guarantee to be docile. The American
philosophy of Pragmatism fitted in eminently well with the
interests of the skilled workers.
Pragmatism was essentially anti-intellectualist. To speak of

the necessity of action and to deride theory, to emphasize
steady progress rather than subservience to any program-
this position was well reflected by Gompers. "The A. F. of
L. . . . are more concerned in doing the actual work of
alleviating the present bad conditions than in promulgating
programs. It is the easiest thing in the world to promulgate
programs which are but simple, idle, elusive words and
mean nothing substantial to the people. (*18)
"The workers will never stop at any effort, nor will they
stop at any point in an effort to secure greater
improvements. Where these efforts may lead, what that
better life may be, I do not care to predict. I decline to
permit my mind or my activities to be labeled or limited by
any particularism because of adherence to a theory or a
dream. The A. F. of L. is neither governed in its activities by
a so-called 'Social Philosophy,' nor does it work 'blindly
from day to day.' Its work is well planned to be continually
of the greatest benefit to the working people . . . . (*19)
426
Against the schematic, blue-print plans of the socialists, the
A. F. of L. proposed a policy of meliorism, policies of steady
improvement for the skilled workers. The A. F. of L.
officials would not in this period admit that capitalism was
an eternal system. At the same time, they could say, with
Gompers, "In brief I replied that I was not sure I wanted the
wage system abolished; . . . (*20)
Typically pragmatic, Gompers appealed to emotion and

impulse rather than to theory. "The movement of the
working people, whether under the A. F. of L. or not, will
simply follow the human impulse for improvement in
conditions wherever that may lead, and wherever that may
lead they will go without aiming at any theoretical goal.
Human impulse for self betterment will lead constantly to
the material, physical, social, and moral betterment of the
people. We decline to commit our labor movement to any
species of speculative philosophy." (*21) With such a
pragmatic speculative philosophy, the A. F. of L. as easily
could become attached to governmental participation and
fascist collectivism as it could to socialism. It all depended
which alternative offered more to the skilled workers.
The World War and its aftermath witnessed a

transformation in the economic relations of the country and
in the policies of the A. F. of L. During the war, the A. F. of
L. leaders had felt the beneficent influence of a government
which protected their unions and insured them high wages,
special privileges, and governmental recognition. In fact, in
many places, as on the railroads and in government-
controlled plants, the government did much to organize the
workers. The A. F. of L. became an important instrument to
win the war. This changed situation permitted the
organized trades to take an entirely different view of
governmental activities than hitherto.
427
After the war, labor officialdom soon found that, without
governmental aid, its power to organize workers was
decidedly reduced; large trusts were establishing their own
company unions, while the unskilled workers were
pushing forth rival organizations.
The complete stoppage of immigration during the war and

its prohibition on a large scale afterward had permitted all
the polyglot nationalities composing the unskilled foreign-
born workers to learn the language and customs of the
United States, and to come to know one another and to
work together. The children of the older workers were now
thoroughly Americanized and could form a living cement
to bind all closer. The ten million women drawn into
industry had become part of the active working class and
no longer acted as a drag on those workers fighting for
better conditions in the factories. The Negroes, who had
been submerged as a separate caste, now were part of the
most important sections of the proletariat and were tied
closer to the white workers. In short, all of the backward
and undeveloped layers of the working class were now
involved in the full stream of the struggle and were rallying
around the general laborer in the big trustified and basic
heavy industries of the country. (*22)
This development among the unskilled led to a tremendous

strike movement in 1919-1920 coincident with the
demobilization of the soldiers and with the rise of the
Russian Revolution and the demand of labor everywhere
for political power. Thus, from both angles, whether by
inducements from above or pressure from below, the A. F.
of L. could be friendly to the idea of participation in
governmental activities. In 1920, the A. F. of L. Convention
advocated national ownership of the railways, even though
Gompers fought against it. The skilled workers of the
428
Railroad Brotherhoods in 1919 approved the Plumb Plan
which called for a nationalization of the railways and
control by the government, workers, and officials. The same
year witnessed the miners' demand for nationalization of
the coal mines. In 1924, the A. F. of L. officialdom was
compelled to endorse the LaFollette candidacy for President,
which was also supported by the Congress for Progressive
Political Action. This Congress for Progressive Political
Action had been organized in 1921 on the initiative of the
Socialist Party and national and local unions connected
with the A. F. of L. It had adopted a program that was
speedily leading the unions to declare for an independent
political party of Labor. Although the plans for the
immediate formation of a Labor Party collapsed, the later
President of the A. F. of L., William Green, affirmed that it
was not beyond the limits of possibility for the A. F. of L.
eventually to organize such a party.
This same period of post-war development occasioned a

marked degeneration in the A. F. of L. Immediately after
the war, the A. F. of L. lost much of its artificial gains,
especially among the railroad and metal workers;
membership fell from four million to three. In the period
from 1923 to 1929, although industry as a whole enjoyed
great prosperity, the A. F. of L., for the first time in its
history in such a period, could not grow, but in fact,
steadily deteriorated.
In their organization campaigns, union organizers no

longer approached the workers themselves, but frequently
went directly to the employer to induce him to "turn over"
his workers on the ground that this would mean better
control, less strikes, and more efficient production.
Together with these tactics there developed a drive to "sell"
the employer the "union label." It was argued that this
429
would increase his sales and expand his business. The
unions, on their part, concentrated on appeals to consumers
to buy union goods, and tried to compel all union men
especially so to do, often going to ridiculous lengths at
delegate meetings.
Thus, the A. F. of L. turned from the active strike to the

passive boycott, from organization on the job to appeals to
consumers. Walking delegates became traveling salesmen,
and the union undertook to sell the product of the
employer even where costs and prices were higher than
elsewhere. In militant union circles the union label
campaign was preached as a method of doubling the power
of labor. In reality, it tended to transform many unions into
adjuncts of business, often of petty business that would
have been junked years before.
In their campaign to sell themselves to solvent businessmen

on a profit sharing basis, the trade union delegates stressed,
not the need for improvement of workers' conditions, but
mainly the issue of recognition of the union. Many strikes
were called solely for recognition. To the union members,
such actions were explained as increasing the power of the
union. Very often they were merely schemes to compel the
employer to turn over some of his profits to the union
agents.
Connected with these matters went questions of the closed

shop and the check-off. Union members believed that with
such principles they would control the employer and insure
the safety of the union. But in the hands of the bureaucracy,
the effect of such policies was to give the officials full
control over the right to hire and to fire and to make them
entirely independent of the membership, since the dues
were taken out of the pay envelopes by the employer and
directly handed over to the union agent. (*23) The power to
430
give men jobs has also resulted in luscious opportunities for
graft and coercion which have by no means gone neglected.
The check-off system has freed the bureaucracy from the
need of calling meetings or of retaining the good will of the
members; all that is necessary is the good will of the boss.
Collaboration with the employers brought about the use of

the trade unions as open strike-breaking machines and as
distinct subsidiaries to the corporation managements for
the improvement of production and the speeding up of
workers. As one of its leaders expressed it, the A. F. of L.
rested upon the important principle of the mutuality of
interests between capital and labor, and he hailed as a
distinctive trend in the American labor movement the
assumption by unions of various degrees of responsibility
for production and the development of various types of co-
operation between unions and managements. (*24) If a
union leader wanted to pose as a Radical, he could declare
that such interest in the productive process was only
preparatory to the workers' taking over industry in the
United States as they did in Russia (*25) But whether
Radical phrases were flung about or not, the A. F. of L.
became steadily company-unionized.
The A. F. of L. bureaucrat increasingly became transformed

into a racketeer and gangster or co-operated with such. A
most interesting illustration occurred at the 1933 A. F. of L.
Convention. One of the delegates had proposed a
resolution against racketeering which had met with most
violent opposition from the leaders. An old-timer, delegate
Sumner, who could not be denied the floor, arose and told
of "Chicago ‘Fort Union’ Protected by seven-foot boiler steel,
double steel mesh on the windows, bulletproof shielded
glass in the doors, gun ports 'to protect us against
racketeers who did not only promise to come in but did
431
come and told us what we would have to do, that when
they walked in next time we would walk out."' Sumner told
how he had to travel in a bulletproof car with a sawed-off
shotgun, a rifle, a Luger revolver, two Colts and hand
grenades. (*26)
Delegate Sumner did not fail to state, either, that it was

probable that his statement would cost him his life as there
were men right at the Convention who were bound to "get"
him for his exposure. The Convention decided to delete the
scandal from the official reports; it can be found only in the
original transcript.
The business unionism of the A. F. of L. effloresced into all

sorts of capitalist schemes to which the treasuries of the
unions were compromised. The United Mine Workers
opened up a non-union mine. Other unions invested in
Florida real estate schemes, "wild cat" banking, etc.
Incidentally, these schemes enormously increased the
power of the bureaucracy of the A. F. of L., while the
members had to foot the bills when the get-rich-quick
projects collapsed.
Remarkable changes took place in the composition of the A.

F. of L. membership. Under the blows of trustified capital,
the United Mine Workers began to disintegrate, and, after a
series of treacherous actions by their leaders, an enormous
number of mine workers quit their affiliation. (*27) The
leading position in the A. F. of L. was assumed by the
fossilized craft unions of the building trades.
It goes without saying that during all this period of bloated

bureaucratic prosperity, the A. F. of L. took an extremely
anti-Communist position, often denouncing Soviet Russia
far more bitterly than the open-shop employers. In this way
432
the officials of the unions hoped to ingratiate themselves for
a while longer with Big Business.
The period ushered in by the economic depression of 1929

has witnessed further transformations in the relationship of
forces. On the one hand, State functions have expanded
enormously under the pressure of the crisis, and with the
bankruptcy of private business, the A. F. of L. has been
compelled to turn more and more to the government for
jobs and for support. A large number of government Boards
have been established in which A. F. of L. officials have
been given a prominent place. As the government goes into
business, economics and politics tend to fuse into one.
At the same time, the unskilled masses, pressed down by

the crisis and now capable of organization on their own
account, have advanced their own interests in a militant
fashion. Under the Roosevelt regime, two vast national
strike waves took place, one in 1933 and one in 1934, and as
the New Deal developed, the strikes became more hostile to
the entire Roosevelt set-up. The number of strikers in the
two years mentioned is the largest since the strike wave
immediately after the war and what is more, the strikes
invariably tended to spread into national strikes of a given
industry or into general strikes of a particular city or
locality. Solidarity of workers, regardless of color, sex,
locality, or whether unemployed, was extremely marked.
The big problem for the government in this period has been
to control the mass of laborers breaking from and outside
the discipline of the A. F. of L. Of the total number of strikes,
the percentage led by organizations has alarmingly
decreased from 95 per cent in 1920 to 56 per cent in 1933.
(*28) The militant spontaneity of the masses has been a
threat to efficient social control. Since the government has
become the largest employer of all, strikes against the
433
government have too much of the character of political
insurrection. Just as large corporations have formed
company unions, so must the government move in the
direction of government unions and try to governmentalize
the A. F. of L., which thus becomes a semi-public institution.
"Should such a quasi-public trade unionism develop it

would mean a considerable modification in the function of
the Federation.... Inevitably, if the government lends its aid
to unionism, it will demand in exchange that the unions
surrender some of their traditional liberties and adhere
more closely to strictly constructive functions in industry."
(*29)
Nor has the A. F. of L. officialdom been reluctant to become

a partner to the government or to obtain sinecures in the
State apparatus. "If industry, on the other hand, is
unwilling to embrace labor as a partner and if management
is determined upon sole dictation, then, indeed will labor
have no alternative other than to turn to the government for
the control and regulation of industry. In such an
unfortunate event labor will be forced to enter into a
partnership relation with government and attempt to
realize politically that relationship so essential in industry
and so desirable of attainment through voluntary methods."
(*30)
The A. F. of L. leadership has now dropped its old theories

of individualism and has wholeheartedly supported the
National Industrial Recovery Act of President Roosevelt,
with its regulation of hours, wages, and prices, and its
arbitration machinery. It has declared that no longer can
individual initiative be carried on in the same manner as in
the past, but a new collectivist approach must be taken.
434
Simultaneously, the A. F. of L. has reversed the position it
held as late as 1931 regarding legislative protection for the
workman, limitation of the work-day, standardization of
pay, etc.: in its 1932 convention the A. F. of L. indorsed a
system of social insurance for the workers. "Five years
before such a decision would have been inconceivable. . . .
Today labor stands at the forefront. . . ." (*31)
As during the war the A. F. of L. was indebted to the

government for many material favors, under the National
Industrial Recovery Act, it has been enabled through the
government to recover some of its losses. In 1929 its
membership had amounted to approximately three million;
by 1932 it had dropped to less than two million. The
building trade locals were rapidly dissolving, and the base
of the A. F. of L. was being reduced to workers in relatively
light industry and petty concerns. Through the Recovery
Act it was able to gain approximately a million workers and
thus recover part of its strength. (*32)
The necessity for gathering within its ranks the majority of

the workers in given industries, in order to come within the
provision of the government codes, compelled the A. F. of L.
to take in large numbers of new elements who had been
heretofore unorganized. This has again pushed to the
forefront the question of industrial unionism which, indeed,
has now been urged by such governmental officials as
General Hugh Johnson himself. In its craft union form, the
A. F. of L. as an agency for social control is not of much use
to the government. Vertical unions are needed.
As a reflection of the transition point which the American

Labor movement has reached, the A. F. of L. has now been
split on the question of the relation of the trade unions to
politics and to the government. One group, headed by the
leaders of the Miner's Union, the clothing workers and
435
others, desires to work closely with the government and to
tie up the unions with the State machine. This can be done
only if the A. F. of L. changes its base from craft to
industrial unions. The leading elements of this group have
already, in one form or another, indorsed the principle of
industrial unionism and have attempted to carry it out. In
its turning away from private industry towards the
government, this faction has compelled the A. F. of L.
officially to break from the National Civic Federation of
Chicago.
The industrial union faction is made up of three separate

elements. The first is typified by those who wish to connect
the union with the Roosevelt administration because of its
protective care of the A. F. of L.; at the same time it declares
its skepticism of such items as the arbitration schemes set
up by the government, etc.
What has made the leadership of the Miners' Union, which

heads both the first element and the industrial union faction
as a whole, to take its stand, has been, more than anything
else, the fact of the dissolution of the union in the soft coal
fields. With the transference of the mining industry to the
southern states, where union organizers have not been able
to penetrate, and with the revolt of the Mine workers in the
soft coal fields of Illinois and elsewhere, the John L. Lewis
machine believes that only government favoritism can save
the organization from complete disruption. To the Mine
Workers' officials can be added the top clique of the United
Textile Workers, whose per capita dues income expanded
enormously during the operation of the national codes
under the Recovery Act, when the northern manufacturers
and the government used the union to try to bring the
southern competitors into line. Substantial sections of the
textile workers union, however, are far closer to the
436
position of the clothing workers than to the miners'
officialdom.
In the second grouping, the agents in charge of the clothing

unions have not been dependent upon governmental favors
to the extent of the miners' bureaucracy. The functioning of
the National Industrial Recovery Act gave them the
opportunity for a vigorous organization drive whereby
masses of workers were won by direct contact. Born in a
period of depression, these locals have no illusions as to the
efficacy of the New Deal. The Socialist and Communist
parties are part of this second grouping.
The final factor in this combination has been the "federal"

unions which were spontaneously organized in basic
industries of the country and which became affiliated
directly to the A. F. of L. This group, primarily connected
with the interests of the rank and file, having no well
established bureaucracy and fighting for its life against the
enormous power of the trusts, favors industrial unionism as
a militant weapon of struggle. It is interested neither in the
Democratic Party panderings of John L. Lewis nor the
socialistic leanings towards the Labor Party on the part of
Sidney Hillman. It is entirely a product of the new class
relations that are forming to throw the bulk of the general
laborers in the important industries of the country into the
struggle against corporation collectivism and for power of
the working class.
Should the industrial union faction actually win the control

over the A. F. of L., or form a separate body, these three
groups would sever their mutual alliance and split into
separate formations.
Completely on the other side is the craft and trade union

wing, representing the orthodox traditional position of the
437
A. F. of L. It is willing to concede the advisability of
industrial unions in some cases. What it objects to most
strongly is that the endorsement of industrial unionism by
the- A. F. of L. as a whole would mean the liquidation of the
independent craft unions and the destruction of many of
the jobs which the bureaucrats now hold. What the craft
union officials fight for is not merely to keep their control in
the A. F. of L., but to retain their jobs in their own unions.
Furthermore, many of these craft unions are engaged in

industries which have not been affected too greatly by
governmental control on the one hand and by the pressure
of modern machinery and trustified capital on the other.
Their position remains an individualistic one in the main
and connects them with the same philosophy that
dominates the Republican Party. They still look to private
employers for their jobs and security.
While the industrial unionists assume the color of

"Progressives" and talk of the increased strength the
industrial form would give to labor, the craft unionists on
their side do not hesitate to imply that the move of the
industrial unionists is a movement towards State capitalism
and Fascism. They maintain that should the Lewis faction
gain control, all liberty, all the traditional autonomy of
locals and freedom of the members would disappear under
the deadening centralized hand of the administration above.
Whether the A. F. of L. will be split asunder by the collision

of these two factions or not is problematical and is
relatively of secondary importance in comparison with the
basic fact that today neither the American Federation of
Labor nor any of its parts is able to solve the basic problems
of labor. Whether taken over by the government,
advocating a Labor Party, or trying to work independently
438
as of old, the organized trade union movement of America
is historically dead as a progressive force.
Footnotes
1. W. H. Crook: General Strike, p. 5.
2. See, P. Snowden: Socialism and Syndicalism, pp. 199-200.
3. It seems that the decision to enter into international

relations was partly induced by the organization's desire to
prevent Oriental immigration and other cheap foreign labor
penetrating farther into the United States.
4. G. G. Groat: The Study of Organized Labor in America (2nd

ed., 1926), p. 80.
5. See, Lucy E. Parsons: Life of Albert Parsons, pp. xxv-xxvi,

213-214, for the role of Terence V. Powderly, head of the
Knights of Labor, regarding the Chicago Haymarket Case.
6. The situation is graphically portrayed by figures of

membership comparing the Knights of Labor with the
American Federation of Labor.
Knights of Labor A. F. of L.
Given in L. Wolman, Growth of American Trade Unions, 1880-

1923, p. 32.
7. Coming at the time of the great Homestead and Coeur

d'Alene strikes, etc., and in a period of impending
depression and great discontent, the People's Party polled
one million votes.
8. L. Lorwin: The American Federation of Labor, p. 12.
439
9. S. Gompers: The American Labor Movement, pamphlet, p.
23.
10. See, R. T. Ely: Recent American Socialism, p. 20.
11. See S. Gompers: Seventy Years of Life and Labor, I, 388-389.
12. See, S. Gompers. American Labor Movement, pp. 7-9.
13. L. Lorwin: The American Federation of Labor, pp. 84-85.
14. S. Gompers: American Labor Movement, p. 14.
16. S. Gompers: The American Labor Movement, p. 23.
17. See M. R. Carroll: Labor and Politics, pp. 45-47.
18. S. Gompers: The American Labor Movement, p. 17.
19. Gompers: The American Labor Movement, pp. 20-21.
20. Gompers: Labor in Europe and .America, p. 54.
21. The same, p. 21, pamphlet.
22. See A. Weisbord: Passaic, pamphlet.
23. The "militant" John L. Lewis, President of the United

Mine Workers, likes this method especially.
24. See M. Woll: Labor, Industry and Government, p. 212.
25. This was the philosophy of Sidney Hillman, President of

the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.
26. N. J. Ware: Labor in Modern Industrial Society, p. 44.
440
27. See, for example, L. Lorwin: The American Federation of
labor, p. 485, who exposes the discrepancy between the
actual membership of the United Mine Workers and the
membership reported officially. In the case of the United
Mine Workers alone the discrepancy amounted to 250,000
members.
28. See, for example, U. S. Bureau of Labor

Statistics: Monthly Labor Review, July, 1934.
29. L. Lorwin: The American Federation of Labor, pp. 459-460.
30. M. Woll: Work Cited, p. 230.
31. Woll: The same, p. 252.
32. In an official report on the National Industrial Recovery

Act, issued by Mr. Donald Richberg, the government took
credit for this million increase in membership within the A.
F. of L.
II. TRADE UNION REVOLUTIONISM
XIV. FRENCH SYNDICALISM
SYNDICALISM first arose neither in England nor in the

United States. For Syndicalism (from the French word
syndicat or union) stands for a revolutionary movement
that regards the trade unions alone as the proper vehicles
for the revolution. Neither in England nor in this country
were the organized trade union workers in the nineteenth
century revolutionary, in England because they had been
441
bribed into passivity through reform, in America because
they had not yet matured politically as a class. Whereas the
English believed in the harmonization of the classes, at the
expense of the colonials, the Americans believed there was
no class struggle at all. Such a movement as Syndicalism
could first arise only in France, Italy, Spain, and in similar
European countries where Anarchism had flourished and
where the revolutionary spirit was still alive.
Bound together with the industrial development of the

country, trade unions developed very tardily in France. All
workers' associations had been looked upon traditionally
with the greatest hostility. Under Napoleon I, workers had
been required to carry certificates and were always under
strict surveillance. It was only under the "Social Emperor,"
Napoleon III, that in 1868 organizations of workers were
tolerated. Yet it was through the instrumentality of
Napoleon's sending a delegation of workers to England to
the London Exhibition of 1862 that the First International
had been organized and in the beginning had as its support
the French Proudhonist workers, the Mutualists. While
these workers were at odds with Proudhon on the question
of unionism, they had succeeded in combining Proudhon's
general conceptions and co-operative ideas with the
necessity for the organization of trade unions as well.
Thus, "The program of the mutuellistes was a peaceful

change in social relations by which the idea of justice ---
conceived as reciprocity or mutuality of services --- should
be realized. The means advocated were education and the
organization of mutual aid societies, of mutual insurance
companies, of syndicates, of co-operative societies and the
like. Much importance was attached to the organizations of
mutual credit societies and of popular banks. It was hoped
that with the help of cheap credit the means of production
442
would be put at the disposal of all and that co-operative
societies of production could then be organized in large
numbers. The mutuellistes emphasized the idea that the
social emancipation of the workingmen must be the work
of the workingmen themselves. They were opposed to state
intervention. Their ideal was a decentralized economic
society based upon a new principle of right --- the principle
of mutuality --- which was the idea of the working class."
(*1)
So, whereas the combination of unions and co-operatives

had arisen in England as a result of utopian Socialism and
Liberalism, this condition was part of the Anarchist
tradition in France. (*2) These ideas of peaceful growth into
a new social order were rudely shattered by the strikers in
Paris in 1867, in support of whom the First International
organized an international demonstration and for whom it
collected funds from all its sections. Even the Proudhonists
themselves, generally against strikes, were forced to go
along and to see the First International taken out of their
hands by Marx, and a declaration adopted favoring the
general strike in case of war. All of these tendencies were
greatly strengthened in the last two years of Napoleon III's
regime and culminated in the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Paris Commune, like a tremendous social physic,

purged the working class of France of much decayed matter
that had remained within it. It cleared away the old
illusions that the French bourgeoisie would give up power
peacefully, by means of mutual aid associations and such
puerilities. Furthermore, it rid the proletariat, now
thoroughly conscious of the fact that it and it alone had to
play the leading role in future revolutions, of any idea that
at a mere blowing of the trumpets Jericho would fall, that
the State could be destroyed by a minority group planning
443
the coup d'e'tat. Both Bakuninism and Blanquism ended
their careers with the Paris insurrection. Two things had
become amply clear: first, that the majority of the working
class of the entire country had to be mobilized and trained
for leadership in the movement; second, that not class
collaboration but ruthless class struggle alone could usher
in the new world.
But the workers were terribly defeated temporarily. They

were forced to retreat, nursing their wounds as best they
could. Knowing well that insurrection was impossible for
years to come, they began the preliminary organization
work all over again. If the animosity and hostility of the
workers to the ruling bourgeois cliques did not lead to
political struggles of fundamental importance, they led at
least to economic struggles of secondary value. To the
advanced proletariat of France, who could never forget that
the main task was the overthrow of the capitalist State, each
strike for economic purposes against even a limited number
of employers was but part of a strategic plan of the workers.
By means of this guerilla warfare they were to reorganize
their ranks, to raise again their morale, to remain
temporarily on the defensive only to pass to the offensive
later on, to weary the enemy by constant blows, at the same
time, in short, militant battles, testing and steeling again the
mighty forces for the social revolution.
Not that these views were openly expressed by the mass of

workers. On the contrary, independent of any
revolutionary group and driven by the pressing problems
of their lives in the shops, the workers, immediately after
the Commune, could take only the first timid steps in the
organization of craft unions which were still illegal under
the existing constitution. In fact, reminiscent of the later
Russian Czaristic attempt to form "police unions," the trade
444
unions of France first began to rise under the leadership of
one Berberet, who thought strikes were criminal
revolutionary acts and who organized his unions in order
to check these subversive tendencies. French trade
unionism thus began as a sort of channelization of the
workers by a frightened bourgeoisie that wanted to head
off the inevitable revolution. Soon, however, Berberet,
unable to control the situation, faded from the picture. By
1876, with a mild and opportunist platform, these craft
unions were able to organize the first congress of the
National Federation of Labor. At once the revolutionary
Socialists and Anarchists sprang to the opportunity and
started assiduously to work from within these unions to
revolutionize them.
Both Socialists and Anarchists had learned certain things

from the Paris Commune. The Anarchists turned from their
old classless position to enter the ranks of the workers.
They dropped their tactics of the coup d'etat and, becoming
"possibilist," that is, trying in a period of defeat to take
advantage "as much as possible" of the opportunities
offered in the Third Republic, they changed their
propaganda activities to boring from within the unions. If
the workers had not been able to seize State power, they
had been able at least to win the right to organize unions; if
they could not revert to insurrection, they could turn to
strikes.
Similarly, among the Socialists there had been formed two

wings. One, organized by Brousse, advocated immediate
reforms and the gradual establishment of a new social
order through reforms. The other wing, led by Guesde, took
the position that not reforms but revolution only must be
agitated for, but that this revolution could come about only
through education and propaganda.
445
In regard to their trade union policies, these two groups
were at odds as to the role of the party and of the trade
union. The Broussists wanted to leave the unions alone, to
work within them but not to control them. The Guesdists,
on their side, urged the necessity of winning the unions, as
revolutionary reserves, to Socialism. Thus within the trade
unions there developed four mutually hostile groups: the
Anarchists, the State-Socialist parliamentarian Broussists,
the Guesdists, and those who were "pure and simple" trade
unionists. At first the victory went to the Guesdists in 1879;
this soon led to a split within the National Federation of
Labor in 1880, and the Moderates withdrew from the
Congress. However, "pure and simpleism" could find no
place in revolutionary France; the malcontents were not
able to win over the workers from the program calling for a
fight against all parliamentary actions and for the abolition
of the capitalist State. "Pure and simpleism" soon died away.
With various vicissitudes, the Guesdists were able to hold
their control of the National Federation of Labor until its
end.
In the meantime, in 1887, the cities of France, led by Paris,

had organized their Bourses du Travail (Labor Exchanges).
These bourses were supported by the municipalities as
meeting-places for the workers. The bourse existed as an
unemployment center and sort of club. The local unions
had their offices there. Libraries, reading rooms, classes,
opportunities for education and information of all sorts,
encouraged the gatherings of the workers in these club
rooms. No doubt, like the first attempt of Berberet, this
effort on the part of the municipalities to bring together all
the local unions was for the purpose of checking up and
controlling the workers. But again these plans of the police
and of the authorities were rendered futile by the workers
446
themselves. All revolutionary groups also hastened to work
within the bourses.
Within the local syndicates and bourses, the Allemanists, a

split-off from the Broussists (who in turn had broken from
the Guesdists in 1887 and had organized their own party),
were very strong; they combined with the Anarchists to
form the National Federation of Bourses in 1892. Thus there
were now two federations, one organized vertically,
composed of the national unions of a given trade and craft,
the other horizontally, by cities and towns, embracing all of
the local unions of a particular place and binding them
together, regardless of trade and craft. In one sense the two
federations were supplementary, in another sense,
mutually antagonistic. Each group had different functions,
the workers having separate problems of a national scale
both in their trade and industry, and also general local
problems affecting all occupations equally. Naturally
enough, it was in the body organized by national trades
and crafts that the Socialists were in power; just as naturally,
in the local municipalities, where workers felt themselves
Parisians or Lyonnais rather than textile workers or shoe
workers, the Anarchists were very strong and, together
with the Allemanists, wielded control.
By this time the cities had abandoned the practice of paying

for the halls for revolutionaries. In a series of raids in 1893
they attempted to destroy the bourses, but instead of
destroying them, they only hastened the unification, in 1895,
of both national bodies into one, the Confederation General du
Travail, "C.G.T." or General Federation of Labor. In the
fusion, the Guesdists were defeated while the Allemanists,
and above all the Anarchists, won the day. From then on to
the aftermath of the World War, the C.G.T. was colored
officially with an Anarchist tendency that gave a theory and
447
program to the trade unions and developed into Anarcho-
Syndicalism.
We have noted that after the Paris Commune the workers

had been forced to turn to defensive movements, to engage
in daily struggles against their particular employers to
maintain their standard of living. Thus, trade and craft
unions had become organized. Under the circumstances,
this represented a turn from revolution to reform. The
workers had need to recuperate. Also, with the advance of
French imperialism and the seizure of vast colonial
territories in Asia and Africa, the French capitalists were
enabled to give larger crumbs to the workers and to the
middle classes and could tolerate craft unions on a strictly
reformist base.
These craft unions developed in a country which had little

heavy industry and which was predominantly agrarian.
There being no decisive iron or coal industries, the
transportation and textile industries took the lead in a land
where the factories were still small and where the world
subdivision of labor had left to the French the manufacture
of fine and luxury products (silks, style forms, perfumes,
jewelry, furs, wines, food products of a special nature, etc.).
With such a proletariat, not able to go beyond craft or trade
unionism, whatever revolution flourished could easily be
provided by the Communist-Anarchists. At the same time,
however, a radical change took place in the program of
these Communist-Anarchists; they began to affirm that, not
the Anarchist conspiracy nor the co-operative, but the
union alone was to accomplish the revolution. (*3)
While the French proletariat ardently desired the revolution

and foresaw its inevitable necessity, it also appreciated the
fact that, after its great defeat, it was too weak to
accomplish it. In spite of French traditions, the
448
revolutionary center of gravity shifted to Germany. All that
remained of revolution in France theoretically was the wish;
all that could be accomplished in fact was reform. The
skilled workers, composing the trade unions in France,
were only too ready to conceal their reformism in practice
by means of revolutionary phrases and wishes. Naturally, it
was Anarchism that, connecting itself with these skilled
workers and operating in an environment of petty economy
in city and country where individual taste, style, and skill
still counted, should furnish these phrases, while the unions
themselves tried to get as much as they could for their
members but in actual practice denied the revolution.
Unlike the British and German trade unions, which

eventually embraced a large section of the working class,
including considerable numbers of unskilled laborers, the
French, like the American trade unions, embraced but a
small portion of the workers, generally the skilled. Both
American and French unions operated as craft unions on
the organizational principle of federalism, loose
organizational control, and no strict centralization. In
America, this federalism or minimum authority coincided
with the strictures of Liberalism; in France, with the anti-
authoritarianism of the Anarchists. Both American and
French unions believed in direct action of the trade unions
to obtain results, whether reforms or revolution.
The late nineteenth century French proletarians, even in

defeat, could not lose their inherent revolutionism. The
contradictory forces of capitalism and its law of unequal
development, had converged in France in such a manner
that although that country had not developed to any
appreciable extent economically, it had yet achieved
considerable development politically. It was in France that
449
class struggles had been fought out in their sharpest forms.
The bloody events from 1789 to 1871 had not drenched the
soil of France in vain.
The theories of French Anarcho-Syndicalism were further

strengthened by the corruption of French Socialism. (*4) In
no other country were parliamentary cretinism and
opportunistic illusions so crassly portrayed as in France. As
with other political manifestations in France, Socialist
corruption took on classically clear forms. When the
workers saw the opportunist "Socialist" Millerand actually
sitting in the cabinet with the "butcher of the Paris
Commune," General Gallafet, when they experienced the
scandal of the "Socialist" Briand's actually breaking the
railwaymen's strike by calling the workers to the colors and,
as soldiers, ordering them to run the trains, etc., Anarcho-
Syndicalism became strengthened in its critique, since these
actions of the reformists showed decisively that the
Socialists were traitors. Besides, the frequent splits that
occurred among the Socialists seemed to prove that political
parties with their theoretical bickerings and internecine
fights were not comparable to the broad unions where all
could join and where breaks did not occur on so-called
"profound" theoretical questions of a future revolution. In
other words, thanks to the crimes of French Socialism,
the syndicats of French labor were driven still more into the
ranks of "practical" Anarchism.
The organized syndicats were but a minor part of the

population in France; how, then, could this minority
accomplish the revolution? The Anarcho-Syndicalists could
answer this question. Had they not always believed in the
principle of "militant minority" liberating all humanity?
The syndicats, in truth, were this militant minority.
Certainly it is true that revolutions can be inaugurated and
450
brought to success even though but a minority of the
working class is organized into trade unions. Indeed, in any
case it might be absolutely fatal to wait until the majority of
the proletariat should become good dues-paying members.
How satisfying this theory must have been to the craft
unionists who in this way justified their lack of effort to
include within their midst the mass of poorly paid workers!
Because of this theory by which the trade unions were

given the role of the "militant minority," the Anarcho-
Syndicalists fell into a fatal error. They gave to the trade
union essentially an offensive, rather than defensive,
character; they conceived of the union as an organ to fight
the State rather than the employers, as a group embracing a
revolutionary minority rather than the broad masses of
workers as a whole. In other words, the Anarcho-
Syndicalists conceived of a union as the revolutionary
Marxist conceived of a political party. In trying to transform
the union into a vanguard political party, the Anarcho-
Syndicalists perforce had to fail both as party and as union
builders. If they tried to construct a regular union, their
revolutionism remained in fact mere phrases, whether these
phrases were repeated in ritual fashion or carefully pushed
into the background. If they attempted actively to put
forward their revolutionary minority principles, they
destroyed the union and made of it an Anarchist
propaganda sect.
How could the syndicats liberate humanity? The Anarcho-

Syndicalist answered: "Only by force, by the direct action of
the masses." (*5) The war against the capitalists was an
unceasing one. The forces to be used could be in the form
either of sabotage or of the strike, the highest form of which
was the general strike with "folded arms."
451
Sabotage is a truly classic expression of Anarcho-
Syndicalism. (*6) It means the clandestine destruction of the
forces of the ruling class and their hindrance in every
possible manner. It is considered a form of the guerilla
warfare of the exploited against their exploiters. Sabotage
may take many guises. It may be the destruction of
machinery and property; for example, the placing of spikes
in logs so as to disable saw mills. It may take the form of
telling the public that a given restaurateur, against whom
there is a strike, is serving unsanitary food to his
unsuspecting public. Sometimes it means idling on the job
by the individual worker. Sabotage corresponds in the
trade union field to the individual terror of the Bakuninist
Anarchists of the "deed" in the political field. It is a limited
and modified form of the individual terror of the early
Anarchists, sabotage being in the main directed at the
property of the employer rather than at the life of the
political ruler. In both cases it generally substitutes
individual action for mass action. In the trade union field it
is particularly suited to the skilled worker.
The guerilla warfare concept of the trade union Anarchists,

coupled with their general irresponsibility, led them to the
theory that no strike could be lost, since each strike meant
so much more training for the workers. That workers could
be wearied out and utterly demoralized by reckless,
constant, guerilla warfare strikes, or that workers entered
into strikes to win and into unions to improve their
economic lot, never forcibly struck the Anarchists.
According to the French Syndicalists, strikes would be won
by militancy and not by union treasuries. Strikes should be
called often and should be sharp and short. Negotiations
with employers must be minimized. Contracts were
unnecessary since only the strength of the respective classes
was the guarantee that classes so inimical to each other as
452
labor and capital would live up to any truce effected.
Differing from the American Federation of Labor and craft
unions generally, the French Syndicalists built their unions
upon the basis of low dues and low initiation fees.
The Anarcho-Syndicalist placed his main reliance on the

general strike. At first he conceived this general strike as
one to be conducted "with folded arms." (*7) Not the ballot,
but persistent pressure would bring the rulers to terms. In
connection with this, two fundamental points must be
stressed.
First, the strike was to be a general strike, that is, not

against a particular set of employers, but against all
employers as a class. It therefore had to be directed against
the State, which is the executive and general organ of the
employers as a class; thus it became a political strike, a
strike with political rather than with economic demands
and motives. It was a strike for freedom, for liberation, for
the abolition of the State and the master class.
This idea of the general strike meant that the workers must
be prepared to strike, not only for their own petty and
immediate material interests, but in solidarity with others
for an ideal. The great emphasis laid upon solidarity and
revolutionary ideals in Syndicalism naturally went hand in
hand with the program of revolution through the general
strike.
The second fundamental point was that the general strike

was to be one conducted "with folded arms." In short, it
was understood as a demonstration of force without
violence, for so thoroughly would the State be paralyzed
that its armed forces would be entirely useless and would
yield without the necessity of a bloody civil war. Such a
peaceful general strike was the sole prospect envisaged by
453
the skilled workers. It was the same sort of utopia about
which the skilled Socialist workers in other countries were
dreaming. Both wanted a peaceful rule, no blood spilt,
nothing "nasty." One proposed to take power through the
peaceful ballot, the other through the peaceful strike.
This theory of the general political strike as a solution to all

revolutionary problems resulted in several fatal errors
being made by the Anarcho-Syndicalists. Since the
Anarchists believed the time was always ripe for the
overthrow of the State, a strong tendency existed to abuse
the general strike, to call the workers out in solidarity and
in sympathy, again and again. This often resulted in
abortive attempts or repeated efforts that wearied and
exhausted the masses and only threw the country into a
chaos which brought all the middle elements to the side of
reaction. The unfolding of the present revolution in Spain
has brought to light many illustrations of this adventurism.
The attempt of the workers to break the State by the

negative action of ceasing work for private employers
sometimes resulted only in the State's or reactionary forces'
marching into the industry in question and taking charge
themselves. This is precisely what happened in Italy in 1922,
the time of the march by the Fascists on Rome. The general
strike on the railroads not having been entirely successful,
the evacuation by all the militant workers of the key
railway posts only facilitated the march on Rome and the
seizure of power by the Fascists.
The steady emphasis on strikes for solidarity and for

political purposes tended to transform the union into an
organ for revolution in which every member was presumed
to be a revolutionist. But this meant that the broad masses
who entered unions, not for revolution, but for the day-to-
day struggle, soon refused to remain in such revolutionary
454
bodies or to abide by their policies. The transformation of
the unions into the main organs for the revolution was
likely to result in the collapse of the unions themselves.
The general strike idea of Anarcho-Syndicalism was

developed in a period of political reaction flowing from the
great rise of European and French capitalism at the time.
No organization of the workers of any importance sincerely
believed that the proletarian insurrection was the
immediate order of the day. Indeed, the whole tendency of
the Anarcho-Syndicalists was to substitute the practical
general strike for the impracticable barricades. To them the
period for street barricade fighting was ended. The general
strike was the only possible form of revolution; it was but
the climactic development of labor's most ordinary weapon
--- the strike.
During a general strike it was not necessary to control

everyone since, owing to the division of labor in society, the
stopping of a few wheels of industry must stop all. It was
argued further that such a general strike did not need
money support, but was more apt to succeed in a business
crisis than in a period of prosperity. Nor was much sacrifice
or heroism involved, for such a strike could start lawfully,
did not expose any individual to great danger, and was
even aided by the cowardice of those who stayed at home.
The general strike would be able to throttle the economic
life of the whole nation, for the quiet districts could not
send food to the districts where the strike was active.
Soldiers could not be concentrated at every point, since the
strike was general and to do so would greatly disperse the
army. (*8)
Developing still further their idea of strikes without undue

social disorder and conflict, some of the Syndicalists also
proposed, as an alternative method to the general strike,
455
special strikes for shorter and shorter hours, until the
capitalists finally lost all of their profits. Thus, just as some
Socialists thought that Socialism could come by gradual
legislative reforms, some Syndicalists conceived the end of
capitalism as brought about by gradually intensified strikes
and shortened hours of labor. Both were utopian reformists.
Against this concept of the general strike with folded arms,

the French Guesdist Socialists carried on a bitter struggle.
They pointed out that such a peaceful general strike was an
illusion and that violence was inevitable. Carried into
practice, the general strike could lead only to insurrection
and social revolution. France was not as yet ready for
insurrection; the social revolution could be brought about
not by economic groups, but only by political organizations.
Eventually the realization spread that the general strike
could not be peaceful, but by the twentieth century the
French workers had fully recuperated from the effects of
the Paris Commune and again were ready for the struggle.
Thus they reaffirmed their faith in the general strike,
regardless of its new meaning to them. Nevertheless, the
whole procedure, in all its implications, was neither clearly
nor carefully worked out.
A good illustration of the immaturity and amateurishness

of these Syndicalists is given in the novel written by two
prominent Syndicalists, E. Pataud and E. Pouget: How We
Shall Bring About the Revolution. The scene opens with
strikes for immediate demands; these are put down with
great bloodshed by government troops. In order to force the
government to punish those responsible for the massacres,
a general political strike is ordered and breaks out suddenly.
By means of sabotage, and after boycotting the quarters of
the rich and wearying the troops, the workers pass to the
offensive, organize the distribution of food, and make a
456
great drive for members. Then the workers seize the
factories, return to work, and the State is abolished. The
trade unions soon begin to run the factories and industries,
and labor-notes are issued instead of money. The revolt
spreads to the countryside and the slogan, "Land to the
peasants," is carried out through the arming of the people
and the formation of "Syndicalist battalions." When foreign
intervention arrives, the answer to the intruder is not the
combat of the Red Army, but the annihilating use of the
mysterious death rays which have just been invented and
which destroy the invaders. The authors conclude their
utopian description with the statement: "The day when it
should become known that a handful of determined men
could successfully oppose the armed crossing of a frontier--
-that day, public opinion would insist upon the suppression
of standing armies." (*9) It seems, then, that the victory of
the proletariat and the general strike depends upon the
advent of death rays not yet invented!
Aside from the charming utopias pictured by revolutionary

Syndicalists, Pataud and Pouget do raise several important
questions pertaining to the program of Syndicalism. Will
the general strike come suddenly or after due preparation?
Will it evolve from economic strikes or will it be political
from the start? Are trade unions the organs of combat in
civil war? Are they the instruments to organize the
peasantry and the general population?
It was the opinion of Jean Jaur'es, the leader of the United

Socialist Party, formed in 1904-1905, when all Socialist
groups got together into one organization, that the
Socialists should not fight the idea of the general strike but
rather should advocate it. However, he believed that the
working class had to be convinced of the importance of the
object of the strike, the public had to be made sympathetic,
457
and the strike must not be made a mask for violence. The
best way was to call the general strike as an extension of the
partial economic strike which was the normal action of the
proletariat. Jean Jaur'es thought that the Anarcho-
Syndicalists wanted to trick the workers into revolution by
starting with a general strike for economic demands and
then attempting the coup d'e'tat. A general strike for
economic demands must not become side-tracked into an
attempt at social revolution. Social revolution meant
violence and civil war and for this the workers had to be
prepared adequately. In the opinion of Jaur'es, the general
strike had a great function in hastening the social
revolution and providing a "revolutionary index." (*10)
There is no doubt that the warnings of Jaur'es were well

taken in the light of the French situation and the policies of
the Anarcho-Syndicalists. But, as a matter of fact, the great
general strikes that were attempted in Europe from the start
had political objectives and not economic ones. Nor were
they always prepared for adequately. The great general
strikes in Belgium in 1893, 1902, 1913 were all for the
purpose of extending the franchise, as was the strike in
Sweden in 1902. The Russian general strikes of 1905
attempted to overthrow the Czar. The Barcelona general
strike of 1909 aimed to stop the Spanish-Moroccan War. In
other cases, as in Italy, in 1904, the general strike resulted
from the use of the military in savagely shooting down
strikers engaged in economic and partial strikes. According
to Kautsky, then speaking as a revolutionary socialist, "The
political general strike succeeds more frequently if it be
sudden and unexpected, brought about spontaneously by
some plainly outrageous act of the bourgeois government."
(*11)
458
The general strike, in and of itself, is no infallible weapon
for revolution. In England and locally in the United States,
it has been used for purely economic aims. Under the
domination of the Social-Democrats of the Second
International, it was used to obtain merely Liberal political
results, such as the extension of democracy to embrace the
mass of workers. To Eduard Bernstein the general strike
had been a substitute for the barricades and revolution.
Later, the Socialists actually used the general strike as a
weapon against the revolution. In 1918-1919 the German
Majority Socialists actually sidetracked the proletarian
revolution by means of a general strike which they were in
a position to call.
A French professor, George Sorel, who attached himself to

the Syndicalist movement, tried to develop a fundamental
line of cleavage between the Syndicalist idea of the general
strike and that of the Socialists. With an eye to the type of
strikes that had been called by the socialists in Belgium,
Sweden, and other countries, Sorel pointed out that such
political general strikes did not presuppose class war, but
were often called for purely Liberal purposes merely to
assure that the Liberals would take power and get certain
posts in the government.
Sorel did not like the Socialist general strikes for other
reasons. According to him, such strikes were led not by
the syndicats themselves but by a committee of a political
party. Also, they were called, not in order to institute a new
economic order, but to overthrow the old governmental
regime. Thus they were destructive, not constructive strikes.
Such general strikes were hand in hand with plans for some
utopia totally disconnected with real factory relations. Sorel,
on the other hand, wanted no interference by political
parties. The syndicats must embrace the entire working class
459
and needed no other groups. The strikes were to take over
industry and were to be guided, not by some intellectuals
who condescended to think for the working class with blue-
prints of the future, but by the masses dominated by their
visceral sensations who made action an end in and of itself.
Sorel did not hesitate to animadvert on the Russian general

strike of 1905 which he denounced as a political move
leading to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to which he
was bitterly opposed. He advocated a Syndicalist strike
where the workers would be free, without leaders, and
which would leave the State entirely alone. (*12)
Fortunately for the proletariat, Sorel had very little
influence among the actual Syndicalist membership.
As a matter of fact, the general strike reached its greatest

force as a revolutionary weapon only when used by the
Russian Communists. To the Communists the general strike
was the prelude to the insurrection itself and led directly to
the seizure of power. As Trotsky put it: "The revolutionary
effect of the political mass strike consists in the fact that it
disorganizes the authority of the State. The greater and
more general the anarchy produced, the nearer to victory is
the strike." (*13)
Of course, no really effective national general strike can fail

to be of a political and revolutionary character. If such
strikes remained limited to economic objectives it was
because they were quickly called off before their full effects
were felt by the social order. If the general strike at any time
served to defend capitalism, it was because it was
supplemented by other actions which crushed the militant
sections of the working class and enabled the strikes to be
called off before the masses could really storm the streets
and demonstrate their true feelings and interests. In spite of
the many abuses of the general strike, once it is waged in a
460
revolutionary manner, history has cleared all doubt of its
great power and overwhelming force.
Within the Socialist International, a severe fight occurred

over the question of the general strike to prevent war. The
French were ardently in favor of such a general strike; the
Germans were as vehemently opposed. The debates were
extraordinarily interesting in the light of the actions of the
various parties in the World War. Did the Germans feel that,
because the French were in reality poorly organized in their
trade-unions compared with the Germans, the French
capitalists would not be stopped from invading Germany?
Could it be that the Germans did not wish to paralyze the
government of the Kaiser, but only to reform it?
On the other hand, the greatest fear on the part of the

German workers was that barbaric Russia would sweep
over them from the East. There was no possibility of the
Russian masses' adopting the general strike at the outbreak
of the war. Thus the question arose: Would not the general
strike aid the Czar to crush German Socialism? And did not
the French nationalists, whose ally the Czar was, count on
effecting just this result? Perhaps all of these considerations
played a part. At any rate, when the war broke out,
nowhere was the general strike called.
On the whole, Syndicalisms in the other Latin countries

resembled their prototype in France. Of especial importance
is Spanish Syndicalism, which, flowering later in the
twentieth century, took on quite different characteristics. In
France, each local trade-union had had full autonomy, both
in regard to its respective national union and in respect to
the general labor body of its vicinity. It was only in 1906 at
the Amiens Congress that the French C. G. T. had decreed
that in the future only industrial federations and no special
craft groups would be allowed, although it did not exclude
461
the then-existing craft organizations. In Spain, on the other
hand, the local unions were local industrial unions and
were connected with local central bodies which had
authority over them. In this respect the federalist tendency
of the French was modified by the Spanish in an
authoritarian direction, although it was true that the local
union did not feel itself bound by its national union but
rather by its local trade union center. In Spain, while these
local centers were authoritative bodies, they enjoyed a great
autonomy of action and independence from control from
above.
These divergences of Spanish Syndicalism as compared

with the French very easily can be traced to the peculiar
Spanish conditions. In Spain, not the skilled alone but the
unskilled workers also have flooded the unions. For this
reason the Anarcho-Syndicalism which still prevails has
been forced to take somewhat of an intermediate form
between federalism and authoritarianism. On the other
hand, the backward conditions of Spanish capitalism have
resulted in the development of a strong separatism in
certain localities.
Since the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution in 1930, the

idea of federalism has received further set-backs. Strong
tendencies for centralized national industrial unions and an
authoritative general national center have arisen and have
been endorsed by several Syndicalist congresses. During
the course of the Spanish Revolution there have also
occurred immensely powerful general strikes which, far
from being "with folded arms," have often resulted in
bloody pitched battles.
After the Spanish Republic was established in 1931, the

Anarcho-Syndicalists fervently believed that they could
now overthrow the capitalist State and introduce a new
462
social order. However, these elements sadly miscalculated
their strength. In spite of their revolutionary ideals, they
were able only to overthrow the old regime and to prevent
its reconstitution; they were not able to go forward to the
constructive tasks of setting up the rule of the workers.
These old-fashioned movements were adequate to
accomplish the negative and critical tasks of overthrowing
an antiquated monarchy; they were totally ineffective in
dealing with a modern bourgeois republic.
As the Spanish Revolution progressed, however, there was

set up what in fact amounted to a dual power. True, there
were as yet no soviets, but the masses respected the
authority of the unions and the other revolutionary
organizations, and the government was forced at times to
yield to the opinions of these mass organizations on vital
questions. The Anarcho-Syndicalists, however, did not
know how to administer their power. With their Bakuninist
idealism, they did not appreciate the necessity for
preparing for revolt by building powerful organizations in
all discontented strata of the population. They attempted
one adventure after another, believing that the State could
be abolished and all oppression ended by one blow struck
by a militant minority. After each failure of these workers,
the toilers lost some of their strength, the reaction picked up
its head, the government consolidated its position. All that
the Anarcho-Syndicalists could accomplish was to wear out
the revolutionary forces in ill-prepared battles and in
fruitless adventures; objectively, they strengthened reaction.
As the failure of the policy of the Anarchists controlling the

unions became apparent to the Spanish workers, a split
occurred among the Syndicalists, some breaking from
Anarchism and urging the formation of centralized
authoritarian bodies which would lead to Dictatorship of
463
the Proletariat. These Syndicalists, however, agreed with
the Anarchists in boycotting the State, in ignoring the work
of the political parties, in refusing to reach the widest strata
of the population. In the beginning of the Revolution, the
million organized Spanish workmen had been divided
somewhat as follows: about two hundred thousand were in
the General Labor Union controlled by the Socialists, and
about eight hundred thousand were under the control of
the C.N.T. (National Confederation of Labor). As the
Anarcho-Syndicalists became discredited, however, the
situation was reversed and the majority of the workers
joined the Socialist union center. (*14)
The fatal influence of the Anarchist in the Spanish

Syndicalist movement was amply demonstrated in the 1934
insurrection in the Asturias region. In this insurrection the
Anarcho-Syndicalist center behaved in truly shameful
fashion. Like the Anarchist Malatesta in Italy, the Anarcho-
Syndicalists actually refused to join the united front of
Socialists, Communists, and the rival trade union center ---
the General Labor Union controlled by the Socialists---
unless this united front would guarantee in advance that,
should the civil war be successful against Fascism and
reaction, no new central power would be set up by the
workers. Because the other elements refused to pledge
themselves in advance not to set up a proletarian
dictatorship, the Anarcho-Syndicalists in most important
sections of Spain stood aside from the battle and watched
passively while their fellow workers were wounded and
killed by the thousands.
The Asturias insurrection gave the final blow reducing the

Anarchist and Anarcho-Syndicalist movements in Spain to
secondary importance and forcing them to consider a
complete change in their line on pain of extinction. When,
464
in the summer of 1936, the present Fascist-monarchist
rebellion broke out in all its fury, these Anarcho-
Syndicalists did not hesitate to run to the aid of the
government. They could not endorse the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, but they could give their lives for the capitalist
State. (*15)
Syndicalism in Italy also took a slightly different direction

from that in France. Since not the Anarchists but the
Socialists were strong in the big cities and industrial centers
of the North, the General Confederation of Labor that had
been organized in 1906, while Syndicalistic, did not break
away from the Socialist Party, and took a far more
authoritarian and centralized position. This was not always
an advance for the proletariat, as was evidenced by two
tendencies in the Italian movement. The first was the
tendency on the part of the national trade union center to
assume an absolutely controlling voice in all labor disputes,
no affiliated federation being authorized to declare a strike
or to adopt any strike tactics without referring the question
to the central body. In many instances this hampered the
militancy of the workers in conducting partial and local
strikes. At the same time, all discussion of the general strike
was deferred for ten years by the Modena Congress.
The second false tendency was the great emphasis on the

formation of producers' co-operatives, rather in the spirit of
Mazzini, by which the illusion was created that through the
co-operatives the workers could actually buy out capitalism
and establish the new social order peacefully. This was
contrary to French Syndicalism where propagandists were
constantly warning the workers against the illusions
created by co-operative societies.
It was no wonder, then, that in 1912 a split took place

within the Italian Syndicalist movement, the split widening
465
in the direction of French Syndicalism and in revolt against
the stifling hand of the opportunist bureaucracy developing
in the trade unions in Italy.
Syndicalism never flourished in Germany. The ardent need

for struggle against the decadent federalism of the petty
principalities, the fact that the unions were built up by
socialists, and the fact that Germany rapidly was becoming
industrialized with a huge and modern proletariat, highly
regimented and disciplined, made it impossible for
Anarcho-Syndicalism or any other kind of Syndicalism to
prevail. Besides, the German proletariat was advanced
enough to know, under the blows of the Kaiser-Junkerdom
then extant, that the main task was to overthrow the
capitalist State, and that this could be done only by the
building up of authoritarian proletarian centers capable of
working secretly in periods of illegality as well as openly
through mass organizations. As Germany was no place for
Anarchism, it could be no place for Anarcho-Syndicalism.
Footnotes
1. L. Levine [Lorwin]: The Labor Movement in France, pp. 36-

37.
2. The same, p. 35.
3. Compare L. Levine [Lorwin]: Syndicalism in France, p. II.
4. "In fact Syndicalism is largely a revolt against socialism."

(J. Ramsay MacDonald: Syndicalism, p. 6.)
5. See J. A. Estey: Revolutionary Syndicalism, p. 74.
6. See E. Pouget: Sabotage.
466
7. See Andre Tridon: The New Unionism, pp. 20-21.
8. See Arnold Roller: The Social General Strike, p. 16.
9. E. Pataud and E. Pouget: Syndicalism and the Co-operative

Commonwealth (How We Shall Bring About the Revolution), p.
220.
10. See W. H. Crook: The General Strike, pp. 44-45.
11. Pataud and Pouget, work cited, p. 227.
12. See G. Sorel: Reflections on Violence, pp. 178-193.
13. W. H. Crook: The General Strike, p. 222, quoting from

Trotsky's Russland in der Revolution, p. 228.
14. At present the union members number about 1,500,000.
15. Lack of space prevents us from going into an extended

analysis of the present Spanish situation.
XV. AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY INDUSTRIAL

UNIONISM
VERY different from the Anarcho-Syndicalism of the

French was the Syndicalism of the Americans which
developed in the twentieth century (1905-1918). (*1) By the
twentieth century the United States had become a vast
industrial country of enormous size and titanic strength.
We have pointed out the basic causes that led to such an
enduring and deep-seated Liberalism in this country and
those tendencies which could foster an Anarchist ideology.
To these forces we must add the following to complete the
467
picture and to show why Syndicalism grew and why it took
the form that it did.
The industrialization of America took place vigorously,

thoroughly, and ruthlessly, exposing all capitalist
contradictions in the clearest light. On the one hand the
factories advanced quantitatively, evoking a vast stream of
labor to compose which all the European countries added
approximately a million emigrants to our population each
year. On the other hand, the factories grew qualitatively
and, with the rapid introduction of all possible new
machinery and its widespread application, crafts and skills
became obsolete over night and an army of men would be
thrown out of work. So long as American capitalism, on the
whole, was on the rise, those thrown out of work could find
re-employment relatively easily, but as the contradictory
forces developed, and American capitalism began to reach
its maturity, re-employment became more difficult.
It is solely in a non-industrial country that Anarchism, or

Anarcho-Syndicalism can flourish. In a thoroughly
industrialized country, only a centralized, authoritarian
type of movement can satisfy the needs of the workers
becoming increasingly revolutionary. It is in such a country
that the Marxian analysis of the dynamic laws of motion of
capitalism can be verified most easily and tested out in
practice. According to the foregoing, then, it should have
been Socialism which took root in this country; if there
arose not Socialism, but Syndicalism, then we must look for
the special conditions in the United States that could have
fused Socialism and Syndicalism together into an entity
unknown in any other country in the world.
We have noted that even in regard to the skilled workers of

the American Federation of Labor, by the twentieth century,
it had become impossible for the organized working class to
468
ignore the State. So long as there had been a frontier, the
worker had been predominantly agrarian, class formations
had been slow in maturing. The transformation of the
United States into an industrial country placed the whole
problem of classes before society as a whole in a manner it
could dodge no longer. The transition from agrarianism to
industrialism had produced the great strike waves of the
last decades of the nineteenth century and the
establishment of skilled labor organizations. The
transformation of America to an imperialist country saw
the unskilled worker articulating his demands and exerting
his pressure. American Syndicalism was the form of
expression by which the unskilled worker made known his
interests. It was the sign manual that revolutionary class
formations were taking place in the United States as well as
in other countries.
The general immaturity of the working class on the

American continent was bound to affect the unskilled
workers, even the foreign born. If they could no longer
ignore the State or the rule of the capitalist class, if they
could no longer hide the fact that their aim was not "a fair
day's wage for a fair day's work" but the abolition of the
wage-system, at the same time they were not able to free
themselves from the limitations of American life. The
peculiarities of that life prevented the mass of workers from
attaining a revolutionary socialist, that is, Communist
position, but forced these workers to stop midway, in
revolutionary Socialist-Syndicalism. "Pure and simple"
trade unionism of the A. F. of L. found its echo in the
Industrial Workers of the World, modulated with a
revolutionary resonance.
The I. W. W. came to life coincident with the refusal of the

A. F. of L. to organize the mass of unorganized unskilled
469
workers rapidly becoming the overwhelming majority of
the working class as a whole. The bitter, cynical
exploitation of the masses was bound to generate an
explosive reaction. Like the skilled workers of the A. F. of L.,
these unskilled laborers placed no reliance upon
governmental legislation but only upon their own power.
Like the A. F. of L., they firmly believed that their unions
could solve all their problems. For Socialism without the
parliamentary Socialist Party, this was as far as the
organization of the unskilled could attain at the time.
Under the banner of the I. W. W., then, American Socialist-

Syndicalism was organized in 1905 with the guidance of a
group of revolutionary minded Socialists, Eugene V. Debs,
Wm. D. Haywood, Daniel De Leon and others. (*2) A
Socialist Party member, Sherman, was the first president.
Many other prominent members were Socialists. The
backbone of the organization was the Western Federation of
Miners, an organization of metal miners in the West
(Colorado, Montana, etc.) which, in order to exist, had been
forced to wage intense battles and to utilize all possible
weapons against the forces of their employers so as to
improve the workers' lot.
Launched in 1893, the Western Federation of Miners had

grown rapidly up to 1900. Having to fight extremely
powerful corporations whose connection with the
governments of the mushroom towns and newly formed
counties and States were of the most openly brazen kind,
the metal miners could not help identifying the various
strikes they were forced to conduct with open battles
against the State troops and sheriff's deputies sent against
them. Every strike took on the nature of a civil war in
miniature scale. In the course of their struggles they were
forced to break from the A. F. of L. and to organize, in 1899,
470
their independent organization, the Western Labor Union,
which later became the American Labor Union.
It was thus natural that these workers of a heavy, basic,

large-scale industry should turn to revolutionary Socialism.
As members of a union that had forged its way through
self-help and direct action, they could not tend but to rely
upon themselves rather than upon politicians and to scoff at
the efficacy of the ballot. In their desperate need for
solidarity, these unionists wanted to organize all the
workers, particularly the unorganized, into strong unions,
not craft unions, but modern centralized, powerful,
industrial unions.
Besides the American Labor Union there was the Socialist

Trades and Labor Alliance (having a considerable German
membership) which had been organized by the Socialist
Labor Party in 1895 and which stood for Socialism and
political, that is, parliamentary action. These two groups
composed the leading elements at the first convention of
the I. W. W. in Chicago in 1905.
Here we can contrast the American type of Syndicalism

with the French. (*3) The first was influenced by Socialism,
the second by Anarchism. The Syndicalists of both
countries were but organized minorities; whereas in France
the Syndicalist workers rationalized themselves into a
theory of "militant minority," the I. W. W. stressed the task
of winning the unorganized and unskilled masses. Not the
elite but the rank and file should control.
In these questions was reflected the difference in the stages

of maturity attained by the working classes in their
respective countries and their different needs. To the
French, democracy was secondary to the question of how to
conduct the class struggle. They knew well that the entire
471
working-class could not be organized before the ruling
class broke into violent action leading to a revolutionary
situation. They understood clearly the meaning of
bourgeois democracy and they made no fetish of it. To the
Americans, however, democracy, in the sense of meaning
the right of each person to be as good as anyone else, was
an end in itself, and the class struggle was made
subordinate to it. Here the American Syndicalists showed
how closely they were rooted in a liberalistic bourgeois
environment.
On the other hand, the theory of the elite played well into
the hands of the French skilled workers and their
bureaucracy who, in fact, were placed in a position to break
the revolutionary movement, as they later did. In the
French Syndicalist movement, the Anarchists refused to
permit proportional representation, that is, to allow the
larger unions to have more votes than the smaller. (*4) In
this way the small locals, often composed of the more
reactionary elements, could control the situation in a critical
moment. In America, this whole reactionary tendency of
the Anarchists was uprooted entirely. Not only was the
principle of proportional representation and centralization
established but, as much as possible, decisions were
referred to the rank and file in referendum votes.
The method of sabotage was not very popular in the United

States. The Socialists within the I. W. W. (DeLeon and
others), as well as without (the Socialist Party), fought the
tactics of sabotage both from the viewpoint of its being a
measure of force and hence a means of converting the
union into an illegal apparatus, and from the collectivist
principle of opposing individualist and loosely controlled
acts.
472
Before the war, the question of sabotage caused a bitter
struggle to rage in the Socialist Party, the Right Wing
attacking it as it attacked all revolutionary practices, the
Left Wing defending it on principle, though not agreeing
with its Anarchist usage. Involved in the conflict were other
questions also, such as whether the Socialist Party should
support the I. W. W. or the A. F. of L. Finally, in the
convention of 1912, Article 11, Section 6, of the Socialist
Party Constitution was adopted. It declared that all those
advocating sabotage be expelled from the Socialist Party. A
considerable group was consequently forced to withdraw
from the Socialist Party.
After the war, bleeding from the brutal persecution which

had been its lot, the I. W. W. officially dropped the word
"sabotage." On the general question of violence it issued the
following statement:
"Its historic attitude in opposition to violence was

reaffirmed at its twelfth convention which unanimously
turned down a communication favoring change in its
tactics . . ." ". . . we, the General Executive Board of said
Industrial Workers of the World, do hereby declare that
said organization does not now, and never has believed in
or advocated either destruction or violence as means of
accomplishing industrial reform; first, because no principle
was ever settled by such methods; second, because
industrial history has taught us that when strikers resort to
violence and unlawful methods all the resources of the
government are immediately arrayed against them and
they lose their cause; third, because such methods destroy
the constructive impulse which it is the purpose of this
organization to foster and develop in order that the workers
may fit themselves to assume their place in the new
society...." (*5)
473
On the question of industrial unionism, the I. W. W. and the
French movement were at opposite poles. The French had
been content with the locally controlled craft unions. The
Americans, in order to meet the trustification so
omnipresent in American life, made a veritable fetish of
industrial unionism. To the I. W. W., structure was the
inevitable counterpart of function, and it was impossible to
conceive of a union's carrying on the class struggle without
creating the industrial union form so as best to realize the
energies of the militant workers and to mobilize the classes
for battle. The I. W. W. theoreticians tended to make the
frame of unionism an end in itself, as though perfection in
structure could guarantee militancy in function.
The I. W. W. were erroneous in their assumption that mere

form of organization can become a cure for opportunism.
Industrial unions totally unconnected with revolutionary
movements have existed. Conversely, there have been a
number of craft unions which have carried on militant
strike struggles and have had Socialist philosophies. At the
same time, the industrial form of unionism has become
typical for company unions in America and Fascist unions
in Europe.
The industrial unions of the A. F. of L. have been in violent

opposition to the principles practiced by the I. W. W., since,
like their brother craft unions, these unions concurred in
such A. F. of L. policies as collaboration with the employers,
establishment of and utmost loyalty to long-term contracts,
etc. Nor have these A. F. of L. industrial unions in the past
favored the transformation of the A. F. of L. into an
authoritarian center of industrial unions, but have been
quite content to live with the craft unions within the same
federation, and, indeed, to justify the craft position of others.
474
Like the other unions, they were ridden with an
exceedingly arrogant bureaucracy.
Two specific types of industrial unionism have existed in

the A. F. of L. The first exemplified excellently by the
United Mine Workers of America. In this union all miners,
helpers, and laborers of a given mine or locality are joined
together in the same local.
The second type is represented by the Ladies Garment

Workers and the Brewers Union. Unlike the United Mine
Workers, these unions, while ostensibly organizing all the
workers in their respective industries, keep the workers
separated in craft locals, although tying up these locals in
compact joint boards and councils. In the Ladies Garment
Workers Union, the operators are divided according to their
crafts and sometimes even according to their language. In
the case of the Brewers Union, "Instead of forming mixed
locals, made up of various types of workers, the usual
policy of the union has been to organize drivers, bottlers,
brewers, soda water workers, etc., separately, and then
unite them by means of the joint boards for concerted action.
No two locals of the same branch may exist in the same
locality." (*6)
Outside the A. F. of L. are a number of independent unions

organized on an industrial basis similar to that of the Ladies
Garment Workers. A good illustration is the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers. This union, moreover, being in intense
sympathy with Soviet Russia, adopted an advanced
socialistic program, indeed, at one time launched a
movement for the purchasing of bonds to finance the
rehabilitation of the clothing industry in that country.
Within the A. F. of L. several other distinct movements

have arisen tending towards industrial unionism. The first
475
such trend was initiated by the conventions of the A. F. of L.
designed to bring together the craft unions in given
industries to discuss common action and grievances. As a
result there were formed various departments of the A. F.
of L., the building trades department being organized in
1908, the metal trades department in 1909, the mining
department and the railroad employees in 1912. Another
tendency leading towards industrial unionism was part of
the movement for nationalization of industry which the
unions indorsed after the war. The Railroad Brotherhoods,
the United Mine Workers, and others, had each come out
for nationalization of certain industries. This drift to
nationalization was bound to bring about a policy of
mutual co-ordination of the various national trade unions
in a given industry for joint action and for eventual fusion.
In Great Britain this tendency was even more noticeable
and became a definite process for gradual amalgamation
into industrial unions.
At the same time, a minority movement composed of Left

Wingers was organized under the slogan of "Amalgamation
or Annihilation." The movement swept the country, it being
estimated that an overwhelming majority of the trade
unions and locals were in favor of such action. The
officialdom then adopted a vigorous policy of expulsion of
those militants favoring the minority movement. Unable to
withstand the attacks launched against it, and suffering
from the extremely limited Communist leadership, the
amalgamation movement soon collapsed.
The industrial unions not subscribing to the theories of the I.

W. W. differed greatly as to their constitutional provisions
for local action. In the Miners Union no local strike was
permitted without the authority of the District Executive
Board. Thus, in spite of an industrial form of organization,
476
the militancy of the lower bodies was stifled by the
complete control maintained by the bureaucracy. In other
organizations, as in the United Textile Workers Union,
autonomy was permitted in many cases, the Executive
Board having the power to step in only when petitioned for
help.
In the struggle against the A. F. of L., therefore, the I. W. W.

was unable to use the argument of industrial unionism
versus craft unionism as freely as otherwise it would have
done. Necessarily restricted, the I. W. W. attack against the
A. F. of L. unions stressed, first, that the industrial unionism
of the A. F. of L. was a sham and not a genuine variety, and
second, that the A. F. of L. did not carry on the class
struggle.
In regard to the second point, the I. W. W., for example,

denounced the agreement policy of conservative unions.
On its part, the I. W. W. at first opposed the entire idea of a
contract with the employer. As revolutionists, they would
have nothing to do with their enemy. Since might was the
basis of right, contracts were of no value because the
moment the slightest advantage was given either side to
break it, class interests, not paper phrases, would prevail.
However, such a policy of incessant open warfare was

bound to meet with resistance from the organized workers
themselves who needed periods of recuperation from
specific battles and who did not believe in a ceaseless fight
in which they themselves would be worn down and
destroyed. Thus, the I. W. W. had to change its policy and
agree to enter into contracts with employers. However, they
stipulated that under no consideration would they tolerate
a specific limitation of the duration of a contract, nor would
they grant the necessity of giving notice to the employer
before making new demands for strike action, or of binding
477
members to work only for a certain association of
employers, or of regulating the price of the product.
The I. W. W. further criticized the lack of solidarity in the

strike policies of the A. F. of L. and ridiculed the idea of
waiting for large strike funds to accumulate before calling
strikes or of needing high strike benefits to be paid to
workers. The I. W. W., pre-eminently representing the
unskilled, knew that from these poor workers they could
not accumulate much funds. Accordingly, prolonged
strikes were generally out of the question. The strike would
have to be short, wide, and militant rather than of the
narrow, prolonged, and pacific type of the craft unionists.
However, even in its strike policy, the I. W. W. found rivals
within the A. F. of L. and outside, in independent unions.
The miners, the clothing workers, and the textile workers,
for example, were able to put up stirring militant battles,
although not under the banner of the I. W. W.
Thus, the I. W. W. was reduced finally to arguing

interminably about the internal form of structure of an
industrial union. Even this refuge was taken away when,
later, they were to be attacked from the Left by several
other types of organization, the Shop Steward Movement in
Great Britain, the Works Council Movement in Germany,
the One Big Union movement of Canada, and Communist
unionism as typified in the Soviet Union.
The One Big Union movement in Canada grew out of the

discontent of the Western unions with the Trades and
Labor Congress of the Dominion, On March 13, 1919, a
conference was called at Calgary, Canada. The 237
delegates who attended immediately voted to sever
connections with the old body and the A. F. of L. and to
form a new industrial organization to be known as the One
Big Union. (*7) The Conference adopted an exceedingly
478
revolutionary program calling for the abolition of the profit
system, for the endorsement of the dictatorship of the
proletariat as an efficient and competent method of
terminating capitalism, and for the sending of greetings, to
the Russian Soviets and to the German revolutionary
Communists, the Spartacists. It also passed a resolution
urging a general strike in June, 1919, should the Allies
persist in their attempts to overthrow the Soviets.
The movement grew rapidly, twenty-five thousand

members in 188 unions, including the Vancouver Trade and
Labor Council, joining in a comparatively short time. By the
end of 1919, eight central labor councils, two district boards
and one hundred and one local units, with a reported
membership of 41,150, had affiliated. (*8) Branches were
also formed in the United States.
The movement received decided impulse through the

Winnipeg general strike in 1919. (*9) The strike had been
called by the regular craft and trade unions, but was
participated in by leaders of the 0. B. U. to such effect that
by July 15, the entire Winnipeg Trades Council had joined
the new body and Winnipeg became the stronghold of the 0.
B. U.
The 0. B. U. stressed class organization rather than

industrial organization. In pursuance of this class policy it
did not condemn political action, but rather declared that
the only hope for the workers was "in the economic and
political solidarity of the working class, One Big Union and
One Workers' Party." (*10) Following the English custom,
however, these unionists could not escape, transforming
political action into a purely parliamentary movement; they
carried out their decisions of "One Workers Party" by
having several of the 0. B. U. members run for office on a
labor ticket.
479
But it is not on these differences with the I. W. W. that stress
is laid here. Regarding the primary question under
discussion, namely, the type of structure that an industrial
union must take, the 0. B. U. asserted that organization by
industries was just as archaic as organization by crafts,
since unskilled workers moved from one industry to
another as occasion demands. Thus the 0. B. U. firmly
adopted the principle of placing all workers, regardless of
at what they worked, within the same locals. In larger
places, separate locals were formed which might coincide
with different industries, but not necessarily. In that case,
all the locals were connected by central labor councils
which controlled the locality. Thus the 0. B. U. formed, not
industrial union locals, but what amounted to Soviets on
practically a territorial basis, with the exception that the 0. B.
U. Soviets were entirely restricted to actual bona fide
workmen.
So strict was the 0. B. U. on this principle that when

delegates to its 1920 Congress arrived from the powerful
lumber workers' group and insisted on representing lumber
workers only rather than the territory from which they
came, they were not recognized, whereupon the delegates
representing twenty thousand members withdrew from the
organization. This was a blow from which the 0. B. U. never
recovered and it quickly became impotent.
After the war in Great Britain there arose a movement in

the trade union field known as the "Shop Steward"
movement, which was a product of the revolutionary
fermentation of the times. The outstanding structural
feature of this movement was the fact that the various
groups in a given shop or factory came together at a
common meeting, cutting across craft lines, and elected a
shop committee and shop steward to represent the workers
480
of that factory, regardless of their former union affiliations.
The Shop Steward movement was not a dual movement to
the existing unions but a supplemental one. It represented a
program of social revolt.
In Germany a similar development occurred as part of the

post-war revolution. There the "Works Council" movement
was definitely controlled by the Communists. Under the
pressure of the Communist Labor Party the Works Councils
increasingly tended to become a dual union affair, splitting
the workers from the regular unions controlled by the
Socialists. Thus the Works Council movement became an
extremely powerful revolutionary weapon for the
Communists. Here, too, however, workmen who joined the
factory councils were not compelled to leave their old craft
or trade unions, but rather were torn by dual loyalty.
In both those movements, the organizational system

stressed was the principle of placing all workers employed
in a given productive unit, regardless of skill or artificial
division, into one group, whereby they could act
concertedly for class interests.
This principle was carried out to its highest degree in the

case of the Russian trade unions which not only organized
the workers nationally on the basis of industrial unionism,
but insisted that the basic unit of each industrial union be
shop, factory, or unit of production. This was different from
the I. W. W. scheme of things which had often brought
together a number of shops in a given industry to form a
local. In the United States it was in the Passaic strike of 1926
that the Communists were able to demonstrate the great
value of this new form of industrial organization.
481
In the early days of the Industrial Workers of the World, the
socialists were able to induce the organization to include a
political clause in its preamble which called upon the
unions to carry on the fight in the political as well as in the
economic field. The leaders of both the Socialist Labor Party
elements and the Socialist Party group within the I. W. W.
favored this clause, although they interpreted it quite
differently.
To the Socialist Party, Socialism was to be ushered in

gradually, through reforms, and peacefully, through the
ballot. It was the political parliamentary party that would
take over and run the State. The struggle in parliament was
the chief one; the economic battle against employers for
better conditions was secondary. Thus, to the Socialist Party
members, the unions were considered subordinate in
importance to the Socialist Party, which, however, was to
leave the unions alone and to permit them full autonomy.
On the other side, the Socialist Labor Party conceived of the

unions as more important than the political party. It also
believed it could bring in Socialism through the ballot; it
would achieve its aim, however, not by means of reforms,
but at one stroke, following the constant reiteration of the
demand for the unconditional surrender of capitalism and
the convincing of the majority of the population, through
education, of the necessity of Socialism. To the Socialist
Labor Party, the role of the party was a destructive one
solely, "to abolish the State," while the unions' role was a
constructive one, to build a new society, the co-operative
commonwealth, after the capitalist State was abolished. As
the American Federation of Labor would not allow within
its ranks any propaganda for Socialism, the Socialist Labor
Party had organized its own "Socialist" unions and
482
proposed the destruction of the American Federation of
Labor.
On this question of the relation of trade unionism to

political parties, all labor organizations in the United States
in the past have come to grief. The Knights of Labor had
been at the same time both a union and a party, and had
ended up by supporting the petty bourgeois People's Party.
The A. F. of L. had declared its opposition to politics inside
the union, not because it was more radical than the Knights
of Labor and therefore refused to become an appendage to
any Liberal or bourgeois Radical Party, but because it was
content to deal with the Democratic and Republican Parties
and was willing to sell its vote to the highest bidder rather
than strike out with any independent political line of its
own. The opportunist Socialist Party, having abandoned
revolution for reform, was willing to abandon the struggle
inside the trade unions and to allow these unions to remain
reform organizations without making the slightest effort to
divert them from their capitalist course. The Socialist Labor
Party confused the trade union with the party, and insisted
that the trade unions be mere propaganda bodies to be split
according to their abstract beliefs regarding Socialism.
Neither the Socialist Party nor the Socialist Labor Party

understood the combat role of the unions, the necessity for
the revolutionary mass political general strike. The Socialist
Party separated reform from revolution, and believed that
through reform (as regards the trade union field, through
partial economic strikes) the workers would be able
gradually to improve their lot and win Socialism; the
Socialist Labor Party separated practice from theory and
affirmed that the unions were important merely as training
schools for Socialist school teachers, where they could learn
how capitalism must give way to Socialism.
483
At any rate, the forces of both Socialist groups were strong
enough, in the beginning of the I. W. W., to swing it to a
position of supporting parliamentary action and of trying to
win the State through the democracy of the ballot. But a
third force soon began to arise within the I. W. W., one that
made the organization gradually change its program. The I.
W. W. began to organize the migratory workers (transport,
lumber, agricultural) and foreign-born workers in the cities
of the East. These groups of workers had few parliamentary
illusions and besides, as aliens or as migratory workers,
were deprived of the ballot. These unskilled, the most
exploited of all workers, abandoned by the skilled and
bribed workers in the American Federation of Labor (which,
unlike the English trade unions had not broadened its base
to receive them) were ready for an entirely different sort of
policy.
First to evacuate were the Socialist Party elements, whose

general opportunism and whose support of the officials of
the A. F. of L. brought them into disrepute. The position of
the Socialist Labor Party was adopted, namely that the I. W.
W. must smash the "labor lieutenants of the capitalist class,"
the A. F. of L. misleaders, by smashing the craft union scabs
in the A. F. of L.
The second group to be forced out was the Socialist Labor

Party itself, headed by DeLeon. If DeLeon was correct in
evaluating the union as more important than the party,
what was the use of the party at all? DeLeon had admitted
that upon the unions rested the constructive task of
building up the new society. If Socialism prevailed, it
would be the party that would disappear, but not the
unions, which would then come into their own as builders
of Socialism. Even within capitalism, it was the unions that
were building up the new within the shell of the old. Did
484
anyone believe that a parliamentary party composed solely
of talkers and educators could be sufficiently destructive to
abolish the State? If the State were to be abolished, this
could be accomplished far more easily by the force of the
union than by the ballots of the Party. Besides, the Socialist
Labor Party had proclaimed itself as opposed to the general
strike, quite in the line of the French Guesdists, although
without their revolutionism.
The I. W. W. removed its political clause and declared

against all political or parliamentary action. With the exit of
the Western Federation of Miners and other trade unions
that had entered the organization at its inception (brewers,
sections of carpenters, miners, etc.), the I. W. W. embraced
the program to which it finally adhered. The I. W. W. could
never accept the Anarcho-Syndicalist position, in spite of
the great prestige the French Syndicalist movement enjoyed
in the United States at this time. The I. W. W. did not even
stress the efficacy of sabotage as a weapon.
Following the expulsion of Daniel DeLeon from the I. W.

W., the Socialist Labor Party group formed its own
"Detroit" I. W. W., a continuation of its old Socialist Trades
and Labor Alliance. This new group, however, soon
disintegrated, and the Socialist Labor Party from then on
ceased to play any creative role in American labor life.
Returning now to the Chicago I. W. W., we must ask: What

were the general views of this type of Syndicalism, strongly
affected as it was by Marxism? In method, the American
Syndicalists were generally eclectic mechanical materialists.
Holding fast to the tenet that economic relations are more
important than the political, and that politics therefore
followed economics, they accordingly interpreted this
general truth in a strictly mechanical manner. From their
general principles they laid down the following theses:
485
First: only industrial unions, and not political parties, were
necessary; only industrial unionism could bring about the
new society and the revolution. Second: since only
industrial unions could achieve the revolution, the
revolution could mature only in well-developed countries
where capitalism had brought powerful industrial unions
in its train. Thus the revolutionary movements in colonial,
semi-colonial, or deeply agrarian countries could not
assume great importance. Third: the principal task
confronting the workers was the seizure of the factories and
not the attack upon the State. This was not to mean that the
unions could nor would defend themselves against the
attacks of the State through one of the methods open to
them, namely, the general strike paralyzing all State
functions. Parliamentary action, however, was absolutely
futile. Fourth: since only wage-workers could join the
industrial unions, there was no need of the intellectual.
Besides, the intellectual, brought up under certain
bourgeois economic relationships, could not possibly break
away from them and thus would bring only confusion and
corruption into the ranks of the working class. Again, what
need was there for "intellect" or "theory," since the
economic relations alone were the decisive ones? The
workers could emancipate themselves without the aid of
those "saviors, the intellectuals." (*11) The main object was
to "organize on the job" at the "point of production."
The American Syndicalists, breaking away from the

bureaucracy and craft unionism of the American Federation
of Labor and from the petty bourgeois illusions of the
Socialists, and basing themselves as they did upon the
poorest and most oppressed layers of the proletariat,
nevertheless could not help but fall into gross errors of an
opposite nature. In denying the role of the "intellectual,"
486
they denied, on one hand, the role of "theory" and, on the
other, the need for leadership.
In denying the role of revolutionary theory, the American

Syndicalists denied the revolution itself as scientifically
verifiable. Further, they entirely underestimated the role
that consciousness plays in the efficacy of spontaneous
outbursts. True products of American conditions of their
times, the I. W. W.'s idealized the element of spontaneity
and, confusing the requirements of winning a strike with
those requisite to conquering State power, entirely
underrated the difficulty of their task.
The I. W. W. took the Marxist slogan that the emancipation

of the workers must be the task of the working class itself,
and translated it to mean that the workers do not need
leaders, certainly not leaders from outside their ranks. Since
common-sense and not science was necessary, the rank and
file could lead themselves; therefore every leader must be a
rank-and-filer. This mechanical Marxism was expanded to
such an extent that a rule was passed preventing any man
from being an organizer for more than one year, as
otherwise he soon would become corrupted, a "pie-card
artist" and faker.
In renouncing science and leaders, the workers of the

Syndicalist movement lost their sense of values. "Blind"
strikes, general irresponsibility and wildness, coupled with
the self-protective efforts of employers, combined to
prevent the organization by the I. W. W. of any real, solid
union organizations. Too often the I. W. W. laid itself open
to accusations by conservative union apologists that it was
interested in strikes rather than organization work and,
during strike action, was concerned with revolutionary
propaganda rather than with the material issues of the
strike. Upon the termination of a strike, it was charged
487
there was insufficient organizational follow-up, that the
locals, improperly and hastily built, would soon collapse.
After the war, when the I. W. W. was definitely on the

decline, more stress was laid on the need for planning and
organization, but by this time the principle of organization
was stressed more than action because the I. W. W. was
losing its revolutionism. If the I. W. W. was losing its
amateurishness, it had also lost its youth. Linked with the
later emphasis on organization went the faith that if the
workers organized to the extent of fifty-one per cent or
more, they easily could take over the factories --- as though
the ruling class of the United States would allow fifty-one
per cent of its workers to become organized into militant
industrial unions!
Both the American and French Syndicalists agreed on the

point that no political party was necessary, but for entirely
different reasons: the French because their "minority
unions' fulfilled the role of the "vanguard" and could
perform every function of a party; the Americans because
they considered no vanguard at all was necessary, since the
masses alone were capable of the task.
Both the French and the American Syndicalists were anti-

capitalist and wanted the workers to take over the factories
for themselves, but they had entirely different conceptions
of the means therefor. The French planned for the unions to
attack and to abolish the capitalist State by means of the
political general strike; the American Syndicalists ignored
politics and the State entirely. Both talked general strike, it
is true, but while to the French the general strike, though
possibly peaceful, was equivalent to the revolution, to the
Americans the revolution was merely a general "economic"
strike, even though it might be violent. The French had
turned from barricades to strikes; the Americans would yet
488
turn strikes into barricades. In France proletarian revolution
had been a fact; in America only the vaguest conception of
it was possible.
The convulsions of capitalist imperialism of the twentieth

century placed supreme tests before Syndicalism.
Everywhere it failed to meet these tests and either was
crushed (Italy), or collapsed (U. S. A.), or was captured by
the Socialists and Communists (France). Today strong
Syndicalist organizations in Europe exist only in Spain, and
even here, under the blows of the present revolution, these
Spanish unions are sheering away from their Anarchist
stand and are taking more of a Communist position.
However, there is no denying the fact that Syndicalism, as a
tendency within other movements, is still strong in some
European countries.
No wing of Syndicalists could meet six important problems,

namely, the World War, the problem of the army, the
problem of the peasantry, the Russian Revolution,
questions concerning the relationship between the
vanguard" (party) and the "class" (unions), problems of
unemployment.
The World War caught the Syndicalists unprepared. They

had concentrated on the point of production, they had
ignored politics. What about the war, which took the
worker from the shop? To answer war with general strike
could result only in fiasco. As a method of preventing or
arresting such a tornado as the World War, the general
strike program soon collapsed. And with the world torn by
enormous conflicts that bathed humanity in blood, the
additional theory that the general strike would have a
peaceful character also went glimmering. Most of the
Syndicalists turned patriots. In the United States, while the I.
W. W. came out against war in general, it did not denounce
489
specifically America's participation in the World War. "As
an organization the I. W. W. took an equivocal stand on the
matter of the draft." (*12)
This ambiguous attitude, however, was not sufficient to

save the I. W. W. from the most brutal assaults. So long as it
was able to call strikes during wartime, even though the
strikes were called, not to retard the prosecution of the war,
but solely to improve working conditions badly in need of
improvement, the I. W. W. brought down upon itself the
full wrath of the government.
In 1917-1918 alone over three hundred arrests took place,

and federal and state prosecutions under the Criminal
Syndicalist Acts and Espionage Law and other war
enactments rained down upon them thick and fast. At the
same time severe physical violence was inflicted upon the
membership wherever possible.
Connected with this problem of the war was the question of

the attitude of the Syndicalists to the army. Just as the
Syndicalists "ignored" the war, so had they "ignored" the
army, although the army never "ignored" them. The theory
of organizing only on the job, the theory of peaceful general
strike, had made them believe that it was not necessary to
work systematically within the army. To rely entirely on
strikes to paralyze the army, rather than upon work within
and without to win the army, proved a very costly error.
This mistaken attitude towards the soldier cost the very life
of the Italian Syndicalists. Because they thought only of
workers and of strikes, they failed to fight for the de-classed
workers, the returned ex-soldier and ex-officer whom the
post-war turmoil had rendered absolutely desperate. Such
desperate elements abandoned by the working class were
490
ripe material for the Fascists, who used them to crush all
working class organizations.
Not only did the Syndicalists ignore the army; they ignored
the peasantry. This, too, contributed its fatal part to the
defeat of the Italian working class. This gross error was
exemplified most crassly by the attitude of the I. W. W. in
the United States. The mechanical Marxists had learned that
the forces of capitalism crowd out the peasantry and
convert the peasant into a proletarian. Therefore, concluded
the materialist Syndicalists, the peasantry being a doomed
class, we need not bother with it. Thus, they failed to draw
the class lines among the farmers and to try to win the most
oppressed sections of them. To the I. W. W. all non-
proletarians were one reactionary mass, unworthy of notice.
Yet, to ignore the peasantry meant to believe that the

revolution cannot take place all over the world, since the
peasantry are still the vast majority of the world's
population and the working class the minority. Since the I.
W. W. did not believe in minority action, to be consistent
they would have to postpone the revolution until such time
as capitalism itself should have transformed the peasant
into a proletarian.
The rebellious peasant could not win without the aid of the
working class. Seeing that the workers, through
Syndicalism, despised him and condemned him to ruin,
was it any wonder that he helped to crush the workers in
Italy (and in Hungary, Finland, Poland, and elsewhere)?
If the revolution is ripe only in countries where the working

class is in the majority, then why bother with the colonial
countries fighting for independence without a large
proletariat? Here we see that the Syndicalist's contempt for
the peasant made him callous to the colonial revolutions
491
and deprived him of an internationalist point of view. This
lack of internationalism resulted in his putting but few
obstacles in the way of imperialism, either in its World War
or in its seizure of colonies. That the Syndicalists protested
at all was not because of their alliance with the colonial
masses, but because they themselves were asked to leave
the factories and risk their lives for their employers' profits.
The Russian Revolution imposed the severest test upon

Syndicalism. For or against the Russian Revolution --- there
could be no neutrality. On this question the Syndicalists
split wide open. The mass of Syndicalists certainly
welcomed the Russian Revolution. The entire Syndicalist
movement of France, and many groups elsewhere, went
over bodily to the Communists. Within the Syndicalist
movement itself the sharpest struggles took place over the
question of the dictatorship of the proletariat and Soviets.
The Anarcho-Syndicalists openly fought the dictatorship as
a State inimical to the workers. Another group began to
modify their theory to take the gigantic fact of the Russian
Revolution into their scheme of things.
This last group could be called Communist-Syndicalists.

They were only minority groups within the remaining
Syndicalist movement. They were willing to endorse
everything about the Soviet Revolution except the need for
a political party. They favored the dictatorship, a
centralized workers' army, civil war, Communism, but they
believed that, not the party with its intellectuals and
inevitable petty bourgeois elements, but the revolutionary
unions alone could accomplish the job as it could
accomplish the task of building Socialism.
These Communist-Syndicalists failed where all the other

Syndicalists failed, that is, in understanding the relation
between politics and economics, of the vanguard (party) to
492
the class (unions). They failed to understand that the loose,
broad, mass organization, the union, could be at best only
the body, it could never be the head of the working class.
The party must act as the political brain, that central organ
which co-ordinates all political sensation. The party is the
general staff of the working class, connecting all phases of
the battle front, so as to marshal and to concentrate not
merely the proletariat but all the forces of the toilers
generally within the country against the central power of
the capitalists, the State.
Connected with this problem is the problem: What will be

the central organ of the working class when it takes power -
-- the trade union councils, or soviets? The history of the
Russian Revolution has answered "soviets," broader types
of organizations than the trade union councils, embracing
sections of the population other than the organized
working class only. The Communist-Syndicalist does not
yet understand that the working class can achieve its
emancipation only when it changes its perspective from
that of its own class, in the narrow sense, to that of the
toilers as a whole and of the other sections of the
population who look to the workers to lead them.
The mechanical materialist Syndicalists, borrowing from

Marx the concept that the foundation of capitalism is the
exploitation of labor in the productive process, distorted
this to mean that the working class is oppressed and robbed
only in this process, that it has no struggles other than those
of the shop. The struggle of consumers against the high cost
of living, the struggle of the workers for supplementary
incomes from the State (in the form of schools, hospitals,
libraries, insurance, etc.) was of little importance to these
Syndicalists. Certainly, the industrial union can not be
expected to organize tenants' leagues to fight evictions,
493
housewives' councils to fight the high cost of living,
students' groups through which workers' children can fight
capitalist oppression in the schools, etc. Yet this is precisely
the job of a revolutionary political party.
Limited by their provincial Americanism and disgusted

with the socialists of this country, the I. W. W.'s confused
politics with parliamentarism. In the light of what is known
of the Socialist International, we can not blame the I. W. W.
for believing that all politicians were parliamentary
careerists. This, of course, is not so. To a genuine
revolutionary working class party, parliamentary activity is
but one phase, and not the most important, of its work.
Linked up with their denial of the role of a party was not

only the failure on the part of the American Syndicalists to
co-ordinate the struggle on many fronts, but a most naive
faith in the permanency of democratic institutions in the
United States. Here the I. W. W. showed itself the true twin
of the A. F. of L. or of the Socialist Party. That Fascism
could arrive, that unionism could become illegal, that broad
mass organization of workers would be outlawed and only
small conspiratorial groups could survive-this was entirely
incomprehensible to the I. W. W. The I. W. W. had no
system by which it could function illegally.
The complete bankruptcy of the Syndicalist movement has

been demonstrated not only in the question of wars and
evolution, but in the question of unemployment. The
present world crisis has seen tens of millions of men out of
work. It is plain that a good many of these workers have
been thrown out of work permanently. It is clear also that
the basic tendency of capitalism results in the constant
growth of this army of unemployed until it becomes a
veritable standing army of the dis-employed. When a
condition prevails wherein society must feed the workers
494
rather than the workers feed society, surely we have
reached the period of decline and disintegration of our
present system.
How can the theory and practice of the Syndicalists fit in

here? Should we have the revolution throughout the world
even though the workers are not yet the majority? Should
we declare the only method to be to "organize on the job at
the point of production" when there are but few jobs and
little production? Should strikes be the sole weapon in a
period when the workers are really locked out of the
factories? Should the union be the unique instrument when
unionism is in a process of disintegration? Should we
ignore politics when to hit the employer through the strike
is useless? Should we refuse to demand social insurance
from the State when we get no wages? Should we use the
method of guerilla warfare at a time when history calls for
the frontal attack? The Syndicalist cannot adequately
answer. He has been bankrupted by events.
After the war, the I. W. W. shrank to a mere shell of its

former self and underwent complete internal degeneration.
It was not able to adjust itself to the tremendous, epoch-
making events occurring in such rapid succession
throughout the world. It had emerged from the war with a
greatly reduced membership, (*13) and a relatively passive
and mediocre leadership. "Its pronouncements were not
taken seriously; its activity between 1924-1927 is hardly
worth recording." (*14) The initiative in revolutionary trade
unionism had been taken by the Communists, as was
demonstrated in the Passaic Strike (1926), the New Bedford
Strike (1928), and the Gastonia Strike (1929) led by Vera
Buch, myself and others.
The attack of the government reduced the I. W. W. to the

status of a mere civil liberties body fighting for free speech
495
and defending its prisoners. Although it was contrary to the
policy of the organization, some of the I. W. W.'s accepted
individual clemency and precipitated a fight on the
question within the remaining organization. Some of the
members had desired to drop defense work completely on
the ground that it was political action and also because it
diverted needed strength from economic organization work.
However, it was impossible to leave the champions of the
organization in jail without any effort to defend them. Thus
the sole result of the Leftists' argument to let those in jail rot
without attention was to throw the organization into
turmoil.
Increasingly the I. W. W. moved away from destructive

activity of the class struggle to "constructive" contemplation
of what it would do when unions took over industry. The I.
W. W. set up a Bureau of Industrial Research and actually
appropriated two thousand dollars in 1920 for its support.
Later on it was unofficially to attach itself to the vagaries of
the Technocrats; thus the organization which had been
derided by smug philistines as composed of slum elements,
attempted to become respectable by attaching itself to
college professors and engineers.
The conservative character of the I. W. W. showed itself also

in the schism that took place in 1924 when a large number
of lumber workers, adhering to an Emergency Program led
by Rowan, seceded from the organization. This was a sign
that the larger locals of the I. W. W. that still survived were
sick of revolutionary activity. This was also apparent when
the Philadelphia workers in the Marine Transport Workers
Union of the I. W. W., which had violated the constitutional
provision for low initiation fees and had charged $25.00 to
get into the union, had to be suspended from the
organization. The lumber workers, too, wanted to make of
496
the I. W. W. a plain union fighting for immediate demands
without a theory of revolution.
The Rowan faction was able partially to conceal its

conservative tendencies with a number of Leftist phrases
which constituted its Emergency Program. In essence,
Rowan was for a complete decentralization of the I. W. W.,
allowing the lumber workers full autonomy. He castigated
the bureaucratic loafers who headed the organization; he
denounced the Press Bureau for revolutionary statements
that made conviction in California easier under the criminal
Syndicalist Law. This faction of Rowan actually utilized the
unprecedented extreme of going into the capitalist courts
for an injunction against the others.
As the organization decayed, the increasingly dominant

Anarchist element was able to abolish the old-time theory
of centralized control which the I. W. W. had adopted as
one of the features distinguishing it from French
Syndicalism, and as time went on, the I. W. W. became less
and less centralized. In 1906 the office of President had been
abolished and a General Executive Board set up in place
thereof. At the 1913 convention an attempt had been made
to abolish even this Board and to have only a corresponding
secretary, proof that from the very start the Anarcho-
Syndicalists had been exerting considerable pressure.
Before the war, however, they had not been strong enough
to dominate. Only as the organization deteriorated could
they step forward in a leading position.
Today the General Executive Board is an impotent body,

meeting irregularly and conducting business only by
correspondence. The authority of the Executive is
recognized by few of the functioning locals. Playing into the
hands of this decentralization has been the rule that officials
must not remain in office more than one year, and the
497
further rule that no official may be a delegate to a general
convention and no member may be a ,delegate twice in
succession. These rules were originally established to
prevent a bureaucratic machine from arising within the I. W.
W., as it had in the A. F. of L. These decisions only aided
the Anarcho-Syndicalists to build their own little cliques
and to carry on their petty factional intrigues on the basis of
the powerlessness of the organization as a whole to act.
It cannot be said, however, that all centralized power is

completely gone. While locals may strike autonomously,
without approval of the General Executive, the latter body
may order a strike and can pass on all agreements with the
employer, so that there still remains a slight modicum of
power in the center. The Secretary, however, is not
responsible to the Executive Board, but is nominated by the
general convention and elected by the vote of the entire
membership; thus, even within the small top administration
there is no mutual responsibility, but rather general
independence of one member from another.
The decay of the I. W. W. is well symbolized in the type of

unemployed work that the organization carried on in the
present depression. In New York City, for example, where
one of their unemployed unions was formed, "Some
members are sent out to beg on the streets; others to try to
get bushel baskets full of carrots and potatoes.... An entry is
made at the appropriate time for each man who has actively
taken part in the propaganda work, clerical work, cooking,
cleaning, begging." (*15)
At the same time the General Executive Board took an

extremely hostile view towards the Communist
International. One of the executives actually protected its
Philadelphia local of seven thousand members which had
been working on ammunition to be used against the Soviet
498
Union. When in 1920 the vote was taken on affiliation with
the Third International, although the membership actually
carried the motion to endorse the Third International, with
reservations, (*16) by a vote of 1,111 to 994, the General
Executive Board decided that it would add 127 more votes
to the negative and then call the referendum null and void.
Being forced to send a delegate to the Red Trade Union
International Conference called in Moscow in 1920, it sent a
rabid anti-Communist who came back advising the
organization not to join the Communist forces but instead
to adhere to the Anarcho-Syndicalist "Berlin" International,
which existed only on paper. Whenever Communists
became editors of I. W. W. journals, the periodicals were
suspended by the executives.
This first against Communists was completely disastrous to

the last remnants of the organization. It may be said that the
criminal blundering of the Communist forces in this
country at the time greatly helped to accomplish this result.
Nevertheless, regardless of the character of the local
Communists, the whole revolutionary standing of the I. W.
W. was destroyed when it fought against the Soviet Union.
From then on Syndicalism openly showed its
transformation into counter-revolution.
Leaving aside the question of Syndicalism, we may

conclude that it is highly problematical whether the I. W. W.
can survive even as an industrial union. While the
opportunities for industrial unionism, independent of the A.
F. of L., are today greater than ever, only a miracle can
retrieve and rehabilitate the organization.
Footnotes
1. In England, in 1911, a Syndicalist Educational League

was formed in Great Britain under the guidance of Tom
499
Mann. This organization never got much farther than mere
propaganda for Socialism, class war, industrial unionism
and centralization. It was the same with the Syndicalist
League of North America in 1912.
2. See Brissenden: The I. W. W., a Study of American

Syndicalism.
3. See also L. Levine [Lorwin]: "The Development of

Syndicalism in America" in Political Science Quarterly, Vol.
28, pp. 451-479 (1913)
4. This is one of the chief points of criticism raised by British

and American opportunist socialists against Syndicalism.
Compare on this point the writings of J. R.
MacDonald, Syndicalism, p. 30 and following.
5. J. S. Gambs: The Decline of the I. W. W., pp. 223-224,

quoting Solidarity, May 22, 1920.
6. M. D. Savage: Industrial Unionism in America, p. 80.
7. See M. D. Savage: Industrial Unionism in America, p. 177

and following.
8. See Department of Labor, Canada: Ninth Annual Report on

Labour Organization in Canada, p.35.
9. How revolutionary the strike really was can be seen from

the fact that when the policemen also struck they were told
by the union leaders to return to their posts to keep order!
10. The 0. B. U. Bulletin, Dec. 20, 1919, given in M. D. Savage,

work cited, p. 187.
11. This attack upon the intellectuals and petty bourgeois

careerists who entered the organized ranks of the workers
particularly incensed the opportunist Socialists. For an
500
example, see John Spargo: Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism
and Socialism.
12. J. S. Gambs: The Decline of the I. W. W., p. 42.
13. At its peak the I. W. W. numbered its following at about

one hundred thousand; it has now but a few thousand.
14. Gambs: work cited, p. 20.
15. J. S. Gambs: The Decline of the I. W. W., p. 153.
16. The reservations were against parliamentarism and for

the right of autonomy to develop its own tactics fitting to
the United States.
501
BOOK IV: SOCIALISM
502
I. FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIALISM
XVI. THE BACKGROUND
By the middle of the nineteenth century and particularly in

England the basic functioning of modern capitalism clearly
was revealed. The explosions of Chartism and the
revolutions of 1848, as well as the vast movements
extending from the United States to Russia and culminating
in the Paris Commune, had revealed the turbulent disorder
hidden beneath the social crust.
Two predominating factors drove the contradictions of

capitalism to extremes. They were, first, the operations of
the market, and second, the exploitation of wage-labor
leading to the accumulation of capital.
Contrary to previous systems of society, under capitalism

the anarchy of the market is the sole social regulator.
According to market-price fluctuations, men are employed
or dismissed, factories built or dismantled, wealth
produced or destroyed, millions made or lost, countries
advanced or retarded. Through the circulation of
commodities, the economic world is transformed into a
veritable madhouse where each person is for himself and
no quarter is given. The functioning basis is competition,
competition among the buyers and among the sellers,
between buyer and seller, between capitalists and laborers,
among the capitalists, and among the workers. The whole
world lives for exchange, though it is not the humans who
live so much as the commodities; the producers are merely
attached to the articles exchanged. Production is primarily
for the market, for sale, for profit and not for use.
Up to the time of the industrial revolution and indeed to

1825, when the first "over-production" occurred, the
503
demands of consumption had exceeded production. With
the tremendous expansion of machine production the
reverse was now true. Supply pressed heavily on the
market, causing periodic gluts of goods and plethora of
capital.
Whereas, prior to the introduction of modern capitalism,

industry and agriculture had been combined in intimate
harmony, the first dependent upon the second,
machinofacture reversed the situation. Industry began to
lead agriculture; the city became divorced from the
countryside. The increasing gap between them has been the
basic source of all manner of maladjustments within the
nation; on an international sphere its counterpart is the
pressure of imperialist, industrialist countries upon the
agrarian, colonial and semi-colonial ones.
Although production is a social operation, requiring

thousands of workmen laboring co-operatively to produce
even a single commodity for the use of others, and a social
network of market relations connecting all, nevertheless,
the productive process is not carried on for the welfare of
society as a whole or for its producers, but for the profit of
the capitalists who control and own the social forces and
individually appropriate the social product for their own
benefit. Thus, between society and its products stands the
individual capitalist.
Competition among the capitalists impels the larger owners

to drive out the smaller. The wealthier capitalists prevail by
increasing the application of science to the productive
process, thus lowering the cost of production. In this
manner the development of industry effects and in turn
affects a tremendous technical revolution, constantly
improving the methods of production and increasing the
productive ability of the workers. Nevertheless, the
504
individualistic system of private ownership leads to an
enormous waste of social forces. The soil is woefully wrung
out; material means of production are scrapped and
destroyed wherever profits can be raised accordingly. In a
thousand ways the lives of the workmen are worn out
prematurely through wanton abuse and with criminal
irresponsibility. In proportion as the anarchy of the market
grips society, the dictatorship of the employers within their
workshops takes a firmer hold.
Driven by the necessity to lower the cost of production, the

capitalists resort to a feverish attempt to displace workmen
and to increase productivity. But hand in hand with the
unlimited possibility for increased output goes the
shrinking of the limited market. Even in the nineteenth
century the profits of prosperity in industrial countries
could accrue only through the terrible impoverishment of
those countries whose markets had been superseded. Thus
the rise of the factory system of England took place only
through the throwing of millions of Indians into misery,
starvation, and death. It has been estimated that
approximately eighty million Indians have died of
starvation alone since the beginning of the twentieth
century.
Even in the best of times, when workers are put to work

and wages are at their highest, the wages of the workers
never rise as fast as the surplus product (profit) which the
capitalist takes. Compared to the capitalist, the worker is
worse off than ever; that is to say, his relative wages
steadily decline. Even when he seems to improve his real
wages, the improvement is often illusory. Although he may
be able to buy more of the necessities of life, which is the
test of real wages (as contrasted with nominal wages, which
is the actual amount of money received) under the
505
increased tension of factory work the laborer is debilitated
much sooner than before, and thus the slight increase in
wages each week cannot compensate him for the increased
wear and tear, nor does it cover the many weeks he is
forced to live without work. At the end of his lifetime of
service he has practically nothing.
The capitalists, on the other hand, are goaded on by the fact

that the rate of profit always tends to fall. In order to make
the same profit, the capitalist has to expand his business,
accumulate capital, invest more and more in machinery,
buildings, etc., that is, in constant capital. The proportion of
constant capital to variable capital, that is, the proportion of
values invested in means of production as contrasted with
the values invested in labor power, generally known as
wages, gradually increases in favor of the former. All the
devices of the capitalist to stop the fall in the rate of profit,
such as the introduction of new inventions or the seizure of
colonies, etc., only speed up the various forces causing it to
fall. More and more the dead weight of capital increases,
dead labor throttles living labor, the past crushes the
present. Like the dinosaur of old, a huge bodily mechanism
is built up which squeezes out the brain and consumes all
its energies in mere maintenance, all lability being lost.
Concatenated to the growth and strength of capitalism is

the augmentation of pauperism and unemployment;
whether times are easy or hard, increasingly must society
feed the workers by means of bread-lines and through
institutions of one sort or another.
Modern capitalism, representing a great increase in private

property, makes its debut by wrenching control over their
means of production from the direct producers, the
peasants and artisans. Commodity private property is
converted into capitalist private property, where a few
506
control the means of production and the rest are forced to
sell their labor-power as a commodity. This is done only
through the application of the greatest violence. Capitalism
thus makes its appearance transpiring sweat and blood
from every pore.
As capitalism develops, personal ownership evolves into

joint stock companies and into private corporate property
which in turn begins to take on a public character, and
develops conjointly with State public property. The
individual owners are steadily ousted from the means of
production. A vast number are transformed into wage
workers, a relative handful into rentiers or coupon-clippers.
These coupon-clippers and investors of all sorts form a
parasitic class completely divorced from the process of
production, and later become the typical representatives of
the capitalist class as a whole. Interested only in
consumption and in the pleasures of the hour, this group
staunchly supports the government and the trusts whose
stocks and bonds it owns.
Simultaneously, capitalism completely revolutionizes

middle class relations within the country. Whole sections of
the old petty bourgeoisie, small bankers, small business
men, merchants, artisans, farmers, and such, are driven
from their occupations and financially ruined. On the other
hand, the rise of large-scale and monopoly industry creates
a new middle class, professional elements, foremen,
technicians, salesmen, etc., and a host of petty interests
completely dependent upon the trust or monopoly and no
longer hostile to it.
Other contradictory features appear. On the one hand, each

country must strive to become self-sufficient so as to be
dependent on no other. On the other hand, due to the great
increase of production and trade, markets become
507
international in the truest sense of the term, and each
country is bound up with the other in a world subdivision
of labor. Here we have the heart of the problem that
perplexes diplomats and causes great complications in
international relations.
The fact that internationalism must go through the filter of

nationalism has its own repercussions in the colonial field
as well. The most backward countries of the world are
drawn into the vortex of capitalism and all the Chinese
walls of isolation are battered down, not in order to
advance the backward countries nor to free the colonies,
but rather further to oppress and enslave them. The welfare
of the colonies is entirely subordinated to that of the home
industrial country. Thus colonial progress takes on a most
uneven, artificial, and exasperating character. The trend of
capital to flow evenly all over the world in its quest for a
higher rate of profit is burked by the monopoly control
exercised by the imperialist country. The tendency of the
colonies to become industrialized is sacrificed to the need of
the imperialist country for sources of raw material, etc.
Thus the export of capital, whose increase is one of the laws
of capitalist development, is hindered by the forces of
capitalism itself.
All these contradictions are developed to their highest point

in the twentieth century when free competitive capitalism
has become transformed into imperialism. The outstanding
factors in an era of imperialism are the development of
monopolies under the hegemony of finance capital, the
export of capital rather than of goods, and the partition of
the entire world into closed colonial systems. (*1)
In the old days trusts had been created chiefly by grant of

special patents by the State and even at present there are
some industries monopolized through patent rights; in the
508
competitive period of the nineteenth century, however,
most of the prominent cartels and syndicates formed were
those connected with the monopolization of raw materials.
As the concentration of capital became accentuated, trusts
became established in many branches of trade, particularly
the newly developed ones springing up in an era of tariff
protection. Thus, today, "The time is past when industrial
combination could be regarded as a more or less
exceptional condition of industrial organization. Cartels
and trusts can no longer be considered as being mainly
devices of industrialists to utilize certain occasional and
accidental conditions, or conditions brought about by the
"artificial" means of tariff protection, to form monopolies.
Industrial combination must be regarded as a form of
industrial organization evolving through and adapted to
certain conditions of concentration, technical, geographical,
economic, arising in many groups of industry, national and
international, and revolutionizing the size of the industrial
unit or of the industrial undertaking." (*2)
The rise of the trust, the cartel, and syndicate (*3) under
control of a centralized banking system does not lead, as
popularly supposed, to the end of competition, but only to
its intensification. While the trusts may bring to an end
competition in a particular industry and locality, they
merely transfer the arena of murderous competition. "Mr. 0.
H. Cheney, vice- president of the Pacific National Bank,
New York, has recognized five distinct channels through
which the new competition functions." (*4) These are
enumerated as vertical competition (between trusts),
competition among trade associations in different
industries, competition of one industry against another,
rivalry of local communities against each other and, finally,
international competition.
509
To counter the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, industry
is "rationalized." Rationalization is the systematic
application of scientific methods to raise the mass and rate
of profit. All of science is brought to bear to extricate
capitalism from its difficulties. Technical revolutions occur
in every field of economic development. Industry is
electrified and mechanized; automatic factories are set up.
Subdivision of labor and conservation of effort become
systematized in Taylor methods and similar schemes.
Standardization and mass production by means of belt
systems are introduced in every field. A delicate balance is
worked out to obtain the best results between the efficiency
of large-scale production and the economy of a smaller unit
in a trust-chain system, while capital is centralized and
concentrated. (*5) Scientific laboratories take up the
utilization of all byproducts and waste materials.
Accompanying these efforts to increase the productivity of
labor goes the skillful pressure upon the workers to
intensify their work and to increase their hours where
possible. The speed-up and stretch-out system is wrought
to an extremely high point; the labor-process becomes so
condensed that the physical capacities of the laborer are
exhausted in a relatively short time.
All sorts of psychological and social welfare measures are

introduced to keep the workers docile in order to insure
continuous production and to break up any tendency to
hostile organization. Company unions are cleverly
contrived to channelize the worker's discontent and to stifle
his rebellion.
Concomitant with this industrial process goes a financial

and commercial rhythm in harmony with it. A whole
technique is developed whereby the few may control the
stocks of the large corporations through the purchase and
510
control of a minimum part of the shares. Huge holding
companies are formed to manage financially the industrial
organizations and to fleece regularly the common
stockholders for the benefit of the few controlling ones. The
amount of paper securities, stocks, bonds, symbols of
money, no longer corresponds to the real wealth of the
country. Speculation and insecurity become more feverish
than ever. To solidify the watered stock, all sorts of
gambling adventures must be launched.
Overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of goods

produced, the trust financiers try to force domestic sales
through the mechanism of instalment buying, prohibitive
tariffs, government purchases, subsidies, and subventions.
To increase foreign sales they employ the measures of
wholesale dumping of exports, of obtaining forced loans,
etc. All these methods, however, only intensify the periodic
industrial crises when they finally arrive.
Generated by these economic contradictions in the normal

evolution of capitalism, a whole host of corresponding
political antagonisms spring up in the era of imperialism. In
the political sphere a great rise in State capitalism and
public property takes place. State capitalism grows on the
one side through the entrance of the State itself into
industry and finance, especially with the development of
militarism; on the other side, it grows also through the most
intimate fusion of the State apparatus with the private
machinery of Big Business.
In the desperate struggle for self-preservation, each

capitalism develops a virulent nationalism which strives for
a strategic position for world power. The tremendous
growth of production has now become completely fettered
by national boundaries. The national State becomes
increasingly a tremendous straight-jacket the laces of which
511
have to be broken. In order to win foreign markets, colonies,
spheres of influence, sources of raw materials, and
advantageous possibilities for capital investments and
military strategic points, and in order to prevent the
competing nationalities from obtaining similar objectives,
each national capitalism must develop its military and
naval power to the maximum.
Mercenary armies tend to give way to the arming of the

whole population and to the mobilizing of the entire nation
in time of war under the indisputable control of Big
Business. The pacifism of the nineteenth century
Manchester School is transformed into the jingoism of
imperialism. War becomes the main obsession of capitalism.
All constructive forces are now dedicated to destruction
and, just as it has laid its deadening hand upon inventions,
thereby stifling the productive processes that may threaten
its control, similarly does monopoly bring to fruition all
destructive inventions and warlike preparations. War
becomes the chief stimulus for industry.
As the competitive era of the nineteenth century gives way

to the imperialism of the twentieth, the pressure upon the
masses becomes increasingly unbearable. The United States,
1923 to 1929, well exemplified this premise, for nowhere
better than in this country has the general law of capitalist
accumulation been demonstrated, namely, the greater the
strength and energy of capitalism the larger the
unemployed and pauper armies.
The intense capitalist rationalization perfected in the United

States has resulted in the following social phenomena. (1)
The workers of this country suffer the highest industrial
accident and disease rates of any country in the world. (2)
Here the relative wage is the lowest of any industrial
country, and the extremes between rich and poor are the
512
sharpest. In 1929, in the year of highest prosperity, while
over five hundred people paid income taxes on incomes
over one million dollars --- a record, over 90 per cent of the
people were reported to have incomes below the minimum
government standards set for health and decency. (3)]
Against the propaganda hailing the steady rise of real
wages in America is opposed the factual increased wear
and tear on the worker, the chronic unemployment and
part-time work, the general lack of adequate social
insurance, and the necessity to support dependents over
forty years of age who can no longer work.
The rapid pace which the worker must keep up, coupled
with the breakdown of family life, has led to a great
increase of nervous disorders, cancer, heart trouble, etc.,
and to suicides. The malnutrition of the masses is well
evidenced by the many deaths yearly from pellagra and,
above all, from the enormous total of deaths from
tuberculosis. Conservative estimates place the number of
undernourished school children at six million throughout
the nation.
We may sum up our estimates of the workings of

capitalism even during periods of relative prosperity,
whether in a state of free competition or of imperialism, by
reiterating our conclusion that under imperialism all of the
contradictions existing in free competitive capitalism, lead
to an ever-intensifying strain upon all social relations until
they reach the breaking point.
Under the laws of the accumulation of capital, periodic

cycles of overproduction occur, whereupon factories close
down because the supply of goods on hand cannot be
disposed of at a profit. If this over-production is the basic
cause of any particular cyclical crisis, at the same time it is
aggravated further by the forces engendered by the crisis
513
itself. During adverse times, in order to prevent shut-downs,
each manufacturer tries earnestly to lower the cost of
production, that is, still further to rationalize his production
and depress the wages of his laborers. It is precisely in the
period of crisis that new machinery is introduced,
sweatshops and over-work become general, and output
enormously increased. Thus to the evils of over-work and
over-strain is added the misery of unemployment and
insecurity of labor.
This situation has occurred during the present economic

crisis in the United States and has greatly aggravated the
sufferings of the people. It may be stated that even in 1936
the equivalent to over twenty million workers are
completely unemployed. In times of crises, we have not
only the number of "floating, latent and stagnant" sections
of the unemployed always with us, (*6) but also those
thrown out of work by the crisis itself, as well as part-time
workers, adults newly come of working age, women and
children formerly dependent and now forced to seek work,
discharged employees in domestic and personal service,
and ruined sections of the petty bourgeoisie, both urban
and rural. For these people, apparently it never rains but it
pours.
During crises of over-production there exists, a plethora of

capital; at the same time, the "little man" cannot obtain
credit and is forced into bankruptcy. The large-scale
operator can now buy up petty property for a song and still
further concentrate and centralize his capital. The stream of
bankruptcies which is always the concomitant of
fluctuation on the market becomes a veritable torrent
during periods of crises; yet at the exact time when the
market is so urgently needed, the pauperization of the
514
masses, both workers and middle classes, drastically
undermines the market further.
During eras of imperialism, the burden of State operations

rapidly increases, even in normal times; during periods of
depression, the State must enter still more into the field in
order to forestall impending social disasters. Thus, at the
very moment when the income of the people is being
sharply curtailed, the State must increase its taxation still
more heavily, must raise farther its prohibitive tariffs, must
augment enormously its military expenses. Increasingly
dependent upon big capital for loans, the State must
enlarge its budget to alleviate the social distress on the one
hand, and, on the other, to try to throw its burden on the
people as a whole.
During the cyclical crises of over-production, destructive

forces are raised to their highest degree. Raw materials,
instruments and means of production, and labor-power are
wasted in wholesale fashion. All the unevenness of
capitalism becomes still farther increased. Industry tries to
shove the cost onto agriculture, the imperialist countries
onto the colonies, the large capitalist onto the small
business man, petty bourgeois, and worker.
The severe curtailment of production, coupled with the

increased output per worker, leads the laborer still farther
into insuperable difficulties. If even in times of prosperity
the skilled workers were being reduced steadily to the rank
of unskilled, now both sections find themselves out of work,
including strata of the new type of petty bourgeois
elements, such as foremen and technicians. If, even in good
times, wage increases never kept pace with the relative
increase in the mass of profit, and advances in real wages
were illusory, now, in bad times, all wages are drastically
515
reduced at the very moment when the burden upon the
poor through the increase of dependents grows heavier still.
During periods of depression it is the unskilled, poorest-

paid laborer who suffers most through wage cuts,
speeding-up and lay-off's, and unemployment, although
the skilled workers, too, feel the pinch. The fall of real
wages, coming exactly at the time when unemployment is
rife, causes the greatest misery among the masses.
Naturally, disease, vice, and crime rates rise enormously.
Prostitution and vice have gravely increased everywhere,
all the more so as the depression greatly accelerates the
breaking up of the family. In the United States it was
reported during 1932-1933 that about a million souls in all,
including whole families, had taken to the road and were
traveling on the freights.
To all this must be added the story of the chronic agrarian

crisis which already, even in days of prosperity, had made
itself felt throughout the entire nation. In the period of
1920-1928 a great differentiation had appeared among the
agrarians. On the one hand, the importance of factory
farming largely increased, together with the number of
agricultural laborers in proportion to farmers.
Mechanization of farming grew by leaps and bounds, and
production per acre and per laborer was much augmented.
At the same time, however, over three million of the farm
population had been driven off the farms, expropriated
from any means of production.
The purchasing power of the farmer in 1929 was but 80 per

cent of that of 1919. Mortgages had increased to ten billion
dollars, or about 25 per cent. Tenancy had ominously
advanced; peonage in fact was still rampant. Conditions
among the toilers of the South and the Southwest,
particularly the Negroes, were indescribable.
516
During the dark days of the crisis that commenced in 1929,
the income of the farmers fell abysmally from a total of
twelve billion dollars, high point in 1929, to about four and
one-half to five billion dollars, low point. On top of this
drastic fall in prices came the wide impoverishment of the
farm masses due to floods and droughts and the loss of
reserve capital consequent upon the widespread
bankruptcy of the small rural banks upon which the
farmers depended. What with the great disparity between
farm and industrial prices (*7) and the actual rise in electric,
gas, and anthracite rates in certain portions of the country;
what with the great increase of taxes and the constantly
increasing heavy debt payments that had to be made in a
period of falling prices, no other outcome faced the farmer
but stark ruin.
The government of the United States has attempted to stave

off this wholesale bankruptcy of the agrarian. At best the
efforts of the State can be but temporary. The United States
is on the verge of revolutionary social consequences on the
countryside.
So the industrialized countries of capitalism present their

ubiquitous data for socialists while they generate
spontaneous rebellions of the masses.
Footnotes
1. For an interesting analysis of imperialism, see V. 1. Lenin

(Ulyanov), Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism. L. Corey,
in his The Decline of American Capitalism, reduces Marx's
general algebraic formulae to the arithmetic applied to the
United States.
2. H. Levy: Industrial Germany, p. 224.
517
3. Where a monopoly is created by fusion of a number of
firms into one we have a trust. In a cartel, each concern
keeps its identity. A syndicate is an intermediate form. All
these forms may intertwine nationally and internationally.
4. See Chase and Schlink, Your Money's Worth, p. 31.
5. Concentration of capital is its physical growth through

accumulation; centralization is its growth through transfer
from the hands of many into those of a few. Centralization
does not necessarily involve a growth in total social wealth.
6. See Karl Marx: Capital, I, 703 and following.
7. See G. C. Means: Industrial Prices and Their Relative

Inflexibility, Senate Document 13, 74th Congress.
XVII. SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM
THE ceaseless clash of contradictions which formed the

foundation of economic life in the middle of the nineteenth
century was bound to find theoretical expression, especially
from members of those classes victimized by those
contradictory forces and which had an interest in changing
the direction of society. In the works of Karl Marx and of
Frederick Engels the interests of the working class found
their best expression. In their life activities they symbolize
the best of German philosophy, French politics, and British
economics, synthesizing all three elements to bring forth
"Scientific Socialism."
Scientific Socialism has three principal divisions, namely,

philosophy, economics, and politics. In philosophy, Marx
518
took the theory of dialectics which he found in Hegel, and,
casting out its idealism, placed it on its feet as a theory of
dialectical materialism which, when applied to human
society, became a theory of historical materialism. In the
field of economics Marx based himself upon the theory of
value as labor which had already been suggested by the
Classical School of British economists before him, and
thereby worked out a theory of surplus value and the laws
of accumulation of capital, analyzing adequately for the
first time both the structure and evolutionary functioning of
the capitalist system. In politics, both Marx and Engels
grasped the principles of the class struggle which already
had been stated by working class elements, and developed
them into a thesis leading to a new system of society,
Socialism or Communism, through the institution of a
Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
As Marx put it: "And now as to myself, no credit is due to

me for discovering the existence of classes in modern
society nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me
bourgeois historians had described the historical
development of this class struggle and bourgeois
economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did
that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes
is only bound up with particular, historic phases in the
development of production; (2) that the class struggle
necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the Proletariat; (3)
that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to
the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. (*1)
To sum up, Scientific Socialism was both a method as well

as a content or body of scientific conclusions, later
becoming both a theory and a practice. Just as it is
impossible to separate program from strategy, and both
from tactics, so it is impossible to divide the philosophical
519
from the political and economic, or the method from the
data. All are bound up together by the monist materialism
of life. We turn first to the philosophy.
From the days of ancient society, two principal camps have

existed in philosophy, the camp of the materialist and that
of the idealist. To the materialist, nature is primary, spirit
secondary; thinking is a process of the brain and thought,
basically, is but a reflection of the action of matter which
exists outside and independent of man. The universality of
all things consists in their materiality; that is, outside of the
philosophic category of "matter" there is nothing.
The opposite to this is the position of the idealist, whose

Right Wing consists of religionists of all sorts and whose
Left is made up of the pure metaphysicians. Stripping aside
theosophical aspects, both religion and metaphysical
idealism agree, contrary to the materialists, that things are
but a collection of images, matter is only the realization of
an idea. It is the idea, the spirit, that is primary and real,
and nature is but a reflection of the spirit.
From the earliest times the battle has raged fiercely. In

ancient Greek society, the materialists were represented by
Democritus and Heraclitus. The idealist position was
represented principally by Plato and Socrates. According to
Democritus and the early Atomists, nothing could be
destroyed, nor could anything arise from nothing. All
change was but a combination and separation of atoms. No
change occurred of itself, but only through cause and
necessity. Both teleology and religion had to be explained
by efficient causes. Nothing existed save atoms and empty
space. All else was but opinion.
The philosophy of these Greek materialists who lived in a

stagnant slave society could not but take on a static
520
character. The fact that matter could not be destroyed
meant for them that all becoming and perishing was denied
(Parmanides), or that all motion was denied, change being
considered as phenomenal only (the Eleatics), or finally,
where change did occur, it was believed the changing
world would return to its old position (Heraclitus). (*2)
With Epicurus and the development of the Roman State,

materialism took on a sensationalist guise. The
sensationalist school accorded well with the Hedonists,
who affirmed that desire is the moving principle of all
human action, and that the true aim of life is not happiness
but sensual pleasure alone; physical pleasure is better than
mental, just as physical pain is worse.
There was no consciousness without sensation. However,

this sort of sensationalism could be a bridge to idealism also;
since sensations are the basis of knowledge and depend on
the individual, it is easy to reach the conclusion that man is
the measure of all change, and thus, that contradictory
assertions are equally true. In this way, the material reality
is forgotten in the stress on the sensations to which it gives
rise.
The opposing idealism of Socrates and Plato took the form

of insisting that name and thing are identical and that
whatever proposition is most general is the most nearly
correct. Like the materialists, all these idealists also built
their closed systems.
In the Middle Ages, the fight between materialism and

idealism assumed the nature of a conflict between
nominalists and realists, and also, within the Catholic
Church, of a struggle against various heresies. The
theologians of the day argued the question regarding the
creation of the world --- whether God created the world
521
from nothing, or whether the matter had existed for God to
create it into a world. They also argued about the relation of
God to the world --- whether God existed in every particle
of matter and thus was pantheistic, etc. The question of
how many angels can stand on the point of a pin was
important precisely from the point of view of materialism
or idealism.
The eighteenth-century development of the factory system

and of science led to the creation of a new school of
mechanical materialists who were non-historical and non-
dialectical, and who regarded human nature abstractly.
These materialists theorized on how to interpret the world;
they made no efforts to change it. They belonged to the
upper aristocratic classes rather than to the rebellious lower
orders. (*3)
Nineteenth-century reaction returned to idealism. As it

idealized the past and bemoaned the changes that the
revolutions had brought from the age of the romantic, it
elaborated the dialectic method of which the best exponent
was the German, Hegel.
With Hegel, "in the beginning was the word." Analyzing

the working of his own mind, Hegel found that thesis
constantly gave way to antithesis and both were resolved in
a synthesis. No sooner did we have one than we had the
other, and the whole, only to start all over again. The same
process occurred in nature, which apparently was but the
realization of the idea unfolded in history. The start was
logic, the thesis; nature was the reflection of this logic, or
the antithesis; the synthesis lay in the philosophy of Hegel,
the acme of world's thought. (*4) Thus Hegel, whose
dialectic method of incessant contradiction might have led
to a revolutionary attitude, ends his theory with the
conservatism of a closed system. To Hegel, all that was real
522
was reasonable, that is, necessary; thus could the status quo
eternally be justified.
At the same time Hegel also could say, all that was
reasonable was real. Therefore if the masses found it
reasonable to protest against a given system, the
reasonableness would compel them to realize their aim. In
this way, in spite of the fact that Hegel himself created a
closed system, his really implied method was eternal and
perpetual flux. For the reactionary idealistic dialectic of
Hegel, Marx substituted his own materialistic dialectic.
Dialectic materialism is at least materialism, and

materialism to the Marxist is the texture of all science.
Testing the positions of materialism and science through an
examination of the basic questions of philosophy, he finds
them identical. This is the reason why the Marxist boasts
that he is scientific.
The first philosophical question is one of ontology-the

nature of being. Does matter exist independently and
outside us, or is it but a reflection of our ideas? This
question is put by the Scientific Socialists in another way;
did nature exist prior to man? Science of course answers,
yes. The whole theory of evolution is evidence of the
opinion of the scientist that nature, the earth, existed before
man and before the ideas of man came into being. Man is
but a part of nature, a product of natural forces, of the
material elements.
The second basic philosophical question is one of

epistomology-the nature of ratiocination, of the cognitive
process. What is the relation of thinking to flesh? The
Scientific Socialist puts the question in another way: Does
man think with the help of his brain? Here, too, of course,
science answers, yes. Thinking is a process of the material
523
brain, just as the light from the electric lamp is the result of
a material process.
The third basic philosophic question has to do with

whether causation, the relation of cause and effect, really
exists in nature, or whether the laws of science which have
to do with the analysis of cause and effect are merely ideas
of man. To this question is related another. Is there a
necessity in nature? Must things happen? Can we predict
them? Again, in answer to these questions, science supports
materialism and affirms that the laws of science are really
the expressions of actual relations in nature. Furthermore,
the objectivity of scientific law applies not only to causality
but to the laws of space and time. Space and time are not
mere ideas of man, but are a real part of the dimensional
materiality of the universe.
Of course, our ideas about things are approximate. We are

always learning more and more about the qualities and
functions of this or that form of matter. All science, dealing
as it does with a becoming, deals with constant change. To
the scientist there is no line to be drawn between matter
and its functions. In proportion as we know more about the
functions of a particular object it loses its mysterious
character of being a "thing-in-itself" and becomes
increasingly a "thing-for-us." (*5) In that sense, all of the
laws of science are relative. Nevertheless, these relative
laws are absolute within the definite framework of
relationships that may be under consideration. What is true
today may be false tomorrow, but only when the frame of
conditions has changed.
The idea of relativity early was expressed by the Scientific

Socialists and became a part of the basic understanding of
the dialectical process of nature. To the dialectician, all
unity is the combination of contradictions, the result of
524
diverse strains. Society, rocks, cabbages, ether waves,
chemical solutions, buildings, and the macrocosm itself, all
these, large and small, are the resultant of opposing forces.
Each unity is composed of opposites and will break up into
opposites. To view things in constant movement, to see
them as the result of constant movement, to mark the
movements as contrary and conflicting, this is the dialectic
method. The dialectician tries to see the relation of each part
to every other part, and of each part to the whole, as their
mutual relations evolve from moment to moment.
The Scientific Socialist adopted the dialectic manner of

approaching things in nature, not because of his willfulness,
but solely because this method of approach accurately
reflects the actual contradictory processes of nature where
everything is eternally posed, opposed, and composed.
However, it is not enough to say that the only thing

changeless is change. The materialist must also add that the
materiality of the universe is absolute. Here, then, is the
dogma of the Scientific Socialists, their "absolute truth" so to
speak. While the Marxist materialists are constantly on the
alert for changes, trying to find out within what patterns a
proposition is correct and where it becomes error, they are
at the same time persistently resisting the spiritualists and
bewildered idealists of all kinds who insist that the idea of
change and relativity includes the concept of the materiality
of the universe itself and that we must bow to the
possibility that the universe might be made up of
"accidental varia," God, luck, chance, spirits, etc., which
have nothing to do with materiality. (*6) This dogma of the
materialists, incidentally, forms the axiom of all scientific
work.
When applied to history, the dialectical method of

approach becomes historical materialism attempting to
525
obviate the two chief defects in early historical theories,
namely, their idealism and their neglect of the activities of
masses. ". . . historical materialism first made it possible to
study with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the
life of the masses and the changes in these conditions." (*7)
The materialistic conception of history starts with the

proposition that the mode of production, which itself is
based upon the given level of technique prevailing at the
time, is the prime mover of all social forces. (*8) In trying to
understand the laws of motion of a given society, its
evolution and its direction, the Marxist begins first of all
with a study of the technique of that society, the level of its
productive forces. These productive forces include not
merely the means of production, the instruments and
subject of labor, but the laborer as well. The whole is to be
analyzed concretely. Such a concretization does not
overlook national, racial, or psychological traits or other
secondary features of society. (*9) On the contrary, an
adequate study must also trace the interconnection between
these factors and their mutual development from the
primary sources.
Starting from this foundation, the Marxist examines those

economic relations between persons which have been
rendered necessary by the technical plane of production.
Upon these economic relations which constitute the given
mode of production, there is erected the whole texture of
political and social relations. Politics, family life, customs,
ideology, thus flow fundamentally from the relations of the
production and distribution of wealth.
In other terms, one must never lose sight of the reciprocal

action of economics to politics and social life. A careful
study of this interaction led Marx to the conclusion that the
laws of motion involved in the capitalist mode of
526
production would lead to the throttling of the forces of
production by the social relations inherent in capitalism.
As Marx put it, "It is not the consciousness of men that

determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social
existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain
stage of their development, the material productive forces
in society come in conflict with the existing relations of
production, or, --- what is but a legal expression for the
same thing --- with the property relationships within which
they have been at work before. From forms of development
of the productive forces, these relationships turn into their
fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the
change of the economic foundation the entire immense
superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed." (*10)
The fetters of capitalism could be broken only by the class

representing the new technique; such a class was the
proletariat. It was the destiny of this class to erect a new
system of production, Communism, of which the first
transitional phase was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Between the two camps of materialism and idealism lies

agnosticism. The groups adhering to this last are as
variegated as the rainbow. Some of these middle-of-the-
road elements are closer to the Right Wing idealists, others
to the Left Wing materialists. Like the petty bourgeois who
hesitates to take sides between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, like the Liberal who tries to harmonize the class
struggle and to bring together both the conservative-
reactionary and the revolutionary elements, the agnostic
camp borrows now from one group, now from the other,
feels itself superior to either, but in reality is inferior to both.
Its ultimate wisdom consists in the phrase, "I don't know."
527
Modern agnosticism has had several principal schools: the
classic school of the English sensationalists starting with
Locke and Hume, the German continental school of Kant
and the neo-Kantians of all varieties, and the American
school of pragmatism, to which we may connect the French
school of voluntarism. As we have dealt somewhat, with
the European schools, we pause here to deal with
pragmatism and its relation to dialectical materialism.
If dialectical materialism is Marxism, pragmatism is

Americanism. While it has become a trite matter to contrast
Marxism with Americanism, few have endeavored to show
the full relationship between the two. At one time it
certainly appeared as though the Liberalism of unlimited
American opportunity would prove an effective substitute
for orthodox Socialism. Certainly if Socialism stood for
permanent prosperity, peace and plenty for all, and for the
largest individual liberty, coupled with the absence of State
and classes, then America has been the nearest approach to
that land of milk and honey yet discovered. Americanism
could pose as the sure way to defeat European methods of
class warfare embraced by Marxism.
The relationship of pragmatism to Marxist philosophy is all

the more important since, of all significant industrial
countries, America alone has not yet entered into its full
political life of conscious class struggles. At the present
moment, America is at a transition point from classlessness
to open classfulness; it is precisely now that Americanism
can foist itself as a substitute for revolutionary Socialism,
and pragmatism appears as efficacious as dialectical
materialism. That pragmatism is not materialism can be
well illustrated by contrasting America and Soviet Russia.
Both are young countries, but how different are their
youths! America is but the newest edition of the old. It has
528
provided the glands to rejuvenate Europe. It itself fosters a
cult of youth. The men go clean shaven; the women make
up like girls; the youth are told they are the best and most
important part of the race; comics furnish the universal
entertainment; there are no more popular film artists than
children who draw fabulous salaries; and so forth.
But the Fountain of Youth is rapidly drying up and

America will find herself suddenly old. There will be no
prolonged period of maturity for her. Childhood will turn
into the childish senility associated with dementia praecox.
Pragmatism can start out with jazzing up God; it will end
up with the table rappings of spiritualism.
The youth of "old Russia" is on an entirely different plane. It

is not the latest edition of the old but the first edition of the
new. Not the luck or chance of pragmatism is its belief, but
its trust lies in the hard materiality of its superior technique.
Yet a close historical connection does exist between

Americanism and Marxism as the comparison with Soviet
Russia shows. If it is true that the Soviet Union is the lowest
socialistic country and the United States is the highest
developed capitalist country, and if it is also true that
Socialism begins where capitalism ends, then it would
naturally follow that much in common exists between the
two, one leading into the other. In Russia today there is a
craze for American experts, for American goods and
machinery, jazz and chewing gum. At least industrially,
and perhaps even politically, Russia is becoming
Americanized with the object of overtaking and surpassing
its teacher. In America there is a growing appreciation of
Russian achievements.
Both America and Russia stress action, the creative faculty

in man, practical activity. Both stand for a philosophy
529
catering to humanitarianism, that is, posing as treating man
not as a means but as an end. Both declare that the system
extant in the country benefits not a class but the entire
community. The people of both America and the Soviet
Union act as though they had "a cause," the Russian living
for his Marxism, the American, at least in the period of
prosperity, absorbed in and living for his work. In both
cases it is production and not consumption that is the
dominant aim of life; in Russia, the production of a better
control over nature and higher social standards, in America,
the production of profit.
Pragmatism, as an American product, would necessarily

carry forward into its philosophy precisely these aspects of
American life. Stressing empiricism or inductive analysis of
the data around it, without prejudgments, emphasizing
practical experiential activity, pragmatism but reflected the
general utilitarianism of bourgeois life. Pragmatism
preached that change was constant but this embraced the
theory that luck and chance, too, were factors in an
indeterminate and unpredictable universe. Combined with
these views went a revolt against all absolutisms, and just
as the Liberal talked of democracy and every man counting
for one, each having the right to his own point of view, so
pragmatism invented a sort of philosophic democracy in
which all causes, all opinions, all ideas counted for the same
and had the same justification. One idea, one vote.
The real founder of pragmatism was William James (who

gives credit, however, to Pierce as his forerunner). We may
learn something of his philosophy when we say that James
himself was a very pessimistic man, (*11) " the kind of "sick
soul" who he himself had declared needed religion to
prevent insanity. James justified his religion by the
530
pragmatic result it had upon his mental health. "God is real
since he produces real effects." (*12)
To James nothing existed save experience. But here it is well

to stress that the term "experience" as used by James has
little to do with the term "practice," as used by the
materialists. Experience may mean a great many things. We
"experience," for example, an apple. This can mean that the
apple is really there or that it is our "experience." In all
experience there must be both the objective factor, material
reality, and the mental factor, subjective sensibility. In the
sense that James uses the word, materiality depends on
mentality; there can be no object without our "experience"
of it. That is as much as to say, for example, on the question
of whether the earth existed before the appearance of
mankind or of organic life, that since we cannot affirm that
the earth was "experienced" by anyone then, we cannot
really say that the earth existed before organic life. This is
but an idea on our part. Here we see that James' pretending
to develop a scientific method flies in the face of all science.
"Experience was regarded by earlier empiricists as a

method for making real discoveries, a safer witness than
reasoning to what might exist in nature; but now
experience is taken to be in itself the only real existence, the
ultimate object that all thought and theory must regard.
This empiricism does not look to the building up of science,
but rather to a more thorough criticism and disintegration
of conventional beliefs, those of empirical science included.
It is in the intrepid prosecution of this criticism and
disintegration that American philosophy has won its
wings." (*13)
James could not state, as did the materialist, that matter

existed independently of man's "experience" of it. To James,
the mind was equally important as the object conceived and
531
felt. If the mind was outside and independent of materiality,
then the question arises. how does thought itself arise?
Does thinking come from the brain? Here again James
broke down on a most fundamental and yet simple
scientific question.
Pragmatism asserted that science was "our" science; that is,

the laws of science, since they were relative, since they were
discovered by the human mind, were purely mental laws.
Time did not exist outside of us; it was a mental concept.
Further, as James wrote: ". . . we have the right to believe at
our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt
our will." (*14) "Pure" reality outside of us did not exist
since we ourselves helped to make the reality that we knew.
As for truth, this was not an expression of the actions of
nature outside of us, but was merely something which
works. "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be
good in the way of belief and good, too, for definite,
assignable reasons.'' (*15)
The idea that truth was merely a question of cash value and
convenience, was one which naturally flowed from the
theory that truth was part of our own creation, a figment of
our mind. Thus, while on the one hand pragmatism was
constantly affirming that it was not related directly to
idealism (though its founder, James, was a religionist, as we
have seen), essentially it made matter dependent upon
mental activity and so led back eventually to idealism.
However, instead of doing this openly and frankly,
pragmatism tried to avoid the entire question of whether
matter is primary by stressing the necessity of avoiding
dogma and too great intellectualization.
As anti-intellectualist, pragmatism was to have "no dogmas,

and no doctrines save its method." (*16) "The pragmatic
method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical
532
disputes that otherwise might be indeterminable. Is the
world one or many? --- fated or free? --- material or
spiritual? ... The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to
interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical
consequences. What difference would it practically make to
anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?"
(*17)
Pragmatism turned away from theological solutions to the

day-to-day facts around it, but not in the same manner that
science did so. Pragmatism indeed wanted to scoop out the
monist materialism of empirical science, and to replace it
with the pluralism of pragmatism. Both idealism and
materialism were monistic philosophies; that is, they
identified matter and spirit, the first in order to make spirit
dominant, the latter in order to make matter the prius. The
older agnostics had adopted a dualist position, agreeing
that both matter and spirit existed, but denying that we
could know either through ordinary cognitive processes.
The pluralistic approach of James, however, affirmed that

truth was not concrete but discrete; that is, each event was to
be judged by itself. "Reality may exist in distributive form,
in the shape not of an all but of a set of caches, just as it
seems to." (*18) Was not pragmatism, in truth, but "common
sense"?
Phenomena constantly appeared on our horizon; later they

disappeared. Whence did they come? Where did they go?
This was not for us to answer, said James. Each event must
be separate. No objective necessity and causality existed in
nature. The world was not determinate but indeterminate.
Chance luck (and God) existed. We must stop searching for
first causes, supposed necessities, and must turn our
attention to last results, fruits, consequences. We lived only
and eternally in the present.
533
Given man as a creative factor in an indeterminate world,
the world handed over to luck, accident, and chance, it was
no accident that James should stress will, man's will, as the
essence of that creative factor. Here James showed himself
really a part of the Kantian School of Free Will which he
himself was willing to adopt as a "doctrine of relief."
Both schools believed phenomena had no existence apart

from our consciousness of them. To both, time was nothing
but the form of our own internal intuition and space was a
necessary, a priori idea. Both denied the value of neumena,
absolutes. (*19) Both held that teleology and mechanism do
not necessarily conflict. To mechanical laws, Kant added
free will; James fought fatalism with his doctrine of chance.
The difference between the Kantians and the pragmatists is

that the latter wiped away the transcendentalist scaffolding
of German mysticism and replaced it with an urge of
striving and a conviction to create and change the world, a
conviction that the world is in the making and the making
is in our hands. Nor would the pragmatist admit, with Kant,
that things exist outside our experience. James was thus far
closer to religion and to the French School of voluntarists.
James openly declared his agreement with Henri Bergson,

chief of the voluntarist school, and Bergson his with James,
although Bergson's school of philosophy opened wide the
door to abstract idealism. Following the line of Rousseau
and Comte, the voluntarist stressed the need of action for
its own sake, the method of intuition, and the value of
feelings and affections. Pragmatism accepted voluntarism
and combined it with empiricism and the scientific attitude.
(*20)
The voluntarist school of Henri Bergson declared we could

apprehend only immobility, and that space alone is its
534
representative; reality, on the contrary, was change
represented by time, itself a continual flux. From this
Bergson deduced that the most fundamental conception of
all was that of duration. Duration was an immediate datum
of consciousness; matter was momentary mind, mind was
memory, condensed vibrations. Duration was the life force -
-- the creative activity that was reality itself. (*21)
The philosophy of Bergson was well attuned to the

transition period from the throes of which science was
emerging. Researches in electro-dynamics had seemed to
prove that matter had disappeared into motion; the laws of
mass and of the conservation of energy no longer applied;
the only thing permanent was rhythmic time. The
speculations of the mathematical physicists and their laws
of relativity lent specious color to all sorts of spiritualisms.
(*22)
In this direction French voluntarism increasingly turned

toward mysticism and monist idealism. Only spiritual
existence counted; matter was the stream which checked
the ascent of life. To achieve freedom, one must follow the
life stream blindly, guided only by intuition. Pursuing this
mystic path, French Voluntarism was bound to diverge
from practical utilitarian pragmatism. (*23)
From all this we can gather how little pragmatism has in

common with materialism. James himself pointed out why
he could not be a materialist. "Materialism means simply
the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off
of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an
eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope." (*24)
Furthermore, materialism signified struggle and discontent,
pragmatism connoted comfort, and James advocated social
compromise, the epicurean life.
535
In the twentieth century, pragmatism is continued by John
Dewey, who restyles it instrumentalism, while others
rename it experimentalism. (*25) Instrumentalism does not
differ much from the pragmatism of James. All the essential
points are carried forward. Dewey, too, believes in
pluralism because "pluralism . . . leaves room for
contingence," (*26) and is indeed harmonious to the
American philosophy of "give us a break." According to
Dewey, instrumentalism generally carries on the work of
James and, indeed, stresses even more strongly than James
the experience of the individual.
The attitude of Dewey towards materialism can be seen by

his consistent struggle against Marxism, his nationalistic
chauvinism during the last war, his counterposing to labor
his own instrument, the new "Third Liberal Party." To
Dewey, Marx "had no conception, moreover, of the capacity
of expanding industry to develop new inventions so as to
develop new wants, new forms of wealth, new occupations;
nor did he imagine that the intellectual ability of the
employing class would be equal to seeing the need for
sustaining consuming power by high wages in order to
keep up production and its profit." (*27)
Having displayed this profound knowledge of the works of

Marx, the instrumentalist, Dewey, was convinced that high
wages bring high profits, and that the intellectual
superiority of the capitalist class would see to it, for the
good of the class and to prevent revolution, that the
workers always get high wages.
We now turn from the modifications of pragmatism to the

historical and social views of the pragmatists. The Right
Wing again may be seen as embodied in the position of
James. For example, it is noted in his argument for peace:
"But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be
536
permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically
organized preserve some of the old elements of army
discipline .... Martial virtues must be the enduring cement ...
obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon
which states are built." (*28)
This is then the ascetic and ethical way of doing away with
war. But it is a theory that not only the pacifist James, but
also Hitler and Mussolini themselves, may hail. Here is
how James, the neurotic, James constantly on the verge of
suicide and afraid to go out alone in the dark, (*29) could
console himself.
In history, the pragmatist condescended to include

economics as "also one of the efficient causes of why things
'happen to happen' in society." These historians invented
the term "economic interpretation" of history, which looked
almost as efficacious as Marx's materialist conception of
history, but in reality was offered as a substitute. (*30) The
economic interpretation of history differed from Marx's
dialectics in that the former adhered to a pluralistic
approach. Economics was but one cause; there were other
active forces in history just as great, such as psychology,
religion, ethics, ideals, biology, individuals, etc, etc., and we
must not be so intolerant as not to allow all cases to have
equal weight or to deny the right of anyone to explain
events by one cause rather than another. This approach
enabled the Liberal historians of the economic
interpretation school to interpose in full their arrant
eclecticism, borrowing now from the idealists the right to
view history as the unfolding of an idea, and now from the
materialists the idea that perhaps we should pay attention
to the materialist needs of the masses, needs based upon
their economic relations and a given mode of production.
(*31)
537
The difference between the two methods showed itself
clearly in their treatment of the labor movement. All these
people of the "economic interpretation" school declaimed
against the class struggle as the driving force in politics,
declaring that social forces do not have to clash, and that
the evolutionary gradual processes of reform are far more
likely to result in the amelioration of workers' conditions
than the road of insurrection, leading to the Dictatorship of
the Proletariat.
The pragmatist historians and sociologists never were

weary of proclaiming that there is no "must" in history, that
everything is an "ought," and that truth is but one aspect of
"the good"; that is, ethics covers the entire field of life. If
socialism was to come --- and some adhering to the Welfare
School of Liberalism began to concede some of the good
points of a sort of socialism --- then it would be adopted
because of its inherent justice, because moral people would
decide that it "ought" to come, rather than that it would
come as a matter of historic inevitability, such as Marx
predicted. There was no inevitability in history.
Just as America offered itself as a substitute for European

socialism, counterposing its unlimited individual
opportunity in a new country, where forces were unknown
and indeterminate, and where luck and chance played a
large part in individual lives, to the crass reality of the class
struggle and to socialism via the rough road of civil war, so
pragmatism became a substitute philosophy for Marxism
among many of the intellectuals who operated on the fringe
of the working class movement. Some of these intellectuals
tried to harmonize Marxism with pragmatism and to affirm
fervently that, after all, a Marxist was a pragmatists. (*32)
In many respects, pragmatism does run parallel to

dialectical materialism. Both believe, for instance, in the
538
necessity of action. But whereas, to the materialist, action is
bound up with theory, with the testing out and the
correcting of our theoretical beliefs by the events outside of
us to the pragmatist, action takes the place of all theory, the
action of the individual replacing the existence of
materiality.
Both philosophies believe in change, but, to the pragmatist,

change is mere perpetual motion; to the materialist, change
is movement. And there is an enormous difference between
mere motion and movement. Movement means evolution.
It signifies that there are basic starting points from which
events move; there is an orientation and direction which
events take; there are unfoldings of events which may be
predicted. Pragmatism flees from such ideas.
In both methods, man is seen as a creator, but the

materialist also stresses the limitation of man's creating.
Man may create, but not out of the whole cloth. (*33) Man is
limited by his material environment. Not so with the
pragmatist, who is restricted only by will, and who is so
indispensable to environment that neither could exist
without the other.
The materialist and the pragmatist place each question on a

basis: "Will it work?" To the pragmatist, this is used to
defend opportunism and even sophistry, and is made into
an apology for the status quo. The pragmatist operates
merely from day to day, without any perspective
whatsoever, since his truth can be convenience or even
whim. Not so the materialist. Whether a thing will work
must depend upon the contradictory laws of motion
involved in a given concrete situation; the resultant analysis
induced thereby in the mind of man can result in
harmonizing man's action to the forces of history, and
539
identifying man's freedom as the consciousness of necessity.
(*34)
Both schools emphasize that truth is concrete. Not only the

pragmatist but the materialist constantly praises empiricism,
the necessity to observe the concrete data of the present
without prejudice or bias. To the pragmatist, however, life
is a mosaic, a picture puzzle, each piece separated from
every other piece without the slightest continuity. To him,
therefore, there is really no history, just as there is no
predictable future. There is only the present with its
phenomena juxtaposed together. Like a mole, pragmatism
prefers to move with its nose from day to day, rather than
to see into the future.
Both sets emphasize experience as the best teacher and

stress the necessity of going beyond mere verbalisms and of
testing everything in action. But the pragmatist does not
understand "experience" as only one form of practice, that
events occur without any experience of them whatever,
while the materialist makes praxis include events of nature
even beyond one's "experience." Does space exist? The
materialist says: "If you doubt it, step out of a tenth-story
window and be convinced for yourself." The pragmatist
declares that there can be no laws of space unless we
experience them. It is our experience, our sensations, that
are real, and not merely space itself.
According to the pragmatist, we can learn nothing from

history, since all truth arrives de novo with each individual's
"experience." This stress on individualism and its denial of
the historic forces and of the limited character of man's
creative ability, was adopted by some of the Anarchists
who could then preach that it was not necessary to wait
until capitalism reached a certain level of development
before the "militant minority" could storm the
540
governmental buildings and seize the power. To such
Anarchists, as to the pragmatists, everything had to be
tested out by experience, each time anew; if you failed the
first time, all that was necessary was an improved will and
another trial.
Both pragmatism and materialism deal with the effect of

the economic forces of society upon history. The pragmatist
treats with idealism as well; to the materialist, the
economics of a given society is but part of the material
environment which at the same time limits and bounds the
making of history and yet compels history to move forward.
Pragmatism belonged to that "middle-of-the-road" agnostic

school which was willing to compromise and to tolerate all
irreconcilable elements with no questions asked. Its Left
Wing was a sort of variation of shame-faced materialism. Its
Right Wing openly flirted with religion. It could endear
itself to both Liberal and Anarchist with its views that there
is no "must" in history, that "goodwill" works wonders.
To the question of whether the socialist insurrection and the

Dictatorship of the Proletariat were inevitable, pragmatism,
in all its varieties, shouted "No," although it did later make
a change of front. At the time of William James, the idea
that socialism was not inevitable, was based on the belief
that capitalism would remain forever. To John Dewey, the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat was not inevitable, because
reform is better than revolution. In both cases their class
desires were hidden by a formula that nothing is inevitable.
Their views were advanced in a period when the object of
bourgeois politics was to forestall the advancing tide of the
workers.
Today the pragmatic view that nothing is inevitable has an

entirely different function, since it is fascism that is
541
advancing and the proletariat that is retreating. If
instrumentalists now say that the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat is not inevitable, it is because they conceive that
fascism may come, and they trim their sails in advance in
order to meet it. The dilettante philosophers who fringe the
proletarian movement try to conceal their cowardice by
stating that Marxism is fatalism and that fatalism prevents
the workers from fighting fascism. Only pragmatism can
save the workers from defeat. The workers must abandon
the theory of the inevitability of communism; otherwise we
may have the annihilation of the human race or a reversion
to barbarism through fascism.
Pragmatism has certain aspects which can well endear it to

fascism. Note the stress of action, the need for change, the
importance of man's will, the test of truth as mere
convenience, a formula which may justify political
trimming, and opportunism. Note the open door to religion,
the struggle against Marxism with its theory of ultimate
victory. It is no accident that Mussolini has been inspired by
William James. Pragmatism fits in exquisitely well with a
movement that is born of desperation, that has prevailed
through demagoguery, that knows not what will happen
from day to day, and that moves convulsively to avoid the
ever-increasing conflicts overwhelming capitalism.
Having discovered, by the use of the materialist method,

that the mode of production in each historical epoch was
the foundation of the social life inevitably arising therefrom,
Marx proceeded to analyze the mode of production he
found around him, the laws of which he elaborated in
his Capital. In his method of approach, Marx proceeded
from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the
abstract, and from the present to the past. Thus in studying
542
capitalist economy he started from the simple unit in which
the wealth of society presents itself, namely, the commodity,
and from that point developed the dialectical contradictions
inherent in every commodity, the transformation of
commodity to money, and money into capital.
Incidentally, in the course of his methodology, Marx made

a profound analysis of the relation of the simple to the
complex, and pointed out that very often the simple
becomes known only after it has become developed into the
complex of which it remains the core. (*35) Regarding the
connection between the present and the past, to Marx, not
history was the key to the present, but the present was a
key to history. Thus, he rejected the method of previous
economists in starting their treatises on political economy
with an analysis of the category of rent simply because rent
was historically the first category developed.
Marx distinctly repudiated the methods of the schools of

economy which had preceded him. He understood that it
was not a simple matter of stating an economic fact, or of
pointing out the conflict of this fact with eternal justice and
true morals; it was explaining a fact which was destined to
revolutionize the entire political economy. Ricardo and
Adam Smith had written reams about morality and justice.
Marx scrupulously refrained from using these concepts and
limited his work solely to an exposition of the inexorable
contradictions that a capitalist mode of production created
in economic, and, therefore, in political and social life
generally, as well.
In his work against Proudhon, Marx went to great length to

combat the methodology of those economists who felt the
ills of capitalist society and wanted to find a cure. The
dialectical method had nothing to do with propounding
cures by experts who stood outside the social system and
543
who called on the will of individuals to adopt their reforms
and thus be cured. Equally did Marx repudiate Proudhon's
method of hypotheses and theoretical antidotes. It was not
a matter of setting before us some hypothetical plan which
would serve as an antidote to ills. Quite the contrary, the
work of Marx was to show that the contradictory processes
which make up the law of motion of capitalism, give rise
within themselves to forces which will do away with the
contradictions and break the fetters of the productive
processes. "For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category
has two sides, the one good, the other bad.... The good side
and the bad side, the advantage and the inconvenience,
taken together, form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in
each economic category." "Hegel has no problems to put.
He has only dialectic. M. Proudhon has of the dialectic of
Hegel nothing but the language. His dialectic movement for
him is the dogmatic distinction of good and evil." (*36)
To begin with, Marx cleared the ground by an analysis of

certain definitions. First, political economy is a science born
in an era of capitalism and destined to die with capitalism.
It is therefore a subject strictly confined in time and space.
Second, Marx broke from the orthodox individualistic and
abstract starting point of "What would Robinson Crusoe
do?" Third, there is no such thing as production in general.
While production has existed from time immemorial, its
modes have changed in different periods. This was in
opposition to the classic school of political economy which
had tried to establish production on an eternal and
unchangeable basis so as to prevent society from interfering
with business.
In a posthumous paper found after his death, Marx

analyzed the intimate correlation between production,
consumption, distribution, circulation, and exchange, in
544
which he not only distinguished one from the other, but
showed their profound interconnections and that they all
constitute a complex of processes of which production is
the heart and core. "The result we arrive at is not that
production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are
identical, but that they are all members of one entity,
different sides of one unit." (*37)
The achievements of Marx in the economic field have been

summarized by his co-worker Engels, as follows: "Marx
analyzed all the economic categories which he found at
hand.... In order to understand what surplus value is, Marx
had to find what value is. Therefore he had above all to
analyze. critically the Ricardian theory of value. Marx also
analyzed labor as to its capacity for producing value, and
he was the first to ascertain what kind of labor it was that
produced value, and why it did so, and by what means it
accomplished this. He found that value is nothing but
crystallized labor of this kind,.... Marx then analyzed the
relation of commodities to money and demonstrated how,
and why, thanks to the immanent character of value,
commodities and the exchange of commodities must
produce the opposition of money and commodities. His
theory of money, founded on this basis, is the first
exhaustive treatment of this subject, and it is tacitly
accepted everywhere. He analyzed the transformation of
money into capital and demonstrated that this
transformation is based on the purchase and sale of labor-
power. By substituting labor-power, as a value ---
producing quality, for labor, he solved with one stroke one
of the difficulties which caused the downfall of the
Ricardian School, viz.: the impossibility of harmonizing the
mutual exchange of capital and labor with the Ricardian
law of determining value by labor. By ascertaining the
distinction between constant and variable capital, he was
545
enabled to trace the process of the formation of surplus-
value in its details and thus to explain it, a feat which none
of his predecessors had accomplished. In other words, he
found a distinction inside of capital itself ... which
nevertheless furnished a key for the solution of the most
complicated economic problems, . . . He furthermore
analyzed surplus value and found its two forms; absolute
and relative surplus value, and he showed that both of
them had played a different and each time a decisive role in
the historical development of capitalist production. On the
basis of this surplus value he developed the first rational
theory of wages which we have, and drew for the first time
an outline of the history of capitalist accumulation and a
sketch of its historical tendencies." (*38)
Marx then, in order to find out what is value, had to

analyze a commodity. A commodity has two factors, use-
value and value; that is, a commodity is something that
satisfies a human need or want and is exchanged for
something else. The utility or usefulness of a product gives
it use-value. Value presents itself first of all in the form of
exchange value; that is, a product is known as a commodity,
as a value, only when it is exchanged. Exchange value,
however, is not value, but the value given in exchange.
Thus commodities appear first of all as in a certain relation
with other use-values. But behind the proportion common
to millions of exchanges there must be something common
to both objects to allow them to be equated one with the
other. And what is common to these products is that both
are the products of labor, abstract, homogenous, human
labor. Thus the production of commodities is a system of
social relationships in which different producers produce
various products in a social division of labor and in which
all of these products are equated to one another in exchange.
In this equation not the specific, concrete labor of the tailor
546
or weaver or of any other craftsman is equated, but rather,
abstract human labor, human labor in general. This abstract
human labor constitutes the source of value when
embodied in a commodity. (*39)
Marx was not the first to lay down the principle that value
is labor. It had been done before him by the physiocrats,
who narrowed it down to agricultural labor, and by the
British Classical School. These statements of Marx's
predecessors, however, had been without adequate proof
and were exceedingly vague and contradictory. Nor had
they been able to divide the kind of labor that constituted
the source of value. Marx clarified all these points.
The Classical School of political economy had arisen at a

time when the manufacturers, products of the industrial
revolution, had to fight the old order and when they did
not fear as yet the working class. Naturally, such an
industrialist class found it to its interest to prove that all
value came from the factory and consisted in labor to which
the owner contributed his part. Later on, when the workers
began to see the possibilities of the theory that value is
labor, the Classical School became discarded by the
bourgeoisie and gave way to schools of apologists, some
calling for a change in the distributive system of wealth and
philanthropically weeping over the poor.
Later on there would arise a psychological school that

would attempt to shift the discussion from a physical
objective basis to a spiritual basis, in which value was not
labor, but was desire --- the same object having different
values according to the intensity of the wish and desire on
the part of the purchaser. Values thus were created, not in
the process of production but by the consumer. In the
twentieth century, this psychological school found its center,
significantly enough, in defeated Vienna, where the
547
psychopathology of Freud dominated the scene. Here was a
fitting setting for the psychological school.
According to Marx, value is not a specific physical property

of an object; it is a social property, a social relation between
persons, maintained as a material exchange of products. We
can understand what value is only when we consider it
from the point of view of a system of social production
relationships which present themselves in a mass form,
repeating the phenomenon of exchange millions upon
millions of times. As values, then, all commodities are only
different quantities of congealed labor time.
As society develops, the system of exchanges develops into

a regular process of circulation, in the course of which the
commodity most fitting takes on the role of contrasting
itself with other commodities, becoming the universal
equivalent called money. Money, therefore, is a commodity
that has the social function of being the measure of all
values as well as the medium of exchange.
Commodity production and money circulation can appear

in societies that produce for use and that are not capitalistic.
In such cases, money and exchange play a secondary role in
the economic functioning of society. When money and
commodity circulation become prominent, already we have
a capitalist mode of production, which is one for exchange
and not for use. The formula for commodity production is
given as C-M-C; that is, a commodity is sold for money and
with the money the seller buys another commodity of a
different kind. Here money is a medium of circulation and
the purpose of the sale is to arrive at a purchase of another
kind of commodity, one with a different usefulness.
When money becomes capital, however, the formula is

changed to M-C-M; that is, with money the owner buys a
548
commodity and later sells the commodity for money, or, in
other words, there is a purchase for the purpose of sale and
money is no longer a medium but the beginning and end of
the transaction. As it stands now, the formula appears
ridiculous. Why should a man give away money in order to
get back money? In the preceding set-up, C-M-C, he had
secured a different article which he wanted in exchange for
another which he did not want so badly. There was here the
gratification of a different desire or the satisfaction of a
different need. Not so in the second case, M-C-M. The
explanation, of course, is simple. The M at the end of the
formula is really M'; that is, it is a larger sum of money than
the original investment, so that the formula stands M-C-M’.
The question now arises, how does M become M’ (that is, M

plus increment "m")? This is the question which Ricardo
and all the other economists before Marx failed to solve.
This increment "m" is called surplus value, or, roughly
speaking, profit, and the process of its production is called
the process of exploitation.
Marx was the first to show that surplus value does not arise
in the sphere of circulation, nor does it arise out of mutual
cheating, but comes legitimately from the mode of
production itself, without anyone's being robbed. If no one
is cheated, and yet M becomes M’, there must be within the
series of exchanges some transformation that increases the
value of the commodity bought. On closer examination, it is
found that the commodities purchased by the owner of
money, turned capitalist, are of two kinds: (1) the means of
production, whose value is constant and can be transferred
only to the finished product, and (2) labor power, whose
value is variable.
Thus we come to an analysis of a new kind of commodity,

labor power. How this labor power comes onto the scene of
549
history, and why men must sell their energies piecemeal, in
the form of labor power, are questions for history to solve.
We may remark here that two historical prerequisites were
necessary to the genesis of capital --- first, the accumulation
of a considerable sum of money in the hands of individuals
living under conditions in which there was a comparatively
high development of commodity production; and second,
the existence of workers who were free in a double sense of
the term, free to sell their labor power everywhere (that is,
free from serfdom and slavery), and free from property so
that they were compelled to sell their labor power in order
to exist. In the sixteenth century, with the development of
commerce, the discovery of the New World, and the
driving off by force of the peasants from the land, these
prerequisites were generally realized.
Capitalism started with the fact of a commodity, known as

labor power, being offered on the labor market. The
peculiar character of this commodity is that, when
consumed or used, it creates a value greater than its own. In
short, labor power is a peculiar commodity that expands its
value when consumed. When commodity production has
reached the phase of making labor power a commodity, it
becomes transformed into capitalism, and money becomes
capital.
This led Marx to a discussion of what is the value of labor

power and how it is determined. Marx thought the value of
labor power, like the value of any other commodity, is
determined by the socially necessary human labor needed
to reproduce it. Therefore, the value of labor power is the
equivalent of the value of the means of life which the
laborer needs to replenish his lost strength day by day and
to breed children to carry on after he is dead. Thus, the
laborer in selling his labor power for wages that will merely
550
keep him efficiently alive is getting the full value of the
commodity which he is selling and is not cheated by the
employer, even though the product which he produces has
a far greater value than the value of the means of life to
sustain him and his family.
The owner of money, having bought labor power, is

entitled to use it, that is, to set it to work for the whole day,
twelve hours let us suppose. Meanwhile, in the course of
perhaps only six hours the laborer can produce enough to
pay back the cost of his own maintenance; thereby, in the
course of the next six hours, he produces a surplus product
for which the capitalist does not pay him, a surplus product
which, in the form of commodities, becomes surplus value.
Therefore, it is in the course of production, in which labor

power is transformed into active labor, working upon raw
materials, that the value of the commodities purchased by
the moneyed men increases. Capital, therefore, is self-
expanding value and it expands solely because the value of
labor power expands in use. We might say, therefore, that it
is labor that is capital, since only labor expands values.
However, we must note that, as labor, the activity is no
longer in the possession of the laborer, but is embedded in
the product which is in the possession of the employer. The
laborer possesses only labor power and therefore is the
owner of that particular commodity, but cannot be a
capitalist. When the value of labor power has been
transformed through the process of labor into a higher
value, it is no longer within the possession of the laborer; it
is the owner of the product who is the capitalist.
To express the degree of the exploitation of labor by capital,

we must compare the surplus value produced by the
laborer, not with the whole capital, but with the variable
capital or wages. Thus, in the example given above, the rate
551
of surplus value, or of exploitation, will be 6:6, or 100 per
cent.
There are two fundamental ways in which surplus value

can be increased: by an increase in the working day, which
creates "absolute surplus value," and by a reduction of the
necessary working time, which yields "relative surplus
value." Analyzing the former method, Marx told of the
struggle of the working class for shorter hours, and of
government interference, first, in the fourteenth to the
seventeenth centuries, in order to lengthen the working day,
and, subsequently, in the nineteenth century, to shorten it
by factory legislation. Analyzing the production of relative
surplus value, Marx investigated the three fundamental
historical stages of the processes whereby capitalism had
increased the productivity of labor and reduced the time
necessary to reproduce the means of life. These stages
embrace first, simple cooperation; second, division of labor
and manufacture; finally, machinery and large-scale
industry.
Of highest importance and originality is Marx's analysis of

the accumulation of capital, that is to say, the
transformation of a portion of surplus value into capital
and the applying of this portion to additional production
instead of using it to satisfy the personal needs of the
capitalist. This surplus value, when returned to industry,
does not, as Adam Smith and others assumed, become
transformed entirely into variable capital, but is also
apportioned into new means of production, or constant
capital. It is this constant capital which consistently grows
at the expense of the variable. The more rapid growth of
constant capital as compared with either the variable capital
alone or the sum total of capital is of immense importance
552
in the process of development of capitalism and in
transforming capitalism into socialism.
The accumulation of capital accelerates the replacement of

workers by machinery, creating wealth at one pole and
poverty at the other, giving birth to the so-called reserve
army of labor and to a relative overpopulation of workers.
Capitalism now has the possibility of expanding production
at an exceptionally rapid rate. This possibility, in
conjunction with enhanced opportunities for credit and
accumulation, furnishes among other things the key to the
understanding of crises of overproduction that occur
periodically in capitalist countries, first on an average of
about ten years, but subsequently in a more continuous
form and with less definite periodicity.
The expropriation of the immediate producers is effected

with ruthless vandalism, and under the stimulus of the
most infamous, the basest, the meanest, and the most
odious of passions. What has now to be expropriated is no
longer the laborer working on his own account, but the
capitalist who exploits many laborers. This expropriation is
brought about by the operation of the immanent laws of
capitalist production, by the centralization of capital. While
there is thus a progressive diminution in the number of the
capitalist magnates (who usurp and monopolize all the
advantages of this transformative process), there occurs a
corresponding increase in the mass of poverty, oppression,
enslavement, degeneration, and exploitation; but at the
same time there is a steady intensification of the wrath of
the working class --- a class which grows ever more
numerous, and is disciplined, unified, and organized by the
very mechanism of the capitalist method of production.
"The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode
of production, which has sprung up and flourished along
553
with, and under it. Centralization of the means of
production and socialization of labour at last reach a point
where they become incompatible with their capitalist
integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of
capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated." (*40)
In the second volume of Capital, Marx takes up the

reproduction of social capital. Here he deals not with an
individual capitalist, but with mass phenomena and with
economy as a whole. In this book Marx thoroughly dissects
the mechanism and operation of the periodic crises of
capitalism. He separates the whole of social production into
two great sections, the production of the means of
production, and the production of articles for consumption,
and shows how maladjustments between these two
divisions invariably take place under the capitalist
accumulation leading to crises.
In the third volume of Capital, Marx solves the problem of

how an average rate of profit is formed on the basis of the
law of value, something that none of the economists before
him had been able to do, and which had placed the classical
school of economy, with its theory of value as labor, in an
inextricable dilemma. Here Marx divides surplus value into
profit, interest, and ground rent. Profit, strictly speaking, is
the mass of surplus value which adheres to the industrialist
and from which ultimately there is derived interest and
ground rent. The rate of profit is the rate of surplus value
compared to the capital invested in the undertaking.
Capital with a high "organic composition," that is, with a
preponderance of constant capital over variable capital to
an extent above the social average, yields a below-average
rate of profit. Capital with a low "organic composition"
yields an above-average rate of profit. It would seem, then,
554
that capitalists would rush to invest their money in the
latter type of industry rather than the former. Competition
among the capitalists, however, levels the rate of profit in
both cases to the average. While the sum total of the values
of all commodities in a given society coincides with the sum
total of the prices of all commodities, in separate branches
of production, as a result of competition, commodities are
sold, not in accordance with their values, but in accordance
with the prices of production, which are equal to the
expended capital plus the average profit.
In this way, the well-known and indisputable fact of the

divergence between prices and values, concomitant to the
equalization of profits, is fully explained by Marx in
conformity with the law of value and makes ridiculous the
claim of bourgeois economists that, in Volume III of Capital,
Marx wholly negates the laws laid down in Volume 1.
However, the adjustment of value, which is a social matter,
to price, which is an individual matter, is an exceedingly
complex affair. In a society made up of separate purchasers
of commodities, linked solely through the market,
conformity to law can be only an average, a general
manifestation, a mass phenomenon, with individually and
mutually compensating deviations to one side and the other.
An increase in the productivity of labor means a more rapid

growth of constant capital as compared with variable
capital. Inasmuch as surplus value is a result of variable
capital alone, it is obvious that the rate of profit, that is, the
ratio of surplus value to the whole capital, has a tendency
to fall. Marx makes a detailed analysis of this tendency, as
well as of the circumstances that tend to counteract the fall
and its exceedingly important effects.
Interesting is Marx's analysis of usurer's capital, commercial

capital, and money capital. From first hand study of
555
parliamentary reports, he carefully lays down the limits
within which the rate of interest can fluctuate and analyzes
the entire superstructure of the credit system. He shows,
too, how the industrialist must part with some of his
surplus value to the merchants, since the existence of large
outlet stores saves the industrialist more money than if he
himself went into the operation of circulating his goods.
In the theory of ground rent, Marx makes another great

contribution. Because the land area is limited and, in the
capitalist countries, is occupied entirely by private owners,
the. production of agricultural products is determined by
the cost of production not on soil of average quality, but on
the worst soil needed for productive purposes, and by the
cost of bringing goods to the market not under average
conditions, but under the worst conditions the market
demands. The difference between this price and the price of
production on better soil under better conditions
constitutes differential rent. Analyzing this differential rent
in detail and showing how it rises in proportion to the
fertility of the individual plots of land and to the extent to
which capital is applied, Marx exposes the error of Ricardo
and the Classical School who believed that differential rent
is obtained only when there is a continual transition from
better to worse land. Advances in agricultural technique,
the growth of towns, etc., may on the contrary act inversely
and transfer land from one category to the other. Thus, the
famous law of diminishing returns, charging Nature with
the insufficiency, limitations, and contradictions of
capitalism, is shown as erroneous.
Moreover, the equalization of profit in all branches of

industry, and natural economy in general, presupposes
complete freedom of competition while the private
ownership of land creates a monopoly. Thanks to this
556
monopoly, the products of agriculture, where low organic
compensation of capital prevails and, consequently,
individually higher rate of profit can be secured, are not
exposed to a perfectly free process of equalization of the
rate of profit. The land-owner, being the monopolist, can
keep the price of his products above the average; this
monopoly price is the source of absolute rent.
Differential rent cannot be done away with so long as

capitalism exists; but absolute rent can be abolished even
under capitalism, for instance, by nationalization of the
land, making all the land State property. Such
nationalization would put an end to a monopoly of private
land-owners, with the result that free competition would be
applied more consistently and fully in the domain of
agriculture. Here is the driving source for such movements
as the Henry George Movement in the United States, and
the motivation of the radical bourgeois in repeatedly
advancing demands for land nationalization.
In his discussion of rent, Marx also expounds the laws of

the evolution of capitalism in agriculture which bring in
their trend the impoverishment and ruin of the agricultural
population and the transformation of the rural population
into an urban proletariat. If the small peasant is able to
survive, it is because he is forced to sell his goods far below
their value, so that although he is an individual owner, his
net income is less than that of the wages of the ordinary
worker. In such cases, the lower price of agricultural
products is a result of the poverty of the producers and by
no means of the productivity of their labor. Peasant
proprietorship and the small holding system, which is the
normal form of petty production, is bound to degenerate,
wither, and perish under capitalism. In agriculture, as in
557
industry, capitalism improves the productive process only
at the price of the martyrdom of the producers.
It is manifest that Marx deduced the inevitability of the

transformation of capitalist society into socialism wholly
and exclusively from the economic law of the movement of
contemporary society. While the socialization of labor
grows apace, those of the ruling class become more and
more divorced from the process of production and
degenerate into mere parasites. The law, "He whom the
gods would destroy he first makes mad" applies to
capitalism as well. The proletariat, on the other hand,
increases in numbers and maturity. Facing ever-increasing
misery and disaster, at the same time it amasses a body of
Marxist knowledge that in its hand becomes a terrible
weapon of revolution, and takes the lead in the struggle for
the emancipation of all humanity. The proletarians become
the grave diggers of capitalism. Capitalism forces the
workers to connect theory with practice, to wander all over
the world, to try their hand at all occupations, to find
themselves reduced to a common level, to organize and
discipline themselves as a class. All this makes them fit to
build a new society. Capitalism hardens them, tests them,
wipes out all their illusions, gives them arms, and compels
them under penalty of extinction to go forward towards
socialism.
The contest of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie assumes

varied forms, growing continually richer in content and
inevitably becoming a political struggle aiming at the
conquest of State power by the proletariat. The proletariat,
when it seizes power, dictates its will openly to the former
ruling classes and establishes then the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat. This is the political essence of Marxism. (*41)
558
In the struggle of the workers against their enemy,
whatever victories they win in the beginning are but
temporary; they seem to take one step forward only to be
forced two steps backward. However, this is only apparent.
Inevitably they grow stronger and better prepared. As the
class struggle nears the decisive hours, even small sections
of the ruling class can cut themselves adrift, see the hand-
writing on the wall, and join the revolutionary proletariat.
No class gives up power without a struggle. The proletariat

cannot hope to dispossess the capitalist from control over
the means of production without violence and bloody
struggles. The necessity for violent revolution arises not
only because this is the sole means to overthrow the
bourgeoisie which throttles the progress of society, but also
because it is the only way by which mankind can purge
itself of bourgeois corruption, can burn out the putrescence
of the old order and prepare itself for the new.
"Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the

proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle.
The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all
settle matters with its own bourgeoisie." (*42) Nevertheless,
at bottom the struggle of the working class must be an
international struggle, cutting through all national
boundaries, in which the slogan is raised, "Workers of the
world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You
have a world to gain!"
"All previous historical movements were movements of

minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian
movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of
the immense majority, in the interest of the immense
majority." (*43) "The proletarians cannot become masters of
the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their
own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also
559
every other previous mode of appropriation." (*44) The
victory of the proletariat, therefore, is the end not only of
wage slavery but of all class rule forever.
In all this, the proletariat of the city is aided by the

uprisings of the colonies. The development of capitalism in
the colonies operates to reduce into impotence the native
ruling cliques which must resort to standing by their
masters, the imperialists, and thus must become thoroughly
exposed to the masses of toilers. At the same time, colonial
development brings into being a many-headed modernized
proletariat that stands on the shoulders of the past, and,
skipping intermediate stages of history, marches to
challenge the capitalist order. Under such circumstances
there occurs one colonial revolution after another,
weakening imperialism and hastening the proletarian
revolt everywhere.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a transition regime

whose sole function is to destroy the ruling classes under
capitalism throughout the world. It is, therefore, a regime
fitted to meet the stress and strain of international civil war.
When the exigencies of the civil war are over, the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat will give way to socialism,
which is the first and lower stage of communism. (*45)
The heavy fetters which the capitalist relations have placed

on production having been broken, there occurs an
immense increase in the productivity of labor, supplanting
the old backward technique by perfected socialization.
Taking over all the technique prepared by capitalism,
socialism begins where capitalism ends.
Under socialism, there are no longer a market, commodities,

values, prices, wages, in the old sense of the terms. The
workers, through their representatives, guide their own
560
destinies and organize themselves so that international
production may be purposefully controlled and planfully
managed. The allocation of material and workers to a
particular industry is made, not according to the hectic
fluctuations of the market, through bankruptcy and frenetic
successes, but by social analysis of the needs of man, of the
productivity of the workers, and of how much strength is
needed to fulfill these needs. For the first time, society rises
from the domain of necessity into the realm of freedom.
Socialism reunites industry and agriculture upon the basis

of the fusion of science and collective labor. The old life of
the agrarian population, with its unsociability and idiocy, is
liquidated, as is the unhealthy concentration of enormous
masses of population in huge cities. The population is
entirely redistributed and a new synthesis is obtained.
Immense factory farms are established where the
agricultural workers can have all the advantages of the city,
and industry is wisely decentralized, bringing into
realization the dream of garden cities.
Under socialism only those who work shall eat, except

those who are physically incapacitated. Each one receives
according to what he puts in. Socialism being but a
transition towards communism, it still contains certain
vestiges of the capitalist past, since under socialism not full
equality is obtained, but only a mechanical equality. Goods
are no longer sold for a market, but are produced for use;
the worker receives a labor note to obtain goods, nearly
equivalent in labor cost to the cost of the goods which he
himself produced. A surplus must remain in order to take
care of the dependents of society and in order to make
possible necessary replacements, and constantly to extend
production. Thus, in no period does the worker get exactly
the full amount of the goods which he has created.
561
There being no class struggles, there is now no need for a
State, and the State withers away. The army and navy are
not necessary. Police disappear. The basis for crime is gone,
since labor is so productive that all the wants of life easily
can be obtained. The criminal is treated as a diseased
person and is given careful hospitalization until he becomes
rehabilitated and made again into a social creature.
Of course, in the early stage of the new social order,

inequalities still persist, since culture is not spread equally,
since the gap between the unskilled laborer and the
professional still remains, and each one receives only what
he produces. Those born weak will not create so much as
those born strong. With the abolition of private property in
the means of production, there still remain different
accumulations of wealth and culture as vestiges of the past.
Under socialism there is laid the basis for a new type of

family life, the ending of the misery and despotism that
mark familial relations. A complete emancipation of
women and children occurs with an entirely new
upbringing for the younger generation to prepare them for
the highest stage of communism. In the home, as in politics,
the government over persons is transformed into the
administration of things.
In the higher stage of social life to which socialism is a

transition and which we can call communism in the narrow
sense of the term, the transformation is entirely complete.
Society has become regenerated. No longer does the rule
prevail, "to each according to what he does," but rather the
precept, "from each according to his ability and to each
according to his needs." Thus the weak and the backward
will be given more in order to allow them to develop at the
same rate as the others. The gap between theory and
practice between the unskilled laborer and the professional
562
scientist becomes entirely closed. Education will have
enabled all to be scientists, at the same time allowing all
scientists to use their hands in manual labor.
The tremendously increased productivity of mankind will

have reduced to a bare minimum the amount of time
necessary for each to produce the wants of life. Elimination
of all toil in work will enable the worker to become an artist,
to find the greatest pleasure in the objective result of his
labors, to fuse into one work and recreation, and to
combine his constructive relations with nature with the
construction and reconstruction of himself. If work becomes
a pleasure, pleasure itself is work.
Under such highly stimulating conditions, mankind will

have raised itself by a full head and will appear as
supermen to the poor mortals of the capitalist world who
have gone before.
Footnotes
1. The Correspondence of Marx and Engels. Marx to

Weydemeyer, p. 57. (International Edition.)
2. See, F. A. Lange: History of Materialism.
3. Hobbes is a good example of aristocratic English

materialism. As for French materialism, see essay by Karl
Marx in Selected Essays, International Publishers.
4. Or, better, the beginning was the Absolute Idea; the end
was Absolute Truth. To Hegel "The self-comprehension of
Spirit as supreme reality, complete spiritual consciousness,
is the necessary demand, the inevitable outcome, and the
final consummation of the entire process of experience." (G.
W. F. Hegel: The Phenomenology Of Mind, p. 41, J. B. Baillie
translation, translator's introduction.)
563
5. See, F. Engels, Feuerbach, pp. 60 and following; compare J.
Dietzgen: Phenomena stand to the thing-in-itself as 20 miles
of road is to the road itself. See, J. Dietzgen: Positive Outcome
of Philosophy, "The Nature of Human Brain Work."
6. Contrast Hegel's treatment of such concepts as "Being,"

"Beginning" and "Becoming."
(See G. W. F. Hegel: Science of Logic, I, 85, 119, Muirhead

edition.)
7. V. I. Lenin (Ulyanov): The Teachings of Karl

Marx, pamphlet, p. 16.
8. See, F. Engels: Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, p. 94. (Kerr

edition.)
9. See, K. Marx: German Ideology, English translation given

in "The Marxist," No. 3 (1926)
10. K. Marx: Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of

Political Economy, pp. 11-12.
11. See, H. Simons: "Why William James 'Stood By'

God," The Open Court XLIII, 80, 81 (1929).
12. WM. James: The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 517.
13. G. Santayana: Philosophical Opinion in America, p. 6.
14. Wm. James: The Will to Believe, p. 29.
15. WM. James: Pragmatism, p. 76. This book is dedicated by

James to John Stuart Mill "from whom I first learned the
pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to
picture as our leader were he alive today."
16. WM. James: Pragmatism, p. 54.
564
18. Wm. James: A Pluralistic Universe, p. 129.
19. See, C. E. Witter: Pragmatic Elements in Kant's Philosophy.
20. See, for example, Wm. James: A Pluralistic Universe.
21. See, H. Bergson, Creative Evolution.
22. See, for example, Jeans: The Mysterious Universe; J. S.

Haldane: The Sciences and Philosophy, who even goes so far
as to criticize Christianity for its materialism in declaring
God created the world, when matter does not exist; and,
Eddington: The Nature of the Physical World. 23. See, L. S.
Stebbing: Pragmatism and French Voluntarism.
24.Wm. James: Pragmatism, p. 107.
25. Professors conduct a bitter rivalry over nomenclature.
26. John Dewey: Philosophy and Civilization, p. 20.
27. J. Dewey: Individualism, Old and New, p. 103.
28. See, Wm. James: "The Moral Equivalent to War"

in Memories and Studies, pp. 287-288.
29. See article by M. Baum in The Monist, Vol. 42 (1932).
30. See, E. Seligman: The Economic Interpretation of

History; also R. Pound: Interpretations of Legal History.
31. Compare S. H. M. Chang: The Marxian Theory of the

State, p. 41. and following.
32. See, for example, S. Hook: Towards the Understanding of

Karl Marx.
565
33. See, K. Marx: Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, pp.
9-10. (Kerr edition.)
34. See, F. Engels: Landmarks of Scientific Socialism, pp. 147-

148.
35. See, K. Marx: Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy, Appendix.
36. K. Marx: The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 121-122 and

following.
37. K. Marx: Introduction to the Critique of Political

Economy, Appendix, p. 291.
38. K. Marx: Capital II, 24-26.
39. In our exposition of Marx's economic views we follow

closely V. I. Lenin's pamphlet, The Teachings of Karl Marx.
40. K. Marx: Capital, I, 837.
41. In their Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels point out

that the written history of all civilized society is the history
of class struggles. See, Communist Manifesto (Kerr Edition),
p. 12.
44. The same, pp. 27-28.
45. See, V. I. Lenin (Ulyanov): State and Revolution.
566
XVIII. EARLY SOCIALISTS
UP to now we have used the term Socialism as though it

were identical with the teachings of Marx and Engels,
founders of scientific socialism. Marx and Engels, however,
called themselves communists; it is therefore important that
at the very outset we state precisely what socialism means
and what is its distinction from communism. A proper
understanding of these two terms is imperative in the light
of the confusion in usage that prevails today. For example,
Russia now designates itself a Socialist Soviet Republic,
although it is controlled by a Communist Party under Stalin
which affirms that it can build socialism in one country
alone. On the other hand, members of the Socialist Party
declare that the regime in Russia is not socialist at all, but is
restoring capitalism. Between the socialists and the
communists there has been a very bitter and sanguinary
struggle. Again, still other people designate as Socialism a
situation wherein the government takes over railroads and
nationalizes a certain amount of property.
In the days of Marx and Engels, the term Socialist had been
used by Robert Owen and others and had come to mean
ideas and plans for a new society put forth by declassed
elements of the upper classes. These socialists were
utopians who, regardless of their specific plans, had certain
basic characteristics in common. According to them,
socialism consisted of a grand plan conceived in the brain
of the utopian genius. The plan was to be realized by means
of peaceful, rational discussion. All the utopians were firm
believers in the power of reason to change the world, and
all they wanted was the opportunity to persuade others of
the justice and reasonableness of their position. All their
plans were static, completed blueprints, eternal and
567
immutable.(*1) None of them understood the meaning of
history or of evolution.
None of these dreamers relied upon the working class.

They had no conception of the class struggle, but rather
appealed to the wealthy to help them to ameliorate the lot
of the poor, either, as Robert Owen, for philanthropic
reasons, or, as Saint-Simon and Fourier, as a reaction from
the terror of the French Revolution. None of these men
conceived of the new social order as being a product of
violence. They hated the insurrections of the mob and
rabble led by communists. The movement was to be led
entirely from the top and not from the bottom.
All of these people were extremely critical of the capitalist

order, being opposed to competition, and wanting to
terminate the privileges of the industrialists. Against all
forms of anarchy and chaos, the utopians sought refuge
from the existing interminable clash to secure eternal
harmony within society, harmony of the social order with
nature. To usher in the new utopia, they worked out
schemes of mutual co-operation and mutual aid of a more
or less authoritarian nature. These aspects of the utopians
gave them the name Socialists. (*2)
The plans of social inventors like Owens, Saint-Simon,

Fourier, and others, could easily have become the ideology
of reactionary collectivists, and, indeed, they do form the
prototypes of the plans of twentieth century fascism.
However, in those days, capitalism had no need of such
schemes. The industrialists were thinking, not of crushing
the labor movement, but of using the poor for their own
political advantage and bringing peace and order to society
not by authoritarian utopias but by the anarchy of
capitalism. Thus the critical doctrines of the utopians could
be taken up only by the victims of capitalism who gave to
568
them certain interpretations which made them the
precursors of scientific socialism.
It was imperative that Marx and Engels, who proceeded in

an entirely different manner, should separate themselves
from this utopian planfulness. If the utopians called
themselves Socialists, Marx and Engels called themselves
Communists and put out their Communist
Manifesto, forming their Communist League, etc. Marx and
Engels created a movement and relied upon the working
class to carry forward the traditions of the peasant war, of
the Paris Commune in the French Revolution, and of
Baboeuf and the other communists. Insurrection, class
struggle, the proletariat, these were the factors of Marxist
political theory, rather than any pale philanthropic and
timid scheme of "harmony."
Before Marxism arises, the disciples of Robert Owen,

Fourier, Saint- Simon, and such elements, color the
movements of the working class. The adherents of Saint-
Simon, for example, were against exploitation, against
private property, and against capitalism, as then extant.
They favored a tax on land and producers' co-operatives.
The Saint-Simonians always thought of society with a
capital "S" and regarded all the members of the nation as
included in one collective organization. Thus it is that the
terms "Socialism" and "Social Democracy" came to be taken
over by the workers who fought many battles under this
name.
The Marxist could not ignore this situation and when, in

Germany and elsewhere, working class organizations arose
that called themselves Socialist or Social Democratic, it was
not for Marx and Engels to stand aloof from these
movements because of a name.
569
Of course, the fact that the name Socialism was chosen to
designate the vague gropings of the proletariat in itself
showed how immature and confused the working class was.
Nevertheless, as Marx himself had declared, the workers
had to learn from their own experiences; they would not
accept learned dissertations imposed upon them by some
intellectual. It was necessary for Marx to penetrate that
movement, to work within it, and to nurture there the seeds
of Marxism that would eventually win over the labor
elements to scientific socialism.
Thus it was that by the '60's of the last century, Marx was
willing to accept the term Socialism, since it no longer
represented the old blueprint plans of the utopian, and
Friedrich Engels could write his book, Socialism, Utopian and
Scientific.
After the death of Marx and with the rise of the Second
International, the term Socialism took complete possession
of the field and became synonymous with communism.
This was all the easier since socialism had always been
understood as a future transition stage of society leading to
communism, as the first or lower stage of communism.
However, it soon became plain that the abandonment of the
term "Communism" had in reality covered the
abandonment of the revolutionary class struggle. After the
debacle of the World War, the revolutionary socialists split
away from the others, under Lenin, and retook the name
Communist.
Thus we see that, even when used exactly, the term

Socialism can have three distinct meanings. First, it can
mean a future system of society characterized, as described
by Marx, by the fact that capitalism, with its markets,
commodities, values, prices, exchange, surplus value,
capital, money, competition, etc., is no more; instead, there
570
is a conscious, planful society where production is for use
on such an enormously improved technical plane that there
will be plenty for all. This society will be a stage between
capitalism and communism and will retain some remnants
of the former in the mental make-up of the individual. The
State, however, will have withered away, together with
religion, recognized as the opium of the people. Socialism
will gradually give way to communism.
Another meaning of the term Socialism has to do with the

Dictatorship of the Proletariat that initiates socialism. The
Soviet Union, for example, is legitimately called the
"Socialist" Republic, not because the stage of society known
as socialism exists in Russia, but rather because the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat existing in Russia has
abolished to a very considerable extent private ownership
of the means of production and has laid the basis for the
extinction of capitalism, leading to socialism. This was the
usage of Lenin. Under Stalin, the theory has been stretched
to mean that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat itself is
socialism, that socialism is compatible with an army, with a
State, with class struggles, with markets, wages, etc. We
shall take this up later. It is well, however, to note that
under Lenin, socialism could mean not only a future state
of society as laid down by Marx, but also could be a
designation of a transition regime --- Dictatorship of the
Proletariat-leading to socialism.
The third meaning of the term Socialism is to signify the

program of the Socialist parties as distinct from that of the
Communist. In short, here socialism is opposed to
communism. In the present chapter we shall use socialism
in this last sense of the term, namely, to mean the program
and practice of the Socialist parties as separate from and in
conflict with those of the Communist.
571
It is true that the Socialist parties agree with the Communist
that socialism, as a stage of society, is the end of their
striving. It is also true that very often the Socialist parties
fervidly maintain their adherence to the doctrines of Marx,
claiming only to interpret them in another direction. In fact,
the literary heirs of Marx and Engels, like Karl Kautsky,
Eduard Bernstein, and others, became leaders, not of a
"Communist" movement but of the "Socialists." Today,
however, what we must stress is not the agreement in
ultimate goal that the socialists have in common with the
communists, but rather the struggles between them that
have led to the breaking up of the labor movement and to
tremendous convulsions all over the world.
If at present we see some signs of the mitigation of these

splits and a tendency for socialists and communists to come
together, it is only because the blows of fascism have
compelled them to unite on the one hand, while, on the
other, the large Communist parties connected with Russia
have so degenerated towards the socialist position as
practically to be indistinguishable from their erstwhile
enemies. We must not, however, confuse "united front"
with "unity" and the fact that the socialists and communists
are willing to unite on a common field of action does not
necessarily mean that they will not fight each other to the
death under other circumstances.
The earliest of the utopians of the nineteenth century from

the point of view of influence was Saint-Simon, a French
nobleman who, at an early age, had volunteered to fight in
the American Revolution, but had later become frightened
by the effects of the French Revolution. To Saint-
Simon,"Progress is achieved in one of two ways, by
revolution or dictatorship, and dictatorship was preferable
572
to revolution." (*3) Revolution was an anachronism that
would become unnecessary were society changed.
Denouncing the sovereignty of the people, Saint-Simon
went so far as to propose an alliance between the Bourbons
and the industrial classes in order to achieve his plan for
preventing revolution; he asked the King to declare himself
the chief of the kingdom and to adopt his plan by royal
ordinance. Thus the plans of Saint-Simon were anti-
revolutionary and anti-democratic from the very beginning.
What Saint-Simon desired was an industrial State directed

by modern science. (*4) "Saint-Simon's creed can best be
described as 'industrialism' plus a slight admixture of
Socialism. . . ." (*5) He advocated the abolition of the landed
idle class and the limitation of society to two classes only,
the learned and the industrial. (*6) Standing armies and war
should be abolished. (*7) The good of society was attained
by the satisfaction of its physical and moral wants. The
object of government was to apply knowledge and wealth
to that end. To Saint-Simon, liberty was not an end or even
a means to an end. It was a result, the result of man's
progressive mastery of nature; man freed himself through
society. Tremendously impressed by the power of industry,
Saint-Simon believed it was necessary to harness industry
and its technical progress to the social order to obtain a
better social system. Thus, in his plans there were to be no
parasites; his was to be a regime where industry dominated.
Saint-Simon invented an industrial parliament of three

chambers, the first, a chamber of invention; the second, of
examination; the third, of execution. The First Chamber was
to have three hundred engineers, poets, scholars, musicians,
and such, of whom two hundred were to be engineers. This
body would initiate all legislation. The Second Chamber
was also to contain three hundred, of which one hundred
573
were to be mathematical physicists, one hundred
metaphysicians, and one hundred physicians. This
Chamber was to examine the laws. The Third Chamber was
to be composed of the "captains of industry," a term which
Saint-Simon was the first to coin. This body alone was to
execute the laws. Thus, the industrialist was to have the
power of administration entirely in his hands.
Labor was the highest duty of a citizen and only the worker
could govern society. Saint-Simon, however, included the
industrialist as part of labor and drew no distinction
between him and his employed worker. Indeed, at this time
in France, to draw such a distinction would have seemed
strange, since the entrepreneurs took an active part in
organizing the labor process. To accomplish the rule of
labor, Saint-Simon planned a widespread general education,
the abolition of poverty, and the preeminence of learning
and industry. In his last work, Saint-Simon raised his utopia
to the level of a religion, exhorting all to love one another;
to raise the moral and physical condition of man by
industry and education; to let the captains of the three
leading departments of knowledge, of art, and of industry
conduct and constitute the government; to give to every
man according to his needs and exact from every man
according to his capacity; to supply work with the head or
hand for everyone."
The opinions of Saint-Simon, so violently a reaction against

the anarchical Liberalism of the French Revolution, easily
are revealed as merely a rationalization of the system of
French affairs which Napoleon attempted to develop. We
have here, as under Napoleon, great praise for industry, a
theory of government of talents, an idealization of work
without talk, a theory of the necessity of religion and of the
ubiquity of the government, a denunciation of the old
574
regime and a criticism of laissez faire Liberalism, with
control in the hands of the dictator, the agent of industry.
Some of these plans of Saint-Simon are even today being
taken over by fascist groups in Europe.
If Saint-Simon became a respectable figure in the eyes of the

workers, it was not so much because of his theories, but
rather owing to the work of his disciples, the Saint-
Simonians, who, made up of petty-bourgeois elements,
heavily stressed their critique of anarchical industrial
society and thus played into the hands of working-class and
middle-class elements who were moving in a progressive
and radical direction. As we have seen, Saint- Simon had
great influence over Auguste Comte, founder of sociology,
and the Saint-Simonians were able to influence some of the
intellectuals on the continent and in England, especially
John Stuart Mill and Carlyle.
Later to achieve recognition was the work of Charles

Fourier. One may say that Fourier and Saint-Simon together
constitute one whole, each being regarded as the
complement of the other. "Saint-Simonism represented the
principle of authority, of centralization; while Fourier made
all possible provision for local and individual freedom.
With Saint- Simonism the State is the starting point, the
normal and dominant power; in Fourier the like position is
held by a local body corresponding to the commune, which
he called the phalange. (*8)
Fourier's starting point in his criticism of the present order

of things was not the injustice of the distribution of social
wealth, or the suffering of the poor, but rather the anarchic
wastefulness of modern production and the repellent
condition of labor. Fourier does not address himself to the
sentiments of man, but to their material interests. "His
battle-cry is not 'justice,' but 'order,' and the general
575
prosperity and happiness of mankind is but an incident of
the universal harmony of his system, not its primal aim." (*9)
As Brisbane, one of his disciples, put it: The universe was
governed by fixed and mathematical laws the discovery of
which would usher in the law of harmony on earth with the
result that man would rule nature, rule himself and become
attuned to the cosmos. (*10) The genius of Fourier
penetrated into these secrets and gave them to the world,
not as a fantasy of wish-fulfillment, but as a mere statement
of the scientific law of universal harmony.
Under Fourier's true order of society there would be

established universal wealth and prosperity, universal
knowledge and intelligence, attractive industry, permanent
peace and social concord, unity of all interests, universal co-
operation and association, practical liberty in all relations,
social equality of the race, universal health and vigor,
passional harmony and social unity. (*11) Fourier stressed
above all two important principles: first, industrial activity
could be made really attractive; secondly, the solidarity of
the human race. Fourier, like most Frenchmen, wanted
social science to be a social science.
Fourier obtained his principles of harmony from a grand

study supposedly embodying the entire universe. His
theory included four movements, social, animal, organic,
and material, and in all of these different worlds one law
prevailed, the law of attraction, which is the idea of God.
(*12) "God, in requiring of any of his creatures the
performance of a work or function, employs no other lever
or agent than Attraction; he never resorts to coercion,
constraint or violence in any form; he governs the Universe
by this power alone; he impels all beings to fulfil their
Destiny from the pleasure, the charm, the delight, he
576
connects with it, and not from fear of pain or punishment."
(*13)
Far more than Saint-Simon, Fourier attempted to work out

the laws of evolution, and insisted that even under the
Harmonic Order there would still be differences of opinion,
contrasts of character and personal antipathies, the
abolition of which would destroy the very spice of life.
These individual clashes, far from leading to discord,
would stimulate a competition for the mutual good.
However, here again, thanks to the utopian colonies of his
disciples and to his own penchant for meticulously closed
systems, what remains of Fourierism is not a theory of
evolution but some schematic blue-print in which Fourier
predicts that in due time wild animals will associate with
man as soon as man overcomes his vices, that the light from
the Aurora Borealis will be transformed into dew that will
make the North Pole have the climate of sunny Italy and
the oceans taste like lemonade. (*14)
According to Fourier, the trouble with industry was that it

was neither attractive nor effective. It was his task to lay
down a theory of how to make industry attractive and to
secure a regime of harmony. To accomplish this, industry
must be organized on the basis of a study of human
passions. All must be productive laborers, organized in
Commune co-operatives where the individual can develop
freely. The Communes are to have local autonomy. The
State is to be reduced to nothing.
By no means was Fourier a communist. He was vehemently

opposed to the schemes of Robert Owen. In his organized
Commune known as the Phalanx, no community of
property existed; private capital was retained, as well as the
right of inheritance. All those within the Phalanx were to
labor and, of the proceeds of their labor, five-twelfths were
577
to go to the laborer, four-twelfths to capital, and three-
twelfths to the talented ones (management), of whom, no
doubt, Fourier was to be the leader. (*15) Thus, capital was
to be made a permanent institution, but in such a guise as
to make Fourier's new industrialism a weapon against red
revolution. While the Saint-Simonians believed in
nationalization of property, the Fourierists were
associationists, more individualistic in character, and
insisting that the individual should not be merged in the
mass but must be safeguarded by means of small
autonomous groups. Federation would be entirely
voluntary; all unity would be prompted from within rather
than imposed from without.
From one angle, Fourier was thus connected with

Proudhon. From another angle, Fourier became a starting
point for the theories of those who later were to espouse
guild socialism. While Saint Simon thought in terms of
national economy, Fourier thought in terms of a garden city
where, with his Phalanstery carefully ordered and
regulated, (*16) the distinction between industry and
agriculture was to be wiped out and within the city there
was to be an intimate correlation of both. Fourier, therefore,
is a reaction against the heaped up monuments of stone
that make up a modern city; as he feared revolution, so did
he fear Paris, and desired to transform its narrow streets
into large boulevards surrounded by fields where the
healthy organism could flourish.
The features of Fourier's utopia appealed mightily to

reformers in America, and while the system of Saint-Simon
found no echo in the United States, that of Fourier was
seized upon in an emphatic and practical manner. After all,
the Americans were nothing if not practical. America had
always been the land of utopia; here was an opportunity to
578
carry out what was an eminently respectable doctrine, not
at all revolutionary, but rather a backfire for revolution,
although the Americans had no such fear of revolution as
Fourier. Fourierism appealed to them because it was an
attempt to organize on a small scale an ideal system of
society, retaining capitalism, retaining individualism,
reducing the State to nil, escaping the conflicts of society
which the intellectuals of America could see so clearly were
at hand.
From early times, colonists had come to America to build

utopia. In the eighteenth century these utopias were
entirely of an agrarian and religious nature, made up of
foreign-born elements. "It is safe to say that considerably
over one hundred, possibly two hundred, communistic
villages have been founded in the United States, although
comparatively few yet live. There are perhaps from seventy
to eighty communities at present in the United States, with
a membership of from six to seven thousand, and property
the value of which may be roughly estimated at twenty-five
or thirty million dollars." (*17) It has been estimated that the
number of persons who at one time or another participated
in utopian experiments in the United States in the
nineteenth century has run into the hundreds of thousands.
(*18)
In the early nineteenth century, those addicted to utopian

plans of such a nature were mostly Germans and later,
French. In the 1820'S, utopianism took the form of
adherence to the views of Robert Owen, who came to this
country to establish his utopian colonies and had great
influence here, being invited several times to speak
privately before the members of the Congress of the United
States, the President, and other important officials. Upon
the failure of Owenism, the utopian reformers, 1840-1850,
579
eagerly went towards Fourierism, yielding, from 1848 on, to
the utopian plans of Cabet.
The Fourierists were able to win a number of talented

admirers. (*19) In 1814, Brisbane published the work of
Fourier under the title of Social Destiny of Man, and two
years later, in New York, Brisbane inaugurated a regular
column for the propagation of Fourier's ideas. The
magazine, The Phalanx or journal of Social Science, was issued;
it was rechristened The Harbinger in 1845, when it was
transferred to the Brook Farm Colony. It passed from
existence in 1849 along with Brook Farm. (*20) Thus, the
Fourierist schemes were closely tied up with the
transcendentalism of the Concord School of Liberal thinkers,
who, in theory and in practice, attempted to run away from
reality.
The third utopian of importance in the early nineteenth

century was Robert Owen, whose chief theoretical
contribution was the plan for the formation of producers'
co-operatives taking in all the industries of a locality
organized in a thoroughly centralized communist manner.
The vital principle of the new industrialism must be co-
operation; competition was to be no more.
"In this above all else Owen's significance lies. It is the idea
that unifies all his varied activities. Whether he is pleading
for a Factory Act to protect the helpless servants of the new
machines, or for a universal system of liberating education,
or for trade unions, or for his own scheme of co-operative
communities, the dominant idea in his mind is the need for
the social control of the new productive power. (*21)
Unlike Fourier and Saint-Simon, Robert Owen did not

represent a reaction from the violence of the French
Revolution as such. His opinion was that politics wasn't of
580
any great importance, since it was but a result of economic
relations. The thing to do was to change the economic
relations and the social environment. A typical Englishman,
Owen believed that man owed his character entirely to
social environment and that, if this could be changed, man
could be entirely transformed. (*22)
The fundamental principles that Owen espoused could be

reduced to five: (1) that man was a product of environment;
(2) that feelings and convictions were independent of our
will; (3) that feelings produced the motive to action (will);
(4) that no two humans were ever similar exactly; (5) that
every normal individual can be raised or lowered by social
influence. (*23) In line with these principles, Owen took an
aggressively anti-religionist position.
Robert Owen spent his life attempting to carry out his ideas.
A wealthy manufacturer, he was able to form a model
village, to pose as a moral reformer, philosopher and
uplifter of society. He paid great attention to infant schools
and to the education of the workmen at a time when such
education was woefully lacking. His idea was, "Happiness
cannot be isolated among a few human beings." (*24) He
reduced the hours of labor and introduced his own factory
legislation to improve working conditions.
All the while, Owen was proving that these reforms only
brought more profit to him, that philanthropy paid
handsomely. And, indeed, "Although the wages given to
the workmen were lower than were paid elsewhere, it
caused no discontent among the people, and New Lanark
escaped the disturbances and protracted strikes so general
among cotton-spinners in England and Glasgow." (*25) This
success led Owen to appeal to the rich to emulate him.
581
Robert Owen, however, knew exactly from whence his
large wealth came. He stated emphatically: "It is a common
mistake arising from the confusion of ideas inseparable
from the present erroneous system of society, to believe that
the rich provide for the poor and working classes; while in
fact the poor and working classes create all the wealth
which the rich possess .... The rich ... actually prevent them
from creating a supply of wealth that would be sufficient to
preclude all from becoming poor ...." (*26)
Owen was no disciple of Malthus. The poor need not

always be with us; labor could always produce a surplus.
Owen never tired of showing the contrast between rich and
poor and of arguing for a system where all would get the
produce of their labor and form communities to this end.
The workers produced forty times as much as before and
yet they were in terrible circumstances. (*27) In his report
on the causes of poverty, made in 1817, Owen pointed to
the effects of the introduction of machinery in this regard
and urged that employment be found for those thrown out
of work by the introduction of a system whereby each city
would provide a farm and factory for employment of the
poor. In his report he actually went to the extent of working
out the minute details of his projected scheme of
Parallelograms. In a later work he expanded his ideas.
Society was to be divided into four classes: (1) paupers, to
be taken care of as above; (2) workmen; (3) small
proprietors; (4) idlers with big capital. The last group was
to hire workmen under conditions whereby the workers
would control. Each workman was to work in comfort for
seven years, then to be given one hundred pounds and
placed in class three --- or he could work five years more
and be given two hundred pounds.
582
With Owen the problem was not production but proper
distribution of wealth. Sturdy advocate of co-operation,
completely refusing to recognize the worth of the State, and
contemptuous of politics, Robert Owen terminated his
activities in England only to re-engage in them on a grander
scale in America, where his utopia could be put into full
effect. He invested much money in his venture at New
Harmony, Indiana, but by 1830 his village of co-operation,
with its labor notes, was forced to close down. (*28)
However, the idea of co-operation did not disappear, and,

after the Reform Bill of 1832, which failed to enfranchise
them, groups of workers in England became active in
organizing co-operative societies. The trade unions
themselves conceived of their function as instruments of
collective bargaining to be merely secondary to their ideas
for a co-operative system. In 1834, indeed, Robert Owen
headed a grand trade union movement, only to see it
collapse that very year. Robert Owen could not endure long
as a trade union leader. "He had been too much used, as an
employer, to playing the benevolent autocrat.... The cause
was, in his eyes, essentially a crusade for the moral
regeneration of society as a whole, and not a war of class
against class. The struggle to achieve a wage advance here,
or to resist a wage reduction there, did not interest him; for
to his mind trade-unionism and co-operation were of
account only as means to the establishment of the 'New
Moral World." (*29)
Besides Robert Owen, who was above all a practical

philanthropist and a dreamer who had pictured that he
could universalize under the capitalist system the social
conditions which he had been able to construct in his
village of New Lanark, there arose in Britain a school of
583
socialists stemming from Ricardo. They included such
people as William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas
Hodgskin, and John Francis Bray. Some of these writers
connected themselves with the school of Welfare-
Liberalism typified by John Stuart Mill.
The fundamental principle of Ricardo's work was that the

exchangeable value of commodities, or their relative worth
as compared with each other, depends exclusively on the
quantities of labor necessary to produce them and bring
them to market. Adam Smith had done this before but had
assumed that after rent had been established and capital
accumulated, values fluctuated according to variations of
rent and wages. Ricardo showed this to be wrong both in
regard to rent and in regard to wages. To Ricardo it was not
true that if wages rose prices had to rise, as Adam Smith
believed, and "There can be no rise in the value of labour
without a fall of profits." (*30) Naturally, such views could
be taken up by workingmen.
William Thompson, (*31) an economist, was interested not

in production, but in the distribution of wealth to insure the
greatest happiness to the greatest number. Like Bentham,
he began to study the laws of happiness and came to the
conclusion that, as all men are susceptible to equal amounts
of happiness, only full equality would lead to justice. Since
all men are naturally nearly equal and all wealth is the
product of labor, great wealth must come from robbery.
The rich were, therefore, robbers.
To Thompson, three different systems of industrial

organization were possible: (1) the present method of theft
and frauds, where wealth is for the few and is taken from
the many; (2) the system of "security" where each is to have
the whole produce of labor; and (3) a system of "equality"
which may be considered as flowing from the principle of
584
utility. Thompson himself favored the third, trying to
follow two masters, both Bentham and Robert Owen,
although he agreed with Owen's co-operatives.
Thompson took his stand against the Malthusian restriction

of population. He exposed the Corn Repeal laws agitation
as purely capitalistic, and took the side of labor. Capital
was unproductive; only labor created value. The worker
was correct in joining unions, but the weapon of the partial
strike was extremely limited and could get the worker
nowhere.
John Gray (*32) agreed with Thompson that the foundation

of all property is labor. Gray's method was to study the
distribution of wealth in a given society, estimating the
total wealth and discovering what portion each class got.
To do this, Gray had to analyze class relations to find out
which were productive and what proportion of the wealth
each section received.
Gray thought only those who worked by manual labor and

produced material wealth were productive, though some
producers were useless --- those producing luxury articles-
while some non-producers were engaged in useful services.
"The productive class, Gray concluded, received only a
trifle more than one-fifth of their produce, while the
remaining four-fifths were absorbed by landlords and
capitalists." (*33)
Gray denounced the occupations of one-third of the

population as useless. The very name soldier was a disgrace
to human nature. (*34) Rent was robbery; lawyers were
useless; doctors would pass away under a new social order.
Gray's great contribution was to show that production is

restricted and confined by competition and exchange.
585
Abolish competition and exchange and there would be no
limit to production. He denied the right of an individual to
own land, since all have an equal right to develop; thus he
stood for land nationalization as well as for a system of
small farms. This economist believed in co-operatives, but
in exchange and not in production. He wanted a national
bank with paper notes based on goods.
Gray sums up his argument as follows: "We have

endeavored to show by whom wealth is created, and by
whom it is consumed. We have endeavored to show that it
is from human labor that every description of wealth
proceeds; that the productive classes DO NOW support, not
only themselves, but every unproductive member of society;
that they only are productive members of society who
apply their own hands either to the cultivation of the earth
itself, or to the preparing or appropriating the produce of
the earth to the uses of life; . . .
"We have endeavored to show that the real income of the

country, which consists in the quantity of wealth annually
created by the labour of the people, is taken from its
producers, chiefly, by the rent of land, by the rent of houses,
by the interest of money, and by the profit obtained by
persons who buy their labour from them at one price, and
sell it at another; that these immense taxes of rent, interest
and profits on labour, must even continue while the system
of individual competition stands; that in the new
communities all would be productive members of society;
excepting only the persons absolutely required in occupations,
who would also devote their time and talents to the general
good. . . ." (*35)
Gray's conclusions should have led him ultimately to

communism, but neither Gray nor Thompson went that far.
Both wanted the laborer to receive the full product of his
586
labor, but both insisted that the laborer could do as he
pleased with this product and could start his own
enterprise by himself. This could lead only to individualism
again. In this way, the communistic theories of Thompson
and Gray were stultified by the limitations of their times.
Starting from an entirely different premise, Thomas

Hodgskin argued that labor was the source of all wealth,
that all exchangeable value is produced by labor. (*36)
Landlords and capitalists produce nothing. Capital is not
stored-up labor as others believe; even wages are the
produce of labor which is entitled to everything it produces.
Instead of arriving at communism, however, Hodgskin
embraced the theory of laissez faire which to him
represented a theory of the laws of the harmony of nature.
(*37) Thus Hodgskin was very close to the utilitarian and
philosophic Radical school. He denounced Ricardo as being
wholly interested in profits, but at the same time he also
condemned the theory that capital and labor have contrary
interests, believing that both capital and wages could be
increased simultaneously. He wanted the master
manufacturers to be paid as laborers for the value of their
services in the factory, although he was opposed, on the
basis of natural rights, to the capitalists receiving an income
from their property holdings.
Hodgskin was jealous of governmental powers which

checked the individual and thus became opposed to the
national system of education by government, favoring the
creation of private mechanics institutes instead. Likewise,
he was opposed to parliamentary regulation of factory laws,
to the taxation of alcohol, and to any interference in the
relations of capital and labor. Thus to Hodgskin, socialism
was a reaction from and not a correction of the errors of
capitalism, and, like some of the Anarchists of the day, his
587
real thesis was to perpetuate true competition by depriving
property holders of their privileges.
If we say that Hodgskin belongs to the economic school of

Ricardian socialists of the day, it is simply because of his
declaration that labor is the source of all value, and his
conclusion that capitalists should receive no income from
their holdings. In effect, Hodgskin was far closer to the
socialistic Anarchism of Proudhon than to the views of Karl
Marx.
To John Francis Bray, the root of all social wrong was the
institution of property as it then existed. (*38) Political
equality unaccompanied by economic equality was
impossible, as would soon be demonstrated in the
evolution of America, as well as already having been amply
proven in Europe.
Like Owen and Thompson, Bray declared that man is a

creature of circumstances which he cannot change and
which he is forced to obey. All men are equal and have the
duties of equal labor and the rights of equal wealth and
social ownership of land. Since men are more or less equal
in labor, wages should be more or less equal.
Bray realized vaguely that the workers were exploited,

although he could not state the fact clearly, implying rather
that the worker is cheated in the process of exchange. He
did exclaim, however, that the worker gives the employer
six days labor for an equivalent worth four days labor, and
that all gain is extracted from the productive classes. The
gain of the capitalist is the loss of the workman. (*39)
Bray characterized the present system as follows: "Under

the present social system, the whole of the working class is
dependent upon the capitalist or employer for the means of
588
labour; and where one class by its position in society, is
thus dependent upon another class for the MEANS of
LABOUR, it is dependent likewise for the MEANS OF
LIFE . . . ." (*40) He recommended that all should labor, all
exchanges should be equal.
The only possible remedy was the abolition of the private

ownership of wealth and of the right of inheritance. The
productive class should take over the State and issue paper
money in terms of labor to buy out the capitalist. Since
money and banking were the great weapons of the
capitalists, these were to be replaced by labor notes.
"Society was to undertake the physical, intellectual, and

moral education of all children, leaving to parents as
individuals only the 'caressing of parental love."' (*41)
Women were to be freed from economic dependence and
political inferiority; thus, like William Thompson and John
Stuart Mill, who had also evoked great interest in the
woman question, Bray became a champion for the
development of womanhood. He also stood for a complete
system of social insurance and protection of labor.
All of these Ricardian socialists with their theories of value

as labor were limited by the defects of utopians generally.
First, as a rule they were unable to take an historical
perspective. Second, they were rationalists, believing in the
power of peaceful persuasion to move the world. Third,
they had no connection with the labor movement, but were
intellectual elements of the bourgeoisie, keen enough to
begin to infer what was wrong with the world and to draw
radical conclusions from orthodox, classical, economic
theory.
None the less, they foreshadowed the works of Marx and

Engels and reflected the claims and pretensions of the labor
589
movement then clamorously arising in Chartist agitations
and in the revolutions of Europe.
At this time, other groups also appeared to criticize the

industrial system and to espouse the cause of the under-
dog. A Christian Socialist movement arose in England.
Later on, in Europe, there would appear a Catholic
Socialism, a State Socialism, and a Guild Socialism. These
movements, however, presented themselves, generally after
the rise of Marxism, in order to fight and destroy revolution.
Thus, these other socialist movements were not the
forerunners of Marxism, but were rather its enemies. Their
theories could very well be adopted by reactionary
collectivists as seen today in the fascist camp. We shall treat
this type of socialism under fascism.
The conditions which were arising prior to 1848 were such

as to make inevitable expressions leading to the conclusions
later embodied by Marx. It would be well to pause to
describe briefly the conditions of the time as they affected
the working class, conditions normally bad, made infinitely
worse by the periodic cyclical crises of overproduction and
unemployment which were then setting. in and which
found the worker completely unprotected.
In Paris, for example, it was estimated in 1836 that 100 out

of every 1,232 people were below the poverty line and that
9 out of every 24 deaths took place in the hospices, that is,
in the alms houses. During the crisis of 1847, one-third of
the population was in receipt of charity, with 450,000 food
tickets issued, (*42) while in July 1848, two-thirds of the
workers were unemployed in Tourcoing, three-fourths in
Calais, two-thirds in St. Etienne, etc.
590
In England the situation was dramatized by the flow of
emigration. In 1838, emigration was about 33,000; in 1842, it
rose to 128,000. For the eight years 1846 to 1854, emigration
totaled over 2,500, 000. (*43) With the Irish famine, the
population of Ireland became rapidly depleted, almost a
million people perishing.
The figures of the criminal rates also are illustrative of the

situation. Whereas the population of Great Britain increased
but 79 per cent between 1805 and 1841, crime committals
increased 482 per cent, reaching a total of 174.6 to every
hundred thousand.
The situation in the United States can be seen from the

reports in the New York Daily Tribune. ". . . the average
earnings of those who live by simple labor in our city ---
embracing at least two-thirds of our population --- scarcely,
if at all, exceed one dollar per week for each person
subsisting thereon." (*44) The typical wage of a needle
worker is given as follows: "Work which had brought 971/2
cents in 1844 was paid Only 371/2 cents in 1845 The
average earnings of these women were $1.50 to $2 a week,
though many of them could not earn more than $1." (*45)
As for working conditions, we cite the following: "The

length of a day's labor varied from twelve to fifteen hours....
The regulations at Patterson, New Jersey, required women
and children to be at work at half past four in the morning....
Operatives were taxed by the companies for the support of
religion; . . . Windows were nailed down and the operatives
deprived of fresh air.... Women and children were urged on
by the use of a cowhide, and an instance is given of a little
girl, eleven years of age, whose leg was broken with a ‘billet
of wood. Still more harrowing is the description of the
merciless whipping of a deaf-and-dumb boy by an
overseer.... He received ... one hundred blows. At Mendon,
591
Mass., a boy of twelve drowned himself in a pond to escape
factory labor." (*46)
In 1849, social conditions were investigated by the City of

Boston. Dr. Clark officially reports: "One cellar was
reported by the police to be occupied nightly as a sleeping-
apartment for thirty-nine persons. In another, the tide had
risen so high that it was necessary to approach the bedside
of a patient by means of a plank which was laid from one
stool to another; while the dead body of an infant was
actually sailing about the room in its Coffin." (*47) An
investigation held at practically the same time in New York
City declares the fact that by no means were such
conditions peculiar to Boston but were common to
practically every large city in the country.
Under such circumstances, it was no wonder that,

especially within the ranks of labor, opinions adumbrating
those of Marx appeared everywhere. Among the Chartists,
for example, Ernest Jones declared: "Money-capital did not
create labor, but labor created money-capital; machinery
did not create work, but work created machinery. It
therefore follows that labour is, by its own nature the
sovereign power, and that it owes no allegiance, gratitude
or subjection to capital." (*48)
Another leader, J. Brontierre O'Brien,,did much to

popularize the phrase "wage slavery." He translated the
work of Buonarotti on the Baboeuf ,movement in the
French Revolution, and thus helped to bring the attention
of the English workman to the early French Communist
movement. Even in America "the term 'wage-slave' had a
much better standing in the forties than it has today." (*49)
Among the Chartists, G. J. Harnay could declare, "As

regards the workingman exterminating other 'classes, the
592
answer is easy. Other classes have no right to exist. To prepare
the way for the absolute supremacy of the working classes ...
preparatory to the abolition of the system of classes, is the
mission of the Red Republican." (*50)
One writer could actually call for an industrial republic

similar to Soviets. "Have the shoemakers a representative in
the House of Commons? There are 133,000 shoemakers in
the country, and these, with their wives and families, make
upwards of half a million of human beings in this country,
all living by shoemaking. Yet not one representative have
they....." (*51)
Thus we may conclude that the writings of the scientific

socialists were fully the product of their times, the result of
sharp economic contradictions and crises, of violent
political revolutions. Had Marx and Engels not lived, there
is no doubt that other writers would have elaborated the
same points of view.
After the Revolution of 1830, repressive measures were

increased by the reactionary forces in control of Central
Europe. In Germany, the protests of intellectual radicals
against the old order led to large-scale banishments from
the country. These exiles, in 1834, were able to organize in
Paris the League of the Banished. Soon a Right and Left
Wing developed within the group, the Left Wing splitting
in 1836 to form the League of the Just. This latter
organization did away with the dictatorial tendencies of the
former and established an administrative committee
democratically elected to head its work. It read
revolutionary and socialistic works and was extremely
interested in the utopian writing of Cabet who was the
leader in appealing directly to the working class for the
establishment of his utopias.
593
The League of the Just did not content itself with abstract
propaganda, but began secretly, in Germany and elsewhere,
to organize branches of the society which functioned under
the guise of educational and singing societies and which
began the task of building labor unions. The League of the
Just contained within it many communists, the leading
figure being Wilhelm Weitling. Several of the League were
imprisoned for taking part in the communist attempt of
Blanqui in France in 1839.
It was this group that later was forced to emigrate to

England, and which founded a German Workers
Educational Union, which became the Communist Labor
Educational Union. These bodies, together with the League
of the Just, formed, in 1847, the Communist League headed
by Marx and Engels.
At this point we do not wish to analyze the activity of the

Communist League, which we leave for another chapter.
Suffice it to say that the League played an important role in
the political turmoils and revolutions of 1848. Through the
Communist League, Marx and Engels were induced to
write their remarkable Communist Manifesto which,
translated into every European language, became a sort of
bible of the working class. Thus the Communist League
prepared the way for the international action of the workers
which was first realized on a large scale in the First
International formed in 1864.
The Communist League was a strictly communist

organization with a definite philosophy, communist
procedure, trained cadres. The First International was an
entirely different body.
Footnotes
594
1. At least it is this part of their heritage for which they are
remembered, thanks to the interpretation of their disciples.
On the other hand, Auguste Comte borrowed his theory of
the evolution of religion from Saint-Simon who also
enunciated the evolutionary thought that mankind must
decay like other living things. Saint-Simon’s speculations,
however, always ended in closed systems.
2. Compare the critique of the utopians in J.

Davis: Contemporary Social Movements, p. 51
3. See, G. Elton: The Revolutionary Idea in France, 1789-1871, p.

123. (1923 edition.)
4. His chief works are: L'Industrie (1816-1818), Le Politique

(1819), L'Organisateur (1819-1820), Systeme Industriel
(1821), and Le Nouveau Christianisme (1825).
5. Gide and Rist: A History of Economic Doctrines, p. 202.
6. In his first work, however, in 1803, Saint-Simon had

proposed the very opposite, namely, to re-establish order in
society by means of a union between the intellectuals and
the territorial proprietors, the model being the Middle Ages,
the purpose, to suppress the authority of the masses. The
industrialists are not mentioned.
7. Saint-Simon's opposition to military government, of

course, came after Napoleon's defeat. While Napoleon lived,
his system of government in Italy was declared to be the
best the world had ever seen. "So long as Napoleon's
fortunes were in the ascendant, no sycophant was ever
more obsequious." (A. J. Booth: Saint-Simon and Saint-
Simonism, p. 39.)
8. See, D. B. Cofer: Saint-Simonism in the Radicalism of Thomas

Carlyle.
595
9. T. Kirkup: A History of Socialism (5th ed., 1913), p. 31.
10. M. Hillquit: History of Socialism in the United States, pp.

72-73. (Fifth edition.)
11. See, A. Brisbane: General Introduction to Social Science, pp.

13, 14 and following. (New York, 1876, edition.)
13. In this respect Fourier seems to be forerunner of the

works of Tarde with his laws of imitation.
14. Brisbane: work cited, p. 71.
15. For his chart of evolution, see C. Fourier: Theory of the

Four Movements, p. 36.
16. Fourier was acute enough to predict that canals would

be built both at Suez and Panama, although it was the
disciples of Saint-Simon who built one and began the other!
17. The plan and rules of Fourier's Phalanges are given in P.

Godwin: A Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier, p.
51 and following.
18. R. T. Ely: The Labor Movement in America, p. 20. (1905

edition.)
19. M. Hillquit: History of Socialism in the United States, p. 25.
20. Brisbane, Greeley, Parke, Godwin, George Ripley, C. A.

Dana, William Henry Channing, Hawthorne, Emerson,
Theodore Parker, Thoreau, Henry James, James Russell
Lowell, Margaret Fuller, Louise Alcott, and others were
Fourierists.
21. N. J. Ware: The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860, p. 165.
596
22. G. D. H. Cole: The Life of Robert Owen, p. 5 (1930 edition.)
23. See R. Owen: A New View of Society and Other

Writings. (Everyman's ed.)
24. See, C. Southwell: Socialism Made Easy or a Plain

Exposition of Mr. Owen's Views; also, R. Owen: Public
Discussion between Robert Owen and the Rev. J. H. Roebuch.
25. R. Owen: Letters on Education, p. 14.
26. A. J. Booth: Robert Owen, p. 41.
28. See, R. Owen: Wealth and Misery.
29. No Negro could become a member of the New

Harmony colony.
At first the constitution of the New Harmony was put on an

exceedingly anti-democratic basis: ". . . the government was
to be in a committee of twelve, of whom eight should be
persons who had advanced one hundred pounds or
upwards." (W. L. Sargent: R. Owen and his Social
Philosophy, p. 235.)
30. G. D. H. Cole, work cited, p. 9.
31. D. Ricardo: Works, p. 23 (J. R. McCulloch 1876 edition).
32. Wrote: An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of

Wealth (1824); Appeal of One Half the Human Race;
Women (1825); Labour Rewarded (1827); Practical Directions for
the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities (1830).
He died 1833.
597
33. Wrote: A Lecture on Human Happiness (1825); A Word of
Advice to the Orbistonians (1826); The Social System (1831); An
Efficient Remedy for the Distress of Nations (1842); The
Currency Question, (1847); Lectures on the Nature and the Use
of Money (1848)
34. E. Lowenthal: The Ricardian Socialists, p. 51.
35. However, the navy was all right!
36. John Gray: A Lecture on Human Happiness, pp. 69-70
37. The pertinent works of T. Hodgskin are: Labour Defended

Against the Claims of Capital (1825); Popular Political
Economy (1827); The Natural and Artificial Rights of
Property Contrasted (1832).
38. Hodgskin, like Herbert Spencer, was on the staff of

the London Economist.
38. J. Bray: Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy, p. 17. (1931

ed.)
39. See, J. Bray, the same, p. 56 and following.
41. E. Lowenthal: The Ricardian Socialists, p. 898.
42. R. W. Postgate: Revolution from 1789 to 1906, p. 165.
43. See, P. W. Slosson: The Decline of the Chartist

Movement, especially p. 178.
44. New York Daily Tribune, July 9, 1845, quoted in N. J.

Ware: The Industrial Worker 1840-1860, p. 7.
598
46. R. T. Ely: The Labor Movement in America, p. 49 (1905
edition).
47. N. J. Ware: work cited, quoted from "City of Boston

Document No. 66."
48. E. Jones: Notes to the People, p. 74, quoted in P. W.

Slosson, work cited.
49. N. J. Ware: The same, p. xv, footnote.
50. Quoted in P. W. Slosson, work cited, p. 197.
51. J. E. Smith: On the Prospects of Society, p. 98, quoted in R.

W. Postgate, work cited, Document 46.
XIX. THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL
THE decade and a half terminating in 1864 in the end of

slavery in the United States had been marked by a great
democratic movement on both sides of the world. It amply
demonstrated that the petty bourgeoisie, with their ideas of
harmony, co-operation, guarantees of security, peaceful
democracy, etc., no longer could maintain the lead in
progressive movements. Bitterly they could reflect with the
Spanish Republican Don Emelio Castelar: "All that we have
fought for, the Conservatives have brought into being." The
conservative Deak had realized Kossuth's ideal of
Hungarian autonomy; a Russian Emperor, the republican
ideal of liberation of the serfs, a conservative Cavour,
Mazzini's ideal of Italian unity; the Imperialist Bismarck,
the ideal of German unity formulated by the republicans at
Frankfort, and Thiers, the final establishment of the French
Republic. The actual demands of the middle classes had
been satisfied peacefully by the ruling groups; the only
599
revolutionary force remaining was the workers'
International.
It is natural that, with democratic movements fresh at hand,

the new organized labor movement appearing should be
penetrated through and through with the petty bourgeois
democratic spirit. The problem became how to extend the
democratic revolution so as to secure social reforms for the
workers and to drive the revolution forward towards
socialism.
In the light of this situation it was impossible for the

Marxist to take the view which the proletariat revolutionists
had expressed earlier and which was exemplified by the
statement of Ernest Jones, "The Trades' Union has been the
greatest upholder (unintentionally) of the present system. It
has made working men uphold it and defend it by teaching
them to believe that their wages could be kept up without a
political change. It has been one of the most anti-democratic
institutions of the modern time." (*1) In the forties and
fifties of the nineteenth century, the working man, just
awakening to the basic functioning of the capitalist system,
dreamed he could initiate the full program of liberation; but
while he was intellectually able to comprehend the
capitalist system and to foresee its ultimate conclusions, he
had no strength to change his material environment, and
thus the most revolutionary intellectual statements went
hand in hand with the most opportunist practice.
During the sixties, however, the labor movement was

growing up. No longer could it be the function of the
revolutionists to scold at the limitations of trade unionism.
It was absolutely necessary actively to take part in the labor
movement and to move it forward in a revolutionary
direction. This was, indeed, part of the general necessity of
working within democratic formations to revolutionize
600
them, and went hand in hand with the theory of permanent
revolution. For that reason, the very same Marx who was
responsible for the Communist Manifesto, with its strong
declaration for the abolition of private property, could put
forth an entirely different inaugural address when, in 1865,
he called together an International Workingmen's
Association in London, known as the First International,
and Placed on the agenda the questions of the trade union
movement, the role of Russian Czarism in Europe, the
restoration of Poland, and the question of standing armies.
In this address, Marx elucidated the general law of

capitalism to increase the relative misery of the working
class in relation to the capitalist, and declared: "And so in
every country it has now become a truth demonstrated to
be so for every unprejudiced person, denied only by those
who have an interest in misleading others by raising false
expectations, that no perfecting of machinery, no
application of science to industry, no improvement of the
means of communication, no new colonies, no emigration,
no opening out of new markets, no free trade, and not all
these things put together can do away with the misery of
the toiling masses, but rather on the contrary that upon the
present false basis every new development of the
productive power of labor must lead to the widening of the
gulf between the classes and to the heightening of the social
antagonisms. During this intoxicating epoch of economic
progress, death from starvation raises itself almost to the
rank of a social institution." (*2) Marx then proceeded to
explain the defeat of the workers in 1848 and pointed out
how by their persistence, ameliorative legislation was
enacted in England. He praised the rise of the co-operative
movement and stressed the need of labor to take up its new
task, namely, to capture political power. To do this it was
601
necessary to organize the masses and to give them
intelligent lead.
"And when these designs of the ruling class have been

brought to nought, the workers must come forward in a
united fashion with the simultaneous demand that the
simple laws of morality and justice, which are considered
right in the relations of private persons, shall be recognized
as the supreme law governing the intercourse of nations.
The struggle for such a foreign policy is embraced in the
universal struggle for the emancipation of the working
class." (*3)
We can see clearly that to Karl Marx the International

Workingmen's Association was really a loosely united front
of various elements. Recognizing that, Marx changed his
tone from the scientific philosophical one of dialectical and
historical materialism to the ethical one emphasizing
morality and justice. This approach was a concession to the
naive workers who were present at the meeting. Scientific
socialism was to be injected carefully as the work
progressed.
In the first meeting, there came together representatives of

the English, French, German, Polish, and Italian groups.
The rules that were proposed by Italian representatives
under the influence of Mazzini were soon changed by Marx
to be along proletarian lines, but deliberately left very
vague. (*4) The result was that the character of the
International remained quite unclear. It really had two sides
to it: It was at once a powerful trade union body and an
international political society. With its defeat on rules, the
Italian delegation withdrew, leaving the field more clearly
dominated by the trade union elements which remained
and which in the beginning of the International formed the
chief body. In England, almost all the delegates were from
602
trade unions, only two political sections existing; in France,
however, nearly all were from political sections. Sometimes
these two categories coalesced, that is, the local union
became the section.
By 1865, propaganda groups existed in Switzerland,

Belgium, and France; Spain, Italy, and Germany were still
relatively untouched. To the conference called in that year
the chief delegations were from the first three countries,
plus Great Britain; the last three sent unimportant
representations. Even so, already the whole character of the
body had changed. There were now sixty -delegates who
were not mere refugees but who were regularly elected.
Forty-six of them came from sections; fourteen from trade
unions. At this Conference the rule seemed to be
established that trade unions as such were not regarded as
members, but only as affiliated "adhering" organizations.
The first real congress came in 1866, in Geneva, when the

statutes and fundamental principles of the program were
ratified. From then on the membership grew rapidly,
jumping from seventy thousand to three hundred thousand.
It was decided to hold congresses annually. By the time of
the Lausanne Congress, held in 1867, a marked step
forward had been taken. At this congress, the function of
the State, the political tasks of the proletariat, the question
of war, and the question of the international policy of the
proletariat were dealt with.
In France the bronze workers had carried on a militant

strike. To aid them, the International collected over five
thousand dollars in London alone, thus demonstrating
dramatically the new international solidarity of the working
class. Increasingly, English and French unions began to
adhere to the International. In Switzerland, the strike of the
building trades workers, adherents of the International, had
603
also established the organization firmly on its feet. In the
same year the massacre at Charleroi in Belgium secured the
affiliation of the Belgium workers. Now German groups
also joined, and the International began to have influence
even in Austria. It was in this year that the National Labor
Union in the United States, with its President, Sylvis, also
joined the International. (*5) The Lausanne Congress was
the last one in which the Proudhonists carried the day with
their resolutions decrying strikes and pressing Proudhonist
schemes for co-operatives and people's banks.
With the victory in 1868 of Marxist ideology, an immense

advance was made by the International. Bitter persecutions
now took place in Paris. The movement became far more
revolutionary, and, at the congress held in Brussels, the
Proudhonist bank idea was shelved and the workers came
out for nationalization of communications with workers'
control. The Congress approved Marx's Capital. It rejected a
proposal to affiliate itself to the bourgeois League of Peace
and Freedom. It advocated the general strike in case of war.
Activity was reported as having been begun in Spain, Italy,
Holland and Hungary.
The year 1868 was thus the definite turning point in the
International. From then on it was not the reformist trade
unions, but the revolutionary communists and political
sections that carried on the brunt of the work. At this point
the First International became the most important labor
power of the century. "Under the power and enlightened
leadership of Marx it united and drilled the workers. It
taught them to march together. It raised socialism to the
status of an international program. Socialism became the
aim of the whole labour movement instead of the secret
doctrine of a Blanquist conspiracy. The First International is,
more than any other single agency, responsible for the
604
foundations of the Trade Union organizations of Spain,
Denmark, France, and Austria-Hungary." (*6)
By this time the International Workingmen's Association

had become powerful enough to attract to itself a group of
trade unionists and political revolutionists headed by
Bakunin. So long as the movement was on the rise, Bakunin
could not dominate the situation. By 1869, in England, the
official trade union Congress had urged all trade unions to
join the International. The large National Labor Union of
the United States sent its delegate to the Basel Congress,
which reported many sections and union affiliations
throughout the industrial world. In Italy even Garibaldi
broke with Mazzini to defend the International, while in the
Latin countries generally, many trade unions joined as a
whole to affiliate as sections to the International. Thus,
around 1870, the membership was estimated as close to
four hundred and fifty thousand.
The peak of the International came with the Paris

Commune. Then the International developed into a
revolutionary communist body in essence. During the
Franco-Prussian War, the French trade unions had
disappeared but had been replaced by forty-six militant
sections of the International. At the time of the Commune, a
considerable minority were adherents to the International,
even if not quite Marxists, although the majority of the
leading Committee were partially Blanquists and partially
of the group known as Radicals of 1848. None the less, it
was the International that mobilized all its forces to support
the Paris Commune and was considered the chief
international agency responsible for the workers' uprising.
Upon the declaration of war, the International

Workingmen's Association had taken its stand against
French chauvinism and its German adherents, while joining
605
in the general scheme of national defense; had emphasized
the difference between German national and dynastic
Prussian interests; and had stood resolutely opposed to any
annexation of Alsace and Lorraine and for immediate peace
as soon as a republican government should be established
in Paris. At the same time, the First International had
brought the French and German workers together for joint
action to stop war.
As soon, however, as French defeat diverted the current of

chauvinism and as Bismarck began to press home his own
imperialist principles, the First International threw all its
forces behind the French working classes' desire for peace.
Before the Paris Commune appeared, the International,
under Marx, did its best not only to point out that such
action would be premature and to warn against it, but also
to lay down certain basic rules which the insurrectionists
would have to follow once the fighting began. When civil
war started, the First International stood by the workers in
revolt in Paris, regardless of their errors and defects, and
issued a call for international working class solidarity
behind the Commune.
The Paris Commune broke the First International to pieces.

It became apparent that within the framework of one
organization there could not exist differences as wide apart
as those, for example, that separated the skilled trade
unionists of England from the pauperized masses of Paris.
The violence of the Paris Commune, which brought the
question of communism directly to a head, led the English
trade unions to withdraw from the International. At the
same time, the reaction in France, following the defeat of
the Commune, destroyed the workers' forces there. Thus
the international was left a mere shell. As the movement
declined, the Bakuninist influence within the International
606
became more threatening, and the struggle between the
Marxists and the Anarchists rose to the point of split.
Regarding the expulsion of Bakunin, Engels could write:

"For the rest, old Hegel has already said: 'A party proves
itself a victorious party by the fact that it splits and can
stand the split.' The movement of the proletariat necessarily
passes through different stages of development; at every
stage one section of people lags behind and does not join in
the further advance; and this alone explains why it is that
actually the 'solidarity of the proletariat' is everywhere
realized in different party groupings which carry on life
and death feuds with one another, as the Christian sects in
the Roman Empire did amidst the worst persecutions." (*7)
In 1872, a Hague Congress was called to consider the

Anarchists' theories. (*8) Strange to say, the English and
Dutch delegations were for Bakunin, not because of his
anarchism, but because of his theory of trade union
decentralization which they believed to be the key issue at
the Congress. Thus, the revolutionary Bakunin received
support from the most conservative trade union elements.
In spite of that, however, Bakunin and Guillaume were
expelled because of their secret organization and
destructive and disruptive methods. The Hague Conference
was really, the last effective one of the First International.
In 1873, both sides held separate congresses in Geneva. (*9)

The First International was then moved to New York and F.
A. Sorge made Secretary. At the General Council meeting in
Philadelphia in 1876, the First International was formally
dissolved. (*10)
The First International was an excellent illustration of the

method of work of the Marxist at a time when the working
class was only beginning to articulate its interests and when
607
proletarian revolution could not have been the order of the
day. As Marx wrote: "The International was founded in
order to replace the Socialist or semi-Socialist sects by a real
organization of the working class for struggle." (*11)
Marx understood very well that the First International

could be but a sounding board for the widespread
penetration of the scientific socialist program into the ranks
of the workers, while it also helped to organize them for
their day-to-day demands. Seizure of power could be
experimental only. The basic achievements of the First
International were the spread of a scientific socialist
program and the first workers' Commune ever erected.
As for the organization of the workers, it was clear that the

only workers who could express their needs were the
mechanics who could not at that time have carried forward
any sustained international or revolutionary action. For this
reason, too, Marx was willing to move the International to
New York, although he knew that such a step would mean
its end. Rather have the International die a natural death
than have it utilized by the Bakuninists in hair-brained
adventures that would disgrace its history! The First
International, in taking responsibility for the Paris
Commune and in popularizing the views of Marx, had
carried forward the work of the Communist League and
laid the basis for the international organization of the
workers in the future.
The conclusion of the First International by no means meant

the end of the separate socialist labor movements. Far from
it. It simply signified that the working class as yet was not
capable of a powerful, solid, international organization that
could accomplish the double job of organizing the workers
608
into unions and at the same time mobilizing them for world
revolutionary struggle. The task had to be continued on a
national and local scale.
It was Marx who pointed out: "Bourgeois revolutions, like

those of the eighteenth century, rush onward rapidly from
success to success, their stage effects outbid one another,
men and things seem to be set in flaming brilliants, ecstasy
is the prevailing spirit; but they are short-lived, they reach
their climax speedily, then society relapses into a long fit of
nervous reaction before it learns how to appropriate the
fruits of its period of feverish excitement. Proletarian
revolutions, on the contrary, such as those of the nineteenth
century, criticize themselves constantly; constantly
interrupt themselves in their own course; come back to
what seems to have been accomplished in order to start
over anew; scorn with cruel thoroughness the half-
measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their first
attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order
to enable him to draw fresh strength from the earth, and
again to rise up against them in more gigantic stature;
constantly recoil in fear before the undefined monster
magnitude of their own objects --- until finally that situation
is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the
conditions themselves cry out: "Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!"'
(*12)
In Germany the active working class movement started in

1844 with the insurrection of the Silesian weavers and the
struggle of the Bohemian factory operatives. With the
revolution of 1848, the workers in Germany, under the
leadership of one Born, called together in Berlin a Labor
League Congress. "The resolutions of the Congress dealt
with the political, trade union and the co-operative
organization of the German proletariat; the establishment of
609
credit banks to aid the productive associations; the right to
work; universal, equal suffrage in State and municipality;
reduction of military service to one year; abolition of
indirect taxation; establishment of a ten-hour working day;
restriction of the number of apprentices; prohibition of the
labor of children under fourteen; general compulsory
education, compulsory continuation schools for apprentices,
consultation of workers in selection and appointment of
foremen in factories and workshops." (*13)
Closely in touch with Marx, Born also organized a

"Brotherhood of Labor" and took the lead in the
insurrection in Dresden, as did other Marxists like Engels in
Baden and Schapper in Wiesbaden. Marx believed the
workers could not assume a pre-eminent revolutionary role
in Germany but would have to confine themselves to
secondary democratic aspects that would, however, allow
the proletariat to grow with maximum speed. Thus Marx
had to fight against Karl Schapper, who advocated the
immediate establishment of a workers' rule.
It is interesting to give the arguments of Marx against these

"Leftists": "The minority substitutes dogmatism for the
standpoint of criticism, and idealism for materialism. It
treats pure will as the motive power of revolution instead of
actual conditions. While we say to the workers: 'You have
got to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars
and national wars not merely in order to change your
conditions but in order to change yourselves and become
qualified for political power' you on the contrary tell them,
'We must achieve power immediately, otherwise we may as
well lie down and go to sleep.' While we especially point
out the undeveloped nature of the German proletariat to
the German workers, you flatter the national feelings and
craft prejudices of the German handicraftsman in the
610
crudest way, which is of course more popular. Just as the
democrats turned the word 'people' into a sacred being, so
you have done with the word 'proletariat.' Like the
Democrats, you substitute revolutionary phrases for
revolutionary development, etc." (*14)
After the revolution of 1848, the organized labor movement

broke up only to revive again in the Democratic Party of the
1860's. In 1863, Ferdinand Lassalle spoke before the
workers of the Schulze-Delitzsch group of the Liberal co-
operative movement. Lassalle, who had been strongly
influenced by Marxism, launched into a fervid polemic
against the leaders of the Liberal co-operative movement. In
his open letter to the workmen, Lassalle pointed out that
the workingmen should form their own political party
which should keep as its core a full social program. The co-
operative measures of Schulze-Delitzsch were mere
palliatives. The workers were bound by an "iron law of
wages" which prevented them from improving materially
their condition under competitive capitalism. Lassalle
believed the State should help the workers. This State,
founded on universal suffrage, should see to it that the
protective associations formed by workingmen should
secure the full product of their labor. (*15)
With this program of State Socialism, Lassalle was able to

win over the workers of the co-operative group and to
launch his Universal German Workingmen's Association
for Full and Equal Suffrage which by 1864 had
approximately five thousand members. Lassalle's state
socialism was an exceedingly dangerous matter for the
German workman, since it made the laborer simply the tool
of Bismarck's Prussian policy. Believing that "the State shall
be the institution in which the whole virtue of mankind
shall realize itself," (*16) Lassalle was making a cult of the
611
State which fitted in very well with the plans of the
reactionary Junkers supporting the monarchy. Lassalle
believed that with his help Germany could be transformed
into a social empire. The first step was to grant suffrage to
all.
Of course, such a program caused the Marxists to break

violently from Lassalle and to denounce him as having
borrowed his program from French-Catholic socialism to
which he had simply added the Chartist cry of universal
suffrage. Marx accused Lassalle of flirting with Bismarck,
although at the time he could not have known of Lassalle's
secret conferences with Bismarck nor of the labor leader's
betrayal of the party in accepting subsidies from the State.
(*17)
In spite of all his defects, however, the brilliant agitation of

Lassalle was able to lead to the building up, for the first
time in German history, of a powerful labor organization.
Thus he performed a great historical service, for he
converted the working class from the appendage of the
petty bourgeoisie into an independent political party. This
the German working class has always remembered
gratefully.
Against the Lassalleans, the Marxists began to build their

own organization. In 1867 a Marxist League was formed
which the following year joined the First International. By
1869 there was a Socialist Democratic Workingmen's Party
created in a Congress at Eisenach. The differences between
the Lassalleans and the Marxists were: first, that the former
wanted to use the State and to continue the existence of the
North German Confederation; the second group, at the
head of which was now August Bebet and Wilhelm
Liebknecht, was opposed to collaboration with the State
and against the North German Confederation, but for a
612
centralized unified Germany. They went so far as to declare
that a parliamentary platform should be used by
workingmen only for revolutionary purposes. This position
they were later to change.
During the Franco-Prussian War, the Marxists, unlike the

Lassalleans, did not vote for war credits in 1870. After the
battle of Sedan, both parties came out against war credits.
Unity between them now could be effected more easily.
This was done at the Congress at Gotha in 1875, on the
basis of a compromise program. The membership of both
organizations was now about twenty-five thousand.
Marx castigated Liebknecht for having made too many

compromises with the opportunists, the Lassalleans, in
order to secure unity. Marx was by no means for "unity-at-
any-price" and while he could declare that every real
advance step of the movement was worth more than a
dozen platforms, yet it was not necessary to write muddled
platforms, to yield principles, in order to secure this
advance step. There could have been created a united front
between both groups rather than an organic unity.
Indeed, the Gotha program did yield to Lassalle on

essential principles. It took over the idea of the "iron law of
wages." It tended to throw the proletariat against the
peasantry for the benefit of the German Junkers. It
formulated the slogan: All those who are not with us are
against us and they who are not workers compose one
reactionary mass. It contained definite nationalist
provisions rather than clear-cut expressions of international
solidarity of the working class. Finally, and what was most
important, it called for the aid of the State under the
democratic control of the working population to build
producers' co-operative associations in order to establish
socialism. The basic concept of the class struggle was here
613
avoided; there was launched instead the slogan for the
establishment of a "Free" State or "People's" State. This last
showed clearly that the German working men were by no
means emancipated from the doctrines of state socialism.
(*18)
Marx railed against these state socialist theories. He

declared that this program played right into the hands of
the Anarchists who had always accused the Marxists of
advocating a State in perpetuity, and pointed out that, as
early as his book against Proudhon in 1847 and later in
the Communist Manifesto in 1848, he had shown that under a
socialist society the State would dissolve of itself and
disappear. The State could never be used in the same
sentence with the term "Freedom." A "Free" State was an
impossibility. "As, therefore, the 'state' is only a transitional
institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution,
in order to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is pure
nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the,
proletariat still uses the state, it does not use it in the
interests of freedom but in order to hold down
[niederzuhalten] its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes
possible to speak of freedom, the state as such ceases to
exist.'' (*19) Instead of the State, Marx would use the word
community (Gemeinwesen), similar to the word commune.
The Germans were never able to overcome their tendencies

towards nationalism, towards close collaboration with the
Emperor, and towards reverence for the State. During this
whole period, up to the war, German socialism was to
prove congenitally and fatally defective in all its
revolutionary activities. Even after the revision of the Gotha
program in 1891 at the Erfurt Congress, Marx's criticisms
were proved to the fullest extent. In the Erfurt program,
while the Lassallean demand for State aid was finally
614
rejected, no attack was made against the monarchy; rather,
the attack was centered on the capitalists who were not
directly in charge of the State. The program limited itself in
the main to demands for democracy and for social reform.
The German Socialists could never reach the status of being
Marxist, that is, communist.
The unification of the Socialists, coinciding with the

tremendous industrial advance of Germany after the
Franco-Prussian War, rapidly increased their strength so
that, two years later, they were able to poll a half million
votes and to seat twelve members in the Reichstag. The
ruling class now became alarmed. The two attempts at the
assassination of the Emperor in 1878 were now used by
Bismarck as an excuse to declare socialism illegal The
Socialist Party was driven underground. Yet it flourished
exceedingly under the persecution. By 1890 the vote had
increased 300 per cent, and so threatening had the Socialists
become that Bismarck was forced to retreat and to abolish
the anti-Socialist laws. In 1890 the Socialist Party of
Germany became the greatest Socialist Party in the world.
The anti-Socialist laws benefitted the German Socialist

Party exceedingly. It drove out of its ranks the old artisan
and petty bourgeois hangers- on. It tested and hardened
large numbers of German workers in illegal revolutionary
struggle. It gave to the German Socialist movement an
immense prestige which allowed it to take the leadership in
the Second International. It was this tradition of struggle,
too, that prevented the open opportunist Right Wing in the
Socialist Party from capturing it. However, all this was not
sufficient to make the Socialist Party a genuine
revolutionary article by the time the World War broke out.
615
During the same period, socialism made rapid headway in
other countries. In England several different groups
appeared. In 1883 there was founded the Fabian Society,
made up of intellectuals who were sympathetic to labor and
who had evolved from liberalism to socialism. ". . . Fabian
socialism regarded the transition from capitalism to
socialism as a gradual process; looked forward to the
socialization of industry by the peaceful economic and
political agencies already at hand; saw in the middle class ,a
group that could be utilized. . . ." (*20)
In 1881 there had been organized under the leadership of H.

M. Hyndman and J. Burns a Social-Democratic Federation
which tried to enunciate the doctrines of Marx but felt it
necessary to open up a bitter attack against trade union
leaders for their conservatism. In 1883 a split occurred in
the organization, William Morris and E. Belfort Bax
founding the Socialist League which differed from its
parent organization in insisting "strongly upon the
necessity of this [social] control being exercised by free
communal groups, only loosely and voluntarily associated
in larger aggregates." (*21) The Socialist League was also
against parliamentary action, not in order to advocate
violent insurrection, but in order to concentrate upon pure
education.
This was the period in England when Henry George's

Radicalism, embodied in his book, Progress and Poverty, and
in the Single Tax movement had created great discussion.
The socialism of these groups was heavily tinged with
liberal individualism. It seemed to be imperative for each
one to answer the attacks of Herbert Spencer that
civilization was entering into a period of social slavery by
pointing out that socialism, far from crushing individualism,
meant its maximum efflorescence. This was the theme song
616
of the Fabian Society. It could induce such people as Oscar
Wilde to write his book, The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
While not everyone took the position of this epicene esthete,
that property meant so much care and effort as to tire one
out and that the individual's energies would be
tremendously released once the obligations of property
were dropped, nevertheless the approach of Oscar Wilde
was typical of those writing about socialism in England
during this period.
In 1893 the Independent Labor Party was organized and

began to participate in parliamentary activity, under the
leadership of Keir Hardie. The aim of the I.L.P. was the
collective ownership and control of the means of
production to be achieved through parliamentary action,
social reform, protection of labor, and democracy in local
and central government. The I.L.P. did not differ in its
general program from the Social Democratic Federation,
but, because it did not launch a bitter attack against the
trade union officials, it was able to penetrate the trade
unions with its propaganda more than the former
organization had done. The I.L.P. took the initiative to
induce the trade unions to form a Labor Party, a step finally
achieved in 1900.
None of the British organizations could be termed

communist or genuinely Marxist. They were all heavily
diluted with bourgeois liberalism, theories of individualism,
illusions about parliamentary factors. Their sole campaign
was either one of education or of petty electioneering
activity for social reform. Very few of them could realize a
revolutionary practice in the heavily bourgeoisified
atmosphere prevailing in England at the twentieth century.
In France, too, the socialist movement was advancing after

a period of recuperation from the defeat of the Paris
617
Commune. Here, five groups soon made themselves known,
which, leaving aside the Blanquists (*22) who somewhat
approximated Communist conceptions, were headed by
Guesde, Brousse, and Allemane. Besides these, there existed
a Society for Social Economy, led by Malon, jaur'es,
Millerand and Viviani, which was formed for the purpose
of formulating legislation with a program urging the
gradual socialization of industry and extension of
democracy. It was this last group that adopted the policy of
co-operating with the government and which obtained
membership in the French Ministry.
The Guesdist group at first refused to take any part in the

struggle for immediate reforms and insisted it was
necessary to seize the political power of the State in a
revolutionary fashion. "The entrance of the socialists into
politics is not, therefore, to carve out seats of councillors or
deputies, but because the political campaign gives to the
socialists a remarkable opportunity for reaching the masses
with the party's educational propaganda. The main object
of the Parti Ouvrier is to be 'a kind of recruiting and
instructing sergeant preparing the masses for the final
assault upon the state, which is the citadel of capitalist
society: Only a revolution . . . would permit the working
class to seize the political power and socialize industry."
(*23) Nevertheless, since it was not yet the time for
revolution, the Guesdists' activity was to center on
education, especially in the trade unions under their control.
Later, the Guesdists were to turn parliamentarian and to
participate in the election campaigns.
In 1893 the Socialists were able to obtain six hundred

thousand votes and to elect over fifty Deputies. It was after
this event that Millerand was called to enter the cabinet of
Waldeck-Rousseau, this action splitting the French socialist
618
movement into two parts --- the Guesdists and Blanquists
forming the Socialist Party of France, definitely opposed to
such participation in capitalist governments, the Broussists,
and Allemanists and Independents creating the French
Socialist Party supporting Millerand. In 1905 both groups
united to establish the United Socialist Party.
In Eastern Europe, where the socialist movement was

compelled to overcome enormous difficulties, it assumed a
more revolutionary character. In Austria the Socialist Party
was organized in 1867 and was more militant than the
German in proportion as it suffered far more from
persecutions. By about 1888, the Anarchist influence was
defeated and the various socialist groups united together to
form their Socialist Party. In Italy, too, about 1893, a
militant Socialist Party was evolved. In the beginning, the
socialist movement there had been dominated by Bakunin's
influence, but by the twentieth century a great majority of
the trade unions were under the guidance of socialists who
maintained a militant program of action.
Both in Austria and in Italy, as elsewhere in East Central

Europe, the Socialist Parties were largely penetrated by the
petty bourgeois influence of agrarian life. While their
programs called for the establishment of a republic by
social reforms and laid down the general program of
socialism, the Socialist Parties were, generally, no more
proletarian in outlook than those which formed the
movements in the more advanced countries.
Only in Russia was the socialist movement able to advance

to approximate a communist position under the special
conditions that existed in that country: on the one hand, the
rapid growth of large-scale modern trustified industry,
thoroughly controlled by the State; on the other hand, the
terribly oppressive and anachronistic regime of Czarist
619
absolutism. While the Russian regime threw thousands of
intellectuals into the ranks of the discontented and
rebellious, it also herded together millions of workers in
barracks under barbarous conditions. Soon both of these
movements were to fuse and to take organized shape in the
Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party.
In the early days of the nineteenth century, the

revolutionary Dekabrists had vaguely agitated for a
liberalized regime mixed with theories of early French
utopians. By the middle of the century, Hertzen had
combined the struggle against the Czar with the struggle
for socialism, and the paper Kolokol (The Bell) began to
introduce not only the question of political democracy, but
that of social reform as well. In 1869 Bakunin succeeded
Hertzen as editor, and, with Lavrov, put forth the doctrine
of "going to the people," which meant that the student
should enter into the life of the peasant in order to combine
peculiar Russian conditions with Western ideas of social
reform. By 1876, however, this program was proved a
failure, both in the sense of spreading propaganda and in
building mass organizations. From 1873 to 1876 alone, over
two thousand of these advocates had been arrested. In 1874,
all the Russian students studying abroad were forced to
return to Russia.
Against this repressive regime of the Czar, the Russian

revolutionary Socialists formed Terrorist organizations.
Vera Zasulich killed the tyrannical police agent, Trepoff; the
Czar, Alexander II, was assassinated in 1881 by Sophia
Perovskaia. This period of terror transformed the previous
lax organizations into extremely disciplined, illegal, and
conspiratorial ones made up of professional revolutionists.
Even these heroic groups, however, could not withstand
the terrifically intensified attack of the government. The old
620
Terrorist groups of "Land and Freedom" and "People's
Freedom" were destroyed completely. Intellectual
revolutionaries now turned to Marxism.
The enthusiasm of this war of the intellectuals against the

State was in part shared by Friedrich Engels, who,
understanding that Russia could not long avoid her
democratic revolution, correctly estimated the importance
of even such blows as the intelligentsia could give in
breaking the dam of Czarism to let loose the floods of
democracy and social reform. He wrote: "What I know or
believe about the situation in Russia impels me to the
opinion that the Russians are approaching their 1789. The
revolution must break out there in a given time; it may break
out there any day. In these circumstances the country is like
a charged mine which only needs a fuse to be laid to it,
especially since March 13. This is one of the exceptional
cases where it is possible for a handful of people to make a
revolution, i.e., with one small push to cause a whole
system ... to come crashing down and thus by one action in
itself insignificant, to release uncontrollable explosive forces.
Well now, if ever Blanquism-the phantasy of overturning
an entire society through the action of a small conspiracy-
had a certain justification for its existence, that is certainly
in Petersburg....
"Supposing these people imagine they can seize power,

what does it matter? Provided they make the hole which
will shatter the dyke, the flood itself will soon rob them of
their illusions. But if by chance these illusions resulted in
giving them a superior force of will, why complain of that?..
"To me the most important thing is that the impulse should

be given in Russia, that the revolution should break out.
Whether this fraction or that fraction gives the signal,
whether it happens under this flag or that flag, matters little
621
to me. If it were a palace conspiracy it would be swept
away tomorrow. There where the position is so strained,
where the revolutionary elements are accumulated to such
a degree, where the economic situation of the enormous
mass of the people becomes daily more impossible, where
every stage of social development is represented, from the
primitive commune to modern large-scale industry and
high finance, and where all these contradictions are
violently held together by an unexampled despotism, a
despotism which is becoming more and more unbearable to
the youth in whom the national worth and intelligence are
united-there, when 1789 has once been launched, 1793 will
not be long in following." (*24)
Under the influence of Marxism, in 1883, Plechanoff broke

away from the old Narodniki groups and organized his
Society for the Liberation of Labor. In 1895, Lenin and
Martov founded in St. Petersburg a League of Struggle for
the Emancipation of the Working Class. In 1898 an attempt
was made to organize a congress for the formation of a
Social-Democratic Labor Party. The Congress was broken
up by the police. It was only in 1903 that a program could
be worked out in the course of which the socialists split. In
1901 the Socialist Revolutionary Party was formed which
worked among the peasants, maintaining the traditions of
the old Populists, the Narodniki, with their connection to
methods of violence.
The split in the Social-Democratic Labor Party of Russia

divided the ranks of that organization into two sections,
one under Martov called Mensheviks, and the other under
Lenin called Bolsheviks. Both groups temporarily came
together in the Revolution of 1905 only to break apart again
immediately afterwards. The Czarist repression grew
fiercer than ever. In 1907 alone, 627 political prisoners were
622
executed; in 1908 the total rose to 702, while 70,000 were
banished, making the total number in exile over 180,000. In
such a crucible, the Bolsheviks were able to fuse their ranks
to the hardness needed by genuine Communists.
Not even the United States was excepted from the rapid
growth of the socialist movement spreading throughout the
world. For one thing, the German emigration, between 1830
and 1848, brought with it many of the artisans and social
revolutionaries, participants in movements at home, who at
once began their propaganda in their new abodes.
William Weitling, for example, arriving in 1849, issued a

paper in 1850, The Republic of the Workingman, and
organized a Central Committee of united trades in New
York. So widespread did his ideas become that "in March,
1850, a mass meeting of Negroes in New York declared
itself in accord with Weitling's ideas of a 'labor-exchange-
bank' ... (*25) In 1852, Weydemeyer launched a magazine
called Revolution.
The Civil War threw many of these German elements into

the conflict on the side of the North, forty to fifty per cent of
all the Turn Vexein members connected with the socialist
groups taking part in the Civil War. However, others of the
socialist sects were quick to notice that the freedom of the
Negro slaves did not mean the end of wage slavery, but
only intensified it.
After the Civil War, there rapidly sprouted the National

Labor Union led by Sylvis, who was the first real native
worker socialist. It soon embraced six hundred and forty
thousand members and connected itself with the First
International. At the same time, in 1867, a Social Party was
formed, giving way in 1871 to the United States section of
the International Workingmen's Association.
623
Simultaneously other groups appeared, all of which
combined together in 1876 to form the Workingmen's Party
of the United States, and in the next year became the
Socialist Labor Party. Of the membership of the Socialist
Labor Party only 10 per cent were native American workers.
The great panic of 1873 imposed upon the workers

extremely miserable conditions. "In the large cities cases of
death from starvation, not only of single individuals, but of
entire families, were reported. During the winter of 1877,
police stations were filled every night with crowds of
workingmen and their families ... Police courts were
besieged by men, women, and children, imploring to be
committed to the workhouse. The number of the
unemployed in the United States was estimated at no less
than 3,000,000." (*26)
As the country emerged from the depression, tremendous

strikes broke out, such as the railway strike of 1877, which
was marked by a great deal of violence. In Pittsburgh, the
workers took over the city and burned in one day 1,600
railroad cars and 120 locomotives. In Maryland, the militia
killed ten rioters, but was then forced to retreat because of
overpowering forces. In Reading, Pennsylvania, the militia
killed thirteen; the workers immediately mobilized and
took command of the city. In St. Louis for a week the city
was controlled by "an executive committee" which in a way
might really be called the first Soviet formed in the United
States. In Chicago, the strike agitation was under the
direction of the National Committee of the S.L.P. under
whom the militant Parsons of Haymarket fame was
especially active.
The agitation of the times affected even the leadership of

the Knights of Labor, so that "In the year 1880 Mr.
Powderly, now the chief of the Knights of Labour, thus
624
expressed himself about strikes: 'I am anxious that each of
our lodges should be provided with powder and shot,
bullets and Winchester rifles, when we intend to strike. If
you strike, the troops are called out to put you down. You
cannot fight with bare hands. You must consider the matter
very seriously, and if we anticipate strikes we must prepare
to fight and to use arms against the forces brought against
us.' " (*27)
Thus it was that about 1879 the membership of the S.L.P.

had grown to ten thousand. Between 1876 and 1877 there
existed twenty-four papers directly or indirectly supported
by the S.L.P.: Eight of these papers were English, one daily
paper in St. Louis and seven weeklies elsewhere; fourteen
of the papers were German, of which seven were dailies.
However, the Socialist Labor Party was not able to hold its
gains. By 1881 revolutionary clubs were emerging within it
which organized themselves into a Left Wing, splitting
away from the S.L.P. and creating in their convention in
Chicago a new "Revolutionary" S.L.P. This new party soon
disappeared. In the next decade the Communist Anarchists
under Johan Most dominated the scene, dramatized by the
Haymarket riots and the May Day general strike in 1886. In
1885 the International Anarchists could count seven
thousand members.
By the last decade of the century it had become clear that

conditions in America were not yet ripe for the formation of
a solid revolutionary socialist organization. The trade
unions, dominated by the skilled workers, were rapidly
moving to a position of close class collaboration with the
imperialists. The Socialist Labor Party could not work even
within the Knights of Labor, and in 1895 DeLeon was
forced to leave the Knights of Labor and to form his own
625
Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance made up of unions that
adhered to the position of the Socialist Labor Party.
At first, the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance was able to

secure the endorsement of the Labor Federation of New
York and of the United Hebrew Trades. At its peak it had
approximately twenty thousand members. But it soon
disintegrated under the pressure of economic conditions
and the sterile policy of the Socialist Labor Party which
made of its unions merely instruments for its own political
ambitions.
The Socialist Labor Party could not work inside the A. F. of

L., which rapidly began to dominate the organized labor
movement. On the other hand, the Socialist Trades and
Labor Alliance was unable itself to organize any such
movement and thus it dwindled until its remnants joined
with other elements, in 1905, to form the I.W.W.
On the political field, too, the Socialist Labor Party was not
able to adopt a consistent policy. In 1880 it supported the
Greenback party. In 1884 it abstained from voting. In 1886 it
supported Henry George. Later on, it indorsed the position
that under no circumstances must it agitate for immediate
demands which were merely palliatives, but rather must
educate for the unconditional surrender of capitalism only.
With such policies, the Socialist Labor Party could not grow
in America.
In 1898 there split away another organization calling itself

the Social Democratic Party. This united with the remnants
of the American Railway Union which had struck in 1893,
under the leadership of Debs, and became in 1901 the
Socialist Party. Thus, from 1901 on, two Socialist political
organizations were in the field --- the Socialist Party and the
Socialist Labor Party ---which have continued with various
626
vicissitudes to eke out an existence in the United States to
the present day.
Footnotes
1. Cited in P. W. Slosson: Work cited, p. 195.
2. K. Marx: "Inaugural Address," given in pamphlet, Outline

of Two Speeches, published by Historical Research Bureau,
Vancouver, B. C., pp. 12-13; also listed as Address and
Provisional Rules of the International Workingmen's
Association (1924, Labour and Socialist International). In this
latter pamphlet the text is somewhat different.
3. "The same pamphlet, p. 15.
4. For the Preamble and Provisional Rules, see G. M.

Steklov: History of the First International, Appendix.
5. It seems that Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner,

American Abolitionists, had also become members of the
International. See, R. W. Postgate: The Workers'
International, p. 35.
6. Postgate: Work cited, p. 16.
7. Marx and Engels: Correspondence, Letter of Engels to

Bebel, p. 327.
8. The Marxists aimed at the conquest of political power;

the Anarchists at its immediate destruction.
627
9. "Within a year Engels had to admit that the Anarchist
International was much stronger than the vestige of the old
International." (G. M. Steklov: History of the First
International, p. 261.)
10. The Bakuninists, however, never recognized this

dissolution, but steadily considered themselves the genuine
International Workingmen's Association.
11. See, Marx and Engels: Correspondence, Letter of Marx to

Bolte, p. 315.
12. K. Marx: Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis- Bonaparte (Kerr

ed.), pp. 14-15.
13. M. Beer: Social Struggles and Modern Socialism, p. 113.
14. Marx and Engels: Correspondence, p. 92, footnote.
15. See, Kirkup: A History of Socialism, p. 84.
16. E. Bernstein: Ferdinand Lassalle, p. 105.
17. See, Marx and Engels; Correspondence, Letter of Marx to

Kugelmann, pp. 193-197.
18. See, K. Marx: The Gotha Program, pamphlet.

Bebel, p. 337.
20. H. W. Laidler: A History of Socialist Thought, p. 229.
21. S. Webb: Socialism in England, pp. 24, 25.
22. The Blanquists operated legally through the "Comit’e

R’evolutionaire Central."
23. H. W. Laidler: .A History of Socialist Thought, p. 358.
628
Vera Zasulich, pp. 437-438.
25. M. Hillquit: History of Socialism in the United States, p. 147.
26. M. Hillquit: work cited, p. 199.
27. H. M. Hyndman: The Chicago Riots, pamphlet, p. 3.
II. THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL
XX. REVISIONISM
THE Second International was the product of two

correlated processes, namely, the rise to leadership within
the labor movement of the modern skilled workman in
large-scale industry, and the shift of the international labor
center to the heavily industrialized countries. From this we
can see how different the Second International was from the
First, and how the Socialists differed from the Anarchists.
We have already noted that, in the middle of the nineteenth

century, when the articulate section of labor was mainly the
artisan and mechanic, the petty bourgeoisie led the radical
and revolutionary movements. Between 1848 and 1870, the
mechanic had his fling; he dominated the Communist
League and the First International and led the way within
revolutionary workers' organizations. The period
culminating in the Paris Commune saw the end of his
hegemony, as his crafts gave way to large-scale production
and the skilled worker took his place.
In the 80's and 90's of the last century, the skilled worker
made his views heard. He had not been able yet to win the
629
concessions and the standards to which he felt he was
entitled. Disgruntled, therefore, he was capable of taking
the lead in widespread strikes to which unskilled laborers
were attached. Through the violence and the savagery of
the unskilled, the skilled workers finally compelled the
employers to arbitrate. Once better conditions were granted
for the skilled, this privileged group was ready to abandon
the unskilled to their fate.
The unskilled, relatively helpless and inarticulate, could not

yet express their own interests or form their own
organizations. Wherever the unskilled moved, it was the
skilled who led, organized, and dominated them, whether
in the Haymarket affairs of the 80's in the United States, in
the American railway strike of the 90's, in the dockworkers'
strike and "New Unionism" in England, or in the
movements of the continent.
It was the modern skilled workmen first understanding

their interests who joined the socialist ranks and flocked
into the socialist parties. If they talked and acted in a
revolutionary manner it was only until the employers were
persuaded sufficiently to accede to their demands. This the
employers were ready to do since, in the imperialist era,
they could well afford to drop a few crumbs from their
loaded table to harness the skilled workers to their interests.
Connected with these skilled workers were large layers of

the petty bourgeoisie who also felt the weight of trustified
capital, who also had been uprooted by the advance of
imperialism and who meant to seek security by attaching
themselves to a militant workers' movement. The petty
bourgeoisie was well aware, especially after 1871, that only
the proletariat could lead the way. Large numbers of white-
collar workers and employees of all sorts affiliated
themselves with the socialist parties. The Socialist parties
630
thus, in the main, were composed of skilled workers
interspersed with considerable numbers of the petty
bourgeoisie. Of course, unskilled workers could not be kept
out entirely from the socialist parties, where they formed a
Left Wing, later to split into communist parties. The
unskilled workers stood for revolution, for the smashing of
the capitalist State.
The socialist movement, therefore, soon found itself with

three distinct Wings. The Right Wing, composed of the
skilled workers and employees, merely wished an
extension of democracy, suffrage, civil liberties, and social
security for themselves, although they bound up their
immediate program with vague theories of ultimate control.
These well-fed workers' sections were content to drift, to
conceive of socialism as a means to perfecting
individualism, as a peaceful, gradual process of social
reform.
The Left Wing expressed the misery and oppression of the

poorest layers of the population, the unskilled workers in
the factories and general laborers. These elements could not
wait. They felt keenly the pressure of capitalism. They
wanted action.
Between these stood the vacillating Centrist faction,

composed of variegated groups of an entirely ephemeral
existence. Capitalism constantly was throwing divers
categories of the skilled and petty bourgeoisie groupings
into the ranks below. Contrariwise, it sometimes raised the
standards of others. Centrism was the reflection of these
movements; it adopted a revolutionary philosophy in
appearance similar to that of the Left Wing, but in reality
closely bound up with the Right Wing that still believed it
had a stake in society and did not wish the immediate and
direct overthrow of capitalism.
631
The struggles between these three wings often led to breaks
in the ranks of the socialists, the schisms assuming different
forms and rates of development according to particular
circumstances. At other times the divisions were only latent.
On the surface, there was unity and harmony only until
severe events tested the party; then the Right and Left
Wings faced each other in deadly combat.
In Russia the split occurred very early, in 1903, and was

never healed. In Germany no split occurred until the World
War. Apparently the orthodox Marxists here dominated the
scene and the Right Wing revisionism of Bernstein was
supported only by a minority. This was, however, but an
illusion. What appeared Left was in reality a Centrist
grouping which had not expelled the revisionists because it
was too close to Bernstein and the other opportunists.
When the critical moment in 1914 came it was found that, in
effect, the Socialist Party was controlled through and
through by the opportunist elements and not by
revolutionary Marxists. In France the split occurred earlier.
The Guesdists represented in their own immature way the
Left Revolutionary Wing; the Jaur'es group, the extreme
Right. However, by 1905 the continued capitalist prosperity
induced both sections to fuse. When the war came in 1914 it
was found in France, too, that the Right Wing
overwhelmingly won the day.
Thus it was throughout the whole Second International.

Vaguely and abstractly the skilled workers talked of
revolution, but they could not carry it through and at every
critical moment their actions were confused and bewildered.
They lost countless opportunities and betrayed their cause
innumerable times. In truth, the skilled workers could not
understand Marxism. They could become opportunist
632
socialists, but they could not reach the level of
revolutionary communism.
In the days of the First International, the advanced workers

were able to see clearly their cause and to enunciate boldly
their general platform for socialism. They had the will to
form conspiratorial groups that would attempt to storm the
heavens. After the defeat in France, and by the time of the
Second International, the will was gone. The skilled worker
had improved his lot considerably and had been separated
cleverly from the mass of rebellious poor. The vanguard
mechanic of the First International, struggling against a
relatively new order and infused with the dramatic fervor
of the revolutions of the past, could conceive that at one
stroke he and his fighting minority could take control of the
State and end the capitalist system. The skilled workers
later on understood far better the enormous weight of the
industrial system pressing on them. They realized that the
revolution was a harder job, indeed, than the earlier
mechanic had imagined and they paled before the task. If
they still talked of revolution and of socialism, the abstract
theory was far removed from the day-to-day practical
reforms suggested.
The Second International was dominated by the proletarian

sections developed in the great industrial countries. Now
Germany took the lead of the world movement; the
backward agrarian countries had to play a secondary role.
The domination of large-scale industry internationally also
accounts for the fact that even in backward agrarian
countries where the artisan and craftsman still play a
considerable part, as in Spain, Italy, etc., the Anarchists can
no longer prevail, and they yield to the Socialists. Only in
Spain does Anarcho-Syndicalism dominate for any length
of time. In Italy, in France and elsewhere, the authoritarians
633
more and more take over the movement. After the middle
of the nineteenth century, the petty bourgeoisie in
prosperous countries had embraced Liberalism, and in
backward agrarian countries discontentedly had turned to
Anarchism; by the end of the nineteenth century, both in
the industrial and in the backward countries, the small
property elements following labor joined the socialist cause
in increasing numbers.
Soon after the formation of the Second International, the

Right Wing mobilized its forces for an open attack against
revolutionary Marxism. Heretofore there had been
piecemeal attacks against the body of Marxist opinions,
coming chiefly from the ranks of the capitalist class but also
from revolutionary elements. Bakunin, for instance, said
that in economics he was a Marxist, but not in politics, and
this was the opinion of some of the syndicalists. Others
maintained that they could not agree with the philosophy
of Marx. Still others disputed the economic theories of Marx,
although agreeing with the program of the class struggle.
It was left to the German Right Wing, under Eduard

Bernstein, who waited until the death of Friedrich Engels
before opening fire, to attack revolutionary Marxism from
top to bottom, from its philosophy to its organization
practices. This German movement to revise Marxism was
given the name of Revisionism and soon became an
international tendency wherever socialism was a force.
While in each country the Revisionists emphasized
different aspects of the struggle and formulated their
attacks to meet national peculiarities, nevertheless, as a
whole, they were united on the basic propositions laid
down by Bernstein. (*1)
634
Bernstein commenced battle with an attack against the
theory of dialectical materialism, proposing instead the
claims of the Kantian school of agnostics then flourishing in
Germany. To Bernstein there was no inevitability or "must"
in history. Socialism would come gradually, through
education, and as an ethical "ought." The Socialists should
therefore appeal to ethics and to concepts of justice to attain
their needs. The correct interpretation of history was not
historical materialism, but rather the eclecticism which
made economic forces only one of a number of equally
important efficient causes in procuring events. Ideas and
ideals played a role equal to material factors.
Since socialism was not inevitable, it was not correct to

stress the final aim of socialism in the propaganda of the
Socialist. One should never pretend to know final aims, hut
only the current events. And with the slogan, Movement is
everything, the final aim of socialism nothing, Bernstein
attempted to restrict the Socialists to social reform and to
day-to-day demands to improve their lot. They must not
struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the
establishment of an entirely new system of society.
Bernstein then proceeded to attack the economics of Marx.

The theory of value as labor was to him misleading and
abstract; he preferred the Austrian school of economics
which stressed psychology and the subjective factors of
consumption rather than employed the objective criteria of
the labor school. Here again Bernstein moved away from
labor to express the subjective vacillations of the petty
bourgeoisie, and tried his best to conceal the creation of
surplus value from the exploitation of the workers by the
capitalists. The class struggle, therefore, had no economic
foundation.
635
But it had been not merely the statical analysis of political
economy as laid down by Marx which Bernstein scorned.
Above all, the dynamic laws of motion which Marx had
revealed came in for his greatest attack. Marx had predicted
that the gap between the capitalists and the workers would
widen and that the strain on all social relations would
increase to a bursting point culminating in cataclysmic
revolution. Bernstein attempted a systematic refutation of
this position. He declared, first, that capitalism was getting
better and better. The workers were improving their
standards. The middle class was not decreasing as Marx
had predicted, but increasing. "It is thus quite wrong to
assume that the present development of society shows a
relative or indeed absolute diminution of the number of the
members of the possessing classes. Their number increases
both relatively and absolutely." Bernstein denied that
agriculture showed a standing still or a direct retrogression
in regard to the use of holdings. He further called attention
to the widespread distribution of stocks, bonds, and profit-
sharing schemes of all sorts, in which sections of the
workers were sharing. Thus, as regarding both industry
and agriculture, Marx's forecast of the withering away of
the older elements of the middle class was incorrect. Here
again Bernstein idealized the lower middle classes.
To Bernstein, cartels and monopolies, coupled with the

extension of credit, were making crises less and less severe
and steadily reducing their effects, Capitalism could be
controlled, crises foreseen and mitigated and finally
abolished. In a period of rising general prosperity, how
ridiculous seemed Marx's prognoses of calamities!
Such views in economics existed side by side with

corresponding opinions as to politics. Bernstein would have
nothing to do with the idea of revolution or insurrection.
636
The term, "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was to him an
unfortunate phrase which must be dropped. The Socialist
movement should not attack the Liberals too severely.
Indeed, Socialism was but the legitimate heir of Liberalism
and continued the tasks of that great historical movement.
Liberalism was no obstacle to Socialism, but a good starting
point. "There is actually no real liberal thought which does
not also belong to the elements of the ideas of socialism."
Socialism could be called "organizing Liberalism" because
Socialism, too, freed the individual who must be the basic
starting point.
The conquest of power which the workers were to

undertake was conceived as being accomplished in two
opposing ways, by the path of parliamentary contention,
turning the right to vote to good account, or by the path of
plots and revolution. Marx and Engels had taken the latter
path clearly; Bernstein could only take the former.
Democracy was not a type of class State, but was above all
classes and was the indication of a social condition wherein
political privilege belongs to no one class as opposed to the
whole community. "The right to vote in a democracy makes
its members virtual partners in the community, and this
virtual partnership must in the end lead to real
partnership."
Bernstein was willing to admit that in preceding eras

violence had been necessary; for example, the rigid feudal
organizations of the old regime had to be destroyed by
violence. But the flexible Liberal organizations of the
nineteenth century did not need violence to effect necessary
changes. A revolutionary dictatorship was totally
unnecessary. In his espousal of the Commune, Marx had
exposed himself as only following the petty bourgeois
Proudhon in his attack against the French State. The State
637
was not to be attacked and overthrown. It was to be won
over to socialism gradually and peacefully, labor being able
to use the State for its own purposes. Like Lassalle,
Bernstein did not believe that the State was to wither away
or that all government was dictatorship.
Along with his idea that the revolution was far away and
must come peacefully, Bernstein expounded a theory that
the working class was not a homogeneous group, since
many workers had property, and the skilled workers were
widely divorced from the unskilled. Neither the skilled nor
the unskilled had sufficient training as yet to manage the
factories. If socialism meant that the workers were to take
over the factories and run them, then it meant, too, that
they should learn how to manage them under the period of
capitalism. The workers needed a long apprenticeship in
economic management. This could be secured through the
co-operative and trade union movements. Thus, against the
need of insurrection Bernstein put forth the practice of
functioning in co-operatives and trade unions. The trade
unions were not armies of men to help destroy capitalism.
"The trade unions are the democratic element in industry.
Their tendency is to destroy the absolutism of capital, and
to procure for the worker a direct influence in the
management of industry." The trade unions, then, were to
co-operate with the employer, gradually to obtain a share in
the management of industry.
Above all, Bernstein praised the co-operative for training

the worker for the responsibilities of management. He took
advantage of the fact that in the First International, Marx, in
order to win the divers elements to his side, in the
beginning had praised the co-operative movement and had
recommended to workmen that they embark upon co-
operative production rather than the establishment of co-
638
operative stores, since the latter touched only the surface of
the economic system, while the first struck at its
foundations. (*2) The co-operatives provided the steps
whereby the workers would learn how to manage property;
to be, not only little storekeepers, but foremen and
technicians in productive schemes to be established. These
producers' co-operatives would gradually grow into a
Socialist system.
It was not equitable, according to Revisionism, for the

Socialists to advocate that the workers take over the
factories without paying the employers. Expropriation
without compensation was robbery. It was against Kantian
ethics. Eschewing all such violent tactics, the Social
Democratic Party would increase in power only if it
appeared openly what it really was, namely, a democratic
Socialist Party. Here Bernstein made an extremely vital
criticism of the German Social Democrats, exposing the fact
that the leaders of the Party were really in agreement with
him, that they really stood for reform and not for revolution,
and that they, too, believed that Marx had been far too
much a slave to doctrine and to document and was really
utopian in essential points. They, too, agreed, at bottom,
that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat meant a dictatorship
of club orators and writers, and that the evolutionary way
was far better than the revolutionary way.
As Bernstein himself put it, the difference between him and

the official leadership under Kautsky was that he spoke
what he believed openly and did not hide behind an
apparent agreement with the orthodox views of Marx. Thus
Bernstein could raise his famous slogan, "For Kant against
cant!" Time was to show that here, indeed, Bernstein was
one hundred per cent correct, and that the very people who
defended Marxist revolutionary ideas were only reformists
639
in disguise. Ironically enough, this was to be proven at the
very moment when Bernstein had recanted and declared
that the events of the World War had thoroughly justified
Marx's position.
How correct was Bernstein's estimate of the others was to

be seen in certain practical questions that came up before
the German Party. Marx had declared that the proletariat
had no fatherland. Bernstein argued this might have been
true in 1847 when the workers had no vote, but it was not
true now. Not only should the German workers defend the
Fatherland, but they should strive to obtain colonies such as
those in China, in order to protect the Chinese from the lack
of culture of other countries. In defense of his position,
Bernstein pointed out that the very leadership of the
German Social Democracy was in agreement with him.
Bebel had openly declared that in case of attack by Russia,
German Social Democracy would rally for the defense of
Germany. The so-called Marxist, Hyndman, in England had
argued in the same way in behalf of the British navy.
Thus Bernstein could prove that, in these policies, the

official leaders of the Socialist parties in the Second
International were really knifing their own revolutionary
program, but, since their practical politics was correct, in
self-justification they would have to adopt the theories of
Revisionism which alone were inextricably intertwined
with their daily opportunism.
The theories of Revisionism dominated the socialist

movement in practically all of the important countries of
640
Western Europe and America. In France, the leader of the
United Socialist Party was the opportunist, Jean Jaur'es.
Understanding well the weight of the revolutionary past of
the French, Jaur'es could not deny the value of the theory of
insurrection. It was not for him to reject the glorious
traditions of Babeouf and Blanqui which were cherished so
dearly by the French workingman. Rather, Jaur’es
undertook to show that conditions in 1906 were no longer
the same as they were in Marx's time. "Today, the definite
form under which Marx, Engels, and Blanqui conceived the
proletarian revolution has been eliminated by history. In
the first place, the proletariat in its increased strength has
ceased to count on the favorable chance of a bourgeois
revolution. . . . It is not lying in wait for a bourgeois
revolution in order to throw the bourgeoisie down from its
revolution.... It has its own organization, and its own
power.... It is not reduced to being an adventurous and
violent parasite on bourgeois revolutions. It is methodically
preparing, or better, it is methodically beginning, its own
Revolution, by the gradual and legal conquest of the power
of production and the power of the State. . . . The
revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie is over." (*3)
"Henceforward, middle class revolutionary action being

over, all violent means employed by the proletariat would
result only in uniting against it all non-proletarian forces.
And that is why I have always interpreted a general strike,
not as a method of violence, but as one of the most gigantic
means of legal pressure that the educated and organized
proletariat could bring to bear for great and definite ends."
(*4)
Thus, to the flexible Jaur’es, the general strike could not be

for a seizure of power, nor for socialism, but only to bring
legal pressure upon parliament for immediate reforms. The
641
general strike was merely to be a warning to the ruling class
to make concessions; it was powerless as a revolutionary
method. Nothing could free socialism from the necessity of
winning over the majority of the nation by propaganda and
legal methods. Above all, since the days of bourgeois
revolution were over, it was unthinkable that the proletariat
should conduct one in its own name.
The fears of Jaur'es directly reflected the fact that in France

the proletariat did not compose a majority of the population.
He believed that the decisive elements were the petty
bourgeoisie, especially the peasants. He conjured up before
his eyes the terrific defeat that the workers had received in
the Paris Commune through the fact that the bourgeoisie
early was able to win the petty bourgeoisie to its side and to
throw the countryside against the city. Jaur'es wanted to
placate the petty bourgeoisie, the middle class public,
believing that in this way only could the workers advance
their interests. His particular opportunist theory, therefore,
had much to do with the specific conditions existing in
France.
The German opportunists, on the other hand, were much

opposed to the general strike altogether. Jaur'es could
conclude that the general strike should be not merely
economic for demands against employers, but also political,
as a pressure against the State; the German opportunists
were against the general strike in any form. In France, the
task was to lay down a theory that would control the
general strike, limiting it only to pressure against the State
and preventing it from either smashing the State or
establishing Socialism. In Germany, the opportunists felt
that the working class was so powerful that the general
strike could not be limited or controlled easily. Once
launched, even for economic demands, it would proceed
642
logically to its revolutionary end of overthrowing the State
and building a new society. Besides there was not in
Germany, as in France, that spontaneity of action leading to
the demand for the general strike.
The voice of Jaur'es was heard by the socialists in Belgium

and in Scandinavia. There the opportunist socialists took
advantage of the general strike movement of the workers to
lead the strike in order to control it. Under their
management the general strikes were merely for suffrage,
for extension of workers' democratic rights, or for some
immediate reform.
It was the general opinion of even the opportunists that,

where Liberalism was not allowed to flourish and where
despotic absolutism not yet had been overthrown by the
bourgeois democratic revolution, there the Socialists could
legitimately advocate violent measures of procedure. In
Russia, the opportunist socialists were also in favor of
revolutionary action against the Czar, the difference
between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks consisting not
so much in their efforts to overthrow Czarism, as in their
relationship to the capitalist class and its Liberal ideologies.
Contrary to the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks took the
position that it was the role of the Socialists to act as the
coolies for the Liberals, to help them usher in capitalism in
Russia. The proletariat was entirely too weak to take over
power. Once capitalism was established in Russia, then the
same peaceful evolutionary methods should be used by the
working class as were proposed for other countries by
Bernstein and other Socialists.
The struggle between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks,

however, was not merely a struggle as to what each would
do in the future if and when Czarism was overthrown. The
differences of perspective and program of the two groups
643
led to entirely opposite tactics and organizational principles.
Indeed, the split that occurred in 1903 between the
opportunist Mensheviks and the revolutionary Bolsheviks
was first of all on questions of organization which
developed into questions of tactics, strategy, and program.
The defeat of the Russian revolution after 1905 brought the

differences between the two groups to a head; from then on
the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, both calling themselves
Social Democrats, veered farther apart until, in 1917, they
were to be found on the opposite sides of the barricades.
However, the Mensheviks always contained in their ranks a

considerable number of Left Socialists who later on were to
take an internationalist position. Between this Left group
and the Bolsheviks was an intermediary Centrist layer of
which the best expression was Leon Trotsky. In the 1905
Revolution this Centrist element played an exceedingly
important role, Leon Trotsky becoming the virtual head of
the first Soviet, formed in St. Petersburg. That the leading
representatives of the Soviet could be Centrist was natural,
considering the transition stage of the revolutionary
movement at the time. Few were prepared for actual
insurrection, all the limitations of a peaceful general strike
had become thoroughly exposed. As Rosa Luxemburg
wrote at the time from Warsaw: "Everywhere people are
hesitant and in a state of expectancy. The reason for all this
is the simple circumstance that the mere general strike
alone has ceased to play the role it once had. Now nothing
but a direct general fight on the street can bring about the
decision, but for this the right moment must be prepared
more carefully." (*5) Rosa Luxemburg, who, apparently,
was closer to the Bolsheviks than to the Trotsky Centrists,
declared that precisely in St. Petersburg, where Trotsky was
at the head, the direction of revolutionary forces was
644
entirely inadequate. The insurrectionary flare-up occurred
not in St. Petersburg, but in Moscow.
During the years of bitter repression, Trotsky's vacillations

between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks took a decided
trend to the Right. This was revealed in the discussions of
1911 regarding the proposal for a joint conference of
Russian Social Democracy. "Our friend Trotzki is revealing
himself more and more as a bad actor.... He insults the
Bolsheviks and the Poles directly as 'party of splitters' but
has not one syllable to utter against Martov's pamphlet
against Lenin, which surpasses anything that has ever
existed in point of meanness and baseness and which
evidently aims at splitting the party." (*6)
In the United States where, by 1912, the Socialist Party had

attained a membership of approximately one hundred and
eighteen thousand, the controlling element was the
machine headed by Morris Hillquit. To Hillquit, the State
must never wither away but must take on a socialist
character. "The modern state, originally the tool in the
hands of the capitalist class for the exploitation of the
workers, is gradually coming to be recognized by the latter
as a most potent instrument for the modification and
ultimate abolition of the capitalist class rule." (*7)
In the more democratic countries the necessary transitional

reforms towards socialism were to be carried out gradually.
Violence was only an accident of the social revolution; it
was by no means its necessary accompaniment and it had
no place in the socialist program. In line with this, the
Socialist Party was completely silent on the question of
whether to compensate the capitalists for their property or
to confiscate without compensation. The Socialist Party in
645
1912 also expelled from its ranks all those who adhered to
the precepts of the I. W. W., which included belief in the
efficacy of revolution by force through the general strike
and through the tactics of sabotage. The opportunist
bureaucracy went to extreme lengths to place its finger on
militant elements so as to expose them to the police. The I.
W. W. to them was composed of scum, slum elements filled
with agents provocateurs and police spies, whose sole game
was to discredit the regular socialists.
The approach of the Socialist Party was well illustrated in

its National Platform of 1904 where it appealed to the
American people as the only movement whereby the liberty
of the individual could become a fact. In its platform of
1908, it declared: "In this battle for freedom the Socialist
Party does not strive to substitute working class rule for
capitalist class rule, but by working class victory, to free all
humanity from class rule and to realize the international
brotherhood of man." (*8) By such formulas the Socialist
Party entirely avoided the question of the necessity of the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
In its platforms the Socialist Party called for the enactment

of a series of immediate demands which included such
items as revision of the Constitution to give greater
democracy to the people, the public ownership of trusts
and utilities, reduction of hours, public works for the
unemployed, inventions to be freely used by all, the
abolition of patent rights and monopolies, and national
labor legislation. Only in 1912 did the Socialist Party begin
to include a demand for collective ownership, which to
them meant public ownership by the State, and democratic
management.
In its immediate demands the Socialist Party by no means

separated itself from the Welfare-Liberalism or Radicalism
646
prevalent at the time. For example, in 1912, the National
Platform of the Progressive Party, headed by Theodore
Roosevelt, came out for almost as many of the immediate
reforms as the Socialists, and declared, "Behind the
ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible
government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no
responsibility to the people." (*9)
Similarly, in 1920, the National Platform of the Farmer

Labor Party formulated a program as radical as that
advanced by the Socialist Party of that year. It affirmed that
a condition of economic servitude existed in the United
States, where wealth was monopolized by a few; all power
must be restored again to the people. It called for a repeal of
criminal syndicalist laws and other wartime legislation. It
demanded the abolition of imperialism at home and abroad,
and the immediate recognition of the elected governments
of the republics of Ireland and of Soviet Russia, the
embargo on arms against these peoples to be immediately
lifted. It urged the self-determination of all nations, and the
withdrawal of American armed forces from the colonies
controlled by the United States. It advocated democratic
control of industry and the right of labor to an increasing
share in the responsibilities and management of business,
application of this principle to be developed in accordance
with the experience of actual operation. It urged public
ownership and operation. It demanded justice for the
soldiers and a complete bill of rights for labor. (*10)
Compared to this, the tone of the Socialist Party platform of

the same year was relatively milder, the platform
addressing itself particularly "to all citizens who believe in
political liberty and social justice." The Socialist Party
platform did not mention the lifting of an embargo against
Soviet Russia and Ireland. It did not go to the length of
647
proposing that the workers manage the industries, but
called only for workers' administration jointly with that of
the government. Such nationalized industries were to be
run, not for the benefit of the working class, but merely to
give "'Just compensation and humane conditions of
unemployment to the workers and efficient and reasonable
service to the public." (*11)
This situation was an adequate illustration of the type of

Socialist parties that dominated the Second International. In
fact, it was not socialism in the Marxian sense that they
conceived, but at best, a sort of State socialism, and at worst,
a pure and simple State capitalism with some degree of
workers' control.
Having fulfilled their duty by stating in their program that

they adhered to the view that they desired the end of
capitalism, the Socialists then completely divorced their
program from their day-to-day activity. There was no
connecting link between the daily practice and the ultimate
theoretical goal. Thus, the present was cut off entirely from
the future, and the working class was given a narrow,
provincial, nationalist point of view, whereupon each
group fought for its own immediate self-interest rather than
for the enduring interests of the international working class
as a whole.
In short, the First International was an international of

program; the Socialist parties of the Second International
were organizations interested mainly in tactics, that is, they
were groups concentrating entirely upon the petty current
struggle for immediate better conditions, and, in this day-
today conflict, the Socialists revealed themselves as no
better than the Welfare-Liberal Radicals. In fact, the
Socialist parties were Welfare-Liberal parties in the ranks of
648
labor to the programs of which was attached a Socialist
ideal to distinguish them from the ordinary Liberals.
The value of the Second International consisted in that it

attempted to organize large masses of workers and to give
them the inspiration of struggling for socialism. The world
was not yet ready for the international working class to
embrace insurrection in its own right. The bourgeois
democratic revolution was over, except in such countries as
Russia; the period of proletarian revolution had not yet
begun. In the interim, only the skilled workers were
articulating their needs; behind them the unskilled workers
were confusedly groping their way.
This transition period adequately was reflected in the

structure and functioning of the Second International which
was entirely limited by the class composition that filled its
ranks, and by the material conditions of the time.
Militarism had not yet let loose the mighty destructiveness
of the World War to compel workers to action. Capitalism
had not as yet matured sufficiently to allow the vast masses
in the basic industries of the country to express themselves
with their own programs and in their own organizations. It
was evident that sooner or later a new international
grouping would have to be formed, a grouping that would
be able to connect theory with practice, to round out the
program, to reach genuine communist levels, to develop the
tactics into a system of struggle, not for palliatives to lull
skilled workers to sleep, but for such concessions as would
deepen and broaden the class struggle to its highest point.
Above all, there would have to arise an International that

would be able to connect the tactics of the present with the
program of the future by means of an adequate strategy.
This strategy could appear only in an era when there would
be placed before the revolutionary workers of the world the
649
question of revolutionary action as the sole method to solve
their immediate problems, when workers would not be able
to win reforms except by revolution. Such a period could
not. come before the war.
The Second International was formed in 1889. In that year

two separate congresses were called in Paris. One was
made up of British trade unions and French Possibilists; the
other comprised the Guesdists, the German party, the
Socialist Labor Party, etc. Shortly, both Congresses were
induced to meet together and to fuse into one. They then
indorsed the eight-hour day, recognition of May Day as an
international holiday, and later, the establishment of an
international labor code. Other congresses were held in
Paris, 1891, Zurich, 1893, and London, 1896. In the course of
this period the Socialist Parties were gradually
systematizing their program and practical activities. As the
congresses developed, they decided to include not only
Socialist parties but trade unions as well; the Anarchists,
however, were excluded.
In taking in the trade unions, the Socialists believed that

they were following the line of Marx and the First
International. This was not the case, however. It will be
recalled that the trade unions in the First International had
been given officially the standing of "affiliated" bodies only
and not of members, unless the local unions were at the
same time regular sections of the International. The
decision to accept the reformist trade unions into
membership was all the more inexcusable when we
consider the difference in proletarian development in the
1890's as compared with 1864. In 1864 the working class
was but beginning to be aroused; the Marxist had no other
line open to him but to form such a body as the First
650
International and patiently work within it. By the end of the
nineteenth century the situation was entirely different,
powerful Socialist bodies existing in many important
European countries.
The inclusion of the trade unions into the International

meant that the International was not to be a revolutionary
body in fact but a loose organization for immediate better
conditions for the workers. This was seen also when the
Second International permitted the British Labor Party to
join, since prior to the World War the British Labor Party,
while looking in the direction of socialism, had never
officially committed itself to the socialist position.
Thus the Second International contained, on the one side,

such elements as those represented by Lenin, or by Rosa
Luxemburg, and on the other side, such groups as the
British Labor Party and trade union reformists. Naturally,
the Second International could not be a centralized
disciplined body with full authority in its central committee.
Instead, the Secretariat became a mere international letter-
box, and the congresses represented futile discussion
centers where resolutions could be adopted but no
authority established. These resolutions were relatively
unimportant since the national Socialist Parties had
complete independence in everything. Thus the congresses
could express the sentiment of various parties, but by no
means could organize international action.
Here, too, we see a great distinction between the First and

the Second International. The First International had
erected an authoritative center that had attempted to
centralize all groups and to formulate a uniform
international policy. The Second International made no
such effort. International solidarity was reduced to a
minimum so that it was easy at the outbreak of the World
651
War for people who had cheered each other in Socialist
Congresses literally the day before to shoot each other
down when the war broke out.
The Socialist leaders of the Second International were able

to build trade unions of skilled workers everywhere and to
unite them in a separate international center. After several
attempts, there was established in 1901 through the
International Secretariat of Trade Unions a trade union
center which convoked a number of congresses: in 1901 in
Copenhagen, in 1902 in Stuttgart, and in 1903 in Dublin,
where the Secretariat was formally organized. Other
congresses were held in 1905 in Amsterdam, 1907 in
Christiania, 1909 in Paris, 1911 in Budapest, and 1913 in
Zurich. In the last congress, the organization was renamed
the International Federation of Trade Unions.
Only in 1910 did the American Federation of Labor join the

International Federation. It demonstrated its Americanism
by taking an extremely reactionary stand on almost all
questions that appeared before the Congress. Its chief role
was to denounce the I. W. W., to denounce French
Revolutionary Syndicalism, to denounce the general strike,
to denounce anti-militarism. It opposed the Socialist
International. It fought against the separate admission of
Canada, believing that country should be represented
through the A. F. of L. Its sole effort was to prevent cheap
European labor from attaining the shores of America and
reducing the standards which the A. F. of L. had won for
itself. The stand of the A. F. of L. during these years was
marked by a complete lack of international solidarity.
Following its own bourgeoisie, the A. F. of L. officialdom
refused to concern itself with European affairs any further
than to touch them with the extreme tips of its fingers and
to keep them at arms' length.
652
A considerable number of important questions came up
before the Socialist International for discussion at its
congresses. These questions revolved around the
discussions on war and on Socialist participation in
capitalist governments. Millerand was discussed in the
Amsterdam Congress of 1904, which had followed the Paris
Congress of 1900.
Three positions were put forward. On the one hand, Jaur'es

and the Right Wing unequivocally endorsed the position of
the Socialists in the government, even as exemplified by
Millerand, where Socialists had to sit in the same Cabinet
with the very General,who had taken the lead in shooting
them down. Certainly, if Socialism was merely a
continuation of Liberalism, then it was correct to form such
a coalition government on the theory of gradually
reforming the State until it became transformed in a
Socialist direction.
On the extreme Left was the revolutionary position

expressed in the opinion of Engels, who had advised the
Italian Party to ally itself with the Radicals for the
establishment of a republic or a bourgeois democracy, but
under no consideration to take part in the government; as
soon as the united forces were victorious, the Socialists
were to break with their former allies and to form an
opposition at once. Engels wrote: "After the common
victory we might perhaps be offered some seats in the new
government --- but always in a minority. Here lies the greatest
danger. After the February Revolution in 1848 the French
socialistic Democrats (the R’eforme people, Ledru Rollin,
Louis Blanc, Flocon, etc.) were incautious enough to accept
such positions. As a minority in the Government they
involuntarily bore the, responsibility for all the infamy and
treachery which the majority, composed of pure
653
Republicans, committed against the working class; at the
same time their participation in the government completely
paralyzed the revolutionary action of the working class
they were supposed to represent." (*12)
Daniel DeLeon of the Socialist Labor Party, as well as

Guesde of the French Socialists, took a leading part in
complete opposition to the idea of Socialists joining with
the capitalists in government.
Between these groups was the opposition of such elements

as that represented by Kautsky, who was head of the
German Party and in reality was head of the Second
International. Kautsky took the position that one cannot
give any absolute answer to the question of socialist
participation in bourgeois governments; it all depended on
concrete circumstances. By means of this vague formulation,
therefore, Kautsky evaded the concrete question of the
specific circumstances in France which had led to the
betrayal of Socialist principles by Millerand. He evaded
also the question of whether parties which stood for
participation in bourgeois governments in such a manner as
to destroy in effect the whole revolutionary essence of the
movement could have a place in the Second International.
In abstract phrase, it seemed that Kautsky had formulated
correctly the revolutionary position. In reality, he concealed
his alliance with the Right Wing, permitting the latter to
flourish and to dominate the policies of the Second
International.
Thus, in 1907, the Socialist Fabian Society could approve of

the British government's rough tactics in putting down the
British railway strike. Thus, too, former French Socialists
could break the general strike of the French railroad
workers in 1910 by calling workers to the colors and
threatening to shoot them as mutinous soldiers if they
654
refused to work on the trains. The same Socialists who were
so eager for peaceful methods proved themselves
exceedingly ferocious against the workers once the
opportunists were a part of the capitalist machinery. The
Second International was democratic enough, evidently, to
contain both revolutionists and police agents.
The question of war became increasingly important as the

twentieth century advanced and was the chief topic
discussed in the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 and the
Copenhagen Congress of 1910. The demands upon which
all were united included the abolition of standing armies,
the limitation of armaments, publication of all treaties,
international arbitration, a referendum vote of the people
before war be declared or carried on. Socialists agreed also
to refuse to vote for any war credits. At this point, however,
sharp disagreement began to arise as each nationalist group
began to defend its "Fatherland."
In 1907, owing especially to the activity of Lenin and

Luxemburg, a militant resolution was adopted declaring
that the Socialists must "do all in their power" to prevent
war and to wipe out war by abolishing capitalism. At the
same Congress, however, the proposal for a general strike
in case of war was voted down, as was the proposal for
armed insurrection.
Thus, in phrases, the Second International adopted a

militant resolution which could retain the loyalty of such
communist elements as those represented by Lenin and
Luxemburg. In actual concrete application, however, it
refused to go even as far as the First International had gone
in 1868, that is, to refuse to lay down the specific militant
action of general strike or, armed insurrection. The Right
Wing, therefore, lost nothing but a debate; in reality it won
the day. In the meantime, a specious unity between the two
655
irreconcilable Wings could be maintained, a unity
irrevocably shattered by the war mobilizations of 1914.
The Socialists of the Second International declared that they

were not bound to oppose a defensive war where a country
was defending itself against an aggressor. However, it was
entirely unable to define just what is a defensive war, and
in practice the slogan: "No opposition to a defensive war,"
played right into the hands of the imperialist militarists the
world over. When the World War came, Socialists found
themselves killing each other in the name of national
defense and of Socialism. With the World War, the Second
International collapsed.
Footnotes
1. All Revisionist opinions and quotations following are

from E. Bernstein: Evolutionary Socialism.
2. This was the view of the Geneva Conference of the First

International, 1866.
3. Jean Jaur’es: Studies in Socialism, pp. 59-61.
4. The same, pp. 62-63.
5. Luise Kautsky: Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 98.
6. The same, pp. 160-161.
7. M. Hillquit: Socialism in Theory and Practice, p. 98.
8. For a reprint of the Platform see K. H. Porter: National

Party Platforms, pp. 313-319.
9. For the platform see K. H. Porter, the same, pp. 334-349.
10. The same, pp. 435-442.
656
11. The same, p. 470.

Turati, p. 523.
XXI. SECTARIANISM
OFFICIALLY, the chief parties of the Second International,

such as the German, tended to repudiate revisionism and in
phrases to uphold the orthodox views of revolutionary
Marxism. In practice, however, the Right Wing had its way,
the orthodox, like Kautsky, really occupying a Centrist
position. Besides these two factions, there was a so-called
revolutionary Left Wing composed of supposedly
intransigent fighters. When closely analyzed, however, the
Left Wing was seen to be made up, in the main, of two
entirely different elements, a group really on the road to
communism, typified by Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg,
and perhaps certain groups of internationalists and
maximalists, and another group of sectarians symbolized
by such leaders as Guesde in France, DeLeon in the United
States, and Hyndman in England. The two sections of the
Left had really very little in common. We shall treat the
activity of those represented by Lenin under Communism.
They were of relatively secondary influence within the
Second International. Those who shouted most loudly
about being true revolutionists were the sectarians.
The sectarians in the Second International were as unable to

utilize Marx's dialectics as were the other revisionists and
centrists. Indeed it could be said of the entire Left Wing that
the mere fact that they could remain within the Second
International and hail those who supported such elements
657
as Millerand and others as their comrades was eloquent
testimony of their immature character. The non-Marxist
views of the sectarian Left were to be seen on every front of
the struggle.
In philosophy, for example, many were confused on the

question of dialectical materialism, some of them going the
way of neo-Kantianism. Kautsky had opened up the official
paper of the German Socialist Party to all philosophical
opinions, and displayed considerable tolerance to various
schools of agnosticism. Many of the sectarians had no fault
to find with this, Daniel DeLeon in the United States, for
example, declaring that religion was not a party affair but a
personal matter. (*1) It is true that to DeLeon the Catholic
Church was not a religion but a political organization and
had to be attacked as such, but to draw a distinction
between church and religion was to tolerate precisely the
point of view of the Right Wing that religionists of all sorts
had a place in socialist ranks where they could argue for
Socialism, not from the scientific point of view, but from the
religious, ethical, and idealistic angles. Thus the party was
to be neutral on religious and philosophical questions and
not to take a positive position for dialectical materialism.
This evasion of philosophy, however, meant an escape from
scientific method and was bound insidiously to affect the
whole program of the revolutionary party.
Only Lenin, practically alone, demanded that the Party take

a stand on questions of philosophy, and refused to declare
that religion was not a party matter. The State, even the
workers' State, of course, was not to abolish religion by
force, since such superstitions would gradually wither
away as socialism proceeded. The Party, however, was not
the State. The Party program was an epitome of proletarian
science and could not tolerate as its creators any active
658
agent propagating mysticism and obscurantist prejudices of
this or that supernatural faith. Lenin called for an expulsion
of such people from the Social Democratic Party.
The Right Wing, of course, would never play up Marx's

statement that religion was the opium of the people, the
idealistic counterpart of alcoholism, needed to besot and
befuddle the masses so that they could not struggle in this
world. The Right made no analysis of the relation of
religious institutions to the class struggle, and they
permitted inside of their ranks religious preachers of all
sorts. While the sectarian Left Wing disagreed with this
mode of approach, it tolerated such an attitude not only
when appearing in the ranks of the Right Wing, but to some
extent even within its own midst. This was summarized in
the statement that religion is not a Party matter.
On questions of historical materialism, the sectarian Left

Wing tended too much to a mechanical materialist
approach and did not consider sufficiently the secondary
social forces which joined together to contribute to a given
historical result. It was of them that Engels was speaking
when he wrote: "Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame
for the fact that younger writers sometimes lay more stress
on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasize
this main principle in opposition to our adversaries, who
denied it, and we had not always the time, the place, or the
opportunity to allow the other elements involved in the
interaction to come into their rights." (*2)
To correct the mechanical viewpoint of the Left Wing,

Engels wrote: "According to the materialist conception of
history, the determining element in history is ultimately the
production and reproduction in real life. More than this
neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore
somebody twists this into the statement that the economic
659
element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a
meaningless, abstract, and absurd phrase. The economic
situation is the basis, but the various elements of the
superstructure-political forms of the class struggle and its
consequences, constitutions established by the victorious
class after a successful battle, etc. --- forms of law --- and
then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the
brains of the combatants. political, legal, philosophical
theories, religious ideas and their further development into
systems of dogma --- also exercise their influence upon the
course of the historical struggles and in many cases
preponderate in determining their form. There is an
interaction of all these elements, in which, amid all the
endless host of accidents (i.e., of things and events whose
inner connection is so remote or so impossible to prove that
we regard it as absent and can neglect it), ,the economic
movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the
application of the theory of any period of history one chose
would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of
the first degree." (*3)
On questions of economics the sectarians again took a

mechanical and too simplified position. Agreeing with the
theory of Marx as to the general law of accumulation of
capital and the driving out of the old middle classes, they
tended to view the process as entirely completed, and failed
to make sufficient efforts to win to their side middle class
elements such as the peasants, which still played an
important part in social action. (*4) Thus they fell into the
error of conceiving that all those not in the ranks of labor
were one reactionary mass against labor. They were unable
to adopt the position on the peasant question that Engels
had worked out for them. . . And indeed we stand
decidedly on the side of the small peasant; we will do
everything in any way admissible to make his lot more
660
bearable, to facilitate his transition to the co-operative. . . .
We do this, not only because we regard the small peasant
who does his own work as virtually belonging to us, but
also in the direct interests of the Party. The greater the
number of peasants whom we can save from actual
downfall into the proletariat and win for ourselves while
they are still peasants, the more rapidly and easily will the
social revolution take place. It can be of no service to us if
we are obliged to wait for this transformation until
capitalist production has developed itself everywhere up to
its final consequences.... It is the duty of our Party to make
clear to the peasants over and over again the absolute
hopelessness of their position while capitalism rules. . . ."
(*5)
In fact, as a general rule, so much were the Left sectarians

impressed by Marx's cataclysmic theory that they seemed
to believe that the end of capitalism would come of its own
accord, that capitalism would collapse of its own weight.
This led to a fatalist attitude that induced these parties not
to struggle for immediate conditions but simply to wait for
and propagandize the coming revolution.
Those who fought for immediate demands were considered

as opportunists, Right Wingers, who wished to have the
capitalist grant a few more crumbs to the workers so as to
bribe them from struggle. While this criticism was indeed
true regarding the Right Wing, the intransigents failed to
see that this refraining from participation in the day-to-day
struggles of the workers turned them into sterile sectarians,
completely futile, and as far removed from revolutionary
activity on the one hand as the Right Wing was on the other.
As inadequate as Bernstein, they acted as though the word
was everything, the movement nothing. They laid down
ultimatums to the masses and were proud of being called
661
"impossibilists," that is, people who had no concerns in
getting as much as possible under the circumstances. They
demanded all or nothing and they got nothing. It was in
answer to such types that Engels had written, using the
American situation as a concrete example: "It is far more
important that the movement should spread, proceed
harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible
the whole American proletariat, than that it should start
and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly
correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness
of comprehension than 'durch Schaden klug werden' [to learn
by one's own mistakes]. And for a whole large class, there is
no other road, especially for a nation so eminently practical
as the Americans. The great thing is to get the working-
class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon
find the right direction, and all who resist, H. G. [Henry
George] or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small
sects of their own.... Our theory is not a dogma but the
exposition of a process of evolution, and that process
involves successive phases. To expect that the Americans
will start with the full consciousness of the theory worked
out in older industrial countries is to expect the impossible.
What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own
theory --- if they understand it as we did in 1845 and 1848 --
to go in for any real general working class movement,
accept its faktische [actual] starting points as such and work
it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how
every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a
necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the
original programme; they ought, in the words of
The Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the
future in the movement of the present. But above all give
the movement time to consolidate, do not make the
inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by
forcing down people's throats things which at present they
662
cannot properly understand, but which they soon will
learn." (*6)
In many countries, socialist sects refused to participate in

parliamentary activity on the ground that, since bourgeois
democracy was a sham, activity should be concentrated
entirely on the necessity to overthrow parliament rather
than to run in elections as candidates for that same
assembly. This was a natural reaction against parliamentary
cretinism and Millerandism which had infested the large
parties of the Right Wing. Yet, in failing to participate in
parliamentary campaigns, the Leftists failed to understand
the dialectical connection between ballots and bullets. They
failed to appreciate that it was necessary for the
revolutionary proletariat to take advantage of every crack
in the wall of capitalism so as to widen the breach further,
in other words, to use every democratic measure that the
employers permitted in order to overthrow the rule of
capitalism. They refused to appreciate the fact that
parliamentary activity was a convenient barometer
indicating the pressure of class forces and the temper of the
masses. They would not listen to the argument that the
masses of workers still believed, to a considerable extent, in
the omnipotence of parliament and the advisability of
having representatives there, and that these illusions best
could be destroyed through practical participation in the
life of the people.
Instead of patiently understanding the prejudices of the

workers and winning them over in the course of their daily
struggles, exposing the character of the capitalist state and
its parliamentary institutions, the Leftists withdrew to a
great height from which they preached to the ignorant
below as though they were mighty, superior individuals.
Like the opportunists who made parliamentary activity an
663
end in itself, the Leftists would not recognize that
parliamentary activity and democratic rights would be
obtained only as by-products of revolutionary action and
that these instruments were to be considered as levers to
aid the masses in further mobilization. Boycotting elections
and parliamentary activity, on the whole, could only play
into the hands of reaction.
Often these anti-parliamentarian Left Socialist groups

developed trends in a Syndicalist direction, sometimes
influenced by Anarcho-Syndicalism. Not parliamentary but
trade union activity was to be the actual way of winning the
workers. This position was well exemplified by the trade
union socialists known as the Economists in Russia. Only
by such a practice, they argued, would the socialists lose
their intellectualist character and become truly
proletarianized. A similar view was expressed by certain
elements in the Socialist Labor Party in the United States.
At the bottom of this position was an extremely healthy

orientation, responding to the great need to change the
character of Socialist membership so that the majority
would be industrial workers. Such elements of the Left
Wing could not fail to see that often the Socialist parties,
taking a professional and intellectual attitude, stood
entirely aloof from the real struggles around them. The
opportunists were playing down strikes and direct actions
in the street. The Leftist Wing, on the contrary, wanted the
Socialists to organize the unorganized workers in industrial
and trade unions and guide them to socialism.
However, in this as in the other questions, the sectarians

could not devise a workable policy. The existing trade
unions, as a whole, were heartily denounced as mere
instruments of the capitalist class to bribe the skilled
workers. It was of the trade unionists that Hyndman wrote,
664
". . . but the British workers have not understood the
economic and social effects of capitalist colonization, and
many of them are --- as the voting of the infamous
Transvaal War showed --- Imperialists in the worst sense of
the word." (*7)
Especially emphatic were the Leftists concerning the trade

union leaders whom Daniel DeLeon called labor lieutenants
of the capitalist class and whose principal function was to
harness the workers to the chariot of imperialism. The
Socialist Labor Party went so far as to declare that no officer
of the American Federation of Labor could be an officer of
the Socialist Labor Party.
In their emphasis upon trade union activity, the Leftists

frequently reasoned from a mechanical Marxist base that
political organization is but the reflection of economic
events and that the political party is entirely secondary to
the trade union. Among the Russian Economists there also
existed the theory that mobilization of the workers had to
proceed in stages, first, purely economic, then in the form of
economic struggles with political demands, finally, purely
political.
In all of these policies the sectarians showed themselves as

far removed from the basic interests of the working class as
the Right Wing itself, and just as opportunist, although in,
an opposite direction. In idealizing the trade union and the
strike struggle, these Left Wingers, like the Russian
Economists, really showed a contempt for the masses, not
believing that the masses would understand the necessity
to overthrow the political machinery of the State, but rather
that they would have to be gradually educated to that
realization.
665
Making the same mistake as the Right Wing in identifying
political activity with parliamentarism which they, however,
completely scorned, the Left sectarians turned to
participation in strikes as a means of diverting attention
from the necessity of joining in insurrectionary movements.
They did not appreciate sufficiently that the State could be
overthrown only on the basis of demands far broader than
those of a merely trade union character. The emphasis on
trade unionism often prevented these Socialists from
participating in the day-to-day demands on other
important fields of the battle front.
In their denunciation of the existing trade unions, the

sectarian elements of the Second International went to the
extreme of removing their members from the unions,
splitting the unions, and building dual organizations to
fight the old. Such a policy lumped the rank and file
together with their bureaucratic officials; by such an
abandonment of the fight in the old unions they could not
win members of the reactionary unions over to their side.
Here again these socialists displayed a certain lack of

confidence in the working class. They failed to realize that,
in the period under question, the skilled workers would
naturally be leaders of the unskilled, and that, to an
increasing extent, sections of the unskilled would be found
in the ranks of the regular trade union movement, although
as a minority. They failed, besides, to appreciate the effects
of capitalist contradictions upon the ranks of the skilled,
and the possibility of winning some of them over to the side
of revolutionary action. Moreover, this was the only
organized element; to desert the trade unions was to
relinquish the only section of the working class that was
articulate and organized.
666
In this way, the Left Wing played directly into the hands of
the labor bureaucrats in the trade union movement,
supplementing by their Leftist errors the action of the Right
Wing Socialists. The Right Wing, in participating in trade
union movement, always supported the bureaucratic
officials and did not attempt to win the workers for
revolutionary action against the wishes of the highly-paid,
well-fed bureaucracy. On the other hand, the Left Wing, in
abandoning these unions, in calling out its own members,
in building paper dual unions, really consolidated the
position of the officials and of the Right Wing Socialists.
Whatever discontent existed in the unions was thus isolated,
and the rule of the opportunist was made firmer than ever.
At the same time, revolutionary socialism was brought into
disrepute.
In building their own dual unions, Left Wing Socialists

frequently revealed themselves as no better than the
opportunists they denounced. When they succeeded in
controlling unions, they utterly failed to understand the
proper relationship between unions and a political party.
This was well exemplified in the Socialist Labor Party in the
United States. Its Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance was
not appreciably different from the Knights of Labor and
other unions which had gone before. The Alliance was
based not on an industrial but on a craft union structure.
The difference between the S. T. and L. A. and the A. F. of L.
was supposed to lie in the contention that the former had
revolutionary leaders who were preaching socialism in the
unions.
At the same time, the formation of a separate, relatively

small trade union body really isolated the revolutionary
workers from the main army of organized labor, and
created a deep hostility between the two. Thus, instead of
667
acquiring a broad, wholesome perspective of the movement
as a whole, the S. T. and L. A. could attain only a narrow
sectarianism. The Socialist Labor Party officials completely
dominated, demanding that the unions officially go on
record in support of all the vagaries concocted annually by
the Socialist Labor Party, every member of the union being
branded as a Socialist and compelled to adhere to the
platform of the S. L. P. Naturally, this militated strongly
against the average worker's joining the union, and the
union was reduced gradually to a mere propaganda sect.
The purposes of the union to struggle for the day-to-day
demands of the workers were nullified completely.
As a potentially effective measure, the Socialist Labor Party

asserted that strikes were relatively futile, that trade unions
were not of much value in improving the workers' lot but
had the function of educating the workers and organizing
them to take over industry when the collapse of capitalism
came. Thus, even in the trade union field, the Socialist
Labor Party denied the efficacy of action and assailed the
whole idea of a general strike. General strikes led to
revolution; revolution was impossible; the general strike,
therefore, was worthless. As a substitute for the general
strike wherein workers came out on the street and took to
violent rioting, DeLeon advocated the general lockout,
where the workers, when organized 51 per cent, would
remain inside the factories and throw out the employers.
This was the peaceful way as opposed to the violent way of
the out-and-out Syndicalists. (*8)
If, then, the Socialist Labor Party stressed economic rather

than political action, it was with the theory that only the
economic movement was constructive, the political
movement brought about destruction, something which the
Socialist Labor Party wanted to avoid. Objectively, such a
668
viewpoint was a capitulation to the pressure of alien classes
which wanted to persuade the workers not to take political
action seriously. In the meantime, while avoiding action on
the economic field and refusing to participate in immediate
demands on the political field, the S. L. P. would project the
unconditional surrender of capitalism and enter into
parliamentary activity as a demonstration of the value of its,
civilized method of the ballot as against the method of
direct action. Thus the Socialist Labor Party was reduced to
complete futility, reiterating a few trite slogans like a
cracked phonographic record whose needle is stuck in the
same groove. Later on the Socialist Labor Party, through the
S. T. & L. A., entered the I. W. W., changed its craft union
position to an advocacy of industrial unionism, but
continued preaching its sterile policies until its spokesmen
were ejected.
According to the sectarian Leftists like the Socialist Labor

Party, the State was not to wither away, but was to be
abolished immediately the workers were organized
sufficiently on the trade union field to declare the general
lockout. (*9) On the surface it seemed as though DeLeon's
program was an extremely revolutionary one, since he
opposed the opportunist view of gradually reforming the
State; indeed, it looked similar to the revolutionary
Anarchist position. In reality, DeLeon was heartily in
accord with the Right Wing in his fear of the use of force
and in his phobia against being driven underground. The
true situation was that the S. L. P. was so far removed from
actual life that it entirely underestimated the strength of the
State, believing it would collapse when the high priests of
the S. L. P. blew their horns before the social walls of the
new Jericho. The S. L. P. had turned from immediate
tangible demands to abstract goals. Under no circumstances
could it connect its preaching of socialism as a distinct
669
break with the present with the necessity for a violent
insurrection and a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Contrary to popular tradition, the S. L. P. intransigents

were far from knowing their own minds, as their history
showed. For example, in its platform of 1892 the S. L. P. had
declared: "Whereas the time is fast coming when, in the
natural course of social evolution this system . . . shall have
worked out its own downfall; therefore, be it Resolved,
That we call upon the people to organize with a view to the
substitution of the co-operative commonwealth for the
present state of planless production, industrial war, and
social disorder. . . ." (*10) Since capitalism was doomed, the
only method given in the platform of 1892 was to struggle
for a whole series of immediate demands which in no
respect differed from those of ordinary Welfare-Liberal
Radicals.
In 1900, however, the national platform of the S. L. P. was

suddenly changed and dropped all mention of immediate
demands. This line was left to the Social Democratic Party,
later to become the Socialist Party, to adopt. The S. L. P.
now was to demonstrate its revolutionism by eliminating
all questions of immediate interest to the working class;
revolutionary activity was to be transformed into
resolutions.
In 1912, influenced by the Syndicalism of the I. W. W., the S.

L. P. again radically changed its position. This time it
opposed the political State and advocated the industrial
Socialist State which contemplated representation by
industry. The Socialist Labor Party was the first group in
the United States to foreshadow the demand for Soviets,
although it formulated its demand in such a way as to give
the impression that the State would last forever, and made
not the slightest effort to reconcile this statist position with
670
its old theories of abolition of the State. The method of
obtaining this industrial State was to be neither by means
solely of the ballot nor solely of the fist. Only the
submerged layer of the slum elements in the working class
could talk about using the fist. "The idea of capturing the
Trust with physical force is a wild chimera." (*11) Not the
revolutionaries but only capitalist reaction would use force,
the method of the bayonet, just as the capitalists planted
spies and agents provocateurs to preach rioting and direct
action to the workers.
But if neither the ballot nor the fist would obtain the victory
of socialism, what other method could be used? The S. L. P.
answered ambiguously that it advocated the "constitutional
method of political action, backed by the industrially and
class-consciously organized proletariat, to the exclusion of
Anarchy, and all that thereby hangs." (*12) Thus the
Socialists believed they could peacefully organize all the
workers until the majority were in unions, while preaching
abstract socialism without any activity whatever. It is no
wonder the Socialist Labor Party withered away to the
proportions of a dried prune.
In England, too, the so-called Left Wing, headed by

Hyndman, refused to participate in immediate struggles,
and severely criticized the trade unions and their leaders.
Here again behind such a criticism was not a policy that
would lead the workers to insurrectionary struggle, but an
orientation that would confine all socialist activity to mere
abstract preaching and the writing of books. According to
Hyndman, "Strikes, Syndicalism, Anarchy, are but varying
forms of restless working-class ignorance, or despairing
revolts against unendurable oppression. There is nothing in
strikes themselves, whether for a rise of wages for all, or for
the enactment of a minimum wage for the lowest grades of
671
labour in any industry, which can emancipate the
propertyless workers. . . . On the contrary, the most
successful strikes under existing conditions do but serve to
rivet the chains of economic slavery, possibly a trifle gilded,
more firmly on their limbs. Trade unions, by admitting
wages as the permanent basis of the industrial system,
virtually condemn their members to continuous toil for the
benefit of the profit-takers so long as that view obtains. The
organization of the trade unions is sometimes useful; their
theory of society is hopeless." (*13)
The French counterpart to this position was the determined

opposition of the Guesdists to the general strike. The
general strike meant revolution, and the workers were not
prepared for revolution. Nor would the general strike be
the means to realize the revolution. To seize the political
power of the State, not trade unionism but revolutionary
action was needed. Upon closer examination, however, of
that revolutionary "action," we find that it means a
preaching of pure and unadulterated socialism couple with
an avoidance of any action that would lead towards
insurrection.
Contrary to the Right Wing, the Left Wing pretended to

conceive of socialism as entirely distinct from bourgeois
democracy, not its mere extension. To the sectarian
elements, the old order could be abolished at one stroke.
This erroneous idea was the direct opposite of the errors of
the Right. The Right Wing believed that Socialism was a
gradual evolution from the bases of Liberalism; the Leftists
failed to comprehend the intimate interconnection between
bourgeois democracy and socialism. Even mature Left
Wing revolutionists failed to understand fully the theory of
permanent revolution and the utilization of bourgeois
democratic revolution for revolutionary purposes.
672
Just as in the case of the Right Wing, so with the Leftist
there was an ultimate program of socialism, there were
day-to-day actions and propaganda, but there was no
strategy, that is, there was no connection between the
tactics of the moment and the strategical objective, the goal
that was to be obtained. A revolutionary strategy would
have dictated the participation in the every-day action of
the masses, not in order to obtain the immediate demands
as ends in themselves, but as mere stepping stones on the
road to struggle. The demands themselves would have
been of such a nature as to have roused the workers to the
highest level of militancy. Revolutionary strategy would
have determined a policy based on the necessity of a
workers' alliance with other classes, not in order to
submerge the interests of the proletariat, but to utilize the
other class forces for revolution as far as possible under the
lead of the working class.
On the whole, neither the opportunists, nor the Centrists,

nor the Left Wing of the Second International could
approximate a communist activity.
Footnotes
1. See, D. DeLeon: Father Gassoniana.
2. Marx and Engels: Correspondence, Letter of Engels to J.

Bloch, p. 477.
3. Marx and Engels: Correspondence, p. 475.
4. See, for example, D. DeLeon 's pamphlet: Fifteen Questions.
5. Marx and Engels: Correspondence, Engels' article: "The

Peasant Question in France and Germany," pp. 526-527.
673
6. Marx and Engels: Correspondence, Letter from Engels to
Florence Wischnewetsky, pp. 453-454.
7. H. M. Hyndman: Colonies and Dependencies, pamphlet,

Report to the International Socialist Congress, 1904, p. 3.
8. The recent wave of "sit-down" strikes both in France and

in the United States apparently justify DeLeon's position. A
closer study of the movement, however, would reveal the
complete falseness of such a conclusion.
9. See, DeLeon's pamphlet: Socialist Reconstruction of Society.
10. Platform given in K. H. Porter: National Party

Platforms, pp. 177-180.
11. See, S. L. P. platform 1912, given in K. H. Porter: the

same, pp. 368-372.
12. The same, p. 372.
13. F. J. Gould: Hyndman, Prophet of Socialism, quoting

Hyndman's view, p. 99.
III. COUNTER-REVOLUTION
XXII. SOCIALISM AND THE WAR
Like an enormous bomb hurled into the camp of the

socialists, the World War with frightful rapidity completely
destroyed the Second International. Whether the groups
were Right Wing, sectarian Left, or Centrist, practically all
followed into the camp of imperialism and, in one way or
another, supported their national governments in the War.
674
Only a small handful of the Left Centrists tried to carry into
effect the beautiful resolutions that had been passed so
unanimously before the outbreak of the War. Of this small
group evolving to the Left only the Bolsheviks presented a
genuine revolutionary communist position.
By 1914, the Socialist parties and labor movements had

grown to enormous size. The Socialists and Second
International alone had approximately twelve million
members. (*1) The trade union movement had reached
proportions in France and Italy of approximately a million
members, in Germany over two million, in the United
States close to three million, in the United Kingdom over
four million. (*2)
The size of the co-operative movement may be judged by

the figures regarding the British co-operatives. In 1914 they
had a membership close to four million, capital three
hundred million dollars, employees one hundred and fifty
thousand, surplus at the end of the year seventy-one
million dollars; the co-operatives owned fourteen thousand
retail stores, fifty or more factories, two big wholesale
distributing centers; their sales were approximately six
hundred and fifty million dollars annually. They had the
greatest tea warehouses in the world and vast tea estates in
Ceylon; they owned a fleet of ships, fruit orchards, banks,
buildings. They ran an insurance association. (*3)
Movements of relatively similar proportions existed in the
important countries on the continent. All of them hastened
to support the War.
In France, the Socialist Party indorsed the call to arms with

gusto, issuing the following manifesto: "It is the future of
the nation. It is the life of France that is in question today.
The Party has not hesitated. "Spontaneously, without
awaiting a manifestation of the will of the people, the chief
675
of the government has appealed to our Party. Our Party has
replied, 'Present.'
"Today as yesterday, after the first proofs, as in the

enthusiasm of the mobilization, we know we are struggling
not only for the existence of the country, not only for the
grandeur of France, but for liberty, for the republic, for
civilization." (*4)
The French Socialist Party justified its nationalism on the

ground that national defense coincided with the interests of
the revolutionary movement not only of France but of the
world. Should France be crushed, it would mean the end of
the glorious revolutionary traditions of the French
proletariat which had inspired the world, the end of that
militant revolutionary theory and culture which the French
working class had brought to such a complete fruition. The
defeat of France would witness a complete victory of
German Kaiserism and European reaction that would wipe
out the whole revolutionary movement in Europe and
plunge the world into new wars. These were the
revolutionary phrases with which the Socialist Party, in an
extremely efficient fashion, it must be admitted, mobilized
the masses for war.
The French Socialists became thoroughly enamored with

the logic of the Liberal democrats. The War was a war of
democracy against German absolutism; it was a war of
republican principles against monarchy. It was a war of
progressive liberty against feudal reaction. They refused to
consider the fact that behind France was the Russian Czar;
that French democracy and Russian reaction would have to
hang together or be hanged separately. The French
capitalist class had financed the Russian Czar and had
enabled him to crush the revolution of 1905. On the other
hand, the Russian Czar had repaid his debt amply to the
676
French bourse by utilizing the hordes at his command
against every revolutionary manifestation in Europe.
The French Socialists could not well deny, either, the fact
that their participation in the War as part of the French
government forced them into a complete surrender to the
national bourgeoisie. No longer could they strike against
the discipline of the capitalists, either in the factory or at the
front. Abandoning its demand for control of the factories,
French Socialism "postponed" the revolution until after the
war and blew itself to pieces in the trenches as a
revolutionary force.
In England, the British Labor Party became part of the

coalition war government and so well did it do its job in
mobilizing the British workers to fight "for God and for
country" that apparently it was not deemed necessary to
institute conscription in England until relatively late, when
the victorious advance of the German armies compelled the
complete mobilization of British forces to stem the tide. The
British Socialist officials did not attempt to cover their
national chauvinism with the glorious revolutionary
phrases of the French. They simply considered themselves
Britons, and went to fight and to die.
In Germany, immediately before the declaration of war, the

Socialist Party had declared, "Everywhere must sound in
the ears of those in power: 'We will have no war! Down
with war! Long live the international brotherhood of the
peoples!"' (*5) The very next day these slogans were
abandoned. With this, the whole International collapsed
like a house of cards, for the chief party of the International
had been the German. By 1914 it had obtained four million
five hundred thousand votes and one hundred and ten
representatives in the Reichstag. It had nearly a million
members. In Austria, too, the Social Democratic Party,
677
which had become unified in 1888, had rapidly advanced.
As early as 1907 it had obtained eighty-seven members in
the Austrian parliament. To the question, What would the
German Socialist Party do in the war crisis? the answer was
never for one moment in doubt.
With enthusiasm, the Socialist Party in Germany voted for

war credits and for support of the German government,
and, as was to be expected, covered up their nationalist
betrayal of their own resolutions with the most laborious
revolutionary arguments. Germany, they argued, was at the
head of the world revolutionary movement because it was
the recipient and beneficiary of a wonderful German kultur.
The invasion of the elysian garden of Germany by the
Russian barbarians would not only destroy this kultur, but
would take away from the German functionaries their
leading position in world Socialist affairs. This would, of
course, completely destroy the world revolutionary
movement and set back the workers forever.
So far the argument was like the French, but the Germans
could never do anything without profoundly invoking
Marx. Thus the Socialists based their identification of
German nationalism with world revolution upon the
alleged "Marxist" principle that socialism must come first in
the most highly developed industrial country. Since
Germany was that country, to destroy Germany under the
blows of Czarism would mean to destroy the hope that
socialism would come anywhere. Since Germany had the
mightiest trusts, the greatest technique, the highest
capitalism, especially the most powerfully organized and
developed proletariat, since the Germans had led in both
the theory and practice of Marxism, since, indeed, Marx
and Engels themselves were Germans, a destruction of
German forces by the victory of Russia would be a decisive
678
catastrophe to the world proletarian movement. The
Germans would not admit for one moment that socialism
could prevail in any other country but Germany or that it
was possible for the workers to take over power in
countries less developed; if it could not prevail in Germany
it could not prevail at all.
After the War, the German Centrist Socialists had to find

some apology for their actions. They repudiated their
former arguments and tried to make the world believe that
they had been totally unaware of the imminence of war, but
were caught completely by surprise. Said Karl Kautsky, for
example, "Had the German Social Democracy known that
the Austrian Ultimatum had not taken the German
Government by surprise . . . then our Party ... would have
turned as sharply against the German Government as it did
against the Austrian." (*6)
Had the German Social Democracy known! As though that

Socialist organization had not been in a full position to
know the tendencies of the German imperialist government
As though it could not imagine that the trickeries of
Bismarck would be repeated by the Kaiser! This bloated
Party, with its thousands of functionaries and hundreds of
officials in the government, boasting its great theoretical
supremacy over all previous movements, finally had to
wind up with the statement that it was caught "surprised."
At best we can declare that fools are just as dangerous as
knaves; but enough! Not for one moment do we believe
Kautsky's apologia. The extreme Right Wing never bothered
to apologize, it merely continued the cry: "Deutschland ueber
alles!"
The sectarian Left Wing of the Second International was no

better. In England, Hyndman shouted that the present war
was not capitalistic and that Marx was proven wrong in his
679
theory of historical materialism, since people fought for
noble ideals as well as for material advantage. (*7) The
ideals for which Hyndman wanted others to die were those
of democracy and of saving poor bleeding Belgium.
Hyndman turned into the most virulent nationalist in the
course of the war.(*8) In France, Guesde became an ardent
chauvinist.
In the United States, the Socialist Labor Party in its

propaganda and national platforms refused to say one
official word about the War. To end the War, no doubt, was
"an immediate demand" and the S. L. P. had nothing to do
with immediate demands. Let the storm rage as it would,
the S. L. P. would reiterate its faith in peaceful education
and its demand for the unconditional surrender of
capitalism. Like the I. W. W., which also "evaded" the War,
insisting that its job was solely to organize on the job, the S.
L. P. serenely barged along with the song: wars may come
and wars may go but programs flow on forever.
It must not be imagined that the workers' debacle was

confined merely to the Socialists. The Syndicalists, too,
hastened to raise their voices for the War. They abandoned
their position of anti-militarism and anti-patriotism. The
French Syndicalists as a whole, as the British and German
trade unionists, rallied en masse for the defense of la
patric. Sorel and others became rabid defenders of France.
It was left to the Left Wing Centrist and pacifist movements

in the neutral countries and elsewhere to carry on the
agitation against the War. In many cases this agitation was
simply a reflection of the desire of the capitalist class of
those countries to keep out of the War. This was
particularly true of the Socialist Parties in the neutral
countries like Scandinavia, Italy, and the United States. In
Scandinavia, the capitalists were benefitting mightily from
680
the war. Some of the drops from the blood feasts were
being transmitted to layers of the workers who also became
enthusiastic for the neutral policy of their governments.
In Italy, the capitalist class was bargaining with both sets of

belligerents to learn which would give them greater
imperialist concessions. These vacillations of the capitalists
were reflected in the ranks of the Italian Socialist Party and
permitted it to take an official position against the War.
Thus, by the time Italy entered the War, the officials of the
Socialist Party were too heavily compromised to change
their position. During the course of the War, the
tremendous loss of life, among the Italian workmen, owing
especially to the incompetency of the militarists, moved the
Socialists still farther to the Left, so that instead of the
situation's being created where the Centrists were
dominated by the Right Wing, as existed in Germany, in
Italy the Right Wing was dominated by the Centrists who
used revolutionary phrases and believed themselves
internationalists.
In the United States, the Socialist Party had still longer time
to take a position against the War, due to America's
extremely belated entrance. The Socialist Party too,
therefore, took not the Right Wing, but the typically
Centrist position, and advocated the following measures to
insure peace, namely, that all laws for the increase of
military and naval forces be repealed; that the President be
given no power to lead the country into such a situation
that war would be inevitable; that no war declaration or
action should be attempted until the matter was submitted
to a popular referendum; that the United States abandon
the Monroe Doctrine as a vicious imperialist policy; that the
Philippines be freed; and that the government use its offices
to mediate to end the War.
681
In its national platform of 1916, the Socialist Party declared
that war was due to capitalism. "The class struggle, like
capitalism, is international. The proletariat of the world has
but one enemy, the capitalist class, whether at home or
abroad." The Socialist Party stood against military
preparedness and against war preparations. "The Socialist
Party stands committed to the class war, and urges upon
the workers in the mines and forests, on the railways and
ships, in factories and fields, the use of their economic and
industrial power, by refusing to mine the coal, to transport
soldiers, to furnish food or other supplies for military
purposes. . . ." (*9)
Thus, strange as it may seem, the legalistic Socialists, who

had constantly fought the I. W. W. and had denounced all
theories of the general strike, were now apparently urging
strikes and other actions to insure peace, while, at the same
time, the I. W. W. was refusing to enter into strikes merely
on questions of war. In both cases, the organizations could
not separate themselves from the policies of capitalism.
While calling for strike action, of course, the Socialist Party

itself did not begin the task of leading strikes to stop the
War. On the contrary, under Hillquit, it was ardently
supporting the A. F. of L. officials who at the proper
moment would give their blessing to all military
production. The key to the Socialist position was the fact
that the U. S. government had not yet determined to enter
the War and thus the Socialist Party did not have to make
up its mind to end its formal and nominal resistance to war.
Then, too, it should be recalled that there was an extremely
large German population in the United States which
flocked to support the Socialist Party as a means of
expressing their own German nationalism. The Germans of
682
Milwaukee stood solidly behind the Socialist representative
in Congress, Victor Berger.
In 1915, the National Committee of the Socialist Party

reported its peace program which included the items: no
annexations and indemnities, political independence for all
foreign nations desiring it, international parliament and
open diplomacy, universal disarmament, and political and
industrial democracy. Later on, President Wilson was to
steal this platform and make it the basis for his famous
Fourteen Points. Thus, the Socialist Party had worked itself
into the position where a considerable Left Wing had been
organized to carry on struggle against the War should
America enter.
The test came in 1917 when it was clear that Wilson would
fling the country into the maelstrom. The Socialist Party by
this time had approximately one hundred and ten thousand
members and was a considerable force. A special
convention of the Socialist Party was called at St. Louis.
Several resolutions were presented, one by the Right Wing
that called for endorsement of the war and supported the
government, one by the extreme Left that called for active
militant war against war. A compromise resolution was
finally adopted, under the patronage of the Centrists
headed by Hillquit, which advocated:
"(1) Continued active and public opposition to all capitalist

wars through demonstrations, mass petitions, and all other
honorable and effective means within our power.
"(2) Unyielding opposition to all proposed legislation for all

military or industrial conscription."
"(3) Vigorous resistance to all reactionary measures......"(*10)
683
As with the platonic resolutions of the Second International
against war, the question remained, what would the
Socialist Party do to carry out this resolution? The fact that
its execution was confided to Hillquit and his associates left
the issue in no doubt. Hillquit, as a legal partner to the
officials of the A. F. of L., was personally strongly in favor
of the government's position. "My opposition to war is
purely a Socialist attitude, and as it happens my personal
sympathies and inclinations are largely on the side of the
Allies." (*11)
Thus Hillquit's opposition to war was openly declared to be

divorced from the vitality of his own personal life; war
opposition was indeed disagreeable to him. He was
extremely apologetic at the vigorous language of the
resolution which had been forced upon him. "Had it been
written in normal circumstances, it would undoubtedly
have been couched in more moderate and less irritating
language. . . ." (*12) Such views operated to excuse the
government even when it vigorously attacked the Socialist
Party. The blame, evidently, lay on the socialists themselves
for using such "irritating" language.
The anti-war resolution had expressly limited its opposition

to "honorable and effective means." The Left Wing
identified their honor with the effectiveness of the means;
to the Centrists such as Hillquit, "honorable" means meant
methods patently ineffective.
The carrying out of the St. Louis resolution, therefore, could

hardly please anyone. The Right Wing nationalists,
represented by such men as Charles Edward Russell and
John Spargo, broke away from the Socialist Party to become
propaganda agents for Wilson. The Left Wing, headed by
Charles E. Ruthenberg and others, incurred the deadly
animosity of the Hillquits by their vigorous attempts to
684
struggle against the war machinery of the United States
government. Following the Left Wing were such warm-
hearted agitators as Eugene V. Debs, who, unable to change
a lifetime of thought and action overnight, continued their
opposition to the War, and soon found themselves in prison.
Debs' sentimentality prevented him from throwing off the
saccharine blandishments of Hillquit, who used Debs'
prestige to maintain his own hold on the party. At the same
time open war was declared against the Left Wing, a war
that was to culminate two years later in a split of the Party
and the organization of a separate Communist movement.
During all this time, the government did not hesitate to

crack down in a most vigorous fashion on the German and
foreign-born elements in the Socialist Party of whatever
political coloration, whether Right or Left Wing. The
Socialist Party, thus, in spite of its ingrown opportunism
and centrist leadership, could emerge from the War with a
good deal of persecution to its credit.
The warlike declarations of the various parties of the

Second International were by no means sudden effluvia,
but could have been foretold from the debates on two
important questions connected with war which the
Socialists had discussed for many years previous, namely,
the question of the relationship of war to revolution and the
attitude of the Socialists to military affairs, and secondly,
the role of nationalism in the international revolution. On
both these questions, Marx and Engels had had much to say.
Unfortunately, in some respects their views were stated so
ambiguously as to become distorted completely by the
Socialist opportunists.
685
Marx and Engels, of course, believed that the worker had
no country to defend, that he had no fatherland. The
worker owed nothing to the national flag or to the capitalist
system of society except the duty of breaking his chains and
liberating humanity from these institutions.
Nevertheless, Marx and Engels were realists. They did not

live in a world of abstractions far removed from the
concrete situation. In every war they took distinct sides.
Since their general strategy was one of bringing about the
democratic bourgeois revolution and overthrowing the
remnants of feudalism, thus clearing the way for the future
battle between capital and labor, the revolutionary Marxists
could take the part of the bourgeois democratic countries as
against the countries of the old regime. They centered their
hatred against Russia, to them the arch supporter of
everything reactionary. It was Czarism that supported the
Holy Alliance of reaction and buttressed Prussian and
Austrian despotism. By denouncing Czarism as a supporter
of Junkerthum, Marx and Engels obviated any conclusion
that they had turned German nationalist and that they were
advocating the overthrow of Czarism in order to allow
German imperialism to grow. The overthrow of the Russian
system was for them part of the struggle against the
Prussian system, both enemies of the German people.
Following this line, Marx and Engels could not be neutral

during the important Crimean War of 1854-1856. Indeed,
they did a great deal to mobilize the English workers in the
demand that Great Britain should declare war against
Russia. Marx wrote a special book on the secret
machinations of Lord Palmerston which portrayed the
honorable Lord as an agent of Russian diplomacy in
England. Not that Marx wanted to tie the English workers
to the imperialism of their bosses; in every case Marx was
686
careful to point out that, in the period under discussion, the
workers could make an alliance with the democratic
bourgeoisie in concrete instances only because they
themselves were not able to take over power, but had the
task of fighting the "enemies of their enemies." As soon as
their bourgeois ally got into power, the workers' duty was
to become an opposition and to clear the decks for their
own battle for communism.
In the Crimean War, the strategy of Marx and Engels was to

defeat Russian reaction and to stimulate revolution in the
Balkans, so as to create a Balkan democratic federation. As
the Ottoman Empire would be broken up, the revolution
was bound to occur in Turkey and the Sultan would be
deposed. Czarism would be dealt a severe blow from which
it would not recover. The Austrian monarchy would be
squeezed between the democratic forces growing all
around it, and a revolution would have to break out,
democratizing the rule. The defeat of Russian Czarism
would terminate the despotism of Prussian absolutism and
all this, in turn, would stimulate a revolution within Russia.
Such was the grand strategy of Marx regarding the
Crimean War!
The strategy of the English imperialists, however, who

finally entered into the war, was an entirely different one.
They were not interested in a Balkan federation which
might lead to a democratic revolution in Eastern Europe
and the independence of Poland and other States. On the
contrary, they were in deadly opposition to such a
movement. They fought solely to maintain the status quo in
Turkey and to keep the tottering Sultan on his throne. This,
in the long run, proved an impossible task and in spite of
the British imperialists, the war of Britain against Russia
687
resulted in many of the democratic actions which Marx and
Engels had predicted.
In the American Civil War, Marx took sides at once

wholeheartedly in favor of the North and mobilized the
British workers in vigorous opposition to the aristocratic
tendency to favor the South and to declare war on the
United States. A cordial correspondence was inaugurated
between Marx and Abraham Lincoln.
In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, by no means did

Marx take a neutral stand, but first favored defeating the
adventure of Louis Napoleon, and later worked for the
defeat of Prussian imperialism and warmly hailed the Paris
Commune.
In spite of this genuine revolutionary real politik, Marx at

times left himself open to the charge that Bakunin and
Kropotkin were so fond of making, that he was at bottom a
German nationalist. As examples of Germanophilism there
has been cited Marx's attitude towards the Slavs of Czecho-
Slovakia and of Croatia. To this might be added Engel's
views regarding Polish independence.
In regard to Czecho-Slovakia, Marx was clearly of the

opinion that this was a Slavic enclave having intrinsically
no future or historical progressiveness. Whatever was
progressive with the Czechs and Slovaks had come from
Germany. The people had become more or less
Germanified. There was no reason for their insistence on
national independence. To a lesser degree, Marx believed
the same about Croatia.
Not that Marx advocated the compulsory subjugation of

one people by another, nor that he was opposed to self-
determination of peoples. On the contrary, such a policy he
688
would have denounced as counter-revolutionary through
and through. It was simply that he believed the Socialists in
those countries did not have to raise as their demand the
struggle for national independence. What was most
important, and here Marx proved to be thoroughly correct,
the struggle for national independence on the part of the
Croatians and the Bohemians had bound the people of
these provinces to the Russian Czar so that they were used
by absolutism as weapons to crush the democratic
revolution. In the 1848 revolutions, the Czechs and
Croatians were utilized by the Austrian Emperor as the
scourge to chastise the Viennese democrats and the
Hungarian rebels.
In regard to Poland, both Marx and Engels were warmly in

favor of Polish independence, since this would mean a
breaking up of the Russian empire and the strengthening of
the democratic forces in Eastern Europe. However, it
cannot be said that Engels looked forward with a great deal
of optimism to the perpetuation of Polish culture. While the
Poles were conceded to have a progressive role in
contradistinction to the Czechs and Croatians, nevertheless
they, too, were torn between the Russians on the one hand
and the Germans on the other and would not be able to
survive as an independent race and nation for any length of
time. Only in a system of Socialist republics would the
Poles be free to enjoy their independent culture and
language, but once obtained, its value would be
problematical.
In the same realistic manner did Engels look upon the

national question in relation to the inevitable World War.
Engels was a finished expert in military affairs and had
contributed many brilliant articles on military evolution,
strategy, and tactics for papers in various countries. (*13)
689
Analyzing the evolution of militarism, Engels traced the
development of the army from the special mercenary force
to universal military service of a whole people, and posed
the question, what should be the attitude of the Socialists to
conscription?
While the Socialists were opposed to a standing army

maintained over and above the people, by no means was
the Marxist indiscriminately opposed to military training.
Marx and Engels were not among those who conceived that
the victory of socialism would in the main come peacefully.
on the contrary, they were certain that the Paris Commune
was a forerunner of the type of struggles that would take
place between the bourgeoisie and the workers. If the class
struggle was destined to terminate in civil war, it was
absolutely necessary that the worker learn how to fight,
that he become an expert in military affairs.
In accord with this basic policy, and not because of pacifist

leanings, Engels began to stress the point that a people
unarmed was not able to defeat the standing army of the
capitalist States. He pointed out that the old methods of
street-barricade fighting were no longer possible in the
modern era where the narrow streets had been changed to
wide boulevards, and the national army had become expert
in dealing with popular insurrection; he declared that two
alternatives faced the revolutionists: either to see that the
people themselves were trained in the use of arms and had
arms, or to be able to crack a national army that was placed
against them, to split it, and to win over portions of the
army to the side of the people.
The easiest way to accomplish both tasks was to ensure that

the people themselves were part of the army. Universal
military training gave all the workers a knowledge of arms.
Conscription placed the workers inside the army with arms
690
in their hands. Should the masses revolt under such
circumstances, there would be no question but that the
workers who composed the overwhelming mass of the
soldiers would refuse to fire upon their brothers, but would
rather turn their guns against the capitalists. Thus, the two
conditions put forth by the Marxists would be fulfilled: on
the one hand, the working class would be trained in the use
of arms and would be actually armed; on the other hand,
the reserve strength of the capitalist, namely, the national
army, would be broken into pieces.
According to Marxism, capitalists inevitably would have to

dig their own grave and prepare for their own destruction,
since, after the Napoleonic Wars, nothing could prevent the
growth of the army from embracing the people.
Conscription and universal military training had to be the
standing rule in every country in Europe. Just as the
capitalists could not prevent the growth of the standing
army to include the nation, so were they unable to prevent
the World War, verifying the basic thesis of Marx that
capitalism meant the increase of all contradictions to the
breaking point, the driving down of the masses to the most
abject misery, to the point of death, where they would he
forced to rebel.
To the Marxist, the bursting forth of the World War,

concomitant with the arming of the people, was bound to
lead to conditions fruitful for the proletarian revolution.
"And, finally, no war is any longer possible for Prussia-
Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an
extension and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten
millions of soldiers will mutually massacre one another and
in so doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have
stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done.
The devastations of the Thirty Years' War compressed into
691
three or four years, and spread over the whole Continent;
famine, pestilence, general demoralization both of the
armies and of the mass of the people produced by acute
distress; hopeless confusion of our artificial machinery in
trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy;
collapse of the old states and their traditional state wisdom
to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens on the
pavement and there will be nobody to pick them up;
absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and
who will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result
absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the
establishment of the conditions for the ultimate victory of
the working class. This is the prospect when the system of
mutual outbidding in armaments, driven to extremities, at
last bears its inevitable fruits. This, my lords, princes, and
statesmen, is where in your wisdom you have brought old
Europe. And when nothing more remains to you but to
open the last great war dance --- that will suit us all right.
The war may perhaps push us temporarily into the
background, may wrench from us many a position already
conquered. But when you have unfettered forces which you
will then no longer be able again to control, things may go
as they will: at the end of the tragedy you will be ruined
and the victory of the proletariat will either be already
achieved or at any rate inevitable." (*14)
However, although revolution was the inevitable ultimate

outcome of such a war, this revolution could take place
only if the Socialists would carry on a revolutionary policy
against their own capitalist class. Engels believed that the
workers would inevitably be compelled so to do, although
this did not necessarily mean that the world revolution
would be successful at its very first attempt.
692
Against the capitalist standing army Engels proposed the
demands of a people's militia and the general arming of the
people. The Socialists at the same time were to carry on a
most vigorous attack against militarism in parliament and
out. As part of the Socialists' revolutionary policy it was
absolutely vital that they hurl themselves full force against
the war programs of imperialism. War could bring
victorious revolution only if the workers fought the war.
The Marxist had nothing in common with those who
preached "the worse, the better," that misery alone would
bring the revolution nearer. Revolution was the product of
two sets of circumstances: on the one hand, the unbearable
misery of the people, generated by the workings of
capitalism itself; on the other hand, the sturdy resistance to
miserable conditions on the part of the workers. The latter
circumstances inevitably flowed from the former, but both
were necessary before revolutions and Socialism could be
realized.
The opportunist Socialists, especially the Germans, were

quick to seize upon Engels' theories and to distort them for
their own purposes. Jean Jaur'es declared when arguing for
universal military service: "Everywhere it is the workmen
and socialists who demand military service for all." (*15)
The same point was made by Bebel in Germany, with the
argument that compulsory military service was entirely
compatible with democracy. People who had been trained
in arms could not long be refused the right to vote. Had not
democracy in Germany followed conscription? Only
despots relied on mercenary forces.
Thus was compulsory military service idealized as the

agent and symbol of democracy. It was declared that
compulsory military service in Prussia "was associated (as it
had been in the France of 1793) with an enormous step
693
forward in the organization of general education. As in
France, it enabled the people finally to drive out the foreign
oppressor. As in France, it abolished at once nine-tenths of
the degrading punishments.... It was intimately associated,
again, with the abolition of serfdom. Even in the strictest
military sense, it worked enormously for the education of
the officers ...." (*16)
The zeal of the Socialist leaders for compulsory military

training was no struggle against the State, but rather a
capitulation before the militarists. In one form or another,
Socialists talked about the duty of the worker to defend his
fatherland. Jaur'es, for example, brushed aside the cry that
the workman has no country with the argument that the
proletariat is more truly in the fatherland than any other
class. "Never would a proletariat which had abandoned the
defense of national independence --- and, therefore, of its
own free development, --- never would such a proletariat
find vigour enough to conquer capitalism. Having
unresistingly suffered the invader's yoke to be added to
that of the capitalist, it would never raise its head again."
(*17)
Similar expressions were uttered by Bebel to the effect that

if the fatherland were attacked he would shoulder his gun.
This statement of a leader in the Second International
enabled Daniel DeLeon in the United States also to indulge
in patriotic splurges and declare that: If the Socialist's Red
Flag of universal freedom is not incompatible with
incidental loyalty to the flag of even a German Empire, then
how much more was the American flag entitled to the love
of the people of the United States, regardless of the misuse
that the ruling class was putting the flag to! (*18)
DeLeon went even further in his American patriotism.

While all the European flags rose out of the fumes of
694
human sighs, were planted upon the prostrate bodies of
subjects and were meant defiantly to proclaim the double
wretchedness as a social principle, it was otherwise, it was
the exact opposite, with the 'Stars and Stripes.'
"Apart from the circumstances that the American flag was

first raised by men who, however, and pardonably
mistaken in their sociology and economics, did sincerely
believe that the American Flag raised over the boundless
natural opportunities which the land offered to industry,
would insure the citizen the power and responsibility of
being the architect of his own fortune, apart from the
circumstances that the American Flag was the first to wave
over a constitution that 'legalizes revolution';-apart from
these and many other kindred circumstances, the historic
fact that the scientist, the noble-minded, the venerable
Franklin, when the scheme of the flag was presented to him,
a blue field with a star for each State, expressed the hope
that the day would dawn when every Nation in the world
would be represented in the blue field with her own star, --
that fact confers upon the American Flag the lofty
distinction of being the first on earth to urge the
Brotherhood of Nations; the first to herald the Solidarity of
peoples; the first drapery --- the symbol of Peace on Earth; -
-- that fact renders the American Flag the anticipation of the
Red Flag of International Brotherhood and endears it to the
heart of civilized man." (*19)
The charge of German nationalism was also made

regarding Engels' analysis of the real politics to be played
during the coming World War. Engels was strongly of the
opinion that the defeat of Germany would be a disaster
from the international working class point of view. "So
much seems certain to me: if we are beaten, every barrier to
chauvinism and a war of revenge in Europe will be thrown
695
down for years hence. If we are victorious our Party will
come into power. The victory of Germany is therefore the
victory of the revolution, and if it comes to war we must
not only desire victory but further it by every means....
"What should have been categorically stated was that if

France formally represents the revolution in relation to
Germany, Germany through its workers' Party,
stands materially at the head of the revolution, and this is
bound to come to light in the war --- in which we, and with
us the revolution, will either be crushed or else come to
power." (*20)
Engels further wrote: "Bebel and I have been in

correspondence on this point and we are of the opinion that
if the Russians start war against us, German Socialists must
go for the Russians and their allies, whoever they may be, a
l'outrance [in a fight to the death]. If Germany is crushed,
then we shall be too, while in the most favourable case the
struggle will be such a violent one that Germany will only
be able to maintain herself by revolutionary means, so that
very possibly we shall be forced to come into power and
play the part of 1793." (*21)
On the surface, this was an exceedingly nationalist

statement and yet, behind it was a profound revolutionary
viewpoint. Engels was certain that the Socialist Party was
growing so rapidly that within ten years it would surely
come to power; once in power, the German Socialists would
open the way for the reconstitution of Poland and would
allow the people both of northern Schleswig and Alsace
Lorraine freedom to vote as to which country they wanted
to embrace. Thus, at once the Socialists would show the
greatest friendliness to the French and would demonstrate
that the victory of Socialism would by no means spell war
against the French. The victory of the German Socialists, of
696
course, would be such a breach in the wall of world
capitalism as to lead to its entire collapse. It was for that
reason that Engels hoped that peace would remain
unbroken.
Nonetheless, it was exactly for that very reason that peace

could not remain intact. The World War began in 1914
precisely because capitalism was entering into a new
economic crisis on the one hand, and, on the other, the
Socialist Parties were growing to enormous size, increasing
in militancy and threatening to take over State power. The
World War was one of the ways in which the capitalists felt
they could control the labor situation. Militant labor could
be sent to the front and disposed of in the trenches. The
very forces that prevented the realization of any gradual
taking over of the government by the Socialists and the
peaceful inauguration of Socialism prevented an unbroken
peace. World war and civil war have common roots.
Engels never imagined that the German workers would not

carry on a revolutionary policy against their government,
even during the war. He wrote: "Then we have to see to it
that the war is conducted by every revolutionary method
and that things are made impossible for any government
which refuses to adopt such methods; also at a given
moment to take the lead ourselves. We have not yet
forgotten the glorious example of the French in 1793 and, if
we are driven to it, it may come about that we celebrate the
centenary of 1793 by showing that the German workers of
1893 are not unworthy of the Sansculottes. . . ." (*22) Thus
Engels believed that the German Socialists, while resisting a
war of invasion by Russian Czarism, would at the same
time make it impossible for the German capitalists to
control the war, but that, in the course of the war, the
697
Socialists would take over the power and carry out the war
in a revolutionary manner.
Unfortunately, nothing of the sort occurred. The German

opportunists were ready to popularize the views of Engels
that Germany must defend itself against Russia, but they
completely distorted his views as to the need of
revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of Germany
conducting that war. It must be said that Engels'
formulations lent themselves at times to malicious
interpretation, although we cannot blame him for not too
closely anticipating in 1891 what would occur in 1914.
When the War broke out, a relatively small number of

Socialist organizations took a stand against it. These
included all the Russian groups, Menshevik, Bolshevik, and
Socialist revolutionary, most of the Balkan groups (the most
heroic of which was the Serbian, which, in spite of the
dreadful invasion of Serbia, came out against the defense of
its Fatherland), some of the groups in the Britannic States,
in Great Britain --- the Independent Labor Party, the British
Socialist Party, and Socialist Labor Party, and the Socialist
parties of the United States and Italy. Not all of these
groups opposing the war were revolutionary. Some of them
were simply Left pacifist, as, for example, the Independent
Labor Party represented by Ramsay MacDonald.
The first problem was to try to organize these small groups

into a national conference against the war. Efforts were
initiated by the Italians and by the Swiss. Another attempt
was made by the American Socialist Party, who invited
groups to come to Washington. A third trial was made by
neutrals at Copenhagen and a fourth was launched by the
698
International Socialist Bureau itself at the Hague. All of
these attempts failed dismally.
The first successful conference was the Women's Socialist

Conference summoned by Clara Zetkin, Secretary of the
Women's International Council of Socialist and Labor
Organizations, which was part of the Second international.
This women's conference met at Berne in March, 1915, and,
under the leadership of the revolutionary Clara Zetkin,
issued a statement against the War and prepared the way
for a larger conference that was called in Zimmerwald,
September, 1915, on the initiative of the Italian Socialist
Party.
This larger anti-war Conference was attended by Socialist

groups from Great Britain, Italy, Russia, Poland, the Baltic
Provinces, and the Balkan States, while unofficially present
were representatives of the Left Wings from France,
Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, and Switzerland. The
Conference formed a permanent body called the
International Socialist Commission, and issued a joint
manifesto of international working class solidarity against
imperialism. Simultaneously, the French and German
delegations pledged mutual support to each other.
The Zimmerwald Conference was a composite of Centrists

and pacifists, besides containing an extreme Left Wing
headed by Lenin. The Conference as a whole was not
intended to replace the Bureau of the Second International,
but merely to stimulate it. The majority did not conceive
that the Second International was dead. The Lenin group,
alone of the delegations, stood for the formation of a new
International and a break from the old. The principal slogan
of the Conference was "immediate peace." Against this, the
Left Wing, under Lenin, proposed the slogan: "The
transformation of imperialist war into civil war and the
699
Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Although defeated, the
Lenin group did not break from the Conference but worked
as a militant minority.
By 1916 the revolutionary Socialists were in a mood to

advance still farther to the Left. The deadly toll of the War
was quietly doing its work. At Kienthal, the Conference
took the step not only of denouncing the Pacifist
movements, but of castigating also the Bureau of the
Socialist International for having failed to bring together the
Socialist workers of different countries to stop the War. The
only solution to end the War was the conquest of power by
the Socialists. Thus, gradually the views of the extreme Left
of Lenin were becoming adopted, and the Kienthal
Conference was to bind together a number of groups that
were to form later the kernel of the Third (Communist)
International.
No further conferences were held during the War. After the

Russian Revolution, a vigorous effort was made to hold a
conference in Stockholm in 1917 on the initiation of the
Socialist International Bureau, but it came to nothing. The
Bolsheviks were highly suspicious that the German
Socialists at the head of the Bureau were simply playing the
game of German imperialism that wanted to stop the War
when it was losing and when it saw that Russia was in
revolution. On the other hand, the governments of the
victorious powers refused to grant passports to their
respective socialists. And so the conference failed to
materialize.
The World War marked a complete collapse of the Socialist

International. From a revolutionary force it had turned into
an instrument for the mobilization of its nationals to shoot
each other down in favor of its supposed enemy, the
capitalists in the rear. The War exposed the Second
700
International as a destructive agent of the working class.
The Russian Revolution was to demonstrate still more
clearly that the only role left for the Socialists to play was
the business of counter-revolution.
Footnotes
1. Estimate of R. P. Dutt: The Two Internationals, p. 14.

(London, 1920 edition.)
2. Compare, L. Wolman: Growth of American Trade Unions,

1880-1923, p. 65.
3. See, H. W. Laidler: The British Co-operative

Movement, pamphlet.
4. See, H. W. Laidler: The European War and

Socialism, pamphlet; see also A. W. Humphrey: International
Socialism, and the War, pp. 82-83.
5. See, H. W. Laidler: The European War and Socialism.
6. K. Kautsky: The Guilt of William Hohenzollern, p. 258.
7. H. M. Hyndman: The Future of Democracy, p. 54 and

before.
8. See, for example, H. M. Hyndman: Clemenceau.
9. See the Socialist Party National Platform, given in K. H.

Porter: National Party Platforms, pp. 403-411.
10. See, M. Hillquit: Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, p. 166.

Compare also H. W. Laidler: Socialism in Thought and
Action, pp. 457-458.
11. M. Hillquit: The same, p. 205.
12. M. Hillquit: The same, p. 167.

701
13. His military analysis of the Crimean War and the
Franco-Prussian War in particular evoked the highest
praise in circles devoted to the pursuit of military science.
14. Marx and Engels: Correspondence, Preface by F. Engels to

Borkheim's "In Memory of the Supreme German Patriots 1806-
1807," pp. 456-457.
15. Quoted by G. S. Coulton; The Case for Compulsory

Military Service, p. 149.
17. The same, p. 198, quoting from statement in J.

Jaur’es': L'Armie Nouvelle, p. 362.
18. See, D. DeLeon: "'The Flag' in Utah," The Weekly

People, November 13, 1912.
19. The same.

Bebel, 1891, p. 490.
21. The same, Letter of Engels to Sorge, 1891, p. 494.
22. The same, Letter of Engels to Bebel, 1891, pp. 491-492.
XXIII. SOCIALISM AND THE PROLETARIAN

REVOLUTION
THE Russian Revolution had been expected for a long time,

not only by the Socialists of Western Europe, but by the
702
capitalist class as well. Particularly had this been one of the
basic considerations of the German General Staff.
The Socialist speculation was typified by the view of

Friedrich Engels who believed that the outburst of the
democratic revolution in Russia would deliver the final
blow to German absolutism. For this reason, Engels
emphasized that peace was more important to the German
Socialists than war, since it was the reactionaries who were
being forced to exclaim that peaceful legality was killing
them. The advances of German capitalism were creating a
socialist movement so vast that it was becoming irresistible.
All that was needed was some outside stimulus, like the
Russian Revolution, to weight the scales decisively in favor
of the workers.
Considering this very element of danger, the German

General Staff had, with the advent of Kaiser Wilhelm II,
deposed Bismarck and his entire staff. The diplomacy of
Bismarck had called for a solidification of Germany proper,
unburdened by any great imperialist pretensions. A
consolidated Germany could easily defend itself
from revanche attacks from the side of France, could make
friends with Russian Czarism, and thus be in a position to
dominate the entire central portion of Europe.
To Bismarck, a monarchical alliance of Russia, Austria,

Germany and Italy on the basis of fighting republican
anarchical tendencies in Europe was far more important
than fighting over the Balkans and risking war with Russia.
He cautioned: "If the monarchical governments have no
understanding of the necessity for holding together in the
interests of political and social order, but make themselves
subservient to the chauvinistic impulses of their subjects, I
fear that the international revolution and social struggle
which will have to be fought out will be all the more
703
dangerous and will take such a form that the victory on the
part of the monarchical order will be more difficult." (*1)
Having seen the nightmare of the Paris Commune spring

out of the soil of the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck feared
any future wars. Repeatedly he warned: "The danger of
foreign wars, the danger that the next war on our west
frontier might bring the red flag into the struggle, just as a
hundred years ago it brought the tricolor, was present at
the time of Schnaebele and Boulanger, and is still present."
(*2)
The new German General Staff had to face entirely different

problems. As Czarism weakened internally, its value as an
ally declined. To counter the inevitable democratic victory
in Russia, it was necessary to strike fierce blows at the
democratic West and to declare war to the bitter end
against France and England. Thus the strategy of the
imperialist military staff came to involve military offensive
on the West, attack on Belgium, destruction of France --- the
opposite of what the opportunist Socialists had expected.
(*3)
The explosion of the Russian revolution, which came as the

World War placed an insuperable strain upon Czarism, was
thus no surprise to the German military staff, and was even
welcomed, since it paralyzed the Russian armies and
released the Germans for concentrated violent attacks on
the West, now all the more necessary as the United States
entered the war. The German General Staff even permitted
the Bolsheviks, Lenin and his group, to travel in a sealed
train from Switzerland, through Germany, to Russia, to
strengthen the forces of the revolution. This event more
than anything else persuaded groups in the countries of the
Entente that the Bolsheviks were paid agents and spies of
the Germans.
704
The attitude of the socialist nationalists to the Russian
Revolution varied in accordance with the capitalist interests
of their countries, the French and English looking upon the
Russian revolution with dismay, as a calamity, the Germans
taking a more favorable stand. Within Russia, the Right
Wing socialists, the Mensheviks and others, did their best,
in spite of the revolution, to continue the war against
Germany to the end.
All of these groups fatally miscalculated the dynamic forces

let loose in the East. They had been prepared for a
democratic revolution, but none of them had foreseen that
the democratic revolution could not stop halfway, but had
to be completed by a proletarian revolution. Since the
Liberals, the Radicals, the Trudoviks (Laborites under
Kerensky), the Socialist Revolutionaries and the
Mensheviks could not solve the most elementary needs of
the masses, there was now no coercive force within Russia
strong enough to prevent these masses from moving
towards the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks now dominated the
Soviets, which had been set up, and all power went to the
Soviets. The workers' rule began.
Once the Soviets had assumed full power and had

enunciated as their goal the establishment of communism,
once they had begun to socialize all industries,
dispossessing the capitalist class, the situation entirely
changed. All the socialists, whether adhering to the Right
Wing or to the Centrists who had managed to keep some of
their revolutionary prestige, now united in an attack
against Soviet Russia.
As though foreseeing this very event, Friedrich Engels had

written years before: "In any case our sole adversary on the
day of the crisis and on the day after the crisis will be the
whole collective reaction which will group itself around full
705
democracy!" (*4) All the remnants of the Second
International closed ranks behind the slogan of democracy
to fight the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Within Russia,
among the masses, the Mensheviks became the chief
organizing force against the revolution which had brushed
them so ruthlessly into the discard of history.
The chief theoretical opponent of the Russian dictatorship

was the leader of the Centrist forces, Karl Kautsky. Posing
as a Marxist, Kautsky could not deny that Marx had
predicted the smashing of the capitalistic State and the
establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It was
his task to interpret the phrase "dictatorship of the
proletariat" so as to emasculate it. To him the term
"dictatorship" could mean only a state of affairs, a form of
government. The workers were to take over power by
winning the majority of the people to their side in
parliamentary elections. After they had won 51 per cent of
the population, should any slave-holding minority rebel,
then the majority could use ruthless methods against the
minority --- always in the name of democracy for all. A
similar position was held by Morris Hillquit, leader of the
Socialist Party of the United States. (*5)
Kautsky denied, indeed, that the revolution in Russia was

even a working class one. The proletarian revolution could
not come in a backward agrarian country; if it did come,
then, like the boy who first saw a giraffe, one had to affirm
"there ain't no such animal." More than a decade before,
Daniel DeLeon had expressed the problem in an orthodox
manner: "The theory hitherto has been that the Social
Revolution would break out first in the most capitalistically
developed nations, and then pull up the others. Was there a
flaw in this theory? Are facts about to be produced to
reverse the theory and show that the impulse is to come
706
from the opposite direction?" (*6) Kautsky answered his
problem dogmatically: "The more a State is capitalistic on
the one side and democratic on the other, the nearer it is to
Socialism. . . . In a number of industrial States the material
and moral prerequisites for Socialism appear already to
exist in sufficient measure.... But Russia is not one of these
leading industrial States. What is being enacted there now
is, in fact, the last of middle class, and not the first of
Socialist revolutions." (*7)
Thus Kautsky believed that the only working class policy

possible in Russia was to overthrow the Czar and to
establish capitalism in Russia. The Socialists should then
attempt to prepare the Russian workers, through long years
of education, for the taking over of power. The
revolutionary workers were to act as coolies for the
impotent capitalists and to hand over the power to their
exploiters on a silver platter. All this in the name of
Marxism! When the workers insisted on retaining the
power they had won, Kautsky scolded them, forecasting
that this premature action could lead only to a tremendous
blood-bath similar to the Paris Commune. The Dictatorship
of the Proletariat in Russia being abortive, the workers
would be forced into the petty bourgeois methods of
violent revolution rather than to solid peaceful methods
which workers in every civilized country, of which
Germany was the model, were expected to use.
To the old turncoat, Kautsky, the Bolshevik theory was the

inevitable counterpart of the Blanquist adventurism which
the Russians were repeating on a far wider scale. He
refused deliberately to recognize the fact that the
Bolsheviks had legitimately won a majority of the workers
in the decisive Soviets of the country. This was not
sufficient, evidently, for this German patriot who insisted
707
the Bolsheviks win the peasantry too. He bemoaned the
brutality of Lenin and contrasted it with his own humanity.
"As we have only the two alternatives --- democracy or civil
war --- I myself draw the conclusion that wherever
Socialism does not appear to be possible on a democratic
basis, and where the majority of the population rejects it, its
time has not fully come." (*8)
Kautsky charged the Bolsheviki with plundering the

peasantry, with robbing the bourgeois, and with
bureaucratic absolutism. Thus did the Centrists join hands
with the Mensheviks in asserting the necessity for a new
civil war in Russia. These people, desirous above all of
peace and good ethical conduct, were most blood-thirsty in
declaring for war and violence against the Bolsheviks. Yet if
it were true, as Kautsky maintained, that the Russian
Revolution was only a capitalist one, and if it were further
true that Russia could reach only some stage of capitalism,
no matter how hard the workers tried, then it would seem
peculiar that the Centrists should have wanted to
overthrow the very Bolsheviks carrying out capitalist
processes. The fact is that the Kautskys stood in deadly fear
of the proletarian revolution.
Within the Soviets, the Mensheviks were able to take

control of the country of Georgia in Asia Minor. The
Georgian Social Democrats had been the picked troops of
Russian Menshevism after the first Russian revolution in
1905; Georgia had constantly returned them with the
largest majority in the Dumas elections. Georgia was to
furnish many of the Menshevik martyrs. (*9) Taking
advantage of the October, 1917, Revolution headed by the
Bolsheviks, which had declared that each nationality could
determine its own future and could withdraw from the
Soviets if it desired, the Mensheviks were able to persuade
708
Georgia to declare her independence in May, 1918, and to
quit the Soviets.
While it was one thing to declare that any nationality could

leave the Soviets, it was another thing to turn over Georgia
to a new exploiting group of capitalists who would reinstall
wage-slavery and use it to launch interventionary armies to
crush the Soviets.
The Georgian Mensheviks by no means established a

dictatorship of proletarians. They allowed landlords,
capitalists, priests, the entire management of the old order
to vote, freely to express themselves and to take advantage
of every difficulty in order to bring back the aristocracy into
power. When they went so far as to make deals with the
French and with the Germans against the Bolsheviks, it was
time to carry the civil war outside of the immediate bounds
of Russia and establish a workers' rule in Georgia. In this
the Bolsheviks were only acting on the old slogan:
"Communism knows no boundaries. Workers of the world,
unite."
Shouting dire imprecations against this so-called invasion

of Georgia, the Mensheviks did their utmost to mobilize
international resistance against "Bolshevik tyranny" and to
arm the interventionary forces striving to crush the
proletarian Soviet regime.
All through the post-war period, the Centrists never let up

in their deadly hostility to the proletarian revolution. In the
United States, Morris Hillquit became the highly-paid
attorney for anti-Soviet oil interests; only indignant
working class pressure inside and without the Socialist
Parties compelled him reluctantly to part from his clients.
In Germany, Kautsky preached day and night the violent
overthrow of the Bolsheviks. As against the Soviets, he
709
proposed a democratic parliamentary republic with a
gradual transition to capitalism. He urged organizers to
unite the peasants with the soldiers in order to support
peasant revolts against the Bolsheviks with a mutiny in the
Red Army. Both were to be led by the Menshevik
intellectuals. In this struggle, Kautsky proposed a united
front between the Socialists and the bourgeois democrats
against the Bolsheviks for the restoration of capitalism, with
social reforms for the masses. (*10)
Once in power, and with the Bolsheviks overthrown, the

Socialists declared they would end the monopoly of foreign
trade, terminate most of the collectives, liquidate the Red
Army, and join hands with Germany in the League of
Nations for real disarmament. Such was the program of
international Centrism in facing the Russian proletarian
revolution.
The Russian revolution exploded the entire stability of

capitalist relations throughout the world. Immediately after
the war, communist revolutions occurred in Hungary and
in Bavaria. In Germany the Kaiser was forced to flee and
the government was placed in the hands of the Social
Democrats. Even the victorious countries felt the impact of
the revolutionary wave. Mutinies broke out in the army and
navy in France. In England a vast general strike movement
shook the entire country. As far off as North America, the
general strikes in Seattle, Oregon, and in Winnipeg, Canada,
showed that the old stability was no more. Outlaw strikes
broke out in the United States on the railroads, in the coal
710
mines, in the steel mills, etc., and a great movement for the
nationalization of industry and for independent political
action of labor took form.
In every case the socialists did pioneer work to preserve

capitalism and to destroy the militant, insurrectionary
proletarian movement. In Germany the Majority Socialists
were able to induce the Centrists to join hands with them in
taking over the government. The chief task of these
Socialists was to put down the communist insurrections. So
bloody was the massacre of the workers under the socialists
that the Independent Socialists, to save their prestige, were
forced to separate from those led by Scheidemann and
Noske. As a desperate measure to stifle the incipient
revolutionary movement of the communist spreading
through the country, these Majority Socialists actually went
to the extent of calling out a general strike of the workers
under their control. The workers, of course, were under the
belief that they were demonstrating against reaction. just as
the socialists had used the general strike before merely for
liberal and reformist purposes, so they were able to use it in
1918 for counter-revolutionary purposes. By the strike
action, the communists were kept scattered and time given
the government to handle the situation.
When the insurrectionary movement rose still higher, the

socialist Noske personally took charge of the military forces,
and placing the most reactionary Prussian Junkers at the
head, went forward with wholesale plans to massacre
militant workers. After the second general strike of the
communists, Noske himself was responsible for the
massacre in one week of fifteen hundred chained prisoners
by machine gun fire in Berlin alone. (*11)
Never were there better saviors for capitalist society than

the German socialists. Under the Kaiser, the bourgeoisie
711
had never taken direct control over the government. After
the Kaiser had fled, it was the socialists who assumed
control for them. In neither case were the capitalists
themselves able to administer Germany directly. "Without
the fight put up by the organized German Socialist
movement and the German trade unionists, Bolshevism
would have gained the day in those dreary winter months.
The German working class, and the working class alone, in
those days saved Europe from Bolshevism. They received
little assistance from the bourgeois classes --- they had none
to give at that time --- and the only support they got from
abroad was a continuation of the blockade." (*12)
Once the revolutionary movement had been put down, the

socialist government voluntarily relinquished its power, on
the pretext that the general elections held showed that it
lacked the support of a clear majority of the people. On the
contrary, the elections had overwhelmingly demonstrated
that a majority of the population were for a new social
order and the abolition of capitalism, since the votes for
socialists and communists swamped all others. However,
the socialists refused to have anything to do with the
communists and declared that since they themselves had
not received the majority, history and decency compelled
them to unite with the capitalists to form a coalition
government to support the republic. Thus the socialists
deliberately chose a capitalist alliance to preserve the
system of exploitation rather than go with the communist
workers for socialism.
Essentially, the same situation occurred in Austria. "In

Austria the Socialist movement, probably the strongest in
the world in relative numbers, discipline, and organization,
deliberately refrained from any attempt to capture and hold
the powers of government as a minority party." (*13) Here
712
the situation was even stronger than in Germany, since
Austria was flanked on either side, both in Bavaria and in
Hungary, with communistic elements that had actually
taken the power. The old Austrian empire had been
shattered into fragments by its defeat in the World War.
The Austrian socialists, therefore, were compelled to use
the most revolutionary phrases and to pretend to act as the
extreme Wing of the Socialist Centrists, yet with all their
talk, they steadfastly refused to join with the genuine
revolutionary forces and stopped midway, after the flight
of the emperor, with a capitalist democracy, using the
specious argument that this was the "will of the people."
In their arguments against the Russian Revolution, the

German socialists had affirmed that, according to Marxism,
socialism could appear only in the most highly developed
countries first of all, and thus the revolution in Russia was a
mere putsch. It was now the turn of the Russians to reply
that, since Germany was the most advanced industrial
country, it was up to the German socialists to start their
revolution there. The very arguments of Kautsky against
the Russian Revolution should have led him to support the
revolution in Germany.
However, the German socialist Centrists were all too eager

to denounce the revolution, not only in Russia, but in
Germany as well. True, Germany was the most
industrialized country and should have socialism first. But
socialism could not come through violence. The workers
were still a minority of the population; they had to be
educated farther. The balloting showed that 51 per cent of
the population had not voted for the socialists. It was
therefore the workers' fault that socialism had not arrived.
During the war, the Kautskys had declared that the
socialists had no arms to revolt and could not defeat the
713
trained army of the Kaiser. The workers were engaged in
war and would be shot down in a wholesale fashion. In
short, conditions were not right for revolt. After the war,
when the socialists had power, they declared that now that
they were disarmed, they were surrounded by hostile
victorious powers that would invade Germany and shoot
down the revolution were it attempted. Thus, neither in
Russia nor in Germany, either before or after the war, was
revolution appropriate.
Centrist theoreticians like Kautsky, in justifying their

position, were forced to make an un-Marxian analysis of the
world economic situation in which they found themselves.
Imperialism was not an era of capitalism; it was merely
a policy by which the militarist industrialist countries
imposed their will upon the backward agrarian colonies.
Imperialism was not inherent in the capitalist system itself,
nor was it necessarily controlling throughout a whole
period of time.
To Kautsky, it was quite possible that imperialism would

yield to a new policy of world capitalism which for
convenience might be called ultra- imperialism. Just as
within a country small industry had given rise to large
monopolies that had put order and system where
competitive chaos had existed previously, --- as, for
example, the United States Steel Corporation in the steel
industry in the United States, --- so international capitalism
could evolve to the extent that it could eradicate all violent
fluctuations and contradictions and establish a uniform
system of order throughout the world.
Such socialists also believed that it was quite possible that

from the war there would emerge several dominant powers
conceiving their interests best subserved if they were to join
together in some international body for the partition of the
714
world and the regulation of markets, prices, conditions of
labor and production. Such powers would therefore
become super-powers and would do away with
competition forever. Under such conditions of ultra-
imperialism, world harmony would prevail. War would
disappear. Thus society could witness a peaceful
civilization ordering its life according to some plan, and
constantly improving its standards.
The establishment of the League of Nations seemed to these

socialist dreamers a verification of their predictions. The
League of Nations would really be a family of nations that
would do away with competitive clashes and regulate the
world harmoniously. There would be established an
international world court of justice, a gradual disarmament,
a widespread education. Ultra-imperialism would wipe out
the possibility of violent revolutions; it would gradually
ease itself into a world socialist society.
Socialist Centrists, like Hillquit and Kautsky, eagerly allied

themselves with all the theories of Woodrow Wilson and
the League of Nations. They would not admit the League of
Nations and the World Court to be merely instrumentalities
of the victorious powers to dictate their will forever upon
the defeated. They repudiated all idea that under capitalism,
even world monopoly could not do away with competition,
rivalry, and nationalism, but only intensified these aspects
of economic and social life.
With such theories, however, the socialist Centrists became

mere adjuncts to the diplomatic machinery of their
respective governments.
715
In 1918 there occurred an Interallied Labor and Socialist
Conference which undertook to lay the base for a general
conference of the Second International, the first since the
war. This conference was held in February, 1919, in Berne,
and included also trade union groups. However, the
nationalist hostility that prevailed among the socialists
prevented the conference from having any genuine
international character. Some socialists refused to attend
because of nationalist reasons, such as the Belgium Labor
Party and the American Federation of Labor; others refused
because they would have nothing to do with the Right
Wing socialism embodied in the Berne Conference. Such
groups as the Italian, Serb, Swiss, Roumanian, Bulgarian
and Russian, were busy building a new or Third
International.
The Conference at once broke up into factions reflecting the

wartime hostilities. Each side tried to place the blame of the
War upon the other, the socialists representing the
countries that had won the War being successful in placing
the blame on those which had lost the War. All of the
groups, however, were strongly in favor of a League of
Nations constituted by delegates from the parliaments of
each country. They declared for the principle of self-
determination of every nationality. Also, they drew up an
International Labor Charter to present to those meeting at
Versailles. In fact, the whole Conference was only a labor
lobby to influence Versailles.
While endorsing the League of Nations, the majority at the

Conference did not neglect to attack the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat. A minority, however, maintained that labor
should take no part in any attack against Soviet Russia. The
Conference adjourned after setting up a permanent
commission, which, in a formal statement, declared that the
716
League of Nations was "the first effective international
organ." (*14)
In the meantime, a deep split was taking place among the

socialists. On the one hand, in a number of countries, the
socialists were becoming the Government and, as
governmental agents, were using their power to bolster up
capitalism. Employers did little to prevent the vast swing of
labor behind the socialists. The International Federation of
Trade Unions that had numbered approximately fifteen
million increased to forty-five million immediately after the
war, Germany alone springing from a little over two
million to over thirteen million in a short time. On the
political field, the turning over of power to the Socialist
Parties without too great resistance by the capitalists had
induced large numbers of the middle class and strata of
workers affected by them to rush into the Socialist Parties.
In England, the Labor Party was able to adopt a program

dealing with the relationship of labor and the new social
order in which the Labor Party called for a national
minimum wage, the democratic control of industry and
nationalization, and a complete revolution in national
finances, with exceedingly heavy income taxes on the
higher brackets, and for the utilization of surplus wealth of
the nation for the common good. The Independent Labor
Party came out with a program of "Socialism in our time."
The Laborites were able to obtain 192 seats in the House of
Commons in 1923, and, under the premiership of Ramsay
MacDonald, formed the first Labor Government which
lasted nine months. In 1924, although the Labor Party lost
its governmental position, it was able to muster four and
one-half million votes and practically wipe out the Liberal
Party.
717
In Denmark, the Socialist Party took over the government
under the Premiership of Stauning. In Sweden, obtaining
almost half the seats in Parliament, the Socialist Party put
forth as Premier its leader, Branting. In Belgium, the
Socialists received over 40 per cent of the votes cast and
established Vandervelde as their Minister in the Cabinet.
Everywhere they were becoming dominant forces for the
maintenance of capitalism.
After the War, a tremendous revolutionary ferment spread

among the workers of Europe. In this period the
Communist International and the Red International of
Labor Unions were born. Against this Red International, a
Trade Union Conference was called in Washington in 1919
for an eight-hour day. Another was convened in London in
1920, calling for the cancellation of war debts and the
socialization of land, mines, and transports under the
workers' control. But these congresses seemed exceedingly
pale in comparison to those held in Moscow.
On the extreme Right, the American Federation of Labor

organized its Pan-American Federation of Labor to carry
out from the labor angle the imperialist scheme of
American capitalists to dominate Latin America.
Conferences were held in Laredo, Mexico City and
elsewhere, in which the A. F. of L. completely dominated
the scene and made it plain that it would rule the labor
conferences in the Western hemisphere, as the United States
imperialists in the capitalist world.
Later, with the defeat of the communist forces on a world

scale, on the one hand, and stabilization within Russia on
the other, after the death of Lenin, the Soviet Union became
recognized by various capitalist governments. This change
of front was reflected within the trade union ranks as well,
and, in 1924, the International Federation of Trade Unions
718
invited the Russian trade unions to join them and there was
established an Anglo-Russian Trade Unity Committee. The
events following the General Strike of 1926 terminated this
venture.
Between the two international groups of trade unions, and

between the communists and socialists, a third Centrist
grouping had crystallized, popularly known as the Two-
and-a-half International, made up of such elements as the
Independent Socialist Party of Germany, the Socialist Party
of the United States, etc.
These Centrists attempted to close the breach in labor's

ranks and to bring together the communists of the Third
International and the socialists of the Second International
into one joint organization. This they were unable to do,
since under Lenin the communists refused to enter into any
class collaboration schemes. Pretending to be indignant at
the treachery of the Right Wing, and unable to join the
communists, the Centrists formed their own group in
Vienna, called the Vienna Union, in 1921. This independent
grouping lasted until the end of the revolutionary wave
and the beginning of the decline of the Communist
International, when it quietly made peace with the Right
Wing and joined forces with the very governmental agency
it had denounced before. In 1923, the Vienna Union
capitulated and fused into the present Socialist and Labor
International.
This had always been the classic procedure of the Centrists.

With the Left Wing, in Germany for example, they had
pretended to be against the War, and, after 1916, they had
formed an Independent Socialist Party, refusing to vote for
war credits. When the revolution came in 1918, the
Centrists hastened to join forces with Scheidemann and
Noske for a government that would uphold capitalism. In
719
1919, posing as indignant at the brutal treatment
administered the Sparticides and at the wholesale massacre
of the workers, the Centrists again broke with the Right
Wing. The chief role of these Centrists then became to
prevent the German masses from joining the communist
organizations of Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Just
as Scheidemann in open court declared he had led the
general strike of German workers in 1918 only in order to
behead it and to save the German social order, so did the
Kautskys organize their Centrist Independent Party only in
order to channelize and to control the discontent of the
workers and to lead them back to the Right Wing socialists
of the Second International. What the Centrists did in
Germany was done on an international scale by the Vienna
Union.
In the United States, the Socialist Party joined the Viennese

Union for different reasons. But being composed to a great
extent of foreign-born workers, especially those who had
lived under the terror of Czarism, the Socialist Party could
not avoid expressing the greatest sympathy with the
Russian Revolution. The tactics of the Socialist Party
leadership were a classical illustration of the methods of the
Centrists. The Socialist Party came out for the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat as advocated by Hillquit, that is, socialists
were peacefully to obtain 51 per cent of the votes, and then
revolutionarily to crush any minority pro-capitalist
rebellion.
The Socialist Party announced it was willing to support all

the conditions laid down by the Third International and,
indeed, tried to affiliate to that body. However, there was
one condition it refused to accept, namely, the
establishment of an authoritarian international center that
would control the program and actions of the various
720
national sections formed under its banner. In phrases, the
Centrists were willing to yield to every point of the
program of the Communist International; all that they
asked was that in practice they should be left alone, that no
one should interfere with their interpretations of the
program, with their leadership, with their mode of
organization, or with their professed strategy and tactics. In
short, what they desired was to appear as revolutionists but
to be free to act as reformists.
Of course, the Communist International rejected such

Centrist approaches and refused to accept the applications
for affiliation. After the communists were removed from
the Socialist Party, that organization rapidly moved farther
and farther to the Right in the United States.
The rewards of government leadership given to the

socialists for their salvage of the old order were not to last
very long. The contradictions of capitalism were to make
impossible the rule of the skilled worker as it had made
impossible the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. The social
reforms demanded by the socialists and the trade unions as
the price of their anti-revolutionism proved too costly.
Capitalism had to dismiss these agents and socialism was
doomed to die as a counter-revolutionary force, as it had
died as a revolutionary one.
Footnotes
1. O. Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman, II, pp. 251-252

(1899 translation under A. J. Butler).
2. Bismarck, work cited, p. 285.
3. Compare Munroe Smith: Militarism and Statecraft.
721
Bebel, Dec. 1884, p. 433.
5. See, M. Hillquit: From Marx to Lenin.
6. D. DeLeon: Russia in Revolution, Pamphlet, p. 30.
7. K. Kautsky: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, pp. 96-97.
8. K. Kautsky: Terrorism and Communism, p. 220.
9. See, K. Kautsky: Georgia, p. 20, pamphlet.
10. See, Kautsky: Bolshevism at a Deadlock, p. 156 and

following.
11. See, W. H. Crook: The General Strike, p. 507.
12. M. J. Bonn: The Crisis of European Democracy, p. 45.
13. M. Hillquit: Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, p. 281.
14. R. P. Dutt: The Two internationals, p. 18.
722
BOOK V: FASCISM
723
I. FOUNDATIONS OF FASCISM
XXIV. CHRONIC CRISIS
FASCISM is an outstanding political demonstration that

the capitalist world is no longer strong and healthy.
Although capitalism grew with vigor and promise during
the nineteenth century, it has already reached its age of
decrepitude. In economics capitalism stifles the forces of
production. In social life it reduces the standards of the
people to an unbelievably low level. In theory it flies to
mysticism and necromantic table-rappings of all sorts.
Instead of the old basic capitalist rhythms and patterns
prevailing in the pre-war period, the framework clatters
convulsively, torn by disintegrating tremors.
Prior to the present, all the contradictions which have

ripened since into such monstrous proportions were
already paining the social consciousness, although the
healthy forces of growth were able to conceal the disease
while indeed nourishing it. In the nineteenth century,
capitalism went through its cycles of prosperity, boom,
panic, depression, revival and prosperity, etc., in which
prosperity and boom were the relatively long periods, panic
and depression the shorter ones. However, as capitalism
advanced, the crises, intensified, affected more countries,
the intervals between crises shortened, the effects grew
more severe. Gradually prosperity and boom were
becoming overshadowed by panic and depression.
The United States furnishes a good example of this

development. According to a carefully worked-out chart of
the Cleveland Trust Company, starting with the panic of
1837, it was found that, generally speaking, and leaving
724
aside the special causes such as existed in the economic
readjustment immediately after the Civil War, panics lasted
only a short time, a year or two, and, in the main, did not
reduce the business activity below 10 per cent of normal.
The crises were separated by intervals of fifteen years
which became shortened, by the latter part of the century,
to intervals of approximately ten years. Only in the panic of
1893, for the first time, did production fall off 20 per cent
from normal, and the depression extend for several years
(three to five years). This was the greatest damage suffered
during the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century,
however, even before the war, the United States witnessed
three periods when industry fell from 10 per cent to 15 per
cent. The country was again on the verge of a great
depression when the European War broke out.
Following the World War came the crisis of 1920-21, which

plunged the country into the deepest depression of its
history. Production fell off at times 25 per cent, and millions
of workers were thrown on the street. That the United
States was able to recover relatively quickly was due to the
weakened conditions of capitalist Europe and its great
demand upon the United States for economic support in its
rehabilitation and reorganization. That is to say, the crisis of
1920-21 in the United States was liquidated by the famine,
poverty, and breakdown of Europe. No such causes for
recovery exist in the present crisis.
The crisis extant today has embraced the whole capitalist

world in its throes and is shaking the entire system to its
foundations. Already it has gone through several stages.
The first was purely economic, from 1929 to 1932. In the
second, economics became concentrated into politics. As
economic measures used to stave off bankruptcy failed,
political expedients were tried. The third phase has
725
witnessed the impossibility of liquidating the crisis within
any country by the utilization of internal forces alone. The
critical events now becoming universal must inevitably
culminate in world war and revolutionary convulsions.
The present crisis is quite distinct from all the others that
have preceded it in the sense that it is due to a mutually
interacting combination of two distinct sets of forces. On
the one hand, it has its roots in the chronic basic crisis in
which imperialism was placed ever since the World War;
on the other hand, it is the result of the very efforts which
allowed capitalism to survive and to stabilize itself after the
war. This partial stabilization regenerated all the forces that
had existed before the war, but on a higher plane. Had
capitalism perished under the advance of the first
proletarian revolutionary wave, the present crisis would
have been impossible. The forces that defeated the
proletarian revolution and that revived capitalist
contradictions re-created the cyclical features of the present
crisis.
Even from the standpoint of the cyclical aspects only, the

present crisis is unprecedented, both in weight and fury. At
the same time, the capitalist world has been unable. as
previously, to absorb the shock of these cyclical depressions.
The blows are harder, and the body has become weaker.
In the discussion of Socialism we have already taken up the

economic contradictions and general social antagonisms
which, operating even in "good times," lead in turn to "bad
times." Now, as in similar periods in the past, the output
per worker has increased more rapidly than the total
disposable production, thus leading to the discharge of
workers even when production is increasing. This increased
output per worker is due especially to increased
productivity, that is, to the introduction and wide-spread
726
application of the improvements of machinery, etc. The
worker, with the same amount of labor power expended,
now turns out increasingly large quantities of commodities.
If the accumulation of capital leading to relative

overproduction is the- basic cause of any particular cyclical
crisis, this overproduction is still further stimulated by the
crisis itself. In order to prevent shut-downs, each
manufacturer tries to lower the cost of production, that is,
still further to rationalize production and to depress the
wages of the laborers. It is precisely in the period of crises
that new machinery, sweatshops, and over-work become
general, and the output per laborer enormously increased.
Thus, to the evils of over-work and over-strain is added the
misery of an uncertainty of labor.
Ample evidence is available in official reports of the great

increase of productivity per man occurring exactly in
periods of crisis. The United States Department of Labor
reports, for example, regarding the coal mines: "A further
significant fact shown in these statistics is that the year-to-
year increase in output per man per day has been more
rapid in years of depression, i.e., 1930 and 1931, than in the
year of more active coal demand, 1929." (*1) The same was
stated in regard to the auto-tire industry for 1930-1931:
"...especially during the last 2 years, there has been an
increase in man-hour productivity, much larger than
during any preceding year in the history of tire making." (*2)
In fact, the rate of increase in 1931 was nine times that of
1929. The same tendency has existed in all industries.
The crisis itself is brought about by the law of accumulation

of capital leading to the contradiction between the
increased productivity of the worker and the slower
increase of markets, or even decrease of markets. The
ingenuity of man is unlimited. His ability to increase his
727
output has steadily progressed. On the other hand, the
world is finite. It has a limited number of people and a
restricted area. The number of people who can purchase
goods so as to yield a profit does not increase with the rate
of growth of production or of productivity. Not only does
the rate of consumption decrease relative to the rate of
production, but now consumption tends, even in absolute
figures, not to increase at all, to remain stagnant, and even
to decrease. The growing impoverishment of the masses
often renders large markets nugatory. This has been
especially true since the World War.
The very tendencies engendering crises are accentuated in

turn by the crisis itself. The rate of growth of productivity
in periods of prosperity has been ascertained to be 4 per
cent per year; in periods of depression it has become 7 per
cent per year. Precisely at the moment when falling markets
create unemployment, workers are thrown out of work all
the more rapidly because of the introduction of new
machinery. (*3) Periods of crisis are generally periods of
complete renovation of machinery and the introduction of
even more efficient systems of rationalization than
prevailed before. At the same time, the market collapses
farther because of unemployment.
In the present crisis, all the harsh contradictory features of

the old cyclical crisis have been reproduced on a much
higher plane. In 1920-1921, in the United States, during the
crisis, production fell off at times to 25 per cent; in the crisis
commencing 1929, production at one time went down to 50
per cent, and although by 1936 it has mounted again to
almost the same levels as before, in many instances, the
number of unemployed in the United States has remained
as large as in the deepest period of the crisis, 1932.
728
The unprecedented violence of the present crisis could be
seen from the start, when the cycle was launched with a
terrific stock market crash in New York City. In a very short
time, industry and trade had fallen to record lows all over
the world. The industrial crisis led to a financial crisis,
aggravated by the insecure financial positions of the
various European governments. Not only large banks
began to go bankrupt, but also the governments themselves
controlling these banks, especially in those countries which
had been defeated in the War. The victorious Versailles
powers, enemies of these governments, had to rush in to
save them with loans and credits of all sorts in order to
bolster up the entire capitalist world. It was too late,
however, for Versailles to repair what it had previously
impaired. Practically the whole world was forced off the
gold standard and a world-wide moratorium for debts
declared. This in turn only brought about a further
stagnation of business, leading to a political crisis in 1932-
1933.
Confining ourselves to the cyclical features of the present

crisis, the following new factors can be noted: (1) The crisis
has affected the whole world simultaneously, no matter to
what degree the various countries may have differed
preceding the turn. The crisis has put a definite end to the
particular violent vacillations marking the economy of each
country, and, with few exceptions, has crashed down upon
the production of all of them. This situation is quite
different from that before the War, when the cycles, though
embracing the whole world, operated in a serial manner
affecting one country after the other, rather than all at once.
(2) The crisis is of far longer duration, so much so as to
become a chronic one. (3) The "hard times" are far more
intense and severe in their effects than those heretofore.
729
In the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Engels had
analyzed the changes occurring in the cyclical crises of
capitalism, where depressions were tending to merge one
into the other. At that time he wrote: "The acute form of the
periodical process, with its former decennial cycle, seems to
have given way to a more chronic, long drawn, alternation
between a relatively short and slight business improvement
and a relatively long, undecided depression, both of them
differently distributed over the various industrial
countries.... is it possible, that we are now in the
preparatory stage of a new world crash of unparalleled
vehemence?" (*4)
The question that Engels posed then can be answered today.

The postwar period of imperialism has amply
demonstrated that today the period of prosperity is the
brief and ephemeral one. We are now in a period of
perpetual panic.
Should the law of accumulation of capital fail to operate as

hitherto, the world would be placed in an extreme
predicament, for, far from ameliorating the contradictions,
this failure would remove the last progressive feature from
capitalism. It is an ominous fact that this very tendency is
coming to the fore during the present depression. As we
have seen, the past crises had at least this justification ---
they swept out the old technique and backward economy in
favor of better methods. Society progressed through the
ruin of the bankrupt.
But what will happen when there is no backward business

man to bankrupt, when, as, for example, in the aluminum
industry in the United States, there exists a complete
monopoly? In this case, when markets are bad, all that the
trust does is to close down one of its branches or subsidiary
factories. There is here no substitution of a better technique
730
or improvement in quality, but simply a curtailment of the
quantity of production. When "good times" return the old
plant may be reopened. Here, then, is an extremely sinister
symptom of capitalism that tends to become more universal,
especially when, with the ever increasing rise in the organic
composition of capital, marked by the preponderance of
fixed and constant capital over labor (variable capital), it
becomes steadily more difficult to throw away the old and
introduce the new in monopolist industries. Under such
circumstances, technique tends to sink into a Pontine Marsh.
The present crisis has given birth to another unique

circumstance of the greatest danger. Up to now, the
expropriated petty owner could find a place in the ranks of
the active working class. This was apparently a step
downward for him, but, in reality, it attached him to a new
class imbued with optimism and vigor, a class which could
refresh him. Now, however, the ranks of the proletariat are
closed to him by the enormous standing army of
unemployed. Thus, the doors have been locked before and
behind and he is left literally to rot. This decaying mass of
humanity, isolated from the active classes, can descend only
to the degeneracy of the d’eclass’e, receptive to any
adventure that promises to raise him from his desperate
plight. He becomes excellent fodder for the fascists, forming
the most important bulk of their forces. (*5)
One final phenomenon should be emphasized, namely, the

formation of a class of permanently disemployed workers.
Some of these disemployed may join with the rotting petty
bourgeoisie to enter the ranks of fascism. In the United
States, this element will be mostly the native American,
skilled worker and employee type unable to adjust itself. To
them will be joined the lumpen proletariat and diseased
criminal elements. The menacing character of this
731
development is especially marked where these
disemployed are formed along race lines. (*6) Under such
conditions, the stage is set for the most savage and violent
civil wars, civil wars which are capable of assuming, in the
United States, truly cyclonic proportions.
The new features of the cyclical crisis that have been

enumerated above can be traced to the changed productive
relations that have developed in the era of imperialism. In
the first place, we have the process of capitalistic
rationalization which, with its scientific and systematic
attempts to increase the mass and rate of surplus value, has
also scientifically and systematically sharpened the
economic and social contradictions of the present order.
The nineteenth century was a stranger to rationalization.
This factor brought the clash more clearly to a head, and all
the faster increased production at a geometric ratio, while,
even in the best of times, consumption increased but
arithmetically. Sooner or later there would have to come a
time when so great would become the productivity of
society that one country could produce enough for all, and,
in one year, sufficient for ten years' use. This time has now
come.
The United States alone can produce enough to satisfy

Europe's present demand. There is no longer any need for
German or English production. Further, its factories are so
productive that no longer can three years of depression
consume the surplus of seven years' hard work. Now one
or two years of capacity production supplies goods it takes
eight years to consume. Here is the reason for the chronic
character of the depression today.
The new features of the cyclical crisis are also due to the
fact that radical structural changes have taken place in
world economy, including such matters as the shift of the
732
economic center of gravity from Europe to the United States,
the breaking down of Europe, the rise of Soviet economy,
the development of Asia, etc. These shifts have
permanently disturbed the former balances and
equilibriums.
We must emphasize again that the very causes of the crisis

are accentuated by the effects. During the depression,
rationalization is intensified, the market is still further
diminished, the law of uneven development, leading to
radical structural changes and shifts, is still further
sharpened. Economics becomes transformed into politics
which in turn reacts upon economics mutually
anastomosing to plunge the world into still greater political
convulsions.
The cyclical crisis has been the gravest in history, and, at

the same time, never was the world in a weaker condition.
These two circumstances have operated mutually to
strengthen each other and to drive the crisis into an
international affair of unsolvable proportions.
The World War and its aftermath greatly weakened

capitalism's power to withstand the blows of the present
crisis, shocks which only the more violently arose. Between
1918 and 1929, England, France, Germany, the large as well
as the small countries, careened madly from one side to
another, from prosperity to crisis, from reaction to
revolution. Periods of prosperity or crisis in England no
longer corresponded with similar periods in Germany, or
those in Germany with events in France, or general
conditions in Europe, with those of Asia or of the United
States. Each country seemed to function as an independent
fragment, dizzily spinning on its own axis towards its
inevitable doom. This has been the basic pattern since the
World War, while entirely new economic and political
733
equilibria have governed America, Europe, the Soviet
Union, and Asia.
Comparative statistics well illustrate the above conclusions.

Conditions in the iron and steel industry are good indices
of general business conditions. (*7) In 1920, for example,
while the United States was falling off in iron and steel
production from about thirty-seven million tons to
seventeen million, the United Kingdom was falling from
nine to four million, Germany was rising from six to almost
nine million, and France was advancing as well. In 1923, on
the other hand, when the United States had recovered to
forty million tons, Germany had fallen to five million,
France was still going up, and England had recovered to
about seven million. In 1926, the United States remained at
forty million, France had gone to ten million, England had
dropped to four million, and Germany had risen to eleven
million. In 1929, the figures for the United States were 42.6
million tons of iron and steel; Germany, 15.5 million; France,
10.4 million; the United Kingdom, 7.6 million.
In the financial sphere, as a result of the re-division of

Europe by the Versailles Treaty and the chaos caused by
war and revolution, one country after the other experienced
drastic currency crises culminating in Germany in 1923 and
in France and Italy in 1925, etc- In 1926 wholesale prices
stood as follows (counting 1913-14 as 100): Germany 134.4;
Belgium 744; France 718; Italy 603; Poland 105; United
Kingdom 148.1; Japan 178.9, etc. Thus in the same year the
widest differences were to be noticed in countries in close
juxtaposition to each other. By 1929, while prices rose 15
per cent in Belgium, they fell 13 per cent in France, 27 per
cent in Italy, 7.2 per cent in the United Kingdom. (*8)
Considering the fluctuations from the aspect of their effects

upon the income of the people, we note that in 1924 the
734
number of bankruptcies in the United States was the lowest
of the nine years that followed; in Great Britain, on the
other hand, it was the highest, while Germany experienced
the most violent fluctuations, ranging from a monthly
average of 516 bankruptcies in 1924 to 1,003 in 1926, falling
to 475 in 1927, and rising to 821 in 1929; in France the
figures showed opposite fluctuations or 659 in 1925, 122 in
1926 and 689 in 1927.
In France, despite temporary suspensions at various levels,

the cost of living, having leaped up during 1925, mounted
steadily from 1927 to 1930; in Italy, it took a drastic drop
from 1925; in Great Britain, it showed a steady decline; in
Germany, it maintained itself at the same level. In France,
wages rose above the slowly dropping cost of living; in
Great Britain, they had been below the cost of living. In
both Germany and Italy also the cost of living dropped
gradually; after 1930 wages dropped at terrific speed. (*9)
Thus, we can safely declare that, as a result of the World

War and the revolutions continually shaking the capitalist
structure, capitalist world economy was nowhere able to
return to the relatively stable equalibria and smooth
functionings that had existed prior to 1914. It was as though
someone had taken a mighty hammer and smashed the
social framework of Europe into fragments.
The crisis has not affected all countries equally. It has fallen
upon the backward agrarian countries, such as Spain and
the European States in Eastern Europe, even more severely
than upon the major industrial countries of Europe. This is
even more true of the non-European agrarian countries,
colonial and semi-colonial, such as Cuba, Central and South
America, India and China, etc., (*10) In every possible way,
the industrial country has tried to shift the burden upon the
weaker agrarian one. The oppressive political regimes and
735
the general bankruptcy existing in these backward
countries have fructified economic difficulties into political
explosions.
Thus, to sum up the whole situation, we may declare that,

upon the shoulders of this new economic and political
situation existent from 1918 onward, the present crisis
enters the scene. Superimposed upon the chronic
breakdown of world order there now arise the heavy
contradictions stemming from the temporary stabilization
of capitalism with the arresting of the proletarian
revolution. We have, then, a double or combined crisis: first,
the general critical situation in which capitalism has been
placed since the War, and, also, the unprecedented regular
cyclical crisis superimposed upon it. This combination
concentrates the economic crisis and transforms it into a
political one.
In its desperate attempt to extricate itself from the crisis, the

capitalist world has been forced to turn to fascism and
rampant adventurism of the most violent character, as
illustrated by the recent actions of Germany, Italy, and
Japan, fraught with the greatest menace of world war.
Although there has been a temporary upturn since 1933, it
has become clear that through peaceful methods alone there
can be no way out for capitalism. The war danger has
become enormously heightened; capitalism stands before a
worldwide political crisis of the greatest magnitude,
involving the decisive question: To be or not to be.
Loaded upon the natural weakness of world imperialism

have been the great structural changes in world economy
that have permanently upset the old equilibria, marked by
a shift of the economic center of gravity to the United States,
736
by the breaking up of the British Empire, by the dissolution
of the natural cohesiveness of Europe and its breakdown,
by the rise of Soviet economy and the markets of Asia.
These structural movements have been sharply exacerbated
by the present crisis which in turn has greatly intensified
the uneven development of capitalism.
The United States is now almost equal to all of capitalist

Europe and comprises 40 per cent of the capitalist world
economy. Besides its own production, American
manufacturers directly control production in many
countries, and, through agreements and cartels, dominate
many industries which they do not control directly. In its
evolution, the United States already has reached the stage
where, in its exports of commodities, two-thirds are
finished and semi-finished, while the imports are moving
more and more to raw materials. This is just the opposite to
the situation that existed in the nineteenth century. In
wealth and income, Europe has slipped behind America,
both relatively and absolutely.
The basis for the hegemony of the United States in world

affairs rests upon its enormous natural and power
resources, its great food supply, the ample raw materials at
hand, the exceptional equipment and rationalized
technique, the huge home market, the lack of any decisive
feudal relationships, the non-exhaustion through war, and
finally, the tremendous reservoir of capital in its possession.
As a result of the shifting of the economic center of gravity

to the United States, a most severe struggle has taken place
between Europe and America generally, and between Great
Britain and the United States especially. The European
capitalists feel heavily the tremendous impact of the United
States. War debts payable to the United States amount to
over twelve billion dollars; private loans abroad payable to
737
American capitalists amount to over fifteen and one-half
billion more. (*11)
Increasingly has the United States become a dominant part

of world capitalism. Up to the twentieth century, America
had served as the instrument for the rejuvenation of Europe,
as an enormous outlet for Europe's surplus capital and
relative surplus population. Had it not been for the Open
Door of America, class conflicts in Europe would have
matured far earlier and would have led to decisive
solutions before this time. Thus, America's growth
postponed the ultimate day of reckoning for Europe.
In this respect the United States and Russia have functioned

as two powerful reservoirs of reaction, each in its own way.
Russian Czarism and the huge Russian army stood ready at
the beck and call of the financiers of Europe to crush every
democratic and socialist movement in the West. Thus, the
breakdown of the Russian system became the goal of every
democratic movement. On the other hand, the United States,
in depriving Europe of its militant characters, in permitting
the masses of Europe to believe that salvation was
attainable in the "promised land," offered an outlet for the
pent-up streams generated by European contradictions and
thus prevented eruption. Under the Russian system,
socialism was crushed; under the American system it was
dissolved into Liberalism. Both co-operated to save Europe
from a workers' rule.
Today, however, America's doors are shut. The tide of

immigrants has turned the other way indeed. There is no
longer any escape either for Europe or for America.
America affects Europe today, not as a liberator, releasing
her productive forces and taking away the revolutionists,
but as a huge competitor smashing Europe to pieces.
738
After the World War, the United States again was called
upon to save Europe. This time America was forced into an
entirely different technique. It had to throw into the fray the
whole might of its reserves to save Europe from the
proletarian revolution, to send its army against the Soviets,
to liquidate many of its war debts. It made fresh loans to
the capitalists. It practically gave away war supplies and
material then in Europe. It brought into Germany alone
four billion dollars for the rehabilitation of Europe, for
stamping out revolution. These favors, however, were not
granted without political payment. The ruling class of the
United States used its favorable position and power to
make Europe entirely subservient to its ends, to break up all
alliances against it. From now on, each country would have
to come to America humbly to beg for funds or for support
for its continued existence.
In self-defense, European capitalists struggled to resist the

impact of American capitalism. Under French and English
leadership, an attempt was made to organize a debtors bloc
against "Uncle Shylock." The reactionary French plan of a
"United States of Europe" was another such attempt to
consolidate the continent. Similarly, many international
cartels were formed to meet the growing competition from
across the Atlantic; high tariffs were erected to resist
American invasion.
That this resistance of reconstructed Europe was successful

to some extent is evidenced by the fact that imports from
the United States into various European countries fell
steadily. (*12) In spite of this, Europe continues to lag far
below its former pre-War strength, both relatively and
absolutely.
Today the resistance of Europe has taken still more drastic

trends. Practically none of the European countries is
739
liquidating its debts to the United States. In consequence of
the increased competition, the ratio of the United States to
the rest of the world in the production of certain key
commodities, such as iron, steel, coal, etc., has steadily
fallen, as it has in the total of the world's foreign trade.
However, it must be noted here that the comparative loss in

position is not due so much to the fact that other countries
have seized the markets belonging to the United States as to
the fact that the markets no longer exist and that each
country is curtailing imports, pulling in its belt, in its
extreme efforts to obtain self-sufficiency and to avoid
complete bankruptcy. Resistance to America has been
carried out only at the ruinous cost of the lowering of all the
levels of living within the nations of Europe.
The fact of the matter is, Europe cannot pull itself together
to give battle to the United States. Torn between the United
States on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other,
Europe is self-divided, cannot unite itself, must be driven
down farther and farther as the tool of this or that historical
force. The sole way out for these peoples is through a
united states of Europe, precisely what European capitalism
congenitally is unable to attain.
As the United States becomes definitely an indissoluble part

of world capitalism, world markets and world division of
labor, every major disturbance in the Western hemisphere
at once rapidly affects the rest of the world, and vice versa.
The United States is not a self-contained system. Over thirty
articles absolutely necessary in time of war, over one
hundred products regularly purchased, are not produced
within the United States, but must be imported. Again, of
the total wealth of the country, approximately 7 per cent is
invested abroad. At the same time, today many countries
are practically dependent on the economy of the United
740
States for their very existence, such as Bolivia supplying tin,
Peru copper, Brazil coffee, Chile nitrates, Malay Peninsula
rubber and tin, Cuba sugar, Japan silk, etc. All these facts
show how closely the United States is linked up with the
rest of the world. A revolutionary crisis in Europe must
rapidly and violently draw in the United States as well.
The structural changes that have occurred in world

economy during and since the War have resulted in the
growing disintegration of the British Empire. This is partly
due also to the terrific pressure that the United States is
bringing to bear against Great Britain for world supremacy.
It is a struggle for all parts of the world in every conceivable
sphere of activity. There can be but one result: In this
struggle, the British Empire must continue to give ground
and, as it loses its position of world supremacy, it also must
begin to disintegrate within. (*13)
Emerging from the World War with a tremendous material

loss, both in goods and in men, with an antiquated
industrial technique, and with increased competition, Great
Britain, heavily in debt, has been unable to regain her
former position. Revolts of the colonies (India, China), the
industrialization of other countries, the technological shift
to means of production which Great Britain proper does not
own (e.g., the shift from coal to oil), coupled with the
breakdown of Europe after the War and the increased tariff
rates all around, all these events further combined to
reduce the power of Great Britain. Added to this was the

resistance labor offered to any drastic decrease in its income,
and the costly struggles which followed the attempt to
lower wages. The British General Strike in 1926 alone cost
Britain nearly a billion dollars, though it lasted but nine
days.
741
In the foreign field, Germany, with the aid of the United
States, has rebuilt its economic machine to the extent that it
is now superior to what it was before the War. Also, the
gigantic competition of the United States is driving Great
Britain before it, especially in South America and in the
Dominions, notably Canada. On the other side, the victory
of the workers of the Soviet Union has considerably
weakened the position of British capitalism. Finally, in Asia
there is above all the increased competition of the rising
Japanese imperialism, particularly in textiles.
On top of all this has come the present world crisis which
has profoundly affected and weakened the British capitalist
system, although the drop in production in foreign trade
has not been so great nor so prolonged in Britain as in the
United States, and the number of unemployed has not
grown so large. Nevertheless, Great Britain is in a far worse
position to bear the strain and has not functioned at full
capacity at any time since the war. In the best of times there
were about three million out of work; this figure has risen
lately to six million. (*14) The British public debt is eleven
times what it was before the war, and is the highest per
capita of any country in the world. At the same time, the
government budget has shown a huge internal deficit. Even
during prosperity (1924-1929), exports paid for only 69 per
cent of its imports; the balance was raised from invisible
imports, especially interest from capital invested abroad,
which equaled close to a billion dollars a year. However,
during the crisis this income, coupled to the moritoria on
debts that have to be effected in Australia, South America,
etc., has been cut down by half. All of these forces jointly
have compelled the government of Britain to take drastic
steps for its preservation.
742
The Bank of England has been forced off the gold standard,
thereby making it profitable for other countries to buy from
but not to sell to England. A sharper policy of forcing
exports has been entered into, leading to dumping. At the
same time, debts to the United States have been factually
canceled. A bitter trade war has been started between the
United Kingdom and Japan. Finally, in self-preservation,
Great Britain has been forced to encircle her Empire with a
tariff of 10 per cent on non-Empire wheat and meat; this is
but one of the methods utilized in an attempt to hold the
British Empire together.
Nevertheless, none of these measures can be more than

temporary stop-gaps. In innumerable ways the superior
industrializations of the United States can undermine and
penetrate the Empire tariff. The pressure on the British
Empire gradually increases. But British capitalism is not
able to deter its rate of disintegration. While it is true that in
the British Dominions, Great Britain has been able to
retrieve some of the ground lost to the United States after
the war, this has been done at great cost and has been more
than compensated by the steady loss of ground to the
United States and Asia, while in South America the fight
rages fiercer than ever; Great Britain attempts to consolidate
itself in Argentina, the United States in Brazil.
Political battles occur coinciding with the growth of

economic competition. Faced with the loss of Germany and
Japan, and with the present formal hostility of the United
States and the Soviet Union, (*15) the League of Nations,
dominated by Great Britain, has completely broken down
as a world instrument of control, and the inevitable military
and naval race has begun.
To counter the growth of American influence in Asia, Great

Britain has tolerated the partition of China and the hacking
743
away of Manchuria. In reply to the recognition of Russia by
the United States, Great Britain has allowed France to bring
the Soviets into the League of Nations. As Great Britain
loses control over Italy, she finds herself in an increasingly
isolated position regarding Europe. The perspective for the
British Empire can be only one of further disintegration,
adventure, and acute growth of the class struggles. An
excellent illustration of the disintegration is the break with
Ireland which is steadily assuming major proportions.
Another illustration is the abdication of Edward VIII.
The tottering international position of Great Britain has to

be accompanied by drastic changes within the country.
Taxes on low incomes are increased; the pay of workers and
government officials is cut down; social insurance is
reduced; heavy consumption taxes are placed on articles
needed by the masses, etc. The government itself must
move steadily to the Right. Both the national government
from above and the Mosley blackshirts from below show
definite fascist symptoms in turn, mute evidences of the
growing disintegration of the British Empire.
All of these changes bring, at every turn, their own

contradictions, such as rioting in Belfast, Glasgow, and
London, mutiny in the navy, drifting of labor organizations
to the Left, the split with Ireland, adoption of the Statute of
Westminster, recognizing the constitutional independence
and equality of the Dominions with Great Britain. (*16)
The World War left Europe exhausted, divided between

victorious and conquering powers, bound in the straight-
jacket of the Versailles Treaty, torn with internal
dissensions and civil war, unable to regain its world
position relative to Soviet Russia and the United States. For
Europe, the world economic crisis has rapidly become
transformed into a gigantic political one. The fascization
744
of Mittel Europa, the breakdown of stability, the feverish
preparations for war undertaken by desperate sections of
the bourgeoisie, and finally, the reopening of all the old
sores of the last war and the transformation of the new
countries created by the Versailles Treaty into veritable
explosion points, indicate that the sole way out for Europe
is either violent social readjustment or collapse. A false
readjustment has already been started brutally by Germany;
the collapse will come later. The victory of fascism has
broken down the last semblance of order and stability in
Europe.
Most extreme is the Austrian situation. Constantly on the

verge of bankruptcy, torn between the ambitions of German
and Italian fascism, and the pawn of world diplomatic
intrigue, Austria has become a vortex of the capitalist
whirlpool in Europe. The victory of Austrian fascism and
the destruction of socialism and proletarian organizations
have moved the bourgeoisie of Austria step by step farther
to the Right. Tied very closely to the economy of Germany
without which it cannot live, Austria nevertheless is
divorced artificially from that system by the victorious
powers. Within Austria the position of the ruling clique has
become increasingly embarrassed. Social explosions have
followed one upon the other, and nothing but perpetual
turmoil and strife can be anticipated until the problem is
definitely solved. The capitalist solution lies in the
restoration of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire or
annexation to Germany, in either case no permanent
solution.
In any event, the old Versailles system is no more. The

Austrian situation has revealed the antipathetic interests
between France and some countries of the Little Entente,
and between each of these and Italy. The old Little Entente
745
combination has been factually broken up, and even the
Franco-Polish Alliance is threatened with a new counter-
alliance between Germany and Poland. All is now chaos
and confusion. The new alliances are no longer on the basis
of order, but on the order of war. A host of potential
explosion points exist in Europe, each one ready to blow up
the entire social system.
In the Far East, too, the strain of events has reached the
breaking point, as demonstrated by the Japanese
adventures in Manchuria and Mongolia. Although
seemingly the first to emerge from the crisis and now
actually experiencing a great boom, Japan has been wasting
her strength through an economy based on inflation and
war. Her present prosperity hides the real reduction of
national wealth and its loss in unproductive processes. The
great increase of exports on an inflationary basis has simply
meant that goods have been sold abroad below their real
value and at the expense of the masses.
Of all the great powers, Japan least of all has been able to
withstand the shock of the world crisis. Her economy was
extremely unbalanced and relied mainly upon the export of
silk, the production of which occupied 20 per cent of the
country's factory operatives and made up about 40 per cent
of its exports, a commodity especially hit by the crisis. At
the same time, Japan suffered from a great under-
production of the means of production. As both exports
and imports dropped drastically, especially silk exports to
the United States, it became imperative for Japan to end its
reliance upon the United States, to find new markets, to
develop other commodities, to become self-sufficient in
basic materials, in respect to iron and steel and to food. This
need was aggravated by the heavy import surplus, the rise
in the national debt, and the increased expenses of
746
government. These were some of the reasons compelling
Japan to act in China.
There were other reasons, too. Economic pressure had

become aggravated by the political situation, both
international and national. On the foreign front, Japan had
received many defeats. Its alliance with Great Britain had
been broken. Its attempts to raise its naval strength above
60 per cent of that of the United States had been frustrated.
In China, a huge boycott had been launched against it. In
Manchuria, the war lords were marching closer to Nanking.
Russia and the United States were winning the markets,
and Chinese railways were paralleling the Japanese.
Internally, Japanese capitalism was ridden by a
Militarist camarilla with a form of government as outmoded
as that of Czarism. In the saddle was an extremely
reactionary element supporting the chauvinistic regime of
the Mikado. This unbridled military chauvinism could only
welcome war.
Just as Japanese economy was unhealthy, so was the

relationship of class forces inimical to the capitalists. Two
big concerns, literally twelve men, controlled practically
everything economic in Japan, e.g., 38 per cent of the
commercial bank deposits, 73 per cent of the trust
properties, etc. On the other hand, the average income per
capita was on the level of the poorest countries in Europe.
By 1931, Japan, immediately upon abandoning the gold

standard, was able by ruthlessly driving down the masses
to make large advances in winning markets. It greatly
extended the rationalization of its industry in textiles, for
example, by reducing the number of workers running the
same machinery by 43 per cent, speeding up all machines,
paying wages one-seventh of those of Great Britain, and
cutting wages 52 per cent, while stepping up the cost of
747
living 10 per cent. Japan was able to reach first place in
cotton textiles, surpassing even Great Britain, and rapidly
dominating Asia, increasing its share in India and even in
South America. By such aggressive measures, Japan shoved
up its proportion of world exports by over 25 per cent.
At the same time and for similar reasons, Japan was forced
into its Manchurian adventure from which there was no
retreat and no outlet save war. The invasion of Manchuria
by imperialist Japan marked a critical moment in
imperialist post-war history. It proved again that, under the
pressure of the crisis, weaker countries become still weaker
and further penetrated by leading powers; debtor countries
become further indebted, colonies and semi-colonies still
more enslaved, the warfare among the leading powers
more intense. The greatly increased political instability is a
close indication of how transient and ephemeral the much
vaunted "stabilization" of capitalism actually is.
The new aggressive acts by Japan have not been due to a

sudden change of policy. On the contrary, they have been
but the culmination of carefully laid imperialist plans that
date from the Russo-Japanese War. The seizure of Sakhaline,
Korea, of various Chinese concessions, of Kiao-chow and
the Manchurian Southern Railroad, the all-rounded
economic penetration of Manchuria, and the support
formerly given the Manchurian militarists, all show that
Japan has been but waiting for the proper correlation of
forces in order to seize Manchuria outright, as one of her
possessions, as she had Korea.
The present crisis has presented an extremely ripe

opportunity for action to Japanese militarists, owing to the
extreme chaos to which China had been reduced by famine,
floods, and constant civil war among the military generals,
which desolated the countryside and shattered any
748
centralized unified power. Within the Nanking
Government goes on a most corrupt and unprincipled
intriguing for power by the various factions, egged on by
the great imperialist powers of the world. The struggles of
these militarists, both within and against the Nanking
Government, have been only the forerunners of open
attempts of the main imperialist powers physically to
dismember and partition China. Such a partition
conceivably would allocate the North of China to Japan, the
coast and central parts to Great Britain, and sections of the
south to France. Preventing these attempts at
dismemberment have been the divisions among the
imperialists, especially the opposition of the United States,
which, having entered China late, having seized no large
territory, yet having a great economic superiority, and
burdened with democratic, non-imperialist pretensions, has
supported the Nanking regime and temporarily fights for
the "open door" policy. The second great force preventing
the partition of China has been the revolutionary
movement still stirring within.
The failure of the Chinese military leaders to resist Japan by

means of war has hastened the dismemberment of China.
Already Yunan has been seized by the French, Szechwan by
the English Tibetans, and a bid made for Chinese Turkestan.
However, the temporary victory of Japan has greatly
increased all capitalist rivalries; at the same time, it has
intensified the internal crisis in China and the revolutionary
movement there. Finally, the temporary victory of Japan
has sharpened the antagonisms between that country and
the Soviet Union. The seizure of Manchuria and Inner
Mongolia now offers imperialism a consolidated basis of
attack. It is a thrust to split Siberia, a menace to Outer
Mongolia under Soviets, a move against Turkestan, and a
749
threat of outflanking the communist forces within China.
Victory by Japan imperils the entire life of the Soviet Union.
Within Japan, the tremendous pressure of the world crisis,

the Manchurian war and invasion have greatly heightened
all social struggles. The Manchurian war alone has taken up
the whole national income of the Japanese government.
With 32 per cent of the peasant's income going to the State
in taxes, loaded as he is, with a debt of six billion yen and
an interest rate rarely below 10 per cent, and chained in a
semi-feudal condition, with the workers regimented in
barracks and increasingly exploited, with the students
unable freely to express their thoughts, Japanese society
seethes on all sides with discontent and revolution. On the
one hand, fascism is growing rapidly. On the other hand,
two thousand strikes in 1935, and thirty thousand political
arrests within the past five years attest to the revolutionary
vitality of the masses.
These structural changes and shifts in economic and

political power are remaking the world, overthrowing the
old balances, and creating world wide disturbances. It is
these changes that help to aggravate the permanent and
chronic character of the present crisis.
Post-war imperialism has thus become an era of permanent

crisis, economic and political. As such, it has become an age
of violence and an era terminating all social reform. The
Marxian theories of polar antagonisms, leading to the
breaking down of the system on the top and the impelling
of the masses to end the social order from below, seem to be
verified completely.
Footnotes
750
1. Monthly Labor Review, Vol. 36, No. 3, p. 511. (March,
1933.)
2. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics: Bulletin No. 585,

p. 24. (July, 1933.)
3. Compare here, too, the general trend described by A. F.

Burns (Production Trends in the United States Since 1870, p.
173): ". . . there are substantial grounds for believing that
the life histories of industries are becoming shorter."
4. K. Marx: Capitol, III, footnote, pp. 574-575.
5. "A census made in 1934 of heads of families on urban

relief shows that about one-third of all were members of the
middle class, including skilled workers as middle class." (S.
Chase: Government in Business, p. 47.)
6. In America, for example, the overwhelming mass of

Negroes are gradually being placed in this category of
permanent disemployed. The destiny of the Negro,
however, is to turn not toward Fascism but toward
Communism.
7. See, National Industrial Conference Board: Chart No. 239,

"Road Maps of Industry," Series October, 1930.
8. See, National Industrial Conference Board: Major Forces in

World Business Depression.
9. See, for example, League of Nations: World Production and

Prices, Appendix III, Table 2 (1933 Series II A, No. 12.)
10. For the terrible effects of imperialism even in normal

times see the statement on the depopulation of French
Equatorial Africa in S. H. Roberts: History of French Colonial
Policy, 1870-1925, I, 365.
751
11. Spread approximately as follows: Nearly 5 billion
dollars to Europe, of which about 4 billion is in Germany; 4
billion to Canada; 5 1/2 billion to Latin America; over 1.2
billion to the Far Fast. Of these investments approximately
two-thirds are in government loans and one- third in loans
to individual corporations, railroads and public utilities.
12. The share of imports from the U. S. into the United

Kingdom fell from 18.6% in values in 1925, to 14.7% in 1930,
and to about 11% in 1933. Germany in 1923 imported 19.1%
of her total imports from the United States. In 1927 this had
fallen to 14.7% and in 1933 to 9%.
13. See, L. Denny: America Conquers Britain.
14. We double the amount totaled by the government as

"registered."
15. Although the Soviet Union has now joined the League
of Nations, the Russians have never retracted their opinion
of the League as a gang of robbers. However, the hostility
between the two is being steadily reduced to a mere
formality.
16. For the present Constitution of the British Empire see, H.

J. Schlosberg: The King's Republics (1929).
XXV. THE AGE OF VIOLENCE
JUST as prosperity has given way to economic depression

as the normal phase of post-war imperialism, and has
become a mere pause between panics, so does the calm of
peace yield to the hysteria of war. Previously, war was
752
considered the exceptional and untoward event, the
conflicts since Napoleon being mainly local and episodic.
The World War, however, was a catastrophe of such a
devastating nature as to change the whole character of
world events. It led to the collapse of capitalism in the
Soviet Union and to the breakdown of Europe. It produced
such convulsions that revolution followed upon revolution
in all parts of the world. Try as it will, capitalist Europe to
this day has not been able to suppress for any length of
time revolutionary manifestations.
In the nineteenth century, war was simply one of the many

useful by-products of industrial evolution; its destructive
character was quickly remedied by a magnificent growth of
the productive processes which the war stimulated and
accelerated. War itself was but a hand-maiden of industry,
advancing the flag where trade was to follow. (*1)
Under imperialism, matters have become reversed. War

becomes an industry in and of itself, attaining increasingly
menacing proportions. To administer to its war needs, the
capitalist class organizes an ever-growing State which
enters into every productive process, laying its heavy hand
upon individual initiative and upon free trade in
accordance with militarist dictates. The rise of militarism is
a concomitant part of the State's development. All functions
are subsumed to the State and an attempt is made to attain
complete economic self-sufficiency which will enable the
nation better to struggle in wartime. In order to accomplish
this end, and to integrate its forces in preparation for war,
the State undertakes the establishment of monopolies and
the co-ordination of private industry. It adopts an elaborate
system of tariffs to protect its economic might and to
regulate its foreign trade according to its war plans. It does
not take into account the facts that such tariffs mean the
753
ultimate thwarting of the productive forces within the
country, the stagnation of certain branches of industry, and
the artificial stimulation of others, that similar methods
result in the burial of inventions, which otherwise might
have been put into practical operations either in archives or
latent in the minds of potential inventors. The sole test is
the immediate advantage given the military.
Whereas in the nineteenth century war had provided a spur

for industry, by the twentieth century, so devastating had
become the instruments of destruction that, in the short
years of the World War, more goods and wealth were
destroyed in Europe than could be produced in the score of
years following the peace. Europe up to the present has not
been able to attain the per capita wealth and income levels
that it had achieved prior to the war. In proportion as war
became the chief business of the State, it was revealed that
the main occupation of capitalism in the twentieth century
was no longer to construct, but to destroy.
Moreover, the very acts of destruction laid the foundation

for new and more terrible havoc to come, just as in peace
the destructive nature of the crisis creates the basis for
deeper depressions. The World War itself tremendously
accelerated the ability of mankind to destroy itself. Deadly
inventions were stimulated by the War and increased
enormously during the period of fighting. So it is, too, that
the treaties of peace will bring on eventually new and even
more devastating wars.
As war becomes transformed into a modern industry, the

inventions which were laid at the feet of peace now are
carried elsewhere. Inventors turn from private industry to
the patronage of the State. The contradictions of
imperialism prevent the trusts from utilizing to the
maximum their productive capacities or from making the
754
best applications of the ever increasing host of inventions
presenting themselves. The State is forced to resort to the
organization of laboratories and research bureaus, to
stimulate discovery and inventions, and to organize its
many universities and higher centers of learning for the
express purpose of advancing technological knowledge.
But the primary interest of the State is not peace, but war.
"Peace established by the State, or resting in the discretion
of the State, is necessarily of the nature of an armistice, in
effect terminable at will and on short notice. . . . At the best,
the State, or the government, is an instrumentality for
making peace, not for perpetuating it." (*2)
Thus the inventive ability of mankind, which heretofore

had been directed towards constructive processes of peace-
time endeavor, now become directed towards destructive
activities for war. Peace becomes a feverish preparation for
military activities. (*3)
Just as the closing down of any single major industry would

threaten the whole structure of the economic system, so the
termination of military industry would create chaos in
modern life. Production depends upon consumption. As
markets relatively dwindle, some disposition must be made
of surplus products. Some of the surplus is squandered by
the wealthy parasites themselves in all manner of perverted
luxuries, but this is but a minute portion of the surplus at
hand. Another part of the surplus is wiped out during
periods of economic crises, when machines rust and
factories are broken up, etc. In such periods, milk is
dumped into the rivers so that the fish die, or thrown into
the sewers so that the sewers are clogged; bananas are
tossed into the ocean by the boatload; fish are scattered on
the seashore until their infested remains threaten to wipe
755
out whole communities; coffee is burned by the thousands
of tons, and so it goes, ad nauseam.
But even this destructiveness is not sufficient to open up the

factories. War at this moment plays the sole creative factor
in history, because only through war is the destruction of
goods so widespread and thorough as to compel all
industry to work at maximum capacity and efficiency. It is
only in wartime that all inventions are utilized, that the
nation can rise to unprecedented heights.
Today, peacetime business has become the servile slave of

Mars. War is not only the chief industry of the nation, it is
practically the sole obsession dominating all business.
Today no invention is realized and put to use or even
conceived without its implications to military affairs being
brought forth at once and worked out by the chief of staff,
whose prime departments at present are indeed the
engineering. Is there an investigation into the stratosphere?
Then we may be sure the military department is actively
calculating the application of its results to the radius of
cruising bombers. Is there research in cosmic rays? Then it
is certain that the war arm of every government is
feverishly at work trying to discover new methods of
remote control by which to lay down a murderous barrage
against the enemy. Thus, even commercial inventions,
which on the surface seem to have nothing whatever to do
with warlike activity, are seized upon and developed with
an eye mainly on this activity. How different was the
situation in the nineteenth century when even such
explosives as dynamite had a far greater use in the
constructive processes of the building industry than in
destructive munition making!
If, prior to the World War, industry could exclaim that

peace was stifling it, today, even in peace, industry works
756
practically entirely under military departments. Especially
is this true in time of crisis, when industries are closing
down and the owners are calling upon the government for
subventions and subsidies to sustain them. Then the
government utilizes the opportunity to put these concerns
at work on matters pertaining to the building up of the
State and of the armed forces of the country. (*4) Thus at the
present time, under the plea that it is necessary to put the
unemployed to work, the United States government has
launched the most expensive military armament campaign
in its history. If the industries were not furnishing war
material today they would be in far more desperate straits
than they are. Especially is this true for the basic industry of
all, iron and steel.
Any diminution of war industry would be bound to affect

most disastrously the iron and steel corporations. For this
reason the armament cartels have established agencies to
foment, deliberately, hostilities between nations so as to
require increased armaments. The armament ring is to be
found behind every jingoist expression, military
organization, patriotic and nationalist demonstration. Nor
can it be said that this armament ring is purely selfish in its
propaganda, since the iron and steel trusts could easily
demonstrate that, should their plants close down, the whole
national economy of the nation would be affected adversely.
The fact of the matter is that only war can maintain and
build up the productive occupations and activities of the
basic industries of the country under imperialism.
Here we have the basic impulse in the drive for war. In the
nineteenth century, colonies were seized on the plea that
the surplus population of the home countries demanded an
outlet; this is still a stereotyped excuse given by imperialists.
Sometimes war was justified on the ground that the vast
757
indemnities taken would help business at home. (*5) In the
twentieth century these reasons obviously are invalid. War
today is not for gain, but for loss, not for the acquisition of
more wealth, but to dissipate the mountain of surpluses
threatening to choke the social order to death! (*6) War is
the only factor today adequate to release the energies of the
people, to unfetter the productive forces from the stifling
relations that peace has imposed.
Consider the question of colonies. Germany went into the

business of seizing colonies at the very moment when
German industry was expanding so greatly that emigration
from that land, even to the United States, had practically
ceased. Thus, population pressure and seizure of colonies
by no
means coincided. (*7) Another example: Great Britain has

the largest colonial empire in the world, yet the number of
British who have emigrated from Britain to the colonies of
Africa or of Asia is an exceedingly negligible portion of the
British population. The British in these dependencies are
those primarily connected with the military regime of
repression or the administration of commercial interests.
Again: the colonies of Italy have been far more costly than
beneficial and have proven to be a steady drain upon the
financial resources of the Italians.
All these considerations, however, do not imply that in

every case the seizure of colonies does not pay financially.
The British colonies, on the contrary, have enabled Britain
to develop its merchant marine to the magnificent might
which it now maintains. The amount of loot that Britain has
seized from the colonies has more than paid for the military
expenses, particularly in India; France, Germany, Italy, and
other countries have not been so fortunate.
758
However, the important point is that whether colonies
furnish outlets for immigration or not makes no difference;
they are not essential because the industrial country is poor
and must have more wealth. This may have been the
situation in the days of antiquity or even in the early days
of capitalism. But not today. Nor does the acquisition of
colonies result in any reduction of the home population,
since it is impossible to deport the surplus population from
the ruling country. The seizure of colonies now is important
primarily as a means of preventing other countries from
grabbing them first, of obtaining military vantage points in
case of war, and as affording a reasonable excuse for
wasting the productive forces of the country.
Furthermore, the development of colonies only increases

the contradictions of imperialist. As we have seen, already
the home imperialist countries suffer from a surfeit of
goods and capital of which they cannot dispose. When the
ruling class seize more territory, it means that the
conquerors have more workers available for exploitation at
a time when they are expelling workers from the factories;
it means they will have more goods for disposal in a period
of overproduction. If factories are developed in the colonies,
then similar factories must close down at home. If,
previously, a country represented a buying market, now, as
a colony seized by the former seller nation, it represents a
mass of goods that must be sold elsewhere. Thus, the very
seizure of a colony increases the demand for further
markets by the victorious country and raises the
contradictions to even a higher point.
It has been said that the obtaining of indemnities helps an

industrial country. How meager this argument is can be
seen in the Franco-Prussian War. Prussia, after the war of
1870, was able to impose an indemnity of five billion francs
759
upon France. To pay this indemnity, France at once greatly
increased her productive powers and rapidly strengthened
herself thereby. The payment of the indemnity was
accomplished relatively easily. On the other hand,
Germany did not know what to do with the five billions.
They aggravated the overproduction already existing and
induced a serious industrial crisis, leading to the great
growth of revolutionary forces in Germany.
The World War illustrated the futility of the indemnity

principle still further. The great drain that was forced upon
Germany compelled her to construct a far more magnificent
technical productive machine than she had ever attained in
her history, and today she represents a far more serious
competitor to Britain than before the war. On the other
hand, whatever indemnity Germany suffered, the
victorious powers, particularly the United States, were
compelled to lend to her, and when Germany financially
was destitute, Britain, France, and the United States were
forced to rush in to save their deadliest capitalist competitor.
It has been said that additional wealth releases the

population of the home country from factory toil. Indeed,
such has been the tendency in imperialist life, as
exemplified by England and Scotland, which are becoming
increasingly luxury countries, countries where servants,
butlers, and panderers to luxuries and pleasures are
produced, rather than factory operatives. Thus the
imperialist country tends to lose its virility, its relations to
the real productive processes of life, and generates a huge
parasitic class. The sole basis for the existence of these
parasites is the military might which they have established
to enforce their rule. But as they degenerate in every sense,
they lose their military fire as well, and are bound to fall
before the countries to which industry has been transferred.
760
"Generally speaking, it would be true to say that no one
believes that war pays and nearly every one believes that
policies which lead inevitably to war do pay. Every nation
sincerely desires peace; and all nations pursue courses
which, if persisted in, must make peace impossible."
"All nations are quite ready to condemn 'in the abstract,'

armaments, economic nationalism, international suspicion
and mistrust, while each one individually clings to his
armament, adds to his tariff, invents new modes of
economic nationalism, and insists upon an absolute
national sovereignty which must make international order
impossible, and the prolongation of anarchy and chaos
inevitable." (*8)
The development of war industry has reached unparalleled

proportions at the present moment. A complete revolution
in military tactics is now being completed whereby no
longer will there be any distinction between the front and
the rear. The whole nation will be called to arms and there
will be formed practically four armies of the population:
first, the army that actually fights at the front, an army
conscripted from the most virile elements of the population;
second, a vast army of helpers taken from the ranks of the
permanently unemployed and trained by military
discipline to support the army in its field work; third, the
regular industrial labor army created from all the laborers
working in factories and industries; and fourth, the
remainder of the population, mobilized in reserves.
Complete regimentation will be the basic rule of such a
society. A capitalist nation sentimental enough not to
redress its ranks on such a basis will be doomed to
destruction in a common war. Fascism, and fascism alone,
attempts to carry forward this principle to its ultimate
761
conclusions; for this reason, the dictatorial tendencies of
fascism are absolutely inevitable so long as capitalism
continues to endure. Fascism is a legitimate product of the
supersession of war.
Front and rear are made into one also by the actions of the
enemy. New scientific developments are of such a nature
that they can be used efficiently only when employed on a
vast scale. Magnificent bombers, traveling at three hundred
miles an hour, capable of a radius of three thousand miles,
cannot be confined to use merely on a front line. The utility
of such great inventions is negated unless they can be
employed on cities far in the rear of the actual fighting. This
action is made all the more necessary by the intimate
correlation of industry to war and the subordination of
industry to military affairs. It is now possible to crush the
enemy by destroying his sources of production. In the long
run, this is the most humane method to terminate conflict.
All circumstances being equal, that country will win the

war which has the greatest economic might, which can
pour into the struggle the largest amount of steel, gas,
deadly microbes, etc. It is vital to the enemy country to
destroy the sources of these supplies; thus it will be
impossible to spare the towns and points of production.
Indeed, it may well be that the safest place in time of war
will be in the very front line trench! Owing to the greatly
increased destructiveness of weapons, wars today tend to
become ones of mutual exhaustion and annihilation. How
different was it a hundred years ago when Napoleon could
write: "It was the opinion of Frederick that all wars should
be short and rapid; because a long war insensibly relaxes
discipline, depopulates the state, and exhausts its
resources." (*9)
762
The consolidation of the front and rear is illustrated in the
United States by the National Defense Weeks carried out
every year by the military department of the government.
National Defense Week is a test to ascertain how quickly
industry can be transformed from a peacetime to a wartime
basis. Owners of factories are required to report exactly
what war goods they can produce, how quickly they can
transform their plants, maximum production possible, etc.
In this way the country rehearses for the awful conflicts to
come.
The correlation of industry to war is illustrated in the

complete mechanization of the army. The rate of increase in
the number of machines of destruction has accelerated to an
enormous degree since the World War. The ordnance
department for some time has maintained sixteen-inch
mobile cannon which can fire accurately at a range of over
thirty miles; during the war the "Big Berthas" of the
Germans actually landed shells at a range of over eighty
miles. To these developments has been added the
possibility of rapid fire.
A marked advance has occurred in the development and

use of the machine gun, every regiment now being
accompanied not only by an ever-increasing number of
heavy machine guns but a relatively large proportion of
light machine guns as well. (*10) The rifle itself has
undergone an important modernization by which, under
average conditions, a soldier may fire, without reloading,
fifty shots a minute. (*11) Thus the quantity of lead that can
be hurled by each man in war has considerably increased.
(*12) Supplemental advances in munitions have been
developed; they now are equipped with time fuses and are
composed of various elements, shrapnel, chemicals,
combustible inflammatory materials, etc., according to the
763
need. Even gas bullets that can diverge from a straight line
have been invented. The development of the torpedo has
enormously increased the accuracy and destructiveness of
this missile, both in submarine and in aviation warfare.
The tank, an innovation during the World War, has evolved

into a regular department of the army. Whereas, during the
war, the tank generally required repairs every sixty miles,
and lumbered along at the rate of four miles an hour, today
there are tanks that are veritable fortresses, weighing over
seventy tons, containing several pieces of medium sized
ordnance.
Other tanks can move at the rate of seventy miles an hour,

and have a cruising radius of nearly a thousand miles
without repair.
With the development of the tank has gone the complete

motorization of the army. In the United States, for example,
the cavalry has been practically abolished, and all soldiers
are transported by motor vehicles of one sort or another.
The lorry, the cycle, even the cab were used extensively in
the World War.
Unparalleled developments have occurred in aviation.

Bombers now are capable of three hundred miles an hour
with a cruising radius of several thousand miles. They may
carry torpedoes of the most explosive materials, each
weighing one ton. Research is being carried on to render
them completely noiseless; this may well be accomplished
before the next common war. A vast number of planes are
ready for use, each of the countries being engaged in a
frenzied military armament and aviation race.
To prevent the wholesale destruction of Paris by a mass air

attack from Germany has been declared impossible. The
764
British General Staff has affirmed the same in regard to
London. Such declarations may be merely propaganda of
the militarists to insure sufficiently large appropriations
from frightened parliaments. There is no doubt, however,
that the military staff relies not so much upon the defense
of their own cities as upon the ability and readiness to
strike first and annihilate the physical resources of the
enemy country. Thus the war becomes one of mutual
annihilation.
This, of course, has not prevented the general staffs from

making defense plans against bombers. Entire civilian
populations are being drilled constantly in the use of gas
masks and in mutual aid during raids in time of war. Cities
are being tunneled for the construction of gas chambers
wherein the population may take refuge. New electrical
anti-aircraft devices have been created that can detect the
sound of an airplane four miles away, and, by trigonomic
calculations, enable the mechanic at once to train his gun
upon the object approaching. Such have been the
improvements made in the efficiency of the anti-aircraft
gun that the norm now recorded is one hit for every eight
shots fired. Pursuit planes of remarkable speed are being
built, the British having developed a plan that can reach the
"ceiling" in ten minutes and from high altitudes pour their
fire into the approaching bombers.
Immense progress has been made in chemical warfare; new

gases have been invented against which no defense is
available, and which affect not merely the respiratory tracts
but the entire body. The protection provided for the soldier
and civilian against these gases is ridiculously inadequate,
and does not prevent persons so "protected" from becoming
completely unfit for active service of any sort. The gases are
heavier than air and penetrate every crevice. Subterranean
765
chambers established by municipal officials are potential
death traps. The heavier-than-air gas, once settled on an
object, may remain intact for over two weeks, maintaining
its death-dealing properties. (*13)
A great advance also has been made in naval warfare. Not

only are the ships faster and more dangerous, but new
features have been added to submarine and aircraft carriers.
Submarine warfare amply proved its tremendous potency
during the World War; the aircraft carrier has yet to show
its worth.
There must be mentioned now those inventions which at

present are kept secret by the various capitalist
governments but which no doubt will be let loose with
awful results once war is begun. While the exact inventions
remain undisclosed, we can predict their character. First of
all, biology has been utilized to furnish an important
weapon in future world struggles. There is no question but
that there will be released in the coming war vast streams of
deadly microbes that will infect the food and water supplies
of entire populations and from which no escape will have
been provided for the ordinary civilian population. This
weapon was used but sparingly during the War; doubtless
its uses in the coming war will astound humanity.
Most important of all, however, are the inventions

pertaining to electrical appliances and remote control.
Already there has been created an airplane which can take
off, fly in a given direction, can release a torpedo, and
return to its base, without a pilot and directed entirely by
radio control. More than that, the torpedo itself may be
guided by remote control so as to be deflected from its
normal course in the air to insure complete and perfect
accuracy in reaching a designated objective. The progress of
television and X-ray and cosmic ray researches make it
766
possible that higher physics may contribute most potent
instruments of death and destruction.
Finally, there is, of course, the careful organization of the

entire population for actual military participation.
Universal military training, specialized Military Training
Camps, Reserve Officers Training Corps, Boy Scouts,
various social organizations pertaining to war, such as rifle
clubs, sports groups, etc., and veterans' associations of all
sorts will have been added to the regular army and national
militias. It goes without saying that the pursuit of all this
activity has instituted an immense increase in the military
budgets of each country. The United States, the most pacific
of the big countries, now spends approximately a billion
dollars a year on its war machine.
The World War was frightfully devastating to civilization.

The dead alone have been estimated at thirteen million and
the severely wounded at twenty million, making a total of
thirty-three million. "If all the losses of the hundred years
which lie between the Napoleonic Wars and the World War
of 1914-1918 are counted, the result will prove a fraction
only of the number of deaths during the World War." (*14)
Of the total British enlistment of 6,211,427, the total
casualties amounted to 2,437,964, and the British losses
were less, proportionately, than either the French, Austrian,
German, or Russian.
In the last war, the ratio of dead to seriously wounded was

ten to twenty-two, a much larger proportion than in other
wars (*15) and far greater than in accidents. In the case of
automobile accidents, for example, it has been found that
the ratio of fatalities to those seriously injured is four to
twenty-one. We have not considered those who suffered
temporary disability and minor injuries.
767
The total combatant dead in the- World War has been
estimated at thirteen million. The ratio of dead to wounded
was thirteen to twenty; the ratio of seriously wounded to
otherwise wounded was six to fourteen. Of all those
wounded only 44.5 per cent were restored to normal ability;
52 per cent were partially restored and their ability reduced;
over 3 per cent were total loss. (*16)
Nor does this figure embrace the tremendous losses

occasioned by massacres, disease and starvation as a result
of the conditions engendered by the War. Of the Armenians,
Syrians, Jews and Greeks alone, four million were
massacred during the course of the War. Especially terrible
were the effects on the children; in many places all perished.
"In conclusion it may fairly be estimated that the loss of
civilian life due directly to war or to causes induced by war
equals, if indeed it does not exceed, that suffered by the
armies in the field." (*17) To this total must be added the
large number of children who normally would have been
born; all countries showed a great fall in the birth rate. The
actual monetary loss has been stated to have been far above
a quarter of a trillion dollars. (*18)
The complete co-ordination of front and rear becomes

realized not only when war breaks out, but in preparation
for it, whereby war training penetrates every feature of
social life. Every activity is now subordinated to the coming
conflicts.
The same categorical imperative which drives a country to

war has induced statesmen and theoreticians to idealize
military measures. "There are certain compensations for
war. War and preparation for war develop national
consciousness --- increase national and individual efficiency;
they lead to industrial expansion, to invention, they bring
order and discipline to men; they develop unselfishness
768
and charity; they strike down needless distinctions; and
through war or a threat of war, the masses have often
achieved personal liberty. Military training benefits the
individual and the nation; it teaches obedience, respect for
authority, punctuality, team play; it promotes physical
development and personal hygiene. Military training is a
valuable preparation for any civil career." (*19)
Here we have some of the efficient social reasons for war.

Democratic and liberal apologists for war have gone to
great lengths to point out that hand in hand with the duty
to fight in war must go the right of political participation in
the government; thus the growth of democracy and of war
proceed simultaneously. The converse argument might also
be stated: if a man will not kill at the behest of the ruling
class, he cannot be trusted with a vote. In history, ballots
have always been part of ballistics.
In Germany, these arguments blossomed out in their richest

hues. The struggle for German unity was one which had
been carried on for centuries entirely by the sword, against
Sweden, against Poland, against Austria, against Russia,
against France, and against England. Accordingly, the
entire aristocratic ruling class enthusiastically endorsed the
military system. Without the slightest cant or hypocrisy, the
Kaiser Junker regime meant to achieve power and position
with every means at its disposal. The philosophy of
Frederick the Great in this respect is well stated in the
following rule which he laid out for himself: "Kindle and
prolong war between my neighbors." (*20) With Frederick
the Great, politics and villainy were synonymous terms.
(*21)
This philosophy was amply reflected by the mouthpieces of

the aristocracy in the universities: "The German university
professors have always been the most enthusiastic
769
defenders of the (military) system. You hear nowhere in
Germany more belittling of the peace and disarmament
movements than among the university professors . . . . " (*22)
Illustrations of this are innumerable. Nietzsche, Professor of
Greek, wrote: "Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars -
-- and the short peace more than the long . . . ye say it is the
good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is
the good war which halloweth every cause. War and
courage have done more great things than charity. . . ." ". . .
be not considerate of thy neighbor!" "Thou shalt not rob!
Thou shalt not slay! . . . And for such precepts to be called
holy, was not truth itself thereby slain?" (*23)
The idea of Nietzsche that war makes men heroic and

transforms them into supermen found its echo in the
writings of Treitschke, who believed that war is sublime
and makes men sacrifice their egoism. (*24) "That the
Germans do not fit into the bustle of peaceful nations is the
proudest ornament of the German character. Their
manhood does not feminize itself in long peace. War has
always been their chief business." (*25)
The German, Muensterberg, could write: ". . . war too is not

simply a disruption of the international peace, but can
become a positive creator of better and higher forms of the
life of mankind. . . . First of all, only war can adjust the
power of countries to the changing stages of their inner
development.... The world's progress has depended at all
times upon the expansive ascendancy of the sound, strong,
solid and able nations and the shrinking of those which
have lost their healthy qualities and have become unfit or
decadent. . . . The laws of the equity courts applied to
nations must stifle progress. . . ." (*26)
German political scientists hastened to add their reasons for

the value of war. They pointed out that the suppression of
770
war would imply the suppression of all States and the
remoulding of civilized community into a single political
system. The German who worshiped the State as an end in
itself conceived such a fruition of civilization as
unspeakably horrible. If States were therefore to exist, war
was inevitable, since separate States are by nature in a state
of war with each other, and conflict must be regarded as the
essence of their relations, while real friendship is accidental.
In the intercourse of State with State there were no laws and
there could be none. Might made right. War was the
fundamental institution of the State. Everything had to be
calculated on the basis of possibility of war.
"In politics decisions may be postponed, but when the

opportunity presents itself, let he who has the power and
feels himself prepared cut the knot with the sword. For
great historical questions this is the only rational and
permanent solution." "Between States there is but one sort
of right, the right of the stronger." (*27)
German professors justified the existence of a separate

German State by claiming that this State was the
culmination of civilized effort, since it represented
the kultur of the Teutons, and the Teutons were the
aristocrats of the community, while the Latins, on the
contrary, belonged to the degenerate mob. (*28) To these
people, "The Teutonic race is called upon to circle the earth
with its rule, to exploit the treasures of nature and of
human labor power, and to make the passive races servient
elements in its cultural development." (*29)
Above these war mongers was the military staff of

Germany. General von Moltke wrote. "The army takes the
first place among the institutions of every country. It alone
makes possible the existence of all the other institutions."
"Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful
771
dream. War is part of the eternal order instituted by God."
(*30) And General von Clausewitz asserted, quoting from
General von der Goltz: "'The statesman who, knowing his
instrument to be ready, and seeing War inevitable, hesitates
to strike first is guilty of a crime against his country."' (*31)
Over all was the Kaiser, who allying himself with God,
called on the army to fight in the name of the Lord, whose
Spirit had descended upon him by virtue of his being the
German Emperor! (*32)
The omnipresence of war leads to important realignments

of social relationships. Certain powerful trusts, such as the
armament ring, the explosive and chemical industries, etc.,
consolidate their power and become intimately correlated
to the State machine. The tremendous rise of the national
debt in wartime leads to the subservience of the State to the
policies of the bankers to whom the nation is indebted.
Just as war is a method of terminating depressions, it

becomes a last effort to stave off revolution. "The issue, then,
is clear; for every great state in the world it is ultimately a
question of war abroad or war at home, and the feeling of
most men, be they English, German, French, or American,
will be that it is better to fight against a foreign foe than to
fight against one's own countrymen. The idea, then, that
under a Capitalistic system of production war can be
eliminated by any other means than the triumph of the
most militarily . . . efficient nation must be dismissed as a
gross and dangerous illusion.’" (*33)
In the nineteenth century, war could be an instrument for

integrating the forces of the nation and reviving national
patriotism. In the twentieth century, war becomes an
historic instrument in the hands either of the revolutionary
proletarian or reactionary capitalist forces. By means of war,
the social set-up is broken completely, and the classes
772
physically determine their share of the distribution of
wealth. War may be started in order to strengthen the
power of the reactionaries, or it may be unopposed or even
welcomed by revolutionists as giving them the opportunity
of advancing their cause.
Apologists appear to defend war according to their

interests. War becomes necessary in order to enable the
white man to raise the culture of the black, to free the slaves,
to help the poor, to teach respect, honor, reverence, duty,
uprighteousness, and discipline to the lower orders. War
teaches the workers to know their place; which, evidently,
is the grave. War is acclaimed as a means of driving out
parasitism by making all suffer under an equal strain, by
putting all to work or to fight. War, as an act of violence, is
justified on the theory of the general beneficence of violence;
a blood purge is needed to cleanse the impurities of the old
order and to make way for the new. By means of war, too,
individualism gives way to collectivism and comradeship.
Military chauvinists take added data from biology and

preach a myth of racial purity that heaps eulogies upon one
race, the race to which they themselves belong, as
embodying the quintessence of racial heroism. They prate
of the value of eugenics and maintain that a natural
selection of the fittest has taken place, bringing their race to
the top. A sort of new Malthusianism is born which affirms
that there is not sufficient good for equal distribution,
wherefore the more degraded nations must be deprived
forever of the best in life.
Nor are there lacking apologists who stress the superiority

of the culture, religion, morals, and customs of the nation to
which they belong, and the necessity to spread this
inevitable system of blessings all over the world, by force if
need be.
773
Even philosophers such as the peaceful pragmatists under
John Dewey in the United States are brought into the war
conflicts. "In the United State, John Dewey unintentionally
did great service to those who were drumming up
sentiment against Germany by ringing the changes on
certain aspects of German philosophy in his book
on German philosophy and Politics (New York, 1915), which
had a new vogue when America went to War." (*34)
Thorstein Veblen also helped, as did others.
Psychology also produces its quota of militarist defenders.

Through war, people rise to new intellectual and emotional
heights. Decay and degeneracy are prevented. In the course
of vital combat and struggle, the soul of man is reborn, it
again becomes unfettered. Egotism gives way to sacrifice
for others, for country and for culture. Such psychologists
often take an anti-intellectualist point of view, announcing
that so long as human nature exists, the fighting instincts of
man must be realized in war; emotions and passions
inevitably flow on to truth, not the pacific lucubrations of
the erudite.
On the part of the proletariat, a thoroughly objective

position is taken on the question of war. The revolutionist is
not opposed to every war. As he favors civil war, so he
favors colonial wars against imperialism. The revolutionist,
too, understands that the struggle for power can be won
only through ruthless physical combat.
War, like economic crises, inevitably leads to social

revolution. If the ruling class enter into war to escape
revolution, war itself only accelerates it. Thus the
statements of the military apologists that only through war
can man rise to new heights and become superman is
echoed by the revolutionists, who change capitalist war into
civil war and, by establishing the Dictatorship of the
774
Proletariat, take the first steps to increase man's stature by a
head.
During war, the State becomes an all-embracing institution,

entering into every phase, even the most intimate, of social
and personal life; no aspect of life is overlooked. In the
World War, for example, there was established in the
United States a Federal Food Administration responsible to
the President, which made an attempt to conserve the
resources of the country and which established co-
operation with various agencies, such as trade and
commercial concerns, educational institutions, women's
organizations, libraries, religious and fraternal groups,
hotels and restaurants, transportation companies, etc, for
the elimination of waste in consumption. A direct appeal
was made to the consumer to conserve the necessities of life
as much as possible, and attempts were made to effect
control through licensing, price fixing, limitations on profits,
prohibition of certain trade practices, etc.
Of course, such conservation efforts failed completely to

curb the avariciousness of Big Business. The wealth of
America was great enough to enable the Administration,
under Hoover, to declare, "We can not and we do not wish
with our free institutions and our large resources of food to
imitate Europe and its policed rationing, but we must
voluntarily and intelligently assume the responsibility
before us as one in which everyone has a direct and
inescapable interest." (*35)
An attempt was made to harness rampant American

individualism by making it profitable for the individual to
increase production. On the farms, a tremendous expansion
of acreage and crops took place, engendering a
775
corresponding increased need for machinery. Here, again, it
is seen that only war could develop the latent productivity
of America. This development, however, laid the basis for a
more serious crisis and a terrific wastefulness of the soil
after the war. Industry, too, was harnessed to the State on
the "cost plus" basis, private enterprise receiving a certain
profit estimated on the cost. This scandalous method of
operation induced businessmen to operate in the most
wasteful fashion, greatly padding their costs, in order to
bloat their profits. The poor, however, were asked to save
their peach pits for use in making gas masks. But when the
Hoover Commission came to investigate the garbage pail of
the poor, to scold them for waste, it found it empty and
learned that poverty had compelled a natural economy far
more potent than its propaganda.
Immediately after the declaration of war, Wilson set up a

Committee on Public Information, consisting of George
Creel, Chairman, and the Secretaries of State, War, and the
Navy. This Committee issued seventy-five million copies of
an assortment of propaganda items to encourage the public
morale. It hired seventy-five thousand speakers, assembled
one thousand four hundred provocative drawings, issued a
daily publication to the Press and similar agencies, and also
furnished twice a month a periodical known as the National
School Service to each of the six hundred thousand public
school teachers in the country. It enlisted the aid of three
thousand college professors of history to prepare pamphlet
material, and, in addition to these worthies, practically
every writer and artist of prominence, and every
advertising expert was drafted into service. Besides, the
Committee regimented every film company and every
minister. (*36)
776
In the United States especial attention was paid to the
mobilization of the church, which ardently gave its blessing
to the war and in the name of God urged the fight to be
waged to the finish. The older clergy and the women
church helpers were mobilized for parish work at home in
order that the younger clergymen might be free to go with
the soldiers into the trenches and barracks.
Such ministers did their best to glorify the war area, to

point out that life in the trenches inspired a wonderful
spiritual revival and became a sort of cleansing of the soul
in fire. Particularly effective work was done by chaplains
and religious organizations at the front. General Pershing is
reported to have said: --- There is no one factor contributing
more to the morale of the army in France than the Y.M.C.A.
The value of the organization cannot be overestimated.
Give me nine hundred men who have the Y.M.C.A. rather
than a thousand men who have none and I will have better
fighters every time. Incidentally, the Catholic clergy, too,
were unanimous for the war, as was every church
denomination that met in convention during 1917.
Of particular value was the country church, since in the

agricultural village the church is the real social center and
frequently the only meeting place. The government issued a
pamphlet containing a war program for country churches
with an edition of fifty thousand copies and also
maintained a weekly news service to ministers. The church
in the village and in the countryside was a potent factor in
mobilizing the people completely for war. (*37)
The Committee on Public Information assumed the

supervision of the films and the stage. Especially important
was the cinema as a powerful weapon for the propaganda
of the masses. The movies satisfied the demands of the
audience in a direct, visual, picturesque, and vital manner,
777
and required nothing from them. Since every person in the
audience, literate or illiterate, had paid a fee for admission,
he tended to give his attention voluntarily to what was put
on the screen. Furthermore, a single picture could be
exhibited simultaneously throughout many thousands of
theaters in the land. This medium of propaganda had a
scope unparalleled. Supplementing the movie was the
legitimate theater. Although the stage served a narrower
and smaller audience, it contained live flesh and blood
actors who could create a most intense atmosphere, even
more so than the screen. Both the theater and the movie
brought together large mass gatherings in which
enthusiasm spread by contagion. The development of the
talking picture and of television will make these
instruments of propaganda even more powerful in the next
war.
In the last war, radio was in its infancy. Today this medium
is greatly developed; by means of it the government will be
able to issue its propaganda to all listeners, even in their
homes, thus immensely increasing efficiency in
mobilization and arousing patriotism. By means of loud
speakers set up in the street, on the roofs of buildings, on
trucks, in small villages and large towns, in the countryside,
the war message can be delivered immediately throughout
the land and even the world.
Needless to say, the staffs and pupils of the schools,

colleges, and universities will be mobilized completely
during the coming war. This will be especially necessary
since the highest centers of learning will be the recruiting
grounds for the officers of the army. What took place at
Columbia University during the last World War is
indicative of the technique employed. On March 13, 1917,
five hundred officers of Columbia sent a telegram to the
778
President of the United States approving his stand. On
April 6, when war was declared, a mass meeting of
students and faculty was held and immediately thereafter
the enrollment of students, faculty, and alumni began. The
registrar mailed fifty-three thousand cards. This Columbia
University plan for mobilizing was adopted by the Federal
Bureau of Education and by the Department of the Interior
and sent out as a model to the presidents of colleges and
universities all over the United States. (*38) Those who did
not enlist were mobilized in all sorts of researches and other
practical activities for the advancement of the War;
professors of engineering advised on personnel, material,
and construction. Those teaching chemistry and social
sciences, and the economists and statisticians also helped,
as did the staff of the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
All types of special courses were inaugurated for students
to enable them to become efficient in war. A Red Cross
ambulance unit was established and men were called into
service for it. Members of the Department of Agriculture
and students acquainted with rural conditions worked out
plans for returning boys to the land, etc. Columbia
established a Division of Intelligence and Publicity which
prepared a series of pamphlets on problems and duties of
citizens in many phases of the war question.
Since the time of this activity, the government has greatly

improved its technique of complete mobilization of all
departments of social life. Each of these social-educational
agencies will have its separate place and importance in the
next war.
Since nothing can replace personal contact in wartime, the

church is incomparable as an agency of war mobilization,
particularly in dealing with backward rural masses, the
poorest elements of the adult population, and women.
779
Second in importance to the church, in the more prosperous
agrarian communities, is the radio; in the countryside and
in the small town, motion pictures and posters are second.
To influence the youth of the country, the chief mechanism
is primarily the school and then the movies. For the city
population, the main agencies for reaching the broadest
masses are the movies, the mass demonstration, the parade,
posters, etc. For the older city population the press is the
best medium; for the aged and the housewife, the radio and
the photograph.
Some of these instruments are better for arousing a war

spirit at the start of hostilities, while others increase their
efficiency as the war progresses. The church, for example,
can play its best role only if it constantly repeats its pacifist
pretensions before the war. This will enable it to whip up a
war spirit better after war is actually declared.
The church is the traditional institution of the dead. When

the mass of dead begins to mount, the church truly comes
into its own; then the fury of its hysteria reaches its highest
intensity. That is why, no doubt, the chaplain, priest, and
semi-religious organizations travel so closely to the soldiers
at the front. It means that the regiments are soon to become
corps of cadavers. In the rear, the mountain of corpses is
turned over to the church, enabling it to invoke all the
solemnity vested in it by the superstitions of the ages, and
to swear by all the dead, in the name of immortality and of
God that the war is a holy one, that it must be waged until
the enemy is exterminated. The coming into prominence of
the church in time of war is only another illustration of the
atavistic and destructive character of war and the
breakdown of normal scientific civilized life that it implies.
However, in spite of its omniscience, the State begins to lose

its perfect social control as the war progresses. Secret
780
councils and nuclei are organized by revolutionary
elements in the army, on the frontier, in the factory and
neighborhood, in all existing organizations. Strikes break
out, mutinies occur, which gradually flare up into general
violent demonstrations, leading toward revolution. The
mobilization of these revolutionary masses is accomplished
primarily not through the press or the other recognized
social agencies, since the work proceeds entirely illegally,
but almost solely by personal contact, man-to-man
approach, through whispers and secret gatherings, the
murmur gradually growing into a roar that deafens
everybody. The destructive character of capitalism and the
State, so dramatically heightened by war activity, brings in
its train the social organizations of those who suffer from
the war to end the slaughter.
Related to the problem of war is the problem of waste and

its connections with the productive systems. We have
already remarked that so great is the destructive character
of peace during present depressions that only through war
can capitalism be revived. So great is the waste in peace-
time, for instance, that in spite of the enormous
destructiveness of the World War, in some countries
actually more was produced by the fraction remaining at
home than formerly had been by a full quota of workers.
This was due, of course, to the fact that war compelled a
maximum utilization of all the activities of the people.
This situation was well illustrated by the economy of the

United States. According to the Secretary of War, in 1918,
four million five hundred thousand men, or about 14.2 per
cent of the working male population, were drafted into the
army, and seven million more men, or about 23.8 per cent
of the working male population, were employed entirely in
781
war work. Thus a total of eleven million five hundred
thousand men or 38 per cent of the working male
population were taken away from normal peace-time
endeavors. To this must be added the two million of the
nine million working women whose labor was diverted for
war work. To sum up, out of a total of forty-two million
recorded in the census as gainfully employed, fourteen
million were used for war activity; and yet far more was
produced during the war than during peace. (*39) Here is a
graphic illustration of the tremendous waste in time of
peace. So large is it that even when the waste of war is
subtracted, the mass of goods produced was greater, as
a result of destructive activity, than it was prior to the war.
It has been estimated that in the United States, on a given

day during periods of prosperity, out of approximately
forty million gainfully employed, the man-power of at least
eight million people is wasted in fruitless and vicious
activities; six million more are idle; the manpower of at
least four million more is wasted in inefficient productive
methods, while that of another two million five hundred
thousand is wasted in faulty distribution. (*40)
A whole series of studies on capitalist decay and waste in

American life has recently been made by various experts.
One writer finds the proportion of productive wealth
devoted to profit-making constantly shrinking; (*41)
another estimates the growing proportion of overhead costs
of production costs; (*42) a third points out the implications
of the fact that wealth under modern capitalism is taking an
increasingly liquid form, intensifying the financial panics in
time of economic rises; (*43) a fourth demonstrates that the
rate of replacement of machinery lags far behind the cut in
costs of production of that machinery. (*44)
782
It is no wonder, therefore, that American engineers have
questioned increasingly the efficacy of the capitalist mode
of production, that they have denounced the capitalists as
saboteurs and criminals who must be displaced by
engineers. The pioneer of this group was Thorstein Veblen
who, in a series of volumes, railed against the profit and
price system. "The expediency of so having the nation's
industry managed on a footing of private ownership in the
pursuit of private gain, by persons who can show no
equitable personal claim to even the most modest
livelihood, and whose habitual method of controlling
industry is sabotage --- refusal to let production go on
except it affords them an unearned income --- the
expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who
have to pay the cost of it." (*45)
The theories of Veblen have been taken up by engineers

with socialistic leanings and latterly by the Technocrats.
These engineers amply have demonstrated that the normal
waste of capitalism in post-war imperialism is as enormous
as in war, although war is needed as a supplementary
activity, since peace cannot waste enough to keep industry
going. They make a full analysis of the enormous increase
in productivity that has occurred, especially since the end
of the War. For example, it is pointed out that in the
incandescent lamp industry one man can produce in one
day what nine hundred men produced in 1914. The Buick
Motor Company reports an increase in production of 1,400
per cent from 1912 to 1927, with an increase labor force of
only 10 per cent. The ocean liner, California, had one
hundred and twenty firemen on the vessel; now it has three.
"The All American Technological Society, headed by
General W. I. Westervelt, recently announced: 'We find that
between ten and twelve million men and women, engaged
in the various technological activities of our productive and
783
distributive system, produce and distribute all the raw
materials and finished commodities required by a
population of one hundred twenty-five million.’" (*46)
Nor does all this increase of production necessarily result

from the application of new machinery. The American
Railways System is a good illustration of what changes are
possible with the same basic means of production. In 1920
there were employed two million one hundred sixty
thousand men on the railroads. Ten years later the number
of men was reduced to one million three hundred thousand,
although 7 per cent more freight was being carried on the
same lines.
Apparently no matter to what extent capitalism may

attempt to choke the productive forces, these forces burst
their fetters at every possible opportunity. The flood of
inventions steadily increases. The patents granted in the
United States, for example, have risen from two hundred
and eight thousand in 1890 to three hundred and fourteen
thousand in 1910, to four hundred and twenty-one
thousand in 1930. (*47) Is it any wonder that engineers,
contemplating such a situation, should move for a new
social order and declare, "The capitalistic formula has run
out.... Capitalism might be revived by war, by ruthless
inflation, or by a series of great new industries. So revived,
however, it can be a matter of only a few years before the
demands of the capital goods sector overtake the new
expansion, and another, and final, crisis is reached." (*48)
Accurate studies of the peacetime wastefulness of

capitalism have been made. One author points out how
energy is wasted in plants not economically located, in the
building up of unnecessarily large cities, in the cultivation
of too much land, in the abuse of natural resources, in the
processes of competition, in the too early scrapping of
784
materials, in finance changes, in style changes, in
overproduction, etc., etc. (*49)
Again an American engineering society analyzes the

sources of waste in the productive process alone and
attributes them to: (1) faulty material control, waiting for
material; (2) faulty design control, no standardization of
machines or materials; (3) lack of production control, bad
scheduling of work; (4) lack of cost control, faulty
accounting; (5) lack of research; (6) faulty labor supply
control; (7) ineffective workmanship; (8) unemployment; (9)
idle material; (10) idle plant; (11) restriction of output; (12)
preventable sickness and accidents. (*50) The engineers
then determined to consider each factory analysis in
comparison with a model plant actually in operation, to
find out who was to blame for the waste. It discovered that
the waste was in every case largely due to the management
and not to labor or outside causes, eighty-one per cent of
the waste in the metal trades, for example, being placed on
the shoulders of the owners and operators (*51) In this way,
the American Engineering Society was able to verify the
charge of sabotage that has been hurled by the technicians
against the capitalists.
Looking at the United States today, we can easily see that

the waste of peace is fully comparable to the destruction of
war. During the period of the present depression, while
twenty million workers have been looking for work, normal
waste has been tremendously increased. Production is
brushed aside, machinery is abandoned to rust or is
doomed to be discarded, antiquated before its time. The
product is not consumed but left to rot. The gap between
capacity to produce and actual production increases so
greatly as to threaten the very ability of industry to grow.
Mountains of goods are destroyed, plowed under, or sunk,
785
in a deliberate policy of destruction. The soil is so
wastefully mishandled as to produce national calamities
through droughts, erosions, floods, sand storms, that could
be prevented by a rational management of the natural
resources. (*52)
The income of the United States was approximately eighty-

five billion dollars in 1929. In 1932 it was estimated at
around forty-five billion dollars. We can assume that there
was an average decrease of thirty billion dollars each year
during the now seven years of crisis, as compared with
1929. Thus the people have lost an income which they could
have produced under 1929 conditions amounting already to
the staggering total of two hundred and ten billion dollars.
Besides, there was a decrease in actual capital values as well.
Certainly the World War did not cost the United States or
any country as much as the depressions. (*53)
Peace is literally bankrupting the capitalism of the United

States. Soon the federal debt will amount to over forty
billion dollars and is increasing approximately at the rate of
four billion a year. The total debt, public and private, has
advanced to one hundred and fifty billion dollars, or
approximately half the entire wealth of the country. (*54)
Federal and State taxes now amount to fifteen billion
dollars a year, or about one-third of the total income.
And yet the United States is in a relatively favorable

condition. The situation is drastically worse in such a
country as Germany. The question invariably must come
up before the ruling group as to how long such a strain can
be endured. Prolonged, it can lead only to madness whose
political expression is fascism and whose release is war.
Here we find the driving urge, the disastrous waste of
peace that compels Germany and other countries to re-arm
and to plunge into military adventures. War at least strains
786
every nerve and sinew of the nation; depression only rots
them. Bursting the straight-jacket of the Versailles Peace,
German fascism has become a raving maniac expressing
only in the clearest form, however, the insanity of the entire
epileptic capitalist world: "La paix nous tue" --- peace is
killing us! This is the agonizing cry of capitalism the world
over.
Peace is matching war even with reference to violence. The

breakdown of capitalist life in the twentieth century
discloses a constant trend toward violence in everyday
normal intercourse. This collapse of law and order was
particularly noticeable after the war. In Europe, the
demobilization of the soldiers, the intense class conflicts,
riots, and revolutions created a background for the use of
direct physical action on the part of individual members of
society as well as of classes to satisfy their needs.
The rise of criminality in the twentieth century is

reminiscent of the sixteenth century when the old order
was breaking down under the impact of modern capitalism.
During the transition period, the old rigid State could not
but treat the new modes of life as criminal. The laws of the
State and the wishes and customs of the individuals
representing the new processes of economic life steadily
diverged. "Harrison assures us that Henry VIII executed his
laws with such severity that seventy-two thousand great
and petty thieves were put to death during his reign," (*55)
and under Elizabeth not a year went by but three to four
hundred persons were hanged for their crimes. So it is in
the twentieth century, but on an immensely grander scale.
Is it not clear that, where the State considers the entire

population potentially criminal, and where the annual
787
number of offences equals the complete population of the
country, a social system has broken down? Yet, in the
United States today practically everyone has been, is, or
will be in the toils of the law.
The rise of criminality has been especially marked in the

United States. In this, as in other matters, America is
constantly smashing all records. The rate of crime is far
higher in the twentieth century as compared to the
nineteenth, in the post-war period as compared to pre-war,
and in the period of depression as compared to that of
prosperity.(*56) The immense amount of crime and its cost
annually in the United States would be unbelievable were it
not reflected in innumerable reports from governmental
authorities.
In a speech delivered by J. E. Hoover, Director of the

Federal Bureau of Investigation, U. S. Department of Justice,
before the annual convention of the Daughters of the
American Revolution, April 23, 1936, the speaker, a
politician with a weather-eye to the future, pointed out that
there were in the United States on that day one hundred
and fifty thousand murderers roaming at large. He
estimated that during the lifetime of those who form the
present population, nearly a quarter of a million persons
would commit murder, and more than three hundred
thousand persons, a figure equivalent to the population of
an entire metropolis, would be murdered. The number of
recorded offenses of murders, felonious assault, burglaries,
and larcenies, including automobile thefts, that is, solely
serious offenses, amounted annually to close to a million
and a half in the United States.(*57)
If this is the annual total for recorded serious offenses, what

must be the total for all criminal offenses recorded by the
police? Adequate statistics are not available, but a fair
788
calculation can be made from the reports of local agents of
police. The City of Cleveland, for example, reported that for
1929 while the total number of persons charged with
serious offenses was 3,193, the total charged with minor
offenses amounted to 101,582. (*58) This means that about
3½ per cent of the total crimes for which arrests were made
were of a major character. In Cincinnati, the figures for the
same year were 3,139 arrests for major crimes and 112,915
for minor, or 2.7 per cent of the total being serious offenses.
Thus, from these figures, we might perhaps assume that 3
per cent is the national average of serious crimes to the total.
This, however, is not accurate, since the figures given by
cities have to do with arrests made rather than with
offenses recorded, and the proportion of arrests in serious
offenses known to the police is sometimes three or four
times as great as the arrests in minor offenses. Thus, the
total number of minor offenses known to the police cannot
be gauged accurately merely by the statistics of arrests.
However, were we to use these proportions, it would

appear, therefore, since there are annually a million and a
half recorded serious offenses, that there are at least fifty
million minor crimes committed annually in the United
States; the total might indeed range to one hundred million.
And these, of course, are crimes known to the police. To
this vast sum we must add the incalculably larger number
of crimes committed which are not recorded or known or
which are concealed from the public. Thus, even these
inadequate figures show that crime has penetrated to the
very fibre of American life and affects almost every citizen.
Such facts are unprecedented in the history of civilization.
The rapid increase of crime can be seen on every side. In

Iowa, for example, although the population increased 150
per cent from 1870 to 1925, the rate of commitment to the
789
reformatories and penitentiaries of the State grew 500 per
cent. In the urban counties of the State, the rate of
conviction per hundred thousand population in five-year
periods jumped from 3.45 in 1870 to 17.35 in 1925, and "The
rate of crime, both of convictions and of sentences, is
highest in the urban counties and lowest in the rural
counties. The relationship seems to be in almost direct ratio
to the extent of urban conditions. . . ." (*59)
The crime rate respects no persons and has climbed into the
Capital itself. "This investigation has established, on the
basis of fact, that Washington has a disgracefully high
crime rate and that law enforcement here is neither
aggressive nor efficient.'' (*60) Washington, D. C., stands
second in murder, first in robbery, second in burglary, first
in manslaughter, second in auto-theft per hundred
thousand population, of all the cities in the country.
Up to now we have spoken of the number of offenses. We

can now turn to the number of persons arrested and
convicted. In the same speech cited above, Mr. Hoover
declared that in the United States there were three million
convicted criminals and that one out of every twenty-five
persons in the United States is "inclined" towards
criminality. From the number of offenses given above, this
would seem to be an underestimation rather than otherwise.
In the present year, 1936, there are about two hundred
thousand prisoners, or one to approximately every four
hundred and forty odd persons over fifteen years of age.
The commitments to prison in the United States in 1933
totaled close to seven hundred thousands. (*61) In New
York State alone in 1934 there were recorded 563,697
convictions. Counting New York State roughly as ten per
cent of the national total, this would mean that over five
and one-half million people were convicted of crimes in the
790
United States that year. Solely in New York City in 1934,
there were approximately five hundred and fifty-seven
thousand arrests. When we consider how large a ratio the
number of offenses bears to the number of arrests, what a
small proportion of those arrested actually are indicted, and
what a small proportion of those indicted are tried and
convicted, how few of those convicted are committed, we
can get an indication of the enormous criminality prevailing
in the country. The seven hundred thousand annual
commitments in the United States, of course, does not
include the large number of those convicted who are fined
rather than sent to prison, or whose sentences are
suspended, or who are released on probation or for parole.
According to Mr. Hoover, the average murderer serves only
four years in prison.
In spite of their enormity, the incompleteness of these

figures can be seen from the mournful reports of various
governmental bodies which have investigated the situation.
The Chicago report, for example, gives the following
summary of its findings: "Many professional criminals
escape the penalties of the law and prey at will upon
society. Poor and petty criminals are often punished more
heavily than is just. The treatment of those sentenced to
penal institutions is pitifully ineffective ... .. The present
machinery catches poor, petty, and occasional criminals,
and punishes them severely, but fails signally to suppress
the professional criminal." (*62) Those arrested tend to
become criminals permanently and the criminals are
intimately linked up with police, with the bar, with officials,
bondsmen, the prosecutor's office, and the intricate nexus
existing between these elements and alcoholism, drug
peddling, prostitution, gambling and vice.
791
The same report illustrates its findings as to the heavy
pressure on the poor by pointing out that over 80 per cent
of those committed to jail were sentenced for non-payment
of fines, of which thirty-five per cent were for non-payment
of fines less than fifteen dollars and 56 per cent for fines less
than twenty dollars.
Sinister, too, is the fact that the average age of the prisoners
is constantly becoming lower. Of the total arrested in 1935,
for example, 55 per cent were less than thirty years of age,
15 per cent less than twenty, 37 per cent less than twenty-
five. (*63) The largest number of arrests were in the
nineteen-year age group. These figures were compiled from
the fingerprint cards in the possession of the United States
government. As, in many states, youthful prisoners are not
fingerprinted, the increase in the percentage of youth who
have been arrested as criminals is really larger. A great
number of these youthful criminals are charged with major
crimes. In 1935, the figures showed that more than 36 per
cent of the persons whose arrest records were examined
during the year had previous fingerprint cards on file,
while 6 per cent more bore notations that the individual
had been arrested before.
To cap the climax of this astounding situation, it must be

emphasized that the most important aspect of criminality,
racketeering, has not been touched by the authorities.
Racketeering is the transition line between legitimate
business and so-called criminal operations. The widespread
character of racketeering in America is eloquent testimony
of the fact that Big Business generally is tainted with
criminality and that the criminal is but the business man
who has been caught.
A voluminous survey was made in 1929 by the Chicago

Crime Commission. (*64) The survey included a study of
792
organized crime in Chicago, including the systematic
exploitation of prostitution, the rule of the underworld, the
beer wars, the widespread bomb terrorization, racketeering,
and the relationship of the gangster to the politician. It
closed on the mournful note: "In fact, during this period
the rule of the underworld, instead of being checked, has in
fact extended its territory and consolidated its power." (*65)
Again. "This entrance of the gunman and gangster into the
control of what had heretofore been normal economic
activities is the most flagrant example of the rule of the
gang." (*66) The report emphasizes, "It must be recognized
that bootlegging and 'racketeering' present an
altogether new problem of law enforcement, entirely different
from the question of punishing old established crimes like
murder and robbery." (*67) It ends with the statement that
"the present study has indicated how, in the
past, crusades against crime have repeatedly failed, although
public opinion had each time been inflamed to white heat."
(*68) And after reaching this conclusion, the Committee had
nothing better to offer than to declare that in the last
analysis, control is governed by public opinion and that "no
one agency can cope with the range of problems presented
by organized crime in gambling, commercialized vice,
bootlegging, and gang activities." (*69)
The Illinois Crime Survey is valuable in reporting, even

though in a sketchy manner, the relationship of crime to
regular business and to the State. It takes up such matters as
election violence, discipline in the stockyards, and the race
riot provocations of the corporation managements. It
discusses how laundry and other associations are formed
through bombing methods. It deals, too, with the strong-
arm squads existing in the trade unions of Chicago. Here is
heard a faint sounding of the fact that the enormous
793
criminality in the United States is connected intimately with
the normal processes of social activity itself.
The matter of criminality can be treated also from the point

of view of cost to society. Only a small fraction of the cost
has been estimated in statistical form. In a Special Report of
the United States Commission on Law Observance, Volume
XII, George W. Wickersham, Chairman, dealt with the cost
of crime in the United States. In 1929-1930 alone the cost of
federal criminal justice was estimated at fifty-three million
dollars. Incomplete statistics on state police forces added
five million, five hundred thousand dollars more. The cost
of state penal and correctional institutions and parole
agencies produced another fifty odd million. The cost in 82
per cent of the cities of over twenty-five thousand with a
combined population of over forty-six million, amounted to
two hundred and forty-four million dollars, and if we
double this figure to cover all the cities, we have a grand
public cost of over six hundred million dollars spent
annually on criminal justice. To this must be added the
private expenditure for protection against crime, the cost of
state industrial police, watchmen, guards, etc., which
amounts to another two hundred million dollars annually.
There are also private detective agencies throughout the
country, the financial operations of which are not estimated
in the report.
The report did not attempt to estimate the private losses

annually due to crime, although it showed that the losses
which were insured amounted to forty-seven million
dollars, and that the full cost of insurance against crime was
at least one hundred and six million dollars annually. The
post office department estimates of mail frauds per year
were sixty-eight million dollars. This omits such items as
794
insurance frauds, fraudulent bankruptcies, secondary
frauds, confidence games, forgery, counterfeiting, etc.
Nor does the report attempt to appraise the indirect losses

to a community through crime. It does show, however, that
if the prisoners and law-enforcement officers alone were
put to work, the wages paid them would equal three
hundred million dollars annually.
Of the highest significance is the fact that losses to society

through racketeering were omitted from the report. Surely
this amounts to several billion dollars annually taken from
the pockets of the people. When we consider that the total
income at the height of prosperity of the United States was
eighty-five billion dollars, we are forced to come to the
conclusion that perhaps 10 per cent of the national income
went into the pockets of racketeers and criminals, or to the
officers of the State and their allies in law enforcement!
The question arises, what are the causes for this astounding
balance sheet of criminality in the United States? Two
principal sets of causes can be assigned as contributing to
this phenomenon, causes that reflect present day general
conditions throughout the world and which are peculiarly
refracted in the prism of American life.
The first basic reason for the phenomenal criminality in

America and elsewhere is that the social order is definitely
breaking down. The State and law are no longer identical
with morals, and must act ever more severely. On the other
hand, the masses consider the State only as an incubus, or
as a monster to be hated and feared. That these conditions
are world-wide can be observed by the fact that in every
795
country during and after the war, and during the post-war
depression, large increases of crime have been recorded.
It may be retorted that of all the capitalist states, that of the

United States is the strongest and most stable. According to
our theory, the crime rate in that country should be smallest;
in fact, the increase of crime in the United States is
incomparably higher than that of any other country in the
world. In criminology, as in economics, America is equal to
all Europe put together.
Our answer is that, precisely because the United States is

the strongest capitalist country existing in a world which is
breaking down as a whole, here antagonism to the State
takes the form of individual criminality. In Europe hostility
to the existing order, the desire of the poor to defend or
improve their standards, takes the form not of individual
striving to get out of their class, but of mass formations,
riots, demonstrations, strikes, insurrections, revolutions.
These events are no longer in the field of criminal
jurisdiction, but rather in the realm of politics. Crime in
Europe is mass crime --- that is, political revolutionary
activity. if, in conjunction with this mass revolt, there occur
individual acts of terror, these are fused with the general
situation. The class-consciousness of the groups in Europe
prevents them from attempting to ameliorate their
conditions by acts of petty crime against property. Solutions
are to be found not in the province of economics, but in that
of politics; the problem is not whether there should be an
individual and temporary redistribution of wealth, but who
should rule whom; that is, it is a question of a conquest of
power.
The situation is entirely different in America. The political

storms abroad whip up a raging ocean of violence which
dashes against the shores of the United States, eroding its
796
stability. The political structure of the United States has not
been long established nor well tested. On the contrary, the
State grew in an extremely belated and haphazard fashion.
Scarcely was America out of its infant swaddling clothes
than it was forced to become part of a senile and decayed
passing order. There is no luxury of time given to America,
as was given to England, for example, where there was a
long period of well-nurtured maturity. America is destined
to dash through its period of maturity, a period marked by
Welfare- Liberalism and social reform. It is hurled at once
from middle nineteenth century politics to that of the
middle twentieth century. It must move from rampant
individualism to vigorous fascism. All the middle periods
are telescoped, with a speed typical of American tempo.
During this transition period toward collectivism, and

while the masses are not yet class conscious, a deep social
maladjustment becomes apparent everywhere.
Individualist actions which were perfectly tolerable in a
libertarian society now become criminal in a complex
industrialist order. The people must be disciplined and
ordered; these strike back in their old individualist fashion -
-- they become criminals. In America, class formations have
not yet become rigidified. Those who suffer under the
contradictions of capitalism, especially the youth, believe it
possible by their own individual action to get out of their
stratum of the poor and exploited classes. In America, the
temptation to do so becomes unbearable in the light of the
immense wealth and tremendous capacity to produce that
meet one everywhere. The question, why this poverty in
the midst of plenty, is a question that a bewildered
individual in America cannot answer according to social
laws, nor is he willing to justify the excuse which he finds at
hand.
797
Acts of violence in the United States have not been peculiar
to the present period. They were part of America from the
beginning, in the extirpation of the Indians, in the
enslavement of millions of Negroes, in the bondage of
further millions of white indentured servants, in the
unbridled conditions of the frontier, in the ruthless
aggrandizement of the wealthy. What is significant,
however, is that, while it was this very violence which in
previous centuries helped to build up America and which
was not at all considered of a criminal nature, today this
behavior destroys the State and must be punished by the
forces of repression. In other words, previously individual
violence and direct action were the highest fruits of
previous American Liberalism; that such actions today are
crimes is an eloquent sign of the disappearance of
Liberalism and the preparations for fascism that exist in
America.
The second basic cause for the advance of criminality in the

United States is the fact that in the era of imperialism it is
the ruling class, the imperialists and their agents, which is
forced to take illegal and criminal action for which its
members are never punished. They plunge the world into
repeated wars and into constant crises. Like snarling dogs
in the manger, they neither produce nor allow others to
produce. It is no longer, then, the revolutionist who takes to
sabotage in order to obtain more wages in the factory or to
improve his lot. It is the capitalist class that deliberately
destroys the processes of production in the present era.
Capitalism can exist only through the most fearful waste;
when the pace of destruction is not fast enough, it opens the
sluices of war.
In an era of permanent depression and war, the ruling

group is compelled increasingly to turn to violence against
798
its own people. By means of violence the oligarches compel
the formation of cartels and trusts. By violence they break
up the organization of workers. With similar measures they
eliminate their business rivals. In a period when masses of
people vote, it is only by violence and criminality that the
ruling class can control elections.
Nothing better illustrates this fact than the situation in the

United States which arose when, partially because of the
original weakness of the State, the rapidly rising trusts were
forced to arm themselves directly. They created a vast
private industrial police, sometimes as in Pennsylvania,
connected with the State apparatus itself and having the
standing of regular police officers, which included
thousands of people. No large strike occurs without
detective agencies and private employment bureaus
handing over to these companies hundreds and sometimes
thousands of guards to be armed and deputized for acts of
violence.
It is not at all uncommon in the United States for a

company to employ gangsters to blow up the factories and
property of its rivals in order to compel merger and
monopoly consolidation. For this purpose some employers
even have utilized the entire officialdom of trade unions,
whereby the unions became weapons for these employers
to strike down the plants of rival concerns that would not
enter the combine. Frequently gangsters are hired to bomb
and terrorize numbers of small storekeepers and
independent producers into entering into agreements to
maintain certain price levels.
In short, we witness in the United States two distinct sets of

crimes. On the one hand is the old type, aimed against
business property and the wealthy. The members of this
criminal group were originally rebellious elements of the
799
poor, products of the slums and vicious conditions of city
life who take this individualist reaction to emerge from
their poverty and to strike back at the forces oppressing
them. The second category of crime is entirely different. It is
a category generated and developed by Big Business itself,
which utilizes the gangster and the racketeer as important
instruments to accelerate the centralization of its power.
This second section is far more important and deadly to the
social order than the first and is rapidly increasing. The
Jesse jameses are insignificant in comparison to the Al
Capones. The Jesse jameses were an expression of
Liberalism; the Al Capones are an expression of trustified
racketeering capital.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America,

criminality was only the social counterpart of rampant
Liberalism. The Liberal wanted to minimize the State; the
criminal broke its provisions. Both believed in individual
direct action. It was not necessary to fight the State in order
to obtain a livelihood, nor was the State strong enough to be
called upon in every eventuality. Each man had to took out
for himself. The law of the frontier was the law of disorder.
Collective action took the form of lynching. What a man
wanted he could attain directly, either by stalking off into
the wilderness and evading social relations, or by
individual actions against his fellow human. Everyone was
too busy trying to secure wealth to pay much attention to
anything else except when the depredations were so
heinous as to threaten to destroy the system itself. The
liberal view that "the sky was the limit" made the country a
paradise for individual action.
Since practically the entire attention of the nation was given

to enhancing production and the economic factors, those
who went into politics were generally business failures or
800
weaklings, or those who, as lawyers retained by business
men and real estate speculators, had some particular goal to
achieve thereby. The average hard-working individual in
the United States looked upon the State official with
somewhat amused contempt. The government apparatus,
being turned over, therefore, to the relatively unfit, who
used their positions to recoup their losses, became easy
prey for graft and corruption. Real wealth was not in the
hands of the State; it was in the hands of private industry.
The treasury of the State was but an insignificant portion of
the total wealth, and no one cared how it was administered.
Thus systematically it could be looted and plundered.
Those who entered politics coolly calculated the
opportunities for graft and peculation which it offered.
Under such circumstances, respect for the law and for the
law officer became conspicuous by its absence in the United
States.
The situation has been aggravated by the fact that, in

America, the wealthy have none of the prestige and
standing which they enjoy in European and other old
established countries. Within the memory of each
generation, the common people were able to watch the
wealthy obtain their riches and to note the methods
carefully. As the wealthy themselves were generally not
from the genteel classes of Europe, they did not bother to
conceal the tough mechanism by which they obtained their
property. It was the common knowledge of all, seen by all,
the avaricious, the criminal methods by which the
capitalists were evolving in this country. Swindling,
cheating, murder, criminality of all sorts, were part of the
routine by which men became owners of Big Business. (*70)
No one in America but a moron could believe that the
millions secured in a decade by given individuals, who had
entered this country penniless, could have been obtained by
801
honest toil alone. That the people did not rebel against this
situation was basically due to the fact that enough wealth
was on hand throughout the nation to afford them a good
livelihood as well, Attacks upon the rich were considered
manifestations of meanness and envy.
With a venal and corrupt governmental apparatus, with a

ruthless and crude capitalist class absorbing the untold
wealth of the country, many of the youth of the poorer
classes turned to the methods by which Big Business had
obtained power, in an effort to do likewise. These
comprised the army of unfortunates who were caught and
convicted.
The situation has changed entirely in the twentieth century,

especially during the present depression. The army of
governmental employees --- eight hundred thousand
federal alone --- now reaches the astounding total of
approximately three million. The number of people who are
directly dependent upon the State for their livelihood can
be counted as close to sixty million. (*71) The amount of
money spent annually by the government during the crisis
has mounted to about 25 per cent of the total national
income. In one stride America, with its backward political
State, is overtaking and surpassing Europe.
Along with this change of front towards governmental

authoritarianism controlled by Big Business, there has taken
place a decided turn in the course of criminality. On the one
hand, individual actions formerly legitimate have been
made criminal offenses. In the nineteenth century to be
penniless was no crime. Today, one of the chief methods of
filling the jails is through arrests for vagrancy. Other
methods include arrests "on suspicion" and for "disorderly
conduct." During the period of prohibition, wholesale
seizures were enacted as part of prohibition enforcement. In
802
the last century, the liberty of the individual to wager his
money was generally respected. Today an increasing
number of arrests are made for betting and gambling. These
categories of crime have entrapped chiefly the poorer
elements of the population. The great increase in the
number of laws has also brought into the net large numbers
of the middle class for violation of traffic and vehicle
ordinances. Those arrested on such charges are generally
not sentenced to jail, however, but merely given fines.
It must not be supposed that these vast numbers of arrests

are unwelcome to the governmental authorities.
Criminality is the meat and sustenance of the very existence
of many of them. Without these arrests, they would have no
jobs and could appeal for no funds. For this reason,
primarily, the police constantly trail those who have been
released from jail and who make efforts to reform their
behavior. Moreover, were mass arrests not vital to the life
of capitalism they could not have grown to such an extent
nor would they have been tolerated.
The fact is that the mass of people in the United States must
be disciplined. They must be taught their place. They must
learn to respect law and order. It is believed that they will
emerge from jail more docile than before, more obedient to
the dictates of capital. The jail takes the place of universal
military service in other countries for the breaking of the
spirit of the masses and for their regimentation behind the
officers of the State. Undoubtedly this belief furnishes the
most important motive for the periodic wholesale arrests in
Negro quarters in the South and among the
poor whites in the mill towns of that region. There is also

always the possibility that, when arrested, these individuals
may break under the strain, may become semi-criminal
803
elements attached to the police department and who can be
used by it to increase the network of its influence.
Further, the fact that these wholesale arrests allow the State
to continue its tradition of slavery and forced labor which is
part of American life must be considered. Chain gangs
build the roads of the South at practically no cost at all.
Prisoners are farmed out to individual owners of lumber
camps for the production of turpentine, etc. (*72) The threat
of arrest can compel masses of Negroes and poor whites to
offer their services free to the plantation owner of the South
or at such wages as he deigns to pay. These wholesale
arrests of the poor have become an enormous weapon for
the disciplining of the masses of the people to compel them
to realize that the era of Liberalism is no more. It is these
arrests which so greatly swell the total of criminal statistics
in this country.
At the same time, with the rise of the State and Big Business,
an entirely new set of criminals enters the field protected by
these elements. Within the political parties, a veritable
swarm of gangsters and crooks place their hands upon the
public till. Every increase in governmental authority is an
increase in their power to blackmail and to swindle. Is there
a prohibition amendment? It means that every officer has
the power to permit drinking and the violation of the law,
at a price. Are there laws against vice and prostitution?
They afford the opportunity for officers to stand at the door
of houses of prostitution for a consideration, to inform all
those who enter that they are legally protected. Should a
prostitute attempt to flee from a house of ill fame, the
political gang controlling the police will insure that she is
brought to jail, and then returned.
The enormous number of gangs existing in the large cities

of the country are well known to the police. They are
804
tolerated because these gangs are connected with the
political machinery of the city. They are needed in times of
election to terrorize the polls, to murder their rivals, .to
miscount the votes. Without these gangsters, what would
maintain the control of the corrupt political officials? Who
controls the State is now a matter of vital concern for
millions who live from the State. The treasury is no longer a
small item in the national wealth. It is constantly increasing
in relative importance. Hordes of intellectuals, professional
men, members of the bar, real estate agents, bondsmen,
insurance companies, and endless others are interested in
the modus operandi of the government. All these elements
must control their election districts and their political party
machines. And the gangster, the criminal on whom the law
can press its finger, is the best servile element for its
purposes. There is no more chance of breaking the hold of
gangsters and the underworld than there is of breaking the
political machines of capitalism itself. These gangsters are
not attackers of the State; they are its protectors and
defenders. This is the type of crime representative of the
twentieth century.
As the State rises to become the greatest industry of all, it is

bound to attract to itself the men of genius who heretofore
have entered only the more lucrative private services. The
same type that became captains of industry, will try to
become captains of the State; they will demand more and
more power as their hold increases. Trustified capital in
control of the State will have great use for the gangsters and
racketeers and gunmen it has created. They will now
become unofficial representatives of repression similar to
the fascist organizations abroad. The wholesale criminality
of the American people will have to be met by still further
repressions by the government as the State becomes further
centralized at the head of a vigorous executive. More and
805
more the criminality of the people will turn into class
political action, as the criminality of the employers will turn
to fascism. America will then be well on the way towards
the final conflict, entering with the greatest violence into the
same cycle of political contradictions which can be seen so
markedly in Europe.
Footnotes
1. "If we look back over the past century we shall find that it
is only in the last quarter of it that the burden of armaments
in time of peace has begun in many countries to grow much
faster than the general wealth." (The Political Economy of
War, F. W. Hirst, p. 73.)
2. T. Veblen: An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace, p. 7.
3. "To some extent the armament race undoubtedly

contributed to industrial progress before the war, even
though the price paid for it afterwards was a heavy one." (P.
Einzig: The Economics of Rearmament, p. 26.)
4. "The spectacular reduction in German unemployment

during 1933 was due in a high degree to the increase in the
Government's armament expenditure." (P. Einzig: The
Economics of Rearmament, p. 105.)
5. John Stuart Mill believed that the foundation of colonies

was the best work the capital of the old countries could do.
6. In his Raw Materials, Population Pressure and War (1935),

Norman Angell points out that conquest of territory is not
necessary to ensure adequate supplies of raw materials and
that successful war enables a nation neither to collect debts
nor to dispose of the surplus that cannot be sold at home.
806
7. France never believed her colonies would be a relief for
overpopulation. (see S. H. Roberts: History of French Colonial
Policy, 1870-1925, I, 37.)
8. Norman Angell: The Great Illusion, 1933, pp. 4-5.
9. Napoleon I: Maxims of War, p. 42. (1861 edition.)
10. Whereas the normal complement of arms previously

contained but two and a half heavy machine guns to every
one thousand men, now this force carries eleven heavy and
forty-nine light machine guns.
11. The rate previously was fifteen shots per minute.
12. The infantry can now fire ½ lb. of metal per man. per
minute. The average for the tanks has been estimated at 6.7
lbs. per minute.
13. When, in 1928, the new gas, cacodyl-isocyanide was

invented, Dr. H. I. Jones, its inventor, of Chicago, declared:
"It is a deadly poison and would destroy armies as a man
would snuff out a candle. It always kills....Now it is much
cheaper to destroy life wholesale with this new gas. It may
be manufactured at the rate of thousands of tons a day and
it costs much less than powder and cannon, yet it will
destroy armies more thoroughly."
14. F. W. Hirst: The Consequences of the War to Great Britain, p.

295. See also E. L. Bogart: Direct and Indirect Costs of the
Great World War, pp. 270-272.
15. The average ratio in other wars was calculated as ten to

thirty-five. (See, E. L. Bogart: work cited, p. 273.)
16. The same, p. 273.
17. The same, p. 282.

807
18. The same, p. 299. This includes the estimated economic
loss due to loss of manpower.
19. G. W. Crile: A Mechanistic View of War and Peace, p. 43.
20. Quoted by M. Smith: Out of Their Own Mouths, p. I.
21. See The Confessions of Frederick the Great (Putnam Son's,

1915), p. 70.
22. H. Muensterberg: The War and America, p. 120.
23. F. Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra, pp. 52, 243. (1924,

MacMillan edition Vol. XI.)
24. See, A. L. Gowans: Selections from Treitschke's Lectures on

Politics, (1914 edition).
25. M. Smith: work cited, p. 84, quoting from Maximilian

Harden in Zukunft, August 29, Sept. 5, 1914.
26. H. Muensterberg: The War and America, pp. 190-191.
27. See, M. Smith: Out of Their Own Mouths, pp. 35-36,

quoting from Lasson: Das Kulturideal und der Krieg.
28. The same, p. 70, quoting from L. Woltmann: Die

Germanen in Frankreich.
29. The same, p. 70, quoting from L. Woltmann: Politische

Anthropologie.
30. The same, pp. 150-151.
31. C. von Clausewitz: On War, I, vii.
32. See, William II's Proclamation to the Army of the East,

1914, given in M. Smith: work cited, p. 4.
808
33. V. W. Germains: The Struggle for Bread, pp. 244-245.
34. H. D. Lasswell: Propaganda Technique in the World War, p.

93.
35. U. S. Food Administration: Bulletin No. 6, quoted by P. H.

Hibbard: Effects of the Great War Upon Agriculture, p. 105.
36. See, G. Creel: How We Advertised America.
37. See, E. deS. Brunner: The Country Church in the New

World Order, especially Chapter IX.
38. See, "Mobilization of a University," Columbia University

Quarterly, XIX, 285-295, No. 3. (June, 1917.)
39. See, S. Chase: The Tragedy of Waste, pp. 5-6. We give the
figures in round numbers.
40. The same, p. 270.
41. R. R. Doane in The Measurement of American Wealth finds

"In 1914 'productive' wealth devoted to profit making was
estimated at 62 percent of all American wealth; in 1921, at
57 percent; in 1932, at 52 percent." This conclusion is given
in S. Chase: Government in Business, p. 10.
42. See, W. Rautenstrauch: Who Gets the Money. "In other

words, in 1917, when producers got one dollar for making
goods, overhead people got another dollar for the various
services, leading up to the sale of goods to the consumer.
But in 1932 when producers got one dollar, overheaders got
$2.30. In 1929, they got $1.60. overhead costs marched
rapidly forward during the 1920's and broke into a run with
the coming of the depression. Business on the downgrade,
overhead on the upgrade --- here is abundant evidence of
809
shocking management." Given in S. Chase: Government in
Business, p. 104.
43. See, A. A. Berle: Liquid Claims and National Wealth, p. 73.

According to this book while the ratio of liquid wealth to
the total was but 16 percent in 1880, this had mounted to 40
percent in 1930 and rested at 34 percent in 1933.
44. ". . . if technical invention were four times as fast, the

rate of replacement might justifiably be doubled; if the cost
of machinery for a given production schedule were cut to
one quarter, the rate of replacement ought to be doubled
again." S. Chase: work cited, quoting Coyle: "The Capital
Goods Fallacy" in Harpers Magazine, December, 1934.
45. T. Veblen: In Inquiry into the Nature Of Peace, p. 323.
46. S. Chase: The Economy of Abundance, pp. 15-16.
48. The same, p. 153.
49. The same, pp. 6-8.
50. See, "Waste in Industry," Federated American Engineering

Societies.
51. See, J. Davis: Capitalism and Its Culture, pp. 54-55.
52. "Denuded forests, floods, droughts, a disappearing

water table, erosion, a less stable and equable climate, a
vanishing wild life --- these are some of the notable results
of unchecked and ruthless exploitation by men who
euphemistically refer to themselves as 'rugged
individualists.' " (H. L. Ickes: The New Democracy, p. 19.)
810
53. An Associated Press despatch dated December 21, 1936,
declared: "An international labor office study estimates the
world depression from 1930 to 1934 cost at least
$149,000,000,000 . . . A fateful figure, equal to the total cost
of the World War,' said Vladimir Woytinsky, author of the
study."
54. Compare, E. Clark: The Internal Debts of the U. S., Table 1,

p. 10.
55. John Wade: History of the Middle and Working Classes, p.

49.
56. For example, the homicide rate in twenty-eight cities

was 5.1 in 1900, and 10.3 in 1924 per hundred thousand. See,
H. C. Brearley: Homicide in the United States, p. 16.
57. Mr. Hoover gives the following annual total: 12,000

murders, 47,000 cases of felonious assault, 284,000
burglaries, 780,000 larcenies and 247,000 automobile thefts.
These figures are substantiated by the U. S. Department
Uniform Crime Reports, December, 1935.
58. Uniform Crime Reports, Vol. 1, No. 4 (April, 1930), p. 19.

These Reports were issued by the International Association
of Chiefs of Police. Later the Reports were taken over by the
U. S. Bureau of Investigation.
59. C. N. Burrows: Criminal Statistics in Iowa, p. 110.
60. Special Report on Crime Conditions by Committee on

the District of Columbia, House of Representatives, House
Resolution 94, 74th Congress, First Session, House Report
No. 1646, p. 5 (July 25, 1935).
61. See, U. S. Bureau of Census: Prisoners in State and Federal

Prisons in 1933, p. I (1935).
811
62. Report of the Chicago City Council Commission on
Crime, C. E. Merriam, Chairman, pp. 9-10. (March, 1915.)
63. See, U. S. Bureau of Investigation: Uniform Crime

Reports, Vol. VI, No. 4, p. 27.
64. See, The Illinois Crime Survey, Editor John B. Wigmore,

published by the Illinois Association for Criminal justice in
Cooperation with the Chicago Crime Commission, 1929.
65. The Illinois Crime Survey, p. 1093.
66. The same, p. 1093.
67. The same, p. 1093.
68. The same, p. 1096.
69. The same, p. 1099.
70. For the criminality of the capitalist see, G. Myers: The

History of Great American Fortunes, 3 Vols.; also see, G.
Myers: History of the Supreme Court.
71. This includes, of course, those on relief, but does not

include those who receive their income from private
sources which are subsidized and supported by the
government. Compare, S. Chase: Government in Business p.
49. Mr Chase gets a total of fifty-one million persons, but
underestimates the number supported on the payrolls, and
does not include pensioners, veterans, institutional inmates,
children fed in schools, etc.
72. The A. F. of L. bureaucracy bemoans the fact that

between 1923 and 1932 the figures of 12 federal and 114
state prisons show an increase in the number of productive
prisoners from 51,800 to 82,300. (See, M. Woll: Labor,
Industry and Government, p. 269.)
812
XXVI. FASCIST PROTOTYPES
THE Fascist regime is a symbol of the hardening of the

arteries of a social system which is losing completely its
flexibility. Any sudden great effort and rush of rich warm
blood can burst its blood vessels. Fascism thus has much in
common with the political schemes with which the ruling
classes of old tried to prevent the rise of a progressive
capitalist system of society. Fascism in Germany and
elsewhere turns back to the Middle ages.
In the thirteenth century, the morality of the merchant

capitalists was beginning to challenge that of the
aristocratic ruling classes. In reply the intellectuals,
speaking for the feudalists of the time, did their best to
denounce the immorality of these nascent capitalists. To the
old landed order, finance, if not immoral, was at best sordid
and disreputable. Merchants who tried to organize a ring to
raise prices were considered monsters of iniquity and were
placed in a pillory in the square with the approval of all
Christians. Labor was considered the common lot of all
mankind and the ideal was approved that one should eat
only that which he produced.
The nobility of labor was one of the theses at the very base
of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. According to the
Schoolmen, "The owner is a trustee, whose rights are
derived from the function which he performs and should
lapse if he repudiates it. They are limited by his duty to the
State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants
against him.... He is, in short, not a rentier, but an officer,
813
and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he sacrifices
the duties of his charge to the greed of personal gain." (*1)
Prior to the time that nascent capitalism had grown

sufficiently to challenge the old order, morality and politics
had been fused under the leadership of the Church. Later,
as the struggle grew fiercely, the State took the lead and the
Church became its arm. This, however, did not destroy the
conception of a single society of which Church and State
were different aspects, and of the necessity to fuse law and
morals. In Queen Elizabeth's day, in England, ecclesiastics
were public officers; the Bishop was normally also the
justice of the peace and relied on secular machinery to
enforce not only religious conformity but Christian
morality, because both were elements in a society in which
secular and spiritual interests had not yet been
disentangled completely from each other.
In their first successful struggles, by no means did the

capitalists adopt a position of laissez faire individualism.
Quite the contrary. They scrupulously maintained the
theories of social responsibility and of mutual dependence
of groups, each to be of service to the other. They insisted,
too, on a complete authoritarianism of the State, just as they
had previously supported the rise of an absolute monarchy.
The business man tried to prove that only under his
guidance would there be the greatest benefit to the whole.
Under Calvin, the early capitalists established an iron
collectivism, an almost military discipline to whose
remorseless and violent rigors Geneva was subjected. As
both the teaching of Calvin himself and the practice of some
Calvinist communities suggest, the social ethics of
Calvinism savored more of collectivist dictatorship than of
individualism.
814
"In the plan for the reorganization of poor relief at Zurich,
which was drafted by Zwingli in 1525, all mendicancy was
strictly forbidden; travelers were to be relieved on
condition that they left the town next day; provision was to
be made for the sick and aged in special institutions; no
inhabitant was to be entitled to relief who wore ornaments
or luxurious clothes, who failed to attend church, or who
played cards or was otherwise disreputable. The basis of his
whole scheme was the duty of industry and the danger of
relaxing the incentive to work." (*2)
We might say in passing that the economic justification of

these laws was the same as that which had led to the
economic theory of mercantilism. The business of middle
and northern Europe which had been embraced in the
Hanseatic League was steadily deteriorating with the
opening up ,of the New World and the shift of the trade
routes to the Atlantic. The pressure of superior economic
competition was reducing these towns to secondary
positions. To prevent or, at worst, to control this
competition, each town was forced to formulate a whole
series of rules to the disadvantage of foreign merchants and
travelers. (*3)
The views of Luther also called for an omnipotent and

omnipresent State to which the church was to be entirely
subordinate, although church and State were to be united.
He furiously denounced the spirit of revolt then prevailing
in Germany and demanded complete and absolute
obedience to the rulers, or the princes. Against the
Anabaptists he wrote: "Therefore strike, throttle, thrust,
each man who can, secretly or openly --- and bear in mind
that there exists nothing more poisonous, more harmful,
more devilish than a rebellious man. --- As one must
slaughter a mad dog...." (*4)
815
As with Calvin, so with Luther the State was an absolute
authority because it was ordained by God and was God's
law. To Luther, the Prince was the father of the land; he was
never weary of thundering at the masses that to honor was
more imperative than to love, that the prime virtues were
modesty, humility, reverence. Christian love was
subordinate to reverence or the order of society. Luther, like
Calvin, confidently believed that "even an individual of the
worst character, one most unworthy of all honor, if invested
with public authority receives that illustrious divine power
which the Lord has, by His Word, devolved on the
ministers of His Justice." (*5)
In all this we see that early capitalism strove for power with
an attitude of extreme conservatism. Neither Luther nor
Calvin believed in free inquiry or toleration, and from their
writings one may as easily reach fascism as individualism.
The Reformation utilized the writings of these men,
gradually reinterpreting them to build a philosophy of
individualism. The business man no longer required
theories of State control and social dependence; he needed
just the opposite.
The early views of the Reformation were reflections of the

prevailing Catholic opinion that the State was a holy
institution and that the monarch ruled by divine law. He
who opposed the State sinned against God. As the
capitalists grew more powerful, however, they constructed
gods violently opposed to the State of the old order; as they
overthrew the ancien regime, the old aristocratic classes and
Catholic apologists had to change their position also, since
they were now, in turn, rebels. (*6) Theories of divine right
and divine law therefore had to be modified; an objective
science of political economy was created even among the
816
reactionary elements. The chief exponents were Machiavelli
and Hobbes.
In Italy, the feudal order had long since dissolved in the

currents of Mediterranean trade, and large city States had
been established under the control of the merchant princes.
Here the ruling class acquired the greatest contempt for the
Pope and the Catholic Church, which they controlled for
their own purposes and whose mechanism they thoroughly
understood. Machiavelli, for example, wrote, "We Italians
then owe to the Church of Rome and to her priests our
having become irreligious and bad; but we owe her a still
greater debt, and one that will be the cause of our ruin,
namely, that the Church has kept and still keeps our
country divided." (*7) Naturally, then, in Italy was
enunciated most clearly the statist policy of making the
Church secondary to the State, which was the chief goal of
society.
To Machiavelli, the State was an end in itself whose

excellence was to be tested solely by its ability to expand.
The necessities of the State could brook no scruples in its
leaders; he who brought morals into politics could only
drag the State to disaster. Machiavelli thus took a
completely unmoral point of view and was the first to
separate ethics from politics. He observed the State with the
eyes of an experienced, practical politician. Man was selfish.
Materialist prosperity was the chief conscious basis of
political life among men. The struggle for wealth resulted in
a clash of interests between the wealthy and the people. The
State was a product of this clash. It must be flexible enough
to move with the changing relation of forces. To attain this
lability the Prince who represented the State must use all
means in his power. Everything was to be made
subordinate to the stability of the State which should
817
exploit even religious sentiment as an instrument of State
policies.
The city-state, however, could remain stable only if it

encouraged increased population of the city, established
colonies in conquered territory, turned all booty into the
treasury, carried on war actively rather than passively, and
if the Prince looked to it that the State was rich and the
individual poor, and took the utmost care to maintain a
well-trained army. The Prince was to be feared, but not
hated. He was to keep the people busy with great
enterprises, encourage the useful arts, tax as lightly as
possible, keep his hands off the property and women of his
subjects, engage in a vigorous foreign policy. In this way he
would be able to unite the people and to prevent the
struggle of classes from destroying the State. These dictates
of Machiavelli, Mussolini no doubt has learned by heart. (*8)
Particularly interesting was Machiavelli's view that men of

real distinction and marked ability are always regarded
with suspicion by the masses. In times of peace and quiet
they are wholly neglected in politics; the leadership falls
into the hands of the rich and well-connected. An escape
from the perils of such a tendency was found by Rome, he
believed, in the policy of incessant war through which the
best of her citizens were kept always to the front. (*9)
Machiavelli's object in strengthening the State was not so

much to prevent its overthrow --- there was no fear of a
capitalist revolution --- but in order to secure the unification
of Italy and the eradication of all rival powers. It was
otherwise with Hobbes, who learned much from
Machiavelli and who applied his knowledge to the entirely
different situation in England, where the capitalists had
beheaded the king, overthrown the old order, and
established the hegemony of parliament, in the course of
818
which they were adopting such theories of individual
liberalism and utilitarianism as were expressed in Locke's
writings. Hobbes looked with dismay upon the gradual
unfolding of the British civil wars in which the lower orders
were gradually asserting their rights. He feared that these
lower orders had been put down but temporarily, and that
the Great Rebellion had begun the march towards complete
anarchy and chaos.
Hobbes was convinced that the only way liberty could be

secured was by the establishment of a complete and all-
powerful State to which all individuals were to be entirely
subordinate. Typical English product of the seventeenth
century, Hobbes reached this conclusion, moreover, from
the same basis as the Liberals; like Locke, he started from
individualist, sensationalist premises and from the
doctrines of natural law and social contract.
Individual man operated according to the pressure on his

senses. He was completely egotistic and materialistic. In the
beginning, before society was formed, each man fought
against the other. "To this war of every man, against every
man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The
notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there
no place. Where there is no common power there is no law;
where no law, no injustice." (*10) The State rises with
private property: "It is consequent also to the same
condition, that there can be no propriety, no dominion,
no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man's,
that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it." (*11)
Hobbes strictly separated natural right from

natural law. The natural right of a man was the liberty each
man possessed to use his own power as he willed for the
preservation and advancement of himself. Natural law, like
all law, meant restriction on right or liberty. When law was
819
established, the liberty and power accruing to each man
were transferred to the State. The State had arisen to create
private property and, once the natural right and liberty of
each individual was transferred to the State, all liberty and
power belonged to it. This transfer was made by means of
an unbreakable social contract of which, however, the
sovereign or king was not a part.
In all this argumentative scaffolding, Hobbes carefully

rejected theological disputations. The king did not rule by
divine right, but only because he represented the State,
which was the mechanism of power and liberty for all. (*12)
The State undertook to guarantee that the original covenant
was kept valid and did so by means of force. All law was
essentially a command. Since the liberty of the individual
was fused with the liberty of the State, fear and liberty or
necessity and liberty were not incompatible terms. To
insure obedience through fear of punishment was only
another way to compel a man to be free. To sum up,
Hobbes declared that the civil law was part of the law of
nature; it restricted natural rights and transferred all of
them to the State, with the exception of those which the
State desired the individual to keep. This was the best way
to guarantee the greatest good to the greatest number and
to advance prosperity and liberty for all.
Civil laws, of course, must never be opposed to reason. The

important factor was the reason of the sovereign, who was
entrusted to make good laws. And by a "good law" Hobbes
meant not a just law, for no law could be unjust, since
justice was synonymous with law, but a law which was
needful and for the good of the people. While it was true
that subjects could not owe to the sovereign obedience in
things contrary to the laws of God, only the sovereign was
the authority as to what actually constituted the law of God.
820
Hobbes was not recognized by the deposed pretenders to
the throne of England as their theoretician because he
specifically denied the theory of rule by divine right, and
placed the institution of royalty entirely upon rationalist
and scientific grounds. It was only in the nineteenth century
in England that Hobbes began to come into his own, when
the bourgeoisie had need for theories of absolute control by
the State. And indeed we may say, "In fact, Hobbes'
Leviathan represents what is called 'the modern State.’ "
(*13) To Hobbes, the chief end in social life was the creation
of power. Power was the goal of the search for truth and the
purpose of worship among men. Power was identical to
liberty and was embodied in the State of which the chief
feature was organized force for the good of all.
The seventeenth century produced not only Hobbes but

also his political companion, Spinoza. Spinoza, too,
believed that to be free one had to act in accordance with
the laws of nature. Both God and man were controlled by
immutable laws which compelled mankind to realize his
union with nature. (*14) Thus, a study of metaphysics led
Spinoza to the study of ethics and politics. In his ethics,
Spinoza agreed with Hobbes that the good is that which we
know to be beneficial to ourselves. Virtue means a
development of well-being. One should love oneself and
pursue one's interests. Spinoza did not believe in humility,
repentance, and pity, but held none the less that such traits
properly could be propagandized by statesmen, so as to
make the people docile, since "If the mob is not in fear, it
threatens in its turn." (*15)
In his political views Spinoza was in accord with Hobbes

that property came into existence only with law, and he
ridiculed the idea of inalienable and natural rights. States
should recognize treaties only in their interests. Patriotism
821
was the highest virtue; the safety of the State was the
supreme consideration; might was the wisest criterion of
right; not wisdom, but authority, made laws and the secular
State in turn decided what was virtue. Like Machiavelli,
Spinoza believed it proper to use religious rituals in behalf
of the State, (*16) although he himself was a metaphysical
pantheist.
During this period, when the bourgeoisie was engaged in

revolutionary action to seize political power, a theory of
popular sovereignty as against the absolute monarchy had
arisen. We have already remarked that the anti-monarchical
Hugenots and Catholics who wrote in the sixteenth century
justified tyrannicide by theories of popular sovereignty. But
to them, "people" did not mean the "mob," but merely the
magistrates controlled by the wealthy oppositionists.
Even when popular sovereignty was no longer so narrowly

construed, such a concept was not necessarily incompatible
with theories stressing action and the omnipotence of the
State. This combination was particularly marked among the
French. It is seen in the works of Jean Bodin, (*17) later in
Rousseau and others. The idea of the supremacy of the
general will of the people and the erection of a republican
form of government was easily linked to the establishment
of a dictatorial administration of the State.
As the evils of laissez faire became evident, new schools of

authoritarian statism arose to protest against the havoc of
free competition. These schools were often connected with
the remnants of the aristocracy still pleading for the
restoration of their power and criticizing the capitalist
822
regime as compared to the past. Naturally, such
authoritarians developed a strong tendency to romanticism
which tinged all of their writings, whether literary or
political. Their romanticism luxuriated in the early and
middle parts of the nineteenth century, especially in
England and Germany.
In England, the literary genius of this type was Thomas

Carlyle. Carlyle waged a bitter struggle against the
Philosophic Radicalism of Bentham, Mill, and others who
expressed the intolerance of the self-made capitalists
toward aristocratic special privilege and who were the
spokesmen of the movement for parliamentary reform.
Carlyle did not hesitate to point out the evils of capitalism.

He was extremely fearful of the probable results of the
French Revolution and the riots that were spreading in
England, especially during the Chartist movement. He
noted the great and growing unemployment; he demanded
a change from the Midas system and an end to the laissez
faire anarchical and chaotic system that was reducing the
English people to such misery. This was a line of approach,
too, which was well adapted to the policies of the Tories
and was used by that arch imperialist, Disraeli. In this
period "Disraeli declared boldly that the Queen ruled in
reality over 'two nations; between whom there is no
intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each
others' habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were
dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different
planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are
ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the
same laws . . . the Rich and the Poor."' (*18)
Carlyle indomitably idealized the feudal past. The State

must terminate laissez faire and organize industry.
Repudiating the cash nexus in which men were but a means
823
to an end, Carlyle urged the restoration of the dignity of
man. Only through work could man be ennobled. A new
chivalry of labor should be created. The foundation of the
new era was to be a fair day's wage and universal
compulsory education. Against the ideal of free contract
there was to be placed the reality of permanent
employment.
Carlyle fought for dictatorship --- Cromwell was his great

idol --- and for the rule of heroes who could achieve. (*19)
Democracy could not bring out the worth of the individual,
but could breed only revolution. Not the ballot for all, but
an open career for the talented. This was the ideal of the
future. In this he seemed to agree with Charles I, whose
reported speech on the scaffold was: "for People are free
under a Government not by being sharers in it, but by the
due administration of the Laws." (*20)
Carlyle, however, had no intention of handing over the

State to the old landlord class. Quite the contrary. The
captains of industry must lead the way. "In the new order
the captain will be a kind of servant, ready to do the
greatest good to the greatest number, ambitious to be a just
master rather than a rich master . . . . " (*21) "To reconcile
Despotism with Freedom: --- well, is that such a mystery?
Do you not already know the way? It is to make your
Despotism just." (*22) Governments were to organize
industrial regiments of the New Era, and the acknowledged
king was to introduce wisely in all his territory a universal
system of drill, not military only, but human in all kinds.
Without question the views of Carlyle could well be

advocated by Adolph Hitler today, and that, should fascism
develop in Great Britain, the ideology expressed by Carlyle
will be a most important weapon in its hands.
824
Typically reactionary was Carlyle's view that the system
could be changed only by making men more moral, a
condition which, in turn, could be effected only by mystical
probing into the soul. "What is to be done? . . . By thee, for
the present, almost nothing.... Thou shalt descend into thy
inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there; till
then there can be nothing done!" (*23) And he denounced
the British business men for treating the soul as some
Slavonic dialects do, as synonymous with the term
"stomach." Carlyle did not shrink from advocating the
seizure of power by a determined and right-thinking
minority whose actions would be thoroughly justified if the
New Era were thereby inaugurated. (*24) Here, too, Carlyle
shows himself a forerunner of the present fascist movement.
In his advocacy of the need for a dictatorship of the
scientists and the elite, Carlyle was only following Saint-
Simon, whose influence he had strongly felt. (*25)
Carlyle's philosophy could be summed up in the following

doctrines: an aristocracy of talent and priesthood; the
organization of labor and education through the
establishment of order, responsibility, and regimentation; a
gospel of work that would unite labor and religion; the
connection of industrial sovereignty and aristocracy under
the rulership of captains of industry; the establishment of a
universal brotherhood. (*26)
The disciple of Carlyle was John Ruskin, who also

announced that all must work under an aristocracy made
up of landed proprietors, soldiers, captains of industry and
professional classes similar to those of feudal times. The
unfit were to be sterilized. A definite reaction was to be
launched against the machine age; there must be built up
again guilds and crafts and artistic quality in work. Work
825
must be a joy. The State must force all to labor and must fix
the incomes of the owners of land and captains of industry.
In literature, romantic Toryism flowered out in great style,

as exemplified by such as Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and Southey. Of the last three, each had
begun as pretended Jacobin sympathizers, but could not
sanction the actions of the masses. From then on they
turned their backs on Liberalism and agreed with Coleridge:
"Only in a voluntary surrender of himself to a corporate
society can man find that mystic repayment of desire that is
at once an expansion and a limitation. Only in state and
church can the anarchy of nature and the order of
civilization be reconciled." (*27) Coleridge was to surrender
himself not to corporate society but to the mysticism of
opium.
Similarly, Southey developed a Tory humanitarianism,

advocating a national grant for education, a well-ordered
plan of emigration, factory laws, child labor restriction,
commutation of tithes, allotment of land to laborers,
building up of a co-operative movement, etc.
With such crocodile tears the wealthy aristocratic groups of

England wept for the poor while actually striving with
might and main to maintain their special privileges. The
Tories were anxious to show the evils of capitalism; they
were equally concerned with proving the glorious wonders
of former days, when they were in power.
These men of letters were seconded by the propaganda of

various Christian and Catholic socialists in England. In
England the violence of the Chartists, especially the
extreme Left atheistic wing, had compelled the wealthy to
take a grip on the situation in an effort to control it. Under
the initiative of Maurice and Kingsley, a movement of
826
Christian Socialism was organized in the middle of the
nineteenth century, whose principal object was to defeat the
Reds. In their opinion, the State should be conservative, but
the church communistic. The increasing gap between the
rich and the poor showed a lack of humanitarianism which
must be terminated if England were to escape revolution.
They contrasted their Christian Socialism with Left Wing
Chartism as follows: the Reds wanted "all thine to be mine,"
whereas the church declared "all that is mine is thine." The
Christian Socialists were to preach this church doctrine
both to the rich and to the poor to apply the golden rule of
Christ. (*28)
The creed of the Christian Socialists could be stated as

follows: "On the one hand, association for work under the
ideal of brotherliness, and on the other, the re-
establishment of the social system-not on a new basis --- but
on the old. The change to present conditions had destroyed
the relation of master and servant, of employer and
employed; but the new order was to give the masters a
principle of humanity, a true feeling of responsibility,
which would make it impossible for them to take
advantage of the labourers; while the workmen, under the
new conditions of peace and prosperity, were to be filled
with the joy of service." (*29)
The Christian Socialist movement in England went through

various phases. Its first phase closed in 1854 with the failure
of the producers' co-operative associations which the
leaders had fostered. The spirit of the Christian Socialist
movement was continued in the Working Men's College
that was founded through the clergy. In 1887 the Guild of St.
Matthew was formed and in 1889 the Christian Social
Union organized.
827
A reaction to French revolutionary Liberalism nowhere
developed more than in Germany. The chief theoretician of
the romantic school, hailing the past and insisting on the
complete submergence of the individual in the State, was
Hegel. According to Hegel, freedom consisted not in the
absence of restraint but in self-determination to which
restraint could be attached. The will of the individual was
free only when fused with that of the State. The State is the
true self into which the mere individual is absorbed. "The
State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth." (*30) This is the
cornerstone of moral and political obligation. In other
words, we are morally free when our actions conform to
our real will. Our real will is the general will and the
general will is most fully embedded in the State.
According to Hegel, "The state being the individual writ

large, its own independence is the primary condition of its
internal life and indeed of its freedom. And for this reason
it imposes an absolute sacrifice on the individual when it is
necessary to maintain it." (*31) War was not something the
State must fear; war was good when it led to discipline and
moral soundness.
The struggle against the Napoleonic invasion and the

humiliating Treaty of Tilsit permitted to appear patriots
who glorified the State in order to mobilize the people
under it to fight the French. This was the position of Fichte,
who made it his business to attack the revolutionary
anarchy of the laissez faire schools and who proposed
instead a social and economic scheme for self-sufficient
communities to be regulated by the State and in which
every able-bodied person was to be organized according to
occupation and would have a modest but assured income.
(*32) Foreign trade was to be reserved solely to the State.
828
Behind Fichte's plans was the tradition of mercantilism so
strongly prevailing in the Hanseatic States of Germany.
In the revolution of 1848, two distinct movements were

attacking capitalist liberalism, namely, the agrarian
aristocrats dominating the Prussian State and the German
system, on the one hand, and the mass of laborers who had
begun to organize themselves, on the other. At this stage
there appeared intellectuals who tried to unite both these
groups against the capitalists in favor of the State. While
they were not able to make much headway with the factory
workers who went towards the Marxists, these intellectuals
were able, under the guidance of Karl Marlo (Professor
Winkelblech), to ally themselves to the handicraftsman.
"Winkelblech would heal the ills of society, and improve

the condition of the working classes, by the adoption of a
compromise between liberalism and communism. Among
his demands are collective property in land, side by side
with private ownership, co-operative production, the
handing over of means of communication to public bodies,
and State participation in mining, forestry, fishing, and
even trading and banking. But he would also restrict
private undertakership and speculation whenever the
interests of society require it, and he would grant to the
labourer the right to work and to the incapable, adequate
means of subsistence." (*33) Marlo believed in the
reconstitution of the guilds of old and the placing of
obligation upon private property according to the old
Christian Germanic law. His system he termed Federal
Socialism.
During the 1848 events, the master handicraftsman who

met in their Congress at Frankfort formulated Marlo's
program. This was also accepted by the journeymen who
met separately and who practically agreed with their
829
masters, although adding demands for suffrage,
compulsory education, industrial schools, twelve-hour day,
legal minimum wage, sickness insurance, progressive
property and income tax, protective duty on wholly
manufactured imports, partition of Crown lands and
division among the land-workers and peasants. (*34) It is
significant that, while the master handicraftsmen agreed
with Marlo in attempting to return to the Middle Ages, the
journeymen, accepting the reactionary theory, added
wholly modern and progressive demands. The past of the
journeymen was indeed with their masters; their future was
to be with the proletariat.
The revolutions of 1848 brought the Catholic Church

actively into the social scene. The clergy viewed with
dismay the rise of large bodies of discontented workmen
who were moving towards a militant atheism in the course
of their struggle. If the church was to retain its hold upon
these people it was absolutely necessary for it to enter into
the social problem and to espouse the cause of the poor. In
this way not only would the Catholic Church maintain its
standing, but the cause of social order would be subserved.
The Catholics were all the more ready to join forces in the
criticism against business since they had always regarded
modern capitalism as coincident with the Reformation
which had both deprived the Catholic Church of its
property and brought forth poverty and misery in its trend.
Thus a Catholic Socialism was born which attempted to link
the ideals of socialism with the idylls of the church.
Such people took pains to prove that the early Christians

were communists and that there are no dicta of Jesus to the
effect that private property is holy. They pointed out, too,
830
that when the church possessed a good part of the land of
the Country, as in the ninth century, when half the soil of
Italy was in its hands, or in the eleventh century in England
and in Germany --- the condition of the poor of those times
was much better than when the church had lost her estates.
(*35) They never ceased to expound the need for the
termination of irresponsible liberalism and for the re-
establishment of mutual duties and responsibilities.
In Germany, special conditions existed to enable the

Catholics to attain a socialist position relatively early. In the
first place, the Catholics there were a minority whose
standing was by no means secure. Later, under the pressure
of Bismarck, a regular kulturkamph of was to be inaugurated
against them to wipe out their influence within the German
nation. Secondly, the Catholics were strong in those
sections where the discontent of 1848 had been manifest.
The Church could not fail to be touched by the demands of
its parishioners. Then, too, it believed that by attaching
itself to the cause of the workers it would be able eventually
to supplant Lutheranism and to regain Germany for itself.
Thus it was that Monseignor Kettler of Mayence could
agree heartily with the Lassallean movement, and write his
book on the Labor Question and Christianity.
These actions of the Catholic Church, however, only

infuriated the hardboiled Prussian reactionists who saw in
the tactics of the Catholics not merely aid to the workers,
but an attempt to mobilize the masses of the Catholic
regions of Bavaria and the Southwest against Prussia, and
to connect them with Catholic Austria. To Bismarck, the
struggle against the Catholic Church was a struggle for
German unity. After the defeat of Austria in 1866 it became
plain to him that a vigorous war must be staged to drive the
Catholics out of the country.
831
In the meantime, to entrench themselves further, a great
many Catholic clergymen embraced Lassalle's views, and in
1869, on the eve of their being driven into illegality, they
met in convention and adopted a program for Catholic
social societies. At Fulda, German bishops drafted a
program which declared: "It is, therefore, necessary to come
to the assistance of the working-classes: -1. By providing
against misery and want. 2. By providing for the rooting
out of vice. 3. By providing for the improvement of the
moral and intellectual condition of the working-classes. 4.
By organizing labour and wages so as to improve the
workman's condition (increase of wages in proportion to
length of service, profit-sharing, etc.). 5. By encouraging the
workman to love his home. 6. By favouring habits of thrift.
7. By promoting harmony among factory people. 8. By
endeavoring to maintain cordial relations between
workmen and employers. 9. By alternating industrial and
agricultural labours. 10. By protecting the morals of
working girls. 11. By rendering it possible for mothers of
families and married women to attend to their domestic
duties. 12. By promoting legislation in favor of the working-
classes, hence: (a) prohibition of the labour of young
children; (b) limitation of the work-hours of growing
youths; (c) separation of men and women in workshops,
factories, etc.; (d) forced closing of all unhealthy workshops;
(e) limitation of the hours of labour; (f) assurance of the
Sunday rest; (g) granting of indemnities to all workmen
who, without any fault of their own, become temporarily or
permanently unfit for work; (h) granting local guarantees to
trades unions; (i) ensuring the observance of the social laws
by means of energetic State control." (*36)
For its inspiration, the German Catholic Socialist movement

went back to the guilds of medieval times. At first it tried to
organize mixed guilds of men and masters; when this failed,
832
it organized workers only. During this period, however, its
chief base was in the regions where the artisan and
handicraftsman still prevailed and where their interests
could be linked up nationally with the rich landowners
rather than with the mass of workers in the industrial cities.
Their ideal was expressed by Pope Leo XII's Encyclical,
namely, that "the corporations which would be set up
under the aegis of religion would aim at making all their
members contented with their lot, patient in toil and
disposed to lead a tranquil, happy life."
The answer of the ruling class to the social Catholic action

was to attempt to win the workers themselves through their
own school of State Socialism. The forerunner of this
movement was Rodbertus; the practical maneuverer was
Bismarck. The theoretical work was continued by Wagner
and Schmoller and the Socialists of the Chair.
Rodbertus, when he became State Minister of Education,

was a product of the turmoil of 1848. He intimately
consorted with both Lassaile and Bismarck, and succeeded
in getting them to work together. His chief idea was that,
since labor created all value, the State should participate in
improving the system of distribution to enable the laborers
to have more. He advocated a gradual nationalization of
industries whereby each worker had recourse to a given
distribution point where he could use "labor notes" instead
of money. (*37) This was also his method to prevent
revolution.
Rodbertus himself could make little impression among the

workers since he enjoined them to retain capital and
landownership, not to found trade unions or co-operative
societies, nor to demand protective legislation. He was also
opposed to the independent politics of the proletarian. (*38)
What Rodbertus wanted above all was to consolidate the
833
workers with the agrarian Junker elements against the big
bourgeoisie; in this, he was able to win Lassalle partially to
his side.
Bismarck proceeded from the premise that the State was a

Christian institution and that mutual responsibilities
existed between the citizens and the State. Social duties
were imposed upon the citizens of the State. The function of
the State was to insure the faithful discharge of these duties.
In his early youth, Bismarck had advocated the formation
anew of compulsory guilds as a remedy for overproduction.
Later, in the last quarter of the century, he was able to help
organize guilds for artisans. It should be borne in mind that
only under the blows of the French Revolution in 1811 had
guild privileges, together with other vestiges of serfdom,
been abolished in Germany, and that even in 1848, guild
remnants had played a role under the influence of Marlo.
With Bismarck, as with other Germans, what was

omnipotent was not the nation nor the government or
administration, but the State. This view of the Prussian
ruling group can be understood readily when it is recalled
into how many principalities Germany was broken up, how
great was the pressure of foreign nations upon it, and how
vital it was for the country's progress to establish unity.
"Upon the sender of a parcel from Koenigsberg to Metz it
was incumbent to calculate the freight of this consignment
according to the rates of nearly fifteen hundred different
tariffs." (*39)
It was no wonder that the German Liberals were unpopular

with their theories of laissez faire. Bismarck was never in
sympathy with them and rested the might of Germany not
upon manufacture but upon agriculture and the land. This
was the general view of the patricians in charge of Prussia
at that time.
834
The theories of paternalism found their practical exponent
in Bismarck, who adopted such an attitude towards the
workers. In dealing with the socialists, Bismarck attempted
the double policy of trying to terrorize them out of
existence and of invalidating their claims by establishing a
more or less complete system of social reforms designed to
improve the lot of the workers without giving them the
possibility of controlling the State while identifying their
interests with the State rather than with either the
revolutionists or the Catholics.
Soon Bismarck's laws were rationalized by governmental

theoreticians. These formed the school of State Socialists of
the Chair, so called because it was composed
predominantly of professors who held chairs in universities.
The policy of these State Socialists was the enactment of a
complete system of factory and general industrial laws, the
creation of an adequate tariff system to protect the internal
economy of Germany, the establishment of sufficient taxes
to insure responsibility to social undertakings, the growth
of State undertakings, especially railways, the formation of
State monopolies, and an adequate colonial system.
"According to the State Socialists, all employers and

workmen ought to be grouped into corporations. No one
should be allowed to exercise a trade unless belonging to
the corresponding guild, nor be admitted to a corporation
previous to having undergone an examination to test his
capacity; the admissions should never exceed the limits of
number fixed by each body. The great industrial
establishments should form themselves into district or
national corporations, and all the guilds of the same
trade . . .ought to unite so as to form national federations.
"And many State Socialists do not stop here. They would

have the State to regulate not only production but even
835
population; they maintain that legislation, besides placing a
restriction on freedom in choice of residence, prohibiting all
emigration from the rural districts and the rapid population
of the large cities, should also put a check on marriage
among proletarians." (*40)
As can be seen, the State Socialism of these worthies was

really a supplementation of private capitalism with a highly
developed regimen of control blending into a system of
state capitalism. These people, therefore, were collectivists
rather than socialists. Except for vague expressions of such
men as Rodbertus, who put forth utopian schemes of labor-
notes, the philosophy of the German professors was merely
one of complete expansion of State control to cover all the
activities of modern social life. Very often it assumed an
anti-Semitic character, as did also the platform of the
Catholic Socialists, particularly in Austria and south
Germany. In their anti-Semitic agitation, these collectivists
warned that the internationalist Jewish Rothschild family
possessed one-quarter of Bohemia, or a wealth seven times
that of the imperial family. It was sinister that Jews
controlled one-third of Hungary and were in charge of all
the important banks. Ominous, too, were the holdings of
more than a million and a half Jews who resided in Austria
and who had a choking control of internal economic life.
Such Catholic Socialists called on the State to wrest this
control from the capitalist in general and from the Jew first
of all.
With the failure of the anti-Catholic laws, Catholic

Socialism became accepted in Germany as an extremely
important aid to social control. The Prussian-German State
was eager to make this alliance with the Catholics because
of the extensive growth of the Marxist movement. This was
a period of vigorous organization of Catholic trade unions
836
in competition with the Marxists, the Catholics attempting
to adopt to their own interests a number of labor theories.
They advanced the opinion that their unions could
gradually become organs of labor legislation and that the
State would entrust them with the discharge of such
functions because of their special qualities. They promised
that all questions affecting the interests of a trade, --- hours
of labor, Sunday observance, apprenticeship, sanitary
conditions of the workshops, the labor of women and
children, and the rate of wages paid, --- instead of being
regulated as they then were by brutal, inflexible laws
seldom adaptable to every individual case, should
henceforth be settled by the union, and the rules of the
union would be incumbent upon all the members of the
trade or profession, both masters and men.
In France, the Social Catholic movement developed at the

same time. At first the question had to be settled within the
Catholic Church whether it should favor democracy or not,
the affirmative being taken by De Tocqueville and
Lamennais. Since the democratic struggles in the early days
of the nineteenth century were associated with acts of
revolution, the Pope in 1832 took occasion to write against
this view, "denying that freedom of conscience and liberty
of the press were unqualified rights, and reproving these
who incited peoples to revolt against their princes." (*41)
This stand against democracy as a political instrument by
the church was reinforced after the revolution of 1848 had
culminated in the empire of Napoleon III, who strongly
favored the Catholic Church. However, the democratic
tendency more or less persisted, with the pioneers of the
social Catholics maintaining five principles, namely:
opposition to the Liberal ,economists, an appeal to
Christian morals of charity, faith in labor organizations
837
adapted to the guild system, minimum wage for all, and
social legislation.
The position of French labor in those days can be gauged by

the number of arrests that occurred for unionization.
Between 1852 and 1860 no less than seven hundred and
twenty-eight coalition cases came before the courts in
which over three thousand and eight hundred men were
punished. (*42) In 1864 the law regarding coalitions was
modified but, even so, almost a thousand persons were
arrested and nine hundred fined or jailed for strikes
between 1864 and 1870. There also existed the infamous law
of livret (passport or certificate), which had been in force
during the eighteenth century and re-enforced under the
First Consulate. Under this law, which was not abolished
until 1890, "Employers were forbidden to engage a worker
who did not produce the livret stating that he had
discharged his debts and obligations toward his former
master. It meant that workers who had fallen into debt with
their former employers were chained to their jobs and that
employers could take advantage of the workers' situation to
lower wages." (*43)
After the Paris Commune, the Church, so as to become a

counterweight to the socialists, was forced to change its
position regarding democracy and the necessity of social
reform. In 1872, workingmen's clubs were started by Count
Albert De Mun, which in 1884 had fifty thousand members
and by 1900 had risen to sixty thousand. De Mun openly
called himself a soldier of the "counter-revolution,"
adopting the extremely menacing slogan, "Workers, you
must Christians be!" (*44) When elected Deputy in
parliament, De Mun took a position with the extreme Right.
From the very beginning, the social Catholic movement was

linked up with monarchical ideals. The Third French
838
Republic, in order to maintain its control over education
and its political integrity, was forced in 1877-78 to engage in
a sharp struggle against the Catholic clergy. The efforts of
the social Catholic movement were therefore an attempt on
the part of the church to obtain a mass base for a counter-
attack against the republic. De Mun, claiming that the
French Revolutionary Law of 1791 forbidding all
association and all organization of labor was responsible for
social disorder, constantly tried to make it appear as though
the bourgeois republicans were breeders of revolution
while the monarchy favored social reform. This view was
abetted by the legitimist pretender to the throne, the Count
de Chambord, who was distinctly aware of the value of a
social program as a political asset, and who tried to portray
the monarchy as the historic protector of the right to
organize.
De Mun was strongly for the limitation of competition, for

association of common interests, for imposing upon the
emperor the duties of patronage, for the uplift of labor and
the conditions of the laborer. Against Marxism, the social
Catholics were active in promoting Catholic trade unionism
and favorable legislation against child labor. (*45) They
aimed at the protection of women from injurious industrial
exploitation, the establishment of social insurance, and
similar matters. In France, the social Catholics helped to
enact the Law of 1884, which has been called the Charter of
French Trade Unionism. Just as in Germany a Catholic or
"Center Party" was organized, so the social Catholics in
France were embodied in the "Action Liberale Populaire."
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the

social Catholic movement was able to claim considerable
successes for its efforts, especially in building up affiliated
unions. In Germany, the Catholic unions, with the aid of the
839
State, had a membership of over a million, even after the
war. In Italy, the Catholic Italian Federation of Workers also
was of considerable size.
The principles of the Catholic union were very different

than those of the free trade union movement. The latter was
Marxist, and preached the need of class struggle. The
Christian and Catholic trade unions believed that work was
a joy. Classes were to be organized according to their
occupations. Each class was to know its limitations and to
have mutual responsibilities. The State must help the poor
with reforms and must be charitable like the church. The
slogan was "Live and let live." The Catholic and Christian
unions did not believe in the strike, but were an agency for
class collaboration, advocating pacifist persuasion and
religious non- resistance. By means of faith and prayer,
both employer and worker, the lion and the lamb, could lie
down side by side. Thus would the golden rule of "Peace on
earth and good-will to men" be realized.
In Italy especially the Catholic unions were able to

demonstrate their value to the employers in the struggle
against revolution through the activity of the Italian
Confederation of Workers. This organization was part of a
general social Catholic network which derived its sanction
from the well known encyclical Rerum Novarum ("On the
Condition of Labor") of Pope Leo XIII, issued in 1891. This
encyclical maintained the right of property, and
consequently rejected socialism, but prescribed for the
various social classes reciprocal duties, with the object of
effectively and permanently harmonizing their relations.
(*46)
The Catholic Church organized the syndicalist movement

centered in the Italian Confederation of Workers, to which
was affiliated the National Syndicates or Federations, and
840
afterwards the Local Unions of Labor. All of these
organizations differed from regular unions in that they
rejected the principle of uncompromising struggle and
recognized and utilized moral factors derived from
Christianity. They advocated the effective sharing by the
workers of the profits in the management and in the
property of the undertaking.
"Following this principle, it has tended also to promote

Parliamentary Reform, with the object of having in the
Senate a technical organ elected by the occupational
associations. Catholic Syndicalism further aimed at
attaining internationalism which from the field of labour
should extend to the political field through disarmament,
international arbitration, etc." (*47) This Catholic group of
unions was closely connected with the Popular Party which
arose in 1919 to fight the revolution, and was an extremely
reactionary organization.
No sooner did the revolutionary movement develop

sharply in Italy than there was to be seen an enormous
increase in the number of Catholic unions, while the
employers mobilized their ranks to struggle against the rule
of the workers. The membership of the Italian
Confederation of Workers jumped from two hundred
thousand in 1919 to a million and a quarter in 1920.
This movement, however, soon receded. The Catholic

unions were not capable of prevailing, although it is true
that the Catholic unions in Italy well prepared the way for
the fascist unions which were to follow.
First of all, the fight was no longer on the economic front,

but was a matter of who was to rule the country. Secondly,
the ideology of Christian Socialism rendered it unfit to meet
the violent problems of the hour. Once the fascists took
841
power, they built their own organizations, and the special
Catholic unions were forced to disappear, shrinking to one
hundred and eighty thousand members in 1925 and further
downward until they are practically non-existent today.
Brutal fascist unions and humanitarian guild unions were

blood brothers in their undying hatred of Marxism and the
class struggle, and in their support of capitalist property
and class collaboration. If, then, we ask why the Catholic
unions had to be reformed into fascist organizations, we
must consider the different character of the epochs which
necessitated these two groups. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries Marxism was to be fought by
means of social reforms; against the theory of revolution by
violence there was to be inculcated the doctrine of peaceful
persuasion. The Catholic Church was an excellent
instrument for this propaganda, since for centuries it had
constantly told the poor to "turn the other cheek" and to
"render unto Caesar what was Caesar's." Thus Christian
Socialism was useful in demoralizing the ranks of the
workers and depriving them of militancy. After the World
War, however, a different task confronted the employers.
Platitudinous discussion had to give way to the methods of
castor oil, bayonet, and terror. The Catholic Church gladly
turned over its organizations to the fascists for this new
purpose, so that a more appropriate program could be
worked out in the light of the exigencies of the times.
In England, too, about the middle of the nineteenth century,

the Catholics developed a social action movement, under
the leadership of Bishop Manning. This was, of course,
supplementary to the Protestant Christian Socialism of
Maurice and Kingsley, and was created from the same
milieu.
842
Bishop Manning pretended to be greatly contemptuous of
the "talking mill" at Westminster and declared his politics
were social politics. Labor was the cause of wealth and was
a state of dignity. As such, labor was entitled not only to the
rights of property but also to the rights of liberty and the
right to protect itself. Manning recognized the right to
strike, "as frequently the only weapon in the hands of the
workers strong enough to rebuke the despotism of capital."
(*48)
The outbursts of Manning were more radical than those of

the Catholics in Europe. The Catholic Church in Great
Britain was such an insignificant minority that it had to use
more radical phrases to win popularity. Thus Manning
talked of the right to strike, a factor carefully denounced in
the Catholic circles on the Continent. Also, in England the
strike was far removed from revolution, while on the
Continent strikes too often were connected with threats
against the State, which itself might be Catholic. Manning
had not the identical concern in the protection of the anti-
Catholic State in Great Britain that the Catholics had in
Europe.
The social Catholic movement did not develop strongly in

England, not only because it could not win the sympathy of
the ruling groups who were strongly dominated by
Liberalism and did not believe revolution was near, but
because, on the other hand, the social Catholics could not
become popular with the British workers. In recent years,
the Catholic Social Guild did its utmost to break the 1926
general strike of British labor.
Connected with the theories of the social Catholic

movement was the Guild Socialist grouping that arose in
Great Britain. The extreme Right Wing of this hodgepodge
843
group was represented by A. J. Penty, a disciple of the
Social Catholics.
To Penty, the Middle ages was one of real enlightenment;

he actually believed society could and should revert to and
restore those model times. (*49) The materialist conception
was one-sided, and the theory of class war utterly false.
Christianity would restore the sense of brotherhood and
bring back the guilds, each with its "just price." The great
evil of mankind was capitalism. By a return to the Catholic
Church and to the medieval view of reciprocal rights and
duties, by renouncing modern intellectualism, by
concentrating on the revival of a prosperous peasantry,
England would be restored to her former virility.
Industrialism had brought in a standard of quantity. Penty

wanted to return to the standard of quality. (*50) By no
means did the present represent any progress over the past.
We must return again to a program based on the law of
nature and justice, with its just and fixed price and
elimination of usury. We must fuse again spirit and matter,
and bring the kingdom of heaven to earth. The great
question of the day was ". . . how to make Christians
understand what is true in socialism, and socialists to
understand the truth of Christianity." (*51) This was the
task of the Guild Socialists. There could be no doubt that
the struggles of the future would be between Marx and the
guilds. (*52)
According to Penty, "Materialist communism is a

contradiction in terms. Communism is a spiritual idea. It is
only possible with people who put spiritual things first."
(*53) And against the theory of bolshevism, which idolizes
machinery and transforms a nation into a mechanism of
robots, Penty would take us back to the old days of crafts
and handicrafts. His program called for protection of
844
industry, national self-sufficiency, a regulated industry, and
the revival of agriculture. Especially this last was important,
since if England was to produce its own food supply, it
would not need such a big navy; the present navy was
proof that free trade was not the support of pacifism, but
led to war.
The only alternative to Marxism was a return to the

principles of Christianity. Human nature must be
recognized for what it is, the eternity of private property
must be respected, self-interest must be accepted as a fact,
but society must limit it. This was the principle of the guilds
in the Middle Ages, when prices and wages were fixed and
property more evenly distributed.
The reactionary plans of these guild socialists can be seen in

Penty's program which called for a restriction of the use of
machinery where it conflicted with the needs of personality.
The application of machinery which could create economic
disorder by unemployment should be prevented as
conflicting with the claims of the crafts and arts. No
overproduction should be tolerated. England should return
to the theory of the small workshop. (*54)
In their insistence on the organization of guilds to take in all

employees, and in their idea of social responsibility and
regulation, the guild socialists showed how closely they
stemmed from the romantic feudalist school of Carlyle. At
the same time, in their demands for a self-sufficient nation
and empire, they easily became the tools of modern
imperialist industry. As the Guild Socialist movement died
out, its theories were taken over partially by the fascists,
with the primary difference that, whereas, as was usual for
the reactionists before the war, the guildsman had appealed
for peaceful methods, the fascists envisaged the realization
of guilds through violence.
845
One of the contributions of the guild socialists was to insist
upon the abolition of the territorial parliament and the
establishment of a State represented by occupations
organized in guilds and corporations. By the Right Wing
this theory was interpreted similarly to the fascist practice.
To the Left Wing, however, it appeared as a policy more
revolutionary than that of the other socialists, since it
closely resembled "self-government in industry." The Left
Wing was particularly active in the trade union movement,
but soon became split on the question of the future
relationship of the workers' organizations to the State.
Hobson, one of the Left Wing leaders, held to the view that
the State was to hold the final authority over industrial
affairs and would be the owner of the tools of production,
handing them over to the guilds as trustees, but remaining
the final court of appeal. The State would retain the power
to tax. This theory was opposed to the guild-commune
theory of Cole, who denied sovereignty to the State and
would establish local and regional communes under the
workers control.
In this respect, Cole posed as a harbinger for the British

trade union movement which, immediately following the
war, through the Miners Federation of Great Britain, had
advanced a demand for the creation of a Miners' Council to
be composed half of workers' organizations and half of the
capitalist groups which controlled mining, but had said
nothing about nationalization of the mines. In 1925 the
British Labor Party made a similar proposal to the Samuel
Commission, with the difference, however, that the
members of the Miners' Council were to be individuals
rather than delegates from organizations. Cole interpreted
these actions to mean that modern socialists had abandoned
their previous advocacy of direct government ownership
846
and were stressing only workers' control, and thus were
becoming more in harmony with the basic program of this
Wing of the guild socialists.
The Cole group of guild socialists had steadfastly countered

the collectivism of those who demanded that industries
should be administered by civil service and should be
nationalized. Instead, Cole called for self-government in
industry and for an industrial government to be based on
the direct representation of the workers. The guild socialist
advocated "that the State should acquire the ownership of
industry, but should hand over its administration, under a
charter, to a Guild composed of the whole body of workers
engaged in it. (*55)
Here, then, was a modern question which had been opened

up by the guild socialists: Should the workers of each
particular industry be the ones to administer that industry,
or should the State as a whole take charge? The
decentralized system proposed by Cole was not far from
that advocated by the communist anarchists of Italy. On the
other hand, the whole socialist movement previously had
urged the nationalization of industry, the workers to
control it through their control of the State. When
revolution broke out in Russia, the 1920 conference of the
guild socialists welcomed the soviet system, but would not
bind themselves to the Russian formulas. The soviet system,
indeed, was a distinct repudiation of the idea that each set
of workers should control their own factory and their own
industry. The workers controlled all through their State.
In their controversies with the opportunist socialists who

called for nationalization of industry, however, it cannot be
said that the guild socialists were less correct than the
others. It is true that the nationalization of industry is the
development of State capitalism, which in turn brings all
847
the contradictions of society to a head and paves the way
for a new social order. But it is extremely questionable
whether it is the function of the socialists to bolster up the
authority of the capitalist State by advocating today such
measures as nationalization of industry, even though the
socialists add the additional demand of "workers' control"
or "democratic management." Those very socialists who
have so warmly advocated the nationalization of industry
invariably have revealed themselves as counter-
revolutionists in the period of active labor struggle.
Especially opportunist was the joining of the idea of
nationalization to the belief in the perpetuation of the
parliamentary State as the finest expression of pure
democracy.
The Left Wing guild socialists also advocated the

reorganization of unions on an industrial basis, and the
abolition of craft unionism. While they would not indorse
the militancy of the shop-steward movement that arose
after the war, they did not disapprove of that form of
organization. The workers must found their own unions for
the control of industry and the establishment of industrial
democracy. However, Cole did not believe in direct action,
while Hobson wanted to buy out capitalism.
On the whole, the literary guildsman of the Left Wing who

found it so convenient to unite with the Catholic
reactionists of the Penty school, played a very slight part in
influencing the labor movement. After the war their views
died to a whisper.
Footnotes
1. R. H. Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp. 149-

150.
848
3. See the Monograph by G. Schmoller: The Mercantile

System and Its Historical Significance.
4. See, R. Pascal: The Social Basis of the German Reformation, p.

146.
5. Calvin: Institute of the Christian Religion, Bk. IV, Ch. XX,

paragraph 25.
6. Among both the Spanish Catholic theologians and the

French Huguenots there was often expressed the view that
subjects were not bound to obey a prince who enjoined
what was contrary to the law of God, since kings do not
rule according to divine right. Tyrannicide was thus
justifiable. See, for example: S. T. Brutus: Grounds of Right
Against Tyrants (1579); George Buchanan: On the Sovereign
Power Among the Scots (1579), and the writings of Mariana,
Suarez and other Spanish theologians, for which also see, W.
A. Dunning: Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu.
7. Machiavelli: Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus

Livius, Book I, Ch. XII, p. 130 in Historical, Political, and
Diplomatic Writings of Machiavelli, II. (1882, Boston edition.)
See also F. P. Sterns: Napoleon and Machiavelli, p. 115.
8. Indeed, the 1928 Paris edition of

Machiavelli's Prince contains a special introduction by
Mussolini.
9. See, W. A. Dunning: A History of Political Theories, Ancient

and Medieval, p. 321 (1935). See also,
Machiavelli: Discourse, work cited, Book III, Ch. XVI.
10. T. Hobbes: Leviathan in Collected Works, III, 115.

(Molesworth edition.)
849
11. The same, p. 115.
12. In all this, Hobbes seemed to have followed the

materialistic Franciscan Englishman, Duns Scotus, who
died in the fourteenth century. To Duns Scotus, "Individual
property had its source neither in divine nor natural law,
but in Civil Law, and was the consequence of the Fall from
Grace. Men were seized with the lust for domination and
riches, a war of all against all arose, as each one aimed at
taking as much as he could from the common possession.
Thus the State and private property were established." (M.
Beer: Social Struggles in the Middle Ages, p. 110.)
13. Leslie Stephen: Hobbes, p. 204.
14. Freedom is not contrary to necessity but works through

it. God is free yet operates according to the necessity of his
own nature. See B. de Spinoza: Political Treatise in Works, I,
Ch. II, Sec. 7, p. 294. (Bohn edition, 1889.)
15. B. de Spinoza: Ethics, Book IV, Proposition 54.

(Everyman's edition)
16. B. de Spinoza: A Theologico-Political Treatise in Works I,

245. (Bohn edition, 1889.)
17. His book was written 1566.
18. E. Neff: Carlyle and Mill, p. 246.
It should be remarked that an intolerable situation had been

created in England at this time by the fact that while the
hours of slave labor were limited, those of wage labor were
unlimited and, when the workers in England were forced to
labor fourteen hours a day, in 1831, an order of council had
forbidden the labor of slaves more than nine hours, night
850
work and child labor being abolished. Thus the slave was
better off than the "free" laborer.
19. To Carlyle, the essence of freedom was the right of the

masses to be adequately led. The masses needed a true
leader, Laissez faire was an abdication on the part of the
governors. Democracy was, by the nature of it a self-
cancelling business, and gave, in the long run, the net result
of zero. (T. Carlyle: Chartism.)
20. See, B. Disraeli: Commentaries on the Life and Reign of

Charles the First, II, 572. (1851 edition.)
21. F. Rowe: The Social Philosophy of Carlyle and Ruskin, p.

111.
22. Carlyle: Past and Present, pp. 329-330. (A. L. Burt edition,
1890.)
23. Carlyle: The Socialism and Unsocialism of Thomas Carlyle, I,

30. (1891 edition.)
24. E. Neff: Carlyle and Mill, p. 327.
25. See, D. B. Cofer: Saint-Simonism in the Radicalism of

Thomas Carlyle.
26. See, T. Carlyle: Past and Present, Book IV, Section

"Horoscope."
27. C. Brinton: The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists, p.

84.
28. See, E. Seligman: "Owen and the Christian

Socialists," in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. I, pp. 206-249
(1886).
29. A. V. Woodworth: Christian Socialism in England, p. 39.
851
30. G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 41.
(J. Sibree edition.)
31. L. T. Hobhouse: The Metaphysical Theory of the State, p.

100.
"In the German view the state is not for the individuals, but
the individuals for the state." The German creed is that not
the enjoyment of happiness, but the fulfillment of duties is
the real meaning of human existence. Life is worth while
only if we serve ideas and if we are ready to sacrifice
everything for them." (H. Muensterberg: The War and
America, p. 135.)
32. See, M. Beer: Social Struggles and Thought, pp. 94-95.
33. W. H. Dawson: German Socialism and Ferdinand

Lasselle, pp. 51-52.
34. See, M. Beer: Social Struggles and Modern Socialism, pp.

110-111.
35. See, F. Nitti: Catholic Socialism, p. 78.
36. F. Nitti: Catholic Socialism, pp. 133-134.
37. See, K. Rodbertus: Overproduction and Crises, p. 70 and

following (1898 Julia Franklin translation).
38. See, M. Beer: Social Struggles and Modern Socialism, p. 101.
39. W. H. Dawson: Bismarck and State Socialism, p. 74.
40. F. Nitti: Catholic Socialism, p. 173.
41. P. T. Moon, The Labor Problem and the Social Catholic

Movement in France, p. 33.
852
42. See, S. Bernstein: The Beginnings of Marxian Socialism in
France, p. 2.
43. The same, p. 189.
44. The same, pp. 85-86.
45. This has not been the position of the Catholic Church in
the United States, however, where it has been a principled
opponent to legislation prohibiting child labor.
46. More recently there has been added another encyclical

along the same line,
the Quadregesimo Anno ("Reconstructing the Social Order"),
May, 1931.
47. F. Pitigliani: The Italian Corporative State, p. 10.
48. G. P. McEntee: The Social Catholic Movement in Great

Britain, p. 25.
49. A. J. Penty: A Guildsman's interpretation of History, p. 298

and following.
50. A. J. Penty: Means and Ends, pp. 82-83.
51. A. J. Penty: Towards a Christian Sociology, p. 18.
52. A. J. Penty: Guilds and the Social Crisis, p. 77.
53. A. J. Penty: Communism and the Alternative, p. 50.
54. See A. J. Penty: Communism and the Alternative, p. 121

and following.
55. G. D. H. Cole: Modern Theories and Forms of Industrial

Organization, p. 66.
853
II. FASCISM ARRIVES
XXVII. THE END OF REFORM
THE spread of fascism is an exquisite demonstration that

the era of reform has come to an end, and has given way to
an age of punishment. The punishment is complete and all-
embracing. The population is thrown into the dungeon of
medieval practice. It is compelled by methods of the
Inquisition to swear to superstitious creeds, and mystic
vagaries, and utopian schema. Like a scorpion which strikes
its own head with its tail, humanity is being knocked
senseless by the physical tortures meted out to it by the
rotting dregs and social scum fascism raises to power.
The d’eclass’es are taking their revenge on the classes. The
narcotic, the homosexual, the paranoiac, the sadist, the
syphilitic, are enthroned in power. Fascism is not genius
become insane but mediocrity become mad.
In the nineteenth century, capitalism had adopted a

philosophy of Meliorism, of the world's becoming better
and better day by day, and had reinforced this philosophy
with a system of social reforms to improve the lot of the
masses and to wean them from revolution. The drain of
reform upon the State was not proportionately costly in a
period of growing markets. Today the situation has
completely changed; capitalism is no longer on the rise, but
is declining in a precipitous spiral. The costs of social
insurance and reform have become infinitely enlarged, so
much so that, unless they are reduced or abolished, the
entire system is threatened with bankruptcy. For this reason
the socialist parties are dismissed with violence by the
propertied rulers; not because the socialist parties advocate
revolution or will not defend capitalism --- the contrary has
854
been amply proven --- but because the cost of maintaining
the socialists is bringing bankruptcy and revolution in its
train.
Paradoxically, the socialists win their point only to lose it.

They had declared that gradually, by a series of reforms,
the capitalist State could be transformed into socialism. The
effect of these series of reforms is indeed as serious as the
socialists visioned, but in a way entirely unanticipated by
them. Precisely the accumulation of these secondary
reforms has so induced the breakdown of the financial
structure of the capitalist system as to lead towards
socialism, not peacefully and gradually, but through
revolution. Far from reform's having staved off revolution,
social reform only has weakened the ruling class and
strengthened the workers. When the benefits of the social
reforms no longer can be paid out to the masses habituated
to them, resentment becomes sharper, revolution nearer.
The mere existence of world wars, revolutions, and

perpetual turmoil proves that capitalism has reached the
final stage of its existence; its constructive abilities have
been superseded by destruction. Today capitalism no
longer can support even social reforms. The ruling group
no longer can harmonize class interests by means of
concessions and bribes, but is forced to resort to crushing
the workers by open violence. From Meliorism, the
bourgeoisie embraces anti-reform; or, to put it another way,
finding itself on the verge of bankruptcy and death,
capitalism undertakes its own reforms under the rubric of
fascism. Fascism is the re-forming of the capitalist system so
as to permit the beneficiaries to profit a bit longer.
Frightened by the handwriting on the wall, the rulers now
begin to comprehend that reform, instead of preventing
855
revolution, has compelled revolution; that is to say,
evolution does not preclude revolution, but rather fosters it.
It would seem that the socialists at least would struggle to

maintain their social reforms, but this is to reckon without
their servility. Once the intimate connection between
reform and revolution clearly is understood, the socialists,
in order to prevent revolution, are quite prepared to give
up the fight for reforms. Thus the Socialist Party in
Germany could tell the workers to vote for Hindenburg in
order to check Hitler, although the vote for Hindenburg
was not only an abandonment of the demand for social
reform, but actually brought in Hitler. Thus the socialists, in
giving up the struggle for social reform, become
transformed into mere bourgeois Radicals.
In this period, too, there is exposed the utter ridiculousness

of those sectarian revolutionists who refused to participate
in immediate struggles of the masses for reform on the
ground that this would divert them from the path of
revolution. Today these day-to-day struggles have become
increasingly revolutionary in portent and are so understood
both by the capitalists and by the workers. The fascists can
not permit even minor struggles to appear in the social
system.
Nor is there any further need for the Blanquist philosophy

which calls for a conspiratorial coup d'e'tat of the few in the
present period when the masses as a whole are ripe for
struggle, and the inevitable direction of that struggle must
be the seizure of State power.
History has made the views of both the opportunist Right

and the sectarian Left a laughing matter. What was tragic
has become comic. In this happy way, mankind breaks
from the past and shows it is ready for the new problems.
856
Precisely for the reason that the day for social reform, for
social Liberalism and social democracy has passed,
revolutionists must participate more than ever in the
struggle for reform; not because reform can be granted to
block the revolution of the masses, but, on the contrary,
because it cannot be granted, because capitalism more and
more becomes anti-reform, anti-humanitarian, anti-social.
In the struggle for the reform which capitalism cannot

sustain, the revolution is won. In the battle for a
Constituent Assembly, the Russian masses give all power to
the soviets-and then the Constituent Assembly is no longer
needed.
Among the revolutionists in the nineteenth century, the

period of reform always was conceived as separate from
that of revolution. Democracy was pictured as distinct from
the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Today, these two periods
intertwine, are the immediate cause and effect,means and
end of each other. The United States, for instance, before it
has wholly emerged into its period of social reform, must
already enter its period of revolution.
As the fascists drive the reformist socialists out of power,

some of the latter try to fight back, belatedly believing that
they can continue to struggle for reform without going the
way of revolution. (*1) These socialists form a new school of
Centrists comically holding on to old methods, blind to the
lessons of the new times.
In the nineteenth century, the struggle for social reforms

was placed in the realm of "tactics" by the old socialists,
while at the same time, tactics and program were kept
entirely divorced each from the other. Today, the tactics
must be connected intimately with the program, and the
revolutionist must so work in the immediate field of tactical
857
reform as to be able to seize that link in the chain of events
which can move the whole forward and realize his program.
As the socialists completely disintegrate even as a reformist

body, and become mere liberals, the communists also
capitulate in the struggle against fascism and degenerate
into mere social reformists. The victory of fascism moves
every organized element among the workers backward one
degree. Left Wing communists become Right Wing
communists; communists become socialists; socialists
become laborites; laborites become liberals; liberals turn to
fascism.
What eliminates the socialist movement even as a counter-

revolutionary force becomes fatal to the reformist trade
unions as well. As in the case of the socialists, it is not that
the trade union leadership does not wish to remain the
savior of capitalist society; it is rather that the capitalists
find these saviors too costly and whip them out of office, to
substitute their own dependable management.
In the nineteenth century, trade unions were permitted as a

part of the functioning of democracy and social reform.
Competitive and democratic capitalism also had room for a
free labor movement. In fact, though developing as a
reaction and protest against capitalism, the labor movement
was itself part of the capitalistic system. A capitalism which
was allied with liberalism and democracy needed a certain
degree of opposition for its functioning. For over a hundred
years this fact was the basis of a socio-political system
which allowed opposition as a legal and constructive factor
in its organization. The political party, the trade union, the
cooperative movement, the socialist movement, were all
part of a dynamic system which predicated itself upon the
idea of progress as a continuous movement toward higher
political forms and higher standards of living and which
858
allowed a certain degree of questioning of its own
foundations and a certain degree of modification in its
component institutions.
"The present trends in economics and politics are seemingly

in the opposite direction. . . . Politically, the development of
social groups with conflicting interests free to carry on their
struggles unhindered is likely to result in a continued
reaction against representative democracy and in a
tendency toward executive forms of government for the
purpose of overcoming friction and making speedy action
possible." (*2)
Today the organization of trade unions cannot remain part

of a general gradual scheme of reform. The employers must
fight trade unionism every inch of the way. The workers to
be effective must organize in industrial unions nationally,
must carry on general strikes against the State, must take in
the masses of unskilled who have now become matured
enough to understand their interests and their
revolutionary destiny. A hundred years ago the Liberal
elements could organize trade unions; today Liberalism has
passed out; it could not organize effective unions if it
wanted to.
This is true even in the United States. Should the workers

try to build national militant industrial unions in the
present period, so great would be the resistance of the
employers, so severe would be the action of the
government that labor would be compelled to take over the
power of the State itself. just as the struggle for
unemployment insurance must develop into the struggle
for workers' control over production, just as generally the
struggle for reform leads them to revolution, so must the
struggle for unionism march them to the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat.
859
In other words, we may say that the United States is bound
to skip the whole period of social reform. The mobilization
of classes will lead to a violent revolutionary struggle; this
is how the law of combined development works out in the
United States. For this reason, the violent social conflicts
that take place in the United States appear, not as open class
struggles of a political nature, but as battles to prevent the
birth of class formations. Whereas in Europe the fight rages
between classes, in America class war has been waged to
prevent the open formation of class alignments or of class
ideology. Hence the fierce struggle in the United States to
prevent the formation of trade unions.
Not that the employers of this country cannot afford to do

what the employers in Europe found profitable. The
capitalists of America are far more thoroughly organized
and far too powerfully entrenched not to be able to yield
the few concessions demanded of them by trade unions. If,
then, the employers are so determined in their open shop
campaigns to prevent the rise of unionism, it is because,
interpreting the experiences of their brethren in Europe,
they understand full well the connection of reform to
revolution, of unions to the class struggle. The class
struggle must fight to be born; the fiercest battle is in the
prenatal period! The way to prevent the workers from
entering into the political sphere, the way to stop them
from organizing as a class, is to crush them even when they
fight on the economic sphere in the form of trade unions.
The way to prevent revolution is not to permit the workers
to wrest any reforms whatsoever.
A good illustration of this law of combined development in

the United States can be found in the struggle of the coal
miners immediately after the War. In West Virginia, the
coal operators refused to allow any union organizer to
860
come into Logan County to organize a local of the United
Mine Workers. In order to present their demands for this
petty reform, namely, the right to organize members into
the conservative A. F. of L., the miners were compelled to
marshal a veritable army of over five thousand men with
arms in their hands. Even then they were unable to win
their point.
At the border of Logan County they were met, not only by a

legion of private bullies, gunmen, and detectives hired by
the companies, not only by the National Guard, the State
Militia, and sheriffs' deputies of the County and the State,
but by the United States Army as well. This army informed
the miners that unless they dispersed immediately they
would be considered as engaging in rebellion against the
republic. The miners hastily broke ranks and dispersed;
they were unable to accomplish even the miserable reform
of obtaining the abstract right of free speech and
assemblage in one county of the Union.
Under such circumstances, which must become more

typical as capitalism grows more desperate, it is impossible
to suppose that the Liberal business-minded labor
bureaucrats of the A. F. of L. could possibly carry out the
task of organizing the thirty-six million unorganized
workers in the United States today. To imagine their
entering the turpentine camps of the South, agitating the
agricultural laborers in the cotton fields, winning the Negro
toilers, or organizing militant unions without the sharpest
possible kind of struggle, is to believe in miracles. The same
situation prevails in the trustified industries. To meet the
terrific obstacles which the employers place in the way of
the organization of labor, there must be at the head of the
organized movement not the soft, fat-bellied, highly-paid,
specially privileged labor business man, but rather the tried
861
and tested revolutionary fighters, men who are willing
daily to risk death or lynching. It would be necessary to
have a highly coordinated nationally organized staff that
could throw the support of all labor behind this task of
organizing the workers. There would also be necessary a
determination on the part of the labor movement to engage
in the most militant general strike movement, even to the
point of taking control over the factories, to support this
kind of campaign. To accomplish these reforms, it would
soon become apparent that the workers themselves would
have to take over the government.
American labor will not endure a long process of laborism,

as in England. It should be borne in mind that the chief
battles between capital and labor have been, not in the
political, but in the economic field. Here is the traditional
battle-ground for physical struggle. Economic battles in
America have been as bloody and brutal as political
demonstrations in Europe. The worker has traditionally
met his employer openly, face to face.
For this reason, the economic struggle in America can

quickly and directly become a struggle for power, the
workers not being concerned primarily with parliamentary
activity, rule of the Supreme Court, suffrage rights, etc.
Hence, too, the employers fear bitterly the economic
struggle, and strive desperately to prevent the organization
of the masses of workers on the economic field. This is
another way of saying that once the American workers are
able to comprehend the A B C of the class struggle, they
will quickly learn the X Y Z, and realize the necessity of
taking over the whole system for themselves.
Added to this is the fact that the employers in this country

have neither the standing nor the stability of the ruling
classes of Europe. Everyone is thoroughly acquainted with
862
the despicable and unscrupulous methods by which
American business tycoons have amassed their wealth and
obtained their power. It is no accident that they hold that
power only through the violence of their large private
armies and that there is scarcely any difference between the
ruthless activities of so-called legitimate big business and
the criminal operations of the racketeer.
From all of these considerations we must draw the

conclusion that the chief struggle in the United States will
include the question of trade union organization. From this
two further corollaries arise: on the one hand is the law that
no one can be considered a revolutionist who does not
engage in the struggle of the unorganized, the success of
which depends upon him alone; on the other hand lies the
comprehension that the A. F. of L. never can organize large
masses of unskilled. Either the revolutionary forces will
achieve such organization, or the masses will not be
organized in labor unions at all --- or they will be organized
only in company unions or compulsory fascist
organizations.
This struggle to prevent the open formation of class

alignments in the United States explains in part the
numerous lynching’s of Negroes. The philosophy of
America is to tolerate no hard and fast caste lines. Such
rigidity would imply that America is as decadent as Europe.
Yet the American Negro is shut out precisely by such lines.
Marked by the color of his skin, he cannot escape. Nor can
it be denied that the Negro represents labor and practically
only labor. Thus, the caste formations that separate the
Negro from the rest of the population are formations that
separate labor from others, but this is labor in an
unconscious form. The fight against labor is here seen as a
struggle against the Negro and is put on a chauvinist basis.
863
This obscures the class character of the lynching, since on
the surface there is no sign that labor is being lynched when
the Negro is burned at the stake or mutilated before
hanging. On the other hand, the unconscious is the only
form that the class struggle can take in America. Hatred of
the Negro is the hatred that the ruling group feels against
any element that maintains a group cohesiveness and that
stands as the living refutation of America's credo of
individualism and equal opportunity for all. The Negro is
lynched really because he is the black foreshadower of the
awful class formations and struggles that are to come in
America. The torture of the Negro is a warning to all labor
of what will happen to it in the South or elsewhere should it
dare to become organized in rigid class lines, denying the
basic tenets of bourgeois Americanism.
Under the conditions generated by capitalism, such intense

contradictions have developed as to make the whole epoch
of imperialism one of wars and revolutions. With the World
War and the revolutionary strife that followed in its wake,
the era of imperialism entered a new stage qualitatively
different from the previous one, 1900-1914. Distinctive of
this new phase, manifesting that imperialism has now
entered definitely upon its period of decline, are the
following situations: First, the proletarian revolution
becomes victorious in the Soviet Union and snatches away
one-sixth of the territory of the globe from the capitalist
system. Second, no matter how much capitalism tries, it
cannot regain its pre-war stability; its disintegration cannot
be halted. All the attempts at stabilization become
desperate efforts merely to slacken the tempo of the break-
down and of the international revolution. During all this
time, revolutionary outbreaks of various degrees constantly
864
occur in all parts of the world, some being temporarily
liquidated, others remaining festering sores, symptoms of
the all-consuming fever within, with new ones erupting.
After the first revolutionary wave subsides, with the defeat
in Germany in 1923, revolutionary situations break out in
Bulgaria and Estonia in 1924, in China 1925-27, in England
1926, in Austria 1927, in India, China, Indo-China, Spain
1930, in Cuba 1933, in Austria, Germany, France, etc., etc.
For such revolutionary situations to appear there had to be

certain objective changes in the internal relations of
capitalist countries. First of all, the ranks of the bourgeoisie
and ruling groups generally had to be broken and their
power lessened. Secondly, the sufferings of the masses had
to become unbearably intense, leading to an unusually
great activity of the people. For these factors to mature into
actual insurrections there had to be added a subjective
element, the ability of the revolutionary classes to carry out
mass action strong enough to break or to undermine the old
government. This ability would have to be crystallized into
the organization of communist parties.
The rise of the communist soviets in Russia made

international imperialism bend every effort to drown them
in blood and to check their extension. This it was not able to
do, the battle ending in a draw. The foreign capitalists
failed to overthrow the soviets; the communist forces were
unable to win in any territory except that which had been
dominated formerly by the Czar. As this territory
represented only 4 per cent of world economy, its loss to
the capitalist markets was not great enough to produce in
the entire capitalist world immediate death convulsions.
The basic causes for the failure of capitalism to overthrow

the soviets were: First, the enormous and inaccessible
territory of the country and its economic self-sufficiency as
865
far as food was concerned. Second, the numerical and
moral strength of the population led by an exceedingly
toughened Communist Party. Third, the revolution having
broken out in the midst of a World War, the international
capitalists were unable to unite their forces in time. They
had to wait a whole year until the termination of the War,
before they could move against the communists. This fact
provided the latter with an invaluable breathing space.
Further, by the time the World War was ended, the
international bourgeoisie had become extremely weak, not
only because of its exhaustion from war, but because of the
revolutionary movements of the masses, who, threatening
revolution at home and refusing to fight the soviets,
manifested considerable international working class
solidarity.
As the capitalists thus exposed their inherent weakness and

failed to crush the Soviet Union, in turn the communism
represented by Russian Bolshevism achieved a rapid
growth all over the world, stimulating and organizing
revolutionary movements everywhere, and threatening to
destroy capitalism in countries other than Russia.
The workers' republic was unable to defeat the capitalists

internationally because, first, the United States lent its
whole might to strengthen and rehabilitate the European
bourgeoisie, and, secondly, the communist movement was
still too weak to support Russia by seizing and holding
power elsewhere. Russia herself was exhausted. This
prevented the Russian communists from routing the Polish
army and joining hands with the German revolutionists.
The Soviets were thrown back at the gates of Warsaw.
Fascism was the direct reaction to this internationalist

communist movement. Historically, fascism appeared as a
dominant movement in those countries which, next to the
866
Soviet Union, were the weakest links in the imperialist
chain which the masses were breaking. Fascism is thus a
post- war movement basically directed against communism
and formed by the bourgeoisie to liquidate the proletarian
revolution threatening its power.
For fascism to take hold in a country, the internal relation of

classes must show the following characteristics: first, a
breakdown and instability of capitalist relationships;
second, a considerable number of declassed social elements
such as ex-soldiers and officers; third, a pauperization of
the city middle class and professional elements; fourth, a
deep crisis among the peasantry; fifth, and most important,
a proletarian movement threatening to seize and to hold
State power.
Fascism first arose in countries predominantly agrarian, but

also containing a well developed industry and commerce.
The highest expression of this type of fascism has occurred
in Italy, although foreshadowing’s of the Italian movement
could be seen in semi-fascist Poland under Pilsudski, and in
Hungary under Horthy. From the victory of National
Socialism in Germany and its great growth in the major
industrial countries of the world, however, it is plain that
fascism has moved from the secondary to the primary
countries, from the limbs and periphery to the heart and
center of European capitalism. Seemingly able to suppress
the threat to communism, fascism has fashioned only new
crises and has sharpened all antagonisms to monstrous
proportions paving the way for new revolutions in the
future.
Fascism is the open Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie with the

aid of the petty bourgeoisie against the workers. It comes at
a time when capitalism has no further use for classical
parliamentarism and when democracy as a bourgeois class
867
state has become thoroughly exposed to the masses.
Fascism boldly replaces the democratic shibboleths of
liberty, equality, and fraternity, with slogans of
responsibility, hierarchy, discipline. For the peaceful and
legal action of the majority as acclaimed by liberalism,
fascism substitutes the direct violence of the minority.
In wiping out the proletarian and all other dissident parties,

fascism unites all the elements of the bourgeoisie under one
flag. The economic possibility of such a fusion is inherent in
the domination of all competition by the Big Business
monopolist. The supersedure of entrepreneur capital by
interest-bearing capital coordinated by the monopolist
financier is the decisive factor to whip all propertied classes
into line. As the trust wipes out competition in economics,
their Party of Fascists attempts to do likewise in politics.
The desperate crisis within the ruling class and the prime
necessity for taking advantage of the breathing space
afforded it by the blunders of the proletariat also play their
part in the formation of fascism. Fascism comes to power
not only through the desperation of the bourgeoisie, but
also because of the inadequate and muddled attempts of
the working class. Fascism is the punishment the workers
must suffer for their opportunist sins. As the communists
sow confusion and the employers determinedly end all
their conflicting interests temporarily to unite against the
proletarian enemy, the layers of the petty bourgeoisie
which support that side which is at the moment the
strongest, swing to fascism and decide the issue.
Fascism, unable to return to the bankruptcy of private

industry, accelerates that growth of State capitalism which
had demonstrated its efficiency especially during the war.
Once established, the trend towards the erection of public
property and State interests grew extensively in all
868
countries. The war had emphasized the complete
inadequacy of private industry. Fascism violently continues
the development of corporate and State capitalism, creating
its own governmental forms.
The era of competition, with its many oppositions,

independent parties, and everlasting debates, could tolerate
a democratic system of checks and balances. Parliament
was a convenient mechanism by which competitive
industry could discover, without redress to civil war and
within the framework of law and order, just what were the
relations of forces, and which group most fundamentally
represented the interests of the nation and therefore should
be given a leading role. In America in the period before the
Civil War, so nearly matched were the opposing forces,
since the slave and free states had an equal representation
in the Senate, that debate and oratory developed to an
exceedingly fine point.
With the rise of monopoly capitalism, which had oppressed

many petty industrialists and forced them with its heavy
hand to abide by the regulations laid down by the trust,
parliament no longer was a necessary mechanism. A
mutual tolerance of many parties had lost its progressive
role. Tolerance is possible only when the State is stable; it is
impossible when the breakdown is near, and the old order
must fight for its life. Those in control of Big Business, who
dominate in the economic field and who surreptitiously
control the political machinery of democracy, cannot but
mock and deride the "talking shop" parliament with its
interminable gab-fest and bombast.
In each country, fascism takes on particular colorations to

fit the national needs of the capitalists. The Italians
popularize their State as corporative, the Germans as
totalitarian; Italy uses the term "Fascism," Germany
869
"National Socialism"; the former stresses "empire," the latter
"race"; in the South there is little anti-Semitism; in the North
it is extremely marked; Italy praises finance capital,
Germany flays the usurer; Italy is Catholic, Germany
abhors Catholicism; all these differences are but due to the
differing basic needs of each nationalist capitalist group.
Similarly with the Austrian fascist movement, torn between
the aims of the German and those of the Italian, and with
the British fascist movement, which tries to synthesize the
features of both Italian and German fascism and to utilize
their experiences.
Despite these differences, all of the fascism’s now in power

are similar in that they have built up a complete theory of
the nationalization of capital and of the dictatorial
corporate or totalitarian State. They all stress the significant
place of religion in State and social life. They have
established compulsory class collaboration with the
prohibition of strikes, the murder of militant workers, and
the annihilation of all workers' organizations.
The sectarian and opportunist socialists of the Second

International could not but play into the hands of the
fascists who, in many cases, adopted parts of their
programs to destroy the labor organizations. As the
movements of the skilled workers turned into counter-
revolutionary channels, it was seen that fascism, on the one
side, and socialism (and syndicalism), on the other side,
were but Right and Left arms of the same capitalist trunk.
Reformist social-democracy prepared the ground for and

abetted fascism in innumerable ways. The socialists' attacks
on Soviet Russia and on communism, their practices of class
collaboration, their nationalism, their active support of all
sorts of rationalization schemes and methods of
compulsory arbitration, their theories of State socialism
870
with compensation to owners --- all such programs and
policies prepared the ideological and practical bases for
fascism. Depending upon the given needs of the hour, the
bourgeoisie could use now social-democracy, now fascism
to defeat the revolution.
Between the two, there was a well-recognized subdivision

of labor. Each movement had a distinct function making
impossible their actual fusion, although later, after the
victory of fascism, certain socialists were to go over to the
fascist point of view with the specious theory that socialism
could come about only through fascism. These people could
be called Socialist-Fascists; (*3) they tried to prove that their
previous programs were well on the road to being realized
by the fascists or national socialists. They formed part of the
Left Wing of the fascist movement and become important
as gears to connect fascism to the motors of the working
class.
Both the fascists and the socialists wanted class peace and
the end of revolution. The role of social-democracy was to
forestall revolution from below, demoralizing the ranks of
the workers by organizing them into a movement
essentially pacifist and reformist. The fascists supplemented
the socialist activity by organizing specially selected
minority combat groups outside of the working class for
extremely violent measures against the revolutionists.
In the period of the first revolutionary wave, when the

capitalist class was forced to turn to the socialists to save
the day, fascism also had to borrow its political program
and social demagogy from the socialist ranks. The ruling
class, through the fascists, in their desperate efforts to
secure time at any cost, were willing to promise everything.
A good example of this demagogy can be seen in
Mussolini's original 1919 platform (*4) which stood, among
871
other things, for a republic, for universal suffrage for men
and women, proportional representation, reduction of the
age of deputies, abolition of the Senate, economic councils
with legislative groups, management of industries by
workers' organizations which proved capable of it (that is,
some form of workers' control over production), eight-hour
day by law, nationalization of munition plants, heavy
capital levy, confiscation of certain church property and
abolition of certain clerical privileges, heavy inheritance tax,
seizure of war profits, and revision of military contracts.
The sophistical slogan was issued: "Class peace in
production, class war in distribution."
In their tactics, too, the fascists demonstrated the same

demagogic flexibility. They gave special place to the ex-
soldier. They pretended to lead some strikes and to aid the
peasantry in confiscating large landed estates. In Italy,
leading fascists, after the seizure of power, proposed
national employment bureaus, denial of the right of
employers to discharge workers after a trial, an improved
classification of workers, a minimum wage, standard
hourly wage rates, and a complete system of social
insurance to cover sickness, death, and unemployment, and
other matters of a similar nature.
In the same way, fascism borrowed considerably from the

syndicalist and trade union movements. (*5) The fascists
demagogically raised the slogan of "No politics in the
union," to prevent the unions from attacking the State. They
advocated federalism and local autonomy, and the
reduction to zero of the salaries of officials. These ideas
were used to break up the workers' organization, separate
the bureaucracy from the members, and paralyze the
unions from fighting effectively in central formation. Once
the fascists had seized power, however, they soon created
872
their own centralized "unions" which really were not
unions at all, but strike-breaking agencies similar to
"company unions," except that they were national industrial
bodies. Under fascism, regimentation of the workers
became complete. The "unions" now were connected with
the State and their contracts recognized by law.
Footnotes
1. This is the position of the Spanish Socialists today.
2. L. L. Lorwin: The American Federation of Labor, pp. 461-462.
3. This must not be confused with the Stalinist theory of

social-fascism, for which see below: Book VI, part on
"Stalinism."
4. For the 1919 program see F. Nitti: Bolshevism, Fascism and

Democracy, pp. 214-215.
5. Compare H. W. Schneider: Making the Fascist State, Ch. IV.
XXVIII. ITALY
OF all the important powers which emerged victorious

from the War, Italy gained the least. As the fascists
expressed it, Italy won the war and lost the peace. The
Versailles Treaty made France and Great Britain complete
arbiters of the Continent, and excluded Italy. The secret
treaties by which the other powers had induced Italy to
break from Germany and to enter into the War on their side
were abandoned. Italy was forced to see her great
Mediterranean rival, France, dominate in the Balkans. At
the same time she witnessed Serbia growing into a great
873
rival State, seizing the provinces of Dalmatia, Croatia and
Montenegro. None of the German colonies was handed
over to Italy, but England and France consolidated their
respective positions in Africa. Italy's territorial gains were
relatively insignificant, far less than what she claimed, so
that after the War, she was impelled to take matters into her
own hands and, through the vigor of D'Annunzio, to
capture the important City of Fiume. No wonder, therefore,
the Italian ruling class felt itself cheated and betrayed by its
allies, and left weakened and susceptible to attack.
The Italian national State only recently had emerged, in the

latter part of the nineteenth century, and was not strong.
The ruling cliques of Italy, the merchant princes and the
grandees, never had been able to overcome the
overwhelming influence in Italian affairs of Emperor and
Pope whose concern it was to keep Italy divided into little
morsels, each part fighting the other to the benefit of these
two. As we have already seen, the people, organized by
Mazzini and Garibaldi, had swept away the influence of
these archaic forces and had brought into existence the
unified national State. But, as usual, not these radical
elements controlled the situation, but the conservatives
who managed to maintain their hold. All this, of course, did
not enhance in the least the prestige of the aristocratic royal
elements of Sardinia.
No sooner was the Italian State formed than the rulers

conceived it necessary to demonstrate the military courage
of its classes by engaging in war for colonies. The Italians,
however, for centuries had been disused to military
fighting except through the condottieri, or mercenary
soldiers. Their military exploits were, therefore, far from
creditable to the ruling class. Lybia and Albania alone cost
Italy six billion lire. The sound defeat Italy had received in
874
the Abyssinian War, the muddled mismanagement of the
army in the Turkish War, and finally, to cap it all, the
disgraceful actions of the General Staff in the World War,
heaping a staggering total of dead and wounded on the
battle fields, led the masses to have only the greatest
contempt for the martial ability of its so-called rulers.
The peaceful pursuits of the Italian population for many

centuries had favored a practical anti-militarism. The
Socialist Party in Italy grew rapidly over the issue of
imperialism and war, and in 1896 was able successfully to
oppose the further continuance of the war in Abyssinia.
After the defeat at Adowa and following the termination of
the war, huge disorders spread throughout the country,
especially in Milan, leading to the killing of over four
hundred by the soldiery of the government. (*1) So
frightened were the rulers that all Italy was declared in a
state of siege. Again, in the war with Turkey over Africa in
1911 and 1912, the socialists took a threatening attitude.
While they could not stop the slaughter, they were able to
purge their ranks at the time of a good many of the national
and chauvinist reformists within the Party. Thus, by 1914,
the Italian Socialist Party was in a strong position to fight
the entrance of Italy into the World War, and helped to
delay Italy's participation. When the War broke out, its
official stand was "neither to help nor to hinder."
Immediately before the World War, the workers'

movements had developed into menacing proportions; in
1914, from June seventh to June fourteenth, a general
insurrection raged throughout the city of Bologna and the
province of Romagna. The World War came just in time to
prevent the overthrow of the royalist regime.
The weak position of the ruling class in Italy was due also
to the fact that Italy was an exceedingly poor country,
875
unable to stand the expenses of imperialist adventures. Italy
had no iron and no coal. Her chief economy was agriculture.
Only in the twentieth century was she able to begin to
develop her water power into electricity. Thus Italy was a
second rate power, unable to meet her industrial rivals in
Europe and unable, therefore, to carve out for herself any
large colonial domain.
At the same time, although essentially an agricultural

country, Italy possessed a well-developed proletariat, her
land being worked not so much by individual peasants as
by agricultural laborers on the estates of the grandees. In
1911, nine million or 54 per cent of the 16.8 million gainfully
employed were working in agriculture, but of these six
million were agricultural laborers. This accounts for the
extraordinary activity of the Socialist Party on the
countryside and the powerful agricultural laborers' unions
that it was able to build. Besides, there Were 2.3 million
industrial workers who, with the transport workers, made
up approximately four million. Thus, of the total gainfully
employed, ten million were proletarians.
The fatal and congenital defect of this working class was

that it was not employed in large-scale heavy industries
such as existed in Germany, England, and the United States.
The result was a peculiar combination of circumstances.
The workers were in the majority; they were militant,
discontented, and meant to take over power. At the same
time, their socialist movement could be based, not on the
most modern technique of capitalism, but on a level of
relatively petty production. This caused the Italian workers
to retain much of petty bourgeois emotional individualism;
on the countryside, they felt themselves closer to the poor,
individual peasant rather than to those engaged in large-
scale factory farming; in the city, they displayed the artistic
876
spirit of the artisan, rather than the regimented and
disciplined approach of heavy industry. Thus, the
development of the Italian proletariat was lopsided, and its
organizations acted in a completely confused and
befuddled manner when they tried to take over industry for
themselves. Militancy they had, but not iron battalions.
The terrible results of the World War threw everything into

chaos in Italy. The masses moved violently to the Left.
Aristocratic rule completely broke down. The Italian
Socialist Party grew to seventy thousand members. By
November, 1919, it secured 156 seats out of a total of 508,
with a program calling for a dictatorship of the proletariat,
and its membership rose to three hundred thousand; the
membership of the Confederation of Labor jumped to two
million. (*2) In the municipal elections, the socialists
controlled over two thousand communes, or one-third of
the total. Vast strikes swept ry, there being registered over a
million strikers in agriculture and over a million and a
quarter strikers in industry that year. (*3) These strikes
were not of the ordinary kind, but rather of the type that
inevitably spells insurrection. After the employers had
instituted a general lock-out, a half million workers
marched into the important factories of Italy and took
possession of them.
It had been admitted by practically all observers that the

revolution was now inevitable. (*4) That the revolution did
not occur, however, was mainly for the reason that the
leadership of the workers either did not want to seize
power or did not know what to do with it if they should.
Simultaneously, the militant action of the workers had
plunged the ranks of the Socialist Party into a crisis. The
Right Wing, opposed to revolution, did not secede, but
stayed inside the Socialist Party in order to work from
877
within to kill the movement. The Left Wing, on its side, was
stupid enough not to expel the Right Wing, but to allow it
to remain to do its demoralizing work. The fact is that the
Left Wing was wholly unable to understand a
revolutionary policy. At best, the militants were guided by
Centrists who held off the revolution long enough to
demoralize the workers with incessant strikes that got them
nowhere, who threw the country into a chaos that alienated
the whole middle class population against the workers, and
who permitted the employers to build up with impunity
their fascist army. As a reward, these leaders earned the
contempt not only of the workers but even of the rulers,
who were thus enabled to write that the socialists, while
threatening revolution, never really desired it. "The Italian
socialists were not dangerous. Almost always they were
merely tiresome and annoying. They talked of revolution
and they aspired to carry out a policy of reform." (*5)
To the treacherous action of the socialist leaders and their

centrist policies was added the pressure of the syndicalists
who told the workers to pay no attention to politics, to
concentrate on economics, and to ignore the State. Thus, at
a moment which would have been decisive for the history
of all Europe, which would have fused the Russian
revolution with the Italian, Hungarian, and German, which
would have made almost inevitable the overthrow of
capitalism in Europe after the war, the Italian workers were
not able to consolidate and act. They could not solve the
problems of revolution.
Only in 1921 were the communist elements able to separate

themselves from the Right Wing centrists and to form their
own organization; but it was entirely too late. Not
communism, but fascism won the day.
2
878
The origin of the Italian fascist movement dates back to
the Fasci d' Azione Revolutionario, organized in 1914-15
under the leadership of Mussolini to bring Italy into the
war. At the outbreak of the war Mussolini became a
passionate patriot, upon which he was ousted from his post
of editor of the leading Italian Socialist Daily, "Avanti." He
then founded the "Popolo d'Italia." It is rather significant
that before he became an ardent interventionist in the war,
Mussolini was on the Left Wing of the socialists. We have
already pointed out that, in the days of the Second
International, the Left Wing was by no means necessarily
composed of intransigent Marxists. On the contrary, often it
contained a considerable number of declassed intellectual
adventurers who took the side of the Left because of their
urge for action. These intellectuals, deprived of a decent
living by capitalism, felt they had to break and to destroy in
revenge. By no means, however, did they accept the
theories and practices of dialectical materialism. Further
examples of this type were Briand and Viviani, in France,
who were active in eulogizing the general strike, but who,
once they achieved power, did their best to break it.
These men had curious counterparts among the professorial

pundits, people like George Sorel in France and Thorstein
Veblen in the United States, who were followers of a
philosophy of action of the Bergson or James variety.
Incontinent iconoclasts, they were ready to prove the
antithesis of everything their smug philosophic brethren
were trying to affirm.
Mussolini professed an enthusiasm for Sorel, (*6) who

defended violence as a source of social progress, and, when
il Duce was first elected to the Italian Parliament, he
shouted to his former comrades: "I know you with a
sincerity which may appear cynical because I was the first
879
to infect you when I introduced into the circulation of
Italian Socialism a little of Bergson mixed with much
Blanqui." (*7)
After the war, new Fasci (Fascio means union or association)

were organized, this time ostensibly for the purpose of
reaffirming the advisability of Italy's entrance into the war
and of defending the interests of the demobilized soldier.
At this time, so unpopular were all memories of the War
that Italians did not hesitate to rip off the uniforms of
soldiers or of officers whom they met and to stamp the
pieces into the ground. "Sometimes an express train waited
hours in a country station until a general or a policeman
decided to get off, and go on his way by some other
means." (*8) Highly significant in this anecdote is the
cowardice of the socialists in being willing to wait, to hold
up a whole train for hours to compel the officer to leave,
rather than to throw him off bodily, without such waste of
time. On a larger scale, precisely this policy caused the
defeat of the entire socialist movement and enabled the
fascist forces to grow bolder in their attacks. All the
socialists could do was to confuse railway time tables; it
was one of Mussolini's greatest boasts that he restored the
trains to schedule.
Mussolini has been stimulated in his views by three

political theorists who preceded him, Machiavelli, Mazzini,
and Sorel. He has attempted to synthesize their views and
to round out what Machiavelli and Mazzini had begun. The
principles of leadership in political affairs had already been
laid down in the classic works of Machiavelli, who had
worked out these practical rules as part of his general plan
for the unification of Italy.
Mazzini had partly realized this unification; it was up to

Mussolini to finish the job, to wipe out all the local
880
provincialisms prevailing in the districts of Italy, to
consolidate the country, to strengthen the national State, to
centralize the government and to give it greater authority.
Mussolini here completes Mazzini in the same manner as
Adolph Hitler completes the work of Bismarck, not only
creating the independent national State, but making the
State all-powerful, compelling the Pope and the Catholic
Church to take a secondary position.
Mazzini had worked along lines entirely different from

those of Machiavelli, since he had mobilized the people
independently of the aristocratic cliques to fight against the
Austrian oppressor and the pretensions of the Pope. Many
of the views of Mazzini were those to which Mussolini
could give his most enthusiastic endorsement. We have
seen that Mazzini tried to unite Italy under the slogan, "God
and the people," and thus to correlate intimately State and
Church. Mazzini declared the first atheist must have been a
criminal and what we must do was not to deny heaven but
to make the earth like heaven. In a special address to Italian
workingmen Mazzini pointed out: "Liberty is not the
negation of all authority: it is the negation of every
authority that fails to represent the Collective Aim of the
nation..." (*9)
Above all did Mazzini fight against the essentials of

communism, since to him property was one of the elements
of human life, and the principle of property was eternal.
(*10) The true remedy lay in the consolidation of labor and
capital in the same hands. With these principles, Mazzini,
although he insisted on free trade, advocated large public
works, the eventual confiscation of church property by the
State, the turning over of all unclaimed land and the profits
of railways and public utilities to the State, the common
land to be given to the State for the benefit of the poor in
881
the communes and a national fund to be created for
distribution to workingmen's associations (corporations).
Mazzini tied up this program with a denunciation of capital
as the tyrant of labor, showing that the people had been
first slaves, then serfs, and were now hirelings, and calling
upon them in the sacred interests of tradition, progress, and
association to build a new Italy.
On the question of communism, Mazzini broke sharply

with Garibaldi, and denounced vehemently the Paris
Commune. (*11) To Mazzini, the Commune was but the
logical continuation of individualism, since both hated the
Fatherland, which was holy. (*12)
Thus we can see that Mussolini carries forward almost the

entire essence of Mazzini's principles. To stress duties not
rights, to link up God and the State, to hold the family
sacred, to emphasize the duty of labor, to attack capitalism
in phrases and communism in fact, to chain together liberty
and authority, to stress action, to link up tradition with
progress, and to justify this entire program on the ground
of benefitting the nation as a whole and particularly the
mass of poor, --- all these things show that Mussolini has
only borrowed heavily from the nineteenth century
program to realize it today.
The philosophical method of Mussolini is heavily indebted

also to the actionist views of Sorel and James. (*13) Sorel
preached that humanity could reach truth only by allowing
full play to its life force as expressed in impulse and
emotion and the intellectual counterpart of which was
intuition. All fascist schools adopt a violent anti-
intellectualism and strongly favor a passionate
intuitionalism. This was the view of Sorel, as it had been
that of Carlyle and Nietzsche.
882
Frenzied by the general smugness of a society that was in
reality resting on a mine of explosives, Sorel believed that
both the middle classes and the proletariat were
degenerating, and that only violence would restore vigor to
both. Proletarian violence would force the middle class to
attend to its own business; it would strike squarely slum-
going welfare workers who tried to meddle in to the life of
the workers with Christian phrases of charity and love. For
the same reason, too, it was a good thing for the workers
occasionally to battle certain representatives of the
government. The ensuing bloodstream would purge the
illusions in the minds of the workers that the upper classes
and the government should control them.
Of course, as social welfare schemes terminated, the

violence of the capitalist class would increase, but capitalist
violence would inevitably lead to the victory of the
proletariat. Sorel believed that such a violent method would
bring to fruition the ultimate laws of the class struggle. "If a
united and revolutionary proletariat confronts a rich
middle class, eager for conquest, capitalist society will
have reached its historical perfection." (*14)
Sorel's insistence on violence induced him to attach himself

to the syndicalist movement wherein he eulogized the
policy of constant strikes to inspire the workers for the
revolution and affirmed that, while the general strike was
but a myth, as was the revolution, it was by means of such
myths that the worker could improve his lot. If, indeed,
Meliorism was the escape for society, it was better to have
Meliorism by blows than by persuasion. (*15)
The same contempt that Mussolini felt for the principal,

socialist leaders Sorel felt for those at the head of the French
Socialist Party; he delighted in quoting Clernenceau,
renegade socialist, who had openly sneered that socialists
883
were moderate radicals and not revolutionists at all. (*16) It
was his complete disgust with the parliamentary cretins
who called themselves socialists that had inspired Sorel to
endorse the syndicalists and to denounce those intellectuals
who had embraced the profession of thinking for the
proletariat. By analyzing the views of Sorel, we can see how
closely they resemble those of Mussolini.
In 1919, the Italian fascist movement was not strong,

although even then it claimed twenty Fasci and twenty
thousand members at its first congress. The movement was
originally entirely spontaneous, decentralized and
uncoordinated except for its guiding head, the clique
around Mussolini. Some of the members were Catholic,
some anti-clerical, some Free-mason. Such contradictions,
however, offered no obstacle to the continuance of a
movement based, not upon any great theoretical program,
but precisely upon vague feelings of discontent and a
consciousness of the necessity to change the existent order.
By no means do fascists strive for intellectual clarity. In
every case, their programs are larded with vague
formulations that can be interpreted in any manner
whatever, according to the needs of the moment. This
permits the leadership to emphasize demagogically any
aspect of events that it desires. At the same time it allows
the organization to corral into its fold diverse petty
bourgeois elements, each with entirely different grievances.
Fascism thus transforms demagogy into a veritable science.
In the beginning, the fascists had to grope their way. The

capitalist class rule was so unstable that it had to depend on
persuasion and demoralization of the workers' ranks by
Fabian tactics rather than on violent suppression. It should
be borne in mind that the workers were still heavily armed
884
and only recently had gone through the experiences of the
War. They had no fear of the regular army, which was in
the process of reorganization. The bourgeoisie, through its
spokesmen Nitti and Giolitti, and later through Bonomi and
Facta, to gain time had to use the method of reform and
concessions as long as it could. At the same time, it tried to
counter the revolutionary unions by pushing the Catholic
unions, which were growing mightily.
The fascists did not begin to play their important role until
the working class resistance had been broken; it was broken
not so much by external violence as by internal treachery.
In the beginning, fascism had to adopt an extremely radical
coloration and swim along with the stream. It offered itself
as a sort of substitute for the regular socialist parties. "Its
propaganda glorified strikes, food riots, calling for the
hanging of speculators, the seizure of land by the peasantry,
occupations of factories by the workers Dalmine, and
denounced the State as the enemy --- 'Down with the State
in all its forms.' " (*17)
As the social concessions only heated the revolutionary

ardor of the masses and solved none of the basic social
problems of the day, the State gradually began to augment
its repressive forces. The gendarmerie in 1920 was
increased from twenty-eight thousand to sixty thousand. A
special Royal Guard of twenty-five thousand was formed.
The fascists began to be armed by the authorities, although
they as yet made no serious attacks on the people.
Mussolini's paper, "Popolo d'Italia," was distributed by the
army authorities freely among the troops. "From the Army
the Fascisti received sympathy, assistance, and war material.
Officers in uniform took part in its punitive expeditions.
The Fascisti were allowed to turn national barracks into
their private arsenals." (*18)
885
The professional officers of the army occupied themselves
by training bands of fascists in military tactics. On October
20, 1920, the General Staff even issued a circular instructing
divisional commanders to support the fascist organizations.
At the same time, the police also helped
the Fascisti enormously. "Sometimes carbineers and Royal
Guards openly made common cause with the Fascisti, and
paralyzed the resistance of the peasants. Against
the Fascisti alone, the latter might have held their own." (*19)
Thus in every possible way the State, supposedly controlled

by Liberals and Catholic humanitarians who were
interested in love and peace, was secretly allied with the
fascists. We have, therefore, a double process: on the one
hand, the development of mass formations below; on the
other hand, heliotropic adversion of the State apparatus to
the fascist sun. The Liberals and humanitarians directly
prepared the way for the black-shirted fascists who
rewarded them by deposing them from office as soon as
possible.
The revolutionary movement came to a peak in 1920 when

the workers, with a tremendous burst of enthusiasm, took
over the factories. These workers, however, reckoned
without their leaders, who at once did their best to break
the revolutionary movement and, to the great dismay of the
workers, actually surrendered the factories, shortly
thereafter, in September. This proved to be the turning
point of the revolutionary movement. The workers in
disgust quit the trade unions and the Socialist Party by the
hundreds of thousands. As the movement became
demoralized, the employers believed the time
advantageous for a political counter-attack, and threw all
their forces behind the Fascists. In November, 1920-note the
date-the Fascists launched their first terrorist action against
886
the workers, at Bologna. "The Fascist jackal strikes only the
already wounded proletarian lion." (*20)
With the powerful help of the government, the Fascists

vigorously pushed forward their work. Between January
and May, 1921, alone, they destroyed 120 labor
headquarters, attacked 243 centers, killed 202 workers and
wounded 1,144. The method which the State used to help
the Black Shirts was to send the Royal Guard to the labor
center with the ostensible purpose of "protecting" the center,
in reality to search the entire premises and entirely to
disarm the workers. Then the center was attacked by the
Fascists; the Royal Guards would retire, and the Fascists
would be left to wreak their destruction at will. During the
first months of 1921, 2,240 workers were arrested by the
"impartial" State officers, but only 162 Fascists.
One reason why the workers could be subdued so quickly

was that the old government, unlike that in Germany, never
had been overthrown but had existed through the whole
critical period of the War and since. In Germany, on the
contrary, it took a much longer time before the fascists were
able to crush the far better organized and disciplined
working class.
Believing that the working class was now in full retreat, the
government under Giolitti declared a special election in
May, 1921. In this election, the fascists formed a bloc with
the nationalists to win thirty-four seats, and in this period
"Mussolini and his followers took their seats on the extreme
Right, and in his speech as leader of the group he declared
that he was 'reactionary because he was anti-
parliamentarian, anti-democratic, anti-socialist."' (*21)
By this time, however, the communists had split away at

the Livorno Congress in April to form their own party and
887
to separate themselves both from Turati, the leader of the
Right Wing, and from Serrati, the head of the Centrists.
These two worthies soon adjusted their differences. The
separating of the communist forces cleared the atmosphere
considerably, and, to the surprise of the government, the
masses actually voted in larger numbers than ever before
for the socialist and communist candidates, both of whom
received a total of close to one million nine hundred
thousand votes, a record. It was clear that the masses had
retreated simply because of their leaders, but that they were
capable of a further attack in the immediate future,
especially since they now had different leadership, a
Communist Party that took its orders from Lenin and the
Communist International. This fact decided the government
to go the limit in aiding the Fascists to crush ruthlessly the
entire movement.
While the ruling group was negotiating with the Fascists,

the latter utilized the period to separate the revolutionary
communists from the reformist socialists and trade union
leadership. In this Mussolini was eminently successful, and,
to the further dismay of the entire working class, he was
able to make an agreement with the socialists and trade
union bureaucracy that neither was to continue the struggle
further. This was a most shameful compact, one that dealt
the finishing blow to the aspirations of the workers, because,
while it thoroughly disarmed the mass organizations of the
proletariat, their leaders declaring that the fight was now
over, the Fascists by no means ceased their bloody attacks,
especially on the militant labor sections, the communists,
who had now their own separate organizations and centers.
The Fascists in truly Machiavellian style at the earliest
possible moment tore up the agreement so solemnly sworn
to.
888
By this time, the Fascists counted two thousand two
hundred fasci groups, with three hundred and ten thousand
members, and were rapidly expanding their forces. By now
they could afford to change their program considerably, so
as to become the chief agency of the reactionary ruling
groups of Italy. Hitherto they had proclaimed the need of
an Italian republic; they now become ardent Royalists,
declaring that the King was necessary as the symbol of
unity of the nation, that the talents of the aristocracy were
essential in administering the government. They wiped out
their clause calling for the abolition of all titles of nobility.
With this, the King was able to give them his blessings and
to make possible the march on Rome.
The Fascists did not "conquer" power; they were inducted

into power by the government after the working class
groups had collapsed from inner bankruptcy. It is true that
"Luigi Facta, who headed the shadow government then in
office, decided to oppose the advance of the Fascists. A
state of siege was declared but the order had to be
countermanded for the King refused to sign the decree."
(*22) The only effect of Facta's act in declaring martial law
was to disarm the civil authorities and thus prevent any
real resistance to Mussolini's march, which was handled by
the generals of the regular army. Incidentally, the march
was facilitated by the wild and unplanned action of the
syndicalists who called an ill-advised general strike on the
railroad; this did not stop the march, but enabled the
Fascists to fill the important railway posts with their own
key men and to insure that the march went forward in
schedule time.
Having been commissioned by the King to form a

government, October 29, 1922, Mussolini's first step was to
consent to form a coalition government. By this time, the
889
Nationalists had completely fused with the Fascists, and
Mussolini was able to use this period to complete the rout
of the workers and to consolidate his forces. He began a
vigorous attack both against the subversive elements and
against the liberals who had permitted the chaos in Italy to
endure so long and who were to be chastised for not
knowing how to fight the communists. An effective
instrument for such punishment was the Fascist militia,
organized in 1923.
Mussolini's next move was to call an election which would

give him full power in parliament. Voting was held under
Mussolini's complete control and accompanied by a regular
reign of terror. Having secured a preponderant number of
seats, Mussolini was then able to annihilate the liberal
socialist opposition. In this he was aided by the towering
blunders of his opponents.
To provoke the socialists into battle, Mussolini actually

murdered his troublesome opponent, Matteoti, but instead
of heeding the challenge, the socialists deserted parliament
entirely, refusing to take their seats, and complaining of the
violence attending the election. Instead of preparing to
overthrow the State, they whined interminably about the
loss of their sinecures in the government. This was all that
was needed by Mussolini to place the opposition in the
light of an anti-national, disloyal group, interested only in
disruption. He not only broke down the "Aventine"
opposition, but, when they crawled back on their knees to
take their places in parliament, he slammed the door in
their faces and declared them out forever.
Thus, by 1925, Mussolini had won the day and could move
on to establish his corporative State. He had no qualms
whatever in eradicating those points in his radical platform
that had called for universal equality and direct suffrage,
890
freedom of thought, conscience, religion, association, press
propaganda and individual collective agitation,
decentralization of executive authority, administrative
autonomy of provinces and communes, abolition of secret
diplomacy, and similar measures.
Further, Mussolini was now free also to break completely

whatever power the radical middle class had obtained
within the Fascist ranks and to change the program of
fascism to conform with the dictates of victorious Big
Business. He denounced political democracy as a fraud. The
State was the absolute to which everything was secondary
and relative, and he raised the slogan: "Everything to the
State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State."
(*23)
Fascism thus repudiated the pass words of nineteenth

century liberalism. Mussolini, as early as 1923, asserted,
"Now the greatest experiences since the War, those which
are in continual movement before our eyes, indicate
liberalism's defeat. In Russia and in Italy it has been
demonstrated that it is possible to govern irrespective of
and contrary to the whole liberal ideology. Communism
and fascism are outside liberalism." (*24)
Against the individualism of the nineteenth century,

fascism set up the idea of a complete subordination to the
State on the ground that individual happiness is dependent
on the general well being. The twentieth century was to
substitute the fascist ideal, "Each for all and all for God."
The principle of authority was to prevail in every line of
social life. The State was to merge again with religion. The
crucifix was put on the walls in every schoolroom and in
every court of law.
891
Of course, this was only Mussolini's Machiavellian method
of utilizing religion for his own purposes. When the Church
attempted to continue the social activity which it had
launched under liberalism, when it strove to maintain its
hold over the youth in education, in sports, and in social
welfare, and to keep its Catholic unions and its prestige
with housewives, the Fascist movement soon put an end to
the pretensions of its rival and made it very plain that not
even the Catholic Church could supplant the authoritarian
State as the people's mentor. The contest between the
Catholic Church and fascism continued for a number of
years until a compromise was worked out whereby the
Fascist Party, while utilizing the Church as an instrument of
social control, maintained its complete leadership in every
field.
The attack against individualism was also made the pretext

for an attack against the old theories of nineteenth century
capitalism which had called on the State only to keep order
while each one went his own way and each class struggled
against the other. The State no longer was to be a police
agent for any class, but a synthesis for all classes. The State
would not permit class war between the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat, but it would recognize different groups
according to their function in production, not according to
their wealth.
The legislation enacted by Mussolini was supposed to

realize new and revolutionary principles. It was the duty of
the individual to act so that his interests coincided with
those of the community, the State to decide just when such
coincidence occurred. Private property was not only an
inalienable right but a public trust. Only those adhering to
standards embodying a sense of responsibility to God,
892
country, and family were eligible to political rights. No
subversive propaganda nor allegiance to an International of
any sort would be tolerated. The highest entity in life was
the State which was to be considered not as undertaking a
residuum of functions which the individual could not carry
out, but as an organic whole embracing all. Competition
would be allowed, nay, encouraged, but not class warfare.
Arbitration would be compulsory. There would be a
dictatorship set up, but one joined to a sort of
representative system so as to keep in touch with all parts
of the nation. (*25)
Mussolini undertook to reorganize social institutions from

top to bottom. One of his first acts was greatly to restrict the
universities, thereby barring many persons from higher
education. A large number of teachers were discharged; the
priest returned to his own. This phobia against higher
education is a marked characteristic of fascism. The fact is,
fascism cannot look science in the face; it can depend only
upon pure force and terror for its control. Just as it cannot
tolerate questioning and discussion, so can it not suffer a
free academic atmosphere.
The reorganization of the government resulted in the

dismissal of eighty thousand old employees. The purging of
the State apparatus was a thorough one, and extended to
the pettiest local administrations, bringing them under the
complete control of the central authorities. This did not
mean, however, that the bureaucracy of the State had
decreased; on the contrary, the number of State pensioners
was remarkably augmented as the State assumed enlarged
functions. Needless to say, of course, the police, gendarmie,
the army and navy were also entirely remodeled.
The fascist theory put an end to the check-and-balance

system of liberalism. The Executive arm was made all
893
important; it alone was responsible for the administration
of laws. The Prime Minister no longer was responsible to
parliament, nor did he require its consent for his acts. Such
a change was absolutely vital to the politics of capitalism in
an age of crisis and civil war. The State must be free to act
rapidly and suddenly, responsible to no other force. Only in
this way can the violent and extremely variable political
fluctuations be met with safety. The present is not a period
of talk but one of action, in which the chief enemy is, above
all, within the gates.
Perhaps the most important innovation in politics instituted

by fascism in Italy was the direct incorporation of the
political party into the State apparatus. On the surface,
fascist dictatorship looks like the dictatorship of one man,
the leader, il duce, der fuehrer. This is far from being the case.
The idealization of the one-man hero is simply to centralize
and unify all striking forces to the maximum height. In
reality, fascism brings out the fact in all its stark nakedness
that the true commanding sovereign within the State is the
Party, and that the sovereign outside the State is the Class.
In the case of Italy, it is the Fascist Grand Council, that is,
the Executive Committee of the political party, which
controls the fascists in parliament and has decisive
authority in the making of laws. It also determines what
candidates appear before the electors at election time. No
other political parties can exist. Thus, the fascists control
not only the executive but the legislative arm of the
government, and fuse both together.
On the surface, it may appear that the fascist dictatorship is

independent of all classes, although it operates for the
benefit of one, the capitalist. This independence is a myth.
The Fascist Party is made up of elements of the small
property holders. Its leaders are in close touch with those of
894
big business and act as its agents. Moreover, the Fascist
Party does not rule without the mechanism of democracy. It
permits the proper persons, that is, those in harmony with
the interests of capital and of private property, to vote, and
by the utilization of this electoral paraphernalia, fascism
makes it plain that it is not the master over classes but the
servant of the general will of capital. Vicariously, through
the Party, the Class dictates its will. Fascism is an open
dictatorship of the capitalist class that strips aside the
masks extant under democracy. From all this it is clear that
fascism is not a return to monarchical despotism, but a
reformation of capitalist society utilizing most modern
means.
In these political changes, Mussolini was deliberately

imitating the advances which had been made in political
theory by the Bolsheviks in establishing the Dictatorship of
the Proletariat. A similar basic mechanism had permitted
the Russian communists to survive their difficulties, namely,
complete centralization of government, the fusion of the
legislative and executive branches without division of
powers, the incorporation of the Party itself into the State
directly, the Party intimately and closely related to the
Class to give the Party nourishment and foundation. The
weapons which the proletariat had used so successfully in
1918-1923 were used by fascism for the benefit of the old
order.
Fascism early recognized that the paramount factor in

society was the class struggle engendered by the relations
existing in the production of wealth. The old territorial
divisions of government and representation had become
inadequate. Materialists had never ceased to point out that
those who controlled the economic power controlled the
political. The utopian dreams of Saint-Simon had
895
emphasized the possibilities of utilizing these principles in
a reactionary direction; his idea was to give complete
political power to the captains of industry. The guild
socialists, too, had talked of representation by occupation
rather than territorially.
The fascists determined to take the first steps in that

direction; they began to organize the population on the
corporative basis under the control of a Grand Economic
Council connected with the central administration of the
State. Thus, in Italy, there have existed two organs of
government, the political parliament and the Council of
Corporations. Formally, parliament had the general
decisive voice, but as Fascism stabilized its hold, gradually
the corporations have been given more power and brought
closer to the general workings of the State, so that today
Italy seems on the verge of abolishing the political
parliament entirely and of substituting for it the corporative
mechanism.
From its earliest days, fascism had attempted to link itself

up with the working class and to organize separate unions
affiliated to its policy. After its complete victory in the State,
it was able to tackle this task seriously on a national scale.
Fascist unions were to be recognized as soon as 10 per cent
of the workers in the factory signified their willingness to
join; they alone then would be entitled to make labor
contracts with the employer. This 10 per cent was easy to
win, since included in the number were foremen,
technicians, and other relatively highly paid elements upon
whom the employer could always rely. The Fascist union,
therefore, was no better than a company union. Despite its
compulsory character, the decisions of the union regarding
wages and hours were held binding for all, even for the 90
per cent.
896
With a heavy hand was laid down the principle: "Every
man in his place and a place for every man." In Italy, the
first part of this policy had to be stressed; in Germany,
where fascism would arrive in a period of unemployment,
the second part would rise in importance. All strikes and
lockouts were now forbidden. All contracts of the workers
with the employers had the sanction of the State; the
violation of this private agreement became a criminal
offense. Special labor courts were set up to compel
obedience to the State's decisions in all disputes that came
before it.
In order to create uniform conditions throughout Italy, the

workers were organized into local unions on an industrial
basis, which in turn were organized into national
federations. The various federations were tied together into
six main confederations. The employers, too, formed their
industrial confederations, and both sides then came
together in a Council of Corporations, each industry having
its own separate corporate agreements and problems. The
National Council, organized in 1930, controls all
corporations. This Council is heavily weighted with
numerous State functionaries and is headed by the Ministry
of Corporations, one of the main departments of the central
authority.
The wisdom of the Fascisti in organizing the workers on an

industrial basis might well be questioned, since this action
would tend to bring together the workers. But actually, no
other choice was available. The fascists could not organize
craft divisions for the simple reason that they needed the
higher paid men to spy on the others and thus insure the
most perfect control. In the nineteenth century, craft
divisions had been encouraged by the employers because
the unskilled could not act of their own accord, and it was
897
essential to divide the workers. In the twentieth century,
when the unskilled workers had demonstrated their ability
to organize themselves in revolutionary mass formations, it
was absolutely imperative to dilute their ranks with higher
paid elements who would refuse to travel in a
revolutionary direction and who would report everything
to the controlling agency in sufficient time to help break up
the solidarity of the workers from within. These bribed
elements functioned as stool pigeons for the capitalist class.
In building up his corporations, Mussolini adopted the

theory that labor in all its manifestations, whether technical
or manual, was a social duty and the basis of the State.
However, the capitalist producer was also a laborer; he, too,
had his rights, which were to be preserved. Although the
capitalist formed a small minority, he was to be permitted
far more influence than the workers.
In line with these views, thirteen confederations were

formed, six of employers and six of workers; the thirteenth
was made up of the liberal professions and arts. The
purpose of the Council of Confederations was to examine
and to work out the interests of national economy, and to
secure permanent collaboration between workers and
employers. In short, it was a mechanism for the increased
nationalization of capital and compulsory subjugation of
labor. The so-called "Charter of Labor," for example, makes
it a duty for the trade association of employers to increase
business, to improve the quality of production, and to
reduce costs in every way possible. If any particular
business man does not conform to these provisions, then
his private initiative may be declared insufficient and the
State may intervene directly in his business, in the form of
supervision, promotion, or direct management. The results
are easily foreseen: "In no country was it so easy as in Italy
898
to obtain the consent of employees to a reduction of wages,
in accordance with the fall of prices and with the depressed
state of industries." (*26)
It is interesting to notice the distribution of power between

labor and capital as shown in the workings of the Council
of Corporations. These corporations have the duty of
submitting to parliament the candidates to be elected. Each
confederation nominates twice the number of candidates
allotted to it and submits the list to the Fascist Grand
Council, which reduces it to the proper number and
presents the whole list as a unit to the electorate for
approval. Each confederation, whether of employers or
workers, is given the same number of votes, the relatively
small number of employers nominating the same number
as the many millions of workers.
In reality, the cards are stacked against the wage-worker in

a multitude of ways. For example, 20 per cent of the list is
allotted to the thirteenth confederation made up of
professional men and artists who are entirely removed
from the working class and intimately connected with the
employers. Thus, already the wealthy control 60 per cent
and labor only 40 per cent. But within the ranks of the
workers still further divisions are made: 3 per cent is given
to employees in banks and insurance offices; 12 per cent
goes to agricultural syndicates; 6 per cent is assigned to
commercial employees. Thus, only 10 per cent is left to
industry, 5 per cent to seamen and airmen, 4 per cent to
land transport and internal navigation workers. The most
the industrial proletariat can control, therefore, is a weight
representing 19 per cent or 20 per cent of the whole.
But even this percentage is entirely fictitious, first, because

the fascist unions are completely dominated by the
management of the factories; second, because the electoral
899
list is submitted not by local bodies, wherein the workers
could have some influence, but only through the district
bodies where the fascists are in complete control; and third,
because even this list contains twice the names required,
permitting the Fascist Grand Council to eliminate half the
number, especially to remove anyone who might be
suspected of the slightest deviation from fascist tendencies.
So far as representing the will of the workers is concerned,
fascist "democracy" is an exceedingly refined mechanism to
prevent this from ever appearing.
It must be emphasized, too, at this point, what power is

vested in the bureaucracy of the fascist unions to discipline
the rank and the file. Though only 10 per cent of the
workers may belong to a fascist union, dues are collected
automatically from all the workers by the employer and
turned over to the leadership. At the same time, only those
belonging to unions can obtain certain important privileges,
such as assured annual vacation, or the right to be hired, or
the prevention of dismissal by an employer at his whim, the
right to appear in court, to press claims of wages and
working conditions, certain recreational, sport,
hospitalization, and other privileges, etc. Finally, anyone
found disloyal to the State can be dismissed from the
corporations and black-listed everywhere.
Should the parliamentary system give way completely to a

government wherein only corporations would represent
directly the nation as a whole, then the fascist system
would be an inverted replica of the soviet form of
government established by the communists, in Italy the
entire machinery being in favor of the capitalist.
900
The difficulties that Mussolini has faced in establishing this
program have been considerable and have been due not so
much to any opposition on the part of Big Business as to the
fact that Big Business in Italy was poorly developed, since
the production of Italy was mostly in the hands of petty
concerns. For this reason, Italian fascism always has
stressed the value of individual private initiative in the field
of production as the most useful and efficient instrument
for furthering the interests of the nation. The corporations
of fascism were not to annihilate individual competition,
but were merely to channelize competition in a form that
would be safe for the authority of capital as a whole. Thus
Italian Fascism could aim only at putting all
individuals, qua producers, in the position of choosing
freely their own economic policy, and starts from the
principle that everyone's property shall enjoy ample
guarantees. On the other hand, the right of property has
limitations in the Fascist Regime when it conflicts with the
interests of the national community, recognized and
impersonated by the State. Economic freedom of enterprise
also is subordinated to restrictions of various kinds,
whenever it interferes with the public interest....
"The State does not assume the place of the organizer of an

enterprise, nor take from him the control nor the possibility
of directing his own undertaking in the manner he deems
best, but proposes to place the individual in the best
conditions for organizing that part of production which
depends on himself." (*27)
Prior at least to 1930, cartels and trusts were not

encouraged directly, and the corporative State did not
emphasize a planned economic system. True, that such
ideas of planned economy gradually have been penetrating
Italian fascism, but it should be remembered that, after all,
901
the Italian has been a pioneer in the working out of the
fascist program and practice, and he has been forced to
work in a country relatively agrarian and backward in
technique. The co-operative, the association, the joint stock
company, the mutual aid group, these have been stressed in
Italy rather than the trust and monopoly of imperialist
business.
What has unified economy in Italy has been not so much

the huge industrial trust as the interests of international
finance capital. Finance capital represented by the United
States reduced the war debt of Italy 85 per cent to bolster up
the rule of Mussolini and to prevent his downfall.
International finance capital permitted the restabilization of
the lira in 1925 and helped Mussolini to overcome the
political difficulties during the Matteoti affair. Italian
Fascism owes its success to its intimate connection with
finance capital.
In connection with the amount of lee-way accorded private

initiative, it is to be noted, too, that both workers and
employers theoretically are organized separately, that the
contracts between them are of their own making. The
government does not establish directly what the wages and
hours of work must be, although it announces its power to
do so in theory, and in practice generally interferes in one
direction or another. In this form, the class struggle is still
recognized in Italy, but it has become a class struggle
appearing in the sphere of distribution rather than of
production, the fight taking place as to what share of the
total wealth should go to each category of "labor." Once the
contract is formed, however, the State throws its entire
weight to enforce it.
Because of the widespread prevalence of petty industry in

city and country, the complete functional mobilization of all
902
sections of the population, so as to permit the corporations
to be superior to territorial parliamentary representation, is
exceedingly difficult to attain. Even in 1932, while there
existed, according to a previous census, 623,640 industrial
undertakings in connection with which about three and
one-half million workers were employed, only about one
hundred and eighteen thousand firms, employing only a
little over two million workers, were represented in the
corporations. Thus the numbers controlled by the
confederations equaled only one-fifth of the active concerns,
employing only one-third of the total number of workers.
The mobilization of the individual peasants on the
countryside has been an even more difficult task. Here,
then, is the reason why fascism does not deny the theory of
individualism in consumption while it decries such a
theory in production. Italian fascism must cater to the
individualist propensities of the small owners.
Since its corporative functional control is incomplete,

fascism has made it its business to permeate all other forms
of social life. It must see to it that the people are controlled
not only at the point of production but in their family life,
leisure, and recreation. It has, therefore, organized the
population from children up. Here, too, it imitates the
Russian Bolshevik system. The very young children are
organized into the Balilla, the older children into the Piccole
Italiane, the adolescent youth into the Avanguardia and
the Giovanni Italiane. There is also the national militia and
the Fascist Party. (*28)
In line with this system, the State has organized a national

recreational service called Dopolavoro wherein fascist
propaganda is presented to the population in the form of
education, sports, games, etc. The institutions
of Dopolavoro are practically the only places wherein
903
workers can come together after work hours. The workers
pay for this service through the dues which are taken from
them by the fascist unions. To increase its control,
the Dopolavoro provides for its members meeting rooms, the
use of stadiums, special railroad fares, better steamship
rates, cheap theater tickets, tax free food
in Dopolovoro restaurants, special libraries, reading rooms,
lectures and instruction in athletics, etc. This, too, has
induced close to two million members to register under it.
(*29)
Similarly national institutes have been formed to handle

problems of maternity and child welfare. These institutes
also serve the purpose of increasing the birthrate through
protecting childbearing. To stimulate birth, the State has
undertaken a veritable campaign. Bachelors are taxed; the
legal age of marriage is reduced; honeymooners are entitled
to cheaper railroad fares; mass marriages are encouraged;
special food doles are given to those who acknowledge
illegitimate children; special prizes are donated to mothers;
bonuses and lower tax rates encourage those who raise
large families. The birth rate, however, still goes down. In
1923 it was 29.23 per thousand; in 1933 it had shrunk to 23.5
per thousand.
Of course, the chief reason for fascism's interest in

maternity and child welfare, as for its interest in sports, is
the drive for a maximum military force. The youth are fed
the rawest kind of chauvinistic propaganda and are
mobilized in military formations from their earliest years.
Before the Ethiopian War, the standing army of Italy
numbered close to three hundred thousand, with a reserve
of about two and one-half million more. Immense
improvements have taken place in the navy and in the air
force. In 1932-33, Italy spent seven and one-half billion lire
904
on her air force alone, having now eighty-one airports and
eighty-six flying fields, all of which are fully equipped. The
situation has become much intensified since the Ethiopian
War. Gradually the whole population is being put in arms
in preparation for the imminent world conflict.
As the birth rate shrinks, the fascists pay increasing

attention to existing youth. The fascist seizure of power is
hailed as a revolution of youth. The youth are idealized as a
force capable of breaking away from the old ideas of class
struggle and of instituting the new ideals fascism. It has
been decreed that there shall be no admissions into the
Fascist Party except youth of eighteen. Thus, on the surface,
capitalism appears entirely rejuvenated. It is no longer a
senile and decrepit order, but one which is supposedly
enthusiastically hailed by children and young people. At
bottom, however, this is merely a case of dementia
praecox wherein the senile play perversely with the genitalia
of children.
Naturally in such a highly agricultural country as Italy, the

fascists have catered to the peasantry and have carried on
large public works for their benefit: The Pontine Marshes,
in the Province of Campagna, have been drained, a
technological achievement which all previous Italian
administrations from the time of early Rome on had failed
to do.
In order to help the peasants, the import duty on wheat was

raised 150 per cent in 1931. In this way, fascism was
determined to bar the cheaper grains of Canada, Australia,
Argentine, the United States, and Russia, and to maintain at
all costs the peasantry, the main bulk of its army, and its
dependable military force in war. The most strenuous
efforts have been made to enable Italy to feed herself. From
1928 to 1934, although two hundred and seven thousand
905
agricultural workers were shelved permanently, ninety-
nine million more bushels of wheat were produced,
representing an increase of 50 per cent. What is true of
wheat is true of other agricultural commodities, barley, oats,
corn, peas, potatoes, and sugar beets. All this has been part
of the so-called national planning of fascism.
The essence of Italian national planning has been merely to

insure a self-sufficiency in time of war. Hence the great
drive to increase both the population and the food supply.
As fascism plans not for peace but for war, in its very
planning it thereby only brings war nearer. Looking about
them to ascertain whether Italy can sustain herself in war,
the Fascisti find that they can mine only one ton of coal for
every fifteen tons that she requires in peace; that she has no
fuel oil at all; that her total iron ore production is only one-
hundredth of the Messaba Range of the United States; that
her production of sulphur has steadily decreased so that,
while she once led the world, she now produces only one-
fifth that of the United States and, were it not for the forced
labor which works the mines and the large subsidies of the
State, she would not be able to maintain even this fractional
proportion. Italy, therefore, must search for an empire that
will make available the sources of raw materials which she
demands for her world struggle. The fight for empire leads
her directly into the vortex of a new world war. Thus the
circle is completed.
As the war danger comes nearer, the fascists intervene

more directly into the intimate workings of every large
industrial concern, as, for instance, in the operation of the
chemical, the electrical, and the machine industries. These
industries have been narrowed into trusts or cartels
dominated by the State. Montecanti, for example, Italy's
largest chemical concern, employing over twenty-five
906
thousand workers and having assets of seventy-seven
million dollars, practically controls chemicals. In the metal
industry, Fiat, employing approximately thirty thousand
men, has a similar hold in steel. It is important to note that
the combined assets of Italy's ten largest corporations, while
only seven hundred and fifty million dollars, none the less
represent 9 per cent of all the corporation assets in Italy.
The key industries steadily are becoming fused with the
State.
The pretensions of fascism have been that it would, by

wiping out the old laissez faire liberalism, prevent the
irresponsibility of capitalism and institute some sort of
security and stability for all. None the less, when the
economic crisis of 1929 came, it affected the fascist regime
as seriously as it did the other profit-making countries.
National self-sufficiency found itself overwhelmed by
gigantic international forces which it could not control and
of which it was indeed a part. It would be a miracle were it
possible to except one country alone from the nexus of
international relations that have been established through
the centuries. Such miracle-dreaming has been the
philosophy of all the utopians in the past, as it has been of
the fascist theoreticians. What Italy has done has been not
to evade the crisis but systematically to misrepresent its
effects.
Foreign trade fell in Italy, as elsewhere, to exceedingly low

levels during the crisis, declining from 44.5 billion lire (*30)
in 1925 to 13.5 billion lire in 1933 or a drop of close to 70 per
cent. The drastic reduction in exports has compelled Italy
still more draconically to curtail imports, thus adversely
affecting both the levels of living of the masses and the
stability of the merchant marine. In order to bolster up the
907
merchant marine, the government has been forced to pay
over three hundred million lire annually for the past six
years as subsidies to maintain the ships on the seas. The
tourist trade which had been relied upon to redress Italy's
unfavorable balance to the extent of forty billion dollars
annually has fallen off sharply during the crisis, helping to
plunge Italy into an extremely poor financial position.
Italy's long-term debt has risen from 84.4 billion lire in 1928
to 92.7 billion lire at the end of February, 1934, while the
foreign debt, which in 1928 amounted to 1.6 billion lire,
reached by February, 1934, the staggering figure of close to
ten billion lire. Then there is the unprecedented advance in
the public debt. At the outset of fascism in 1923, the public
debt amounted to ninety-five billion lire; in 1934, with the
additions stemming from fascism, the total had leaped to
one hundred and seventy billion lire, which is close to nine
billion dollars, or about two hundred and ten dollars per
capita. Nor is this the complete balance sheet, for there
must be added the war debts, the Morgan loan of more
than sixteen and one-half billion lire, the subsidies and
subventions of the State such as to the government-
controlled merchant marine, and to the credit associations,
which by now total over ten billion lire, the two or three
billion lire indebtedness of the telegraph, telephone, and
postal service and the forty billion lire in State annuities for
work already done under contract.
Thus, even before the Ethiopian adventure, Italy was in a

hopelessly bankrupt financial condition, having relied upon
international finance capital to extricate it and to release it
from its debt obligations. The Ethiopian War, of course, has
continued the ruinous financial course of fascism. The
figures have been carefully concealed from public view, but
the country has notoriously been drained of all precious
908
metals, and there is no adequate reserve to cover the
currency.
During the depression, the national income of Italy

declined from one hundred billion lire in 1929 to less than
sixty billion. At the same time, taxes exceeded thirty-four
billion lire, or more than one-half of the income on which it
could be levied. Bankruptcies have steadily climbed
upward from a total of one thousand nine hundred in 1921
to over twenty-one thousand for 1933. Ever since 1930, the
budget has not been balanced, each year disclosing a wide
gap between expenditures and receipts, equaling
approximately three to four billion lire annually. Twenty
per cent of the budget must be devoted to charges on the
public debt. Another 20 per cent goes for military purposes.
This is the Garden of Eden which the fascists have
promised an eager world.
The workers are in a more miserable position than ever, for

even allowing for the many services that the State supplies
to the people, the level of living has sunk below pre-war,
and is probably among the lowest of all Europe. And this
has grown worse during the crisis. In 1928 it was estimated
that the average industrial wage was about 10.4 cents an
hour, the agricultural rate much lower, while women and
children averaged from five to nine cents. By 1933 this had
fallen to nine cents per hour as the average industrial wage,
a little over six cents as the agricultural wage, with three
and one-half cents for women in agriculture. These wages
prevailed in a country that had raised its tariff on wheat,
enormously increasing the cost of living for the workers.
(*31)
These unbelievably low nominal wages do not reflect the

real wages which the Italian worker actually receives, for
not only are these wages average and conceal the wages of
909
the mass of workers' but they do not take into consideration
the numerous indirect taxes which strike the worker at
every turn. It has been estimated that almost one-half of the
total government revenue of eighteen billion lire comes
from these indirect levies upon everything on which the
worker can be forced to bear the lion's share of the burden,
such as taxes on sales, salt, tobacco, slaughter of animals,
matches, etc. The income tax of the State cuts sharply into
the lower brackets, affecting farm incomes as low as 534 lire,
or twenty-seven dollars. The highest categories have to pay
merely 25 per cent income tax. Besides these taxes, there are
the tributes in dues which the workers have to pay to the
fascist unions, 82 per cent of this going to the maintenance
of the apparatus and only 17 per cent admittedly taking
care of educational and vocational training.
As for the great public works which Mussolini has

advertised, it has been said that "Its record of public service,
particularly in the smaller towns and in the suburbs of the
cities --- public service, as represented not only by utilities,
but by such things as hospitals, sanatoria and schools --- is
poorer than that of any other European country in the same
political category, and is certainly poorer than that of pre-
fascist Italy." (*32) Thus the entire cost of lethal fascism falls
upon the masses who are to work and fight for the honor of
Mussolini.
Mussolini has not been able to stop the torrent of

unemployment let loose by the world crisis. The fascist
figures, notoriously deceptive, admit one million registered
unemployed. The truer estimate no doubt would be closer
to three million, although a part of this is covered by the
fact that the agricultural laborers, thrown out of work, have
been driven into attempts to eke out a living on small farms
or have returned to their folks on the land.
910
The Ethiopian adventure of Mussolini has given the fascists
a fine opportunity to rid themselves of their surplus
population, either by shipping the unemployed to Africa to
be killed off by bullets or disease, or to remain there for
years to "pacify" the country, or by mobilizing them in
concentration camps and calling them to the colors in
preparation for the immediate warlike struggles ahead.
Under such circumstances, the boastful statements of

fascism are completely empty. None of the basic problems
have been solved. The lid has only been clamped down
tighter for the moment, making more violent the inevitable
explosion of the compressed forces. Italian fascism has
endured so long only because it came into existence at the
very beginning of the partial stabilization of capital, when
the workers were beginning their long retreat and could not
aid. It is to be seen how well fascism will be able to stand
the strain of the new turbulent epoch that awaits it in the
near future.
Footnotes
1. See, C. M. Cresswell: Keystone of Fascism, p. 34.
2. See, R. P. Dutt: Fascism and Social Revolution, p. 94. (1934

edition.) See, also, Bonomi: From Socialism to Fascism, p. 36.
3. See, F. Pitigliani: The Italian Corporative State, p. 258.
4. See, G. Salvemini; The Fascist Dictatorship, I, 41.
5. F. Nitti: Bolshevism, Fascism and Democracy, p. 77.
6. ". . . in the great river of Fascism one can trace currents

which had their source in Sorel, Pegly, Lagardelle......" (B.
Mussolini: Fascism, p. 16 [Rome, 1935].)
911
7. See, I. S. Munro: Through Fascism to World Power, p. 120.
8. E. A. Mowrer: Immortal Italy, p. 319.
9. J. Mazzini: An Essay on the Duties of Man, p. 91.
10. Mazzini, The same, p. 120.
11. See, J. Mazzini: The War and the Commune. (1871.)
12. Mazzini had intimate contact with Carlyle who,

however, did not agree with Mazzini',s violent practical
actions.
13. Regarding James, Compare J. S. Barnes: Universal

Aspects of Fascism, pp. 126-128.
14. G. Sorel: Reflections on Violence, p. 91.
15. Compare, G. Sorel: The same, p. 47.
16. Compare, G. Sorel: The same, p. 57.
17. R. P. Dutt: Fascism and Social Revolution, p. 100, citing as

authority Popolo d’Italia, April 6, 1930.
18. E. A. Mowrer: Immortal Italy, pp. 361, 362.
19. The same, p. 362.
20. R. P. Dutt: work cited, p. 99.
21. M. T. Florinsky: Fascism and National Socialism, pp. 12-13.
22. M. T. Florinski, The same, p. 18.
23. See B. Mussolini: Fascism, pp. II, 40.
24. Quoted in H. W. Schneider: Making the Fascist State, p.

371.
912
25. See, J. S. Barnes: Fascism.
26. P. Einzig: The Economic Foundations of Fascism, p. 31.
27. F. Pitigliani: The Italian Corporative State, pp. 18-19.
28. A. Turati, in his book, A Revolution and Its Leader, pp.

xviii-xix (1930), gives the following figures: Balilla 781,000;
Piccole Italiane 366,000; Avanguardia 325,000; Giovanni
Italiane 66,000; national militia 300,000; Fascists 1,027,000
(88,000 women); total 2,865,000.
29. None the less, the Italian illiteracy rate is still very high.
30. The lira as stabilized after the war was considered at

about the same level as the franc, or about 5 cents.
31. For the wage scale see "Fascism Fails Italy" by Hugh
Quigley, Chief Statistical Officer of the, Central Electricity
Board of Great Britain, in Current History, June 1934. The
figures are from official fascist sources.
32. Quigley, work cited.
XXIX. GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM
SINCE the era of imperialism, the keystone of the arch of

capitalist Europe has been Germany. The most brilliant
example of European prosperity was the period when the
Kaiser reigned. So much was Germany the heart of Europe
that, indeed, the pan-Germanists conceived their destiny as
pre-eminently one of organizing Europe under its control.
The desperate plight of Germany after the war amply
testifies to the ruin of the political stability of Europe.
913
After the war, as before, Germany has proven itself the
decisive country of Europe and, emerging defeated and
despoiled, was one of those weak links in the European
capitalist chain that threatened to break and plunge the
whole world into communism. Had Germany turned Soviet
in 1918 a new World War would have been fought on the
issue of world soviets and workers' rule. Bolshevism,
however, did not prevail. In Germany, the Workers'
Councils could not overthrow at the critical moment the
Right Wing and Centrist groups, and the revolutionary
elements went down to defeat.
No country was objectively more ripe for socialism than

Germany after the war. In no country were State and trust
capital so highly integrated. No country was so heavily
saddled with foreign debts and reparations. In no
industrialist country had the income and standards of
living of the masses fallen so far below the pre-war
standards, nor had their savings and reserves been so
entirely depleted by inflation and other measures as in
Germany.
Economically as well as politically, Germany went through

three main post-war phases. The first period was one of
chaos and inflation, from 1918 to 1925. Politically, this was
marked by the overthrow of the old ruling class and the
attempt on the part of capital to check the advance of the
militant workers by giving power to the Socialist
bureaucracy. Economically, it meant a terrific
impoverishment of the whole population and the
destruction of the savings of the entire middle class. From
the point of view of the bourgeoisie, however, it meant a
great growth in the trustification and cartel movements
which had been spreading in Germany even before the War,
914
which had been immensely spurred on by the hostilities,
and which now reached their culmination point. (*1)
The cartels established in Germany had been of many kinds,

including those establishing price fixing, uniform trade
conditions, quotas of production, apportionments of
territories, standardizing of products, etc. Prior to the War,
Germany had generally stopped at the cartel and had not
advanced to the trust form, the reason being that the
manufacturers were still specializing in imitating the goods
of other countries, perfecting the inventions produced
elsewhere and winning markets through better sales
methods rather than through superior production. During
the War, a complete centralization of all industry had been
established by the State. The post-war chaos and inflation
enabled big business to buy up practically anything cheap,
and to erect at once a tremendous new trust movement
based on speculation. This was best illustrated in the great
Stinnes Konzern and other vertical combinations. (*2)
The basic cause for this unprecedented rise of vertical

trustification was not only the currency inflation but the
loss of territory under the Versailles Treaty, by which the
Reich lost 26 per cent of its coal and 74 per cent of its iron
ore. This meant that German business had to utilize far
more efficiently than ever before the greatly decreased
resources at its disposal. The result was an immense
development of scientific research. "Scientific research has
increased in importance with the slowing down of the rate
of technical progress, the growing complexity and increase
in the scale of manufacturing and distributing processes,
and the gradual exhaustion of the better raw material
resources. It holds the key to the technical, if not to the
entire economic development of the future. In Germany the
loss of territory and resources through the Treaty of
915
Versailles, the rapid exhaustion of certain important
mineral deposits, population increase, and growth in the
national standard of living, have combined to emphasize
the importance of science in industry." (*3)
In international politics, the victorious Versailles powers

did their best to hack the German regime to pieces. The
German State itself was threatened with dissolution. Its
sovereignty was split up in the hands of a Rhineland
Commission, a Reparations Commission, an Ambassadors'
Conference in Paris, and a League of Nations. The German
government was bound not to violate any of the 428
paragraphs of the Treaty of Peace. The Saar, the Ruhr,
Malmy, Eupen, Holstein, parts of Prussia, Silesia, and the
Tyrol were torn away from the main body. Prussia was split
into two; the Ruhr was made into a field of influence for
France; Alsace and Lorraine were taken outright. The
rolling stock was seized and taken away. The important
coal centers and iron resources were grabbed by the victors.
The ally of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was
broken into bits and each fragment utilized as a spear
against the side of Germany. The German fleet was sunk,
the merchant marine confiscated, the foreign credits
canceled; a severe blockade encircled Germany like a noose.
Immediately upon the termination of the war, the German

working class, with one mighty heave, shook off the hold of
the aristocracy and proclaimed the Republic. According to
precedent, the aristocracy should have given way to the
rule of liberal big business, but this was not to be the fate of
Germany. The industrialists were entirely too unfit and too
untested to become the rulers. Under the Kaiser they had
been restricted to governmental posts of secondary
importance; by no means did they have the standing and
916
prestige that their fellow exploiters had secured in Western
Europe.
The tragedy of the German bourgeoisie was that it had

never held political power directly in its hands. Before the
war, it had refused to fight the Kaiser, fearing the social
revolution. When the Kaiser had fled, all that it could do
was allow the power to slip through its fingers into the
hands of its agents, the socialists, who, however, held it
firmly to the end and saved the day for the capitalist
cowards.
Wealthy property could not take over the German

government after the war, neither could the old petty
bourgeoisie which already, in 1848, had proven its
bankruptcy, and, in the twentieth century, had followed the
parties either of imperialism or of socialism. The elements
that did take advantage of the situation were the skilled
sections of the working class led by the newer forces of the
petty bourgeoisie, the professional employee, white-collar
and factory foremen elements. Although a host of workers
flocked into the unions --- the total number of unionists in
Germany at one time rose to almost fourteen million and
maintained an average of over eight million ---they could
not break the hold of this bureaucracy which secretly
worked night and day in intimate relations with the Junkers
to crush the revolutionary movement.
The German working class was incapable of organizing a

powerful communist movement able to establish the rule of
the workers. The favored position of German imperialism
before the war had weakened the revolutionary spirit of the
worker, making him docile and subservient to orders. His
very strength was his weakness, that is, his ability to
organize and to act in concert resulted in a lack of initiative
and an inability to break organizational discipline at the
917
proper time. The slogans "Ordnung und Diziplin" had
penetrated into the very fibre of the German people.
The German people suffered intensely after the war and

were rapidly moving towards a communist position, but
the strict blockade around Germany, the threat of
intervention by the victorious powers should Germany go
Red, the weakness of Russian communism, and the
pressure of United States capital, proved, in the long run,
heavy enough to swing the scales the other way. When the
opportunity came again, in 1923, in the hectic period of
inflation, at a time when a newspaper cost eighty billion
marks, (*4) and the most widespread misery and ruin
prevailed, the communists were not able to establish
themselves in power and showed that they remained
essentially merely Centrists, half-way revolutionists.
The construction of a revolutionary Communist Party in

Germany has proved a difficult task which the German
workers, overwhelmed by superior forces, had not
sufficient time to accomplish immediately after the war.
Thus the German working class, the most powerful and
important of all Europe, and the most strongly organized,
holding the majority of the decisive industrial districts in
their hand, having a high political level, disciplined
through periods of war and revolution, fourteen million of
them supporting the communist and socialist position,
were yet unable to take power.
The second period of German post-war history ranged

approximately from 1925 to 1930. It was marked politically
by the coalition government, the mutual collaboration
between the reformist socialists and the Liberals and
Centrists under the Weimar Republic, at whose head was
Hindenburg. The communist revolutionary wave now
definitely had been broken, and Germany had become a
918
vast market for foreign capital, absorbing in this period
over sixteen billion reichmarks from the United States alone,
completely rehabilitating its factories and industrial
machinery, and emerging in more gigantic proportions
than ever. At this stage the Versailles Treaty was modified
by the Dawes and Young plans, thus reducing the
unspeakable total of reparations Germany was to pay
under the original Versailles Treaty to the merely
staggering sum of over thirty-five billion marks. To secure
further concessions, Germany also flirted with Russia and
signed a treaty of friendly relations.
With the end of inflation, the vertical combinations

represented by Stinnes broke down and collapsed. New
cartels and a far stronger trustified movement sprung up,
however, this time closely controlled by the government
itself. The cartels now entered into a struggle with the co-
operatives, who demanded a social regulation of the cartel
whereby the co-operative could maintain its existence. In
industry as in trade, a tremendous concentration of capital
occurred, leading to the direct entrance of the State into
many industries. A large increase of public utilities took
place, a trustification of important industries, a
consolidation of capital in trade, both through the chain
store and department store systems on the one hand, and
the large co-operative movement on the other.
The old individualist middle class was being rapidly driven

out from economic life on every side. At the same time, it
no longer could find a place in the proletariat, owing to the
vast number of unemployed. Hence the hysteria and
desperation of this class. No wonder Hitler, following the
old Austrian Christian socialist Lueger, decided to recruit
his party from these elements. "Lueger based his new party
first of all on the middle class which was threatened with
919
extinction, and thus secured a class of adherents extremely
hard to shake, ready both for great sacrifices and capable of
stubborn fighting." (*5)
The movement for the concentration and centralization of

capital was reinforced in Germany by traditional factors as
well as by the pressing problems that the country had to
face. First of all was the fact that laissez faire economic
habits had never flourished in Germany, the mercantilism
of the sixteenth century prevailing until the nineteenth and
then being superseded by an imperialism that choked all
Liberal development. The State constantly intervened in
industry, helping it as much as possible, but making it
secondary to the interest of the State.
Germany’s general position in Central Europe also induced

an apotheosis of the State, since she arose to nationhood
surrounded by a steel ring of mighty world powers. Further,
the world was already on the road to imperialism when
Germany became industrialized, and as imperialism means
essentially control by monopoly capital headed by finance,
coupled with the seizure of colonies, naturally the
industrialization of Germany had to leap immediately from
the petty industry of the sixteenth century to the most
modern trust formations possible to enable her to meet the
world of competition. These modern trusts and cartels were
not hampered by the prejudices of nineteenth century
technique and management; they were not bothered by
laissez faire presuppositions which would prevent them
from integrating their concerns behind the leadership of the
centralizing general staff of the State. Thus the Germans
alone were adequately prepared for the World War.
After 1918, the socialists who took control held the belief
that socialism would come through the rise of State
capitalism. Far from disturbing big business, they did their
920
best to aid the development of scientific laboratories and
research groups already formed by the trusts. They placed
no obstacles whatsoever to the great concentration of
capital that followed the peace. Under Hindenburg, the
socialists idealized America and posed the question of Ford
versus Marx, they themselves choosing Ford and trying to
adapt their trade union movement to the American
Federation of Labor. In general social life as well as in
economics there was an attempt to Americanize Germany;
American jazz, movies, chewing gum, and ice cream
became widespread fads.
"Added to these trends in Germany are the peculiarities of

her problem of national resources. Practically without
petroleum, with her lignite deposits rapidly vanishing, and
with but scanty resources in ferrous and non-ferrous metals,
the whole problem of conservation has become a matter of
the greatest public concern." (*6) Deprived of natural
resources by the war, the industries turned to ersatz
production and synthetic combinations to replace the lack
of natural resources. Lacking oil, Germany created
synthetic oil from the cracking of coal. The coal industry,
therefore, was transformed into a chemical one, which in
turn became a power industry erected upon the bony
structure of steel and based on electrical energy. In all this,
there was no intimation of any desire to return to a freely
competitive economic system, nor did the possibility of
such a return any longer exist.
With increased rationalization, the individual sank

completely into the group. The whole movement, in both its
technological and organizational aspects, was based on co-
operative effort and pooled labor. And to this, the socialists
added their great strength. Nowhere among the German
workers was there talk of sabotage or destruction of
921
property, as there might be in Italy, France, the United
States, or elsewhere. The worker went hand in hand with
the trustification process and the absorption of the
individual into the organization. The individual became
attached to the union, association or combine, and State
enterprise, whether he was a capitalist or a worker.
Under socialist influence, the middle period of the German

post-war republic was also marked by the breaking down
of the old traditional family and institutionalized religion.
Women became more independent, the marriage age was
postponed, the church lost its influence, the Passion Plays
of Oberammergau deteriorated to mere pageants designed
to lure the tourist trade to Germany.
The third stage of German post-war history coincided with

the ushering in of the world crisis, which hit Germany with
frightful force. As in the United States, production fell
approximately 50 per cent below 1929 levels, and the
number of registered unemployed equaled six million,
signifying perhaps ten to twelve million actually
unemployed. The German capitalist system was faced
either with complete bankruptcy or with revolution, unless
it could re-establish its position as an imperialist power.
The sole way out for the German bourgeoisie was the way
of fascism.
Above all, the German system had to stem the enormous

financial drain on its resources arising from reparations
payments, charges on private debts, and social insurance.
Under the Dawes and Young plans, Germany had already
paid out twelve billion marks. This she could do only so
long as she could sell her goods in foreign markets and was
able to receive loans from America. But in return for her
magnanimous aid, America insisted upon mortgaging
922
German railroads and public utilities, and placing its hands
upon the very vitals of the nation.
During the crisis, Germany was unable to sell its goods and
could pay nothing. Thus a breach was made in the
Versailles Treaty by "act of God," that is, by the havoc of the
crisis, rather than by the military might of Germany. This
was now the opportune moment for German capitalism to
break the entire Versailles Treaty to pieces. Thus, German
big business had to turn its face away from pacific means of
persuasion to the violent ferocity of the fascist attack to
destroy the Versailles Treaty. Once the Versailles Treaty
was broken, the question of the payment of private debts
could be handled through diplomatic channels and
arranged in accordance with the situation.
Hand in hand with this went the necessity of capital to free

itself from the enormous cost of the social insurance which
had been foisted upon it by the socialists. The German
system no longer could tolerate reforms if it were to resume
its former position. Payment of unemployment insurance to
six million workers and their dependents in Germany was
an intolerable act destined to deprive capital of its virility in
international competition, and could result only in a
stagnation of the sort that could be seen in its sister capital
city, Vienna, where the city's chief achievements were co-
operative bedrooms, coffee drunk with whipped cream,
museums and monuments carefully dusted, soft music
played in slow tempo, and the psychopathology of Freud.
The crisis threw into bankruptcy some of the larger

concerns of Germany, such as the Wollkammerai in textiles,
the great Dresdener Bank, etc. As it rushed to save such
concerns, buying heavily of their stocks and taking direct
control, the German government itself was threatened with
complete bankruptcy. This in turn compelled the most
923
powerful nations of the world, such as England and
America, to go off the gold standard and to declare a
moratorium of payments of debts from Germany. Such was
the world division of labor that, in spite of themselves, the
countries that most hated Germany were forced to save it.
On the other hand, with the advent of the crisis, the

Socialist Party steadily lost ground to the communists, as
the masses moved to the Left. What else could be expected
in a country where the statistics demonstrated that the
suicide rate was twice that of the United States and higher
than that of any other country, and where a study of the
yearly income of the people showed that less than 3 per
cent, or one million had over five thousand marks annual
income (equivalent to about $1,250), and that seventeen and
one-half million people earned less than one thousand five
hundred marks ($350.00) annually? As the working class
movement drifted Leftward, the German capitalists were
forced to resort to the violent methods of fascism which at
the same time offered them the opportunity of winning the
ruined middle classes which the criminal socialist and
communist bureaucracies had not been able to influence
and which were ready to support the new German
imperialism as a way out.
Thus, in the short space of fourteen years, the German

Republic burned itself out. With Hindenburg's second
election as President, the whole rotten structure gave way.
Hindenburg gracefully effaced himself in favor of Hitler.
It was after the war, in 1919, that Adolph Hitler determined

to enter politics and joined a small organization in Munich
called the German Workers Party. This was a group of men
united by their refusal to accept the betrayal of the army
924
which they felt had been stabbed in the back. There were
only twenty-eight members, of whom six were active, and
Hitler received membership card number 7.
The original program of Hitler was exceedingly vague. One

of his principal obsessions was the ignominy of the fact that
those who had gone into the army and served in the War,
who had proved their heroism and nobility, should return
home only to see cowards and weaklings counting heads in
a democratic fashion, ignoring the strong men who had
sacrificed their all at the front. He cursed the Versailles
Treaty, the high cost of living, the failure to reward the
veteran and the soldier. He was the incarnation of the
revengefulness of the embittered soldier. And there were
plenty of battered, worn-out people, impoverished and
reduced in circumstances, who could listen to Hitler, each
one of them yearning to strike out with clenched fist. They
could be led by the soldier who was accustomed to
commands and leadership.
The vague religious mysticism of Hitler and his method of

impassioned appeal found a natural outlet amid the social
wreckage of the great war whereby ruin and decay faced
the middle class, and to which class there was no future
save to rot. "Not all embittered petty bourgeois can become
a Hitler, but a bit of Hitler can be found in each one of
them." (*7) This was the element, led by former soldiers
who could not reconcile themselves to the new situation,
that composed the beginnings f National Socialism.
Hitler was prepared for his future role by his adherence to

the ideology of the Christian Socialist Party in Vienna. This
group was ardently Pan-Germanist. It believed that the
Austrian monarchy was rotten to the core and that it was
bound to collapse, first, because instead of uniting the
Germans of Europe into one empire, it had divided them
925
into two opposing monarchies; and second, because, thus
divided, the Germans in Austria were not able to control
the various subject nationalities that composed that "prison
of the people," Austro-Hungary. The Austro-Germans were
being reduced to relatively secondary place as other
nationalities steadily won concessions granted to forestall
their independence. This Austrian party, therefore, worked
hand in glove with Berlin and yearned for organic unity
between German Austria and the real Fatherland. Inspired
by this Pan-Germanism, Adolph Hitler volunteered in the
War. Yet the very reasons for his patriotism demonstrated
that German industry could no longer be contained within
national boundaries. Nationalism was choking modern
industry to death; this fact could lead Hitler only to
National Socialism.
Naturally, such an Austrian party would assume an anti-

Semitic position, since the Jews had no special interest in
Pan-Germanism, but, on the contrary, supported Franz-
Josef and held an important place in the financial and
economic life of the Empire, and even dominated large
sections of the City of Vienna itself. The Christian Socialist
Party believed it could fight the Jew by attacking Judaism,
that is, the religion of the Jew. It also attacked the Jew as a
Marxist and as a money-lender. But religious toleration had
to be practiced in such a conglomerate Empire as the
Austro-Hungarian; also, trade and money-lending were
highly respectable vocations. Furthermore, the masses of
people manifested a trend towards socialism. Thus it was
exceedingly difficult to carry on anti-Semitic attacks, and
the Party failed.
It remained for Hitler to link up the attack against the Jew

with a program of race that could also be utilized to fuse
Germany and Austria into one organic whole. Hitler set up
926
the "devil Jew" as the antithesis to the godly Germanic race,
and thus created a scape-goat for his world philosophy.
"Thus did I now believe that I must act in the sense of the
Almighty Creator: by fighting against the Jews I am doing
the Lord's work." (*8)
Even in those early days, then, Hitler had conceived as an

absolute principle the complete unification of the German
people. The loose empire of the Hapsburgs was worthless.
Parliament was nothing but a pack of rascals. It was
necessary to fight to the end against democracy and the
Jewish doctrine of Marxism which rejected the aristocratic
principle in nature, and, in place of the eternal privilege of
force and strength, set up the massed weight of dead
numbers, denied the value of individuality among men,
combated the importance of nationality and race, and
thereby deprived humanity of the whole manner of its
existence and culture. (*9) Germanic democracy was the
opposite of Jewish democracy; it was the free choice of the
leader who achieved responsibility and power and who
backed up his decision with his life. (*10)
According to Hitler, the human race was to be divided into

three categories, fighters, maintainers, and destroyers of
culture. The Aryan stock alone could be considered as
representing the first category. (*11)
Hitler also borrowed from the Christian Socialists the

distinction between speculative capital and industrial
capital. Money, stocks, bonds, bourses and exchanges, and
speculative investments of all sorts became anathema to
him, as they had been originally considered sinful to the
Catholic Church whose devout disciple Hitler was. The
cynical Mussolini knew how to use the church, the devout
Hitler knelt before it; the former knew his Machiavelli, the
latter was a victim of Metternich's police mysticism. This
927
mysticism, however, could attract the decayed middle
classes of Germany, although it could not win any workers
to Hitler's cause.
From the very beginning, Hitler understood the necessity of

reaching the masses with his propaganda. For this reason,
the group of which he was a member had called itself
a workers' party, and later, as the organization grew, had
added to this title the term "Socialist" so as to become the
National Socialist German Workers Party (N.S.D.A.P.). In
this manner he was able to appeal to sections of the lower
middle classes which above all desired an end to the
interminable horrors prevailing in political life, and
yearned for security, stability, and order. The petty
proprietors had turned first to the socialists for this; when
the socialists would not take power and the Communist
Party proved incapable of doing so, the failure of the
workingmen drove the middle class, especially the soldier
groupings, to the other side. "The fairy tales that the
National Socialists have saved Germany from Communism,
which were broadcast for foreign consumption by official
German propaganda, were not taken seriously in foreign
banking circles, where it was known that, for the past ten
years or so, there had no longer existed any Communist
danger in Germany." (*12) In proportion as the working
class lost its strength and proved incapable of establishing a
suitable rule, in that proportion did the petty bourgeoisie
become anti-working class.
It was highly significant that the fascist movement of Hitler

should have been impelled to recognize the value of using
the name "Socialist." So thoroughly had Marx's concepts
penetrated into the masses of people and, in actual fact, so
classically had the laws of capitalism worked out as the
Marxists had predicted, that the only way to raise any mass
928
support was to appear as a socialist offering a special brand.
Here is an illustration of the excellent flexibility and
demagogy that private property can display when
necessary. Before it rose to power, National Socialism had
to stress as much as possible its "socialistic" features.
Hitler offered to the middle classes a socialism that would

relieve them of the pressure of big business by pressing
down most heavily upon those still lower in the social scale.
The only way of reviving the lost social dignity of the
depraved middle class was evidently through the
destruction of workers' organizations.
By 1920 the National Socialists were able to formulate their

official program. (*13) Like the Italian fascists, they made a
fetish of the nobility of labor and launched a demagogic
attack against forms of capitalism. No longer were there to
be any idlers in Germany. Incomes not earned by work
were to be abolished. Especially speculative money-capital
was to be attacked, an end must be made to the slavery of
interest. The activities of the individual must not conflict
with the welfare of the whole, but must proceed entirely
within the frame of the community. Demands were made
for ruthless treatment of those whose activities were
injurious to the common interest, including usurers,
profiteers, and such, who were to be punished with death,
regardless of race. All trusts were to be nationalized. The
profits from wholesale trade were to be shared.
Special appeals were made to particular elements of the

middle class. For the soldier, the plank was inserted that, in
view of the enormous sacrifice of life and property
demanded by a nation in every war, personal
aggrandizement in war must be regarded as a crime against
the nation. Fascism demanded, therefore, ruthless
confiscation of all war gains. To attract the small business
929
man, there was included the principle that the creation and
maintenance of a healthy middle class was of the utmost
importance. Special attention, too, was paid to the
peasantry, and demands were made for a land reform
suitable to national requirements, for the passage of a law
confiscating, without compensation, land for communal
purposes, for the abolition of interest on land loans, and for
the prevention of all speculation in land.
As to foreign policy, the National Socialists demanded the

creation of the unity of all Germans to form a new Germany
on the principle of self- determination for every nationality,
the wiping out of the Treaty clauses that stigmatized the
Germans as being responsible for the war, the complete
equality of the German people in its dealing with other
nations, and the restoration of colonies to Germany. Finally,
they insisted that Germany be given whatever land and
territories she needed for the nourishment of her people
and for the settling of her superfluous population.
For the workers, a system of complete social insurance was

advocated and a demand made upon the employers for an
end of the latter's right recklessly and criminally to mistreat
labor. The standard of health in the nation was to be
protected. Child labor was to be abolished.
According to the Nazis, the German State itself was to

intervene in all economic affairs. None but members of the
nation could be citizens; none except those of German
blood, whatever their creed, could be members of the
nation. Thus the nation was to consist of three categories:
citizens, subjects, and foreigners. The Jew could not be a
citizen. Only Germans could be editors of the press. The old
Roman law must be overthrown entirely, so that the true
German spirit could be manifested in the codes.
930
While liberty for all religious denominations in the State
was to be secured, it would be only on condition that these
denominations were no danger to the State and did not
militate against the moral feelings of the German race. On
the question of religion and philosophy, the Party declared:
"The Party as such stands for positive Christianity but does
not bind itself in the matter of the creed to any particular
confession. It combats the Jewish materialist spirit within
and without us and is convinced that our nation can only
achieve permanent health from within on the principle, the
common interest before self."
The first activity of the Nazis was to join hands with the
reactionary nationalists under the leadership of General
Ludendorf who, in 1923, attempted to overthrow the
Republic and re-establish the old order. In command in
Munich was General Rittendorf, under whom Hitler and
his group placed their forces. With the collapse of the
putsch, Hitler was arrested in November, 1923, and
sentenced to five years in jail. While the trial was taking
place, the Nazi Party formed a bloc with the German
People's Party, and obtained thirty-two seats in 1924. Upon
his release from prison in 1925, Hitler immediately
reorganized his party and inaugurated its official paper,
the "Voelkische Beobachter." In the elections of 1928, although
the German People's Party was practically wiped out, the
Nazis were able to obtain eight hundred thousand votes
and twelve seats in the Reichstag. In 1929, they combined
with the German Nationalist Party to fight the Young Plan
by advocating a referendum of the people. The referendum
failed, although the Nazis obtained considerable support by
this measure.
The tremendous crisis of German life ushered in with 1930

afforded the National Socialists their chance. As the
931
communist forces degenerated, they proved unable to fight
the fascists, but rather played directly into their hands.
Hitler had nothing but contempt for the superlative
cowardice which the socialist and communist leaders
displayed. "One reason why it never got as far as breaking
up our meetings was indubitably the extraordinary
cowardice displayed by our opponents' leaders. At all
critical moments these despicable creatures waited outside
the halls for the result of the explosion." (*14)
The Nazis, on the other hand, employed the most radical

slogans. They never tired of demonstrating the complete
collapse of the Republic in freeing the people or in solving
the problems of Germany. They denounced the miserable
pacifism of the socialists in foreign affairs, a policy which
had made Germany a football for all the other powers. They
castigated the irresponsible criminality of the capitalist
Liberals who threw out so many from work. They raised
the slogan, "Arbeit und Brot," work and bread, insisting that
every worker had a place in society that must be respected,
and denouncing capitalist profiteering greed.
From this time, the Nazis adopted violent action, a move

made possible, first, because of the frailness of the
government and the willingness of the Hindenburg regime
to utilize the Nazis (similar to the situation in Italy whereby
the police and Royal Guards aided the Black Shirts); and
second, because the workers were hopelessly divided by
the socialist and communist misleaders in their ranks.
By now the Nazis were enthusiastically supported by the

heavy industrial elements such as the immensely wealthy
Thynnes trust. This concern subsidized the Nazi movement,
enabling it to organize its Brown Shirts on a wholesale
fashion, supplying the money for the clothes, the barracks,
the arms, the food, etc. At the same time, the government
932
mightily aided Hitler. First it forbade both the workers and
the Nazis from wearing uniforms and marching in the
street; after the socialists willingly obeyed, it revoked this
prohibition regarding the Nazis, but retained it against the
Red Front fighters of the communists. As in Italy, the
situation was carefully developed to concentrate attack
upon the communists, and to dally with the socialists until
the proper moment for their dismissal, while the
government heavily supported the fascists.
The task before the Nazis was, however, no simple one. In

spite of the enormous pressure, the workers' ranks
remained absolutely firm, hardly any breaking from either
socialists or communists. Up to the very end, these parties
received a total of fourteen million votes, coupled with a
steady drift to the Left in favor of the communists. Before
seizing power the Nazis had to accomplish the assimilation
of the royalists and the agrarian elements, organized in the
Nationalist Party under Hugenberg and in the veterans'
organization, the Stahlhelm. Hitler's second objective was
to break up the coalition between the Catholic Centrists, the
bourgeois liberals, and the socialists. The Nazis' third aim
was the consolidation of their own organizations in order to
become the largest single force in the Reich. Their fourth
task was to penetrate gradually into the government in
order to permit them to assume power without too great
upheaval.
The Nazis, now the agents of big trustified finance capital

connected with the State, easily brought about a deal with
the royalists. Certain sections of the monarchists held out
stubbornly for the return of the Kaiser or the Crown Prince,
for the restoration of the old Empire, wherein prosperity
and glory had signalized the German rule. An especially
difficult group to reconcile was the die-hard monarchists
933
composed of those who had benefitted by the federalism of
the former German Empire, that is, by the existence of a
number of petty monarchies such as those in Bavaria, and
Saxony.
Most of the royalists were content to make certain

temporary concessions. If they could retain their hold of the
officerships within the army, and if their large-scale
agrarian interests could be preserved, there was no reason
why they should not support the Nazis, particularly since
the monarchy had been unpopular and since it could not be
re-established without a violent revolution, which everyone
wanted to avoid. True, the industrialists had done nothing
to drive out the Kaiser in 1918; also true, they no longer
were willing to play a servient role in German political
affairs and in the administration of the State.
Federalism German industry could not tolerate for a

moment. If the markets of all Germany were not sufficient,
even before the war, and had compelled the industrialist to
adopt a policy of Pan-Germanism, the return to the
provincial autonomy of Bavaria, Saxony, or Hesse would be
the last straw. The Nazis were determined to centralize
completely the entire country, thus bringing about in
Germany what had been accomplished in France and what
Mussolini was achieving in Italy.
On this question, too, the struggle between the two

elements continued for some time, often coming to blows.
However, the common sense of the ruling class prevailed.
Industry was given the leadership, with important
concessions made to the wealthy landlords in the State
apparatus, and the two finally were fused together.
Hugenberg was not a candidate for President when Hitler
competed with Hindenburg in the 1932 elections.
934
The breaking up of the Weimar coalition government also
was not a difficult task. Under the blows of the world crisis,
the government was patently bankrupt, and was forced into
a series of extremely unpopular anti-working class
measures. As the Reichstag was bound to resist these
measures, the Catholic Centrist Party, supported by
Hindenburg, was forced to carry on the government by
means of emergency decrees of the Chancellor. Gradually
parliament was placed in a secondary position in relation to
the faits accomplis of the government, issued in the form of
administrative orders which constantly increased the
burdens of the crisis on the people. Under the
Chancellorship of Bruening, the methods of dictatorship
and the measures curtailing social reforms and welfare
schemes were given a prominent push forward.
The socialists unofficially took responsibility for this action,

since they maintained the coalition. Their chief fire was
directed not against Hitler but against the communists. The
organization of militants which they had formed, called the
"Iron Front," composed of republicans, trade unionists and
socialists, made no serious resistance to the attacks by either
the government or the fascists, and calmly submitted to
being disarmed and dis-uniformed. It should be
remembered that the socialists were at the head of the
government in Berlin, in Prussia, and in the most important
sections of Germany. It was the police under the socialists
who helped to beat down the communists and to disarm
the Reds, while the fascists executed their raids.
As the governmental crisis increased, particularly as the

foreign pressure of the Young Plan became unbearable and
bankruptcy was rife, the parliamentary re'gime gave way to
the temporary Bonapartist dictatorships of Von Papen and
Von Schleicher, who held power until the second election of
935
Hindenburg in 1932. The socialists refused to enter a
candidate against Hindenburg on the ground that
Hindenburg was the mainstay of the German Republic and
the hero of the people, one who would keep intact the
democracy and social reforms which had been won. No
sooner was Hindenburg re-elected, however, than he
allowed Hitler to become Chancellor. This was providential,
for already the vote had shown that the peak of Nazi
popularity had passed; it was either then or never. Once
Hitler had become Chancellor, he was able to call new
elections under his absolute control and to do in Germany
what Mussolini had done at Rome. There was no fascist
"march on Berlin," however, for the simple reason that,
owing to the action of the government and the failure of the
workers, Hitler had already become established in Berlin
before becoming Chancellor.
The elections, of course, gave an overwhelming return to

the Nazis, all the other parties of property, except the
Catholic Centre, merging with them. Only the working
class elements under the socialists and communists held
firm. To break the power of the workers, the Reichstag fire
was staged and a wholesale attack instituted against the
communists. Thousands of workers were killed, hundreds
of thousands either were forced to flee the country or were
placed in concentration camps. The fascist "revolution" was
in progress.
Nor were the socialists spared, and, when some of their

leaders like Scheidemann begged Hitler to be allowed to
retain their State pensions, Hitler mockingly reported this
act to a huge gathering of his followers, pointing out how
"these socialist swine" were interested only in maintaining
their private pensions, so much so that they were willing to
beg the hangman of the socialists to give them their money.
936
The Socialist Party was shattered as a counter-revolutionary
force, as it had been broken by the war as a revolutionary
one.
The victory of Nazism spelled the doom of the Versailles

Treaty and the authority of the League of Nations. All
reparations were canceled. A moratorium was placed on
the payment of interest on private debts. Instead of the
pacific liberal policy of the Second Reich, new Germany
began a vigorous policy to recover all the territory it had
lost, and to build its own system of alliances. Fascism
immediately became strong in Austria and throughout
Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans; the Saar
Basin was reincorporated into Germany; the Rhine became
re-militarized. The demand was raised for the return of that
part of Silesia seized from Prussia after the War. While
tension has increased in the Polish corridor, this has been
mitigated partly by the alliance between Poland and
Germany for war against the Soviet Union. Simultaneously
Germany has borne down on Austria to compel Anschluss.
Hand in hand with this has gone a feverish importation of

war materials, a complete re-arming of the population, and
a thorough reconstruction of the army and navy. Germany
has been transformed into an immense war camp, working
night and day for the impending conflict. The whole nation
has been mobilized as a monolithic whole in preparation
for the struggle, and has become infested with a war-like
ideology, borrowing heavily from Nietzsche, Spengler, and
the old Pan-Germanists. just as all individual problems
have become subjected to the welfare of the State, so all
State problems have become subordinated to the matter of
war. In order to prosecute this war, which is the very breath
of life of the Nazis, all measures of their program are
propagated, whether it be a theory of autarchy, a religion of
937
paganism, a hereditary land system, or a smashing of the
trade union organizations. Under the mad guidance of the
fascists, the German people are plunging to destruction.
The economic principles of the German National Socialists

revolve around the theory of autarchy, or self-rule. This
autarchy is supposed to put an end to theories of nineteenth
century competitive capital. While retaining industrial
capital, the Nazis intend to wipe out the fluctuations of the
market and of prices and to insure a stable order. As to
their methods for accomplishing this magic, the
theoreticians are extremely vague, yet enough has been said
about autarchy to enable us to analyze the scientific
character of these proposals.
In the first place, autarchy means the complete economic

self-sufficiency of the country, not in the loose Italian fascist
sense which connotes hardly more than an ability of the
country to feed itself and proposes some degree of control
over industry by the State, but in a far more comprehensive
manner. The State is to interfere intimately with the
administration of every business. Industries are to be
organized not in loose corporations but in mighty trusts,
connected with the State. That is, the State not merely is to
control industry, but actually is to consider the productive
machinery as its own property and to dominate it
completely. Capitalism thus becomes State capitalism in a
far more completed sense than ever before, and the
industrialist must consider himself as a direct officer of the
government, working according to plan.
To a certain extent the theory of autarchy makes a virtue of

necessity. During the World War and afterwards, an
extremely tight blockade was established around the
938
German State. Now, too, a blockade to some extent exists
and may become more severe. This is a fact which the Nazis
accept and use as a strong point in support of their plans.
That the fascists would be reduced to the necessity of some
such theory as autarchy was obvious when, under the force
of the crisis, the gold coverage for paper money in Germany
fell from 24 per cent to less than 2 per cent. Autarchy would
prevent this drain of gold; simultaneously it would fit in
very well with the denunciation of the international
financiers and credit sharks. Then, too, autarchy could be
used to advocate the non-payment of foreign debts, since
each nation must stand on its own feet, and the slavery of
interest must be broken.
It is hard to believe that the Nazis can take seriously their

denunciations of interest and the credit system, or that they
can imagine that large-scale industry can flourish today
except through the medium of loans and credits. Denounce
speculative capital as they will, they cannot deny that it is
only through the amassing of such speculative capital that
private industrialists can obtain their support in founding
new industries in a modern and efficient manner, or in
maintaining their old functions on a higher scale. Were each
capitalist to wait until he himself had accumulated the
money necessary before expanding his business, expansion
would be a slow and prolonged process. The centralization
of capital in the hands of bankers, brokers, speculators, and
such, is the normal method under capitalism by which
industrial production can be increased.
The Nazis pretend that finance and money have nothing to

do with industrial progress under the present system. What
the Nazis really mean is that, with the bankruptcy of
German economy, no foreign capital is flowing into
Germany. Private industry must beg the State itself for aid;
939
the State now becomes the chief financier and speculator
par excellence.
Self-sufficiency is also extremely imperative in time of war,

especially since Germany has felt that all around it there
exists a steel ring and that she must rely upon her own
internal strength. It is this reliance on the internal rather
than the external that lends weight to the introspective
mysticism of German politics and its violent race theories.
The Germans are alone; they are an Ishmael among nations.
They must stand alone and glory in their race.
The tenets of autarchy of the Germans are but the logical

result of the imperialism of the League of Nations which
Balkanized Europe and set up entirely indefeasible
independent States each of which, to maintain its existence,
was forced to erect large tariff walls. The World War broke
up the old world division of labor; the process was
continued by the Liberals of Versailles; German Fascism
completes it.
Theories of self-sufficiency affirm that the government must

make an effort to support those industries which are failing
in international competition and which otherwise would be
driven out of existence. The State, therefore, must subsidize
and support a backward technique which ordinarily would
be discarded. Thus, the program of self-sufficiency to a
considerable extent must lead to stagnation of the
productive processes. The politics of autarchy here
interferes with economic progress and in this sense
becomes reactionary.
In compensation for this, the autarchic State must make

every effort to find substitutes for the better materials
found abroad. This may lead to a great expansion of the
chemical and other industries and to the devising of
940
entirely new methods of production, such as the
manufacture of rubber from plants, the making of clothes
from paper, etc. These substitute products, however, are
frequently inferior to products available elsewhere, and the
burden falls upon the consumer who must use them.
Insofar as the production of these substitutes keeps pace
with a development of science, it is a cultural advance; the
usual result, however, is a conservation of inferior products
rather than a development of science on the basis of the use
of the best available material. In this sense, too, autarchic
science becomes reactionary.
It must not be supposed, however, that the German

economists really believe that they can achieve complete
self-sufficiency or complete economic autonomy. The
imperative needs of war demand a close watch upon the
latest events in every country in the world. The Germans
must borrow their inventions from every nation; they must
steal their ideas even from the Jews. The waging of war is a
ruthless rhythm demanding the highest perfection of
technique at the risk of defeat. Self-sufficiency in goods
which Germany cannot produce and which she must
possess in order to carry on war can imply, then, only an
organized and systematic purchase of raw materials from
other countries to establish a reserve for time of war.
To believe that fascism means the destruction of large-scale

industry is a fatal mistake. (*15) Far from it. The chief
financial backers as well as the beneficiaries have been
precisely the mighty imperialist industries. It is not the
petty bourgeoisie that runs the fascist movement; it is the
big trusts who use the petty bourgeoisie as their tools to
crush the workers; this accomplished, petty property is
again reduced to insignificance.
941
The whole aim of the State is to increase its power in time of
war. Fascism could never come into existence were it not
for reasons of war. To believe that the German State wants
to break down large-scale industry, so much needed by
Mars, in favor of petty incomes, is to understand nothing
about Germany, about National Socialism, or about the
period in which we live.
The theory of self-sufficiency, if carried out elsewhere as

well as in Germany, would spell a complete disruption of
the world division of labor and a permanent segregation of
nationalities. The world would tend to become a crazy-
patch quilt of one nation in mechanical juxtaposition to
another, rather than a fusing of each into one integrated
and coordinated whole, every nationality contributing its
cultural achievements for the use of the whole world. It
would produce, especially in agricultural countries,
tremendously reduced levels of living, since such countries
can improve their lot only by world trade and exchange.
Nor could German autarchy terminate international

competition. It could only intensify world rivalry. If
Germany is striving for autarchy, it is only so that she can
restrict imports as much as possible and expand her
industries to the maximum in order to dump the enormous
surplus products on the world market. Competition
remains there, but it takes on a snarling, vicious form
compatible only with efforts of war.
No matter how vehemently the Nazis may denounce

competition, their theories of autarchy, with their postulate
of a wholly integrated national economy acting as a mighty
frictionless machine, presuppose an international
competition more intensified than ever. Fascism is but a
better equipment for this higher international competition.
942
A self-sufficient Germany would intensify international
competition in other ways. All the smaller countries of
Europe depend for their livelihood upon German foreign
trade, which in turn dominates a major portion of the
foreign economic activity of Eastern Europe. The
prohibiting of imports by Germany already has thrown
these countries into fierce convulsions. They have been
compelled to enter into a sharper competition among
themselves for the limited markets left. On the other hand,
they have been reduced further to acknowledging their
dependence upon the German system. German autarchy,
therefore, has immensely consolidated German influence in
the smaller countries of Europe. These countries had relied
upon the Versailles Treaty for their protection. Now that
the Versailles Treaty has broken down, and the
unchallenged punishment of the German system has fallen
upon them, they can do nothing but capitulate to this
mighty machine in the heart of Europe.
Should these smaller countries resist capitulation, the

increased economic difficulties which they will bring upon
themselves will cause such intense internal antagonisms
and class conflicts as to compel the ruling classes to run in
fright to the protection of the strongest reactionary force in
Europe, namely, German Nazism. Thus, for example, in the
Baltic States, the consciousness of these small countries of
their complete economic dependence on German economy
has brought them into close alliance with Nazism. In short,
the very Versailles Treaty which broke up Europe into
small countries and was designed to spell the end of
German influence, has now played directly into the hands
of the German ruling class. Autarchy, therefore, far from
being purely a nationalist principle of retreat from world
events, has become an enormous weapon in the hands of
the fascists to dominate international affairs.
943
Nor can autarchy stop competition within the nation. Since
it must rely for its troops upon the middle class, it must
permit competitive action, markets and prices to exist.
What is far more important, big business remains on a
capitalist basis. Fundamentally, it is not the State that
controls the capitalist, it is the capitalist who uses and
controls the State. The capitalist is in business for profit. His
profits are inherent in surplus goods of which he must
dispose. The capitalist can dispose of his surplus by selling
it abroad, which means intensified international
competition and maintenance of a world division of labor,
or he can utilize the surplus products by storing them in the
name of the State for war.
This second alternative is the peculiar contribution of the

practice of autarchy. The State enters into all business,
taxing the people to subsidize industries and to produce the
surplus product which is mainly war material. Hence, the
State does its utmost to shift economy from means of
consumption to means of production, from light industry to
heavy industry and large-scale production. In this way, the
State intervenes to increase still further the organic
composition of capital, to enhance the productivity of labor,
and to add to all the contradictions of capitalism. If the
State stores the surplus product merely to render the
explosion of war more terrible, it also stores up the surplus
labor, regimenting and militarizing the unemployed,
placing them in barracks, training them ceaselessly for the
coming fighting.
The economics of autarchy is intertwined with the politics

of the totalitarian State. In the use of the term "totalitarian,"
the German here shows a great distinction between his
National Socialism and Italian fascism. In Germany, the
State is not merely a coordinator, organizing private petty
944
industry into corporative associations and then seeing that
both sides come together on their own initiative to work out
a labor contract which the State will enforce. The mighty
German industrial machine permits no such picayune
trivialities. National socialism begins where Italian fascism
ends, namely, with a Grand Economic Council that is part
of its General Staff and that intervenes in the life of every
large business corporation. The initiative and free play of
the entrepreneur, in which the Italian fascist glories, do not
exist in Nazi theory.
The Italians have stressed the egotistic principle of self-

interest to bring both worker and capitalist into the
corporations. The Germans abhor the doctrine of personal
self-interest. They improve the Italian pass-word,
"Everything for the State, nothing outside the State," with
the Hegelian statement, "The individual is nothing, but is
completely fused to the State, which is all." A sign hangs
before the concentration camps of Germany: "Du bist
nichts," --- you are nothing.
Such principles have permitted masses of Germans to

believe that the National Socialists are really anti-capitalists.
When the Hitler revolution began, the large body of petty
bourgeois adherents who had believed in the socialism of
the Nazi program thought that there would take place
immediately public control of all industries and
compulsory cartelization; the right to fire employees would
be curtailed; storm troop commissars would be supreme;
competition would come to an end. This was the socialism
of the little fellow that was to control the big fellow and
smash the proletariat.
There is no question that the phrases of the Nazis lent

themselves to such interpretation and, as a matter of fact,
storm troopers were placed in control of industries,
945
directors were cursorily dismissed, and owners were
dispossessed. But all this was really for the ultimate benefit
of the industrialists. The Nazi State soon roughly removed
its petty bourgeois agents who had invaded the premises of
the industrialists. The Nazi Party was purged of its Left
socialists by the wholesale executions of leaders of the
storm troops and others.
A situation entirely different from that which existed before

the advent of Hitler, however, has remained. Theoretically,
all industry is now considered part of public property
which the owners, as servants of the State, hold only in
trust. What this really means is that the big business that
controls the State has determined to control all the other
concerns as well and to bring labor in line with their plans.
The State aids in every possible way all the industrial works
under its guidance; in return, these plants become the
secondary arms of the military machine preparing for war.
The practice of the totalitarian State involves a policy of the

most rampant and rasping nationalism. The Nazis would
have one believe that liberalism never had had anything in
common with nationalism, but had turned over the country
to international communism. As a matter of fact, of course,
nationalism sprang into prominence precisely in the era of
the rise of Liberalism. German fascist nationalism is no
more solid than is the French variety, although the French
fight their national wars with slogans of the French
democratic revolution. There is this difference, however,
between the two: French nationalism played a
tremendously progressive role in world history, wiping out
the petty provincial restrictions of industry that had
prevailed in Europe, and throwing into the discard the
relations of the ancien r’egime, even creating the national
unity of Germany itself. The nationalism of Liberalism
946
partially was responsible for an enormous expansion of
world trade and the complete interconnection of one nation
with the other. Just the opposite is the nationalism of
fascism. It is a nationalism that would render permanent a
complete blockade of one country against the other. There
are no liberating factors in fascism. It displays merely an
invidious and unrelieved lust for conquest and mastery.
Footnotes
1. A statistical summary of cartelization in Germany is to be

found in H. Levy: Industrial Germany, Ch. II, pp. 15-23.
2. See, R. K. Michels: Cartels, Combines and Trusts in Post-War

Germany, pp. 26-27.
3. R. A. Brady: The Rationalization Movement in German

Industry, p. 19.
4. This would be the equivalent of 20 billion dollars at par.
5. A. Hitler: My Battle, p. 43.
6. R. A. Brady, work cited, p. 391.
7. Leon Trotsky: "A Portrait of National Socialism," Class

Struggle, official organ of the Communist League of
Struggle, Vol. IV, No. I, Jan. 1934.
8. A. Hitler: My Battle, p. 25.
9. See, A. Hitler: The same, pp. 24-25.
10. The same, pp. 38, 39.
11. The same, p. 122.
As an example of the value of keeping the blood pure,

Hitler cites the United States, which to him presents itself as
947
an excellent example where the Aryan did not mix with
other races!
12. P. Einzig: Germany's Default (1934), p. 27.
13. For the program, see, P. Einzig: Work cited, p. 125 and
following.
14. A. Hitler: My Battle, p. 206. Certainly very few of the so-

called Marxist leaders could meet the test laid down by
Hitler that every leader must be ready to back up his
principles with his life.
15. This is the view of Dr. Scott Nearing and similar

communists.
XXX. NATIONAL SOCIALISM (CONTINUED)
THE emergence of the huge German totalitarian State has

effectuated a terrific realignment in the international sphere.
It has become very plain that there is now no bourgeois
force in Eastern Europe capable of stopping the German
advance towards the East. The pressure upon Austria,
Hungary, and Eastern Europe has immeasurably increased.
Immediately after the World War, the French imperialists

attempted to forge from the fragments of Europe some sort
of counter-weight east of Germany. The newly created
smaller nations were to be at the same time a wall against
Russian communism and a steel ring around Germany. As
a wall, the smaller nations were able to hold their ground,
but as a ring, they have been broken to pieces. France has
come to realize that nothing can take the place of the solid
mass of Russians as its supporters. The fragments from
948
Finland to Roumania are after all but fragments, and cannot
replace Russia.
It was felt, too, that Italy could be a counter-weight to

German ambitions in Austria, in Hungary, and in the
Balkans, but that counterweight, too, has been taken away
and, there has been substituted the increasing possibility of
Germany and Italy's working together. A further point that
is becoming increasingly clear is that Central Europe
belongs to Germany.
As Germany goes, so must go the rest of Central and

Eastern capitalist Europe. Already Germany has been able
to break up the Polish-French alliance and lay the basis for
cracking the Little Entente. Following the war, France and
Britain were able to lead in continental affairs only because
Germany was dismantled and disarmed, but the fateful law
that politics must eventually follow economics has
manifested itself in Europe as well. Not forever would the
economically weaker countries like France and England
drain the lifeblood of German capitalism.
At least before 1914, these two countries could rely on

Czarist Russia. Now there is no such reliance. The advent of
the Russian Revolution ended the old European balance of
power. Now that Germany is taking advantage of this lack
of equilibrium, France and England must work feverishly
and desperately to restore a capitalist regime in Russia to
counterbalance Germany. Whether they can succeed in
doing so depends upon whether the workers or the
bureaucrats within Russia prevail. Should the workers
maintain the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, it is
inconceivable that they will fight for French and British
imperialism. Thus, not only Germany, but France and
England as well, each in her own way, must work for the
breakdown of the workers' rule in Russia. If this breakdown
949
cannot be procured peacefully, it must be accomplished
through war.
The depreciation of the power of the former victorious

countries is rendered more acute by the provisions of the
Versailles Treaty which Balkanized Europe and cut it up
into little fragments. The newly created countries of East
Europe now are forced to beg for peace with the Germans.
Torn between Russian communism on the one hand and
German fascism on the other, the ruling classes of these
countries, whether Polish, Lettish, or Bulgarian, etc., can
choose only one course, fascism. Hence, in all the small
countries of Eastern Europe, fascistic development is taking
place with extraordinary rapidity. In the Baltic, this is aided
by the fact that the ruling classes of these provinces are of
German extraction, trained by German culture, and holding
the deadliest hatred for Russian communism.
The policy of French and British imperialism has been to

establish around the Soviet Union a cordon sanitaire, linked
by a chain of military dictatorships armed to the teeth
against Russia. Thus it is precisely these Eastern countries
which Germany is winning over to its side, countries,
which, ever since the World War, have been thoroughly
prepared for battle, mobilized, financed, and armed by the
Versailles powers themselves. The irony of fate decrees that
these militarist powers join Germany. All that remains for
England and France are the relatively peaceful and
disarmed countries, such as Scandinavia and Holland, on
the one hand; on the other hand, whatever militarist
support the former victors may secure consists of such
nations as Czecho-Slovakia or Jugo-Slavia, which are
isolated from each other and are too weak to fight alone.
The victory of German fascism is of great importance in

winning an alliance with Poland. The Polish ruling class
950
knows well that it stands in the line of fire between Russian
communism and German fascism, and that it will be forced
to take sides in the coming war. Without hesitation it has
chosen Germany. The Germans, in return for united action
against the Soviet Union, offer the enormously rich territory
of the Ukraine to Poland; thus the old Polish Empire is to be
reconstituted. Poland may realize also well that, once
Germany wins the war against Russia, its own
independence would be in an extremely precarious state,
but Poland has no choice in the matter, and rather hopes
that, with the downfall of Russian communism, a new
Polish alliance can spring up that would block German
pretensions to swallow Poland. As the Polish population
numbers thirty-five million, and as, with the aid of the
French, they have built up a respectable military machine,
Poland's alliance with Germany is decisive for future
politics.
The increase of pressure that German fascism can place

upon Austria has resulted in the complete isolation of
Czecho-Slovakia. There is no question that as a military
force Czecho-Slovakia's power has become considerably
reduced, especially when within that country there are over
three million Germans who form a strong force ready to
break up the ruling class of that country from within.
Added to this is her economic dependence upon German
trade. Hence, whether we look at the economic or the
political situation, internally or externally, the position of
Czecho-Slovakia is extremely weak. Apparently doomed as
an independent nation and race, her future under
capitalism is a dismal one.
The struggle for a new German Empire coincides with the

struggle against international communism as embodied in
the Soviet Union. This is the logical continuation of the
951
extermination of the German Communist Party. The Hitler
movement carries forward under present day conditions
the highest dreams of the Pan-German movement, with its
famous directive "Drang nach Osten." With one and the
same stroke, German imperialism can silence the menace of
communism and can carve out a territory for itself.
The idea that this is the historic destination of German

fascism is buttressed by the fact that there is no other
capitalist force in Europe strong enough to break the Soviet
Union. England and France, the victorious powers of
Versailles, with the benign support of America, all tried to
break that huge mass, the workers and peasants of Russia,
but failed. It is the punishment of those who fail to be cast
into the discard of history. Having failed to break the
power of the Soviet Union, by that fact alone France and
England gave up their historic roles in Europe. Their failure
was a sign that communism had now become so strong that,
to defeat it, an entirely new set-up was necessary. To
overwhelm the Soviet Union there must be launched
against it, first, not small industrial countries, but the most
powerful countries of Europe; second, not a Europe divided
into defeated and victorious powers, but a Europe entirely
united; third, not countries accustomed to democratic
pacifism with its waste and inefficiency, but countries that
can be mobilized as a unit under the military; fourth, not a
haphazard attack only through the flank, North and South,
or by means of a navy, but the most awful direct military
avalanche known to history, hurled by an immense army at
the heart of Russia --- Moscow. This combination alone can
accomplish the victory, and only Germany can forge this
mighty chain of events. To put it another way, capitalism,
sick unto death, must call upon its greatest and most highly
developed power in Europe to take the leadership in the
struggle against communism and the Soviet Union.
952
Here, then, is the basic reason why German Nazism
believes with such fervid intensity in the godliness of its
destiny, that it alone can form a united front of Europe for
the destruction of communism. Thus Hitler appears to his
protagonists as a veritable St. George arming himself
against the dragon, as a Siegfried going forth to battle for
right and truth. Nazi propaganda literally wallows in an
orgy of mystic impressionism to this effect.
Only Nazism can organize the countries nearest the Soviet

Union and already under military dictatorships into a
united front. It leaves to England and to France all the
liberal, democratic, socialistic countries which are of little or,
at most, secondary value in the struggle. That country
which carries on the task of breaking communism and the
Soviet Union is bound to receive the support of all those
militarist dictatorships which have been formed on the
border of the Soviet Union and which have no reason for
their present separate existence except the struggle against
Russia and the forces generated there.
What is more, Germany, by its decisive actions against

international communism, is bound to earn the undying
gratitude of every ruling class that is tottering and unstable.
In wiping out communism, Germany is a rival to no one,
but is rather the armed knight fighting the battles for all
capital. Should Germany fail, it means the end of the
leadership of capitalist Europe in history, either because of
the victory of communism or because of exhaustion, the
initiative then passing to America.
Thus "pacific-democratic" capitalism, having failed to

destroy the Soviet Union by force, has left the task open to
aggressive militarist capitalism and has forfeited its
leadership over capitalist Europe today. If Briand cannot
953
form his United States of Europe, Hitler will not fail in
creating the necessary united front against the Soviets.
Great Britain cannot stop the mobilization of forces by

Germany, even if it so desires. England at present is in no
position for warlike adventures; she is heavily laden with
pacifism because she has already seized all she can possibly
gorge and is now definitely deteriorating industrially in
comparison with Germany, Russia and the United States.
Her principal task is to maintain her position and retain her
possessions intact.
Great Britain has nothing to gain from an exhausting war.

Any war which will tax her strength must weaken her hold
upon her colonies and stimulate the colonial peoples to
revolt. The British army, too, is primarily a colonial army
that can govern subject backward peoples; it is not
preeminently an army capable of supporting itself against
the great powers in Europe, Germany, Russia and France,
or against Japan. With the development of aviation and the
submarine, Great Britain has become increasingly
vulnerable to attack. No longer is the English Channel a
barrier protecting the tight little Isle.
Finally, the labor movement of Great Britain is a force with

which to reckon, since the workers will struggle in one way
or another against being used as cannon fodder. The British
capitalists are not deluded by patriotic splurges of the labor
bureaucracy such as its petitions during the Ethiopian War
for England to apply sanctions in a military sense. The
question is, can the labor leaders control their rank and file
in time of war? Once the war starts, not the labor officials
but the plain worker will have his say in stentorian tones
that may deafen the genteel.
954
The British capitalists, too, must desire the end of
communism. They understand by now that a navy alone,
even though it be the mightiest in the world, is completely
unable to batter down large masses of people in huge land
formations. The military backbone of every large-scale
attack must be an army; in this, Britain must yield above all
to Germany. The British realize, too, that the rise of the
Russian Revolution has effected a tremendous stirring in
Asia, striking at the British Empire's weakest spot. The
successive ferments in Persia, India, and the Near East, the
revolution in China, all have drawn their strength from the
trend of forces let loose by the Russian Revolution.
Finally, and what is generally overlooked, the great land

development in Siberia and Eastern Russia is pulling the
center of economic gravity more and more away from the
normal trade routes controlled by Britain. Naturally,
therefore, the British capitalists for a long time took the lead
as the implacable enemies of the Soviet Union, and did their
utmost to destroy it. Unable to accomplish this, they cannot
prevent the Germans from attempting the task which must
be done if the present order is to live. Great Britain cannot
do other than wish Germany God-speed in the task of
destroying the Soviet Union.
Naturally, what Great Britain desires is not only the

destruction of the Soviets, but the complete exhaustion of
Germany as well. Then capitalism could be re-installed in
Russia, and the alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia
to encircle Germany could be recreated. Should Germany,
in its coming war, destroy the Soviet Union too quickly,
then, with the re-installation of capitalism in Russia, there
would be no alternative but for France and England to enter
the war against Germany to deprive her of the fruits of
victory and to re-establish the old balance of power.
955
Similar calculations prevail in France. France, too, must
profess a pacifism, a pacifism that flows from the fact that
the re-armament of Germany was destined to smash the
hegemony of French imperialism on the European
continent. A second-rate industrial country as compared
with Germany, England, or Russia today, France was able
to play a political, role after the war entirely out of
proportion to its real economic weight. This was
attributable largely to the fact that Germany had been
defeated and disarmed, and Russia had turned soviet. So
long as France was able to drain hundreds of millions in
reparations from Germany and to transmit this gold to the
puppet countries of Eastern Europe, rebuilding their armies
and filling their treasures with the loot, it was able to
maintain the myth that no one could contest French
imperialist might on the continent. This illusion has been
shattered. The terrific effect of the crisis on France and the
end of reparations have stopped the flow of gold to its
mercenary henchmen, while, at the same time, the re-
armament of Germany, and its professed destiny of
attacking the Soviet Union, was bound to collect around
Germany the countries left scattered and helpless. The
situation is such that France, in self-preservation, must end
its pacifist theories and at once prepare for military struggle.
Thus, the final arbiter in the international European arena

today is Germany. And yet, with all the boasting of Hitler
that the fascist regime will endure a thousand years, the
mystical character of its philosophy is proof enough that
the German ruling class has come on the scene too late to
make progressive history. The lust for power poignantly
expressed by German theoreticians is made more intense by
the fact that, with all its power, Germany never has been
able to make history for itself. For centuries it was the
stamping ground of superior powers which used Germany
956
as a scene for its battles, wrecking the country and
mutilating the character of its population. Whatever was
progressive came from France and the West. Whatever was
reactionary came from Austria, Russia, and the East.
Germany was a hectograph impressed with the indelible
writings of other powers. In the realm of emotions and
affections, she yielded to the French; in experimental
empiricism, to the English; in practical power, to the
Americans; in mysticism, to the Russians; in intellect, to the
Jews. In what realm could Germany prove superior? All
that remained for her was wish and imagination; in short,
German philosophy. With such a head, the German ruling
class, with all its organizing ability, could create only a
social moron, an immense perfect body with a dwarfed and
atrophied psyche.
Pan-Germanism always was threaded with mystical and

medieval theories of race and blood. Before the War, these
were expressed by such writers as Ludwig Woltmann,
Lasson, and also the Englishman, Chamberlain. The
German dreams for power were put into spicy, racy
language by that other "writer with blood," Nietzsche. The
Junker theoretician has always loved to pose as a "writer
with blood," spilling his heart's stream on the printed page
in most impetuous and poignant fashion. These are the
sighs of day-dreamers desiring power, so near and yet so
far!
It is interesting to contrast the racial views of the German

Junkers which prevailed before the War, and immediately
after, with the present day racial theories expressed by the
bourgeois industrialists through the Nazis.
957
The central thesis was well expounded by Chamberlain
who wrote: "...our whole civilization and culture of today is
the work of one definite race of men, the Teutonic." (*1)
According to this writer, the "Aryan" included, also, the
Celt and the Slav and other races of Northern Europe; while
Pan-Germanism could flirt with Ireland and cast eyes at
Asia, it could not glorify France and Russia. Thus it is the
"Teuton," not the "Aryan," who is supreme.
The antithesis to the Teuton Junker, "that blond beast" who

could rise above good and evil and reach the status of
superman, was the Jew. The Jew alone was strong enough
to give the German a real battle. The Jews, too, like the
Teutons, had understood the basic principles of biology so
as to produce a race capable of achieving world power.
These principles were, first, original derivation from a
strong stock which, second, fuses itself with several others
to form a powerful mixture, although, third, the mixture
definitely and appropriately must be limited; fourth, this
mixed group permits only inbreeding with, fifth, a careful
selection of offspring. According to Chamberlain, in order
to overcome all other nations, the Jew had determined to
make them into mongrels by traveling all over the world,
seducing and bastardizing the population. The Jews
themselves, however, cleverly refused to adulterate their
own stock and laid down religious laws preventing the
sons of Jews from marriage with goyem, non-Jews.
Strongly affirming the vast superiority of Christianity over

Judaism, Chamberlain called upon the Teutonic race to
throw off the Jew and bring forth the light of Christ into the
world. The intense Christianity of Chamberlain was in
definite accord with the religiousity of a Kaiserthum that
pretended always to be in intimate telepathic
communication with The Almighty.
958
It is to be noted that with Chamberlain "pure" race did not
exist; the directions on his medicine box plainly stated that
the strong race began with the strong stock intermixed with
others, the stock was carried to its point of genius through
interbreeding, the highest product of which was the hero,
or individual genius (read, Junker). Chamberlain also
warned against confusing the Teutonic race with blond hair
and fair features, since many rulers of Germany and many
eminent militarists, such as von Moltke, came from a stock
with black hair and aquiline noses, Chamberlain, as well as
the other pan-Germanists, however, insisted on the
complete fusion of nation and race, the race being the
biological basis for the nation. In this he was at one with
other sociologists (*2) and with the definite political drift of
the day.
With Hitler, race theories change. The term "Aryan" to him

no longer includes Celt or Slav, but is restricted primarily to
the German and Scandinavian peoples. Besides, Hitler's
task no longer is to fight "Latin" France but to fight Russia.
Thus theories of race become convenient instruments,
depending upon diplomatic and military exigencies. With
Hitler, racial theory serves the following functions: first, to
be used as a mask in order to crush communism, which is
denounced as a Jewish theory; second, to weld together the
German nation into a monolithic whole, bound together by
a belief in blood brotherhood; third, to enable Germany to
attempt to bring into her fold the twelve to fifteen million
Germans living outside of Germany proper, in Alsace,
Lorraine, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, the Baltic Provinces, the
Danube, and above all, in Austria. The Nazi racial theories
go hand in hand with the pressure for Anschluss with
Austria, for the formation of a magnificent German Empire
of eighty million souls.
959
In accord with these new purposes, the Jew is made to now
occupy a different place. No longer does he represent a
typical strong people to be followed as a model for the
Teuton in the utilization of biological principles for the
maintenance of power in history. Now the Jew is the model
mongrel, the very opposite to what the true German must
strive to be. He is the outcast, the Ishmael, the devil.
The views of fascism on race are excellent demonstrations

of the senile idiocy to which capitalism has been reduced.
Unlike Chamberlain, Hitler violently affirms the purity of
the Teutonic stock. It is blood purity (in contrast to
Chamberlain's inbreeding) which is the chief method of
maintaining the nation's virility. (*3) It is not convenient for
Hitler to remember that the Thirty years' War so exhausted
Germany, reducing the population of thirteen million to
three million, as to compel the King of Prussia to open his
lands to all types of immigrants. If ever there was an
"impure" race, the Germans have exemplified it. Patently,
fascist science is marked by its colossal impudence as well
as its charlatanry and demagogy.
According to Hitlerism, all "races" have been indelibly set

into eternal patterns from the beginning of time, and so
they will remain. The theories of Hitler, Rosenberg, (*4) and
similar fascist leaders would mean that forever races must
be at war against each other, one conquering the other.
There is no evolution in history, simply action and reaction,
a constant re-shifting of the same eternal pieces on God's
checkerboard, according to which player at the moment
was operating under the star of destiny. The normal state is
that of war, eternal conquest and subjection. There is to be
no interconnection between races, no borrowing, no
amalgamation, no fusing, no synthesis into a larger whole.
Forever and eternally the blood wash is to erect complete
960
caste walls between races. Were such a situation really to
come about, it would mark indeed the end of the civilized
world.
Nothing illustrates better the ideological bankruptcy of a

ruling class than a philosophy that bases political power
upon speculations of biology and astral theories of destiny.
With Hitler, the failure of nations to conquer markets is
reduced to congenital defects in the racial bloodstream. The
same sort of theory leads bankrupts to commit suicide; with
Hitler, it has the opposite purpose: he relies on the "pure"
bloodstream of the Germans to overcome economic
bankruptcy.
In Germany, doctrines of race and breeding naturally have

gone hand in glove with theories of eugenics and
prescriptions for breeding supermen. The fascists have
practiced sterilization of the so-called unfit on a wide scale.
In 1934 alone there were two hundred thousand such cases
reported in Germany. The causes sufficient to justify
sterilization included not only those traceable to hereditary
defects, such as congenital feeble mindedness, but also
chronic alcoholism and melancholomania which may be
induced by environmental influences. In this way,
sterilization has become a weapon in the hands of the State
to terrorize the population and wipe out Nazi enemies.
The difference between the Nazi movement and the

protagonists of the former Prussian State also can be seen
by contrasting the views of the Hitlerites with those of
Nietzsche. Many points, however, are identical, as where
Nietzsche emphatically opposes the movement for the
extension and democratization of education, calling rather
for the limitation of education and concentration upon the
few, the best. (*5) This method would produce the proper
leaders or geniuses. Nietzsche, being far removed from
961
practical life, insisted that institutions for teaching culture
were the very opposite to those teaching how to succeed in
life (*6) and that true culture lay above the sphere of
necessity and the struggle for existence. This point of view,
of course, cannot be the position of the Nazi in a period
when Germany is struggling precisely for its life and
existence. It could only be the theory of the edel Junkers,
sportsmen.
Nietzsche denounced democracy and praised the rule of a

strong hero. "Later generations will be greatly disgusted,
when they come to treat the movements of the period in
which no living man ruled, but shadow-men on the screen
of public opinion......" (*7) But Nietzsche's anti-democracy
was inseparably part of his antipathy to labor. The rule of
the people or of labor was impossible from the point of
view of this aristocratic artist and man of letters.
Nietzsche agreed with the Greeks who saw no dignity in

labor and who despised it. (*8) Since it was impossible for
any man fighting for bare existence to become an artist,
labor was a disgrace. Slavery was justifiable because art
could exist only through slavery recognized by an all-
powerful State. "If the Greeks perished through their
slavery, one thing is still more certain: we shall perish
through the lack of slavery. To the essence of Culture
slavery is innate." (*9) "Culture, which is chiefly a real need
for art, rests upon a terrible basis: the latter however makes
itself known in the twilight sensation of shame. In order
that there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the
development of art, the enormous majority must, in. the
service of a minority, be slavishly subjected to life's struggle,
to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate."
"Accordingly, we must accept this cruel sounding truth,
that Slavery is the essence of Culture." (*10)
962
Nietzsche viewed with the utmost disgust the fact that so
miserable were the slaves that they idealized their very
slavery with peans of praise for the "dignity of labor" and
the "dignity of man." The expressions of Nietzsche, so
apropos of the sword-rattling militarists of Germany in the
days of the Kaiser, sound very hollow to the Nazis of today.
Although both Nietzsche and the Nazis would support the
Prussian State in its maximum development, the State
today faces conditions entirely different from those of the
Kaiser's time. The theories of Nietzsche would cost Hitler
his head. Hitler is receiving his support not from a group of
sporting, dueling landlords who have never labored in their
life, but from the heads of factories to whom labor is
everything.
In his views on religion, Nietzsche even today influences a

portion of the Nazis. Chamberlain was an intense Christian
and attacked the Jew as anti-Christ. Nietzsche showed that
Christianity was only a development of Judaism, that the
heart of the New Testament was in the Old, and that
Protestantism was thoroughly logical in going back to
Jewish authority. The essence of Christianity was servility,
and this was learned from the Jew. If Chamberlain "proved"
that Christ was not a Jew but an Aryan, Nietzsche
demonstrated that Christ could be only a Jew, and that the
Jew, through Christ, had Judafied the world, tearing down
the original pagan spirit of the Teuton and rendering him
subservient to Rome. (*11)
From multitudinous angles, Nietzsche made devastating

attacks against the morality of Christianity, with its tenets
of an avenging God, general sinfulness, eternal damnation,
redemption, etc. He declared: "The imagination of many
Christian saints was filthy to an extraordinary degree . . . . "
(*12) He swept aside the esthetics of Christianity to show its
963
essential vanity, and affirmed, "He that humbleth himself
wishes to be exalted," (*13) that men are grateful in
proportion as they are revengeful.
Thus Nietzsche would take us beyond good and evil, which

are products of religion. His superman would soar from the
empyrian heights, an eagle, alone, untinged by remorse or
twinges of conscience. Men who are subject to qualms of
conscience are not yet free. Nietzsche called for the
development in Germany of a "free spirit" and by free spirit
he meant not one free in the idealistic sense of
Schopenhauer, in the sense of a will free from material
circumstances, but rather a man who had taken possession
of himself. (*14) Nietzsche broke from Schopenhauer, as he
broke from the religious sentimentality of Wagner,
although at one time he was a disciple of both. It is worth
noting wherein Nietzsche and Max Stirner resemble each
other in their struggle to "possess" themselves, and to be
free from holy prejudices.
The views of Nietzsche were carried forward after the war

by Oswald Spengler, but what is roseate optimism with
Nietzsche, child of the Franco-Prussian victories of the
Kaiser, is deep despair and gloom with Spengler, impressed
with the defeat and the flight of the Kaiser. Spengler stems
directly from Hegel, Goethe, and Nietzsche. He is proud
that his philosophy is a German one, (*15) and he believes
that only the Germans who gave birth to a Hegel can
understand the real meaning of evolution. To him, as to
Hegel, the source of the world is in the soul, and evolution
is the unfolding of this soul. (*16) The unfolding of each
soul took the form of a destiny for each culture. "It follows
from the meaning that we have attached to the culture as a
prime phenomenon and to destiny as the organic logic of
existence, that each culture must necessarily possess its
964
own destiny-idea. Indeed, this conclusion is implicit from
the first in the feeling that every great culture is nothing but
the actualizing and form of a single, singularly constituted
(monolithic?) soul." (*17)
In the period that followed the War, the whole embittered

German aristocracy was filled with the gall and brimstone
of the idea of r’evanche. A peace that spelled a dismembered
and defeated Germany was an intolerable conception. They
utterly detested the British theories of no more war, no
more destruction of law, people, States or religions, no
more danger, no conflicts, no more hate, nothing but
unending comfort. This was a violation of all the eternal
laws of life. Man was a fighter. To deprive him of war was
to destroy him. "The animal of prey is the highest form of mobile
life." It implies a maximum of freedom for self against
others, of responsibility to self, of singleness of self, of
extreme to necessity where that self can hold its own by
only fighting and winning and destroying. It imparts a high
dignity to Man, as a type, that he is a beast of prey." (*18)
Spengler was particularly infuriated with those socialists

who had adopted pacifist ideas, who refused to organize
for revenge, and who ridiculed the Junker type of man as a
beast of prey. Against the democracy of the masses,
Spengler ventured to repeat the old belief that "there are
men whose nature is to command and men whose nature is
to obey," (*19) and he demanded the rise of the real
leadership which everyone must respect. "Men will no
longer see nor understand, that leader's work is the harder
work, and that their own life depends upon its success." (*20)
Spengler, like Nietzsche, made of reason a secondary factor,

an inactive quantity. "The emphasis on emotion, experience,
and inner feeling, has come to mean a glorification of man's
unconscious, intuitive life as against his conscious, rational
965
life. The interest in the dynamic as opposed to the static,
now results in a conception of the whole world as a
continuous battle of forces, a more and more warlike 'Will
to Power."' (*21) Spengler believed, however, that all
systems develop in closed cycles, the last one marked by
paralysis of the will and the rule of reason. The West had
reached its cycle of reason, and, therefore, the state of
maturity and decay. The World War had defeated Europe.
Such defeatism, however, could be no part of the Nazi
dream.
Up to a certain point, Hitler easily could go along with the

nationalist Spengler, just as he could travel with the Junkers;
when Spengler began to declare that the West was
declining, that German civilization was ruined and could
not recover, but was doomed to destruction, revealing as he
did the hopeless cause of Kaiserthum, and his belief that the
good days before the War, never would return, here Hitler
would have to part company with Spengler. The work of
Hitler must be of a Messianic character; by no means could
he adopt the diseased pessimism of Spengler.
The present situation in Germany demonstrates how

bitterly the struggle over philosophy and religion is being
waged. The very fact that the class struggle has to assume a
religious guise and that workers must express their
interests through petty bourgeois church channels shows
how far underground the social conflict had been driven.
The church has been the traditional haven for the refugee.
There is no question but that the religious controversies
cover up in fact the struggle over deeper material interests,
economic and political.
966
The religious question in Germany today is being fought
out on four fronts, namely, the Jewish, the Catholic, the
Independent Protestant, and the neo-Pagan. For the Nazis,
it is a question of insuring complete nationalism
preparatory to the struggle against the Bolsheviks. For
centuries, Germany has been the battle ground on which
various religious schools have fought. As far back as the
sixteenth century, in England, and even prior to that, in
France and Italy, politicians knew how to use the church for
their own purposes. In Germany, however, where material
belatedness coincided with a dearth of understanding of the
physical forces governing the world, everything has always
been stood on its head theoretically, and in the stuffy attic
of religious metaphysics the German Philistine worked out
eternal truths entirely devoid of practicality. Realistic
thinkers too often were found only among the Jews. In this
struggle to identify nationality with religion and vice versa,
Germany has been trying to do only what England and
France did centuries ago. Even so, its task is more difficult.
The struggle against the Catholic Church is, in the first

place, a struggle by industrial capital of North Germany
against the landlords, especially in the South. It is thus a
struggle, on the one hand, of city against country, and, on
the other hand, of the industrialist supporters of Hitler
against the old-style type, mourning for the petty kingships
such as existed in Catholic Bavaria. In this respect it is only
another aspect of the general fight that has been waged
between Hitler and Hugenberg, between the storm troops
and the Stahlhelm, between the old federal regime and the
new centralized one.
The Catholics, with their ultra-montane sympathies and

their recollections of the old Holy Roman Empire, have
been bound up closely with the politics of other countries,
967
especially Austria and Italy, and have been committed too
much to provincial federalism, with its semi-independent
Bavaria and other kingdoms, to be of much service today.
In smashing the Catholics, German fascism puts an end to
the subordination of German policy to any
foreign camarilla and sets out on its own. (*22) Furthermore,
the breaking of the professional Catholic apparatus
provides many State jobs to good Nazi henchmen.
Simultaneously, Bavaria is transformed into a mere
administrative and police district, and the whole country is
centralized by Berlin. Thus does Hitler complete the scheme
of Frederick the Great.
If Austria is to enter this scheme of things, it can be only as

a vassal, with no friendly forces within capable of
sympathizing with her special aims. The attack on the
Catholics also has helped to straighten out the Western
Front. In the important Ruhr region, so close to Catholic
France, a completely inimical regime has been set up, and
any sympathy for French culture and religion is blasted
away. The Ruhr is made more safe for Berlin. No longer can
the French divert themselves with dreams in which the
Ruhr will be carved away from Germany and set up as a
buffer State.
The Nazis cannot tolerate any apparatus dual to the forces

in control of the State. The Catholics are too numerous in
Germany and too well organized not to menace the national
unity which has become the Nazi goal. Catholics have not
been patriotic enough ever to understand that all German
gold is to be kept in Germany for the use of the German
State and is not to be shipped to another country via the
Pope.
In aiding the drain of gold from Germany, the Catholics,

from fascism's point of view, here tended to rival the Jews
968
in their disintegrating tendencies. Under the Concordat of
1933, the Catholics are bound to obey the exchange laws of
Germany; very rigid has been their enforcement and drastic
the punishment, especially where Catholic priests and nuns
have been involved. The Catholic organizations have too
much wealth not to be tempting rewards for the marauding
bands of Hitler, and now that the wealth of the workers'
organizations has been distributed, the rich Catholic
institutions are the prizes next in order.
The attack on the Catholic Church in Germany seems also

to be in line with the general separation from the middle
class that Hitler has effected ever since he purged the Nazi
ranks from Left extremists. The adherents of the Catholic
Church were, in the main, middle class elements who had
always been resentful of the great industrialists and who
had believed to a certain extent that Hitler would take over
the trusts and administer them for all the people. Among
the Catholic middle class, disillusionment with Hitler has
gone farther than in many other sections.
It must not be forgotten also that the Catholic Church had

been the sponsor of the Catholic Centrist Party which had
remained in power during the Second Reich. This party had
coalized with the socialists and trade union forces to run
the government. Catholic centrist liberalism had proved too
conciliatory to Marxism. Catholic pacifism and turn-the-
other-cheek propaganda too often had been invoked to
calm the people and to prevent them from bursting forth
against the Versailles Treaty and against oppressors at
home. In the Catholic unions which the Church had formed
among the workers the ideal had been set up of a socialism
that should come about through complete harmony and
peacefulness of all classes, with charity for all. Today
Catholic internationalism, pacifism, and Christian unionism
969
are no longer needed by the bourgeoisie of Germany. The
German ruling class is preparing for the most frightful
blood bath in history. All elements must be steeled to force,
violence, and national hatred for all other groups. The
Catholic Church finds itself completely out of step with
modern Nazi Germany.
However, the job of uprooting the Catholic influence, now

centuries old, from the mass of people is no small task. The
totalitarian German State, in attempting to guide the
subjects of new Germany in every walk of life, has been
compelled to take cognizance of the powerful entrenchment
of the Catholic Church in social affairs. Here, as in Italy, the
struggle between fascism and Catholicism has taken place
on questions of education and morality, particularly over
such institutions as the Confessional, the control over the
youth and special Catholic organizations.
Fascism understands well the power the priest wields

through the institution of the Confessional, as well as all the
latent treachery to the State which this institution involves,
and has decided to annihilate it once and for all.
Confessional organizations are no longer allowed to
criticize or to oppose government measures or to introduce
disunity in the Third Reich. All activities, except those
strictly religious, are forbidden absolutely to Confessional
societies. The Minister of the Interior has been especially
severe with Catholic newspapers, Catholic social service
leagues, Catholic youth, apprentice, labor, or educational
organizations. Thus has Nazism striven to reach the
backward elements most influenced by the Confessional
and to bring them closer to the State. The youth have been
torn from the jealous hands of the clergy. Education has
become a complete monopoly of the government.
Charitable organizations have been restricted and
970
liquidated. The Church is confined to abstract dogma--
dogma on which it can only choke to death.
Against the morality of the Catholic Church the Nazis are

setting up their own morality; especially sharp is the fight
on matters, such as sterilization, which involve questions of
the immortality of the soul. The Catholics always have been
opposed to all forms of sterilization; now, under the
Concordat of 1933, they are bound to obey even these laws.
Nazism means to press the fight until it is completely
victorious.
The struggle against the Jew is only part of the struggle of

the industrialists against the operation of finance capital. By
means of an aggressive attack against "Jewish" capital,
whether of Downing Street or of Wall Street, the new
German rulers can rally into one solid mass the whole
people, especially the rural elements of the middle class.
The attack on the Jew was profitable to the Nazis through

bribes for protection, through liquidation of Jewish
property, etc. Antisemitism meant a chance for the German
storekeepers and other tradesmen to wipe out their cleverer
Jewish competitors and to enrich themselves at the Jew's
expense. For the mystic German dolt, it meant an
opportunity to filch the Jew's professional clientele, to take
patients away from doctors, students from teachers, clients
from lawyers, and so forth.
Like the Catholic, the Jew has his own form of

internationalism. Like the Catholic, the Jew, too, has been a
pacifist in his own way. In economics he has often practiced
the doctrines of laissez faire. Thus, the attack of the German
totalitarian State against all forms of economic and political
liberalism brought on the attack not only against the
Catholic, but most sharply against the Jew as well. No
971
wonder the Catholics have been considered an aid to the
Jews in Germany. The Catholic has been attacked for
introducing an alien morality into the German soul; the Jew
has been assaulted for his materialist unmorality in which
everything, including German honor, was available for cash.
The struggle against the Jew in Germany is symbolic of the

desperate efforts by which the Nazis have attempted to
unify the entire population around themselves. They wish
no longer to be troubled by the ever-present religious
complex that has torn Germany for so many centuries.
Whatever elements they cannot assimilate they mean either
to destroy or expel. With the Jews, such action is easy
because they are politically helpless, and the Nazis like no
better opponents than those who cannot fight. In
eliminating the Jew, the Hitlerites again have raised their
spurious cry of purity of race behind which used to be
echoed the yells of Pan-Germanism of yesteryear, with
its Deutschland uber Alles, and its policy of denouncing all
other races as "pig-dogs."
The real reason for the attack against the Jews is not so
much that they are merchants or financiers or belong to a
different race or religion, but because in the past they have
played a leading role in labor and communist organizations.
The pogrom against the Jew is traditionally part of the
attack against "Jewish" Marxism and "Jewish" revolutionism.
Fascism has as its very raison d'etre the incessant and
ruthless struggle against the new social order of
communism that is being born by the explosions within the
old. True that without communism there would be no
fascism. Also true that without a decaying social order
giving birth to a revolutionary proletariat, there would be
no need for the resistance of degenerate capitalism to take
the form of fascism.
972
By attacking the Jew as revolutionist and communist, the
Nazis lay the base for attacking Marxism as Jewish and thus
prepare for a holy crusade against both German labor and
communism of the Soviet Union. The fight against the Jew
is the opening gun in the battle by Hitler against Russia.
Here, however, the brave Nazis will face an enemy far more
formidable; here, they will encounter, not a weakened
minority group, but the iron front of the Soviet Union.
There is also the so called Protestant menace which the

Nazis fight. The German Protestants have been divided into
two chief churches, the Lutheran and the Calvinist, both of
these in the main standing for individualism and laissez
faire in economic and social life. With the rise of the
totalitarian State under Hitler, these church organizations
with their antiquated ideologies have been subjected to
blow upon blow. Many Protestant pastors have been
banished and others imprisoned. The Government has set
up an official German Church called the German Christians,
under the appointee of Hitler, Reichsbishop Mueller.
To resist this new attack both Calvinists and Lutherans

have fused to form a United Calvin-Lutheran Church, thus
bringing to an end the religious disharmony existing
between them for A Protestant opposition to the decrees of
German fascism also was organized. In order to bring all
Protestants into line, Hitler decided to appoint a special
officer to be the final authority in deciding all local disputes
within the church, especially such matters pertaining to
funds, property, the livings of the ministers, etc. Thus
Nazism interferes intimately with all church matters and
constantly threatens the confiscation of all independent
church property should the Protestants fail to hew to the
line.
973
Hitler means to wipe out every remnant of the old forces in
Germany, to harry them to the end and to redress them
behind his own State system. The Protestant churches have
been too close to liberalism to be free from the heavy hand
of the State. Too many Protestants were in the trade union
ranks. Too many supported liberalism, feminism, and free-
thinking. This no longer can be tolerated in modern
Germany.
The whole theory of Protestantism has been fought in a

typical Nietzschean manner. The Nazis have loudly
excoriated the Protestant religious dogma of original sin, to
them an un-German doctrine. No weeping, no wailing over
the past, but pure unadulterated joy must be the spirit in
every German's breast. There must be joy in labor, joy in
working for the State. The Nazis order joy as one would
order beer. A regular organization for the building up of
German joy has been founded. The Independent
Protestants are too melancholy and depressed; they seem to
be always moping and giving comfort to the enemies of
Germany. The original Germans never had any sin, original
or otherwise, according to Nazi theories. Today the original
sin in the religious world in Germany is to talk about
original sin, and the poor Independent Protestants who
wanted the joy of being miserable must now be miserable
in their joy. They must not only endure Hitlerism, but like it
as well.
But if all these religious schemes are to be discarded, what

is to take their place? (*23) German fascism cannot turn to
atheism, although by its attacks on the old religions,
Nazism certainly works in that direction. Atheism is the
anti-religious doctrine of revolution, of communism. Within
the new German State, the Nazis are organizing their own
religious vanguard, carrying forward the traditions of
974
Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. One of the chief
present theoreticians is Rosenberg. Rosenberg, while not an
ardent Christian like Chamberlain, agrees that Christ was
no Jew, but a Nordic who, as a revolutionist, brought not
the olive branch but the sword. However, Christianity does
resemble Judaism, in Rosenberg's opinion, and in this he
agrees with Nietzsche. Matthew was a Jewish fanatic, Paul
a materialist rabbi, Tertulian an African jurist, and
Augustine a mongrel half-breed.
Fascist theoreticians like Rosenberg have thundered against

the Old Testament, against the Sermon on the Mount,
against the doctrine of Grace, against the doctrine of
original sin, and against the cross, that woeful symbol of
torture. Instead of the cross, the swastika is to be
substituted, which to Rosenberg stands for the ancient sign
of the Sun God Against the internationalism of Christianity
there must be created a religion of race and blood. The
miserable moaning of the underdog must be changed into a
pean of praise for the superman. Here, then, is a doctrine of
might and of race that would take the Germans back to the
Icelandic sagas and eddas and to the Niebelungen myths of
the old Germanic Tribes.
This reversion from the present to the past can give no

consolation to the German Philistine. In the deep past of the
barbarian tribes, primitive communism ruled the day. Only
then had the Germans made their own history, as
barbarians and as communists.
But Rosenberg returns not to the primitive communism of

the German tribes, a stage of society naturally associated
with sagas and eddas, but to the superstitions of the
medieval world. Abandoning the electric light and even the
oil lamp, the fascists revert to the days of torch light and
faggot. Turning away from "Jewish" intellectualism,
975
Nazism can create only a mumbo-jumbo mysticism,
reviving the medieval past. The fascists dare not face the
future. This would lead them only to the gibbet and the
gallows. They dare not go forward with evolution, but only
back, back to the hysterical rituals of frightened ignorance.
Yet it is precisely this substitution of emotion for intellect
that will enable the Nazis to mobilize their cohorts into a
holy crusade against communism. The old dies hard;
sometimes blood clots form on the brain, and, in a mad
brain storm, the diseased are convulsed in spasms until
kind death releases them from their agonies. This is the case
with German capitalism.
We turn now to the socialism embodied in National

Socialism. The further history of Germany shows clearly
how the bourgeoisie repudiated its socialistic promises to
the middle classes and used them as dupes the moment the
workers were crushed. For example, the Nazi program had
demanded the preservation of a healthy middle class. To
stave off ruin, the petty bourgeois storekeeper had urged
the attack on the Jewish merchant, the department store, the
foreign chain store, and the co-operative. This was his petty
bourgeois socialism. How did it work out?
While it is true that the Jew was attacked, the wealthy Jew
generally was able to escape. The Nazi movement was
forced to take official cognizance of the fact that very often
the Brown Shirt who came into the store and demanded
that the owner support the Nazi movement or be put out of
business was simply a racketeer who pocketed the extorted
money for himself. When it became a question of abolishing
the department stores, the Nazi regime found this action
would lead to too much unemployment They have
abandoned this part of the program, as they have also that
976
in regard to various chain stores. There remained only the
attack on the cooperatives.
When the Nazis took power, they liquidated the co-

operatives as Marxist organizations, as they had similarly
dissolved the trade unions and political parties of the
workers, and confiscated their property. It should be borne
in mind that the number of co-operative stores in Germany
totaled fifty thousand, and that even in the depression year
of 1932 they did half a billion dollars worth of business, or 5
per cent of the total of all retail trade in the country. No
wonder the small shopkeeper felt himself driven to the wall,
that he hailed with glee the seizure of the co-operatives.
However, as soon as the Nazis took over these co-operative
stores, they discovered that the co-operative indeed could
become a wonderful nest egg for themselves. It seemed
ridiculous that they should break up the co- operatives and
turn them over to the little storekeeper, when they could
run the stores themselves. Such a procedure would mean
jobs for at least two hundred and fifty thousand, immense
graft in terms of millions and economic power. So the
Brown Shirt troopers took over the co-operatives and the
little shopkeepers' paradise crashed to earth again.
In the domain of agriculture, the Nazi program had called

for an adequate system of land reform and the passage of a
law which would provide expropriation without
compensation of land for socially useful purposes, for the
abolition of ground rent, and for the prohibition of
speculation in land values. To the poor peasant, such a
program indeed sounded revolutionary and socialistic.
Compared to the phrases "expropriation without
compensation," "abolition of ground rent," "prohibition of
speculation," how pale the "regular" socialists appeared!
977
Strangely enough, the points in the national socialist
program closely repeated the demands of the French
peasants organized by the Jacobins in the French
Revolution. Whereas, however, the French peasantry went
towards Liberal Radicalism in the nineteenth century, with
slogans of "liberty, equality, democracy," in the era of
trustification, the same demands were put forth, not by the
liberal democrats, but by the fascists with the slogans, "A
place must be found for every German citizen," "German
blood must be rooted to the soil," etc. The crying hunger for
land remained, only the demagogy had changed. And
whether under the Jacobins or the Nazis, the peasants'
demands remained unrequited.
Of course, no expropriation without compensation has

occurred in Germany. The law which actually passed
simply permits farmers to purchase at a heavy price a
certain portion of the land from the Junkers. In short, the
actual accomplishment is the same which the Czar
provided in 1861 when he graciously freed the serfs --- at a
price. The Junkers will part with their worst lands at the
highest possible evaluation ascertained by the government
under their influence; only those Junkers will sell who are
bankrupt and need the ready cash for their political aims,
thus profiting doubly by the legislation; the farmers will be
sunk into debt from which they will never recover, while
the funds of the State enter into the pockets of their enemies.
Very charmingly the East Pomeranian Junkers have
decided to "sacrifice" 20 per cent of their land holdings to
the farmers. "Better the concession from above than the
seizure from below." By controlling completely the land
sales' the Junkers bind the peasants to the yoke of
oppression more firmly than before.
978
The theory of the Nazis is that an agricultural middle class
is the backbone of the nation and that every effort must be
made to remove it from the commercialization of capitalism.
For centuries the ignorant peasantry has dreamed of a
system of private property without the contradictions of
private property. This idiocy fascism has raised into a
system. Instead of removing the peasant from the
commercialization of capitalism, Hitler has chained him the
more securely to the landlords. There was passed, for
example, in September 1933, the Hereditary Homestead
Law which, in addition to defining the racial and social
status of the farmer and the size of the farm subject to the
new law, provided that the qualified owner cannot be
dispossessed for debt; his crops cannot be seized for private
debt, the farm must pass undivided to a single heir
according to local custom. Here, again, is to be noted how
socialistic this law sounds; no dispossess for debt, no
seizure of crops for private debt, etc. It appeared as though
a veritable peasant utopia, flavored with all the romance of
feudalism, had been achieved. Even a law declaring that
henceforth the hereditary farmer was to be considered a
true nobleman was passed.
Drab reality has proved far different from the romantic

phrases. The hereditary farmer now is not allowed to
divide his land, nor to give it to anyone but a single heir.
This has had a tremendous effect on the countryside. It has
reconstituted in the village the old patriarchal conditions
calculated to discipline the peasants, and make them even
more docile to the aims of the Junkers. All children, from
the youngest to the oldest, must now obey the father.
Agricultural workers cannot migrate without special passes.
Rebellious youth cannot seek work elsewhere. Around the
village have been forged immensely heavy chains
entrapping the masses of agrarians.
979
The fact that the peasant cannot alienate his land or sell it
means, of course, that he cannot mortgage it. This means, in
turn, that he cannot borrow money for the inauguration of
necessary mechanical improvements. Thus the peasant is
bound to an old technique of production that
prevents ;scientific advancement. If the modern German
State tolerates this system, it is because it does not need the
production of the peasant so much as it requires his
thorough military personal support. On the other hand, the
very large estates, especially in East Prussia, Pomerania,
and the Baltic regions, are free to develop agricultural
technique to the highest degree. Science is for the rulers, not
the masses.
All the economic measures trumpeted as being for the

benefit of the agrarian masses have really been to the
advantage of the Junkers and the large estate owners.
Typical and significant has been the scandal of
the Osthilfe in which it was revealed that hundreds of
millions of marks had been swindled from the government
by the Junkers headed by Hindenburg himself. The money
was supposed to have gone to the Eastern farmers who
were hurt by the World War and its results; instead it went
almost entirely into the pockets of the former aristocracy.
Hindenburg, incidentally, was present to help himself to a
grant of land equal to five hundred thousand acres.
Prohibitive tariffs have raised the price of fats and oils,

butter, margarine, and other products used by the poor
people of Germany. This has entailed a great increase in the
cost of living for city workers and others while the profit
thereof had gone directly into the pockets of the large estate
owners, for they alone could raise enough dairy products to
profit from the tariff. The promises that the Nazis made to
the poor peasants to reduce the rate of interest and to
980
maintain it at 3 per cent have not been carried out. On the
other hand, prices of food stuffs are fixed by government
interference and through the compulsory organization of
the farmers who are thus imprisoned in the hands of the
Junkers.
By these measures, the industrialists won the support of the

aristocratic agrarian elements and could fuse them into the
National Socialist Party. And while the wealthy, both of city
and country, were lining their pockets, the Nazi State was
endowing the peasant with the title of political nobility, one
of the many ways in which the national socialists hoped to
separate the agrarian from the city worker and to pit one
against the other.
Certain promises of socialism were made to the city

workers also. It had been promised that industry would be
controlled in such a manner that the workers would not be
thrown out of work, and that they would have something
of a voice, therefore, in the production system. Workers'
councils would be maintained, standards improved. What
has happened in fact has been the smashing of the trade
unions, the lowering of wages, and the drastic curtailment
of unemployment insurance and other social measures. In
some places the right to discharge employees temporarily
was curtailed, but the power was simply shifted to the Nazi
apparatus which formed its own organizations in the
factory, as Mussolini had done in Italy.
Significantly enough, the Italian example of organizing

workers into unions separate from employers has not been
repeated in Germany. The employer himself and all his
agents meet directly in the same room with the workers,
with the idea that the factory hands form a family of which
the employer is the father, or Fuehrer. Although the workers
had understood the real situation from the beginning, this
981
was a relatively rude awakening for the professional man
or technician who had believed that in supporting the
Nazis he was attaining a new social order wherein the
factory would be turned over to the scientist for
unhindered development. Instead, tax exemptions were
granted to owners who replaced obsolete machinery, or
repaired their buildings, or hired more workers. Sometimes
the amount of the subsidy allotted to manufacturers for
hiring a worker was higher than the wages paid that
worker!
Similarly have the illusions of unemployment vanished.

The official figures, undoubtedly exaggerated, show a
marked reduction in the number of unemployed. But if
unemployment has been reduced, it has been by the
following methods: First, several hundred thousand
workers have been forced to flee the country. Others,
numbering perhaps many more, have been too terrorized to
apply for relief and have been stricken off the lists. Tens of
thousands have been arrested and placed in concentration
camps. Simultaneously, the attack was made against the
Jews and they, too, were driven out of the jobs and
professions which had been theirs. It should be borne in
mind that while the Jews number only five hundred
thousand in Germany, still with the definition of a Jew as a
person who has Jewish blood in the third generation, the
number affected is closer to one million five hundred
thousand.
A terrific drive was also started to oust women from all

occupations, with the slogan "Woman's place is in the
home." Moreover, youth, from sixteen to twenty-five,
including many who, taken from jobs, have been sent into
labor service camps and registered as employed. In parts of
the country a special compulsory labor service has been
982
established. Public works have been inaugurated on an
enormous scale. In this way the official unemployed figures
have been reduced. Finally, the enrollment of two and one-
half million storm troopers, many of them fed, clothed, and
maintained in barracks, has also been used to lower the
official figures of the registered unemployed. Through such
means, Hitler is able to propagandize the world that
unemployment in Germany has been curtailed drastically.
In reality, the condition of the masses has grown worse.
No wonder the mass of unemployed youth and lower

middle classes that had battered down with its fists all the
obstacles blocking Hitler's advent to power should have
resented deeply his abandonment of the original program
of socialism. These elements were strong particularly in the
militant storm trooper groups, whose head was Roehm and
whose theoretician was Gregory Strasser. As their
discontent grew more serious and took the form of
conspiracies against der Fuehrer, the leaders of the national
socialists had to decide whether they meant to go the way
of socialism or of nationalism. The issue was no more in
doubt with Hitler than with Mussolini. In the case of
Mussolini, it had taken him three years, from the seizure of
power in 1922 to the Matteoti murder, to consolidate his
position well enough so as to break from the petty-
bourgeois mass and to reduce them to impotence. In the
case of Germany, this was done in a much shorter time. The
storm troops' control over the army was reduced, Roehrn
and many others were shot, the ranks of the Nazi storm
troopers were completely purged, and the lower orders
were made to realize that, once and for all, the question
"Who rules whom?" was definitely solved. The second
Hitler revolution in 1934 gave full and complete power to
the heavy industrialists.
983
The Nazi blood purge did not realize the hopes of the
socialist and communist leaders that Hitler would be
overthrown. These mock heroes who had fled Germany
and were spending their leisure in Paris or reporting to the
functionaries in Moscow had to realize bitterly that their
day of influence was over. Thanks to these bureaucrats, too
thoroughly had the workers' movement been destroyed,
too conscious was the proletariat of their betrayal for them
ever to be able to rebuild their apparatus and revive their
influence again. Many of these socialists and communists
turned renegades and made their peace with fascism.
In line with its goal of complete State regulation, control of

all forms of life within the nation, and the subordination
and discipline of the individual, Nazism has enforced a
policy for women that has taken them out of the factory and
office jobs and put them back in the kitchen. Here again the
fascist movement has revealed itself as thoroughly
reactionary. The slogan "Back to the home" at one stroke
has turned the clock back one hundred years for Germany's
womankind. (*24) The role of women has been laid out
officially for them; they are to be the home-makers, the
bearers and rearers of numerous children of pure,
unadulterated German stock, to be enrolled in the ranks
of der Fuehrer's army.
According to Von Papen, women must exhaust themselves

in child birth, preferably of sons. As one Nazi authoress,
Maria Diers, put it: "Hitler does not need us women now,
for the fight in which he stands demands spirit, courage
and character. But women are not capable of the fight. We
are only in the way." In the declaration of the Women's
Order of the Red Swastika there appears the statement:
"There is no higher or finer privilege for a woman than that
of sending her children to war."(*25)
984
German women have been working outside the home for
many years; since the crisis it was increasingly common for
a woman to be the only breadwinner of the family. Behind
the drive to oust women from jobs, therefore, has been the
great fact of unemployment and the necessity of the Nazis
to appear to be putting more men workers to work. The
campaign to remove the women from industry began in the
professions in the fall of 1933 and rapidly spread in scope
through a series of decrees. Employed wives of men in the
civil service had to relinquish their jobs in favor of men.
Women in civil service posts were retired wherever
possible. A drive against "multiple" earnings began, which
meant that women wage workers of all sorts were pressed
to give up their jobs to men, either to husband or fianc’e, or,
if such were already employed, to some other man.
Women have been frowned upon in the professions

wherein they were already established and practicing.
Enrollment of young women students in the universities
has been restricted to an exceedingly small percentage of
the applications, thus automatically cutting off most of
Germany's present female generation from the possibility of
an intellectual life and training for a profession. The
situation in which women find themselves in Germany
today repeats the position in which Jewish students in
Czarist Russia were placed before the war, the conditions
against which women have fought continually in all
countries.
It should be stressed that sending woman back to the home

under modern conditions is sending her to a miniature
insane asylum. Formerly, when the home was the center of
production, women could develop themselves in artistry
and craftsmanship. Their work was then highly skilled and
of great importance. But today women can be reduced only
985
to the most menial unskilled work, which wearisome toil
grows in proportion to its stultifying monotony. The test of
a civilization is its treatment of women. Measured by that
test, German fascism represents a dismal decay of
civilization.
All the advances which the Feminist Movement made in

the past hundred years have been practically erased in
Germany. There is left to woman only the function of
perpetual breeding of the race.
This had also been the recipe that Nietzsche had given
Germany in keeping Greece as a model. "The women had
no other mission than to produce beautiful, strong bodies,
in which the father's character lived on as unbrokenly as
possible.... This kept the Greek culture young for a
relatively long time...." (*26)
Women have been made to feel that they are of secondary

importance, which must always be the militarist point of
view. With Nietzsche it went so far as to induce him to
praise homosexuality. "The erotic relation of men to youths
was the necessary and sole preparation, to a degree
unattainable to our comprehension, of all manly
education. .. . ." (*27)
Accompanying the ousting of women from industry and

their exclusion from the professions has been an ideological
campaign to train the women to think of themselves as
wives and mothers only, as helpers of men and rearers of
children, out of place in the factory, office, or schoolroom.
As Nietzsche again so aptly put it, "Man must treat woman
as a possession, as confinable property, as they do in Asia.
Her task is to charm and play for man, the conqueror." (*28)
986
Marriage and child bearing, as in Italy, are given great
encouragement in Hitler land. Government loans in the
shape of vouchers for the purchase of furniture are made to
engaged girls, who, of course, must give up their jobs to
their fiance's; 25 per cent of the loan is canceled upon the
birth of each child. All sorts of home-building schemes are
offered. Mass marriages take place, wherein scores or
hundreds of couples are paired off at once. Prizes for large
families are offered. The present adult generation being
designed for speedy extinction via the trenches,
replacements must be assured. Sports and Nazi sport
organizations are encouraged for young women with a
view to training them for healthy motherhood. In the
meantime, they are regimented by the State and sent to
work in the homes of the wealthy as housemaids and
servants. Thus, the Nazi labor policy regarding women is to
drive the working class women backward into isolation and
ignorance.
Note, too, that the women are cut off from the working
class at the point of production, where they could organize
effectively with the men workers. In this way, the Nazis
have divided the class which they fear the most, the
proletariat, and have forced the young girls into the
position of domestic servants where they can be isolated
and broken down easily. Of course, in line with this is the
destruction of all the political and social gains women had
won, a loss all the greater as the German women were the
most advanced in organization and in concessions wrung
from the rulers.
The Hitler policy towards women proves the frailty of the

achievement of feminism under capitalism and the
impossibility for any specially suppressed group in society
to free itself except through a fundamental change in the
987
property relations; that is, through the proletarian
revolution. Even the worst socialistic State, the Soviet
Union, under the regime of Stalinism, is infinitely superior
to this latest development of capitalism in its treatment of
women.
However, there is one bit of consolation. This anti-feminist

policy is bound to be but a temporary one in Germany.
Once war breaks out, and the men are sent to the front to be
consumed in wholesale fashion, the women again and in
even larger numbers than before will be drawn back into
the factories and the professions. Capitalism cannot long
turn backward the wheel of evolution. Nor can it deter the
development of women. Fascism can do nothing else but
continue to grip the backward layers of society with its steel
fingers and mold them into the army of producers that will
be compelled to end this anti-social order forever.
Footnotes
1. H. S. Chamberlain: Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, I,

Ixvii.
2. Compare L. Gumplowicz: Outlines of Sociology, and his

theory of Rassenkamph, race war.
3. See, A. Hitler: My Battle, p. 121.
4. It is significant that the basic views were developed by

Chamberlain, an Englishman, Hitler an Austrian, and
Rosenberg a Balt. This, evidently, is the intellectual "self-
sufficiency" of the Germans.
5. See, F. W. Nietzsche: On the Future of our Educational

Institutions, pp. 12, 13. (Complete Works, III, Macmillan,
1911.)
988
6. This was also the view of Thorstein Veblen. See his The
Higher Learning in America, p. 224 and following.
7. F. W. Nietzsche: Thoughts Out of Season, II, 105. (Complete

Works, V.) Incidentally it was the Jew, Oscar Levy, who
advanced the complete translation into English of
Nietzsche's works, taking pains to praise the Jew, Disraeli,
as the best Nietzschean in England. "The Disraelian novels
are in my opinion the best and only preparation for those
amongst you who wish gradually to become acquainted
with the Nietzschean spirit." (The same, I, xx.)
8. See Nietzsche: Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays, p. vii.

(Complete Works, IV.)
9. The same, p. viii.
10. The same, pp. 6, 7.
11. See Nietzsche, for example: Human, All-Too-Human, I,

122 and following. (Complete Works, VI, London, 1910.)
12. The same, I, 143.
13. The same, I, 88.
14. Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, p. 75.
15. Spengler, too, was an obscure school teacher.
16. This is also the point of view of Graf von Keyserling. See,
for example, H. A. Keyserling: America Set Free.
17. O. Spengler: Decline of the West, I, 129.
18. O. Spengler: Man and Technics, p. 22.
989
21. W. H. Hale: Challenge to Defeat, p. 137.
22. "All the popes, who had common sense, have held no
principles of religion but what favoured their
aggrandizement." (The Confessions of Frederick the Great, p.
41.)
23. According to Frederick the Great, "Religion is absolutely

necessary in a state ... but then it would not be very wise in
a king to have any religion himself." (The Confessions of
Frederick the Great, p. 40.)
24. See V. Buch: "Hitlerism Turns the Clock Back for

Women," Class Struggle (Jan. 1935), Vol. V, No. I.
25. The above three statements are cited in J.

Strachey: Menace of Fascism, p. 65.
26. F. W. Nietzsche: Human, All-Too-Human, I, 238.
27. The same, II, 237.
28. F. W. Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 182, 187.

(Complete Works, XII, Macmillan, 1914.)
XXXI. THE SPREAD OF FASCISM
THE WORLD WAR shattered the Austro-Hungarian

Empire into fragments. Austria was reduced to complete
impotence. No sooner was the body dismembered than
each severed part demonstrated that, under the
circumstances, it could not possibly lead a healthy
990
bourgeois existence. Hungary went towards communism,
Austria towards Left socialism. In Austria, also, the ruling
group never could rest, content with its artificial isolation
and general helplessness.
Of all the countries of Europe, Austria was the weakest

economically and the least able to weather the storm of new
events. In 1919, she had to be fed by the United States Food
Administration in Europe. During the period thereafter, she
had to be supported by external aid in the form of loans
and financial support. No sooner did the present crisis
break out when the Creditanstalt, the chief bank of Austria,
announced its bankruptcy and had to be aided by Germany
and other countries, thereby accelerating the financial crash
all over the world.
No sooner was the Versailles Treaty smashed by a

victorious Nazism than a virulent fascism surged up to
overwhelm Austria. This fascism was divided into two
sections, one adhering to the Nazi-type, made up of city
elements subservient to big industry and favoring organic
unity with Germany, the other leaning towards Italian
fascism, and supported by large landed estate owners
sympathetic to Italy. Connected to this second division
were the governmental forces under Dollfuss which were
interested in a revival of a greater Austria, and which
wanted to maintain Austrian independence.
Against the Right Wing fascist formations were the

socialists. These socialists had received 70 per cent of the
electoral vote of Vienna. They constituted the government
of that City, and held 40 per cent of the power in the
country as a whole. The Austrian socialists, too, had been
sufficiently affected by the communist revolutions in
Bavaria and in Hungary and by the deep degradation of
Austria after the War to have mouthed extremely Left
991
socialist phrases. They professed a readiness to recognize at
times the necessity of a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and a
friendliness toward Soviet Russia. In view of the extreme
language of the socialists and of the miserable failure of the
communists in that part of Europe, as well as owing to the
fact that Austria had not much large-scale heavy industry,
the communists were practically of no account. The
socialists held complete sway of the labor field and were
proud of the many social reforms they had inaugurated,
such as their model co-operative dwelling houses. Had
these socialists really wanted to fight, they could have taken
over power long ago, but this would have precipitated that
civil war which above all they wanted to avoid.
Following the world crisis, the initiative was taken by the

fascist groups and reactionary forces to drive the socialists
out of the national government, to increase the army and
the Heimwehr, and to disarm the socialists outside of
Vienna. Increasingly Vienna lost her autonomy, while the
Austrian government assumed a Bonapartist character,
dispensing with parliament and operating through
emergency decrees.
The second stage was marked by a temporary coalition of

the fascist groups to storm the Socialist Party's stronghold
of Vienna. This Dollfuss could do only by establishing a
dictatorship and physically annihilating the socialist
administration. The leaders of the socialists did not wish to
fight, but they were compelled to make some show of
resistance, not only because of their previous revolutionary
phrase-mongering which had compromised them, but also
because they actually held the power in Vienna, and no
bureaucracy will relinquish its sinecures without struggle.
The pitiful showing of the Socialist Party proved again that
historically the socialists could play only comic opera, no
992
matter how many poor rank and filers were shot down and
killed.
Although they were in a position to know thoroughly the

plans of the government to attack them, the leaders of the
Socialist Party made no adequate preparations for defense.
When the attack began, these heroes, instead of vigorously
defending the center of the city, at once took refuge in their
co-operative houses on the outskirts. Not the barricade but
the bedroom became the scene of fighting.
Had the Socialists really wanted to fight they easily could

have held the center of the city, but by taking to their
"forts," the co-operative houses, they permitted themselves
most efficiently to be massacred. This is the first time in
history that a revolution was conducted by running to
fortresses and taking to the defensive rather than the
offensive. Of course, the co-operative houses in the suburbs
were soon isolated one from the other and blown to pieces
by artillery. The masses lost the effectiveness of their
numbers by the fact that they were compelled to cower in
their kitchens to carry on the fight.
No doubt the socialist leaders believed that Dollfuss would

spare them if they behaved in such a foolish manner and
that as soon as the co-operative houses were surrounded
they could beg their socialist workers to yield on the
ground that they were overwhelmed by superior force. But
in such calculations the phrase-mongering bureaucracy
reckoned without two factors: first, the militancy of the
membership that conceived such action a complete betrayal;
and second, and most important of all, the fact that the
fascists were in no mood to spare them. It was not
necessary to destroy the co-operative houses and to kill so
many socialists --- it is estimated two thousand socialists
were slaughtered. All that the fascists needed to have done
993
was to have surrounded the houses for a day or two and
starved the defenders into submission. However, it was the
intention of the fascists to teach the socialists a good lesson.
Only in this way could the reactionaries show Mussolini
and Hitler that the Austrian government meant really to
wipe out the socialist and trade union menace. The killings
that followed, therefore, were not so much due to the
vigorous activity of the socialist bureaucracy as they were
to the determination of the fascists to take every advantage
of the situation to destroy the workers' organizations, root
and branch.
To the Austrian reformists, the destruction of their precious

co-operative houses was the loss of their whole world and
the end of their entire socialism; so the burning of the
Reichstag had seemed to the German opportunists. It was
an end of an era. Not fighting for socialism, the socialists
could not retain even their co-operatives; Austrian reaction,
to puncture the bubble of socialism, merely had to destroy
some plumbing. Down went the unions, the mass
organizations, everything. By blowing to pieces the co-
operative houses, the fascists demonstrated not only what
they would do to revolution, but how they intended to
handle social reform. The whole episode was an excellent
illustration of the law that he who stops half way today can
get nothing. It is either all, or nothing. (*1)
Nevertheless, it must be added for the sake of completeness

that the socialist workers in Austria behaved far better than
the communist workers of Germany. In Austria they did
not run away; they actually stood their ground and fought
in battle against the army of fascism.
The events in Austria gave the communists in Germany a

great opportunity to demonstrate whether they had
survived the terror of Hitler. Had there been any regular
994
communist movement, there would have been outbursts in
Germany to coincide with the fighting in the sister country.
But all was quiet. The complete absence of any disturbance
during the Hitler blood purge and the dissolution of the
storm troops, during the events in Austria, during the Saar
plebescite, and during the rearmament of the Rhine, have
furnished mute evidence of the complete breakdown of the
communist forces of Stalin in Germany.
No sooner were the socialists put down in bloody struggle

when the fight began to rage between the followers of
Hitler and the Catholic fascists under Stahrernberg, who
was linked up with the Heimwehr. The issue between the
two forces was the issue between industry and agriculture
between Germany and Italy. Had the Nazis won the day,
Austria would have been swallowed by Germany and
made into a province, like Bavaria. But what Germany
could do with Bavaria it could not do with Austria, a far
greater country.
The Austrian aristocracy had to struggle against any such

fate as Bavaria had met. Like Bavaria, Austria is Catholic,
but, unlike Bavaria, it is far closer to Italian influence. For
centuries Austria was connected with Italy, and these ties
have entered into the very manners of the Austrians. At the
moment, too, Italy was rising in relative importance. Italy
needed a counterweight to the Franco-Jugo-Slav alliance;
she was willing to work through the old Austrian
monarchical and agrarian interests that wished to maintain
the independence of Austria and at the same time crush the
labor movement. The idea of Mussolini was to set up again
a new Austro-Hungarian empire under the domination of
Italy and thus expand Italian influence on the Danube. As
part of its diplomacy, Italy stressed the fact that both
countries were Catholic, while Germany, contrariwise,
995
emphasized the fact that both were German. One used
religion, the other race for its imperialist purposes.
In this welter of intrigue, one thing is clear: Austria cannot

remain as she is. She must either be reduced to a semi-
colonial state under Italy, or become fused with Germany.
The latter is far more probable.
The efforts of France and the countries of the Little Entente

were concentrated to keep Austria as insignificant and
helpless as possible. This they did partly through working
through the socialists. Indeed, France was accused of aiding
the Socialist Party of Austria by shipping them arms via
Czecho-Slovak agents, to resist the government. This policy
has, however, failed. Italy can dominate the scene not by
repeating the choking policy of France, but by working
through the royal family, Otto of Hapsburg and others, to
restore the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. To this the
Hungarian agrarian aristocracy is favorable, and is working
day and night with Italy for the accomplishment of this
purpose.
Two separate and distinct groups are opposed to the

reconstitution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They are,
first, the countries that would be menaced immediately by
the restoration of such a monarchy, namely, Czecho-
Slovakia, Jugoslavia, and, to a lesser extent, Roumania and
Poland, which countries had also grabbed pieces of the
former empire's territory. There is hardly a doubt that the
restoration of the Hapsburg monarchy in Austria and
Hungary in 1935 would have led to war.
On the other side, also in opposition, is Germany. If Austria

and Germany unite, it cannot be under the Hapsburgs. This
would be similar to making the tail wag the dog. Germany
must rule the fusion, and, just as the industrialists of that
996
country have been unwilling to yield their leadership to the
royalist forces of the Kaiser but rather have compelled the
Royalist-Nationalists to submerge their identity within the
Nazis, so would the industrialists refuse to yield leadership
to Austria. A return of the Hapsburgs in Austria would
stimulate greatly the royalist movement in Germany to the
detriment of the political power of Thynnes and Company.
Of course, it is not entirely out of the question that German
diplomacy might temporarily become reconciled to an
Austro-Hungarian monarchy, provided its internal stability
were secure and Germany's ultimate victory inevitable.
Then a great alliance could be forged, including Italy and
Eastern Europe under the leadership of Germany, against
the Soviet Union.
There are elements even among the royalists of Austria

who suspect Italy of perfidy, who prefer the policy of
playing off Italy against Germany and vice versa, and who
dream of a reconstituted old order in which the Austro-
Hungarian Empire would arise as independent, as
powerful, and as domineering as before. They point out
that Italy's interest in Austria is like that of France, namely,
merely a negative one to prevent Germany from growing
strong in a southern direction, to prevent Austria from
improving in any direction, and to keep Austria constantly
dependent upon Italy and its allies.
If this is Italy's scheme, it is a lost one. Austria cannot

permanently be kept weakened. Such a policy led to the fall
of the socialists and would lead to the fall of any capitalist
government eventually. The Austrian Heimwehr fascists
refuse to serve without perspective, merely as tools of Italy.
But to what way out can they turn? To reconstitute the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy without Italy is impossible,
and would lead to war. To be under the tutelage of Italy
997
means to be linked up with interests that cannot develop
Austria. Eventually Austria must turn to Germany.
Confident of their success, the Nazis in Austria pressed

impatiently for victory; they assassinated Dollfuss and
staged a rebellion. The government was forced to act,
although it could not count on the sympathy of the people
after the destruction of the socialist and workers'
organizations. Indeed, many of these groups tended to
favor the Nazis, who at least were allied to modern
industry rather than to backward landed property of the
old royalty. Nevertheless, the government, behind which
were the Heimwehr and Catholic fascists, was able to crush
the Nazis temporarily.
The ease with which this was accomplished leads the

impartial historian to speculate whether the defeat was not
planned by Hitler himself. Such politics is not impossible.
At the moment in question, Hitler was greatly embarrassed
by the revolt in the storm troops against his conservative
tendencies which compelled him to execute many of his
former friends It might well have been that Hitler, knowing
Austria must eventually fall into Germany's power,
deliberately allowed the Austrian Nazis to be shot down on
the grounds that they were not reliable and that the
movement was premature. Had the Austrian petty
bourgeois Nazis won the victory, Hitler's control might
have been greatly threatened. At the same time, Hitler
could obtain the same results through negotiation and
compromise, rather than through force. After all, the
Austrian Nazis did accomplish their first aim, the
destruction of the Dollfuss regime. It is questionable
whether der Fuehrer wanted them to go beyond removing
Dollfuss or farther than putting just enough pressure on the
998
government so as to force Austria's fusion with the German
rulers.
Assuming such were the calculations of Hitler, recent

events have amply demonstrated their worth. As the
pressure against Austria grows greater, it becomes clear
that Austria cannot live without the support of Germany;
day by day the influence of the Nazis grows stronger. The
socialists, too, remember that it was the Catholic troops
who shot them down and not the Nazis. Certainly the
people do not support the government. Some of the
socialists even bend towards collaboration with the
"National Socialism" of the petty bourgeoisie under Hitler.
It is clear that no Austrian government can live long
without the Nazis' co-operation. Either fusion with
Germany (or, what is the same thing, the Austrian Nazis in
the government), or perpetual rebellion, turmoil, and chaos
--- this is the immediate perspective in Austria.
In the meantime, the clerical fascists in power have

attempted a reorganization of the government somewhat
along the lines fantastically laid out by Saint-Simon, with
three separate houses of parliament. At the present time it
is too early to analyze the effect of the new regulations.
Already the Catholic fascists are in conflict with the
government, and a new dictatorship has been set up, under
Schuschnig, which has driven out Stahremberg and his
adherents who are too closely sympathetic to Italy's
aspirations.
The intensity of the world crisis and the rise of fascism have
placed the most severe burdens upon the French capitalist
system. All signs point to an acute situation within France
leading to fascists attempts at power. Although one of the
999
very last countries to be drawn into the crisis, owing to her
exceptional economic conditions, such as the high
development of usurer capital, the big reparations
payments, etc. France has been rapidly reduced to 60 per
cent of the production she enjoyed in prosperity, which had
been falling very sharply since 1931, revealing an
unemployment of at least two million workers.
Bankruptcies and receiverships, too, have mounted to
almost one thousand five hundred monthly. Although
trade fell, huge import surpluses were accumulated (in 1933
alone mounting to about half a billion dollars), which could
not easily be paid for, owing to the drastic drop in tourist
income, the cessation of reparations payments, the great
lowering of investment returns, the intensified tariff wars,
and other losses.
To the three hundred billion francs public debt the French

government has been forced to add the annually mounting
deficits. In spite of her drastic efforts to reduce the import
surplus, to cut down governmental expenditures, and to
cancel debts to the United States, governmental financial
obligations have so continued to rise that France is
threatened with having to go off the gold standard. (*2) To
the French middle class, this is the most terrible thing that
can happen. Deeply involved in financial operations,
having already experienced an 80 per cent loss, when all
French investments were marked down in order to stabilize
the franc after the War, France can go off the gold standard
today only with the greatest social convulsions. As the cost
of living remains high, the effects of the crisis make
themselves felt more tensely. With fascist Germany on its
right and the Spanish Revolution on its left, France finds
itself in a critical transition period.
1000
To the internal difficulties must be added the external: the
loss of the Saar Basin, the rise of German imperialism, the
growing influence of Italy in the Mediterranean, the break-
up of France's post-war continental hegemony, the
necessity to bolster up the puppet countries supported by
France for its protection, the need for increased military
preparations, etc. No wonder France fears it will be the next
country to crack; no wonder class formations have
crystallized accordingly.
As elsewhere, however, it is the Right Wing that has taken

the aggressive initiative, and among the Rightists it is the
Royalists who lead. The fact that the Royalists fill such a
prominent role is an indication of the fact that France is still
agrarian, that her economy is relatively stagnant, and that,
not the great industrialists, but the finance and landed
capitalist interests still play the leading organizational role
in France. Together with the fascists, then, the Royalists,
such as Les Camelots du Roi, took to the streets in vigorous
denunciation of parliament, as in February 1934, and
actually built barricades in their fight with the police. While
the party of law and order, the Right Wing, used the
Stavisky Parliamentary scandal to threaten insurrection, the
socialists went to the defense of the government and called
a general strike to support the legislature. Here again we
see that the socialists become active only in the preservation
of capitalist democracy; while never dreaming of calling a
general strike for socialism, they are very eager to do so
where the safety of the capitalist system is involved.
The socialist movement has been temporarily successful in

putting down the fascist forces in France, and the recent
election returns of 1936 have placed Leon Blum, socialist, as
Premier of France. Nevertheless, it is highly questionable
whether the victory of fascism in Germany does not
1001
inevitably spell the victory of similar reactionary forces in
the rival countries of France and England, if only for the
self-preservation of these countries. Even though the
socialists and the communists in France completely
capitulate to the theories of nationalist defense and become
subservient elements in French capitalist schemes of
imperialism --- that is, even should these parties
demonstrate to the full what amounts to their complete
counter-revolutionary activity against the interests of the
workers who support them --- nevertheless, French
capitalism may be compelled to find the socialists and
communists entirely too costly and too inefficient for its
purposes, and be eventually driven, as the war danger
grows near, to bring into existence in France the same sort
of coordinated integrated militarist dictatorship as exists in
Germany. We may say, then, rather safely, that the victory
of the Right Wing forces in France is eventually assured.
The alternative, that the socialists and communist forces
would be allowed to retain power, is only conceivable in
case capitalist France goes to aid communist Russia, but
that is inconceivable. France can aid Russia only after
Russia has abandoned its communism, which in turn can
occur only after a fierce civil war within Russia itself.
The oldest French organization to have taken on a fascist

color is the Ligue de l'Action Francaise. It was organized
during the exciting days of the Dreyfuss case, under the
leadership of Charles Maurras and Leon Daudet. Its
policies from the start were strongly nationalistic, anti-
semitic, monarchical, and Catholic. France was to be for the
French, not for the Jews and Protestants. Bitterly opposed to
democratic principles, it organized its shock troops,
the Camelots du Roi, or henchmen of the King. In 1923, these
"henchmen" staged a demonstration in which they wrecked
the presses of several newspapers and fed castor oil to the
1002
Left Deputies. They have been enthusiastic in their support
of Mussolini's principles and methods. Indeed, the first
official book of fascist doctrine, Fascisme, written by
Gorgolini, was published by George Valois under the
auspices of the Ligue.
For a long time the Camelots du Roi, mostly students with a

penchant for violence, have been systematically drilled, and
now have established many arsenals. Following the
principles of Mussolini, the Action Francaise tried to form
corporations of workers and employers, as in Italy. Leon
Daudet has declared that everyone must recognize the
overwhelming superiority of Mussolini, especially since his
display of wisdom in preserving that incomparable force of
political stability --- the hereditary monarchy, the House of
Savoy.
Daudet would welcome a French Mussolini to restore the

House of Bourbon. To him, Briand, Boncour, and Poincaire
are pernicious fools for preferring their old "democ-soc-
parliamentary fetich" to the cause of real peace by a Latin
alliance. Parliaments, parties, and universal suffrage are
ruining France. Sovereignty should be taken from the
people and given to the State, the goal of which should be
not quantity but quality.
In 1923, Francois Coty, the masculine perfume magnate,

also attempted the organization of a fascist group called the
"Blue-shirts." He bought over the paper Le Figaro for anti-
communistic propaganda, and, when that failed in 1928, he
issued L’Ami du Peuple, selling it below cost. Like Daudet,
Coty advocated Italo-French amity, and the use of the idea
of Latinity as a rallying cry for fascism. Having once been a
radical socialist, Coty used his slogans of solidarism to
organize his Solidarit’e Francaise, which today is one of the
largest fascist groups in France.
1003
The fascist movement generally received a great impetus in
1924 during the hectic period preceding the stabilization of
the franc, when masses were taking to the streets. At that
time, two hundred thousand workers assembled to pay
their respects to Jean Jaur'es in a gigantic demonstration in
his honor. The bourgeoisie became frightened and began to
organize numerous military organizations, the most
important being the Ligue des Patriotes, led by General
Castelnau. These groups, strictly speaking, were not fascist
organizations, but leaned in the general direction of fascism
with their anti-parliamentary, anti-Bolshevik, anti-labor
programs. As a subdivision of the Ligue des Patriotes, Pierre
Taittinger organized the Jeunesse Patriotes, or Young Patriots.
This group strove to build up a national party and openly
acknowledged its intentions to seize power in the fashion of
Mussolini, with a program demanding the defense of the
small middle class, small producers, small pensioners, and
French petty property. For the workers, the Young Patriots
threatened law and order everywhere, in the streets,
schools and factories, and advocated the elimination of
strikes.
During this period of fright there was formed also

the Federation Nationale Catholique, again under the
leadership of General Castelnau. Its base was among the
peasants, who were advised to be ready to fight against the
dictatorship of the cities. It participated in anti-red and
strike- breaking activities. This National Catholic
Federation has been intimately connected with the Jeunesse
Patriotes, to whom it turned over its own Catholic Boy
Scouts. Thus there has taken place a considerable
interlocking between the movements.
It should be noted that the chief financial supporters of all

of these groups include Marsal, a banker, Arthuys and
1004
Mathon, industrialists, Poncet of the steel trust and
ambassador to Germany, and Serge Andre', director of
large oil companies and also of the Societe d'Armaments, one
of the armament firms handled by Sir Basil Zaharoff. All of
these men, of course, ardently proclaimed themselves "the
defenders of the small middle class Frenchmen."
The theoretician of the Right Wing generally has been

Andre' Tardieu who has ceaselessly struck at democracy
and socialism in favor of Mussolini's model. Parliament is
the root of all evil, and Tardieu would curtail drastically its
powers. His "minimum reforms" are: (1) the withdrawal of
parliament's power to initiate expenditures; (2) the granting
to the executive of power to dissolve parliament; (3)
prolongation of parliament's term of office, that is, less
frequent elections, and extension of the time during which
the executive may rule after dissolving parliament; (4)
popular referendum on parliamentary acts whenever the
executive sees fit; and (5) defense of the State against the
subversive tendency of its own employees. Tardieu is
against any interpellations of the government; the executive
should be accountable to no one, and should be free to
handle expenditures as he sees fit.
At present, the Chamber can be dissolved only with the

consent of the Senate, and this has happened only once.
Under Tardieu's view, the influence of the Chamber
gradually would disappear. Tardieu would prevent all
State employees from joining any trade union or
organization. They must be at all times 100 per cent loyal to
the regime. This is all the more important in France since
the number of functionaries is very large. Following the
philosophy of Mussolini, Tardieu insists upon establishing
authority to save liberty.
1005
The most threatening organization in street action has been,
however, none of the preceding organizations, but the Croix
de Feu, which at first was organized to include only war
veterans who had been decorated, but later was extended
to take in other veterans and finally, the sons of war
veterans. It is led by Colonel Robert De la Rocque. The
membership claimed is over one hundred and twenty
thousand. (*3) The program of the Croix de Feu is an
elaborate one. In its foreign policy, it would scrap the
Versailles Treaty, calling for reliance on no other force
except the military might of the nation. It also demands two
years military service and large increases in the military
budget at the expense of social reform and education. In its
internal policies, it is opposed to civil liberties for any other
but nationalist opinions. On the other hand, it caters
strongly to the views of the Catholic Church, challenging
the State's monopoly of education, calling for fewer college
graduates and for less democracy in the public schools. Of
course, it fights the trade unions and favors the dissolution
of the National Federation of Labor. In some respects the
program of the Croix de Feu is far from the theories of
fascism, but there is no doubt that every contradiction will
be ironed out in time. The Croix de Feu apparently carries
forward the traditions of Napoleon, and should lend itself
to Bonapartist politicians.
The arch foe of this veterans' group admittedly is

communism, and La Rocque has promised to hang the
communists or socialists, should they attempt to control the
government. His own positive program, however, is
exceedingly vague, advocating abstractly a political clean-
up and good leadership; La Rocque has made his aim
rather the acquisition of power than a clear statement of
social reforms.
1006
Under the pressure of the Right Wing, the French
government has rapidly taken on aspects similar to that of
the Bruening regime in Germany and that of Giolitti in Italy,
before the fascist victories. While chaos exists in the
parliamentary sphere, with one government giving way to
another in rapid succession, all during 1934 the Right Wing
on the one hand and the workers on the other were arming
themselves for physical struggle in the street. The Right
Wing, under the patronage of the Wendell family of
munition makers and the Rothschild family of bankers, has
now united in a Unione Nationale des Combattants.
At the same time, the government, by its treaty with Soviet

Russia, has been able cleverly to disarm the workers
morally and materially. Suddenly the capitalist government
of France appears as the champion of the Soviet Union and
receives the enthusiastic endorsement of the socialists and
communists. If Russia is to be supported and Hitler is to be
fought, what more can these so-called revolutionists ask?
They now promise to support the French army and no
longer to embarrass the ruling class by strikes in the
factories. In the Chamber of Deputies, their representatives
declare that they gladly will give up their arms and no
longer attempt to take matters to the street. Thus in France,
as in Germany, while the Right Wing cynically organizes
itself more strongly than ever, the Left Wing becomes a
mere tail end of the republican government. As the
communists liquidate themselves into socialists, the
socialists crystallize into republican adherents of national
defense.
As the day of French fascist victory grows near, we can

foreshadow what its general theory will be. In economics it
will be far closer to Italian fascism than to German national
socialism, not only because the country is economically
1007
similar to Italy, agriculture and petty industry playing a
predominant part, but because friendliness to Italy will fit
in with French imperialism to raise the slogan of Latin unity
against the Teutons. French fascism will follow Sorel and
Bergson in philosophic method and will adopt the
corporate State in politics, all the while stressing the general
will of Rosseau, and the sociology of August Comte.
However, within the fascist ranks there are several

tendencies which will have to compose their differences.
First, there exists the struggle between the industrialists and
the Royalists. There is this difference between the French
and the Italian situation. In Italy the King was never
overthrown; in France, over sixty-five years stand between
the present and the last empire. Should Germany restore its
monarchy, it is possible that French fascism also would
require such a figurehead. In the absence of such a necessity,
it is doubtful whether the industrialists will consent to
having such an expensive symbol reinstalled.
The second difference is over the question of the character

of the actual leader of the movement. In Italy and England
the fascist leadership is in the hands of men who were
active militants in the Left Wing of the Socialist and Labor
Parties. In Germany, Hitler followed the ideology of
Christian socialism. In France, national conditions would
demand a leader who can pose as a socialist, perhaps a
leader of the Catholic union movement, who at the same
time intimately will be connected with the military forces of
France. The army has always played a decisive role in
France. One who aspires to fascist leadership must have the
whole-hearted endorsement of the army and veteran forces
of the country. It is difficult to find such a person in the
ranks of the orthodox socialist and trade union movements
which for so long a time have taken a sharp anti-militarist
1008
position. With the physiognomy of Catholic socialism and
with the mailed fist of militarism, however, fascism in
France has the possibility of playing the same integrating
and destructive role as other fascisms have accomplished in
other countries.
That fascism has arisen in Great Britain is amply indicative

of two factors, first, the breaking down of the British
Empire and its slow disintegration, and second, the fact that
all countries today must be prepared for sudden
declarations of war. Britain can counter the perfected fascist
organs of rival countries only by similar governmental
centralization. It is difficult to see how any country in
Western Europe today can avoid fascist tendencies when all
nations are living under the shadow of perpetual war that
will begin without the formalities of declarations or
warnings. That country will win the war soonest that is
completely prepared for any emergency, that has mobilized
its entire population into an immense frictionless machine,
that has wiped out the class struggle or reduced it to
innocuous chatterings, that rests upon the most highly
developed industries, that has coordinated all industrial
and social life behind it.
Fascism is the only theory and movement that fits in with

this scheme of things, and even though the internal
situation within the country itself, --- namely, the
development of class war, --- might not necessitate such
fascism at this time, the international situation and the war
danger may compel it to come into existence. This is
increasingly the situation with Great Britain, and has begun
to affect even the United States.
1009
In spite of their parliamentary traditions, the British have
been well prepared for fascist tendencies by the long
operations of their powerful imperialism which all classes
have ardently indorsed. British "democracy" was ready to
adopt a policy of blood and iron in its colonies. There were
no parliamentary elections for the Africans or Asiatics but
the cold stark terror of a ubiquitous State. How poetically
just it will be when precisely because India and other
colonial regions are striving to win a maximum of
independence and democratic liberalism for themselves,
Britain should be moved to fascism!
The huge colonial structure of the British Empire has

maintained a cynical State apparatus, highly contemptuous
of the common run of mortals, each functionary a petty
satrap or nabob thoroughly prepared to adopt the views of
Hobbes, views which today can be realized only through
fascism. The colonials have a saying that only "mad dogs
and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun"; the immense
energy of Britain's rulers will not ooze supinely away
should the Empire be in danger because of labor's claims.
As it crushed the colonials, so will it try to crush the
workers at home.
Even before the great crash of 1929, the danger of the

disintegration of the British Empire had become apparent
to the acutest political thinkers of the day, affecting
drastically all political parties. As G. D. H. Cole put it,
"Today, the situation is changed.Capitalism is not in Great
Britain in any danger of immediate or dramatic collapse;
but it is plainly sliding downhill.... The Socialists, for the
most part, are not encouraged by the growing difficulties of
capitalism; they are frightened by them." (*4) Indeed that
was exactly the situation with the socialists. One might
have imagined that, with the decline of British capitalism,
1010
the socialists would have proclaimed the verification of
their theories and the necessity of sliding into socialism.
The socialists have not pressed the point, although for the
first time the doubt has begun to penetrate among them as
to whether there could be partial, gradual steps to socialism.
Formerly, the socialists used to speak of the nationalization

of the mines, the further questions then debated being
whether to give compensation to the mine owners, or
whether that compensation should he in the form of
royalties, general debt on the public, or mine stock
payments. Today, the British socialists must comprehend
that, even if the State should nationalize the coal mines, the
coal would still not be sold. What difference would it make
whether the mines were owned privately or publicly, when
there would remain the same vast number of miners out of
work? Prior to the war, the socialists used to speak of the
necessity for a minimum wage; now many of them have
admitted that under the present set-up this would only
increase the army of unemployed. Previously they had
talked of the right to work; the question now has become
where to place those unemployed. In short, the novel
features created by the great technological changes in the
era of imperialism have whirled the socialists into a sea of
confusion.
This new situation hastens some of the socialistic

theoreticians towards fascism, especially those formerly
connected with the guild socialists. Their solution is to rely
less on experts, to develop the home market and to revive
agriculture. Away from industry, back to the land!
Writers like Cole emphatically polemicized against such

measures as work relief on the grounds that the dole was
cheaper, the work was entirely too costly and hurriedly
improvised, the accomplished task was considered like
1011
prison work, men were not selected according to
capabilities, the kind of work done was wasteful, etc.
Instead of work relief, he argued that every unemployed
worker should be given the option to enroll in a volunteer
"National Labor Corps." (*5) Together with this
regimentation of the unemployed should go a complete
reorganization of the workers in the factory, somewhat on
the style of Mussolini. "There should be in every industrial
plant employing more than a handful of persons some sort
of Works Council, chosen by the whole body of workers in
the plant and representative of the different grades and
sections. This Council shall be a statutory body, either set
up, as in Germany, under a special Act of Parliament, or
created as an integral part of the system of State control. (*6)
All of these theories Italian and British fascisms may well
indorse.
That the guild socialists have become fascist forerunners is

especially noticeable in the general theses proposed by Cole,
(*7) which included the following: (1) The necessity for
elaboration of a new economic policy based on the
admission of the fact that Great Britain never could regain
her old supremacy in overseas commerce; (2) A recognition
that the main problem is unemployment to be met by
means of National Labor Corps to improve the country
through slum clearance, house building, forestration, road
making, railway development, electrification, and land
drainage; (3) The creation of a Board of National
Investment to guide capital investment in creative lines or
to borrow money to go into such new enterprises itself; (4)
A recognition of the hopelessness of the old trade unions
and the encouragement of new Works Councils, connected
with the State; (5) The encouragement by the State of all,
methods of rationalization, the State to take over certain
concerns and to see that the new equipment which English
1012
industry needs so badly is obtained; (6) The building up of
the dairy industry, encouragement of "back to the land"
movement, socialization of land and extensive credits given
to the farmers. (*8)
The views expressed above bespeak eloquently of the

general pessimism in the ranks of the ruling class of Great
Britain, and show clearly the difference between British
fascism and Italian. Both must stress empire --- the Italians,
however, in order to win one and to revive the glory that
was Rome's, while the British fight to maintain their old
standing, pessimistically admitting their deterioration. In
short, fascist theories are developing in Great Britain not so
much because of the rise of the class struggle within the
country, or of the fear of communism, but rather because of
the shifts in world economy and the changed international
position of the British Empire. We have here a classic case
of slow and gradual desuetude.
To provide the monkey glands for Britain's rejuvenation,

Cole urges, first, closer international collaboration ---
evidently through the League of Nations under British
control, through cancellation of debts, and through a
stopping of the fall of prices --- apparently in order to allow
Britain to compete despite its antiquated machinery; second,
a real disarmament --- especially necessary now that Britain
has become increasingly vulnerable to attack both in the
Mediterranean by Italy and from the air by Germany; and,
third, peace with Russia. The old individualist liberalism
must disappear forever. "There must be a large infusion of
State socialism into the economic system of every important
country. . . ." (*9)
In practical politics the fascist movement in Britain has been

adumbrated by two important developments; first, the
domination of heavy monopoly industry in the British
1013
Federation of manufactures with theories most clearly
expressed by Sir Alfred Mond, calling for a complete self-
sufficient empire. Here is the basic slogan of British fascism.
Unlike Austria, apparently torn between conflicting
doctrines of race and empire, Great Britain must take her
stand on the same ground as Italy, namely, "Empire."
Britain's economic views cannot be those of autarchy. She is
too much involved in international trade as the carrier of
the world's goods ever to advocate any disruption of
commodity intercourse. Nor can Great Britain take to
theories of race. Herself a admitted conglomerate of many
races, Danes, Saxons, Welsh, Irish, French, etc, theories of
racial purity cannot advance the prestige of Britain. Besides,
there is her polyglot empire to consider. Nor can Great
Britain make any further pretensions of organizing the
world. Such claims are for American fascism to advance.
Faced with the superior rivalry of the United States, the
most that Great Britain can hope to do is to maintain its
scattered forces intact.
The second important development leading to fascism was

the organization of the Maintenance Men during the British
general strike in 1926. This gigantic strike that involved
directly five million workers gave the British ruling class
the shock of its life. The bourgeoisie saw clearly that any
drastic reduction in the standards of the British workers
would be met by a movement leading towards revolution.
On the other hand, the capitalists knew that the decline of
the economy of the British Empire was bound to lead to
reductions of standards at home. The British employers
would be gored to death on the horns of this dilemma
unless they acted in time. During the strike itself they
organized their corps of Maintenance Men to keep order
and to help break the strike. With the need for the
Maintenance Men arose the need for a fascist program.
1014
The terrific impact of the economic depression in 1929
greatly accelerated all such developments in Great Britain.
Finally, under the leadership of Sir Oswald Mosley,
formerly a Left Wing socialist, there has been organized the
British Union of Fascists. There are other fascist
organizations in Britain, such as the Imperial Fascists, the
National Fascists and the British Fascists, but they are
relatively small compared to Mosley's Blackshirts. Unlike
the other three, the British Union of Fascists is not
especially anti-Semitic.
According to Mosley, fascism comes to each great nation in

turn as the country reaches the crisis inevitable in the
modern age, as the epoch of civilization comes to an end,
and the necessity arises to reorganize the system. Britain
cannot meet the problems of decline, the losing fight to
keep the colonies, or the discontent at home, by means of
the talking gallery of Parliament. Action is ceded on the
style of Italy. A stronger State should be established so that
every member of the body politic will act in harmony with
the whole under the guidance and driving force of the
fascist movement.
All lesser interests, whether of the Right or of the Left,

whether they be employers' federation, trade union,
banking or professional interest, must be subordinated to
the welfare of the nation as a whole. Within the corporate
State structure, trade unions and employers' federations no
longer will oppose each other, but function as the joint
directors of national enterprise. Class war will give place to
national cooperation through the formation of corporations.
Here the British Fascists only modernize the opinions of
that inveterate utopian, Robert Owen, who had declared a
hundred years previously in an address to the working
classes of England that they must recognize "First-that the
1015
rich and the poor, the governors and the governed have
really but one interest.... Fourth --- that the higher classes in
general no longer wish to degrade you. . . ." (*10)
The heart of the program of the British Union of Fascists is

the question of the empire. According to this organization,
only through the corporate organization of Britain can there
be the best and maximum development of the empire. The
dominions and the colonies being natural producers of food
stuffs and raw materials, they will be kept as such, while
the mother country will remain highly organized to
produce manufactured goods. Thus the British Union of
Fascists repeats the same coercion of the old mercantilists
that led to the American Revolution and would be bound to
lead to further explosions in the colonies.
This program only rationalizes the recent efforts of the

British government to establish a tariff around the empire,
to keep out foreign competitors, and to make the British
imperialist system an integrated whole. Such efforts,
however, cannot succeed permanently. The tariff on wheat
and meat can tend only to raise the cost of living for the
workers of Great Britain. The keeping out of foreign
finished products will tend only to increase the technical
stagnation in Great Britain and to raise costs throughout the
empire. The establishment of such a tariff only can increase
the animosity of the United States, which country,
moreover, can evade the tariff by means of the export of
capital into the dominions, incidentally reaping an extra
profit because of the tariff. The idea of an imperial tariff
that will hold is a bursting bubble.
Together with these policies, Mosley intends to build up the

home market; first, in order to compensate England for her
loss in foreign trade; second, so as to make England more
self-sufficient in time of war; and third, to raise a more
1016
powerful middle class throughout the countryside. To the
masses, Mosley promises that such regulation of agriculture
and industry will lead to the end of irresponsibility and
criminal competition, whereby each employer competes
with the others to lower wages, and instead will institute a
planned economy and will raise the standards of life
everywhere. The middle class will be preserved from the
competition of the big fellows, which is driving them to
extinction.
While speaking thus prettily to the petty bourgeoisie, the

fascists do not neglect to promise the big industrialists that
under the control of fascism there would be a real
organization of British power to increase exports, under the
slogan "Britain buys from those who buy from Britain."
Thus there would be a vigorous governmental policy to
club weaker nations into line and to make them purchase
British goods or suffer the disastrous boycott movement
which Britain might be able to enforce under particular
circumstances.
Recognizing the weakened position of Great Britain and the

existence of powerful labor forces opposed to war, the
British fascists have been forced to play down the theories
of militarism that flow from fascism. On the contrary, they
have declared repeatedly that it is irresponsible liberalism
and free trade which have started wars, but that organized
economy under fascism could not do so. As they have put it,
it is muddle, not organization which leads to war; chaos is
more dangerous than thought and method. Fascist
organization is the method of world peace among nations
bound together by the universal fascism of the twentieth
century.
It is significant, too, that the British fascists do not oppose

democracy to dictatorship, but, on the contrary, point out
1017
that a dictatorship is the necessary culmination of
democracy. Fascism will be victorious not against the will
of the people but only as its expression. Fascism implies a
government armed by the people with power to overcome
problems which must be conquered if the nation is to live
and to remain great. If the people do not give fascism
power, then the State will collapse and nothing will stand
in the way of communism. Thus, the dictator should
constantly avail himself of plebiscites wherever they can
serve a useful purpose, since, according to Mosley, fascism
is no less determined to secure popular representation than
to secure government itself. Mosley is not too coy, however,
to affirm that under some circumstances it might become
necessary for a strong man and fascist movement to save
England even against itself. History is to decide whether
such action is correct. Following Carlyle, Mosley preens
himself as another Cromwell.
Of course, even more so than in Italy, fascism in England is

loyal to the Crown and pledges itself to co-operate strongly
with the Royalty. After all, Sir Oswald is not a mere
plebeian like Mussolini or Hitler. The Crown is needed not
only because it symbolizes the unity of the British Empire,
but because that all men are created equal is a false
supposition. Under fascism, the talented and strong men
will rule, these elements, of course, being found in the
fascist aristocratic camp only.
Besides the fascist movement's forming from below, similar

trends have been recently occurring within the British
government itself. A "National" government has been
created which undertakes to harmonize the interests of all
parties and to end the party system in Britain. The situation
today, therefore, is similar to that during the War, when the
coalition government prevailed, only, significantly enough,
1018
it is not the liberals who have made the coalition, but the
conservatives. Here again we see how present-day peace
must use methods in ordinary life that were resorted to
only during war time in the preceding era. What was a
temporary war measure becomes a permanent peace
philosophy.
The formation of the "National" government has gone hand

in hand with a reduction of the power of parliament whose
chattering is being curbed by the ever-increasing authority
of the executive arm of the government. More and more the
British government is adopting administrative decrees
rather than old-style parliamentary methods. In this respect,
also, we have a foreshadowing of theories and practice of
fascism. In the other countries where fascism has
triumphed, a similar set-up has always preceded the
accession of the new forces.
Up to now, the fascist movement in Great Britain has not

been able to make great headway. The strongly entrenched
labor movement in Great Britain, despite its bellicose
nationalism and servile imperialism, is a great obstacle in
its path. However, as the war danger grows greater and
more menacing, there can be no question but that these
tendencies must develop further toward victory. The death
of King George V may well mark the transition between the
old and the new.
We are now able to examine more particularly the road and

methods by which fascism reaches power. Essentially,
fascism is the reformation and re-dressment of the capitalist
front to enable the social order to exist a while longer. It
brushes aside the veiled dictatorship of the economic rulers,
which exists under a democracy, to establish the open
1019
dictatorship of Big Business over the nation. To accomplish
its purpose, however, it is compelled to use the middle class
which it mobilizes and to which it makes various
concessions. The fascist movement arises from the fact that
the ruling class is unable to govern as of old and from the
further fact that the proletariat is extraordinarily active,
threatening to take power. Fascism develops through two
routes. First, there is the mass movement organized in
militant formation from below; second, there is the
insidious fascization of the government from above. In the
background is the lack of capacity of the working class to
accomplish what it threatens. These three factors combined
allow fascism to get control.
Between parliamentary democracy and fascism there stands

the mechanism of Bonapartism as a logical intermediary
step in government. The profound necessity of Bonapartism
has been proved in Italy, Germany, and Austria, and as the
other countries, such as France, England, and the United
States, move toward fascism, the definite signs of
Bonapartism similarly have appeared. As soon as the
struggle of the social strata-the -Haves and the -Have-nots,
the exploiters and exploited-reaches its highest tension, the
conditions are ripe for the domination of bureaucracy,
police, soldiery; the government becomes "independent" of
society. These are precisely the characteristics of
Bonapartism.
Bonapartism, therefore, is a governmental regime resting

not upon the mass support of political parties, but entirely
upon the bayonets of its army and the activity of its
functionaries. The government endures solely because the
main classes have mutually paralyzed or exhausted each
other. Such a situation existed when Napoleon I became
emperor. None of the powerful classes, whether
1020
represented by Jacobins or Bourbons, had desired the rule
of this upstart. He was tolerated only because he was able
to secure stability for private property in an era of violence
and chaos' when no single class engaged in the civil war
could put down the other. A similar situation existed under
Napoleon III. As the revolution of 1848 unfolded itself, it
was apparent that there was no class strong enough to take
the power, so all groups were forced to tolerate a
Napoleonic government which each detested.
Generically identical events existed in Italy, Germany, and

Austria before the victory of fascism. In Italy, the workers,
on the one hand, and the capitalists, on the other, were
struggling bitterly in the streets. Neither side was able to
put down the other. The government under Nitti and later
under Giolitti, Bonomi, and Facta, was merely a frame for
the conflicting elements, was simply maintaining the State
apparatus necessary to protect private property and order
as a whole. None of the contending groups really wanted to
support the Giolittis. They were in office through sufferance
and because no majority could be found to support any
other. The Bonapartism of the Giolitti government was a
short one, owing to the fact that, unlike the days of
Napoleon I and Napoleon III, the classes had not mutually
exhausted themselves, but were still fighting for control. As
soon as one or the other opposing class won the day, it was
bound to shove aside the temporary governmental regime
and install its own representatives. The same situation
prevailed in the days of Bruening, von Papen, and von
Schleicher in Germany, and of Dollfuss and Schuschnig in
Austria.
All this, however, does not mean that Bonapartism is

impartial or neutral in the struggle. Bonapartism lends itself
very favorably to the struggle for fascism. The very fact that
1021
the government was no longer actively supported by the
classes but existed solely on sufferance, was an indication to
the property owners that the days of democratic
parliamentarism were over and that they would have to
support a group, like the fascist, which was not afraid to
use open terror force to secure stabilization. The very
capitalist interests that create the Bonapartist regime in the
government in order to hold the fort are the same interests
that help to support fascism. And conversely, both
Bonapartism and fascism being agents of the same class, the
old governmental order, although it tries to hold on as long
as possible, finally, when it knows it has to go, does
whatever it can to aid the victory of the fascists.
Thus we have seen in the cases of Italy, Germany, and

Austria that the very governmental apparatus which was
supposedly opposed to fascist usurpation helped the
fascists with all the power at its command, the police and
the army disarming the subversive forces, arming the
fascists, and gradually fusing with fascism, under its
leadership. We therefore can declare it to be a fundamental
political rule that countries proceeding from
parliamentarism to fascism have to pass through the stage
of Bonapartism, which exists during the interim, while the
classes fight, and which paves the way to and aids fascist
victory.
To this we may add the further notation that it is the

liberals and democrats who, naively enough, ardently
support the Bonapartist regime, believing that their support
of Bonapartism will prevent fascism. By these very actions,
however, the liberal democrats help to destroy the
authority of parliament, while they give unparalleled
power to the executive arm of the government, and increase
1022
the might of the military. Thus they prepare the people for
a new fascist dictatorship.
Very often Bonapartism deliberately takes upon itself the

initiation of "emergency" decrees hostile to the masses (*11)
so as to permit the fascist demagogue to stir up the people
against the government, now pathetically endorsed by the
liberals and social democrats. The hatred of the people
becomes centered not on fascism but on Bonapartism,
although these very decrees are precisely the ones that
would have been executed by fascism, had it had the power.
Thus Bonapartism, in a way, does the groundwork for
fascism, takes the blame for unpopular measures, and
releases the fascist movement from the possibility of
exposure and defeat in advance.
It is not to be imagined that fascism arrives only where the

internal contradictions have become unbearable. It may also
arise because of external pressure's reacting upon the
internal life of the nation. Austria is a good example of this
possibility. In Austria, unlike the case of Germany, there
was no revolutionary situation. The socialists made no
efforts to take over the government or to lead a revolt. It
was not the Left Wing that threatened the government; it
was rather the Right Wing that took the initiative to change
the regime by driving out the socialists. What urged the
Right Wing forward was primarily international pressure.
The breakdown of the Versailles Treaty and the rise of
German fascism gave the ruling class of Austria its
opportunity to reform its empire and cement its
international alliances. It was inconceivable that Germany
should declare war against the Soviet Union and be
unprotected in her rear by having German Austria
dominated by socialists. It was absolutely necessary to
straighten out the front to clear the decks for final action.
1023
And Austria, as a pawn in the international chess game,
was bound to respond.
The rise of fascism in the Western capitalist countries which

emerged victorious from the war demonstrates another
aspect of the same principle, since fascism may be instituted
not because of the danger of the working class's starting a
revolution against capital, but because of the necessity to
meet the rivalry of countries strengthened by fascism. If
fascism enhances the ability of Germany to conduct war,
then it is inevitable that France, England, and other
countries must adopt similar political machinery.
Fascism does not arise only where the workers are actually
in revolt, as in Italy. It can attain power also where the
working class is merely on the verge of revolt, that is,
where a revolutionary situation is developing but has not as
yet matured to an actual insurrection. Germany is a good
illustration of this. Austria shows that fascism may triumph
where even a revolutionary situation is lacking, but where
the change is required for international and imperialist
reasons.
The fact is that today political fluctuations can be so violent

and sudden that the ruling class cannot afford to wait until
the workers have actually burst out in insurrection; it may
have to turn to fascism in advance in order to nip the
maturing movement in the bud. Thus fascism may take
power not only to prepare for war or to meet the fascist
consolidations of other countries, but also to guard against
surprises.
Naturally, then, if the victory of fascism need not await an

actual proletarian insurrection, fascism may be germinating
in countries where the labor movement has not yet become
threatening. The United States is an example of this.
1024
Precisely in such a period of sudden radicalization of the
people, when the masses can move quickly from their
former positions into violent demonstrations against the
State, must conservative governments, even though not
actually in fear of revolution, keep in reserve such
movements as the fascist to prepare for any emergency.
In Germany and Italy there were powerful communist

parties in revolt or threatening revolt. This gave the
socialists a chance to charge that the harebrained antics of
the communists breed fascism. But the Austrian example
shows that the existence of a strong communist party is not
necessary in order to spur fascism to take power, since in
Austria the communist party was practically non-existent.
Furthermore, in England, the fascist movement is arising
without even a strong socialist movement's existing, but
only a Labor Party. Finally, fascist trends are rearing their
heads in the United States where there is not even a Labor
Party.
In short, while it is true that originally for a capitalist class

to turn to fascism there had to be the immediate threat or
actual outburst of the proletarian revolution under
communist direction, today this is no longer so. As the
United States is demonstrating, fascist drifts may appear
even where the labor movement is weak and poorly
organized. The mere fact that the masses potentially may
form a powerfully organized militant labor movement is
sufficient for the rulers to prepare their fascist weapons in
reserve. This is all the more necessary since in countries like
the United States there is no doubt that, should the workers
make even the most moderate attempt to engage in
independent political action or to form national industrial
unions, the inevitable clashes that would arise would
speedily lead the country to a revolutionary situation. In
1025
the United States, above all, there exist the finest
potentialities for a deep-going and general radicalization of
the masses against which the bourgeoisie can prepare only
by forging its fascist weapons in advance.
It is precisely in the latter cases, where the masses are not

immediately threatening to overthrow the capitalist order,
that fascism proceeds via the governmental route rather
than by the road from below. Here there is no occasion for
the organization of large mass demonstrations by fascists
who shoot down all in their way and who march on Rome.
Rather is it a case of the cold and calculating fascization of
the apparatus of government and the steady submergence
of democratic institutions to give rise to Bonapartism and to
dictatorial tendencies that pave the way for fascism. This
last is the situation characterizing the United States today.
If we attempt to pass judgment historically upon the fascist

movement so as to guide our conduct in relation to it, in
short, if we ask ourselves the question whether fascism is
reactionary or progressive, we find that the answer is by no
means a simple one. If we put the question: Must society
pass through a period of fascism in order to reach a higher
productive level? our answer must be emphatically, No!
Fascism is not inevitable. The human race can proceed from
the chaos of capitalist competition with its waste and wars
to a planful, organized society without going through the
blood-path and horror of the fascist regime. It was entirely
possible, as Russia has shown, to pass from pre-fascist
capitalism directly to the rule of the working class.
If fascism is reactionary, it is fundamentally because it has

set back the only class capable of moving the world to a
higher technique and better relations. Precisely because
fascism destroys the organizations of the working class and
would prevent them from overthrowing capitalism, does
1026
fascism stifle the birth of a new order, and thus becomes
reactionary. This is the essence of the matter.
Flowing from this fundamental policy of throttling the

working class, fascism has been forced to adopt other
reactionary features. In its methodology, it derogates
science and intellectual pursuits, emphasizing emotions
and passions. It reduces the number of students in the
higher institutions of learning; in huge pyres it burns the
books of which it disapproves. However, while it pretends
to avoid intellectualizing, it spins out all sorts of utopian
phalanstaries of organized capitalism, planned economy,
self-sufficiency, autarchy, etc. In short, capitalism, in its
period of senility, ends up where socialism begins, namely,
in utopia, in the belief of its ability to maintain the profit
system without its evils and to establish a purposeful order
that will eliminate rivalry and secure harmony for all.
Capitalism refuses to recognize that it has passed its

menopause. To restore its virility, it resorts to the magic
potions of fascism with frenzied incantations to the blood of
its ancestors. The sole result is intellectual abortions. As its
body fails, it gives up hope in evolution and turns from
materialism to idealism, from objectivism to subjectivism,
from the bug of reality to the spider-web of wish.
In its reliance upon the middle class, fascism must maintain

the backward petty economy of that class, must make
concessions to the peasantry and small property holders,
and must prevent the development of the productive forces.
At the same time, the powers of destruction in the hands of
the ruling class become greatly strengthened. None of the
basic problems leading to chronic crisis and perpetual
warfare can be solved. On the contrary, all become
intensified.
1027
The reactionary features of fascism are evidenced, too, in its
emphatic insistence on a most intense form of nationalism,
adopting theories that could lead only to the strangling of
all the races of humanity and perpetual warfare between
them. At the very moment when the new productive forces,
such as radio, television, and the airplane, imperiously
demand the end of national boundaries and the intimate co-
ordination of all the productive forces of the world, at that
moment fascism increases national restrictions a
hundredfold.
Reactionary, too, are fascist reforms in social life. The

position of women is relegated to that of hundreds of years
ago; the youth are broken on the wheel of fascist discipline;
babies are compelled to be born under gas masks. The
masses, already having developed to a point where they
can organize themselves in powerful groupings and can
express their interests, find all self-development closed to
them. They are compelled to be followers of leaders, a
species of sheep whose task is "not to reason why, but to do
and die" for fascism. The suppression of all initiative,
ambition, and desire for advancement on the part of
individuals belonging to the lower orders is part of the
fascist scheme. All the evils that Herbert Spencer
denounced in his tirades against socialism, calling it the
new feudalism, or new slavery, have been realized in the
guise of National Socialism or fascism. The very policies for
which the workers were cursed, such as Luddism, that is,
destruction of machinery, sabotage, terrorism, the crushing
of individual liberty, etc., all have been realized, not by the
workers, but by their capitalist opponents who were the
first to attack the workers on these grounds.
On the other hand, strive as it will to prevent the inevitable

victory of the working class, fascism both positively and
1028
negatively prepares the way for its own downfall and for
the ultimate triumph of the new social order. Wherever
fascism wins and atomizes the proletarian organizations, it
does not really destroy the working class. That it could not
do, without destroying the whole system of wage-slavery.
The workers can do without their masters, but the masters
cannot do without the workers. What fascism does
unwittingly is to harden and toughen the workers and to
overcome the poison which demoralized them.
In methodology, the very emphasis of the fascists upon

emotion and passion plays into the hands of the
revolutionists who, contra to the socialists and idealist
rationalists who babble about the power of persuasion,
have constantly roused the temper of the workers to induce
them to get into action. Revolutionary communist theory is
above all a theory of action, acclaiming education through
action rather than through abstruse book reading and
abstract chattering. Practice is the best pedagogue. To
fascism, the present is an age of unreason; fascist appeals to
babies, to little children and to adolescents are appeals to
those below reason. The communist, on the contrary, relies
on the burning hatred and passions of the exploited adult
worker whose life is tortured away under fascism. The age
of violence that characterizes the era of fascism fits in well
enough with the plans of the subversive forces working for
a new order.
In economics, fascism is compelled to base itself upon the

highest technique and most developed trustified system.
Thus, far from scattering the workers, it must organize
them into larger masses and bring them closer together. The
nationalization of industry only emphasizes again the end
of private industry and the bankruptcy of the private
property owner. The more the State takes over the factories,
1029
the easier it is for everyone to see that the capitalist is a
mere parasite. How long can the State guarantee the private
owners a stated income merely because of their ownership?
Sooner or later the question must become acute, whether
these payments which drain the vitality of the whole nation
should be made in perpetuity.
The National Socialists themselves are compelled to attack

"parasitic" capital, viz., interest-capital, stock-and-bond-
capital, speculative capital, etc. How long can the fascist
divorce these children of capital from their brethren, and on
what more equitable basis can they support the claims of
the landlord and of the merchant as against the banker and
the financier? Fascism here, against its will, is constrained
to denounce a part of capitalism, and lets loose a force
condemning the entire capitalist system. In this way, also,
the petty bourgeois, who feared and hated socialism,
eventually is brought to the point of view of adopting
theories of socialism, even though at first on a restricted
national scale.
Fascism is forced to raise collectivism to an unprecedented

level. It wipes out all the filth of criminal individualism that
nineteenth-century competition had accumulated. In its
strictures against the evils of competition, fascism
stimulates all, especially those who learn with such
difficulty, namely, the petty bourgeoisie, to think not of
themselves alone in the swinish egotistic manner of old, but
of the welfare of the State. Soon enough the welfare of the
State will be identified with the welfare of the masses. The
permanent result of fascist teaching in the long run will be
the subordination of the individual, not to the State, but to
the needs of all, that is, of the masses who labor and suffer.
The accelerated development of State capitalism which

occurs under fascism only brings to a head all the
1030
contradictions of the mode of production and prepares the
mass of people better than ever for the transformation of
society into one where only those who work control the
means of work. Simultaneously, the fusion of State and
business transforms every struggle of the workers into a
political one against the State. State capitalism compels the
workers to attack not a particular phase of the system but
the heart of the order itself.
Just as fascism has been forced to deride certain forms of

capital, so must it praise and idealize labor. The old
aristocratic ruling class, like a bird of prey soaring on high,
could look with contempt and mockery upon the grubby
individuals digging at hard labor in the valleys. Against
such birds of prey, the socialists countered with a theory
stressing the dignity and value of labor so disdainfully
scorned by Nietzsche. Now this very cry of the dignity of
labor is taken up by the ruling class as the sole way to
maintain its rule. Only he eats who labors. The only person
of value is the worker; idlers have no place in a system
fighting for its existence.
Such is the theory of fascism and, whether it likes it or not,

this new point plays directly into the hands of the
communist revolutionary who easily can point out the
abyss between fascist theory and practice, and how fascism
protects not the laborer but the destroyer and the loafer,
immensely increasing the number of these parasites. For
good or evil, fascism has identified its role with the rule of
labor and has therefore confirmed, in its own way, all the
pretensions that the laborer has made that he and he alone
should rule. Sooner or later, the laborer will decide to
remove fascism in favor of a rule more in accordance with
his interests; fascism will be hard pressed to prevent its
1031
deposition. Theoretically, then, in the very beginning
fascism lays the basis for its own destruction.
An excellent step has been made by fascism in

exterminating the gangrenous rot which was poisoning the
working class in the form of the trade union and socialist-
communist bureaucracy. Fascism has squeezed the pus out
of the proletarian system. By hanging the labor bureaucrat
from the lamp-post and exposing his cowardice to ridicule
and shame, the fascists have done an inestimable although
unconscious service to the working class. First of all, by
destroying these old bureaucracies, fascism gives the
opportunity to the workers to build afresh, and has
removed the old weights bending the working class to its
knees. At the same time, fascism has killed once and for all
the possibility of these cancerous growths' returning.
In the second place, the workers have become

tremendously hardened under fascism, especially the
advanced class-conscious workers. Having been forced to
break from their past groupings, these workers, in jail, in
concentration camp, and elsewhere, have probed deeply
into their souls to discover the sins for which they are being
punished. The old sentimental slogans have disappeared.
Fascism has completed what the World War started. It has
made the working class disciplined, realistic, and hard. If
nationalism is fascism, the workers must become
internationalist! With kicks and blows, fascism forces the
proletariat to revolution.
All the problems over which the old movements --- may
they rest in peace! --- used to mull interminably have now
disappeared. The problem of parliamentarism --- Should
the workers participate in parliamentary democratic
elections or not? --- entirely loses its force now that
parliaments are abolished. Should bourgeois property be
1032
confiscated, should the employers be paid? --- is no longer
debatable in the light of the complete confiscation of the
working class property made by the bourgeoisie. Is
insurrection inevitable, or will peaceful persuasion do the
job? --- is a subject that now can meet only amused
contempt if posed to the proletariat. Thus have the
opportunists and the liberal reformists been driven not only
out of the ranks of the government but out of the ranks of
labor as well. From this hard ordeal of fascism there must
emerge a new working class, bred by the even more intense
contradictions and antagonisms of the future, thrust
forward even still more sharply by the exigencies of world
war and similar cataclysms, no longer divided as of old by
craft lines, national boundaries, economic distinctions,
reforms, ideals, etc., but now thoroughly united and
welded together under the leadership of a tested and
tempered vanguard.
This is the progressive feature of fascism. History does not

proceed in one straight line, nor is it as smooth as the
pavements of our boulevard. The road to power is
exceedingly hard and devious. Apparently the labor
movement is declining, taking two steps backward for
every one that it advances. But this is only on the surface.
So long as capitalism develops, it must develop these
workers, increase their numbers and their power materially
and ideologically. If it throws them back it is only in order
to enable them to take a running jump towards the next
stage before it.
Capitalism inexorably, and through the very reactionary

features of fascism, whips and kicks the battalions of
progress into line, compelling them to fight for the future,
as they paralyze the present. Symbolic indeed is the castor-
oil that fascism employs; it has enabled the workers to clean
1033
out all the filth of the past and to emerge with their fever
gone, ready for battle.
Despite the rapidly menacing rise of fascism, we

categorically can declare that fascism cannot last long. The
case of Mussolini is no criterion, since Italian fascism was
fortunate enough to stabilize its power at a time when the
revolutionary proletariat was being defeated throughout
the world, and when capitalism was recovering its stability
and strength. Italian fascism obtained power in the
beginning of the period of prosperity that began in 1923.
The victory of Hitler and of other fascists, however, did not
occur in this happy interlude of capitalism. Hitler took
power in a stage when the economic crisis was at its
deepest. He can maintain his power only by showing
results in war. In the meantime, the longer fascism remains
in power, the deeper grows the gap between it and the
masses, and the more fascism degenerates further into a
mere apparatus.
However, it is not so much the internal difficulties which

will overthrow the fascist regime as will the inevitable
bursting forth of the world war for which fascism is the
preparation. The direction of this war, in a basic sense, only
can be against the international working class as
symbolized by the Soviet Union. Whatever other
complications occur are secondary to this fundamental
perspective.
It is hardly conceivable, whether the Soviet Union resists

the invasion or whether it succumbs, that the terrible
holocaust of war will not generate the whirlwind of
revolution afterward. The Franco-Prussian War gave rise to
the Paris Commune and the victory of the workers in one
city; the World War gave rise to the Russian Revolution and
the victory of the workers in one country; the next war,
1034
unprecedented in its havoc, is bound to raise the problem to
a higher pitch and to pose before the working class the
inexorable necessity of ending the capitalist system
throughout the world.
Of course it is not inevitable that this next revolutionary

attempt must succeed, just as it was possible for the
workers to have failed previously. However, the
probabilities are that in the next revolutionary wave, the
workers, prepared as they have been by fascism itself, will
be far more competent and capable of accomplishing the job
than ever before. Fascism, in all likelihood, therefore,
represents the last political gasp of a dying social order.
Footnotes
1. This the Spanish Socialists will also learn.
2. A recent decree has devalued the franc by about 30 per

cent.
3. Compare the pamphlet issued by the Vigilantes

Committee of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals on the Croix de
Feu, which points out that the Vice President of that
organization is a director of large concerns, the manager is
the Vice President of a bank, and Taittinger is a corporation
director, etc.
4. G. D. H. Cole: The Next Ten Years in British Social and

Economic Policy, p. 7.
5. The same, p. 51.
6. The same, pp. 163, 164.
7. The same, pp. 423 and following.
1035
8. Incidentally, a good many of these suggestions relating to
unemployment have been adopted in the United States
under the Roosevelt regime.
9. G. D. H. Cole: British Trade and Industry, Past and Future, p.

440.
10. Robert Owen: "Address to Working Classes," in A New

Society & Other Writings (Everyman's edition), p. 154.
11. Compare the Bruening "hunger decrees," for example.
XXXII. FASCIST TRENDS IN THE UNITED STATES
THE fascist movement is inevitable in the United States. To

believe otherwise is to imagine that the capitalists will give
up their power without a fight. On the contrary, at the
slightest indication of loss of their power, they will be
prepared for a most ferocious struggle. The people of this
country must learn this important truth.
Already fascist tendencies are in evidence on every side in

the United States, in the popular organizations attempted
by German and Italian fascisms, in the native secret
organizations, in the mass political organizations developed
by Father Coughlin, Huey long, and others, in the
1036
movement among the veterans, in the intellectual and
engineering fields, and in important governmental
activities.
America always has been a battleground on which various

European philosophies and powers have fought to obtain
mastery. European fascism has continued the attempt to
colonize America. As soon as the Mussolini government
became stabilized in Italy, it sent to the United States picked
agents supported by large subsidies for an organization of
the fascist movement among the Italians in this country.
The organizational results of Italian fascism in America,
however, have not been startling; but while no more than a
few thousand were ever organized in separate Fasci,
Mussolini laid the seeds for fascist propaganda and has
steadily been able to influence important Italian societies.
Moreover, numbers of Italian youth are to be found
sprinkled in divers fascist groupings arising in the East.
The German National Socialists have done far better

organizationally in the New World. The Friends of New
Germany has progressed into a powerful organization,
putting out a paper and a large amount of propaganda. The
membership in New York City alone is over ten thousand,
while the organization is increasing its control over the very
powerful German-American societies which claim to have
membership and influence of over thirteen million people
in the United States. Of course, this organization is
controlled completely by the Nazis in Germany and is used
as their foreign weapon to fight for Germany's interests in
this country. Thus, propaganda of the Friends of New
Germany is naturally intensely anti-Semitic, as well as anti-
communist. Steadily all the bourgeois German groups in
the United States are becoming dominated by Hitler's
agents sent from Germany.
1037
It is not to be expected that foreign-born elements,
organized by European agents subsidized by countries in
an infinitely worse financial position than America, can
lead or form any fascist movement of any importance in
this country. Such organizations are simply reflections of
the chaos and conflict in Europe. Business men of these
nationalities frequently support their respective fascisms
simply because they must trade with Germany or Italy and
need the favor of these governments for their business, or
they are afraid of boycotts, etc. These very same business
men may have all their lives advocated republican and
democratic measures, just the opposite to those proposed
by Hitler. Still, they are tied to their kinsfolk in the old
country. Often they must join in order to prevent harm
from coming to their relatives abroad. This adherence,
therefore, to foreign varieties of fascism is an exceedingly
weak one which cannot develop a genuine fascist
movement in the United States. It is simply German and
Italian nationalism carried over among the colonists of
these countries in America.
However, there is no gainsaying the fact that all sorts of

active movements have sprung up with leaders itching to
ape Mussolini or Hitler. (*1) One of the earliest of the
organizations, formed in 1930, was the American Fascistic
Association and Order of Black Shirts. This group followed
the tradition of the Ku Klux Klan and had its seat in the
South, around Atlanta, Georgia. Its slogans were: "Drive the
Negroes out of jobs and put whites in their place," "Fight
communism in Georgia." With the Black Shirts, the Negro,
in a sense, took the place of the Jew in Germany. These
people went about blackmailing employers to compel
companies to hire only their members whenever jobs were
open. At the same time, they saw to it that all members
would act as scabs and strike-breakers if need be. They
1038
edited a weekly with the motto "America for Americans."
Unfortunately for the Fascistic Association, with the on-
coming depression job opportunities became scarce and the
organization withered away.
Another organization to appear was the Silver Shirts, with

headquarters in San Francisco. Their battle-cry was, "The
Jews must go, the Pope must go, democracy must go." They
advertised as part of their uniform a "knout of rope" to be
used against their enemies. The organization adopted the
swastika as its symbol and professed itself in sympathy
with the Hitler movement. Unfortunately for the
organization, their leader, Pelley, was arrested for fraud
and his influence rapidly waned.
At this time, the Crusaders for Economic Liberty rose in

their glory. They succeeded in attracting to their fold the
Congressional representative from Pennsylvania, Lewis T.
McFadden, who made a brilliant speech on the floor of the
House to the effect that Franklin D. Roosevelt was
the .servant of the international money Jews of the world to
whom he had turned over all the gold and lawful money of
the country. The scheme of Mr. Pelley's Silver Shirts was to
secure the reign of Christ on earth; the plan of Mr.
Christian's Crusaders was to establish economic liberty
under capitalism by destroying the money monopoly, and
by inaugurating the Golden Rule through the introduction
of a new monopoly system.
The general discontent prevailing among the masses of

people in the United States during the depression has
stimulated the mushroom-like growth of a number of secret
organizations,"some' of them known to the public, such as
the Order of Seventy-Six, the Khaki Shirts, and, more
recently, the so-called Black Legion, and some of them no
doubt still uncovered. None of these organizations is of
1039
great importance. Their programs are exceedingly vague,
mostly confined to negative aspects, launching attacks
against the communist, Negro, Jew, Catholic, and foreign-
born, mixing this with demagogic criticisms of capitalism.
Frequently the groups profess intense religiosity, but of no
particular denomination.
Their leadership is mediocre; often they are organized

merely for racketeering and blackmail purposes, and they
have not been able to last long. However, they are
significant in showing the change in the temper of the
middle class in the United States. All of these associations
have undertaken to mobilize the masses directly outside the
pale of the State, to take matters into their own hands and
to idealize lynch law and direct action. They generally
organize vigilantes made up of stalwart men who secretly
drill and prepare for physical combat.
In connection with this trend towards drilling storm troops

ready for struggle must be considered the movement
among the veterans. Of the greatest significance is the
report of Major General Smedley D. Butler, former head of
the United States Marine Corps, that he had been offered
several million dollars by Wall Street agents to organize the
veterans of the country into troops that could march on the
government if need be and establish a sort of fascist
dictatorship. Mr. Butler testified before a Congressional
Committee, giving detailed facts, and mentioned specific
names of the conspirators. For the moment, the attempt has
been broken. There remains the fact, however, that the
attempt was made by elements who play an important role
in the economic and political life of the country. It is to be
noticed, too, that the veteran organizations, such as the
American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, have
1040
intensified their anti-communist, anti-labor campaigns in
recent years.
What prevents the organization of such fascist bodies of

storm troops on a mass scale is the fact that there is no
active movement on the part of the masses toward
communism. The communists in America, in the main, are
not only insignificant but are an utterly ridiculous group,
comprised of Jews and Russian nationalists who play the
diplomatic game of the Soviet Union without any regard to
the needs of the American working class. Whatever
adaptability they have shown to the American scene has
often consisted merely of cunning maneuvers to put over
Russian nationalist propaganda. Thus in the United States
there is no strong communist or organized revolutionary
movement for any middle class fascist body to organize
against or to strike down. There is, however, vast
discontent and militancy among the workers, employed
and unemployed. This is still inchoate. It manifests itself in
violent, spontaneous outbursts that last but a short time
and cannot evoke any fascist reaction. What exists, then, in
the United States, is a pervasive restiveness and a desire to
break with the old order, coupled with a general inclination
towards violence, but no specific large cohesive mass that
can threaten the stability of the social order. The present, of
course, is a transition period, and marks a turning point in
American affairs, as the United States turns from
individualism to collectivism.
Far more than in previous periods of depression, the

middle classes in the United States thoroughly have
resented the blows which fate under the present system has
meted out to them. As usual, they rationalize their interests
in utopian plans of harmony and goodwill, trying to work
1041
out some system of planning whereby the capitalism of the
big fellow will not drive them still further into ruin. Unable
to understand the productive process, they work out their
own panaceas in the sphere of the circulation of
commodities and the money system. It is not capitalism that
is bad, but the money system.
In their outbursts, they repeat the plans formerly presented

by the utopians, Josiah Warren, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and
their type. For a century, the middle class has remained in
the same rut. What is new in the present situation is that,
whereas the middle class, from 1848 on, in its mutterings of
discontent, looked to labor for support and turned either
anarchistic, as in France, or socialistic, as in industrial
countries, in the United States today the new movements
ominously steer away from any labor contract and, on the
contrary, borrow much of their doctrines from fascism.
In previous periods, when the petty proprietors in the

United States had formed their own radical movements,
such as the Farmers Alliance, the People's Party, the Non-
Partisan League, Farmer-Labor groups, etc., in each case
they strove to take under their wing the labor movement as
an ally in the struggle for the welfare of the petty
bourgeoisie. Today this is not so. The labor movement is
too large to become merely a wing of the middle class. In
any combined movement today it must be labor that leads,
not the farmer or the petty bourgeois, and once labor enters
into independent action, the middle class only can trail
along.
A feature of the present movement is that labor is not

organizing its own party for power. The government has
been astute enough not to drive labor into independent
political action. On the one hand, the working class is not
accustomed to assuming the initiative in politics, and
1042
therefore shows much reluctance in sailing such uncharted
seas; on the other hand, once the working man enters
politics, he will go the whole way in a determined and
extremely militant manner. In the meantime, today, as
before, political initiative is left to the middle class, at a time,
however, when it feels itself a decadent minority of the
people, no longer playing the chief role as heretofore. For
this reason, too, the movements of the middle class contain
a certain pacifist and persuasive character and concentrate
entirely upon legislation and parliamentary activity. The
cowardly petty bourgeoisie does not dare to shake its fist at
the wealthy, and there is no organized labor movement for
it to crush. It drifts aimlessly, a heterogeneous herd under
the crook of demagogic shepherds.
The first of these shepherds is a priest, Father Coughlin.

The trouble with this world, according to Coughlin, is that
there is not enough silver in America. If we had more silver,
money would be cheaper, prices would rise, and prosperity
would return. Thus Coughlin advocates that particular
form of inflation which would enable his sponsor, William
Randolph Hearst, and other silver mine owners, to raise the
value of their mine capital. At the same time, it would
enable the Shrine of the Little Flower to cash in heavily on
the silver speculation in which it had indulged.
This demand for cheaper money is one which the middle

classes have always stressed in periods of falling prices,
when they have to pay their debts with goods, the prices of
which have fallen. It seems to these panting harts that the
monetary pools for which they have been thirsting have
been drained by the monopolist. The State will not print
more money, so that from the reservoirs of the printing
press the pecuniary lakes may be refilled and all may
quench their thirst. The lower middle class does not wish to
1043
realize that before it can get money it must sell goods;
before it can sell goods, the world must want them, and
that production of big business has reached a point where
the wares of little business are worthless. The petty
proprietors imagine their labor valuable; if they cannot
secure cash for it, they mean to overthrow the gold reality
and to substitute for it their paper-money dreams. Because
they lack money they believe there is a general lack of
money, and they call on the State to fill this void of nature.
Of course, the quantity of money in the country remains the
same, and its amount in circulation might even be larger in
periods of depression than in periods of prosperity, only
the money, alas, is not going their way!
The insolvency of bankers who cannot pay in gold for the

paper notes they have issued, the bankruptcy of local
communities which are compelled to issue "scrip money"
for a time, the reversion of petty producers in some parts of
the country to schemes of direct barter, all these things add
to the belief of the middle class that the ills of society are
due to the methods of circulation and finance rather than to
the capitalist mode of production. Storekeepers, salesmen,
clerks who produce nothing, they live in a world of
exchange; naturally they must seek their panaceas there.
The program of Father Coughlin's Union of Social Justice,

while it calls for a nationalization of banking for the
purpose of insuring a steady currency for the middle class,
is careful not to advocate the national ownership of any
other economic function. (*2) By no means would Coughlin,
living under the shadow of Henry Ford's plants in Detroit,
dare to advocate the nationalization of industrial property.
Thus Coughlin is willing to attack Wall Street (and the Jew)
and offer a demagogic program tempting to the Middle
West, while he cleverly diverts the attention of these people
1044
from their own enemies at home, the big metal
industrialists, the Fords, the McCormacks, the Cranes, et al.,
with their high prices for machinery and metal products
and their low prices for all things farmers and workers sell.
In this separation of finance from industry, Father Coughlin
shows himself an apt pupil of Hitler, as he does in his
abstract declamations that human rights are to be preferred
to property rights, that, in time of war, wealth should be
conscripted, that private property should be controlled for
the public good, and similar empty phrases that can mean
anything to anybody and which are designed to attract
every discordant group.
The Union of Social Justice has as one of its principles the

"simplification of government." This "simplification" can
imply only a fascist orientation. Certainly the fascist
movements of Italy and Germany are "simple" if anything.
At the top is the Grand Council of the Party which is led by
the leader and whose words are law. Could anything be
more simple than this? Father Coughlin here insinuates an
ideology suitable for dictatorial movements contriving to
end the "complicated" liberal-democratic check-and-balance
system in the United States.
In his labor policy, Coughlin calls for the placing of the

labor unions under government protection. In other words,
while he will not nationalize the property of Henry Ford, he
would nationalize the labor unions, regiment them and
discipline them under the whip of the State. The existing
trade unions, of course, would be broken up and in their
places would be established the vertical unions of General
Hugh Johnson of conscription fame. At the same time, to
throw a sop to the middle class and to show his
humanitarianism, Father Coughlin comes out for a living
1045
annual wage for all, although what that means and how
that is to be obtained, nobody knows.
We can sum up the program of Father Coughlin by

pointing out that in general outline it offers a collectivism
based upon the middle class, one which can be used by the
large industrialists in their fight for open dictatorship
should the need arise. While Father Coughlin does not
preach violence, this is no criterion as to his actions in the
future. We have already seen that the church plays its best
role in time of war by projecting peace until the fighting
starts. Similarly we have seen that in Italy and Germany the
peaceful Catholic and Christian unions quickly lent
themselves to the violent schemes of the fascists the
moment the time was ripe. It is true that Father Coughlin
can be no serious menace to the United States. No Catholic,
and above all, no priest, can lead politics in this country.
None the less, he has played an important preliminary part
for the more serious fascist movements that are to come. (*3)
The most militant of the middle class agitation has been the
"Share the Wealth" movement, formerly headed by Huey
Long, and still strong in the Southwest. This movement,
like all the others, also has "a plan," a blue print to appeal to
reason and a sense of justice. Naively, it barges along with
absolutely no conception of the impossibility of burdening
business with its schemes of justice without serious militant
struggle. The slogan, "Share the Wealth," is typically
American and describes accurately the exact process of
statecraft which has characterized America from its very
beginning. Here the ruling class did not win power by vast
armies and physical control. What they did was really to
"Share the Wealth." Wealth was so abundant in this country
that the masses of people could not be prevented from
putting their fingers into the general pie and drawing out
1046
some of the plums for themselves. The wealthy were not
envied because the others also had their modest moiety; the
rich were not opposed because they were smart enough to
part with a portion of resources and wealth of the country
in favor of the mass of petty proprietors. The slogan of
"Share the Wealth," therefore, is an admirable one to catch
the middle class in America.
The plan of Huey Long (*4) calls for the elimination of

poverty by providing that every deserving family shall
share in the wealth of America for not less than one-third of
the average wealth, thereby , to possess not less than five
thousand dollars free of debt. Fortunes are to be limited to a
few million dollars maximum, or to such a level as would
yet allow American people to share in the wealth and
produce of the land. Old- age pensions of thirty dollars a
month are to be given to those who possess less than ten
thousand dollars in cash, or earn less than one thousand
dollars a year.
Together with this program go demands to limit the

workday so as to prevent overproduction and to give the
workers of America some share in the recreation,
conveniences, and luxuries of life. The veterans of
America's wars are to be well taken care of. Taxation will be
based upon the large fortunes of the wealthy. Nor is the
farmer forgotten. Just as Coughlin calls for a "fair price" to
be given to the farmer above the cost of production, so
Huey Long advocates the need of "balancing" agricultural
production with what can be sold and consumed according
to the laws of God.
The "Share the Wealth" movement, appealing for a drastic

redistribution of wealth, has never stopped to consider that
the laws of distribution are intimately connected with the
mode of production. No family that is permitted to have
1047
five thousand dollars free of debt ever can be induced to
work for the coal, steel, or automobile barons, or to sweat
away their lives for the profit of others. Should everyone
possess five thousand dollars, it would immediately mean
the richest flowering out of all sorts of independent petty
businesses. Work in the large-scale factories would be
abandoned and the owners of these, in turn, would be
compelled either to move their capital elsewhere or to
introduce far greater machinery than ever before.
Furthermore, the competition in the new industries that
would arise would soon lead to the same situation of
bankruptcy on the one hand and monopoly on the other as
had already evolved.
It is interesting to compare the Huey Long program with

that of the Jacobins in the French Revolution. Both wanted
to reduce the power of the rich and to equalize wealth. But
what a difference between their equalizations! Whereas to
the French peasant, equality meant all would have the
necessities and none the luxuries, to the American petty
bourgeoisie, all are to have not only the necessities but all
the comforts which ordinary work can not bring. The
French peasants wanted merely to be let alone. Their
confiscation of bourgeois property was a war emergency
measure. The Americans invidiously want to "soak the
rich."
The planning of Huey Long is typical of petty bourgeois

scheming from another angle. Whereas the Marxist proved
that revolution is a product of misery-should there be no
hunger and slaughter, there would be no revolution-the
petty bourgeois thinks of the revolution as a result of envy.
It is not that he is driven to starvation, but that others have
more; I asked to fight not because the practical present is
unbearable but because of some shimmering Garden of
1048
Eden that will be his in the future. Thus the petty bourgeois
conception is that revolutions come about not through
deprivation but through the desire to obtain more; not
through hunger, but through appeals to cupidity and
acquisitiveness. If the source of proletarian motivation is
the stomach, that of the petty bourgeoisie is the spleen and
gall bladder.
This petty bourgeois conception of revolution has also been

adopted by the official Communist Parties which call upon
the American people to observe the wonders of Russia.
These Stalinists are sure that, having gazed upon the
Elysian gardens that exist six thousand miles away,
American people will take up arms and overthrow the
government. Such stupidity fits in well with the Russian
nationalism of the communists; it has nothing whatever to
do with a realistic analysis of how revolutions come about.
If America experiences a social revolution it will be not
because conditions are good in Russia, but because they are
wretched in America. Masses do not give up their lives for
foreign dreams; they build barricades when life becomes
unbearable.
Of course, the "Share the Wealth" program also attempts to

cater specifically to every division of the middle class, the
declassed soldier, those hit heavily by taxes, the farmer who
is being ruined, and the formerly comfortably placed
middle class now squeezed out of its business by the crisis.
The third movement that has embraced millions of middle

class is that led by Dr. Townsend. His "plan" also calls for
giving something for nothing to those who have nothing
after a lifetime of toil. The Townsend Plan would hand out
to all old people over sixty years of age a pension of two
hundred dollars a month, all of which must be spent within
a month. Thus the Townsend Plan is not an old-age pension
1049
scheme of ordinary cloth, but is woven with the shuttle of
grandiose utopianism. Here the unique idea seems to be
that the old are worth more than the young, and those who
can do no work deserve far more than those who toil.
Another stupendous conception is that by means of this
redistribution of wealth, industry will be stimulated, a
purchasing market will be created, and factories will boom
again. Here, again, we see that the petty bourgeoisie tackles
the problem from the sphere of distribution rather than the
sphere of production. Another little Red Riding Hood,
Townsend cannot believe that modern capitalism is the big
bad wolf whose teeth are sharp, "the better to eat you with,
my dear," but to him it is a good, kindly soul that lives for
charity and love, especially for the aged and the weak.
Of course it is absurd to believe that the Townsend

movement can receive any further consideration than the
contemptuous amusement both of the working class and of
the wealthy. The value of the grouping consists simply in
its insistence on adequate old age pensions. The movement,
however, can be toyed with by certain politicians capable of
mock solemnity to secure themselves needed votes.
America has never honored its old. It has' always gloried in

the fact that the victory belongs to the youth, continually
boasting that it is youthful. It is laughable to imagine that
the vigorous, virile, mature producer, slaving in the factory,
would be willing to shed blood for a condition whereby he
would be granted fifteen dollars a week for his life-taking
toil, and the older folks, many of whom have never been in
a factory in their lives, would live a life of ease at two
hundred dollars a month.
Can it be supposed that the capitalists of America who feel

their business choked because of high wages even when
they pay the code minimum of fourteen dollars a week will
1050
consent to have their corporation taxes raised so as to pay
two hundred dollars a month to outcasts of industry? Can it
be conceived that, in the jungle of ruthless imperialism in
an age of violence, a beatific attitude of Christian love will
descend on the low brow of the racketeer and profiteer?
What the vigorous and heroic struggles of countless
millions of workers were not able to attain, surely the
pathetic smiles and persuasive phrases of the broken-down
and aged will not be able to win. Even if two hundred
dollars were given every aged couple, can anyone believe
that they would permit their children to work and sweat
their lives away in factories for one-fourth of the sum that
they are given free? Would they not quickly take their
children out of the productive processes, thereby leading to
the same situation that we have explained in analyzing the
program of Huey Long?
But enough of these hospital utopias fit for the sick and the
broken-down. These embittered weaklings are incapable of
the slightest shadow of an idea that, if they are going to
redistribute the wealth, perhaps at least the producer
should keep the product of his toil, or at least the worker
should get the two hundred dollars monthly or the five
thousand dollars yearly that is to be handed out to "revive
the market." Here is the secret of the fascist tendencies of
these middle class movements. They want the workers to
keep on slaving but for their benefit, rather than that of the
bourgeoisie. They would enrich themselves, but entirely
ignore the claims of the working class. On the other side,
the workers know that these miserable movements can
raise nothing but hilarious contempt.
It is not only the aged and home-loving elements of the

middle class that prepare their utopian schemes of the
1051
millennium. The section that is active in production also
has its schemes, well illustrated by the fad of technocracy
that at one time swept into great popularity in the United
States. The leaders of the technocratic movement were
engineers nursing a grievance. They believed that they
were responsible for all inventions and progress of industry
and that to them belonged the leadership of the productive
system. Thus, they referred in their plans to a line of
argument very reminiscent of the utopians of the style of
Saint-Simon and Robert Owen. Characteristically enough,
the movement received inspiration from the works of
Professor Thorstein Veblen who, in turn, was inspired by
the utopian, Edward Bellamy. (*5)
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy

wrote his utopia, Looking Backward. It purported to be a
description of America as it would be in the twenty-first
century. Looking back from the twenty-first century, the
historian analyzes the criminality and waste and
foolishness of the capitalism of Bellamy's time. Typically
American, Bellamy idealized common sense of which the
future utopia was simply the realization. By the twenty-first
century everything was to be run by machinery and science.
There would remain no exploitation, waste, anarchy and
chaos, but a planned economy with plenty and prosperity
for all.
Bellamy differed from all other utopians who had tended to

look backward rather than forward, and who had called for
a return to conditions similar to the Middle Ages where
there would be no machinery but the crafts and skills of old,
and where love and responsibility would prevail. Instead of
relying on religion, Bellamy leaned on science and made
machinery the archstone of a new social order. Here, again,
Bellamy was the typical American who had no choice other
1052
than to rest his production on machinery, and who was not
affected by the feudal conditions of the past. How different
was this from the utopia of William Morris' News From
Nowhere, put out in England about the same time; or from
the esthetic gentility and refined socialism of John Ruskin
and Oscar Wilde! (*6)
Deeply moved by this utopia, Thorstein Veblen developed

his theories criticizing the capitalist system and calling on
the scientists and engineers to change it. Exceedingly bitter
was Veblen against the waste that prevailed on every side
and for which the capitalists were to blame. In his
book, Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen elaborated the point
that conspicuous waste and exemption from useful work
were the chief qualities by which the ruling class advertised
their superiority to the world. So bitter was he that he could
actually write that the killing of officers of the army in
wartime was a positive boon to humanity since it removed
from the earth a large number of useless wastrels and
parasites. (*7) In line with his iconoclastic thinking, Veblen
assailed absentee ownership, attempting to show that active
competition and business enterprise were entirely opposed
to each other, the business men by the very nature of their
urge for profit constantly driving towards monopoly. (*8)
In his economic thinking, Veblen drew a sharp distinction

between business and industry, between pecuniary
occupations and productive ones. True to petty bourgeois
type, Veblen would not and could not link theories of prices
and profits with theories of production. He came to
advocate the thesis that depressions arise not from the
accumulations of capital and the mode of production, but
from the method of the functioning of credit and money.
Thus, with his lopsided economic thinking, Veblen laid the
1053
base for the programs of those who sympathize with Hitler,
who uses the same approach.
In his other works, Veblen praised the instinct of

workmanship to be found among the workers, and, as he
attacked the vested interests, he urged the engineers to do
away with the system of profit which sabotaged and
destroyed all science. (*9) The engineers should take over
the industrial system. Then we would have a world based
on science, a world without money.
As an economist, Veblen threw the orthodox professors into

confusion by taking the points which they upheld and then
proving the opposite. While the regulars were declaring
that business stood for competition, Veblen showed that
business demanded collusion; while they hailed the
productive power of wealth, Veblen pointed out that
wealth sabotaged production; while they affirmed that
capital was not only money but goods or stored up labor,
Veblen demonstrated that capital could not be machinery;
while they praised the role of credit, Veblen asserted that
credit only meant inflation which raised the cost of living
and threw the burden on the backs of the poor.
Although Veblen proclaimed that economic advancement

lay in the release of the potentialities of technical
proficiency for purposes of production, his own positive
program was exceedingly vague. He was unable to take the
Marxist position. (*10)
In their discontent and critique of the capitalist system, the

engineers who had been thrown out of employment during
the depression were able to expose some startling facts
about capitalist evolution. They showed, for example, that;
If t equals time, energy has grown to curve t8, debt to t4,
production to t3, populations to t2, man hours per unit
1054
output to minus t4. (*11) Translated into everyday language
this means, first of all, that there has accrued under
capitalism an enormous development of power and energy
that ought to be used. If the criterion of civilization is a
materialist one, namely, how much matter can man move
with a given quantum of energy in a given time --- or, to
put it another way, how much horsepower per capita is
there in the country --- then the modern world was
immensely superior to every social system that had gone
before. Indeed, so wildly had power been generated that no
longer could capitalism control it; the social order was
choking the forces of production and the technical
development. The technocrats completed their survey by an
exhaustive study of waste under capitalism.
The school of engineers was thoroughly familiar with the

fact that America had entered into the era of tremendous
super-corporations and trusts, the management of which
was entirely divorced from the owners, the industrial
concerns being repeatedly looted by the parasitic "old men
of the sea," on the boards of directors. (*12) They
understood well that already in America corporations were
dominating all forms of life, and pointed out that two
hundred of the largest non-banking corporations had assets
of eighty-one billion dollars in 1930, or half of the corporate
wealth of the United States. (*13) But even this did not
reveal the true situation, since many of these companies
were owned or controlled by others in the same group.
"Approximately two thousand men were directors of the
two hundred largest corporations in 1930. Since an
important number of these are inactive, the ultimate control
of nearly half of industry was actually in the hands of a few
hundred men." (*14)
1055
Such an analysis was bound to question whether a
corporation was any longer to be considered a private
enterprise or whether it was not an institution whose social
evolution could not be stopped. The large corporations
were constantly growing over the small ones through the
methods of merger and the issuance of more stock and by
their ability to keep a larger share of the profits and to
reinvest in industry. "In conclusion, then, the huge
corporation, the corporation with ninety million dollars of
assets or more, has come to dominate most major industries
if not all industry in the United States; a rapidly increasing
proportion of industry is carried on under this form of
organization. There is apparently no immediate limit to its
increase. It is coming more and more to be the industrial
unit with which American economic, social and political life
must deal." (*15)
The engineers of a socialistic mind could not help but know

that as the corporations advanced to such tremendous size,
an increasing proportion of goods produced by a given
corporation was produced not for sale but for use in its own
connected plants; thus there was a growing tendency in
certain industries to end the cheating and adulteration to be
found in normal trade and to insist on high standards of
quality of goods. Here, then, was a sort of socialism within
one corporation which did away with the evils of
competitive capitalism to a considerable extent. If this could
be done in one corporation, why could it not be done in all
industry? Such engineers also noticed that of all the
corporations, those which were public utilities were
growing faster than all; thus they were induced inevitably
to work out plans by which all corporations would have the
character of a public utility, and the State itself would take a
firm hand in insisting on production for use and not for
profit.
1056
The engineer no longer could be the partner or even the
servant of the capitalist, but his enemy, since capitalism
opposed everything that the engineer stood and fought for,
and choked the development of science on every side.
Under capitalism, while there was literally plenty for
everyone, the masses of people, including hundreds of
thousands of engineers, were starving.
In his critical analysis of the production system, the

technocrat, with all his professional gibberish, was only
parroting the line of thought which the Marxist had worked
out long before, his own contribution being a concrete
arithmetical analysis of present-day American society
which had not been made by the socialists. However,
technocracy was more than a critique of economy from the
point of view of the engineer. It was above all a bid for
power and a political program. The technocrat, like the
typical utopian, believed that all that was needed was to
work out "a plan," then to prove its reasonableness by
scientifically showing how the workings of the present
system had led to chaos, waste, and destruction. Thus the
technocrat was really a rationalist, and showed that he had
not as yet emerged from the chrysalis of the college
classroom to know the meaning of life. Precisely this fact
demonstrated the impossibility of giving the engineer any
power whatsoever.
Of course, it was not true that the engineer was responsible

for all the advances of industry. The figures of the Patent
Office of the United States bear witness a thousand times
that it is far more often the actual worker at the machine
who makes improvements that are seized by the
corporations and capitalized for their benefit. Even when
the individual inventor is an engineer, or, better still, even
where the engineers gather together in collective research
1057
under the aegis of some corporation or government, the
important inventions produced are not the work of this
narrow professional class alone, but are the culmination of
all the experiments and labors of all society, especially the
working class.
In America most of all has the gap been closed between the
workers and the professional men. There is no country in
the world where the working class is so developed in
technical culture, where so many have finished high school
and know the principles of physical science as intimately as
here. It is no accident that in America the most efficient
corporations choose their leading staff from the ranks of the
workmen. Nor is it an accident that these same corporations
insist that the college boy technicians who come to them
must learn from the workers the practical handling of
machinery by starting from the bottom. The working class
long ago emancipated itself from the myth that it is the
small staff of engineers from which all production flows.
But the technocrat does not wish to give any credit to the
laborer. As a professional man he looks with great disdain
on the common variety of worker. He refuses to believe that
a new order of planned production will come about only
through the misery of the poorest layers of the population
and not through the daydreams of the discontented,
disemployed professional. Sitting in his ivory tower, he
supposes that reason and intellect move the world, not the
passion and material interests of the proletariat. This almost
starving secondary servant of big business compensates
himself for his destitution by grandiose dreams of power
realized by remote control.
The technocrat may well be fooled by pretending that when

technocracy gets into power, the engineer, with his big
scientific."planned economy," will really control industry
1058
and government. In his hatred of the workers, he isolates
himself from all the mass movements of the day. In his
rational appeal he ties himself to the petty bourgeois
utopian and flees the class struggle. Thus the technocrat,
drawing distinctions between finance and industry, shows
himself closer to Fordism than to Marxism, and lends
himself openly to agencies of fascism.
The Right Wing of technocracy rests its head on the

shoulders of fascistic Fordism; there is also a Left Wing that
leans on the workers. It is composed of a group of engineers
and writers who sympathize with socialism and desire to
fuse both movements into one. Wherever there is a conflict,
however, between socialism and technocracy, such persons,
as for example, Max Eastman, insist they are Left Wing
technocrats rather than Marxists, and prefer the utopian
planners, the pragmatists and the Veblens, to the
communists. In practical political life, this type has
synchronized its rhythms with the utopian movement of
Upton Sinclair and with such "Left Wing" governmental
planners as Mr. Hopkins, unemployment relief head.
Among the large industrialists, fascist tendencies are

naturally finding a foothold. An interesting example is
Henry Ford. Henry Ford started out as a pacifist, adopting
the point of view that war can bring no benefit to humanity
and that it does not pay. In spite of that, however, Ford is
an ardent believer in destiny, not only for the individual
but for the nation. "The whole secret of a successful life is to
find out what it is one's destiny to do, and then do it." (*16)
It was simply Ford's destiny to be a manufacturer of
automobiles rather than a militarist, but should America's
destiny compel the use of military force, say to prevent the
seizure of Henry Ford's many factories abroad, there is no
question that Ford would ardently support such destiny
1059
and turn out numbers of airplanes for the combat. The
pacifism of the American business man, it must be repeated,
comes from the fact that American liberalism has entered
late into the field of world affairs and relies on its economic
might to conquer that which the others seized by means of
force.
Mr. Ford, being the most outstanding independent

industrialist, has naturally developed a sharp antagonism
to the financiers and money lenders, and thus has also
taken to anti-Semitism. Such views fit in heartily with the
theories of the middle class, especially of the West, which
blames Wall Street and stock speculation especially for all
its ills. Ford is against parasitic capital. He is against
consumption as an end in life. He is for production as a sort
of religion stimulating the community for improvement. He
is for the organization of the United States so that work and
order and science will penetrate every part of the
country.(*17)
There is no doubt but that Ford would like to see the whole
country organized in the same magnificent way that he has
organized factories. He can become an excellent supporter
of the fascist movement in the United States. He knows
how to cover the ruthless operation of his plants with all
sorts of theories, even including one that workmen are right
in resisting scientific management when they feel that they
are being transformed into machines themselves. (*18)
Organized planning, scientific co-ordination, idealization of
work, division of proceeds, universal pacifism, and a
United States of the World, these are theories of Ford that
may well be incorporated into American fascism.
In the intellectual world, the trends towards fascist

collectivism, preaching the control by the State of the whole
competitive system and embellished with the claptrap so
1060
prevalent now in Europe, are progressing on every side. It
should be borne in mind that, there being no traditions of
feudal aristocracy of any importance in America, the
fascists of tomorrow must come from the ranks of those
who are the liberals of today. It is indeed the very people
who claim to be ardent liberals who do most to pave the
way for fascism. This can be seen in practical government
politics also.
In the professional world, the liberal Charles A. Beard has

now written a whole series of tomes that tend towards
fascism. In his The Idea of National Interest, (*19) Beard makes
a thorough analysis of the American investments abroad
and then comes to the conclusion, in his supplemental
book, The Open Door at Home, that the way forward for
America is not by increasing the international co-operation
of one country with another, but by returning to the policy
of isolation hallowed by Washington. "By withdrawing
from the war of trade and huckstering, by avoiding the
hateful conflicts of passionate acquisition in Europe and the
Orient, by offering to exchange goods for honest goods
without employing any engines of coercion, by using its
own endowment wisely and efficiently, it could really make
its diplomacy the diplomacy of 'the good neighbor' as
distinguished from the diplomacy of the dollar, the navy,
and the marines." (*20)
Behind this apparent pacifism lies an important

appreciation of the unique methods of work of American
capitalism. As we have repeatedly asserted already, the
American ruling class stands to win world power above all
not by the use of its military might, but by the tremendous
energy of its economics. Already a good portion of the
world intimately depends upon the wealth and trade of the
productive system of America. Were America to withdraw
1061
in any sense from world affairs, it would mean the collapse
of whole countries abroad. This collapse may induce a
communist revolution; for this reason, the American
business element has been so careful to refrain from
pressing its demands for payments of debts due it, etc.; and
was so generous in helping Europe immediately after the
War. On the other hand, the collapse of certain other
countries would take the form of compelling them to beg
with hat in hand for further continuance of support and to
place themselves completely under the dominion of the
American colossus. Should Europe be engaged in war, for
example, there is no question but that this would be the
probable result in Central and South America.
Apparently aping the communist successes in Russia, Beard

also proposes, in his America Faces the Future, a five-year
plan for the United States, calling for a National Economic
Council which would repeal the Anti-Trust Acts, a National
Board of Strategy composed of engineers and functioning
like the War Industries Board. This Board of Strategy would
co-operate with the Bureau of Standards. In all this, Beard
shows himself far closer to Mussolini's schemes than to
Russian communism, and significantly enough, he has
become a supporter of features of the New Deal.
To conclude, the views of Beard play directly into the hands

of those who stand for fascist schemes of autarchy, self-
sufficiency, complete preparedness for war, and who at the
same time can use this ideology to increase American
imperialist power.
In part of Beard's book, America Faces the Future, another

writer points out that, while it is estimated the Tennessee
hill-billy spends $2.40 to produce a bushel of wheat, the
poor plains farmer about $2.00, and the skilled farmer
about $1.00, the big farms can produce a bushel now at
1062
forty cents; so that if wheat sells for seventy-five cents a
bushel, all the farmers must lose except the most advanced
factory farms. It is the opinion of this writer that only such
farms should prevail. But when he comes to a positive
solution of what to do with the other farmers and their
families who would be thrown off the land, all that the
author can advocate is to deport all aliens, to build big
public works, and to shorten the work day. No doubt this,
too, could well fit in with American fascist planning. (*21)
The liberal, John Dewey, also seems to be changing his

liberalism in a direction that fascism might welcome. In his
recent book, Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey admits that
liberalism has had a chequered career and that it has meant
in practice things so different as to be opposed to one
another. The liberal of today must restate the ideas of
liberty. A new adjustment must be made, and liberalism is
created for just that purpose of adjustment. Today we need
a radical change. Renascent liberalism stands for organized
planning. (*22) Liberty now means liberty from insecurity
and he who brings security brings liberty. But the fascist
also claims to bring security; is there not the danger of new
oppressive measures? John Dewey, as though in reply,
emphasizes that "liberty in the concrete signifies release
from the impact of past oppressive forces . . . " (*23) Is it not
clear that liberalism is now preparing itself to be the
midwife to American organized and fascistic capitalism?
In jurisprudence, the activities of the sociological school,

especially some of the theories of the "engineering
interpretation" of Roscoe Pound and others, lend
themselves to a great growth of State authority, and could
easily be part of the fascistic scheme. This school of legal
thinkers has always been a follower of pragmatism and
therefore quite capable of interpreting truth according to its
1063
"cash benefits." (*24) Similarly, sociologists who stem from
Lester Ward's "sociocracy," historians who follow
Seligman's "economic interpretation" and pragmatists who
look like materialists, in short, all these chickens offering
substitutes for socialism naturally form fine ideological
prototypes for the fascist birds of prey.
In the delicate and dilettante artistic world, similar drifts

are making their way, as is witnessed in the writings of
Lewis Mumford who believes that we should turn back to
the romanticism of the past and that "The fact is that an
elaborate mechanical organization is often a temporary and
expensive substitute for an effective social organization or
for a sound biological adaptation." (*25)
It was not only the engineer who turned to plans of

production during the period of depression; there were also
middle class elements dabbling with the problem of
unemployment who busied themselves with utopia
building. An example was Upton Sinclair's "Epic" campaign
---- "Epic" meant: End Poverty in California.
Sinclair proposed to have the State of California take over

idle farms and factories and work them with the
unemployed. Owners were supposed to receive a "fair
rental" for their property. Products were to be sold at cost
and distributed under State supervision. Here, then, was to
be formed a State within a State, a Nirvana for the
unemployed permanently removed from competition. The
means to obtain this limbo, of course, were appeals to
reason and parliamentary electioneering. That Sinclair, like
Long, Townsend, and Coughlin, received the hearty
endorsement of literally millions of people shows how
politically immature and groping the masses are in America.
1064
It is not hard to prove the complete impracticability of
Sinclairs planning under the present capitalist system. Just
when markets are hard enough to obtain, Upton Sinclair
would reduce them practically by half by having the
unemployed workers produce for their own needs, and
consume the products. Under such conditions, how
possibly could capitalism ever revive and the factories
privately owned open up again?
Furthermore, the plan calls for payment of a "fair rental" to

landlords. This payment could be made only by selling the
goods thus created, the factories run by the unemployed
and the State entering into direct competition with private
industry. Such competition, in turn, would produce another
surplus of goods and result either in throwing other
workers out of work or in the State's factories' losing out
and closing down again. Besides, there are the raw
materials that must be purchased, unless the State is to
nationalize the natural resources and hand them over free
to the unemployed. In that case there would be increased
taxation to pay the former owners for the deprivation of
their property and the crisis would be still further
intensified.
If the unemployed were put to work in factories, naturally

the factories would have to be equipped with the most
modern machinery, unless the unemployed were to be
compelled to use antiquated machinery which would
increase costs and drown the workers in an economic
Sargasso Sea. Simultaneously, were the unemployed to
enter into competition with private industry, they would
have to work under the same conditions as the other
workers, and thus repeat anew the very causes leading to
unemployment. On the other hand, why should the
workers in private industry be ruthlessly exploited and the
1065
unemployed permanently take it easy? Such contradictions
could not possibly be tolerated for long. Furthermore, if the
unemployed can work for themselves, why not the other
workers? Why should not the State take over all the
factories and put all on the same basis as those operated by
the unemployed? The favors of a benign socialistic regime
could not be restricted forever to but a portion of the
population.
Upton Sinclair did not openly propose to introduce

socialism or to turn over all the factories to the workers, but
merely to execute some plan of State capitalism that would
keep the unemployed productive; nevertheless, capitalism
could tolerate his utopianism as little as it could stand the
real socialism itself.
However, Sinclair's utopia was not far removed from the

"plan" of certain figures in the "brain trust" gathered by the
Roosevelt administration. The ideas of Harry L. Hopkins,
Chief of the Unemployed Relief Division of the Federal
Government, only repeated in another form the utopian
vagaries of Louis Blanc and his confreres of 1848. Other
Roosevelt advisers, like Rex Tugwell, have openly
manifested their support of the technocratic movement and
its revival of the cult of Veblenism.(*26)
The fact is that the State must shun as a plague any attempt
to mobilize the unemployed in competition with private
capitalism, since this would be a mortal body blow to the
present order. Therefore, the government must take the
millions of unemployed and put them to work on the most
secondary and inconsequential functions, such as picking
up papers from the streets, making toboggan slides in parks,
causing the entire population to look upon the projects with
the greatest disgust as the quintessence of uselessness. It
will be recalled that the French Government had similarly
1066
operated Louis Blanc's plan with the deliberate intention of
so discrediting the work relief that the middle class would
favor its abolition. The Roosevelt regime is working
objectively in the same direction.
The government is compelled to act thus by the pressure of

its big business critics. It does not dare to have the
unemployed carpenter work at his trade, the tailor make
clothes, or the weaver produce cloth; this would mean the
erection of a complete system of economy in rivalry with
private business, and could be accomplished only through a
political revolution. The relatively useless compulsory labor
to which the mass of unemployed have been put is in
harmony with the other destructive processes inaugurated
by Roosevelt, --- the plowing under of crops, the wholesale
slaughter of pigs, the bonuses for reduction of production,
etc. The planned economy of capitalism must be not on a
plan of plenty, but on a plan of organized scarcity and of an
artificially stimulated increase of profits.
Of course, the government agents are not the naive radicals

of the Sinclair type. When they advocate a reconstitution of
the federal system for the unemployed under government
control, they have in mind, doubtless, that the future of
America inevitably lies in the direction of a regimentation
of the workers under barrack-like discipline, supervised by
the State. These views, hallowed by the ideals of Plato's
Republic and bejeweled with scintillating socialistic phrases,
in fact drift directly in the direction already being pursued
in Italy, Germany, and other fascist countries.
The unemployed, too, have had their day of utopian

planning. On the West Coast of the United States, for
example, they believed that throwing away the money
system and reverting to barter would solve the complicated
problems of the day. And for a time the barter idea spread
1067
like fire. There was plenty of noise but little improvement.
Such schemes could come only from people with a
backwoods tradition. They could not secure any following
among those acquainted with large-scale industry.
The utopianism of the petty bourgeoisie has been brought

directly into the ranks of the working class by the Socialist
and Communist Parties in the United States. This serves as
another indication that these Parties are only middle class
bodies having really nothing to do with the interests of the
workers. Witness the character of their unemployed
programs which are founded on the slogan, "We want
work." The socialist and communist officials, most of whom
themselves have probably never worked in factories in their
lives, all agree on the urgent need to demand work for the
rest of the workers and insist that this is the way out of the
crisis. Some of them are motivated by the fact that if the
unemployed are put to work the latter can pay dues and
there will be more funds for wages for the bureaucracy.
Loafers themselves, they grow indignant at the thought that
the workers might want rest and the right to be lazy.
The slogan "We want work" is a perfectly safe one and is

very convenient for the fascists who, with Mussolini and
Hitler, also idealize labor as the most ennobling activity and
denounce as outrageous a program where the workers eat
without slaving daily. Certainly the master can never object
when his slave devotedly insists that all he wants is to
continue to work for the benefit of the master and to place
his whole life at the service of the capitalist. The fascists are
quite ready to give the workers work --- on the chain gang
and through compulsory labor service. While the rulers
cannot give adequate unemployment insurance they can
certainly give work to all, if not in the factories, then in the
concentration camps, on military projects, and in the army.
1068
In Germany, the communists who shouted, "We want
work," now have their wish amply fulfilled under the Nazis.
Thus the slogan "We want work" plays directly into the
hands of the master class, since every bit of work that the
workers do must yield a profit and thus increase the power
and stability of the rulers. It is not work that the capitalists
fear. It is the class struggle. But it is precisely the class
struggle that the socialists and communists play down.
They do not demand that the capitalists be hanged from the
lamp-posts for their conspiracy against the people in
wantonly closing down their factories. They do not call for
the confiscation of the factories, because of sabotage and
destruction of goods by the owners. They do not raise the
demand that the factories belong to the workers who
produced them. In short, they do not call for socialism; they
ask only, in the most servile and abject manner, that the
workers be put to work.
The slogan "We want work" draws attention away from the
main problem, namely, an understanding of the system of
capitalist production and how to liquidate its contradictions.
The workers are made to idealize the wages system and
become blinded to the fact that unemployment has arisen
precisely because of the continued labor under capitalist
direction, and that just before every epoch of
unemployment we have a period of feverish activity, where
everyone is working full speed. It is because everyone is
working at top speed, turning over to the private owners of
industry a vast amount of goods which they cannot sell,
that we have the present unemployment and
overproduction.
In short, the trouble is not that labor has been lazy or

inefficient or non-productive or that more work is needed
in order to prevent crises or to mitigate them. Quite the
1069
contrary, the crisis is caused by the overproduction of
goods, by the tremendous productivity of labor which
capitalist relations cannot handle. Shouting "We want
work," the socialists and communists cannot emphasize the
elementary fact that the crisis is due to overproduction and
the extra hard work of labor, but instead, must tend to
throw the blame upon the working class rather than upon
the capitalist, since they assert more work and not higher
standards would relieve society of the present congestion of
goods.
In this respect, the conservative A. F. of L. has been far

more revolutionary than the communists. The unions have
constantly threatened to strike unless union rates be paid
on unemployment projects. Realistically, they insist on
maintaining their standards rather than demand work at
any pay whatsoever. While the A. F. of L. declares its
members will not work unless certain minimum conditions
are granted, the communists actually have demanded that
the government set a minimum number of hours, not less
than thirty, at which all unemployed shall be compelled to
work! (*27)
Operating under the slogan of "We want work," the

workers tend to forget that all the factories in the country
owe their existence to labor, and that whatever labor gets in
relief or unemployment insurance really comes from what
labor has produced previously. They are made to feel that
relief or insurance given them without working for it is like
charity, as though the State were handing them something
for nothing. The proletariat, therefore, is asked to give up
all claims to the factories and goods which it has produced
and, if the unemployed insist they must eat, then it seems
they should be compelled to build up new factories or make
new stuff. According to the communists, apparently, the
1070
trouble with the United State's is that the country has not
enough factories, dams and highways, and urgently needs
more at once, or the people will starve!
No wonder the middle class movements of Townsend,

Long, and Coughlin do not fight for labor when labor
cannot fight for itself. At least the middle class demands a
better distribution of wealth; all that the wage slaves
demand is --- more work.
The demand "We want work," implies that it is great to

have a job and wonderful to return to the old state of affairs
that existed in 1929 and previously. Thus the workers are
now in a position of demanding with the communists the
return of "the good old days" when everyone was working,
thus hiding the true conditions under which labor operated
even in 1929. Furthermore, if jobs at private industry are so
fine, why should strikes be tolerated? (*28) The
unemployed should form long queues outside of every
factory competing for employment, thus acting as a club in
the hands of the employers to batter down the conditions of
those actually at work and to destroy labor organizations.
The unemployed, however, instinctively have refused to
carry out the logic of the position offered them by their
socialist and communist misleaders. The strike
demonstrations that have taken place recently have been
remarkable in the complete solidarity which the employed
and unemployed have displayed together.
Naturally, those who shout for work cannot object if they

are put to work constructing military roads, improving
naval stations, building battle ships, preparing for war. Nor
can they complain too much of the pay and working
conditions since they ought to be glad to get a job. If they
insist on work they cannot at the same time throw their
energies into strikes or class struggles. Thus the socialist
1071
and communist forces have become instruments chaining
the workers to the present system.
These parties have become ardent supporters of the basic

principles behind the present administration's work relief
plans, criticizing the projects only on the ground that there
are not enough of them and that they are temporary. They
are quite satisfied with the character of the projects,
defending their social usefulness, and would consider it
ideal were their members to become permanent pensioners
on an eternal State. This would indeed be the American
substitute for Stalin's "socialism in one country." (*29)
American communists carefully refrain from calling on the

workers not to work under capitalist control, since the
capitalists are responsible for the crisis and all capitalist
control leads to destructive activity, not construction of the
nation. So long as they are paid to work, apparently they do
not care that capitalism has paid billions for the destruction
of crops, the wasting of soil, the rotting of the products, the
rusting of machinery, the wanton killing of animals, etc.
Praising the State for its constructive projects, these groups,
for thirty pieces of silver, conceal the basic fact that today
the State's chief function is war and destruction, not aid to
old ladies crossing the street.
The socialists and communists demonstrate the complete

degeneration prevailing in the ranks of the movements that
have sprung from liberalism. The workers of America have
indeed shown their good common sense and virility in
avoiding these organizations so patently bankrupt and with
policies similar to those which have proven so disastrous to
Europe.
1072
With the first advent of imperialism there could, already be
discerned in the operations of the government the
germination of policies resembling those of fascism.
Significantly enough, precisely the more militant liberals
develop these new trends. Ever more energetically, the
government begins to favor executive and administrative
action through boards of health, public utility commissions,
boards of engineers, probation commissions, pure food
commissions, trade commissions, labor boards,
immigration bureaus, etc. (*30)
These policies were aggressively pushed forward by the

forceful Theodore Roosevelt who, indeed, furnishes a good
political prototype of the future American fascist leader.
Theodore Roosevelt was the incarnation of boisterous
militancy and lust for power. He started his career with an
attack on the graft and corruption in the government, and
became police commissioner in New York City, where he
vigorously endeavored to reform the police system. In
Washington he came out as a patron of the navy. In his
foreign policies while President, he showed his "big stick"
everywhere, seizing the Panama Canal, energetically
entering into the internal affairs of South America and
Cuba, intervening in the Russo- Japanese War, and so forth.
Particularly significant were Roosevelt's views on war.

"When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women
fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom ...."
(*31) "To no body of men in the United States is the country
so much indebted as to the splendid officers and enlisted
men of the regular army and navy." (*32) "It is only the
warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to
the world ." (*33) "We cannot, if we would, play the part of
China... in this world the nation that has trained itself to a
career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end,
1073
to go down before other nations which have not lost the
manly and adventurous qualities." (*34) No wonder
Theodore Roosevelt and the German Kaiser admired each
other.
His social views were characterized by a denunciation of

the wastefulness of big business; he emphasized the
necessity of the State's controlling the trusts, and
conserving natural resources. In other matters, too, he
foreshadowed the European fascists of today, hailing labor
as the basis of American life, appealing for large families,
(*35) and praising the fighting character. His own personal
life was an exemplification of his theories, his will and
determination having been sufficient to overcome the
handicap of an originally puny body so as to develop him
into a rough and burly personality, fond of hunting and
warlike pursuits, proud of his Rough-Riders and Cowboys.
Theodore Roosevelt was willing to break precedent and

tradition where needed. As police commissioner, he tried to
be above parties. (*36) As a politician himself, he formed a
new radical "Bull Moose" organization that strove to end
the traditional ties of the old parties. His denunciation of
the obsolete penetrated even his literary activities, where he
appeared as a protagonist for simplified spelling. Theodore
Roosevelt was the type of man in politics that Henry Ford
could idolize, a man who could get things done, who
believed in work and not talk, who was a mine of activity.
Under the liberal Woodrow Wilson, fascistic trends became

still further marked, as the State and nation were mobilized
for war. A whole series of Boards and State agencies were
created to supervise every economic and social function of
the people, including a War Industries Board, a War
Shipping Board, a Railroad Administration, a Food
Administration, a Fuel Administration, State machinery to
1074
cover espionage and property of the enemy, a Committee
on Public Information, etc. Through the Selective Service
Act, thirty-two cantonments and special officers' camps
were erected. Under the Emergency Fleet Corporation, big
shipyards --- one of them alone, Hog Island, employing
three hundred and fifty thousand men --- were erected, so
that within a year the United States, which had only ninety-
four thousand tons of Atlantic shipping in July 1917, had,
by December 1, 1918, over three and a quarter million tons,
mostly owned by the Federal Government.
Here, then, was a great development of State authority and

State capitalism. Once having tasted power, government
officials could hardly be expected permanently to be
reconciled to its loss after the War. They bided their time. In
the meantime, the war machinery of government had
grooved the channels and laid out the direction which a
corporate or totalitarian State in this country will take. The
machinery set up for the exceptional occasion of war, now
that war is always near us, can easily become a permanent
apparatus to govern the people all the time.
While these tendencies were being developed in the Federal

Government, fascist germs were appearing in municipal
administrations. Here, too, it was the reform liberal who
undertook to inoculate local government with this virus
under the guise of improving the old checks-and- balance
system of the nineteenth century. The type of city
government, then widely in use in the United States, was
the mayor-council form in which the legislative and
administrative functions were separated. Just as
imperialism inaugurated a general blending of government
with industrial and financial management, so did this
synthesis of power introduce in municipal government the
movement for the Commission or the City-Manager form of
1075
government. As a transition to these new forms there was
developed the "strong-mayor" type of city government
where the mayor had considerably greater administrative
power than previously. From the "strong mayor" to the
City-Manager plan was not much of a jump.
However, the City-Manager plan of government developed

from the Commission form of local government rather than
from the old mayor-council arrangement. The Commission
form of administration had been part of the liberal-radical
program to introduce direct methods of popular control,
the initiative, referendum, and recall into local government.
A small Commission of from three to nine constituted the
ruling body, replacing both mayor and council. The
commissioners served in a dual capacity; collectively they
were a legislative body, individually each was the
administrative head of a city department. While this
simplified the government, it failed to bring about adequate
co-ordination of activity, an administration weakness
inherently springing from the diffusion of responsibility
among the commissioners. To overcome this defect, the
City-Manager plan was adopted, having as its unique
feature the appointive executive.
The City-Manager plan fully retained the three integral

principles of the Commission plan; namely, the unification
of powers, the short ballot, and "non-partisan" elections.
There was a small council or commission in which was
invested every power of the city, legislative and executive.
These councilmen were the only elected officers in the city
government and were elected on a ballot that did not
permit political party designations. To these principles was
added the additional one that the council or commission
was required to appoint a chief executive officer, called a
City Manager, chosen for his training, ability, and
1076
experience, regardless of the local political lineup.
Frequently, he came from a distant city. Supposed to be an
expert, he was put in full charge, directly responsible to the
elected authority.
In the old days, the mayor was considered primarily a good

ward politician, that is, a dispenser of patronage rather than
an administrator; and with the efficient operation of the
"spoils" system, the cities' treasuries were plundered
regularly. While business was good, business men did not
complain too much of the wasteful, grafting system that
grew up in the cities. With the fall in the rate of profit,
however, and the rise of big trusts, the old situation became
unbearable. It was big business that took the leading role in
municipal reform to drive forward for the City-Manager
plan. The haphazard functioning of municipal government
also became impossible in the light of the increasing
functions which the rapidly growing cities had to perform.
Detroit, for example, added 136 new activities in the years
between 1910 and 1930, compared to the 147 acquired
during the eighty-six years prior to 1910.
The twentieth century business men who had already

reorganized industry drew an obvious analogy between
industrial corporations and the municipal government, and
pressed home their opinion that the city must be managed
precisely like a business undertaking of tremendous
complexity. Not only must the efficiency of government be
increased, but its cost must be reduced. The executive must
be completely free from the influence of ward politicians
who might be swayed by popular pressure. A centralized
city government could also handle union and labor troubles
more effectively. Above all, the corporation men hoped to
gain control of local affairs by placing their own men in
strategic positions as experts. They proposed, then, to
1077
handle the city government on the style of a corporation,
the City Commission, concentrating executive power in one
responsible office, the City Manager, just as a stock
corporation chooses a Board of Directors which in turn
selects the President or Manager. The City Manager, like
the company executive, was to have power to choose most
or all of his operating staff, and was responsible to the
Board of Directors only for getting results.
The rise of the City-Manager plan is a manifestation in

municipal government of the increasing recognition of the
technological revolution in industry. It replaces the amateur
by the technician who, trained by industry, now organizes
and runs the city. Here, on a local scale, it would seem as
though the aims of the technocrats have been partially
realized; indeed, the City-Manager plan is one of the most
advanced points in the movement towards government by
expert. In the United States, of the 629 City Managers, 52
per cent have been chosen from responsible business or
industrial positions, and are mostly men trained by the
trusts.
The City Manager appoints, without regard to political

affiliations, competent department heads, supposedly
experts like himself. He appoints all of the city officials and
employees "subject to civil service regulations," assigns to
each his particular work, and may suspend or dismiss them
for proper cause. In this way, with his trained experts
around him, he forms his own city "brain trust," and
becomes the autocrat of the city administration. Here is a
realization of the strong man ideal on a local scale.
Many cities which did not adopt either the Commission or

City-Manager plan of government instead have developed
a "strong mayor." Thus, on every side, the old mayor-and-
council scheme is disappearing in favor of centralized
1078
action and executive responsibility. From the trusts, the
City Manager or "strong mayor" copies plans of
rationalization, and introduces into the government
machinization, electrification, motorization, new methods
of incineration, standardization of tasks, abolition of
redundant posts, combining of duties, reduction of wages
and salaries, etc. Such a city, while not a corporation City-
State, is certainly a City-State run like a corporation.
It is meaningful that the Commission and City-Manager

plans come into being as a result of the pitiful inability of
the old form to meet critical situations, either national
calamities or social disorders. When the government
manifested its incompetency in the City of Galveston
during the tidal wave of 1900, the electors decided radically
to change its structure; similarly after the 1913 flood in
Dayton, Ohio. The reform movement was spurred on
during the War when the federal government established
great army training camps which had all the facilities of
modern cities and which were put under the control of
practical managers, known as "officers in charge of
utilities," who were often members of the City Managers
Association. The City Managers, with their centralized
power, also proved well able to handle in a very energetic
manner the various phases of war work which they were
called upon to do, especially in regard to the fuel question,
the housing problem, etc. These emergencies, leading to the
termination of the old liberal style of municipal government
in favor of the new centralized form, tend to become more
frequent in an age of violence and depression.
In all phases of this movement to centralize the powers of

the city government, there exists a fertile field for the
growth of fascist forms. The fascist doctrine of the
centralized State is quite in harmony with the City-Manager
1079
theories which give to the whole mechanism of city
government that single controlling composite action which
fascism finds necessary for its success. In Italy and in
Germany the same centralized city government has been
created with the head directly appointed by the national
authority. In America, with slight changes, pre-war liberal-
radicalism can provide the basis for fascist programs of
local administration. Already we have certain precedents
for such action. In Alaska, for example, the governments of
many communities are carried on by United States officers
whose duties correspond very closely with those of a city
manager. When the Commission plan was adopted in
Galveston, three of the five commissioners were appointed
by the governor. In Washington, D. C., also there has been a
Commission government since 1878, the Commission being
appointed by the President and the Senate. Fascism would
simply universalize these methods already extant.
It is not merely in the specific form of the administration of

local affairs but also in its whole theory that the "strong
man" city government and the City-Manager plan fits in
well with fascism. In the Commission and City-Manager
forms of government there are usually no party lines as
such, and the policy is actively carried out that there must
be no class alignments in municipal election. Thus, in the
important local elections, the workers have found it
generally impossible to organize their own class parties
separate from the others. This destruction of parliamentary
precedents in elections governing the municipality and
affecting so much of the people's actual day-to-day lives
leads to the general attitude that parliamentarism, at least
in the form of city councils, political party and opposition,
are harmful to the community and to society. Such views
are part of the tenets of fascism.
1080
It makes no difference that the City-Manager plan was first
hailed by liberals and radicals as a reaction to the spoils
system of the past. The fact is that the nineteenth century
system, even with its ward heelers and graft, was often far
more responsive to the ordinary claims of the people in the
cities than the City Manager can be, since the ward
councilman was much closer to the desires of his
neighborhood constituents. Under the City-Manager plan,
the control is removed from the many to the few. Naturally,
the small controlling Board can be "reached" more easily by
big business. It is simpler by far for the trust-trained and
dominated councilman to become the controlling influence
in a small centralized body with its semi-secret sessions,
than could be possible in a larger localized Board of
Aldermen of the old type.
It must not be forgotten, too, that fascism in its drive for

power in America will declare, as the City Manager does,
that only by centralizing control will there be established
competency, efficiency, and cheapness in government and
an end be made to racketeering, graft, and gangsterism. All
the evils of parliamentarism will be blamed upon the
liberals; and the fascists will use these evils as the basis
from which to drive democracy out of existence in America.
Under the strain of the unprecedented economic depression

which has been America's lot since 1929, the national
government, too, is making a complete volte face from
nineteenth-century ideals of checks and balances in the
government, and under the provisions of the Constitution
itself there are being rooted deep dictatorial tendencies and
a fascist method of work. The fascist germs in the Roosevelt
regime counter the potentialities for a deep-going and rapid
radicalization appearing in the working class. Despite
liberal gestures, the Roosevelt administration may be said
1081
to be paving the way for Bonapartism on the road to
fascism. (*37) The economic crisis is slowly maturing into a
political one in the United States.
The departure from the nineteenth-century scheme of

things can be summarized as follows: First, the relative
importance of the locality and of the State is greatly
reduced and the Federal Government becomes all-powerful.
Second, the national government itself becomes far more
sensitized to shifts in events and centralized in the hands of
the executive. Congress is relegated to a secondary role and
more and more the judiciary is shoved into the background.
Third, the executive arm of the government tends to be
symbolized by the "strong man" who bears the
responsibility of everything upon his shoulders and has
unprecedented and enormous powers. Fourth, the
importance of the Party is superseded by that of the leader
who thrusts aside party programs at will, constructing new
ones overnight. The leader now uses the State apparatus,
not to give the spoils of office to his party, but to build a
strong army of henchmen around himself. Finally, in the
policy of the government there is to be found some
orientation and methods of solution of problems which, in
Europe, the fascists have claimed as their own.
A good illustration of the increasing sensitiveness of the

government is the practically unanimous passage of the
legislation that ended the "lame duck" Congresses.
Previously, although elections occurred in November,
neither Congress nor the President could be installed in
office until March of the following year, or four months
later. In the leisurely days of the nineteenth century this
could be tolerated, although the history of the United States
immediately preceding the Civil War shows how this four-
month period was used to foment rebellion and to harass
1082
the incoming administration. Today, however, sudden
political changes are everyday occurrences. The exigencies
both of foreign and internal affairs make dangerous any
four-month hiatus in government.
The most important method of achieving sensitivity has

been through the creation of a host of administrative boards
with power constantly to change and to revise rules along
the lines of the general standards and principles which
have been laid down by Congress and the President. A
good example of this is the Board in charge of Tariff
Revision. Thus has it become demonstrated that large
legislative bodies cannot handle the day-to-day adjustments
that are needed in the complex governmental activities of
the twentieth century. The legislature tends steadily to yield
its prerogatives and power to administrative boards for
action. Congress increasingly appears as useless as the
appendix in the human body; an operation for its removal
seemingly eliminates mere waste.
The dictatorial powers of the President have grown

enormously in the past few years. Under the pressure of the
crisis, he has been given an almost unlimited power of
inflation and virtual command of banking and fiscal policy.
Congress, too, has handed over to him extensive powers of
taxation. Today the President can juggle postage rates,
impose taxes upon manufacturers and basic farm processes;
in addition, the President now has the right to change tariff
rates by simple executive proclamations. Congress has also
given to the President vast and increasing powers of
appointment, as well as virtual control of the pension
system.
Naturally, with such enlarged powers, the President has

risen to an unprecedented stature in political affairs.
Hitherto, corporations had to establish powerful lobbies to
1083
persuade congressmen to pass tariff bills or other measures
in their favor; today these favors are to be received best
from the hands of the President. Thus, as these interests
concentrate their efforts to control the executive arm, in
turn the executive is able to build an enormous army of
civil retainers who owe their jobs entirely to him. In this
way, the hardy democracy by which the candidate was
controlled by the Party tends to break down completely.
Now we have a political Napoleon supported by a host of
functionaries. Around him there have been gathered
millions of public employees and pensioners.
The dictatorial pre-eminence of the President has been

accomplished within the framework of the Constitution of
the United States which, in its origin, was designed to
suffocate the will of the masses and to delegate to the office
of the President greater powers than even kings enjoyed in
other countries. In 1917, the power of the President was
demonstrated in the manner in which Woodrow Wilson
involved the United States in the War without needing the
consent of the Senate or of the people. During the
emergency of the present depression it has been illustrated
in the way in which the President, through the National
Recovery Act, the Agricultural Administration Act, the
banking and railway measures and other means, has
commanded all the basic processes of production and
distribution of wealth in the United States. Today there is
allocated to him the full responsibility for the expenditure
of many billions of dollars. Through emergency relief
measures, he is in complete control of all money given to
the unemployed.
As the tension of the social situation increases, inevitably

the tendencies symbolized by Roosevelt will develop into
fruition and mature into a well-rounded Bonapartism until
1084
the classes can fight it out on the issue dividing labor and
capital. That Roosevelt has not completed the stage of
Bonapartism is primarily owing to the fact that there is no
proletarian revolutionary organization of any large size or
any movement threatening to overthrow the system. When
such a development does occur, the new orientation in
government will be completed rapidly and the way will be
prepared for the advent of fascism into power.
The measures of the Roosevelt administration have been in

line with those which fascists in other countries have
brought forth. Its theories of planned economy are
variations of Mussolini's self-sufficiency, Hitler's autarchy,
and Mosley's self-sufficient British Empire. In his friendship
to Soviet Russia, President Roosevelt's phrases of
"planning" might seem to be a reaction from the
communistic plans abroad and appear a bid to the socialists
and communists and such groups as the technocrats. As
part of the "planning," there has been the setting up of the
"brain trust" by which the present regime would give the
impression that it has mustered all the forces of science at
its disposal to solve the problems of the day. In reality, the
only planning that capitalism can accomplish is the kind
that is being done under the fascist banner in Europe.
One of the characteristic signs of the times is the steady

drive on the part of the federal government for the
establishment of a federal police. Already the Federal
Bureau of Investigation has been greatly expanded and has
won a reputation in the handling of kidnaping cases. The
Bureau has extended its functions to take control over the
American Association of the Chiefs of Police and to issue
uniform crime reports. Increasingly it is being called upon
by local and state officials to take charge of the curbing of
certain criminal activities. It seems probable that this field
1085
will be exploited progressively by governmental officials
who plan to enlarge the authority of the State, especially
through strengthening the hands of the administrative and
executive organs.
The establishment of a federal police will have to go hand

in hand with the formation of uniform criminal legislation
and may lead the way towards the establishment of that
Ministry of Justice which the sociological school of
jurisprudence has been advocating for some time. Such a
Ministry of justice and Federal Police Force must tend
further to batter down the distinctions between local and
state governmental activities and federal administration,
gradually centralizing all power in Washington. This
centralization, of course, must fit in nicely with any fascistic
trends and dictatorial tendencies that exist in the national
government.
It must be remarked that the Roosevelt regime has made a

strong appeal to the middle classes and has striven to
separate them from the workers. It has allocated about two
billion dollars to farm crops to help the farmer. It has given
a similar amount to the Home Owners Loan Corporation.
At the same time, it has yielded to the pressure of elements
of the middle class by adopting a more latitudinarian policy
regarding silver and inflationary currency, thus raising
prices and allowing the lower middle class to pay some of
its debts. It is true that none of these measures can be of any
permanent relief to the petty bourgeoisie, and in fact must
aggravate the situation in the long run; but at least for the
moment, the Roosevelt regime can boast of carrying out the
interests of the small fellow. All failure can be blamed on
the Supreme Court. At the same time, the Administration
has been careful to increase the profits of the largest
concerns and to fuse the interests of the State with big
1086
business, pouring out billions via the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation and other bodies for the aid of the
railroads, mortgage and insurance companies, and big
industrialists.
In regard to the labor movement, however, matters have

been otherwise, efforts being made to keep wages at their
lowest point since the war, while raising the cost of living.
Through the National Industrial Reconstruction Act,
schemes of compulsory arbitration were attempted and the
government has taken a hand in propagandizing for the
breaking down of the old craft unions and the
establishment of "vertical" unions more intimately
connected with the government. Only under the great
pressure of the emergency has the most meager legislation
for social insurance been passed. Relief is still carried out in
the most haphazard manner, although with a cleverly
concealed purpose.
Apparently the unemployed are to be divided into three

distinct categories: The youth are herded into C.C.C. and
other camps where they are placed under barrack discipline
and trained for the military events in the future. Part of the
virile unemployed are put to work on projects that will
enable them to obtain slightly more necessities than they
can secure under the dole. The older folks are to be
dropped completely and handed over to the mercies of the
bankrupt local and state officials. By thus dividing the
unemployed, the government hopes that their
demonstrations will not be too threatening, and that they
can be better controlled by the authorities.
The problems of the day are rapidly taking the ruling class
far from the old standards of liberalism. (*38) The old
nineteenth-century schemes of government and control can
no longer hold, whether they are executed by a Democratic
1087
Party or by a Republican Party or both. The problems in the
coming elections must emphasize the great turn in the road
that America is making, from individualism to collectivism,
from a backward, haphazard State to a tremendously
complex and all-inclusive State authority, from liberalism
towards fascism.
Footnotes
1. For an account of some of these fascist organizations, see

M. H. Braun: "Fascist Organizations in the United
States," Class Struggle, Vol. IV, Nos. 1, 2 & 3, Jan. to March,
1934.
2. For the program of Father Coughlin, see, R. G.

Swing: Forerunners of American Fascism.
3. During the recent presidential election, Coughlin flirted

with the Townsend and "Share- the-Wealth" movements for
an alliance. The whole combination made a miserable
showing.
4. For his program see his pamphlet: Share Our Wealth.
5. See J. Dorfman: Thorstein Veblen and His America, p. 68.
6. See, for example, John Ruskin's: The Crown of Wild Olive,

and his Fors Clavigera.
7. See, T. Veblen: The Imperial Germany and the Industrial

Revolution, p. 269.
8. See, T. Veblen: Theory of Business Enterprise.
9. See, T. Veblen. The Engineers and the Price System. See,

also, his book The Higher Learning in America, where he
shows the lethal touch of business in the universities.
1088
10. For an analysis of Veblen's views see, P. T.
Homan: Contemporary American Thought, pp. III and
following.
11. Stuart Chase: Technocracy, p. 25, pamphlet.
12. For a discussion of the antagonistic interests of

corporation management to stockholders, see, A. A. Berle
and G. C. Means: The Modern Corporation and Private
Property.
13. The same, p. 19. The 200 corporations are divided into
42 railroads, 52 utilities and 106 industrials.
14. The same, p. 46, footnote.
16. H. Ford: My Philosophy of Industry, p. 75.
17. See, G. Bradford: The Quick and the Dead, section on Ford.
18. See, H. Ford: Moving Forward, p. 39.
19. Written in collaboration with Smith.
20. C. A. Beard: The Open Door at Home, pp. 318-319.
The rest of the world can burn up, America will have no
part in it, except to defend its own borders.
21. Mr. Walter B. Pitkin.
22. J. Dewey: Liberalism and Social Action, pp. 54-55.
23. The Same, p. 48.
1089
24. For the "engineering interpretation" of Pound, see R.
Pound: Interpretations of Legal History. 25. L.
Mumford: Technics and Civilization, p. 275.
26. J. Dorfman openly acknowledges that his book Thorstein

Veblen and His America is indebted to Tugwell, financially
and morally.
27. Originally they wanted more than a thirty-hour

minimum since they were opposed to the six-hour day on
the ground that Soviet Russia had a seven-hour day and
how could Capitalist America beat socialist Russia?
28. We note that in the recent automobile strike (January,

1937) the General Motors Corporation organized a mass
meeting of anti-strikers who raised the slogan "We want
work!"
29. This assumes the Stalinists could stand the shock of

imagining socialism in two countries alone!
30. In America it is the Labor Department to which is

entrusted the deportation of undesirable workmen.
31. T. Roosevelt: Strenuous Life, p. 4.
34. T. Roosevelt, work cited, p. 6.
35. "The woman must be the housewife...." (The same, p. 4.)
36. "We wanted at one time to get plenty of strong, honest

young men for the police force, and did not want to draw
them from among the ordinary types of ward-heeler. Two
1090
fertile recruiting-grounds proved to be, one a Catholic
church and the other a Methodist church."
(T. Roosevelt: Strenuous Life, p. 97.)
37. President Roosevelt declares his regime is not fascistic

simply because it draws its inspiration from the mass of
people, rather than from a class or group or marching army
and because it has worked within the pattern of traditional
political institutions. (See F. D. Roosevelt: On Our Way, pp.
ix, x. This is a very precarious distinction, if true. It is the
stock in trade of most fascist leaders to claim to be inspired
by the whole people.
38. The present administration believes it has fused the

principles both of Theodore Roosevelt and of Woodrow
Wilson into a higher synthesis. Hence the "New Deal", a
compound of "Square Deal" and "New Freedom." (See F. D.
Roosevelt: On Our Way, pp. x-xi.)
Characteristically American, Mr. Roosevelt knows we are

"on our way" although he is not quite so sure just where we
are going.
XXXIII. THE FUTURE PHYSIOGNOMY OF AMERICAN

FASCISM
ASSUMING that fascism as a political tendency will sooner

or later make its appearance in the United States as a
serious force, the question remains, what are the national
peculiarities that this movement will show in this country?
American fascism does not have to take the name "Fascism"
or "National Socialism." Differing from the European
brands, it can simply take the name "Americanism" and
appear on the scene as the "American Party." If it is to hold
1091
true to Americanism, it will blazon forth as its goal the
magic word "Utopia," where planned social science under
the direction of the technician will be assured.
Like the English variety, American fascism will not be able

to exaggerate racial theories of chauvinism based on race;
that is, so far as white people are concerned. The fact is,
there is no American race unless thereby we mean the
American Indian. America has been peculiarly the melting
pot of the world, where all white races come together and
have been assimilated. To emphasize racial peculiarities
now would be, far from uniting the entire nation, but the
surest way to throw it into incessant turmoil. Therefore, in
this respect American fascism will have to take a
completely opposite stand to German Nazism which
stresses race.
In this country, if any racial angle is put forth at all, it

probably will be on the ground of non-assimilability, rather
than the rejection of any race as such. Such a reason given
will excuse the attack against the Chinese or Japanese or
Negro, or even the Jew. On the other hand, those people
who are willing to assimilate themselves with America, to
identify themselves with this nation and to lose their old
European traits, will be accepted willingly. Of course, there
still will be room for thrusting out "aliens" where they make
themselves inconvenient to authorities by joining
subversive movements or where unemployment
necessitates such pressure.
In the nineteenth century, the "American Party" or "Know

Nothing Party" had already enunciated the ideal that only
native-born Americans were to hold office. While this may
be continued as a program of fascism, certainly it would be
suicide for any native group to attempt to win the country
with any program that would create hostility to all those
1092
born on the other side who number today fifteen million,
and with their descendants forty million, in the United
States. The attitude of embracing the foreign-born and alien,
moreover, is a policy that fits in well with the past of the
country, with the imperialist pretensions of the United
States, and with America's general role.
Always America has appeared as a sort of New World

where the Old World racial combinations, national
prejudices, and class struggles could play no part. America
as a whole stood for a new deal, for a new social order, for
the forgotten man. It seemed, moreover, that the West was
destined to counter and to reverse all the social, processes
immemorably ingrained in the East. If in Europe there were
many races, each antagonistic to the other, here all races
could fuse into one.
The unbridled nationalism of the cultured members of the

ruling classes of Europe did not necessarily prevent them
from having their own type of internationalism. European
internationalism, however, was an internationalism that
emphasized national differences. In so doing, the most
reactionary variety of such internationalists could support
the claims of its particular ruling class, proving that its
rulers were better than all the others, and must conquer and
subject the others. The best of these internationalists were
willing to admit that Europe would be much the loser
should any race such as the French or German or Italian or
Hungarian be subjected completely and broken over the
wheel of oppression. These people conceded that the worth
of Europe consisted precisely in that the continent was a
variegated blend of composite parts, each different from the
other. To this latter school of thinkers, each nation of
Europe should have its own independence and culture to
make the European as richly cosmopolitan as possible.
1093
Yet both types of European internationalism insisted that
each nation should know its place, and strongly marked the
differences among them in regard to habits, customs, ideals,
etc., rather than their similarities. The Frenchman was
French in exactly those aspects in which he was not German,
and vice versa. The historical destiny of each nation was to
emphasize and to exaggerate precisely those traits which
separated it from other groups. Thus the internationalism of
the European on the whole was of a merely negative nature
that rejected adulteration of the races and their mixture and
tolerated other races only if they were separate and outside
of their own country.
American internationalism was just the opposite. It did not

reject the other races. It took them all into its bosom and
remade them in its own image. The internationalism of
America was really a supernationalism. Apparently, just as
the United States was greater than one country
geographically, but equal to the whole continent of Europe
in area, so it was more than one nation socially but a whole
world in itself, ethnically and sociologically. In Europe, too,
racial struggles were bound up with class struggles. In
America, just as there was a general classlessness, so all
races were fused into one.
Just as convenient as the theory of race is to the German

ruling class would be the American theory that
Americanism embraces the whole world and is a world
philosophy that can take in and assimilate all peoples. It is
with this theory that American imperialists can go out to
conquer and digest the world, and, scorning the chaos of
old Europe, cut across all its antagonisms.
Since, historically, Europe is dying as a progressive force,

America can now step out and take leadership. At any rate,
such will be the imperialist objective of the future fascist
1094
"American Party," with its program of "Americanism."
Europe has been a failure. It could not bring peace and
prosperity into the world, but only conflict and war. It is
made up of a lot of little decadent nations whose heads
have to be cracked together so that they will listen to reason.
In this way, too, can the door be shut to communism and
class war. Just as Germany, before the War, felt compelled
to organize Europe, so America under the fascists will feel it
its duty to organize the world. Here, then, is the program
for American fascism --- the organization of the world,
planned economy for the world, utopia for the world.
Utopia always has been connected intimately with the

ideals of America. By its newness, by its uniqueness, by its
apparent violation of historical laws, by the intrinsic
experimentation of its life, America always has appeared as
the new Jerusalem. The idea of being able to violate the
traditional has gone hand in hand with the widespread
belief in luck that prevails in this country, whether in the
form of Santa Claus who hands out something for nothing,
or in the general pass-word of "Give us a break."
Utopia is the magic pass-key that brings hundreds of

thousands of voters to the plans of Upton Sinclair. It is the
program of various fascistic movements that already
contain hundreds of thousands, even millions, of adherents.
In this country, then, utopia becomes not a sneering name
for a dream impossible to realize, but the daring scientific
experimentation and pioneering that has always
characterized America and that has permitted this country
to accomplish the apparently impossible. With an
unconcealed program of utopia, American fascism may
well gather into its folds the mass of petty bourgeois
elements that it needs.
1095
The utopianism of America will be not the dream of the
poet, but the ideal of the scientist; it will propose not a
sentimental return to the past, but a well-organized and
planned social order. The industrialism of American life,
the extremely well-developed technique of American
engineering prevents utopianism from having anything but
a scientific character. On the other hand, the general
immaturity of social life in this country has, at least up to
now, prevented the scientist from being anything else but a
social utopian. The phenomenal rise of technocracy with its
"planned" economy of plenty under the rule of scientist and
engineer is a harbinger of the type of theoretical program
that our future "American Party" will try to advance.
In other countries, fascism has fought openly the slogan of

the French Revolution, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,"
using its own passwords, "Order, Discipline, Hierarchy." In
the United States, however, an incipient fascist movement
may well use these very liberal terms for its own purpose.
There is nothing more conservative in America than these
traditional concepts. Fascism could not overthrow them.
It must be borne in mind that in America the government

has never been controlled directly by Big Business men;
that is to say, the extremely wealthy heads of corporations
have not sought political posts in order to take charge of the
government. Big Business rather has operated by utilizing
the ubiquitous and decisive middle class. In the United
States, it is the middle class that has historically taken the
initiative in things political, where petty bourgeois
equalitarianism always has been a predominant feature
precisely because of the general classlessness that prevails
and because of the fact that the nation as such was always
identified with the middle class. For these reasons, every
political party and administration has paid so much
1096
attention to the middle class, that class, so to speak, from
whose loins both capital and labor have sprung.
The fascist movement must rely on this middle class.

Slogans of equality and fraternity go hand in hand with the
slogans against class war. If the fascist movement arises in
this country it will not be so much because there is an open
threat of communism uttered by mass organizations of half
a million members or more, but rather in order to prevent
this class struggle from even appearing in such a
revolutionary formation. Fascism in Italy sprang up in
order to crush communism. Fascism in the United States
will appear in order to prevent a native communism from
rearing its head.
This is also true since once the American proletariat really

moves in the direction of communism, the end for world
capitalism will soon be in sight. There will be no long
process between beginning and end in America, as there
has been in Europe. The American tempo, if nothing else,
guarantees directness and speed in social evolution.
Therefore, the chief job of the American ruling class must
be to prevent the masses from even starting to move in the
direction of communism.
European fascism stresses self-sufficiency, autarchy, empire,

etc. America, being more self-sufficient than any other
country, does not need to stress this. In its role of
conquering and organizing the world, it will have to
emphasize other features more in harmony with its
supernationaiism. As it puts Europe further on the dole, as
it injects its mighty force in the wars and conflicts of Europe,
it must rationalize its processes with the theory of
extending the United States of America to become the
United States of the World under America. American
1097
fascism indeed can be the creature to try to carry out Karl
Kautsky's theory of ultra-imperialism. (*1)
For the same reason American fascism, unlike the European

varieties, will be able to employ not jingoistic, but pacifistic
phrases. It is Europe that is always at war and engaged in
interminable internecine fights. An end to this chaos; an
end to eternal wars! Peace and plenty; planned economy for
the world! These are the catchwords that American fascism
can use, and in this way American supernationalism will
offer itself as a substitute both for the anarchical
internationalism of the European bourgeoisie and the
Marxist internationalism of the proletarian communist.
European fascism has been born in a struggle against the

existing constitution and framework of government that
has permitted communism and the labor movement to
grow. In its attack against communism, fascism has also
blamed the liberal constitutions which had allowed the
subversive movements to advance to such strength. In
America, however, fascism can arise well within the
framework of the Constitution, through a Constitutional
dictatorship. After all, the Constitution arose without a
labor movement in America and has continued until today
without much of a labor movement. Under the Constitution,
dictatorial powers of the President may be provided,
company unions formed, criminal syndicalist laws enacted,
thousands of Negroes lynched, etc. Such a Constitution of
theoretical classlessness and pragmatic lynching of labor
need not be fought by fascism. The Constitution may have
to be modified in interpretation and even in letter, but
American fascism may well advance against communistic
labor with the slogan "Obey the Constitution" on its lips.
As in economics and in politics, so in general philosophic

theory and method. If fascism in Europe needs a State
1098
religion and to achieve it has to revert to Catholicism or
paganism, the United States can turn to nothing. It cannot
reproduce in this country the old forms of a passe Europe.
Rather, the problem in America will be how to embrace all
religions. Deism does so and Deism is the Traditional
religion of the leaders of America. At present, many moves
for the unification of all Protestant Churches have been
launched and prove again that the American bourgeoisie
begins where the European ends. By means of Deism, that
is, by insisting in the belief in a God and a divine power
over all, American fascism can unify all the groups within
the country and the nations outside of it. With Deism as its
religion and pragmatism as its method, American fascism
can be inspired to lead the world.
The fascist movement must take an irreconcilably hostile

attitude to the Negro and will immeasurably burden his lot.
German fascism burned books; American fascism will burn
men. Lynching is too old a genuine American custom not to
be indulged in by fascism when it becomes a force in this
country. In all critical moments in American life there has
been a tendency for the propertied elements to come
together in citizens' vigilante committees to take the law
into their own hands. This is perfectly understandable in a
country where the State has been despised and is corrupt,
while individual business men have been so strong.
The formation of these vigilante committees need not

necessarily be secret. This can be seen, for example, in the
records of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilantes
formed in 1851. Here the Vigilantes Committee met openly
and passed a resolution: "Whereas it has become apparent
to the Citizens of San Francisco that there is no security for
life and property, either under the regulations of society as
1099
it at present exists or under the laws as now administered,
therefore the Citizens whose names are hereunto attached
do unite themselves into an association for the maintenance
of the peace and good order of society.... We are
determined that no thief, burglar incendiary assassin . . .
shall escape punishment either by the quibbles of law, the
insecurity of prisons, the carelessness and corruption of the
police or the laxity of those who pretend to administer
justice--. . ."
". . . and if in the judgment of the member or members of

the Committee present it be such an act as justifies the
interference of this Committee ... the Committee shall be at
once assembled for the purpose of taking such action as the
majority of the Committee when assembled shall determine
upon." (*2)
The Committee then calmly records how it handled ninety-

one cases, of which four were hanged, three of them being
merely for larceny. Such lynching traditions have been kept
fresh in the Far West, and in the South against the Negro.
The fascists will gladly take to this method of operation
against the Negro. The Negro is too dangerous an element
of social life. He is too much a representative of unskilled
labor and of the existence of classes not to be made to feel
the full brunt of fascism. The fascist way to eliminate class
struggles will take the course of the physical extirpation of
the black man.
That American fascism will declare the Negro undesirable

and launch its most ferocious attacks against the black
worker becomes clear the moment we compare the relative
standing of the communist to the Negro in America. In
other countries, communists have been the most hated,
feared, and persecuted by the ruling class. In order to crush
communism, fascism rises and comes to power. In Europe,
1100
classes exist as a fact, and the oppressed class can be
prevented from seizing power only if the leadership of
these lower classes, namely the Communist Party, is
destroyed.
In this country, however, the problem always has been

posed differently. It is not the communist representative of
the class that is alien to American soil; rather, it is the class
itself, as a class. What the American bourgeoisie fears is not
the communist, but the mere organization of the workers
into class formations. Since it is the Negro who has always
symbolized the class of labor and whose black skin casts its
shadow upon the capitalists' dream of classlessness, we
have here the reason for the traditional ferocity against him,
while the communist is not even taken seriously. These
communist groups are still mulling over the played-out
European problems and are composed of elements still
alien to the native proletariat; the Negro, on the other hand,
has no other problem but how to fight his American
masters.
If we compare the two groups, Negro and communist, we

can see the reasons why the bourgeoisie of this country
fears the Negro rather than the communist. First of all, the
Negro is rooted in American life and history; the
communist merely flirts around the fringe. Second, the
Negro is the most exploited and propertyless section of the
American toilers; the communist has been generally of
foreign-born extraction, and often has a good job and high
pay. Many of them are Jewish intellectuals. Third, the
Negro has a long history of actual rebellion and
insurrection behind him; the communist has never tried his
hand at insurrection in this country. Fourth, the Negro once
held State power in some of the states after the Civil War
1101
and demonstrated there his revolutionary character; the
communists have been only talkers. They have not dared
seriously to undertake the penetration of the South. Their
ranks are filled with white chauvinist poison. They would
not even understand, most of them, the present lines that
are being written. Fifth, the Negro has a long history of
illegal and conspiratorial work; the communists of this
country would not know what to do in periods of illegality,
but would flounder helplessly.
Let us compare the difference in treatment which the two

groups have received up to now. Since the Civil War, over
five thousand Negroes have been lynched; the writer does
not know of one communist who has ever met such a fate.
Daily, the American bourgeoisie carries on the ferocious
war against the Negro. Compared with this, the treatment
given the American communist is relatively mild.
Communists like Corliss Lamont, or John Strachey, of
"noble" blood, can get into the best of society, not to speak
of the lesser lights such as Mike Gold and Sydney Hook
who would be barred rather because of their Jewish origin
than for their communism. On the other hand, the Negro is
treated like a beast.
The American white worker has had the rankest illusions

about equality, liberty for all, no classes, rich and poor are
alike, etc.; not so the Negro. The Negro knows very well
that there is a line which he can cross only after a fight.
Generally, the white worker lives off the exploitation of the
black; the black worker lives off no one. Is it not clear from
these facts how far more dangerous and potentially more
revolutionary is the "unconscious" Negro than is the
"conscious" communist in the United States?
All this, however, is not to say that fascist power would not
attack the communist movement. Quite the contrary. The
1102
communist also will feel the heavy lash of the fascist's
knout. As a matter of fact, at the first breath of fascist
victory, the regular Communist Parties will run to cover
and disappear. Fascism is not to be fought by workers who
are imperialistically minded or by soft-headed intellectuals,
both of which types now infest the revolutionary
organizations. These communist movements will simply
shatter themselves into so many atoms.
An entirely new communist movement will have to arise.

This time the elements will be different, made up mainly of
American workers, to a very considerable extent of Negroes.
It is only then that communism will have a chance of
becoming Americanized.
Since fascism cannot assimilate the Negro, the future in the

United States is posed by the problem, fascism, or Negro
liberation, which is another form of saying, fascism or
communism and the permanent victory for labor.
The lines on the physiognomy of future American fascism

will grow clearer if we consider more closely the unique
circumstances characterizing the social and political life of
this country. Fascism is essentially a movement of order. It
carries out the old Prussian dictum: "Ruhe ist der erste Pflick
des Burghers,"---quiet is the first duty of the citizen. Each
man is to have a place and to be put in his place. In America,
however, such a philosophy would be absolutely fatal to all
the traditions and sentiments that go to make up
Americanism. For every man to have a place presupposes a
society of classes, each class mutually dependent on the
other, or it presupposes a definite stratefication of functions.
The son of the shoemaker takes up shoe-making; the son of
1103
the laborer is a laborer, etc. Such a philosophy never had
any place in this country.
It has been the boast in the United States that fortunes have
been made and lost within three generations, grandfather
and grandson both starting in shirtsleeves. (*3) In short,
whereas in Europe classes have always existed under the
leadership of the aristocracy, or bourgeoisie, in America the
job has always been to prevent the formation of classes.
Thus, class struggles will arise in this country on the
principle that classes should not be formed. The fascist
movement in this country cannot adopt a philosophy of
every class or every man in his place. Quite the contrary; it
must reaffirm the old doctrine of opportunity for everyone.
As we have repeatedly stressed, in America, capitalism has

been compelled to work through the wide strata of the
middle class whose representatives took charge of the
government machine. And just as the bourgeoisie became
typified by the tremendously powerful captains of industry,
so the little man became symbolized in the powerful
political figure of the President, who has never failed to
acknowledge his allegiance to that middle class. Thus, in
Europe the fascist movement is a mobilization of the
middle class by a frightened bourgeoisie that wants to
maintain its control by crushing the workers; the situation
is the opposite in the United States. In Europe, the
bourgeoisie is already in direct control, while the lower
middle class is not; it is the reverse in this country. The
middle class, traditionally, has furnished the members of
the government. If big business should want to take over
the government in the United States, above all it would
have to fight the middle class, which would refuse to give
up its hold on the juicy posts which have belonged to it for
so long and which are needed especially now. Evidently,
1104
then, fascism in this country will have to rely upon the
middle class, not only to form the main army of fascism,
but also to be its leaders to transform the government.
Fascism has symbolized the intimate fusion of trust capital

with the State and the formation of State capitalism. In
America, since the State has been controlled by the middle
class while the trust, on the contrary, was controlled by the
big bourgeoisie, the fusion between State and trust must
precipitate a clash as to who will control. It is clear that,
should the State take over the industries of America, such
as the railroads, or the banks, or the mines, the pragmatic
functionary, typical member of the middle class in control
of the government, will do his best to control the trust. Thus,
instead of "bust the trust," now the middle class will adopt
the theory of taking over the trust and using it for its own
benefit and for the re-establishment of classlessness. Hence
the establishment of State monopoly will appear to the
middle class as the termination of monopoly of the
industrialist, since the State will be controlled "by the
people."
Now it is precisely this middle class that feels itself choked

by any thought that it must be put in a definite place. In
America it has always lived in the hope of advancement,
and was never satisfied merely with maintaining the status
quo. The economic attitude of the American middle class
was the opposite to that of the European. In Europe, for
example, if the middle class family wanted a piano, the
income was carefully saved until the funds were sufficient
to purchase the instrument. In America, the breadwinner
simply went out and hustled harder to get the extra money.
The European petty bourgeois economy was a saving
economy, a husbanding of limited strength; American
middle class economy was always an aggressive one, one
1105
that knew not its limits and had never been checked. A
fascist theory that would tell the middle class that it must
know its place and that its place was a subordinate one
would be bound to meet with overwhelming resistance. For
the Americans, there must always be kept the illusion that
"there is plenty of room on top."
German fascism has developed a theory denouncing all

speculative capital. Such a theory never could be supported
in America by the middle class whose very essence has
been twined around speculation, horse-trading, pioneering,
gold-mine hunting, real estate investment, etc. Consider, for
example, the difference between the farmer in America and
the peasant of Germany, where the Nazis have passed their
Hereditary Homestead Law forbidding the alienation of
land. Is it conceivable that American fascism could take
such a position to prevent the farmer from selling his land,
forcing him to remain in one spot forever? Such an idea
would be absolutely abhorrent to the American farmer. The
American farmer is no peasant. He is not and never has
been rooted to the soil. There is an immense difference
between land hunger and love of soil. The American farmer
has often enough been land hungry, but he never has had a
true love for the soil. He has treated his farm as others
treated their business; he was always ready to pack up and
leave if a new and better opportunity showed itself. Often
the land was held merely for speculation, and millions of
members of the middle class have been able to exist as long
as they have, simply because of the booming land values.
The purchase of land in the countryside for practically
nothing, the holding on to it while big cities arose on every
side, increasing the value of the land, the cashing in of the
land when prices reached their highest point, when the
family can then betake themselves to California, or
1106
elsewhere, for new speculative adventures, --- this was the
routine for many a shrewd Yankee.
It must never be forgotten that, in the main, agriculture in

America was developed after capitalism had become
powerful in England, the mother country, and thus
agriculture did not precede capitalism, but borrowed all
capitalist features in its production of land products. The
American farmer was a capitalist adventurer, going where
profit was high. He had no feudal traditions. He migrated
from New England to the Middle West, and from the
Middle West to the Far West. Within each state, the
mobility of the farmer was notorious. Even among the
Negro share-croppers it is estimated that their migration
within the South was far greater than even their
extraordinary trek to the North.
In short, European fascism means immobility and

stationary life. But the Americans are an uprooted people
who have their tentacles in no particular spot. In this
respect they have much in common with the Jews. America
has symbolized mobility. Incidentally, there is no country
where the automobile prevails that as yet has swung to
fascism. Italy and Germany are the land of the bicycle. In
America there are close to thirty million automobiles,
constantly moving. To take these exceedingly active
energetic atoms of the middle class who drive the
automobiles and to place them in some stationary category
would be indeed to transform the bright blue sky of
America into the dungeons of Europe.
No, fascist claims in America must not take the form of the
advocacy of hereditary land laws and the creation of an
immobile stationary society of classes and occupations. It
must be a philosophy that will open up still greater
opportunities for the middle class to replace those which
1107
are being closed by the trusts. Thus the schemes of Huey
Long, Father Coughlin, and Doctor Townsend are schemes
to give money to the middle class so that they may continue
their speculation, their initiative, their driving around the
country in automobiles, and similar customs.
All fascist philosophy has been a turning back to the past,

but America has no past to which to turn back. Fascism is a
sign of a defeated country, a country slipping, a country
afraid. The Americans know no fear. They have never been
defeated. They do not appreciate their limitations and
would not recognize them if they saw them. Why should
the American middle class turn back? What force is
oppressing it? Who dares to order it? In Europe, fascism is
the sign of the weak and desperate; in America, it will take
on the Messianic feature of saving the world.
Old World fascism is a movement that proposes to the

middle class that it can keep its security and position only
by crushing the working class; in America such a theory of
progress by crushing others never has been adopted. In
general, the philosophy of Meliorism and expansive
humanitarianism has been particularly deep-seated in this
country. There has been generally wealth enough for all, so
that one did not have to bother his neighbor. Wealth came
from one's own initiative and hard work rather than from
pushing others down. At least, the contrary was never
admitted by the middle class of the United States, where
the class struggle was still in an unconscious state. Here, the
middle class always idealized labor, and it has been from
the middle class that the native laboring elements have
come. On the other hand, the native labor movement
always has been closely allied to the middle class. It is hard
to believe that the millions of middle class members can
adopt as their philosophy in America that their position can
1108
be secured only if they trample those who are under them
still further down the scale.
From all these considerations we may conclude that the

fascist movement in the United States, that is, the
movement towards complete governmental control,
collectivism in all forms of life, destruction of the labor
movement, and compulsory abolition of classes, will take
on forms in this country entirely different from those
anywhere else.
The mere formation of fascist groupings, the continued

centralization of the State, and the wiping out of political
democracy and parliamentarism are bound to create a
profound reaction in the ranks of labor itself, leading to
open class formations in the interests of labor. Once the
labor movement will have organized on its own account, it
will clear the political atmosphere. The middle class is
floundering today precisely because it has no one to whom
to took for aid. The labor movement, strangely politically
silent, with no adequate program and organization of its
own, makes no attempt to fight for power.
When labor does begin to move, however, it is bound to

show such strength as to win to its side large numbers of
the middle class whose interests labor really carries forward.
If fascism results in the stimulation of the labor movement
to counter with its own mass organizations, then it will
have accomplished the setting off of the spark of the
struggle for power between capital and labor in America.
From this it can be seen that fascism can have no long
future in America.
So virile, so energetic, so intrinsically unspoiled is the

American laborer that his mere organization and first timid
steps towards power will shake the entire structure. There
1109
can be no long period of time between labor's awakening
and labor's victory; it is the awakening that is slow and
painful. Contrary to the Russian, the American has a hard
task to reach power; he will have an easy task to hold it.
And if the task to reach power is difficult, it is because the
task of awakening the worker is difficult. Once on the road
of class consciousness, his pace will be terrifically fast until
the goal is completed. He will advance with the same spirit
that makes him a foremost sportsman, with a whirlwind
release of his pent-up energy.
As Friedrich Engels put it: "To expect that the Americans

will start out with the full consciousness of the theory
worked out in older industrial countries is to expect the
impossible." (*4) "Once the Americans get started it will be
with an energy and violence compared with which we in
Europe shall be mere children." (*5)
Footnotes
1. "If we can learn to adjust out interest to the rights of

others, we stand to knit the world into an economic
federation to which war would be the supreme calamity
and to spread a Pax Americana over the greater portion of
the globe. If we can take the nations into partnership with
us, it is our manifest destiny to control the world as it has
never been ruled before; informally, unobtrusively,
invulnerably." (J. Carter: Conquest-America's Painless
Imperialism, pp. 267-8.)
2. Papers of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of

1851, edited by M. F. Williams, pp. 1 and 2.
3. One American writer has put it: "The commonest axiom

of history is that every generation revolts against its fathers
1110
and makes friends with its grandfathers." (L. Mumford: The
Brown Decades, p. 3.)
4. The Correspondence of Marx and Engels, Letter of Engels to

Florence Kelley Wischaewetsky, No. 203, pp. 453-454.
1111
BOOK IV: COMMUNISM
1112
I. THE ZIG-ZAG CHARACTER OF THE PROLETARIAN
REVOLUTION
XXXIV. EARLY COMMUNIST UPRISINGS
LONG before its scientific principles had been laid down by

Marx and Engels, communism had arisen from time to time
as a powerful movement frightening the ruling classes.
Communism is a movement of the lowest classes to
terminate private property in the means of production for
the general social advancement. No matter how strong or
powerful the State, always the slave, the serf, and the
laborer had been prone to remember that the race had
originated with a communism which had been for the
benefit of all and that, in the course of the development of
private property and the State, the people had been
deprived of their possessions and with them of their power.
(*1) Thus the discontented masses who took to communism
only were following the old rule that revolutionary classes
always look to the past for their inspiration. "The tradition
of all past generations weighs like an Alp upon the brain of
the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in
revolutionizing things and themselves in bringing about
what was never before, at such very epochs of
revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their
service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their
battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in
such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed
language." (*2)
At the dawn of the human race, a primitive communism

had existed among the savages and barbarians that then
peopled the earth. The low productivity of labor of
mankind in the hunting and fishing stage or agriculture
1113
and the domestication of animals made necessary a pooling
of the resources of all in order to survive.
Indeed, the existence of the herd, or rather the horde, was

the factor that enabled homo sapiens to emerge from the ape
stock. It was the horde that provided the plastic milieu by
which every innovation that improved the ability of the
stock to survive could be imitated and passed on. The
collective form of labor of the horde with its rude
subdivisions mightily increased the ape-stock's strength
and power. Through the existence of the
horde, pithecanthropos erectus was able to utilize tools and to
rise to the dignity of man. Naturally, the ties that held the
individual to the group were extraordinarily strong and, in
the early period of savagery, each one thought himself
bound to the group as the finger is bound to the hand.
In such a low stage of technical development, where man

was far more the victim of nature than its master, the
ecological arrangements of such social animals had to be in
the form of primitive communism, where each shared alike
and where the means of production as well as the general
product belonged to no one individual. Some of the
primitive tribes, indeed had no word for "I" separate from
the term "we." (*3)
The implications of this early stage of social life are drawn

with a skillful hand by Friedrich Engels: "How wonderful
this gentile constitution is in all its natural simplicity! No
soldiers, gendarmes, and policemen, no nobility, kings,
regents, prefects or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits, and still
affairs run smoothly. All quarrels and disputes are settled
by the entire community involved in them, either the gens
or the tribe or the various gentes among themselves. Only
in very rare cases the blood revenge is threatened as an
extreme measure. Our capital punishment is simply a
1114
civilized form of it, afflicted with all the advantages and
drawbacks of civilization. Not a vestige of our cumbersome
and intricate system of administration is needed, although
there are more public affairs to be settled than nowadays:
the communistic household is shared by a number of
families, the land belongs to the tribe, only the gardens are
temporarily assigned to the households. The parties
involved in a question settle it and in most cases the
hundred-year-old traditions have settled everything
beforehand. There cannot be any poor and destitute --- the
communistic households and the gentes know their duties
toward the aged, sick and disabled. All are free and equal --
- the women included. There is no room yet for slaves, nor
for the subjugation of foreign tribes." (*4)
During the Middle Ages, the opposition of the serfs to the

oppression of the Catholic Church and of the landlords
took the form of religious communistic schemes that were
denounced as heresies by the church and were put down
with a great deal of bloodshed. In Southern France, for
example, the mass of poor took to the heretical beliefs of the
Waldenses. (*5) Veritable crusades were launched against
them and, after they had defeated several armies, they were
practically exterminated with ferocious beastliness by order
of the church.
The communism that flourished in the Middle Ages must

be carefully distinguished from primitive communism and
the religious communism that had preceded it, as well as
from the communism of modern capitalist times. The
communism of the Middle Ages stood for the equality of
the beggars' wallet, for a communism of consumers, for
communal housekeeping, not communal labor. "Wherever
we find co-operative production among the communistic
1115
sects of the Middle Ages, it is the effect, not the cause of
housekeeping in common." (*6)
While "The character of Christian asceticism in its

beginning was chiefly determined by the ragged proletariat
whose prominent peculiarities were idleness, dirt and
stupidity," (*7) the communism of the Middle Ages had a
truly revolutionary spirit. The early Christian communists
were unpolitical and passive, the communists of the Middle
Ages took to the theory of the apocalypse and the active
doctrines of the Old Testament. Reading the Bible for
themselves, they ended their humility before the powers
that be.
As feudalism broke down, the peasants, in their struggles to

emancipate themselves from serfdom, became the natural
allies of the merchants and other groups in the cities which
also were struggling against the feudal forces and
supporting the development of absolutism in the monarchy.
Peasants' revolts burst out in England whenever the ruling
group was in difficulties and was pressing too hard upon
the peasantry, as in 1381 under John Ball and in 1449 under
Jack Cade. These peasants combined heterodox religious
beliefs such as those of Wyclif and Huss, with political
views that hailed communism on the one hand and the
King on the other. Their chief enemy was the feudal lords.
Similar eruptions occurred in France, in the wars known as
the Jacqueries. Finally, in the sixteenth century, they broke
forth in prolonged Peasants Wars.
In this last outburst the peasants were aided by the mass of

plebeians in the cities. What the conditions of the latter
were may be seen from the Statute of Labourers passed in
1547 in England. "By this Act of 1547 it was laid down as
law that every able-bodied loiterer should be branded with
a hot iron and handed over as a slave to the person who
1116
denounced him. Thus if an employer wanted a slave to
work for him, he had only to drag the first vagrant he met
before a magistrate and his need was supplied. The slave
might be kept on bread and water ... he might be compelled
to undertake the most filthy tasks by means of flogging or
other torture. If he ran away for a fortnight he was
condemned to perpetual slavery, and to be branded with
the letter S on his cheek and on his forehead; if he ran away
again, death as a felon was his doom. His master could sell
him, bequeath him, or let him like a horse or a mule. Death
is the punishment of slaves who 'contrive aught against
their masters. When one of the vagabonds is caught on the
roads by the public officers he is to be branded with the
letter V on his chest, and brought back to his birthplace,
where he must work in chains on the public works. If a
vagrant gives a false birthplace he becomes a slave of the
municipality, and is branded again. His children become
the apprentices of the first-comer who want them --- the
lads up to the age of twenty-four, the girls up to the age of
twenty. If these poor creatures take to flight they then
become ... slaves to their masters, who may put them in
irons, whip them to their heart's content, put rings around
their necks and the like." (*8)
By the sixteenth century, the situation came to a head under

the leadership of the Anabaptists in Germany. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Germany under the
Hanseatic League had made considerable progress and was
getting out of medieval barbarism. None the less it was still
behind other countries. It had no central city like London or
Paris; the means of communication were poor and
civilization existed only in scattered territories near the
towns. Germany was marked by a political decentralization
with the feudal Holy Roman Empire falling apart and big
independent princes arising.
1117
The Emperor was only a prince among other princes who
acted independently and were absolute despots within their
own provinces, each with a strong centralized machinery of
state. As Germany decayed, with the shift of the trade
routes to the West and the rise of superior manufactures
elsewhere, the princes heavily increased their taxes. Since
they could not enforce their taxes against the big cities
which were able to protect themselves, the entire burden
fell upon the peasantry, who hated the princes as outright
bandits. Also pressed to the wall were the elements of the
lower nobility, the knights', whose castles had become
pregnable to attack, who were useless as cavalry since the
introduction of gunpowder, and who had now become
impoverished and had turned into robbers.
As the oppressed elements of the countryside, in their

desperate need to strike back against the system, looked
around them for the weakest link in the armor of the rulers,
the Catholic Church met their hungry eyes as a fat parasitic
organism sucking their blood. The upper clergy were part
of the prince-caste and partook of all the spoils obtained by
the princes. Yet by this time the clergy were fast losing all
trace of social usefulness. The printing press had deprived
them of their intellectual monopoly and the civil
magistrates were driving them out of jurisprudence.
The peasantry could remember the good times when the

German tribes were run by the system of the Mark where
land was held in common and a blood brotherhood was
recognized. (*9) Then the land had been cultivated in
common and the products divided among the families that
settled round the village land or Mark. As the peasants bore
the yoke of the Catholic Church of Rome they could not
help but feel that this was an alien master having nothing to
do with the Germanic peoples. They betook themselves to
1118
the doctrines of primitive Christianity that had prevailed
when the disciples of Christ had lived in common. They
raised as a virtue the ascetic rule that all should be poor and
that the wealthy and idlers should be put out of the way.
Asceticism and mutual poverty were inevitably the ethics
of the rebels of this time owing both to the impossibility
then for all to be wealthy with the prevailing low
productivity of labor of the agrarian, and to the natural
revulsion from the orgiastic parasitism of the church.
Finally in the sixteenth century, the desperation of the

peasants broke forth in the prolonged Peasants' Wars, in
which the peasants were aided by the mass of plebeians in
the cities.
Organizations such as the Union Shoe and Poor Konrad

and the religious communist sect of the Anabaptists
focused the discontent of the peasants. Outbreaks of
peasants throughout Europe occurred until finally,
concurrently with the Reformation agitation of Luther, the
great Peasants' War broke out in 1525 under the leadership
of Thomas Muenzer. The demands of the peasants
envisaged relief from serfdom and the excessive oppression
of the lords. Their program consisted of twelve articles: the
right to choose their own pastor; the right to pay reasonable
tithes only; release from serfdom; abolition of the hunting
rights of the lords; the return of the woods back to the
people; the termination of the oppressive demands of the
lords; the abolition of exorbitant dues; fair rent; the
institution of a formal code and the end of arbitrary justice;
the restoration of the commons to the people; the abolition
of heriot; submission to the scripture, and willingness to
withdraw any demand if proven against the scriptures.
Because of the naivety of the peasants and their general

backwardness and isolation and because also of the
1119
vacillations of the cities, the Peasants' War was crushed
with dreadful slaughter.
After the peasant forces under Muenzer were annihilated,

the lot of the agrarian in Germany became much worse. The
only gainers in the struggle were the princes. Germany
became more definitely decentralized than ever. The
masses were defeated because the peasants, plebeians, and
middle classes could not unite. They localized their actions
and were crushed separately. From now on it was not the
country that would lead the city, but the reverse; the urban
middle classes would have to take the leading roles. The
religious argument would give way to the political and
social polemic.
The Anabaptist communists appeared for the last time as an

important force in the English Civil Wars, where they
formed part of the group of Diggers. As though suffering
from an intermittent fever, society from now on must feel
itself sweat every so often under the internal fires of
communism. Up to the nineteenth century the intervals
between communist spasms lasted about six score years;
after the introduction of machinery, the intervals become
much shortened, the fever more intense. With the twentieth
century, communism had become chronic and all pervasive.
Over a century elapsed after the English Civil Wars before

the communists raised their heads again. This time it was
not the peasantry that spoke, looking back to the ideals of
primitive communism, but the plebeian and proletarian
masses of the foremost city of the world-Paris. The wretches
in the slums of Paris had seen the French Revolution unfold
from the movement calling for the cours de lit of the nobility
to the directorate of Robespierre. In every case the
1120
revolution had rested within the framework of private
property and had not succeeded in solving the problems of
the poorest layers of the people of Paris. Under Robespierre,
the Committee of Public Safety had enacted severe
regulations against workmen's combinations or other
assemblies having in view the raising of wages or the
affecting of trade interests in any other manner. Many
hundreds of workmen had been brought to the guillotine
and, when the Commune under Hebert rose in revolt, the
people's leaders were summarily executed. This in turn so
weakened the regime of Robespierre as to allow the Right
Wing to do away with him and usher in the power of the
Directory.
All of these revolutionaries had been ardent supporters of

private property; when the Thermidorians took power
there was an unconscionable scramble for loot. Barras
obtained five estates, de Thionville seized immense landed
property, as did Tatien and Legendre. During the five
revolutionary years before Thermidor, the paper currency,
the assignat, based on land values, had been kept within
some sort of bounds, being restricted to seven billion francs;
but under the Directory it soon reached the staggering total
of thirty-eight billion, causing an immense rise in the prices
of necessities, chaos in the city, and great suffering among
the masses. Among the poor there was generated the most
intense hatred for these nouveaux riches and for their entire
system of property. The basis was laid for a genuine
communist movement. A leader was soon found, Baboeuf.
Baboeuf was one of those middle class Jacobins who had

moved steadily to the Left with the unfolding of the
revolution. While in jail he had become immensely
impressed with the work of Morelly, utopian communist
litterateur. Morelly was among the first to put forward the
1121
idea "from each according to his abilities, to each according
to his needs."
According to Morelly's system, which had much in

common with that of Rousseau, all primitive instincts were
good and had resulted in a primitive communism which
later had become spoiled. Avarice was the only vice in the
world; property was the source of avarice. (*10) The root of
all conduct was self-love, but man to be happy must be a
social person, and the key to happiness was to be found in
moral rectitude. Fixed moral rules were to govern society
which was to be divided along some mechanical scheme
similar to the phalanstaries of Fourier who, indeed, seems
to have borrowed some of his ideas from Morelly. There
was to be common ownership of all wealth and equal
enjoyment of it. (*11) Men do not avoid labor but the
unpleasantness of it. (*12) The directors of this society
should be the talented ones and, if necessary, should be
empowered to use force to prevent any backsliding into the
present immoral system.
Morelly undertook to lay down the rules even to marriage.

All must marry; only those over forty years of age could
remain celibate. The first marriage was to be for ten years.
Then divorce could be granted on the demand of one party.
The only condition to the divorce was that the same persons
could not remarry each other within a year, or any person
younger than the original pair. In this way, with such
familial and property rules worked out, mankind could
reach his highest happiness and perfection.
Another contemporary to inspire Baboeuf was Mably. (*13)

Mably spoke most longingly of communism, but to him it
was an ideal impossible to achieve. The primitives had
practiced communism, but it was now gone never to return.
The next best thing was a modified feudalism. "The
1122
distance between Mably's idea of a republican communism
and his improved feudalism which was to serve as the first
step towards reform was so wide and filled in by so many
alternative stages that it became easy for nearly all parties
to appeal to him for support." (*14)
To Mably the Law of Nature was the law of equality among

men. This equality had originally existed but had been
obscured by the establishment of private property, that root
of all immorality. He was opposed to equal distribution of
goods, since in a short time such a distribution would cause
the same evils to arise again. He was for a communized
production rather, of the type that had existed in primitive
society. This agrarian communism was based not on
economics, but on ethics. Men would do that type of work
for which they are best suited; their products would be
gathered into common store houses, from which
magistrates would distribute them according to the needs
of the recipients.
Deeply affected by these ideas, and disgusted with the

unequal results of the revolution, despite the rivers of blood
that had been shed by the people, Baboeuf, in 1795 began
his secret organization of the Society of the Equals. The
Manifesto of the Equals declared: "The French Revolution is
but the precursor of another, and a greater and more
solemn revolution, and which will be the last! ... We aim at
something more sublime and more equitable --- the
common good, or the community of goods. No more
individual property in land; the land belongs to no one....
Let disappear, once for all, the revolting distinctions of rich
and poor, of great and small, of masters and valets, of
governors and governed." (*15)
The constitution of the Society of the Equals had for its

motto: equality, liberty, universal well-being. According to
1123
its principles, the poor were to get the houses and furniture
of the rich; a national community of goods was to be
established; the right of inheritance was to be abolished; the
national community was to guarantee to all an equal and
moderate existence and assure to each person a dwelling,
clothes, food, heat, light, laundry, and medical aid; all
members of society were to work except the aged and the
sick; each industrial group was to be organized, elect
Officers, and see that labor was carried out. The length of
the working day was to be definitely determined,
machinery was to be introduced to relieve toil. Those who
refused to work were to be arrested. Public meals were to
be served. The military were to be treated the same as the
civil institutions. The use of money was to be abolished
within the country and the saving of money prohibited. All
private trade with foreign countries was to be forbidden
and a national monopoly of foreign trade established. Taxes
were to be placed only on non-members of the community.
The national debt was to be extinguished for Frenchmen.
As for the foreign debt, the republic would repay the capital
loaned, but not the interest. Pupils were to be brought up in
national institutions. The program was acute enough to call
for the use of the telegraph, although this invention was
perfected only in the middle of the nineteenth century. (*16)
Here was a program pregnant for the future, a close

comparison demonstrating how much of it the Russian
Revolution actually carried out. Even the most extreme of
the revolutionists, such as Hebert, Roux, Clootz, and others
of an Anarchist trend, had not dared to advocate the
termination of private property; the few writers who had
attempted to work out such dread pictures had no
influence upon the masses. It was Baboeuf's unique
contribution to France that he was the first to attempt
actually to realize a communist society by means of
1124
insurrection. Baboeuf was the first genuine communist
revolutionary.
Instinctively he understood that to accomplish this program

he must base himself upon the poor and not upon the
wealthy, and that among the poor it was the working class
that was to make up the core of his army. All of his
program was designed to win that class in a practical and
thorough manner. And in his program there was very little
of the utopian wish-mongering that characterizes the
genteel literary men who want to reform the world. There
were no fantastic religious, nor ethical theories. There was,
instead, a practical concrete economic and political program
worked out for the consideration of the masses.
None the less, the program was an impossible one to realize.

The only ones who could fight for such a program were the
proletariat and the propertyless. But these constituted but a
small proportion of the population. The great majority of
the nation was made up of either peasants, shopkeepers,
artisans, and such petty owners, or those who ardently
desired to obtain some property. The technical level of
society was still insufficient to have generated masses of
city factory workers who would pool their collective labor
in large-scale plants for the production of articles in an
intricate network of subdivision of labor. Baboeuf amply
forecast the orientation and direction of future champions
of the working class, but he came too early upon the scene
to be able to realize that goal himself.
Baboeuf himself, however, could not predict the tragic

nature of his actions. Optimistically, he believed that all
that was necessary was an irrefutable program and a
vanguard of determined fighters. Thus, at bottom, Baboeuf
revealed himself incapable of appreciating the actual
situation. Will and determination were to make up for
1125
numbers. In his Manifesto he declared, for instance, "The
day after this veritable revolution they will say, with
astonishment, What? the common well-being was to be had
for so little? We had only to will it. Ah! why did we not will
it sooner?" (*17)
Baboeuf soon was to realize the premature character of his

attempts. With extraordinary ability he was able to
organize his secret society and prepare for the insurrection
which took place in 1796. But alas, with all his will, his
determination, his care and his secrecy, the adventure was
soon over, the organization shattered, and Baboeuf himself
brought to trial. Here Baboeuf behaved like a hero, but the
movement perished with him and might have been lost to
posterity had not Buonarotti preserved the record with his
work on the Babouvist movement. This work of Buonarotti
was to furnish the inspiration for the movement of the
Blanquists, the logical heirs of the Babouvists in the
nineteenth century.
The time was now at hand when the industrial revolution

in England was doing its quiet work in creating a working
class, and when all of Europe was beginning to be
convulsed in modern capitalist crises. On the continent
there was a great deal of ferment. Thinkers were building
all sorts of utopian schemes of harmony and social justice.
Soon the proletariat would make its first great bid for
power, in the June days of the 1848 insurrection.
During this period, from the band of German exiles in Paris

there was formed in 1836 the Federation of the Just. This
Federation became an active factor in French proletarian
communism and carried on the Babouvist tradition,
demanding a community of goods and dividing its activity
between propaganda and conspiratorial work. The
organization was in close touch with Blanqui and Barb'es,
1126
and fought shoulder to shoulder with them in the abortive
1839 Paris revolt.
The League of the Just was strongly influenced by the views

of the contemporary Frenchman Cabet. Cabet had been one
of the actives in the Carbonari and, after the Revolution of
1830 in France, had been exiled for five years. In England he
became a utopian Communist. As a transition to
Communism Cabet wanted to set up a democratic republic
composed of self-governing communes. National
workshops were included in his plan, together with a tax
on income and the communization of public lands.
"By the absorption of inheritances under an extended law of

escheat, by the mode of imposing taxes, by the legal
regulations of wages, and by the development of large
national industries, the state would absorb all private
property and all industrial and social functions, so that, at
the end of half a century, the people would find themselves
transformed into a vast partnership --- a great national hive,
where each labored according to his abilities and consumed
according to his necessities; where crime had vanished with
poverty, and idleness with luxurious wealth; where peace
and plenty, liberty and equality, virtue and intelligence
reigned supreme. Thus the former political unit of the
commune would have developed by a gradual and simple
process into the unit of social and industrial cooperation.
The waste of competition would have been replaced by the
economy of general organization. Buying and selling and
all monetary operations would obviously have become
obsolete." (*18)
At the start, the most influential member of the League of

the Just was the German tailor, Wilhelm Weitling, who
joined the organization in 1837 and divided his time
between propaganda work explaining communism and
1127
practical organizational activity. In 1839 he wrote his
book, Mankind as It Is and as It Should Be and in 1842
his Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom. His Gospel of the
Poor came out in 1845.
Weitling borrowed much of his "Guarantees of Harmony"

from Fourier and, like the latter, founded his plan of
reorganization of society upon the nature of man whose
desires are to be placed in three categories, to acquire, to
enjoy, and to know, and whose means to satisfy these
desires are his capabilities as embodied in production,
consumption, and administration. Private property causes
the lack of satisfaction of the desire of knowledge; labor
produces wealth or money, which is taken away by the
employer. This is capital. Capital is, therefore, originally the
property of the laborers, and the greater the capital, the
greater the exploitation of labor.
Against this capitalist system Weitling proposed to build a

social State. Like other utopian thinkers, Weitling would
have the power in society rest not in a dictatorship of
majority rule but in intelligence. At the head of his society
there would stand the three greatest philosophers, a
triumvirate, with supreme control and administration.
These triumvirs would adjust the needs of consumption.
Six hours of labor were to be the average. All material
products and intellectual labor were to be estimated
according to their value in labor hours. Authorities would
set the rate of exchange. Each worker would have a labor
book with labor notes. Full education was considered
necessary for progress and for the evolution of the race.
Education was to cease to be a privilege and was to be
given to all under the rule of Philosophy.
From these views it can be seen that although Weitling still

had his head in the clouds of petty bourgeois utopias and
1128
still was dazzled by Saint-Simon and Fourier, yet he was
entirely different from these others in that he had his feet in
the ranks of the workers. Thus Weitling furnished a
peculiar bridge between the utopianism of the French and
the later materialism of the Marxists. He was a true
forerunner of proletarian communism.
According to Weitling, the new order was to be established

when a majority of the proletarians in any locality decided
to introduce it. "If resistance is offered, then more drastic
measures are resorted to. The proletarians are to declare a
provisional government, depose all existing offices,
especially the police and judges, and elect new officers from
their own ranks. The rich are to be disfranchised and
compelled to support the poor and destitute while
reconstruction is pending. The property of the State and of
the church at once becomes communal. Those who choose
to leave the country may do so, their property being
confiscated. The rich who offer their means for the support
of the new society are promised a pension during life; the
rest, by limitations on their activity, by punishments and
penalties, will be forced to succumb. If all these means fail,
then a moral must be preached which no one now dares to
preach. A revolution after the order of Baboeuf is the
'moral'." (*19)
The works of Weitling made a profound impression upon

the advanced German workers of his time. It was of
Weitling that Marx later wrote, "It must be admitted that
the German proletariat is the theorist of the European
proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its political
economist, and the French proletariat its politician." (*20)
But Weitling was not only a propagandist but a splendid

organizer and an excellent agitator, surpassed only by
Lassalle among the Germans. The plan of the League of the
1129
Just was to organize innocent "surface" groups, such as
singing societies, educational and sport clubs, etc.; within
which there were to be established the nuclei of the
Federation and also unions of the workers for struggle on
the economic field. In the course of his work, Weitling was
able to build up a considerable network of such societies.
Weitling was unable long to remain a pioneer. The

prominence of his writings prompted him to take a sort of
messianic role and, like Saint- Simon and Auguste Comte,
he took to religion, fighting for the belief that Jesus Christ
was the first communist. After the defeat of the workers in
1848, he moved to America, where he tried to set up a
communist colony. In Europe, Weitling was a revolutionary;
removed to the happy hunting grounds of America, he
became a pure utopian.
Upon the collapse of the Blanquist putsch, in which some of

the leaders of the Federation of the Just, such as Schapper
and Bauer, were involved, these people were forced to
leave France. In England in 1840 they formed a German
Workers Educational Society, recruiting members for a local
of the Federation in London and successfully building up
branches in a number of cities. Gradually, the Federation
became international in character, the London Workers
Educational Society was turned into the Communist
Workers Educational Society, a secret organization being
retained.
The Federation at this time was composed mostly of craft

workers employed in small shops. With such elements it
could not advance much farther along the lines of scientific
communist struggle. But at this juncture the Federation of
the Just was enriched by the aid of Marx and Engels, who
had formed a German Workers Society in Brussels in 1845.
The views of Weitling and of French equalitarianism
1130
proving inadequate, the Federation of the Just asked Marx
and Engels to join and put forth their views, some of which
had already become known in the English Chartist paper,
the "Northern Star," and in the French organ, "La Re'forme."
Under the guidance of Marx and Engels, the Federation
changed its rules and adopted a new purpose, brilliantly
affirmed in the document, the Communist Manifesto,
which these two revolutionists had been asked to draw up
and which had been accepted. Conspiratorial methods were
abolished and the Federation functioned as a propaganda
society until the outbreak of the February Revolution in
1848. Entering this revolution, the Federation of the Just
became the Communist League.
The Communist Manifesto is one of the most astounding

documents in the history of revolutionary movements.
Boldly it declares: "The communists disdain to conceal their
views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be
attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social
conditions. Let the ruling class tremble at a communistic
revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their
chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all
countries, unite!" (*21)
In this "Bible of the working class" there are to be found all

the fundamental principles of revolutionary communism.
The document traces the history of civilized society as a
history of class struggles and, basing itself on the
materialistic conception of history, shows that the rise of the
bourgeoisie to power only creates its own grave-diggers,
the proletariat. No sooner are the capitalists firmly in the
saddle than the executioner is at the door. The Manifesto
then enters into an analysis of why the bourgeoisie cannot
control the forces it has generated and how the proletariat
1131
inevitably must take power and usher in the new society.
To do this, the proletariat must organize its own party, the
Communist Party, since every class struggle is a political
struggle, and since the organization of a class is its
organization into a political party.
"All previous historical movements were movements of

minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian
movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of
the immense majority, in the interest of the immense
majority.... Though not in substance, yet in form, the
struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a
national struggle. The proletariat of each country, must, of
course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie....
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its
own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat
are equally inevitable." (*22)
The Communist Manifesto then lays down the principles

governing the relation of communists to the class they
represent. It declares, "The Communists do not form a
separate party opposed to other working class parties. They
have no interests separate and apart from those of the
proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian
principles of their own by which to shape and mould the
proletarian movement. The communists are distinguished
from the other working class parties by this only: 1. In the
national struggles of the proletarians of the different
countries, they point out and bring to the front the common
interests of the entire proletariat independently, of all
nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which
the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie
has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent
the interests of the movement as a whole. The communists,
therefore, are, on the one hand, practically, the most
1132
advanced and resolute section of the working class parties
of every country, that section which pushes forward all
others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the
great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly
understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the
ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The
immediate aim of the communists is the same as that of all
the other proletarian parties; formation of the proletariat
into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy,
conquest of political power by the proletariat." (*23)
As the Revolution of 1848 began, the Communist League

understood well that it would have to work hand in hand
for the while with the petty bourgeois democrats to
struggle for immediate demands. Communists were to
support every revolutionary movement against the existing
order and to bring to the front the property question, no
matter what the degree of development of property
prevailing at the time. Although the Communists were to
labor to unite all democratic parties of all countries, by no
means were they to lose their identity. "The Communists
fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the
enforcement of the momentary interests of the working
class; but in the movement of the present, they also
represent and take care of the future of the movement." (*24)
In the struggle against the old order by the democratic

forces, the communists were to take part actively and as
soon as possible to raise the proletariat to the position of
ruling class, that is to win the battle of democracy. Once in
control under the situation that existed, the workers were to
introduce communism, not immediately, but step by step.
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy, to wrest,
by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all
instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of
1133
the proletariat organized as a ruling class; and to increase
the total productive forces as rapidly as possible." (*25)
The measures that were to be introduced at once were: the

abolition of property in land and the application of all rents
of land to public purposes; a heavy progressive or
graduated income tax; abolition of all right of inheritance;
confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels;
centralization of credit in the hands of the State by means of
a national bank with State capital and an exclusive
monopoly; centralization of the means of communication
and transport in the hands of the State; extension of
factories and instruments of production owned by the State;
the bringing into cultivation of waste lands and the
improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a
common plan; equal liability of all to labor; establishment of
industrial armies, especially for agriculture; combination of
agriculture with manufacturing industries; the gradual
abolition of the distinction between town and country by a
more equable distribution of population over the country;
free education of all children in public schools; abolition of
children's factory labor in its present form; combination of
education with industrial production; and similar measures.
After the French revolution of 1830, Europe was sitting on a

powder keg which not all the water of the Metternich Holy
Alliance could prevent from blowing up. Recognizing this
situation, the smaller States of Germany had granted
constitutions to the people in order to rally the population
of these principalities against possible aggrandizement by
the big States of Austria and Prussia. To play with
liberalism was not too dangerous for these petty rulers,
since the big States would see that the people did not go too
far. These constitutional and republican tendencies were
much advanced by the French Revolution of 1830. But as
1134
time went on, the petty potentates began to retract the
constitutional rights given the people.
Within Prussia, the stupid tactics of Frederick Wilhelm IV

compelled the bourgeoisie to resist. Business, with the
lower nobility, forced the King to create a "Diet." When this
body was granted only consultative powers, the
bourgeoisie continued its resistance by refusing the
financial aid necessary to the State and, as it needed to
appeal to the people for support, it began to pose in a way
as socialistic. In Germany there was no separate republican
party, the people being either constitutional monarchists or
socialists and communists. In the meantime, the proletariat
was starting to organize on its own account. The Rhenish
Gazette, edited by Marx, fired the first shot in 1842. In 1844
there occurred the big strike movements of the Silesian and
Bohemian workers which were bloodily suppressed. French
socialism won headway and the Communist League was
formed.
By 1848, Germany was on the eve of revolt, and the French

Revolution opened up the way. At the same time, in Vienna
itself, under the blows of a unanimous popular revolt, the
whole rotting reactionary system of Metternich crashed. No
sooner, however, was the old Austrian regime removed
than differences began to appear among the groups which
had revolted. While a Committee of Safety was being
formed with the bourgeoisie at the head, another and dual
power was arising in the form of a student "Aula" body
which had borne the brunt of the fighting and was an
intermediary between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
While in the city the students and workers were trying to
push forward their claims, in the countryside the peasantry
smashed feudalism once and for all.
1135
It was now the turn of Berlin to rise, but the situation here
was entirely different from that in Paris. In France, the
proletariat from the start had taken a hand in the political
turn of affairs and had prevented the formation of a
constitutional monarchy. Instead, the monarchy was
overthrown and a republic was created. Thus the French
revolt was against the very system which the Germans
were trying to install. The German bourgeoisie, fearful that
their workers also would go too far, capitulated to the King
against the lower classes and, believing that the old
absolutism could not return, granted a new loan to the
government and established an indirect system of voting.
At the same time there arose a petty bourgeois People's

Democratic Party which demanded reforms similar to those
won in France, namely, direct and universal suffrage, single
legislative assembly, open recognition of the March, 1848,
Revolution and of the National Assembly at Frankfort.
Within this Party, the Right Wing wanted a democratic
monarchy, the Left Wing called for a Federal Republic.
Far to the Left was the proletarian party whose kernel was
the communist groupings. At the beginning, the workers
functioned as the tail to the petty bourgeoisie but gradually
they increased their strength and put forth their own claims,
defending the extreme party in France and calling for a
unified German Republic.
In Germany, the liberal bourgeoisie took power directly

and formed its National Assembly in Frankfort; in Austria,
the liberal bureaucracy took the power in trust for the
bourgeoisie. The German Assembly should have dissolved
the reactionary Diet and created an armed force for action.
Instead, it talked and talked, until it talked itself to death.
When the Poles revolted, these liberal bourgeois gentlemen,
instead of declaring war on Russia to support Poland,
1136
helped Russia to overwhelm the Poles. Simultaneously, the
Austrian monarchical forces, by means of reactionary
slogans catering to pan-Slavism, were able to rally the
Czechs and Croats for counter-revolution.
As the Liberals exposed their impotence on the continent,

reaction began to consolidate its forces. The Bohemian
movement was crushed; in Italy, King Bomba regained his
throne and Italian unification was thwarted; the
Hungarians were stifled into legality; in Germany, the
conservative assemblies became stronger. In England, an ill-
timed Chartist movement ended in defeat. There remained
but one place whence decisive action could come and that
place was Paris.
But in Paris the only force capable of carrying forward the

revolution was the proletariat. "If Paris, because of political
centralization, dominates France, so do the workers
dominate Paris in moments of revolutionary earthquakes."
(*26) The bourgeoisie imagined that only Louis Philippe
would be overthrown and that the old system would
remain. However, the workers, in compelling the formation
of a republic opened up to all classes the fight for power
and came to the front as an independent class and party.
Now the workers compelled the revolution to move to the
left and carried out measures of social reform. While the
officialdom, as a sop to the toilers, formed a "Labor
Commission" to discover means of improving the condition
of the masses, it was busy with plans to provoke the
workers into battle and to annihilate them. At the same
time, the provisional government did its best to make the
republic palatable to the bourgeoisie. The old officials were
invited to remain. The government drained its treasury to
pay in advance its debt to private bankers. Then to fill its
unnecessarily depleted coffers, the government taxed the
1137
peasantry and forced them to fall into the hands of the
financiers. Concurrently sharp pressure was put against the
workers.
The strategy of the French bourgeoisie against labor

contained two main features: first, to increase the strength
of its own armed forces; and second, to divide the workers.
The first aim was realized by adding to the army and the
National Guard a new force, the Mobile Guard. This was
recruited from elements of the slum proletariat residing in
workers' quarters. Here the working class committed a
great error. Believing that the Mobile Guard was theirs
because of its composition, the workers made no efforts to
counter this force. They were to learn, to their sorrow, that
the slum elements composed of degenerate sections of the
workers are easily bribed by reaction to shoot down their
own brothers and friends.
On the other hand, the government organized its National

Workshops as a measure of winning over the unemployed
and separating them from the other workers. Here the
government miscalculated, since the unemployed refused
to take the part of the government, but sided with their
rebel fellow workers. The government did succeed,
however, in discrediting entirely the Louis Blancs by giving
the impression that these National Workshops were
synonymous with socialism. The petty bourgeois, looking
at the wasteful work at which the government put the
unemployed, hated the expense and blamed the workers.
Thus by means of their method of distributing unemployed
relief, the government bureaucrats won away the petty
bourgeoisie from the idea of socialism.
Having carefully prepared its way, the government now

entered into a series of provocations, calling in the army
into Paris, forbidding public meetings, throwing many
1138
workers out of the National Workshops and thus off relief,
and so forth. Upon this, the workers were forced to take up
the challenge and they revolted in June, 1848. With the
brutal stamping down of this insurrection all illusions as to
the kind of "fraternity" workers may expect within a
bourgeois republic disappeared; the republic now became
only another instrument of oppression in the eyes of the
masses.
Confused as the proletarians were with all sorts of schemes

of State socialism, their defeat was inevitable. It soon
became clear to all that the defeat of the proletariat in
France meant the downfall of the democratic liberal
bourgeois elements throughout all Europe. Because the
workers could not win in France, none of these latter
groups could succeed in liberating itself. Neither Hungary
nor Poland nor other countries could realize their freedom
precisely because the French workers could not win
socialism. Here is an excellent illustration how the struggle
for socialism coincides with the struggle for democracy.
"Finally, Europe, through the victories of the Holy Alliance,

took on such shape that every new proletarian insurrection
in France would at once become coincident with a world
war. The new French revolution would be forced at once to
go beyond the national confines, and to conquer the
European terrain upon which alone the social revolution of
the 19th century can establish itself.
"Only through the June defeat were created all the

conditions within which France can take the initiative in the
European revolution. Only when dipped in the blood of the
June insurgents did the Tricolor become the 'banner of the
European revolution-the Red Flag." (*27)
1139
After the proletarian resurrection in France was broken, the
petty bourgeoisie was the next to lose control; the industrial
bourgeoisie took the helm while the monarchists who were
hiding as republicans now openly showed themselves as a
minority opposition. The reforms were abrogated,
imprisonment for debt was re-established, freedom of the
press and the ten-hour work law were repealed. An
immense pressure was put on the shop keepers, and many
were forced into bankruptcy. The government worked
hand in glove with the financiers. The "right to work"
which previously had been affirmed theoretically was now
taken away. The progressive tax was banned, thus
throwing the tax burden on the petty bourgeoisie. The
judges were made indeposable, thereby aiding the
monarchists.
In revenge against these measures, the peasantry and petty

bourgeois groups voted for Louis Bonaparte for President
rather than for the Assembly candidate. Now the industrial
bourgeoisie was kicked out of all the posts of government
and the royalists were put in charge. Bonaparte opened fire
upon the Assembly. He dissolved the Mobile Guard. He
attacked the Republic of Rome which fell under the weight
of French arms. He engaged in a reactionary foreign policy
in aid of the Czar.
Again the petty bourgeoisie were forced to take the lead in

the opposition, since the workers had been suppressed and
the big bourgeoisie was too small a group. But by June,
1849, the little property holders miserably ran away from
the struggle. Now the National Guard was dissolved,
leaving only the regular army. The press was gagged, Paris
put in a state of siege, the right of association destroyed;
reaction was completely victorious. Because of the deadlock
1140
created, the adventurer Louis Napoleon ultimately was
crowned Emperor.
With the defeat of the proletariat in France, reaction raised

its head throughout Europe. In Vienna, the bourgeoisie
attempted to attack the student petty bourgeois dual
government and, when that failed, the National Guard
broke with the proletariat over the question of unemployed
relief and shot down the workers. The students vacillated
and did not come to the aid of the workers who were
disarmed. Thus in Vienna confusion reigned, with no
adequate leadership. Now was the time for the Emperor to
act and, with the help of the Slavs, he stormed the city.
Although the Viennese had defended the Hungarians, the
latter did not come to the aid of the Viennese. The German
people did not help because they were paralyzed by the
inactivity of the Frankfort Assembly. Thus Vienna fell. This
was decisive for Germany.
The King of Prussia marched on Berlin, which was yielded

without a struggle, the Liberals displaying such cowardice
as to bring down upon themselves only the greatest
contempt. In a revolution, he who commands a decisive
position and surrenders it instead of forcing the enemy to
try his hand at an assault, invariably is treated as a traitor.
Now the final act of liquidation of the revolution was

possible. In Austria, the Emperor turned savagely upon the
Slavs who had helped him against Vienna and flayed them
mercilessly; in Germany, the King of Prussia dissolved the
National Assembly created at Frankfort. As the Prussian
King began hostilities, the mass of people took up arms.
Especially the workers fought bravely in Dresden, Rhenish
Prussia, and Westphalia, in the Palatinate, Wurtemberg,
and Baden. But here again it was of no avail, since
everywhere the liberal bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces
1141
abandoned the struggle. It became crystal clear that from
now on all revolutionary movements would have to be led
by the proletariat, and that the proletariat would embrace
communism.
What would also be further learned is that insurrection is

an art the basic rules of which are: "Firstly, never play with
insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the
consequences of your play. Insurrection is a calculus with
very indefinite magnitudes, the value of which may change
every day; the forces opposed to you have all the advantage
of organization, discipline, and habitual authority; unless
you bring strong odds against them you are defeated and
ruined. Secondly, the insurrectionary career once entered
upon, act with the greatest determination, and on the
offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising;
it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies. Surprise
your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare
new successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral
ascendancy which your first successful rising has given to
you; rally those vacillating elements to your side which
always follow the strongest impulse, and which always
look out for the safer side; force your enemies to a retreat
before they can collect their strength against you; in the
words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary
policy yet known, de I'audace, de I'audace, encore de
I'audace." (*28)
The fact of the matter is that the revolution could not be

sustained for any great length of time. It had been
precipitated by the panic of 1847; it was terminated by the
prosperity of 1849. The crisis did not last long, and good
times were restored to the workers and the petty
bourgeoisie. (*29)
1142
At the earliest possibility, Marx and Engels hastened to
Germany to take part in the revolutionary events, Marx to
edit the new Rhenish Gazette and Engels to serve as an
adjutant in the army against the Prussians. Engels was
among the very last to give up the fighting; he retreated
with his group only under the heaviest odds. With the close
of the revolution, the members of the Communist League
were tried in Koeln and, although some of them were
acquitted, the Communist League was dissolved.
The Communist League had been a secret conspiratorial

organization. ("He is a coward that under certain
circumstances would not conspire just as he is a fool who
under other circumstances would do so."(*30)) To the
genuine revolutionist, the necessity of illegal conspiratorial
work is unquestioned, and, in forming secret bodies, the
advanced proletariat is only imitating the bourgeoisie itself.
This, such secret orders as the Masons, the Illuminati, the
Carbonari, the American Committees of Correspondence,
and similar societies, amply show.
For hundreds of years the Masons have flourished in secret

bodies, being part of the bourgeois apparatus of struggle
ever since the Reformation. Whatever the original purpose
of the Masons or of their Rosicrucian mysticism, it is certain
that they frequently developed into congregations of
business men who plotted how to control affairs during
times when they were forced into revolutionary struggles.
Examine, for example, the constitutions of Anderson: "If a
Brother," writes Anderson, "should be a Rebel against the
State, he is not to be countenanced in his rebellion, however
he may be pitied as an unhappy man; and if convicted of no
other crime . . . they cannot expel him from the Lodge, and
his relations to it remain indefeasible." (*31) At a time of
narrow provincialism and bigoted nationalism, the Masons
1143
adopted as two of their basic principles, indifference in
matters of religion and a tendency to cosmopolitanism or
internationalism. The Masonic oath is "to sustain by all
means and under all circumstances" liberty of speech, liberty
of thought and liberty of conscience in religion and political
matters. Freemasons are supposed to stick together whether
right or wrong.
In the struggle against the Catholic Church, the

Freemasons' secret order became an important appendage
to the capitalists. The British Party in Ireland relied
especially upon it. The Dublin police, for example, were
excluded from all secret societies save Freemasons. "In the
two Home Rule Acts for Ireland, those of 1914 and of 1920,
the Irish Parliaments were definitely precluded from any
power to abrogate or prejudicially affect any privilege or
exemption of the Grand Lodge of Freemasons in Ireland, or
any lodge or society recognized by the Grand Lodge."' (*32)
According to Cahill, in 1930, of the 580 deputies in France,

300 were Freemasons, though there are only 52,000 in the
country, and of the Senate Of 300 members, 180 Freemasons
were to be counted. In the United States, 356 out of the 531
in the House of Representatives belong to the order. It is
estimated that in the United States there are about 3,250,000
Masons, 700,000 Knights of Columbus, and 850,000 Elks, to
mention merely three of the many secret orders that
abound among the business men, bourgeois and petty
bourgeois. (*33)
Connected with the Masonic order in the eighteenth

century was Adam Weishaupt who founded the secret
order of Perfectibles later changed to the Illuminati. His
creed embraced support for philosophical Anarchism,
while it stood opposed to despotism, nationalism, the State,
races and patriotism. "Reduced to simple formula, the aims
1144
of the Illuminati may be summarized in the following six
points: 1. Abolition of monarchy and all ordered
government. 2. Abolition of private Property. 3. Abolition
of inheritance. 4. Abolition of patriotism. 5. Abolition of the
family (ie., marriage and all morality and the institution of
the communal education of children). 6. Abolition of all
religion." (*34)
Of course this "terrible" program was known only to the

few initiated into the highest secret layers of the
organization which Weishaupt built up. On the surface, the
Illuminati appeared similar to the Masons. This was the
method of the intellectuals for promoting their ideas and
was perhaps the only method feasible under the despotisms
prevailing in Central Europe at the time.
In the nineteenth century, bourgeois liberals created all

sorts of secret societies such as the Carbonari (charcoal
burners) in Italy and France, just as the Americans had
formed their secret revolutionary "Committees of
Correspondence" in 1775. Similarly, various other property
owning groups built their covert organizations, such as the
Catholics in their secret orders, and the Jews in their
synagogues.
But with what horror the secret organizations of the

proletariat have been regarded, since the ruling class
always will attempt to extirpate with the greatest ferocity
any and all revolutionary groups upon which it can lay
hands! Revolutions are no delicate affairs. In the ruthless
struggle for power, the victims who plot revolt must gather
together in secret formations. The law which is on the side
of the strong and the wealthy compels the poor and
downtrodden to form their vanguard organizations in the
cellars and secret corners of the social order. We shall see
that one of the most important problems of the communists
1145
is precisely the question of organization, of illegal
conspiratorial work so as to take advantage of all the
opportunities open for revolutionary activity.
The Revolution of 1848 was the first great attempt of the

proletariat to take power. After their defeat, a serious
discussion took place among the communists as to the
value of the barricades which the workers had set up
during those days. It was the opinion of Friedrich Engels in
the latter part of the nineteenth century that the fighting
methods of 1848 were obsolete. He stated: "The rebellion of
the old style, the street fight behind barricades, which up to
1848 gave the final decision, has become antiquated." (*35) "
Thus, Engels created the impression that the workers no
longer would utilize barricade fighting. The opportunist
socialists distorted his arguments to mean that Engels did
not believe revolutionary methods should be used any
more; this was a distinct forgery of Engels remarks and
nothing further need be said about it. The question of
barricade fighting, however, is important and must be
discussed.
Engels made the point that insurgents never really plan a

victory over the military in street battle, that such a victory
is rare. What the insurgents really hope to do is to
disintegrate the military by moral influence when they
make such a barricade stand. If the soldiers are not
demoralized, then the military have an excellent chance of
winning the fight, because of their equipment, training, and
organization. The rebels cannot do much more than offer
passive resistance in fact. Paris, June, 1848, Vienna, 1848,
Dresden, 1849, all showed that the people could not
overwhelm the army. Wherever the people were successful
in 1848 it was because the Citizens Guard went over to their
side against the army or caused the army to waver. Where
1146
the civil guard was not won over, there the insurrection
was lost. In the case of Berlin, 1848, the people won because
the troops were exhausted and badly nourished. Also
because of the poor command and because the new forces
went over to the rebels. Hence Engels came to the
conclusion, ". . . even during the classic period of street
battles, the barricade had a moral rather than a material
effect. It was a means to shake the solidity of the military. If
it held until that had been accomplished, the victory was
won; if not, it meant defeat." (*36)
According to Engels, the evolution of military technique

made mass barricade fighting increasingly difficult. The
soldiers became accustomed to the barricades and
developed new tactics; the armies were larger and the
mobilization was quicker; there was great technical
advance in armaments; the streets were wider and well
paved, thus making barricades more difficult to build;
finally, it was now much harder to get arms. Engels,
however, closed by saying that of course the communists
have not abandoned the right to revolution.
Engels was a military expert and his opinion was based on

a thorough study not only of 1848 but above all of the Paris
Commune in 1871 wherein the workers had been signally
defeated in such barricade fighting. Nevertheless, Engels
did not say the last word on this question. In the Russian
Revolution of 1905 the workers were able to develop a new
type of barricade fighting which required but few men to
hold the barricades and which wearied larger numbers of
the Czar's soldiery. Instead of maintaining the barricades
with massed men, a few picked cadres held off the soldiers
until the barricades were stormed or blown away,
whereupon the defenders would retreat to others built
directly behind them, and so on. And no sooner was a
1147
quarter taken by the soldiers than they would find that the
barricades had been rebuilt in their rear.
Even Karl Kautsky had to point out the contribution of the

Russian workers in their new style of barricade fighting, an
immense improvement over 1848. (*37) There is now far
more material than ever to build such barricades and to
obstruct the military, what with the enormous number of
vehicles such as automobiles that can be commandeered by
the proletariat. But should barricade fighting prove it
cannot endure before perfected military technique, yet it
may have to be undertaken, if only for its moral effect, if
only to enable the workers to meet the militia face to face
and to show that they are ready to die for their cause.
There is one further fact of the greatest importance. Engels

had spoken of the need to crack the army and to demoralize
it if the workers were to win. Engels did not live in a period
of perpetual warfare such as the present where practically
the entire population has been trained in the most frightful
wars and where every worker knows how to shoot and has
faced death in the trenches. The French and the German
proletariat, for example, do not fear the soldiers; they
understand discipline and methods of fighting as well as
the armed forces of the state. Indeed, such proletarians are
simply disbanded soldiers now turned worker-
revolutionists. Under such circumstances, it is no longer a
case of trained troops against mere rabble, but rather more
generally a case of callow mercenaries pitted against well-
trained veterans of whom there are to be found literally
millions among the people. Thus the relation of forces
becomes entirely reversed. And it may well be that Engels'
hard and fast rule --- either to demoralize the army or suffer
defeat --- no longer applies. The February, 1934, days in
Paris, for example, showed how former veterans could
1148
stand their ground before the most determined charges of
regular troops. Had the situation been more acute, there is
no question that the veterans would have been able to
return blow for blow, even though the regular army had
not cracked at all.
In short, regarding barricade fighting, the last word must

yet be worked out in practice. Always new technique is
being developed on both sides, whether in Paris, in the
Chapei district of Shanghai, China, in Spain or elsewhere.
The period of 1848 to 1871 was one in which the proletariat

was slowly getting on its feet and arriving at an
understanding of matters political. In this period, the
intellectual elements of the middle class who were acute
enough to realize that their class had lost its historical force
and to attach themselves to the workers played an
enormous educational and organizational role. It was a
period of transition, in which the declassed intellectual
relied upon the working class, preached revolution, and yet
could not conduct the revolutionary movement with
proletarian methods, but rather ran it for the proletariat. On
the other hand, the skilled worker, turning to revolution,
remained tied to the petty bourgeoisie by an umbilical cord
which he could not as yet sever. In this period occurred the
extraordinary revolutionary movement developed by
Auguste Blanqui.
Blanqui himself started out in his youth as a republican and,

in 1821, at the early age of sixteen, joined the Carbonari in
Paris. Here he imbibed the traditions of militant Jacobinism
and learned of the movement of Baboeuf in the French
Revolution. All through his youth, up to the time of the
Revolution of 1830, Blanqui remained no more than a loyal
1149
and vigorous member of the republican movement. This
adherence to militant Jacobinism, however, only prepared
him for his career as a revolutionary Communist.
After all, it had not been a far cry from Jacobinism to

Babouvism, and Blanqui was the legitimate heir of Baboeuf.
Militant Jacobinism had always stressed equality; what was
a step forward in Baboeuf's plan was the insuring of
economic equality and security for the working class by
means of methods of revolution to which the Jacobins could
heartily aspire. In closely following Baboeuf, Blanqui was
able to win over to his side many intellectuals who had
admired the Jacobins of the French Revolution. While
Proudhon and Louis Blanc were preaching reform and
quiet peaceful action, both Blanqui and the nineteenth
century Jacobins were advocating the solution of all
problems by means of the insurrection and coup d'e'tat.
"Although subscribing thoroughly to the democratic

implications of Rousseau's general will, Jacobinism
habitually drew a distinction between the general will and
the will of all, quite destructive of democratic practices and
policies. However equal men might be at birth in their
natural inheritance of reason and goodness, the
environment provided by contemporary society was not
universally conducive to the development of the qualities
necessary to the free man and the citizen. Not only was the
ruling class, the clergy, and their servitors disqualified, but
the peasantry was in large part so steeped in the tradition of
servility as to be unfitted, immediately, for the performance
of the functions of citizenship. Jacobinism tended to mean,
therefore, a minority dictatorship of the elect." (*38)
From all of these traits Blanqui could not break. Thus we

may say that Auguste Blanqui, like Baboeuf, was an
example of Jacobin turned socialist and, while he became an
1150
heroic figure and a true leader of the proletariat, yet he was
such only in consideration of his environment and the
general immaturity of the working class. His views would
be inadequate to meet the situation of today. As Friedrich
Engels put it, "Blanqui is really a political revolutionary,
socialist only in his emotions, sympathizing with the
suffering of the people, but without a socialist theory or
definite, practical proposals for social reform; in his political
activities he is essentially a man of deeds, and of the
opinion that a small, well-organized minority, which strikes
at the right moment, can carry with it the mass of the
population and thus consummate a successful revolution.
One sees that Blanqui is a revolutionary of a past
generation." (*39)
Like the Jacobins generally, and like Bakunin, who

borrowed much from him, Blanqui adopted views which
were essentially a-historical, individualist and idealist,
rather than materialist. Ideas and habits to him evidently
were not determined by any such instrumentality as the
mode of production; on the contrary, human institutions
apparently were the product of the human mind. It was not
necessary to wait until the proletariat, the class that could
usher in the future, could mature and grow strong. The
society of the future could be built by the unaided action of
the intellectual, guided by reason, and institutions could be
built in a logically rigid way according to certain postulates
of justice and morality.
While believing in the labor theory of value and the right of

the laborer to the full product of his toil, like Baboeuf,
Blanqui did not develop these ideas in any scientific
manner but made them flow from ethical premises
confusedly jumbled with economics. Like Bakunin, Blanqui
considered the church as his chief enemy. Thus in a nutshell,
1151
his program could be put as atheism, communism and
revolution. (*40)
After the Revolution of 1830, Blanqui began to move to the

Left. He joined the "Friends of the People" headed by
Godefrey Cavaignac. (*41) When this group was
suppressed in 1834-35, he started his own organization,
"The Society of, the Families," with a communistic program.
(*42) Through this organization he suffered his first arrest.
Upon his emergence from jail he began seriously to work
along the line of revolution and, in 1838, organized his
"Society of the Seasons." Now he carefully picked his men.
Political discussion and theoretical arguments were
restricted, and the men were trained for action. Blanqui's
party was Blanqui's army.
In 1839 he made his first attempt to overthrow the

government by means of an insurrection staged with six
hundred men. Suddenly, without the slightest warning,
Paris woke up to find that there had been an insurrection. A
small determined handful of men had stormed the city hall
and the police stations, but had been routed , and
completely overwhelmed. Many of his followers had been
bourgeois Jacobin youth but included were also some
workers. Although most of the Parisians smiled at this hare-
brained attempt, the government took the matter more
seriously and sentenced Blanqui to ten years in prison. This
was the first of a series of long sentences that was to place
this indefatigable fighter behind the bars for practically all
of his life. It was only just before the Revolution of 1848 that
Blanqui was released.
By no means had Blanqui given up his plans. As soon as he

was freed, he became a tremendous figure among the
proletariat as the foremost veteran revolutionist. He had
learned, however, from the past. Instead of urging
1152
premature adventures, he now bent his efforts to prevent
the workers from being provoked too early into battle. The
government recognized in him its foremost enemy and took
the earliest pretext to arrest him as part of its policy of
provoking the workers and removing their leadership at
the same time. Thus the historic June days occurred with
the workers leaderless and the foremost champion of their
insurrectionary tactics in jail. This was to become the
tragedy of Blanqui's life; in all the decisive battles of the
revolutionary proletariat he was to find himself out of the
events and in jail.
With the fatal ending of the June days, and with the
elimination of its principal leaders, either through death or
incarceration, the proletariat was forced to retreat. The
leaders who now stepped forth were shabby mediocrities
and the workers turned to doctrinaire experiments of co-
operative banking and labor exchanges. It was the day of
Proudhon and Louis Blanc. By giving up their
insurrectionary weapons for such schemes, the proletariat
went into movements whereby it gave up its own task of
revolutionizing the old world With its own large collective
weapons and, on the contrary, sought to bring about its
emancipation behind the back of society, in private ways,
within the narrow bounds of its own class conditions. These
attempts inevitably had to fail. It was the petty bourgeoisie
that now took the lead.
During this whole period, Blanqui's essential views and

plans constituted the very opposite of those of Louis Blanc,
whom he hated furiously. Blanc had proposed that the
workers rely on the State for the constructive measures of
ushering in socialism. With Blanqui the foremost duty was
first to destroy the old State, that monster of the people.
While Blanc had a complete blue print plan ready in his
1153
pocket, Blanqui was strongly averse to such
intellectualizing and "idiotic" plans. He had come out
against the type of planning of Saint-Simon and the
utopians and he was against the rationalist strictures and
preachings of the Blancs. His own positive program was
rather vague but he trusted to the future. "As one of his
followers put it, As socialism the Blanquist theory can be
summed up as follows: nihilism first; then at the mercy of
evolution."'(*43)
Although Blanqui had great respect for Proudhon,

especially because of the latter's fight against the Church
and his adoption of the traditions of the French Revolution,
yet the two had really very little in common. Blanqui was
the political conspirator par excellence. Proudhon
advocated peaceful reforms; Blanqui was against fighting
for reforms, even those which improved the lot of the
workers, but stood for the insurrection only. Proudhon was
in favor of banks and co-operatives and against strikes;
Blanqui was opposed to all such co-operative schemes, and
advocated strikes by workers as preparation for
insurrection. In his whole plan of struggle Blanqui was
opposed to the Proudonists, so much so that they never
were able to get together, even within the First International.
Having crushed the workers, the government felt itself safe

enough to release Blanqui, who immediately went to work
to organize his new society. This time he saw to it that the
intellectuals were in a minority and that the workers were
represented in the proportion of two to one. He was now
careful and patient, and urged the necessity of winning the
peasantry over to the side of the workers. As the
government moved to the Right, however, and the petty
bourgeois opposition collapsed, the authorities again
1154
arrested him and sentenced him to another ten long years
in prison.
When he emerged from prison this time the world was

quite changed. The working class was growing far more
mature and ever more ready to understand his views. He,
on his part, had become the most hardened and tested
revolutionist of his age. It was true that his former partner,
Barb'es, had weakened enough under the mental strain of
prison to believe that Blanqui had become a traitor and an
informer to the police, but the mass of workingmen knew
better and the scandal that broke out between the two had
no fatal results for Blanqui's work. Between his release and
the time of the Paris Commune, Blanqui found a wife,
obtained some rest, and worked out his theories more
thoroughly.
In this interim the struggle between the Blanquists and the

Proudhonists reached its sharpest point. Strangely enough,
Proudhon himself sprang from the proletariat, yet had
placed himself "above" the class struggle, while Blanqui,
who had gathered around him many student and
intellectual elements of the middle classes, favored the
workers' insurrection. The Blanquists' lack of contact with
the masses of workers was closely bound up with their
underestimation of the proletariat; they operated like a sect
rather than a political party and, when the Paris Commune
burst forth, instead of really leading the people, they were
found moving in an exclusive circle of friends. (*44) This
isolation was fatal, not only for the Blanquists, but for the
workers who found themselves without adequate
leadership. No doubt this particular turn of history
contributed to the tendency of the French masses to rely
upon themselves without too great organization or
leadership.
1155
The Proudhonists, on the other hand, were closely in touch
with the workers and had taken over the trade unions and
co-operatives. Thus at this time there were three groups in
France, the co-operatives under Proudhon's influence of
mutualism, the trade unions made up of skilled workers
and under the patronage of Napoleon III's family, but also
connected with Proudhonism, and the insurrectionary
party under Blanqui. When the First International was
formed, it was the Proudhonist unionists who joined and
attempted to take an international point of view. Blanqui
and his Jacobin friends could never take such an
international point of view but rather tended to ardent
nationalism, at times even to chauvinism. The Blanquists,
therefore, did not join the First International before the
Paris Commune.
Proudhon relied on slow economic forces; Blanqui was an

impatient political revolutionist. Proudhon favored
federalism and fought any and all authority. Proudhon's
chief distinction was that between authority and liberty.
Under the rubric of authority he had put 1. the government
of all by one, or monarchy, and 2. its counterpart the
government of all by all, panarchy, or communism. Both
these regimes were to be combated. On the other side,
under the rubric of "liberty" there was 1. the government of
all by each, --- democracy, and 2. the government of each by
each, --- Anarchy or self-government.(*45) Proudhon
advocated the last.
But for insurrection there was needed centralization,

Dictatorship of the Proletariat, force, coups d'e'tat, terrorism,
etc. In all of this the Blanquists stood at the opposite pole to
Proudhon. In short, if Proudhon made all the mistakes of
the opportunist and collaborator with the bourgeoisie,
Blanqui made the mistakes of the sectarian Leftist who
1156
conceives of the revolution as made by a small minority for
the proletariat, but not of them. Both were doomed to
failure. After the Paris Commune, the Blanquists came to
appreciate the value of international solidarity and working
class aid throughout the world; also they were made to feel
that they no longer could be the sole cocks of the walk, and,
as they fled in exile to London, they were brought into the
circle of the First International. However, as the fight grew
hot against Bakunin, they soon withdrew with the
following statement:
"For us the International was neither a union of trade

unions nor a federation of trade societies. It should have
been the international vanguard of the revolutionary
proletariat. We recognized the utility of these vast workers'
associations, organizing revolt upon the economic field,
and time and again breaking by their unity, by the strike,
the stifling circle of oppression. We recognized the
indissoluble unity of proletarian revolutionary activity in its
double character (economic and political) too well to fall
into the error of our adversaries and to deny one side on the
pretext of stressing the other. We knew that it was by
economic struggles that the proletariat began to organize,
by them that it began to be conscious of itself as a class and
a power, by them, finally, that were created the conditions
that permit it, formed into a proletarian party, to accept
battle on all fields --- a struggle without mercy or truce,
which will only end when by the conquest of political
power and by its own dictatorship the proletariat has
broken the old society and created new elements of the
new....
"But for the realization of this emancipation of the workers,

this abolition of the classes, aim of the social revolution, it is
necessary that the bourgeoisie be deprived of its political
1157
privilege by which it maintains all its others. It is necessary
during a period of revolutionary dictatorship for the
proletariat to employ for its freeing the power till then used
against it, to turn against its adversary the very weapons
that till then have held it down in oppression. And only
then, when tabula rasa has been made of its institutions and
privileges which make up present society, will this
dictatorship of the proletariat cease as being without
objective, the abolition of all classes carrying with it
naturally the disappearance of class government. Then
groups like individuals will be autonomous, then will be
realized that federation, result and not means of victory,
that anarchy which victory will produce and which during
the struggle is failure and disorganization where it is not
imbecility or treason." (*46) Here we see the Jacobinical
Blanquists lean heavily towards Bakunin, not
understanding the value of the First International, despite
its broad and amorphous character, not understanding the
meaning and importance of the trade unions, not seeing the
necessity of the economic processes as factors in the
political revolution. After the Commune, the Blanquist
movement comes to an end.
Footnotes
1. See, for example, M. Beer: Social Struggles in

Antiquity, also M. Beer: Social Struggles in the Middle Ages.
2. Karl Marx: Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, pp. 9-10.

(Kerr ed.)
3. See Mary Austin: The American Rhythm, p. 20.
Lewis Morgan in his Ancient Society explains how the horde

develops into the tribe.
1158
4. F. Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State, p. 117.
5. Lack of space prevents us from giving the views of these

sects in detail.
6. K. Kautsky: Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the

Reformation, p. 12.
7. The same, p. 22.
8. H. M. Hyndman: The Historical Basis of Socialism in

England, pp. 41-42.
9. Compare F. Engels: The Mark, pp. 5-6.
10. Morelly: Code de la Nature ou le Veritable Esprit de Ses

Loix, p. 15. (No English translation available.) Paris, 1910
edition.
11. The same, Fourth Part.
12. See W. B. Guthrie: Socialism before the French Revolution, p.

262.
13. Mably was astute enough to have predicted the course

of the French Revolution as far back as 1758, even to the
extent of showing how the States General would have to be
called, how it would split into factions, and in the end give
way to a dictatorship.
14. E. A. Whitfield: Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, p. 30.
15. See E. B. Bax: The Last Episode of the French Revolution,

pp. 109-110.
16. The same, pp. 124-134.
17. The same, pp. 112-113.

1159
18. A. Shaw: Icaria, pp. 13-14.
19. F. C. Clark: "A Neglected Socialist," in Annals of The

American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. V, pp.
736-737. (1894-1895.)
20. Karl Marx: "On the King of Prussia and Social Reform,"
in Selected Essays, p. 124.
21. Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto, p. 58. (Kerr

Ed.)
22. Communist Manifesto, pp. 28-29.
23. The same, pp. 30-31.
25. The same, pp. 40-41.
26. Karl Marx: Class Struggles in France (Socialist Labor

Party edition), p. 42.
28. Karl Marx: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, p. 120.

(London, 1896 edition.)
29. A comparison of the figures for wages and prices, taking

1837-1841 as 100, shows that in 1846 wages stood at 104 and
prices at 95.5; in 1847 wages fell to 96 while prices rose to
115; in 1850 the figures were 96 and 71 respectively. See P.
W. Slosson:. The Decline of the Chartist Movement, p. 137.
30. Karl Marx: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, p. 137.
31. E. Cahill: Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, p.

5. (1930 edition.)
1160
33. See M. J. Bonn: The American Experiment, p. 196.
34. N. H. Webster: World Revolution, pp. 22-23.
35. F. Engels: "Preface" in K. Marx: Class Struggles in

France, p. 19.
37. See V. I. Lenin's comments on Kautsky's article

in Selections From Lenin, II, p. 170.
38. E. S. Mason: The Paris Commune, p. 15.
39. The same: quoting F. Engels' "Program der

blanquistischen Kommune," Fluchtlinge Volkstaat (1874, No.
73), p. 19.
40. Blanqui at one time put out a paper with the

title "Neither God nor Master."
41. A brother to the general Cavaignac who put down the

1848 June insurrection with so much slaughter! It is
interesting, too, that the brother of Jean Jaures, leading
socialist, was an Admiral in the French Navy and an ardent
Royalist.
42. See R. W. Postgate: Out of the Past, p. 5 and following.
43. E. S. Mason: The Paris Commune, p. 20.
44. Compare Lissagaray: History of the Commune of 1871, p.

26.
45. See P. J. Proudhon: Du Principe Federatif, pp. 13-14 (1868

edition).
1161
46. Given in R. W. Postgate: Out of the Past, pp. 51-53.
XXXV. THE PARIS COMMUNE
THE Revolution of 1848 brought in its train the first attempt

by the working class to take power in a single city. By the
time of the Paris Commune, not quite a quarter of a century
later, the workers already were able to seize control of the
most important European city, although unable indefinitely
to hold it. Now for the first time, too, did the intimate
connection between capitalist war and proletarian
revolution make itself felt. The Paris Commune came at the
end of the Franco-Prussian war, just as the Russian
Revolution of 1905 came on the heels of the Russo-Japanese
War and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 followed the
World War. Conversely, a victorious workers' revolution
must involve the country in international warfare. It is
preposterous to believe that socialism can exist in one city
or even in one country alone.
The Paris Commune marked at last a break with the

traditions of the past. There was now an end to the
nostalgic dependence upon history for inspiration.
Henceforth the social revolution would draw its poetry not
from the past but from the future. "Former revolutions
required historic reminiscences in order to intoxicate
themselves with their own issues. The revolution of the
nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in
order to reach its issue." (*1)
As soon as the declaration of war against Prussia had been

issued by Napoleon III, the First International issued a
Manifesto to arouse the workers. The Manifesto pointed out
1162
that Napoleon III had been the great enemy of the First
International which constantly had warned the workers of
the chauvinist and adventurist policies of this upstart. On
the German side, it was a war of defense, although Prussia
had provoked the war in order to crush the workers'
opposition at home and to unite the German Empire. Under
the influence of the International, many of the French trade
unions had protested against the war, but the workers had
been prevented from demonstrating. The war meant the
death knell of the Second French Empire, but, if the German
workers permitted what had begun as a defensive war to
become a war against the French people, then victory or
defeat would be alike disastrous to them. The way out, the
Manifesto concluded, was for the German workers, who
also wanted peace, to unite with the French under the
banner of the International and unitedly to abolish war by
establishing the international rule of labor.
In the course of the war, the worst fears of the International

were realized. As Friedrich Engels had brilliantly foreseen,
(*2) Napoleon's army was empty boastfulness. He was
caught unprepared. He foolishly engaged in the tactics of a
braggadocio and encountered one disaster after the other,
culminating in his surrender at Sedan. The fall of Metz
followed, and the supreme Prussian army invested Paris.
Now was the time for the French to have rallied their
strength to throw back the invader. On the side of the
Prussians it had become clearly a war for plunder, devoid
of any connection with defense. On the other side, the
French Empire was now overthrown and the republican
bourgeoisie could rally the entire nation to the defense. It
was one thing for the Prussians to take a city; it was another
matter for them to control the entire country. Already all
over the countryside the peasants were carrying on a
1163
guerrilla war against the invaders, despite the most ruthless
terror launched against them by the Prussian officers who
did not hesitate to burn down whole villages and slaughter
the inhabitants. This could only stimulate the French to
fight harder. Then there was the South of France which was
entirely untouched and which could raise large armies for
the fight. Finally, there was Paris which was still being
besieged.
However, the bourgeoisie realized that, with the downfall

of Napoleon III, not they would come to power, but the
people led by the workers whom they feared most of all.
"Thanks to the economic and political development of
France since 1789, Paris has for fifty years been placed in
such a position that no revolution could there break out
without assuming a proletarian character, in such wise that
the proletariat, which had bought the victory with its blood,
would immediately thereafter put forward its own
demands." (*3)
With the ignominious surrender of the Emperor at Sedan,

the people of Paris invade the legislature, although the
supposed republicans, Gambetta and Favre, try to prevent
it. The National Guards of the people push the gendarmes
aside and the Republic is proclaimed September 4, 1870.
Just prior to this event, the Blanquists have tried to stage a
communist putsch, but the masses have not been prepared
for the attempt, and the group is arrested and condemned.
A committee of twelve former deputies of the government
provisionally controls Paris, and Blanqui, although he has
aided mightily in the overthrow of the old regime again can
take no part in the actual decisive events. The new regime,
however, releases him.
In the meantime, as Paris is being attacked by the Prussians,

all the workers, including the Blanquists, rally to the
1164
defense of the city. The workers establish their Committee
of Vigilance, made up of many trade unionists and First
International members, to prevent any treachery. This
committee now demands that municipal elections be held,
that the police be placed in the hands of the people of Paris
who are also to elect and control all the magistrates, that
absolute freedom of the press and public meetings be
granted, that all necessities be expropriated and carefully
rationed out to the people, and that all the citizens be
armed and the provinces aroused. Thus the working class,
in a frenzy of patriotic fervor, takes up the defense of Paris,
although nominally the head of the defense is left to
Gambetta, Favre, and General Trochu.
But the Workers do not reckon with the treachery of the

bourgeoisie who understand their class interests entirely
too well not to prefer to make peace with the Prussian
Bismarcks rather than permit their own nation to triumph.
Outside of Paris, the bourgeoisie carried on the fight in a
most lackadaisical fashion. They do not arouse the peasants
to volunteer nor comb the South of France for new armies.
Paris is left practically abandoned.
At the same time, the bourgeois defense of Paris is

conducted wretchedly. General Trochu behaves like an
agent of the Prussians. The capital should have been able to
secure sufficient food for itself; so poor is the defense of the
city, however, that Paris becomes completely surrounded
and cut off. Despite the most brilliant sorties and heroic
defense of the National Guard, the people of Paris are
forced to witness the surrender of the city under
humiliating terms.
After the fall of Sedan, the First International had put forth
a second Manifesto to rouse the German workers to
demand peace and to rally behind the working class of
1165
France and Paris. The Manifesto declared that if Germany
won, it either would become the tool of Russia, oppressing
the workers at home, or pave the way for a new war in
which France would be united with Russia, and the
reactionary Czarist system buttressed by the West. In either
case, the outcome would be a mighty defeat for the workers
of the world, leading to a new blood bath. The predictions
of this Manifesto have come true in every respect, although
not until forty-five years later.
The French Government has stipulated that Paris is to be

disarmed The crafty Bismarck, however, far more afraid of
the street fighting of the Parisian workers than all the
armies of Thiers and Gambetta, refuses to disarm Paris and
forces the new French Government itself to perform the job.
In order to do this, the bourgeoisie and old ruling cliques
quickly call a special election in which the masses
understand little of the issues and, through this trick,
reactionists and monarchists are elected. The rural regions
are given a predominant place, while Paris has not been
able to make itself heard. This new government convenes in
Bordeaux and gives orders to the defenders of the country,
the workmen of Paris. Thus, despite their fighting, the
workers of Paris hear that the war is to result not even in a
republic, but merely in a new monarchy. Further, Paris
learns that its heroic National Guard is to be disarmed, that
the thirty cents a day that have been given to all workmen
during the siege is to be discontinued, and that all house
rents and debts in arrears are to be enforced in spite of the
fact that the siege of Paris has made such debts absolutely
unavoidable.
Protected by the arms of Bismarck and the Prussians, the

National Assembly now moves from Bordeaux to Versailles.
It is absolutely necessary to crush the masses, since the
1166
sufferings due to the war are becoming unbearable, and
there is bound to be resistance to the new government so
hastily established. Not only are there the terrible debts
previously incurred by Napoleon III to pay, but the war
expenses and the huge war indemnity of five billion francs
are now to be saddled upon the country. Having made his
secret deal with the Prussians to prevent the republic, so as
to form instead a new monarchy, Thiers is now ready to
provoke the people into open resistance so that he can
shoot them down.
The new government moves into action at once. All

newspapers are taxed. Overdue rent bills are enforced.
Republican journals are suppressed. Then the government
arrests Blanqui, who, as usual, entirely underestimates his
value to the proletariat and lets himself be caught; the court
condemns him to be executed. Finally, the government
declares its intention to disband the National Guard and to
remove the cannon from the people, the cannon which the
National Guard have bought and paid for from its own
private subscriptions. When the National Guard discovers a
clandestine attempt on the part of the regular army groups
to steal this cannon, there is nothing to do but to resist.
The National Guard now elects a Central Committee to

unite the resistance of the people opposed to the return of
the monarchy. This Central Committee is made up of "men
of the small middle-class, as well as workmen, shop keepers,
commercial clerks, mechanics, sculptors, architects, caring
little for systems, anxious above all to save the Republic."
(*4)
How can such a committee really understand or carry out

the interests of the masses? The Committee realizes little of
the fierce struggle that is to come and yields completely to
the happiness of the moment, imagines all problems of easy
1167
solution. This is the "honeymoon period," when all appears
to be rosy, when the middle class, taking power for the
moment, becomes intoxicated with its own phrases and
believes it can put aside the class struggle and live
peacefully ever after. The deep gulf existing between these
committeemen and the workers soon becomes apparent.
Instead of vigorously marching on Versailles and taking the
initiative to disband the gang of reactionary monarchists
who have gathered there, the Committee decides to stop
and hold municipal elections, since it has not been elected
originally by the whole people. Thus, under the pretext of
more democracy, the Commune allows those at Versailles
to withdraw all their forces, and to gather an immense
army around them from the rural regions of France and
from troops which Bismarck kindly releases from his prison
camps for their benefit.
At the same time, the Committee conveniently neglects to

close the gates of Paris and allows the all-important fort of
Mt. Vallerian, overlooking the entire city, to be taken by the
Rurals. Other forts are abandoned, the barricades are
dissolved, and the generals of the reactionists are freed. At
this very time, Thiers, who is plotting destruction for Paris,
is doing his best to disorganize the hospitals, the markets,
the finances, the lighting systems, the unemployed relief,
etc., so as to throw Paris into chaos. Thus, while the instinct
of the masses urges drastic and immediate action, the petty
bourgeois leadership behaves in an extremely naive fashion
that is to have terrible and fatal results. Everything in Paris,
at a critical moment when the most decisive and
determined action alone could have saved the day, is
suspended while "elections" take place.
At this point, how much would one Blanqui be worth! But

the bourgeoisie knows this far better than the workers and,
1168
when later the Commune offers any number of hostages in
return for this one man, Thiers refuses under any
circumstances to release him. Thus again, and for the last
time in his frustrated life, this arch revolutionist to whom
death holds no terrors is to miss the revolutionary events of
France. But even greater than the loss of Blanqui was the
tragedy of the proletariat.
As Paris is thrown into the turmoil of elections, for the first

time in the history of revolutions in France the students
attack the revolutionary movement rather than lead it. Here
is an important law that is to be underlined in the future;
where the revolution is merely democratic, the students
play a leading and important role; where it becomes a
question of communism and the abolition of private
property and special privileges, the students reverse their
stand and show themselves to be often the arch enemies of
the workers and the revolutionists.
In the meantime, the masses, including those belonging to

the First International, are moving rapidly to the Left, and
even the most radical of the deputies begin to stand
appalled at the initiative of the people. As the Red Flag flies
over the City Hall, court martial is abolished and amnesty is
given to all politicals. This further enriches the forces of the
Left Wing, which now put forth demands for actual
municipal liberties, for the suppression of the police
prefecture, responsibility of the police to the people of the
city and not to the central government, for the right of the
National Guard to name its chiefs, for a republic, for the
cancellation of rents and bills due and for the evacuation of
Paris by the army. Thus the masses are demanding the
Commune rather than communism or the abolition of
private property.
1169
On the surface, the program of the Paris populace seemed
to call for a return to the decentralized condition of
medieval days and for the breaking up of the nation into
loosely federated Communes. In reality, what the
Communal Constitution would have done was to bring the
rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central
towns of their districts held by the workingmen. It also
would have realized that catchword of the bourgeoisie, a
cheap government, by destroying the two greatest sources
of expenditure, namely, the standing army and state
functionaries. Thus, incidentally, there would have been
guaranteed both the republic and a cheap government.
But, most important of all, if the demands of the Paris

masses had been satisfied, the working men would have
controlled all the important and decisive national
operations. Once the workers took power they could not
limit themselves to demands compatible with the system of
private property. Thus the Commune also meant
communism. So the bourgeoisie understood it and
prepared for a struggle to the death.
Only the Liberals who are in control of the Council of

Mayors, with old Louis Blanc at their head, try to reconcile
the interests of Versailles and those of Paris and make
hurried trips between the two cities. But the Revolution
flows on. The Central Committee is forced to suspend the
sale of pawned objects, overdue bills are prolonged, and
evictions are forbidden. Thus the holy institution of private
property is attacked. A reactionary mob then tries to storm
the City Hall, but is dispersed. Paris enters into civil war
without a party or a program, but with deep instincts for
communism.
The "elections" are held finally on March 26, and the Paris
Commune is proclaimed with immense enthusiasm. The
1170
innocent people fail to realize that they have wasted
precious time for which they will pay heavily with their life
blood later on. The elections produce no better results than
before. Sixteen Liberals are elected, four Radicals, and sixty
revolutionists. None of these candidates had been put to the
test; the people vote for names rather than for programs. Of
the total, only twenty-four are workers, of whom sixteen
belong to the International or workingmen's societies. (*5)
The rest are petty bourgeois intellectuals. Incidentally, the
Central Committee of the National Guard, in the interest of
"fairness" and "democracy," had refused to run again.
How much these elections are really worth is seen when

once the fight is started. Of the total delegates to the
Commune Assembly, nine are Blanquists and seventeen
Proudhonist internationalists; these are practically the only
ones who stand firm. Before the first shot is fired, the
Moderate Republicans resign and run away, soon to be
followed by the Radical Republicans. All that this election
actually accomplishes is to produce several dual bodies.
Sharp squabbles break out between this Commune
Assembly and the still functioning Central Committee of
the National Guard, and later between the Assembly and
the Committee of Public Safety which is set up to control
the fighting forces of the Commune.
"World history would indeed be very easy to make, if the

struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly
favorable chances. It would, on the other hand, be of a very
mystical nature, if 'accidents' played no part. These
1171
accidents themselves fall naturally into the general course
of development and are compensated again by other
accidents. But acceleration and delay are very dependent
upon such 'accidents,' which include the accident of the
character of those who at first stand at the head of the
movement."' (*6) Had the Parisians not taken up the
struggle, the demoralization of the working class would
have been a far greater misfortune than the fall of any
number of leaders. Although the Parisians had not
appreciated the tremendous value of the initiative in attack
at the decisive moment, at least they realized the
importance of a well-contested defeat. Under the impact of
the fighting, Paris moved to communism.
From the very outset, the Commune had to recognize that

the working class, having once attained supremacy in the
State, could not work with the old machinery of
government; that this working class, if it was not to lose the
position which it had just conquered must, on the one hand,
abolish all the old machinery, good only for bourgeois
chicanery, cheating, and swindling, and set up its own. The
Paris Commune showed that the workers could not transfer
the bureaucratic military machine simply from one hand to
another, but had to smash it completely.
The Commune Assembly furnished an extremely

haphazard and muddled leadership and committed many
fatal errors. Yet despite these mistakes, the number of
revolutionary acts the Communards were able to
accomplish is remarkable. First, conscription and the
standing army, together with the police, were abolished,
and all citizens who could bear arms were enrolled into the
National Guard that elected its own officers and became
intimately fused with the people. Death being decreed for
all thieves, remarkable order prevailed in the capital. The
1172
second step was to remove entirely all the special privileges
of the state functionaries. All officials received but
workmen's wages. Political functionaries were easily and
directly elected and recalled, judges included. Of course,
Church and State were separated. Thus an entirely new
governmental set-up, unprecedented in the history of the
world, was created. As the Manifesto of the Commune,
April 19, declared: The Commune ". . . inaugurates a new
era of experimental, positive, and scientific politics. It
means the end of the old governmental and clerical world,
the world of militarism, of functionarism, of exploitation,
speculation, monopoly, and privilege, to which the
proletariat owes its slavery and the fatherland its misery
and disaster." (*7)
The plan of Paris was to establish all over the country

communes after its model. Instead of a national army, there
was to be a national militia of very short service. Two
important points were involved, first, the need of universal
arming of the people as a measure of insuring peace, the
army to be fused with and become part of the people; and
second, the short duration of the actual term of service. The
people knew that the long conscription service was decreed
by the former State not in order to make better soldiers but
to break the spirit of the recruits. All the important arms of
warfare could be mastered by the average soldier in six
months; he did not require two or four years of discipline in
the barracks.
The unity of the nation was not to be broken by the

communes, but only the old central state power was to be
destroyed. This was insured by the decision that the
decrees of the central government were to be carried out
only by communal agents and never must be imposed from
the top upon the locality. This important principle, as well
1173
as other points, was to be taken up by Lenin in the Russian
Revolution of 1917.
Within Paris the middle class followed the lead of the

workers, a usual procedure whenever workers show
themselves firm and determined. The chief problem was to
reach the agrarian petty proprietors. Although the victory
of the Commune would have freed the peasantry of taxes,
would have released it from debt, and would have imposed
the cost of the war upon its true originators, although the
new government would have given the peasant a cheap
government and would have educated and freed him, yet
the Commune's propaganda never penetrated the
countryside. The rural deputies prevented Paris from
reaching the provinces, and it was the peasantry that
eventually drowned the city of Paris in blood.
From the very beginning, the Commune demonstrated its

internationalism. It gave foreigners full right to participate
in elections. It placed a German at the head of its
department of labor. It had a Pole in charge of its military
forces. It pulled down Napoleon's statue, denounced
nationalism and chauvinism, and came out as champion of
the workers of the world.
But it was in its social measures especially that the

Commune showed itself to be a rule of the workers. (*8)
Back rent of the workers due for 1870-1871, was wiped out.
Pawnshops were first restricted and then abolished. Church
property became national property. Capital punishment
was done away with. All closed factories were turned over
to the workers and workers' control over production was
established. Stoppage of wages was ended, night work for
bakers prohibited, etc. (*9) Full publicity was given to all
acts of the Commune and conniving and swindling in the
government disappeared.
1174
The workers had seized power easily enough. They were
now face to face with the far more difficult problem, that of
holding power. In this, the leaders revealed themselves as
amateurs who needed long and hard experience before the
common sense of morality would be remolten in the
crucible of civil war into an art of insurrection and a science
of revolution.
The Commune Assembly was composed of Proudhonists

and Blanquists. The latter became the majority, especially
after the new elections were held in April, where the
workers stepped forward more boldly. In the course of the
struggle, both groups violated their own principles. The
Blanquists, although strong centralists, agreed to the
scheme of a federation of communes, while the
Proudhonists, traditionally opportunists, came out for
insurrection. These men were socialists rather by instinct
than as a result of scientific study. Only a few of them were
clear, theoretically, and the members of the First
International were in the minority.
From the first intimations of the Commune, Marx had sent

urgent letters, strongly advising against the revolt as
premature; within the letters, however, were also to be
found instructions and advice on how to proceed should
the decisive revolutionary steps be taken. Once the
Commune was established, Marx did all he could to guide
and support it. However, the confused leadership ignored
his explicit warnings.
There was in the Bank of France at Paris, 2,180,000,000

francs, an enormous sum. This the workers should have
confiscated and used for their own purposes. Instead,
under the influence of the Proudhonists, especially Beslay,
with their unsound ideas of a People's Bank, the money was
carefully protected; the bourgeoisie at Versailles breathed a
1175
great sigh of relief. This did not prevent the capitalists,
however, from wreaking the direst punishment upon
Proudhonists as upon others.
The second important error was the complete failure of the

Communards to invade the Department of State in Paris
and publish the documents in the files. This was a serious
mistake, since the publication of the correspondence of
Napoleon III and the politicians resident at Versailles
clearly would have exposed their guilt in the war. To reveal
to an unsuspecting world all the crimes of the French
bourgeoisie for the past twenty years would have isolated
and demoralized the bourgeoisie. The decent and common
people of France would have been won to the side of the
Commune.
The third dire mistake was the failure to centralize the

government within Paris for the struggle. The Blanquists
and the Jacobins wanted to set up a Committee of Public
Safety with dictatorial powers. This led to prolonged
bickering and only on May 1 was such a committee elected,
lasting only to May 9, while twenty-three members of the
Assembly resigned in protest. However, those who
resigned soon returned to their posts, and a new committee
was elected. In the midst of all this confusion, however, it
was impossible to adopt a uniform policy for all the
departments of the Commune.
For some time there existed the possibility that the

Commune of Paris would reach other cities and the
countryside of France. Indeed, communes were actually
established at Marseilles, Narbonne, Toulouse, Lyons, St.
Etienne, and Creuzot, but they were easily swept away. The
fact remains that Paris did not make sufficient efforts to win
the provinces to its cause.
1176
But the chief defect of the Parisians was their good nature
and naivete. They should have taken the offensive. They
should have marched on Versailles, whose main support at
first was the artillery and not the infantry; only later did the
reactionaries obtain infantry. (*10) In the meantime, only by
the grace of the Prussians was Paris even partially
surrounded. Thiers had to ask the Germans to post one
hundred and thirty thousand men around Paris, although
the truce had called for only forty thousand, so as to
surround the city and enable Thiers to act. Had it not been
for the Prussians, Thiers could never have won the day.
Here was eloquent proof that when the proletarian
revolution breaks forth, all governments put aside their
quarrels to protect international capital.
"That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the

conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternize for
the common massacre of the proletariat --- this unparalleled
event does indicate, not as Bismarck thinks, the final
repression of a new society upheaving, but the crumbling
into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of
which old society is still capable is national war; and this is
now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended
to defer the struggle of the classes, and to be thrown aside
as soon as that class struggle bursts out in civil war. Class
rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform;
the national Governments are one as against the
proletariat!" (*11)
The suppression of the Commune was marked with a

bestial ferocity unprecedented in the annals of modern
Europe. The proletariat was burned and bombed out of the
city, the number of victims who perished ran into the tens
of thousands, the number imprisoned and exiled reached
many times that number. Altogether it was a slaughter that
1177
drenched the soil of France with the blood of its best
members. The bourgeois elements who had run at the sight
of the Prussians indulged in the most sadistic orgies at the
expense of Frenchmen.
The Paris Commune taught the world some significant

lessons. In the first place, it demonstrated that to take
power is not sufficient, that, especially in an agrarian
country, the real fight occurs after the workers have
attained power, when they are trying to establish a new
world. In the second place, it made it plain to the workers
that insurrection is indeed an art, that amateurs first must
graduate into professionals, and that revolutionists must
wait until their number has increased from a small handful
to a decisive size throughout the country before another
attempt could be made. In the third place, the Commune
outlined in deep grooves the inevitable channels that
proletarian revolts would have to take. It furnished
indelible lessons to the Russian Bolsheviks who later
carried forward the whole line of the Paris Commune on an
even more magnificent scale. Finally, it taught the world
that no great war can exist without its aftermath of
proletarian revolt.
The workers were able to maintain their Commune for two

whole months because of a peculiar combination of factors
operating in France. The government had been disastrously
defeated in the war and had lost entirely its prestige. The
new government of the bourgeoisie was provisional and
extremely weak, burdened as it was with the debts of its
predecessor. The workers who predominated in Paris had
arms in their hands; they were the ones who had
demonstrated their heroism in national defense and who
had saved the honor of the country. These extraordinary
circumstances impelled the workers of Paris to make their
1178
attempt even though they realized it was still premature to
try to introduce the new social order.
On the other hand, these workers were defeated so easily

only because of their neglect of the important rules of
struggle, because they were sentimental towards their
national bourgeoisie, because they refused to take the
offensive and go the whole route to the end. Had they been
more ruthless and practical, they inevitably would have
made more headway with the peasantry. At is was, the
French bourgeoisie could win only because of the
enormous aid of the Prussians, who furnished them with
the soldiers necessary to surround the city and who
released the most backward prisoners for action against
Paris. Further, the mere fact that Paris had revolted under
the Red Flag caused the monarchists, who previously had
been so certain of their monarchy, to flee. Thus, even in its
defeat, the Commune was strong enough to compel the
establishment of a democratic republic; at the same time, it
was clear to the people that even a democratic republic was
a product of counter-revolution. The Third French Republic
was born with a congenital defect.
Speculations as to what might have happened had the Paris

Commune better understood the art of insurrection are
entirely out of place. It would be strange indeed were the
working class, only recently arrived upon the scene of
history, able, like one sprung full blown from the brain of
Jupiter, to have acted in the masterly manner which can be
worked out so clearly many years after the event. At the
time, the workers of France were still engaged in petty
industry. Their program could not be anything but vague
and confused. The workers of the world were not united in
any solid body; they were but beginning to grope their way.
Above all, there was no international party, no scientific
1179
vanguard capable of giving to each section the lessons of
every workers' struggle throughout the world. Such an
international was to be formed later on. Under these
circumstances, no other result could have occurred than the
defeat of the brave French proletarians.
Had the workers blasted their way through to Versailles,

had they been able to win elements of the peasantry to their
side, they immediately would have been faced with a world
war. The Prussians were already at Paris, in the heart of
France. The British and international bankers would have
rallied their forces to put down this monster of iniquity,
communism, which threatened to wipe out forever all
private property and plunder. International pressure would
have been entirely too severe even for heroic France.
Eventually communism would have been overwhelmed
with even greater loss.
The Paris Commune at least put flesh and blood on the

spectre of communism that had haunted Europe from 1848
on. Henceforth, the great problem was to be the social
problem. While the revolution from below came to an end,
the revolution from the top went on ruthlessly. The
capitalists could not prevent factories from being
established or proletarians from increasing in number and
in the understanding of their role. What the workers could
not learn from the Paris Commune they were taught by the
employers through the contradictions of the capitalist
system. Sooner or later the conflagration was bound to
burst forth again.
The first two Communist attempts had been restricted to

one city; the next was to involve a whole country. In 1905,
the Communists in Russia tried but failed. In 1917, they
tried again, won, and began to make a bold bid for the
world. Only time can reveal whether these communists will
1180
be able to dominate indefinitely the country of the Soviet
Union. Certainly they have surpassed the two months'
record of the Paris Commune; they have held the fort
already for close to twenty years.
Footnotes
1. Karl Marx: Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 13.

(Kerr edition.)
2. See his Notes on the War.
3. Friedrich Engels: "Preface" to Karl Marx: Paris

Commune, p. 3. (Socialist Labor Party edition).
4. Lissagaray: History of the Commune of 1871, p. 88.
5. In the Paris Commune, forty-six sections of the

International could be counted, according to R. W.
Postgate: The Workers International, p. 113.
6. Karl Marx: Letters to Kugelmann, p. 125, Letter of April 17,

1871. (international Publishers.)
7. The Manifesto is given in E. S. Mason: The Paris

Commune, p. 256.
8. Although the Commune permitted all to vote, the

workers completely dominated the elections and, since the
bourgeoisie had fled to Versailles, there was no need for
restricting the vote specifically to toilers.
9. The trade union groups, of course, were very much

broken up by many of their members being on the firing
line. See Les Seances officielles de l'Internationale a Paris
pendant le siege et pendant la Commune. (No English
translation available.) Paris, 1872 edition.
1181
10. It may be observed that the divisions of the regular
army are sharply unequal in their responsiveness to the
mass of people during civil war. The cavalry is often
controlled or close to the landed aristocracy, the artillery by
the bourgeoisie, as is the corps of aviators. Closest to the
mass of people, workers and peasants, is the infantry and it
is also this arm that tends first of all to crack and go over to
the side of the people.
11. Karl Marx: Paris Commune, pp. 103-104.
XXXVI. BOLSHEVISM
THE heirs of Baboeuf, Blanqui, Marx, and Engels were the

Russian Bolsheviks. After the Commune had perished,
there was a short lull during which it seemed that the palm
of revolutionary leadership had passed to the Germans.
This, indeed, was the express opinion of Engels himself.
However, it was not in Germany that the revolution was to
break out next, but in Russia. On the Russian anvil was
hammered out a social-democratic group which alone, of
all the parties within the Second International, really
understood and carried out the policies of the founders of
communism. Russian Bolshevism was born out of the
womb of the hideous conditions of Mother Russia, sired by
the world revolutionary movement. With such notable
parentage, it was bound to go far.
Capitalism developed in Russia notoriously late and under

peculiar circumstances. In the Middle Ages, Russia had
been fairly on the road to active commercial life, the fairs at
Nishni Novgorod, for example, attracting the merchants of
all Europe. However, the country was in the direct course
of the Mongolian invasions. With no geographical obstacles
1182
to overcome, the hordes of Ghengis Khan and the Tartars
swept over the steppes and set back the Slavs for over four
hundred years. Gradually the Russians emerged from the
Asiatic flood and turned towards Europe. Only in the
seventeenth century was serfdom really instituted in that
benighted land. Thus, contrary to popular conception,
Russia really never had a strong feudal class. Also, there
was no merchant and trading class, no capitalist elements
that supported the King, as had been the case in Western
countries, so as to create an absolute monarchy. The power
of the Czar arose, not because of the pressure of modern
and progressive forces, but rather from the decay of the old
and the defeat and assimilation of the Asiatics. Instead of
absolute monarchy's springing from feudalism, there
resulted a semi-oriental despotism arising from the decline
of the inferior princes and their gradual subjugation by the
Muscovites.
The Russian State, which arose upon primitive economic

foundations, in its progressive development clashed with
other national States functioning on a higher plane. (*1) In
order not to succumb to the pressure of Poland, Lithuania,
Sweden, and other Western countries, the Russian National
State would have to adopt the methods of the West. To do
this it had increasingly to absorb the living sources of the
nation; thus the State constantly grew and expanded until it
became the greatest force within Russia. In order to hold
out against its better-armed enemies, the Russian State was
forced to create its own industry and technique, to engage
in its service specialists in military arts, powder-makers,
public coiners, and to procure manuals of fortification, to
set up naval schools and factories, to maintain secret court
counselors, and so forth.
1183
While it was possible to obtain military instructors and
secret counselors from abroad, the material means, cost
what they might, had to come from the country itself. The
history of Russian political economy then was made up of a
series of efforts to guarantee the armed forces of the State;
the task of its rulers was to see that every atom of the
nation's strength furthered this purpose.
In its quest for the indispensable funds, the government

imposed the most arbitrary and excessive taxes upon the
peasantry, established the collective responsibility of the
Mir, extorted money from merchants and monasteries. In
the seventeenth century, about 85 per cent of the budget
was used for the upkeep of troops; when, in the eighteenth
century, Peter's military reverses compelled him to
reorganize his infantry and also to create a fleet, these
expenses became still larger. With the Crimean War, the
Russian State was forced to establish a system of universal
military service, even though this meant the freeing of the
serfs, and to introduce railroads and modern factories.
In spite of all such measures, the internal resources were

not sufficient to enable the Russian State to oppose the most
powerful States in Europe in armed conflict. However, with
the accumulation of capital reserves in Western Europe, in
Paris, London and elsewhere, Czarism was able to borrow
immense supplementary sums. From this time on,
international finance capital exercised a fatal influence on
Russia's political development; gradually Russia was
transformed into a sort of semi-colony for the international
bankers. The growth of the State went hand in hand with
the increase of the public debt. In the ten years from 1898 to
1908 this debt increased by 19 per cent and, at the end of
this period, it reached nine billion rubles, the interest on the
1184
debt alone absorbing about one-third of the net revenues of
the treasury.
To procure these vast sums necessary to maintain the

Russian State, the government had to absorb a huge portion
of the surplus of the country. So severe was the taxation
that it was not possible for individuals to accumulate
capital, and merchant and private industrial capital
remained in an infantile state. But more than that, so heavy
was the burden on the peasantry that they could hardly
keep body and soul together and suffered periodic famines.
Totally unable to improve their lot or their technique of
production, they were loaded down with unbearable debts.
Thus the State, through the enormous demands of its
superstructure, the political military state, destroyed even
the possibilities of improving its economic foundations. At
the same time there existed no class that could possibly
overthrow this enormous weight. As all the challenging
forces atrophied, the only progressive and creative agency
able to change conditions was the State itself.
The Russian State could not live in a vacuum; it was part of

Europe and as such had to connect itself and become the
servant of international capitalism. By relying on this force,
Czarism was able to consolidate itself, to bring in railroads
and telegraphs, and to unite the country more firmly. The
Russian Army was developed to a colossal size and, while
unable to meet the task of the Russo-Japanese war, was
quite capable of maintaining order internally. This military
Juggernaut crushed even the barest signs of liberalism and
loomed as an independent power over the classes then
extant. In this way, the administrative, military, and
financial power of absolutism which gave it the possibility
of subsisting in spite of social development, far from
preventing all revolution, as liberalism thought, on the
1185
contrary, made revolution the only conceivable outcome;
this revolution was destined to be all the more radical as
the power of Absolutism deepened the gulf between the
ruling power and the masses of people involved in the new
economic movement.
"Thanks to the rapacity of the state, the level of

development of the productive forces was too low to permit
either the accumulation of surplus, a great extension of the
social division of labor, or the growth of cities. The
handicrafts were not separated from agriculture, and
concentrated in the cities, but remained scattered among
the rural population in the hands of village artisans,
throughout the whole extent of the country. On account of
this very dispersion of the industries, the artisans were
obliged to work not to order, as in European cities, but for
gross sale. The intermediary between the isolated
producers and the not less isolated consumers was the
merchant. (Russian gost, the guest, the traveler.)" (*2)
Thus, while the general population, scattered and

impoverished, was connected only by merchant capital of
small amount and mostly in the hands of peddlers, the State
felt the urgent need to create big cities and big industry. To
maintain the army it was necessary to have clothing
factories, arms, munitions plants, and similar works. The
needs of war compelled Peter the Great to industrialize his
forces. During his reign there were introduced over two
hundred and thirty public or private enterprises of great
scope, mines and arsenals and such. Unlike the situation in
the West, where the factory system had brought order to a
disintegrating feudal system and where free laborers could
be obtained, the factories in Russia had to be run by serfs.
Thus, in the eighteenth century, the Russian factory was
free from competition from the cities; on the other hand, the
1186
country artisans did not compete with the factories which
worked almost exclusively for the State or for the ruling
and wealthy groups.
In the nineteenth century, the textile industry finally broke

down the norms of serfdom and instituted free wage labor.
Although Russia needed free trade and labor, yet the claims
of the State had prevented such a development and had
compelled Russia to institute closed monopolies and to take
control of the tariff. There had been no force within Russia
capable of ending serfdom. The capitalists were entirely too
weak, the peasants had no cities to support them; the
abolition of serfdom had to come from the top due to the
disasters in the Crimea and the necessity to modernize the
military.
With the emancipation of the serfs there took place an

immense development of the factory system in Russia.
Owing to the extreme oppression of the people of Russia
and the complete monopolies granted by the State,
European capital could realize enormous profits and it
poured its capital into Russia at a great rate. Thus Russia
moved overnight to modem, large-scale industry owned
and controlled by foreign investors and subsidized and
watched over by the State. Prodigious railroad construction
took place. And with this development there arose a many-
headed proletariat, the number of railroad workers in 1905
alone totaling close to seven hundred thousand.
The flood of capital into Russia was stupendous. In the last

decade of the nineteenth century alone, over a billion and a
half rubles of industrial capital were introduced. While
during the forty years preceding 1892 the funds of stock
companies amounted only to 919 millions, in the ten years
following they leaped to 2.1 billions. In the ten years from
1890 to 1900 the value of factory production leaped two and
1187
one-half times and the number of workers in factories and
mills doubled. In that time 40 per cent of all existing
enterprises made their appearance.
Together with the railroad and general industrial

development there occurred a grand development of the
coal and petroleum industries in the South, to which the
center of gravity shifted. This part of the country took on a
sort of American boom aspect. For this growth there was
combined with the best technique of America the great
subsidies of the Russian State. All the metallurgical mills in
Russia received, upon installation, State orders for several
years. Thus Russian industry did not grow like the English,
slowly from small factories to large ones, but advanced
overnight to tremendous size. "In Russia the ratio of large
establishments (employing two hundred or more) to
medium sized establishments (employing fifty to two
hundred) was, in 1913, as 1 to 7.4. In Germany that ratio
was, in 1907, as 1 to 50.7." (*3) The productivity of labor,
however, was exceedingly low. Nor could this be increased
without raising the economic level of the masses, both
peasants and workers, and this in turn could not be
achieved without entailing the revolutionary overthrow of
Czarism.
Together with the rise of industry there took place in 1861,

following the emancipation of the serfs, a deep accentuation
of the peasant problem. The land was not given to
communes for collective utilization, but individual peasants
were enabled to buy small pieces, too small really to
support them, at exorbitant prices that threw them directly
into the hands of the usurer and soon thereafter drove them
out of their farms. While on the one hand a small kulak or
capitalist farmer class emerged and the large estates of the
big landlords flourished, for the mass of peasantry,
1188
especially in the "black earth" region of central Russia,
conditions became unbearable. The peasant was forced to
exist on bread made of flour mixed with shavings or
ground bark.
"In places the misery of the peasants reaches such

proportions that the presence of bed bugs and cockroaches
in the isba is considered an eloquent symptom of comfort;
and indeed, Chingarov, a Zemstvo physician, now a liberal
deputy to the Third Duma, has testified that among the
landless peasants, in the districts of Voroneje province,
which he explored, bed bugs are never found, while as for
the other categories of the rural population, the quantity of
bed bugs that lodge in the isbas is in proportion to the well-
being of the families. The cockroach it seems has a less
aristocratic nature, but even it needs more comfort than the
poor humans; among 9.3% of the peasants no cockroaches
are found because of the hunger and cold that prevail in
their dwellings." (*4)
Simultaneously with the rise of the peasant question to

acute proportions came the problems of the cities. Because
of the lack of commercial and industrial development in
Russia in the eighteenth century, there were few cities, and
these were almost entirely of a governmental character,
constituting military and administrative points rather than
centers of manufacturing and production. With the
introduction of large scale industries, cities were built
overnight and laid out in barrack formation. Thus what
existed in Russia was the most concentrated industry in
Europe on the basis of the most backward agriculture, with
the most powerful governmental machine in the world
hindering the progressive development of its own country.
The Russian bourgeoisie was very weak. The big factories
were controlled by foreigners, who, moreover, would not
1189
support the native capitalists in any struggle against the
Czar, first, because there was no other government that
safely could be established; second, because the Czar was
their great supporter and subsidizer; and third, because
these foreign financiers were the hated enemy of the arising
proletariat.
In ignoring small industry, the financial bourgeoisie and

Czarism had taken away the very basis of liberalism and
democracy. Between the toilers and the rulers there was no
large and solid middle layers of population, as in England
or France or America. Just as the native bourgeoisie could
play very little role by itself, neither the petty bourgeoisie of
the cities nor the peasants scattered throughout the
countryside could function alone.
The only class within the country that could possibly

change the situation was the proletariat. Already in 1897
the figures showed that there were over nine million wage
earners in the country, of whom about three and one-half
million were in the principal industries, workers who were
in the decisive sectors of the nation's economy and who,
although a minority in the population, could paralyze the
whole system. In a country like Russia, the government had
to rely for its control upon the railroads and telegraph far
more than in the West.
Within the proletariat, the sections employed in the large

factories and heavy industries, laboring under unspeakable
conditions, had to take the lead. These heavy industry
workers avidly took to socialism. Hence, Russia furnished
another contrast: on the basis of the greatest illiteracy and
in a country heavily agrarian and the most backward of
Europe, there flourished a socialistic proletariat that could
read and write, which actively followed world affairs,
whether these were events in the Balkans, debates in the
1190
Reichstag, or news from America. No counter force could
compare with this class of workers in numbers, in
understanding, in power.
Thus, even if in Russia the only revolution possible was a

bourgeois capitalist one for the abolition of absolutism and
the introduction of the capitalist system of the West, yet it
was not the bourgeoisie, too small and too fearful to act, nor
the peasantry, benighted and isolated, but only the
proletariat which could accomplish the task. This was
apparent by the time of the first revolution of 1905. Russia
skipped the whole period of democracy, whether liberal or
social, and moved straight from Czarism to the Soviet.
The stifling nightmare of Czarist despotism was bound to

drive every courageous and honest intellectual into the
ranks of opposition. Every trip abroad that was made,
every book produced in the West that was read in Russia,
every contact with other countries, profoundly convinced
him that the social and political order of Russia was
doomed. Czarism could exist only by isolating the country
from Europe, as the Kremlin was isolated from Russia, and
by erecting an intolerable tariff wall on goods, coupled with
a complete prohibition of intellectual intercourse. But such
complete isolation had become impossible. The very needs
of the State compelled communion with the rest of the
world; in spite of the most rigid censorship, Western ideas
began to penetrate and Western customs to be adopted. The
walls of semi-Asiatic, semi-colonial Russia could no more
enclose than the walls of colonial and Asiatic China.
The first discontented intellectuals came from the nobility;

they were "repentent noblemen," whose consciences were
smitten by the atrocious crimes being committed against
1191
the serfs and people of Russia. As the middle of the
nineteenth century approached, these people discovered
that deep in the heart of Russia the old customs of primitive
communism were still existent; just as the Germans were
unearthing the ancient Teutonic Mark, they discovered with
joy the old Russian Mir in the primitive agrarian
countryside.
Here, then, was the basis of a home-grown socialism ---

the Mir. The Mir was peculiarly Russian and it was
flattering to the Russian intellectuals to believe that Russian
genius had understood the need for collectivism and co-
operation. What other interpretations could Russian
"enlightened" noblemen and landlords possibly have made
of socialism? They hated the Czar, there was no capitalism;
the only antithetical regime known to them was
the Mir, typifying the very soul of the Russian people and
covered, with the religious mysticism of the immemorial
past. Against the constant revolutionism of the West they
posed the deep placidity and tradition of the Mir.
With the emancipation of the serfs, these intellectual

elements of the nobility were forced to witness the more or
less complete breaking up of the old village Mir formations
and the introduction of capitalism, with all its
individualism and differentiations, to the countryside.
These intellectuals then turned to nihilism, or nothingism, a
philosophy against the State and against all authority. To
the nihilists' negative ideas was added a faith in the
goodness and value of the people and a belief in the
necessity of going to the masses to enlighten them, to bring
them culture and science so that they could improve their
condition. Thus nihilists became narodniki or populists.
The narodniki or populists of the 70's were collectivist
Anarchists limited by their Russian agrarian horizon. They
1192
were willing to admit that, in the West, with capitalism
gripping both city and country, and with political
democracy achieved as the heritage of past revolutions, the
road to socialism lay through a revolutionary political
movement of wage earners. In absolutist Russia, however,
they held that socialism, avoiding the painful capitalistic
period, could be evolved directly out of the Mir. And thus
the narodniki appealed to the peasants and advocated
loosely federated peasant communes.
These "enlighteners" had a violent hatred of the feudal

regime and of all its social, economic, and judicial
consequences. They had a profound attachment for the
liberty and science and enlightened culture of Western
Europe, and believed they were carrying forward the
traditions of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the enlightened
philosophers of the eighteenth century before the
revolution. To this was added a genuine love for and
interest in the people, particularly the peasantry.
The narodniki were ready for socialism, they were ready for
revolution, and their chief enemy was Czarism. They were
unable, none the less, to attain any of their aims for the
simple reason that there was no class capable of responding
to their ideals. Furthermore, the fact that capitalism not yet
had developed to any great extent in Russia made the
narodniki believe that peasants and villages, not
proletarians and cities, would be the basis for socialism,
that the soul and destiny of Russia would enable the
country to skip the period of capitalism.
As their campaigns among the peasantry failed, in spite of

the greatest nobility of character and heroism of action on
their part, the more desperate element began to take to
terrorist deeds, from 1878 on, culminating in the
assassination of Alexander II in 1881. This act was the swan
1193
song of these narodniki. The government let loose a
ferocious counter-attack that smashed their organizations to
pieces. At the same time, with the rise of capitalism in the
80's, the intelligentsia was changing its character and role.
Intellectualizing was no longer monopolized by the nobility.
Bourgeois students and thinkers were turning to socialism,
now become a great movement throughout Europe. It was
becoming clear that Russia could not skip the stage of
capitalism.
Thus the terrorist and narodniki movement died, both from

the arrests and execution of its leaders by the government
and because of the abandonment of its cause by the new
generation. Moreover, the narodniki had lost their historic
progressiveness as they fought against the internationalist
Marxists with their nationalist program that Russia must
not follow the "barbaric" West. Because of this hostility to
Marxism, although the remnants of the narodniki in the 80's
and 90's retained some following and prestige, and it was
from their ranks that the Marxists generally evolved, (*5) it
had now become necessary for the Marxists to enter into the
sharpest polemic with these remnants of the past so as to
eradicate their influence altogether.
The rise of the typical bourgeois intellectual resulted in the

spread of Marxism from various angles. Such intellectuals,
products as they were of the city, factory, and commerce,
could not idealize the backward village. Marxism from the
very start had attracted them, since one of the cardinal
points elaborated in "Capital" was that the victory of
capitalism was bound to overthrow the old order of
Czarism. It was no accident that Marx received the highest
praise not from German and Western professors but from
the professors of economy in St. Petersburg. Here, then, was
a whole line of intellectuals who believed thoroughly in the
1194
economics of Marx, although they refused to become
revolutionists. This was the school of "legal" Marxists best
exemplified by Peter Struve.
On the other hand there was another line of intellectuals

who had come from the revolutionary narodniki, who
accepted not only Marxist economics but above all Marxist
revolutionary theories, who were willing to go into action,
and who based themselves upon the proletariat. In the
struggle against the old narodnik theories, both these
Marxist elements, the proletarian and the "legal," united.
This unity could be effected since the "legal" Marxist, while
anxious for his own preservation, by no means intended to
weep over the fall of the Czar, and was quite willing to
wish others luck in their revolutionary attempts. On the
other side, among the proletarian Marxists, it was realized
the time had not yet come to act alone, that the whole
situation was still amorphous, that it was necessary to keep
in contact with all other anti-Czarist movements.
The first great step to clarify the movement was taken when
George Plechanov together with Vera Zasulich left the
narodniki to form the first genuine Marxist group abroad.
From then on a stream of Marxist literature of a high
quality began to pour forth in the Russian language, and
this group gradually began to win great influence. To this
nucleus Lenin soon adhered, but instead of remaining
abroad, he concentrated his efforts, as long as he was able,
on the building of groups within Russia itself.
Henceforth, until the 1905 revolution, the big question

before the Marxists was the establishment of an adequate
program, a party organization, and tactics. It was on these
questions that the Marxists not only separated themselves
from other groups, but within their own ranks broke
sharply into three different tendencies: the legal Marxists,
1195
the Mensheviks, and the Bolsheviks. Rapidly Lenin sprang
to the fore as the great leader in every phase of the struggle.
Lenin's first step was to divorce himself as drastically as

possible from the populists of whom he had been a member.
He pointed out that populism was distinguished by three
reactionary ideas: first, that capitalism in Russia was a
symptom of decline, a "retrogression," thereby inducing the
populists to try to "restrain" capitalism and thus to play into
the hands of reaction; second, that the economic system of
Russia with its communes, artels and Mirs, was something
peculiar to Russia and not a general phenomenon
characteristic at one time of all backward people, thereby
leading the narodniki into the swamp of nationalism; and
third, that the intellectuals could "divert history" and
change the course of material interests and social evolution,
thus giving rise to a false idea of the relation of the
intellectuals to society and to the masses.
From these views of the populists of the 90's, Lenin arrived

at the conclusion that such populists really had nothing to
do with the heritage of the "Enlighteners" of the 70's, that in
fact it was the Marxists who carried forward the historic
work and noble traditions of the democrats of the past
generation. Here was a classic example of the methods of
Lenin. In every possible way he tried to make Marxism fit
in with Russian traditions and Russian character and to root
it deeply in the nation. By no means could Marxism appear
as something foreign or artificially applied to Russian
conditions. Revolutionary scientist, he knew the value of
traditions, customs, and morals.
Whereas the "Enlighteners" had fought reaction and

favored the West, the populists were turning towards Asia
and were idealizing the backward peasantry, therein
hindering agrarian improvement. Furthermore, the
1196
populists, entirely unlike the heroic "Enlighteners," were
bureaucrats through and through. "But populists always
think of the population generally, and the toiling
population in particular, as the object of various more or
less intelligent experiments, and as inanimate material
which can be directed along certain paths. They never look
upon the various classes of the population as independent
historical factors in the given path, they never consider that
the conditions of that path may cause either the
development or the paralysis of the independent and
conscious activities of these makers of history." (*6)
Finally, Lenin summed up the three groups, the

"Enlighteners," the decadent populists, and the Marxists, as
follows: the "Enlighteners" had favored contemporary
social development in Russia but had not understood the
inevitable contradictions; the populists opposed this social
development because they did understand its
contradictions; the Marxists advocated social development
because they understood its contradictions and knew that
these would usher in a new world. Both the "Enlighteners"
and the Marxists were optimists and wanted to clear away
barriers; their aims corresponded to classes arising and
growing with capitalism. The populists were doomed to
futility.
Under such an attack, the old populists indeed could not

for long maintain their position and, in 1900, they formed a
new organization, the social-revolutionaries, with a
platform calling for a democracy in Russia and a capitalist
liberalism. Now basing themselves on the city and not on
the country, the social-revolutionaries, however, continued
to emphasize the agrarian program. Later, in 1917, a Left-
Socialists-Revolutionists Party split off and for a while co-
operated with the Bolsheviks on the question of immediate
1197
socialization of the land and the establishment of a Soviet
Republic. But the alliance broke down in 1918, and the
social-revolutionaries were erased from the scene.
The next battle was to be within the ranks of the Marxists

themselves. First, the conflict would have to take place with
the Legal Marxists in an effort to drive them out of the
movement and to liquidate their influence among the
workers. At that time the movement was extremely
inchoate, with scattered circles operating independently in
various cities of the country. These local circles established
no traditions and maintained no continuity. Lenin set to
work to remedy these conditions and, while Plechanov was
building his League of Social Democrats abroad, Lenin was
forming his League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the
Working Class in St. Petersburg. At that time the
intellectuals had no idea of remaining separate and apart
from the masses, but tried in every possible way to
penetrate the ranks of the workers and to meet them on
every occasion. On their part, the advanced workers
welcomed this intervention of the intellectuals and took
advantage of their help in strike struggles and organization
problems. The dangerous character of the work under
Czarist conditions prevented any snobbish and
bureaucratic tendencies from becoming strong among the
sincere intellectuals. Thus it was part of Lenin's tasks to
help in the strike agitation and organizational activity of the
workers; while thus engaged he was arrested in 1897 and
sent to Siberia.
In the meantime, in 1898 the social-democrats decided to

hold a convention to work out a definitive program. In this
convention, Lenin and many other characters in exile could
not participate. The convention itself was broken up by the
1198
police before a program could be worked out and a national
organization established. Meanwhile there had been little
effort on the part of anyone to prevent the bourgeois
Marxists from calling themselves social-democrats.
Upon his release from Siberia in 1900, Lenin was

commissioned to go abroad and found a paper that would
present these very points before the revolutionary Marxists.
This was done, and in collaboration with Martov,
Plechanov, Potressov and others, Lenin founded the
paper Iskra (the Spark). From its inauguration, it was the
policy to keep Legal Marxists like Peter Struve out of the
editorial board, although they might be used as
collaborators. Thus, for the first time there was drawn a
very sharp line between those who based themselves on the
workers and favored revolution, and those who were only
liberals using Marxist phrases.
As the movement began to grow throughout Russia, it was

necessary to call another Congress in 1903. In preparation
for this, Lenin opened up a sharp polemic against the so-
called "Economists" or trade union communists. All
through the years 1900 and 1901 this battle was fought,
until, by the time of the Conference in 1903, the issue had
been clarified in favor of the position of Lenin. Knowing
well that the movement was not homogeneous, Lenin was
not in favor of rushing into a new congress or elections
until all matters had been clarified; he believed that it was
the duty of a revolutionary paper to bring openly before the
workers all the disputed questions. This was the function of
the Iskra.
The paper was designed to give space to theoretical

questions, to furnish information on the Parties in the West,
and to respond to questions that arose in all spheres of
daily life at home or abroad. The paper was to prepare for
1199
the drafting of a real Party program, especially on
organization questions, and to study carefully the
conditions of the working class and the methods for
arousing it. Above all it was necessary to fuse the growing
Russian labor movement with the Marxian socialists. "Only
when this contact has been established will a Social-
Democratic Labour Party be established in Russia; for
Social-Democracy does not exist merely to serve the
spontaneous labour movement . . . but to combine Socialism
with the labour movement." (*7) While firmly upholding
the Marxist tendency, the paper would be open for
discussion to enable all fighters against autocracy to use it.
From the very beginning, Lenin took the position:

"Consequently, while appealing primarily to the Russian
socialists and class-conscious workers, we do not appeal
exclusively to them. We also call upon all those who are
oppressed by the present political system in Russia, to all
those who are striving for the emancipation of the Russian
people from their slavery to support the publications which
will be devoted to a work of organizing the labour
movement into a revolutionary political party. We place
our columns at their disposal in order that they may expose
the despicability and criminality of the Russian autocracy.
We make this appeal in the conviction that the banner of
the political struggle raised by Russian Social-Democracy
can and will become the banner of the whole people." (*8)
Thus, before the Party really was created, Lenin had formed
his own paper to obtain that unity of ideas which was
essential. To present this ideological agreement, the
paper Iskra entered, not merely into questions of wages and
working conditions for the workers, but above all into the
political questions of the day centered around the question
of overthrowing Czarism. The Iskra became filled with
1200
important articles of such a nature as those on May Day, on
the war against China, on a program for the peasantry, on
police brutality, on the revolt of the students in the
universities, on the liberal movements, and on the famine.
As this whole orientation was opposed by the "Economists,"
it was necessary to drive them to the wall before the Party
Congress of 1903.
While the Iskraists were concentrating on connecting all the

isolated circles and directing their struggle against Czarism,
the "Economists" had done some valuable work in the
factories, leading strikes, winning demands for the workers,
organizing them secretly, etc. As they became successful
they declared that only the trade union work was important;
that political circles did not have to be connected; that
politics belonged to the intellectuals and not to the workers
who could get all they wanted by strike action against the
employers. The "Economists" sneered at the various
conspiratorial groups created by Lenin and called for broad
mass organizations. Besides, they affirmed, this was not yet
the time for the political struggle against the Czar. First, the
workers were not yet ready. They had to be educated to
politics gradually. This education was to be given in stages.
In the beginning there were to be strikes for economic aims,
then strikes with political aims; only then could there be
direct political movements, only after the confidence of the
workers had been won in the economic struggle. Second,
said the "Economists," the moment was not a revolutionary
one. If it should become revolutionary, then it would be all
right to change tactics and insist on the political struggle
against the Czar. The Iskra was run by a bunch of sectarian
intransigents who overestimated the influence of social
science and intellectualism among the workers and were
too idealistic, not taking into sufficient consideration the
material environment. Furthermore, the "Economists"
1201
claimed the Iskraists, while very sharp to the real workers'
champions themselves, made alliances with the Liberals
and others, to induce them to write for their paper.
There was no question but that much of the "Economists"'

criticism was correct as it concerned many individuals then
connected with Lenin, but before Lenin could deal with his
allies he had to deal first of all with the "Economists"; some
of their supporters, moreover, on certain points agreed with
Lenin. It is important to note that Lenin attacked his semi-
supporters far more bitterly than he did the open enemy.
This was one of Lenin's cardinal polemical tactics and
helped to account for the extreme bitterness of all debates
within the ranks of the Marxists of Russia. Repeatedly
Lenin insisted that the near-friend was far more dangerous
than the open enemy; he turned his heaviest fire not upon
the opportunist but upon the conciliators to the
opportunists who were to be found nearest him.
In answer to the "Economists," Lenin pointed out that they

were underestimating the political struggle and were
divorcing the workers from politics, thus driving the social-
democratic movement into the old sectarian ruts and
keeping the workers benighted. Isolated from social-
democracy, the labor movement would become petty and
would function only as the tail to the capitalist parties. The
real task was to imbue the masses of the proletariat with the
ideas of Socialism and political consciousness and to
organize a revolutionary party closely connected with the
spontaneous labor movement.
Furthermore, the revolutionists were not to be mere coolies

catering to the prejudices of the workers and their day-to-
day fights. "Social-Democracy is a combination of the
labour movement with Socialism. Its task is not passively to
serve the labour movement at each of its separate stages,
1202
but to represent the interests of the movement as a whole,
to point out to this movement its ultimate aims and its
political task, and to protect its political and ideological
independence." (*9)
According to Lenin, it was absolutely necessary at this stage

of the struggle in Russia not to draw an artificial distinction
between the intellectual and the worker, but to unite the
two as closely as possible. People were to be trained who
would devote to the revolution not only their spare
evenings, as the workers could do, but the whole of their
lives, in an effort to build up an organization with a vast
division of labor.
Constantly must it be borne in mind that the chief enemy

was the State. Only if there was a strong political party
could the local strike or local rebellion flare into a
revolution. The concessions to be won on the economic
field were but slight skirmishes with the enemy, mainly
valuable for training good troops. To fail to attack the State
was to play into the hands of the Czar, who was pursuing a
subtle policy. Unlike Bismarck, who had made an alliance
with the employers against the workers, the Czar was
trying to play off one against the other, since he despised or
feared both. For example, the Czar was taking a hand in
passing legislation to force employers to improve
conditions of work; thus, he was posing as a friend of the
workmen against the employer. The Czarist police agent,
Zubatoff, actually began building police trade unions.
Everywhere the Czar presented himself as the "Little
Father" of his people. Under such conditions it was
dangerous for the revolutionists to isolate the struggle for
economic demands from the struggle for the end of
Czarism. And the workers increasingly were beginning to
see this. Repeatedly, large strikes broke out in support of
1203
the political demonstrations of the peasants and the
students, and for political aims. Life itself was refuting the
"Economists" and showing that they who claimed to be
close to the workers were really shirking the revolutionary
struggle and isolating themselves.
According to Lenin, the "Economists," in ridiculing theory

and the discussion of the principles of the class struggle,
were relying entirely too much upon the spontaneity of the
masses to produce the revolution. They were overlooking
the fact that, without a professional revolutionist
organization, the victory of the workers would be
impossible; thus, they were falling into the errors of the
opportunists generally. What was needed in Russia was not
the stimulation of spontaneity --- Czarism would see amply
to that --- but the raising of that spontaneous revolt to the
level of conscious, connected, systematic, class struggle.
Encouraged by the mass organizations they had created,
the "Economists" tended to lose themselves in the mass;
they failed to understand that the mass character of the
movement only rendered it more obligatory than ever that
they should build up a centralized, disciplined organization
of revolutionists.
The catering to spontaneity on the part of the "Economists"

had led them to move hysterically now from one extreme
position to another and, in periods of retreat, they tended to
give up the battle. Lenin warned them that "It would be a
grievous error indeed to build up the party organization in
the expectation only of outbreaks and street fighting, or
only upon the 'forward march of the drab, every-day
struggle.' We must always carry on our every-day work and
always be prepared for everything, because very frequently,
it is almost impossible to foresee beforehand when periods
of outbreaks will give way to periods of calm." (*10)
1204
As for working with the liberals, this was necessary in the
political struggle against Czarism, although it might not be
possible in the economic struggle against the employer or in
the fight for socialism directly. "The party of the proletariat
must learn to catch every liberal just at the moment when
he is prepared to move forward an inch, and compel him to
move forward a yard. If he is obstinate and won't --- we
shall go forward without him, and over his body." (*11)
The "Economists" should not imagine, Lenin thundered,

that those who were with Iskra had failed to go to the
workers or to enter into the work of strikes and economic
organization. Quite the contrary. They had been noted for
this very ability and had been arrested on this account.
They were no ivory-tower intellectuals far removed from
the masses, telling the workers what to do. But they did not
limit themselves merely to trade union agitation in an
absolutist country like Russia. It must not be believed that
the socialist movement was made up only of workers. The
history of all countries showed that the workers by
themselves were capable only of trade union action and
alone could not reach the level of political revolutionism.
To attain this level there must be added the theory and
science of socialism which workers at the bench toiling their
lives away could not evolve.
It had been assumed that socialism necessarily and

absolutely arose from the class struggle. But already
Kautsky had shown this to be untrue. "Of course, Socialism,
as a theory, has its roots in modern economic relationships
in the same way as the class struggle of the proletariat has,
and in the same way as the latter emerges from the struggle
against the capitalist-created poverty and misery of the
masses. But Socialism and the class struggle arise side by
side and not one out of the other; each arises out of
1205
different premises. Modern Socialist consciousness can
arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge.
Indeed, modern economic science is as much a condition
for Socialist production, as, say, modern technology, and
the proletariat can create neither the one nor the other, no
matter how much it may desire to do so; both arise out of
the modern social process. The vehicles of science are not
the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia: It was out of
the heads of members of this stratum that modern
Socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it
to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in
their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle
where conditions allow that to be done. Thus Socialist
consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian
class struggle from without and not something that arose
within it spontaneously." (*12)
The socialist movement was to be a fusion of both groups,

and the workers were to take an active part in it, not as
workers, however, but as scientific socialists. It was vital to
develop leadership, and the social-democratic movement
had to pay the greatest attention to theory and science so as
to lead the workers rather than to trail after the events.
The "Economists" were concentrating entirely upon trade

union action, as though this were the sole or best method to
produce the revolution. Such a position was absolutely false,
especially in Russia. There were many ways by which the
revolution could break out other than through strikes."All
and sundry manifestations of police tyranny and autocratic
outrage, in addition to the evils connected with the
economic struggle, are equally ‘widely applicable’ as a
means of 'drawing in' the masses. The tyranny of the
Zemztvo chiefs, the flogging of the peasantry, the
corruption of the officials, the conduct of the police towards
1206
the 'common people' in the cities, the fight against the
famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving
towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of
taxes, the persecution of the religious sects, the severe
discipline in the army, the militarist conduct towards the
students and the liberal intelligentsia --- all these and a
thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though
not directly connected with the 'economic' struggle, do they,
in general, represent a less ‘widely applicable’ method and
subject for political agitation and for drawing the masses
into the political struggle?" (*13)
The workers could not win by looking only to themselves.

They had to know the workings of all classes of society.
Without a knowledge of the whole they could not know
even their own part. The workers could acquire political
consciousness not solely from within their ranks but also
from without, outside the bounds of the economic struggle
of workers and employers. "The Social-Democrat's ideal
should not be a trade-union secretary but a tribune of the
people, able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and
oppression, no matter where it takes place, no matter what
stratum or class of the people it affects; he must be able to
group all these manifestations into a single picture of police
violence and capitalist exploitation; he must be able to take
advantage of every petty event in order to explain his
Socialistic convictions and his Social-Democratic
demands to all in order to explain to all and every one the
world historical significance of the struggle for the
emancipation of the proletariat." (*14)
The problems of mobilizing workers were entirely different

from those of organizing revolutionists. The workers'
organizations must be broad, open, and of a mass character.
They must function legally in the main. The revolutionary
1207
organization, on the contrary, must know how to go
underground and to operate secretly, and must be of a
trained conspiratorial character whereby every member is
tested and can be relied upon, where the discipline is of the
strictest. The proletariat needed both types of organizations.
Under Czarism, the method of approach was with the

strong revolutionary organization, that is, from the top and
not from the bottom, with tested members and leaders
engaged in mass work of an all-rounded character without
the 'dozen' of tried and talented leaders (and talented men
are not born by hundreds), professionally trained, schooled
by long experience and working in perfect harmony, no
class in modern society is capable of conducting a
determined struggle." (*15) The student should supply the
workers with his crumbs of knowledge, but above all it is
the talented workers who should be trained for leadership.
It was a "duty to assist every capable worker to become
a professional agitator, organizer, propagandist, literature
distributor, etc., etc." (*16) "A workingman who is at all
talented and 'promising' must not be left to work eleven
hours a day in a factory. We must arrange that he be
maintained by the Party, that he may in due time go
underground, that he change the place of his activity,
otherwise he will not enlarge his experience, he will not
widen his outlook, and will not be able to stay in the fight
against the gendarmes for several years." (*17)
The bitter fights within the Marxist ranks had led to a split
in 1900. The minority adherents of Plechanov and Lenin,
formerly of the Emancipation of Labor Group later
reorganized as the League of Social-Democrats Abroad,
now formed a new body called "Social-Democrat" while the
majority made up of the "Economists" and conciliators
retained the old name. In the course of the sharp debates,
1208
however, the majority steadily lost ground. They argued,
therefore, that in the Party there was room for both,
implying then that the Party was not to be a unified
centralized whole, but a loose body of various factions. In
effect, this was connected with their theories which played
down the role of the Party and relied solely upon the
spontaneity of the masses. Lenin's whole theory, however,
was one of tremendous emphasis on the role of the Party,
the vanguard of the workers. Although this question of
what sort of Party should be built was to be threshed out
later in the fight with the Mensheviks, it first became raised
in the struggle with the "Economists." Against the
"Economists"' position, Lenin called for the formation of a
Party that would expel the opportunists and the revisionists
from its ranks. The idea of a Party containing elements far
apart and constantly attacking each other was abhorrent to
him, as such factions would paralyze the organization and
turn it into a debating society rather than a revolutionary
organ of action.
Lenin was attacked on the ground that he was dictatorial

and did not believe in democracy within the Party. The
"Economists" and conciliators pointed out that the kind of
centralized leadership Lenin advocated, with the Party built
from the top, would give rise to a tendency to adventurism
in politics. Also, it was anti-democratic; the Party should be
built from below, not from above.
Lenin replied that, under Czarist conditions of illegality, it

was absolutely impossible to maintain full publicity for
elections and the exposure of candidates, without which
democracy would be a farce. The secret acts of
revolutionists could not be controlled by all the
membership; thus elections were impossible on the basis of
acts. After all, democracy was only a vicarious mechanism
1209
for confidence. Confidence could be attained only in the
course of the struggle wherein leaders and workers fought
together and showed their respective worth. "The only
serious organizational principle the active workers of our
movement can accept is: strict secrecy, strict selection of
members, and the training of professional revolutionists. If
we possessed these qualities, 'democracy' and something
even more would be guaranteed to us, namely: complete
comradely, mutual confidence among revolutionists." (*18)
Even without democracy, the membership of a genuinely

revolutionary organization actually would control, since
genuine communists would stop at nothing to rid
themselves of an undesirable member. Such revolutionists
had a lively sense of their responsibility and had no time to
think about toy forms of democracy. "Myshkin, Rogachev,
Zhelyabov, Mikhailov, Perovskaya, Figner, and others
never regarded themselves as leaders, and no one ever
elected or appointed them as such, although as a matter of
fact, they were leaders because both in the propaganda
period, as well as in the period of the fight against the
government, they took the brunt of the work upon
themselves, they went into the most dangerous places, and
their activities were the most fruitful. Priority came to them
not because they wished it, but because the comrades
surrounding them had confidence in their wisdom, their
energy, and loyalty. To be afraid of some kind of
Areopagus ... that would arbitrarily govern the movement
is far too naive. Who would obey it?" (*19)
Before the 1903 Congress was held, the "Economist" wing

capitulated and yielded their arguments on trade unionism.
But the truce was but temporary. The same elements were
to fuse with the Mensheviks and re-phrase their
1210
opportunism at the Second Congress. This in turn led to the
famous split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.
To sum up, we can say that the history of social-democracy

in Russia can be divided into three periods. The first lasted
from 1884 to 1894. Here theory and program took root, but
the numbers were small and social-democracy was isolated
from the labor movement. This was the period of gestation.
The second period was from 1894 to 1898, a period of
infancy and adolescence. Here there was a social movement
and a political party. Big strides were made by the
intelligentsia who circulated among the workers. The third
period was from 1898 to the Convention of 1903, and was
marked by confusion and vacillation, Legal Marxism,
"Economism," etc. This period was to culminate in the
Congress of 1903.
Having settled the important questions of political program,

the struggle against Czarism, and the relation of the Party
to the class, it had become time for Russian social-
democracy to end the chaotic situation of isolated circles
and to build a centralized, disciplined national organization.
The Second Congress witnessed the struggle between the
opportunists and the revolutionary elements over questions
of organization.
In Russia the situation at the time was as follows: social-

democratic "committees," composed of a small selected
number of revolutionaries, existed in various cities. These
committees were at the head of the local labor movements.
Behind these committees were numerous circles of
sympathizers and militant elements that carried out special
work but were not part of the organization itself. The
question was: What should be the relation of these
1211
sympathetic circles and detached individuals to the
organization?
On questions of organization the old Iskra group itself split

up. On the one side was Lenin, to whom Plechanov was
attached, and on the other side were Martov and Axelrod.
Close to these was Trotsky. Later Plechanov was to leave
Lenin and go over to the opposite camp. The Right Wing
wanted to permit all of the circles mentioned above to call
themselves part of the Party, provided they paid dues and
put themselves under the directions of the Party, regularly
participating in its activities. Lenin's formula was
somewhat different. Members not only would have to pay
dues, but they would have to join one of the Party
organizations. On the surface it seemed the differences
between the two formulas were slight indeed. (*20) But, as
the debate progressed it became apparent that the issue was
based not merely on organization but also on the relation of
the Party to the class in general, on the role of the Party in
the class struggle, on the relations within the Party, and on
an estimate of the particular situation in which the
revolutionists lived. Questions of organization became
intimately linked up with those of tactics, strategy, and
program, absolutely vital to the movement.
This is very often the case. It is a great mistake to believe

that organization questions are secondary matters.
Certainly organization is a means to an end, an instrument
in the struggle; but one builds an instrument in accordance
with one's use and need. If the instrument desired is one
which could not possibly become a weapon in the class
struggle, it is clear that the fight for such an organization to
prevail is a fight for a non-struggle program and is
intimately linked up with other questions of program.
Indeed, very often differences on questions of organization
1212
are profound indicators of differences in programs of
struggle reflecting antagonistic classes of society.
At that time in Russia all sections of the revolutionary

movement were compelled by the ruthless terror of
Czarism to adhere to a program calling for the violent
overthrow of the Czar. It was only through questions of
organization that the existing differences within the Marxist
camp could arise in acute form before the Czar was
overthrown. It was the genius of Lenin that, in the
discussion of relatively picayune questions, such as who
should be considered a member of the Party, he could
discern differences which later were to compel the different
factions to shoot each other from opposite sides of the
barricades.
In the course of the discussions it became plain that the

Right Wing wanted a loose grouping called the Social-
Democratic Party which would be made up of all sorts of
elements in the various circles. In this way the Party would
be practically indistinguishable from the class; it no longer
would be a highly selected group of revolutionists who had
dedicated their lives to their cause. Within this vague and
loose Party, in view of the prevailing conditions of
persecution, there would have to exist another tighter, more
conspiratorial group. Hence there would be two categories
of citizens within the Socialist Party, one made up of
ordinary members who would not be disciplined strictly
nor necessarily active, the other composed of the active
functionaries who would work conspiratorially.
The Lenin wing was opposed to this whole conception. It

was in agreement with the theory that a political party must
embrace more than professional revolutionists. This wing
defined professional revolutionist as one who considers it
his life work to help to bring about the revolution; a
1213
professional revolutionist was not necessarily one paid by
the organization to devote full time to it, but rather one
who gave all his time to the revolutionary movement,
whether paid or not, one who considered his private
employment, if he was forced to work for others in order to
live, as merely an interlude or a side line. The Party had to
admit masses of militant workers who were not ready to
renounce their jobs and their families in order to travel
anywhere the Party needed them. While these could not be
professional revolutionists and lead the Party, they could be
good soldiers in the ranks. Thus Lenin also agreed to the
need of extension of the membership. The disagreement
consisted in how loose the Party organization should be,
which elements should be excluded and which included
and what should be the minimum activity and discipline to
be exacted.
Far from fusing the Party with the class and taking in every
striker or every intellectual who called himself a socialist,
Lenin believed in distinguishing the Party from the class on
the ground that the Party was to be solely the vanguard, the
selected best elements. Every member must be active, must
be ready to do his duty, must be disciplined, accountable,
and loyal, while, at the same time, the Party was to be
responsible for the actions of every member. If all sorts of
elements were admitted, it would be impossible to trust the
rank and file; the result would be bureaucracy, the
separation of the officials from the members, an
undemocratic and unreliable organization. There were to be
no first and second degree citizens within the Party, the
mass of members to perform the hard work, while the
functionaries and the professional revolutionists enjoyed
the only real democracy within the Party.
1214
It had been argued by the Mensheviks that, since the Social-
Democratic Party was to be a class organ, it should take in
every member of the class. Every striker, when arrested,
should be allowed to say in a court room that he was a
socialist; the more widespread the title of Party member,
the better, and the greater the prestige of the Party. To this
Lenin answered that the better organized the vanguard of
the workers was, the less easily could the police break up
its ranks, the better could it control mass organizations,
unions, strikes, demonstrations, etc. The higher the quality
of the vanguard, the easier to organize the mass of
workmen and to win their respect. ". . . the stronger our
Party organizations, consisting of real Social Democrats,
will be, the less will the vacillation and instability within the
Party be and the wider, the more many-sided, the richer
and the more fruitful will the influence of the Party be over
the elements of the surrounding working class masses which
it leads." (*21)
According to Lenin, whether the Party became a mass

organization or a sect, was measured not necessarily by
whether it admitted the masses into its ranks, but rather
was tested by the criterion whether it expressed the needs
and interests of the masses and fought for them, whether it
was followed and respected by the masses. In the latter case,
it would be a mass Party, regardless of the actual numbers
in its ranks although, naturally, should there exist such an
organization fighting correctly and bravely for the mass of
people, it would soon grow in size accordingly.
.The Right Wing would have lowered the Russian Party to

the same level as the Second International, with its British
Labor Parties which were hardly better than the reformist
trade unions. In Russia the movement was faced with a
similar identification of Party with union and mass
1215
organization, but for the opposite reason; that is to say, in
Russia, both the Party and unions were illegal, both had to
be constructed along secret conspiratorial lines, both were
severely punished by the dreaded Ochrana, or secret police
of the Czar. In both cases, whether in England or in Russia,
Right Wingers believed that the Socialist Party and the
trade unions were two arms of the same body, the working
class. Opportunists, they refused to see that the relation
between them was not one of limb to another, but rather of
brain to body. Mass organizations such as the unions and
similar groups were part of the body of the working class;
the party was to be the brain, the central ganglion
coordinating all phases of action, made up of the best, most
sensitive elements only.
While the Party must thus be distinguished from the class,

in the sense of containing only the most advanced elements,
and not lowering its bars to include all, within the Party
there must be no distinction between functionary or
"professional" and the ordinary member. All were to be
tested. There was to be strict centralization of leadership
and just as strict decentralization of tasks and responsibility.
Every member was to be given responsible and dangerous
work which must lead to his arrest. The best and most
capable and tested were to rise to the leadership. The
leadership itself was to have experienced all the phases of
the struggle, to be master of all the political weapons and
schools of arms extant, and should be constantly refreshed
in the struggle. In this way the old amateurishness of the
discrete circles would disappear, and the Party would
become the professional revolutionary factor within the less
conscious mass of workers.
Every member had the duty to report at least once a month.

There must be a strict division of labor and an end to the
1216
continual chattering and waste of time within the Party.
Those who refused to perform the dangerous, concrete
tasks of the movement, to immerse themselves in the
struggles of the workers, were to have no place within the
organization. Thus the intellectual butterfly was to be
driven out of the Socialist Party. Around the Party, of
course, there must be concentric circles of sympathizers,
from groups relatively narrow and close to the Party to
broad groups, such as the trade unions, which might be
very far from the Party itself, although controlled by it. But
in every case the sympathizer was far removed from the
member, the Party remembering that "The whole art of
conspiratorial organization consists in making use
of everything and everybody and in finding work for
everybody, at the same time retaining the leadership of the
whole movement, not by force, but by virtue of authority,
energy, greater experience, greater versatility, and greater
talent." (*22)
As the polemic on organization questions heightened, it

became apparent that the struggle involved also the
question whether the Party should be based upon the
workers or upon petty bourgeois intellectuals who would
learn that, within the Party, rules of discipline and activity
were not indispensable. The intellectual characterized by
individualism, careerism, and instability hated discipline,
but liked to work out theses and programs ad infinitum.
But, as Lenin put it, "It would be far better that ten men
who worked (men who really worked and were not striving
for office) should not call themselves members of the Party,
than that one chatterbox should have the right and the
opportunity to become a member." (*23) In plain language,
the formula of Lenin as elaborated meant that if one wanted
to be a member of the Party one could not regard
organizational relations purely platonically. The difference
1217
between Lenin and Martov was expressed by Lenin in
another manner: "The fundamental idea of Comrade
Martov --- self inscription in the Party --- is the false
'democratic' idea of constructing the Party from the bottom
upwards. On the other hand, my idea is 'bureaucratic' in the
sense that the Party should be constructed from the top
downwards, from the Party Congress to the individual
Party organization." (*24)
Lenin insisted that the composition of the Party be

thoroughly proletarian, and that such rules of organization
be laid down as would insure that proletarian elements
predominated. "Discipline and organization, lessons which
a bourgeois intellectual learns with such difficulty, are
learned with facility by the proletarian precisely because he
received his training in the 'school' of the factory. Mortal
fear of this school and a complete failure to understand its
organizing significance are characteristic of the methods of
reasoning which reflect petty bourgeois conditions of
existence, which give rise to the form of anarchism which
the German social- democrats have described as
'Edelanarchismus,' the anarchism of the nobleman. . . ." (*25)
"This is where the proletarian who has passed through the

school of the factory can and must give a lesson to anarchist
individualism. The class conscious worker has long ago
abandoned his swaddling clothes; he no longer flees from
the intellectual as such. The class conscious worker fully
appreciates the rich store of knowledge and the wider
political outlook of the social-democratic intellectual. But to
the extent that a real party is growing up among us, the
class conscious worker must learn to distinguish between
the mentality of the soldier of the proletarian army and that
of the bourgeois intellectual flaunting anarchist phrases; he
must learn to demand the fulfillment of the duties of
1218
membership of the Party, not only from the rank and file,
but also from the comrades in high places; . . ." (*26)
The rigid insistence by Lenin on the need to build the

organization from highly selected elements, starting at the
top rather than at the bottom, or, as he put it,
"bureaucratically" rather than "democratically," made his
group appear in a false light, even to those who were part
of the Left Wing of the Second International. Rosa
Luxemburg, for example, was much opposed to Lenin's
theories of organization, describing them as belonging to
Jacobins attached to the proletariat rather than to a truly
working class party. But time has shown that, in Lenin's
hands, the revolutionary group developed a centralism
balanced by democracy, while in the hands of his
opponents, the Socialist Parties, although apparently
managed from below, were corrupted through and through
with bureaucracy. The methods of Lenin were the only ones
appropriate to meet Czarist conditions and to insure that
the Party would lead, not follow, the course of events.
Even though a number of brilliant intellectuals were

eliminated thereby from the Party, the gains would be far
greater than the loss, since the workers would gain
organizational stability and discipline. "The proletariat has
no other weapon in the fight for power except organization.
Disorganized by the domination of anarchic competition in
the capitalist world, oppressed by forced labor for the
capitalists, constantly forced 'to the depths' of utter poverty,
ignorance and degeneracy, the proletariat can become and
inevitably will become an indomitable force only because
its intellectual unity created by the principles of Marxism is
fortified by the material unity of organization which welds
millions of toilers into an army of the working class. . . .
This army will close up its ranks more and more closely in
1219
spite of zig-zags and retreats, in spite of the opportunistic
phrases of the Girondists of contemporary Social-
Democracy, in spite of the smug self-satisfaction of obsolete
study circleism, and in spite of the brilliance and bustle of
intellectual anarchism." (*27)
The function of the Party being to act as the leader of the

class, it was imperative that the Party train workers from its
ranks into leaders; to do this, it was necessary to make the
whole activity of every candidate for every post well
known to the members. To place each person in his proper
place, full publicity was necessary. Sometimes, under
Czarism, such publicity was impossible. For that reason,
while centralism could not be dispensed with, democracy
could be subordinated to the conditions of the struggle
since, as has been remarked above, democracy was only a
substitute for confidence as a method of sifting out the
inefficient and poor material from the more capable and
tested.
If we sum up the quarrel between the two factions at the

Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party, it can be seen that the Mensheviks wanted to build,
along the lines of Bernstein or of Kautsky, some loose
organization that would be incapable of actual insurrection
and wherein not the workers but the petty bourgeois
intellectuals would predominate. The Bolsheviks were of
sterner stuff. They realized that the revolution against
Czarism was actually at hand and they meant to take
advantage of every opportunity. Anticipating the growing
spontaneous revolts that would break out, the Leninists
wanted to inject the factors of consciousness, of theory, of
science, of organization, of leadership, of steel-like firmness
into the pattern of politics.
1220
It was no accident that those who were opportunist on
questions of organization also believed that the Czar could
not be overthrown, or that, should he be overthrown, the
new social order would have to be of a capitalist nature
whereby the workers and peasants would not take power
directly. If the proletarian revolution was far away and the
day of insurrection was not at hand, it was not necessary to
build a disciplined and tested Party. On the other hand, if
one appreciated the basic fact that the present was the
period of action for the workers, it was absolutely
imperative to construct a Party capable of leading the
insurrection. At bottom, therefore, the questions of
organization had to do with the question whether the
workers should take power in Russia or whether it was the
turn of the petty bourgeois and bourgeois elements to do so,
the workers simply fighting the battles of capitalism rather
than their own. Those who thought the workers could take
power directly refused to allow the agents of other classes
to dominate the organization of the workers, the
Revolutionary Party.
At the Second Congress, a split occurred on these questions.

At first Lenin was in the minority and, because he felt the
question not acute enough to warrant an immediate split,
remained within the Party. But in the course of the
Congress, the Jewish Bund withdrew because they were not
permitted the autonomy they had demanded. This changed
the situation, and the followers of Lenin now became the
majority (those of the majority being called Bolsheviki in
Russian). Now it was the turn of the opportunist wing of
Martov to become the minority (Mensheviki). But instead of
abiding by majority rule, these lovers of democracy decided
to split and form their own faction, meeting separately
within the organization. Thus two groups crystallized
themselves, the Bolsheviks under Lenin and the
1221
Mensheviks under Martov. Plechanov, after the Congress,
left the Leninists to side with Martov in order to give
control of the Iskra to the Mensheviks. The two groups
worked together during the days of 1905 but broke again in
the latter part of that year. Attempts were made as late as
1910 to bring them together, but the efforts failed and, with
the World War and the Russian Revolution, the two came
into deadly hostility.
Under Lenin's guidance, the Bolsheviks as far back as 1903

were able to foretell that the Mensheviks would be the
Party to oppose the proletarian revolution; thus the Russian
communists were the first to train themselves for struggle
against the revisionists and opportunists of the Second
International. They became demoralized the least in periods
of defeat or stress and storm. Only because they had
organized as far back as 1903 were they able to keep
themselves intact in 1914 and 1917, and to take the
leadership in the revolutionary movement throughout the
world.
Footnotes
1. In this section we follow closely L. D. Trotsky's analysis

of Russian conditions to be found in his "1905." (English
translation non-existent.)
2. L. D. Trotsky: 1905 (French translation by Parajanine), p.

22.
3. S. Perlman: A Theory of The Labor Movement, p. 23,

footnote.
4. L. D. Trotsky: work cited, p. 37.
5. Plechanov, Lenin and Trotsky all started out as narodniki.
1222
6. Selections from Lenin, I, 24.
7. V. I. Lenin: The Iskra Period, I, 18.
8. The same, p. 21.
10. The same, pp. 244-245.
11. The same, II, p. 87.
12. K. Kautsky: quoted by Lenin in "What Is to Be Done"

in Collected Works, Vol. IV, Book II, p. 122.
13. The same, p. 140.
14. The same, pp. 159-160.
15. The same, p. 196.
16. The same, p. 205.
17. The same, p. 206.
18. The same, p. 213.
19. The same, pp. 212-213.
20. Lenin's formula was "A member of the Party is a person

who accepts the Party programme, pays Party dues and
personally joins one of the Party organizations." Martov's
formula was: "A member of the Social-Democratic Labour
Party of Russia is a person who adopts its programme, pays
Party dues and regularly participates in its activity under
the direction of one of its organizations." See Selections from
Lenin, I, 154.
1223
21. From "One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward" in Lenin
on Organization, p. 135.
22. Lenin on Organization, pp. 124-125.
23. Selections from Lenin, I, 161.
24. Lenin on Organization, p. 188.
25. Selections from Lenin, I, 188-189.
26. The same, pp. 103-104.
XXXVII. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1905
THE Russian Revolution of 1905 proved again the truth

which underlay the action of the French in the Paris
Commune, namely, that from then on every major war
would be followed by revolution, just as every successful
revolution would have to be met by war on the part of the
old order.
In 1903 all signs pointed to a great movement forward on

the part of the workers throughout Russia. The Czar was
forced into a number of concessions. A surge of strikes
broke out with a corresponding growth of revolutionary
activity. Even the Zubatoff police unions were becoming
transformed into genuine workers' organizations.
At this point the disastrous Russo-Japanese War occurred

and demonstrated anew the terrible criminality and
reactionary character of Czarism. By now, discontent was
1224
rife among all classes and, with the assassination of von
Plehve, the Liberals began openly to express themselves in
the form of banquets where they passed resolutions, while
the Zemstvos sent in petitions for a constitution. Peasant
revolts began to flare up all over Russia.
Then came the events of January 9, 1905. A great general

strike having occurred in St. Petersburg, the workers
decided, under the leadership of a priest, Father Gapon, to
present a petition of their grievances to their "Little Father,"
the Czar. Donning their best clothes and in the most
peaceful manner, the people staged on that fateful Sunday a
tremendous gathering before the Winter Palace of the Czar.
Their petition began. "Sovereign, we the workers, with our

wives and children and our helpless old parents, have come
to you to ask for justice and protection. We are reduced to
want; we are oppressed; we are overworked beyond our
strength; we are cursed at, we are not considered as men,
but are treated like slaves who must either endure their lot
or keep silent. We have been patient, but we are being
driven deeper and deeper into an abyss of poverty, slavery
and ignorance. Despotism and absolutism are crushing us,
choking us. Our strength is failing, Sovereign. The limit of
endurance has been reached; the terrible moment is at hand
when death seems preferable to the prolongation of
unbearable torture." (*1) Although a priest led the way, the
language was that of revolutionary groups who had
convinced the workers to present a large number of
demands, the chief of them being for amnesty, civil liberty,
separation of Church and State, the eight-hour day, a
normal wage, and progressive transfer of the land to the
people. But, above all, the petition asked for the
convocation of a Constituent Assembly, to be elected by
free, universal suffrage not based upon property.
1225
In solemn language the petition declared, "Here are the
principal demands we are submitting to you. Give your
orders and pledge yourself to grant them --- and you will
make Russia powerful and glorious, you will impress your
name upon our hearts, in our children's and
grandchildren's hearts, forever. If you refuse to hear our
entreaty --- we shall die here, on this spot, in front of your
palace. Two roads only lie open to us --- either to freedom
and happiness or to the grave. Tell us, Sovereign, which we
must choose; we shall follow it without a word, even
though it be the road of death. Let our life be sacrificed for
Russia worn out with torments. We shall not regret the
sacrifice; we shall offer it voluntarily." (*2)
And indeed the sacrifice was made. Out from their hiding
places came the government troops, shooting the people
down on all sides. The number of dead ran into the
hundreds, the wounded into the thousands. After this
massacre the workers came no more with petitions and
prayers, but with bullets and curses. As with the Paris
Commune, the action began with patriotic motives
(following the defeat of the country in the Japanese War)
and beseeching the most modest and humble requests. It
ended with the red flag flying for communism. When the
news of the massacre flashed around, the whole nation
stood horrified. From one end of the land to the other a
grandiose wave of strikes shook the very body of the nation,
spreading to 122 cities and localities and drawing nearly
one million persons into its swing. The railway workers
took the initiative, and the railroads became the route for
the epidemic to spread until it included innumerable trades.
Without a definite plan, often without even formulating
any demand, interrupting itself and beginning over again,
guided by the sole instinct of solidarity, the general strike
prevailed in the country for nearly two months. Sporadic
1226
fighting erupted everywhere. All progressive groups now
looked upon the government only as a monster to be
destroyed. The demand for a Constitution and a
Constituent Assembly grew louder and more threatening. It
was now clear that revolution was inevitable.
On the heels of the assassination of von Plehve, the

government had put forth the so-called conciliator of the
people, Sviatopolk Mirsky, to make a pretense of liberality.
Enamored with the genial Mirsky, the liberals had declared
there was no need for revolution. After the events of
January, 1905, the liberals had to realize that any softening
of Czarist rule only opened the way for the demands of the
proletariat and for the revolution itself.
The question that faced the Russian social-democrats most

acutely in the light of the impending events was: What
should be the attitude of the revolutionary workers to the
other classes, such as the bourgeois liberals who were also
opposed to the Czar? The Mensheviks proposed the
following fundamental thesis: The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat was impossible. The revolution would have to
be a bourgeois one, even in spite of the bourgeoisie and,
although the workers had to participate in the revolt, they
must turn the power over to the capitalists and be content
to remain as a minority pushing capitalism forward until
the time became ripe, years later, for the proletarians to
establish socialism.
They argued that if the proletariat took power it would be

because it was the strongest and best prepared class, but,
once it took power, it could not limit itself to capitalist
forms, but would have to transform society on socialist
lines in order to solve such questions as factory exploitation
and unemployment. Thus the victorious proletariat would
proceed inevitably to set up its own dictatorship. But since
1227
such a dictatorship was premature in Russia, where the
workers were but a small minority of the population, this
attempt by the proletariat could lead only to a tremendous
blood bath, a new Paris Commune on a Gargantuan scale.
Nor could the workers, according to the Mensheviks, seize

power in alliance with the petty bourgeoisie, since then the
former would have to carry out the program of petty
property and act against their own interests. In any event,
the mere attempt of the workers to take power would drive
the bourgeois property owners back into absolutism.
Therefore it were better for the proletariat to renounce the
task and to let the capitalists take the power. Since the
revolution could be only a bourgeois democratic one, the
bourgeoisie itself should lead the way and, if it vacillated,
the working class should compel the wealthy to take the
helm.
Thus the Mensheviks, while calling themselves socialist,

shrank from taking leadership in the revolution and wanted
the proletariat to surrender to the bourgeoisie. Against this
idea both the Bolsheviki and the Centrist grouping, headed
by Trotsky and Parvus, were strongly opposed. According
to Parvus (and Trotsky allowed himself to be identified
with this view), (*3) the workers were to raise the slogan
"Down with the Czar and for a Workers' Government," and
were to seize the power and establish a socialist
government. In this fashion, Parvus overlooked the great
fact that it was the peasantry who composed the enormous
bulk of the revolutionary elements against Czarism. Their
shibboleths, "Down with the Czar and for a Workers'
Government," contained no mention of the peasantry
except to ask that class to yield its property in favor of
nationalization and socialism under the leadership of the
proletariat. Such a course truly would have led to a
1228
repetition of the Paris Commune, wherein the city would be
isolated from the countryside and put down by rural troops.
A third point of view was expressed by Lenin and the

Bolsheviks. With Trotsky they agreed that the workers were
to lead the revolution; that, having done so and having
sacrificed the lives of many on the barricades, the workers
could not be asked to give up power to another class. The
Bolsheviks proposed, however that there be established, not
the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but the joint democratic-
dictatorship of the workers and peasants. In a rather vague
manner, the Bolsheviks were working out a sort of
intermediate form.
Several matters had to be cleared up before the

revolutionary movement could advance farther. First,
clarification was needed as to what was meant by the term
democratic-dictatorship and wherein it differed from
democracy. Democracy, in its fullest expression, is a type of
state wherein everyone can express himself freely, can vote,
and can elect representatives to the government. Lenin
proposed to limit this democracy so that only those
favoring democracy, namely the Parties of the people, the
Socialists, the Social-Revolutionaries and such, would be
allowed to vote and agitate; those who favored a return to
the Czar and to absolutism, or who would restrict the
franchise of the people, would not be allowed to vote. The
democratic parties would establish a dictatorship and
ruthlessly put down by force all counter-revolutionary and
anti-democratic organizations. Here then was a most
important distinction between the ordinary form of
democracy and the form called the democratic-dictatorship.
Under ordinary capitalist democracy, it was really the
bourgeoisie and private property that controlled; under the
1229
open "democratic-dictatorship" there was to be established
the dictatorship of the workers and peasants.
The next question that had to be solved in this connection

was whether any distinctions among the peasantry should
be recognized. As the revolutionary events grew nearer,
Lenin reformulated his slogan to call for the democratic-
dictatorship of the workers and poor peasants in alliance
with the middle peasants. The poor peasants were to be
part of the dictatorship; the middle peasants were to be
befriended, although having no decisive control in the
events. The other sections of agrarians, the kulaks or rich
peasants, the landlords and the capitalist owners of large
estates were to be fought bitterly.
However, what Lenin and the Bolsheviks left unclear, and

what Trotsky and Parvus brought out most forcibly, was
the point as to the relationship of the workers to the
peasants in the democratic-dictatorship of both. In short,
within the mechanism of the State, which of the two groups
would dominate? Would the workers limit themselves to
the demands of the poor peasants and restrain themselves
from marching to socialism, thus letting the poor peasantry
have the leadership, or would the opposite prevail? Trotsky
pointed out, as had also the Mensheviks for that matter,
that the workers, once having grasped power, never would
allow themselves to be cheated of their goal, that the
proletariat would be forced to move towards socialism;
what in reality would be established would be, not the
democratic-dictatorship of two classes, with the peasantry
equal to the workers, but the dictatorship of the proletariat,
which would move to socialism but move in such a way as
to maintain the friendliest contact with the masses of poor
peasants who would support the city workers, while the
middle peasants would be neutralized.
1230
This, indeed, is what actually happened in the course of the
revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and both Lenin and Trotsky
came closer to each other's viewpoint as the events
progressed. The mistake of Trotsky was that, in his
formulations, he left little intimation to the peasantry that a
friendly alliance would be open for them and that the
workers would proceed towards socialism gradually, and
only after convincing the poorest peasantry of each step of
the way. The strong point of Lenin's formula was that it
stressed that alliance. On the other hand, Lenin did not
make it sufficiently clear that, within the alliance of both
classes, it would be the workers and not the peasants that
would lead, that the workers could not limit their
dictatorship by the dictates of private property, but would
move on irresistibly to make the revolution permanent.
Both Lenin and Trotsky were in basic agreement but
emphasized different aspects of the same problem. As a
matter of fact, a democratic-dictatorship is a regime
impossible for any length of time. It can only be a transition,
either towards the dictatorship of the capitalist or towards
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Mensheviks, like other representatives of the Second

International, were not able to appreciate the dialectical
connections between the democratic and the socialist
revolutions. They conceived of the two periods as though
cleft by a deep abyss and could not comprehend how they
could merge. The merit of both Lenin and Trotsky was that
they understood how a revolution, originally democratic,
could be turned into a socialist one to end capitalism.
The Mensheviks were of the opinion that socialist

revolutions were not possible in agrarian countries, that the
private property of the peasants was irretrievably bound up
with bourgeois ownership and imperialism. The
1231
Mensheviks professed to believe also that the proletarian
revolution could come only in the most highly
industrialized countries like Germany, England, and the
United States. In Russia and Asia, the masses would have to
wait hundreds of years, perhaps, until capitalism could
uproot the peasants and expropriate them. Only when
capitalism had become predominant all over the world
would the socialist revolution be possible in each country.
The Bolsheviks on the contrary affirmed that it was false to
abandon the peasantry to the bourgeoisie, that the peasants
could be won as allies and fighters for the victory of the
workers, since the enemy of both groups was the same
bourgeois class of imperialists.
Not only did the Menshevik viewpoint underestimate the

ripeness of the world proletariat and its ability to win other
sections to its side, but it failed to appreciate that socialism
could not be victorious even in the most industrial country
unless the world as a whole was ready for it. If the world
were not ready for worker's rule as a whole, then, should
the workers take power even in a Germany, they would
have to meet a united capitalist world in merciless war, and
would go down in defeat. Thus, the same arguments that
proved that the proletarian revolution was unripe in Russia
would make it hazardous in Germany as well. The
alternative was to declare that socialism could be built in
one country alone, that socialist countries and capitalist
countries could co-exist peacefully, side by side, capitalism
going quietly and peacefully into the grave. Such a theory
was left for Stalin to enunciate later. Even the worst
opportunists of the Second International did not go so far.
It appears, however, that the whole world is becoming ripe

for socialist victory. This became clearer after the World
War. One of the contributions of Lenin in his study of
1232
imperialism was to point out how capitalism had in reality
dominated the entire world, and that, in the era of
imperialism, it was entering into its period of decline, a
period which would convulse all countries. Under such
circumstances it might become imperative for the workers
in a less industrialized country to go into immediate action.
The most recently created working class could often stand
on the shoulders of movements that had gone before. There
was a basic law of uneven development through which
capitalism worked. It was quite possible that, should the
workers and peasants in Russia sweep into power, a
conflagration would start throughout Europe that would
consume capitalism and, in turn, drive the Russian
revolution farther than it ordinarily could go.
Thus Lenin believed "Due to our efforts, the Russian

revolution will become a movement not only of a few
months' duration, but a movement lasting many years, so
that it will lead, not merely to a few paltry concessions on
the part of ruling sovereigns, but to the complete overthrow
of these rulers. And if we succeed in doing that --- then ...
the revolutionary conflagration will spread all over Europe;
the European workers languishing under bourgeois
reaction will rise and in their turn show us 'how to do it';
then the revolutionary wave in Europe will sweep back into
Russia and convert the epoch of a few revolutionary years
into an epoch of several revolutionary decades. . . ." (*4)
The strategy of working with the peasantry in order to form

a democratic-dictatorship implied that, should such a
provisional government arise, the proletariat would exist in
a government which might have a majority of private
proprietors in control. This, argued the Mensheviks, only
could discredit the workers as it had discredited the
socialists in France who had supported Millerand's
1233
entrance into the Cabinet. In this way the Mensheviks tried
to attack the position of the Bolsheviks from the Left, as
though Lenin were forgetting the necessity of keeping the
proletariat independent from the petty bourgeoisie.
The answer of the Bolsheviks was that, while it was

certainly not correct for socialists to belong to a bourgeois
government fighting socialism, as was the case with
Millerand in France, such a situation was not to be confused
with one wherein the proletariat was participating with the
revolutionary bourgeois democracy in a democratic
revolution and in the transitional democratic regime
essential for the complete accomplishment of such a
revolution. The democratic-dictatorship meant putting into
effect the minimum program of the revolutionists, namely,
the arming of the people, a republic, democratic liberty, and
certain economic reforms. In such a transition regime, the
proletarian representative in the government would be in a
far better position to drive the revolution forward to the
Left than were he voluntarily to exclude himself. Of course
the workers had to march separately from the petty
bourgeois revolutionists, but both columns could strike
together at the same enemy.
Although to overthrow the autocracy a revolutionary

provisional government was absolutely necessary,
according to the Mensheviks, the social-democrats could
not participate in such a government. To the Bolsheviks,
such action was perfectly correct, since proletarian
participation in the provisional government was not in
order to establish socialism immediately nor to bolster up
capitalism but rather to drive the revolution by degrees
forward to the Left. Should the proletariat refuse to take,
with the peasants, joint responsibility for the revolution,
such refusal would result either in the isolation of the
1234
peasantry and its defeat or in the sharpest antagonisms
between the proletariat and the peasantry. Similarly, were
the proletariat to enter into a sharp head-on collision with
the peasantry in the fight for socialism, such impact would
spell disaster for the revolution by driving the peasantry
into the hands of the bourgeois-Czarist reaction.
In line with these questions was the additional one as to

what the socialists could do to help the revolution. Here,
too, the sharpest differences arose between the Mensheviks
and the Bolsheviks. To the Mensheviks, the revolution was
to be an entirely spontaneous process, unleashing itself as
events unfolded; their policy was simply to follow the
events in an agitational manner. They drew no distinction
between a revolution and an insurrection.
Lenin, on the contrary, carefully distinguished the period of

general propaganda for the revolution from the later period
when the question of insurrection was a practical reality. By
no means was he willing merely to follow the actions of the
masses, making a fetish of "spontaneity." The Bolsheviks
could not create a revolution, just as they could not create a
labor movement, but they could help to organize the
insurrection so that it would have some sort of plan, just as
they could help to organize a strike. "A popular revolution
cannot be arranged beforehand, that is true. . . . But if we
have really prepared for the popular rebellion, and if that
rebellion is possible because of the changes that have been
brought about in social relations, then it is quite possible to
fix the time for such a rebellion." (*5) Constantly Lenin
stressed the point that the role of the vanguard was not the
same as that of the masses, but rather that the former had
the duty of organizing, preparing, and leading the latter
and must not drift along with spontaneous chaos which
could result eventually only in the defeat of the workers.
1235
While the Mensheviks were carrying out agitation and
relying on the spontaneity of the masses, the Bolsheviks
were not merely agitating, but also working out their plans.
First it was necessary to urge the arming of the masses. "We
must have arms at the very outset of the insurrection; with
this end in view, we must organize the pillaging of
armourers and, wherever possible, of arsenals. To achieve
this it is necessary first of all to have an armed force, not
necessarily a numerous one, and men who could
immediately distribute the arms and give instruction in
their use; the importance of having contacts with soldiers
and officers, with arsenal workers . . . cannot be
overrated."(*6)
"Armed insurrection does not, as a rule, develop according

to plan, as the people is not an army and the revolutionaries,
unfortunately, are not captains. Nevertheless, it is possible
to be prepared to a certain extent. Each local branch must
draw up beforehand a strategical plan of its city and its
surroundings, so as to know where resistance should be
offered, where barricades should be erected and where they
would be unnecessary, where it would be more convenient
to cut the means of communication . . . where the arms
shops and stores and the quarters of the commanding
officers are situated. . . . The release of prisoners from jail,
the confiscation of governmental funds, and the speedy
organization of courts martial to try spies are desirable
from the very outset of the insurrection. . . ." (*7)
While the Mensheviks shrank from helping the proletarian

insurrection, they heartily advocated a policy not to
antagonize the liberals but rather to push them forward. In
line with this, Menshevik demonstrations took the form of
rallies before the liberal municipal councils and Zemstvos
to press their demands. Lenin, on the contrary, urged
1236
demonstrations before the prisons, the police censor's office,
and the police stations, since the demonstrations were not
for the purpose of pushing forward the liberals but rather
of rallying the people to overthrowing Czarism. The attack
must be made first of all upon the government.
This wide difference of approach of the two groups was

expressed strikingly in the Congresses held separately in
April of 1905 by the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. At the
Menshevik Congress, it was decided that the socialists must
drive the revolution forward, but must not organize it and
must not aim at sharing power in the provisional
government except where the revolution should spread to
European countries more or less ripe for socialism. On the
other hand the Bolshevik Congress, really the Third
Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party,
adopted Lenin's ideas. While the Mensheviks were fearful
of offending the liberal bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks
cultivated the friendship of the peasants and struggled
against the bourgeoisie. "The proletariat must carry the
democratic revolution to its logical end, and in so doing,
must bring over to its side the masses of the peasantry in
order to break the power of resistance of the autocracy and
to paralyze the instability of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat
must bring about a social revolution, and in so doing, must
bring over to its side the masses of the semi-proletarian
elements of the population in order to break the power of
resistance of the bourgeoisie and to paralyze the instability
of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie." (*8)
By October, 1905, another formidable strike wave broke out.

This time it was the printing trade, the Moscow
compositors, who touched the match to the flame. They
went on strike demanding an increase in their piece rates,
1237
with pay for punctuation marks. This apparently
insignificant question was to lead to nothing less than an
assault on the ancient bastilles of absolutism. On October 7,
the compositors of St. Petersburg went on a sympathy
strike, and the strike spread to other industries. After a brief
lull, the railway workers, always the stormy petrels of the
1905 events, declared a general strike, demanding the eight-
hour day, civil liberties, amnesty, and the Constituent
Assembly.
Where the telegraph workers were not ready to join, the

strikers cut wires and uprooted poles. They tore up railroad
ties and placed cars across bridges. By the tenth of October,
traffic was almost at a standstill on all lines out of Moscow.
By the twelfth, all work was stopped on the St. Petersburg
branch. The strike spread rapidly to the rest of the country.
Soon seven hundred and fifty thousand railroad workers
were on strike. Nothing remained standing before this
tornado of a general strike; it closed shops and mills, stores,
offices, and courts. On October 10 a general political strike
was declared in Moscow, Kharkov, and Reval. Six days
later at least forty cities were affected. Barricades were
erected in Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav, and Odessa.
The paralysis of economic life, the uselessness of the

telephone and telegraph, the failure of the mail, the
demoralization of the stock exchange, the immobility of the
railroads, all had their effect. The excitement which gripped
the entire country shattered the front of reaction, and the
Czar yielded. Frightened by the growing revolutionary
events, he made certain minimum concessions. In the
Manifesto of October 17 he granted a sort of constitution
and agreed to call a Duma. (*9) There would be two Houses,
the upper House to be appointed by the Czar, the lower
House to be elective; the franchise was to be strictly limited
1238
to the rich and to be administered through three elaborate
stages. The Duma was to have no real power but was to
meet only one and one-half to two months during the year
to "advise" the Czar. Such miserable concessions could
merit only the decided contempt of the people. Far from
appeasing the masses, it nevertheless showed the Czar was
weakening, and whetted their appetite for more.
For the first time was demonstrated what a tremendous

weapon the general strike, born of modern industry, was to
become in the hands of the proletariat. The leadership of
the workers in the struggle now became indisputable. It is
true that some professionals, lawyers, doctors, and
engineers had also struck, and that the most revolutionary
group among the intellectuals, the students, long had been
accustomed to use the strike in their struggles against
autocratic repression. However, the liberals in the Zemstvos,
the bourgeois opposition, played no role in the events. The
revolution against Czarism was being made by the
proletariat. The great extent of the battles made it clear that
the possibilities for power lay in the hands of the workers
of industry. Furthermore, the struggle was now centered in
the cities; the old populist idealization of the countryside
was henceforth no longer possible.
Although the October strike had shaken the old regime

tremendously, nothing in the political situation was
changed; the power remained where it had been. The
general strike thus exposed its limitations. It could weaken
the ruling classes and lay the basis for a change of power,
but much more was necessary actually to bring about this
change. Certain tasks of revolution, however, from now on
clearly were defined: to organize the countryside and unite
it with the cities; to get into closer contact with the army,
and to arm the workers.
1239
The general strike came into use as a great proletarian
weapon in 1905; a new form of revolutionary proletarian
organization also appeared, the soviet. On October 13 took
place in the halls of the Institute of Technology the first
gathering of the future Soviet of Petersburg. There were
only thirty or forty delegates present. At the second session,
forty large mills were represented, two factories and three
unions (the printers, store clerks, and office clerks). From
the beginning, the Soviet was proletarian, based on
industry and the unions. Eventually, in the fifty days of its
existence, its numbers were to grow to nearly 600,
representing 147 factories and mills, 34 workshops, and 16
unions. A majority of the delegates, or 351, came from the
metal industry; thus heavy industry is seen to play the
predominant role in the revolution in Petersburg. Although
the Soviet represented about two hundred thousand souls,
the scope of its influence politically was much broader.
Insofar as it was the undisputed proletarian organ, and as
the proletariat then comprised about 53 per cent of the
population, it can be said that the Soviet represented the
majority of the city. The enemies of the Soviet were all
representatives of capitalist robbery, brokers, entrepreneurs,
merchants, and exporters ruined by the general strike, the
hangers-on of court life, the high bureaucracy, with their
lackeys and their kept women, everything that was
connected with the cupidity, brutality, and debauchery of a
big capital.
"What was the essential character of this institution which

so quickly won such an important place in the revolution
and so distinctively marked the height of its power?"
"The Soviet organized the working masses, directed the

strikes and demonstrations, armed the workers, protected
the population against pogroms. But other revolutionary
1240
organizations filled the same task before it, side by side
with it and after it; yet they did not have the influence the
Soviet enjoyed. The secret of this influence is this: this
assembly comes forth organically from the proletariat in the
course of the direct struggle, predetermined by events,
which the working class conducts for the conquest of power.
The proletarians on the one hand and the reactionary press
on the other gave the Soviet the title of 'proletarian
government,' and indeed the fact is that this organization is
nothing else but the embryo of a revolutionary government.
The Soviet realized the power to the extent that the
revolutionary force of the workers' quarters guaranteed it; it
struggled directly for the conquest of power to the extent
that the power still remained in the hands of the military
police monarchy." (*10)
The Soviet did not need to worry about conciliating various

classes, and thus had no democratic shame of two chambers.
Neither had it a paid bureaucracy. It was a nonpartisan
organization which linked up the scattered elements of the
workers as no one political party could do. Symbolizing the
interests of the workers as a whole, it could digest and
maintain in its ranks the representatives of the different
workers' parties, whose function was to throw light on the
political significance of events, to propose the correct
slogans and to stiffen the struggle. The Soviet was much
broader than the parties.
Although, at the height of the October strike, the Czar had

not resorted to the army to crush the movement (not out of
humanitarianism but from sheer demoralization and
helplessness), the inevitable reaction was not slow in
coming. "The Soviet liquidated the October strike in somber
days; the tears of slaughtered innocents, the curses of
mothers, the death rattle of old men, and the groans of
1241
despair rose to heaven from all parts of the country.
Countless cities and localities were turned into a veritable
hell. The smoke of incendiary fires darkened the sun's rays,
flames consumed entire streets, with the houses and their
inhabitants. The old regime was taking revenge for the
humiliations it had undergone."
"Everywhere it gathered its cohorts in every corner, in

every hut, in every shack. In this army we see the little
shopkeeper and the down-and-out, the cafe' owner and the
cafe' habitue', the stable boy, and the police spy, the
professional thief and the occasional offender, the petty
artisan and the pimp, the obscure starving peasant, and the
new comer from the countryside deafened by the noise of
the factory. Stark misery, darkness, and venal debauchery
place themselves at the orders of rapacious privilege and
high anarchy." (*11)
In these October days of the Czar's revenge, there were

three to four thousand people killed in one hundred cities,
and ten thousand more mutilated and injured. The
President of the American Federation of Labor sent a
telegram to Count Witte urging the Russian workers to
resist the pogroms which were threatening their newly
acquired liberties. This, Witte hid in a secret drawer. But, in
many cities, the workers organized armed bands which
heroically resisted the Black Hundreds. In Petersburg,
although preparations for a pogrom were made openly,
and the vigilante bands harassed Jews, students, and
worker agitators, yet the atrocity did not occur. The soviets
and the workers' parties armed their members as best they
could. All metal shops worked overtime to turn out
weapons of any sort they could produce. On the evening of
October 29, at the meeting of the Soviet, one deputy after
another got up and brandished his sword, his knife, his
1242
black-jack. A night patrol was organized which paced the
city streets in groups of ten. The regular troops fired on this
workers' militia, but by that time the danger of the pogrom
was averted.
In fighting censorship, too, the workers took matters into

their own hands and won. Of twenty thousand typesetters,
not one could be found to set up the Czar's Manifesto. But
the papers of the social-democracy which printed this
Manifesto with their own commentaries came out in great
numbers. The Soviet sent its deputies to compel the
reactionary and bourgeois papers to go to press without
submitting their proofs to the censor. So was the age-long
censorship lifted. One hundred thousand copies of a
manifesto signed by a so-called "group of workers" and
inciting the people against "the new Czars" (the social-
democrats) were confiscated. The circulation of the
revolutionary press grew by leaps and bounds. In
Petersburg appeared two social-democratic papers, one
with a subscription list of fifty thousand, the other soon
reaching a circulation of one hundred thousand. In the
province, people clamored for papers from the capital and
also set up their own papers. The Soviet, too, wanted to
issue a paper, but had no press. This was no difficulty,
however; a group of delegates was sent to take possession
of a large printing press, the management was declared
under arrest, and reliable printers were sent in. In a few
hours Isvestia, ["News"] of the Soviet, appeared.
The employers had maintained a certain neutrality during

the October strike, had refused the services of the Cossacks
in Moscow, and had even paid the workers their wages for
the time on strike, hoping to see an expansion of business
under a legal regime. But their hopes were not realized. Far
from being calmed by the Czar's Manifesto, the masses
1243
became more and more independent and threatening. The
answer of the soviet to the October 17 Manifesto was a
decision to continue the general strike. The pressing need of
money above all drove the capitalists into the arms of the
government. They were rewarded. Money flowed freely
from the banks, and the employers lined up as the most
resolute enemies of the soviet. The Radical, intellectual
petty bourgeoisie in the meantime played a pitiable role. At
the height of the October strike, these elements came
together and organized the Kadet (Constitutional-Democrat)
Party, which declared their Platonic solidarity with the
general strike. They were isolated and without influence,
however, and could only wait helplessly.
November saw a renewal of the general strike, this time in

solidarity with the military revolt which had taken place in
Kronstadt in protest against the regime of martial law
which had been declared throughout Poland and against
the death sentences of the leaders of the Kronstadt revolt.
Count Witte, the Czar's minister at that time, addressed a
tearful telegram to the workers, begging them to go back to
work. To this the soviet made the following answer:
"The Soviet of Workers Deputies, after hearing Count

Witte's telegram to his 'brother workers,' expresses first its
extreme astonishment at the lack of manners of the Czar's
favorite in calling the workers of Petersburg 'brothers.' The
proletarians have no bond of relationship with Count Witte.
"On the question at issue, the Soviet declares:
"1. Count Witte urges us to take pity upon our wives and
children. The Soviet of Workers Deputies in reply urges all
workers to count how many new widows and orphans are
crowding the ranks of the working class since the day
Count Witte took power.
1244
"2. Count Witte mentions the gracious solicitude of the
Sovereign for the working people. The Soviet of Workers
Deputies recalls to the memory of the proletariat of
Petersburg Bloody Sunday of January 9th.
"3. Count Witte begs us to give him the 'necessary time' and
promises to 'do everything possible' for the workers. The
Soviet of Workers Deputies knows that Witte has already
found time enough to give Poland over to the military
executioners and the same Soviet does not doubt that Count
Witte will do everything possible to crush the revolutionary
proletariat.
"4. Count Witte says he is a well-meaning man who

sympathizes with us. The Soviet of Workers Deputies
declares it has no need of the sympathy of the Czar's
favorites. It demands a people's government based on
universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage." (*12)
In the audacious tones of this answer we can see how far

the working class had traveled since the days of humble
petitions in January preceding.
The strike was successful: the government retreated and for

the moment calm returned. Now that the workers had
returned to the back-breaking, brain-destroying toil of
industry, they became conscious that their most crying
immediate need was for shortening the hours of work. This
they proceeded to obtain in their own way. Several big
shops in Petersburg, through their shop committees, took a
secret vote, and the workers themselves carried out the
decision to stop work after eight hours. The movement
quickly spread. But this time the enemy knew how to strike
too. First the state industries, then the private shops,
instituted a lock-out. Thousands of workers were thrown
on the streets. Although some sections of the workers
1245
wanted to continue the struggle, particularly the ill-paid
women textile workers, yet the majority of the Soviet
decided it was expedient to yield.
Simultaneously a general strike raged in Poland and led to

local insurrections. Under such conditions, even the liberals
decided to boycott the elections, although the Union of
Unions, with liberal employees at the head, condemned the
Duma while the majority of the Congress of Zemstvos
insisted on a real constitutional monarchy.
The struggle on the countryside had followed its own

course. Widespread revolts took place, the movement
becoming deeper and more violent after the October strike,
when the example of the cities had penetrated into the
remote villages. Especially militant were the peasants in the
central part of the country where land was scarce and
famine a common experience. The struggle took on various
forms: strikes of the agricultural laborers, boycott by the
peasants of work on the lord's domain, refusal to recognize
the administrative powers and to pay taxes.
In one province the peasants appropriated from the owner's

barns whatever grain and supplies they needed. Elsewhere
they went in great crowds from one demesne to another
with their wagons and took what they felt to be their share
of the crops. The owners and managers were terrified and
fled. In the same province, a struggle took place to reduce
the rents, the peasant communes themselves setting the
prices. Meanwhile, at the Bezukov monastery, the peasants
seized fifteen thousand desiatins of land for which they
refused to pay, declaring it was the monks' business to pray
and not to meddle in real estate. But the most violent events
took place in Saratov province, where owners were forced
to flee before the red flames consuming their manorial
homes. The peasants adjudicated the land to the Mir, as
1246
well as the money which was seized from the landlord's
house. Altogether throughout the country about two
thousand manors were destroyed, at an estimated money
loss of twenty-nine million rubles for the proprietors.
For all these actions, Social-Democratic propaganda, carried

on in the country for several years, had paved the way. And
yet the peasant revolt was the release of a primitive tide, the
result of generations of sufferings endured, rather than a
movement of clear ideology and purpose. However, the
peasants recently had formed their organization, the
Peasants Union, which held a second meeting on
November 6. The methods of action proposed ranged from
peaceful meetings to armed insurrection. Three days before
the Congress met, the government had published a
Manifesto announcing the abolition of repurchase taxes on
land and increasing the resources of the Peasants' Bank. On
November 12 the Congress convened, and on November 14
its office force in Moscow was arrested. Not long afterward,
the Ministry of the Interior issued an announcement that
the peasant revolt must be put down by no matter what
means. And now the horrors of the Pogroms in the cities
spread to the villages throughout Russia.
So far, the role of the armed forces had not become decisive.
As the revolution drew to its height, this question was to be
solved. At last, the disorders spread to the soldiers and
sailors. There had already taken place in June a revolt on
the armored cruiser "Prince Potemkin," provoked by the
presence of worms in the decayed meat which was served
in the crews' mess. During the October strike, great mass
meetings of soldiers and sailors had been held. When the
armed forces were forbidden to attend the workers'
gatherings, meetings were organized in the courtyards of
the soldiers' and sailors' barracks. At Sebastopol on the
1247
Black Sea, the barracks were open day and night to the
representatives of the social-democrats, the officers not
daring to protest. The plan was to create a soldiers' and
sailors' soviet and link up the military struggle with that in
the cities. When the commandant of the fortress Nepluev
arrived with General Sedelnikov, Chief of the Division, the
sailors arrested both, disarmed them, and locked them up
in the barracks. Later, however, they were released. A great
demonstration of soldiers and sailors passed through the
city. The sailors persuaded the machine gun company to
get their guns out of sight . . . later, however, the machine
guns reappeared. In the meantime, the "Potemkin" had
hoisted the Red Flag.
A committee composed of soldier and sailor delegates with

a few representatives of the social-democratic party was in
control of the military and naval revolt. Although the
arrested officers of the Brest regiment had demoralized the
soldiers in the barracks with drink and debauchery,
nevertheless it was necessary to go ahead with the revolt.
Declarations of solidarity were received from another
cruiser, and from two destroyers. A telegram came from the
Czar ordering the rebels to lay down their arms within
twenty-four hours. The officer bringing this telegram was
kicked out. Patrols of sailors kept perfect order in
Sebastopol. A certain Lieutenant Schmidt, retired naval
officer who had become popular as a speaker in the sailors'
and soldiers' meetings, was made the military head. At
once the following telegram was sent to the Czar:
"The glorious Black Sea fleet, keeping sacred faith with the
people, demands from you the immediate convocation of a
Constituent Assembly, and will no longer obey your
ministers.
Commandant of the Fleet,

1248
Citizen Schmidt." (*13)
The inevitable answer from Petersburg came: "Crush the

revolt." The city and fortress were occupied by troops, and
the rebel vessels were subjected to terrific bombardment.
For hours the battle went on. More than two thousand men
were taken prisoner. The soldiers, who had never been
definitively compromised from the beginning, abandoned
the sailors, fired on the sailors' barracks, and the revolt was
crushed.(*14)
During this period the Mensheviks proposed to utilize the

electoral campaign in order to establish semi-legal workers'
committees of agitation to exert pressure on the
enfranchised groups to fight for the convocation of a
constitutional assembly. These workers' committees were to
conduct their own plebiscite and to elect a network of
organs to operate as though they constituted a
revolutionary self-government which could dictate its will
to all the other groups. The Mensheviks substituted this
tactic for the active boycott and demonstration strike.
The Bolsheviks on their side ridiculed as purely utopian the

idea of electing workers' committees for the establishment
of another government before the insurrection occurred.
What was necessary were demonstrations, active boycotts,
the breaking up of Czarist election meetings, political
strikes, etc. Only after the revolution was on its way could a
dual government be considered. The principal
revolutionary slogan was to be armed insurrection to
establish a provisional government to carry out the
following program: convocation of a national constituent
assembly, arming of the people, institution of political
liberties, establishment of cultural and political liberty for
1249
all oppressed and disfranchised nationalities, adoption of
the eight-hour day, and the formation of peasant
committees for confiscation of land and securing agrarian
reforms.
As a matter of fact, the Mensheviks had hit upon a proposal

which actually was to be carried out by the Russians when
they spontaneously set up the soviet as a dual government
to the official State. Here also, it seemed, was a verification
of the theory of reliance merely upon the spontaneity of the
masses, since the soviets were foreseen by no party, even by
the Bolsheviks who had talked of organizing and laying
plans. The ingenuity and initiative of the masses surprised
all Parties. Nevertheless, the position of the Mensheviks
was untenable in spite of their apparent theoretical triumph.
The fact is that the Mensheviks had called for the setting up
of these self-government bodies, not as part of the
insurrection, but as a substitute for the active boycott of the
Bulygin Duma. Thus whatever may have been progressive
in the Menshevik proposals was rendered nugatory by their
anti-insurrectionary program. Conversely, Lenin, who had
insisted most of all on the need for the insurrectionary
struggle against Czarism, on destruction of the old before
construction of the new, nevertheless thoroughly
understood the importance of the soviets when they
appeared and at once called upon them to take full power
into their hands. To Lenin, the soviets were not primarily
institutions of government, but organs of civil war.
It must not be imagined that the views of Lenin were the

views of all the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, Lenin's
insistence on the need for preparing the armed insurrection,
a revolutionary army, and a provisional revolutionary
government, and for making these points the central part of
the strategy of the Bolsheviks met with the opposition of
1250
the majority of the Central Committee of the Party who
believed these plans were premature and advocated them
conditionally, according to the degree of preparation. In
August, 1905, the Central Committee significantly omitted
the term "insurrection" from its resolutions. Swiftly
following events nevertheless amply exposed the
vacillating character of the Bolshevik Central Committee
and the correctness of Lenin's views.
Soon after the decision of the Central Committee to oppose

Lenin's unconditional call for revolt there took place the
unprecedented general strike in October, 1905, throughout
all Russia. To appease the masses, the Czar now changed
the consultative Duma to a legislative one elected by a
wider franchise. In the course of the strike, new organs of
the masses, the soviets, sprang up, elected directly by the
workers in the factories and in the neighborhoods, and
taking in all, regardless of political affiliations. In the light
of this event, both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks came
together and formed a Federal Council. Within the soviets,
the question was raised of the relation of the soviets to the
social-democrats. Although the Federal Council wanted to
secure the soviets' acceptance of the social-democratic
program, the majority of the delegates, despite the fact that
they themselves were social-democrats, refused to open the
question. This was a fortunate decision, since to bring the
matter before the soviets in such an abstract manner would
have split the unity of the workers.
All this time Lenin had been unable to be present at the

scene of action. At last, by November 12, he reached Russia
from Switzerland and at once the situation changed sharply.
He forcibly drove home the tremendous importance of the
soviets, not as workers' parliaments, which the Mensheviks
believed they were, but as united-front bodies for the
1251
seizure of power, which indeed they had become. Lenin
insisted that the soviet be recognized as the fighting organ
of the working class, without distinction of Party. On their
side, the soviets did nothing to antagonize the socialists, but
permitted each of the main parties, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks,
and Social-Revolutionaries to have three delegates each
with consultative voice and vote. Incidentally, a
preponderance of the soviet delegates belonged to these
Parties. The only ones excluded from direct invitation were
the anarchists, because of their wretched traditions in the
First International and because they did not believe in any
organization nor in the establishment of a workers' State.
With the arrival of Lenin, the Bolshevik Party began to

adhere to a more revolutionary position. After losing
control of the Iskra in 1903, the Bolsheviks had put out a
paper, Vperiod (Forward) in 1904 and, with the outbreak of
the events in 1905, issued Proletarii. Now they were
growing so fast that they could print a daily paper, Novaya
Zhizn (New Life). Lenin saw to it that the paper became
truly a communist sheet. Half of the editorial staff,
especially the decayed literateur and liberal intellectual
types, were removed, and for the first time appeared the
slogan, "Workers of the World, Unite." This is eloquent
testimony to the mess of opportunism that existed within
the ranks of the Bolsheviks themselves. Here, too, 1905 was
to be but a prelude for 1917.
All through November and December of 1905, the

proletarian vanguard tried to broaden and deepen the
strike movement. In St. Petersburg, the soviet called on all
to withdraw their savings from the banks, so as to cause a
financial panic, and to refuse to pay taxes. After their many
strike actions, however, the skilled workers of St.
Petersburg, who were in the lead of the movement, found
1252
themselves too weary to be able to carry on actual
insurrection. A major part of the army was not in support
of the strikers. The proletarians were isolated from the
peasantry. Liberal society, now deeply frightened, hastened
to support the cause of law and order. The St. Petersburg
factories were of the heavy metal type which had been
subsidized extensively by the Czar and the owners of
which, quite satisfied with the concessions the Czar had
been forced to grant, were intimately in support of the
aristocracy.
The situation was somewhat different in Moscow where the

factories, mostly textiles, were not so closely connected with
the State and government, and whose owners desired still
greater concessions. There the workers came out in actual
insurrection from the eighth to the seventeenth of
December. Barricades were thrown up in the streets but
here, too, the mass of workers had become fatigued and did
not support the small minority of active revolutionists.
Nonetheless, the vanguard manned the barricades with
small groups and carried out a new style of guerrilla
fighting that wearied the picked troops of the Czar, far
superior in numbers, and forced the government to send in
heavy reinforcements. However, not supported by St.
Petersburg and abandoned by the petty bourgeoisie, the
Moscow proletariat was bound to succumb and the
insurrection was doomed.
In Moscow, the soviets and other organizations were

insufficiently prepared for the insurrection. Even the soviet
executive of the combat units did not participate in the
street fighting. While there were one hundred and fifty
thousand strikers at the time, there were only fifteen
hundred barricade fighters. The strike had become an
insurrection due to the organization of the counter-
1253
revolution by the government, and spontaneously the
events had proceeded from strikes and demonstrations to
single barricades, from single barricades to the mass
construction of barricades and to street fighting against the
troops. Over the heads of the organizations the mass
proletarian struggle had become transformed from a strike
into an insurrection. As is always the case, practice ran
ahead of theory, and the proletariat sensed sooner than its
leaders the change in the objective conditions of the
struggle which demanded a transition from the strike to
insurrection. The instructions to set up barricades came
belatedly, after the workers had done so themselves. The
leadership failed to use the masses of workers who were
eager to fight.
Although the revolt failed, it would be incorrect to conclude

that the workers should not have taken up arms. On the
contrary, their mistake consisted in not having taken up
arms more aggressively. They failed to realize sufficiently
that they had to make a physical fight to win over the
troops to their side. There should have been far better
fraternization of the workers with the troops. At times the
soldiers were wavering and could have been won over by
energetic action. The revolutionists failed to realize the
need for determined attack. Also, the extermination of
certain military officers and officials would have enabled
the workers to win over troops at critical moments.
Now that the movement had been put down and the
leaders arrested, the government was in a position to
increase its repressive measures. The Czar repudiated his
promises and the Duma was again reduced to merely a
consultative body. The question then arose: what policy
should the social-democrats take in regard to the new
Duma? The discussion involved the question whether the
1254
revolution was exhausted or whether the present period
was but a lull before a new spurt forward.
Naturally the Mensheviks came out for participation in the

election, for full parliamentary activity wherever possible,
and for full attention to the bourgeoisie wherever alliances
could be made. As now the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks had
established their common paper, Izvestia (News) of the
Party the discussion raged in the common organ of both
factions. Lenin insisted that again the Duma be boycotted
for the reason that the revolution was not yet exhausted,
but only temporarily repressed.
In 1905, as in 1848 in France, the government had provoked

the armed uprising when the workers were not sufficiently
prepared nor organized, and reaction had been triumphant,
regardless of the heroism of the proletariat. Yet there was
this distinction between 1848 and 1905: The defeat in Paris
meant defeat in all of France; by no means was this the case
in Russia, since the Moscow defeat was not necessarily
decisive for the workers of St. Petersburg, Kiev, Odessa,
Warsaw, Lodz, and other places. Again, in 1848 the
peasantry had been on the side of reaction, but not in 1905,
and the Bolsheviks estimated that peasant revolts were
bound to break out again shortly. The revolution of 1848
had been induced by the crisis of 1847 which became
liquidated with the return of prosperity. In Russia, however,
the present regime could lead only to an accentuation of the
crisis which had been hovering over the country for a long
time. Added to all this, a new financial panic was
approaching, a new agrarian famine was impending, and
the country's structure had been weakened by the strikes.
If the revolution really had become exhausted, Lenin felt it

was the duty of the social-democrats to announce this fact
and to adapt their tactics accordingly. In that case, he was
1255
in favor of participating in the elections of the Duma, of
putting the legal Party to the forefront, and of abandoning
the plans for continuing the insurrection. Also there should
then occur an end to arming of the people, and the workers
should try to make alliances with the democratic liberals in
parliamentary activity. "Then we must regard the task of
organizing trade unions as being a first-class Party task, as
in the previous historical period we regarded the task of
armed rebellion." (*15)
On the other hand, should this be but a lull between two

revolutionary waves, then the task of the revolutionists and
workers was to carry the democratic revolution to the end,
the central and immediate political task being to create the
armed forces for rebellion. "In that case it is necessary to
prepare for rebellion by means of guerrilla attacks, for it
would be ridiculous to 'prepare' merely by enrollments and
drawing up lists." (*16) All revolutionary slogans should be
retained and offensive operations organized. All of these
views were threshed out at the Fourth Congress of the
Russian Party, a unity Congress of both Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks taking place in April, 1906. By this time it had
become clear that the sporadic peasants' revolts that had
broken out had remained isolated from the workers'
attempts and that, because the revolutionary activity had
not been coordinated sufficiently in city and country, both
sections temporarily had been defeated. Lenin was now in
agreement with the tactics of participation in the elections
of the new consultative Duma as the best that could be
done under the circumstances. Still the Bolsheviks were not
willing to admit that they had made an error previously in
urging the boycott. (*17) While the Mensheviks called for
support of the Duma against the Czarist bureaucracy, the
Bolshevik faction, which still kept its ranks intact, (*18)
1256
urged that the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie be broken
away from the Kadets at the head of the Duma.
Now it was time for the Czar to take the next step in
reaction. As he attacked the Duma, that body retreated to
Finland and, in a Manifesto, prohibited the collection of
taxes, enrollment of recruits, loans, etc. Under the pressure
of the Bolsheviks, the Central Committee of the Social-
Democratic Party issued an appeal to the army, navy, and
peasants, declaring the government illegal and calling on
the peasantry to take possession of the land, and on the
soldiers to refuse to fire. The tactics of the Bolsheviks were
to fuse the strikes into a general one, to stimulate and unite
the peasant revolts and mutinies and co-ordinate them into
one grand struggle on all fronts. While they had given up
the idea of boycott, they called attention to the fact that
work within the Duma was subordinated to other forms of
struggle, strikes, insurrections, etc.
The year 1906 was marked by great tumult throughout the

countryside. In this period the Bolsheviks decided to carry
on a regular guerrilla warfare against the government, or
rather to participate in what was already raging. The
Bolsheviks even organized groups for the expropriation of
wealthy private and governmental institutions so as to
secure funds. The Mensheviks were horrified at this and at
the Fourth Congress passed a resolution demanding the
immediate liquidation of these groups of "partisans." The
Bolsheviks supported the terrorism on principle, on the
ground that such actions disorganized the reactionaries and
educated the revolutionists. They insisted, however, that
these operations be carried on under strict Party control,
and then only where the attacks could be made safety and
without being misunderstood either by the labor movement
or the local public. There was a further necessity to conduct
1257
a relentless struggle against the gangs of the Black
Hundreds. The Bolsheviks here in practice disobeyed the
decision of the Fourth Congress and maintained their
fighting groups on the ground that this was the only way to
fight the terrorism of the Czar.
By the end of 1906, the Bolsheviks were advocating a series

of rear guard struggles to enable the workers to resist the
ever intensifying repressions of the autocracy. In coming
out for guerrilla warfare and conspiratorial terrorism
during the period when the Bolsheviks believed the masses
had been put down only temporarily, Lenin showed his
acuteness as a revolutionary strategist. The Russians had
gone through many forms of struggle, and he considered it
incorrect to make a fetish of any one of them.
According to Lenin, during the period of retreat and lull it

was perfectly proper to encourage individuals or small
groups, whether social-democratic or "partisan," to
assassinate government officials and to confiscate funds
from the government or the wealthy, even though these
were tactics generally employed by the slum proletariat and
by anarchists. Part of the funds were sent to the Party,
especially the large expropriations, while small amounts
went for the upkeep of the group. Lenin laid down the
conclusion that "Guerrilla warfare is an inevitable form of
struggle when the mass movement has reached the stage of
rebellion and when more or less prolonged intervals of time
intervene between the 'big battles' of the civil war." (*19)
The concrete reality was that guerrilla warfare was a factor

of the times and an instrument which the masses
themselves were employing effectively; the question,
therefore, was not whether the social-democrats should
initiate this form of struggle or make it the principal
weapon in its arsenal, but rather what attitude should the
1258
social-democrats take to a conflict already going on,
whether they should participate or not. To this Lenin
replied, "Social-democracy has no universal means of
struggle which would separate the proletariat, as by a
Chinese wall, from the sections that stand a little above or a
little below it. At different times Social-Democracy employs
different methods, always applying them under strictly
defined ideological and organizational conditions." (*20)
Correlated to this question was the policy of individual

terror. The Mensheviks had shrunk from such a form of
struggle as anarchistic; the Bolsheviks did not hesitate to
adopt it wherever it would further the needs of the struggle.
To Lenin, terror was a form of military operations that
might be usefully applied or might be essential in certain
moments of the battle, and under certain conditions. Terror
never could become the regular means of warfare, but, at
best, only one of the methods of the final onslaught. In
other words, individual terror, in and of itself, was to be
condemned but was justifiable as part of mass terror, which
in turn was but one of the methods by which the masses
conquered and held power. For example, it would be
manifestly proper to start an insurrection by assassinating
the governor or blowing up of the State House, while
ordinarily such actions were to be condemned, yet in the
light of the civil war that was presumptively indicated, they
might constitute the only type of signal that the masses
could understand, informing the discontented that the die
was definitely cast and that the combat was on. Such a
policy might help to demoralize the enemy and to hearten
the revolutionary forces at a critical moment, or might be a
demonstration to compel the conflict to go on to the bitter
end.
1259
After the events of 1905, reaction once more sat securely in
the saddle. The Witte Duma was dissolved, the electorate
much cut down, and a new futile Duma installed. The
revolutionary forces, disheartened and pessimistic, began to
disintegrate and the members tended to abandon the
conspiratorial struggle and to adopt forms of idealism and
religion, or to emphasize sexual questions. This was called
Seninism after its representative Senin. The old generation
was tired; the new generation had not yet come to maturity.
The Bolsheviks made the most energetic fight against

Seninism in personal conduct, against God building and
idealism in philosophy, and liquidationism in politics. They
reaffirmed the Marxist view that religion never could be a
private matter for individuals in the Party, as the
Mensheviks claimed, although of course it was wrong to
emphasize religious divisions which would divert the
workers from the real issues.
Religion was not merely a product of ignorance, as

bourgeois atheists maintained, but had its roots in the social
and material environment of which it was a part. Religion
had existed before the class struggle was known, in the
days of primitive tribal communism. Then it served as a
system of cosmology, as a rationale to explain such
phenomena as lightning, death, dreams, or mental and
physical diseases. With primitive people, religion was
highly materialistic; the gods, feared and unknown, were
conceived as similar to human beings with homologous
lusts and passions. Religion was basically the reflection of
the fact that man could not control, rather was a victim of,
natural forces which he did not understand.
As society progressed, religion came to rationalize ethical

customs important to the tribe and race, and, with the
advent of private property and the State, this ethical part of
1260
religion became of the utmost social importance as a means
by which the State could control the oppressed classes. For
the masses, on the other hand, religion with its dreams of a
future, better life, was the drug which dulled them to their
sufferings in this world --- as Karl Marx put it, "Religion is
the moan of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a
heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It
is the opium of the people." (*21)
The ruling classes embraced religion in order to give a

supernatural backing to their creed of rendering unto
Caesar what was Caesar's and to keep the masses docile
and meek. The Church became an intimate part of the State
apparatus.
With the development of capitalism, definite atheistic

trends arose. Science broke away from the Church; thus,
religion was no longer a cosmological system satisfying to
the intelligent. Attempts were made also to separate ethics
from religion and to work out a system of morality upon
the basis of utilitarianism and a scientific analysis of social
laws. All that was left to the Church was the dry-as-dust
scaffolding of theosophy, mumbo-jumbo of gods and
angels. The Church belonged no longer to this world.
And yet the ruling classes needed the Church and religion,
not merely because it helped them to control the masses,
but also because even the rulers were in no position to
explain the events of nature and of society. They could not
explain crises and depressions, wars and revolutions, nor
the laws of social change. And in proportion as the
capitalists became victims of their own social system, of
price fluctuations, of their own national chauvinisms, and
of the very improvements in their technique of production,
they could not emancipate themselves from their religious
fetters. Science comes to a blind alley under capitalism; only
1261
the proletarian will release science and enable it really to
flourish.
The working class turned to atheism, not so much through

books as in the course of its functioning in the class struggle.
In strike times, the worker found the Church ranged against
him. Since he produced all that was good and beautiful in
the world, unlike his employer he was not mystified as to
how he earned his daily bread and he did not find it
necessary to thank God or some other creator for it. He
himself was the creator. While the petty bourgeois would
limit religion to love ("God is Love") because he needed to
conciliate all classes, placed as he was between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the proletariat as it fought
capitalism and the State had to contest all systems of social
control, including the material institution of the Church and
its rationale of religion.
The best way for the communist to turn the workers from
religion, therefore, was not to subject them to abstract
preachments but to involve them in the class struggle itself
and there to clarify the material issues before them. "A
Marxist must be a materialist, that is an enemy of religion,
but from the materialist and dialectical standpoint, i.e., he
must conceive the fight against religion not as an
abstraction, not on the basis of pure theoretical atheism,
equally applicable to all times and conditions, but
concretely, on the basis of the class struggle which is
actually going on and which will train and educate the
masses better than anything else." (*22)
On the other hand, while it was possible to break down the

prejudices of religion in backward workers by mass
struggles, emphasizing material issues, yet religious
workers could not belong to the revolutionary vanguard.
The Bolsheviks, unlike the Socialist Parties of the West,
1262
insisted that ardent religionists had no place in their ranks.
It was easy for the Russians to reach this conclusion since,
there, Church and State were linked into one, and the
struggle against the State was extremely severe and ruthless.
The Bolsheviks were ready to take in individual religious
workers, provided they were willing to read and to study
and were amenable to change, but such religious people
were not fit to assume leadership in the organization.
Certainly ministers and those who preached religion could
not be allowed in the organization.
During the period of retreat in Russia, from 1906 to 1910,

this whole problem became acute. Some of the social-
democrats interpreted socialism as their "religion" so
literally that they actually bolstered up faith in religion
generally. Lenin, on the other hand, wanted to throw such
people out of the Party and succeeded in doing so until the
theoretical supporters of God gave up their myth-building
and abided by the line of the Party. Thus the Bolsheviks
were able early to cleanse their ranks of those who
ideologically yielded to reaction and mysticism; the
Mensheviks, on the contrary, having a far greater number
of intellectuals and petty bourgeois elements in their ranks,
were broken to pieces by such tendencies. (*23)
The chief struggle within the social-democratic movement

during the period was against liquidationism, marked by
the tendency to repudiate the class struggle and the
leadership of the workers in it, and expressed
organizationally in resignations from the Party and in the
columns of the legal press and, in the legal labor
organizations, in a struggle against the need for a secret
revolutionary organization. At the same time another
deviation arose, to which was given the name of Otsovism.
The Otsovists desired to maintain the boycott of the Duma
1263
on the ground that it was a sham parliament and, in the
period of reaction, a worthless instrument. While Lenin
wanted to center the activity of the Party upon
parliamentarism, the Otsovists declared the chief task was
military preparation and the training of instructors for
future battles. The Otsovists therefore were Leftist groups
which were opposed, for example, to the liquidation of the
expropriation groups to which the Bolsheviks had finally
agreed in 1909, after such groups had degenerated greatly
and the basis for their continued operations had
disappeared.
According to Lenin, just as the Mensheviks and liquidators

had lost their head in one direction, the Otsovists had lost
their bearings in another and also did not know how to
work in periods of reaction. Lenin averred: "It is precisely
amidst acute and growing reaction, when the mechanical
force of reaction really breaks our contacts with the masses,
hampers our efforts to carry on sufficiently extensive work,
and weakens the Party, that the specific task of the Party is
to utilize the parliamentary weapon, not because the
parliamentary struggle is higher than other forms of
struggle --- but because it really is lower than the other
forms which draw even troops into the mass movement,
which give rise to mass strikes, insurrection, etc. Why
should the use of this lower form of struggle become the
specific task of the Party (i.e., the one distinguishing the
given period from other periods) ? Because the stronger the
force of the reaction and the weaker the ties with the masses,
the more urgent becomes the task of preparing the mind of
the masses (and not the task of direct action), of utilizing
the channels of propaganda and agitation created by the
old regime (and not the direct attack of the masses upon the
old regime itself)." (*24)
1264
However, in the struggle against the Otsovists, against the
God Builders and other groups, Lenin, while urging their
expulsion from the Bolshevik faction, was not desirous of
expelling them from the Party itself. To Lenin the Party was
no rigid instrument in which everyone had to think exactly
alike on every question. On the contrary, within the
framework of the Party program there could arise great and
sharp divergences which yet could be confined within one
organization under certain conditions.
It was inevitable that a mass party should attract to itself a

certain number of camp followers of various shades. There
was nothing alarming or abnormal in this so long as the
proletarian element managed to assimilate them and knew
them for what they were. But it would be an entirely
different thing were they to control the organization.
"To break away from a fraction is not the same as breaking

away from the Party. Those who have left our fraction are
by no means deprived of the possibility of working in the
Party. They will either remain 'unattached,' i.e., outside the
fraction, and in that case they will be absorbed in the
general work of the Party, or they will try to establish a new
fraction, which they have a perfect right to do if they desire
to defend and develop their special shade of views and
tactics; in that case the whole Party will very quickly see the
manifestations of those tendencies, whose ideological
significance we tried to appraise above." (*25)
Thus, when the Otsovists, expelled from the Bolshevik

faction, wanted to form a faction of their own, Lenin
emphasized their right to do so, since they represented a
distinct tendency at the time as when their place was still
among the social-democrats. Here, then, must be noted an
important point in the Lenin theory of a Communist Party.
While the Party must insist on an adherence to a definite
1265
platform and policy, within limits it was certainly possible
for the inevitable different shadings within the Party to
gather into factions, to have their own caucuses, and so on.
In 1903 the Bolsheviks had obtained a majority in the

Social-Democratic Labor Party of Russia. During the events
of 1905, when they worked together with the Mensheviks,
they lost that majority but did not break from the Party. By
1907, with the heavy losses which the Mensheviks suffered
through liquidationism, the Bolsheviks were able to regain
the majority, but by that time they had become convinced
that the Mensheviks were class enemies of the workers. The
formal split, however, did not occur until 1912 when, with
the revival of the movement, the liquidators were expelled,
and the Mensheviks finally separated organizationally from
the Bolsheviks.
When the Mensheviks were in the majority in 1905, Lenin

insisted on freedom of factional conflict, freedom of
discussion and criticism of the central committee, the rights
of the local organizations. At the same time, however, he
stood for democratic centralism and strict party discipline.
The problem was how to obtain freedom for criticism and
yet maintain discipline and unity in action, at the same time
recognizing that there are times when discipline and
organizational unity must be broken, that is, when the
leaders of the party became opportunists and traitors to
their class. It becomes a very fine question where to draw
the line, since both strict discipline and factional splits
become necessities at different times.
Lenin's theories of democratic centralism provided for full

discussion before and after the action, but for complete
unity during the course of the action. While it was true that
without organization the strength of the proletariat was
nothing, and the essence of organization lay in unity in
1266
action, it was also true that it was possible for the Party to
embark on a wrong course of action. Only full discussion
could determine when this had happened. Organization
without ideas was an absurdity. Consequently, without the
freedom of discussion and criticism, the proletariat did not
recognize unity of action. For that reason, intelligent
workers must never forget that sometimes serious
violations of principles could occur which make the break-
off of organizational relations absolutely necessary. Thus
Lenin, who was for the strictest of disciplines, understood
also the limitations of such discipline and knew when to
break it.
In the Bolshevik Party there was a voluntary intelligent

discipline based on the principle that the interests of the
proletarian revolution and of the Communist Party stood
above all. "We must always bear in mind that the army (our
Party) of six hundred thousand men must be the vanguard
of the working class, that without iron discipline it will be
impossible to fulfill our task. The fundamental condition for
the maintenance and preservation of our strict discipline is
loyalty. All the old methods and resources for creating
discipline have been destroyed. At the basis of all our
activity we have laid only a high degree of thoughtfulness
and intelligence. This has enabled us to maintain a
discipline that stands higher than the discipline of any other
State, and which rests on a basis totally different from that
upon which the discipline of capitalist society is barely
maintained, if it is maintained at all." (*26)
Later, in dealing with the October, 1917, Revolution, Lenin

wrote that one of the principal conditions of the success of
the Bolsheviks was their iron discipline plus the fullest and
unreserved support of advanced, sensible, honest, devoted,
influential workers capable of leading and inspiring the
1267
working class. "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the
fiercest and most merciless war of the new class against its
most powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose power of
resistance increases tenfold after its overthrow, even though
overthrown in only one country. The power of the
bourgeoisie rests not alone upon international capital, upon
its strong international connections, but also upon the force
of habit, on the force of small industry of which
unfortunately there is plenty left, and which daily, hourly,
gives birth to capitalism and bourgeoisie spontaneously
and on a large scale." (*27) To Lenin, the experience of the
triumphant proletarian dictatorship proved that
unqualified centralization and strictest discipline of the
proletariat were among the principal conditions for the
victory over the bourgeoisie.
"Upon what rests the discipline of the Revolutionary Party

of the proletariat? How is it controlled? How is it
strengthened? Firstly, by the class consciousness of the
proletarian vanguard and, by its devotion to the Revolution,
by its steadiness, spirit of self-sacrifice and heroism.
Secondly, by its ability to mix with the toiling masses, to
become intimate and to a certain extent, if you will, to fuse
itself with the proletarian masses primarily but also with
the non-proletarian toilers. Thirdly, by the soundness of the
political leadership, carried on by this vanguard, and by its
correct political strategy and tactics, based on the idea that
the workers by their own experience must convince
themselves of the soundness of this political leadership
strategy and tactics. Without all these conditions, discipline
in a Revolutionary Party, really capable of being a Party of
the advanced class whose object is to overthrow the
bourgeoisie and transform society, is impossible of
realization. Without these conditions, all attempts to create
discipline result in empty phrases, in mere contortions. On
1268
the other hand, these conditions will not arise suddenly.
They are created through long effort and bitter experience.
Their creation is facilitated by correct revolutionary theory,
which, in its turn, is not dogmatic, but which forms itself in
its finality only through close connection with the practice
of the real mass and true revolutionary movement." (*28)
Thus discipline was irretrievably connected with the

correctness of the political line of the party. Should the
party be leading the masses against the revolution, by all
means was it necessary to break from such an organization
and to build up a revolutionary one.
Between this extreme duty of split and the one of

unconditional obedience there were numerous intermediate
positions. If the Central Committee of the Party was
committing isolated acts detrimental to the masses, then it
was the duty of the genuine communist to raise his voice in
criticism. Where the Central Committee was guilty of a
whole series of such acts which were no longer merely
isolated but were bound together into a tendency, there the
criticism could begin to take a more hostile tone. When the
tendency developed into a regular deviation from
revolutionary communism, it became the duty of the
communist to fight against such deviation by means of
organized criticism in the form of a faction.
But the logic of factional fighting leads to a split. Such

factions should not split away from the party so long as the
party is putting up a correct battle on the whole and has a
scientific program in spite of its inconsistent deviations.
Where, however, the deviation is becoming the main line
and the Central Committee is really on the road to counter-
revolution, then it is imperative for the faction to prepare
for and organize the split from the party. Here is the limit of
discipline, where loyalty to the class conflicts with loyalty
1269
to the instrument of the class, the party. In such cases, the
class must always prevail.
On the other hand, the Central Committee must create such

a regime that both discussion and criticism in full be
permitted. Nor can the Central Committee act upon the
formation of factions so as to expel them automatically.
Factions are bound to arise in every mass party. The world
moves on; some of the members of the party stand still,
others follow ideologically the real movement and are
ready with new proposals. It is most natural for each
grouping to band itself together and to conduct struggles
for control of the party according to their views. Such an
internal life of the party, far from being detrimental, is a
sure sign that the party is alive and sensitive to the new
events. What is to be condemned is unprincipled factional
fighting where cliques struggle for power. This is a sure
sign that the organization has nothing to do with the
revolution but is a breeding place for careerists and all sorts
of counter-revolutionary elements within the working class,
those who substitute their own future for that of their
organization or for the welfare of their class.
In a Leninist organization, the Central Committee is bound

to tolerate the faction where the faction abides by the
discipline of the majority and insures unity in action and
where the program of that faction is on the whole identical
with that of the party itself. Where, however, the faction has
passed beyond that stage and is trying to bring into the
ranks of the communists a program fit only for
opportunists or enemy elements, then there is nothing left
for such a Party to do but to expel the faction.
Here, then, was the basis and the limitations of discipline

among the Bolsheviks. The-Bolshevik Party under Lenin
was able to be the vehicle to accomplish the revolution
1270
precisely because it tested out all its elements in all sorts of
struggles, not merely in Russia, but abroad, and allowed
the freest discussion of all communist elements within its
ranks. The Bolshevik leaders, forced to emigrate to other
countries, were able to overcome national provinciality and
to realize very rich international experiences.
In their practical history, the Russians went through a wide

revolutionary experience, embracing a great variety and
rapidity of shifting forms, adaptable to legal and to illegal
work, to peaceful and stormy periods, to parliamentary and
terrorist activity, to open and underground organizations,
to small circles and large masses. Through these
experiences they were able to steel themselves for the
events of 1917.
In preparation for their great achievements of 1917 the

Bolsheviks had to go through several stages. In the years
prior to 1905 there raged the bitter fight on questions of
program and tactics. In these fights, the class was able to
forge an adequate program for itself. In the period of the
Revolution, from 1905 to 1907, all the programs and tactics
were tested out. Strikes of unprecedented extent and
acuteness arose, first economic, then political, finally
turning into insurrections led by soviets. Here also was
tested out the relationship of the workers to the peasants.
Without the general rehearsal of 1905, the victory of 1917
would have been impossible. But it was not enough to go
through the period of preparation and action, it was also
necessary to experience defeat and depression, when
demoralization, schism, dispersal of forces, renegacy,
pornography, took the place of revolutionary politics. It
was really in this period of defeat and retreat that the
political Party of Lenin became hardened and tested the
most. It was in this period that the phrase-mongers were
1271
most sharply exposed and could be expelled from the ranks
while the organization was prepared for the new advances
that would be made.
After 1910, the movement began slowly to revive; it became

active again in 1912. Now, because of their hard work in the
period of retreat, the Bolsheviks were able to drive back the
Mensheviks and succeeded in co-ordinating illegal forms of
work with the obligatory utilization of all legal possibilities.
By the time of the imperialist war, the Bolsheviks were
prepared to take a revolutionary position against the
Second International and to take advantage of the first
break that should occur in the ranks of the Czarist
absolutism. When the great Russian State began to crumble,
as a result of the War, and the Revolution of 1917 began,
they were ready.
Footnotes
1. See L. D. Trotsky. 1905, p. 68.
2. The same, p. 69.
3. Afterward, Trotsky declared that the views were those of

Parvus alone, but this explanation came rather late.
4. Selections from Lenin, II, 63-64.
5. The same, pp. 16-17.
6. The same, pp. 41-42.
7. The same, p. 42.
8. The same, pp. 102-103.
9. Called the Bulygin Duma after the Czar's minister.
1272
10. L. D. Trotsky. 1905, p. 211.
11. The same, p. 115.
12. Trotsky: 1905, pp. 146-147.
13. Trotsky: 1905, p. 176.
14. It is significant that the Navy has led popular revolts in

a number of important instances, not only in the Russian
Revolution of 1905, but in the German Revolution of 1918,
the Russian Revolution of 1917, the French revolutionary
ferment after the War, the Spanish Revolutionary events of
1936, etc. This can be traced to numerous causes. The sailors
have occupations in the main similar to workmen, their
conditions are generally bad, they live close together and
can communicate their ideas to each other easily; they
travel around and get to compare the lot of their people
with those abroad while they are seldom given the
functions of coming into conflict with their own
countrymen. Thus the Naval forces are often ripe for
subversive propaganda during revolutionary moments and
are generally not the strongest or most reliable troops for
reaction.
15. Selections from Lenin, II, 172.
16. The same, pp. 173-174.
17. Much later Lenin did declare that he had erred in

continuing the boycott after the objective circumstances had
changed. See his "Left" Communism, an Infantile Disorder, p.
44. (Toiler edition.)
18. And put out its own papers (Volya, Vperiod and Echo).
1273
20. The same, p. 225.
21. Karl Marx: Selected Essays, p. 12.
23. At the 1907 Convention it was revealed that 52 per cent

of the Mensheviks were intellectuals and only 6 per cent of
the Bolsheviks.
24. Selections from Lenin, II, 311-312.
25. The same, pp. 300-301.
27. V. I. Lenin: "Left" Communism, an Infantile Disorder, p. 6.
28. The same, pp. 6-7.
XXXVIII. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1917
THE World War slit open the living corpse of the Russian
State from top to bottom and exposed the mass of maggots
and parasitic pathogens that had been feeding upon the
body politic. Under the onslaught of the German army, the
1274
whole rotten tissue of the ruling class fell to pieces in one
disgraceful military debacle after another. To make up for
its lack of technique, the Russian general staff mobilized
fifteen million men, of whom soon five and a half million
were counted as dead, wounded, or captured. (*1) No
wonder the mass of deserters reached unheard-of
proportions, no wonder the revolutionary movement
burned fiercely everywhere.
Now that the life of Czarism was in danger, the liberal

bourgeoisie, as the chief beneficiary of the flood of gold and
profits that came from the War, hugged closer than ever to
the bureaucracy. The people, on the other hand, had first to
drink to the dregs all the horrors and misery of the War
before they could mobilize their forces for the revolt.
In the years just prior to the War, the labor movement

already had begun again to raise its voice in no uncertain
terms. After the massacre in the Lena Gold Fields in 1912
there came a series of strikes and demonstrations mounting
in the first half of 1914 to an extent surpassed only by the
events of 1905. In the seven months of 1914, the strike wave
embraced one and a half million workers. In July alone
three hundred and twenty-five thousand, or one-tenth of
the total proletariat was on strike. Immediately upon the
declaration of War, the movement had been sternly
suppressed but, by the first two months of 1917, labor
activity had regained its extraordinary high level. The War
retarded the revolutionary process only later to drive it
deeper, to accelerate it and aid it to grip the very vitals of
society.
When revolutionary activity reappeared in 1917, it was

quite a different sort of movement than that which had
existed before the War. First, the Second International had
collapsed and its fall had greatly disorientated the workers.
1275
Second, many of the older fighters had been called to the
front and there either had perished or were lost. At the
same time immense numbers of new villagers were brought
into the city to dilute the ranks of the conscious proletariat.
These new elements had to learn the lessons of the past all
over again before they could become soldiers in the class
struggle. The War also made the backward workers
intensely patriotic. In fact, their discontent with the
government began not with the declaration of the War but
with the manner in which the War was conducted. They
resented the bottomless treachery of the government and
the immense loss of lives due to criminal irresponsibility
and waste. They hated the profiteers and other parasites
growing fat off the War and making the ruin of the country
inevitable. Protesting against the methods of conducting the
War, they came in conflict with the government and thus
learned their first lessons in the class struggle. But all of this
took time.
At the same time the revolutionary forces had become

much dispersed and had taken opportunist and nationalist
positions. Even the Bolshevik faction in the Duma
displayed certain weaknesses. Lenin was abroad, and his
defeatist position on war was shared by no Russian
organization.(*2) However, the percentage of patriots in the
ranks of the Bolsheviks was not large, and the deputies
soon recovered their balance and continued their struggle
against the War. The government followed all their moves
very closely, and in November the group of deputies was
arrested and exiled to Siberia.
It should be remarked that already the police had noted:

"The most energetic and audacious element, ready for
tireless struggle, for resistance and continual organization is
that element, those organizations, and those people who are
1276
concentrated around Lenin." (*3) So closely were these
elements watched that in the St. Petersburg Committee of
the Bolsheviks alone, three out of the seven members were
in the employ of the government's Secret Service.
"By the end of 1916, prices are rising by leaps and bounds.
To the inflation and the breakdown of transport, there is
added an actual lack of goods. The demands of the
population have been cut down by this time to one-half.
The curve of the workers' movement rises sharply. In
October the struggle enters its decisive phase, uniting all
forms of discontent in one. Petrograd draws back for the
February leap. A wave of meetings runs through the
factories. The topics: food supplies, high cost of living, war,
government. Bolshevik leaflets are distributed; political
strikes begin; improvised demonstrations occur at factory
gates; cases of fraternization between certain factories and
the soldiers are observed; a stormy protest-strike flares up
over the trial of the revolutionary sailors of the Baltic Fleet."
(*4)
The same thing was occurring in the provinces. When the

Duma met on the fourteenth of February, bread cards were
distributed in Petrograd. Strikes now occurred more
frequently. At the same time, the unsolved agrarian
problem flared forth again, fusing the proletarian revolt
with the peasant war. After 1905 the government had made
some attempts to pacify the peasantry by abolishing the old
land redemption payments and opening the way to a
broader colonization of Siberia. Landlords had begun to
make concessions in the matter of rentals and to sell their
land in far larger quantities than before. This did not,
however, help the great mass of peasants but only
facilitated the rise of the kulak and capitalist section of the
peasantry. To cap the climax, the War, in drawing two
1277
million horses and fifteen million men into the army
flattened out the poorer sections even further and caused
the agrarian crisis to enter a most acute phase.
The chaos on the countryside could not but find an echo in

the chaos in the ruling class itself. The isolation of the
monarchy from the people had led to the most idiotic and
stultified condition of the Court and to the concentration of
a religious hysteria and mysticism that found an outlet in
the magic of Rasputin. The Court's isolation was deepened
by its definitely pro-German sympathies. The Czarina
herself was a Hessian.
The traitorous leanings of the Court offered the mass of

people of Russia a convenient pretext for their
demonstrations. As in the French Revolution, where the
Austrian-born Queen was suspected of being against her
adopted country, and the people, by directing their attacks
against the foreigner, were able to overthrow the old French
regime, so in Russia, the masses, by concentrating their
hatred against the German camarilla and the Hessian
Queen, could move step by step objectively against their
own "Little Father" and overthrow the old order. Every
defeat of the Russian Army was laid to the treachery of the
pro-Germans in the Czarist Court. At first it was considered
as a problem of saving the Czar from his treacherous
advisers, then it became a matter of dealing with the Chief
himself, of eliminating him as the real public enemy of the
people.
The idiocy of the monarchy, the deep cleft in the ranks of

the nobility between the pro-Germans and those in favor of
the Triple Entente, the general network of intrigue and
distrust around the leading centers of the government, all
helped to paralyze the ruling cliques and to accelerate the
developments of the Revolution. Added to this were the
1278
plots of the English and French diplomats who were greatly
discontented with the part Russia was playing in the War
and wanted a change in the regime so as to insure greater
efficiency at the front. Finally came the palace revolution
wherein Rasputin, the Queen's favorite priest, was
murdered by elements of the aristocracy.
"The murder of Rasputin played a colossal role, but a very

different one from that upon which its perpetrators and
inspirers had counted. It did not weaken the crisis, but
sharpened it. People talked of the murder everywhere; in
the palaces, in the staffs, at the factories, and in the
peasants' huts. The inference drew itself; even the grand
dukes have no other recourse against the leprous camarilla
except poison and the revolver. The poet Blok wrote of the
murder of Rasputin: 'The bullet which killed him reached
the very heart of the ruling dynasty."' (*5)
Thus the attack upon the monarchy by the masses from

below was preceded from above by the disintegration of the
ruling groups whose mutual struggles attested to the fact
that they no longer could control either events or
themselves.
On the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth of February (*6)

the action came to a head. At first the disorders at
Petrograd and the insurrection of the entire garrison there
compelled the Czar to flee to the front, that is, to the general
headquarters of the army. When the crisis deepened, the
Czar determined to return to his family, but on the way
back he was held up by the workers in revolt. The Monarch
decided to wire the Council of Advisers, at the head of
which stood the bourgeois Rodzianko, that he should form
a new government. By this time, however, the troops
already had invaded the Czar's palaces and his private
sentries had disappeared. Far away from the scene of action,
1279
the Czar was pitifully belated with his concessions. The
very general whom the despot appointed to deal drastically
with the situation, arrived at the capital, and found he
could accomplish nothing. All over the country the army
was in revolt and was recognizing the new regime that had
not yet formally been established, but which was presumed
to be composed of the ministers abandoned by the Czar
when he fled.
By the time the Czar had been convinced that the

revolution could not be stopped and had wired Rodzianko
to form a responsible ministry and a Constitutional
Monarchy, it was too late; the question now being debated
was whether Nicholas himself should be further tolerated
by the people. The generals at the front advised the
monarch to abdicate; the Czar hesitated between abdicating
in favor of his son or his brother; the revolution pressed on
and threw the entire monarchy into the discard.
The events had started with the celebration of International

Women's Day, February 23, when working class women,
incensed at the high cost of living and the waiting in line for
bread, called the workers on strike. The next day the slogan
for bread was drowned by the slogans, "Down with the
Autocracy!" "Down with the War!"
Instinctively the masses were differentiating between the

police and the regular army. Towards the former there was
unmitigated and relentless hostility; towards the latter
every effort for fraternization and conciliation was made to
win them to the people's side. Here, indeed, is an important
lesson. The police were professional dogs of the
government. They were involved in all the graft and
corruption of the old regime and intimately connected with
the vice and other institutions of the slums that had
dragged the people down. All during their professional
1280
lives they carefully had calculated how much they could
possibly squeeze and blackmail from each and every
individual. With such debased and degenerate elements the
people could deal only by extermination.
It was entirely different with the regular army of conscripts

who came fresh from the factory and the farm, who were
close to the people and who were not accustomed to
shooting at their own countrymen. Although unarmed, the
people were emboldened by desperation to stand firm in
the face of the troops' charges. They attempted physically to
demoralize the troops so as to compel them to disobey their
furious officers who had ordered them to shoot to kill, and
to induce them to turn upon these very officers with their
guns and to go over to the side of the revolution. Thus the
revolution was able to crack the army and to win the first
troops to the side of the masses. This in turn compromised
these soldiers to the extent of making them the most firm
defenders of the movement, since their mutiny would now
cost them their lives should the revolution fail. The
mutineers became the ardent trainers of the revolutionary
army. For them the die was cast; they had backed up their
opinions with their lives.
Not that the government had been caught unprepared for

the revolt. For years, ever since 1905, the authorities
carefully had worked out plans to meet the next attempt. A
commission under General Khabalov had completed, by
the middle of January, 1917, an exact scheme for the
crushing of a possible insurrection in St. Petersburg. The
difficulty lay not in the plan but in the ability to carry it out;
the human material refused to function since the garrison
itself had revolted.
In a sense, a similar situation existed among the workers.

For a long time the revolutionary movement had been
1281
preparing for the new revolution, but the events caught the
organizations unready. It was the women, mostly
unorganized, who led the way and started the ball rolling,
just as it was the women who most courageously faced the
troops and shamed them into lowering their guns. The
organizations, even the boldest of them, the Bolsheviks,
tended to lag behind the events. However, there is this
important dialectical connection to be noted between the
spontaneous mass actions and the workers' revolutionary
organizations, like the Bolshevik party. It was the masses
that pressed forward creating events that dragged the
Bolsheviks with them, but once the Bolsheviks and the
other organizations similar to them participated, they
stiffened the people in the course of action. There existed no
longer the jelly-like wavering, the general hysteria; the
ranks held more firmly and the lessons of events were
brought up for scientific discussion. If the organizations'
theory lagged behind the practice of the people, in turn this
theory helped to guide that practice ever to higher levels.
Within the organizations themselves, as events moved with

the swiftness of the airplane, the gap between theory and
practice caused peristaltic convulsions to shake the whole
organism from time to time. Generally it was to be found
that the functionaries of the organization were further
removed from the events than the rank and file members
who ran into battle and were closer to the praxis of the
people. The functionaries had been elected on the basis of
past events, already dead and buried in the light of the tidal
wave sweeping society; these functionaries by no means
could guarantee that they would remain as flexible as in the
past when they had won their superior positions of control.
They tended to a certain rigidity and conservatism in spite
of themselves. On the other hand, their position and
training allowed them to see the problem more in its true
1282
perspective and breadth, and this too tended to make them
hesitate to take the enormous responsibility which the
decisions of the day entailed. The action of the masses
relieved them of this responsibility but, should they not
support the mass struggle, everything might be
compromised because of the masses' insufficient
understanding of the process as a whole, and insufficient
organization and preparation for the events of the future.
Thus there had to be found within the organizations of the

working class a membership close enough to the workers
and to decisive class actions to enable them sensitively to
follow every event and to push forward leaders who would
see that the lag between theory and practice was not too
great. Genuine leaders constantly would refresh themselves
in the struggle and would remain close to their membership
and their class; such people overcame the general
conservatism of the functionary and supplemented the
action of the class with the leadership of the organization
necessary for victory. In Russia, the only organization
trained to do so was the Bolshevik party and even this one
could proceed only haltingly and with a good deal of
friction. So delicate was the equilibrium that it was possible
for the weight of even one man to change historic events.
The events produced the man --- Lenin.
"To the question, Who led the February revolution? we can

then answer definitely enough: Conscious and tempered
workers educated for the most part by the Party of Lenin.
But we must here immediately add: This leadership proved
sufficient to guarantee the victory of the insurrection, but it
was not adequate to transfer immediately into the hands of
the proletarian vanguard the leadership of the revolution."
(*7)
1283
The February revolution was achieved in Petrograd. The
rest of the country followed, not because it was accustomed
to do what the capital did, but because the capital
expressed in the most concentrated form the aspirations
and needs of the entire country. The fighting was limited in
the main to one city. Thus the February revolution, for an
action of that scope, was practically bloodless. Less than
one thousand five hundred casualties, including killed and
wounded, were reported for the historic days of the
overthrow of the monarchy and for the establishment of a
bourgeois republic. The democracy-lovers, especially those
who later denounced the Bolsheviks for having seized
power without taking a vote throughout the country, have
little to say generally on the fact that the action in one city
decided the fate of the entire country and that, if such could
be a realistic expression of the feelings of all the people, the
action of the Bolsheviks in October might also have been
such an expression. We shall return later to the question of
the "democracy" of the October revolution.
The elemental forces that had so brusquely pushed aside

the monarchy now threw all the problems of 1905, which
had remained all this time in chiaroscuro, into the brightest
light. There had been no responsible Duma or Ministry.
Indeed, the Czar had dismissed even his rubber-stamp
Duma when the telling blows were delivered by the
soldiers and masses. When the first shock of revolution was
over it occurred to the bourgeois leaders of the Duma to
form a Provisional Committee of the Duma Members to run
affairs. Simultaneously, with the release of the political
prisoners and the advance of the revolution, there was
created also a Provisional Executive Committee of the
Soviet of Workers' Deputies composed of old, experienced
1284
revolutionists. This Executive Committee immediately
called for the elections of regular delegates from the soviets
of workers and soldiers which were spontaneously
springing up on all sides. The experiences of 1905 had not
been in vain.
"From the moment of its formation the Soviet, in the person

of its Executive Committee, begins to function as a
sovereign. It elects a temporary food commission and
places it in charge of the mutineers and of the garrison in
general. It organizes parallel with itself a Provisional
revolutionary staff --- everything was called provisional in
those days --- of which we have already spoken above. In
order to remove financial resources from the hands of the
officials of the old power, the Soviet decides to occupy the
State Bank, the Treasury, the Mint and the Printing Office
with a revolutionary guard. The tasks and functions of the
Soviet grow unceasingly under pressure from the masses.
The revolution finds here its indubitable center. The
workers, the soldiers, and soon also the peasants, will from
now on turn only to the Soviet. In their eyes, the Soviet
becomes the focus of all hopes and all authority, an
incarnation of the revolution itself. But representatives of
the possessing classes will also seek in the Soviet, with
whatever grindings of teeth, protection and counsel in the
resolving of conflicts." (*8)
What was to prevent the masses through their soviets from

taking over the power then and there? The bourgeoisie had
made not the slightest pretense of favoring the revolution;
on the contrary, they were in deadly fear of the people and
acted in close conspiracy with the monarchy for the
restoration of Czarism in one form or another. They had not
even dared to create a formal Provisional Committee of the
Duma but only an unofficial one to keep the government
1285
functioning during the period of chaos. At this moment the
delegation of the Provisional Executive Committee of the
soviets came to the Duma representatives and begged them
to take the power.
Here we have the unprecedented situation wherein

revolutionary socialists, Mensheviks, and Social-
Revolutionaries, themselves in charge of the organs of real
power, the soviets, the only institutions that the masses
respected, went to their enemies, the capitalists, and begged
them to take power. This could happen only because the
Mensheviks had developed the theory that the revolution
had to be a bourgeois democratic one and that, in such a
revolution, only the bourgeoisie could lead the way and
take control. Finally, after repeated urgings by the
Provisional Executive Committee, and after the bourgeois
ministers could not help but realize that, if they did not
accept, the masses would indeed take things into their own
hands' the Miliukovs, Guchkovs, Rodziankos, et al.,
decided, as loyal subjects to the Czar, to assume control and
try to save the old order and capitalism. Thereupon these
craven elements suddenly blossomed out as the
"Revolutionary Government" and were enabled to maintain
this pose, not because of their revolutionary activity but
simply because Menshevism and socialist populism had
coolly and calculatingly turned over all power to them and
had quit the fight for control.
The masses, intoxicated by the first honeymoon days of the

revolution, did not realize that their chief enemy was to be
found entirely within their own ranks. They had yet to
learn the bitter lesson that always the fight has to be waged
on two fronts, one against the open enemy, the other in the
rear --- in their case, against the agents of the enemy who
were paralyzing the working class from within.
1286
In the struggle against Czarism various classes and sections
had participated in such a way as often to blur distinctions.
In a common front were not only the workers in the large
factories, but those of the small and the light shops, not
only the unskilled laborer but the skilled mechanic,
together with elements of the rural and urban petty
bourgeoisie. These masses had been fused into one
uncritical mass against the old order; they had not as yet
become differentiated into their various component parts.
Naturally, at this stage of events, it was the upper strata, the
more articulate elements, that took the lead. These were the
skilled workers and the petty bourgeois groups adhering to
the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries. At this
period, the masses could not as yet distinguish the true
from the false, the genuine from the sham revolutionists.
For that matter, the Bolsheviks themselves had not been
prepared for the events and were not able either to
crystallize at once a correct policy or to win the confidence
of the masses. All the pressure of capitalism inclined to
favor the parties of the Right among the revolutionary
masses rather than those of the Left. This was another way
of saying that the revolution could not proceed
immediately to give victory to the Soviets because of the
lack of clarity and understanding on the part of the workers
and their leaders and organizations. Clarity and firmness
had to be gained in the course of a long struggle wherein
every day was to count as a year. The Bolsheviks were to
win only after the masses had tried all other parties and
these organizations had failed them.
It would seem, from the formal argument of democracy,

that the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, those
staunch protagonists of the rule of the people, could not
have supported the Provisional Committee of Duma
Members. This committee had not been elected by the
1287
people. According to the Czar, the Duma had been
dismissed. Had the Mensheviks believed that the Duma
was indeed a more democratic mechanism than the soviets,
at least they could have taken the power in order to call for
immediate elections by the people. But it was precisely
these democrats who steadily insisted on postponing the
elections and retaining a government not elected by the
people. These were the politicians who attacked the
Bolsheviks for lack of democracy!
In spite of themselves, however, the Mensheviks and Social-

Revolutionaries could not liquidate the soviets. All they
could declare was that the soviets would agree to support
the Provisional Committee of the Duma and a Provisional
Government, but they added the condition that the
government must allow the soviets the complete right to
develop themselves. The government itself soon enough
would come to realize that it existed only because of the
good nature of the masses and at the will of the soviets.
During the whole period there existed a dual government --
- on the one hand the Provisional Government living by the
good graces of the soviets, and on the other hand the
soviets supported by the masses but abdicating power to
the Duma Committee. A fierce struggle ensued between
these two forms of government. The Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries in charge of the soviets supported the
power of the Duma. Only the Bolsheviks, at first a small
minority, raised the slogan: "All Power to the Soviets" and
convinced the masses behind the soviets that they
themselves no longer should abdicate their power, but must
grasp immediately and permanently what had been
available to them from the beginning.
This was how the Russian situation stood until the gigantic
problems of the day came up for solution. The matter of the
1288
War, of hunger, of land distribution, of disorganization,
these were pressing questions that neither the Duma nor
the parties in control of the soviets could answer. Slowly
the masses were forced to take matters into their own hands;
they placed the control in the Bolshevik Party. The period
from February to October, 1917, was the period of the
gradual, zig-zag movement of the masses to accomplish the
basic tasks before them by the assumption of complete
power.
"On the 1st of March the Provisional Committee undertook

the formation of a ministry, appointing to it those men
whom the Duma had been recommending to the Tsar since
1915 as enjoying the confidence of the country. They were
big landlords and industrialists, opposition deputies in the
Duma, leaders of the Progressive Bloc. The fact is that, with
one single exception, the revolution accomplished by
workers and soldiers found no reflection whatever in the
staff of the revolutionary government. The exception was
Kerensky." (*9) Still without calling elections, the Kadets in
the saddle named Prince Lvov as the Prime Minister and
supported him with two other Right Wingers, Miliukov
and Guchkov.
On the surface this group had obtained central power; in

reality they were prisoners of the revolution and had to
come to the soviets for approval of all their acts. In the
provinces this was far more true than in the center, and
while the Provisional Government appointed
commissioners to govern the rest of the country, such
commissioners usually achieved nothing. They complained
that no one obeyed them, but heeded only the soviets in
charge of the villages, towns, districts, and provinces. In
other words, the top leaders of the Mensheviks and Social-
Revolutionaries who turned over their power in the capital
1289
were not followed by their own members living closer to
the masses, in the back parts of the country; it became the
duty of the provinces to push forward the center.
It should be borne in mind that the Executive Committee of

the Soviets had not been created, as in 1905, from a strike
wave of which they had been the leaders. The February
revolution, thanks to the revolt of the troops, was victorious
before the workers had created any soviet at all. The
Executive Committee, then, was self-constituted in advance
while many of the real leaders were still engaged in
insurrection. Both in the soviets and in the government, the
people in charge were interested only in maintaining the
status quo and not permitting the revolution to progress to
its end.
At the start, the workers could not raise their voice too
authoritatively in the soviet, since extreme chaos reigned,
and many petty bourgeois careerists crowded into the
soviet and became "delegates" representing no one. Then,
too, the country was at war, soldiers were flooding the
cities, and, for every two delegates who were workers,
there were five who were but peasants in uniform. The
revolution could proceed farther only when the drive of the
proletariat was buttressed by the needs of the peasants' war.
Within the soviets, the political representatives of the
peasantry, the Social-Revolutionaries, dominated the scene
and, together with the skilled workers and petty bourgeois
elements of the city, overwhelmed all other factors.
Within these parties definite clefts soon began to appear,

especially as the old leaders returned from abroad or from
exile. On the Right were those people who had been
patriotic from the outset of the War, such as Plechanov,
Zasulich, and Deutsch among the Mensheviks, and
Chaikovsky and Breshko-Breshkovskaia among the Social-
1290
Revolutionaries. In the Center there were those who had
been part of the Zimmerwald conference, who had opposed
the War when conducted by the Czar but who found the
War agreeable when it was conducted by democracy. These
men found themselves in the same camp as the other
Socialist opportunists who were fighting the War "for
democracy's sake." Among the Mensheviks they included
Tseritelli, Cheidze, and Dan, while farther Left, opposing
the War, yet wanting a rapprochement between the
Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, was Martov who had been
connected with Trotsky in editing Nashe Slovo (Our Word)
in Paris. Among the Social-Revolutionaries the Centrist
position was occupied by Kerensky and Chernov, both of
whom wanted war to end, once the War had been
connected with the introduction of democracy in Russia.
However, within the soviets were elements of these parties

that were forced to take on those responsible tasks which
brought them into conflict with the old regime. The soviets,
under mass pressure, had to suppress the monarchist press,
although later the right of the press to advocate the return
of the Czar was restored. The soviets were forced to issue
an order to prevent the Provisional Government from
releasing the Czar. They also had to solve the problem of
feeding the people, and this led them to expropriate private
property, to control speculation, and to organize a market.
The soviets were obliged to declare all grain stores to be
public property, to fix prices for bread, to take control over
industry, to regulate exchange with the peasantry, precisely
as the Jacobins had done in the French Revolution.
Thus, although the leaders wanted to maintain the status

quo, this had become impossible. Soon conflicts arose
between the Provisional Executive Committee and the
workers. The overthrow of the monarchy had been
1291
accompanied by strikes of the workers, mainly for the
eight-hour day. The leaders of the soviets ordered the
strikers back to work; the strikers refused, and carried on
until they had won their principal demand. The Menshevik
leaders had wanted the revolution to be merely political;
the workers insisted on making the revolution operate to
their advantage and began to fight for the real
improvement of their position. In their own way the
proletarians were testing their strength for the real
struggles ahead. In the strike victory for the eight-hour day
it was the Bolsheviks who were beginning to make
themselves heard over the parliamentarian opportunists. In
the action of the soviet executives who opposed the
workers' continuing the strike until their demands had been
won, already there was to be seen a basic struggle between
the workers in the unions and the peasants in the country.
Already the fact was apparent that the soviet deputies no
longer represented the real situation in the country and that
the soviets had become an organ for the intellectual
politicians and careerists who meant to block the will of the
most advanced section of the proletariat. Through the
Executive Committee, the politics of the bourgeois order,
crystallized in the most revolutionary organs, vainly tried
to prevail over the economics of the workers enunciated
through the regular institutions of the trade union and the
strike. Such was the paradoxical dialectics of the revolution.
In the long run, the soviets had to give the order for the
establishment of the eight-hour day, politics began to catch
up with economics, and the workman began to take the
leading role.
"The events connected with this struggle for the eight-hour

day had an immense significance for the whole future
development of the revolution. The workers had gained a
few free hours a week for reading, for meetings, and also
1292
for practice with the rifle, which became a regular routine
from the moment of the creation of the workers' militia.
Moreover, after this clear lesson, the workers began to
watch the Soviet leadership more closely. The authority of
the Mensheviks suffered a serious drop. The Bolsheviks
grew stronger in the factories, and partly too in the barracks.
The soldier became more attentive, thoughtful, cautious: he
understood that somebody was stalking him. The
treacherous design of the demagogue turned against its
own inspirers. Instead of alienation and hostility, they got a
closer welding together of workers and soldiers." (*10)
Through their closeness to the soldiers, who were peasants

in uniform, the workers were able to get nearer to the
peasantry, far nearer than in 1905. These soldiers formed
the natural contact committee between the two classes and
frequently visited the factories to fraternize with the
workers and then went to the villages to translate the
meaning of the struggle to the people there. The existence
of a vast army of conscripts had immense effect upon the
ability of the workers to impress their will upon the
countryside and to lead the peasantry to victory.
One of the first acts of the soviets was to free the soldier
through its famous Order No. 1 in which it declared in bold
paragraphs that elective committees should be formed in all
military regiments; soldiers' deputies should be elected to
the soviet; in all political acts the soldiers should submit to
the soviet and its committees; weapons should be in the
control of the regimental and battalion committees, and
should in no case be given up to the officer; on duty the
severest military discipline --- off duty, complete citizens'
rights; saluting off duty and titling of officers were
abolished; uncivil treatment of soldiers was forbidden.
"That Order of the Day gained wide and painful notoriety
1293
and gave the first impetus to the collapse of the army." (*11)
When the Executive Committee later wanted to modify this
Order, the typesetters refused to set up the type for the
print. Thus the leaders of the soviets could not retract in
time the Order breaking the discipline of the Czarist army.
In revenge, the Executive Committee permitted practically
all the old Czarist officers to remain in charge. It was left to
the soldiers themselves to deal with their former masters in
their own way.
In the meantime, within the ranks of the Bolsheviks

themselves, sharp disputes were taking place. At the start,
the Bolshevik leaders acted as though they were merely a
Left Wing of democracy and not a proletarian party
fighting for power. Eleven of their members or adherents
were members of the Executive Committee of the Soviets
and their fraction in the soviet numbered forty, and yet
without an official protest on their part they allowed the
soviets to give up their power to the Provisional
Government. Only on the fourth of March did the Bureau
of the Bolshevik Central Committee issue a statement that
the Provisional Government was counter-revolutionary, but
nothing concrete was done about it. Such friendliness to the
new government was not the viewpoint of the membership
of the Bolshevik Party, but it was the leadership that
controlled the situation. This opportunist policy was
rendered more secure when Stalin and Kamenev returned
from exile and veered the Bolshevik Party sharply to the
Right. These leaders came out with slogans that varied but
slightly from those of the Menshevik defensists, who called
for the continuation of the War in order to save the
revolution. Thus, as they moved to the bourgeoisie and to a
coalition with the Mensheviks, the Bolshevik officials began
to break sharply from Lenin, who was in Switzerland and
up to then unable to reach Russia.
1294
"The policy of the Party throughout the whole country
naturally followed that of Pravda (Truth). (*12) In many
Soviets, resolutions about fundamental problems were
adopted unanimously: the Bolsheviks simply bowed down
to the Soviet majority. At a conference of the Soviets of the
Moscow region, the Bolsheviks joined in the resolution of
the social patriots on the War. And finally, at the All-
Russian Conference of the representatives of eighty-two
Soviets at the end of March and the beginning of April, the
Bolsheviks voted for the official resolution on the question
of power which was defended by Dan. This extraordinary
political rapprochement with the Mensheviks caused a
widespread tendency towards unification. In the provinces,
the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks entered into united
organizations. The Kamenev-Stalin faction was steadily
converting itself into a left flank of the so-called
revolutionary democracy." (*13)
Although removed from the scene of struggle, Lenin had

correctly diagnosed the situation and, fuming and fretting,
was exhausting the ingenuity of all his contacts in order to
return to Russia. As soon as the reports of events had
reached him, he had pointed out the fact that, while the
workers had done the fighting, they had turned over the
power to their enemies; this could be only the first stage of
the revolution. What was necessary was the organization of
a genuine revolutionary party, a break with the Mensheviks,
struggle for a republic, war against imperialism, activity for
the international proletarian revolution and pressing for the
realization of the demand: All Power to the Soviets. (*14)
Lenin, and Zinoviev with him, were under no illusions

about the new Provisional Government. This government
could not establish peace, it would not publish secret
treaties, nor conclude an armistice, nor free the colonies and
1295
subject nations of Russia, nor give bread to the people. Only
a workers' government, allied first with the mass of poorest
village population and second with revolutionary workers
of all warring countries, would be able to perform these
tasks. The job of the revolutionary movement was to expose
the government, to organize soviets, to arm the workers, to
work in the army, to organize in the countryside,
particularly among the agricultural workers.
Lenin now sent a series of "Letters from Afar" to be

published in Pravda, official organ of the Party. Significantly,
only one of the letters was allowed to be published and
then only on the date that Lenin actually arrived in Russia,
that is, on April third. In these letters, Lenin urged that the
Bolsheviks fight for the overthrow of the Provisional
Government and use the soviets as the organs of
insurrection. The workers must create their universal
militia.
Like a caged lion, Lenin understood he must break out of

his prison and enter Russia at all costs if he was to change
the fatal direction given to the Bolshevik Party by the old
leadership now in control. He knew Bolshevik leaders were
taking a nationalist and class collaborationist direction
approaching the line of the Menshevik opportunists. As a
desperate measure, he agreed, therefore, to permit the
German government to send him in a sealed train through
Germany so that he could return.
The German government, of course, had its own purpose in

so doing. It hoped that Lenin would be able further to
demoralize the Russian government so that an early peace
could be made, thus releasing all German troops for action
on the Western Front. Affairs were going against the
German imperialists, and America was on the verge of
entrance into the War. Decisions had to be reached quickly
1296
or all would be lost. The imperial government of Germany
was therefore willing to play with the revolutionist Lenin.
Under such circumstances, Lenin had difficulty in meeting
the propaganda of the Entente and hostile press that he was
a German agent.
On his side, Lenin had no choice but to accept the offer, his
sole condition being that the train be sealed so that no
person could enter it while he was passing through
Germany. There was absolutely no other means of reaching
Russia and, in the light of the opportunism of the Bolshevik
leadership, it was urgent that he delay not one day more
than was necessary. In his farewell letter to the Swiss
workers, Lenin took pains to expound his conception of the
Russian revolution and the idea that the Russian revolution
could not be successful without the world revolution and
the end of capitalism. He writes: "The Russian proletariat
single-handed cannot bring the Socialist revolution to a
victorious conclusion. But it can give the Russian
Revolution a mighty sweep such as would create most
favorable conditions for a Socialist revolution and would in
a sense start it.... It can help create more favourable
circumstances for its most important, most trustworthy and
most reliable collaborator, the European and the American
socialist proletariat, to join in the decisive battles." (*15)
How different was this world conception from the
nationalist practical politics of Stalin and Kamenev at the
time.
Lenin arrived in Russia not a day too soon. His first words
were in the nature of a scathing attack upon the leadership
of the Bolshevik Party and the editorship of the Pravda.
Immediately he advanced his theses: "The peculiarity of the
present situation in Russia is that it represents a transition,
which, from the first stage of the revolution because of the
1297
inadequate organization and insufficient class-
consciousness of the proletariat, led to the assumption of
power by the bourgeoisie, to its second stage which is to
place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest
strata of the peasantry." (*16)
Lenin insisted no concessions be made to revolutionary

defensism so long as the workers and poor peasants had no
power, secret treaties existed, and the War was being
fought for imperialist aims. He pointed out that capitalism
could never give peace, that the battle for peace must be
part of the struggle to end capitalism. As Lenin saw it, the
only reason why the workers did not take power in Russia
was because they were not class conscious and not
sufficiently organized. It was necessary to use the period of
legality given to the Bolsheviks to explain to the workers
that it was imperative for the soviets to take all the power
into their hands. So long as the Provisional Government did
not forbid freedom of speech and press, so long would the
Bolsheviks abstain from violent insurrectionary tactics and
take solely to methods of persuasion to win the majority of
the workers to the side of the victory of their own organs,
the soviets.
The program of the Bolsheviks would have to call for

nationalization of the banks, workers' control over
production and distribution. Above all was it necessary to
clear up the confusion within the Bolshevik ranks in order
to put an end to the situation where ". . . even our own
Bolsheviks show confidence in the government." (*17) An
immediate convention must be called for the entire Party
that would change the Party program on the question of
imperialism and imperialist war, on the matter of the
proper attitude toward the State and soviets, and on the
minimum program required. The Party name should also
1298
be changed to Communist Party so as sharply to
distinguish it forever from the Menshevik Social-
Democratic. A new international of revolutionary socialists
must be created. Those who refused to go this way would
have to break with Lenin, the leader and founder and
genius of the Party.
This speech of Lenin, delivered to a caucus of Bolshevik

members of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets on the
day of his arrival, came as a veritable bombshell. Lenin had
warned them he would rather be with one Liebknecht than
with one hundred and ten defensists. Here was proven
again the paradox that, in politics, the part is sometimes
greater than the whole; Lenin was greater than all the rest
of the Executive Committee that opposed him. Stalin was
forced to yield in silence, a silence that was to endure
practically until the death of Lenin; the others were
defeated overwhelmingly. The fact was that the Bolshevik
worker members long ago had been prepared for just such
policies as Lenin had proposed, and, even before Lenin's
arrival, had fought against the opportunism of their leaders.
The arrival of Lenin helped immensely to close the gap
between the leadership and the members of the Bolsheviks
as well as between the Bolshevik organization and the
masses. From now on the action of the masses would be
sensitively followed, understood, and even anticipated by
its scientific vanguard, the Russian Communist Party, that
would interpret every experience and constantly raise the
struggle to a higher level.
The Czar had been overthrown, but when was the War to
end? This was the question on the lips of the people; it was
on this question that the Provisional Government was to
fall. The Guchkovs, Miliukovs, and Rodziankos had no
1299
intention of ending the War until the imperialist aims of the
Russian Czar had been realized: the capture of
Constantinople, Armenia, Northern Persia, portions of
Austria and Turkey. The soviets, however, issued a
proclamation that Russia was no longer interested in
annexations and would carry out only a war of defense.
Ignoring this action and not waiting to test the temper of
the masses, Miliukov published a note to the effect that
Russia would continue the War. Herein lay his fatal error.
On the twentieth of April, the masses invaded the streets
with arms in their hands to demand: "Down with
Miliukov." Again it was the soldiers who led the way; the
workers quickly followed and streamed out of their
factories. That day the masses were persuaded to return to
the barracks and to the factories, but the next day they came
out again, this time on the call of the newly revived
Bolshevik Party itself. In turn, the Kadets supporting
Miliukov organized their own demonstration in the
bourgeois center of town. Thus two hostile forces met in a
head-on collision; the stage was set for the further course of
the civil war.
At this critical moment the revolution was menaced by a

great threat. In the first place, many of the Bolsheviks,
apparently having quelled the Right danger in their ranks
and having realized how power had slipped from their
hands into that of the bourgeoisie, believed, together with
the soviet workers, who also now appreciated that the
Provisional Government lived only by sufferance, that it
would be a very easy thing, as easy as the downfall of the
Czar, to overthrow the Provisional Government and
capitalism. In these days, the Petrograd Bolshevik Central
Committee actually put forward the slogan, "Down with
the Provisional Government!" They did not consider such a
move totally unprepared for; that it was one thing to put
1300
down the remnants of a decayed monarchy supported by
no active class, and another thing to put down the capitalist
system then dominant throughout the world. The seizure of
power would have to be maintained and supported by a
proletariat only recently awakened and organized, still far
removed from the peasantry and soldiery so far as socialist
demands were concerned. The submersion of the
Provisional Government could have been only a Blanquist
adventure and would have led to the sternest repression by
the reactionary forces aided by middle layers of the
population.
The danger manifest in the "April Days" is inherent in all

people's revolutions. The masses in their "honeymoon"
stage underestimate their difficulties and the power of the
enemy. They believe that "the people" are basically united
and that the conquest of power for the new social order can
be achieved at one blow. In such a parlous stage of the
revolution, only a stern and tested party close to the
realities of the situation can prevent the masses from
compromising themselves and going too far. This is
precisely what Lenin attempted to do. He threw all his
energy against the "Leftist" Central Committee of the
Petrograd Bolshevik Party. The slogan, "Down with the
Provisional Government," was dropped.
On the other hand, the government had prepared for

precisely this sort of provocation. Miliukov had already
been in consultation with General Kornilov for the
stationing of troops and cannon and the smashing of the
demonstration. But here, too, the counter-revolutionary
forces miscalculated and were made to appreciate the fact
that behind the Bolsheviks stood the soviets. Faced with the
menace of Kornilov, the Executive Committee of the Soviets
was impelled to wire all the regiments that "To the Executive
1301
Committee alone belongs the right to command you. Thereafter
every order for the despatch of troops had, besides the
customary formalities, to be issued on an official paper of
the Soviet and countersigned by no less than two persons
authorized for this purpose." (*18)
Thus, despite itself, and to save its own neck, the Executive
Committee was forced to divorce itself farther from the
Government and to demonstrate its own power. The
Provisional Government had exposed itself openly as the
enemy of the people, not only in its note for the
continuation of the War with Czarist aims, but in its
readiness to shoot down the revolution whose agent it
professed to be. Although the civil war was averted,
Miliukov had to resign, together with Guchkov. With the
ousting of the Kadets, it became necessary to establish a
new government, which was accomplished, still without
elections, by the formation of a coalition between the
remnants of the old Provisional Committee and the
elements controlling the Executive Committee of the
Soviets. The Social-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks
entered the government.
Within the soviets, support was accumulating for the

demand of the Bolsheviks that the soviets take the power.
Already the April Days had forced the hand of the
Executive Committee and, as a result, the Bolsheviks had
rallied at least one-third of the Petrograd proletariat behind
them. Within the Bolshevik Party, the line of Lenin clearly
had become recognized as indisputably correct. The whole
atmosphere was clearing. To overcome this Bolshevik
pressure, the opportunists decided to enter the government.
The coalition in fact was to be a substitute for the soviets'
taking power. The self-appointed leaders of the soviets
were to enter the Provisional Government, not as a majority,
1302
of course, but as a minority, not to take responsibility for
the events, but only, like the dog in the manger, to prevent
the masses from taking the responsibility which the leaders
renounced.
The entrance of the Mensheviks into the government was

also for the purpose of stabilizing the government and
renewing the offensive against the Germans. The April
offensive of the Entente had failed. It was necessary to
renew the war on the Eastern Front in order to stave off the
Germans until the Americans could arrive. Socialists from
France, Belgium, and England were shipped into Russia by
their respective governments to persuade the soviets to
continue the war. Nonetheless, the entrance of the
Mensheviks into the government was the very act necessary
to expose them. Only by hoisting them into the high office
of leadership could the masses hang them by their own
petard. While the revolution here made another definite
turn to the Left, simultaneously the socialists were forced to
take responsibility for all the crimes of capitalism and to
move to the Right.
On June 18, the new Provisional Government, socialists and

all, began a new offensive on the Western Front. By July 9,
this was transformed into a catastrophic defeat and, with
the rout at the front, the revolution took another
tremendous leap forward. Throughout the provinces the
peasants were beginning to take matters into their own
hands and to confiscate the estates of the nobles. In the
cities, hunger grew apace, and the employers began a
systematic series of lockouts designed to demoralize the
workers and to throw the country into a panic.
By June the Bolsheviks were winning the majority of the

shop committees, which were closer to the proletariat than
the soviets, and thus understood better the aims of the
1303
Bolsheviks. At a conference of the factory and shop
committees of Petrograd, for example, the Bolshevik
resolution won 335 out of 421 votes. Throughout the trade
unions the Bolshevik influence was becoming strong. All
the by-elections to the soviets also were showing a victory
for the Left, and the Bolshevik Party was growing at a great
rate. The agitation of the Leninists everywhere resulted in a
workers' militia taking form under the direction of the
factory committees. Among the Kronstadt sailors, the
Bolsheviks early had won a majority, and also in certain key
regiments in the army, such as among the Lettish troops.
During this period, too, the workers were beginning to

realize that small and sporadic strikes would not enable
them to solve any of their important problems. They were
now being persuaded by the Bolsheviks not to waste their
strength in such maneuvers, but to conserve their energy
for the second revolution that would soon come to
complete the first. As a result of the victory of the Left in
the conference of shop delegates, the struggle between the
Bolsheviks and the socialist compromisers took on the form
of a conflict between the soviet executives backed up by a
National Soviet Congress, called in June, and the workers in
the shops. To bring the matter to a sharp issue, the
Bolsheviks determined upon a demonstration in Petrograd
on June 10, during the sessions of the Congress of the
Soviets. The manifestation was to raise the banner of
"Power to the Soviets" and to demand "Down with the Ten
Capitalist Ministers." Upon hearing this, the Congress of the
Soviets categorically demanded that all demonstrations be
forbidden for three days. Thus, when dealing with the
Bolsheviks, the soviet compromisers did not hesitate to use
the power that they were constantly swearing belonged
only to the State. In the face of this drastic decision, the
Bolsheviks decided to postpone their demonstration.
1304
Pressing their advantage, the Mensheviks actually tried to
disarm the workers and the Bolsheviks, but this was
attempting too much, and they were forced to withdraw
from an action that would have led to civil war. So matters
stood for the moment. In the end, the Soviet Congress itself
had to call the demonstration for June 18; in that
demonstration, the Bolshevik banners and slogans
overwhelmingly dominated the parade.
It had now become clear that the revolution could not stand
still, but would either turn backwards into the hands of the
reactionary forces or go forward towards the soviet power
and the solution of the difficulties which constantly were
growing worse. At the top, the leaders of the soviets were
working more closely with the bourgeois Provisional
Government; below, the masses began to press forward on
their own initiative for a permanent solution of the question
of power. Particularly impatient were the soldiers who,
being peasants, did not entirely understand the relation of
forces throughout the whole country. Moreover, these
soldiers had arms in their hands and believed that they
could do again what they had done in February. When
these militants were ordered to the front at the same time
that the Kadet ministers resigned from the government
with the intention of preparing for the counter-revolution
and throwing the blame of the collapse of the renewed
offensive at the front upon the soviet opportunists in the
government, the impatience of the masses could no longer
be contained. Stimulated by the Anarchists who were now
beginning to make themselves felt, the masses poured out
into the streets on July third with demands for the removal
of the ten bourgeois ministers, all power to the soviets,
cessation of the offensive, confiscation of the printing plants
of the bourgeois press, the land to be State property, and
national control of production.
1305
Paradoxically, while the slogans were indeed Bolshevik
ones, the demonstration was bitterly opposed by the
Bolsheviks. It is strange that the most revolutionary party
should be placed in a position to restrain the revolution, yet
that was precisely the situation in which the Bolsheviks
found themselves. They knew that such an armed
demonstration could be followed only by civil war, and
they understood that, in this respect, Petrograd and
Kronstadt were far in advance of the rest of the country. It
was necessary to organize more solidly, to prepare better,
and to wait for the rest of the country to catch up to its
vanguard. In spite of these arguments, the masses decided
to act; once the demonstration was in progress, the
Bolsheviks participated in it in order to be with the masses
in all of their battles, even when they were doomed to
defeat.
What is further significant is the fact that the masses could

so easily shove aside the opinion of their most trusted
section, the Bolshevik Party. It was a symptom of the
enormous energy and initiative of the toilers, and also a
sign that they had not yet come to appreciate the value of
organization and a vanguard leadership. The newly
awakened people believed the formless mass in the street,
stiffened by some regiments, could take the place of
prepared insurrectionary forces. They had the illusion that
the action would be a matter of a few blows, and conceived
of the conquest of power in an entirely too haphazard
fashion. On the other hand to the clearest thinkers among
the Bolsheviks, such as Lenin and Trotsky, it had become
clear that from now on there must be the most feverish
haste in mobilizing the masses for the insurrection. The
disregard of the warnings of the Bolshevik Party combined
with the utilization of its slogans was an ominous signal
that the Party was lagging behind events, and that it must
1306
work day and night with maximum strength to organize
the masses for the advancement of the revolution;
otherwise the toilers would be defeated by the counter
revolution and the plans of the Party would mature entirely
too late. From now on, Lenin bent all his energies for the
preparation of the insurrection that would come in October.
In the course of this orientation, the leadership of the
Bolsheviks split wide open, several of the most prominent
functionaries showing their opposition to the second
revolution.
The July demonstration made the Provisional government

understand that it was absolutely imperative to disarm the
masses, and that the first step in this direction would have
to be a reign of terror against the Bolsheviks. But in fighting
the Bolsheviks, the coalition regime only could play into the
hands of the counter-revolution and stand fully revealed as
the enemy of the people. This in turn would eventually
spell the doom of the government and would bring the
victory to the Bolshevik forces.
To meet the July demonstration, Kerensky was sent to the

front to round up loyal regiments who were to be ready to
shoot down the masses. Conspiring with Kerensky against
the people were the leaders of the soviets themselves. A
ferocious attack was launched against the Bolsheviks; they
were hunted down, their headquarters destroyed, and their
leaders arrested. A great hue and cry was raised that the
Bolsheviks were the agents of the Kaiser. The Mensheviks
and Social-Revolutionaries took prominent part in this
disgraceful campaign. Finally, with the help of the most
reactionary regiments, the Provisional Government and the
Executive Committee were able to put down the
demonstration.
1307
The "July Days" resulted in making clear the great
difference between the shop committees and the soviets. As
we have seen, the shop committee's, composed solely of
proletarians mostly from the big factories, had gone
Bolshevik relatively early. Intoxicated by their victory in the
basic industries of Petrograd, the Petrograd Central
Committee of the Bolsheviks had imagined earlier that the
time had come to strike. They underestimated the fact that
at the same time the Mensheviks were still in control of the
soviets, which in turn were divided into two sections, one
for workers and one for soldiers, and embraced far wider
strata of the masses than the shop committees. Lenin and
the Central Committee saw that it was insufficient to win
only the shop committees at this stage of the movement; it
was above all imperative to win the majority of the soviets.
Later, the Bolsheviks would seriously consider whether, in
the light of the fact that the Executive Committee and the
majority of the leadership of the soviets no longer
represented the will of the people, it would not be wise to
brush aside the soviets as instruments of insurrection and
use other organs, such as the shop committees and the
unions. This question, however, did not come up in the
"July Days" for the simple reason that the Bolsheviks were
not only a minority, but the soviets were entirely too weak
in the countryside as a whole.
It is important to disabuse oneself of the idea that

revolutionary elements are bound to the utilization of any
given form or instrument under all circumstances. It is a
question yet to be settled in the more industrialized
countries, where the agrarian population and petty
bourgeois mass are not so great, whether the instruments of
insurrection and control will be soviets rather than trade
union councils or shop committees. Certainly the latter are
more restricted bodies than are soviets, but, in countries
1308
where the proletariat decisively leads and is the
overwhelming majority of the population, it may not be
necessary to create soviets.
Even in Russia, once having won the shop committees and

the mass of factory workers at the point of production, it
could not be long before the soviets would be swung in line
in the cities; from there the example would spread
throughout the country. But while the shop committees
were the vanguard as compared to the soviets, they would
have to pause in their move to conquer power until they
had won their fellow-travelers in the soviets to their side. It
should be borne in mind that, during the War, the soldiers'
soviets were quartered within the cities and were armed. In
other times, the city would have been able to deal with the
countryside at arms length but, during the War, the
peasantry, in the form of the mass of armed soldiers, were
encamped right within the city and were the ones with the
decisive voice. While these soldiers' organizations
eventually became an excellent liason between the workers
and the peasantry to transfer and to spread the demands of
the advanced proletarians throughout the countryside, and
to compel the workers to reflect that they could not move to
victory without firmly attaching the soldier and the
peasantry to their side, for the time being they were a force
that weighed down the workers. The existence of this more
conservative force contributed to the defeat during the "July
Days," but helped to remind the workers that they must be
sober and sure and engage in no adventures.
If 1905 was a dress rehearsal for February 1917, then the

"July Days" were a dress rehearsal for October. During the
course of this movement, the Bolsheviks found themselves
face to face with the same problems relevant to taking
power through an organized insurrection which they were
1309
to face later. The July experiences were invaluable, not only
to the masses, but to the Party planning the insurrection.
The mistakes made in the July trial were corrected in
October. That, too, accounts for the relatively very slight
casualties in the October Revolution.
From the broad historic point of view it seems that attempts

on the style of the "July Days" are necessary experiences for
all revolutions of a proletarian nature. It is impossible for
the masses to test their powers without sometimes going
beyond the proper limits. It is impossible for them to learn
all the lessons without coming up against the solid walls of
experience whereby categorical imperatives can be knocked
into their heads. In other instances the semi-insurrections
comparable to the "July Days" have been fatal to the
revolution; in the Russian experience they were, on the
contrary, but the necessary preliminary steps on the road to
power. In the Russian Revolution there was a Bolshevik
Party.
Footnotes
1. The total loss to Russia, including loss of children due to

decreased birth rate, has been estimated at eight million
souls! (See S. Kohn and A. F. Meyendorff: The Cost of the
War to Russia, p. 138.)
2. See L. D. Trotsky: The History of the Russian Revolution,

I, 37.
3. The same, quoting Police Report, p. 36.
4. The same, pp. 42-43.
5. The History of the Russian Revolution, I, 75.
1310
6. The dates are of the old Russian calendar, that is thirteen
days behind that of the ordinary calendar.
8. The same, I, p. 159.
10. The same, p. 244.
11. General A. I. Denikin: The Russian Turmoil, p. 61.
Denikin declares: "Kerensky is reported to have declared

afterwards pathetically that he would have given ten years
of his life to prevent the order from being signed." (The
same, p. 62.)
12. The official organ of the Bolsheviks edited by Kamenev

and Stalin.
13. The same, pp. 291-292.
14. See V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. XX, Book I, pp. 19-
20.
18. L. D. Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution, I, 348.
XXXIX. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (CONTINUED)
1311
THE "July Days" and their aftermath reduced the
Provisional Government to a shadow of authority; patently
that government was a mere transition, a mere holdover
while matters were being settled in the streets. In order to
put down the July demonstration, the Executive Committee
had been forced to call in the most reactionary troops, the
officers of which were supporters of the monarchy and of
the bourgeois Kadets. Repeatedly thereafter these officers
reminded all and sundry of the fact that, in the days of peril,
the Executive Committee of the Soviets, ie., the socialists
and other so-called laborites, had called on them, the
Cossacks and monarchists, for protection.
The "July Days" had been provoked by the fact that the
Kadet ministers in the Provisional Government had
tendered their resignations. The only ones remaining at the
head of the government were those who were at the head of
the soviets. Thus also it would seem that the Bolsheviks had
won their point and that the ten capitalist ministers had
actually been removed in favor of a completely socialist
government. But no! The socialists were to use all their
influence to insure that the soviets and the socialists would
not take power. They begged the Kadets to return, and,
finally, they turned over their resignations to Kerensky,
who thereupon formed another coalition government. This
time the main Kadet forces were to stay outside the
government to prepare their counter-revolutionary blow
while the socialists to be retained were to be of a second-
rate character, chief leaders who had tendered their
resignations, preferring instead to keep their places in the
Executive Committee of the Soviets where they could better
stop the Bolsheviks.
This action of the socialists must be carefully noted as it

becomes a regular part of their technique all over the world
1312
in similar cases. So far, never have they taken the power
outright, even where the masses are willing to give it to
them, but assume office only under such conditions
whereby they are in coalition with the capitalists or
monarchist reactionaries. Were they to take the power
themselves, they would have to bear the full responsibility
for the continuation of war, of unemployment, of
exploitation and misery; they would then become fully
exposed, and their pseudo-Socialism would become
laughable. Instead, they adopt another role. They must
always be in a position where they can declare that they are
still in the minority, that they are doing the best they can
but the enemy prohibits their going farther, that they have
no power to introduce socialism, etc. In the Russian
Revolution under Kerensky they actually had the majority
of the seats in the Provisional Government but, by filling it
with second-rate characters, they hoped to give the
impression that they were not responsible for the criminal
actions of the Government of which they were a part.
Now that the masses had been defeated it was the turn of
reaction to have its pleasant say. The Kerensky government
and the socialists who had fought so diligently for the right
of the monarchists to have freedom of speech and of press,
now passed vicious legislation against the Bolsheviks,
depriving them of their news organs, forcing them into
semi-legality, and smashing their headquarters. The land
committees of the peasants that were expropriating the
landlord were attacked, corporal punishment was re-
introduced into the army, and the soldiers' committees
were dealt with by an iron hand.
To put down the Bolsheviks and the masses, the socialists

had concentrated all power in the hands of Kerensky and
the Provisional Government to which had been
1313
subordinated even the Executive Committee of the Soviets.
In return, Kerensky, on his part, was to contact actively the
reactionary generals at the front for the complete smashing
of the soviets. The elections for the Constituent Assembly
which still had not been called, and which had been
announced for September, were now farther postponed.
The leaders of the revolutionary forces, such as Trotsky,
Lunacharsky, Krylenko, and others, were arrested, while
Lenin went into hiding, as he had done in Czarist days.
Throughout the country numerous congresses and
conferences were called by monarchist and reactionary
bourgeois forces to consolidate their ranks and to put their
drive behind that organizer of defeats at the front, General
Kornilov, their champion to crush the revolution in the rear.
The soldiers who participated in the July demonstration
were sent to the front as punishment --- there they were to
become indefatigable organizers against Kerensky and the
Mensheviks --- and the workers were partially disarmed.
Kornilov, called on to put down the masses, made it plain
that not long would he continue to operate under the orders
of the Provisional Government. Thus, the conciliators and
compromising socialists, having refused to give power to
the soviets, were threatened now with being driven out of
the Government as well. "In the first Coalition, formed on
May 6, the Socialists had been in the minority, but they
were in fact masters of the situation. In the ministry of July
24, the Socialists were in a majority, but they were mere
shadows of the Liberals." (*1)
Although Petrograd was silenced momentarily, the

revolutionary movement was to be heard in other quarters.
In Moscow, despite the fact that the soviet itself forbade any
demonstration on August 12, when the State was holding
its most important national conference for a mobilization of
its forces, there occurred under the call of the Bolsheviks a
1314
magnificent demonstration which paralyzed the entire city
for the day. Four hundred thousand workers went on strike,
forecasting the coming October events. However, this time
the Bolsheviks, fearing a repetition of the "July Days,"
refused to mobilize the workers in the streets. The masses,
with marvelous discipline and solidarity, simply stayed
away from work. Now it was clear that Petrograd was not
isolated and that everywhere the decks were being cleared
for decisive action. The Moscow general strike reverberated
throughout the country and similar one-day strikes were
organized in many cities. This was a master stroke of the
Bolsheviks, one demonstrating their ever growing power.
It was now high time to take drastic action against the

Bolsheviks and against the soviets as well. General
Kornilov, as Chief of Staff, carefully prepared to attack
Petrograd. In this he was supported by Kerensky who in
turn had behind him the socialists. All was not smooth,
however, between Kerensky and Kornilov. Kerensky
wanted to set up a directorate to "save the country" which
would leave the civil authorities in control and would later
establish a parliament in favor of the bourgeoisie; Kornilov,
in turn, after hanging the soviets, would be quite ready to
hang Kerensky and reinstitute the monarchy, with or
without constitutional limitations. Each faction of the
conspiracy distrusted and double-crossed the other.
In preparation for his coup, Kornilov stationed four

trustworthy divisions of cavalry outside of Petrograd and
prepared his secret organizations to aid them from within.
At the same time, an army of provocateurs was trying to
stir up the people into some sort of demonstrations, so as to
give an excuse for Kornilov to get into action. The
Bolsheviks, on their part, were restraining the masses as
much as possible, while preparing them for the inevitable
1315
civil war. Then Kerensky, at last discovering that his own
head was in danger, wired Kornilov to turn over his
command to his staff and come to Petrograd. Kornilov,
forced into the open, on the twenty-eighth of August began
the march against Petrograd. At the same time, the Right
Wing ministers resigned from the government so as to
demoralize the apparatus and free themselves from the
responsibility of attacking Kornilov.
As the reactionary troops marched to destroy Petrograd

there arose a new force, namely, the mass of workers. At a
special joint session of the Executive Committees of both
the workers-soldiers and the peasants' soviets there had
been created a "Committee of Struggle against the Counter-
Revolution," consisting of specially delegated
representatives from the three soviet Parties, from both
Executive Committees, from the trade union center, and
from the Petrograd soviet. Under their pressure, the
Kerensky government was compelled to end its wavering
and prohibited from longer hindering the direct struggle
with Kornilov.
The counter-revolutionary attempt of Kornilov was

doomed to failure. With his program he could not rely
upon a single detachment of the infantry, but solely upon
the Cossacks and mountaineer cavalry troops. The General
had no access to the muzhik, the peasant, just as he had none
to the worker. Entirely removed from mass support, the
Czarist officers were bound to make one blunder after
another.
In Petrograd itself there was the greatest intensity of action,

"Formally the liquidation of the conspiracy was in the
hands of the government, and the Executive Committee co-
operated. In reality, the struggle was carried on within
totally different channels ... the Committee of Defense, also
1316
called the Military Revolutionary Committee, was taking
action on a vast scale ." (*2) This Committee was composed
of the active workers in the soviets. At the moment of peril,
the soviets were imbued with new life; the genuine
revolutionists, especially the Bolsheviks, took the posts of
danger and became the chief reliance in struggle. From now
on everyone could see who actually best defended the
revolution and who betrayed it.
"Under direct pressure from the Bolsheviks and the

organization led by them, the Committee of Defense
recognized the desirability of arming individual groups of
workers for the defense of the workers' quarters, the shops,
and factories.... The unarmed workers formed companies
for trench-digging, sheet-metal fortification, barbed-wire
fencing. . . . The giant Putilov factory became the center of
resistance in the Peterhoff district.... The railroad workers
tore up and barricaded the tracks in order to hold back
Kornilov's army. War experiences came in handy. Measures
were also taken to isolate the center of the conspiracy,
Moghiliev, preventing movements both towards and away
from headquarters. The postal and telegraph clerks began
to hold up and send to the Committee telegrams and orders
from headquarters or copies of them.... The printers' union
arranged in a few hours for the issue of Monday's papers,
so as to keep the population in touch with events, and at the
same time availed themselves of the most effective of all
possible means of controlling the press." (*3)
The Kornilovists within Petrograd were wiped out

wherever found. Officers of reaction were killed in the
street. The Kronstadt sailors moved in. The regiments
within Petrograd fell in line. The troops of Kornilov now
began to find themselves entirely surrounded, their moves
disjointed, their ranks penetrated with agitators who told
1317
them the truth about the situation. Around these agitators
was a steel ring of revolutionists. The vaunted trusted
companies of Kornalov began to disintegrate and to
dissolve, The counter-revolution was over.
As a reward, the brave Kerensky kept Trotsky and the

revolutionary Bolsheviks in jail, while, on the other hand,
he actually sent a telegram restoring Kornilov as supreme
general in command of all the armies at the front!
Eventually, under the pressure of the masses, Kornilov was
arrested only to be released by Kerensky at the critical
moment when it became necessary to fire openly upon the
Bolshevik revolution.
The August counter-revolution was an inevitable

counterpart to the "July Days." It had been relatively easy to
put down the masses in July; would it not be just as easy to
go a step farther and put an end to their pretensions in
August? But the July demonstration had been put down
under the pretense that the Bolsheviks were German agents
working against both the soviets and the Provisional
Government, that is, against the revolution. The
Kornilovists did not realize that, although the government
itself was a shell, the soviets and the Revolution were solid,
and that when they marched to Petrograd not to defend the
Revolution but to attack it, they would be shriveled and
burnt to a cinder in the hot fires of the Revolution.
The August days were of incalculable importance. Their

events cleared the atmosphere and proved invaluable as a
rehearsal for the future. They exposed the government as
the enemy of the people; they revealed the Bolsheviks as
the best fighters; they demonstrated that no half-way
measures could be effective. In order to win democracy the
people would have to go beyond democracy, towards
socialism. If power were not taken by the workers and the
1318
peasants, not even the Republic was safe. The Bolsheviks
fought to defend Petrograd against Kornilov, not to
preserve Kerensky, but to destroy in Kornilov the base of
Kerensky. With the defeat of Kornilov, Kerensky stood
alone, representing a mere stick of a government,
ineffective even against his own removal.
Following the August days, the strength of the Bolsheviks

grew by leaps and bounds. Prior to the July demonstration,
the Bolsheviks had won the majority of the proletarians in
the important factories of the country, as was witnessed by
the elections of the shop committees, but, at the same time,
the Mensheviks had gained a victory in the soviets and the
Social-Revolutionaries in the municipal elections in the
Zemstvos and Dumas. Now the Bolsheviks began
overwhelmingly to predominate in all the factories and
within the more important garrison regiments. They also
made the deepest inroads into the soviets and actually
became the majority in the key soviets of the land. In the
Dumas and Zemstvos, the Bolsheviks rose to a considerable
minority.
As the Bolsheviks began to win the majority within the

soviets, the Mensheviks and other compromisers withdrew
into the Executive Committee of the Soviets and there held
out as their last resort. Thus the so-called democrats, the
socialists, not only had postponed repeatedly the
convocation of a genuine National Assembly, but they
began also to postpone the calling of the regular Soviet
Congress, which would, surely have removed them.
Steadily representing less and less, these "democrats" who
had relied upon their provincial majorities until these
backward layers had caught up with the capital, now were
plotting to retain the power without any elections whatever.
1319
As a counter to the advance of the Bolsheviks in the soviets,
the socialists announced the convocation of a "Pre-
Parliament," that is, a hand-selected assembly which was to
advise the directorate of Kerensky and to take
responsibility for his crimes until the regular Constituent
Assembly should be convoked. This would enable the
"democrats" further to postpone the regular National
Assembly and, at the same time, would allow them to
parcel out the voting powers of each group as they
themselves saw fit. The Leninists, not without bitter
struggle within their own ranks, however, decided to
inaugurate a boycott against this hand-picked Pre-
Parliament and to come out boldly for the preparation for
the seizure of power by the soviets. These struggles were to
lead to an actual split in the top ranks of the party on the
eve of the insurrection of October 25, 1917.
Immediately following Lenin's return, a deep change had

manifested itself within the Bolshevik party as it orientated
towards a Marxist and revolutionary position. Lenin
himself had been very careful not to go beyond the needs of
the given movement, but proceeded step by step to advance
the tactics of the party according to the unfolding of the
revolution. He had laid down at first a program, not for the
seizure of power by the proletariat nor for socialism, but for
the assumption of power by soviets in which the soldiers
and peasants were by far superior in numbers to the
workers, with demands urging the end of the imperialist
war, confiscation of the land by the peasants, and workers'
control over production. Indeed, in many local centers, the
workers' soviets already had taken the ruling power into its
hands, had disarmed the bourgeoisie, controlled
production and distribution, and had seized the land
through land committees.
1320
At the All-Russian Conference of the Bolsheviks in the latter
part of April, the first big fight had broken out between
Lenin and the Right Wing, represented by Kamenev, Rykov,
and others (including Stalin) on the question of moving the
revolution forward. The Right Wing took as its refuge the
principle which Lenin himself had advanced, namely, the
need of a democratic-dictatorship of the workers and
peasants. These people insisted that the dual power of
Soviet and Provisional-Duma government mutually
checking each other represented precisely this sort of a
democratic-dictatorship. Were the revolution to go forward,
this would mean the establishment of an out-and-out
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which would be
adventurism. The Right Wing advocated instead a policy
merely to control the Provisional Government, just as,
previously, the same elements had wanted to make an
alliance with the Mensheviks to drive the government to
the Left. The Right Wing also tended to believe that, now
that the revolution was raging in Russia, it was proper to
continue the War against the German Kaiser, since this
would be another form of defeating imperialist war by
revolution. They simply desired the promise of the
Provisional Government not to use for annexation of the
conquered countries any victory it might win in war, but to
fight for the freedom of all peoples.
Against this line, Lenin argued that had he proposed

indeed the immediate establishment of a proletarian
dictatorship and socialism, the argument of skipping stages
might be a correct one, but that all he was proposing
actually was that the soviets take power, not to introduce
socialism, but to fulfill certain democratic needs of the
people --- confiscation of land, peace, bread, etc. These were
the Jacobin demands of the petty bourgeoisie rather than
the socialist demands of an advanced proletariat. What was
1321
more, the very regime established after February had been
a sort of dual rule of workers and peasants, that is, of
socialists and private property claims. The property
elements were represented in the new Dumas, the new
Zemstvos, and in the Provisional Government, where the
Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks controlled. The
proletariat was centered in the soviets. Russia had not in
fact passed from Czarism to socialism, but had entered the
intermediate stage of democratic-dictatorship which the
Bolsheviks had predicted in 1905.
Lenin did not imply, however, that this particular stage

must be maintained permanently. Nor did the advance
toward the seizure of power by the soviets necessarily bring
with it the end of the two-fold rule of workers and peasants.
It simply meant that, with the dissolution of the Provisional
Government and the Dumas, the peasantry would be
divorced from the control of the bourgeoisie and would fall
more under the control of the proletariat. It merely signified
that the gains of the revolution could be secured and the
danger of counter-revolution minimized. It still did not
spell socialism.
As a matter of fact, Lenin never proposed that the

Bolsheviks should issue the slogan: "Down with the
Constituent Assembly," that is, "Down with Parliament and
Up with the Soviets." On the contrary, it was the
bourgeoisie that manifested deadly fear of a republican
parliament. For that matter, not until after the days of
August did even the Mensheviks and Social-
Revolutionaries announce that they really wanted a
Republic rather than a Constitutional Monarchy with
democratic rights and social reforms. The capitalists in the
Provisional Government were strongly against a
democratic Republic. This being so, it was natural for the
1322
soviets to overthrow the Provisional Government with the
demand for a Constituent Assembly on their lips. However,
once having taken power, the soviets would see that there
was no need for a constituent assembly or a parliament of
the western bourgeois variety. Later, the Constituent
Assembly forcibly would be dispersed by the soviets as
being unnecessary.
Thus, the mere fact that the policy of the Bolsheviks

advocated the overthrow of the Provisional Government
did not imply that they would abandon the slogan of
"Constituent Assembly" as they advocated "All Power to
the Soviets." In the latter slogan, all the Bolsheviks did was
to say: Let the people take the power themselves and thus
put an end to the little bourgeois clique's playing in the
name of the revolution. "All Power to the Soviets" could be
considered a slogan that would throw against the
Provisional Government all the mass organizations
established for the protection of the revolution. It did not
follow necessarily that the soviets were to become the
organs of State and government. It was left for the masses
themselves to realize this point as the revolution advanced,
although, of course, the whole policy of the Bolsheviks was
to guide events in that direction.
In short, the advocacy of soviet power was not in order to

establish a dictatorship but rather in order to retain the
democracy, to maintain the gains of the revolution, to
prevent the Germans from conquering the country, etc.
When, in the April Days, the Petrograd Committee of the
Bolsheviks tried to raise the slogan, "Down with the
Provisional Government," they were sternly rebuked.
Instead the demand was issued, "Down with Miliukov and
the Right Kadets," just as later, in July, the demonstration
call was "Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers."
1323
Soon after his arrival, Lenin had made the point that the
Provisional Government could not as yet be called a
counter-revolutionary regime. It certainly was not counter-
revolutionary from the point of view of the bourgeoisie,
and it was premature to call it so from the standpoint of the
proletarian and peasant revolution, since no one was sure
whether the combined workers and peasants could go
farther. That had to be shown step by step through the test
of events and the support of the masses for the advanced
slogans of the Bolsheviks. It was Lenin who had insisted
that the motto must be: "caution, caution, caution." (*4)
It is well to stress the fact that, as far as possible, the

Bolsheviks kept carefully within the framework of the
legitimate and the traditional. They had not formed the
soviets, but simply had utilized them as superior forms of
struggle. They did not call for a Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, but only for an end to the intolerable dual
power then extant in favor of a broader democracy. In each
case, as they advanced against the Provisional Government,
it was defensively in order to protect the gains the masses
had already won. This was so when the government
ordered a new war offensive, when Kerensky tried to move
the revolutionary regiments out of Petrograd, and in similar
cases. Indeed, Lenin, at one time after the July
demonstration, when the Kadets had quit the government,
had proposed that the socialists take over the Provisional
Government and simply assure free speech and press, in
which case the Bolsheviks would guarantee to employ
entirely peaceful methods. The fact is, the socialists would
not take over the power, even within the framework of the
bourgeois provisional regime, just as they refused to give
the soviets the power, but insisted that control be in the
hands of the capitalists and the landlords.
1324
During the Kornilov insurrection, the matter of support to
the Provisional Government again became important to the
Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks decided to fight Kornilov, but
not to support Kerensky. "In what, then, does our change of
tactics following on the Kornilov rising consist? In this: that
we modify the form of our struggle against Kerensky.
Without diminishing the least bit in the world our
hostility ... without renouncing our intention to beat him,
we declare that consideration must be given to the
circumstances of the moment, that we shall not concern
ourselves at the present with overthrowing Kerensky, that
we shall now conduct the struggle against him in another
way by emphasizing to the people (and it is the people who
are engaged in fighting Kornilov) the weakness and
vacillations of Kerensky." (*5)
The Kornilov attempt at counter-revolution had brought

the question of Kerensky's conspiracy with Kornilov and
the vicious nature of the self-appointed Provisional
Government sharply to the fore. It made all the more
necessary now the seizure of power by the soviets. Even at
this stage, the Bolsheviks offered a compromise to the
socialists, that the socialists take over the government and
give full power to the soviets. Again the Bolsheviks
promised that, should the soviets take power, even though
under the leadership of the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks
would not plan insurrection, but would try to win the
people to their cause peacefully and legally. For
revolutionists, this, indeed, was a compromise, since such a
government would remain one supporting capitalism, on
the whole. Yet, as Lenin pointed out ". . . it is stupid to
condemn oneself never 'to accept payment of a debt by
installments.' But the duty of a truly revolutionary party is
not to proclaim an impossible renunciation of every sort of
compromise, but to know throughout all compromises, in
1325
so far as such are inevitable, how to remain faithful to its
principles, to its class, to its revolutionary goal. . . ." (*6)
When, however, the socialists refused any such

compromise, the Bolsheviks, faced with the necessity of the
seizure of power by the proletariat, actually began to
consider whether, since the soviets still were dominated by
the Right Wing, the revolution could not be organized
outside of the soviets. After all, soviets were only one of a
number of forms of struggle. There were the trade unions,
the shop committees, and other bodies far closer to the
proletariat. The soviets had this great value, that they were
bodies that were the traditional symbol of the revolution
and that embraced far wider strata of the people than the
trade unions or factory groups.
The question was really whether the proletariat, by its bold

action in solving the problems of the day, would not win
the peasantry and middle elements to its side, even though
the regular organs of these elements were opposed to the
further development of the revolution. Precedent existed
wherein the proletariat had carried on even against the
soviets for example, when the soviets had opposed the
prolongation of the strike movement for the eight-hour day
and no one had paid much attention to this decision. Again,
when the soviet had banned the general strike in Moscow
after the "July Days," the strike had occurred just the same,
with tremendous success. All this really meant that the
proletariat as such would yield to no one when it came to
specific actions affecting it and it alone. It was an entirely
different question, however, whether the shop committees
could win enough support for a revolution against the
Provisional Government in opposition to the soviets
themselves. It would be exceedingly hard to use the slogan,
"All Power to the Soviets," when that very body declared
1326
the slogan premature and dangerous. The revolution would
then have to take a somewhat different tack and, in doing
so, undoubtedly would alienate large groups of soldiers,
thus resulting in a parlous situation, especially for the
workers in a country as predominantly agrarian as Russia.
Fortunately, the question whether to push the revolution

forward outside the soviets was soon solved by the
tremendous development toward the Left within the
soviets themselves, in favor of the Bolsheviks. From then on,
as the Bolsheviks began to win majorities in Petrograd,
Moscow, and other key centers, and would sooner or later
win the majority in the soviets in every important city, the
revolutionists could return safely to their slogan: "All
Power to the Soviets." But this time the slogan had an
entirely different content, since power to the Soviets under
the Bolshevik policy meant an enormously different thing
than under the Mensheviks, who disbelieved in the rule of
the workers. Now the traditional slogan meant an actual
new revolution, the smashing of the old bourgeois power,
and the development of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
When the Pre-Parliament question was debated before the

Bolsheviks, the issues became drawn even more sharply
than before between Lenin and Trotsky, on the one hand,
and the Right Wing of Kamenev, Rykov, Riazanov, and
others. Using the same argument that power to the Soviets
and boycott of the Pre-Parliament meant insurrection and
the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Right Wing proposed
instead that the Bolsheviks attend the Pre-Parliament and
participate constructively in the government actions. This
would mean, of course, further camouflaging the
government, giving it extra authority, and allowing it to
pose as revolutionary. It would also signify before the
masses that the Bolsheviks had declared the time was not
1327
ripe for the soviets to take power by drastic action. Behind
all this argumentation lurked a Menshevik policy, the Right
Wing dreaded the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and
the establishment of proletarian rule.
However, just as the Kadets had removed themselves from

the government immediately prior to the Kornilov attempt,
so was it absolutely y necessary that the Bolsheviks remove
themselves from the empty machinery of the government
now that they were preparing their own insurrection. The
Right Wingers among the Bolsheviks wanted still to
"control" the government so as to "push" it toward the
people etc. To win their point they put forth the subtle
argument that the democratic-dictatorship of the workers
and peasants meant a dual government in which there
should exist both soviets and parliament, a hybrid form of
government intermediary between western bourgeois
democracy and future socialism. The Parliament was to be
responsible to the soviets which were to have power, but
the form of government must be kept as of old.
Against this the Left Wing polemicized sharply. The old

machinery could not be used. It was necessary to smash the
old bourgeois state and to build a new one, one with
machinery fit for the majority to use and not for a minority
that wanted to deceive and cheat the people. Once the
soviets took power, the whole parliamentary machinery
would become entirely useless and must be discarded as
part of the old debris of history. Thus the fight between
Lenin and Trotsky on the one hand and the Right Wing
Bolsheviks on the other hand was in reality the same fight
under other forms as between the Bolsheviks and the
Mensheviks.
Trounced in the councils of the Party, the Right Wing now

began to spread its defeatism throughout the ranks.
1328
Zinoviev refused to take an active part in the work. Stalin
sulked in his editorial offices and sabotaged the line of the
Party by permitting the oppositional letters of Zinoviev and
Kamenev to be published in the official paper, Pravda.
Stalin went so far as to offer his resignation as editor of the
paper, just before the October days. These Right Wingers
with such men as Kalinin, Frunze, Rykov, Manuilsky,
Tomsky, and others, were able to do considerable damage
until the events of the October insurrection themselves put
them straight. (*7) Although some of them actually left the
Party on the eve of the insurrection, they soon returned to
the fold. (*8)
Because of these serious vacillations at the top of the

Bolshevik Party, Lenin strenuously insisted on pressing the
date for the insurrection. His slogans were: Power to the
soviets; peace for the people; all treaties to be published; no
annexations; the right of self-determination; examples to be
made in the cases of Ukraine, Finland, Armenia, and other
conquered nations. The land was to be given to the
peasants, workers' control was to be established over the
factories, the banks and the most important branches of
industry were to be nationalized, the counter-revolutionary
nests ruthlessly broken up and destroyed, and their presses
taken away. Only if the soviets seized the power, Lenin
warned, would the revolution proceed without bloodshed,
otherwise bloody civil war was inevitable on the part of the
reactionists. To meet the Germans who were advancing
farther and farther into the country, it was imperative to
unleash the whole power of the people. Only the
revolutionary movement, not the Czarist generals, actually
could defend the country. For this reason, too, the greatest
haste was needed.
1329
The first revolution in February was entirely spontaneous.
The revolution urged by Lenin was to be planned in every
principal point. For the second revolution called for not
merely the overthrow of a past system, but for the
establishment of an entirely new social order. The
Bolsheviks wanted to avoid as much as possible the errors
of Blanquism as embodied in the conspiratorial insurrection
of a few. They were by far the most "democratic" of the
parties. They waited until the time was so ripe that the
overwhelming majority of the workers who composed the
decisive part of the population had come over to their side.
(*9) Indeed, the fears of Lenin were that they were too
"democratic," that they were waiting too long and, in the
meantime, the opportunities for victory were slipping by.
Thus the planned insurrection of October, far from being

the conspiratorial machinations of a tiny minority, was the
deliberate action of a Party behind which stood such an
overwhelming part of the toiling population that the
insurrection went off like clockwork. There were no vast
masses storming the bastilles in Petrograd as in the French
Revolution. On every side there were millions held in
reserve, disciplined, organized, and ready to go into action,
but not called upon to do so. The government fell like
rotten fruit from a tree.
Kerensky rushed to the front to gather up a few Cossack

detachments, under General Krassnov, to retake Petrograd.
But as with Kornilov, so with Kerensky and Krassnov. The
troops were stopped by the railway workers' union. The
Cossacks were surrounded on all sides by the forces of the
proletariat and the revolutionary regiments, and soon
melted away. Only in Moscow was there an uprising
against the Bolsheviki by a few thousand military cadets
1330
and university students who made a last stand against the
red regiments, but the affair was soon over. (*10) The
soviets and the Bolsheviks were in power throughout
Russia.
With immense enthusiasm, the soviets now set about to

solve the tremendous problems that had brought the
revolution about. On the burning question of peace, an
immediate proposal was wired to all warring peoples and
governments to begin negotiations for a just peace. An
armistice for three months was proposed. There were to be
no annexations or indemnities. All secret treaties were to be
annulled. The various belligerent governments responded
to this open and honest plea for peace with murderous and
cynical proposals of their own. The Entente powers looked
upon the declaration of the Russian Bolsheviks as out-and-
out treachery to their cause and immediately began the
secret mobilization of forces for the military destruction of
the Red Army.
Only the German Imperial Government responded to the

overtures of the Bolsheviks. In December, 1917, peace
parleys were opened up in the course of which there was
revealed the type of peace that the Kaiser meant to impose
upon the world were he victorious in the War. Boldly the
representatives of German imperialism proposed to hack
Russia to pieces and to seize immense areas for Germany.
These proposals led to bitter resentment among the
Russians and caused the ranks of the Bolshevik leadership
to become divided into three factions. On one side was the
faction headed by Nicolai Bucharin, to whom the peace
terms of the Germans were utterly preposterous. It were
better to go down with the Red Flag flying, he said, than to
yield to such robber terms, especially when it was clear that
now, with the entrance of America into the conflict, the
1331
German system was doomed. Bucharin uttered the "Leftist"
theory that, since the class war was international, it
demanded unceasing war against the capitalists of the
world with the result that no peace was ever possible. In the
heat of the polemic, Bucharin was able to win almost half of
the Central Committee.
On the other side was the position of Lenin. It was true that
the terms proposed by General von Hoffmann were
outrageous, but the Bolsheviks had promised peace, and
the country could not stand a continuance of the War. The
desertions from the front would only multiply, and the
Bolsheviks would be overthrown. Lenin threatened that, if
his views were not adopted, he would split the Party and
force the peace.
The chief representative of the Bolsheviks at the Peace

Conference at Brest Litovsk was Trotsky. His position was
between that of Bucharin and of Lenin. Instead of either
immediate peace or eternal war with capitalism, Trotsky
put forth the viewpoint that peace should be established in
fact, but no treaty signed. His slogan was, "Neither War nor
Peace," his idea being that the continued invasion of Russia
by Germany would compel the German soldiers to revolt
and would thus initiate the world revolution. With such a
position, Trotsky could not sign the proposed treaty of the
Germans, and he returned to Petrograd for further
instructions. When he realized that matters were reaching a
split with Lenin, he decided to abstain from voting on the
question in order to allow Lenin to secure the majority of
the Central Committee. (*11) Rather be wrong with Lenin
than right without him, thus precipitating a split in the
Bolshevik party, was his position.
As a matter of fact, Lenin was correct in his insistence on

peace. The army broke down completely and allowed the
1332
Germans to make an unhindered advance within Russia so
that, when the peace negotiators resumed their parleys, the
terms of Germany were far more onerous. By the Treaty of
Brest Litovsk of March 3, 1918, (*12) Russia lost the Baltic
provinces, Poland, Ukraine, and part of Trans Caucasia, in
all surrendering about one-third of her total population,
and, besides, was saddled with a huge indemnity. It was
indeed a "Tilsit Peace" for Russia.
Lenin's principal idea, however, was to secure a necessary

breathing space for the consolidation of power and the
establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. As
events later showed this was the only move possible to save
the day for the Russian soviets. The World War dragged on
for almost another year and left European capitalism too
exhausted to overthrow the Soviet regime. A unique
situation was thus created wherein world capitalism was so
torn by conflict that it could not stop its own quarrels in
order to put down the menace of communism. This was
another manifestation of the fact that the capitalist system
was doomed to destruction by the new proletarian force.
On the very first day of the Congress of the Soviets it was

decreed that private ownership in land thenceforth was
abolished. Land no more could be bought, sold, leased,
mortgaged, or alienated. All the lands belonged to the
nation. The lands of the peasants were not to be confiscated,
and some of the big estates were not to be divided, but
turned over to the State, with live stock and implements
carefully accounted for. For the most part, however, there
was to be an equalization of land, and the estates of the
nobles were to be seized and partitioned among the
peasants according to the number of "eaters" in the family
and their capacity to work. This last was the program of the
Social-Revolutionaries which Lenin took over almost in toto.
1333
Here, with one fell stroke, the workers demonstrated that
they were the closest friends and supporters of the peasants
to the end. All the parties had promised this victory to the
peasants, but only the proletarian party of the Bolsheviks
fulfilled it. By this act, the soviets rallied the immense body
of the peasantry to the revolution and were able to
effectuate a temporary alliance with the Left Wing of the
Social-Revolutionaries to support the revolutionary
program.
From the very beginning, Lenin had refused to consider the

agrarian problem as a simple one in which the workers'
interests were seen as antagonistic to the property interests
of the peasantry. On the contrary, he took pains to divide
the peasantry into various categories, each one to be treated
differently. At the bottom were the agricultural laborers,
not a decisive part of the agrarians, but a considerable
minority, intimately bound up with the mass of peasantry.
These agricultural laborers were working the modern large-
scale farms that had been established by imperialist capital
in Russia. Obviously the agricultural proletariat was the
closest to the city industrial worker, and Lenin repeatedly
emphasized the necessity of organizing this stratum into
regular industrial unions and tying them up directly with
the others. The large farms upon which they worked were
not to be broken up in the main, but were to be turned over
to the State and run by the workers, thereby preserving the
high technique that had prevailed before.
Next to the agricultural laborers were the semi-proletarians

who worked in the city during the winter but returned to
their farms in the spring and summer. These elements, too,
were friendly, and could be won over to the side of the
workers. It was similar with the great mass of desperately
poor peasants. They were easily convinced by the actions of
1334
the proletariat that only the victory of the soviets could give
them the land they so sorely needed, and could satisfy their
cry for bread.
Besides these elements there were the strata of middle

peasants and, above them, the kulaks. The middle peasants
were a minority of the peasantry who were able to make a
living by working their own property. The kulak was a
farmer who worked his farm with hired laborers. Both of
these sections looked enviously on the property of the large
landlords. Lenin pointed out that the middle peasants could
be neutralized by the policy of the proletariat to allow the
land to be seized, and that the kulaks could be separated
from the nobles for the same reason. And indeed, this is
what actually happened. All sections of the peasantry
united to attack the nobility. The result was that the
immense majority were able to improve their standing so as
to become middle independent peasants who owed their
new wealth entirely to the actions of the soviets. The kulaks,
who had feared the Bolsheviks, did not hesitate also to put
their fingers in the pie and, indeed, invariably plucked out
the biggest plums for themselves.
The result of the land decree completely isolated the

nobility and Czarist aristocracy, and allowed the revolution
to proceed violently throughout the countryside. It is no
wonder that the counter-revolution initiated by these
aristocratic elements had to attack all the agrarian strata
indiscriminately, which in turn only further consolidated
the mass of peasantry against them. This was well
illustrated by the action of the "Volunteers," an army
formed by Kornilov and Alexeiev that opened up civil war
in South Russia, in November, 1917, and continued under
Denikin and Alexeiev from April, 1918, to September, 1918,
under Denikin until March, 1920, and under Wrangel until
1335
September, 1920, when the last remnants were driven out of
Russia. "Officers and men alike seemed in general to regard
every one who was not in their force as a Bolshevik, and
therefore as someone who might be killed or robbed with
impunity. When the Army was in retreat, the country was
laid waste." (*13)
The land policy of the Bolsheviks was part of their general

strategy to turn the revolution only gradually from the
democratic-dictatorship stage toward the Dictatorship of
the Proletariat. The first objective was to annihilate the
Czarist aristocracy, later to deal with the capitalist elements.
Each blow given the Republic by the reactionary forces was
regarded as an opportunity to drive the revolution farther
ahead.
In the beginning, as we have seen, Lenin was quite willing

to adopt practically the whole program of Social-
Revolutionaries in dealing with the peasantry, in order to
split that party and to win a section of it over to an alliance
with the Bolsheviks. This was accomplished. On November
17, a formal agreement was made with the new Party, the
Left Social-Revolutionaries, in which the latter party took
certain seats in the cabinet and helped to line up even the
kulaks behind the regime. To win the support of other
elements, especially the Executive Committee of the
Railroad Union, composed of Mensheviks and bitter
opponents of the Bolsheviks, Lenin proposed a United
Socialist Cabinet to include the representatives of other
groupings.
Having cast their die with the anti-Bolsheviks, however, the

Executive Committee refused to accept this offer of a joint
cabinet. When Krassnov was sending his troops to
Petrograd and the Moscow counter-revolt broke out, the
Executive Committee ordered the railway workers not only
1336
to stop the troops of the counter-revolution, but also to
refuse to transport the soldiers of the soviets. Such
impudent activity in the name of "neutrality" in the fight
between the soviets and reaction could not go unpunished.
After the Moscow uprising was put down, Lenin stopped
all parleys with the railway union "labor leaders." The last
effort to work with the opportunist socialists came to an
end.
This new development, however, did not occur without a

new crisis being provoked in the party by the Right Wing
Bolsheviks. "Rykov resigned his post of Commissar of the
Interior and Kamenev gave up the chairmanship of the
Central Executive Committee of the Soviets." (*14) The
Leninists, however, drove relentlessly forward. The
bourgeois papers were suppressed and a powerful secret
police force, the Che-ka, was established; the Kadets were
proclaimed the enemies of the people; the Constituent
Assembly was disbanded as unnecessary at its very first
sitting, January 6, 1918.
The workers had been well taken care of. The bourgeois
residences of the city were placed under the control of the
soviets and the proletarians moved into the apartment
houses of the wealthy. In all factories there was established
a workers' control over production. The program of the
winter of 1917-18 included the nationalization of the banks,
and the repudiation of all debts. Commerce was also
nationalized, and the co-operatives were developed as
substitutes for private trading. Food was rationed on a class
basis.
Many of these measures were provoked by the fact that,

owing to the breakdown of economy because of exhaustion
by war and the overthrow of Czarism, the country, by the
spring of 1918, was on the verge of famine. On all sides the
1337
capitalist world was bringing up its heavy artillery to batter
down the Soviet regime. After the Treaty of Brest Litovsk,
the German army immediately moved into Ukrainia. There
an independent Ukrainian Rada, subservient to German
imperialism, had been formed, which openly had declared
its hostility to the Bolsheviks and, while Russia was
starving, had moved food and grain supplies to Germany.
(*15) This presented an intolerable situation, one which
could be liquidated only by draconic measures and armed
conflict.
During the course of the War, three hundred thousand

Czech soldiers had been captured by the Russians as war
prisoners. As the Czechs were Slavs and never had wanted
to fight "Mother Russia," they were treated especially well
and, under the Provisional Government, had been
mobilized to be shipped out of the country to the Western
Front to fight on French soil against the Germans. By
agreement, March 26, 1918, it was decided that an army of
these Czechs, some fifty thousand or more, was to be sent
to Vladivostok where allied shipping was to convey them
to France. However, when the Czechs arrived at the Pacific
port they found Japanese and British troops in possession
of the city. Instead of being transported to France, the
Czechs were re-armed, informed that their brothers were
being slaughtered in Russia, and were ordered back by
their leaders to seize the Trans-Siberian railroad. Under the
influence of army officers headed by Kolchak and members
of the Social-Revolutionaries, they turned back from Siberia
to fight the Reds. Thus, while the Germans were helping
the Ukrainian bourgeois fight Bolsheviks on the West, their
so-called bitter enemies, the members of the Entente, were
invading Russia on the East, both in a crusade against the
Reds.
1338
As in the French Revolution, so in the Russian, ruthless
intervention coupled with the foisting of war upon a people
bent on peace only rallied the masses still more strongly
around the revolutionists and whipped the revolution to
more severe measures. The requisitioning of food became
absolutely necessary and the wealthy peasants, i.e., the
kulaks, were forced to surrender part of their surplus stock.
(*16) The kulaks openly resisted, and civil war began on the
countryside, the Bolsheviks forming Committees of the
Poor in order to struggle against them.
Up to now, the Bolsheviks had not nationalized the

factories, nor attempted to establish the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat nor to end exploitation. They had formed
alliances with other parties and had merely controlled and
regulated the capitalist elements. Now, however, they were
forced to go farther. On June 14, 1918, the soviets expelled
the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries of the Right
and Center for their actions in aiding the enemy. (*17) In
their attack against the kulak and their formation of the
Poor Committees in the village they were moving towards
the elimination of capitalism on the countryside. On
February 19, 1918, a Decree on Land Socialization was
passed, providing that all persons engaged in agriculture
were to be protected by social insurance. The right to use
land belonged respectively to the State, to public bodies, to
agricultural communes, to co-operatives, to village
communities, and only lastly to individuals. This decree
was a body blow against the kulaks. Naturally, the Left
Social-Revolutionaries would not tolerate all this. They had
been violently opposed also to the Brest Litovsk Treaty and
were ready to break with the Bolsheviks on this question as
well. The Social-Revolutionaries had always spoken in the
name of the "people" and had called themselves both
socialists and revolutionists; no sooner was capitalism
1339
attacked, however, than the Left Social-Revolutionaries
broke from the government alliance and declared war on
the Leninists. The split occurred in July, 1918, when the Left
Social-Revolutionaries, in order to compel the continuance
of the war with Germany, assassinated the German
Ambassador, Count von Mirbach.
The Bolsheviks now were determined to go the whole route

and complete the revolution as far as possible. The Czar
and his family were exterminated as a nest of counter-
revolution. Thus, only in the summer of 1918, in July, did
the Bolsheviks terminate their democratic-dictatorship of
the workers and peasants, marked by workers' control over
production, their alliance with the Left Social-
Revolutionaries, their alliance with the kulak against the
noble, their granting all parties the right to the press and to
assemblage and all classes of democracy equal vote. From
now on their backs were to the wall. The open Dictatorship
of the Proletariat was established, but in friendly alliance
with the poor peasantry. The kulak was attacked, the
factories were taken over and socialized, the minority of
workers was given more votes and power than the vast
majority of the peasantry, opposition parties were
destroyed, civil war raged against the whole capitalist
system.
At this point, the soviets were faced with a peasant war led
by the kulaks, with civil war led by the capitalists and
Czarist officials, politically aided by the Social-
Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and with foreign
intervention. Eastern Siberia and Western Ukrainia were
occupied by foreign forces. An anti-Bolshevik government
was being formed in the Urals by Kolchak, backed up by
the Czechs. German troops were in Crimea and Trans-
Caucasia. An anti-Bolshevik government was being formed
1340
in the North Caucasus supported by Cossacks and the
officers of Kornilov. This was the situation in the summer of
1918.
It has been a popular illusion that the socialist revolution

began in Russia with the October Revolution. As we have
seen, this is indeed far from the truth. The soviets moved
very slowly to this conclusion and did not end capitalist
exploitation in the factories until the middle of 1918. The
October Revolution itself was not bloody, and numerous
intermediary groups went along with the Bolsheviks. It was
only when the Russian capitalists were attacked that the
real violence of the civil war began.
As Lenin himself put it, the revolution of the summer and

autumn of 1918 was of far greater significance than that in
October, 1917. (*18) "The formation in the villages of the
committees of the poor was the turning point, and showed
that the working class of the towns, which united last
November with all the peasants for the purpose of
destroying the chief enemy of free, labouring and Socialist
Russia --- the landowners --- had advanced from that
problem to another, much more difficult, historically much
higher, and really Socialistic." (*19) "In other words, having
liberated Russia from the yoke of the landowners, it has
now proceeded to the creation of a Socialist
commonwealth." (*20)
Lenin knew very well that, in countries of small peasant

proprietors, the transition to socialism was impossible
without a whole series of gradual, preparatory stages. To
him, the October revolution had been devoted mainly to the
task of crushing the common enemy of the whole peasant
class --- the landowners --- and thus it had retained its
bourgeois setting, and the revolution had been but half
1341
finished. By the summer of 1918 it was time to complete
that revolution and turn it into a genuine socialist one.
In the struggle against capitalism and for socialism, Lenin

tried hard to separate the capitalists of the city from their
kulak representatives in the country. Whereas the
Bolsheviks had taken over the property of the city factory
owners, they did not decree the confiscation of the land of
the kulak. They were willing to let him keep his land on the
sole condition that he obey the corn monopoly and not
enrich himself at the expense of others. This strategy of the
Bolsheviks was entirely realistic. Large numbers of the
better-situated peasants became partisans to the cause of
the soviets, especially after their lands had been invaded by
the Whites; when they were forced to choose between
White and Red, they chose Red. In the long run, however,
the kulak became the most embittered opponent to
socialism and one of the most difficult problems the
revolution had to face.
We are now ready to ask ourselves the important question:

Now that they had gone the whole length in establishing a
socialistic regime resting on the proletariat, how could the
communists of Russia have hoped to sustain themselves in
their abolition of private property in a country peopled
predominantly with peasants whose whole lives were
based on private property? Were the Leninists really an
anti-democratic party based on a small minority of the
population like the Blanquists? Will the Russian revolution
be but another Paris Commune and go down in blood as
premature? What were the forces upon which Lenin relied?
After all, it is one thing to overthrow Czarism, it is another
to overthrow private property and capitalism; it is one
thing to seize power, it is another thing to hold it.
1342
In the first place, there was no thought of such a
proposition as the possibility of building socialism in one
country. The Bolsheviks of those days believed that the
proletariat could take power in Russia, but that this could
serve only as a stimulant and cause, compelling the
workers of Europe to seize control, which in turn would
help the Communists of Russia finally to overcome their
difficulties. In December, 1918, Lenin said, "You know that
our main hope, our chief security, is the proletariat of
Western European and other advanced countries. It is the
great buttress of the world-revolution. We firmly believe in
it, and the progress of the German Revolution shows us
that we are justified." (*21) At another time he declared,
"The absolute truth is that without a revolution in Germany
we will perish ." (*22) Again, "Our backwardness has thrust
us forward and we will perish if we will not be able to hold
out until we meet with the mighty support of the
insurrectionary workers of other countries." (*23)
That Lenin understood the precarious position of Russian

communism can be noted in his important speeches as late
as 1921. At the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist
Party, in a speech delivered March 15, 1921, Lenin
emphasized, regarding a revolution in an agrarian country,
"The social revolution in such a country may meet with
complete success only under two conditions: 1. It must be
supported by the social revolution in one or more of the
advanced countries.... 2. There must be an understanding
between the proletariat which is the executor of the
dictatorship and holds the state power in its hands, and the
majority of the population." (*24) Soon after that, at the
Third Congress of the Communist International on July
1921 he reiterated: "It was clear to us that without aid from
the international worldwide revolution a victory of the
proletarian revolution is impossible. Even before the
1343
revolution, and also after it, we thought that the revolution
either immediately or at least very soon will come also in
other countries, otherwise we will perish. Notwithstanding
this conviction, we did our utmost to preserve the Soviet
system under any circumstances and at all costs because we
know that we are not working only for ourselves but also
for the international revolution." (*25)
Besides counting on the help of the proletarian revolution

in the advanced European countries, Lenin depended on
the workers' understanding how to work with and to win
the friendship of the peasantry. To maintain an alliance
with the peasantry meant that in effect the State could not
be a proletarian State but a two-class state, one in which the
proletariat was careful not to go too far in its socialization
and which existed only on the sufferance of the peasantry.
"The working classes must not be deceived. . . . The small
peasant has aims that are not the same as those of the
workers." (*26) We are conducting a class struggle and our
aim is to abolish classes; so long as there still exist two
classes, those of peasants and workers, socialism cannot be
realized and an irreconcilable struggle goes on incessantly."
(*27)
In Russia, the peasantry by itself was not able to accomplish

its emancipation or even to overthrow Czarism. As an
historic class, it had to follow either the proletariat or the
bourgeoisie. At first it followed the bourgeoisie, but that
class did not and could not live up to its historic role. It was
the proletariat alone that was able to satisfy the basic needs
of the peasantry and thus to cement an alliance with the
countryside in the overthrow of the Provisional
government and the establishment of the soviets.
Paradoxically, the peasantry did not vote for the Bolsheviks,
who had their interests at heart. (*28) And yet the
1344
communists operated on the principle that the votes of such
a class were not decisive, and took power regardless.
The reasons for the confidence of the Bolsheviks were that,

although the towns made up but a minority of the
population, they were more important than the countryside
and dragged the latter behind them. The question was not
whether the city should lead, but rather which class of the
city should lead the peasantry, the upper bourgeois crust,
or the proletarians? Nor was it necessary to win the
majority of the entire population in the cities. What was
imperative was to gain the decisive majority at the decisive
places. The big factories, the larger soviets, the trade unions
as well as the army, for example, were more than half
conquered by the Bolsheviks. To win the proletariat, a
genuine Communist Party was necessary, of course.
"Without a complete and varied preparation of the
proletariat by a revolutionary party accompanied by the
expulsion and defeat of the opportunist elements, it is
absurd to think of the dictatorship of the proletariat." (*29)
Once the proletariat had been won, that was sufficient even
in an agrarian country such as Russia. The proletariat could
be victorious without convincing the majority of the
population, if that class, after taking power, satisfied the
needs of the majority at the expense of the exploiters. The
masses of the petty bourgeoisie were constantly vacillating.
They needed the fact of the proletarian regime to enable
them to compare which class was better, the proletariat or
the bourgeoisie. Thus it could be laid down as a social law
that the proletariat could win the majority of the population
in a peasant country only after it crushed the bourgeoisie,
not before. The peasantry needs the power of example; the
Russian Revolution bore eloquent witness to that fact. At
first, only 10 per cent to 16 per cent were for Bolshevism;
1345
when they were given the land, all were for Bolshevism.
Later, in the period of War communism, almost all turned
against Bolshevism. Finally, when they felt the hand of
Kolchak and other White Guardists, most of them became
Bolshevist partisans again. Thus, it required two years of
acute civil war to teach the peasantry which side they must
follow. By no means is the question definitively solved even
today.
We have seen that the proletariat made firm allies of the

peasants by giving them land, but, by that very act, the
Bolsheviks only spread the base for private ownership and
control of the means of production, land, still more firmly.
Instead of the old differentiations on the countryside (the
overwhelming mass of poor and destitute peasants on the
bottom and the few agrarian capitalists on the top), the land
distribution created a mass of peasant holdings mostly of
medium size; that is, the muzhiks now had enough land to
till to take care of themselves and their families.
At this point the conflict began to arise between workers

moving towards socialism and peasants desirous of
retaining their property. The proletariat of Russia found
itself surrounded from without by a powerful hostile world
of which it was but a relatively small part, economically
speaking, while, within, it was but a small fraction of the
population faced with an overwhelming mass of peasants,
on the one side, and gangs of bureaucrats on the other.
Whether the proletariat liked it or not, these classes were
bound to resist the course of socialization and to strive for
the return of capitalism. The middle peasant wanted to
become a kulak and increase his holdings; the kulak
wanted to increase the number of workers working for him
and exploit them still further. All the peasants desired free
trade and the right to sell their products as dear as they
1346
could and to buy manufactured materials as cheaply as
possible.
To lead the peasantry toward socialism there was necessary

the firm control of the proletariat. To secure this control, the
election system was so set up that the minority of
proletarians had as many votes and more influence than the
peasants. Frankly, the workers gave themselves five times
the voting power that the peasants received. The Bolsheviks
realized very well, after the dictatorship of the proletariat
was established, that the class struggle had not ceased by
that initial act; on the contrary, peasant commodity
economics was automatically establishing new capitalist
relations. The only way to end this contradiction was to
abolish classes, but the peasantry could be abolished only
when some higher method of production than individual
land working could be established; this in turn could be
done only on the basis of the widespread application of
machinery. The fight for socialism then was a fight for
machinery and electrical power, a fight for increased
productivity.
That Lenin recognized the situation can be seen by his

remarks: "There is no doubt that the social revolution in a
country where the overwhelming majority of the
population consists of small farmers and producers may
only be achieved by providing for a number of special
transition measures that would be entirely unnecessary in
countries in which the wage workers constitute the
overwhelming majority in industry and agriculture." (*30)
"The application of tractors and machinery in agriculture on
a large scale, the electrification of the whole country, would
immediately produce a transformation of the thought of the
small peasants." (*31) "The situation is now this: either we
must economically satisfy the medium peasants and
1347
consent to a freedom of commodity exchange or it will be
impossible to maintain the power of the proletariat in
Russia in view of the slowing down of the international
revolution." By no means was the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat in a backward agrarian country to abolish
private property immediately. As Lenin wrote, there was
no Chinese wall between the bourgeois democratic
revolution and the socialist one, and one could proceed
gradually from one system to the other. Incidentally, it is to
be remarked how the Leninists, who had argued for the
insurrection and the sharp break with the past politically,
also knew how to be gradualists in economics under given
circumstances. There was no unbridgeable gap between the
worker and the land toiler, the peasant. After the Brest
Litovsk Treaty, and until the proletarian revolution could
spread, the chief task was to hold the fort. (*32)
In order to attain increased production, machinery and

electric power, Lenin was willing to make all sorts of
economic concessions to capitalism. Thus, as far back as
1918, foreshadowing the days of the "New Economic
Policy" in 1921, he pointed out that, should Russia develop
a State capitalism, this would mark a great advance over
what was actually existing, for even after the seizure of
power by the workers, Russian economy was by no means
homogeneous. In the vast tundras of the North, in the
taigas of Siberia, in the backward regions of Eurasia and
elsewhere, a pre-capitalist patriarchal system of production
still prevailed. To this had to be added the petty commodity
production of the peasants now in possession of plots of
land. Then there were many small factories that could not
well be taken over at once by the workers; there were also
millions of petty shopkeepers and artisans. All of these
groups represented private property and a form of
capitalist commodity production.
1348
The big factories had been seized by the workers; thus there
was also a socialistic form of production, but this section of
Russian economy did not at all represent the main weight
of production. The predominant form of economy was
petty commodity production; the chief producers were
small peasant proprietors. The possession of big factories in
certain cities of the land did not by any means mark the end
of private property in the means of production. In order to
liquidate the peasantry and to win them over to socialism it
was necessary for the country to have machinery and for
the workers to show the peasants how they could increase
their standards of living by supporting proletarian
collectivism. If the workers could rapidly increase
production and provide the peasantry with cheap and good
commodities, if they could organize agrarian collectives
and demonstrate how each member of the collective would
improve his lot by joining his property with that of his
neighbors, the alliance of the workers with the peasantry
could be firmly cemented.
Now State capitalism was one form by which the workers

could increase their production. State capitalism meant the
running of State industries by means of capitalist loans or
by means of partnership with big capitalists, through which
the latter would ship machinery into Russia. Or it could
take the form of concessions by which the State owned and
controlled the plants built by private capital and run for
profit. In all cases, the capitalists would be getting their
profit temporarily, but the Russian workers would be
producing commodities, increasing their technique, and
tightening their friendship with the peasants.
For these reasons, with the first breathing space that the
Bolsheviks received after putting down the initial revolts of
Krassnov and of the Czarist Kadets in Moscow, Lenin was
1349
advocating the bringing in of foreign capital under
guarantees and increasing the productivity of the country.
Of course, under Lenin, this introduction of capitalism
would have been carefully restricted and guarded.
Economically, capitalism was to be allowed to function in
certain key industries where it was needed to prepare the
way for its own destruction. Politically, capitalism was to
have no control at all. Unfortunately, all these plans for the
exploitation of capital to bolster up the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat came to an end with the gigantic civil war that
burst forth throughout the country.
To sum up, it is necessary for us to emphasize that the

October Revolution did not bring about immediate end of
capitalism. On the contrary, all that it accomplished was the
completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution; for that
reason, the soviets were supported by the peasantry as a
whole, including the capitalist kulak elements, the class
divisions on the countryside then being only in embryo and
still latent. "At first the Soviets represented the peasantry as
a whole, and the result was that the mental backwardness
of the poorer peasants placed the leadership in the hands of
the village vultures, of the prosperous peasants, of the petty
bourgeois intellectuals. This was the period of the
predominance of the petty bourgeois Mensheviks and
Social Revolutionaries, whom only fools or turncoats like
Kautsky could regard as socialists." (*33)
The Bolshevik revolution laid the basis for the attack

against capitalism. At first the city capitalist was attacked;
much later, during the course of the civil war, the attack
began against the kulak. Not till November, 1918, did the
proletarian revolution pass through the countryside, one
year after its advent in the cities, and the kulaks were put
down. "If the Bolshevik proletariat in the capitals and large
1350
industrial centers had not been able to rally to its side the
village poor against the peasant rich, this would have
proved Russia's unripeness for the socialist revolution. The
peasantry would then have remained an undivided whole,
that is, under the economic, political, and moral leadership
of the village vultures, of the rich and the bourgeoisie, and
the revolution would not have passed beyond the
bourgeois-democratic limits.... On the other hand, if the
Bolshevik proletariat had attempted at once, in November,
1917, without waiting or without being able to prepare and
to carry through the class cleavage in the village, to decree a
civil war or the establishment of Socialism in the villages,
had attempted to do without the temporary union with the
peasants as a whole, had attempted to do without the
necessary concession to the middle peasantry, it would
have been a Blanquist distortion of Marxism, an attempt of
the minority to impose its will upon the majority, a
theoretical absurdity and a display of ignorance of the fact
that a common peasant revolution is still a bourgeois
revolution, and could not in a backward country be turned
into a socialist one without a whole series of transitions and
successive stages." (*34) "With the peasantry to the end of the
bourgeois democratic revolution, and with the poorest, the
proletarian and semi- proletarian section of the peasantry to
the socialist revolution --- such has been the policy of the
Bolsheviks and such is the only Marxist policy.'' (*35)
From the very start, the Bolsheviks had enunciated as their

program the self-determination of subject nationalities and
had propagandized for the right of Poland, Finland,
Armenia, and other countries to lead their independent
existence. Naturally, with the advent of the Bolshevik
revolution, these countries became the scene of a virulent
1351
nationalism on the part of the capitalists of these countries
who wanted to separate themselves from communistic
Russia. Behind this nationalist movement in 1918 stood the
German Imperial Army which thereby envisioned great
gains for itself. No sooner had Finland declared itself
independent than the bourgeoisie invited the Reich to send
in troops to defeat the Finnish proletariat and to insure
Finland for capitalism and for Germany. Poland, Lithuania,
Latvia, and Esthonia found themselves placed under
German military governors. Especially important was
German activity in the Ukraine.
Early in the negotiations for peace between the German

General Staff and the Russian Government, the Ukrainian
bourgeoisie had appeared, clamoring for independence. To
secure this, they were willing to submit to any terms; one of
the reasons for the final signing of the Treaty of Brest
Litovsk was the fact that the Russian soviets were faced
with the fact that the Germans had recognized the hastily
organized Ukrainian Rada as a legitimate government and
had signed a peace treaty with them. There was nothing
further for the Russians to do but also to sign. (*36)
Ostensibly Ukrainia was now independent, but she
immediately opened up war against the soviets. The result
was that civil war began between the workers of Ukraine
and the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, at the head of which stood
the chief, Hetman Skoropadsky, and behind it the German
army.
The Russian bourgeoisie, so eager to denounce Lenin as a

German agent, soon began to intrigue for German help
against the Bolsheviks. "The question of yielding to the
Germans and crushing the communists with their help was
eagerly discussed in connection with the plan of a
monarchical restoration. The idea found favor among the
1352
Rights and was supported among the Kadets by P.
Miliukov . . ." (*37)
The Eastern part of the Ukraine, together with the northern

Caucasus, had been the great homeland of the Cossacks of
the Don and Kuban regions. The Cossacks had been given
special privileges by the Czar. They had comfortable, tax-
free farms, with horses and supplies granted them. In
return, they had to serve the Czar at all times. When the
Revolution broke out, these Cossacks returned to their
farms. While they had not fought the people, the older
elements at least were not at all in sympathy with
communism and the soviets. To this region flocked the
officers of the Czarist army, and reactionaries, and formed
their White Guard Volunteer Army against Bolshevism.
The Kuban district was headed by General Krassnov, the
Don region by Hetman Kaledin assisted by Kornilov.
Between these White Guardist forces and those of the Rada
there was this difference, however. The Rada stood for an
independent Ukraine, friendly to Germany; the Czarist
officers stood for the return of old Russia and the
subjugation not only of the communists but also of
Ukrainian nationalism. Moreover, these officers had fought
the Germans.
Thus the two reactionary armies were divided, and the

soviet workers and peasants were able relatively easily to
break the forces of the Rada, to drive Skoropadsky out of
the country and into Germany and then defeat the troops of
Kaledin and Kornilov, the latter being killed, the former
committing suicide. Thus by April, 1918, it seemed that
everywhere the Bolsheviks would be able to triumph
within the territory that was not openly taken from them by
the Brest Treaty.
1353
However, this idyllic picture was destined to be destroyed
by the intervention of Russia's former allies in the war. In
February and March of 1918, British soldiers were landed in
the Murmansk region in the Arctic sea. They were joined by
an American force. In June, 1918, the military compelled the
local soviet to declare its independence from Moscow and,
in August, the foreigners were in possession of the
important city of Archangel.
So long as the World War was raging with all its fury in
1918, the Bolsheviks were able to meet and to overcome
these comparatively puny blows of world capitalism. The
situation changed entirely when the War was over. By
January, 1919, the allied forces had stationed thirty
thousand troops in the Murmansk district and were
marching south, towards the center of Russia. On the West,
the Finnish troops, with the aid first of the Germans and
later of the victorious powers, were able to defeat the
proletarian revolution there and to menace Russia in the
Baltic. To the Baltic Sea, a strong British Naval force was
sent that destroyed and sank the Russian fleet. (*38) Further
south, on the Western Front, three armies threatened the
Russians.
First there was the German Imperial Army under Von der
Goltz. Although the terms of the peace called for an
immediate evacuation of the Baltic provinces which were to
become independent countries, the Entente allowed the
Germans to hold their advanced positions as a barrier to
Bolshevism. Then there was the Russ-German White Guard
Army of fifteen thousand under General Bermont, and
finally another army under General Yudenitch. It had been
hoped that the people of the Baltic provinces also would
rally to the anti-Bolshevik crusade, but this hope was
doomed. The Soviet Government had from the start
1354
declared its willingness to recognize an independent Latvia,
Esthonia, and Lithuania, as it had an independent Finland.
On the other hand, the capitalists of these small Baltic
countries knew very well that, should the Bolsheviks fall,
they would be swallowed up again by an imperialist Russia.
The steel ring around the Bolsheviks was tightened still

more by events in the Ukraine. On the West, the bourgeois
Ukrainian nationalist rebellion was carried on by Petlura;
on the East, the forces of the Cossacks were being solidified
under the leadership of Denikin. Both of these armies,
especially the latter, were aided by enormous supplies as
well as troops from the Versailles victors. The French were
in possession of Odessa, and everywhere were taking the
place of the Germans in mobilizing the counter-revolution.
On the Eastern Front, the forces under Kolchak had reached

considerable size. His foreign troops alone have been
estimated to have contained fifty-five thousand Czecho-
Slovaks, twelve thousand Poles, four thousand Serbs, four
thousand Rumanians, two thousand Italians, sixteen
hundred British, over seven hundred French, twenty-eight
thousand Japanese later increased to seventy-five thousand,
seven thousand five hundred Americans and four thousand
Canadians. Like those of Denikin in the Southeast, these
Siberian forces must have numbered at least half a million
in all.
Added to this was the separation of Georgia from Russia by

the Mensheviks, the seizure of the Batum-Baku railway by
twenty thousand British troops, and the destruction of the
Russian naval forces in the Black Sea. Later was to come the
seizure of Bessarabia by Rumania and portions of White
Russia by Poland.
1355
It must not be imagined that all the forces against the
Bolsheviks were united among themselves. Far from it. In
1919, the Polish divisions under Pilsudski declared war
against Petlura and seized Eastern Galicia, then claimed by
Ukrainia, and a portion of Western Ukraine. (*39) Between
Petlura and Denikin there was open hostility, since it was
no secret that Denikin meant to restore Czarist control. The
French compelled the German army to quit the border
provinces, as required under the terms of peace, and they
themselves went in to organize the Polish army and the war
against Russia. On the eastern front, the Czechs soon
became weary of being the tools for the White-Guardists
and began to fight to return home. Mutiny broke out
among the American and British soldiers in Archangel and
among the vessels of the French Black Sea Fleet. In spite of
the urgency of the moment, the capitalist classes were yet
unable to unite their forces to overcome the common enemy.
The most determined efforts were made in 1919 to crush the

soviet regime. On the East, the important city of Tobolsk
was taken; in the South, the city of Orel; in the West,
Yudenitch was marching to within eight miles of Petrograd.
In all, some sixteen armies were fighting at one time. It was
then that the Bolsheviks, like the Jacobins in the French
Revolution and the Communards in 1871, rose to truly
heroic heights. They found their Carnot and Danton
combined in Trotsky. Under the leadership of Trotsky, the
old worthless Czarist army was replaced by a powerful Red
army, each regiment with its political commissars who
carried out the revolutionary policy of the communists,
inspired by the genius of Trotsky to whom Lenin had given
literally carte blanche to go the limit.
Like Napoleon for the bourgeoisie, so Trotsky for the

proletariat, became the representative of the cutting edge of
1356
a new international class rising to power. As his forces
drove their way into the lines of other countries, it was
impossible for him to become bound by considerations
merely national in character. The military accomplishments
of Trotsky were connected with his international
revolutionary policies; in both cases he aroused the enmity
of communists not so enlightened in outlook nor
intransigent in character.
When Zinoviev wanted to abandon Petrograd to the forces

of Yudenitch, it was Trotsky who won over Lenin and
mobilized the whole proletariat of that city for a counter-
attack that defeated the enemy. (*40) When Stalin insisted
upon retaining military supplies intended for the whole
army for his particular sector, it was Trotsky who opposed
him with a bitterness that increased as the war progressed.
The military struggle between Stalin and Trotsky hinged on
various issues. The first was whether the main attack
should be made against Kolchak or against Denikin; here it
seemed as though Stalin was more far-sighted: The second
issue hinged on what part of the South-eastern front to
attack. Here Trotsky countermanded the decision of Stalin
(a tactical error which would have proved most costly to
the Bolsheviks) to march against the Cossacks in their own
territory, instead of marching against the forces of Denikin
where the Cossacks would not have fought so strenuously.
This was not only a military blunder on the part of Stalin,
but above all a profound political error, reflecting a false
estimation of the peasantry of the region and of the Cossack
forces.
Particularly damaging was Stalin's part in the Polish war

which was to come later. Trotsky had advised against the
Polish war but had yielded to Lenin in this matter. In the
course of this struggle, the Polish Army was pushed into
1357
Warsaw, before the gates of which was decided the mighty
question whether Poland would turn Bolshevik and the
Russian Revolution be physically connected with the
German or whether the bourgeoisie would prevail. For his
own reasons, Stalin disobeyed the orders of the General
Staff led by Trotsky and marched in such a fashion from
Lvov as to render his army unable to withstand the counter
blows of the Poles, now under the direction of the brilliant
French General Weygand. This, and the foolish march of
Budenny's cavalry, made a disastrous defeat of the Russian
Army inevitable, and the Bolsheviks had to withdraw.
If the Bolsheviks themselves could not thoroughly agree,

the dissension was still more pronounced outside their
ranks. In the Ukraine, for example, there had been
organized under the lead of the peasant anarchist, Nestor
Makhno, a guerrilla army that proved valuable in fighting
Petlura and the Ukrainian nationalists and yet would not
subordinate its struggles to the welfare of the Russian
Army as a whole; thus in turn it had to be fought by the
Bolsheviks for trying to set up a dual regime. All over the
country there were partisan armies of peasants sprung up
to fight against the return of Czarism and reaction, but
armies which would not become incorporated directly into
the Red Army.
The reason for peasant hesitation and vacillation was not

hard to find. Under the stress of gigantic capitalist pressure
against them, the Bolsheviks had been forced to adopt
draconic requisitions from the peasantry to sustain
themselves. Production fell close to zero. Hunger and
sickness gripped the land. All surplus goods were seized
for military use. Private ownership was reduced to its
narrowest possible limits. Compulsory labor was
established for all. Money was abolished. An extreme
1358
centralization marked all production and distribution. This
was the military communism established by Lenin. It was
not much different in form from the expropriations carried
on by the Jacobins in the critical days of the French
Revolution, but there was this difference in fact: In the
French Revolution, the requisitions were carried on by
representatives of the peasantry; in the Russian Revolution,
it was done in behalf of the cities, in the name of
communism and of the abolition of private property in the
means of production.
Naturally, the peasantry resisted this policy of the

Bolsheviks. But no sooner did they open the gates to the
White Guardists and reactionists than they had cause
quickly to repent. "There were horrible murders committed,
but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks as the
world believes. I am well on the side of safety when I say
that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in
Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks." (*41)
For the regime inaugurated under Denikin it is sufficient to
report his treatment of the Jews, of whom it is estimated
close to half a million perished "There were pogroms that
lasted a week; ... In many populous Jewish communities
there were no survivors left to bury the dead, and
thousands of Jewish wounded and killed were eaten by
dogs . . . . " (*42)
With such a terrible rule of repression facing them, there

was nothing for even the mass of middle peasants to do but
to join forces with the Bolsheviks. Everywhere "green"
armies, or partisan troops, sprang up that, like Makhno's
forces in the Ukraine, rendered valuable service in
harassing the reactionists in ferocious guerrilla warfare in
which no quarter was given or asked. What the exact
number of casualties was is exceedingly difficult to estimate,
1359
but they must have been at least equal to those suffered in
the World War itself.
in spite of unheard of difficulties, however, the Bolsheviks

were able to survive, and, when the Poles, after their
unceasing advance on the Western border of Russia, had
marched to Minsk and had engaged in actions resulting in
war, they were hurled back to the very gates of Warsaw
and barely saved by the military genius of the French
general staff. By 1920, victory was with the Leninists.
The termination of the Polish war left the country in a

completely wrecked state economically. To the many
millions of war dead and the breakdown of economy due to
Czarist conduct there had been added the awful casualties
and ruin of the most devastating civil war known in history.
The foreign interventionists had been driven out and the
White Guardists crushed, but at a cost that was destroying
the entire nation.
The first to rebel were the peasants in the fall of 1920;

unfortunately the needs of the hour were so great that the
Bolsheviks did not heed the warning of these events and
did not loosen their stringent requisition measures. Then
there broke out the Kronstadt revolt among the sailors who
had been the chief supporters of the Bolsheviks at critical
moments of the Revolution. The Kronstadt rebellion of
March 1, 1921 advanced demands that, on the surface,
seemed mild but, in reality, challenged the fundamental
measures of the Bolsheviks. These demands included the
re-election of soviets by secret voting, free speech for

anarchists and Left socialist parties, freedom of meetings
for peasant associations, liberty for all socialist political
1360
prisoners, and the right of the peasants to have priority of
lands over the State farms and communes.
Behind these demands inspired by misery lurked the

anarchist propaganda for "Soviets without parties" and the
termination of the Dictatorship. Expressing this thought,
the Kronstadters actually called for a "Third Revolution."
The Kronstadt revolt was put down with draconic
thoroughness, but it served the purpose of reminding the
leaders of the Russian Communist Party that it was time to
change their policy of military communism which had
stripped the peasantry and the petty owners completely
bare. Above all it was necessary to increase production, or
the entire country would perish.
As a transition measure to the rebuilding of Russian

economy, Lenin proposed the abolition of military
communism and the substitution of an agricultural tax. Up
to now, the peasants had been paying no taxes; instead, all
their surplus had been taken away, and trading had been
abolished. Now limited trading again would be permitted.
Lenin affirmed that the agricultural tax was a form of
transition from the peculiar "military communism" made
necessary by extreme necessity, ruin and war, for the
purpose of a proper socialist exchange of products.(*43)
By March, 1921, Lenin was ready for the next big step, his
New Economic Policy (called the "NEP" for short). Now
would be brought in all the measures already worked out
in 1918 for the enticing of capital back into the Soviet Union
so as to build up its economy on a better basis. A moderate
and cautious introduction of the policy of concessions was
effected that was calculated to improve the state of industry
and the condition of the peasantry. Just how far the
concessions to capitalism could go had to be determined by
the relation of forces, but it was clear that while capitalism
1361
could get economic concessions it could make little political
headway. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat would be as
rigidly enforced as ever.
The task of building up State capitalism side by side with a

socialistic regime over the factories already seized was
concretized by measures inviting merchants and traders
into Russia, and the opening up of a free market. The re-
introduction of free trade was the sole measure to rebuild
the economy on the countryside and to stimulate peasant
production, even though buying and selling on the open
market was bound to lead to the formation of kulaks and
new capitalist elements ("Nepmen"). The government also
began the policy of selling bonds on interest, the funds to
go for the purchase of machinery, etc. In every way, the
Soviet regime tried to induce wealthy capitalists to build
plants in Russia for the State to work at a mutual profit.
On the countryside, the development of co-operatives of

small commodity producers was ardently pushed. Lenin
had no illusions about these co-operatives of producers,
and openly declared that they inevitably would generate
petty bourgeois relations, but at least these co-operatives
would simplify control over the capitalists and would
increase the supply of goods. Entirely different from the
concessions to individual capitalists, the co-operatives
could also be a transition toward socialism. The concessions
were based on large machine industry and granted to a
single capitalist or trust by a definite written document not
easy to repeal. Besides, transition from State capitalism to
socialism was a transition from one form of large scale
production to another. It was otherwise with the co-
operatives, which was based on small industry and took in
many thousands of members on terms that easily could be
changed. The transition from co-operatives to socialism was
1362
the transition from petty industry to large-scale production,
and thus would mark a great forward step in a backward
country like Russia.
These changes came just in time to save the Bolshevik

regime. Following the military intervention and economic
blockade of Soviet Russia by the foreign powers, and owing
to the complete breakdown of economy, Russia suffered a
terrible famine in 1921-1922 that attained the unbelievable
toll of five million deaths from starvation and disease.
Added to the war dead and the losses in the civil war, this
new and awful blow would have been sufficient to crush
any other country and any other force than Russia and the
Bolsheviks. By means of the new measures, however, the
Russian Revolutionists did manage to survive. A
commercial treaty was effected with Great Britain in 1921,
and, in 1922, the Treaty of Rapallo was signed with
Germany. Affairs thenceforth were brought to a more
normal state.
Thus there was prolonged a peculiar equilibrium in

international affairs wherein a proletarian regime was able
to exist for a number of years side by side with a capitalist
world. This mutual coexistence has led to the illusion in
some circles that the two parts could work together
peacefully for an indefinite, protracted period. What was
rather the case was that neither side could for the moment
overcome the other; thus both had to tolerate each other.
The shift to the New Economic Policy also brought great

changes in the ranks of the advanced workers in the
Communist Party. During the course of the civil war, the
proletariat had been forced to take up arms and had
become quite disused to industrial discipline. In many cases
the factories were destroyed or dismantled. In other cases,
the workers had met interminably over every question of
1363
production, "democracy" being interpreted in such a
manner that it spelled perpetual debating with nothing
accomplished.
The drive to increase production implied the drive also for

centralization and for strict responsibility. Anarchistic
tendencies had to be overcome, endless discussions
terminated. Instead of responsibilities being scattered
through large committees, now there was to be individual
responsibility, with one chief director appointed for the
factories. Lenin urged "Hold meetings, but administer
without the least hesitation, administer more firmly and
severely than ever the capitalist did before. Otherwise you
will not be able to conquer him." (*44) There was to be no
tolerance of sentimentality, dilettantism, or slacking. The
three chief enemies were defined as communist conceit,
illiteracy, and bribery.
The shifting of the front from the military arena to that of

economics brought out most clearly the basic fact that the
technical culture of Russia was extremely low. To build
factories required a large stratum of skilled workers and a
trained general proletariat. In Russia, however, this was
lacking. It was easier for the Russian workers to win on the
military front than it was for them to build up a socialistic
economy. The management and direction of factories had to
be vested in experts who were almost to a man old Czarist
professionals, who hated the new regime, and who literally
were forced to work by pistols placed at their heads.
Under Trotsky in the Red Army also, thousands of old

Czarist officers had been used for the proletarian cause, but
always under the closest supervision of the political
commissars at the head of which stood Trotsky and Lenin
himself. (*45) The task of controlling chemical engineers
and industrial experts was a more involved process, one far
1364
more difficult for the mass of workers to follow. Since the
number of trained skilled workers was inconsiderable in
the light of the gigantic tasks before the nation, these
experts were able to seize for themselves special privileges
and positions and threatened to get out of the control of the
workers. It must also be remembered that the civil war had
wrought havoc with the trade union movement generally.
The majority of the members had volunteered for the front;
the unions had become depopulated. This led to a certain
bureaucracy and conservatism among the leadership that
remained.
The New Economic Policy also introduced individual

responsibility in production. Each worker was now to
receive wages in proportion to the quantity and quality of
his work; at once there became differentiated various layers
among the workers. The skilled layers separated
themselves from the unskilled and inclined to dominate the
posts in the unions. Conditions thereupon tended to
become as follows: Experts and specialists in the shop took
power into their own hands or were controlled by
subservient committees of skilled and specially privileged
workers; trade unions were dominated by bureaucrats
interested in production rather than in international
struggle; the soviets were controlled by intellectuals far
removed from the interests of the masses. All this is another
way of reiterating the basic general truth that workers who
seize power in a backward agrarian country cannot
maintain their rule without aid from the workers of
advanced countries. Because of the lack of culture prevalent
in such agrarian countries, bureaucracy is bound to flourish
and gradually to dominate the scene. Within the
Communist Party a struggle was sure to arise.
1365
Under Lenin, so long as the world proletariat was
advancing in a great revolutionary wave, the struggle could
be confined within fraternal patterns. Later, the conflict
became sharpened into an aspect of the class struggle, and
the Bolshevik Party was split. The first warnings of the
struggle appeared immediately after the "NEP" in the guise
of a "Workers Opposition."
The spokesmen of the Workers' Opposition denounced the

new bureaucracy that was arising. They pointed out that
the upper layers were arising at the expense of the general
mass of labor; the trade unions were being subordinated to
a state apparatus; the one-man management was creating a
new bureaucracy in the factories; the initiative of the
masses was being destroyed; new "NEPmen" and
speculators were arising on all sides to restore capitalism.
To the Workers' Opposition the cardinal point was: Who
shall develop the creative powers in the sphere of economic
reconstruction, the industrial unions or the soviet machine?
(*46) If the unions were not given full control, then they
would atrophy, the soviets would become more and more
subservient to the peasantry and lower middle classes, and
the revolution would be in danger.
Soviet industry was administered by the following

mechanism: The soviets had created a Supreme Council of
National Economy to be in complete charge of soviet
economy and to reconstruct and build up industry. This
Council had under its control large numbers of bourgeois
specialists, engineers, experts and pseudo-experts, to whom
the factories were entrusted. Besides this economic set-up,
there were the All-Russian Trade Unions in whose hands
were the functions of negotiating with the directors placed
in charge by the Supreme Council the questions of wages,
hours, and working conditions. Third, there was the Labor
1366
Commissariat of the Soviet government that looked after
the administration of soviet laws in regard to labor
conditions in the factories, such as health, sanitation, etc.
The Workers' Opposition took the position that the

direction of economy should be placed in the hands of the
Russian unions, the Supreme Council to be retained, but as
a subordinate agency to the unions. This would give a real
class policy to economic reconstruction. As matters then
stood, the Supreme Council was responsible to the soviets
which in turn were heavily mixed with peasant and petty
bourgeois elements. Besides, if the unions were not given
the constructive task of building up economy, they would
lose all vital functions and degenerate into mere
propaganda clubs.
On this question a different attitude was taken by Trotsky,

who wanted to bring the Russian trade unions directly into
the State apparatus and thus place them in charge of
economic reconstruction really as part of the Supreme
Economic Council. Those administrative tendencies which
had made Trotsky an excellent Commander-in-Chief of the
Red Army here were stretched unduly into the field of
trade union life as well.
Against all of these positions was the viewpoint of Lenin,

which finally prevailed. The direction of the factories would
be controlled by workers' committees and commissars
elected by the unions and the workers in the shops. The
unions also were to select the head of the Labor
Commissariat, which would be virtually under their control.
But the unions were not to be made part of the State
apparatus; this connoted a dangerous tendency towards
regimentation of the workers and would take the class
struggle character away from the unions.
1367
Had the Workers' Opposition prevailed, there would have
been a tendency of the proletariat to separate itself too
much from the peasantry, and of the unions to diverge from
their Soviet base. Whether this actually would have
occurred is another question. It must be remembered that
Lenin at one time considered pushing the revolution
forward, not through the Soviets, but through other
workers organizations. At any rate, the Bolshevik leaders
wanted above all to increase production from the existing
dangerously low levels. They wished to exert pressure
upon the workers to increase production and to discipline
them anew. Unless production rapidly augmented, all
would be lost, and the Leninists would take no chances on
further experimentation. It is another question whether the
plan of the Workers' opposition would have been
appropriate after Soviet economy was well on its feet. But,
by that time, such proposals had become politically
impossible.
On the other hand, it was imperative to keep the unions

entirely separate from the State apparatus which was
growing steadily with an incubus of bureaucracy. The
unions must be free to represent not the State as a whole,
but only one class, the workers; in their negotiations with
the State directors on hours and wages, this became clear.
Above all the unions were to maintain the right to strike. If
they were to become part of the State apparatus, as Trotsky
proposed, this right to strike in fact would be destroyed;
thus the unions as such would be given a mortal blow. It
might appear strange that workers would want to strike
against a State which theoretically was controlled by the
working class but, as Lenin remarked, "Our State is not
entirely a 'workers state'; we also have our peasants. Then
our State is bureaucratic. The trade unions must defend the
workers against the state bureaucracy." (*47) In any given
1368
instance, a strike meant that the bureaucratic official in
charge was really thwarting the will of the workers; the
strike would be a scandalous and dramatic way of showing
up the bureaucracy, focusing publicity on it.
However wrong the Workers' Opposition may have been,

certainly it served a healthy purpose in bringing forward
the tendencies which already were thwarting the rule of the
workers. Lenin counted on the Party to check all such
tendencies. The Workers opposition replied that the Party
itself was being choked with all sorts of alien elements that
had joined it only after the victory of Bolshevism was
assured. And they called for the expulsion from the Party of
all non-workers who had joined after 1919; in the future, all
persons who were to be admitted first had to go to work in
a factory and obtain first hand general labor experience.
Lenin himself not much later was to issue stern warnings
against the opportunists who had crept into the Bolshevik
ranks and to threaten the expulsion of 99 per cent of the
Mensheviks who had changed color and joined the
Bolsheviks after the seizure of power.
The Workers' Opposition was correct in its stern strictures

against the rise of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.
However, it failed to realize that the roots of bureaucracy
lay in the backward condition of the country and in the
failure of the world revolution to support the Soviet regime.
Before his death, Lenin, too, railed at the symptoms of
bureaucracy appearing around him. He noted the complete
failure of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, headed by
Stalin, to change that situation. He found Stalin himself
engaged in placing his men by appointments at all key
positions of the Party. Finally, in desperation, he tried to
strike hard at the Stalinist Party bureaucracy, but the blow
fell too late and, although he called for Stalin's removal
1369
from his post as Secretary of the Party, by that time Lenin
was paralyzed and on his death bed. The task was left to
Trotsky to handle. And Trotsky failed.
Footnotes
1. L. D. Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution, II, 126-127.
3. The same, II, 230-231.
4. V. I. Lenin: Vol. XX, Book I, p. 279.
5. V. I. Lenin: Preparing for Revolt, pp. 10-11
6. The same, p. 14.
7. Stalin voted against the motion forbidding Kamenev to

continue his "strike breaking" activities by publishing anti-
insurrection articles. Stalin also voted against Kamenev's
resignation from the leading body of the Party. Such was
Stalin's brilliant role in the October insurrection!
8. "And there were some vacillators among the Bolsheviks.

On November 4 (17) a number of members of the Central
Committee resigned because they considered the
committee's refusal to form a government made up of all
the parties represented in the soviets fatal to the Revolution.
Those who resigned were: Rykov, Milioutin, Zinoviev, and
Nogin. A similar attitude was taken by a large number of
the People's Commissars . . ." L. Colesnikov: Struggles and
Achievements of the Soviets, pp. 37-38.
9. Even in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in

November, 1917, the Bolsheviks were able to get nine
million votes or 25 per cent of the total throughout the
country.
1370
10. The Bolsheviks had fifty thousand soldiers actively
engaged in suppressing the revolt, while fifty thousand
more were benevolently neutral. The "Gospodin" and
student rebels had about ten thousand.
11. The vote on the signing of the Treaty in the Committee

of the Bolsheviks was 7 for, 4 against, 4 abstentions; the
final vote in the Soviet Congress was 724 for, 276 against,
with 206 abstentions.
12. The dates from now on are given in the world calendar.
13. J. Mavor: The Russian Revolution, pp. 348-349.
14. G. Vernadski: The Russian Revolution 1917-1931, p. 68.
15. The Germans took over 113,000 tons of foodstuffs. See

W. H. Chamberlin: The Russian Revolution 1917-1921, I, 410.
16. For the decree confiscating grain and announcing war

against the kulaks, see W. H. Chamberlin, Work Cited, I,
509, appendix.
17. See W. H. Chamberlin, Work Cited, II, 50.
18. See V. I. Lenin: "The Land Revolution in Russia," Speech,

December 1918, pamphlet issued by the Independent
Labour Party, London.
19. The same, p. 7.
20. The same, p. 8.
22. Speech March 7, 1918, given in L. D. Trotsky: The Draft

Program of the Communist International, p. 14.
23. Speech April 23, 1918, the same, p. 1 4.

1371
24. Lenin's speech on "The Tax in Kind." This speech is also
to be found in a slightly different translation in "Speeches of
V. I. Lenin," Voices of Revolt, Vol. VIII.
25. Quoted in L. D. Trotsky, work cited, pp. 15-16.
26. V. I. Lenin: Speech on "The Tax in Kind."
27. V. I. Lenin: Speech at the Third All-Russian Trade Union

Congress, 1920. This speech can also be found in Trade
Unions in Soviet Russia, a collection of documents compiled
by the Independent Labour Party of Great Britain.
28. The vast majority voted for the Social-Revolutionaries in

the November 1917 elections for the Constituent Assembly.
29. V. I. Lenin: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the

Elections for the Constituent Assembly, p. 10.
30. V. I. Lenin: Speech, "The Tax in Kind."
31. The same.
32. See, V. I. Lenin: "The Chief Task of our Times," article

in Izvestia, May 30, 1918, reprinted pamphlet form, London.
33. V. I. Lenin: The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the

Renegade, pp. 92-93. (1920, British Socialist Party edition.)
34. The same, pp. 96-97.
35. The same, p. 103.
36. Before signing, the Russians tried to get aid from

London and Washington. Wilson sent a warm cablegram
but the Liberal Lloyd George met the overtures with cold
silence.
1372
37. Given in W. P. and Z. K. Coates: Armed Intervention in
Russia, 1918-1922, p. 143. See also L. D. Trotsky. The History
of the Russian Revolution, I, 273.
38. See W. P. and Z. K. Coates: Armed Intervention in Russia,

1918-1922, p. 189.
39. This did not prevent Petlura, however, from marching

with Pilsudski in common war against the Bolsheviks later
on in 1920.
40. See L. D. Trotsky: My Life, p. 424 and following.
41. Major-General Wm. S. Graves: America's Siberian

Adventure, p. 108.
42. W. P. and Z. K. Coates: Armed Intervention in Russia,

1918-1922, quoting from Dr. J H. Hertz: Decade of Woe and
Hope, p. 5.
43. See V. I. Lenin: "Meaning of the Agricultural

Tax," Labour Monthly, Vol. I, No. I, pp. 18-24. (July, 1921.)
This article also appears in Lenin, Bucharin and
Rutgers: The New Policies of Soviet Russia.
44. V. I. Lenin: "The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of

Political Enlightenment," speech delivered October 1921.
In Labour Monthly, Vol. I, No. 6, p. 514, (Dec. 1921.)
45. Between June 1918 and August 1920 nearly fifty

thousand former Czarist officers were induced to serve in
the Red Army.
46. See A. Kolontay: The Workers' Opposition in

Russia, pamphlet, p. 9.
47. Quoted by W. H. Chamberlin, work cited, II, 436.
1373
II. THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL UNDER LENIN
XL. THE POST-WAR REVOLUTIONARY WAVE
The victory of the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia made it

inevitable and imperative that they build a new Communist
International. From the first days of the World War in 1914,
Lenin had declared that the Socialist International was dead
and that it was the duty of the genuine revolutionists to
split from that body and to create a new one. The road in
this direction was not easy. For the five years following, the
communist Left Wing remained but a small minority. By
1919, however, a different situation presented itself. In the
first place, the War and its aftermath had ground all
reformist hopes to pieces, had disillusioned the masses,
discredited the socialists, and driven the people to take
action themselves. A great revolutionary wave spread
throughout all Europe. In the countries formerly controlled
by the Czar, such as Finland, Latvia, Poland, Georgia, and
similar regions, upheavals were rife. In the defeated
countries of Germany, Austria, and Hungary, the
monarchist cliques were fleeing in terror. In Munich and
Budapest the Red Flag of the Soviets flew boldly.
In the victorious countries also, immense struggles were

breaking forth. In France, the number of recorded strikers
in 1919 reached a total of over a million, one hundred
thousand; in 1920 it climbed close to one million five
hundred thousand. (*1) The chaos of events caused the
French working class to react so violently that both the
trade union and socialist movements were split from top to
bottom. The majority at the Socialist Party conference in
1374
Tours, December, 1920, formed the Communist Party and
joined the Third International. This Left Wing took with it
practically the entire Socialist Party machinery, two-thirds
of the membership, and the daily
newspaper l'Humanit’e. The communists were able also to
win the majority of the trade unions and to organize their
own "Unitarian" center.
In England, the workers increasingly demonstrated their

solidarity in stormy strike struggles cutting across all craft
and industrial union lines. In these strikes, the workers
began to raise not merely economic but political demands,
such as the withdrawal of troops from Russia, sympathy for
the soviets, the nationalization of the coal, iron, railways,
electrical, and other key industries. The sharp resolution of
the Trade Union Congress in 1920 denouncing the British
intervention in Russia helped considerably in the decision
of the government to withdraw the British troops from the
Murmansk region of Russia, just as the revolutionary
demonstrations of the French workers led to the
withdrawal of the French troops from Odessa and the
French fleet from the Black Sea.
As far away as America, general strikes occurred in Seattle,

Washington, and in Winnipeg, Canada. In Argentina, the
repression of the 1919 general strike resulted in five
hundred killed and fifteen hundred wounded. In the
United States, large-scale strikes occurred in, steel, railroad,
coal, textile, and other industries, the number of strikers
mounting to several millions, an unprecedented total.
The position of the Leninists had followed the Marxist

dictum "Workers of the World Unite" and, from the
beginning, Lenin had been astute enough to see that the
revolution begun in Russia would have to be carried on
internationally to a finish. In the opinion of the Bolsheviks,
1375
the War had created a situation whereby revolution was
ripe throughout the world. To accomplish this revolution, it
was necessary to organize the communists in other
countries and to wipe out the fateful influence of the
socialists in the labor movement. The revolutionary
movement was spreading so violently that the bourgeoisie
in several countries had yielded full power to socialist
opportunists. Elsewhere the socialists were considered to be
the decisive factor preventing the working class from taking
power. The attitude of the Socialist Parties towards Soviet
Russia already had been negative and critical and, in some
places, distinctly hostile. If the Leninists were to take
advantage of the revolutionary wave spreading throughout
Europe, they had to destroy completely the influence of the
Second International. Furthermore, the events of the day
had already caused splits in the ranks of the socialists.
Various ultra Left groups were putting forth their programs
which, while apparently criticizing the Leninist point of
view supposedly from the Left, could result, in the long run,
only in strengthening organizations inimical to the
communists.
The creation of a Third International was also necessary if

the communists in other countries were to learn the lessons
of Bolshevism and make it an international reality.
Revolutions were convulsing the peoples of Europe, yet,
nowhere, save in Russia, were the workers able to hold the
fort. This could be attributed either to objective difficulties,
to subjective defects, or to both. A Communist International
could, at least, minimize the blunders of its adherents.
Even from the Russian nationalist point of view, it was

imperative to reconstruct the Communist International with
its center in Moscow. The victorious powers, by 1919, had
concentrated on the task of destroying the soviets by means
1376
of interventionary armies. It was highly important to
paralyze these at their source. The internationalism of the
Bolsheviks, therefore, had a real identity with the national
interests of Russia, not only from the point of view of Lenin,
that only the World Revolution could save the proletarian
victory in Russia, but also from the nationalist penchant of
using the World Revolution as a subservient agency for
Russian ends.
The task of forming a new International was immensely

lightened for the communists by the fact that they had at
their disposal the incalculable resources of a huge country
of over one hundred sixty million people. Coupled with the
misery and poverty of the masses driving them to
communism, there existed also the powerful attractive force
of a strong well-knit Communist Party under Lenin, that
had actually seized and held power, and taken over the
factories. In the light of this conjuncture of forces, it is no
wonder that the Socialist International, which had from the
start embraced a considerable number of revolutionists,
should have broken up into large fragments moving
towards communism.
The testing and proving of the Bolshevik Party had been a

long drawn out process in Russia, lasting almost twenty
years. It had taken five years to call even the first
International Communist Conference. It might be presumed
that the creation of an International of Bolshevik caliber
would have required as long a time as Lenin needed to
form his own section. If, therefore, we see the Communist
International flourish with extraordinary success from the
very start, it is not only because of the ripe objective
conditions, but also because most of those who styled
themselves communists were sailing under false colors. To
a considerable degree, the Third International exaggerated
1377
its strength so as to gloss over the extreme difficulty of the
tasks which the Bolsheviks had placed before themselves.
Later, when world capitalism had become temporarily

stabilized, it was seen that the gains of the communists
were partly pseudo-victories, that the new recruits who
called themselves communists were really new types of Left
Wing socialists. In 1919, large sections of Centrist elements,
who really had little in common with the vigorous and
ruthless training of the Bolsheviks, were swept off their feet
by the current of revolution and flowed on towards the
communist movement. So great was the influx of new
members that the powerful Bolshevik party was not able to
digest its international material and to remake it into
communist tissue.
Several results accrued from the situation. In the first place,

the Communist International was made responsible for
actions by its newly acquired adherents; this discredited it,
since these new disciples, although recognized as such,
were not really communists. In the second place, the
moment reaction began to stiffen, these chameleons broke
away from the movement to which they adhered. Thus, the
process of transforming socialist Centrists into effective
cadres for the Communist International was to prove
exceedingly fitful and up-hill. Scarcely had the Leninists
begun to build the International than it began to appear to
be but a specious illusion. The Communist International
could not maintain its Leninist level.
It was quite natural for the labor movement of the countries

formerly ruled by Czarism to go towards extremism and to
follow the path laid down by the Russians. Czarism had
laid a heavy hand upon its subject nationalities, and now its
policy of russification was to find its antithesis in the
influence of Russian Bolshevism. This was true for Finland,
1378
as it was to be for Latvia, Lithuania, Ukrainia, and
elsewhere.
As far back as 1905 the Finnish movement had

synchronized itself with the Russian. A Red Guard had
been organized and soviets established. Revolution was the
order of the day. Even after 1905, the Russian rulers were
forced to make concessions to Finland. So hostile was the
general population in Finland to the military that, all
during the War, the General Staff did not dare to enlist
soldiers in that country. (*2)
In the summer of 1916, the Finnish Labor Party actually

gained the majority of the antiquated Landtag which the
Czar had permitted to function in Finland. The agitation for
independence was now intensified, and around the Labor
Party various nationalist-liberal constellations were formed
to push the question of political freedom. A Finnish militia
was organized.
Simultaneously with the overthrow of the Czar, revolution

broke out in Finland. The nationalists now withdrew from
their connections with the Labor Party and, frightened by
the growing revolutionism of the masses, mobilized their
peasant forces in the elections of October 1, 1917, for a new
Landtag. As a result, the Labor Party lost its majority,
acquiring but ninety-two seats out of two hundred.
On its part the Finnish Labor Party was caught surprised by

the rapid turn of events. As Russia went Bolshevik, the
advanced Finnish workers who had been in the forefront,
demanding the independence of Finland, were forced to
change their propaganda to favor solidarity with the soviets.
Naturally, the transition period was bound to be one of
confusion, resulting in the workers' loss of support by the
1379
peasants who were still captivated by nationalist-
democratic slogans.
It will be recalled that Russian soviets had sprung up

spontaneously in the demand for bread and peace. But, as
we have noted, Finland was not directly dragged into the
War. Her forces were not conscripted; on the contrary, war
prosperity manifested itself in numerous quarters. The
pressure of the War on Finland showed itself in the large
numbers of soldiers billeted there, in the heavy taxation,
and in dislocation of trade. All these matters the middle
classes believed could be solved by independence.
Furthermore, for the bourgeoisie, the independence of
Finland would be the first step in destroying Bolshevism.
The moment the Bolshevik revolution succeeded, the

Finnish Landtag declared its complete independence. This
declaration was met by a general strike of the Finnish
proletariat on November thirteenth. As Finland had always
been kept disarmed by Russia, and as numerous soviet
troops still remained on Finnish territory, the bourgeoisie
was not able to suppress the strike or to disarm the Red
Guard.
However, the Finnish communists did not take this

occasion to overthrow the Landtag. The Labor Party
permitted the Landtag to resume sessions and mobilize its
forces under Svinhufvud. Only on January 27, 1918, did the
Finnish proletariat go into action to establish their
dictatorship. They easily took control of all the important
centers of South Finland, driving the Whites into the
tundras of the north.
By this time, Russia was being forced into the Brest Litovsk
Peace, the result of which was the freeing of the hands of
the German imperialists to destroy Bolshevism outside of
1380
Russia proper. The Finnish bourgeoisie hastened to invite
the German army into the country, and by May, 1918, the
communist forces were routed and the White Terror began,
not to end until thirty thousand workers had perished for
their support of sovietism.
In the course of the Finnish revolt, the need of an

international center must have become impressed indelibly
upon the Russian communists, if only to prevent the many
serious amateur mistakes being made in the name of
communism. This lesson was to be emphasized in the
events of Hungary and Germany.
In Finland, the communists did not know how to win the

peasantry to their side. They did not take advantage of their
early opportunities to take over the factories and to smash
the capitalists entrenched in the Landtag. They were still
cherishing too many legalistic and parliamentary fetishes.
They paid for their amateurishness with their lives.
Even before the final debacle at the front, a revolutionary

explosion had been maturing in Hungary. A strong pacifist
policy was being pursued by the group led by the Radical
philanthropist, Karolyi. Count Michael Karolyi had
belonged to the extreme Left Wing of the "Party of 1848"
which had advocated Kossuth's dream of a free democratic
federation of Serbs, Hungarians, Rumanians, and other
nationalities of Central-Eastern Europe. The Karolyists had
found the Party of 1848, however, too mild for their views,
and had split to form their own organization. Since, under
the reactionary election laws of Hungary, social-democratic
workers found it extremely difficult to elect delegates to
1381
Parliament, the Karolyi Party was really the only opposition
in that body and, as such, it gathered the hopes of the
people around it.
Already, in 1918, anti-militarist agitation had become

pronounced throughout the country. A military mutiny had
to be suppressed in Pecs. In June, a strike was called in the
machine works of the State railway system and developed
into a general strike in Budapest. From this time on, the
workers began to form Workmen's Councils, no doubt
inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution.
With the collapse of the Bulgarian front, in October, and the

realization by the Hungarians that the War was lost,
matters rapidly came to a head. On October twenty-fifth the
old parliament was superseded by a National Council
headed by Karolyi. A portion of the Budapest police joined
the movement, troops refused obedience to their superiors
and formed Soldiers' Councils. The revolutionists seized the
General Post Office, the telegraph and telephone centers,
the railways, and the military buildings, All without any
resistance from the aristocratic regime, which was in a state
of collapse. The King fled the country.
This unique situation calls for some explanation. The fact is

the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy never had been anything
but a warden in an immense prison of the peoples of
Central Europe. The reactionary regime had held on by
brute terror, by its policy of divide and conquer, and by its
support from Germany. Now history was taking its revenge;
the blows of the War had shattered this bastile. The Czechs,
the Serbs, the Rumanians, were all in active battle against it.
Coming on top of this, the revolt of the Hungarians was too
much. There was a complete collapse of the power of the
ruling class; the old State crashed into pieces.
1382
"On the signing of the Armistice, the Minister of War had
stated that it would take three years to demobilize the army,
and to return the troops to their ordinary civil occupations.
As a matter of fact, the army demobilized itself, without
waiting for the order of the Minister of War, in exactly three
days !" (3)
At this critical moment, Count Karolyi undertook to hold

the fort for capitalism. That he was not feared by the rulers
was evidenced by the fact that the King of Hungary himself
entrusted Karolyi with the task of forming a new cabinet,
and Karolyi's "revolutionary" National Council actually
took the old oath to the King before assuming office. But
the Karolyi Radicals were astute enough to realize that
unusual measures, including the full support of the
working class led by the social-democrats, were necessary.
On November sixteenth, 1818, a Republic was proclaimed
and the Social-Democratic Party was invited to join the
government.
This radical procedure was not unwelcome to the former

rulers. The War was now over. The question was to secure
the best peace terms possible. The die-hard military clique
felt that the pacifist, naive Karolyi was a far better face
behind which to hide than the old, worn out masks. Many
in Hungary had followed Kossuth's ideals for an
independent Hungary and a free Danubian Federation.
Now that the program of Karolyi actually was being
advocated by such as Woodrow Wilson there was none
better to meet the Versailles victors than the Count.
Hungary was to be partitioned. Perhaps the Hungarian

socialists could stop this process or could keep the Serbs,
Czechs, and other former subject nations closer to Hungary
than would otherwise be the case. Now that coercion had
failed, perhaps cajolery covered with socialist phrases of
1383
"brotherhood" might be of influence. Undoubtedly these
considerations played an important part in the events, and
Karolyi, instead of being a traitor to Hungarian nationalism,
was in reality an aristocratic patriot trying to save his class
by unaccustomed methods. If he opened the way for
communism, it was because nothing could have prevented
the course of events from flowing in that direction. Where
Karolyi failed was in underestimating the ability of Paris to
judge the servility of the socialists and their pretensions.
The far-sighted policy of Karolyi tremendously appealed to

the social-democrats, who were highly flattered by the
invitation to form a Cabinet. A debate now arose among
them whether they should take the entire government or
should limit themselves to a coalition with the bourgeoisie.
The vacillating and amateurish character of the Hungarian
socialist representatives of the workers was seen in the
progress of this debate.
A Workers' Council meeting was called for January 14, 1919,

wherein one of the leaders, Garbai, proposed that there be
formed a purely socialist government. To his own surprise,
the proposition was carried, whereupon he at once begged
leave to withdraw it as premature; another proposal, by
Kunfi, was put forth for a coalition with the capitalists, but
with the proviso that the socialists be in the majority. This
motion also was passed, but there was such a considerable
minority opposed to this outright class collaboration,
especially among the metal workers, that proceedings were
temporarily suspended until the resistance of the metal
workers was overcome, when another vote was taken on
Kunfi's policy. Only five voted against; these alone
represented the communist tendency. (*4)
The disappointment of the masses in the decision of the

socialists began to manifest itself in a strong Left Wing that
1384
urged another revolution. This Movement was greatly
accelerated by the arrival of Bela Kun from Russia on
January 19, 1919. Now an active fight began between the
socialist and communist groups which rapidly led to a
decision.
The fact is that the radical rule of Karolyi, despite the

unconditional support given him by the socialists, was
totally unable to solve the elemental problems facing the
country. It was incapable of resurrecting any discipline
among the returned soldiers, many of whom still retained
their arms and who could find no work anywhere. The vast
latifundia on the countryside were still controlled by the
former owners. The borders were being steadily invaded on
all sides by Serb, Czech, and Rumanian military forces,
despite the Armistice. The hungry people were demanding
the lowering of prices. The workers were seizing the
factories. Production was rapidly falling.
"The immediate cause of the October revolution was the

gradually returning tide from the disintegrating fronts and
the accumulation of great masses of people in Budapest.
The soldiers and students and munition workers were the
true leaven of the revolution. It was in the first instance a
military and national revolution, not until much later did it
become a social revolution, then socialist, finally
communist." (*5)
The Karolyi government already had learned to its sorrow

that flirting with the socialists would not mitigate the harsh
terms of the victors in Paris. Steadily the pressure was
increased to dismember Hungary. The climax came with
the arrogant note from Colonel Vyx to the effect that new
political frontiers would be established around Hungary.
This was the last straw for the pacifist Karolyi regime.
Understanding now that Hungary would have to fight for
1385
its borders, and realizing that his regime could rally no one,
Karolyi resigned on March 21, 1919, with the remarkable
statement: "Ordered production cannot be guaranteed
unless the proletariat takes the power into its own hands....
I lay down my office one hand over the power to the
proletariat of Hungary." (*6) Thus Karolyi gracefully
withdrew from all difficulties and retained his reputation
for unsullied delicacy in slumming among the poor.
In all his tactics, Count Karolyi lent a close ear to the events
in Europe, whereby the socialists were becoming a great
force to be propitiated and utilized. In his proposal for a
socialist cabinet, Karolyi was not following Kerensky so
much as events in Germany. The Versailles victors had
proved willing to deal with a socialist regime in Germany
and in Austria and to back up socialistic groups in Czecho-
Slovakia and Poland. Karolyi hoped perhaps they also
would befriend the radical-socialist coalition in Hungary.
When this policy failed, Karolyi had to resign. War against
Hungary's old enemies could be carried on by only one
force, the proletariat, and by new slogans and new leaders.
Let the proletariat take power, such action could lead only
to a head-on collision with the Entente. Further
dismemberment of Hungary would become the
communists' fault. If the new government won important
victories, it would end the destruction of Hungary. Thus
Hungarian nationalism egged on the communists.
With the resignation of the government, Bela Kun, who had

been arrested after an abortive attempt to seize control in
February, was now released. He marched from jail to
become overnight the factual head of the new regime. The
Socialist Party which had expelled the communists now
fused with them and, on the twenty-third of March, the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat was announced. Hungarian
1386
nationalism immediately was appeased with a statement by
Kun that now a mighty proletarian army would be created
to fight the Vyx vote and to crush both the Rumanian
Boyars and the Czech bourgeoisie.
It is now necessary to pause to compare the Hungarian

Revolution with the Russian. It is true that fundamentally
the same pattern appears. The anachronistic monarchy gave
rise to a Liberal provisional government which became a
radical socialist republic that turned towards communism.
In both countries, the masses, as returned soldiers, were
armed; in both they had to face intervention and, although
the peasantry predominated, the proletariat took the lead.
Nevertheless there were enormous differences between the
two revolutions.
The first great difference was the fact that the Russian
Revolution had started from the desire of the masses for
peace. Theirs was an immense country, vast and
inaccessible to invasion for the most part. To secure peace,
the people had to overthrow not only the Czar, but
Kerensky and the socialists. In Hungary, peace had been
obtained, but a disastrous peace. Now the ruling classes
wanted to dodge the consequence of their crimes. That is to
say, in Russia the masses had to fight every inch of the way
before the old regime was discredited and overthrown. In
Hungary, on the other hand, military disaster from without
forced the breakdown of the old State and the abdication of
the rulers. The new administration was handed office on a
silver Platter. Very few remembered the old adage: "Beware
of the Greeks even when they bear gifts."
Thus in Hungary everyone appeared more radical than he

really was. No one had to hew out a given place for himself,
but rather fell into it by default. No group was tested or
proved its worth in bitter large-scale fighting. In Russia, the
1387
bourgeois Kadets had hung on like leeches before resigning
and letting Kerensky and the socialists have undisputed
power. In Hungary, on the contrary, the Revolution started
from this very point. In Russia, Kerensky was exposed as a
traitor before he was driven from the scene; Karolyi bowed
himself out with the plaudits of the socialists.
In Russia, for many years the Bolshevik Party had prepared

itself for its seizure of power. In Hungary, there had been
no communists during the War. Bela Kun was converted to
the faith as a Hungarian prisoner of war in Russia; his chief
supporters at first were soldiers who similarly had
witnessed the revolution in the land of the soviets. Thus the
Hungarian Communist Party was born hastily and in the
midst of the very events which were to carry it to power. It
was not rooted in the country. Ninety-five per cent of the
leadership were Jews. (*7) This alone was to prove fatal, for
these Jews knew nothing about dealing with the peasantry,
and alienated the middle classes which might have been
won over.
Added to the lack of experience of the communists was the

great dilution of their ranks by all sorts of careerist and
social-democratic elements. We have noted that the social-
democrats literally found it possible one day to work with
the bourgeois radicals and the next day to fuse with the
communists. Hasty fusion with socialists in all cases is a
highly dangerous symptom, since it means that the ranks of
the communists are corroded with alien elements that will
prove untrustworthy in battle. In Russia, Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks were speaking to each other at opposite ends of
their rifles; in Hungary in the People's Commissariats, on
the other hand, communists and socialists were equally
represented.
1388
The March Revolution introduced entirely new principles
from the October one. "The state independence of Hungary,
universal suffrage for legislature and administration, a
democratic peoples' alliance with the neighboring states,
the partition of the latifundia and a social policy following
the example of the most highly developed independent
states --- in a word, the sovereignty of the industrious
masses of peasants and town workers in the state, under
the guidance of the genuinely creative intelligentsia ---
these were the fundamental principles of the October
Revolution." (*8)
In March the Hungarians copied almost everything from

their illustrious Russian predecessors. With the initiation of
the Dictatorship, Church and State were separated. All
power was taken by the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.
Food cards were introduced without which no food could
be obtained. These cards were given only to producers and
to members of the trade unions. All private shops were
closed, and the State assumed the monopoly over trade.
The first task of the communists was to insure the

hegemony of the proletarians and city poor. Private houses
were abolished, and the wealthy quarters of the city were
turned over to the proletariat, all producers being treated
equally in the number of rooms and the kind of house they
received. An extremely rapid nationalization of factories
took place, so that, on April 18, it was declared that over
one thousand concerns had been socialized, whereas in a
whole year in Russia only 513 firms had been so occupied.
This mechanical socialization affected not merely the big.
plants, whatever few there were in Hungary, but also the
small factories employing only a few workers. Together
with the drastic closing down of the small shops, the
1389
mechanical socialization tended to alienate the petty
bourgeoisie of the city from the workers.
Hungary had not had the same industrial development as

Russia. Here there were not the immense modern works
that had been constructed under Czarism. Had the
Hungarian communists not socialized the smaller shops, it
would have meant that a large number of the factory
workers of Hungary would not be controlling directly the
means of production. On the other hand, socialization
could take place only with a great amount of friction with
the lower middle classes, resulting in great difficulty on the
part of the State to control the productive processes. When
factories are large and the unions solidly built, a discipline
among the workers is effected both by the process of
production itself and by the class struggle. In small shops,
however, the tendency to looseness, to individualist and
anarchistic habits, is far more prevalent. In the case of
Hungary, the proletariat could not go beyond its training
and environment in these petty shops. With the
establishment of the Dictatorship, at once discipline and
control were loosened, never to be regained. At a time
when production of goods was sorely needed, not only for
the Red Army but in order to supply the peasantry so as to
win their friendship, the workers allowed production to fall
heavily everywhere.
The difficulties here encountered are only extra proof of the

fact that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat can be sustained
in a backward agrarian country only against the greatest
obstacles and with the greatest heroism on the part of the
proletariat. The loose control by the communist leaders,
even over their own members in Hungary, bore witness to
the fact that time and long experience are needed before a
1390
revolutionary party can be built up properly to handle the
tremendous task of running a revolution.
The possibility of resuming production even at capitalist

levels was sadly diminished by the fact that Hungary was
not living under normal conditions. There were large
armies at all her frontiers. A complete blockade was to be
established around Red Hungary; the proletariat naturally
could not continue production when raw materials were
lacking. Hungary was not Russia. She was more intimately
dependent upon intercourse with the other countries of
Europe around her and, lacking that, her factories were
bound to deteriorate, production to drop. All this meant
that Soviet Hungary had to rise or fall, not on the economic
but on the military battle front.
The establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in a

backward agrarian country depends above all on the
relationship set up between the workers and the peasants. It
was here that the Jewish Commissars of the Communist
Party of Hungary fell down. Unlike the situation in Russia,
agricultural production in Hungary had been carried on not
so much on small peasant holdings as on large latifundia
worked by armies of agricultural laborers and owned by
powerful aristocrats. In Russia, the question had been
relatively simple, a matter of partitioning the estates among
the poor peasants; in Hungary, this problem was to be one
of sharp dispute. The Karolyists were in favor of
partitioning these estates among the peasants and the
agricultural laborers. But this was not the policy that Bela
Kun adopted. The communist leadership decided not to
divide the modern estates among the peasantry and not to
insist on the formation of cooperatives for the collective use
of the machinery; instead, they decided to socialize the
property, paying greatly increased wages to the agricultural
1391
proletarians. Nor did the communists make any distinction
between the type of large estates, between those cultivated
extensively or intensively.
Had the agrarian question been handled with

discrimination and due preparation, had some concessions
been made to the peasants by partitioning some estates so
as to give the toilers on the land a stake in the revolution
and induce them to defend the new order with their lives,
the policy of Bela Kun might not have been so disastrous.
Not only was the whole question handled in a most
slipshod manner, but the debates around the question
showed so much contempt for the average peasant that the
agrarians on the countryside could not but feel that the
communists would deal with them as enemies as soon as
they got the chance. "Bela Kun himself, in the session of the
Soviet on June 21, let loose a flood of demagogic
denunciation of the small farmers and called on the
agricultural labourers to make an end of them!" (*9)
It is true that the Hungarian communists decreed that the

land tax should be dispensed with in favor of peasants'
cultivating pieces of land under one hundred acres. But
coupled with this decision was another one to curtail
commodity markets on the countryside by setting up a
central control of farm prices which would limit the income
the farmer received for his products. Despite all measures,
the peasantry became increasingly hostile to the city
communists. Anti-Semitism became virulent and
widespread, and the stage was set for the return of the
aristocracy, supported by the peasantry of the country.
However, none of these defects necessarily would have had

fatal consequences had the communists been able to show
results on the military field. From the first they had rallied
much of the entire population around themselves by
1392
promises that they would fight for the independence of
Hungary against the rapacious demands of the powers at
Paris. Here was really the sole way out for the communists,
and it seemed at first that they appreciated the fact that a
war against foreign capitalist powers could do for them
what it did for the Russian Sovietists, and for the French
Jacobins of 1793. The country would be consolidated. The
unemployed soldiers would be harnessed to the
dictatorship. In the name of war-needs, the State could
proceed far more drastically than otherwise to take control
of all production and distribution. The nationalism of the
peasantry would have supported the struggle without
question.
But far more than all this, unless the Hungarian working
class broke through the capitalist wall around it and
reached the German proletariat, fusing both movements,
unless the Hungarian proletariat showed itself to be the
liberator of all the oppressed peoples of Central Europe and,
with their aid, blasted its way to connect itself with the
Russians, it was bound to be cut down and defeated. Not a
moment should have been lost. The whole country should
have been mobilized for a proletarian crusade, especially
when all were outraged by the fact that their country was
being invaded on three fronts and the Armistice violated by
the enemy.
As we have said, it seemed at first that the communists

understood this. When in the last days of May, 1919, the
Czech army began its campaign, the Hungarian Red Army
marched against it and scored decisive victories. Soon the
Red Army was close to Pressburg and was about to take the
city. Slovakia was overrun and a Soviet Slovakia
proclaimed. Now the allied powers in Paris became
thoroughly alarmed. Should Pressburg fall, the whole
1393
capitalist structure of Bohemia might collapse. It was
necessary to press for time; this the Parisian masters did by
wiring Kun that, if he called off his attack, they would
consent to deal with his government.
Here a fatal mistake was made. Had Bela Kun been really a
Leninist, or had the leadership of the Communist Party
been in the hands of native Hungarians rather than of
elements who, even in their own minds, believed
themselves alien to the people and lacking the nation's
confidence, the march on Pressburg never would have been
stopped. But at heart Bela Kun and his associates were
opportunists. Instinctively they shrank from enlarging the
struggle, from making communism an issue throughout
Central Europe. Believing that the allied victors actually
would treat with his Red Government, Kun moved his
troops away. From now on the case of the Hungarian
Soviets was doomed. The army lost its crusading morale
and disintegrated. The French diplomats soon exchanged
their promises for generals who were instructed to go the
limit in destroying the Hungarian regime.
"The fatal mistake of a proletarian republic which had

turned its face eastward to Moscow was to come to terms
with Paris. No government could endure that tried to serve
two masters; Paris quickly discovered this and set about to
crush the Soviets." (*10)
This monumental blunder on the part of Bela Kun could

have accrued only from the fact that there was as yet no real
Communist Party in Hungary. Bela Kun here exposed
himself not as an internationalist revolutionist but as a
national socialist who believed it possible to attain
socialism in one country alone; one who put faith in the
mercy of the bourgeoisie and believed their promises to
refrain from destroying the communists. The Hungarian
1394
soviets had been erected before the humanitarian
"democrats" who had won the World War had
demonstrated what havoc their interventionary armies
could do in Russia.
The abandonment of the campaign to form soviets outside

of Hungary and to connect his movement with that of the
workers elsewhere went hand in hand with Bela Kun's
opportunist alliance with the reformist socialists. To Kun,
evidently, a long period was not necessary before socialists
could be turned into communists. Any phrase of adherence
could accomplish the transformation. We have already
commented on his failure to break sufficiently with the
socialist opportunists within Hungary. Now we are to
observe the results of his international policy of friendliness
to the socialist Vienna government.
With the end of the War and the flight of the Austrian
Emperor, the opportunist and Centrist socialists of Vienna
had taken over the country, as similar groups had done in
Germany. In Austria, however, the socialists ever had been
more to the Left, more Marxian, than the German variety.
This was due to their relative poverty, for one thing, and to
the instability and ruthless methods of their ruling class.
Now that the Red Flag was waving both to the Right of
them in Bavaria and to the Left in Hungary, the Austrian
socialists couched their speeches in still more revolutionary
phraseology; at the same time they made deals with foreign
capitalism to save Austria as much as possible for the
bourgeoisie. In these diluted socialists, Bela Kun evidently
had the utmost faith. Nowhere was an attempt made to
overthrow this pseudo-socialist Austrian regime from the
Hungarian side, and to call on the Austrian workers to aid
the Hungarians to do this, job. Instead of solidarizing
himself with the German Spartacists who were actually
1395
moving against these socialists, Bela Kun objectively joined
up with the Viennese bureaucrats.
So great was his trust in them that he used Vienna as his

financial base of operations and transferred there much of
the gold of Hungary. This trust was to be betrayed. When a
shipment of 135 million crowns was made from Hungary to
Vienna by the Party functionary in charge, the money was
seized by the White Guards in Vienna who had learned of
the proposed shipment; thus a severe blow was given to the
proletarian regime. That Bela Kun could have shipped such
sums out of the country into hostile territory where White
Guards could be protected speaks volumes for the type of
"Lenin" leading Hungary.
If Hungary had its mock Lenin, it was to have its mock

Trotsky in the person of Jacob Pogany (Schwartz) who
became Commissar over the Army overnight and headed
the military until a battalion of soldiers marched to the
soviets and demanded an end to his intolerable regime and
his removal from the Army. The communists hastened to
comply, and Schwartz was given the post of Commissar of
Foreign Affairs instead, his chief worry being how to flee
the country in time when communism collapsed
(something he managed to do very nicely). (*11)
The retreat from Pressburg brought about the collapse of

the Slovakian Soviet Republic and the determined advance
of the French and Rumanian armies from the South.
Knowing now the caliber of their communist leaders and
thoroughly demoralized, the Hungarian army lost heart
and broke before the enemy. As Bela Kun and others hastily
took flight, the Rumanians invested Budapest and began a
systematic looting of the Country. (*12)
1396
Before the invaders had left, there had been established a
ferocious White Guard regime under Admiral Horthy, in
August, 1919, that proceeded to mop up the Reds. This
patriot was willing to sign treaties that would strip
Hungary bare of vast territories peopled with Hungarians;
he was ready to enter into the most friendly relations with
the enemies of his people. His undying enmity was
reserved for the Jews and communists who, he declared,
had despoiled the country. For a long time a White Terror
raged, impelling even the anti-communist Oskar Jaszi to
declare: "This raging of the White Terror makes one of the
darkest pages of Hungarian history. . . ." (*13) It has been
estimated about thirty thousand Soviet sympathizers
perished. This speaks eloquently, not only for Horthy, but
also for the soft and opportunist character of the Kun
regime.
But the Hungarian scene also permitted some farce. As the

communist leaders departed, the social-democrats
reappeared and, under the leadership of Peidle, took
control of the city of Budapest, hoping to appease the
Rumanians and the French so that they would not invade
Budapest and thus would permit it to become another
Vienna. This naive plan rudely came to an end amidst the
raucous laughter of the soldiery.
Eventually the French were to pay heavily for the

reinstitution of the White Guard regime under Horthy.
Hungary became the only defeated imperialist power
wherein the old aristocracy was allowed to rule. The
Horthy regime soon became a center of intrigue for the
return of all the old privileged classes. Hungary was to
prove an excellent springboard for Italian ambitions on the
Danube, for the restoration of the Hapsburgs, and for
alliance with German fascism. But it was by now nothing
1397
new for the French "democrats" to prefer the return of their
old enemies to the rule of the Reds.
Beyond question, the most important country of all Europe

was Germany. It had been expected that, should Germany
be defeated, revolution would surely follow, and the Kaiser
would be forced to abdicate. It was not generally believed
that the revolution would go any farther than the formation
of a democratic republic that would curb the war desires of
the German upper classes, and temporarily render German
imperialism harmless. While in the main this is what
actually occurred, the German events gave the capitalists
anxiety for a long period of time.
When the War first began, the German masses were by no

means as unanimously in favor of the conflict as has been
generally pictured. At the start, in 1914, when the social-
democrats held their parliamentary caucus on the question
of voting for war credits, fourteen deputies voted against
although they finally decided to bow to the majority
opinion in the Reichstag. Only one abstained from voting in
Parliament. By December, 1914, the number opposed to the
War Budget had reached seventeen, and Liebknecht openly
cast his ballot against his Party. In the vote on war finances
in March, 1915, thirty deputies left the hall and two voted
against. The Left Wing was now becoming a force with
which to reckon. Karl Liebknecht was imprisoned.
As the War continued, the fight became sharper between

the Right Wing that favored the support of the War, the
Center, led by Kautsky, Haase, Bernstein, and others, who
refused to support the War but who did not believe in
revolution, and the Left. By 1916, the Left Wing was ready
to form its own group, called the Spartacus Union, headed
1398
by Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and Franz
Mehring. With them was Richard Mueller, the leader of the
powerful metal workers union.
All through 1916, wild strikes occurred, culminating in a

mass strike, political in its inception and purpose. Rosa
Luxemburg was arrested, but the movement steadily
gained momentum. In 1917, discontent was so rife in Berlin,
Saxony, and Thuringia that the government made every
effort to clean out the revolutionary elements from the
factories and to send them to the trenches. Large numbers
of troops on the Russian front were becoming strongly
infected with the virus of Bolshevism and could no longer
be trusted. Moreover, the young men conscripted from the
factories were proving extremely unwilling to fight.
With the severe defeats suffered by the German Imperial

Army in 1918, the forces hostile to the ruling class
intensified their activity. A great munition strike prevailed
in Germany in 1918, in spite of the efforts of the socialist
leaders to put it down. In July, a mutiny broke out among
the sailors which the Imperial government found itself
powerless to suppress. Later, when, in fact, all was over on
the Western Front, the German Admiralty decided to send
out all its ships in one last fight. At this point the sailors
openly revolted, and some officers were shot. Of the four
infantry companies sent against the sailors on November 4,
1918, to put down the revolt, three joined the rebels and one
was disarmed. The revolt now rapidly spread to Hamburg
and affected the entire civil population. At this juncture, the
socialist Scheidemann took control of the revolt in order to
stifle it and prevent it from going farther. (*14)
The German military staff had believed that, at the very

worst, the Entente could never enter Germany proper, that
the mass of people would fight to the end in a defensive
1399
war. Now, however, the Junkers found that their real
enemy was within the gates, and that the revolutionary
movement was growing by leaps and bounds. For the
militarists to continue to fight to the end would mean
proletarian revolution. In panic, they decided to end the
War while the forces of control were still capable of dealing
with the revolutionary workers. Quickly the Majority
Socialists were given the power to form a government, and
royalty fled the realm.
In dealing with this flight of the Kaiser and his family from
Germany, it has been stated openly that "There was no
internal reason why either should have fled." (*15) The
Spartacists were absolutely unprepared for civil war; the
Independents had conceived of the revolution as a
completely bloodless and political affair; the Majority
Socialists were still in control of large sections of the people.
Probably the most decisive argument that weighed with the
General Staff when they gave permission to their chief to
depart was the fact that the masses of the victorious
countries had raised the slogan "Hang the Kaiser" and the
hatred for the war abroad had been concentrated upon the
person of the chief Junker representative. The army
chieftains must have felt that far easier terms could be
secured from the conquerors should the Kaiser be relegated
from the picture and the people be put forward. This was
quite in line with Wilson's propaganda, and the German
military machine hoped much from Wilson and America.
In the meantime, events were proceeding more rapidly in

Bavaria. On November 7, in Munich, Auer and Kurt Eisner
addressed vast crowds, calling for the end of the War and
the abdication of the Kaiser. While the other demands
raised were mild, the whole tone of the demonstration
constituted a serious threat to the authorities. Arsenals were
1400
raided and political prisoners were set free. The barracks
were stormed and the people obtained arms. As the
Bavarian Royalty fled, Kurt Eisner signed the decree as First
President of the Bavarian Soviet, in which Bavaria was
declared a Free State.
These were brave words, but the good socialists of Munich

were by no means prepared to go Bolshevik. There had
been no formation of Soviets spontaneously among the
people; the title Soviet Bavaria was really but a name. To
Kurt Eisner, no doubt, sovietism meant merely a system
that would lead to a federation of parliamentary republics
of Germany and Austria in a socialized world of peace and
plenty. Naively, Eisner allowed elections for a Constituent
Assembly to be called, and believed it unnecessary to form
a Red Guard for action.
Kurt Eisner's politik was doomed to quick disaster. When

the returns of the Constituent Assembly were made it was
found that of the 280 seats, the socialists won only 65, and
the out-and-out bourgeois parties 115. On February 20, 1919,
Kurt Eisner was murdered, and the "Left" Socialist Auer
was shot down while making a speech eulogizing him, and
seriously wounded. Now, of course, the masses began to
realize their "honeymoon" foolishness; by this time,
however, they were forced to face the power of the new
Majority Socialist regime in Germany, and were overcome.
The events in Bavaria were concurrent with stirring action

throughout Germany. On November 9, 1918, a huge
general strike had been called for the overthrow of the
regime. The masses, however, discovered that they were
entirely leaderless so far as effective plans were concerned.
Everywhere the majority socialists obtained control of the
movement to direct it into safe channels. Millions were
returning from the front, sporadic seizures of the factories
1401
were occurring, everywhere Workmens' Councils were
being formed on the style of the Russian Soviets, but
nowhere was there sufficient direction or national planning
of the movement.
The Majority Socialists, to whom the government had been

entrusted, did their utmost to take advantage of the
breathing spell offered to them. The Russian Revolution
had not occurred in vain for them, and they were able to
understand the value of time far better than the
revolutionary elements. Hoping to cover up their real
activity with phrases borrowed from the Russians, the
Majority Socialists, from the first days of the revolution
named their provisional government, a "Council of People's
Commissars," thus giving the impression that the German
revolution would follow the same path as the Russian. In
Russia, the Council of People's Commissars had been
erected only as the result of the Bolshevik revolution, and
was an expression of soviets which had overturned
parliamentarism. In Germany, on the other hand, the
Council of Peoples Commissars was an opportunist
socialist mechanism for stalling for time until the forces of
reaction could be gathered to compel the convocation of a
bourgeois parliament and the dissolution of the real soviets
which had been organized.
While this attempted deception of the Majority Socialists

did not fool the mass of workers, it was well received by the
Independent Socialists who played directly into the hands
of the Scheidemanns and Noskes and who protected these
worthies with a revolutionary alliance. Without waiting for
any vote, the two parties, the Majority Socialist and the
Independent Socialist met together and decided to form a
joint Provisional Government Committee, made up of three
from each Party. The Spartacists were to be excluded
1402
entirely. Thus these "democrats," in the name of democracy,
proved entirely willing to foist a governing body of six men
upon sixty-five million people. It must be said that if the
Independent Socialists worked hand in glove with the
social-patriots in fact, they did try to distinguish themselves
from the Scheidemanns in words. And, in this,
Scheidemann was very willing to accommodate them so
long as he and his group could gain the precious time
needed to reorganize the forces of repression.
Hence, when the Independent Socialist Party insisted that

Germany be turned into a Socialist Republic with the entire
executive, legislative, and judicial powers of governing in
the hands of the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, the Kaiser
socialists were quite willing to concur . . . provided that the
National Assembly to be called later would agree to its own
dissolution. On the question of giving all power to the
Councils, the Majority Socialists declared they were not
against . . . provided it did not mean the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat so as to exclude the bourgeoisie. The main
points of the final agreement read ". . . that only Social-
Democrats should be members of the Cabinet, and that they
were to function as People's Commissaries upon a footing
of complete equality.... Political power was to rest in the
hands of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils, of which a
congress representing the whole Reich was to be
summoned without delay. The question of a Constituent
Assembly they agreed to regard as not urgent . . ." (*16)
In the meantime, Karl Liebknecht, released from jail, had

organized a Council Congress for December 16. Soldiers
called on by the government to disperse the people refused
to fire on the crowds and, instead, organized their soldier
soviets. But, when the socialist "Commissars" came to them
with their arguments, the soldiers' soviets were won over,
1403
and carried out the orders to break up the demonstrations
of the people. In Prussia, however, the soviets decreed the
dissolution of the Lower House of the Prussian Diet and the
abolition of the House of Lords, a decree which was obeyed.
It was in the generally vague declaration of these soviets
calling for rapid socialization of the means of production,
but taking no measures to realize this, that the full
impotency of the soviets was felt. The urgent need for a
revolutionary party became evident.
An attempt was made to fill this need by a Convention

called by the Spartacists for December 30, in Berlin. At this
convention the Spartacists came out for various extreme
measures to pave the way for a proletarian revolution.
These measures included: disarming of the police, officers,
bourgeois soldiers, and all members of the ruling class;
seizure of all arms depots; arming of the proletariat, and the
formation of a standing Red Guard against the counter-
revolution; abolition of military discipline, and the
adoption of the principle of the election and the recall of
officers and the removal of all officers and cadets from the
Councils; formation of revolutionary tribunals; confiscation
of all food, and the introduction of a card rationing system;
the establishment of a unified German Socialist Republic
with all power to the Councils. With these demands went
others calling for the institution of the six-hour day, the
confiscation of all dynastic property and incomes, the
annulment of all State debts, the confiscation of property
over a certain amount, and the expropriation of large
estates and industries. It was plain that the Spartacus Union
was moving towards insurrection. (*17)
The struggle in Germany now condensed itself on the

question: "Should the National Assembly be convened in
special elections or should power be taken over by the
1404
workmen through Soviets?" The Provisional Government
had filled in a temporary Cabinet made up almost entirely
of former Kaiser officers. The Independent Socialists,
although advocating in words that power should go to the
Councils or Soviets, yet allowed the Right Wing to proceed
in calling a National Assembly. The big question was:
"What will the Congress of Council delegates itself decide?
Will it take the power or, will it surrender to the general
parliament?" The matter was fatefully decided when the
Council Congress decided to vote against the Spartacus
policy (even though at the last moment the Independent
Socialist Party delegates added their voice to the
Spartacists), and to allow the convocation of the National
Assembly. This was precisely the opportunity for which the
bourgeoisie had been praying during the revolutionary
events.
What were the considerations that swayed the workers'

representatives so that they should deliberately decide to
abnegate the power they held in their grasp? In the first
place, there was the fact that the Majority Socialists
controlled the vast trade union apparatus which by no
means had broken down after the armistice. On the
contrary, millions of new workers now flocked into the
ranks of the unions, while, at the same time, events had
proceeded so rapidly that there had been no opportunity to
remove the old officials and to install new, trained men,
more in harmony with the will of the workers. Thus it can
be said that there was a great divergence between the
desires of the rank and file of the unions and the apparatus
men.
Now, when the elections were held for delegates from the
Workers' Councils, everywhere the trade union opportunist
leaders put themselves forward; in few localities were the
1405
new members and awakened workers able to put forward
other and better lists. Thus, as in Russia, in the beginning of
the 1917 Revolution, so, in Germany, the delegates elected
to the Soviet Congress were in the main not those closest to
the masses. Furthermore, events were moving at such a
tempo, carrying the masses to the Left, that very often
delegates who were truly typical at the period of the
elections, by the time the Congress met were so no longer.
Generally speaking, not the poorest layers of the working
population were elected, but the better elements, those long
connected with the trade union apparatus and bound to it.
It must be recalled that the German Social-Democratic Party

was the most powerful organization in the Second
International, with great prestige and understanding of its
role. For many decades it had propagandized the
proletariat with the theory of gradual development of
social-democracy and the need for Ordnung und Diziplin.
And what was more important, the so-called revolutionists,
who were now appealing to the workers to break from the
Majority Socialists, only recently had accomplished the
break themselves. Far different from Lenin, who had
organized his Bolshevik faction seventeen years before the
revolutionary events that were to give him power, the
Spartacist socialists had always been ardent believers in
unity. Only under the long pressure of the War had a small
section of them broken away from their former comrades to
organize a Left group, and even they were a considerable
distance away from true Bolshevik hardness. As for the
Independent Socialists, at the very moment of the Congress
they were co-operating with the Majority Socialists, having
organized a joint provisional government with them which
excluded the Spartacists. Thus, if even the so-called "Left"
that called for all power to the soviets was so weak and
1406
conciliatory, the workers felt that they could not risk their
lives under such leadership.
Nothing speaks more eloquently for the unpreparedness

and amateurishness of the Spartacists than the fact that the
Council Congress was held, not after, but before the
Convention of their Party. Their failure to act promptly
resulted in the situation whereby, when the Congress
convened, the Spartacists had achieved neither national
mobilization nor an adequately firm policy. To the workers
it testified to the fact that the Spartacists were dragging
belatedly behind the events, neither anticipating nor
controlling them.
There was no doubt that, had the Council Congress decided

to take over power, the soviet delegates would have been
faced immediately with civil war and with all the horrors of
the Russian experience, an experience which many of them
felt the Germans were too civilized to repeat. This
impression that Germany could not follow the footsteps of
Russia gained weight by the close connection of the
Majority Socialists with the employers, and, by the case
with which concessions were gained in every strike called.
Then too, there was the pressure of the victorious Entente
to consider. "Meanwhile a plain hint had been received
from the American government that unless law and order
were preserved, American troops would march into the
country." (*18)
However, the basic reason for the decision of the delegates

of the Council Congress to renounce State power lay in the
fact that the German working class was over-balanced by
too thick an upper stratum that had been bribed by
imperialism. This layer was war-weary and wanted peace;
it opposed profiteers and yearned for the return of the
"good old days" before the War. Pre-war German
1407
imperialism had known well how to share with the mass of
skilled workers in the factories the super-profits that came
from its winning of markets and its seizure of colonies.
These German workers considered the War merely as a
temporary interruption in the enjoyment of their reforms
which they believed permanent. They had no conception
that the world was entering a new era in which the German
State would be in a position not to grant reforms but only to
take them away. It was this basic economic condition that
also accounted for the failure of the Germans sooner to
build a truly Bolshevik Party, for the weakness of their Left
Wing, and for the apathy of sections of the workers. The
German masses did not yet realize what the defeat in the
War would really mean for them.
None the less, the decision of the Council Congress to

permit the convocation of the National Assembly on
February 16, 1919, caused an immediate split in the ranks of
the delegates. The Left Wing broke away, on the ground
that the Congress had committed suicide, and repeated its
determination to take power. Now, however, backed by the
decision of the Congress, the Majority Socialists felt that
they had a free hand to act drastically against the Left, and
began to issue orders to shoot down the revolutionary
elements. Such unheard-of action in turn called forth
protests from the well-meaning Independent Socialists,
who resigned from the Provisional Government.
Thereupon the Majority Socialists, seeing that the time
really had come for a decision, seized the empty posts and
filled them with their own men, reducing the number,
however to five. The Majority Socialists evidently knew
their duty to God and Country, and determinedly prepared
to perform it.
1408
Now the bewildered Centrist Independents, deserted and
driven by events towards the Spartacists, convened their
own Congress. Here another split occurred; the Right Wing
kept the name Independent Socialist, and planned to
continue to work in every critical moment with the Majority
Socialists; the center of the Independents formed the
Revolutionary Vanguard, while the Left Wing broke away
to join the Spartacists outright, and form the Communist
Labor Party-Spartacus Union, later to become the United
Communist Party, after further fusions. From now on, the
battle raged bitterly between the Majority Socialists for
capitalism and the Spartacists for the proletarian revolution.
On January 5, 1919, the masses were called out on the

streets of Berlin by the Spartacists and two hundred
thousand armed men responded in a truly magnificent
demonstration. Never had Germany felt the power of its
workingmen stronger than at this moment. The sole factor
missing was the revolutionary party. "The Masses stood
from early morning till nine o'clock in the cold and fog.
Somewhere or other the leaders sat and deliberated.... They
deliberated and deliberated and deliberated." (*19) "Had the
Spartacans possessed able military leaders and abandoned
their speech-making for fighting, they could have easily
overthrown the Socialist government in the Wilhelmstrasse
and established the Soviet system in Berlin." (*20)
The Spartacists talked; the Right Wing knew well how to

act. The socialist Noske volunteered for the job of
organizing a new guard to put down the workers.
Everywhere the government troops, under the direction of
their old Junker officers acting under socialist orders, threw
themselves furiously against the strikers who had taken to
the streets. Fierce fighting occurred. Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht were taken prisoner and murdered on the
1409
way to jail. A thousand times over the Majority Socialists
demonstrated that they deserved the great trust that the
bourgeoisie had put in them. The January insurrection was
put down with much loss of life.
A deep wave of discontent with the Socialist Party's actions

now manifested itself throughout the country. In the
ensuing elections for the National Assembly, many of the
workers refused to vote, believing such parliamentary
action futile. On the other hand, the property owners were
anxious to put down the rule of labor generally. Thus, at the
elections, the Majority Socialists obtained only 163 deputies
and the Independents 22 out of a total of 393. This result
was not entirely displeasing to the Majority Socialists, since
they could now always declare that the majority of the
people of Germany did not want socialism and, until a
change of heart be shown by the nation, it would be
impossible to take over the factories.
The murders of Liebknecht in Germany and of Kurt Eisner

in Bavaria inflamed the masses to new outbursts. In Bavaria,
as in Germany generally, the Majority Socialists tried to
gain time by trying to form with the Independents a
government giving the impression that socialism soon
would be inaugurated. However, the communists quickly
rallied to the attack and took over the control of Munich.
The Majority Socialists were driven into the countryside
where they rallied the peasantry to attack the workers of
the city. In this they were reinforced by military aid from
Prussia and Wurtemberg, sent by Scheidemann and Noske.
For nearly a month the Reds ruled Munich. A Dictatorship

of the Proletariat was established with Levine, Axelrod, and
Levien at the head, supported by such intellectuals as Ernst
Toiler and Erich Muhsam. A Red Army was formed to
defend the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and a general strike
1410
was declared to paralyze the bourgeois forces. But the
communists eventually were not able to hold the fort and,
with the full force of Noske's troops against them, the
soviets succumbed.
The Bavarian beacon seemed to operate as a signal for the

remainder of Germany. During the interim from January to
March, the Spartacists steadily had increased their strength
in the Councils so that, by the end of that time, they had
secured control over the Workmens' Councils in Berlin and
the support of the soldiers groups. On March 3, 1919, a new
proletarian uprising was attempted in Berlin. Strikes and
outbursts occurred everywhere. The installation of a
Dictatorship of the Proletariat also was attempted in Saxony.
But by now the Majority Socialists were ready to go to any

extreme to defeat the movement. "To inflame the people
against the communists, Noske falsely accused them of a
general massacre of prisoners at the Lichtenberg Police
Station and therefore ordered them to be exterminated."
(*21)
Noske issued his notorious illegal order to shoot at sight all

workmen found armed. The Prussian Junkers in charge of
the loyal troops responded with zeal, and nearly twelve
hundred were killed during the fighting.
Uprisings broke out all over Germany, in Koenigsberg,

Breslau, Upper Silesia, Hamburg, Emden, Rhineland,
Westphalia, and Thuringia, but, by a mixed policy of stern
force and prompt concessions in secondary matters, the
uprisings were all put down, as were the general strikes in
Magdeburg, in the Ruhr, and elsewhere.
The defeat of the German Communists accrued not because

the proletarians were inadequately armed or did not know
1411
how to fight. Indeed, as a result of the demobilization of the
German Army and the break-up of discipline, the Berlin
proletariat was better armed than it ever had been. Rather,
"The failure of the March rebellion was due to a lack of
leaders, discipline, and co-ordination of plans." (*22)
One of the most important errors of the German

Communists was their failure to understand how to utilize
the soldiers. Unlike the situations in Russia or in Hungary,
there had been no complete breakdown of order among the
soldiers. The returning soldiers were kept in barracks at
State expense, since there was no opportunity for them to
secure work, and disorder reigned throughout the country.
This gave the Socialist Government the opportunity to
separate these soldiers from the regular workers, and to use
them as a force to suppress strikes and demonstrations.
Of course, a large number of the soldiers had been

proletarians; these went over to the side of their brethren.
But there were enough left who were hungry and miserable
enough to do anything, who were part of the upper classes,
or who were bewildered and did not understand their own
interests. Such elements could be used to put down the
insurrections.
In Russia, the officers had been dechevroned, and even in

Italy it had been dangerous for officers to appear with
decorations, epaulets, or other officer insignia. This was not
the case in Germany. In many cases, the officers actually
were part of the Soldiers' Soviets, paralyzing all activity.
One of the main tasks of the revolutionary workers should

have been to drive a deep wedge between the officers and
the soldiers, to make it impossible for the officers to appear
openly on the streets, to create a reign of terror against
them. This, however, should have been only part of the
1412
general task of complete disorganization of the former
Kaiser's army. The soldiers who had returned from the
front should have been sent at once to the factories and
work shops whence they had come before their
conscription. In this way, they would have been returned to
the fold of the working class and not kept separated from
the proletariat under the influence of their old officers. At
the same time, the workers in the factories would have
rallied around these returned soldiers who would have
formed the basis for a genuine Red Army or Red Guard.
As it was, the soldiers were paid by the State and felt

indebted to the Socialist Government. The workers should
have seen to it that the factories which had formerly
employed these soldiers laid aside funds for their upkeep;
thus the soldiers would have been attached to their former
brothers and would have become their foremost defense
fighters. Had such a policy been pursued from the earliest
days, there would have been built up a force that would
have given a far better account of itself in the field than was
actually done when large masses were put down by the
skeleton army under the control of the government.
The fact is, that just as the German workers paid little
consideration to the needs of the German peasantry, so
never did they fight adequately for the interests of the
soldiers; the Communists never carried out a policy that
would lead to the speedy incorporation of the veterans into
the ranks of the toilers and would give them a place in the
new social order.
As in Russia, where Kerensky had called in the Cossacks

and the Czarist officers to put down the proletarian
movement in the "July Days," so, in Germany, the Junker
officers, having saved temporarily the socialist regime, now
believed it time to show who was master of the social order.
1413
Now that peace was a definite reality, it was possible for
the old Kaiserthum to raise its head again. On March 10,
1920, army officers presented to President Ebert a four-
point program, demanding new elections, presidential
selection by a plebiscite, a cabinet of "experts," and no
further disbanding of the troops. When the Ebert-Bauer
government answered this ultimatum with a warrant for
the arrest of Kapp, the leader of the officers, the forces of
reaction moved on Berlin and took the city on March 13.
With the flight of the Socialist Government, the workers
undertook to conduct a general strike that paralyzed all the
activity of the monarchists, so that Kapp was forced to
withdraw from the city, and acknowledge his helplessness.
By March 20, the strike was called off, having demonstrated
that the return of the old order now absolutely was
impossible.
The treatment accorded the Kapp counter-revolutionists

was in marked contrast to the brutal terror against the
Spartacists. "No serious steps were taken against the
majority of the Kappists, as it was feared that this would
merely lead to further bitterness. Only a few sub-prefects
were dismissed and their posts filled by Socialists. Nor was
any attempt made to get rid of the reactionary officers of
the Reichswchr, and the talk about democratizing the army
was seen to be futile when it was realized that the officers'
corps felt strong enough to oppose interference. Later on, in
the following August, an amnesty law was passed for the
benefit of all but the actual instigators. On the other hand, a
great deal of summary justice was meted out to those who
had opposed the Kappists ... For them there was no
amnesty." (*23)
The efficacy of the general strike against reaction and the

utter discrediting of the Majority Socialists, with their close
1414
collaboration with the bourgeoisie,now induced the
workers to make another effort to seize the power of the
government. The Kapp putsch was followed by the
Communist venture. The Reds tried to seize the Ruhr. Here
again was illustrated the power and readiness of the
workers to struggle, and the utter incompetency of the
revolutionists to prepare adequately or to control their
forces. "Not even the Communists were under the control
of their leaders. The whole Ruhr coal district was in the
hands of the workers. But the movement was wild, had run
beyond its leaders. Plans were ill calculated and pre-
doomed to failure." (*24)
It was not only that the workers not yet had achieved a
trained Communist Party, or that they had to face the
combined forces of their bourgeoisie and Socialist lackeys,
but the revolt in the Ruhr was bound to bring the army of
French imperialism on the side of their enemies to crush the
revolt. On April 4, 1921, the French troops occupied
Frankfort, Darmstadt, Homburg, Hanau, and Duisburg,
and materially aided the German government to put down
the workers' revolt.
Even then the workers put up a strong battle. Revolts broke

out in the Dusseldorf district, East Prussia, Silesia, Saxony,
and elsewhere. In Leipsig and Halle, the communists
actually took control and established the rule of the workers.
In the course of the recapture of these cities, hundreds of
workers were killed by government forces. Only toward the
end of May, 1921, did the Socialist President, Ebert, feel it
safe enough to void the state of siege that he had declared
as existing in these regions. Like 1919, 1921 showed a wild
upheaval that was not strong enough to carry the workers
to power. In almost all cases, the outburst had been due to
the spontaneous hatred and misery of the people, and the
1415
United Communist Party found itself behind the actual
events.
The fact is, the Communist forces were now divided into
two principal divisions. One group was organized in the
Communist Labor Party made up of revolutionary workers
impatient for the struggle, of disbelievers in
parliamentarism or in any co-operation with the old
conservative unions. This group made mistakes of
impulsiveness and lack of preparation, but contained
excellent material. On the other side there were the Socialist
centrist elements that had steadily gravitated to
communism, who termed themselves Communists but who
in reality never really had broken from their old
opportunist and conciliationist habits. This group, called
the United Communist Party, and recognized by the
Communist International as its official section was guilty of
concentrating too much on the parliamentary struggle and
of being backward in the actual street battles. In almost all
the forthcoming struggles we shall find that the German
Communist Party suffered greatly from this Right Wing
danger, from bureaucracy and parliamentarism.
In Hungary, the chief force that destroyed the Dictatorship

of the Proletariat was the peasantry, allied to foreign
intervention. So was it also in Finland. In Germany, the
only force that could stop the workers' taking the power
was the working class itself. In this country the skilled
workers separated themselves from the mass of unskilled
and rallied to the Socialist Party, which destroyed the
proletarian uprisings. But if the process of transforming
peasants into workers or socialists is a slow one, the process
of changing privileged workers into unprivileged is not so
slow. Soon enough the German State became unable to
support the social reforms demanded by the reformist
1416
socialists as the price of their saving the bourgeois republic.
The socialists were brutally expelled by the fascists;
millions of skilled workers and petty proprietors suffered
the full weight of the defeat of the War with its spoliation of
the country and its indemnities and reparations, they
experienced the burden and chaos of inflation and even the
concentration camps of fascism before they were prepared
to break from their past to stand united for proletarian
revolution. By this time, too, the unskilled masses no longer
remained in their power.
One more revolutionary effort was yet to be made before

the workers gave up their insurrectionary attempts for the
time being. By 1923 the full effect of the war defeats had
made itself felt in Germany. The terms of the Treaty of
Versailles had stripped the country. Germany was on the
verge of being dismembered. Pushing its ruthless plans in
this direction, French imperialism, on the argument that the
coal payments had not been made on January 11, 1923,
invaded the Ruhr. There was no adequate German force
capable of meeting the French Army of invasion except the
armed might of the people themselves, but the socialists did
not dare call upon the people to resist the foreign invader
for fear that this would be precisely the move that would
lead to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
It will be recalled that, in all other countries where the

workers took power and had gone to the extreme of
forming a proletarian dictatorship, the country had been
invaded by foreign powers. The pressure of national war
had added its weight to the stress of class struggle within.
Germany, on the other hand, had had no foreign invasion;
the Junkers, frightened at the temper of the people, had
been astute enough to yield beforehand. Furthermore, a real
defense of the Fatherland could have been undertaken only
1417
by the people themselves, led by the proletariat, and
nothing could have stopped the victory of the workers then.
Now, however, the Ruhr was invaded and lay in danger of
being taken away from Germany. Had the struggle been
pursued by military means it would have meant the end of
the reformist socialists who constantly posed as being
pacifists except in dealing with their own workers, when
plenty of blood was spilled. It was necessary, therefore, that
the socialist government take to other measures; hence
began the policy of passive resistance. While this policy
harassed the French, it was carried out only at great cost to
German economy and by arousing the initiative of the
people.
Unable to stand the combined strain of being looted, of

indemnities, reparations, invasion, loss of territories, and
civil war, German economy in 1923 broke down. All debts
were canceled by the speedy mechanism of inflation when,
in September of that year, a newspaper cost billions of
marks, and when the workers were paid several times a
day, their wives standing by to rush to the stores before
their paper money wages should become utterly worthless.
The wild chaos and complete cessation of trade, the

widespread suffering and misery of the people,
simultaneous with the most riotous orgies of the
speculators and trust capitalists who were benefitting
enormously by the events, were bound to lead to violent
outbursts. Here again the working class was to pay heavily
for the amateurishness and opportunism of its parties. In
Saxony, the communists and socialists united to take power,
but, instead of using the opportunity offered by their
parliamentary majority to arm the workers and really
smash the old machinery in favor of Workers' Councils,
they dickered and dallied in the parliament until the
1418
favorable moment had gone by, and it was too late to revolt.
Other cities of Germany had been awaiting the signal from
Saxony; when that was not forthcoming, their movement
became isolated and easily crushed.
The failure of the communists to take advantage of the

revolutionary situation brewing in Germany in 1923 was
their last chance to act before capitalism could recover its
strength. The year 1923 can be said to mark in almost all the
countries of Europe the last of the great revolutionary wave
that began in 1918-1919. From then on, for about eight years,
in Europe, there was a partial and temporary stabilization
of capitalism. The year 1923 also coincides with the
stabilization of the Soviet regime in Russia. The end of the
acute revolutionary epoch was dramatized by the death of
Lenin and the great struggle in the ranks of the communists
between the internationalists headed by Trotsky and the
Russian leadership headed by Stalin. This marks a new
period in proletarian history.
Footnotes
1. See D. J. Saposs: The Labor movement in Post-war France, pp.

163-164.
2. See H. Soderhjelm: The Red Insurrection in Finland in

1918, p. 12.
3. E. Ashmead-Bartlett: The Tragedy of Central Europe, pp. 46-

47.
4. See A. Kaas and F. de Lazarovics: Bolshevism in

Hungary, p. 62.
5. O. Jaszi: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary, p.

29.
1419
6. A. Kaas and F. de Lazarovics: work cited, pp. 86-87.
7. The prominence of the Jews in the communist movement

of Central and Eastern Europe helps to account for the
bitter anti-Semitism prevalent there among the
reactionaries. No wonder the Viennese Hitler would stress
the menace of the Jew.
8. O. Jaszi: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary, p.

36.
9. O. Jaszi: work cited, p. 127.
10. M. W. Graham: New Governments of Central Europe, p.

236.
11. Later in 1923, Schwartz was to command the American

communists under the name of John Pepper.
12. For a statement of the outrageous conduct of the

Rumanian troops under French direction see Maj. Gen. H.
H. Brandholdz: An Undiplomatic Diary.
13. O. Jaszi; work cited, p. 160.
14. At a later date Scheidemann was to bring a court action

alleging libel against one who had declared he had
fomented strikes and encouraged rebellion. He was to
prove overwhelmingly that he headed the strike
movements only to behead them.
15. H. G. Daniels: The Rise of the German Republic, p. 42.
16. Daniels, work cited, p. 53.
17. See R. H. Lutz: The German Revolution, 1918-1919, pp. 92-

93.
1420
18. Daniels, work cited, p. 57.
19. H. G. Daniels: work cited, pp. 78-79.
20. R. H. Lutz: work cited, p. 95.
23. H. G. Daniels: work cited, p. 145.
XLI. THE FIRST FOUR CONGRESSES
ON the background of this gigantic world revolutionary

wave which was putting flesh and blood on the nemesis of
communism which had been haunting Europe for three-
quarters of a century and, spreading from Ireland to India,
was affecting imperialist and colonial countries throughout
the world, the First Congress of the Communist
International was called. At that moment, the Russian
Bolsheviks were exceedingly hard pressed by the
interventionary wars; nevertheless, they felt they could not
postpone the Congress any longer. The World War was
over. The opportunist socialists had already issued their call
for the reconstitution of the Second International for
February, 1919. It was time to act.
During the war, the socialist movement had progressed

steadily to the Left. In France there had been formed a
"Committee for the Resumption of International Relations"
which was gradually being reinforced by Centrist elements
headed by Longuet. This Committee also began to press
forward for a full international congress of the socialists of
all countries to be called despite hostilities. By 1916, the
1421
Right Wing, which was opposed to meeting with the
Germans, was barely able to muster a majority. In June of
that year, three French socialist deputies refused to vote for
the war credits and, toward the end of the year, thirty-six
deputies agreed to present in the Chamber interpellations
on the War.
In Great Britain, the British Socialist Party (organized in

1911 from the former Social-Democratic Party which in turn
had been the offspring of Hyndman's Social Democratic
Federation in 1908), was split into two sections, the
minority going with Hyndman to form a chauvinistic
National Socialist Party and the majority swinging with
MacLean to struggle against the War.
By 1916, in Germany, the Spartacus group was fully

organized as separate both from the Majority Socialists and
from the Independents. In January, 1917, the Independents
also organized themselves as a distinct Party outside of the
Majority Socialists, and took a stand against the War. The
Serbian socialists from the start had refused to support their
government, as had the Marxists in Bulgaria and Rumania.
In Italy, the Socialist Party had taken a militant stand
against the War. Indeed, before the War broke out, in 1914,
the Socialist Party had led a general strike movement
embracing two million workers. In Russia, both
Mensheviks and Bolsheviks theoretically were against the
War and refused to concur with the International
Secretariat of the Second International in its sabotage of
international congresses during the war period.
Left tendencies were naturally strong in the neutral

countries not actually engaged in the hostilities, but
suffering from the reactions of the War. In Sweden, the
young socialists early came out against the War and for the
proletarian revolution. In Denmark and Norway, also, the
1422
youth were extreme in their anti-militarist position. When
the first International Conference of Socialist Youth
Organizations was held in April, 1915, representatives were
present from Germany, Holland, Russia, Bulgaria, Italy,
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland.
Those parties that opposed the slaughter and favored

international solidarity immediately began to bestir
themselves to organize internationally. At first their ranks
were weak and confused. At the international Women's
conference held in Berne, March, 1915, the predominant
tone was one of pacifism rather than militant struggle. A
conflict arose between Krupskaya, Bolshevik delegate, and
Clara Zetkin of the German group, on the question of
breaking sharply with the International Bureau of the
opportunists. From the earliest days of the War, Lenin had
advocated the formation of a new international, but the
Bolsheviks then were in a small minority. Most of the
delegates who came from Germany, France, England,
Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, Poland, and Hungary
were not able to adopt so early this extreme point of view.
A similar situation prevailed in the aforementioned Youth
conference and at the first Zimmerwald conference of the
Socialist Parties.
The situation had changed a good deal by 1916, however,

when those Socialist Parties which opposed the War and
condemned the sabotage of the regular bureau came
together in April at Kienthal. At this conference forty-three
delegates arrived from Germany, France, Italy, Russia,
Poland, Switzerland, Serbia, Portugal, Austria, and England.
By now, the Left Wing, which called for a complete break
with the International Secretariat and the formation of a
new international, could count twelve delegates (three each
from Russia, Germany, Poland, and Switzerland) and seven
1423
more moving in their direction. To the Bolsheviks, the anti-
war formulations had a pacifistic color, but they were still a
small minority on the question of turning the imperialist
war into civil war.
At this point the International Secretariat began to make

some effort to counteract the influence of the Zimmerwald-
Kienthal group. It called a conference of socialists from
neutral countries, but this was a distinct failure. When it
tried to call an inter-Allied conference, Russian, British, and
Italian socialists fought against it as being no international
meeting at all. As the socialists swung to the Left, the
governments commenced to bear down upon the
revolutionary wing. Rakovsky, Trotsky, Friedrich Adler,
Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Zetkin, Mehring, MacLean,
Hoglund, and many others found themselves behind prison
bars.
The advent of the momentous Russian Revolution soon

changed the entire situation. At once the extreme Russian
groups began to win great prestige, and the Bolsheviks took
the leadership of the Left wing in the Zimmerwald
grouping, which as a whole was swinging to the Left. The
International Bureau essayed to counter this drift by calling
an International Congress of all parties in Stockholm, but
this did not materialize, in spite of the support of the
Petrograd soviets which endorsed the idea. Among the
Bolsheviks, only such Right Wingers as Nogin and
Kamenev agreed to the Party's attendance at Stockholm.
The Spartacists, too, spurned the invitation.
Among the Zimrnerwaldians, however, confusion arose.

The International Socialist Commission established at
Zimmerwald to convoke a third Congress in May, 1917, put
off its call from month to month, hoping that the Stockholm
conference would materialize. Finally, the Zimmerwald
1424
meeting was held in September, 1917, and, although the
parties of the Entente could not be present, as they could
not reach Stockholm because of refusal of their
governments to grant them passports, it was decided that
the meeting should act decisively for all. At this conference
the Bolsheviks scored heavy victories over the vacillating
Centrists.
It had been the position of Lenin, with the outbreak of the

Russian Revolution, that the Bolsheviks should no longer
bother with the Centrist groupings to be found in the
Zimmerwald Union, but should come out boldly for the
new International and should organize it. He wanted to
send delegates to the 1917 meeting only to secure
information. Against this plan Zinoviev posed the
argument that the Bolsheviks should send delegates in
order to come to some agreement with the Spartacus Bund
and that, after cementing an alliance with Liebknecht and
the Left, they should openly break with the Centrist
opportunists at the conference. In the Party conference,
Lenin was defeated, and Zinoviev's position prevailed. At
the Zimmerwald meeting, under the pressure of the
Bolshevik delegates, resolutions were passed against the
Stockholm conference and in sympathy with Trotsky, now
in jail under the Menshevik Kerensky regime in Russia. A
Manifesto was adopted which called for an international
general strike for peace and socialism.
Soon after the last Conference of the Zimmerwald Union

adjourned, the Independent Socialist Party of Germany
rushed a special delegate to Stockholm, general
headquarters of the Zimmerwaldians, to beg for a
postponement of the printing of the Manifesto on the
ground that it would cause the Party to go underground in
Germany, thus ruining the Socialists. The disgust that this
1425
action caused among the Bolsheviks only intensified their
determination to end once and for all the farce of unity with
the Centrists. Once the great October Revolution became an
accomplished fact, and the Bolsheviks took power in Russia,
they decided to call the Third International themselves, and
not to use the machinery of the Zimmerwald Union. At the
first Congress of the Third International, the Zimmerwald
Union was formally dissolved with a statement that its task
was accomplished.
The victory of the Russian revolutionists and the great

chaos in the train of the World War helped to accelerate the
splits in the ranks of the socialists and to swing the Left
Wing rapidly towards communism. "Shortly after the
Armistice, the Allies took steps to isolate the Bolsheviks in
order to prevent the virus of Bolshevism from infecting the
proletariat of the Allied countries. A steady stream of
Bolshevik propaganda was flowing at this time through the
Soviet embassies of Switzerland and the Scandinavian
countries for distribution in France, England, and the
United States." (*1)
The invitations to the First Congress of the Third

International were sent out by Soviet wireless in January,
the written invitations not being received until after the
Conference, and were signed by the Communist Parties of
those countries which had been affected directly by the
Russian Revolution as well as by the communists of
German-Austria, the Balkan Revolutionary Socialist
Federation, and by one delegate acting on his own initiative
for the American Socialist Labor Party. The basis of
representation was to be wide enough to include several
types of trade unions, such as the American Industrial
Workers of the World and the British Shop Steward
organization, but the invitations were issued only to those
1426
groups that were in agreement with the announced
program. This program called for the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, the smashing of the old state, the arming of the
workers, and the disarming of the bourgeoisie. It
announced as the function of the Dictatorship the ushering
in of socialism. Finally, the call openly declared its purpose
to smash the Right Wing of the socialists, to break away the
socialist workers from their Centrist leaders, and to win
over the revolutionary elements to the new Communist
International. The program took pains to stress that "The
interests of the movement in each country are to be
subordinated to the general interests of the revolution from
an international point of view." (*2)
In spite of the haste in which it was called and the great

difficulties entailed in reaching Moscow at the time, the
First Congress of the Comintern held in Moscow March 2-6,
1919, was attended by groups representing nineteen
different countries. Advisory delegates came from many
other lands. Zinoviev was made Chairman, Angelica
Balabanova, Secretary. This Congress accomplished one
major object: the working out of a Communist Manifesto
that would give a program of action to communists in all
countries and lay the basis for a regular working Congress
the following year.
.The Manifesto adopted started off with placing the blame

for the World War on the shoulders of the capitalists, and
stressed the need for the Proletarian Dictatorship to
prohibit repetitions of such catastrophes. The document
went on to point out that the Versailles Treaty could solve
none of the vexatious problems of nationalities, that the
independence of the petty states in Europe was completely
illusory, since they were bound to become mere puppets of
this or that superior imperialist power. Only the spread of
1427
the proletarian revolution could guarantee equal rights to
all the peoples, as well as insure the liberation of the
colonies.
Throughout the world at that time the question of

democracy or dictatorship was agitating the labor and
revolutionary movements. At the 1919 Berne Convention of
the reconstituted Second International, this had been the
chief subject of discussion, outside of the attempt to fix the
responsibility for the War. Although the majority of this
Congress had come out for democracy as against the type
of dictatorship prevalent in Russia, a strong minority
headed by Longuet and Adler stood firm in demanding a
hands-off-Soviet-Russia policy, at least so far as negative
criticism was concerned.
Understanding this situation, the Manifesto stressed the

fact that communists also stood for liberty and democracy,
but democracy for the toilers. Soviets were declared to be
the best instrument to assure democracy, just as they were
the best instrument to achieve the proletarian revolution.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat was the highest form of
democracy yet worked out by humanity since the
beginning of civilization.
The theses presented to the First Congress by Lenin averred:

"14. Proletarian dictatorship is like the dictatorship of other
classes in that it arises from the necessity of suppressing the
armed resistance of the class that loses its political
supremacy. The fundamental difference between
proletarian dictatorship and that of other classes ... is
simply that the two last named dictatorships were a forcible
suppression of the resistance of the majority of the
population, the working masses, whereas proletarian
dictatorship is a forcible suppression of the resistance of the
exploiters . . . Hence it follows that proletarian dictatorship
1428
must inevitably bring with it not only a change in the forms
and institutions of democracy, generally speaking, but also
precisely such a change as will bring a hitherto undreamt of
extension in practice of the use made of democracy by those
who have been oppressed by capitalism, i.e., the working
classes.
"And, in fact, those forms of proletarian dictatorship

already worked out in practice--e.g., the Soviet Power in
Russia, the Raete system in Germany, the Shop Steward's
Committees, and similar Soviet institutions in other
countries, all signify, and in practice realize for the working
classes --- i.e., for the enormous majority of the population -
-- the practical possibility of democratic liberty and
privileges to an extent never before known, even
approximately, in the best democratic bourgeois
republics."(*3)
As a final point, the Manifesto called the Second

International completely bankrupt. The Third International
was to be not an International of words but an International
of deeds. The communists were proud to stem directly from
the old revolutionaries, from Baboeuf and the First
international, and to carry forward the great traditions of
Marx.
Owing to the dire straits of the Russians at the time and the
urgent need of the delegates to return home and begin to
work, the Congress did not last long. The seeds of the
Manifesto, however, began to bear fruit in 1919-1920. In
Italy, the Socialist Party decided by executive vote to join
the Third International, as did the Norwegian Party. The
Bulgarian "Narrows"'renamed themselves "Communist
Party" and affiliated, as did also the Dutch "Tribune" group
headed by Roland Holst and Anton Pannekoek. The
Hungarian Communist Party in 1919 united with the
1429
Socialist Party and declared in favor of the Third
International. In Greece the socialists declared their
adherence. In Sweden, the Left Socialist Party signified its
intention to join the British Socialist Party likewise.
At the same time, under the pressure of events, minorities

were springing up in all the Socialist Parties demanding a
communist position and forcing their parties either to
abandon the Second International or to adhere to the Third.
In France, the split was growing steadily; in 1919, a
plurality came out for the position of trying to fuse both the
Second and the Third Internationals, a minority favored the
Second, and a still smaller minority favored the Third. The
following year, the majority of the French Socialist Party
swung over to the Third International at the Congress of
Tours, even such avowed Centrists as Longuet stating their
willingness to join. This placed before the Leninists a
genuine problem of how to keep out those who were
Centrists and who yet thought their place was with the
Comintern.
The situation in Germany was more complicated. The

Independent Socialist Party advocated a fusion of both the
Second and the Third International, and seceded from the
Second. The Spartacus group adhered to the Third
International, although its delegate had spoken at the First
Congress against its immediate formation. To the Left of the
Spartacus group were two other groups that also had been
members of the Zimmerwald "Left." There was the group of
Bremen Left Radicals headed by Paul Froelich and the
International Socialist group of Germany led by Julian
Borchart. The Liebknecht Spartacists had been more
conservative than these other two. We have already noted
the conflict between the Bolsheviks and the Spartacists at
the Women's International Conference at Berne, at the First
1430
Congress, and elsewhere. The fact is that the Spartacus
group was still close to the old socialists. They did not
break thoroughly with the old Party and did not unite with
the other Left groups, preferring to stay closer to the
Independent Socialist Party. The result of this policy was
that, on the one hand, eventually large numbers of the
Independent Socialist Party broke away from that
organization and joined with the Spartacists to form the
United Communist Party. On the other hand, the influx of
these older socialist types eventually led to the formation of
serious Right Wing deviations that were to prevent the
German communists from reaching the level of the Russian
Bolsheviks.
In America, the Socialist Party split. A majority of the

membership went with the Third International but found
themselves out of the Party. The minority, who retained the
name, "Socialist Party," also voted to affiliate with the Third
International, but with such reservations as would have
emasculated the program of the communists and would
have transformed the Third International into another
Centrist grouping.
The Swiss Socialist Party at first had voted to join the Third
International, but later reconsidered the matter and finally
voted down the proposition. The Austrian Social-
Democratic Party opposed both the Second and the Third
Internationals. In the Spanish Socialist Party, a bare
majority advocated purification of the Second and unity
with the Third, while an extremely strong minority
clamored for outright affiliation with the Third. The Scotch
Independent Labor Party voted to adhere to the Third.
Certain trade unions also decided to affiliate with the

Communist International. The Spanish C.N.T. was one, the
Italian Syndicalist Union, another, and the I.W.W. retained
1431
a friendly attitude. The French trade union movement split,
the Syndicalist forces joining hands with the communists to
win the majority of the unions and forming the Unitarian
Confederation. This development was to give the
Comintern several problems concerning the relationship of
communism to syndicalism and of the Third International
to the Red Trade Unions. As with the problem of Centrism,
so with these; they would be left to the Second Congress for
solution.
The Third international was the product of a world in

which capitalism was disintegrating and revolution was
rampant; but what was not sufficiently appreciated was the
fact that world capitalism was breaking down not so much
in the most developed countries but rather in its weakest
links. The world revolution, hence, had not broken out
according to some scheme, first in Germany and last in
Russia, but first in the agricultural countries where the
proletariat, whether skilled or unskilled, had been a victim
of the cruel super-exploitation which was the lot of all the
toilers in such countries. Thus, if considerable numbers of
the Bolsheviks were made up of skilled workers, this had
no great deleterious effect upon the revolutionary ardor of
the masses, since, under conditions such as existed in
Russia, as in Asia and other colonial and agrarian regions,
even the skilled layers would be moved to revolutionary
action.
The situation was quite different, however, once the

movement was developed in the Western industrial
countries, where the skilled workers long had been bribed
by the privileges of imperialism. There the material
conditions of the skilled were not such as would induce
these workers to understand or to follow the ruthless
rigorous policies of Bolshevism. Or even if the skilled
1432
worker were suffering from the post-war conditions,
psychologically he was still living in the past, with the
illusion that the good old times presently would return. A
new generation might have to grow up, protracted crises
might have to create worse conditions, and vast new
machinery might have to be introduced rendering skill
forever useless, before countries with a heavy layer of
skilled workers might be ready for proletarian revolt. Even
where the proletarian of such a country did see the
handwriting of revolution on the wall, often he did not
react in time.
Thus, in the Communist International, the working men in

the colonial countries, such as China, or in the countries
where oppression was very heavy, were able to move
towards Leninism; elsewhere the process took longer than
was originally anticipated. The workers who espoused
Leninism theoretically should have been mostly unskilled
industrial workers, able to take care of themselves and to
articulate their needs. Unfortunately, this was not always
the case. The first to reach the Third International were
frequently intellectual elements and skilled workers who
had been rendered desperate by the post-war economic and
political disarrangements. If considerable bodies of the
unskilled entered, they generally followed in the train of
the other elements who had been coached in the
organizations of the Second International or elsewhere, and
who could not, without the greatest struggle, understand
the essence of revolutionary communism.
Thus, we might say, the Third International was a sort of

half-way point between the best that the Second
International could produce and the future International,
which alone really could solve the important world
problems of revolution. The Third International was the
1433
product of the time when imperialism was breaking, but
when the weakest links of capitalism comprised not the
important but rather the unimportant countries of the
world. Whenever the time is reached that the revolution
finds its field of action, not in an agrarian Russia or a
colonial China, but in an industrial England, Germany, or
the United States, then the International will become
entirely different from the one created by Lenin with the
material at hand. The Third International only began the
real awakening of the basic layers of the unskilled
proletarians in industrial countries. The final International
will see precisely these layers take the leading role and
dominate all the others.
The inadequacy of the Third International, the fact that its

heart was not of Western industrial Europe but rather of
agrarian semi-Asiatic Russia, showed itself in the losing
fight that would be made within its own ranks to take the
Western parties that came to the Comintern and really
Bolshevize them. No sooner was the process started than
the International began in fact to break up. This was a sign
that the world proletariat would have to go through some
further training before being ready for the final struggle.
However, all this was to become manifest later; at the time

of the First Congress, there was no thought of this. It
fervently was believed that the revolution would be
successful throughout all of Western Europe, that the
former revolutionary socialists would be transformed more
or less easily into revolutionary communists. From the very
beginning, the Communist International became a scene of
splits and fusions which continued year in and year out,
with this difference, however: in the splits of the early days,
various groups broken from divers political tendencies
came towards communism. To reach communism they had
1434
to find a common ground with other communist elements.
However, these split-off groups were not hardened and
experienced enough to meet the oncoming events. Before
they could become Bolshevized, capitalism had taken them
in hand and revealed them in their true colors as Left
Centrists. New splits began in all the parties of the
Comintern. These last splits were in the main not of
leftward moving groups going towards Leninism, but
frightened people who had discovered what Leninism
really meant and who wanted to retreat before it was too
late.
In spite of these historic defects, the International

legitimately started out with great prospects. The leaders of
the Bolsheviks could count two factors promising much in
their favor: first, the unprecedented power at their disposal,
and second, the unique objective situation in which they
found themselves.
That the Russian Revolution had put into the hands of the
communists an unprecedented power which the other
Internationals had never possessed was of the highest
importance. The Russian workers actually had seized the
power of a vast stretch of the globe inhabited by over one
hundred and sixty-five million people and controlling
untold natural resources and wealth. The communists now
had the opportunity to use this power in the Soviet Union,
both economic and military, in order at given moments to
change the whole history of the world in favor of
communism.
The favorable objective' position of the communists can be

appreciated best by contrasting their environment with that
before the War. Prior to the War, neither revolutionary
situations nor actual revolutions could have been created
by the activity of the Socialist revolutionary Parties
1435
throughout the world. No matter how well or how
tirelessly these Parties worked, the bourgeoisie was too
strong, the level of activity of the masses, generally
speaking, too low for the revolutionary Parties in and of
themselves to change much the objective scene. Basically,
the revolutionary situations had to develop by themselves,
from the objective contradictions in capitalist society. Thus
the role of the Socialist Parties had to be a more or less
quiescent one, in which the activity was mainly that of day-
to-day propaganda and organization rather than of the
planning of insurrection.
However, when, during, and after the War, these objective

contradictions caused revolutionary situations to arise, by
that time the subjective factor, namely the revolutionary
Party, had become so powerful as to be able to mature
revolutionary situations in a number of countries into
actual revolutions. In other words, before the War,
conditions in most countries were not revolutionary, and no
action of political revolutionists could make them so. After
the War, in many countries, so weak had imperialism
become, so near was the situation to a revolutionary one
that the action of a strong revolutionary organization with a
correct policy could be the very factor to precipitate a crisis;
or, if the situation was already revolutionary then the
proper action of a strong party of the proletariat could
cause it to mature into an actual outburst of insurrection; or,
finally, once the revolution had started, the very presence of
such a Party might mean the difference between success
and failure of the revolution. These were the qualitative
changes that had taken place in world politics.
During the first revolutionary post-war wave, there was a

possibility for the advanced proletariat with the correct
policy in many countries to disintegrate the capitalist
1436
armies, to ruin the prestige of the ruling classes, to expose
the petty bourgeoisie, and to activize the masses to a high
degree. For the first time in history, the communists had to
some degree the ability to pick their time and place of battle,
and to prepare their forces accordingly in advance. The
Communist Party in one country or another could have
been the decisive force, both in stimulating the exploited
and oppressed masses with the understanding of the
impossibility of living in the old way, and in helping to
make the ruling class unable to govern as of old. Since the
War, the old power and might of the ruling classes had
been irretrievably broken. Further the experience of 1918 to
1923 weighed heavily on the memory of the ruling class, for
they had been unable to govern in many countries during
that period. Finally, the Soviet Union, with its tremendous
economic and political weight, could have thrown its forces
at times so as to help break the economic and political
power of different sections of the international bourgeoisie
at critical moments.
From this it followed that the task of the hour was the
creation of that sort of tested Party which Leninism implied.
The Third International, therefore, saw as its chief task not
so much to transform the objective circumstances which
were revolutionary enough, but to change the subjective
factor, the lack of will and science in the working class as
manifested in the lack of a genuine Party. Just here,
however, a certain uneven development was to play havoc
with the Third International. The contradictions of world
capitalism were to create revolutionary situations faster
than they could create Parties capable of solving the
problems favorably for the workers. The building up of the
Party, or subjective element, was slower than the creating of
revolutionary situations due to the breakdown of society.
To put it another way, the rate of breakdown of the old
1437
social order was faster than the rate of building up the
elements of the new; thus breakdowns occurred without
the proper facilities being present to reconstruct on a new
basis. Politics was lagging behind economics: economically
the world was ready for collective socialized ownership of
the means of production and distribution, but politically
men's ingenuity had found no means as yet of bringing this
about and of releasing the productive forces.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that there

was an uneven development politically among the different
sections of the working class. For the Russians, for example,
the creation of the Party was relatively easy, just as the
conquest of power for them was comparatively simple. But
for the Western industrial workers, the creation of a real
Communist Party is extraordinarily difficult, as difficult in
proportion as the accomplishment of the revolution itself. If,
later, we shall find the Russian Bolshevik Party breaking
down, this will be a sign that in Russia the workers are able
to win power smoothly enough but find it infinitely harder
to grow into socialism. In the West, however, once the party
is built and workers have taken power, there can be no such
degeneration, but the speedy smashing of capitalism. The
Russian Bolsheviks were able to solve the problems in
genuine communist fashion temporarily, and for a long
time they strove to mold the other Parties to their liking,
but in the end not only were to fail, but, in their failure,
they themselves were to sink back to the level of the
Centrist Europeans.
To materialists, this sort of situation can come as no

surprise. Always they have postulated the fact that mind
limps after matter, that material changes develop for some
time before psychological reverberations become attuned to
the new interplay of forces. Just as it is the material forces
1438
that decide and mold the minds of men, however, so, in the
long run, the political understanding of the proletariat will
catch up with the new events.
Not only did Russia need the world revolution to rescue it,
but Russia could also succor the world revolution if the
forces were utilized properly. The world revolution had in
Russia its greatest reservoir of strength and power, which
could become decisive in any engagement. Naturally, all
this presumed that Russia was directed by communist
forces with a genuine revolutionary policy. The recognition
of the qualitative changes that had taken place in world
politics should have been the cornerstone of the strategy of
the Communist International. But should the leading
groups in Russia no longer maintain a revolutionary
attitude, should they succumb to capitalist pressure and
embrace nationalism, abandoning the world revolution for
their own presumed safety, then it might well result that
the enormous weight and power in the hands of the now
degenerate Communist Party would be used not to further
evolution, but to destroy it, not to build world soviets, but
to prevent them. The Russian Revolution could become a
great force to prevent and to crush the world revolution.
This in turn would lead to the collapse of the Russian
revolution and would force the proletarians to begin all
over again, although from a higher plane.
The Manifesto of the First Congress clearly had striven to

mark off the Communist International from the socialists,
but a great deal of confusion still existed. All sorts of
socialist centrists were demanding admission, adapting
themselves to the revolutionary currents of the times and to
the fact that Soviet Russia had been able to break the steel
ring of capitalist intervention around her. One of the chief
1439
tasks of the Second Congress which met in Moscow in
August 1920 was the organizational one of eliminating
those who were really not communists and of giving
definite form to the Comintern. The principal polemics and
resolutions, therefore, pertained to the questions of
conditions of admission to the International and of
parliamentarism and democracy. There was also a problem
of what to do with the syndicalistic unions that had joined
in the First Congress. This would give rise to a thorough
discussion on the trade union question and on the approach
to the masses.
In its statutes, the Congress of the Comintern declared: "The

aim of the Communist International is to organize armed
struggle for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie
and the establishment of an international Soviet republic as
a transition to the complete abolition of the capitalist state.
The Communist International considers the Dictatorship of
the Proletariat an essential means for the liberation of
humanity from the horrors of capitalism and regards the
Soviet form of government as the historic necessary form of
this dictatorship. . . . The Communist International breaks
once and for all with the traditions of the Second
International which, in reality, only recognized the white
race. The task of the Communist International is to
emancipate the workers of the whole world." (*4)
The Congress then set seriously to work to deal with the

problem of centrist applications for membership. It
affirmed that one of the chief duties of the communists was
intransigent war against opportunism and centrism. "No
communist must forget the lessons of the Hungarian Soviet
Republic. The Hungarian communists paid dearly for their
unity with the so-called social-democrats of the Left ." (*5)
In order to keep out such pseudo-communists, the
1440
Congress worked out twenty-one conditions to be put to
every party desirous of affiliation. The following conditions
were included.
The propaganda of the Party must be thoroughly

communist. The press must be edited by reliable
communists and must be controlled by the central executive.
Special attention must be given to the detailed and
particular denunciation of the reformists. All reformists in
the Party must be removed from any post they may have,
and communists must replace them. Since the class struggle
in almost every country of Europe and America was
declared to be reaching the threshold of civil war, all Parties
must do illegal work. Especially important was steady and
persistent work in the armed forces of the capitalist
governments.
Systematic work also must be conducted in agricultural

districts, especially among agricultural laborers. On every
side social pacifism must be fought. All centrist leaders,
many of them at the head of the Parties asking for
admission, must be expelled. All Communist Parties
worthy of the name must carry on a fight for colonial
independence, the first duty in this struggle devolving
upon the workers of the imperialist countries whose
capitalists were the oppressors of the given colonies.
The conditions also demanded that revolutionary fractions

be formed in all the reactionary trade unions and other
mass organizations of the workers. A bitter struggle must
be launched against the Yellow Trade Union International.
In the Party, iron discipline must prevail on the basis of the
principles of democratic centralism. "The chief principle of
the latter is the elective nature of the lowest unit, the
absolute authority of all the decisions of higher units upon
the one immediately beneath and a strong party central
1441
organization whose decrees are binding between party
conventions."(*6)
Every effort must be made to cleanse petty bourgeois

elements from the ranks of the Party. Special attention must
be given to the character and work of the parliamentary
groups which have great tendencies to commit acts of
collaboration with the capitalist enemy and to carry on their
work only in parliamentary debates. All parties would have
to change their names, to take the name Communist Party
of their respective country. Each must draw up a
communist program for submission to the Executive of the
Communist International. They must pledge themselves to
give aid to the Soviet Republic in every possible manner.
The resolutions of the Communist International were to be

binding upon all the Parties. On the other hand, the
Communist International was to be bound to regard the
national peculiarities of each country in its various
decisions. However, an end was to be made to the platonic
internationalism of the Second International, where the
center was hardly more than a post office box and where
international discipline and solidarity never had existed.
The Comintern was to be really a world Communist Party,
and the same discipline and close co-operation would exist
internationally as had existed in Russia.
Each party desirous of affiliation to the Comintern was

required to publish all the documents of the Congresses
and Executive. It was to call a Congress within four months
after full discussion of the conditions. Two-thirds of the
executive committee was to be made up of revolutionary
workers who had called for affiliation to the Comintern
before the application for admission actually was made. All
the leading members of the Party who were opposed to the
conditions were to be expelled from the Party. In this way,
1442
the Communist International undertook to guarantee that
its composition would be thoroughly communist in
character.
The Second Congress took note of two mistaken tendencies

in its own ranks. The first was a tendency to become
conciliatory to the centrist socialists who were posing as
being "almost" communists. This was the chief danger and
had to be ruthlessly fought. The second danger was
"Leftism," which consisted of super-revolutionary phrases,
refusal to work in parliaments, refusal to work in
reactionary unions, refusal to build a strong disciplined
party leading the masses, etc. This "Leftist" danger,
however, was not the main one, and the Comintern, after
declaring that it considered the anti-parliamentarism of the
Communist Labor Party of Germany, the Swiss party, the
Dutch party, the I.W.W., and the Shop Steward movement
misguided and wrong, nevertheless urged them to affiliate
on the ground that the question of parliamentarism was
after all not decisive, since all of them believed in direct
revolutionary action as the main method of work of
revolutionary workers.
The question of the communists' relation to parliamentary

activity came in for a great deal of discussion at the Second
Congress, for various reasons. In the first place, in their
break with their old socialist past, many of the new parties
had to learn the rudimentary lessons of revolutionary work
in bourgeois parliaments. In the second place, some former
socialists, in extreme reaction to the opportunists, had
begun to deny the efficacy of parliamentary action at all.
These in combination with former anarchists and
syndicalists caused a heated polemic to arise. An elaborate
thesis was worked out on this subject.
1443
The Second Congress pointed out that at the time of the
First International, socialists had looked on
parliamentarism as a method of using bourgeois
parliaments for the purpose of agitation. They had not
hoped for any effective results from their parliamentary
work, outside of propaganda. Under the Second
International, conditions had changed and many social
reform measures had been obtained through parliamentary
action which gave the illusion that the capitalist State
eventually could be turned into a workers' State by such
action alone. But in the present era, marked by the
instability of parliaments, such tactics were out of the
question. "Parliament at present can in no way serve as the
arena of a struggle for reform, or for improving the lot of
the working people, as it was at certain periods of the
preceding epoch." (*7) The center of gravity of all
revolutionary work would have to be outside of the
parliament.
The thesis declared that parliamentarism is the rule of the

bourgeoisie and cannot be a form of communist society nor
can it be a form marking the transition from capitalism to
workers' rule. "Parliamentarism cannot be a form of
proletarian government during the transition period
between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and that of the
proletariat. At the moment when the accentuated class
struggle turns into civil war, the proletariat must inevitably
form its state organization as a fighting organization which
cannot contain any representatives of the former ruling
classes. All fictions of the 'national will' are harmful to the
proletariat at that time.... The only form of proletarian
dictatorship is a Republic of Soviets." (*8)
Since bourgeois parliaments must be smashed in favor of

soviets, parliamentary activity could be only of a sort to
1444
destroy parliaments from within. The capitalist parliament
could not be ignored, since its destruction was part of the
political struggle for the seizure of power. The fundamental
method of destroying the capitalist State was that of mass
action, but it was not incorrect to try to utilize all legal and
bourgeois democratic positions to accomplish the same end.
Work in the capitalist parliaments was precisely such legal
work as could be engaged in favorably. Where a communist
was elected to parliament, he could use the platform to put
forth revolutionary propaganda to expose the chicanery
and fraud of capitalist democracy and to provide a center
for the ideological unification of the masses, as Karl
Liebknecht had done by his parliamentary work during the
War. Parliamentary activity was also a good way to reach
the backward strata of the masses who retained illusions
about capitalist democracy.
Of course, electoral campaigns were not to be carried on

with the view to securing the maximum number of votes,
but rather to launch issues and to use parliamentary
positions to push forward the mass work. Where
communists were in the majority in local government
bodies, their duty was to carry on revolutionary opposition
against the central government to arm the masses in their
district, to aid them economically in every possible way, to
expose capitalist democracy, and to develop revolutionary
propaganda. In some cases they were to substitute workers'
councils, or soviets, for the municipal administration to
which they had been elected.
Sometimes it might be necessary to boycott a parliament.

The Bolsheviks themselves had done this to the Bulygin
Duma of 1905, and afterwards. But this was not because of
any general principles to this effect, but rather because of
concrete circumstances whereby the mass movement could
1445
be furthered best by open denunciation of the type of
parliament for which they were asked to vote. However, to
substitute for this concrete policy some general principle
borrowed from anarchism as to the impossibility of doing
revolutionary work in parliament was childish extremism
that failed to take real situations into consideration. The
whole question ought to be considered of relatively
secondary importance, moreover, and no splits should
occur on this question alone. Here was a question on which
communists could agree to disagree and yet remain within
the framework of one Communist Party, as strict as that
might be.
Because of the danger of opportunism in parliamentary

work, the Second Congress put forth detailed instructions
on revolutionary parliamentarism. The candidates for office
in election campaigns must be reliable men, carefully
selected. They were to be always under the direct control of
the center of the Party and ready to resign at all times.
Careerists and adventurers ruthlessly must be eliminated,
and every opportunity given to place actual workmen in
parliament. The parliamentary deputy had to combine legal
with illegal work, and the Party must never permit a
division of labor to occur where some leaders would have
the legal posts and be perfectly safe, while others did the
dangerous illegal tasks that would place them in jail or
perhaps worse. On the contrary, the deputy had to head all
labor demonstrations of importance and must expose
himself in dangerous situations, so that all workers would
see that the communists did not make parliamentary
activity their chief work, that it was subordinate to the tasks
of mass action.
The communist deputy must not consider himself a

"legislator" separate and apart from the people. His
1446
function was not to bolster up capitalism or to worry how
to make bills correspond to the law of the land. He must be
ready to be used in all sorts of work, before factory gates, in
the countryside, etc. In parliament he had to consider
himself an outpost of the proletariat inside the camp of the
enemy. He was to speak plainly so that workers could
understand him. Not expert lawyers calling themselves
communists, but plain workers should take the floor of
parliament and speak their minds, denouncing the
reformists and challenging capitalism. (*9)
The problem of the relation between parliaments and

soviets also came up for solution since, on the one hand,
some of those against any parliamentary action were for
setting up soviets immediately, at all times; on the other
hand, there were those who believed some sort of
combined form might be possible. The Second Congress
then went into the question as to when and under what
conditions soviets of workers deputies should be formed.
The Communist International declared it was foolish to

build paper soviets under stable capitalist conditions. This
was being tried by American communists and had to be
stopped. On the other hand, only traitors could conceive of
soviets' being formed peacefully, and working hand in
hand with parliaments. "Soviets without a revolution are
impossible. Soviets without a proletarian revolution
inevitably become a parody of Soviets. The authentic
soviets of the masses are the historical elaborated forms of
the dictatorship of the proletariat." (*10)
Before soviets could be formed properly, the following

conditions had to appear on the social horizon: First, there
must be a great revolutionary impulse among the workers
and peasants. Second, there must be such an acute political
and economic crisis that the power is beginning to slip out
1447
of the hands of the government. Third, it must be a time
when the masses are plainly and seriously considering a
struggle for power. In short, only at the beginning of a
movement that was patently a deep revolutionary one
inevitably culminating in a clash for power should soviets
be built, for soviets were precisely organs adapted to the
conquest of power in such circumstances.
The Russian Revolution had greatly stirred up the colonial

peoples, especially of Asia. Already the first Congress of the
Comintern had issued an appeal to the colonial peoples and
subject nationalities. Even before then, Lenin had declared:
"Victorious Socialism must necessarily realize complete
democracy, and, consequently, it must not only achieve
complete equality of nations, but also realize the right to
self-determination of the oppressed nations, that is the right
to free political separation." (*11)
In the midst of the War, when the question of oppressed

nations was on the lips of every democrat, Lenin had
enunciated the position of the revolutionary socialists on
this important matter. The proletariat would have to
distinguish between oppressed and oppressor nations and
fight now for the freedom of national minorities and
colonies, not postponing the solution of this question until
after socialism had arrived. The situation in France over the
Dreyfuss affair showed how closely civil war could be
bound up with the national question. On the other hand,
the socialists of the oppressed countries had to adopt a class
line and to unite with the workers elsewhere and not
succumb to nationalism. They had to remember that often
the struggle for national independence can be used by
imperialist powers for their own purpose.
It should be borne in mind that the goal of socialism was

not the division of humanity into petty states and
1448
individual nations, each one eking out a miserable existence,
but rather the fusion of nations. None the less, "Just as
humanity can only arrive at the destruction of classes
through a transitional period of the dictatorship of the
oppressed class, so also humanity can only arrive at the
inevitable fusion of nations through a transitional period of
complete freedom of all oppressed nationalities, that is,
their freedom of separation." (*12)
Three types of countries had to be distinguished in relation

to the question of national self-determination. In the
imperialist countries, the workers had to fight against their
bourgeoisie and in behalf of the colonial and nationally
oppressed groups. In such countries as the Balkans and the
Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, the bourgeois
democratic revolutions must be intimately connected with
the national liberation question. In the colonies and semi-
colonies, the socialists would have to support in the most
decisive fashion the revolutionary elements of the
bourgeois-democratic national emancipatory movements in
their countries, and assist them in rebellion and, if need be,
in revolutionary war, against the oppressing imperialist
powers.
By the time of the Second Congress, the communists were

able to develop these Leninist ideas further. The Comintern
went to great lengths to expose the program of the League
of Nations and to declare that the Balkanization of Europe
that was being effected was no solution whatever to the
national question, but was bound to bring further wars and
to make the petty countries, set up at Versailles, the vortex
of international intrigue and diplomatic pretexts for war.
The Second Congress also had before it the experiments

that had been undertaken in Soviet Russia; it emphasized
that the Russian Revolution had demonstrated how
1449
valuable the federation idea was as a transition to fusion of
all nationalities. The Soviet was establishing a federation of
republics which was able to solve both the problem of
international solidarity and that of national development
and freedom. The Congress further declared: "Petty
bourgeois internationalism means the mere recognition of
the rights of national equality and preserves intact national
egotism. Proletarian internationalism, on the other hand,
demands: (1) the subordination of the interests of the
proletarian struggle in one country to the interests of that
struggle on an international scale; (2) the capability and the
readiness on the part of any one nation which has gained a
victory over the bourgeoisie, of making the greatest
national sacrifices for the overthrow of international
capitalism." (*13)
In dealing with the liberation movements in the colonial

and semi-colonial countries, Lenin was careful to point out
that not every such movement would the proletariat have
to support, but only those bourgeois movements for
liberation which were really revolutionary, which were not
opposed to the communists' enlightening and organizing
the peasantry and the great masses for revolutionary
purposes. When this was not possible, communists must
counter these movements, such as, for example, was
represented by Pan-Islamism or Pan-Asia. (*14)
Naturally, the question would have to arise whether the

colonial movements for freedom would result in the
formation of capitalist regimes in the backward colonial
countries, or whether these nations could skip capitalism
and go directly to communism. The answer of the Leninists
was that, not only was the formation of peasant soviets
possible and applicable to countries in a pre-capitalist stage
of society, but that by no means was capitalism inevitable in
1450
such lands; colonies could move directly to socialism if the
proletarians of the advanced countries were in a position to
aid them.
As we have already remarked, a number of trade unions

had decided to join the Third International at the First
Congress, but the relations to the trade union movement,
particularly its revolutionary sections, had to be definitely
cleared up. The arrival in Russia of British, Italian, and
other trade union delegates for the purpose of studying
conditions in that country in 1920 served as a starting point
for negotiations for the creation of a new and revolutionary
trade union center. Many Italians already had joined the
Third International, while in England, too, there was a
considerable shifting taking place to the Left. Not only was
there the Shop Steward movement, but there had been
formed the famous Triple Alliance of the railroad, miners,
and transport workers for mutual support and mutual
action; it was these militant groups that had sent a
delegation to Russia for investigation and report.
Thus, on the tenth of June, 1920, there was possible a

conference between the representatives of the British Trade
Unions (Williams and Purcell), those from the Italian
Federation of Labor, including its metal and agricultural
sections (D'Aragona, Bianchi, Colombina, and Dugoni), and
the spokesmen of the Russian trade unions (Tomsky,
Losovsky, Tsiperovitch, and Schmidt), together with the
delegate of the Comintern (Zinoviev). (*15) It soon was
discovered that differences existed among them on several
questions, namely, on the relations between the future trade
union center and the Third International, on the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and on the relations to the
Amsterdam Federation of Trade Unions, reformist
1451
international trade union center. However, all three groups
found it possible to agree that a new revolutionary trade
union center should be formed, that an international
congress of Left trade unions should be convoked, and that
a committee should be set up to work closely with the Third
International.
In July of the same year there were also present in Moscow

representatives of the Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Jugo-Slav,
and French trade unions, British Shop Steward committees,
the syndicalists and labor unions of Germany, the I.W.W. of
America and of Australia. New discussions were held with
them, and here differences arose on further points
involving not only the relation to the Third International
and the question of the proletarian dictatorship, but also the
general question of the relation of politics to economics and
of the necessity for a political party for the proletariat.
Together with this, there were other issues raised
concerning the proletarian government and the soviet
system and the matter of splitting off from or conquering
the mass unions. These problems touched the very
foundations of the trade union movement.
On the question of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the

Italians were willing to agree to its necessity, but would not
ask the unions to take a stand on it. The German
syndicalists would not consider dictatorship in any form.
The American and English representatives were not averse
to a dictatorship, not through a party, however, but only
through the industrial unions. Finally, the syndicalists
agreed on a resolution which called for "(1) Recognition of
revolutionary class struggle as a fundamental principle. (2)
The violent overthrow of the State and capitalism by
adopting the dictatorship of proletarian organization as a
temporary and transitional measure for the attainment of
1452
Communism." (*16) The other representatives concurred
with the Russians' resolution, which was along Leninist
lines.
On the relation of politics to economics, the German and

the American delegates were opposed to all "politics," by
which they meant primarily parliamentarism; the British
Shop Steward delegates did not go so far. The Russians,
and with them the others, even the Spanish delegate,
Pestana, stood not only for the intimate connection of union
with party, but for the subordinate position of the unions to
the party. However, Pestana did point out that in Spain
such a relation could not arise, since the unions were strong
and the political party weak. Pestana therefore opposed the
subordination of the unions to the party in Spain. Neither
the British nor the Americans were opposed to co-operating
with the Communist Parties; only the German syndicalists
were in deadly opposition.
At this conference, the syndicalists also expressed their

antagonism to the formation of a proletarian state. They
declared they were against all States, although they had
stood for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. They were also
opposed to soviets. On this latter point the Russians
pointed out that the question of the exact form of
organization to supplant the bourgeois parliament would
have to be decided concretely in each country, and by no
means were soviets to be considered the sole and universal
formula to the exclusion, for example, of industrial councils.
It was on the question of direct affiliation to the Third

International that the Leninists received a formal defeat.
The original plan of the Third International had been to
form a trade union section directly connected and
subordinated to it, as one of its departments. On this, all the
delegates except the Bulgarians opposed the Russians.
1453
Finally, it was decided to form an independent body, but to
maintain reciprocal representation between the two
Internationals.
The subject that raised most discussion was that of the

tactics of the communist revolutionary elements within the
trade union movement in connection with the old mass
unions. The question was: Should the old unions be split or
captured? Both the Germans and the Americans favored
splitting from the reformist unions and forming new ones
to destroy the old. The communists, however, advocated
not the destruction but the conquest of the trade unions. On
this question, the communists refused to make any
compromise, since it meant the life and death of the new
international, and a split occurred with the elimination of
the out-and-out syndicalists.
In the end, the representatives of the principal unions from

Russia, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Jugo-slavia, and of
important minorities from France and Georgia, signed a
declaration calling for the formation of a new revolutionary
trade union center that would help abolish the dictatorship
of the bourgeoisie and would set up the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat. It condemned the tactics of the advanced
revolutionary elements in leaving the existing unions.
Finally, it set up a committee to function as the
International Council of Trade Unions, to act in agreement
with the Third International, and to prepare for a
forthcoming international congress.
Since to the groups actually present there were to be added

the whole of the trade union movements in Esthonia,
Norway, and Finland, and the revolutionary unions of
Germany, Austria, Ireland, Holland, and some in Canada
and America, the new trade union center presented a
promising future. The next year was held the congress that
1454
organized the Red International of Labor Unions. So long as
the communists maintained an international policy, they
had some chance of keeping their trade union organization
alive; the moment they degenerated to Russian nationalism,
they would lose most of their adherents.
The disagreements which had shown themselves in the

trade union conferences, in the course of which the
Leninists had lost the communistic syndicalist elements,
found a sharp echo within the ranks of the Communist
International itself. As usual, it was the Germans who gave
the Bolsheviks their chief theoretical battles; but this time
the German "Communists," only recently emancipated from
Kautskyianism and rank opportunism, were to attack from
the Left, although with arguments that strangely resembled
those in the books of Kautsky. In a special brochure, Lenin
was forced to take issue with the German Communist
Labor Party, with the Dutch Leftists, and with similar
tendencies to be found in an especially ludicrous form in
the United States.
The Communist Labor Party of Germany took up the

Centrist cry of Rosa Luxemburg that the Leninists had
created a Party attached to but over the masses. There
existed under Lenin not the dictatorship of the masses but
the dictatorship of the leaders, not the dictatorship of the
class but of the Party. This was also the opinion of Kautsky.
In his tractate, Lenin had to call attention to the fact that the
slogan "Down with Leaders" was nonsense, that the
statement that political parties were no longer necessary
was the acme of absurdity. The negation of the Party and of
Party discipline was equivalent to disarming the proletariat,
to capitulating to petty bourgeois lack of organization
which must end every proletarian revolutionary movement.
To reject the Party meant to attempt to jump from
1455
capitalism to the final stage of communism and to deny the
long hard process of struggle during which the bourgeoisie
must be crushed by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The second question which the Leftists raised concerned

work in the reactionary trade unions. In a large number of
countries, the "revolutionists" had decided that they no
longer could sit in the same room with the traitors who led
the workers' movement. Having just broken from the
Socialist Party, these elements never had learned how to do
revolutionary work among backward workers; now that
they were faced with this task, they concealed their
ineptness by leaving the scene and abandoning the workers
to the bureaucrats, all the while shouting about the purity
of their revolutionism. In Germany, indeed, the people who
so left the trade unions were often genuine, impatient
revolutionists, but this was not so in other countries where
weaklings posing as communists, unable to prove their
worth in given situations, took to flight.
On this question the Second Congress had categorically

avowed: "All voluntary withdrawals from the industrial
movement, every artificial attempt to organize special
unions without being compelled thereto by the exceptional
acts of violence on the part of the trade union
bureaucracy... .... represents a great danger to the
communist movement." (*17) In his polemic against the
childish "Leftists," Lenin stressed the point that it was silly
to wait until all the trade unionists became revolutionists
before the revolution would be ripe, and that a certain
conservatism in the trade unions was always to be found.
This existed even under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
To believe that the unions should be treated as though they
were political revolutionary organizations and that no
worker should be allowed to join unless he subscribed to
1456
the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or that, in turn, no
communist could join a union unless that body had
affirmed its adherence to such a principle was a crime. Even
under the soviets, to try to make communist bodies out of
trade union organizations was "like trying to make a four-
year-old girl a mother. At best, it would be a silly joke, a
foolish trick --- at its worst, an abuse of, and sordid crime
against nature." (*18)
"A greater lack of sense and more harm to the Revolution

than this attitude of the left revolutionists cannot be
imagined. Why, if we in Russia, after two and one-half
years of incredible victories over the Russian bourgeois and
the Entente, had demanded that entrance into the Trade
Unions must be conditional upon the 'acceptance of the
dictatorship,' we should have committed a stupid act,
impaired our influence over the masses and helped the
Mensheviki. For the whole of the communist problem is to
be able to convince the backward, to work in
their midst and not to set up a barrier between us and them, a
barrier of pedantic childishly 'left' slogans." (*19)
This viewpoint also was emphasized in the theses and

resolutions adopted at the Third Congress of the Comintern.
At the same time, the theory that the unions were to be
neutral in the class struggle was declared to be fallacious,
the correct view being that every protracted struggle of the
unions was bound to have great political reverberations,
just as every political decision of social importance was
bound to affect the unions. The Russian revolution had
been full of the harmful effects of such "neutrality" as
exemplified by the attempt of the railroad workers' union
executive to be "neutral" in the fight between Kerensky and
the Bolsheviks. However, all this did not mean the
communists could not work in the reactionary unions, but
1457
rather that, since the action of the unions could have such
fateful effect, this was all the more reason to work within
them to move them in the right direction.
Also, it was possible that splits would occur, no matter

what the communists did, since the trade union bureaucrats
would expel all those who were a menace to them.
However, the communists were to work so carefully that,
when they were expelled, large numbers of workers would
go with them, and thus the basis for a powerful union could
be laid that would free the workers from the agents of the
employers in the unions. The communists were to go into
the reactionary unions, not with abstract propaganda for
communism or with artificial issues, but with practical
concrete questions that the workers would recognize as
beneficial to them.
The issues that communists were to force prominently in

the unions were the struggles for better conditions,
industrial unionism, amalgamation of various unions facing
the same employers and meeting the same conditions,
democracy within the unions, militant action in strikes,
determined effort to organize the unorganized, and similar
matters. At the same time, the communists had to strive for
solidarity of the workers, leading to the general strike and
to workers' control over production, and also had to push
political issues such as the struggle against war, against
reaction, in behalf of Soviet Russia, and for a workers'
government in their respective countries. The unions were
to work closely with the Communist Party.
Then, too, there was the task of organizing the unorganized

workers, a task which properly belonged to the communists,
especially in periods of violence and upheaval. In the
course of this work it might happen that entire unions
would be controlled by communists; thus the question of
1458
the relation between the Party and the unions became a
vital one.
The Third Congress of the Comintern reiterated the

Leninist position that "The Party must learn how to
influence the unions without attempting to keep them in
leading strings." (*20) The communists must exercise no
choking control but rather lead through ability, teaching the
workers in the unions the lessons of revolution by leading
them in the sort of direct action to which the union was
accustomed. "Under 'direct action' we mean all forms of
direct pressure of the workers upon the employers and the
state: boycott, strike, street demonstrations, seizure of the
factories, armed uprisings and other revolutionary activity,
which tend to unite the working class in the fight for
Socialism." (*21)
The attitude of the Left communists at the Second Congress

in refusing to work in reactionary organizations did not
confine itself to the trade unions, but was enunciated as a
general principle. The German Leftists declared the
revolution was at hand, that the only thing needed was
independence of action and the masses would follow. This
was essentially a putschist, and Blanquist point of view.
They completely underestimated the need for preparation
for the insurrection and the role of the Party in that
preparation. They substituted their subjective wishes for
the political reality and constituted a most dangerous factor
in the German movement at that time. To the German
Leftists, evidently, everything would be settled
immediately at the barricades. There was no need for dull,
routine, day-today, practical work.
It must be confessed that this attitude of the German

Leftists of the Communist Labor Party variety sprang from
deep sources and should have served as a warning to the
1459
Comintern of the dangerous Right Wing tendencies that
their official Party, the United Communist Party, a fusion of
Spartacists and Independent Socialists, was displaying.
Indeed, Lenin recognized that very point and made every
effort to retain the Communist Labor Party within the ranks
of the Comintern and to persuade them eventually to fuse
with the Communist Party. But the errors of the Leftists
were too far-reaching to permit such fusion. The
Communist Labor Party, after launching an open attack
against the Russian Revolution, itself deteriorated steadily
in an anarchistic and syndicalistic direction.
The German Leftists at least were rooted in the German

scene and numbered several hundred thousand members
and supporters in the early days. Similarly was it with the
situation in Italy, where the Leftists had raised the sharpest
struggle against the fatal error of the communists in not
separating themselves soon enough from the Right Wing
and Centrists. But in other countries, Leftism took on a
ludicrous coloring indeed and showed that the communists
of these nations were simply part of the lunatic fringe
rather than deeply rooted in the social life of their nations.
In spite of all their screaming for the revolution, without
making the slightest serious preparations for it, they
showed themselves to be not parties of a class but circles of
intellectuals copying the worst aspects of the intellectualism
of a handful of workingmen. In many places this became
the popular impression of communists. Lenin fought these
phrase-mongers with especial vigor. The whole aspect of
the Second Congress was one in which the Bolsheviks were
trying to force the communists of the world to root
themselves in the class relations of their country and to
appeal to the masses. This was to be emphasized greatly in
the Third Congress; organizational guarantees to insure it
were to be taken.
1460
In the course of their general argument, the Leftists had
opened fire against participation in bourgeois parliaments
by revolutionists. Lenin had to call them to task and to
plead that they view the situation more realistically.
Questions of participation in parliament were questions of
tactics. The Bolsheviks at times had participated in and, at
other times, had boycotted parliament. But what the Leftists
had to realize was that the European revolution was going
to prove a far more difficult job than had been the case in
Russia. Certain specific conditions which had existed in
Russia were not present in Western Europe, and a
repetition of those factors was not probable. These special
conditions were the possibility of connecting the Soviet
revolution with the end of the War, the possibility of
making use of the deadly struggle of two sets of world
plunderers who could not unite against the soviets in time,
the possibility of withstanding civil war because of the
gigantic extent of the country, the poor means of
communication, the lack of food supply, and, finally, the
existence of a broad bourgeois revolutionary peasant
movement.
In short, the European revolution was not a single act, but a

long process with many a zig-zag curve. The idea that
communists would advance in a single straight line always
upward and forward was nonsense. The forefront fighters
of the proletariat would have to be prepared to make many
retreats and many compromises, compromises not in the
sense of abandoning principles as the opportunists were
doing, but in the sense of utilizing compromise but
temporarily, only to push forward the revolution later,
which were the tactics of the Leninists. Under such
circumstances, the ability cleverly to maneuver was
absolutely essential. Above all, communists had to be
1461
realists if they were to accomplish the task of world
revolution.
Wrote the Master: "It is not at all difficult to be a good

Revolutionist once the Revolution has broken out-when all
and everyone joins the Revolution from mere enthusiasm,
because it is the fashion, sometimes even from
considerations of personal gain. It costs the proletariat labor,
great labor and I may say excruciating pains, after the
victory to rid itself of these pseudo-Revolutionists. But it is
far more difficult, and yet more valuable, to know how to
be a Revolutionist, even when conditions are yet lacking for
direct, general, truly mass and truly Revolutionary action;
to be able to defend the interests of the Revolution by
propaganda, agitation and organization, in non-
Revolutionary institutions and oftentimes in downright
reactionary surroundings, among masses incapable of
immediately understanding the necessity for Revolutionary
methods. To be able to find, to sense, to determine the
concrete plan of still incomplete Revolutionary methods
and measures, leading the masses to the real, decisive, final,
great Revolutionary struggle --- this is the chief problem of
modern Communism in Western Europe and America."
(*22)
From the time of the Second Congress to his death, Lenin

bent all his energies to building solid and capable
revolutionary parties throughout the world. The First
Congress had worked out the general principles; the
Second Congress had given form to the organization,
excluding the worst Centrist elements; the Third Congress
was to set to work actually to create an army for
revolutionary work. Lenin made no attempt to conceal the
fact that his international army was woefully weak, and,
1462
with the Third Congress, we find the utmost attention paid
to the thorough reorganization of the Parties. Only through
such reorganization could the resolutions on mass work
really be put into effect. The Theses on Organization,
therefore, are really the heart of the work of the Third
Congress.
I The Third Congress of the Comintern met from June 22 to

July 12, 1921, in Moscow. By this time, the world
revolutionary wave had subsided somewhat, with the
defeat of the movement in Germany and the introduction of
the New Economic Policy in Russia. The post-war crisis of
1920 had ended, and European capitalism was reviving.
The first question that arose in the minds of the delegates
was whether this revival signified the falseness of the whole
theory of the Communist International to the effect that the
present was an era of wars and revolutions. Would
capitalism be restored? Was revolution to be postponed
indefinitely? Could Soviet Russia endure? Already, in
practically every country, pessimism was entering into the
ranks of the newly formed Communist Parties, and many
Centrist elements were deserting what they considered a
lost cause. In Germany, Levi was expelled, (*23) and later
Brandler; in France, Froissard, and later Souvarine and
Treint; in Italy, Turati, and later Serrati. In practically every
country there arose deep schisms and factional struggles.
The Third Congress carefully analyzed the situation and

pointed out that, although the proletariat was losing some
of its too easily won positions, and had experienced some
temporary setbacks, nevertheless, it was "an undoubted
mark of our time that the curve of capitalist evolution
proceeds, through temporary rises, constantly downwards,
while the curve of revolution proceeds through some
vacillations constantly upwards." (*24) All this but
1463
reaffirmed the conclusion that the basic task before the
communists was to try in a revolutionary manner to win
the majority of the workers to their side. The most vigorous
struggle must be launched against the Centrists, not only
outside the Comintern's ranks and now crystallized in the
new Vienna Union of Socialist-Centrist Parties, but against
every Centrist tendency within. "The character of the
transition period makes it imperative for all Communist
Parties to be thoroughly prepared for the struggle. Each
separate struggle may lead to the struggle for power.
Preparedness can only be achieved by giving to the entire
Party agitation the character of a vehement attack against
capitalist society." (*25)
The Comintern meeting then set itself to discuss the

Leninist Theses on Organization. The Theses declared that,
while no absolutely infallible form of organization existed,
forms changing with the needs of the times, yet general
principles holding true for all capitalist countries were
possible. Everywhere the Communist Party was to consider
itself the vanguard of the working class and must affirm the
necessity of leadership and close association to the masses.
Organic unity within the Party could be attained only
through the principle of democratic centralism. "Democratic
centralism in the Communist Party organization must be a
real synthesis, a fusion of centralism and proletarian
democracy. This fusion can be achieved only on the basis of
constant common activity, constant common struggle of the
entire party organization. Centralization in the Communist
Party organization does not mean a formal and mechanical
centralization, but a centralization of communist activity,
that is to say the formation of a strong leadership, ready for
war and at the same time capable of adaptability." (*26)
1464
The Congress went on to point out that the Communist
Parties were still under bourgeois influence, that within
them was to be found a division of labor between the
members and the functionaries, in which the latter were
turning into bureaucrats substituting formal democracy for
the living association of common endeavor, while the
members were relegated to passive positions. This dualism
had to be fought by any means.
Mere adoption of communist programs was not enough.

"Regular participation on the part of most of the members
in the daily work of the Party is lacking even today in the
lawful Communist Parties. That is the chief fault of these
parties, forming the basis of constant insecurity in their
development.... The art of Communist organization lies in
the ability of making use of each and every one for the
proletarian class struggle; of distributing the Party work
amongst all the Party members, and of constantly attracting
through its members ever wider masses of the proletariat to
the revolutionary movement; further it must hold the
direction of the whole movement in its hand not by virtue
of its might but by its authority, energy, greater experience,
greater all-round knowledge and capabilities. A
Communist Party must strive to have only really active
members, and to demand from every rank and file party
worker that he should place his whole strength and time, in
so far as he can himself dispose of it, under existing
conditions, at the disposal of his Party and devote his best
forces to these services."(*27)
With the social-democrats, the Party was an instrument

primarily for election campaigns. It was composed of large
branches organized on a residential territorial basis and
engaged mainly in educational activity. The Communist
Parties, on the other hand, would have to be entirely
1465
remodeled on a nuclei and fraction basis. Wherever there
were gathered together three or more communists, there
should be organized a nucleus based either on a given shop
or a given industrial or territorial area. Hence there were to
be three forms of nuclei: the shop nucleus, the street
nucleus, and the transition nucleus based on several
factories in a given industrial area.
The nuclei were to be small; thus they easily could function

illegally. The smallness of the unit lent itself to the training
of every member and to the checking up of all work. Thus
could be established that flexibility and mutual confidence
that only common living associative effort could produce.
The leadership should come from the best material, the
ones who best could perform the concrete dangerous jobs
under the communist policy, the ones tested and refreshed
in the struggle.
The most important nuclei were the shop nuclei in a given

factory, plant, works, or industrial unit. Their function was
to make every factory a communist stronghold and to carry
out all the political activity possible among the workers of
the given place. One of the chief tasks of the nucleus was
the building up of a shop committee for struggle for better
conditions at the point of production and eventually for
workers' control over the factories. They were to
concentrate their efforts also to unionize the shop and to
initiate a militant policy in the union thus formed. But the
shop nucleus was not to confine itself to trade union or
economic questions. Above all, it must be a political unit of
a revolutionary party; it must issue a paper if possible; it
must distribute political leaflets and lead the workers in all
sorts of demonstrations to expose and overthrow the State.
The street nuclei were not as important as the shop nuclei,

although they too had considerable tasks to perform. One
1466
of their main duties was concentration on the factories in
their given neighborhoods in an effort to form nuclei in
every plant and productive unit within their jurisdiction.
They also were to assist the shop nuclei in such matters as
the distribution of the shop paper, which could not be done
by the members working in the factory itself. The street
nuclei also should help to organize the transition unit in a
given industrial area, which unit was to include a number
of similar shops not yet providing their own shop nuclei.
Besides, the street unit had the job of organizing struggles

in the workers' quarters, the mobilization of the women in
the fight against the high cost of living or against war, the
creation of tenants' leagues for the reduction of rents, the
work among the capitalist-led organizations in workers'
neighborhoods, the carrying on of open air meetings and of
various demonstrations. Of great importance, too, was the
work of the street unit in regard to unemployment.
Naturally, the workers in the shop nuclei could not take the
lead here and, as the unemployment crisis grew worse at
different times, the street nuclei had to take charge.
The reorganization of the old parties on the new nuclei

basis meant a veritable revolution in the lives of the
communists. It signified that the Party no longer was to be
an opportunist organization with loose control and with
simple educational and parliamentary functions. The Party
was to be engaged in tireless, day-to-day, practical tasks in
preparation for the winning of the masses for the seizure of
power. All members now were to be active and trained for
leadership in the various departments of work that opened
up. The Communist International was to be Bolshevized.
No Party with such a method of operation could fail to
carry on a revolutionary policy; no revolutionary party
1467
could carry on its multitudinous and variegated tasks
without such a structure.
The work of the Communist Parties also was to be

systematized into a definite division of labor. A number of
departments and committees were to carry on special work.
The principal fields of activity were placed in the hands of
departments which had representatives in every district,
section, and unit of the Party. Such departments were the
agitation and propaganda departments, the women's work
department, the Negro work department, the trade union
work department, the organization department; in various
localities, other departments were added according to the
nature of the work. Besides these, there were committees on
anti-militarist work, on work among the co-operatives, on
work among the various groups of foreign-speaking
workers in a given country, on anti-imperialist work in
behalf of the colonies, on work among the youth, in the
clubs, and in other associations of the working class and
other strata of the population.
The communists had the duty of penetrating into all

associations of the working class, wherever they could do
work and carry on revolutionary activity. Where such
organizations did not exist, the communists were to try to
create them on a broad basis, with a given concrete
program of struggle. Thus, the Party would be a central
ganglion connecting a myriad of organizations with a
uniform policy and coordinating all phases of the battle
against the capitalist State. The leaders of such a Party,
naturally, had to be tested elements with a wide and varied
experience, capable of effective performance in any branch
of the service.
Within the broad organizations of the working class, the

communists were to come together and organize a fraction
1468
to be composed solely of these revolutionists for special
work in the given organization. Fractions did not have the
power of nuclei, which were the basic political units of the
Party where dues were collected, tasks assigned, elections
held, and general control exercised. The fractions had the
special purpose of working out concrete tasks in a given
specific field, of determining and carrying forth a
revolutionary policy in all the mass organizations with
which they were connected. Thus, there were trade union
fractions, club fractions, co-operative fractions, etc., which
were the levers which moved the big wheels of the mass
organizations in turn to stir the entire class into action at
given moments.
When operating properly, the Communist Party would

embrace several important social functions. First, it would
serve as the general scientific staff of the working class,
made up of advanced class-conscious theoreticians,
working in different fields of activity, but capable of
comprehending the problem of their class as a whole and of
connecting their particular activity with the basic needs of
the international proletariat. Second, the Party, embracing
as it should the active members of the proletariat and the
most courageous elements, represented the vanguard of the
class; that is, it was made up of troops eager for the battle
and the first to take the most dangerous posts in the fight.
Third, the Party, when properly formed and functioning,
was the driving force in the ranks of the workers, moving
them in the proper direction and stiffening up their ranks in
struggle. This was the ideal of the Third International under
Lenin.
The aforementioned plan of organization was worked out

in detail, and instructions were drawn up for each
department. One of the main tasks was that of agitation and
1469
propaganda. The Socialist Parties had stressed propaganda
rather than agitation, the Communists were to emphasize
the latter. (*28) Communism would not arise from book-
reading, it would arrive only through the bitter experiences
of the mass of workers unable to read much and dependent
on life itself to teach them. Instead of mulling over abstract
treatises on the value of socialism, therefore, the communist
had to occupy himself above all with the concrete problems
of the proletariat and, through these problems, propound to
the workers the general theory.
Under the Socialist Party, the press generally had been

uncontrolled, sometimes the official organ being the private
property of a few. Such a situation was intolerable among
communists. Not only ownership but the whole character
of the paper must be changed. "Our papers must not serve
for the satisfaction of the desire for sensation or as a
pastime for the general public. They must not yield to the
criticism of the petty bourgeois writers or journalist
virtuosos in the striving to become 'respectable."' (*29)
The editorial staff no longer was to be composed

exclusively of intellectuals who had never been engaged in
actual struggle and who made writing their profession. The
paper above all was to be administered and written by the
active workers at the scene of struggle.
This was in line with the general theory of the Leninists,

that there was to be no bourgeois division of brain and
brawn in the communist ranks. While no distinction was
made between communist intellectuals and communist
workers, yet the intellectual was to be proletarianized and
the proletarian intellectualized. The intellectual had to learn
by doing, through performing concrete tasks, both the dull
and routine and the dangerous ones; he had to show his
mettle before he could rise towards leadership. The workers
1470
who had accomplished these tasks should be taken out of
the factories and, wherever possible, out of the work shops,
and made into general leaders of the Party.
Of very great importance was the anti-militarist struggle

which the opportunist socialists had never carried on.
Nuclei had to be formed within the armed forces of the
State, but by no means must the anti-militarist agitation be
of a pacifist nature, since such agitation only assisted the
bourgeoisie in its efforts to disarm the proletariat.
"Intensive agitation must therefore be directed not against
the military training of the youth and workers, but against
the militaristic regime, and the domination of the officers.
Every possibility of providing the workers with weapons
should most eagerly be taken advantage of." (*30)
In regard to work among the State forces, the Third

Congress called attention to the fact that the lawful parties
were not preparing sufficiently for illegal work, for the time
when democracy would come to an end, and they would be
driven underground. The lawful parties, for example, had
done little in the matter of combating secret service men in
their ranks. The Leninists favored harsh treatment of spies
and agents provocateurs found in their ranks. This was not a
variation of anarchist individual terror, but mere self-
defense.
The Third Congress considered fully the need for

organization of both the women and the youth. In regard to
the women it declared: "The Third Congress of the
Communist International maintains that the conquest of
power by the proletariat, as well as the achievement of
Communism in those countries where the capitalist State
has already been overthrown, can be realized only with the
active participation of the wide masses of the proletarian
and semi-proletarian Women.'' (*31) By 1920, an
1471
International Secretariat for work among women had been
started, not because the communists believed in special
organizations for women, but because of special conditions
affecting them and of the necessity for special methods of
work. The thesis declared:
"Being earnestly opposed to the separate organization of

women into all sorts of parties, unions, or any other special
women’s organizations, the Third Congress, nevertheless,
believes that in view of: (a) the present conditions of
subjection prevailing not only in the bourgeois-capitalist
countries, but also in countries under the Soviet system,
undergoing transition from capitalism to communism; (b)
the great inertness and political ignorance of the masses of
women, due to the fact that they have been for centuries
barred from social life and to age-long slavery to the family,
and (c) the special functions imposed upon women by
nature-childbirth, and the peculiarities attached to this,
calling for the protection of her strength and health in the
interests of the entire community, the Third Congress
therefore considers it necessary to find special methods of
work among the women of the Communist Parties and
establishes a standard of special apparatus within the
Communist Parties for the realization of this work." (*32)
Similarly, the Communist International gave full

consideration to the organization of the youth. From the
start it had valued the youth organizations which had been
among the first to break from the old Socialist Parties, to
fight the War, and to take a revolutionary stand. There was
this difference between the special apparatus for working
out methods for work among women and work among the
youth: the women's work was but a department of the
Comintern; the youth work was made into a special
organization with its own heads and own political
1472
functions. Not that the youth organizations were young
people's parties, rivals to the Communist Parties. On the
contrary, the Young Communist Leagues were subordinate
politically to the Communist Parties, but they were not to
be subordinated organizationally.
This latter was an extremely wise policy, not only because

of the special problems of the young, but because it gave a
guarantee to the youth that they would not be swamped by
older elements, that they would have the opportunity to
work out problems for themselves, that they could use the
flexibility and adaptability and independence of youth to
the best advantage to themselves and to the working class
as a whole.
Sending delegates to the Comintern and abiding by its

decisions, the Young Communist International nevertheless
was to be of a broader nature than the regular Parties. It
was not to be limited to professional revolutionaries, but
rather was to develop a full program, including sports,
social activities, and so forth, that would appeal to youth. It
would be responsible for carrying out tasks especially
pertaining to youth. It was to undertake educational work
among the small children, who were to be organized into
Pioneer associations. Above all, it had serious
responsibilities towards anti-militarist work which was left
to a considerable extent in its hands. It was to take an
important position in physical defense work and in all
fighting and demonstrations of such a character.
All this rendered the Young Communist Leagues entirely

different from the Socialist Leagues of the day, which were
made up mostly of students, carrying on no real economic
struggles for the youth, entrenched in no factory or point of
production, neglecting all serious anti-militarist work, and
concentrating entirely on education of an academic
1473
character. The Third Congress stressed that "The
fundamental difference between the Young Communist
organizations and the young centrist and social-democratic
organizations lies in their participation in all political
problems; in the work and construction of Communist
Parties, and in the active participation in revolutionary
struggle." (*33)
One further important question the Comintern considered,

the question of internal struggles and factional fighting. The
Third Congress declared that the way to win the confidence
of the membership and to secure discipline was not to crush
all differences of opinion that might arise on various
questions, but to allow full discussion in the Party where
such questions arose within the general framework of the
Party Program. In line with this, the Third Congress
affirmed: "In order to study the general and political
situation and to gain a clear idea of the state of affairs in the
Party it is necessary to have various localities represented
on the Central Committee whenever decisions are to be
passed affecting the life of the entire Party. For the same
reason, differences of opinion regarding tactics should not
be suppressed by the Central Committee if they are of a
serious nature. On the contrary, these opinions should get
representation upon the Central Committee." (*34) This
policy reiterated the belief of Lenin that objective events are
constantly changing, thereby forcing new decisions. Where
the Party is new and weak, factions are often inevitable.
(*35) That the factions do not result in splits may be because
the Party is doing important work, and each member feels a
certain responsibility not to break off this work without
grave reasons. In the case of a new Party in the formative
stages, splits are generally disastrous, and all sides tend to
avoid them unless they believe there is absolutely no other
possibility of changing the wrong line of the organization.
1474
Even in older and more tested organizations, factions are
inevitable because of the lack of unity among all layers of
the working class, and because of the influence of other
classes upon sections of the Party. So long as the factions
have a difference of policy within the general framework of
communism, these differences can be tolerated and
adjusted in the course of struggle. As we have seen, the
Comintern provided that minority groups should be
represented even in the leading executive body of the Party,
the Central Committee which had full power of control
between conventions. The theory of the monolithic party, in
the sense of the rejection of all toleration of differences of
opinion, had not been introduced. The follow-the-leader
idea was to arise later, in the period of degeneration of the
Comintern.
Lenin's Theses on Organization came as a bomb shell upon

the Parties affiliated with the Comintern. Although they
had joined the Communist International, they were only
just weaned from socialist centrist tendencies. Now they
found that before they could really understand the Leninist
method of work, they would have to re-organize their ranks
completely. The re-organization stripped bare all the
revolutionary phraseology of the so-called communists and
exposed them as having had really no preparation for
revolutionary struggle.
Naturally, the various Parties resisted these Theses. The

resolutions of the Third Congress were adopted
unanimously and then systematically sabotaged. At the
Fourth Congress, the instructions were repeated. At the
Fifth Congress, in 1924, it was reluctantly admitted that in
practice the re-organization "has hitherto not been pushed
with sufficient energy." (*36)
1475
At the Fourth Congress, held in 1922, Lenin, in one of the
last speeches he was ever to make, undertook to estimate
the situation as follows: "At the Third Congress of 1921 we
adopted a resolution concerning the organizatory
upbuilding of the Communist Parties, and concerning the
method and the substance of their work. It was a good
resolution.... Everything in the resolution has remained a
dead letter.... Foreigners ... first of all have to learn how to
understand all that we have written about the organization
and upbuilding of the Communist Parties which they have
subscribed to without reading and without understanding
it. You foreign comrades must make this your first duty.
This resolution must be carried into effect.'' (*37)
At the Fifth Congress, in 1924, also it had to be mournfully

declared that "The Period between the Fourth and Fifth
congresses of the Communist International has shown that
the opportunist tendencies in the Communist movement
are stronger than could have been expected. A number of
the sections of the Comintern had grown out of the very
heart of the Second International and had brought with
them unsuppressed remnants of Social-Democratic
traditions. Right deviations can acquire a dangerous
character, as our Communist parties become mass
organizations." (*38)
As a matter of fact, so vigorously did the Parties sabotage

the resolution on re-organization that, before it could
become effective, large splits had occurred in almost every
country. Its execution at the very best was a haphazard and
fitful process, in the course of which many of the Parties
shrank to a small percentage of their former bloated
membership. In the end, it was given up in fact. The failure
to accomplish the re-organization of the Party was only part
of the general failure of the Communist Parties, outside of
1476
the Russian, to attain the level of Leninism that had been
reached in the course of the Russian Revolution.
Among the worst was the situation in the American

Communist Party. With a membership entirely out of touch
with the mass of workers of the country, with internal,
factional fighting rendering the organization futile, with
nineteen foreign federations striving for power and setting
up as their leader any puppet who could speak English, the
American Communist Party was the greatest possible
antithesis to the kind of Bolshevik Party the Leninists meant
to create. Thus, when degeneration struck the center of the
Comintern, it found decay already present in the American
groups. However, we leave this matter here to treat it in
extenso later.
The complete failure to re-organize the quondam Socialist

Parties into genuine Bolshevik organizations was an
ominous sign that these so-called Communist Parties were
Socialist reformist Parties at heart, essentially unchanged.
This manifested itself clearly in the functioning of these
Parties in mass work. The time had now come when the
Communist Parties had to apply themselves to the task of
winning workers and proving their worth.
Already the Third Congress had laid down detailed

instructions on how to realize the slogan "To the Masses."
The next Congress, held in November-December, 1922,
developed this idea of mass work still further. The Fourth
Congress, commemorating as it did Five Years of the
victorious Russian Revolution, started its proceedings with
the statement that "The Fourth World Congress reminds the
proletarians of all countries that the proletarian revolution
can never be completely victorious within one single
country, but that it must win the victory internationally, as
the world revolution.'' (*39)
1477
The stability of the Russian Dictatorship depended upon
the increased power of the world communist movement. To
attain this increased power, these Parties had seriously to
address themselves to winning over the masses. One of the
best ways to accomplish this was through the tactics of the
united front. The question of the united front, therefore,
was the chief one to disturb the Fourth Congress of the
Comintern.
A united front may be defined as the coming together of

various organizations for the purpose of combining their
forces for common struggle on a concrete issue or set of
issues. For communists, the united front is not a mere
maneuver, but an absolute necessity for the working class.
Without a united front the workers cannot resist the
employers' attacks. The workers divided cannot win and, if
the communists are to lead the workers in their struggles,
they must know how to unite them on the specific issues of
the day. These issues form the common denominator which
binds together all the divergent groups.
Naturally, within the united front, the Communist

Organization maintained its entire independence and right
to criticize. Otherwise the revolutionary organization
would be giving up its right to work out a revolutionary
policy. The fact that other organizations differed on
essential questions with the communists posed before the
latter a difficult problem. On the one hand it was necessary
to create united fronts with the broadest possible basis; on
the other hand it was imperative for the communists to
unmask the various other agencies within the united front,
to expose their shortcomings and their limitations, and to
destroy their influence. Thus, the communists had before
them a dual task, namely, to unite the workers and, at the
same time, to win them away from organizations with a
1478
non-revolutionary policy. There was the task of mobilizing
the broadest strata of the working class; there was also the
task of revolutionizing them. The problem was dialectically
to connect these two tasks so that instead of being
antithetical they became part of one whole.
That the united front implied the divided rear was a truism;
while the different organizations that came together were
willing to agree on a common struggle for a concrete point,
they often disagreed on methods and on aims. Were the
groups really alike they would have come together not in a
united front, where they touched each other at one given
point, but in a complete fusion. Thus the united front was
not a compact of uncritical friends, but rather an alliance in
which the communists watched their allies as they would
their enemies, one in which the communists had no
illusions concerning their more or less temporary fellow-
travelers.
In all united fronts lay the danger that the communist

elements would form not only a united front but a united
front and rear, in which they would become the rear and be
used by their allies as coolies for aims against the working
class. For this reason it was absolutely necessary to secure
that kind of united front that would avoid all secret
diplomatic maneuvers and would place the issues squarely
before the masses. The united front should not be a
parliamentary bloc but should be one of actual physical
struggle. The united front should not be a round table
discussion with leaders only. "United front tactics from
above alone is the method that the Communist
International categorically and resolutely repudiates." (*40)
Nor should the united front be formed with indefinite

general aims; it must be definite, concrete, and limited in
time and subject matter. It should be pointed out, however,
1479
that the united front for specific daily demands also could
lead directly to the struggle for the State. This had
happened in Russia where the soviets represented a united
front body of various organizations for the seizure of power.
Thus, the united front could lead to the formation of a
workers' government.
In working out rules whereby communists could prevent

their becoming the tail of reformists, the Fourth Congress
declared: "The most important thing in the tactics of the
United Front is and remains the agitational and
organizational unification of the working masses
themselves. The real success of the United Front tactics is to
come from 'below,' from the depth of the working masses
themselves. At the same time, the Communists should not
decline, under given circumstances, to negotiate with the
leaders of the workers' parties in opposition to us. But the
masses must be constantly and completely kept informed of
the course of these negotiations." (*41)
The united front was not only a method of uniting masses

for struggle, but a means of reaching workers otherwise
unattainable. This was particularly true in such countries as
the United States where the communists were isolated from
the masses and were weak. Nor was the united front
merely to be employed as tactics where the communists
were uninfluential. The history of the Bolshevik Party
showed that they made united fronts even on the day of the
conquest of power.
The united front indeed offered an excellent arena for the

communists to engage in a life-and-death, hand-to-hand,
close struggle with opportunists and centrists of all shades,
since, in the united front movement, all sections were faced
with the same tasks, and the masses could see clearly which
group, in a given situation, evolved the correct analysis,
1480
who was the real fighter and who was not. The united front
in communist theory was a struggle of tooth-and-claw,
without which the masses could not be torn from their false
leaders.
Moreover, the united front tactic was a method by which

the character of the communists was rounded out, their
ability tested, their revolutionary science put to the proof.
Only through the most intimate contact with the
opportunists and centrists of all kinds could the communist
thoroughly understand all the relations of forces in the
ranks of the workers.
That the communists were not afraid to confer with their

worst enemies in the interests of the working class was seen
in April, 1922, when there gathered together the
representatives of the Second, Third, and Vienna Union
("Two-and-a-half") Internationals. The meeting had been
called by the Vienna Union. The delegates from the Third
International proposed that the agenda confine itself to the
following concrete points: 1. defense against the capitalist
offensive; 2. struggle against reaction; 3. preparation of the
fight against new imperialist wars; 4. assistance in the
reconstruction of the Russian Soviet Republic; 5. the Treaty
of Versailles and the reconstruction of the devastated
regions. (*42)
Evidently the Second International had not come for such a

purpose. Before it would agree to a united front with the
communists, the latter would have to satisfy three
conditions: First, the communists must release the political
prisoners in Russia; second, they must free Georgia; third,
they must abandon their nuclei tactics and independence of
action. Here we see a classic situation of the sabotage of the
opportunists of the Second International to the united front.
It was obvious that should the debates embrace the
1481
conditions presented by the Second International, a united
front would be impossible, for the communists would retort
(as they did) that the socialists had shot them down by the
thousands and had turned over the workers of the world to
the capitalists. The communists had come with no
conditions, they had not tried to bring before the conference
the crimes of the opportunist socialists; all they asked was
that the groups should unite in common action on concrete
questions so that the capitalists of the world should be
defeated.
In regard to the history of Georgia under the Mensheviks,

Radek, the delegate from the Third International, made an
interesting expose of the entire situation. He read a
declaration from the Menshevik Foreign Minister of
Georgia at the time, Gegetchkori, to General Alexiev, at a
Conference with the representatives of the White armies of
the South, in which the socialist had proudly declared, "We
have suppressed the Bolshevists in our country, we have
given shelter to your White officers." (*43) Also, on the
invitation of this socialist Georgian government claiming
independence, arrived the German troops, under General
von Kress, who were greeted with bursts of enthusiasm by
the socialists. When the Germans were forced to withdraw,
the Georgians admitted the British, under General
Thomson, who installed their army at Batoum. Radek then
read from the book written by the Menshevik Dschugeli,
which had affirmed. "At the command of General Thomson
the Social-Democratic Party and the Government were to
pull down the red flag from the Government House."
Radek concludes with the point that, in the period when the
Georgian Mensheviks, such as Tseretelli and Jordania, were
supporting Kerensky, they never had proposed the
independence of Georgia; the moment the Bolsheviks
1482
gained control, the others immediately allied themselves
with the bourgeoisie of their country to break away.
Jordania, indeed, had declared in a speech: "We cannot
remain neutral, and if we have to choose between Eastern
fanaticism and Western civilization, we decide in favor of
Western civilization." (*44)
The fact of the matter is that the opportunists and Centrists

came to this International Conference, not in order to find
means of struggling against the new capitalist offensive, but
to struggle against alleged Russian imperialism. Unless the
communists would relinquish their principles, there could
be no united front. This was the import of their declarations.
And, in fact, no united front was obtained. Soon thereafter
the Vienna Union fused with the Second International to
form the Labor and Socialist International. It now became
plain that even to bring about the united front, the most
rigorous struggle against the opportunists would have to be
made on all sides. The slogan of the unity of the workers in
concrete questions would become an excellent method to
expose the deliberate lack of unity of the workers under the
reformists.
However, one important united front was established. The

aforementioned Conference had agreed to try to bring the
Amsterdam Trade Union International Center and the Red
International together for joint discussions. When this
second Conference was held, it was found that, while the
general leadership was opposed to united actions with the
Russians, the British trade union movement was willing to
participate. This was due to several factors. In the first place,
the British officials were not as yet afraid of the small and
timid Communist Party of Great Britain. It was otherwise
on the continent itself. Secondly, Britain already had begun
commercial relations with Russia, and the trade union
1483
leaders, following their masters, saw no reason why labor
should not now permit the same relations. Accordingly
there was formed an Anglo-Russian Trade Union
Committee. "The driving force in this campaign were the
British trade unionists and Socialists who saw in the
Russian market a chance for the revival of British industry
and who were worried by economic depression and by the
specter of big strikes ahead." (*45) Nothing constructive
came out of the work of this Anglo-Russian Trade Union
Unity Committee and, after the British General Strike of
1926, it passed out of existence, giving place to violent
polemics within the communist's ranks.
The Fourth Congress of the Comintern analyzed five

varieties of workers governments. First, there was the
Liberal Workers Government, such as existed in Australia
and was likely to be formed in Great Britain in the near
future. Second, there was the Social-Democratic Workers
Government, such as had been formed in Germany. Third,
the possibility existed of a Workers and Peasants
Government in the Balkans. Fourth, there was a Workers'
Government in which communists participated, such as
existed when both Bolsheviks and Left Social-
Revolutionaries held cabinet seats after the October
Revolution. Finally, there was the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat which the Communist Party alone could
embody.
The Congress went on to declare: "The first two types are

not revolutionary workers' governments, but a disguised
coalition between the bourgeoisie and the anti-
revolutionary groups. Such workers' governments are
tolerated, at critical moments, by the weakened bourgeoisie,
in order to dupe the workers as to the true class character of
1484
the State, or with the aid of the corrupt leaders to divert the
revolutionary onslaught of the proletariat, and to gain time.
"The communists cannot take part in such governments. On

the contrary, they must ruthlessly expose their true
character to the masses. In this period of capitalist decline,
when the main task is to win the majority of the
proletarians for the proletarian revolution, such
governments may serve as a means to precipitate the
destruction of bourgeois power." (*46)
The application of this policy was to be seen clearly in

England when, before the Labour Party took power, the
communists supported that Party against the Liberals and
Conservatives, even though the Labour Party would have
nothing to do with Communist Party affiliation and was
even expelling communist individuals to be found in its
ranks. But when the Labour Party took office and the first
Labour Government was formed, the Communist Party
openly broke from the Labourites, to concentrate their
attack upon this government as a form of collaboration with
the employers.
If we now review the history and work of the first four

Congresses of the Communist International, we see the
Leninists desperately striving to take advantage of the first
great revolutionary wave to spread the revolution. This was
for them a categorical imperative, if the Russian Socialist
Soviet Republic were to survive. We find, however, that
there was a deep abyss between the Russian Party and
other Parties which were groping their way to communism.
The Western Communist Parties were unable to redress
their ranks in a revolutionary manner soon enough to take
advantage of the many opportunities weakened capitalism
offered to them.
1485
As the first revolutionary wave came to an end in Western
Europe by 1923, these immature communists begin to
succumb to the capitalist pressure around them. This
pressure, moreover, affected not merely the outside
Communist Parties, but the Russian as well, especially after
the death of Lenin. As the Russians controlled the
Communist International, this only intensified the collapse
of that body, since there could be no adequate resistance
from the other semi-communist organizations. The fact is, a
stable Communist International is impossible unless the
advanced workers in the important industrial countries of
the world are ready for communism.
Footnotes
1. M. Fainsod: International Socialism and the World War, p.

182.
3. Lenin's theses are given in R. W. Postgate: The Bolshevik

Theory, Appendix III, pp. 211-212.
4. Theses of the Communist International, Second Congress, p. 4.
5. The same, p. 8.
6. Theses presented to the Second Congress of the Communist

International, pp. 13-14.
7. Theses of the Communist International, Second

Congress, "The Communist Party and Parliamentarism," p. 2.
8. The same, p. 3.
9. How different these rules were from the practice of the

reformists can be seen when we find, for example, that even
the Labour Party of Great Britain, supposedly based upon
1486
the trade unions, had only 13 workers direct from the
trades out of its 142 members elected to Parliament in the
elections of 1922. (See W. P. Maddox: Foreign Relations in
British Labour Politics, p. 20.)

Congress, "When and Under What Conditions Soviets of
Workers Deputies Should Be Formed," p. 12.
11. V. I. Lenin: "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of

Nations to Self-Determination" in Labour Monthly, Vol. X,
No. 2, p. 421 (July 1928).
12. The same, p. 425.

Congress, "Theses on National and Colonial Questions," p.
10.
14. See V. I. Lenin: "Speech on the Colonial Question"

in Communist Review, Vol. I, No. 2, pp. 87-91. (Feb., 1929.)
15. See A. Losovsky: The International Council of Trade and

Industrial Unions, p. 28 and following.
16. Losovsky, work cited, p. 31

Congress, "Theses on the Trade Union Movement," p. 11.
18. V. I. Lenin: "Left" Communism, an Infantile

Disorder (Toiler edition), p. 31.
19. The same pp. 35-36.
20. Theses of the Third Congress of the Communist

International, p. 137.
1487
21. The same, p. 143.
23. Lenin's attitude towards Levi is given in his "Letter to

the German Communist Party" (1921) printed in Labour
Monthly, Vol. I, No. 4, p. 349. (Oct., 1921.)
24. Theses of Third Congress of the Communist International, p.

32.
26. Theses of Third Congress, p. 77.
27. The same, pp. 78-79.
28. The difference between the two has been explained as

follows: propaganda is the dissemination of the general
scientific views of Communism to a few; agitation is the
stimulation of the masses to action on given concrete points.
29. Theses of the Communist International, Third Congress, p.

101.
30. Theses of Third Congress, pp. 91-92.
31. The same, p. 156.
32. The same, pp. 162-163.
33. Theses of Third Congress, p. 86.
34. The same, p. 108.
35. See above, p. 832 and following.
1488
36. Theses and Resolutions Adopted by the Fifth World
Congress of the Comintern, printed in the Communist
International, Dec. 1924-Jan. 1925, No. 7, p. 60.
37. Fourth Congress of the Communist International, pp. 118-

119.
In the report made by Zinoviev for the Executive

Committee of the Comintern and printed in the volume
cited above, there is pictured the full situation in the
various affiliated bodies at the time, from which it can be
seen how far away the various so-called Communist Parties
were from Leninism.
38. Theses and Resolutions Adopted by the Fifth World

Congress of the Comintern, work cited, p. 23.
39. Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the

Communist International, p. 22.
40. Theses, and Resolutions of the Fifth Congress of the


42. See The Second and Third Internationals and the Vienna
Union, Official Report, p. 18.
44. The same, pp. 69-70.
45. L. Lorwin, Labor and Internationalism, p. 322.

1489
III STALINISM
XLII. THE SWING TO THE RIGHT
SEVERAL periods can be said to mark the post-War

revolutionary political development of Europe. The first
period extended from s 1919 to 1921; the second from
March, 1921, to October, 1923; the third from 1923 to 1928;
the fourth from 1928 to 1933; and the fifth from 1933 to the
present. In this chapter of our work we shall confine
ourselves mainly to the third period, (*1) 1923 to 1928.
Immediately after the War, the revolutionary mass

movement developed to the point where it was strong
enough physically to overthrow capitalism, but was unable
so to do for lack of a mature revolutionary party. Nor had
the proletariat had sufficient time during the actions
themselves to forge the proper party. By March, 1921, when
the German Communist Party attempted an insurrection,
the wave was declining. This flare-up was defeated by the
failure of this party adequately to prepare and by the
absence, therefore, of certain important prerequisites for a
successful revolution.
At this point it could hardly be said that the Comintern

itself had failed in its duty; it was simply a question of the
extreme difficulty of building an adequate Communist
International that could fulfill its historic mission all over
the world. Indeed, Lenin was among the first to realize the
new situation; he pointed out that the Communist Parties
were ready neither politically nor organizationally for the
conquest of power. It was necessary to win the masses in
day to day struggles. Here Lenin attacked the Leftists who
1490
remained living in the past, who had not appreciated the
changing conditions demanding new tasks. These Leftists
would consider no retreat, no compromise; they wanted
unceasing, continual attacks. Such a way was the way to
ruin. (*2)
In the summer of 1923, however, a new revolutionary

situation developed in Germany. The internal position of
Germany, especially in connection with the collapse of the
government's tactics of passive resistance, was catastrophic.
Yet the German Communist Party took no advantage of the
opportunities. As was admitted some time after the event:
"If in May, 1924, during the stabilization of the mark and a
certain consolidation of the bourgeoisie, after the passage of
the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie to the
nationalists, after a deep party crisis and after a heavy
defeat of the proletariat, if, after all this, the communists are
able to rally three million seven hundred thousand votes to
themselves, then it is clear that in October, 1923, during the
unprecedented economic crisis, during the complete
disintegration of the middle classes, during a frightful
disorder in the ranks of the social democracy consequent
upon the sharp contradictions among the bourgeoisie itself
and an unprecedented mood of struggle of the proletarian
masses in the industrial centers the Communist Party had
the majority of the population on its side, could and should
have fought, and had all the chances for success." (*3)
It so happened that, by this time, the Executive Committee

of the Comintern was reasonably well organized, and the
whole German situation had been considered prior to the
events of October. A group within the Executive Committee,
headed by Trotsky, (*4) demanded that the German Party
be forewarned and instructed to prepare itself for the
oncoming revolutionary crisis. With the failure of the
1491
revolutionary situation to materialize and the consequent
defeat of the German revolution (which indeed was the
final mighty blow of the bourgeoisie in the course of its
stabilization), a new political period opened up marked,
however, not merely by the improvement of the position of
capitalism, but by the fact that the Executive Committee of
the Comintern itself was exposed as a blunderer
responsible for the disasters.
From now on, this was to be the typical situation: The

Comintern would dictate a policy leading only to
catastrophe and when the true situation should be revealed,
the top leadership would begin to find scapegoats for its
errors and to expel the national leaders for the crime of
following the International. In the case of Germany in 1923,
the Comintern at once proceeded to the removal of
Brandler and Thalheimer, who, indeed, had committed
many serious blunders of an opportunist character, but
who, in all their actions, had been in harmony with the
leadership of the Comintern.
Such a situation was bound to have a doubly deleterious

effect upon the Communist International. In the first place,
the illusion was increased that the Executive Committee
was infallible, that it never made mistakes, but rather that
all the errors were due to people who perversely refused to
follow the instructions given by the center. In the second
place by this method all possibility of correction was
removed, and the national sections were thrown into
interminable confusion. Such a policy was divorced from
that of Lenin, who consistently had followed the line as
stated by him:
"The attitude of a political party toward its own mistakes is

one of the most important and surest criteria of the
seriousness of the party, and of how it fulfills in practice its
1492
obligations toward its class and toward the laboring masses.
To admit a mistake openly, to disclose its reasons, to
analyze the surroundings which created it, to study
attentively the means of correcting it --- these are the signs
of a serious party; this means the performance of its duties;
this means educating and training the class, and
subsequently, the masses." (*5)
What was ominously pregnant with possibilities for the

future was that now there was organized in the very top
leadership of the Comintern a critical group, led by Trotsky,
which declared that the errors in Germany were due to the
policies adopted by the general leadership, and that these
errors were so costly that the Comintern leadership must be
removed as an opportunist and centrist one. From now on,
a titanic struggle was to occur on all fronts between these
two sections of the communist movement.
Defending itself against the Trotskyist charge that it had

capitulated in Germany without striking a blow and thus
definitely had retarded the movement for some time to
come, the Executive Committee adopted the theory that the
events of October, 1923, were only episodic, that the
revolution had not been averted but was still possible in
Germany and elsewhere. To compensate for the Executive's
Right Wing errors in Germany, abortive attempts to take
power were made in Bulgaria and in Esthonia, but, on
every front, the Communists signally were defeated. By the
time of the Fifth Congress of the Communist International,
the chairman, Zinoviev, (*6) was ready to admit that "The
chief thing that strikes the eye when reviewing the present
international political situation, is the beginning of the
democratic-pacifist period." (*7) But even here the
Comintern made a doubly false analysis.
1493
In the first place, the Fifth Congress believed that the reason
why capitalist countries were entering upon a democratic-
pacifist era with the Labour Party in control in England, the
Left Bloc in France, the Weimar coalition in Germany, and
similar situations elsewhere, was because the situation was
rapidly becoming a revolutionary one, and this was the
capitalist method of forestalling revolution. The Fifth
Congress declared: "The objective meaning of the present
unique democratic-pacifist period is that the bourgeoisie
can no longer rule according to its old methods. This period
reflects the instability of the capitalist structure, its decline,
which is beginning to develop in a descending curve.'' (*8)
Certainly the capitalist class would never have permitted

the socialists to rule Germany and Austria and the
Labourites to govern England were it not for the fact that
capitalism was bankrupt and could continue to function
only with the consent of the workers themselves. But what
the Congress failed to realize was that this situation accrued,
not because the workers were advancing to the barricades,
and Socialist rule represented a sort of international
Kerensky regime to that goal, but that the workers were in
full retreat after the blunders committed by the communist
revolutionists in various countries.
In the second place, afterward, when the leaders of the

Comintern had been put right by events and had reviewed
the situation more realistically, their conclusion that this
was a democratic-pacifist period was held too rigidly and
mechanically. They failed, therefore, to see that, even in the
period of retreat, there was a law of uneven development in
which sections of the world's toilers would be advancing to
the revolution, not retreating. Thus the outbreak of the
British General Strike found the Executive Committee
thoroughly unprepared. Thus, too, the historic Chinese
1494
revolutionary movement of 1925-1927 would see the
Comintern stifle the revolution at its birth.
The combination of errors committed by the Fifth Congress

of the Comintern in interpreting the victory of the socialists
in the government as a sign of a forthcoming revolutionary
wave, coupled with the later belief that the socialist-pacifist
era was to be of prolonged duration, gave a plausible
pretext for various immature Communist Parties to
abandon their class base and to make all sorts of
agreements with non-revolutionary elements.
Fundamentally, this was a reflection of the increased
pressure of world capitalism upon the ranks of the
proletariat. Had this fact been recognized, the Communist
International would have been able to survive the period of
partial and temporary stabilization of capitalism. But the
very weakening of the revolutionary caliber of the
advanced workers prevented their recognizing their
weaknesses, and so they plunged into one disastrous
venture after another.
The first crime committed was in relation to the trade union

reformists of Great Britain. We have already noted that the
British trade union leaders had broken from their
Amsterdam comrades to advocate the unity of the Russian
unions with those of the rest of the world. From this date
there had been organized the Anglo-Russian Trade Union
Unity Committee, which immediately had begun to exert
great influence among the workers all over the world for
the unity of all forces of labor in action. Soon the
Communist International heads were idealizing this united
front and dreaming that communism would arrive in
Britain not so much through the weak Communist Party as
through the Anglo-Russian Committee.
1495
"The Anglo-Russian Committee was regarded not as a
purely episodic bloc of leaders that inevitably would have
to be and demonstratively would be broken at the first
serious test, in order to compromise the General Council.
No, not only Stalin, Bucharin, Tomsky, and others, but also
Zinoviev saw in it a long lasting 'friendship,' an instrument
for the systematic revolutionization of the English working
masses, and if not the gate, at least the threshold over
which the revolution of the English proletariat would stride.
The farther it went, the more the Anglo-Russian Committee
became transformed from an episodic understanding into
an inviolable principle standing above the real class
struggle. That became obvious at the time of the general
strike." (*9)
In the course of this alliance with the Trade Union Council

of Great Britain, the communists violated all the resolutions
adopted at their Congresses. Fulsome adulation was
poured on the heads of the British leaders, and a Minority
Movement was built in the Trade Unions which was placed
wholly at the disposal of the Left members of the General
Council.
Then came the great British General Strike of 1926, whereby

the falseness of the communists' attitude clearly was
revealed. British economy had been slowly but steadily
deteriorating after the War, and the British workers had
been moving consistently to the Left. With the repeated
breakdown of the "Triple Alliance," a burning desire had
been created in the British workmen to force a show-down
with the employers. At first, labor had taken to
parliamentary means and had voted overwhelmingly for
the Labour Party, placing that Party in office in 1924, only
to be disappointed in its achievements and its short
duration. In 1926, however, there came the opportunity for
1496
which the workers had been waiting. The miners had
received new wage cuts of 10 per cent, and they appealed to
all the trade unionists of Great Britain to support them in
their struggle. The General Council was now forced to call a
General Strike; immediately five million men responded in
the most magnificent demonstration of its kind in industrial
Europe.
Ostensibly, the General Strike was in sympathy with the

miners and had merely economic aims; in reality, the strike
shook the British Empire to its very foundations and, in the
short time of its existence, cost the employers close to one
billion dollars. Although the General Council, frightened by
the revolutionary situation it had provoked, did its best to
call out as few workers as possible and to dilute their
militancy, the General Strike marked an immense step for
the British worker. It meant that he no longer relied solely
upon parliamentary measures, but took to direct action to
satisfy his demands. This in turn implied a diminution of
the prestige of the Labour Party methods and a warning to
the employers that British Labor could be as revolutionary
as any. From this time on, British capitalists began to form
their Maintenance Men and the beginnings of their fascist
corps. From this time on, too, the illusions of democracy
among the trade unionists rapidly diminished and, for the
first time in their history, a resolution was passed at their
Trade Union Congress sympathizing with the aspirations of
the colonial peoples under the iron heel of British
Imperialism and calling for the independence of India. At
last the British worker was becoming international in
outlook and revolutionary in attitude.(*10)
The development of the trade union movement to an

openly revolutionary position threw the opportunist and
centrist leaders back to the arms of the capitalist reaction.
1497
Frantically the Trade Union General Council made
overtures to the employers and soon, like a bolt from the
blue, came the order for the cessation of the General Strike.
Up to that time, the solidarity had been magnificent, and
more and more workers had expected to be called out. Now
all were commanded to return to work, and the miners
were left to fight the battle alone.
Needless to say, at this moment the retention of the

friendship bloc of the Russians with the General Council
was playing directly into the hands of the strike breakers.
(*11) "The All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions
should have declared openly to the English mine workers'
union and the whole English working class that the mine
workers' strike could seriously count upon success only if
by its stubbornness, its tenacity and its impetus it could
prepare the way for a new outbreak of the general strike. That
could have been achieved, however, only by an open and
direct struggle against the General Council, that agency of
the government and the mining employers. The struggle to
convert the economic strike into a political strike signified,
therefore, an intense political and organizational war
against the General Council. The first step to such a war
had to be the break with the Anglo-Russian Committee
which had become a reactionary obstacle, a chain on the
feet of the working class." (*12)
Thus the fact that the Russian communist unions were

working hand in glove with the British General Council
was immensely useful to the latter in breaking the strike
while retaining the confidence of the mass of workers. Later,
when their services no longer were necessary, the Russians
were to be dismissed by the General Council as similarly
they would be dismissed by the British workers. The
Communist Party, which had had a chance to become an
1498
important factor in the life of the British workers, shrank to
an insignificant sect. (*13)
Not only on the trade union front did the Comintern

display class capitulation, but also on the political field, in
reference to the Labor Party question and to the peasant
question.
As far back as the Second Congress of the Communist

International, Lenin had urged the British Communist Party
to support the Labour Party candidates against the liberals
and conservatives, and to try to join that Party as an
affiliated section. To understand this decision of the Third
International, one must appreciate the concrete situation
existing in England at the time. In the first place, the British
communists were fractious and divorced from the masses.
It was necessary for them to connect with the trade unions.
In the second place, the Labour Party at that time was really
not a party at all, but rather an amorphous grouping made
up of federated bodies, each element able to retain its
independence and its platform. Thus to the trade unions
were affiliated the Fabians, the Independent Labour Party,
the British Socialist Party, and others. In 1917, the Labour
Party decided also to admit individuals who could join
locals for that purpose. The Labour Party had no great
discipline, and no definitive program except one of such a
minimum nature that all labor groups could agree upon it.
Thus the Leninists were in favor of using the Labour Party
as a bridge over which the masses could cross in their own
way on the road to communism. Although the Labour
Party had rejected the affiliation of the Communist Party of
Great Britain and had even begun the expulsion of
communist individuals from the Party, they still permitted
communists in their ranks if they were delegated by their
1499
respective trade unions; this permitted the communists
some opportunity to work and to make contacts.
Added to these considerations of a communist character

were also hidden nationalist reasons which prompted the
Russians to urge the British communists into the Labour
Party. These reasons were intimated much later in a speech
by Bucharin, who declared: "If I remember rightly, we had
at that time the Russo-Polish war and practically all trade
union leaders supported the country of proletarian
dictatorship." (*14) Thus, because the British trade union
reformists were for the moment antagonistic to the Polish
War against Russia, fearful as they were that this would
mean the spread of communism all over Europe with
resulting new world wars, to compel the British
Communist Party to make peace with the Labour Party
officials and no longer to fight them was considered
sufficient. Here we see in germination the method later to
become universal by which nationalist Russians would
attempt to use the world revolution solely for their own
immediate benefit.
Even in the early days the Leninists had pointed out that
joining the Labor Party as a group could be only tentative
tactics, possible only because the Labor Party had not
crystallized as yet into a regular party, but was only an
integrated series of united fronts on questions detailed in its
platform. In 1920, Lenin had written: "At the present
moment there is a tendency of the opportunist leaders to
make the Labour Party a real party with local organizations
and a programme. They aim to create a large opportunist
party which is to retard the revolutionary development of
the masses. Were this tendency to succeed, the Labour
Party would never afford the Socialist organizations which
form part of it the right to an individual Communist policy,
1500
nor to the propagation of the revolutionary struggle. It
would bind their freedom of action hand and foot. It is thus
evident that no kind of organization seeking to carry out a
Communist policy could possibly belong to the Labour
Party. It would then become necessary after a most
energetic struggle against this tendency to leave the Labour
Party . . . . (*15)
What was experimental, tentative, and concrete under

Lenin soon became mechanical, general, and permanent in
the period of communist backsliding following the Fourth
Congress. In the United States, the communists were
ordered to join or form Labor Parties; in the Far East were
forced to enter into "Workers' and Peasants"' parties. In all
cases, the revolutionists had to give up their insurrectionary
banner and to capitulate to alien class elements. The
contradictions that arose from these tendencies gave rise to
keen factional fighting among the communists, especially in
America.
As a result of the 1920-1921 industrial depression in the

United States, the progressive elements in the trade union
movement, headed by the machinists' organization which
had grown greatly during the War, and supported by the
Socialist Party, had initiated a Conference for Progressive
Political Action which went on record for the formation of a
Labor Party. The industrial recession of 1924 greatly
stimulated Labor Party sentiment, and the communists
rightly analyzed this movement as marking a forward step
in American life in that, for the first time, labor would be
divorced politically from the two open capitalist parties
which had monopolized the scene for so long. They
correctly divined that this would accelerate sharply the
class consciousness of the average American worker and
1501
trade unionist, and they reached the conclusion that the
Labor Party movement should be supported.
There were several other factors in the political scene in the

United States which rendered that decision timely. In the
first place, the communists had suffered sharp persecution
right after the War and only recently had decided to come
above ground and to conduct legal work. Its underground
period had induced a wild ultra-Leftism which had to be
eradicated in mass work. Thus the decision to participate in
the building of a Labor Party was conceived to be a healthy
antidote for the communists, as indeed it might have been,
had there been proper direction given.
All other important countries had large parties representing

the independent labor movement. Only in America was
such a party lacking. The Labor Party would put an end to
this exceptional circumstance, as it would terminate the
period of individualism in American life. Thus it would
become a bridge, far more necessary than in Britain, where
class lines always had been recognized, for the masses to
cross over to communism. Indeed, to some, it appeared to
be an inevitable bridge, one with which the American
workers by no means could disperse. Here was the
infallible formula by which the workers could become
communized in America.
The American communists failed to realize sufficiently

certain key differences between the situation in the United
States and that in Britain. In the first place, the decision of
the British communists to work in the Labor Party was
induced by the fact that in Britain there already existed a
strong and powerful Labor Party which had only to exert
its strength to take power. It was necessary to expose the
limitations and inadequacies of that Party. The best method
was to help it get power; soon thereafter the workers would
1502
become disillusioned. In America, on the other hand, it was
not a question of a Labor Party's actual existence, but of the
organization of such a party wherein the communists were
to set themselves to work to build up a reformist
organization which could only betray the masses.
To conceal this situation, the communists blinded

themselves with the belief that the Labor Party could
become truly revolutionary and would not necessarily have
to take on a reformist and opportunist character. Thus in
fact, as in the case of the Anglo-Russian Committee, so with
regard to the American Labor Party, the Comintern cast
doubt on the value of a genuine vanguard party, and threw
out implications that the revolution could proceed via other
channels, or specifically, that the communists could capture
the Labor Party movement for the revolution and transform
it into a revolutionary weapon.
The communists failed also to see that, whereas the British

Labour Party had been born in the pre-war period and had
represented a genuine movement to the Left and a real
awakening of the British toilers, the American Labor Party
was being built by socialists who had represented the Right
Wing of their Party, and by trade union officials who had
done their best to stifle the militancy of the workers in the
great strike waves of 1919-1921. Whereas the British Labour
Party had been an earnest expression of the progressive
development of the workers, the Conference for
Progressive Political Action, in attempting to form a Labor
Party was mainly a movement to channelize the discontent
of the workers into safe directions. Thus, when, in 1924, the
movement was on the verge of taking the shape of a
permanent party, the leaders decided to endorse LaFollette
and to turn it into a political mechanism for the career of a
petty bourgeois leader. Although five million votes were
1503
collected, truly a remarkable feat, no Labor Party resulted,
and the movement collapsed.
The communists, however, who, under the influence of the

Comintern representative, Pepper, had come to believe that
without the trick of the Labor Party, the "bridge" game
could not be won, did everything possible to penetrate the
reformist party. They were willing to endorse LaFollette.
More than that, one section, headed by Cannon and
Hathaway, even proposed that the Labor Party movement
be broadened to include the farmers, that it was possible for
the agrarian West to take the lead.
Thus there were heaped, one upon the other, a whole series
of errors. Error number one consisted in the belief that a
Labor Party was inevitable and necessary in American life.
Error number two lay in the attempt to mix workers and
farmers together into one party. Error number three was
inherent in the illusion that under some circumstances the
farmers would take the revolutionary lead over the workers.
Error number four was revealed in the substitution of
parliamentary activity and deals with the reformists for
actual revolutionary conduct. Error number five was made
when the communists tried to form their own Federated
Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota.
This last adventure was replete with comedy. Against the

Conference for Progressive Political Action, the communists
suddenly called a dual conference wherein was to be
formulated the "true" party of the masses. This was the
class-mass-revolutionary Federated Farmer-Labor Party.
What was really organized was a paper conference in
which the communists captured themselves and proceeded
to put up dummy candidates to run against LaFollette and
Wheeler. Thus the Communist Party tried to approach the
workers through a maneuver, but the whole plan was so
1504
ridiculous that the candidates were withdrawn soon after,
much to their chagrin and discomfiture. Pepper was
recalled from America. The communists had exposed
themselves as crude maneuvrists rather than as class
fighters.
The theory of mixing workers and farmers into one

indiscriminate organization had been turned into a general
line by the Communist International after the Fifth
Congress of 1924. They had actually formed a Peasants
International (*16) to which had been invited the party of
agrarian capitalists of Yugo-Slavia led by Raditch. Later,
Raditch was to repay the communists by capitulating to
reactionary Belgrade. The Comintern developed a
systematic idealization of the peasantry and the kulak. This
was to be seen within Russia and it was to be noticed in the
Balkans as well as in the United States. But its most harmful
manifestations were to be reserved for China. (*17)
Footnotes
1. Compare L. D. Trotsky: The Strategy of the World

Revolution, p. 12 and following.
2. At the Third and Fourth Congresses Bucharin fought

against the policy of the united front and similar
transitional tactics.
3. L. D. Trotsky, work cited, pp. 17-18, quoting

from Pravda, May .25, 1924.
4. Lenin was fatally ill.
6. Zinoviev’s real name was Applebaum, Trotsky's was

Bronstein and Stalin's Djugeshvili.
1505
7. "Theses and Resolutions of the Fifth World Congress of
the Comintern," printed in The Communist International, Dec.
1924-Jan. 1925, No. 7, p. 11.
8. The same, p. 18.
9. L. D. Trotsky: The Strategy of the World Revolution, p. 50.
10. For an interesting account of the General Strike and its

lessons, see John Pepper: the British General Strike and the
General Betrayal, pamphlet.
11. As late as April, 1927, at the meeting of the Anglo-

Russian Unity Committee in Berlin, the Russian trade union
leaders proclaimed the "hearty accord" and unanimity of
the Committee. The Russian Communists also pledged
themselves to non-interference in the affairs of the General
Council.
12. L. D. Trotsky, work cited, p. 52.
13. In 1926 the British Communist Party rapidly grew to

12,000 members with a circulation of its paper of 120,000.
See O. Piatnitsky: The Organization of a World
Party, pamphlet, p. 22.
14. See Communist Policy in Great Britain, pamphlet, 1928, p.

50.
15. The Communist International Answers the I. L. P., p. 26.

The title is also Moscow's Reply to the I. L. P.
16. Headed by the Pole, Dombal.
17. Lack of space forbids us to treat of India.
1506
XLIII. THE CHINESE REVOLUTION
IN 1925 there erupted in China an immense revolutionary

volcano that for two years belched its lava in gigantic floods
which swept all before them. The Comintern was elated.
The Chinese Communist Party grew in influence, and two
of its members became Ministers in the new Nationalist
Government. On April 5, 1927, Stalin spoke highly of
Chiang Kai-shek, praising this general of the Kuomintang
as a fine revolutionary fighter, and exchanging portraits
with him. A week later, rivers of blood began to flow. By
the winter of that year, the very flower of the revolution
had been wiped out and, with the help of Chiang Kai-shek
and others of the Kuomintang, about one hundred
thousand Chinese communists and workers had been
executed in unprecedented massacres. Never had there
been such favorable prospects for Communism in China;
never was such monumental criminality displayed by the
Communist International. If the beheading of the Chinese
Revolution did not mean the complete end of the
Comintern as a revolutionary force it was solely because the
action in China was not yet decisive for the proletariat all
over the world. There had yet to come the disastrous events
in Germany, culminating in the victory of Hitler, before the
conclusion that the Communist International was spent as a
revolutionary force would begin to be accepted in wide
circles of advanced workers.
The modern revolutionary history of China can be said to

have started in the year 1894, a year marked by the
humiliating defeat of the Chinese Imperial Government by
the Japanese. The Boxer War of 1900 and the Russo-
1507
Japanese War of 1904 also served greatly to awaken the
Chinese people and to crystallize a political crisis in that
country. In this period, too, began the open seizure of China
and the policy of partitioning the country into spheres of
influence monopolized by the great imperialist powers of
the world. Taiwan was occupied by Japan in 1895,
Kiaochow by Germany in 1898, Weihaiwei by England, and
Port Arthur by Russia in the same year. In 1895, Japan
forced China to recognize the independence of Korea,
which formally was annexed to Japan in 1910. Furthermore,
the imperialist Powers forced China to pay huge
indemnities and extorted from her all sorts of special
privileges and concessions, including the control of the
customs.
Here we must note several important differences between

the situations in India and in China. In India, control was
vested in one imperialist overlord, England, which was
interested in the spread of capitalism under its monopoly
and for its benefit. To maintain its rule, Britain had to
support the princes in power, thus uniting them behind her,
to disarm the general population as far as possible, to break
down the provincial barriers, and to institute free trade.
With her powerful navy, Britain prevented all invasions
and maintained order. In China, the situation was just the
opposite. The whole Chinese scene was marked by the
ruthless rivalry of the imperialist powers in China, one
against the other, a rivalry constantly upsetting its internal
system and rendering chaos perpetual.
World capitalism had to smash down the barriers erected in

its path by the old Chinese dynasty. Imperialism thus had
to work for the overthrow of the old regime and for the
weakening of the aristocratic clique around it. Imperialism
in China stood not for unification, as was the case in India,
1508
but for the partition of the country and the setting up of
various military dictators who were armed by the
imperialists to serve their purposes. In short, the invasion of
capitalism in China meant constant turmoil, unceasing
strife and warfare. The splitting up of China into provinces
under separate control also gave the foreign merchants,
who were free of taxation and special tolls, a great
advantage over the native merchant or nascent
manufacturer.
In India the National Congress arose in order to complete

the national development and to give the native
bourgeoisie more power. At the start, no group wanted to
dissociate itself entirely from England or to lose England's
armed protection, In China, on the other hand, from the
very beginning, the fight was a conflict against imperialist
division of the country. Nationalism in India to a
considerable extent could exist with loyalty to British
control; nationalism in China would have to take on a
revolutionary violent character from the outset. Here are in
brief some of the differences that distinguish a colony from
a semi-colony.
After the defeat of the Chinese Imperial Government by

Japan, a few leading scholars petitioned the Government
for reforms. Their basic principles were the teachings of
Confucius, and their plan to save China was to adapt the
applied science and practical arts of the West to the need of
'he country. These elements created a Reform Party which
was beginning to receive some favor from the Emperor
when the latter was deposed and imprisoned; the Empress
Dowager was put on the throne, and the reformers had to
flee the country, some being killed. It now became very
clear that the salvation of the country lay in the overthrow
of the Manchu dynasty.
1509
In 1894, Sun Yat-sen organized his society, the Shing Chung
Hwei, ostensibly to unite patriotic Chinamen to cultivate
the arts of wealth and of power for the purpose of reviving
China and securing her unity; the real and secret aim was
the overthrow of the government. Naturally the group that
most ardently would support such a move at this time was
the overseas Chinese merchants who were in a position to
contrast the plight of their country with the capitalist
prosperity of the West, and who wanted to modernize the
social regime of China in their favor. In 1895 Dr. Sun tried
to make an attack upon Canton, but failed. In 1900, another
futile effort was made. The movement was at a stalemate
when the great Russian Revolution of 1905 occurred,
causing a change in the situation. In 1905, the Shing Chung
Hwei was reorganized, at a great Tokyo conference, and the
name Tung Ming Hwei (Revolutionary Alliance) was
adopted.
"Several remarks may be made regarding the career of the

Shing Chung Hwei, which lasted a full decade and ended
in 1905 with the conference in Tokyo. Firstly, this Society
was the embryo from which the Kuomintang had sprung
up. This was the first organized body for the purpose of
revolution in China. Second, the Society derived its
financial support mainly from the overseas Chinese
merchants, who identified themselves from the very
beginning with the revolution and were Dr. Sun's warm
supporters throughout his life-time. Thirdly, a large
number of Chinese students abroad had joined the Society,
who were the directing intellectual force of the party.
Fourthly, we may say that the work done at this time was
more of a preparatory propaganda nature. It did no real
harm to the Government. The people were very gradually
won over to its cause. Revolutionary literature was
smuggled into China and was rapidly circulated. The party
1510
was out for the overthrow of the Manchu Government, not
as an end in itself, but as a means to stop the foreign
invasion in order to save China. These men were out for the
unconditional overthrow of the Government, which was
regarded as the obstacle to China's salvation." (*1)
At the Tokyo Conference of the re-organized party, the

following six articles were adopted as its program: 1. to
overthrow the present wicked government; 2. to establish a
republican form of government; 3. to maintain the peace of
the world; 4. to nationalize the land; 5. to promote
friendship between the peoples of China and Japan; 6. to
ask the other countries to support the work of reform. From
this program it can be seen that the organization was put on
an entirely different basis than previously, and that a much
broader appeal was being made to include strata of the
petty bourgeoisie, liberal students, peasants, and others. At
this time many military students joined Dr. Sun and began
their work within the Imperial Army to undermine it for
the cause.
In 1911 there occurred the successful uprising of the army

in Wuchang. Rotten to the core, the Manchu dynasty
collapsed. A revolutionary government was established at
the temporary capital in Nanking and a Provisional
Constitution was framed in the style of Western republics.
Dr. Sun was made the Provisional President.
"In the words of Dr. Sun, two things were achieved by the
revolution of 1911; 'First, it effaced the shame of more than
two hundred and sixty years standing, rendering races in
China equal, and abolishing once for years all the aspect of
inter-racial friction and exploitation; second, it wiped out
the trace of monarchy, which was more than four thousand
years old, thus making democracy to begin from now.'" (*2)
1511
The parliamentary regime set up after the revolution of
1911, however, did not affect the mass of the people. The
elections were participated in by only a handful and, within
the party, the Right Wing, which refused to allow any self-
government in cities and provinces, dominated the party. In
protest, Sun resigned his presidency and permitted Yuan
Shih-kai to become President in 1912, while he himself
became concerned in a program of economic nationalism in
which he envisaged a great growth of national railways
throughout the country, with the help of foreign capital. In
a short time, Yuan Shih-kai completed his own coup d'e'tat,
dissolved the National Congress, drove out the members of
the Kuomintang, and overthrew the Provisional
Constitution. The emperor had been overthrown, but the
old Mandarins were still in power.
The 1911 revolution was the Chinese variation of 1848 and

was bound to fail as a permanent regime. On the one hand
were the imperialists doing their best to cause dissension
among the military generals of the party, now arming one
and then the other, and causing each to strive to control the
presidency. On the other hand there was no party offering
to solve the basic economic problems of the masses. In the
early part of the same year, the Kuomintang had been
formed out of the Revolutionary Alliance and its base had
been still further broadened. Now there were not only the
liberal bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, broad sections of the
city petty bourgeoisie, and the home workers but, at the
same time, permanent connections were being sought with
the working class and peasantry. No wonder the older
bourgeois elements separated from the Left Wing and
precipitated a schism in the party. In 1914 the Kuomintang
was re-organized as the Revolutionary Party of China and,
while the Mandarins and militarists were fighting in the
1512
North, Sun and his followers went down to Canton in the
autumn of 1917 and set up a government there.
During all this period there had taken place a steadily

accentuated development of modern capitalism in China, a
development which increased its tempo at a feverish pace
during the War and afterwards. A native Chinese
industrialist and capitalist class was arising of no mean
importance. In 1925 this group controlled 60 per cent of the
capital invested in the coal industry, 20 per cent in the iron,
67 per cent in the textile, 70 per cent in the match, 25 per
cent in the sugar, 58 per cent in the railroad, 26 per cent in
river and sea transport, and similar percentages in other
industries. Twenty-seven Chinese banks had a capital of
two hundred and fifty million Chinese dollars. Besides this,
the trading capital of the native bourgeoisie also amounted
to a large sum. (*3) It is interesting to compare this with the
Russian situation prior to 1905. Then only 21 per cent of the
total capital in Russia was indigenous, the rest being
foreign; thus the Chinese percentage was much greater than
the Russian had been, while, at the same time, the foreign
investment in China appreciably was greater than the
Russian, which stood at about one and one-fourth billion
dollars.
As in Russia, so in China the factories that were being built

were of the most modern design, huge plants that often
embraced thousands of workers within each unit. By 1927
there were almost five million wage workers, including
three million industrial workers employed in the mines, on
the railroads, in textile and silk factories, in large iron mills,
and similar works. These workers were exploited in truly
horrible fashion, their condition being impossible for the
average European to appreciate. The excessive toil of the
Chinese working class, the super-exploitation of China by
1513
world imperialism, made it inevitable that once the workers
got into action they should adopt revolutionary politics.
From the very beginning the Chinese workers were affected,
not by reformist socialists, but by revolutionary
communists. This tendency was greatly strengthened after
the 1917 Russian Revolution.
The vast population of over four hundred million in China,

however, was composed not of modern factory workers
and artisans who could be allied to them, but of peasants.
85 per cent of the population was agrarian, of which the
overwhelming number was desperately poor, loaded to the
breaking point by the exactions of the military governors,
the rents of the landlords, and the interest payments to the
usurers. Sometimes the peasant had to hand over one-half
of his produce in rent. "The poverty of the Chinese peasant
is not a comparative term, but is a condition where in some
provinces one uses all his efforts to produce something that
is not sufficient to support the mere existence of life." (*4)
The distribution of land in the countryside was stated to be

as follows: "63 per cent of the peasantry consists of poor
peasants who do not possess more than two hectares of
land and are exploited and enslaved by the large
landowners and the kulaks. This 63 per cent of poor
peasants possesses only one-fourth of all the cultivated land.
5 per cent of the rich kulaks and large landowners has 30
per cent of the total cultivated land; 10 per cent owns 20 per
cent of the landed property; the middle-peasants --- 20 per
cent of the total --- have 26 per cent of the cultivated land in
their hands." (*5)
As in India, so far more in China the rise of capitalism in

the country induced large numbers of students and
industrialists, as well as the smaller capitalist elements, to
struggle against the burdens of imperialism to which had
1514
been added the shame and ignominy of the destruction of
national unity. In India there was a powerful central
government; in China there had existed a decrepit
monarchy which had given way to the futile rule of the
Mandarins and their generals. It would be relatively easy to
reform the regime were the imperialists to keep their hands
off; therefore the struggle of these elements for their
development had to lead to sharp anti-imperialist clashes.
Only the wealthy sections of the Chinese, who were
government functionaries or who were engaged as part of
the comporadore class of traders and agents of foreign capital
in China, were on the side of the imperialists. The rest
found it easy to join the forces of revolution. This became
all the more true in proportion as the people became
unanimous in the need for a new regime. The nascent
capitalist class of China and its theoreticians had no fear of
the lower orders, since the wealthy never had experienced
such revolts and could not properly estimate the effect of
modern capitalism upon the toiling population, especially
the proletariat.
In the midst of these processes there burst with full force

upon all Asia the proletarian revolution in Russia and the
victory of the Bolsheviks. Dr. Sun Yat-sen immediately sent
a congratulatory telegram to Lenin and, as the revolution
proceeded in Russia he could not help but contrast it with
his attempts in China. He recognized that the Chinese party
had not based itself enough upon the people; it had relied
upon mercenary armies instead of building up its own; the
whole technique would have to be reorganized. Dr. Sun
began to visualize as the most powerful force in the
regeneration of China no longer the old student groups and
overseas merchants, but the mass of people whose
problems had to be satisfied. He began to develop more
clearly his formulation of the basic three principles of the
1515
Kuomintang, namely, nationalism, democracy, and security
of livelihood for the people, including State capitalism.
It was now the turn of the Bolsheviks to show their hand. In

July, 1919, the Soviet Government issued a "manifesto to
the Chinese people" in which it offered to return all
territory wrongfully taken from China by the Russian
Imperial Government, to restore to China the control of the
Chinese Eastern Railway, to renounce its claims to any
share in the Boxer indemnity, to give up the rights of extra-
territoriality enjoyed by Russians on Chinese soil, and to
abandon all other special privileges inconsistent with the
equality of nations.
In 1921, a revolution occurring in Outer Mongolia resulted

in the formation of a Soviet Republic, which, however, was
not affiliated directly to the Soviet Union but remained
merely on a fraternal basis. This was a sign that Russia did
not want to swallow the countries of Asia, but sincerely
desired to make them friends. In 1922, Joffe was sent as the
Russian representative to China; there he met Dr. Sun and,
after a conference, both issued a joint statement of accord.
"This statement affirmed in the first place that Dr. Sun
believed that neither communism nor the soviet political
system could be successfully introduced into China,
because in his opinion the conditions for their successful
establishment did not exist in China. In this belief Joffe
concurred, declaring that China's first task was to establish
its national independence." (*6)
Here, evidently, was the basis for an alliance between the

Russian Bolsheviks and the Chinese social-revolutionaries
and liberals. From the point of view of Russian nationalism,
it was necessary to have both a strong and a friendly China;
from the point of view of the international revolution, the
Second Congress had already declared that the colonial
1516
world was ready for revolution, that the theory of
permanent revolution could be applied, and the colonies,
with the aid of the world proletariat, could form their
soviets and move directly to socialism. Neither Lenin nor
Sun Yat-sen were fooled by their mutual alliance; each
understood the other, each hoped to use the other.
Although he met considerable resistance in his Russian

policy and in his new attitude toward the communists and
toward labor, Sun Yat-sen, in the historic Congress of the
party in 1924, where the party was finally re-organized and
renamed the Kuomintang of China, was able to win his
point of view. To aid him there was the fact, first, that
Russia of all the countries, voluntarily had made enormous
concessions to Chinese nationalism and equality; and
second, that imperialism had grown so strong that only a
people's movement could overthrow it. To build such a
movement, the Chinese could well learn from the Russians.
Always Western labor had been sympathetic to the Chinese
revolutionary forces, and this was now the time to get in
closer touch with it.
Just as the Russians were willing to use the capitalist for

their purposes and even to initiate temporarily a form of
State capitalism, making concessions to the enemy in order
to learn economically from him, so the Chinese petty
bourgeoisie conceived it possible to make concessions to the
communists if the latter would teach it the art of revolution,
while it remained loyal to the aims of Chinese nationalism.
"The Russians have been so successful in their
revolutionary methods and tactics that someone has
ironically remarked that the Russians are as unequaled in
civil warfare as the French are in international warfare. The
Russian leaders are experts in revolution, so to speak. They
are the masters of the revolutionary art. They put their
1517
experience at the disposal of the Kuomintang. They did
everything they could to help the Kuomintang to improve
revolutionary methods." (*7)
To replace Joffe in 1923 there arrived Karakhan, who sent

Borodin to Canton to help work with Sun Yat-sen. (*8)
Borodin immediately undertook to reconstruct the
Kuomintang on a disciplined basis in order to make it an
efficient instrument for carrying on a struggle. In fact, he
operated as though he did not understand the difference
between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party.
Having learned all the tricks possible from Borodin, the
Nationalists were to use them later in killing the
communists and in chasing Borodin out of the country.
Borodin insisted "that there be a definite body of party

principles, unity of party organization, and strict party
discipline." Locals of the party were organized and put on a
sound footing for action for the first time. "At the same time
a political training institute was established in which party
organizers and propagandists could be instructed in the
technique of their professions ... Borodin helped to establish
also a military training institute, the Whampoa Academy,
where German and Russian officers, and Chinese who had
visited Russia, taught the elements of the art of war and
reproduced the discipline of the Red Army." (*9)
It was under Borodin's influence that the party was called

together in 1924 and entirely re-organized. Here it was
resolved that a definite platform and constitution be given
to the new Kuomintang, and here were elaborated the three
principles of Sun Yat-sen. Thanks to the influence of the
Russian Revolution, the Chinese nationalist movement
received an immense impetus. It was at this conference, too,
that it was decided to take communists into the party. This
leads us to consider the important question concerning the
1518
relation of the labor and communist movement to the
Kuomintang.
In the world revolutionary wave following the War the

Chinese labor movement got off to a firm start. In 1920
there were some strikes on the railways, but it was only in
1922 that the First National Labor Conference met in
Canton. Some two hundred unions from twelve cities and
representing a membership on paper of from three to four
hundred thousand workers came together and bound
themselves into a federation. Among them communists
were active, the Communist Party really dating from the
railway strike in 1920. Following the conference, the
railway workers attempted organization in North China. A
strike broke out on the Peking-Hankow line and was
suppressed with great brutality, many of the leaders being
executed. A strike of seamen at Hongkong was more
successful and resulted in the recognition of the Seamen's
Union; from this dates a new era in the history of Chinese
labor.
The Soviet Union was not unaware of the possibilities of

revolution in Asia and formed in Moscow a Communist
University for the Toilers of the Orient, in order to train
party organizers and propagandists for Asiatic service. In
1925, the growing interest at Moscow in the Chinese
Revolution resulted in the organization of a special training
school for Chinese revolutionists, the Sun Yat-sen
University, with Karl Radek at the head. At its period of
greatest prosperity there were nearly one thousand
students in attendance.
Before the arrival of Borodin, the Communist Party slowly

had been gathering its forces and eking out an independent
1519
existence. With the new tendencies manifest in the
Communist International, however, Borodin had a free
hand to apply his theories that the revolution could come
about not through the Communist Party but through the
Kuomintang. Borodin accepted seriously the program of
the Kuomintang of 1924 that it was going to fight
imperialism, militarism, and feudalism, and believed that
Sun Yat-sen's three principles could include not only State
capitalism but State socialism, on the road to communism.
Thus it was his policy that the Communist Party should
relinquish its independent existence and become part of the
Kuomintang.
Originally, the communists under Lenin had set out to

make a united front with Sun Yat-sen, both sides
understanding their eventual incompatibility, but both
willing temporarily to work together. With the new line
extolling workers' and peasants' parties, however, working
subserviently with officials of the British General Council,
and idealizing the peasantry, the stage was all set for the
incorporation of the communists into the Kuomintang. At
the 1924 Kuomintang conference the communists were
permitted to join the organization, but only as obedient
individuals. "It is true that Dr. Sun consented to admit the
communists into the Kuomintang as individuals, but not as
a unit. So, speaking of it as the 'alliance of the two parties' is
a misinterpretation of the facts by the communists." (*10)
Thus we start the strange history of the Chinese upheaval

of 1925-27 with the fact that the communists, instead of
forming a limited united front with the Chinese nationalists,
actually fused with them and became part of them. It might
be said that this was the instruction given to the British
Communist Party regarding the Labour Party of that
country, and that this also should have been the procedure
1520
of the communists in regard to the Indian National
Congress. Nevertheless, the situations of these two latter
countries were entirely different from the Chinese. The
resolutions of the Comintern specifically had declared that
by all means must the independence of the revolutionary
party be preserved. If the communists attempted to join the
Labor Party, this was solely because there was no discipline
in the Labor Party, no definite program, but rather it was a
loose federated mass made up of various tendencies, each
allowed to express its own point of view. In regard to the
Indian Congress, the same situation prevailed; it was a
federated body with its various tendencies allowed full
play. But this was not the case with the Kuomintang after
1924, and, strange to say, it was the Communist
International representative Borodin himself who insisted
that program, discipline, and form be instituted within the
old Revolutionary Party of the Nationalists.
The program of the Kuomintang was now very clear. It

rejected the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and firmly
advocated the national collaboration of all classes for the
benefit of the native capitalists. The Right Wing indeed
wanted merely to have a political revolution; the Left Wing
wished for a social revolution; both desired capitalism in
city and country. The Kuomintang leaders proposed State
capitalism, not because they were socialistic, but simply
because the grand projects which they contemplated for the
modernization of the country called for such an outlay of
capital as could be raised or controlled only by the State. As
the Nationalists began to understand the vastness of their
aims and the difficulty of accomplishing them, the officials
realized that they needed the support of the workers and
peasants; thus, after 1924, the Kuomintang did not prevent
the organization of trade unions or peasant unions, and, as
a matter of fact, later, frequently it was the workers that
1521
helped the Kuomintang to survive, calling strikes to
prevent its enemies from prevailing, demoralizing the
hostile forces with propaganda, and, in similar ways,
building up the power of the Kuomintang.
The rising Chinese labor movement was all the more ready
to do this work, since now the communists were inside the
Kuomintang and were idealizing that organization, making
it almost communist in character. The Kuomintang
therefore gained greatly from posing as a semi-communist
organization, utilizing to the full the heroism and devotion
of the communists. The Kuomintang was officially
recognized as a party sympathetic to the Communist
International; its delegates sat at the Seventh Plenary
Session of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, in
the autumn of 1926. Thus, in spite of all the theses of
Leninism, in spite of all the lessons of the many revolutions
since 1917, the Communist Party fused with the party of
opportunists controlled by capitalists and militarists. The
only one on the Political Committee of the Bolsheviks to
vote, as far back as 1923, against the communists' joining
was Leon Trotsky.
However, this was not the first time that the national
movement in colonies had made use of communists. "The
national movement in Turkey, led by Kemal Pasha, for a
long time had an indubitably revolutionary character, and
thoroughly deserved to be called a national revolutionary
movement. It was directed against the old feudal regime in
the country, against the Sultanate, as well as against
imperialism, primarily against British imperialism. This
movement swept along with it a tremendous mass of the
peasants and to a certain degree, the Turkish working class.
The Kemalist Party of that time resembled to a certain
extent, the Kuo Min Tang of today. (But it must not be
1522
forgotten for a single moment that the working class in
Turkey was, of course, far weaker than in China.) The
Kemalist Party had its 'council of People's Commissars,' it
stressed its solidarity with Soviet Russia, etc., etc. In a
telegram from Kemal Pasha to Chicherin, dated November
29, 1920, it says literally: 'I am deeply convinced that on the
day that the toilers of the West, on the one side, and the
oppressed peoples of Asia and Africa, on the other, will
understand that international capital uses them for mutual
destruction and enslavement, solely for the benefit of their
masters, on the day when the consciousness of the crimes of
colonial policy will imbue the hearts of the toiling masses of
the world --- then the power of the bourgeoisie will be at an
end!' This did not prevent the same Kemal from cutting the
throats of the communist leaders some time later, from
driving the labor movement into illegality, from reducing
agrarian reform to a minimum, and, in his domestic policy,
from following a road to the bourgeoisie and the rich
peasants." (*11)
For this reason Lenin and the Second Congress had pointed
out that the communists could not support every bourgeois
democratic movement in colonial countries, since some
were revolutionary and some were not. It was permissible
to work with the national liberation colonial movement
only where it allowed communists to educate and to
organize the masses of the exploited in a revolutionary
sense. This is precisely what the Komintang refused to
permit the communists to do.
However, definite relations between the Kuomintang and

the communists were by no means settled, and the
correctness of joining the Kuomintang was still being
debated when a sudden explosion shook the country. In
Shanghai there occurred a textile strike which ended in a
1523
massacre of the workers by foreign troops led by the British.
This was followed by another massacre of Chinese at
Canton, also by the English. Tremendous resentment burst
forth at once throughout the country. The so-called central
government was paralyzed by a new outbreak of fighting
among the northern militarists. At the same time, the
bourgeoisie was discontented with the way the Washington
Conference in 1922 had handled the question of extra-
territoriality and special privileges to imperialism, and with
its refusal of any satisfaction to China. Thus to the strikes of
the workers was added the political determination of the
nationalists to strike hard for the unification of China and
for the accomplishment of the aims of the Kuomintang.
In Canton, the Kuomintang, having re-organized its party,

immediately began the reconstitution of the army and,
instead of using mercenary troops, opened up the
Whampoa Academy for the training of officers under
Russian influence. At the head of the Academy was Chiang
Kai-shek who had played a subordinate role so long as Dr.
Sun Yat-sen was alive, but who, at the death in the early
part of 1925 of the founder of the movement, stepped forth
as the leader of the militarist wing of the party. The
significance of the change to Chiang Kai-shek was not clear
in the beginning, since at the time he favored the
continuation of Dr. Sun's policy towards the communists;
his role became increasingly clear as the movement
developed.
In the course of the Leftward swing of the Kuomintang, and

the development of its new "Model Army," there occurred
in Canton several attempts to reinstall the old reactionary
regime. The Canton bourgeoisie through its organization,
the Paper Tigers, staged an attempt to overthrow the
Kuomintang police and to establish its own. The workers
1524
responded to the battle immediately and, with their aid,
Chiang Kai-shek was able to defeat these elements.
Similarly, when mercenary soldiers attempted to challenge
the rule of the Kuomintang in Canton, again the people
moved to isolate the reaction and again the new "Model
Army" was overwhelmingly victorious. While careful to
gather for himself all the prestige possible from these
victories, Chiang Kai-shek was made to feel the necessity of
the people's movement aiding his small military forces
before he could take Shanghai and Pekin. For this he
needed the aid of the communists.
Within the Kuomintang, although the mass of members

incorporated were, in the main, elements who could be won
by the communists, it was the Right Wing allied with the
military generals who were in control of the Party. This
Right Wing laid down the rules for the government of the
region over which it controlled. Although Dr. Sun Yat-sen
also had worked out a provisional constitution calling for a
constitutional democracy, the Right Wing decided there
would be no democratic rule, but a Party dictatorship. On
the surface, it might seem as though this new situation
resembled the one in Russia, but there was this mighty
difference: in China there existed at this time no soviets.
The Kuomintang had locals which theoretically controlled
the executive, and the theme of the party leaders was that
the party dictatorship was infinitely better than military
dictatorship. Indeed, they repeated that this political
dictatorship was quite in line with the basic principles of
Sun Yat-sen, since he himself had worked out three stages
of rule, military rule until the enemy was crushed, political
tutelage of the party until the masses were ready for
democracy, and then full democracy. None the less, the fact
remained that the locals met very seldom, had no control
1525
over the executive, and that the executive itself was in the
hands of the military.
Thus if any distinction could be drawn between the

budding militarists of the South and the hardened
reactionary elements of the North it was that the Southern
nascent military leaders were more flexible, were learning
from history, were using the communists and the people for
their own benefit, and understood that their military
dictatorship was far more secure when buttressed by a
Party. The Southern militarists were alert enough to try to
represent a class as a whole, the Chinese bourgeoisie; they
understood the need of collective effort and national control
as superior to individual rule.
In any case, the communists who joined the Kuomintang

were now compromised by a system of government set up
by that party which, far from favoring soviets, was opposed
even to ordinary democracy. "Such political system clearly
had nothing to do with democracy. No such claim was.
made for it by the Nationalist leaders." (*12) And it was this
party that was allowed a delegate to the sessions of the
Executive Committee of the Comintern!
The British outrages had occasioned a mighty mass

movement that was to prove irresistible. A four months'
strike was waged in Shanghai and, in Canton, a boycott of
British goods was begun which for a year and a half
completely paralyzed the port of Hongkong. The cry went
up for the termination of foreign imperialism in China and
the downfall of the militarists who were its agents. But
behind these slogans went other demands of the people, of
the peasants, and of the workmen for their own interests.
On all sides unions of laborers and peasant unions began to
be formed. A large number began to join the Kuomintang.
What is more significant, they joined the communist wing,
1526
causing one of the leaders of the Kuomintang to write: "The
rise of any political party in history cannot be compared
with the rapid rise of the Chinese Communist Party. The
rapidity with which it developed was unparalleled. Of
course, the Kuomintang has contributed to its growth by
working hand in hand with it for several years, but that is
not the main reason for its growth. The main reason for its
growth must be looked for in the political and economic
conditions of the country." (*13)
"It is interesting to note the type of men and women that

were drawn into the Chinese Communist Party. At first,
only students came in, led by some intellectuals .... Later in
the stages of the development, workmen began to come
in .... Peasants also joined but in very small numbers. The
main strength of the Chinese Communist Party consists of
students, who are its leaders, and the workmen who are the
rank-and-file of the party and who also furnished a number
of leaders.... One may safely say that all the great labour
strikes in Shanghai and elsewhere are directed in one way
or another by this party, for it is the party of labour." (*14)
Soon the Communist Party had a membership of fifty
thousand, with thirty thousand in the Young Communist
League, out of the total of three hundred thousand in the
entire Kuomintang.
If, in the beginning, there had been some confusion whether

the communists should form their own independent
organization, there could have been no difference of
opinion among Leninists by the time the masses were
stirring in their own right, when one and one-half million
men were organizing in labor unions, and peasants were
taking up arms in their own behalf, particularly when the
Kuomintang itself was controlled by military generals and
was pursuing a scandalous policy.
1527
So long as the disturbances occurred in territories not
controlled by the Kuomintang the Right Wing benevolently
appraised the outbreaks of the workers and peasants; as
soon as the Kuomintang seized control, strikes were
ruthlessly put down, workers and peasants were disarmed,
and the bourgeoisie was allowed to organize its own armed
forces to suppress the workers. Yet all this time the
Communists not only did not break from the Kuomintang
militarists, but actually carried out the orders of these men.
In July, 1925, the test between the Right Wing and the Left
came in the elections to control the party in Canton. Owing
to the great mass movement at the time, the Left won a
sweeping victory. At once the Right Wing met separately
and, put forward the following demands: 1. to expel the
Communists; 2. to end the Political Bureau of the Party and
to give power to the Military staff; 3. to dismiss Borodin
and his Russian military advisers; 4. to move the seat of the
Central Executive Committee to Shanghai. Although this
group was defeated nationally because of the revolutionary
events, the great stride forward of the Nationalists and the
need of the militarists for popular support in their
contemplated Northern expedition to seize the capital of
the country, it had become clearly evident that the two
groups were reaching an irreconcilable conflict.
However, in spite of even these provocations, the

communists held firm to their policy of remaining inside
the Kuomintang. Wang Ching-wei, member of the Left
Kuomintang, who wanted both sides to remain temporarily
within the Kuomintang, now tried to be peacemaker and
urged that disputes concerning the compatibility of the
ultimate aims of the nationalists and the communists could
safely be postponed until the attainment of their more
immediate objects. "Both Communists and nationalists were
1528
practical revolutionists, he argued, and could work well
together for the equality of China among the nations. That
was enough for the time being. And Borodin supported his
argument by publicly discountenancing all purely
Communistic propaganda." (*15) At this juncture there
arrived a telegram from Moscow sent by Hu-Han-min,
Kuomintang delegate, to the effect that the Third
International had agreed that China was not ripe for
communism, that the economic and social conditions of the
country made a successful revolution of the Russian type
impossible. The communists agreed to help the Chinese
nationalists on their own terms. (*16)
But now the Right Wing was to assert itself more boldly.
Chiang Kai-shek, having made himself generalissimo of the
nationalist armies, suddenly swept down upon Canton in
March, 1926, at the head of his most trusted recruits, shot a
number of workers, and arrested several prominent
revolutionists whom he charged with communist
proclivities and a conspiracy against the nationalist
Government. At the same time, he pursued those in the
armed forces whom he considered disloyal and completely
routed them. Thus, from now on the army was to be solidly
in control of the Right Wing and militarists, while Canton
suffered a severe setback. Still no break occurred between
the communists and the Right Wing. On the contrary, the
Communist International refused to allow any item of the
events in Canton to appear in any of its papers, so that none
of the parties outside of China knew of the upheaval.
Furthermore, although by now the character of the armed
forces of the Kuomintang was becoming perfectly plain, no
effort whatsoever was made to win them over to the side of
the communists. Before starting on its northern expedition,
the Right Wing was ready to drive its victory still farther.
1529
A special plenary session of the Central Executive
Committee was held in May, 1926, which laid down the
following rules concerning the Communist Party. 1. They
were not to criticize the principles of Sun Yat-sen but were
to abide by them implicitly. 2. The Communist Party must
hand over its complete membership list to the Kuomintang
(in order that the generals could massacre them later on). 3.
Communists could not control more than one-third of the
higher executive committees. 4. They could not serve as
heads of departments in the central party organization. 5.
Without authorization from the party, no member of the
Kuomintang could call any meeting in its name to discuss
party affairs. 6. Without the authorization from the highest
body in the party, no member of the Kuomintang was
allowed to be a member of any other political organization
or to engage in any other political activity. 7. If the
Communist Party wanted to send instructions to its
members in the Kuomintang, such instructions first had to
be submitted to a joint committee of which the majority was
non-communist, for approval. 8. No member of the
Kuomintang could join the Communist Party before
tendering his resignation and, once a member had resigned,
he could not rejoin the Kuomintang. 9. All those who
violated the rules were to be punished. (*17)
Thus the activities of the Communist Party fatally were

curtailed. Not only were the communists prevented from
forming soviets, from advocating the arming of the people
and the disarming of the bourgeoisie, not only were they
forced to subscribe to all the capitalist principles of Sun Yat-
senism, but they themselves were destined to be consumed
entirely by the Chinese dragons of the military. They could
not issue any publications (they never had an official organ),
they could not form a faction to fight against the line of the
Kuomintang, they could not criticize the leadership of the
1530
Right Wing to any effective degree, they could not work
within the nationalist army; in short, all that was permitted
them was to become the coolies for the bourgeois
nationalists. They were the rear of the united front. It was
precisely after these stringent terms had been laid down for
the communists that the Communist International hailed
the Kuomintang as a friendly and revolutionary party, and
seated its delegates in Moscow with consultative voices.
It must not be forgotten for a moment that every important

action of the Chinese communists either was ordered by the
Communist International itself, now headed by Stalin and
Bucharin, or was supervised and approved by them. So
inexperienced were the Chinese communists that, with the
utmost naivete', they accepted all advice from the Russians
implicitly, and carried out their instructions to the letter.
The Chinese Revolution was directed, not by the Chinese,
but by the Russian leaders of the Communist International.
Inside the leadership of the International a great struggle
raged on the Chinese question now, since, besides the
Trotsky faction, there had also been formed the Zinoviev
faction, which had united with Trotsky on the question of
China, to demand the formation of soviets, the arming of
the workers, nationalization of landed property and
railroads, the eight-hour day for the workers, a whole series
of labor laws, the agrarian revolution with all its
implications, including the confiscation of wealthy estates
and the partition of the land among the poor peasantry,
confiscation of Chinese shops and factories, large and
medium, leading to the confiscation also of foreign factories
or an agreement with some of the foreign owners to buy
them out, nationalization of the banks, creation of a regular
and genuine Red Army, emancipation of women, abolition
of the remnants of feudalism, disarming of the counter-
revolutionary forces, abolition of rent payments or
1531
immediate drastic reductions, suppression of illegal taxes
and collections, the driving out of rural gentry from their
strongholds, and the wiping out of the usurious parasites.
These were demands that only soviets could enforce, and

the mere raising of these demands would mean eliminating
the power of the Right Wing of the Kuomintang and
winning the Kuomintang to the side of the communists. It
must be borne in mind constantly that in this great
revolutionary period in China the masses were organizing
in their own right and were taking action themselves. It was
their action that was creating the easy victories for the
Kuomintang, and not the sham battles of the Chiang Kai-
shek forces. Hence, had the communists issued this
program they would have increased their power
enormously and would have become superior to the entire
Kuomintang. The roles of the two would have been
reversed. This is another way of saying that in China there
was no class besides the proletariat that could really ally
itself with the overwhelming mass of poor peasantry to
accomplish the titanic task of ridding China of foreign
imperialists and to move to the solution of the great
economic problems of that unfortunate country.
The better to stifle the opposition that was growing

mightily against the policies of Stalin and Bucharin, the
official apparatus decided to call no Congress of the
International throughout the entire period of the Chinese
Revolution. Under Lenin it had been decided to hold
International Congresses every year; under Zinoviev at
Lenin's death this had been changed to once every two
years at the latest; now four solid years were to go by, from
1924 to 1928, before a Congress would be held, and the next
Congress would not be held until seven years later, in 1935.
The apparatus had to arrange that there be no discussions,
1532
that reports and speeches be suppressed, that a reign of
terror be instituted in the Party, and that the leaders of the
opposition be arrested, exiled and shot, before a Congress
could be considered safe.
In their guidance of the Chinese Communists, the Stalin-

Bucharin factions in control of the Comintern violated
every fundamental principle of Leninism. First, they
declared that China was not ready for communism or for
soviets, despite the theses of the Second Congress on the
colonial question and the history of Russia itself, which had
experienced a general capitalist development similar to that
of China. Then the Comintern leadership affirmed that, in
colonial and semi-colonial countries, the workers could
form an alliance with the revolutionary native bourgeois
elements fighting imperialism and thus create a bloc of four
classes, the workers, the peasants, the lower middle class,
and the industrial capitalists, against the comporadores, the
militarists, the feudalists, and the imperialists. This was the
theory of Stalinism.
In vain the Opposition pointed out that always the tactics of

the Marxists and Leninists from 1848 on had been to form
independent organizations of the working class, even
where that class could co-operate with bourgeois
revolutionary sections for the moment. It was inevitable
that at a certain moment the nationalist capitalists of China
would break from the working class and fight the latter,
and the workers had to have their own organizations for
defense. In vain it was urged that, while the workers could
form a close alliance with the peasantry, the communists
must try to keep both these classes separated from the
bourgeoisie.
1533
Furthermore, what was being created was not a bloc at all.
There was no united front of independent organizations for
a temporary concrete objective, which is the true meaning
of a bloc. On the contrary, "The Chinese Communist Party,
in this whole period, had not been in alliance with the
revolutionary petty bourgeois section of the Kuomintang,
but in subordination to the whole Kuomintang, led in reality
by the bourgeoisie which had the army and the power in its
hands." (*18)
In defense of their position, the Comintern leaders attacked

the whole theory of permanent revolution laid down by
Marx and so brilliantly followed through by Lenin. They
maintained that, since China could have only a bourgeois
revolution, it was necessary for the bourgeoisie to take the
lead. To maintain otherwise was denounced as Trotskyism
and the skipping of necessary stages of social and political
development. But it was Lenin's genius to have seen that,
because the revolution would start as a bourgeois
democratic one, the workers and peasants should keep their
forces separate from the bourgeoisie so as to be able to push
the revolution forward at the proper time, establish the
dictatorship of the workers and poor peasants, and make
the revolution permanent.
To gloss their errors, the Russian leadership began to

idealize the Right Wing of the Kuomintang and to paint the
military generals behind Chiang Kai-shek as revolutionists.
Moreover, when reports arrived from China from the
leaders of the Communist Party, Chen Du-siu and Tang
Ping-shan, to the effect that "We followed a too pacific
policy," "We sacrificed the interests of the workers and
peasants in practice," these reports were not allowed to be
printed, and were not revealed even to the members of the
Central Executive, an unprecedented bureaucratic action.
1534
To defend the "bloc," the apparatus had to declare that the
generals did not really control the Kuomintang, but were
obedient to the Left. Only a short month before the terrible
events in Shanghai which we shall describe later, an
editorial in the communist Pravda denounced the
opposition for declaring that the bourgeoisie stood at the
head of the Kuomintang and were preparing treason. "Only
on April 5, that is, a week before the coup d'etat of Chiang
Kai-shek, Stalin rejected Radek's opinion in a meeting of
Moscow functionaries and declared again that Chiang Kai-
shek is submitting to discipline, that the admonitions are
baseless, that we will use the Chinese bourgeoisie and then
toss it away like a squeezed-out lemon." (*19) This speech
by Stalin was ordered suppressed by the spokesman
himself.
The Comintern apparatus defended itself from attacks of

the opposition by affirming that Trotsky and the others
were too impatient, that they were making mistakes in
tempo, that of course the Right Wing would break away
and the communists eventually would have to fight the
Kuomintang, but this was neither the time nor the occasion.
They suppressed the reports that showed that the
Communist Party was limping far behind the events. They
forgot that soviets were to be formed, not suddenly, but at
the very beginning of a movement that was developing into
revolution.
The official Russian apparatus also undertook to defend the

Kuomintang as a sort of unique combination of party and
Soviet, thereby trying to substantiate the argument that it
was unnecessary to build Soviets. As a matter of fact, the
Kuomintang not only stood against Soviets, it had rejected
ordinary parliamentary democracy, just as the leaders
suppressed all democracy within the party itself. But to
1535
compare the Kuomintang with Soviets was truly a
malicious interpretation of history. In Russia, out of a
population of one hundred and sixty-five million, the
Soviets contained literally tens of millions in their ranks; in
China, out of a population of over four hundred million, the
Kuomintang had about,three hundred thousand members.
To maintain that this small Chinese group was equivalent
to Soviets was to fail completely to understand what are
Soviets, and what was indeed the role of the Kuomintang.
However, what was lacking with the Russian leaders was
not so much understanding as international class loyalty.
In the meantime, while these debates were being conducted,

Chiang Kai-shek began his great Northern expedition.
Everywhere the enemy, although far superior in numbers,
equipment and training, either fled at the approach of the
nationalists, or were demoralized by propaganda of the
communists, or paralyzed by vast strikes and guerrilla
warfare in their rear and all around them. To facilitate this
action of the masses, the Second Congress of the
Kuomintang in 1926 had worked out demands of a social
reform character for the peasantry and for the workers. This
inspired the masses to fight most heroically, so that often
the nationalist armies conquered their opponents without a
shot, and their expedition took on the appearance of a great
parade. However, no sooner were the nationalist generals
in control than there began again the shooting of workers,
compulsory arbitration, the disarming of the people, and
the arming of the industrialists, already noted. The Labor
Code was forgotten, the agrarian reforms postponed. None
the less the movement grew mightily. The number of
organized workers grew to the enormous total of three
million. In one province alone, Honan, it was recorded that
thirty million peasants had joined the peasants union. The
1536
generals, having used the masses as long as they could,
determined to settle accounts as soon as possible.
This reckoning was made all the more imperative by the

fact that now the nationalists had reached the Yang-tze
valley and had taken the key cities of Hankow and
Wuchang, which contained a proletariat second only to
Shanghai and more important than that of Canton. These
workers had joined the Left Wing and the communist forces,
and now it seemed that the masses were getting out of
control. The national leadership of the Kuomintang was
now in the hands of the Left nationalists headed by such as
Wang-Ching-wei, Sun-fo, Madame Sun Yat-sen, T. C. Wu,
and others who wanted to retain the collaboration of the
communists. The Communist Party ardently believed that
the Kuomintang could be won over as a body for
communism. "At no time had the relations between the
Nationalist and Communist Parties seemed more intimate
and cordial than in the early spring of 1927." (*20) Two
communists became Ministers in the new Nationalist
Government which had its seat at Hankow.
At the Communist Party conference held in Hankow at the

time, the Left Kuomintang leaders like Wang-Ching-wei
were invited, and the Party tried its best to identify its
program with that of these Lefts. At the conference the
Comintern representative, Roy, of Indian fame, declared:
"The Communist Party is going to work with the
Kuomintang, not only to share responsibility, but also to
share power. In this stage of the revolution, therefore, it is
very necessary that our conceptions of the revolution be
made mutually clear. The task which the Communist
International has put before the Communist Party of China
is not the struggle for the immediate realization of
socialism.... The Kuomintang is a revolutionary
1537
organization . . . because it struggles against imperialism."
(*21)
The generals, however, had different plans. In the course of

their triumphant march northward they had incorporated
into their ranks large numbers of soldiery and officers of
their former mercenary enemies. Thus the Right Wing had
swelled considerably with careerist and reactionary
elements. It had been decided by the Kuomintang that the
army should take Pekin and should establish a national
government. The army generals, however, decided to
violate these decisions and to march on Shanghai instead.
On the surface it looked as though Chiang Kai-shek was
going to attack the heart of imperialism and make open war
against it; in reality, the militarists were marching to unite
with imperialism in order to shoot down the people. This
could be seen by their demand that the party move its
headquarters from the Wu-Han district, with its center at
Hankow, and transfer it to Nanking, which the army
controlled. As the Left Wing refused to comply, the
generals now acted entirely upon their own initiative. Thus
the communists both at Wu-Han and at Shanghai had
ample notice that the militarists intended to break. Still
nothing was done to warn the people; while the militarists
were preparing to strike, the Left Kuomintang leaders were
parlaying with the communists and politically disarming
them before the slaughter.
The march on Shanghai was met with tremendous

enthusiasm of the masses who believed that the real
struggle against imperialism would begin now, with the
defeat of the northern military puppets. Long before the
army could reach Shanghai, a huge general strike broke out
which took control of the city; for twenty-one days there
ruled the so-called People's Government in which the
1538
communists had a majority. At this point we turn for a
report of the situation to Chitarov, one of the leading young
communists of Russia who had been sent as a
representative to China and who reported at the Fifteenth
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
December 11, 1927.(*22)
Chitarov states: "We can therefore say that for twenty-one

days Shanghai had a Communist Government. This
Communist Government, however, revealed a complete
inactivity in spite of the fact that the overturn by Chiang
Kai-shek was expected any day.
"The Communist Government, in the first place, did not

begin to work for a long time under the excuse that, on the
one hand, the bourgeois part of the government did not
want to get to work, sabotaging it, and, on the other hand,
because the Wuhan government did not approve of the
composition of the Shanghai government. Of the activity of
this government three decrees are known and one of them,
by the way, speaks of the preparation of a triumphal
reception to Chiang Kai-shek, who was expected to arrive
in Shanghai.
"In Shanghai, at this time, the relations between the army

and the workers became acute. It is known for instance that
the army (*23) deliberately drove the workers into slaughter.
The army for a period of several days stood at the gates of
Shanghai and did not want to enter the city because they
knew that the workers were battling against the
Shantungese and they wanted the workers to be bled in this
struggle. They expected to enter later. Afterward the army
did enter Shanghai. But among these troops there was one
division that sympathized with the workers -----the First
Division of the Canton army. The commander, Say-O, was
in disfavor with Chiang Kai-shek, who knew about his
1539
sympathies for the mass movement, because this Say-O
himself came from the ranks. He was at first the
commander of a company and later commanded a division.
"Say-O came to the comrades in Shanghai and told them

that there was a military overthrow in preparation, that
Chiang Kai-shek had summoned him to headquarters, had
given him an unusually cold reception and that he, Say-O,
would not go there any longer because he fears a trap.
Chiang Kai-shek proposed to Say-O to get out of the city
with his division and to go to the front; and he, Say-O
proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party
to agree that he should not submit to Chiang Kai-shek's
order. He was ready to remain in Shanghai and fight
together with the Shanghai workers against the military
overthrow that was in preparation. To all this, our
responsible leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, Tchen
Du-siu included, declared that they know about the
overturn being prepared, but that they do not want a
premature conflict with Chiang Kai-shek. The First Division
was let out of Shanghai, the city was occupied by the
Second Division of Bai-Sung Gee and, two days later, the
Shanghai workers were massacred."
The reply of the official apparatus to this most damning

report from one of its own members was to order the
narrative deleted from the minutes! For even now the
official policy was to remain with the Kuomintang; even
now no soviets were to be organized; even now the way
was prepared for a repetition in Wu-Han of what had
happened in Shanghai. The murder of thousands of
workers took place in April; in May, Stalin was declaring,
when it was as yet by no means too late to remedy matters,
that to enter into struggle would mean victory to the enemy.
To give up a revolutionary situation without even a fight, a
1540
characteristic of Stalin's policy first dramatized in Shanghai,
was to find a gigantic elaboration later in Germany in 1933.
At this time, Trotsky, still permitted to speak, summed up

matters as follows: "We continued to maintain the bloc with
the bourgeoisie at a time when the working masses were
driving towards independent struggle. We attempted to
utilize the experience of the 'Rights' and became playthings
in their hands. We carried on an ostrich policy in the press,
by suppressing and concealing from our own party the
first coup d’etat by Chiang Kai-shek in March, 1926, the
shooting of workers and peasants, and in general all the
facts that marked the counter-revolutionary character of the
Kuomintang leadership. We neglected to look after the
independence of our own party. We founded no newspaper
for it. 'We sacrificed the interests of the workers and the
peasants in practice' (Tang Ping-shan). We did not take a
single serious step to win over the soldiers. We allowed the
Chiang Kai-shek band to establish a 'military dictatorship of
the Center,' that is, a dictatorship of the bourgeois counter-
revolution. On the very eve of the coup d'etat we blew the
trumpets for Chiang Kai-shek. We declared that he had
'submitted to discipline,' and that we had succeeded 'by a
skillful tactical maneuver, in forestalling an abrupt turn to
the Right that threatened the Chinese revolution.'
(Raskolnikov's foreword to the pamphlet by Tang Ping-
shan.) We remained behind the events all along the line."
(*24)
The victory of the Right Wing in Shanghai, however,

compelled the communist leadership somewhat to change
their line. Even the Central Committee of the Kuomintang,
controlled by the Wang Ching-wei's, had issued a tearful
apology to the workers and had declared "it only remains
1541
for us to regret that we did not act when there was still
time." The Political Bureau called together the Eighth
Plenary Session of the Comintern, in May, 1927, to consider
the situation. (*25) Although the Political Bureau had not
even read the Theses of Stalin, these Theses were advanced
in its name for discussion. Only now did Stalin issue the
statement that the policy of isolating the Right should be
replaced by a policy of struggle. Only now did Stalin
advocate the arming of the workers and the peasants,
although he still maintained that it was wrong to attempt
the formation of soviets. How it was possible
simultaneously to arm the people and yet prevent soviets
the Russian revolutionists, least of all, would be able to tell.
At this Plenary Session, Stalin again defended the bloc for
four classes and forbade the communists to split from the
Left Kuomintang.
But now the policy of the International leadership was

meeting with stern resistance from important sections of the
Chinese communists themselves. The workers were
beginning to take matters into their own hands. At Wu-Han
they inflicted decisive defeats to the militarists. At that time
"In every action of any importance, nearly two-thirds of
those who participated were killed. The severity of the
campaign, and the heroism displayed by the troops will
always be remembered in the history of the Party." (*26)
The masses broke through the foreign concession granted
to England and took possession of it in spite of the fact that
the navies of the imperialist powers of the entire world had
gathered in the waters of the Yang-tze, ready to unite
against the revolution. Eventually England had to
relinquish this concession, the first important direct
Chinese victory against world imperialism.
1542
After the coup of Chiang Kai-shek at Shanghai there had
been objectively established a sort of dual power, the Left
being gathered in Wu-Han. Now it would seem certain the
Russian experiences would be evaluated and the
independence of the Communist Party secured so that it
could organize soviets and arm the masses. Yet precisely
the same policy was carried out in Wu-Han with Wang-
Ching-wei and the generals Tang-San- chi and Feng that
was carried out with the Right Wing and Chiang Kai- shek!
The Comintern repeated "We will not give up the
Kuomintang banner." The Central Committee of the
Communist Party ordered the workers to render increasing
obedience to the Kuomintang and insisted that the trade
unions arrest no one, not even counter-revolutionaries, but
must always apply to the authorities when they consider an
arrest necessary. According to the Communist Party, the
Left Kuomintang represented not a Kerensky regime which
had to be overthrown, but a democratic-dictatorship of the
workers and peasants growing into socialism
Instead of immediately breaking with the bourgeoisie in the

Kuomintang, the communist officialdom ordered the
building up of the Kuomintang; instead of forming soviets
when there was still time, Stalin declared "It is clear that
whoever calls at present for the immediate creation of
soviets of workers' deputies in this Wu-Han district, is
attempting to jump over the Kuomintang phase of the
Chinese revolution and he risks putting the Chinese
revolution in a most difficult position." (*27) Instead of
taking the offensive against the Right Wing, the
communists ordered a retreat which included the
subordination of all the trade unions, the peasant unions
and other revolutionary organizations to the Kuomintang,
the rejection of independent action on the part of the toilers,
1543
the voluntary disarming of the workers, and the crushing of
the people.
In his report, Chitarov described the behavior of the

communists in Wu-Han. "You know that there were two
Communist ministers in the Government. Afterwards, they
stopped coming around to the ministries altogether, failed
to appear themselves, and put in their places a hundred
functionaries. During the activity of these ministers, not a
single law was promulgated which would ease the position
of the workers and peasants. This reprehensible activity
was wound up with a still more reprehensible, shameful
end. These ministers declared that one of them is ill and the
other wishes to go abroad, etc., and therefore asked to be
released. They did not resign with a political declaration in
which they would have declared: 'You are counter-
revolutionists, you are traitors, you are betrayers --- we will
no longer go along with you.' No. They declared that one is
allegedly ill. In addition, Tang Ping Shan wrote that he cannot
cope with the magnitude of the, peasant movement, therefore he
asked that his release be granted. Can a greater disgrace be
imagined? A Communist minister declares that he cannot
cope with the peasant movement. Then who can? It is clear,
the military, and nobody else. This was an open legalization
of the rigorous suppression of the peasant movement,
undertaken by the Wuhan government." (*28)
This part of the report also was suppressed, for it was clear
that the communist ministers only were following the line
of the top leadership to curb the peasant movement and
prevent soviets from being formed. Even Chitarov was
bound to report that the local communists were not at fault.
"To my deep conviction (I have seen many sections of the
Comintern), there isn't another such section so devoted to
1544
the cause of Communism, so courageous in its fight for our
cause as are the Chinese Communists." (*29)
The criminal policy carried out in Wu-Han now brought its

retribution. The generals Tang and Feng also moved against
the communists, and the Left Kuomintang element now
deserted the proletarians. Chitarov reported the overturn in
Wu-Han which took place May 21-22, 1927: "The overturn
took place under simply unbelievable circumstances. In
Changsha the army consisted of one thousand seven
hundred soldiers, and the peasants made up a majority of
the armed detachments gathered around Changsha to the
number of twenty thousand. In spite of this, the military
command succeeded in seizing power, in shooting all the
active peasants, in dispersing all revolutionary
organizations, and in establishing its dictatorship only
because of the cowardly, irresolute, conciliatory policy of
the leaders in Changsha and Wuhan. When the peasants
learned of the overturn in Changsha, they began to prepare
themselves, to gather around Changsha in order to
undertake a march on it. This march was set for May 21.
The peasants started to draw up their detachments in
increasing numbers toward Changsha. It was clear that they
would seize the city without great effort. But at this point a
letter arrived from the Central Committee of the Chinese
Communist Party in which Tchen Du-Siu wrote that they should
presumably avoid an open conflict and transfer the question to
Wuhan. On the basis of this letter, the District Committee
dispatched to the peasant detachments an order to retreat,
not to advance any further; but this order failed to reach
two detachments. Two peasant detachments advanced on
Wuhan and were annihilated by the soldiers." (*30)
Although tens of thousands had been sacrificed in Shanghai

and more tens of thousands at Wu-Han, there was still the
1545
third great city to be heard from, Canton, where the
communists and workers had not yet been defeated and
executed. In a short time, however, the Stalinist leadership
was to correct this defect also and to provide a third blood
bath for the workers. The terrible drama of the Chinese
Revolution had yet one more chapter to unfold.
The workers by now had been severely defeated in the

North. The whole movement should have been reorganized,
the Party prepared for the new events. In a period of retreat
the slogan raised should have been one demanding a
Constituent Assembly and the application of social reforms;
on that basis, soviets could be organized at the proper time.
It was necessary to entrench, to redress the ranks, to work
among the soldiery, and to prepare for the future events.
The contrary was done. Suddenly, in August, 1927, a

special conference of the Chinese Communist Party was
called which denounced the old leadership which had all
too faithfully followed the line of the Comintern.
Preparations for an immediate insurrection were ordered.
Thus soviets, which had not been organized when the
revolutionary wave was moving forward, were decreed in a
period of retreat and depression. The communist leadership
refused to acknowledge that the period was one of retreat;
they refused to consider the consequences of the fact that all
this time they had done no work whatever within the
armies of the Kuomintang but, on the contrary, had hailed
them as revolutionary and had forbade their own members
under any circumstances to disorganize the armed ranks.
Having ordered soviets, the Communists now burst forth

with a totally unprepared insurrection in Canton in
December, 1927. Suddenly it was announced that soviets
had taken over the city, but these soviets were organized so
hastily that nobody knew anything about them. Soviets
1546
usually have been spontaneously organized bodies
springing from the depths of the people and having around
them the vast majority of toilers whose expression they are.
The soviets in Canton, however, were not even elected
bodies. Soviets not elected! Was any worse parody of
Soviets ever perpetrated? The soviets were communist-
appointed bodies totally divorced from the people and
formed artificially when the revolution already decisively
was defeated. The net result was a new massacre of the
people in Canton that definitely crushed the last remnants
of the revolution.
But even then the Communist International would not

admit the facts. As late as February, 1928, Pravda wrote:
"The Chinese Communist Party is heading towards an
armed insurrection. The whole situation in China speaks for
the fact that this is the correct course." (*31) Although the
best revolutionists had been slaughtered by the tens of
thousands, the official apparatus, attempting to conceal
their crimes, still was declaring that the attack would be
pursued, that the revolution was in progress. At last the
Chinese representatives had to inform the center in
Moscow that the Canton defeat had marked the end of the
first stage of the Chinese Revolution, and that a definite
depression was occurring in the labor movement. As the
report of the international delegates to China declared: "The
responsibility for all this lies equally with the Right wing of
the leadership and the representative of the E.C.C.I.
(Executive Committee, Comintern)." (*32)
In the Chinese Revolution of 1925-1927, the Russian

Bolshevik Party played a role scandalously worse than that
of the Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution of 1905. The
Mensheviks at least never had opposed the strikes of the
workmen. They never had resisted the formation of soviets,
1547
nor of revolutionary parties independent of and critical of
the capitalist class. They never had decided not to build up
their own press. They never had declared that the workers
could take power through any party other than the Marxist
Party, Through this comparison we can gauge to what
depths the degeneration of the Communist International
had sunk. (*33)
It is impossible to believe that the leaders of the Comintern

were ignorant of the lessons of the Russian Revolution or of
the teachings of Marxism. We can explain the policies of
these functionaries only as a result of a deliberate conscious
policy. That policy was expressed in the formula: "Socialism
in One Country." The capitulation to Chinese nationalism
could be made only because, under the pressure of
international capitalism, the Russian leaders already had
permitted full play to Russian nationalism and had
abandoned the world revolution.
Nationalism and internationalism dialectically were

interwoven in the Chinese revolution. The fact that
nationalism had conquered the Russian Party meant that
the great resources of the soviets were used not for the
furthering of the world revolution but for distinctly
nationalist purposes. The victory of the toilers in China was
bound to lead directly and immediately to united armed
intervention on the part of all of the imperialist powers
whose vast naval might constantly was displayed in the
Chinese ports and on the rivers. This would have led to a
new war in which the soviet would have been involved. But
the theory of the Stalinists required that they be let alone to
build socialism in one country. Their motto could be
expressed; "We have made our revolution; let the others
worry about making theirs."
1548
If the Stalinists had refused to interfere in China and had
confined their efforts to Russian nationalism, resulting
events might not have been so disastrous. But the Russians
controlled the whole Communist International and
instructed the Communist Parties all over the world. The
theory of Socialism in One Country had to be adopted not
only by the Russians but also by communists everywhere.
Thus the nationalism of Stalin was inflated into an
international policy and directly and fatally affected the
Chinese revolution. As we have seen, it was the Russians
who directed from first to last every important measure of
the Chinese communists and led them to a terrible defeat.
In this way the communists used the glorious prestige of

the Russian Revolution to destroy the Chinese Revolution;
they utilized the soviets of Russia to prevent the formation
of the soviets in China; they employed the victories of the
Russian Red Army to stop the formation of the Chinese Red
Army; the Comintern did its best to stifle the creation of a
genuine Communist Party of China. Hence the Communist
Party leaders became veritable lackeys of the Chinese
reactionaries and of the foreign imperialists. The fact is, the
unification and emancipation of China was too big a task
for the Chinese workers alone to carry out; they needed
international aid. But the only international aid forthcoming
was such as to destroy their revolution.
From now on it should have become increasingly evident

that the Communist International as a revolutionary force
was absolutely worthless. But there was a decided lag
between the facts of the case and the consciousness,
appreciation, and widespread dissemination of these facts.
As we have seen, the reports systematically were
suppressed by the Stalinist machine. Immediately after the
Chinese Revolution was terminated, the Russian
1549
oppositionists in possession of the facts were exiled and
severely persecuted. Only years later were the facts
published. This was the manner by which communist
officialdom tried to postpone the inevitable reckoning of
history. Thanks to its method of suppression and its
crushing of the opposition, the Comintern would be
exposed only much later, by the events of Germany in 1933.
Then the crisis which had affected the Chinese communist
movement would become universal. A call for a Fourth
International would be made and it would be seen that
China had been only a colonial dress rehearsal for the
crimes in Germany leading to the victory of fascism in the
most important industrial country of Europe.
The Chinese Revolution had been beheaded, but the virility

of that body of people was too great for the huge torso of
the Chinese toilers not to begin to produce new heads.
Although in the cities the workers took to strike movements
of an economic nature and the Communist Party rapidly
disintegrated, the new Nationalist Government of Chiang
Kai-shek was too weak to control the entire country. In the
North, the military chieftains began a new struggle for
power, each one supported by some particular foreign
imperialism. The imperialists refused to give up any of the
concessions and special privileges they had wrested from
China. The Kuomintang rapidly shriveled to a mere
apparatus and an army, just another group of military
bandits.
Deep in the interior of China, a new peasant movement

developed, led by the Chinese Communist Party. This
movement showed that by no means was the revolution
over, but rather that there existed simply a lull preceding a
new revolutionary wave to rise when the Chinese
proletariat should have recovered from its terrible loss of
1550
life. To the surprise of the imperialists, this peasant
movement, instead of diminishing steadily, began to grow
until peasant soviets covered a vast territory and controlled
seventy-five million people. A number of campaigns of
Chiang Kai-shek came to nothing; in four months of one
year it was reported that the soviet armies had captured
nearly one hundred and fifty thousand rifles, fourteen
hundred heavy and light machine guns, one hundred
heavy and light cannon, six airplanes, twenty radio sets,
and other material, and that the force now numbered three
hundred fifty thousand effectives. (*34)
Here was a cancer eating the very heart of the Chinese

militarists. The people now were acting in their own behalf.
The old pacifist precepts of Confucius which had derided
the soldier were giving way to entirely new ideals. Under
the soviets it is true there was no Socialism, no confiscation
of the means of production, no abolition of capitalism. On
the contrary, a sort of Jacobin equalitarianism was the most
extreme tendency that could be said to prevail. A land law
was carried out which helped the mass of poor peasants; a
labor code was adopted to carry out social reform; the army,
workers and the poor agrarians were exempted from
taxation. There was no nationalization of industries, but
there existed some form of workers' control over
production, and the confiscation of all property of those
capitalists who practiced sabotage.
The Communist International leadership was not content,

however, with stating the facts and preparing for new
uprisings later on. They had to affirm that this signified that
a new Chinese revolution was in progress, that the army
was a real Red Army, and that the soviets were introducing
socialism so that, in China, it would not be the proletariat of
the big cities that would free the peasantry, but rather the
1551
peasantry who would march to the cities, blow down the
walls, and free the proletariat. The effect of this policy was
to withdraw the attention of the Chinese communists from
the city and to throw them into military adventures on the
countryside.
Foreign imperialists had recognized clearly the menace of

this unceasing civil war. Since the Nationalist Government
could not put down the people, it was time for the big
powers to act. The only one really free to act was Japan and,
soon after the defeat of the attempt of the Northern
militarist Chang Tso-lin to seize the Chinese Eastern
Railway, Japanese troops marched into the country, seizing
the whole northern area. Chiang Kai-shek made no real
effort to oppose the Japanese, hoping that they would co-
operate with him to destroy the communists within China
and their source of inspiration in Russia.
This invasion of North China, Manchuria, and Mongolia by

Japan greatly has revived the revolutionary movement in
China. The masses understand that the only way to fight
Japan is to overthrow the Chiang Kai-shek regime and take
over power themselves. This was demonstrated by the
heroism of the workers in the Chapei district of Shanghai
and the soldiers of the nineteenth Route Army of Canton at
Woosung when Japan attacked these regions. Now is the
time for the Leninists to combine the struggle against their
internal enemies with the struggle to free China from
Japanese and other aggression. At this moment the slogan
demanding the convocation of a Constituent Assembly to
consider the questions of war against Japan and of social
reform for the masses can be a fine lever for the creation of
soviets and the revival of the whole revolutionary
movement on a higher level.
1552
Regardless of the momentary trend of affairs, war against
Japan by China is inevitable. Such a war will stir up all of
Asia and, if coupled with the defense of Russia against
foreign invasion, will be bound to end forever the
disastrous theory of Socialism in One Country and lead the
revolution to a new world plane.
Footnotes
1. T. C. Wu: The Kuomintang and the Future of the Chinese

Revolution, p. 25. The author's name is also spelled T. C.
Woo.
2. The same, p. 28.
3. See "Theses of Zinoviev" given as an appendix in L. D.

Trotsky: Problems of the Chinese Revolution, p. 322.
4. T. C. Wu: work cited, p. 185.
5. Theses of Zinoviev, work cited, pp. 323-324.
6. A. N. Holcombe: The Chinese Revolution, p. 160.
8. Borodin, it seems, was born with the name Grusenberg

which he changed to Berg when he was operating a
business school in Chicago. It became Borodin later. Before
serving in China he had been sent on missions to Mexico
and Turkey and witnessed the nationalist revolutionary
movements there.
9. A. N. Holcombe: The Chinese Revolution, p. 163.
10. Chen Tsung-hsi, Wang An-tsiang and Want I-

ting: General Chiang Kai-shek, Builder of New China, pp. 96-97.
1553
11. Theses of Zinoviev, work cited, pp. 316-317.
12. A. N. Holcombe: work cited, p. 184.
14. The same, p. 140.
16. The same, 195-196.
17. See T. C. Wu: work cited, pp. 176-177.
18. L. D. Trotsky: Problems of the Chinese Revolution, p 41.
21. Speech quoted in A. N. Holcombe: work cited, p. 210.
22. This report is given in L. D. Trotsky: work cited, pp. 274-

276.
23. Chitarov here means Chiang Kai-shek's officers.
24. L. D. Trotsky: work cited, pp. 45-46.
25. The whole plenary session was censored and very little
of the reports got out to the communist membership.
27. L. D. Trotsky: work cited, quoting from Stalin's speech

delivered May 24, 1927, p. 284.
28. L. D. Trotsky: work cited, pp. 286-287.
29. Given in L. D. Trotsky: work cited, p. 291.
1554
30. Given in L. D. Trotsky: work cited, pp. 289-290.
31. See L. D. Trotsky: work cited, p. 294.
32. Report of Nassonov, Fokine and Albrecht, given in L. D.

Trotsky: work cited, p. 430.
33. Compare A. Weisbord: For a New Communist

International!, pamphlet, p. 8.
34. See Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic, p. 8.
XLIV. SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY
THE defeats of the Italian and German proletariats,

accentuated by the events in Britain and China, left Soviet
Russia isolated. The Communist International under Lenin
had hoped that an international revolution would support
the proletarian revolution in Russia. The international
revolution, however, apparently was not immediate. The
Russian working class found itself surrounded externally
by a hostile capitalist world with which it had to deal, and
internally with a vast peasantry composing the
overwhelming majority of the population. The thin red line
of Bolsheviks would now have an exceedingly hard time to
hold the fort.
The difficulty necessarily was aggravated when the New

Economic Policy was introduced. The NEP itself was a sign
that a certain retreat was inevitable and that, to survive, the
Russians had to make concessions to world capitalism.
Under Lenin, the retreat was mainly an economic one.
Foreign capital was sought, free trade was established, and
1555
domestic capitalism to a considerable extent was revived,
but politically the proletariat kept firm control, so that
capitalist competition served merely to stimulate the
productivity of the country and to consolidate the hold of
the working class dictatorship.
But eventually politics follows economics; the economic

retreat under Lenin was to become a political retreat under
Stalin. The NEP had accelerated production greatly, it was
true, but it also greatly had increased the importance of the
capitalist elements of economy. These capitalists could not
overthrow the proletarian regime directly, but they could
transform its apparatus and undermine the workers' rule.
Technically, the Russian workers had been extremely

backward. Far more than in industrial countries, they had
to rely upon the specialists and the engineers of the Czar for
the reconstitution of national economy. These specialists
and intellectuals could be made to serve the proletariat only
at a price, only by special privileges, higher salaries, certain
control in the factories, etc. Furthermore, the need for such
experts was so great that a moiety of the skilled workers
and communist functionaries could be moved into this
stratum of society relatively easily. Once ensconced in their
exceptional positions, such workers tended to become
bureaucrats and, with their special posts, could well
become the connecting link between the old Czarist
specialists and the trade unions, co-operatives, and Soviets.
Simultaneously within the mass institutions a certain
stratification was taking place. The trade unions no longer
were engaged in a bitter day-to-day struggle against
national capitalism. Not the capitalist, but the trade union
official had the last say in the question of hiring and firing
and negotiated the matter of hours and wages and working
conditions. These trade union officials also obtained for
1556
themselves the salaries and privileges of the intellectual
elements, and gradually separated themselves from the
mass of workers. This deviation was still more sharply
delineated in the Soviets, where the very nature of the
government organs compelled them to admit large
numbers of former white-collar workers, bookkeepers,
accountants, office clerks, and specialists of one sort or
another.
Theoretically, the Communist Party, being composed of the

most advanced and courageous elements, should have been
in a position to correct the growth of bureaucracy. However,
since these bureaucrats temporarily were exceedingly
necessary, a mass dismissal of them would have
disorganized the whole plan for reconstruction. After the
exhaustive World War, civil war, and famine periods,
above all more production was imperative, and the
Communist Party was forced to make many concessions to
these functionaries in order to keep the economic machine
going. But what was far more important, within the
Communist Party itself bureaucracy was undergoing a
mushroom growth. The stress of leading the world
revolution could not be placed forever upon the Russian
working class. If the Russians were not relieved by other
sections of the world proletariat, they were bound to grow
tired and to crack under the strain. This weariness of the
Communist Party leaders was manifest in their disinterest
in the world revolution, which had been disappointing in
its delay, and in emphasis on national problems. The fact
that world capitalism had not been able to overthrow the
Soviet Union gave them a certain security which induced
an attitude of rest and repose. They turned away from
permanent revolution to economic problems of
construction in which the class struggle no longer was felt
directly to the same degree as before.
1557
It should be borne in mind, too, that the victory of the
Russian communists had given to the leadership enormous
power and had attracted to this Party all sorts of careerists
and adventurers who bowed down to the apparatus
precisely in proportion as they hoped themselves to inherit
this power for their own advantage. Had the Bolsheviks
engaged in ruthless civil war internationally so as to be able
constantly to test and to refresh their Party, such elements
could have been minimized or even eliminated, but the
animadversion from the world revolution denied the
Russians the opportunity to prove all their new recruits. On
the other hand, these new members, especially those who
previously had been with the Social- Revolutionaries or the
Mensheviks and who had entered into the Bolshevik Party
by the thousands, were able to carry their old nationalist
baggage with them and to accentuate the tendencies to
nationalism and bureaucracy already growing among the
Communists. Thus the isolation of the Russian proletariat
and the failure of the world revolution to materialize in
other countries led to a sort of vicious circle or, rather, to a
downward spiral in which party degeneration and growing
bureaucracy mutually aided each other.
To sum up the forces alien to the proletariat within the

country: there were the kulaks on the countryside who still
hired laborers; the middle peasants who wanted more land,
high prices for goods, and free trade; the foreign capitalists
and their agents in the cities; the merchants and traders
who believed in free trade; and the small property elements
who bought government bonds and wanted to live on their
incomes. There were also the specialists, the intellectuals,
and the bureaucratic functionaries.
The bureaucratic functionaries could be divided into

several categories. Closest to the capitalist class were the
1558
old Czarist officials, specialists, experts, and engineers of all
sorts. These worked in the factories and in the soviets. They
supposedly were controlled by designated representatives
of the workers and the peasants, but frequently these
deputies found themselves closer to the specialists than to
the workers; they soon formed a second layer of
bureaucrats entrenched in the co-operatives, in the trade
unions, and in the Soviets. Both of these two layers of
functionaries tried desperately to enter the Communist
Party and added their weight to the third element which
controlled the Party and the International.
The situation was well expressed by the figures of the

Communist Party given out for January 1, 1927. Out of
approximately 1,200,000 members of the Communist Party
at that time, only about one-third, or 430,000, were workers
actually occupied in industry and transport; at the same
time, the Party contained 462,000 officials, half of whom
were formerly workers, and 303,000 peasants, of whom
more than half were now governmental officials.
In the latter part of his life, Lenin began to recognize the

seriousness of this situation. "In his speech at the last Party
Congress he attended, Lenin said: 'Here we have lived a
year, with the state in our hands, and under the New
Economic Policy has it operated our way? No. We don't like
to acknowledge this, but it hasn't. And how has it operated?
The machine isn't going where we guide it, but where some
illegal, or lawless, or God-knows-whence-derived
speculators or private capitalistic businessmen either the
one or the other, are guiding it. A machine doesn't always
travel just exactly the way, and it often travels just exactly
not the way, that the man imagines who sits at the wheel.' "
(*1)
1559
Under the given conditions of a victorious proletarian
revolution in a backward agrarian country, the capitalist
classes and their agents within could not hope for a direct
coup d'etat for the restoration of capitalism. Just as no class
could have overthrown Czarism and established the power
of the Soviets other than the proletariat, so was there no
other class that could challenge the existing rule. Instead of
a head-on collision with the proletarian party and the class,
therefore, the growth of capitalism would have to take the
form of steady triturition of that party, its slow corrosion
and degeneration. Such degeneration had been known
many times before in history. The kulak, the Nepman, the
specialist and the bureaucrat represented the Thermidorean
elements within Russia that were working for the
restoration of capitalism.
Furthermore, if capitalism was to get a foothold in the

Bolshevik Party it had to do so stealthily, not by open
argument, certainly so long as Lenin was alive, but by
secret organizational maneuvers. Those in the top layers of
the Bolshevik Party who would capitulate the soonest
would be naturally the officials who had never been abroad
or subject to the direct influence of international experience,
who were not the foremost intellectual leaders but rather
those who had in their hands the power of appointments,
removals and general organizational supervision.
In this respect the person who nearest represented the ideal

was Stalin. Intellectually a mediocrity who had never
played a theoretical role in the party but who per contra was
a man of "action" and strong will, strongly influenced by
reformism, having come from Georgia, (a territory that had
always yielded a large per cent of social reformists due to
the general backwardness of the country) and more than
once clashed with the internationalism of Lenin, (*2) Stalin,
1560
who had been given the post of organizational secretary of
the party, was precisely the man in exactly the position to
accomplish the change. The illness of Lenin gave Stalin the
needed opportunity and he steadily began to increase his
influence by placing his men secretly in the important
positions of the party. What was more, Stalin was at the
head of the "Workers' and Peasants' Inspection," an
institution intended to eradicate bureaucracy in the State
organization, and, in that position, he had been able greatly
to consolidate his hold. We already have noted Stalin's
vacillations during the revolution and his intrigue during
the civil war leading directly to the loss of the Polish
campaign. Now Stalin was to plot to drive Lenin himself
from the leader's position. (*3) His intrigue would
culminate in the arrest, exile, and execution of all the old
leading partners of Lenin. In 1937, Stalin would be supreme.
Already, in the early part of 1923, Lenin had taken steps for
Stalin's removal. At that time he proposed a complete
reorganization of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection and,
in March, 1923, from his sick bed, Lenin dictated a letter to
Stalin breaking off all comradely relations with him. (*4)
But Lenin was now mortally ill and, when his proposal was
brought to the Political Bureau by Trotsky at Lenin's
request, Stalin, Bucharin, and others not only were hostile
but actually proposed not to print the resolution in the
press. Intrigue went so far, indeed, that "In view of the
insistent demand of Lenin that the article should be shown
him in print, Comrade Kuibishev, afterwards the head of
the Rabkrin, proposed that one special number
of Pravda should be printed with Lenin's article and shown
to him, while the article itself should be concealed from the
party." (*5)
1561
Such circumstances as these induced Lenin to write his
"Testament" to the Bolsheviks in which, having traced the
instability of the Russian State to the fact that it rested not
only upon the proletariat but also upon the peasantry, and
having declared that, under such circumstances, a split in
the Party was quite possible, and after having characterized
the defects of both Stalin and of Trotsky, he stated: "Stalin is
too rude and this fault, entirely supportable in relations
among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office
of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades
to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and
appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from
Stalin only in superiority --- namely, more patient, more
loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less
capricious, and so on." (*6)
The death of Lenin brought to light the terrific struggle

within the Communist Party that had been brewing during
his illness. While understanding well enough the two-class
foundation of the Russian State, neither Lenin nor Trotsky
had appreciated sufficiently the practical implications of
this duality to the Communist Party; both failed to see soon
enough that the class struggle would be waged within the
ranks of the Bolsheviks themselves. Thus, they realized too
late that, during the entire period beginning with the New
Economic Policy, the anti-proletarian forces had been
obtaining a firm foothold in the Party and, through Stalin,
were working for its control. The struggle of the classes had
gone on secretly for some time; in 1924 it burst into the
open.
In Russia, the battle of the classes could find its expression

in no other way than through formulations within the
Communist Party. Both sides would be composed of
sincere and tested communists of long standing and yet,
1562
ironically enough, it was only through such communists
that capitalism could have an opportunity to express itself.
In other words, only when capitalist pressure could reach
the Communist Party could capitalist ideology come out in
the open. Whatever class controlled the Party would be in a
position to dictate terms. That this situation was not
examined concretely enough by Lenin and by Trotsky
could be seen from their permitting Stalin to act in the key,
although at the time subordinate, post of organizational
Secretary.
The struggle began on the question of bureaucracy in the

Party and in the soviets, but behind this struggle loomed
the wider and more basic interests of the proletariat. At the
end of 1922, while Lenin was ill, the Central Committee
already had adopted a resolution which would have meant
the end of the State monopoly of foreign trade, and thus
would have opened the doors wide to world capitalism,
and transformed Russia sooner or later into an agrarian
region at the mercy of industrial imperialism. Only through
the monopoly of foreign trade could Russia begin rapid
industrial reconstruction and supply for herself the sinews
of war that adequately could defend her. Had Russia
become simply part of the capitalist world division of labor,
then her factories would have been rendered idle by the
more efficient production of the West and, while the
peasantry would have benefitted from cheaper goods, the
proletarian power would have been liquidated. Thanks to
the energy of Lenin and of Trotsky, this measure of the
Central Committee was defeated.
Significant too, was the fact that Trotsky was able to

convince Lenin of the necessity for an independent State
Planning Commission (The Gosplan) that should devise a
national plan of industrialization which in turn would
1563
supply the material basis for the growing and continuous
power of the proletariat. The struggle that arose between
Stalin and Trotsky was precisely over the deep questions of
the building-up of Russian economy. These questions had
to do with the relations of the proletariat to the peasantry,
of industry to agriculture, with the relations between light
and heavy industry, with the relations of Russia to the rest
of the world.
The crushing defeat that the soviets had given to the

counter-revolution and to foreign intervention had allowed
the Russians a breathing space in which to concentrate
upon building up a new economy from the ruins of the old.
The victory of the proletariat, which ultimately would lead
to a far better system of production than capitalism had
developed, nevertheless had been consolidated only after
the country was in utter ruin. It was necessary to obtain
more products. The workers were demanding bread, the
peasants were crying for shoes, clothing, finished goods. If
the grain were seized from the peasants without any
commensurate return, the alliance between the workers and
their agrarian supporters would be broken, and a new civil
war would result. On the other hand, the proletariat could
not produce goods cheaply, when all the chief factories
were in a ruined condition. Above all, it was necessary to
throw all possible resources of the country into building up
the industries.
Such a course, however, strenuously was resisted by the

peasantry who knew that any building-up of industry
would have to come from capital reserves obtained by
selling peasant products on the open markets. The peasants
would have preferred to have given up the monopoly of
foreign trade and to have obtained cheap products directly
from abroad. Thus the struggle opening up for the
1564
industrialization of Russia involved the question of the
relation of the workers to the peasants.
From the beginning, the Central Committee, deprived of

Lenin's aid, tended to make great concessions to the
peasantry. The most efficient producers were the kulaks and,
in order to hold up their output as an example before the
middle peasants, favors had to be granted to the wealthier
group. Every effort was made by the Central Executive to
show the peasants that the workers did not mean to behave
unsympathetically to their problems. The communist
leaders began to talk of building socialism at a snail's pace;
they raised the motto to the peasantry of "Enrich
yourselves," and adopted the slogan "Face to the village."
Bucharin believed that even the kulak would be able to
grow into socialism.
Such a solution, however, only could aggravate the

problem. The fact that taxation was so light on
the kulak meant that very little surplus could be
accumulated to throw into industry. With the growth of
production on the countryside, the lack of finished goods in
the city presented an ever greater contrast, and the peasants
began to rebel at the lack of finished commodities under
which they were suffering. But, more than that, the workers
too were beginning to complain.
The opposition under Trotsky had urged the

industrialization of the country in the speediest possible
manner commensurate with the task of maintaining the
alliance with the mass of peasantry. First of all they had
enunciated the idea of the need for a national plan carefully
regulating the amounts to be thrown into heavy industry
for the manufacture of means of production and machinery,
and the amounts to be thrown into light industry producing
the means of consumption that would satisfy directly the
1565
needs of the masses. Trotsky pointed out that, hand in hand
with the growth of economy, there would have to go the
improved condition of the working class, which was also
one of the productive forces, indeed the main productive
force to be considered.
The Central Committee attacked these proposals as part of

Trotsky's tendencies to ignore the peasantry on the ground
that his plan would lead to a break of the alliance between
the workers and the peasants. The opposition was
denounced as a group of super-industrialists who would
ruin the Soviet Union. The Central Committee declared that
to undertake such industrialization would mean that taxes
would become so heavy on the peasantry that it would
revolt under the leadership of the kulak.
It became clear enough, however, that behind the policy of

the Central Committee actually were gathered all
the kulak elements, the Nepmen and capitalist agents who
feared the growth of industrialization as strengthening the
hand of the proletariat in soviet economy. The workers
themselves began to take a hand in the debate. If Russia
was not industrialized rapidly, then there would be no
economic basis for the sustaining of the proper kind of Red
Army that adequately could defend the isolated Soviet
Union. Without industrialization, it would be impossible
for prices ever to become cheap without the breakdown of
the monopoly of foreign trade, a step which the workers
meant to resist to the end.
The platform of the opposition was worked out in this

period. It pointed out that the whole taxation policy of the
Soviet Union was becoming distorted in favor of the kulak,
with the result that the poorer agrarians were bearing the
burden and slowly bowing under it. In spite of the
equalitarian confiscation of the land, 34 per cent of the
1566
poorest peasantry earned only 18 per cent of the total
income, while 7 per cent of the top layers earned also 18 per
cent. The taxation policy of the country was not taking into
account this growing differentation, was not taxing
the kulak sufficiently. Furthermore, because of free trade
and the great dearth of goods, the disparity between
wholesale and retail prices was enormous, leading to the
wildest speculation on the part of
the Nepmen and kulaks. On the other hand, real wages were
not rising commensurately with the increased production,
while the intensity of labor was becoming greater. Housing
conditions were appalling, scarcely any funds being thrown
into this phase of economy.
Concatinated with this lack of improvement in the workers'

standards went the fact that the trade unions were
becoming reduced to mere shells. "In the staff of the elective
executive organs of ten industrial unions, the percentage of
workers from the shops and non-party militant workers is
extremely small (12 to 13 per cent). The immense majority
of the delegates to the trade-union conferences are people
entirely disassociated from industry." (*7) The opposition
demanded that an end be made to these intolerable
sacrifices on the part of the proletariat, and that the
workers' conditions immediately be improved. It also
demanded a reform of the trade unions, cleaning out the
bureaucrats and drawing into greater participation the non-
party members. "At every trade-union congress (including
the all-union congress) and in all the elective organs of the
trade unions (including the All-Russian Council of Trade
Unions) there must be a majority of workers directly
engaged in industry. The percentage of non-party workers
in these organs must be raised to at least one-third." (*8)
Moreover, the opposition incurred the deadly hatred of the
trade union functionaries by proposing that "at regular
1567
intervals, a certain number of the officials of the trade-
union apparatus must be drafted for industrial work." (*9)
The agrarian program of the opposition contained far-

reaching changes. It proposed that the State aid, with
credits and machinery, only the village poor to whom
would be allied the middle peasants. These two sections,
together with the agricultural laborers, would comprise the
heart of agrarian collective enterprise. A maximum sum
should be appropriated for the creation of the soviet and
collective farms.
The Central Committee finally, in 1926, had adopted a Five-

Year Plan which had called for a rate of from 4 per cent to 9
per cent annual increase in production. This was far from
enough, according to the opposition. "The gigantic
advantage involved in the nationalization of the land, the
means of production, the banks, and the centralized organs
of administration --- that is, the advantages derived from
the socialist revolution --- find almost no expression in the
five-year plan." (*10) As a matter of fact, when the
Committee began to put its Plan into operation, it had to
revise it upward several times, so far had it diverged from
the capacity of the toilers to achieve.
Finally, in the economic section of its program, the

opposition considered the problem of resources for the
rapid upbuilding of industrial economy of the Soviet Union,
called for a far heavier tax upon the kulak and Nepman and
for a strict regime of economy, including the dismissal of a
considerable part of the army of bureaucrats. Every effort
was to be made to increase the export of agricultural goods
and the import of machinery and finished articles, and to
obtain credits abroad. Finally, the government should
terminate the sale of vodka in order to raise the material
and spiritual resources of the country.
1568
The views of the opposition split the Bolshevik Party into

three distinct groups. To the Left was the faction of Trotsky
to which soon adhered Zinoviev and Kamenev,
representing the most important centers of Leningrad and
of Moscow, although at the start they had fought the
opposition. To the extreme Right were the communists
representing the trade union officialdom and specialists, led
by Bucharin, Tomsky, Rykov, and others. Between these
two, representing the communist officialdom in the Party
itself were the Stalinists, at the head of the Party apparatus,
swinging from Right to Left as they were pushed now by
one class and now by the other.
At first, the Stalin faction worked hand in glove with the

Right Wing of Bucharin and united with it to defeat the Left.
Only by defeating the Left could the apparatus itself live
and grow. The communist apparatus was in a peculiar
position. On the one hand, it was tiring of incessant
revolution and was rapidly turning from the struggle, thus
turning away from the position of the proletariat towards
that of alien groups; on the other hand, it was functioning
in a country where the proletarians had taken the power
and, in a sense, was a prisoner of the revolution which had
given it power.
In order to defeat the proletarian policy, of the Left

opposition, Stalin was forced to take steps leading to the
complete crushing of the Communist Party, nationally and
internationally. For four years, from 1924 to 1928, no
Congress of the International was held. Instead there were
1569
substituted periodic meetings of the top functionaries only.
The theory was advanced that the Communist Party had to
be a monolithic organization, of one piece, that no factional
discussion could be tolerated. This was interpreted to mean
that any criticism of the apparatus now was impossible, and,
in order to enforce its decrees, all discussion was broken up
in the most brutal manner; into the Party for the first time
entered rowdyism. Secret soviet police began to sit in at the
Party meetings themselves to make the arrests. Local
secretaries were appointed from the top. Whole units and
sections were dissolved. Thousands of Party members were
arrested and sent to jail for Trotskyism. Others actually
were condemned and put to death. Trotsky, himself,
together with other leaders, was exiled to Siberia and then
deported.
The mechanism which the apparatus used to control the

Party was both internal and external. The following tricks
were resorted to within the Party: 1. The drives. 2. The
purges. 3. The frame-up. 4. The abolition of democracy. We
shall discuss briefly these various features of Communist
degeneration.
Just prior to the death of Lenin, when the struggle against

Trotsky began, the apparatus had immediate need of
drawing in as many henchmen as necessary in order to
swing the votes. The leaders inaugurated what they called
the "Lenin Drive," which was supposed to draw hundreds
of thousands of workers into the Party to replace the loss of
Lenin and to strengthen the Party. Of this drive, Walter
Duranty wrote: "Not long before Christmas it was
announced that the Thirteenth Party Conference had
decided that one hundred thousand 'workers from the
bench' should be invited to join the Party without delay.
The inference was obvious that this new membership,
1570
which amounted to nearly 20 per cent of the total strength
of the Party at that time, would be hand-picked by the
Secretariat, through its subordinate personnel in Moscow
and the provinces. When it subsequently became known
that the new members would have a right to vote for
delegates to the next Party Congress (in May, 1924), the full
import of the maneuver became clear; the Secretariat had
boldly added 20 per cent of the total electorate to its own
supporters in what bid fair to be an evenly divided contest.
Several years later a veteran communist told me he thought
this to have been the turning point in the struggle between
Stalin and Trotsky. 'Prior to that,' he said, 'the odds were in
Trotsky's favor.' " (*11)
Thus, the Party, instead of being strengthened, was filled

with persons who had not professed communism during
the stern period of the civil war, but who were trying to
benefit, now that the Bolsheviks were in power. How well
the apparatus succeeded can be seen from the following
figures. "Following the death of Lenin, on January 21, 1924,
the Party increased its membership from 440,000 to 741,000
in 1924, or a growth of 63.6 per cent. By 1925, there was a
further increase of 39.7 per cent, and, in 1926, of 12.3 per
cent." (*12) "In 1926, however, over 85 per cent had entered
since 1924. This means that they had not suffered for the
party and their convictions under the Czar's regime." (*13)
At the same time, the membership of the Youth League
jumped from 500,700 in 1924 to 1,140,706 in 1925, and to
2,051,950 in 1926.
Simultaneously with the drives went the purges. It would

be announced that the Party contained too many careerist
and untested elements; these the apparatus would proceed
to eradicate. Naturally, the brunt of the expulsions and
suspensions that took place in wholesale fashion was borne
1571
by those in opposition to the center. Thus, by means of this
double process of purges and drives, the Stalinist apparatus
was creating an entirely new Communist Party made up of
brand new material, the only stable element of which was
the bureaucracy itself. Now, more than ever, the
membership was not to be trusted in the eyes of the officials,
because it was new and untried; now, more than ever, all
the decisions of the Party were in the hands of the
functionaries whose head was Stalin.
But all these measures still were not sufficient to drive out
the Left opposition whose leaders had won enormous
prestige in the trying days when communism had been
forced to fight for its life in Russia. To discredit its enemies,
Stalinism invented the peculiar Russian form of frame-up to
which has been given the name of "Amalgam." This process
consisted of obtaining a notorious White-Guard or anti-
communist agent and planting him among the
oppositionists where his presence could prove that the
opposition was a counter-revolutionary group plotting
against the proletariat in the Soviet Union. Without this
method, the apparatus never could have succeeded in
removing such men as Trotsky from the Party. (*14) With
this excuse, too, the OGPU agents began to sit in on all
discussions of the Party, making criminal arrests of those
who were suspected of being oppositionists.
These methods could succeed only when coupled with a

complete denial of loyal inner party democracy. The
opposition was not permitted to take the floor at factory
nuclei meetings; their views were not allowed to appear in
the press; Congresses were postponed until the opposition
should be driven out and the elections made safe. When the
opposition advanced its views in Party circles by means of a
mimeograph, the Party center raided, and declared to the
1572
world that the opposition was conducting underground
work through illegal printing presses, that it was plotting a
counter-revolution. The final act came during an outdoor
celebration, when thousands of workers had flocked to the
platform where Trotsky and Zinoviev appeared, and
cheered them. The Party was informed that now the
opposition had taken to the streets; the whole faction
brutally was dispersed. Trotsky was thrown out of the
Party and finally deported from the country.
By the actions of the Stalinist functionaries, not only the

Communist Party was destroyed as a democratic
instrument to express the will of the proletariat, but with
the destruction of the Party naturally went the destruction
of the unions, the co-operatives, and finally the soviets. The
victory of the bureaucracy of the Party over the members
meant an even greater victory of the bureaucracy over the
mass organizations. The unions became transformed from
agencies representing the interests of the workers in the
shop to agencies to speed up production under the
direction of the mass of petty officials and experts, who
pocketed a good portion of the collective produce for
themselves. The unions became increasingly incorporated
into the State apparatus itself, until finally the process was
completed, and the workers were in fact forbidden to strike,
on pain of being considered traitors to the cause and being
arrested for sedition.
The co-operatives which were far more liable to be

controlled by functionaries and petty officials suffered a
similar fate, even more completely. They became no longer
the real representative of the mass of consumers, but rather
thoroughly were corroded with elements close to the
capitalist tradespeople. The soviets also became a mere
shell of their former selves. Meetings were but slightly
1573
attended, and the mass of work was left to the few officials
who controlled the body. The ominously reactionary
atmosphere could be seen in the diminution of the number
of non-Party persons drawn into work, and in the falling off
of such elements as the women, who were demonstrating
by their absence that the Party was making no appeal to the
broadest layers of the population.
Despite these processes, however, the economic

development of the country to pre-War levels had
compelled the proletariat to take up the question of State
planning and of the proper relations to the peasantry. The
adoption of the Five-Year Plan and its execution at an ever
accelerated tempo was forced by the workers themselves.
The Stalinist apparatus now was compelled to make
concessions to the workers who, having gone through three
revolutions and taken power, still knew how to make their
will felt and how to whip the alien classes into line. A
struggle opened up between the Right Wing, headed by
Bucharin, and the Stalinists. The year 1928 that saw the
inauguration of the Five-Year Plan also witnessed the
Bucharin, Tomsky, Rykov group driven out of influence in
the Party and threatened with the same treatment that was
given the Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc. Matters, however, did not
go too far. Neither faction felt it could survive as yet
without the other. The Stalinists could not lose the support
of the mass of officials and experts represented by the Right
Wing, behind whom stood also the kulak and the Nepman.
On the other hand, the Bucharin group felt that if they
remained in the Party they might retain the final word, in
molding the policy in their direction.
Besides, both Bucharin and Stalin understood that the fight

with the opposition by no means was over. With the
operation of the Five-Year Plan, new difficulties were
1574
bound to arise which might cause the working class to rebel.
These would be provoked not merely by the immensity of
the task and its unprecedented character, but by the nature
of the methods of the bureaucracy. In the course of its
victory by the crushing of proletarian democracy within the
Soviet Union, the bureaucracy had destroyed the delicate
social barometers and instruments by which the working
class could check up on all the multifarious results of the
operations of the Plan. The ways were reduced through
which any deleterious effects could be detected and the
necessary adjustments made. Bureaucratic guesswork took
the place of collective co-operation of the masses. The result
was an extremely zig-zag execution of the Five-Year Plan.
Having just abandoned the catch phrase, "Socialism at a
snail's pace," the Stalinists now could declare they would
attain complete socialism in Russia by the end of the Five-
Year Plan or, at most, of two Five-Year Plans. The Five-Year
Plan would be completed in four years and even less. Such
a reckless application of the Plan greatly threatened the
relations of the workers to the peasants, since the latter
were paying for the construction.
Instead of working out a careful balance between the light

and the heavy industry, Stalin threw all the surplus goods
possible into heavy industry. This led to a shortage of
consumable goods such as clothing and shoes, and the
result was a deep grumbling from the peasantry, and the
breaking of the firm alliance between the city and the
country. The peasant was taxed to the breaking point. He
saw himself deprived of his stock and his produce, and
receiving nothing in return but a "Plan." He began to
sabotage, to kill his stock and eat it himself. Before this
move could be checked, in 1932 approximately half of all
the live-stock in Russia had been destroyed! The peasant
refused to till the soil. Hunger began to invade the cities.
1575
Instead of proceeding at a steady, sure pace, Stalin had put
the country on a war basis with the slogan of "The Five-
Year Plan in Four Years." The workers were forced to work
harder than ever. All the bureaucrats began to try for
"records." Quality did not count, only quantity. Shoes and
clothing unfit for use were produced. A dreadful waste
prevailed in all factories. No control was placed over the
bureaucrats, who were soon in alliance with groups of
saboteurs all over the country. Thus, the workers not only
worked harder, but the products they received in return for
their labor were shoddy. Instead of the Five-Year Plan with
its increase of production actually benefitting the workers,
the working class was pushed down lower than before. The
result was that the workers also began to sabotage. They
refused to work. They began to move from factory to
factory with the hope that the next place would prove
better than the last. Thus the factories became handicapped
by a terrific turnover of labor, and so great was the
passenger congestion on the railroads that freight
movements were hindered and sometimes stopped by it.
Now the Stalinist bureaucracy was forced to take drastic
steps against the workers to suppress their discontent.
Measures were enacted to prevent their moving around
freely. A rigid passport system was introduced.
An equally rash and unbalanced policy was carried out in

agriculture. The peasants, instead of being induced through
persuasion and example to enter the co-operatives were
driven to join by force, many against their will. The plan of
the opposition had been for a judicious and careful use of
machinery given to the village poor and middle peasants
who would be organized in collectives. In this way
the kulaks could be met in economic competition and
eventually beaten and liquidated. But the Russians had but
few tractors and furthermore, the officials were opposed to
1576
the line of organizing the poor and middle peasant against
the kulak. What actually took place, therefore, was the hasty
formation of co-operatives, not on a machine basis, but by
the simple joining of lands. In these co-operatives,
the kulak, instead of being liquidated, was driven to join;
once in the co-operative, he soon took a leading position.
There were elements of danger in such a situation. The

producers' co-operative, in and of itself, is not a Socialist
enterprise but, in the case of peasants, can become simply a
pooling of resources, similar to the formation of a joint
stock company. The co-operative does not lead inevitably to
the abolition of private property, but may lead also to the
consolidation of that property. The hasty formation of the
co-operatives organized the peasants hitherto unorganized,
and strengthened their resistance to the workers, thus
putting a strong weapon in the hands of the capitalistic
groups.
Where the co-operative was organized along the lines of

machine production, the State and the workers in the
factories, through their control of the machinery, ultimately
could lay down certain lines which the co-operative had to
follow. But where, as in the immense majority of cases, the
co-operative was formed simply by a pooling of land, then
the rich peasant, who contributed far more land and
material than the poorer elements and the landless, was
bound to have considerable say in the workings of the co-
operative. This might not be the case were the kulak isolated,
but it must not be forgotten that the most numerous group
in the Russian countryside was the middle peasant, and
most of these envied the kulaks and wanted to attain their
level of work and living. A firm and correct policy on the
part of the workers would have won the middle peasant to
the cause of socialism; a policy that pampered the kulak or
1577
gave him decisive economic leadership in the co-operative,
inevitably drove the mass of middle peasants to his side.
The harsh measures which the State fuctionaries undertook

to drive the peasants into the co-operative thus not only
placed the kulak inside and tended to obliterate class
distinction in the countryside, but at the same time, also
allowed the kulak to take the lead within the entire
collective. The kulak, instead of being isolated, now had his
army organized for him. Soon whole collectives began to
sabotage the plans of the government. This was one of the
principal reasons for the terrible dearth of food in the
Ukraine and Northern Caucasus in the winter of 1932-1933,
which has been estimated to have cost over two million
lives. The rich steppes became barren. Weeds grew
everywhere. Actual civil war did not break out, but
wholesale migrations from the rich land of the South took
place.
To top the entire process, the State officials decided upon

the ominous policy of inflation which, with one sweep, by
raising all the prices of necessities, took away most of the
advantages which had been promised the workers from
increased production. Thus the boasted advance in real
wages was but nominal and, although the seven-hour day
had been inaugurated, the worker found that he had to
work overtime steadily in order to make both ends meet.
The artificially stimulated rise in prices of finished goods in
the same way deprived the peasants of the reward of their
labor.
Despite all the mistakes made by the apparatus, Russia took

a remarkably great step forward economically during the
course of the Five-Year Plan. The achievements made
1578
proved conclusively the great advantage of a socialistic
regime over private capitalism. Immense plants began to
spring up all over the land, and Russia rapidly was
becoming transformed into a great industrial country. To
speed up the process, the State adopted the policy of
importing large numbers of foreign specialists to train the
Russians in the use of their new machinery and technique.
The relation of Russia to the outside world had changed
considerably since the NEP. At that time, the State had been
anxious to have foreigners build factories in Russia and
invest their capital there. Now foreign capital was not
asked to enter. Merely with the aid of foreign specialists,
the Russians now could create their own factories and
attempt to run them.
The opposition had believed that the adoption of the Five-

Year Plan would strengthen considerably the hands of the
proletariat, since numerically the workers would increase,
and the roles of the city and of industry would be more
preponderant than ever. With this growth of the proletariat,
it was believed that the control of the bureaucrat would be
diminished and that the Left Wing would be able to drive
back the Right and put the Party on a correct line. However,
while this might be the ultimate case, it was by no means
the result of the Five-Year Plan. It is true that peasants were
drawn into the ranks of the working class and became
strengthened in socialist ideology. But it is also true that the
standards of the masses did not improve. What was most
important, the ranks of the specialists, of the functionaries,
of the white-collar workers, of the skilled workers, of the
bureaucrats, of the State officials, increased far more than
ever in proportion to the increase in the proletariat. Thus
the industrialization of Russia by no means proceeded
concurrently with the increased power of the rank-and-file
worker, but, on the contrary, diminished his political
1579
capacity still more and put even greater power in the hands
of the experts and of the professional elements of all sorts.
Moreover, the economic advance of the Workers' State in
Russia did not counterbalance the political defeats of the
revolutionary workers internationally, but rather was
accelerating those defeats.
The rise of the all-powerful bureaucracy within the Soviet

Union led to serious political readjustments within Russia.
In the days of Lenin, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat had
taken the direct form whereby the proletariat was in actual
control of the State apparatus and ruled through its own
members. This situation was now changing. There still
existed a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, in the sense that no
other class had taken from the proletariat the ownership of
the means of production. The direct control of the workers
over the State, however, now was missing. The machinery
of government was being run, not by the workers
themselves, but by an officialdom no longer controlled
directly by the workers.
None the less, this officialdom was not completely a free

agent. It could not dispose of the fate of the country as it
chose. Like every other State officialdom, it had to represent
the interests of the economically dominant class which in
Russia still remained the workers. The decisive aspect of the
economy of the Soviet Union steadily has remained the fact
that the industries are socialized, and that private
ownership of the means of production is not a dominant
factor in the economic life of the country. There is no class
within Russia capable of taking the factories away from the
workers. Thus the Russian Revolution has set a pattern of
economic relations which no bureaucracy within Russia is
capable of breaking down completely.
1580
It is true, there has been a growth of capitalist forces within
Russia. As we have pointed out, many of the collectives are
no better than joint stock companies wherein the partners
co-operate to produce goods more efficiently within the
framework of commodity production. In the cities also
private traders still flourish. In the sphere of finance, the
issuance of government bonds has created a class
of rentiers, or coupon-clippers, who live from their
dividends. Within the industries, the bureaucracy draws to
itself an exceptionally large and undue portion of the total
product and thus robs the other groups. But all these factors
are not comparable to the fact that the industries and means
of production on the whole are socialized. No great
bourgeoisie exists, but rather remnants of the old capitalist
class and would-be agents of the new capitalist class which
may be germinating. As yet, the number of people who are
coupon-clippers is relatively insignificant. The amount of
money borrowed by the government at interest rates when
compared with the capital wealth of the country is trifling.
The number of factories given over to concessionaries or
worked for royalties is practically nil.
Despite the bureaucratic management of the means of

production, the socialization of industry in Russia is
entirely different from the nationalization of industry
taking place in capitalist countries. In such countries, the
nationalization of industries would be, not against the
interests of the former owners, but on their behalf, to
guarantee them their dividends regularly. The capitalist is
not deprived of his property; on the contrary, he receives
full security for it, and the State simply runs the industry on
his behalf in its own way. The former owners draw vast
incomes and use these to open up new industries and
avenues of trade, in order to augment their accumulation.
None of this is the case in the Soviet Union.
1581
It cannot be said that the bureaucracy itself collectively
makes up the real owners of the factories in the Soviet
Union. The bureaucrats are simply the managers, not the
owners, of industry. They may be receiving a higher salary
than they should, they may be dreaming of a reconstituted
capitalist Russia, they may be the germs of the new
bourgeoisie, but they make no pretense of owning the
particular factory to which they may be attached, or any
section of the industry as a whole. State officials are not a
class in and of themselves, but only the agents of a class.
We have seen as a rule of history that no ruling class has

lost its economic power without a struggle amounting to
civil war and revolution. Unless it were to be maintained
that the workers never took the power over the industries
in Russia, and that, from the beginning, Soviet Russia was a
capitalist State (which argument would have absolutely no
substantiation in fact and would make inexplicable the
bitter civil war, intervention, blockade, and universal
hostility by the capitalists to that country), then we can
safely say that in Russia also the workers will not lose basic
control over the industries without a civil war. Such a civil
war has not taken place as yet. The Russian workers will
protect their socialized industries with their lives.
Thus we have the following situation in Russia. On the one

hand, the Workers' State still exists, but in a different form
than in the days of Lenin, in a form where the workers
dictate their will, not directly, but indirectly, through a
bureaucracy which in form has established its own
dictatorship. Naturally, once the workers have lost direct
control of the instruments of the government, once the
workers' Party, their unions, their cooperatives, and their
Soviets have been destroyed as creative factors, and only
the bureaucracy occupies the position of the historically
1582
active force, it is plain that the Worker’s State is in a sick
condition.
The mere fact that the historic initiative no longer is

contained within the masses but in the bureaucracy means
that the revolution is in the greatest danger. All that is
necessary for the capitalist world in launching its attack is
to assassinate a half dozen key leaders, and the country will
be thrown into confusion and chaos. Furthermore, just as
the bureaucracy itself could not carry on a sure and steady
policy in the Five-Year Plan, so will it be impossible for
such a group efficiently to conduct a great war of defense.
Systematic blunders and a mountain of dead will be the
results.
It is possible that, should fascism launch a vigorous and

sustained attack against the Soviet Union, large numbers of
the bureaucracy will be glad to open the gates to fascism
and to help to rebuild capitalism in Russia. Nationalist
groups also will arise, peasant and Nepman elements that
will protest against fighting fascism, that will call for peace
and capitulation of Bolshevism. Given a devastating and
prolonged war, the bureaucracy, too, will break down.
Soviet economy will tend to crack and the smitchka (alliance)
between workers and peasants will be destroyed.
But this will not be the only result of such a war. Up to now,
the Russian workers have tolerated Stalinism in order not to
weaken the Russian dictatorship in front of the enemy, in
order not to provoke a war. But once war shall have been
declared, there will be no limits within which the
proletariat can be restrained. The workers will raise again
the revolutionary banner and will impose the most ruthless
terror upon any capitalist element that attempts to hinder
the progress of the revolutionary war. In this process, the
Stalinist bureaucracy itself will be wiped out. A new
1583
Communist Party, a new Soviet system, a new trade union
movement, will shake off the bureaucratic parasitism.
We must bear in mind the important fact that, since the

workers have not yet lost the power, a new civil war will
not be necessary in order to oust the bureaucrats from their
positions. Vigorous police action alone will suffice. If, in
time of war, the workings of the bureaucracy endanger the
life of the Soviet Union, as they must, the mere sending of a
few regiments to the Kremlin will in all likelihood mean the
end of the present regime. Whether the events are
precipitated during war time by a move from the Right, or
whether the Left removes Stalin and provokes a counter-
action, it is almost inevitable that foreign intervention
should coincide with a rejuvenation of the workers' power
and position.
The peculiar situation that has prevailed in the Soviet

Union since the period f the NEP has led several of the
communist groups in opposition to Stalinism to go
somewhat astray. The German communist group, the Lenin
Bund, headed by Urbahns, took the position that Russia
was neither a Workers' State nor a Capitalist State, but
something in between, and unique. This also apparently is
the position of the Italian Left Communist Faction led by
Bordigha. But such a theoretical position leading to the
conclusion that there could be a State without a dominant
class violates all the fundamental precepts of Marxism.
According to them, the State would be above classes and
living its own life independent of them. Whatever the
surface indications, the Revolution had definitely settled
the question that the factories belonged to the producers.
Another view was put forth to the effect that the

Communist Party was crushed completely and thus there
was no Party at all in the Soviet Union. This would lead to
1584
the position that there could be a Workers' State carrying
forward a Five-Year Plan without a Workers' Party. It is
hardly possible to conceive of a proletarian dictatorship or
even of a bourgeois democracy without any party whatever,
since every class that comes to power must express and
realize its interests through a political party. It is possible to
have a democratic state with many parties. It is further
possible, at certain periods, that no one party will be
dominant, but that there will be temporarily a complete
equilibrium of classes and of parties. Such a situation is
likely to give rise to a personal dictatorship, to Bonapartism.
The real situation in the Soviet Union was that there existed
two parties, both included within the frame of the
Communist Party. On the one hand there was the
bureaucracy constituting the apparatus of the Communist
Party; and on the other hand, there were the discontented
elements of the working class, rallying to the views of the
opposition and forming their own centers of resistance.
The Trotsky opposition has committed a different error. It

has declared that "Thermidor" has been completed in
Russia and the Stalinist rule constitutes a Bonapartist
regime. With this theory, Trotsky can play only into the
hands of the enemies of the Soviet Union. Trotsky attempts
to prove his point by a play of words which is untenable in
serious political analysis. In political science the term
"Thermidor," based upon the fall of Robespierre in the
French Revolution in the month of Thermidor, has come to
mean the moment when the revolutionary forces are
stopped by counter-revolutionary elements. In his article on
the subject, (*15) Trotsky wrote: "In the internal
controversies of the Russian and the international
Opposition we conditionally understood by Thermidor, the
first stage of the bourgeois counter-revolution, aimed
against the social basis of the workers' State.... The overturn
1585
of the Ninth Thermidor did not liquidate the basic
conquests of the bourgeois revolution; but it did transfer
the power into the hands of the more moderate and
conservative Jacobins, the better-to-do elements of the
bourgeois society. . . . The smashing of the Left opposition
implied in the most direct and immediate sense the transfer
of power from the hands of the revolutionary vanguard
into the hands of the more conservative elements among
the bureaucracy and the upper crust of the working class.
The year 1924 --- that was the beginning of the Soviet
Thermidor." In another place he declared: "In both cases the
bureaucracy raised itself upon the backs of the plebeian
democracy which had assured the victory for the new
regime. The Jacobin clubs were strangled gradually. The
revolutionists of 1793 died on the battlefields; they became
diplomats and generals, they fell under the blows of
repression . . or went underground. Subsequently, other
Jacobins successfully transformed themselves into
Napoleon's prefects."
Thus Trotsky's modern views on the subject might be

summed up as follows: First, the term, Thermidor, strictly
speaking, does not mean the victory of counter-revolution,
but means a reactionary manner of maintaining the
revolution. This is the essence of Stalinism, and, therefore,
the victory of Stalin over the forces led by Trotsky is the
completion of Thermidor in the soviets. Second,
analogically, Trotsky stands for Robespierre, and the Left
opposition and resembles the genuine Jacobin
revolutionaries. Robespierre was the leader of the French
Revolution as Trotsky (with Lenin) was the leader of the
Russian Revolution; the Jacobins were the leading party in
the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik-Leninists of the
Left opposition were the Jacobins of the Russian Revolution.
1586
This whole analysis, however, is incorrect. Previously we
have elaborated the role of Robespierre in the French
Revolution and shown how he himself helped to put an end
to the Leftward drift of the masses. Trotsky here puts
himself indeed in an unenviable position as the executioner
of the masses, which role Robespierre played just before his
downfall. Strictly speaking, the real "Thermidor" of the
French Revolution occurred prior to the execution of
Robespierre, namely in the crushing of the Paris Commune
and the executions of Hebert, Clootz, Chaumette, and their
associates by Robespierre. If we may pursue the analogy, it
is not Trotsky who represents the Russian Robespierre, but
Stalin who has done to the Left opposition what
Robespierre did to Hebert. Moreover, the fall of Stalin,
when pushed from the Right, will coincide with the fall of
the Russian Soviet Republic, whereas the fall of Trotsky had
no such immediate significance.
Trotsky makes a similar mistake about the Jacobins. We can

say of the Jacobins, as we said of Robespierre, that they
were compelled to follow the masses up to a certain point,
and thus agreed to take the leadership, but they had no
desire to carry the revolution too far. The role of the
Jacobins was to see that the revolution did not go beyond a
bourgeois framework, hence they yielded to the pressure of
the masses only in order to control and later to behead
them when they threatened to go beyond capitalism. To call
the Jacobins the revolutionary vanguard is to forget the
Commune and the revolutionary masses whom the Jacobin
clubs detested. It is to tell but half the truth, since the
Jacobins were not merely the revolutionary vanguard of
capitalism against the aristocracy --- the Jacobins, under
pressure, were forced to act at times even against the
capitalists themselves --- but they were also the counter-
revolutionary vanguard of capitalism against the poor of
1587
the Commune, and they helped to pave the way for
Bonaparte.
This role of the Jacobins generally has been overlooked by

the numerous historians who have trembled at the mere
thought of the Terror. However, in a certain sense, the
prevailing faulty analysis of the position of the Jacobins has
a certain justification, since their revolutionary role was far
more important than their counter-revolutionary one. In
being the instrument, often against their own will, to carry
forward the bourgeois revolution so far and so ruthlessly
against the old aristocratic regime, the Jacobins were
fulfilling a necessary historical task. On the other hand, in
crushing the plebeian communistic efforts, they were
putting down a premature outburst, an abortive attempt to
anticipate history.
Turning now to the Russian Revolution we can say that

there, too, the revolution has not been completed. It has yet
to be made international in scope. The individual proprietor
giving birth to new capitalist forces by no means has been
eliminated. However, and what is of the utmost importance
for our comparison, the Russian Revolution has gone far
beyond the stage of the French Revolution, and has reached
the point where, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, the
proletariat has actually taken over the power. It is true that,
under Stalin, a portion of the Bolsheviks have turned into
petty bourgeois revolutionaries of the Jacobin type and
have stopped the revolution from going forward, but these
people cannot restore capitalism. Thermidor does not mean,
as Trotsky says, merely the transfer of power into the hands
of conservatives from the hands of the radicals, but means a
transfer of class basis, and the substitution of one class
instead of another. Prior to Thermidor there existed the
momentary domination of the Paris Commune marching to
1588
communism and anarchism. After that date, the people are
crushed. Prior to the fall of Robespierre, the ultimate
beneficiaries of the revolution were not firmly at the helm;
after that moment, they took open and direct control. Such
a situation as yet has not been established in the Soviet
Union. Thermidor in terms of Russia would mean that the
working class had been decisively defeated and capitalism
was re-established.
Even conceding the most to Trotsky's analysis, we would

have to say that, in the French Revolution, before
Thermidor, there was an essentially bourgeois revolution
conducted against the will of that class which ultimately
became the very beneficiary, while, after Thermidor, the
bourgeoisie itself controlled the revolution. Thermidor
appears as the point where the Jacobins ceased to be
susceptible to the pressure of the proletarian and plebeian
Commune, and went over to the bourgeoisie entirely. It
was the "moment" when the bourgeois revolution which
had been carried on against the wishes of the bourgeoisie
and without their leadership, would now be carried on in a
thoroughly bourgeois manner and under their direct
leadership. It meant the decisive victory of the class that
wished to keep the revolution bourgeois and to prevent the
proletariat and plebeian mass from making their own
revolution.
Even so, just the opposite prevails in the Russian case. If we

were to pursue Trotsky's analogy we would have to say
that before 1924 --- the Russian Thermidor --- the interests
of the proletariat were being carried out by the Bolsheviks
against its will and that, after 1924, the proletariat itself, the
class whose interests were being subserved by the
revolution, actually took over the reins. This of course is the
very opposite of the truth and of what Trotsky himself
1589
means to say, for it was precisely before 1924, under Lenin,
that the workers themselves had the power, while after
1924, their will was expressed for them by a bureaucracy.
To say with Trotsky that Thermidor means reaction,

operating on the social foundation of the revolution, is to
declare that the Paris Commune could have carried out the
bourgeois revolution better than the Jacobins or better than
Napoleon. From the historical standpoint, the later victory
of Napoleon was not reactionary at all, but rather the only
way in which the French Revolution could progress all over
Europe. Napoleon was reactionary only in relation to the
masses, but in those days the historic initiative of the
masses was relatively secondary to that of the bourgeoisie.
Had the Paris Commune taken the power, for example, it is
impossible to imagine that they would have swept
the ancien regime out of Europe, as did Napoleon.
In his article Trotsky declares that, not only has Thermidor

been completed in Russia, but that Stalinism spells
Bonapartism. Thus, we are given to understand now that
we can have one Bonapartism in a framework of capitalism
and another Bonapartism in a framework of a Workers'
State. This, of course, confuses the character of the Workers'
State with that of the capitalist State and assumes that, in
spite of the enormous differences between them, the same
social phenomena can prevail and can be designated in the
same way. Such an attitude loses all sense of historic
distinction. Trotsky here overlooks the class content of the
term "Bonapartism" which hitherto always has been applied
to governmental and class relations only in a capitalist state.
Has it ever been heard that Bonapartists call themselves
communists, raise as their goal the formation of a co-
operative commonwealth, call for the abolition of private
1590
property, issue the scientific works of Marx, Engels, Lenin,
and others, and perform the work the Stalinists have done?
The fact that Stalin does these things shows that we have to
deal here not with a capitalist but with a workers' organism;
with a Party, formerly communist, which has now become
Centrist, based upon the privileges accorded to the
bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. In proportion as this
bureaucracy is stable, in proportion is the pseudo-
communist Centrism of the Stalinists lasting. Stalinist
degeneration, then, is not a form of Bonapartism, but of
Centrism. Should Stalin be overthrown by some strong man
representing the kulak elements, then indeed we might
speak of Bonapartism. The declaration that Stalinism is
Bonapartism carries the implication that Russia is a
capitalist State, and that the workers must wage a new civil
war there in order to drive out the Stalinists.
The struggle of the Left Wing of the communists against the

official leadership took the form of a struggle against the
theory of Socialism in One Country which had been
brought forward by Stalin in 1924 and was developed in the
Communist Program issued by the Sixth World Congress of
the Communist International in 1928.
In the beginning, the theory of Socialism in One Country

was merely a negative reaction to the fact that the workers
had succeeded in moving towards socialism in only one
country. For the officialdom it was a form of whistling in
the dark, a method of keeping up spirits during difficult
moments. With the accentuation of reactionary tendencies,
however, the theory of Socialism in One Country began to
take on nationalistic accretions, and strongly to retard
international solidarity. If Russia in her isolation was able,
1591
not merely to hold her own, but to become completely self-
sufficient and to build up a socialist paradise in a capitalist
world, then Russia's interest in the international revolution
was bound to become platonic and humanitarian and to
lose the poignancy of self-interest.
The struggle for socialism for the Russians was reducing

itself to a mere economic problem. The protracted
equilibrium which had tolerated a Soviet Union in a
capitalist environment had begun also to engender illusions
that the soviets could coexist peacefully for an indefinite
period with the rest of the world. All that was needed was
for the soviets to leave other nations alone; they would
return the compliment. International relations now
assumed the form of seeking trade relations with capitalist
nations. In line with this policy, the entire diplomacy of the
Soviet Union was reconstructed. In the days of Lenin, who
was the leader both of the Russian State and of the Third
International, revolutionary communism and Russian
diplomacy went hand in hand. Joffe, Karakhan, Litvinoff,
Trotsky, all were primarily propagandists for the world
revolution in their relationship with the diplomats of other
countries. This was bound up with the belief that the
welfare of Russia was dependent upon the development of
the world revolution.
Under Stalin, and with the influence of the theory of

Socialism in One Country, the Russian State became
divorced from the International. No sooner had Lenin died
and Trotsky been reduced to secondary influence than the
capitalist countries began to recognize Russia and to enter
into commercial relations with her. All of them stipulated
that Russia must not engage in revolutionary propaganda,
and increasingly it was borne home to Russian officialdom
that they could do business better were they to become
1592
entirely divorced from the Third International. Accordingly,
the diplomats now sent out by the Soviet no longer were
eminent revolutionists, but rather keen businessmen with
an eye to bargains and a love for bourgeois tastes.
The theory of Socialism in One Country also brought in its

train the idea that nothing must be done by the Russians to
jeopardize their chances for building socialism. Socialism in
Russia was the bird in the hand, international revolution
was the bird in the bush. If Russia could build up socialism,
it could inspire all the world to emulate that country's
example. Thus the Russians abandoned the conception of
revolution as a result of misery to take up the idealistic
theory that people will revolt because of some utopia
realized elsewhere. Marxism had taught that revolutions
are made, not by the intellect, but by emotions and passions
aroused by hunger and need. Stalinism began to teach that
the world revolution could be attained simply by showing
the world a perfect picture of the ideal.
The theory of Socialism in One Country also implied that

the rest of the world would allow Russia to build socialism
in that country. Thus the capitalist world was not so vicious
after all and, if Russia behaved herself, she could manage to
divide the capitalist forces, make business deals with some,
and secure their aid. Essentially this was a theory of class
collaboration because, in trying to obtain economic favors
from world capitalism, the Russians would be forced to
refuse to help the workers abroad in their struggle against
their employers. This in turn would strengthen the power
of the employers and increase their demands upon the
Soviet Union.
The utopia of Socialism in One Country had appeared

before in Russia in the ranks of the Narodniki and the social
revolutionaries. These latter had believed that the Russians
1593
did not need international solidarity to obtain social justice.
On the contrary, the Russian soul, through the institution of
the Mir, had shown the whole western world how to live
collectively, how to wipe out the individualism of
capitalism. The victorious Stalinist functionaries apparently
were reverting to a modification of these nationalist and
racial theories. Bolsheviks alone had succeeded; the rest of
the world had failed. Did this not show the exceptional
character of the Russians? Was there anything that the
Russians could not do? More and more the Russian
functionaries began to regard foreign communists with
contempt, especially the dependence of the international
communist forces on the subsidies sent them from Russia.
Socialism could be built in one country alone as a task of

mere economic construction only if Russia did not have to
depend upon other countries for material resources, but
had all the necessaries at its disposal. The Soviet provincial
officials actually believed that they were not part of a world
division of labor, which division was bound to increase
commensurately with the restoration of Russian economy.
The self-sufficiency of any country, of course, can be
achieved only on a very low plane of economy, when the
society is in the hunting or fishing stage, or in a primitive
state of agrarian life. But to imagine that socialism, which is
a stage of social development higher than capitalism, does
not need the division of labor which capitalism itself has set
up, but can dispense with the resources of the rest of the
world, was greatly to exaggerate the forces within the
Soviet Union and to reverse the real relations existing. This
was a type of nationalist megalomania, possible for a camel
driver from Tashkent or a Djugeshvili from the sheep hills
of Georgia, who had come to Moscow and been impressed
by its size but who had never seen the outside world, but
impossible for a western industrial worker to conceive.
1594
Socialism without an increased world planning and world
division of labor never could be anticipated by an English
or a German revolutionist. It was for the Russians to
develop this theory to ludicrous lengths.
The idea that Russia could gain far more from capitalist
intercourse than from the world revolution was bound to
affect the whole international movement. The various
Communist Parties also began to make nationalist
arrangements. This was seen first in China and then in
Germany. It was to culminate in the Franco-Soviet pact and
in the alliance of the American communists with the
Roosevelt Administration. Naturally, this meant the end of
the International as a world revolutionary force.
The belief that Russia, unaided, could build socialism

within her own borders naturally led to an idealization of
the peasant countries. It meant that socialism would come
first, not from the industrial West, but from the Asiatic East,
and that Russia, the most backward industrial country,
would be permitted to catch up with and later to surpass
the rest of the world. All that was necessary, evidently, was
the proper relations with the peasantry.
At first, during the difficult days of 1924, when the memory

of Lenin was still fresh, the idea of socialism's being built in
one country was not conceived as immediate but rather
gradually. With the success of the Five-Year Plan, however,
socialism was due to arrive within a very short time.
The Stalinists did not deny that socialism meant the

liquidation of classes, not only of the kulak but of the
peasantry as a whole. Socialism also meant the termination
of the discrepancies between city and country. It meant a
system of society wherein a far higher system of production
was obtained than in any capitalist country. It meant the
1595
withering away of the State and the absence of prisons,
police, armies. It meant the disappearance of the gap
between hand and brain labor, and the elimination of the
bureaucrat and the monopoly of specialists. But the
Stalinists actually affirmed that all classes would be
liquidated by the Second Five-Year Plan ending in 1937 or
thereabouts. Just as the kulak was liquidated by sending
him into the collective, however, so the peasantry was
liquidated by the fiction that all those working in collective
farms were now the same as agricultural laborers. Thus
were hidden the fundamental differences between the
country and the city while, at the same time, the basis was
created for the end of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The myth that no more classes existed in Russia would be
used to wipe out the special power of the proletariat.
Socialism in One Country was to be created by inducing the

rest of the world to let Russia alone politically. Thus peace
was essential. From now on, Russia was to take a decided
pacifist tone and, in the peace conferences, to propose
complete disarmament as the sole way to prevent war.
Lenin's dictum that universal disarmament was the
negation of the principle of the class struggle, since the only
way that the slaves could emancipate themselves was by
militant use of arms, was forgotten.
Whereas Litvinoff in his disarmament proposals called for

general and total disarmament as the only infallible
solution of the war problem, (*16) Lenin, on the contrary,
had affirmed: "An oppressed class which does not strive to
learn to handle weapons, to possess weapons, would only
deserve that it should be treated as slaves. We may not
forget, without becoming converted into bourgeois pacifists
or opportunists, that we are living in a class society and that
there is not and cannot be any way out from that except by
1596
class struggle and the overthrow of the power of the ruling
class. . . . And in the face of such a fact, the proposal is
made to revolutionary social-democrats (*17) that they put
forward the 'demand' for 'disarmament'! This is equivalent
to complete surrender of the point of view of the class
struggle, renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our
slogan must be: arming of the proletariat in order to
conquer, to expropriate and to disarm the bourgeoisie. This
is the sole possible tactics for a revolutionary class, tactics
arising from the whole objective development of capitalist
militarism and prescribed by this development." (*18)
And in another place, Lenin stresses, "To put 'disarmament'

as a point in the program means to say in general we are
against the use of weapons. In this there is not a particle of
Marxism any more than if we said. 'We are against the use
of force.' . . . The Kautskian preaching of disarmament,
addressed directly to the present governments of the big
imperialist powers, is the most vulgar opportunism and
bourgeois pacifism, serving in fact --- in spite of the 'good
intentions' of the sweet-spoken Kautsky --- to draw the
workers away from the revolutionary struggle. For by such
preaching the idea is instilled into the workers that the
present bourgeois governments of the imperialist powers
are not enmeshed by the thousands of threads of finance-
capital and by scores of hundreds of corresponding secret
treaties among themselves."
"Thus the chief defect of the demand for disarmament is

exactly that it evades all the concrete questions of
revolutions. Or do the supporters of disarmament stand for
a completely new view of an unarmed revolution? . . .
Disarmament is precisely a flight from nasty reality but not
at all a struggle against it."
1597
At the disarmament conferences, of course, Litvinoff
presented not only his ideal of total disarmament but his
practical plan of disarmament, a plan which failed to
include the disarmament of the State's police force,
including the troops in the colonial countries, but did
incorporate the disarmament of independent colonial
countries, such as China. Litvinoff was willing to tolerate
the retention of small arms, the instruments with which the
State meets the demonstrations of the proletariat. In their
practical aspects, the proposals of Litvinoff differed little
from the American proposals submitted by President
Hoover.
As a matter of fact, Stalinist degeneration had placed the

policies of the communists in such a light that the
distinction between capitalism and communism was
blurred. Capitalist leaders also brought forth plans for
national socialism, or socialism in their country alone; they
issued periodically practical proposals for the disarmament
of all their enemies; they argued on the necessity and
possibility of self-sufficiency and the liquidation of all
classes within the country under the control of the State.
This was, indeed, the ideology of the fascists, who learned
much from the new tactics in Russia.
In a military sense, too, the pacifistic theories of the Russian

diplomats wrought enormous damage upon the defense of
the Soviet Union. Those theories compelled Stalin to declare
that he was not concerned with what was occurring in the
countries around him; Russia would worry only about its
own physical borders. Thus the militarist and fascist
enemies of Russia, such as Germany on the West and Japan
on the East, were given ample opportunity to prepare their
forces and to win important bases for attack. Japan has now
consolidated her position on an immense front on the
1598
border of Siberia; Germany has been placed in a position
where she can secure complete united action of all the
Eastern European countries against Russia. Stalinism
abandoned the foremost revolutionary principle that the
best defense for a revolution is an offense. Russian
misleadership has given to the superior forces of the enemy
the opportunity of choosing both the time and the place for
the future battle.
In this period the capitalist world began to praise the

statesmanship of Stalin. Russia was invited to participate in
the League of Nations and, to the surprise of the old
communists who knew Lenin's views on that subject, the
Soviet Union accepted and, when joining that family of
nations, pledged loyally to co-operate. Similarly, the Soviet
Union signed the Kellogg Peace Pact which also brought it
into confraternity with the capitalist world. Thus, in every
country the Communist Parties controlled by the Russians
were forced to change their attitude towards the League of
Nations and to hail it as an instrument of peace and the
way out for a bleeding world. Everywhere the Communist
International became the mere diplomatic auxiliary for the
foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Thus, under Lenin,
Soviet diplomacy was united to the Communist
International under the banner of world revolution; under
Stalin, a new unity of the two was achieved, but this time
Russian nationalism led and the Communist International
withered away.
Under such circumstances, the struggle for Socialism in

One Country became a struggle against socialism in more
than one country. Since the whole Communist International
was now reduced to serving the aims of one country and
was turning its back to the world revolution, it is clear that
revolutions could occur in other countries only by a
1599
struggle against the Communist Parties. Should a
revolution break out in other countries, the proletariat of
those lands would have to call for a revision of the program
and policies of the Soviet Union. It would mean the end of
Stalinism and the end of the leadership of the Russians.
Against this development the Russian nationalists would
have to fight. The Western revolutionists would have to
form their own grouping --- the Fourth International.
Under the theory of Socialism in One Country, the

Communist International changed from an international
organization to an appendage of a national organism; the
program moved from "Workers of the World Unite" to
"Defend the Soviet Union." Militant struggle turned to
pacifism; the goal of a better world division of labor was
transformed to a plan for national self-sufficiency; the
workers gave way to the peasants as the leaders of the
world revolution; the West yielded to the East; class
struggle surrendered to class collaboration; "destructive"
politics gave place to "constructive" economics; within all
the Parties, the members retreated in favor of the
bureaucratic officials who appointed their supporters
regardless of the expressed wish of the membership;
communism became populism. Socialism in One Country
finally made socialism simply ridiculous.
Footnotes
1. Given in L. D. Trotsky: The Real Situation in Russia, p. 23.
2. See the letters of Lenin on Stalin given in L. D. Trotsky:

work cited, pp. 293 and following.
3. "In 1926 N. K. Krupskaya, who along with Zinoviev and

Kamenev then adhered to the Left Opposition, said, 'Were
1600
Lenin alive, he would most assuredly be in a G. P. U.
prison.'" L. D. Trotsky: The Kirov Assassination, p. 24.
4. "Finally, the last letter which Lenin ever wrote in his life -
-- or rather dictated --- was a letter to Stalin breaking off all
comradely relations with him. . . . The existence of the letter
was confirmed in the stenographic copy of the testimony of
M. I. Ulianova." (Lenin's sister.) L. D. Trotsky: work cited, p.
308.
5. The same, pp. 301-302.
6. Given in L. D. Trotsky: work cited, pp. 322-323. Also see

Stalin's recognition of Lenin's letter in International Press
Correspondence, Vol. VII, No. 64, p. 1428. (November 17,
1927.)
7. L. D. Trotsky: work cited, p. 51 giving Pravda, July 23,

1927 for authority.
8. The same, p. 57.
9. The same, p. 57.
11. See W. Duranty: I Write as I Please, pp. 215-216.
12. J. Davis: Contemporary Social Movements, p. 300.
13. The same, p. 300.
14. For an account of how the OGPU (secret police) planted

White-Guard agents who were in its pay, in the meetings of
the oppositionists, see L. D. Trotsky: The Real Situation in
Russia, Introduction by Max Eastman.
1601
15. See The New International, periodical of the defunct
Communist League of America and of the now defunct
"Workers Party," Vol. II, No. 4, pp. 118, 119 (July, 1935).
16. Speech at the Geneva Disarmament Conference, 1932.
17. Read Communists.
18. Lenin's speech is printed in The Communist, Vol. XI, No.

3, p. 273. (March, 1932.)
XLV. ISOLATION AND COLLAPSE
THE Sixth World Congress of the Communist International

finally was convened in 1928. By that time, the
revolutionary movement as manifested in the General
Strike in England and the Revolution in China had received
signal defeats. In the United States, for the next year and a
half, capitalist production reached new peaks, breaking all
records. Regardless of this situation, the Sixth Congress laid
down a line based on the following concepts: First, the
world was on the eve of a new revolutionary wave. This
would usher in the third period of post-War history, the
first having ended in 1923, the second in 1928. Secondly, in
1602
view of the coming struggle for power, communists must
consider socialist and other workers' reformist groups as
their chief enemies to be destroyed at all costs. The
socialists were really social-fascists, that is a wing of fascism,
and by no means could united fronts be made with them or
with the reformists in the trade unions. Third, the
communists no longer were to work within the reactionary
trade unions, but everywhere were to form their own trade
union centers. The Congress also adopted a new
Communist Program which justified the idea of Socialism
in One Country.
The policies of the Sixth Congress wrought enormous

damage upon communist forces throughout the world. At
first sight it might appear that all the Right Wing errors of
the four years since the Fifth World Congress were being
corrected. In reality, all the Leftist blunders against which
Lenin had polemicized here were repeated in the crassest
form, so that the Congress achieved not an antidote for past
mistakes, but a multiplication of all the Right Wing
blunders by new Leftist ones.
Particularly fatal was this course to the German movement.

Following the line of the "Stalintern," the German
communists fell headlong into a bottomless abyss. Before
the next Congress of the International could be called, the
great German Communist Party no longer existed.
Although the political storm troops of Hitler were
composed mainly of students, youth, declassed petty
bourgeois, and slum proletarians who in no way should
have been a match for the well-organized and trained
workmen, yet these sections were able overwhelmingly to
defeat the strongest working class in Europe and to crush it
mercilessly. The whole world watched with amazement as
the powerful German Communist Party with two hundred
1603
and fifty thousand members, with a defense group of half a
million, and with voting support of six million, give up its
cause without even a fight. To lose in an open conflict not
necessarily would have constituted disgrace, but the
German communists capitulated without engaging the
enemy in a single battle. The loss of the Chinese Revolution
had not been decisive, after all, for world affairs; the loss of
the German Revolution penetrated the very heart and soul
of the international proletarian forces.
Although the German revolutionary movement was

destroyed precisely because it adhered so loyally and
closely to the line of the Stalintern, that body in return did
no more than print the bare news of the events. When
Hitler threatened to take power, no emergency congress
was called to discuss the drastic change in the situation, nor
was a special congress convoked afterward to clarify the
lessons of this terrible defeat and to work out a new policy.
All during the critical days in Germany, before, during, and
after the advent of Hitler to power, there took place merely
a perfunctory gathering of the Executive Committee of the
Communist International in which it was affirmed that no
mistakes had been made, either in Germany or in Moscow.
From now on, the Left opposition groups took the stand
that the Third International was dead as a revolutionary
force and could play only a counter-revolutionary role. The
German defeat seemed to demonstrate that the Russians
were so engrossed with their own national problems that
they concerned themselves very little with what took place
outside their own country. As for the other Parties of the
Third International, they did not dare to raise their voices in
protest to the killing of the German Revolution.
But the German Communist Party was destroyed not only

because the Third International failed to act, but also as a
1604
result of its fatal decisions at the Sixth Congress. In the
name of Leninism, all the wisdom of Lenin quietly had
been discarded. Incalculable harm was done the German
movement by the declaration that the Socialist Party was
but a branch of fascism and in reality the chief enemy of the
workers. That the actions of the socialist leadership more
than once had destroyed the Revolution in Germany was,
without doubt, correct. But at this time, it was not the
socialists who were representing reaction, but the rapidly
growing Fascist Party which murderously attacked both
communists and socialists. When the socialists were killed
by fascist raids, the communists refused to help, on the
ground that it was simply a case of two reactionary forces
killing off each other. When the communists received the
same treatment, the socialists also abstained from coming to
their assistance. This division of the workers immeasurably
hastened the advance of the fascists to power.
As a matter of fact, the Socialist Party never could have

been considered correctly as a wing of fascism. The Socialist
Party might be the agent through which capitalism retained
power, but it was, after all, a party composed in the main of
workers bearing the traditions of Marxism and espousing
the cause of the proletariat. Objectively, its role was to
demoralize the proletariat from within by basing its
program on social reform rather than on social revolution.
The fascists, however, as we have already seen, were of
entirely different stock, and came into power because it was
possible no longer for the capitalists to sustain social reform.
Indeed, the very fact that fascism was arising and socialism
was being dismissed by economically dominant classes was
a sign that now more than ever both socialists and
communists could be united in struggle.
1605
Now that the concessions which had been invaluable no
longer were forthcoming, the socialists were in an entirely
different position. At worst, many of them might be willing
to fight for their old jobs, their old reforms and privileges,
and to join hands with whomever they could on these
issues; at best, some socialists might be moved by the new
situation to act in a revolutionary manner. Certainly the
socialists no longer were in any position to refuse to make
united fronts with other sections of the labor movement.
The onrush of fascism, thrusting aside social reform,
dragged the socialist bureaucracy out of its old entrenched
positions and diminished its influence over its members.
It was at this very juncture, when the possibilities for a

united front were greater than they had been for some time,
that the Communist Parties decided to change their tack
and to wipe out all united fronts with socialist
organizations. No longer would the pure communists sit
with the socialist traitors. The Stalinists declared the only
united front they would make would be the united front
"from below." That is, in trying to win the socialist worker
for united action, they would not appeal to him through his
organization, permitting him to elect whatever
representative he pleased; instead the Communist Party
now decided to dictate to the socialist worker what delegate
he must elect and what policy he must choose. Thus, to
form the united front, the socialist worker had to break the
discipline of his own organization. This, of course, most of
them refused to do, especially in Germany, where traditions
of discipline and organized action were so strong. No
longer did the communist consider it his duty patiently and
painstakingly to convince his socialist fellow-workers of the
proper policy to be pursued, but now a policy of threats
and bureaucratic ultimatums were issued. The Stalinist
might succeed in this action in backward Russia, where he
1606
had control of all jobs; he could not succeed in Germany.
The result was that no united front at all was obtainable.
Such a situation also played into the hands of the old die-
hard socialist officials who for many years had sabotaged
the united front with the revolutionary forces, in order to
form a united front with the capitalists against the
communists. Thus the new policy of the Third International
became the chief means to prevent the Leftward-moving
socialist workers from actually breaking the bonds of their
Party and attaining united revolutionary action. Nowhere
was this more apparent than in Germany prior to the
victory of Hitler.
The Third International functionaries tried to justify their

rupture of the united front policy by alleging that, in a
period of revolutionary upswing, such as characterized the
"third period," united fronts with reformists were vital to
the revolution. They closed their eyes to the fact that Lenin
had made united fronts with similar reformist parties in the
Russian Revolution, up to and including the moment of
seizure of power. Indeed, the soviets themselves were
united front bodies so that, far from denying the value of
the united front in acute revolutionary situations, the
Russian experience proved that the united front was
invariably the best instrument for seizing power, and that
the united front itself, in the form of soviets, became
transformed into an organ of the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat for the maintenance of power and the
establishment of the socialistic regime. If the united front
under given circumstances leads to the soviet, conversely
genuine soviets can not be formed without the united front.
Can it be that the Germans believed they could skip this
stage and create soviets without the united front? The 1927
Canton adventure should have shown them the lethal
1607
character of such a course. The fact is, the German
communist leaders did not believe the time was ripe for
soviets. How natural then was their sabotage of the united
front!
The decision that the Socialist Party was to be treated as a

wing of fascism meant also that communists were duty
bound to destroy the Socialist Party physically, as they had
boasted they would the Fascist. Thus, the socialist workers
often found themselves attacked on two fronts; their
meetings were broken up by hooligans, and they were
forced to defend themselves not only from the side of the
reactionaries but from the side of the communists.
The situation was aggravated by the new decisions of the

Sixth Congress in regard to the organized trade union
movement. Hitherto it had been the policy of the
communists to work within the established trade unions.
Now it was decided wherever possible to split the old
unions and to form new revolutionary ones. In Germany,
above all, this policy proved disastrous. In 1929, the
reformist trade unions counted about eight million
members. Communist members and sympathizers in these
unions amounted to no more than about three hundred
thousand. Yet the Reds decided to withdraw their forces
from these reformist unions and to form their own Red
Trade Union Center. This action of course split the trade
union movement wide open. Not only did it cement the
power of the reformists over the workers who remained in
the unions, but it entirely isolated the communists from the
mass of members, and transformed them from an active
force to an isolated sect. The paper unions formed by the
Stalinists were helpless to prevent the employers from
launching their attacks and, because of the split in the ranks
of labor, the workers lost battle after battle. No wonder,
1608
when the communists decided at the eleventh hour and
fifty-ninth minute to call a general strike to prevent Hitler's
rise to power, nobody responded! The Communist Party
always could declare that it was provoked into splits by
expulsions and other actions against it by the reformist
officials; the fact remained that communists were only too
willing to accept this gage of battle, forgetting that these
officials were playing the game of the employers, whereas
their own duty was to unite the workers in struggle.
In line with their designation of the Socialist Party as a

social-fascist group, the Stalinists had to declare that all the
parties to the Right of the socialists were thereby fascist.
Thus, simple republicans and democrats became
transformed over night into fascists and, if the united front
could not be made with the Socialist Party and the unions,
certainly it could not be made with these other groups.
Furthermore, this sort of analysis meant that the democratic
parliamentary regime was to be considered no better than a
fascist administration. This failure to distinguish between
various forms of capitalist States had also dire effects.
In Germany, the communists at different periods

denounced as fascist Hindenburg, von Papen, von
Schleicher, and others who had held office under the
Weimar Republic. But, under these administrators, the right
to vote freely had existed, certain social reforms were still
granted, there was still the right to speak, to organize, and
to strike. Evidently, if this was fascism, fascism was not so
terrible as painted. Thus, in effect, the communists glossed
over the real meaning of fascism and thereby helped to
pave the way for the victory of Hitler.
Furthermore, if the existent regime was fascist, this could

imply only that the fascists already were in the saddle and
that it was futile to struggle to keep them out of power. In
1609
this way, the Stalinist theory further paralyzed the people's
fight against fascism. Just as by its theory of social-fascism,
Stalinism had decided that masses of organized workers
already had been won to the cause of fascism, so, by its
confused identification of democracy and fascism, it
denounced every supporter of the Weimar Republic as a
Hitler sympathizer, thus driving him towards the Nazis.
Instead of comprehending that the mass of people were
hostile to fascism and that the workers were ready to fight
to the end against Hitler, German Stalinism was busy
proving that the mass of people already were fascist. A
timely psychological interpretation of the Stalinists' attitude
would have exposed this sort of theory as the reflection of
their intention to run away from the fight. To spread the
belief that the democrats all were in favor of fascism was to
popularize the idea that all those not communists were in
league against communism. This was the conception of one
reactionary mass against which Marx had polemicized as
far back as 1875, when the Gotha program was adopted by
the German social-democrats. Instead of seeking to drive
wedges among the ruling class elements in order to
disunite them and, above all, of trying to win over the petty
bourgeoisie, the Stalinists made it as easy as possible for the
fascists to unite the people against the revolutionists.
Furthermore, by their false analysis, the Stalinists showed

that they had failed to understand the essence of capitalist
democracy. They went to great lengths to prove, for
example, that each time the policeman's club descended
upon the head of some unfortunate striker, this was a
fascist act, and the State was thereby fascist. Hence, they
concealed from the people the simple fact that wherever
policemen flourish, even in the most democratic or social-
democratic states, they use their clubs and guns against
those who challenge capitalism in any form whatsoever.
1610
Democracy does not mean the absence of terror, but merely
a particular form of it.
Since to the Stalinists the democratic parliamentary republic

had become identical with fascism, it was now possible to
unite with fascists to overthrow parliament. Thus, when the
Nazis in Prussia in 1930 brought forth the proposition to
issue a referendum on the question whether the Landtag
should be abolished, the communists voted for this fascist
measure, uniting with the Hitlerites against socialists and
democrats. The Stalinists, of course, declared they were not
in favor of the fascist dictatorship, but advocated the
smashing of parliament and the installation of Soviets.
Yet it must be remarked that, if this was truly the aim of the
communists, they certainly did not prepare for its
realization. Assuming that the referendum really had been
passed and the Landtag dissolved, then the communists
should have been preparing feverishly for insurrection, so
as to allow the soviets to take power. Indeed, soviets
already should have been formed. But nothing of the sort
was done, nor could have been done in the light of the
objective circumstances. The Communist Party of Germany
was dreaming neither of insurrection nor of building
soviets. By engaging in this demonstrative referendum
without the slightest preparations for revolution, the
communists showed that they believed soviets could be
established either suddenly, by Party decree, as in Canton,
or through the parliamentary measure of the referendum,
or that they were indifferent whether the fascists took
power or not. Certainly, had the referendum gone through,
it would not have been soviets that would have been
established, but rather a reactionary institution much closer
to Hitler's desire.
1611
In this period, communist collaboration with the fascists,
both in theory and in practice, gradually was worked into a
system. The communists, for example, began to raise as
their chief slogan "Down with the Versailles Treaty." From
the very beginning, the Comintern had been against this
robber treaty, but Lenin distinctly had advised the German
communists not to make this their principal demand, since
it would play into the hands of the imperialists of Germany.
For communists to make such a demand the center of their
campaign meant to arouse the most intense national feeling
at precisely the time when the Nazis were making such
feeling their principal objective. Thus the line between
communists and Nazis tended to become blurred,
especially when the National Socialists also thunderously
were denouncing capitalism. The masses were now being
instructed that their chief enemies were not the German
employers but the foreign oppressor, who must be
overthrown. This whole orientation added grist to the mill,
not of the communists, but of the fascists. In the ranks of the
German communists, the Stalinist policy of Russian
nationalism was bearing fruit in German nationalism.
Nationalism could have been avoided by the German
communists if, instead of declaiming against the Versailles
Treaty, they had pointed out that Germany was suffering
because she was not intimately related to the other peoples
of Europe, but torn asunder from Europe by capitalism. Not
the isolation of Germany, but her intimate relation with
Russia and her other neighbors, through a Soviet United
States of Europe, could have been demanded as the way
out of the crisis.
German nationalism was farther advanced by the Stalinists

when they changed their slogans from the call to the
proletarian revolution to an appeal for a Volks Revolution, or
"People's Revolution." This was indeed aping the fascists,
1612
who had made this their shibboleth from the very
beginning, in contradistinction to the Communist Party,
which had formerly urged the international proletarian
dictatorship. In Germany, more than elsewhere, such a
vague idea of a "People's Revolution" was entirely
inadequate, since it was in Germany, of all the industrial
countries of the West, that the proletarian revolution was
the ripest, that it had been most discussed theoretically, and
attempted practically. It meant an admission that the
proletarian revolution was not really in order, that it was
not the workers who must rule, but the heterogeneous
people. In this wise, the Stalinists made it plain they had no
great faith in the proletariat's running the revolution, that
the proletariat was too narrow a class. But if the
communists had no faith in the firmness and ability of the
workers to rule, why should the petty bourgeoisie have
such faith? Lack of confidence in the proletariat was
precisely the decisive factor in moving the petty
bourgeoisie completely over to the side of fascism; in
creating this lack of faith, the Stalinists did their part very
well.
Thus the logic of their actions impelled Communist Party

members objectively to support the Nazis and to fight the
socialists and liberal-democrats. Instead of a united front
being made against fascism, there was being created in fact
the united front against the Weimar Republic and the social
reformists and democrats. For this reason, in spite of the
growing revolutionary situation, the communists could
break away but few workers from the Socialist Party, so
that, to the very end, the social-democrats were able to
retain their adherents and their eight million votes.
Coupled with their attacks on the socialists, the communist

officials made all sorts of boasts of what they would do
1613
were Hitler actually to get into power. They declared that
his rule would not last more than a couple of weeks, that
such rule would compel the formation of a united front
from below of all the workers, to sweep him out. One of the
Stalinist leaders declared: "If they, the Nazis, once come
into power, the united front of the proletariat will be
established and sweep everything away. . . . They will come
to grief more speedily than any other government." (*1)
Indeed, the communist officials actually voiced the opinion

that it would not be too harmful for the Nazis actually to
take power, since this would be the best way to expose the
demagogy of the fascists and thus destroy them. The
fascists would not be able to live up to their multifarious
promises; they would fall of their own weight. With such a
platform, the communists gave the impression that the
installation of fascism was not to be fought too hard. On
their side, by no means were the Nazis opposed to finding
new arguments why they should get into power. They
understood far better than the communists that it would be
infinitely more difficult to dislodge the Nazis after they
were entrenched in office and had the armed forces of the
State at their disposal.
None the less, as the situation grew more and more

revolutionary, in 1932 the communists became the
beneficiaries of an immense sweep toward the Left on the
part of the masses. The communist vote, which had been
about four million at peak, now surged upward to six
million. In the most important industrial sections of
Germany, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Saxony, and the Ruhr,
the German Communist Party had an absolute majority of
the working class. (*2) These workers, feeling a battle
impending, construed the attitude of the Communist Party
to mean that they would fight before Hitler would get into
1614
power. They had no inkling that the communist officials
later were to declare that there was no revolutionary
situation in Germany, and that the advent of Hitler was
inevitable.
According to all the theories upon which the Communist

International was founded, the revolutionary forces in
Germany should have been able to prevent the victory of
fascism. The world was then in the throes of a deep
economic and political crisis acutely affecting the whole of
Europe, in the course of which the communist forces had
grown considerably. Had the Comintern lived up to its
early internationalist conception of the revolution, had it
recognized the gravity of the situation, it could have
mobilized its parties in Poland, in Czecho-Slovakia, in
France, and in the other bordering countries, to help the
Germans. It could have made every effort to form united
fronts with other working class organizations throughout
Europe which would have declared that, should Hitler take
power, it would mean international struggle. To back up
this threat, the Red Army should have been mobilized
immediately on the Western frontiers of Russia. This would
have been the Soviet Union's method of demonstrating that
it not only called on the workers of other countries to
defend the workers' Fatherland, but that it felt bound to
help the revolution throughout the world as well.
Such a policy was impossible for Stalinism. The Russian

leaders running the Third International had turned away
from the world revolution. They had adopted the program
that the Soviet Union did not rest upon the support which
the international working class could give, but relied solely
upon its internal strength, its Red Army and its factories,
upon the deals that it could make with foreign capitalist
diplomats. The Russian bureaucrats failed to realize that, by
1615
allowing the German and European working class
movements to be destroyed, the attack against the Soviet by
capitalist Europe led by fascist Germany would become
inevitable, since there would then be no force within those
capitalist countries able to stave off the war. They failed to
see that the destruction of the German proletarian
organizations was a decisive step toward the destruction of
the Soviet Union itself. Not by posing the national interests
of the Soviet Union against those of the world revolution,
but only by throwing the weight of the soviets themselves
behind the drive for world communism at the decisive time
and place, could Russia herself be safe.
The mobilization of the Red Army, far from provoking war,

might have been the very factor temporarily to prevent it,
had the German fascists in this way been defeated and the
pacifist social-democratic regimes retained the power in
Central Europe. The real question was not whether Russia
should mobilize her Red Army --- this would have to occur
sooner or later --- but whether 1932 was the right moment
for Russia to act. But time already has shown how correct
such a move would have been. In 1932, Japan had not as yet
seized the whole of Manchuria and fortified her positions
all along the Siberian border. In 1932, Hitler was not yet
Chancellor, and there was no reconstituted German Army.
The Red Army would have had a far easier task to prevent
Hitler's getting into power than to stop him from launching
war after he had become dictator precisely on a program of
war and militarism.
After all, the German workers had a difficult task to carry

out a revolution alone. Up to now, at least in the West,
proletarian revolutions had been concomitant with war.
Only in China and Spain had it been demonstrated that in
the present era revolution did not have to depend upon the
1616
outbreak of war. The situation in 1932 was far more difficult
in a way than the one the Russians had had to face in 1917.
In that period the world was divided and could not unite to
crush the communists. The Russian workers and peasants
were armed. Russia was inaccessible to a considerable
extent and far from being surrounded on all sides by a ring
of enemy countries. In 1919, when the soviets had to defend
their victory, they were favored by the fact that capitalist
Europe was exhausted and torn by internal revolution.
Fundamentally, Russia had been saved by the activities of
the world proletariat. In Germany in 1932, on the contrary,
not only were the workers disarmed, but all the European
capitalists were armed to the teeth, united and ready to
attack a German proletarian revolution.
Under such circumstances the German workers needed

some assurance that, should they begin their revolt, they
would receive substantial international aid. They
understood well that, should they take to civil war, it
would mean foreign intervention, with the possibilities of
world revolution. The question was, in case of intervention,
would the Red Army be ready to help the embattled
German proletariat? Furthermore, was the Communist
International prepared to initiate the world revolution and
to throw all the forces of the Soviet Union behind it?
The answer that the German workers received was clear.

The Stalinists were interested solely in building up
socialism in their own country. They were unwilling to halt
the Five-Year Plan in order to help the German workers.
The German revolution would be a bothersome disturbance
of all the utopian plans of the Russian bureaucrats, busy
putting forth pacifist plans at disarmament conferences.
Such a policy was in line with the Stalinist strategy never to
take the military offensive, but to give the enemy the full
1617
advantage of choosing the time and place of battle. In short,
there was to be no world mobilization on behalf of the
German workers.
Such a reply was bound to discourage the German working

class. Had the Red Army been mobilized and plans
prepared for revolt, the German bourgeoisie would have
been compelled to consider seriously the feasibility of
supporting Hitler to the end. At the same time, the
demonstrated determination of the communists to bring on
the revolution in Germany, should Hitler attempt to take
power, would have rallied large masses of German middle
class elements and workers who had moved away from the
cause of the proletariat precisely because of the vacillating,
negative policy of the advanced workers' organizations.
Furthermore, the foreign capitalist rulers would have felt
the ground stirring under them and would have mobilized
all their forces to prevent the victory of German fascism.
The Stalinists being what they were, the terrible debacle of

1933 resulted. The destruction of the German organizations
inevitably was followed by the crushing of the workers'
movement throughout all of Central Europe, thus removing
the chief brake to intervention against the Soviet Union.
From this time on, world imperialism became far more
arrogant to the Soviets. Japan advanced with seven league
boots in the East, Germany sprang forward as the
spearhead of the attack in the West. Under Stalinism, the
Soviet Union had now become isolated and forced to
defend itself against the whole world.
In a meeting of the high functionaries of the Stalintern, after

the German disaster, the infallible leadership attempted to
prove conclusively that no other course of action had been
possible. In brief, thousands of communists had been killed,
tens of thousands had been jailed, hundreds of thousands
1618
had fled the country, fascism had become victorious
throughout Central Europe, the most important proletarian
outposts had been surrendered without a shot being fired,
and all that Stalinism could declare was that events had
gone along "as predicted"; it had been inevitable that Hitler
was to take power!
In Italy, while Lenin was alive the workers fought fascism,

although those engaged in industry and trade represented
but six and one-half million compared to ten and one-half
million agrarians; in Germany, under Stalinism, the
workers did not fight fascism, although there were eighteen
and one-half million engaged in industry and trade
compared to ten million agrarians, and although the
communists controlled the decisive sections of the country.
With a Party and a following not much stronger than the
Germans, in a backward country two and a half times the
size of Germany, Lenin boldly had fought for power. The
Germans under Stalin, although having behind them the
best theoretical and practical training, did not even make a
fight for it.
In "Proof" of their point that Hitler's victory was inevitable,

the Stalinists gave voluminous evidence to show the
treachery of the social-democrats in that they had refused to
follow the lead of the revolutionary Stalinists. But these
bankrupt Stalinists could not stop there; they had also to
attempt to show that the German people did not want to
fight, and that no revolutionary situation existed in
Germany. The Comintern, however, lived on hopes and
affirmed that, while there had been no revolutionary
situation as yet, there would soon be one, and the
communists must prepare for a revolution.
How empty was this analysis could be seen by the events

that occurred in Germany later. The blood purge of the
1619
Nazis, by which Hitler finally separated himself from his
former socialistic comrades, the plebiscite in the Saar, the
Austrian revolt, the French revolutionary ferment, the
rearmament of Germany, and the open declarations against
the Soviet Union, all found Germany silent as the grave, so
far as organized demonstrations of communists or workers
were concerned. Measured by the barometers of these
events, it was plain that the Third International was now
completely dead in Germany.
The defeat of the proletariat in the decisive portions of

Europe in turn only drove the Russian leaders still farther
to the Right. In proportion, as they could rely less and less
on the international working class organizations for active
support, the Russian diplomats turned to intrigue and to
alliance with the world capitalists. With the advent of
fascism in Germany, Russia became a member of the
League of Nations precisely at a time when that happy
family itself was no longer an instrument effective to
prevent German imperialism from declaring war, and when
it functioned merely as a variation of the old pre-War set-
ups to maintain the imperialist balance of power and the
status quo. It was impossible for Russia to become part of
the League of Nations, to enter its machinery and to assume
responsibility without adding her weight to the great
incubus of oppression already bearing down upon
hundreds of millions of colonial slaves. It was not enough
that Russia had entered a defunct organization effective
only as a war machine and anti-colonial force; it was now
necessary to idealize the whole set-up and to build theories
on France and England as real forces for peace.
The military aspect of Russia's entrance into the League of

Nations was soon seen in the creation of the Franco-Soviet
1620
Pact in May 15, 1935, in which both France and Russia
pledged mutually to assist each other in case of invasion by
another country. Prior to this time, Russia had made non-
aggression pacts with her capitalist neighbors in which each
pledged not to invade the territory of the other. This was
the first time that Stalin had dared to gamble with the
Russian workers' lives to the extent of promising to aid
some capitalist country if invaded by another imperialist
rival. He declared in a signed statement that he understood
and fully approved the national defense policy of France in
keeping her armed forces at a level required for security.
This statement was supported the next day by an article
appearing in the official Soviet newspaper, "lzvestia," which
affirmed: "Until a system of collective security including
countries governed by elements endangering peace has
been firmly established, France and the U.S.S.R. will
maintain their armaments at a level guaranteeing their
safety. This, it is true, a heavy burden for both countries.
But to weaken these forces now would be to strengthen the
hopes of the opponents of peace and to subject other
peoples to the risk of having to pay dearly for negligence in
preparing their defenses."
The arguments of the sovietists were identical with those

which the French militarists had adopted in the various
disarmament conferences to prove why France should not
follow the line of the Versailles Treaty and either disarm or
allow Germany to arm. In these conferences, Litvinoff had
challenged the French thesis, advocating disarmament; now
France suddenly became a great force for peace, and her
army had to be supported.
In their pact with the French capitalists, the Stalinists

involved themselves in the whole metaphysical question,
when is a country the aggressor and when is it on the
1621
defensive? During the World War, the opportunist
Socialists had banged their heads in vain against the wall of
that problem, all the socialists maintaining that "their"
country was the one attacked. The Germans proved this fact
by referring to the Russian invasion, the French by pointing
at Germany, the English by parading Belgium, the Russians
by stressing the invasion of Serbia, the country of their
"fellow-Slavs," by Austria, and so on. As a matter of fact,
regardless of the form that the world conflict happened to
take at any particular moment, the War was the result of
the mutual rivalry and aggressions of all the imperialist
powers whom the socialists were defending. It became a
highly dubious question whether any country was solely on
the defense. Now, thirty years later, the Red bureaucrats of
Russia again raise the problem of "mutual defense" as
though it were a cud for the proletariat to chew upon
indefinitely, to their own destruction. Who will undertake
to say what is "offense" and what is "defense" in the jungle
world of imperialism? For example, if Germany tries to
recover Alsace-Lorraine, will that constitute an act of
defense or of offense? To the Germans it is simply regaining
possession of a piece of German territory which wrongfully
had been seized.
To take up the question of defense and offense is to

presume that there is an abstract law of international
morals, something eternal and holy which all nations must
obey. The truth is, a country can be weakened and
overthrown without a territorial invasion, so that there can
be aggression without invasion just as conversely, there can
be invasion without aggression. Suppose that a country that
desires to make war on France first attacks an ally of France
whom the latter is pledged to defend? Could not France
maintain that this fight for her ally is really a measure of
self-defense, that if her ally is beaten in advance she is
1622
bound to be defeated later? Let us suppose that Czecho-
Slovakia is invaded by Germany, would not France
interpret this as an attack upon her interests preliminary to
an attack upon her territory? Would she not be able
legitimately to call upon Russia for support? And if Russia
counts on France to help her, will not Russia be bound to
engage in war against Germany for the preservation of
Franco- Czecho-Slovakian friendship?
At the same time as the Franco-Soviet Pact was signed there

was forged another alliance between Czecho-Slovakia and
the Soviets engaging to perform the same obligations. This
is even more scandalous, since every one knows that only
the greatest act of violence tore the three and a half million
Germans of Bohemia from their brethren in Germany and
put them in an independent rival state. Thus, if these three
and a half million Germans want to be free from an alien
yoke and to join their blood brethren in Germany, Russia is
now pledged to interfere to the point of war in order to
separate the German people.
Furthermore, if the Riff tribes rebel in Africa and the

Syrians in the Near East, if the Indo-Chinese fight in
Annam, if the Sudanese rise up and the great colonial
empire of France is threatened, then the French generals can
reckon on the fact that Stalin fully approves the large
standing army of French imperialism and cannot afford to
have that military force weakened or its prestige
diminished in the slightest. In the colonial countries it now
becomes the duty of the communists to prove why the
French colonial army is better than others, why by no
means must colonial revolts embarrass this force. Since
France stands for peace and for true national defense, it is
thoroughly improper for any colonial people to demand
their freedom from such a force and to risk war with it.
1623
As in the case of Russia's entering the League of Nations, it
was not enough for the Stalinists to sign the Pact, it was
necessary for the Communist International to idealize it and
to "prove" that there was nothing class collaborationist
about it. Later they would call a special world congress of
the Third International to perform this sleight-of-hand. In
the meantime, Stalin gave notice to all the Communist
Parties that French militarism was now to be supported.
Only a short time previously, the Soviet Union leaders had
been working overtime to prove that France was the arch
enemy of Russia, had been organizing a White Guard Army
of one hundred thousand in Paris for intervention at the
proper time. The murders of Voikoff and Vorovsky, Soviet
diplomats abroad, had been laid directly at the door of
French capitalism. Concurrently, the German workers were
being informed that Germany was Russia's best friend and
that Russia would have to fight side by side with the
Reichswehr, were France to invade Germany. The Germans
were told to concentrate their attack upon the Versailles
Treaty and the League of Nations, its off-spring.
Unfortunately for the Soviet Union, history has proved that

it is always its best friend who turns traitor, but the lesson
is never learned, and always there are new friends. This
was the case first with Chiang Kai-shek and later with
Wang Ching-wei in China; this was the case with Germany
in the West. Accordingly, no sooner had Russia won France
as a new friend than French fascism made startling
advances, and signs appeared on every side that it would
be victorious eventually. Thus, evidently, the best friends of
Russia are those countries which are so weak that they need
Russia's support until they can reorganize their economy
along fascist lines. But at the moment, at any rate, France
has suddenly blossomed out as the bosom friend of the
1624
Soviets, for whom the latter is ready to give the life of all its
citizens.
We have already shown the nationalist behavior of the

Stalinists in Germany in directing their principal attacks
against the Versailles Treaty rather than against the German
capitalist class. Under the new line, the Russians were
protecting the League of Nations and status quo which
previously they had denounced. This time they were
playing into the hands of the French nationalists as before
they had played into the hands of the German. To the
German workers, the chief enemy was pointed out as the
French; to the French workers, the chief enemy became the
Germans. In 1932, the Russian Army could not lift its finger
to declare its solidarity with the German workers; in 1935 it
could pledge to sacrifice all for the French capitalists. When
the German workers were on the verge of civil war, the
Stalinists were filled with pacifist phrases and disarmament
proposals. When, however, the militarists were in the
saddle and called for reinforcements, the Stalinists stood
ready with arms in their hands to pull the chestnuts out of
the fire for decadent French capital.
Most important of all is the fact that the French communists

are forced to abandon all thought of revolutionary activity.
Since the French Army is to be supported at its maximum
efficiency, it becomes necessary to recruit for that army and
to end all anti-militarist work; it is also necessary to put
down strikes in all munition, metal, and other factories that
might be useful in war time. Furthermore, since strikes
would weaken the army, the French Communist Party
must assure the French capitalist class that, in consideration
for the support that Russia is to receive, the French workers
will not attack their employers, but must unite the whole
nation behind the pact. Further than that, if the army is to
1625
be supported to the maximum, it, is necessary to support
the militarist clique at the head of the army. There is no
question that this military clique understands full well the
advantage in war that Germany has derived from its
dictatorial reorganization under Hitler. These French
militarists, for their own self-protection if for no other
reason, are compelled also to move towards the same
dictatorial centralization of forces. Thus, since the fascists
support a strong army, and since the army officers must
move towards fascism as a political mechanism for the
efficient conduct of war, Stalinism has objectively given
support to those very forces which must bring fascism to
victory in France.
The Franco-Soviet Pact came at a time when the French

employers were facing a difficult situation, both within and
without. They were in desperate need of Soviet support to
bolster up their position. Externally, they feared the power
of Germany, and wanted the guarantee of the strong Red
Army behind French interests. At the same time, in the light
of the coming war, they needed some cause, some heroic
symbol, by which to induce the French anti-militarist
workers to fight. In the World War, the shibboleth was "to
make the world safe for democracy." Now the slogan:
"Defend the Soviet Union" will be the bait to encourage
French workers to shoot down their German brothers.
The feelings of the German militant workers, drinking the

dregs of reaction to the last drop in the concentration camps
under Hitler, can be imagined. Now they are told that, as
sympathizers of the Communist International, it is their
duty to support the army of France against Germany. This
becomes a powerful argument in the hands of Hitler to
disillusion the German workers, showing how they always
have been made the dupes of Russian nationalism. As
1626
Stalinism develops its new French nationalist orientation, it
must drive the workers deeper and deeper into the grip of
German nationalism, thus helping to prepare for the new
world war. It must make the German workers hate the
Soviet Republic as a sham to cover a new Russian
imperialism. Stalinism has done everything possible to
convince the German workers that the Soviet Union should
not be defended, but rather overthrown.
The French employers need the Soviet alliance for another

internal reason. In Germany, although both socialists and
communists were split and urging the members of the
opposing group to break discipline and to join the other,
none the less, so great was the influence of discipline and
organization upon the German working class that, as we
have seen, practically no one left his organization to enter
the other. The socialists and communists both maintained
their membership practically intact to the last. In France,
however, the situation is entirely different. There
organizational discipline is not so highly valued; on the
contrary, the masses have a tradition of taking matters into
their own hands. Here it is socially necessary, if capitalism
is to stave off the revolution, to bring both socialists and
communists together, for, even when both parties act jointly,
there is no safeguard that the workers will follow their
leaders and be directed into safe channels. The Franco-
Soviet pact became an immensely powerful instrument to
bring the Russian nationalist communists and the French
nationalist socialists together. From then on they began
loyally to co-operate with one another and to join their
forces to keep the proletariat enchained to the chariot
wheels of French capitalism.
It must not be imagined that French capitalism will shed

one drop of blood for the Soviet Union's Dictatorship of the
1627
Proletariat. On the contrary, at every decisive moment,
French imperialism will use the Pact as a lever to batter
down that Dictatorship. France wants not a risky
proletarian ally that may usher in the world revolution once
war begins, but a safe partner, one that can be trusted to
fight according to capitalist rules. Accordingly, France
bends every effort to support the Stalinist bureaucracy and
to put down the proletariat within the Soviet Union.
The danger of Russia's new orientation to the workers of

the world was fully seen in the Italian-Ethiopian conflict
that broke in 1935. The Italian adventure was an important
blow, upsetting the status quo so carefully preserved by the
League of Nations. Unlike Japan's attack on Manchuria, it
was a blow which fell heavily, not upon the Soviet Union,
but upon British imperialism, although in both cases it was
directly an attack upon the colonial peoples and indirectly
upon the proletariat generally.
Moreover, Ethiopia, in her struggles against Italian fascism,

was thrust forward as a political factor capable of changing
the entire situation of Europe. First of all, had Italian
fascism been defeated, it would have meant in all
probability the eruption of the proletarian revolution in
Italy which, in turn, would have upset completely the
political equilibrium in Europe. Secondly, there was always
the possibility of the Ethiopian war's starting a
conflagration that would rage throughout Africa and all the
colonial countries, thereby also involving the leading
imperialist nations. These were the two great axes that
should have determined the strategy of the communists.
Ethiopia's battle could have become a rallying point for the

awakening of Africa. After all, Italy's attack was but the last
of a series of aggressive moves that had been visited upon
the hapless Africans, completing what England, France,
1628
Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and others had begun. From the
communist point of view, the struggle against Italian
imperialism could not be limited to Mussolini's defeat, but
inevitably had to be carried forward by the other oppressed
sections of Africa until all imperialism’s were driven out of
that continent. The possibility of the whole of Africa's
becoming aroused was one aspect of the war that greatly
worried French and British imperialism.
The Italo-Ethiopian conflict demonstrated the fact that even

the darkest continent was ripe to play an important historic
role and was becoming a decisive factor in world affairs. At
a time when the advanced European workers of Italy and
Germany had not been able to answer fascism with blows,
it was the benighted Negroes of East Africa who dared to
take up the challenge and in effect took their post as the
vanguard in the struggle against fascism.
The Communist International, of course, should have done

its best to widen and deepen the struggle of the African
masses. Its policy should have been to set in motion the
colonial masses of Egypt, of the Sudan, of Morocco, of
South Africa, as well as those in the Near East whose
interests were vitally affected. That these peoples were ripe
for such action could be seen by the riots that broke out in
Egypt, the insurrections in French and Spanish Morocco,
and the great Arabian movement against British
imperialism. However, these developments were inspired
not by the Communist International but were instigated by
fascist intrigue in the employ of Italian imperialism as a
counter to the pressure of Great Britain.
The Communist International and Russia were too

engrossed in following the lead of Great Britain and the
League of Nations to undertake to spread the colonial
revolt. Besides, Russia was pledged by the Franco-Soviet
1629
pact and by her adherence to the League of Nations to a
hands-off policy. Russia would have a good deal to say
about Italian aggression, but nothing about the fact that
France and England were carrying out precisely the same
colonial policy that Italy was attempting to pursue. In
denouncing Italy's efforts to obtain a place in the sun,
Russia would forget that it was not Italy but precisely
Russia's newly-found friends, France and England, who
were the chief imperialist powers. This, however, did not
prevent Russia from selling oil to Italy during the conflict or
from refusing to help, either with materials or credits, the
people of Ethiopia battling for their independence.
Italian imperialism had now trod heavily upon the toes of

the master of the colonial world, Great Britain. At once the
League of Nations was convened to consider the grave
crisis. When seizure was made of Fiume by Italy, of Vilna
by Poland, of Memel by Lithuania, and of Bessarabia by
Rumania, there had been no such outcry. When China was
attacked by Japan and partially dismembered, there was no
resistance. When Great Britain seized Egypt and vast
colonial mandates, no whisper of protest was heard from
the League. But once the sacred rights of the British Empire
were infringed, heaven and earth were to be moved to
protect this great uplifter of mankind and foremost
representative of the White Man's Burden. Great Britain
proposed that drastic sanctions be adopted against Italy by
all the countries of the world. Aggressively pushing the
idea, even to the extent of military sanctions, was no other
than Soviet Russia and the Communist International.
Sanctions is a term meaning law enforcement, in this case

the law being the Covenant of the League 'of Nations. There
has never been a genuine body of international law, for the
very reason that there has been no international state or
1630
government capable of enforcing such law. Up to now,
international sanction has had one meaning --- military
conflict leading to war. Thus communist Russia, which had
stood for the breaking of all capitalist laws, now brought
forth the theory that there exists an international law that
all countries must obey under penalty of being attacked by
the whole world. Moreover, the international law to be
defended was precisely the international law of world
imperialism. Just as the lives of the Russian soldiers were to
be offered in defense of French capitalism, so were they to
be sacrificed for British imperialism.
Of course, the sanctions advocated by the League of

Nations had nothing to do with Ethiopian independence,
but rather with the Covenant of the League. This was
clearly seen by the fact that both Great Britain and France
were ready to come to an agreement with Italy for the
dismemberment of Ethiopia and its transformation into
spheres of influence. A treaty had already been prepared to
this effect without serious protest from Russia. The only
difficulty was that Italy decided to seize the whole country
for herself, thereby violating "international law."
In her demand for sanctions, Russia was even more

aggressive than Great Britain. The latter country restricted
itself temporarily to economic sanctions; Russia openly
declared her willingness to go the limit. What was the
motive behind her aggressiveness? Was it in order to
stimulate war in the West so as to insure the weakening of
any European united front against her, just as it is the
policy of England and France to turn the coming war, if
possible, into a struggle between Germany and Russia, with
France and England free to enjoy the profits? Regardless of
this speculation, it is a fact that at once the Communist
Parties of Great Britain and France began to insist on
1631
military sanctions. But such a course could mean only a
strengthening of the British navy and the French army. In
this wise, these communists who only yesterday were
building Leagues against War and Fascism and advocating
peace, overnight were turned into protagonists of a policy
which, carried out, must have led to world war. In all
countries, nationalism and militarism, with their fascist
counterpart, took marked strides forward.
Comparing her entrance into the League of Nations, Russia

was able, also to enter into more friendly relations with the
United States and to obtain recognition from that arch-
capitalist country. Recognition was agreeable to the
Americans since Russia no longer appeared a Red menace
and could now become useful. The United States needed a
friend in the Far East to oppose Japanese aggression and its
menace to the Open Door Policy. Furthermore, if war were
to break out soon, American capitalism wanted to be in a
position where it could sell ammunition freely to both sides.
There were other weighty internal reasons as well that led
President Roosevelt to recognize Russia. The pressure of the
crisis compelled him to demonstrate that he was doing all
he could to open up new markets. His dictatorial tendencies
and schemes of planned economy fitted in well with the
recognition of countries that had put similar policies into
operation. Finally, he needed the support of the liberals and
of sections of the labor movement that had favored such a
policy.
In order to appease the conservative forces in American life,

however, it was necessary to convince them that Russia was
entirely safe for capitalism and becoming increasingly so.
1632
Roosevelt therefore insisted that Soviet Russia outstrip all
precedent in the way of guaranteeing that no revolutionary
propaganda would be spread abroad. Hitherto Russia had
consented to agreements that the officials of the Russian
State would not propagandize for the overthrow of
governments willing to sign treaties with Russia, but had
never offered to control the Communist International, a
supposedly independent body. Stalinism, however, now
was ready to end the fiction of Comintern independence of
Russian national policies and openly to announce its
liquidation.
Point Four of the document recognizing Russia therefore

declared that Russia was "not to permit the formation or
residence in its territory of any organization or group and
to prevent the activity on its territory of any organization or
group, or of the representatives or officials of any
organization or group which has as an aim the overthrow
or the preparation for the overthrow of, or bringing about
by force of a change in the political or social order of the
whole or any part of the United States, its territories or
possessions."
It is well to analyze this truly astounding document. Russia

here guarantees not only what her own agents will not do
but what she will let any body of people do on Russian soil.
As the document reads, no group of refugees or any body
of men whatever can now gather on Russian soil, six
thousand miles away from the United States, and hold a
congress which will discuss the inevitability of a social
change by force in the United States. The United States not
only is controlling acts in its own country, it is controlling
the actions of private people in Russia itself. This document
sounded the death knell of the Communist International;
from then on it was plain that the Comintern factually
1633
would be dissolved so far as America was concerned. A
short time later it was decided, at the Seventh Congress of
the Third International, that each of the Communist Parties
would now be independent in the various countries and no
longer would receive instructions from Moscow on national
problems.
The conditions incident to American recognition of Russia,

however, are stricter than the laws of the United States
governing its own subjects. In the United States it has been
permissible for a soap box orator to call for the overthrow
of the American social system. He could not urge the
overthrow of the government, but he could demand the
abolition of capitalism and the profit system, even by
violence. The pact signed with Litvinoff by Roosevelt,
however, specifies that no one in Russia shall be allowed to
do what can be done in America, namely, no one in Russia
can advocate the overthrow not only of the American
government, but even of the social system of capitalism
prevailing in the United States. Russia is to put an end not
only to the conclusions of politics but to the finding of
economics and philosophy as well.
Nor is this yet all. Point Four of the recognition terms

declares that Russia shall allow no one to advocate the
overthrow by force of the social order in any territory or
possession of the United States. Thus, specifically, the
communists of Cuba are to be ordered by Russia to end all
anti-American propaganda and all denunciation of
American imperialism. Nor must it be imagined that these
are mere platonic guarantees.
The first illustration of the deadly menace of the treaty was

to be seen in the activity of the Communist Party in Cuba.
There in 1933 a powerful revolution had broken out against
the Machado administration which was threatening to
1634
develop into a Soviet regime embodying the confiscation of
American property. Roosevelt needed the communists to
put down the revolution and to control it. For this the bait
of Russian recognition was offered. At once Cuban
communists changed their whole approach to American
imperialism. Again the interests of Russian nationalism
triumphed over the international revolution.
The situation in Cuba can be briefly stated. Under Machado,

an open military dictatorship had been established, in the
style of the worst Chicago gangsters, which already had
taken the lives of over twenty-five hundred People. Behind
the Machado regime stood the power of Wall Street. Since
the Spanish-American War, the imperialist government of
the United States never really had relinquished its prize
plum. By articles II and III of the Platt Amendment, the
government to be established was forbidden to contract a
public debt over the amount it could meet with ordinary
revenues. Also, the United States was allowed to intervene
for the "Preservation of Cuban independence, maintenance
of government adequate for the protection of life, property,
and individual liberty." This of course meant that the
United States government could intervene with its military
forces whenever the masses made any attempt to end the
rule of capitalism and vicious landlordism which controlled
the lives of the people.
In fact, since 1898 the United States literally had controlled

the island by means of its armed forces. The first time the
army was in occupation from 1898 to 1902; the second time,
after the liberal revolution had occurred against President
Palma, the United States intervened with its army from
1905 to 1909. Then, during the World War, General
Crowder was sent to control the country. Only after the
1635
War was the military control removed. In 1924, Machado
became President.
The 1929 crisis seriously affected Cuba and its chief

industry, sugar. Imports and exports fell more than 80 per
cent. Cuba was loaded with external debts greater in
proportion than any other country in Latin America. In
order to bolster up the shaky Machado regime, however, a
new loan of fifty million dollars was made in 1930 by the
Chase National Bank. Increasingly the puppet government
had to resort to the most brutal terror. This action alienated
the entire population of the island, so that even the students
revolted, employing the social-revolutionary and anarchist
methods of bomb throwing and assassination. To suppress
them, the high schools and the university had to be closed.
Added to this was the situation confronting Cuban labor.

The United States Consul to Cuba reported (*3) that within
a year and a half wages had fallen 40 per cent, that
complete chaos existed in the country, the agricultural
laborers in many cases receiving no wages at all, but merely
orders on the commissary department. Wage-earners who
two years ago were earning from forty to sixty cents a day
now received ten cents a day (five cents in cash). The
working hours were from sun up to sun down. According
to the Consular report "Wages paid in 1932 are reported to
have been the lowest since the days of slavery in Cuba."
Under such circumstances, not even the power of American

imperialism and the highly trained special army of
Machado could prevent the revolution. With lightning
speed the revolution opened up with student strikes and
demonstrations and led to a general strike of all labor.
Machado was overthrown; De Cespedes was ousted, and
the liberal Grau San Martin was set up as provisional
president. But the workers were in no mood for half way
1636
measures. Immense union organizations were built over
night; the union halls were armed with guns seized in the
revolution. The workers advanced the boldest demands for
improving their conditions. There was no one to gainsay
them. In the countryside the agrarian workers were seizing
the large estates and appropriating the foodstuffs for their
own use. The Cuban Revolution reached the position of a
dual power existing within the country. The provisional
government regime that did not dare call for elections, in
spite of its democratic pretensions, no longer could control
the situation and had to look to the trade union centers,
where the real power resided. The army had become
demoralized and was under the leadership of the sergeants.
The danger was that the sergeants would give way to the
soldiers and the revolution be completed.
The tasks of the Cuban proletariat and communists were

crystal clear, namely, to begin the formation of soviets or
workers' councils to fight for power, to arm the people, to
further demoralize the army through fraternization and
bringing forward the interests of the soldiers, to confiscate
the land for the agrarians, to establish a workers' control
over production. Of course, none of these things could be
accomplished without incurring American intervention.
Americans controlled practically the entire property of the
island. The question of the relation of the communists to the
American government became, therefore, of vital
importance. At this juncture, Roosevelt recognized Russia,
and the communists declared they would not permit
anyone to advocate by force the change of social system in
any territory or possession of the United States. Litvinoff
was to make his first payment to Roosevelt in Cuba.
Comrade Sanini stated the policy of the Cuban Stalinists:

the Communist Party of Cuba is striving to do everything
1637
possible to avert intervention and to create the greatest
possible forces for resistance to it, if it nevertheless take
place. But this is only possible by means of concessions to
the imperialism of the U. S. A., at the price of which the
Cuban toiling masses, under the leadership of the
Communist Party, will try to buy off intervention. It is
precisely with this aim... .... the C. P. Cuba tries to direct the
chief blow of the revolutionary masses above all against the
local Cuban ruling classes.... It is precisely with this aim ...
that the Communist Party of Cuba considers it inadvisable
for the workers to seize the American enterprises....
Precisely with this aim... the Communist Party of Cuba
considers it inadvisable to force ahead the seizure of
plantations belonging to American capital, and fights above
all for considerable reductions of the rent of this land. . . .
Precisely with this aim . . .the Communist Party of Cuba
considers it advisable for the workers' and peasants'
government, if it should be formed, to enter into
negotiations with the government of the U. S. A. on the
conditions of nationalization of big foreign property.... i.e.,
it allows the possibility of buying out this property. With
the same aim the Communist Party of Cuba allows the
possibility of retaining American ownership to some extent
in the form of concessions.... the imperialism of the U. S. A.
would obviously like to avoid armed intervention in Cuba.
This is shown plainly enough if only by the statement of
Roosevelt to the ambassadors of the countries of South and
Caribbean America. . . ." (*4)
This decision found affirmation in the inspired article of a

representative of the Communist Party of the United States
who declared: "The Communist Party... will offer to deal
with Yankee imperialism on the basis of concessions to
avoid armed intervention in the event of the success of the
workers' and peasants' regime." (*5)
1638
The treacherous conduct of Stalinism here was illustrated
with obvious bluntness. It was necessary above all to come
to an agreement with Roosevelt. He was now a friend of
Russia. But to come to this agreement and to prevent the
threat of intervention it also was necessary to end the
Cuban revolution. The masses had to be diverted from the
line of confiscation of American property. But American
property in Cuba comprised practically all of Cuba that was
of worth. Thus, in effect, the masses were told by the so-
called communists that they must not take over the means
of production of Cuba. More than that, they were told that
the American government was to be informed that
American property would be protected, that the real enemy
was not American imperialism --- which could be bought
off --- but the Cuban capitalists. The Cuban capitalists,
however, were, in the main, only the agents of American
capitalists. It was ridiculous to attack the agent and to
ignore the principal. The Cuban ruling class was the puppet
of American imperialism. What the Cuban communists
proposed, never-the-less, was that the people should stage
a political show, but not a social revolution. To this effect,
the Cuban Communist Party offered itself as the willing
tool of American imperialism. (*6)
In China the communists were told to attack above all

Japanese imperialism, that the Chinese bourgeoisie could
be won over to a revolutionary united front with that sort
of policy. In Cuba, on the contrary, the communists were
informed they must attack not imperialism but the Cuban
capitalists, although those local capitalists had no power
and influence of any importance whatsoever. In the one
case, Japan was Russia's enemy; in the other, Roosevelt was
now considered Russia's friend. In each case, the movement
was to be sacrificed for Russia's temporary interests.
1639
But the statement of Sanini went much farther than that.
Not only must the masses refrain from seizing American
property, that is, refrain from taking over the means of
production in Cuba, but the Cuban communists must fight
"above all" for considerable reductions of the rent of this
land to American planters. Thus the Cuban Communist
Party became an agent to reduce the rent of American
capitalists! But if American property was to be held
inviolate, then what was the purpose of any revolution at
all? With the maintenance of the power of American
imperialism in Cuba puppets could be shuffled, but not one
single important step for the solution of the great problems
which had led the Cuban masses to venture their lives in
revolution could be taken. Wages could not be raised, and
neither social security nor political freedom obtained so
long as imperialism controlled the island.
With their brazen counter-revolutionary program, the

Cuban Stalinists did not hesitate to declare that American
imperialism was opposed to intervention; they accepted at
its face value the speech of Roosevelt to that effect made to
a group of diplomats whose entire stock in trade was
intrigue and trickery. Ever since the Spanish-American war,
Cuban independence had been a myth. Now, according to
the Stalinists, American imperialism suddenly was to take
another course; this was evidenced in a general formal
speech by Roosevelt, not to Cuban workers, but to
ambassadors of Latin America!
The Cuban section of the Third International affirmed that

Cuba would buy off American imperialism! Here was
repeated the old argument of the opportunist socialists that
they could buy out capitalism peacefully and gradually,
and that the Marxist theories were false to the core. But,
practically speaking, what funds, what wealth had the poor
1640
Cuban people with which to buy off American imperialism?
Certainly if the Cubans were not to take over the wealth of
the island held in the hands of the Americans, they would
have not only no funds to buy off American imperialism,
but no money to pay the interest on the huge debt accruing.
Even if the attempt were made to buy off, it would mean
that the Cuban masses would be in effect selling themselves
to America in perpetuity in order to make the money
payments. Finally, from a Marxist point of view, it was
childish to believe that American imperialism would allow
itself to be bought off and to lose control over such a
colonial market as Cuba.
Thus the American and Cuban communists came out

openly as the aides of Roosevelt to stop the Cuban
Revolution, the only place where their aid was of decisive
importance to the United States at the time. This new Policy
was effective in checking temporarily the revolutionary
movement. With this, the reactionaries of Cuba took heart
and attempted a counter stroke. The masses again
advanced and dealt a crushing blow to the former officers
of the army who attempted the new coup. But as the masses
moved to the Left, the ruling groups united to prevent its
going too far. The San Martin government gave way to the
Hevia government which almost immediately disappeared
to make way for Mendieta, Cuba's "strong man" who would
restore order. (*7) Thanks to the aid of the Communist
Party, the revolution again temporarily was halted and the
masses demoralized and confused.
The second effect of the recognition of Russia by Roosevelt

was the striking transformation of the Communist Party of
the United States. Before the full effects of the Russian
recognition policy had become felt, the position of the
Communist Party towards Roosevelt and the New Deal had
1641
been expressed to the effect that the New Deal "is a sharper
turn of the capitalist dictatorship in the United States to war
and fascism." (*8) Even as late as the Eighth Convention of
the Communist Party, the National Industrial Recovery Act
(N.I.R.A.) was interpreted as being a strike-breaking move
in a trend towards fascism. The resolution of that
convention stated: "The Roosevelt government is, however,
moving in the direction of the incorporation of the
company unions within the A. F. of L., the conversion of the
existing A. F. of L. unions into company unions regulated
by the government, the outlawing of all class unions, as
part of the drive for the fascization of the government and
the trade unions." (*9)
Once Roosevelt had become Russia's friend, however, a

complete change of attitude took place. The independent
unions and other organizations controlled by Stalinists
which threatened to cause the administration
embarrassment were liquidated. Whereas, in the days of
Hoover, there had occurred periodic marches to
Washington, hunger marches, farmers' marches, bonus
marches, and what-not, now no big militant demonstrations
were staged at the capitol of the country. The recognition of
Russia had been hailed as a great force for peace, as an act
that would give many jobs to the workers. (*10) Now that
Roosevelt had accomplished this recognition, it was
difficult to attack him except for not going far enough.
Thus Roosevelt, instead of being a representative of the

class enemy, became a sort of friend of communism. This
attitude was to culminate in the presidential campaign of
1936, when Roosevelt stood for re-election. The attitude of
the Communist Party suddenly became one by which it
was no longer Roosevelt who was representing fascism, but
Landon, and that at all costs Landon must be defeated, even
1642
though the campaign of the communists against Landon
was to result in votes for Roosevelt. In the trade unions,
certain communists became spokesmen for the Roosevelt
Administration and did their best to mobilize labor behind
his campaign. This was especially true of those communists
who were officials of unions affiliated to the Labor Non-
Partisan Committee and the American Labor Party of New
York, both of which endorsed the candidacy of Roosevelt. It
was no accident that the communist candidate suddenly
could be considered respectable enough to be permitted to
present his viewpoint over the radio on national hook-ups
from which revolutionary speeches are barred. (*11)
Browder himself has gone to great lengths to declare that it
is slander to imply that his organization advocates violence
and the overthrow of the American government by force.
The Communist Party now stands for democracy as against
fascism, for peace as against violence.
Footnotes
1. Speech of Remmele in the Reichstag, given in "Rote

Fahne," Oct. 16, 1931. Compare L. D. Trotsky: What Next? p.
60.
2. The fact that six million followed the German

Communist Party politically and only three hundred
thousand or so in the trade unions should have served as an
ominous warning. These figures meant that the workers did
not trust the Communist leadership in the day-to-day
struggle although they still had faith in the Comintern and
Russia as a revolutionary force.
3. See Monthly Labor Review, Vol. 35, No. 6, p. 1403 (Dec.

1932).
1643
4. See, The Communist, Vol. XII, No. 12, p. 1228 (Dec. 1933).
The Communist is the official organ of the Communist Party
of the U. S. The parts eliminated are too long to give in full.
5. Harry Gannes in the New Masses, p. 16 (Jan. 9, 1934).
6. Note that the Communist Party did not talk of the

Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but of some vague Workers'
and Peasants' Government although the number of
"peasants" in Cuba is a relatively very small portion of the
total toiling population.
7. Mendieta has now been impeached and deposed by the

army run by Batista and an even more reactionary regime
installed.
8. A. Bittleman: "The New Deal and the Old Deal." The

Communist, Vol. XIII, No. 1, p. 881. (January 1934.)
9. The Resolution is given in The Communist, Vol. XIII, No. 5,

p. 461. (May 1934.)
10. See, for example, Earl Browder: "Out of a job," pamphlet,

where he makes the argument that unemployment would
be considerably lessened were Russia recognized.
11. Or that Browder could break bread with Roosevelt,

Landon, Hearst, Du Pont, Rockefeller and similar characters
at the annual banquet of the Washington Gridiron Club.
XLVI. ISOLATION AND COLLAPSE (CONTINUED)
HAVING faced the world communist movement with a

mass of accomplished facts, in 1935 the Russian leaders
1644
finally convened the Seventh World Congress. In the days
of Lenin, the Comintern had met annually; under Stalin it
did not meet for seven years, from 1928 to 1935. During that
time there had occurred the Peasants' War and soviets in
China, the Spanish and Cuban revolutions, the rise of
fascism in Europe and its victory in Germany, Austria, and
Central Europe, the adventure of Japan in Manchuria and
China, the Italo-Ethiopian conflict as a prelude to a world
war, the accomplishments and failures of the Five-Year
Plan in Russia, and the change of front in American social
and political life, not to speak of the development of the
deepest economic crisis that the world had ever seen,
bringing in its wake untold misery and revolutionary
possibilities. None of these questions had been discussed by
a gathering of Communist Parties assembled in
International Congress.
The Seventh Congress was entirely perfunctory and rubber

stamped. It met only for three weeks. The deadly unanimity
was striking. The Congress failed to touch on the
perspectives of the crisis; it made no analysis of the reasons
for the obvious failure of the Stalinist Parties throughout
the world. All it could do was to approve actions already
past. Such questions as the Franco-Soviet pact were not
even discussed.
The Seventh Congress not only completely wiped out the

decisions of the Sixth Congress of 1928 --- although in each
particular case the Executive Committee held itself up as an
infallible revolutionary center --- but actually prepared for
the dissolution of the International as a workers' force. This
liquidatory policy could be seen in every phase of its work.
The Congress stated plainly that no longer was the
proletarian revolution involved, but merely the struggle
against fascism; the fight was not of workers against
1645
capitalists, but of bourgeois democracy against fascism; it
was the duty of communists to support democracy not only
at home but abroad. "Today the proletariat in most
capitalist countries are not confronted with the alternative
of bourgeois democracy or proletarian democracy; they are
confronted with the alternative of bourgeois democracy or
fascism." (*1)
The head of the International plainly declared that all the

key problems of the proletarian movement of the world, all
its tactical maneuvers revolved around the central axis, the
reinforcement of the Soviet Union as the base of the world
proletarian revolution. (*2) The main policy of the world
proletariat in case of war was not the defeat of its own
capitalist class, as Lenin would have had it. This task had
now become secondary to another. "Today the defense of the
U.S.S.R. determines the main line of policy of the world
proletariat in relation to war." (*3) Nothing could be clearer.
The unprecedented decisions of the Seventh Congress may

be summed up as follows: First, communists were to unite
with democratic capitalists to form People's Fronts against
fascism. In pursuit of this aim, communists could join
People's Fronts governments and help build up capitalist
armies for the defense of democracy. Second, in foreign
policies, the Stalinists in time of war must support the
democratic countries against the fascist countries. Third, in
regard to the situation within the ranks of labor, the
communist unions were to liquidate and to join the
reformist unions under any conditions. The Red
International of Labor Unions thus would disappear.
Fourth, the Communist Parties themselves must form close
united fronts with the Socialist Parties in such a way as to
pave the way for organic unity later, even though this
would mean that the Communist International in certain
1646
countries would have no official section. In order better to
accomplish this last task, each party was to be given
organizational independence.
The People's Front was a universal extension of the policy

that had proved so disastrous in China, the policy of servile
unity with elements of the capitalist class, sections that
posed as democratic and liberal. In the People's Fronts there
were three factors, the communists, the socialists, and the
bourgeois radicals. Of course this alliance could be
maintained only if the communists were to agree not to
jeopardize the interests of those capitalists who were part of
the People's Front. Evidently it was called "People's" front
because capitalists were admitted. The handful of
capitalists gave it the character of belonging to the entire
people beyond a doubt.
The bourgeois radicals, of course would not participate in a

movement that permitted strikes in their plants; they could
not favor the reduction of the democratic army and navy,
nor could they look on passively while Reds carried on
anti-militarist propaganda in the ranks of the armed forces.
These capitalist radicals could not permit themselves to
become part of a movement that caused pain to democracy
by staging riots, demonstrations, and other manifestations
of a dangerous character. By forming such an alliance, the
communists bound themselves to collaborate with the
employers of the country, which they called democratic.
Thus the communists decided to pursue a policy of
rewarding friends and punishing enemies, some of the
capitalists being good and some bad (the good capitalists
being none other than those who had signed pacts with
Russia). Such a policy must lead to the intensification of
nationalism and militarism in all the countries and,
eventually, to the victory of fascism itself.
1647
Of course it was understood clearly in communist circles
that those countries which could still afford democracy
were those which were the most prosperous, where the
employers were most secure. The democratic countries
were those, in the main, which had suffered least from the
War, which had the largest colonial empires, which, in
short, formed the reservoir of world capitalism. In this way
the Communist Parties of the world rallied to the defense of
the most secure sections of the capitalist class, apparently
believing that these capitalists would risk their fortunes
eventually on behalf of the Workers' State in the Soviet
Union.
If bourgeois democracy was to be defended with the lives

of the workers, then, the workers must not overthrow the
capitalist State. If the democratic capitalists were good
revolutionary fighters against reaction, then it was possible
to persuade them of the justice of the workers' cause, at
least to such an extent that civil war between democratic
capitalists and revolutionary proletarians would become
out of the question. In democratic countries the revolution
was postponed. Democratic capitalism in an era of
imperialism was still able to play a progressive role,
according to the Stalinists, and the difference between
bourgeois democracy and fascism was not a difference in
degree and form of capitalist rule but a fundamental
difference in kind. This is to abandon materialism for
idealism; it is to assume that the struggles of the different
layers of capitalists against each other are superior to their
joint struggles against the workers as one class against
another.
Incidentally, within the democratic countries themselves,

Fascism rapidly was growing, although naturally the turn
to fascism did not affect all sections of the capitalist classes
1648
with the same speed and directness. The heavy trustified
industry was the first to turn to fascism; the light,
competitive, older capitalist layers retained their
democratic tendencies longer. But precisely these latter
elements no longer exerted the decisive weight in capitalist
affairs, but yielded to the trusts. Hence, within the
democratic countries, on these secondary capitalists, who
possessed little independent force in critical moments, the
Stalinists had to rely; these relatively petty elements are the
ones who, the Stalinists believed would stand firm for the
proletariat. Nothing could better illustrate the petty
bourgeois character of the Third International today.
Furthermore, the Stalinists went much farther than the

mere formation of a People's Front; and they also declared
their willingness to become part of a People's Front
Government and, like MacDonald for the Labour Party of
Great Britain, take the responsibility and leadership of the
criminal actions of the capitalist State. The Seventh
Congress reviewed the situation in various countries
throughout the world and came to the following specific
conclusions: In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium,
where the socialists were in the government, the
communists were to support the socialists and the State. In
Czecho-Slovakia, the communists must become more
patriotic and nationalist. "The biggest mistake of the
Czecho-Slovak communists is their insufficient
consideration for the national feelings of the masses in their
struggle against the Fascist Home Front." (*4) In England,
the Communists were to work for the Labour Party and for
a Labour Government. Whereas, in the days of Lenin the
entrance of communists into the Labor Party was in order
to fight the reformists more effectively, with the
understanding that, if the Labor Party won the elections,
the communists would break from it and attack it as a
1649
capitalist agency, today communists are to be the vanguard
agitating for such a Labor Party capitalist government. In
Rumania, Poland, Jugo-Slavia, and similar countries the
Communists were to include in their People's Front the
reactionary peasants' parties headed by the big capitalist
agrarians. Inasmuch as these countries are predominantly
agrarian, this policy internally meant a united front with
the agrarian capitalists objectively to prevent the
organization of the revolutionary agricultural workers. In
Mexico the Communist Party was to support President
Cardenas against Calles; in Cuba, they were to unite with
the forces of Grau San Martin.
As for China, "I declare from this world platform that the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and
the Soviet Government of China are prepared to form a
government of all who are unwilling to be colonial slaves,
on the basis of a universally acceptable program for armed
resistance against Japan regardless of divergent opinions on
other important problems." (*5) So the Chinese Communist
Party no longer was to fight all imperialism, since French,
British, and American were now considered friendly and
democratic, but only Japanese imperialism. Again the
Chinese Communist Party called for a bloc of four classes,
not to win communism but merely for a struggle against
Japan. (*6)
As we have seen above, this whole program of idealization

of democracy was intimately connected with the war
program of Russia. Having dropped their disarmament
proposals, the Stalinists turned to the slogan of making the
world safe for democracy and were taking the place of
Wilsonian liberalism of 1917. The workers of the world
were called upon unhesitatingly to defend the democratic
countries against the fascist countries and to urge that their
1650
government declare war in defense of democracy. Thus the
People's Front became merely a transition to the National
Front or Union Sacr’ee in which the French and other
workers during the War joined hands with their capitalists
for the unified execution of war aims and policies.
The most developed form of the People's Front has been

established in France. From the capitalist point of view,
several considerations prompted a section of them,
members of the Radical Socialist Party, to join. First, there
was the danger of German fascism and the need of national
unity to resist German invasion. Second, there was the
Franco-Soviet pact and the need of proletarian support for
this arrangement. Third, the French working class was
moving dangerously to the Left, and it was thought
possible to curb them by joining forces with them.
From the workers point of view, one lesson had been

ingrained from the German defeat, and that was the fatal
outcome of splitting ranks, the crying need for unity in the
struggle. To the genuine revolutionists, in spite of the fact
that the People's Front meant a powerfully coordinated
bureaucracy to curb the masses, it also enabled the workers
to establish a far more fraternal connection with each other
than before, mutually to exchange ideas, and to break down
old barriers. Through the People's Front, the masses
strengthened their power to act more than the united
bureaucracy could increase its force to restrain the struggle.
Ever since the February, 1934, riots in which the situation

was rapidly mounting to revolution, the masses had united
their forces in street fighting, in spite of the bureaucracies of
both the socialists and the communists. In a vast general
strike of over four million workers they had demonstrated
their tremendous power and revolutionary energy and had
compelled the officials of both Parties to come together.
1651
From that time on there had been formed, not a united front
between these two Parties, but rather what was called a
Common Front. The difference between the two was that,
in a united front each organization would send delegates to
a conference limited to a specific subject, time, and place.
Each organization would have the right to act
independently and to criticize the other factors of the
united front. In the Common Front, the membership of both
Parties would meet jointly; the leadership of both
organizations would agree not to criticize each other, but to
support each other before the working class. This, of course,
was all to the advantage of the reformists who had always
been willing to unite with the communists if the latter
would give up their attempts to agitate for the revolution
and to discredit them. The Common Front, then, meant a
blurring of all organizational distinctions and the laying of
the basis for a fusion of socialists and Stalinists into one
centrist reformist organization. (*7)
In this way the Communist Party forged a double set of

chains around the revolutionary element. First was the
Common Front wherein the revolutionists were in effect
fused with the reformists in an organization in which the
reformists took the lead and worked out the principal
features of the common policy without criticism from the
other side. Second, there was the People's Front wherein the
entire working class was bound to the support of French
nationalism in the coming war.
That the stage has been set for a renewal of the Union
Sacr’ee can be seen from the following quotations from
leaders of the Communist Party of France. "If the workers,
to take Marx's words, have no fatherland, they, the
internationalists, have something to defend from now on, it
is the cultural inheritance of France, it is the spiritual wealth
1652
accumulated through all that her artists, her artisans, her
workers and thinkers have produced." (*8) Thus the
workers are to fight for the defense of the French spirit.
And again: "Here, I shall answer a question which has been
put to me: in such a war launched by Hitler against the
U.S.S.R. would you apply the slogan: transformation of the
imperialist war into a civil war? . . . No, because in such a
war, it is not a question of an imperialist war, a war
between imperialists, it is a question of a war against the
Soviet Union." (*9)
How far matters have advanced can be seen by comparing

the Seventh Congress, wherein it had been declared that the
French communists were to vote against military credits
and military measures of the bourgeoisie, (*10) with the
statement "Long Live the Republican Army" made on
armistice day of that year. (*11) By May, 1936, the
communists had decided under certain conditions to vote
for all military appropriations. "So far, the vote for military
appropriations indisputably meant the support of militarist
ends. We do not know if tomorrow the situation will not be
such that the vote for military credits can have a different
meaning. . . . In any case, anxious as we are to assure the
freedom and independence of our country, while we are
fighting the domestic Hitlerites, we could not be indifferent
to the threats which the foreign Hitlerites are bringing to
bear on our country." (*12) And another leader affirmed:
"The vote for the budget under the conditions of a
collaboration with other parties, even though we are not
taking part in the ministry, is a political question which can
only be solved within the frame of a general domestic and
foreign policy of France. If the changes we pointed out take
place, the communists could be brought to vote for the
budget." (*13)
1653
The liquidation of the independent position of the
Communist Party in the Common Front naturally went
hand in hand with the liquidation of the French Red Trade
Union Center. Ever since the 1928 "Third Period" frenzy, the
independent unions controlled by the communists had
been reduced to mere shells, and, with the end of the
German unions, the Red international was on the verge of
dissolution as an international body. In France the
Unitarian Confederation of Labor, which at one time had
had the majority of the organized workers behind it, had
fallen far behind the opportunist regular Confederation.
Now, in the name of suddenly discovered unity, the Red
Unions of France disbanded. The Stalinist unions agreed to
the conditions imposed upon them by the opportunists;
they condemned all fractional work inside the reformist
federation, agreed to support all decisions of the League of
Nations in the economic field, and, finally, ratified the
utopian plan for peaceful reformation of society into
socialism.
During the events of February, 1934, when France was on

the brink of civil war, the Communist Party, still living in
the "Third Period" had marched in a separate
demonstration demanding the downfall of parliament, just
as the fascists were demanding it. At the same time the
socialists were defending Parliament and the republic. The
Prussian Landtag experiment of 1930 was to be repeated in
Paris. But this time the Stalinists did not reckon with the
initiative of the masses, who flocked into the streets and
joined forces against the fascist menace. The Common Front
was the result of this joint action of the workers themselves,
but the Front had the purpose of stifling rather than
stimulating the civil war. A great strike broke out in the
arsenals of Toulon, Brest, and elsewhere, which could easily
have assumed a revolutionary character. But the united
1654
forces of the socialists and communists, with their specious
arguments that strikes in the armed forces of the state
would play into the hands of Hitler, not only prevented the
strike from spreading but compelled its speedy termination.
The strike was a sign, however, that the workers could no
longer be restrained by the old methods; new methods
must be tried. The French government was turned over to
the People's Front in 1936. The socialist Leon Blum became
Premier, and bourgeois radicals were given the most
important posts in the Cabinet, the ministries of the State, of
War, and similar posts. The communists, while supporting
the government, decided not to be part of it for the time
being. The fact that the government is now a People's Front
does not mean, however, that the great army of
functionaries or the powerful body of reactionary officers in
the army has been affected in the slightest. So far as the
State apparatus is concerned, there has been simply another
change in administration.
But if the socialist-communist combination did not act in a

revolutionary manner, repeatedly affirming that the task
was no longer a struggle for socialism but only a struggle
against fascism, the workers themselves took matters again
into their own hands. As soon as it was certain that the
People's Front Government had been elected, a tremendous
strike wave burst forth throughout the country which
developed in such a way as to show that France was on the
verge of revolution. Instead of marching out of the factories
into their meeting halls, the workers decided to remain in
the factories and to drive the employers and their
henchmen out until their demands for a 15 per cent increase
in wages, a forty-hour week, and other improvements were
won. The masses did not wait for the socialists and
communists to act in parliament; they decided to force the
hands of these parliamentarians by direct action. The
1655
socialist Blum government faced a dilemma; it was
impossible for the incoming People's Front regime to make
its debut by the use of soldiers against the workers.
The stay-in strikes in France were manifestations that the

workers were getting ready to establish workers' control
over production. The shop committees that were formed
were signs of a growing unity for struggle on the part of the
proletariat. That the workers could stage such a strike
peacefully was due to the fact that soldiers could not be
used against them. Had there been fighting, the masses
would have been forced to quit the factories for action in
the streets. This, however, would have led to barricade
fighting and the re-entrance into the factories, this time not
as workers but as masters.
The parties to the People's Front did their best to terminate

the strike movement. The Communist Press asserted no
revolutionary situation existed in France and there could be
none; Thorez, the head of the Party, declared the workers
must know when to end strikes as well as when to begin
them. But if the Blum regime could not send the workers
back to work without their having won their demands, it
knew how to make the victory valueless after the strike was
over. This it did by taking the initiative to devaluate the
franc. Automatically prices would rise far higher than the
wages had increased, leaving the workers with a reduced
standard of living and lower real wages. For a long time all
the bourgeois parties had evaded the problem of inflation,
fearing the unpopularity of such a move in a country of
small investors whose savings already had been liquidated
80 per cent by the stabilization of the franc at four cents
instead of twenty after the War. It remained to the People's
Front regime to put over this measure which reduced the
1656
position of the masses of workers and petty bourgeoisie to
the point of desperation.
In its foreign policy, the People's Front regime outshone

itself in enforcing strict neutrality in the Spanish Rebellion
at a time when the fascist countries of Europe were aiding
the fascist-monarchist rebels with all the means at their
command. Had any other government been in power it
would have been extremely difficult to have restrained the
French workers from aiding their Spanish comrades under
the circumstances. The People's Front regime proved
invaluable in this respect.
The People's Front government can be only a transition

regime, either to the victory of the proletariat or of fascism.
(*14) However, for the proletariat to win, it is necessary for
them to create an entirely new party. They have a chance to
do so by breaking out in open, prolonged rebellion for the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It is probable, however, that
the masses will be unable to hurdle all the barriers placed in
their way, and that neither communism nor the People's
Front, but reaction, will be at the helm when the next war
breaks out.
In Spain the People's Front established in 1936 rapidly

crumbled in the fires of the fascist-monarchist rebellion.
Under pressure of the masses, the socialist Cabellero,
supported by the Stalinists, had to take the helm. The
activities of these government leaders consisted not merely
in defending bourgeois democracy from the attacks of the
reactionaries but, above all, in preventing the masses from
carrying on the revolution to the end and establishing a
socialistic rule, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
1657
The collapse of the Third International meant of course a
collapse of the Communist Party within Russia, a collapse
marked by the insistent demand for the abolition of the
Dictatorship, the termination of the soviets and the
institution instead of pure democracy. This latter move
culminated in the new Russian Constitution. In this
counterposing of pure democracy to the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, the Russians adopted in fact the arguments of
the socialists. They entirely ignored the Marxist solutions to
the questions whether any State could exist that was not the
dictatorship of a class, whether democracy also was not a
form of dictatorship, or whether the dictatorship of the
proletariat could exist without democracy. Forgotten was
the claim that the soviets had made possible the greatest
democracy that had ever existed since the beginning of the
class struggle.
We already have taken the occasion to point out that

dictatorship and democracy are not necessarily antithetical,
but that indeed democracy is a type of State through which
the dictatorship of a class is expressed. Further, even
dictatorship as a form or State may be so closely connected
with a democratic mechanism that a Bonaparte and a Hitler
may use the plebiscite to come into power. Just as a
capitalist State may have different forms varying from open
dictatorship, with or without democratic trappings, to
broad democracy, and still remain the expression of
capitalist class dictatorship, similarly, the working class
may dictate its will through a worker's State which may
also assume different forms. These may include the
democratic-dictatorship of workers and peasants, the
dictatorship of the workers in alliance with the poorest
peasantry, or the dictatorship of a bureaucracy still
following the interests of the proletariat. So long, however,
as the social produce of the working class returns to that
1658
class, so long as there does not exist private ownership of
the means of production, private profits, and so on, there
remains a Workers State and, in that sense, a Dictatorship of
the Proletariat. (*15)
We have also pointed out that a ruling class may dictate its
will, not directly through members of its own class, but
through members of another and even hostile class. For
example, there is no question but that Germany in 1914 was
a capitalist State, i.e., expressed the interests of the
capitalists. Yet the capitalists themselves had little power in
the government. The dictatorship of capital was expressed
through the apparatus of the Junker aristocracy headed by
the Kaiser. So it is today in Japan. On the other hand, in
Germany after the War, capitalism was saved by the
socialists, supposedly enemies of the employers and
representatives of the proletarians.
This paradox may also be found where the working class

rules. The proletariat can rule directly through its own open
dictatorship, where the workers alone can vote (or where
they have the decisive vote) and man the state apparatus-
Case I; or it can rule through an alliance with other classes,
such as the peasantry and other petty bourgeois elements
not capable of ruling either themselves or the proletariat
and who are content to allow the working class to lead in
their mutual interests-Case II; or it can rule through a
bureaucracy which still carries out the will of the working
class-Case III. Infinite varieties and combinations of these
three categories can be concretely realized.
In the first case, the direct open dictatorship of the

proletariat, we have the widest development of the
democracy of the workers, where the proletariat dictates its
will directly and unrestrictedly through the members of its
own class in power.
1659
In the second case, we have a limitation of the democracy of
the workers where they are a minority of the population in
a backward country. Here the workers restrict their
interests in favor of the petty bourgeoisie and peasantry,
and dictate their will only through the permission of the
small property holders. This mutual alliance of the workers
and peasantry may take the form either of a democratic
dictatorship of workers and peasants, in which these two
elements crush all other sections of the population, refusing
to permit them to vote or to express their interests, or it
may take the form of a broad extension of democracy in
which all layers of the population, generals, landlords,
capitalists, and so forth, are allowed to vote, although it is
the interests of the broad masses that are actually carried
out for the moment. In this later event we have a popular
democracy, not a democratic dictatorship.
In the third case, the workers' State or the workers' and

peasants' State is expressed and carried out through the
dictatorship of the bureaucracy. We can say, if we will, that
the dictatorship of the proletariat is being administered by a
dictatorship of the bureaucracy. But in all cases, whether
the proletariat rules immediately and directly, or even
indirectly, through the mediation of this or that group, so
long as the forms of property created by the October
Revolution are not overthrown, the proletariat remains the
ruling class and the State is still a Workers State.
The Russian Revolution evolved a number of State forms.

In the period from February, 1917 to October, 1917, there
existed a capitalist State managed by a provisional
government that ruled with the passive permission of the
masses organized in soviets. The bourgeoisie dominated
through the Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties.
1660
The capitalist State was forced to express itself through a
broad democracy.
In the second period of the Russian Revolution, from

October 1917 to the autumn of 1918, the capitalist State, that
is the dictatorship of the capitalist class, expressed through
a broad democracy and through a dual power, gave way to
a dictatorship of the proletarians who, however, for the
moment limited themselves to carrying out not only their
own interests but also the interests of small property
holders, especially the peasantry. As Trotsky put it, "Not
only up to the Brest-Litovsk Peace, but even up to autumn
of 1918, the social content of the revolution was restricted to
a petty-bourgeois agrarian overturn and workers' control
over production. This means that the revolution in its
actions had not yet passed the boundaries of bourgeois
society. During this first period, soldiers' soviets ruled side
by side with workers' soviets, and often elbowed them
aside. Only toward the autumn of 1918, did the petty-
bourgeois soldier-agrarian elemental wave recede a little to
its shores, and the workers went forward with the
nationalization of the means of production. Only from this
time can one speak of the inception of a real dictatorship of
the proletariat." (*16) Thus in the second period, we had a
form of the democratic-dictatorship carried out under the
leadership of the proletariat itself.
The third period of the Russian Revolution was the stage

from 1918 to 1921, when the New Economic Policy was
introduced. In this period there existed the outright
dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the poor
peasantry. Industry was nationalized, the kulak and the
capitalist were attacked. Broad democracy no longer
prevailed; the proletariat took to itself as many votes as it
needed to gain full control of the State; the peasants were
1661
subordinated to the proletariat; peasant democracy was
restricted, proletarian democracy expanded to the
maximum. This was the period of stern civil war and war
communism. The Communist Party here rose to heroic
heights.
The fourth stage was ushered in with the New Economic

Policy of Lenin and lasted to 1924. This period witnessed
certain concessions made to capitalism and the political
growth of a bureaucracy.
The fifth phase lasted from 1924 to 1933 and was marked by
the gradual strangulation of the democracy of the
proletariat. The rule of the workers was carried out through
the uncontrolled bureaucracy. Up to then the peasants still
had no equal power with the proletariat and the capitalists
had not dared to raise their heads politically.
The next period, delineated by the victory of fascism in

Central Europe and the destruction of the communist and
revolutionary working class organizations there, witnessed
great changes. The bureaucracy in pursuit of its own aims
had to weaken the exclusive monopoly of the workers and
to extend the democracy of the peasant property holders.
Their secret aim was to form a united front of the
bureaucracy and peasant against the proletariat if necessary
in critical moments. The peasantry itself could not form its
own party to defeat the proletariat of Russia. The
bureaucracy by itself could not restore capitalism. However,
if a juncture could be effected between both groups they
might yet be able to dominate at decisive moments.
Thus in 1935 the vote was given to the peasants equally

with the workers. Simultaneously the kulaks, now
thoroughly entrenched in the collectives, were informed
they also could return to vote in the soviets. The Stalinists
1662
defended their course on the ground that so secure was the
socialist State of Russia and so close were they to the
liquidation of all classes that they no longer had to fear the
kulak, despite the danger of war and the rise of fascism
outside of Russia. The further argument was made that the
peasant on the collective was now a worker just like the
agricultural laborer on the State farms. With these Left
arguments that classes no longer existed, that there was no
danger from the kulak, that democracy must be made
broader, etc., the dictatorship of the proletariat was
weakened by extension of democracy to alien classes,
notably the peasantry. From then on, since the Soviet Union
is overwhelmingly peasant, if the workers wanted to vote a
socialistic policy they would have to do so with the consent
of the peasantry. However, this as yet was not an
insuperable difficulty since, for a long time, the peasantry
had been taught to follow the proletariat, and the
instrument of collaboration between the two classes was
still the soviet mechanism of class war for socialism.
To make it easier for the peasantry and other alien classes to

separate themselves from the influence of the proletariat,
the secret ballot was introduced, and complete freedom was
promised for groups to put forward their own candidates.
But even this was not sufficient. It was necessary to revise
the constitution and to wipe out the soviets. The end of
1936 witnessed the adoption of an entirely different
constitutional set-up than before.
As a prelude to the adoption of this Constitution the

Stalinist apparatus conducted a reign of terror against the
old revolutionary fighters, the Bolsheviks of Lenin's day.
We have already analyzed the methods by which the
internationalist wing of the Comintern was destroyed. But
there were large numbers of old fighters who were still
1663
closely attached to the Party. There was the old Bolshevik
secret police, the OGPU, there was the Society of Old
Bolsheviks who had gone through the revolution as
communists, and similar bodies. It was necessary to
liquidate these. The OGPU was dissolved and a new body
organized in its place; the Society of Old Bolsheviks was
disbanded. The old time fighters were steadily driven out
from all the auxiliary organizations outside the Party itself.
Naturally, reactionary social changes also were effected.

The army was gradually reorganized. Instead of short term
service for the masses, instead of the rifle's being tied firmly
to the shoulder of the worker, the guns were removed from
the barracks of the factories, the military training of the
ordinary worker decreased, the professional army rose in
numbers, the old Czarist ranks were re-introduced within
the army, and a large corps of officers, whose permanent
career was the military one, was formed.
The Soviet coins dropped the word "For World Revolution";

Christmas trees were set up for children; the Society for
Militant Atheism gave up its activist agitation. The
educational system abandoned its experimental work with
vast numbers of children and returned to the beaten track
of bourgeois educational methods. There was even talk that
the history text books were too prosaic and did not give
the ancien regime sufficient credit, that these revolutionary
text books must be revised.
Reactionary tendencies invaded the life of the home as well.

Divorce became more difficult. The motto "sanctity of the
home" was revived. The youth were "put in their place";
they were to interfere less with politics and to play a greater
part in home building. Fashion styles were introduced with
a great flourish, and fashion parades were held. American
jazz, cosmetics, and bourgeois ideals were introduced,
1664
together with American machinery and American experts.
By itself, each of these items was not important; collectively,
they indicated definitely which way the wind was blowing.
On the basis of this steady trend away from the October

revolution, the Stalinist apparatus resorted to open
executions of the former revolutionary members of the
Party. The assassination of Kirov gave the pretext for a
regular Stalinist Bartholomew's Night. At first the press
despatches declared that the assassination of this leader of
the Communist Party was the act of a White-Guard Ring.
But soon it was announced that Nicoleiev, the assassin, had
been a Zinovievist in 1926, whereupon wholesale arrests
were made of persons who had been active revolutionists
all their lives and who had even played a glorious role in
October. A hasty secret trial was given to some of the
alleged conspirators; one hundred and seventeen were
executed. Many of those executed had absolutely nothing to
do with the particular ring that may have been involved in
the killing of Kirov. Indeed, some of them, like Lazar
Shatzkin, who was one of the founders of the Young
Communist International, had been arrested for expressing
opinions against Stalinism and were in jail long before the
assassination had been planned. It was simply a case of the
Stalinists' using the assassination of Kirov as a pretext to
wipe out their dangerous political opponents. It was the old
amalgam method.
Although Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested

immediately after the events in February, 1935, they were
released on the ground, as the T.A.S.S. (Soviet Union
Telegraphic Agency) despatch admitted, that they really
had no connection with the affair. (*17) At this time Trotsky
himself was not mentioned as being in touch with any band
of terrorists within the Soviet Union, and the official
1665
indictment did not contain the names of Zinoviev and
Kamenev.
In the true amalgam method made famous by Stalinism, the

prosecution then alleged that Nicoleiev and his band of
former Party members were in touch with the consul of a
foreign country who had given the terrorists some money
and had demanded that they give him a letter to Trotsky.
The consul was not named, nor was any attempt made to
prove that Trotsky was part of this alleged scheme. Instead,
it was proved that the secret police knew of the proposed
assassination before it occurred and yet had done nothing.
The question was raised whether the police was not
involved in the job itself, as it had been involved in the
former White-Guard episode in connection with the former
Left Opposition.
A year and a half later, however, the apparatus struck again

and arrested the former partners of Lenin, Zinoviev,
Kamenev, and others, and executed them. (*18) At the same
time Trotsky was denounced as the real leader of the gang
of terrorists who wanted to restore capitalism in Russia in
the form of fascism and who were acting as agents of
Hitler's secret police. There was no evidence given in the
second trial except the confessions of those indicted and
shot. However, it is absolutely impossible to believe that
men who had embraced Bolshevism for thirty years could
have resorted to the method of individual terror, have
adopted the aim of the restoration of capitalism, and to this
end have become agents of German fascism. Such
conclusions are as fantastic as the charges of the Entente
that Lenin was a German agent of the Kaiser, sent to
destroy Russia.
It was not enough that the Left was destroyed; Bucharin,

Tomsky, Rykov, and others were named as having been in
1666
the plot. Tomsky suddenly "committed suicide"; others
were removed from their posts and faced indictments. It
was clear that the Stalinists were aiming at the complete
extermination of the Old Guard. Stalin was now fulfilling
his Robespierrean role. (*19)
The reasons for these wholesale executions of old members

of the Party are not hard to find. There was first the
necessity of establishing the new Constitution; the reign of
terror operated to crush all opposition. Second, the
demands of the Franco-Soviet pact and similar alliances
with world capitalism made it imperative that the
firebrands be wiped out in Russia and the country made
"safe for democracy." Third, there was the fact that the
Spanish and French revolutionary forces were moving
rapidly to the Left, adopting an internationalist point of
view in which the enemies of Stalinism, such as Trotsky
and even Zinoviev, became symbols of the world
revolution.
The Russian leaders had to give guarantees that, if war

should start, the Red Army would be entirely controlled
and would not turn into a revolutionary army. It was in the
imminent period of war, when the strain on the
bureaucracy was the greatest, and the workers were armed
and fighting for their lives, that Trotsky, Zinoviev, and
similar agitators could play a most dangerous role in Russia.
The wholesale executions of the world leaders of Leninism
left Stalin absolutely alone. The killings signified that the
heroic period of the bureaucracy was coming to a close and
that the enlightened absolutism of the Stalinist variety had
exhausted its internal resources. Henceforth, only two
things were permissible: to glorify the Great Leader, the
Beloved Chief, and to prove that every opponent of
Stalinism was promoting fascism as its paid agent.
1667
The new Constitution of the Soviet Union is the
culmination of the process to destroy the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat from within. It is now declared that so far has
socialism advanced in the Soviet Union that there is no
longer any need for soviets, but that forms of pure
democracy will replace the instruments of the class struggle.
These phrases are meant to cover the fact that, in effect, the
Constitution enormously extends the democracy of classes
alien to the proletariat and limits the power of the working
class.
To the Marxist-Leninist, a "Free People's State" is an

irreconcilable contradiction. Under no State can the people
as a whole be free. "One can only speak of class democracy
(one may remark in passing that 'pure democracy' is not
only an ignorant phrase showing lack of understanding
both of the struggle of classes and of the nature of the State,
but also a hollow phrase, since in communist society
democracy will gradually become a habit and finally wither
away but never will be 'pure democracy')." (*20) If
democracy be extended for the peasantry so that it can
overwhelm the proletariat, then democracy is really
restricted for the proletariat. Democracy must always have
a class basis and a class objective.
That the new Constitution was really expressing the

interests of a new class hostile to the proletariat and not a
general classlessness can be seen by the provisions of the
document itself. The Constitution provides for two houses
to replace the former single body, the Soviet Congress.
Despite the claims of pure democracy made by the
Stalinists, all history shows that popular revolutions are led
by single chambered bodies, and only when the people's
revolution is definitely checked is the double chamber
reconstituted. Furthermore, the two-house system is the
1668
inevitable expression of the class struggle between two or
more classes.
In English history, we find that the two houses of the

English parliament were based on estates, that is, on classes.
During the course of the English Civil Wars, the rising class
found it had no use for the double chamber, and so, in 1649,
the Second Chamber was abolished under the pressure of
the plebeian forces of the rebellion. When Cromwell had
stopped the revolution from going too far, the ruling
Puritan elements which Cromwell represented tried their
best to reinstitute a double chamber. The most reactionary
portion of Cromwell's forces pressed for the formation of a
select senate to be formed entirely of appointees of the
Protector. (*21)
When the English House of Lords was re-instituted after

the Restoration, it was a new body which recognized the
fact that the House of Commons really represented the
people. Gradually the power was taken away from the
Upper House. Today the House of Lords has lost most of its
legislative functions, has little control of money bills, and
can only delay, but not permanently thwart, the will of the
House of Commons.
In the French Revolution, no sooner had the people

triumphed than they abolished the two-house system
introduced by the Liberal bourgeoisie, and formed a single
chamber Convention which reflected the will of the masses
more closely. It was argued even by petty bourgeois
democrats that the two-chamber system was entirely
reactionary. Only when the petty bourgeois Jacobins were
put down after the Paris Commune, were the two houses
restored. But even when the Second House was firmly re-
established under the Third Republic, it did not have the
1669
same power as the House of Deputies which alone had the
right to initiate money bills.
In the American Revolution there was formed a Continental

Congress of one chamber which lasted all during the time
the revolution was in progress. Only when the fighting was
over and the rebellious will of the people had to be
thwarted was the Constitution formulated providing for a
second chamber, with division of powers of government, an
arrangement which allowed the minority of wealth to
control. But even in the United States, the Senate did not
acquire equal power. Finance bills must originate in the
House of Representatives, although the Senate may amend
these bills. The Lower House controls the all-important
purse strings. So well known is the conservative character
of the Upper House that everywhere liberals and radicals
long have been urging the abolition of the Upper House so
that the Legislature as a whole can get closer to the people.
"The conclusions to which these arguments lead is that the
danger that the popular House will seriously misrepresent
those on whom it depends for election, is not great enough
to justify a Second Chamber which adds to the
cumbersomeness of the Constitution." (*22)
But now the Stalinists in Russia, in the name of pure

democracy and classlessness, introduce the two chambered
parliamentary system with such accompaniments that it
becomes less democratic than even the parliamentary
system in capitalist countries. In the United States, there is
now a direct election of Senators and in France an indirect
election on a population basis. In Russia, the Upper House
or Council of Nationalities is not elected at all but selected
by the Supreme Councils of the National Republics
connected with the Soviet Union. (*23) And what is equally
important, this Upper House has equal power with the
1670
Lower House elected by the people. In reality, the Upper
House will be more than equal in the every day workings of
the State apparatus. The situation now created in Russia
finds no parallel in capitalist democratic countries; the
nearest comparison being the Bundesrath under the Kaiser.
The two-chambered parliamentary system now introduced

in the Soviet Union makes an end to the entire soviet
system. Far from being an expression of classlessness, it is a
recognition that classes do exist and that certain classes are
clamoring to overwhelm the proletariat. Were this not the
case, why should it be necessary to change the soviet
system? It would be possible to retain the soviets and yet to
give everyone the vote. As Lenin declared: "As I have
pointed out already, the disfranchisement of the
bourgeoisie does not constitute a necessary element of the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Nor did the Bolsheviks in
Russia, when putting forward the demand for such a
Dictatorship, long before the November revolution, say
anything in advance about the disfranchisement of the
exploiters. This particular element of the Dictatorship was
not born according to a plan conceived by some party but
grew up spontaneously in the course of the fight." (*24)
The fact of the matter is, however, that within the soviets
the peasants could not be separated from the workers and
united firmly with the bureaucracy. An entirely new
framework of the State was necessary. The Upper House
established, composed almost entirely of bureaucrats and
peasants, will have the decisive voice in the selection of the
Presidium that governs between meetings and in the
functioning of the apparatus.
The great powers given to the Council of Nationalities and

the fact that it was proposed to have it selected by the
various Supreme Councils of the Republics make it
1671
necessary to look more closely into its composition. The
deputies of this Upper House are apportioned not
according to population but according to the formal status
of the republic. Each Union Republic is entitled to ten
delegates, each Autonomous Republic five, and each
Autonomous Province, two. Thus the great Ukraine obtains
only fifteen delegates, while little Azerbaijan has seventeen.
Important White Russia gets ten, but the camel drivers of
Tajikistan are entitled to twelve and Georgia is favored with
twenty-two. Furthermore, to insure that the backward
regions will predominate over the proletarian ones in this
Upper House, three relatively unimportant regions,
Kazakhistan, Kirghizistan, and Tajikistan, were raised into
the dignity of full Republics so as to increase their voting
power accordingly. More than that, even though Russia,
White Russia, and Ukrainia have been given only one
hundred thirty-two delegates out of two hundred forty-
eight, (*25) the votes of these regions are so apportioned
that the industrialized regions obtain only a very small
percentage of the total number allotted to these republics.
Lenin had always stressed the superiority of soviets as a

form of democracy for the workers and peasants. It was
Stalin who had refused to break with the Pre-parliament of
the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, it will be
recalled. Under Lenin, the soviets were to embrace the
widest strata of the toilers, initiating them into the
intricacies of the State preparatory to the withering away of
the State. The soviet delegates were elected frequently, and
there was easy recall. Every effort was made to wipe out
specialists and bureaucracy. Under the new Constitution,
the Supreme Council and the Presidium elected by the
Council will hold office for four years unless dissolved
because both houses cannot agree. Even the lowest State
organs in the villages will now retain office for two years.
1672
The Supreme Court, not elected by the people, but selected
by the Supreme Council, keeps office for five years, as do
the territorial courts. The People's Courts are elected by
secret ballot for three years. The Prosecutor of the U.S.S.R.,
who appoints all other prosecutors for five-year terms,
himself is appointed by the Supreme Council for seven
years.
Thus the soviets have been buried formally by Stalinism.

They were killed when the right to strike was taken from
the unions, when the secret police drove out the
internationalist wing of communists from the meetings,
when the bureaucracy took uncontrolled power into its
own hands. Now the corpse formally is interred. A new
parliamentarism arises. Instead of Lenin's ideal of the
humblest scrubwoman's taking part in the government,
there is now a parliamentary regime of professionals, of
political experts.
In formally destroying the soviets, Stalinism has destroyed

the traditional instrument which the masses used to get into
power. Now the State apparatus and elections of
functionaries will have nothing to do with the stirring days
of 1917. The peasants no longer will be confined by the
traditions and framework of the revolution to follow the
proletariat. Here we can see patently that Stalinism is
prepared to show world capitalism that Russia will be safe
in the coming war and that the permanent revolution will
be buried once and for all. Strictly speaking, it is no longer
possible for the workers to declare they must defend the
Soviet Union, since the soviets themselves are now no more.
And if the workers are to take back political power there
will have to be raised again the slogan: "All Power to the
Soviets." Just as this battle-cry meant the end of the
1673
Kerenskys and the centrists of 1917, so will it spell finis for
the Stalinist bureaucracy as well.
The new Constitution marks a complete capitulation to

capitalism in admitting that parliaments are more
democratic than soviets. Evidently, Russia is not only
Americanizing herself industrially, but aping America
politically, except for this difference, that Stalinism takes on
not the most progressive features of capitalist democracy
but its most outworn characteristics.
We fittingly conclude by pointing out the method of

amending the Constitution that Russia has now adopted. In
the United States, the Constitution can be amended, if need
be, by the people themselves, if conventions are held in
three-quarters of the States or if two-thirds of the State
Legislatures act. In Russia, under the new democratic
Constitution, there is no way for the people themselves to
amend the Constitution. The only way amendments can be
carried is by a two-thirds vote of both houses --- and one of
the houses was proposed to be not even elective!
This new Constitution marks the final great step in the

preparation of the counter-revolution from within. The next
step will have to coincide with the fascist and militarist
attacks from without.
The collapse of the Third International and the rise of

fascism have produced a unique phenomenon in the ranks
of the revolutionary movement, namely, the rise and
dominance of centrism. Heretofore, centrism had been a
secondary development subordinate to open reformism;
now it has become the principal aspect of the movement.
1674
"Speaking formally and descriptively, Centrism is
composed of all those trends within the proletariat and on
its periphery which are distributed between reformism and
Marxism and which most often represent various stages of'
evolution from reformism to Marxism --- and vice-versa.
Both Marxism and reformism have a solid social support
underlying them. Marxism expresses the historical interests
of the proletariat. Reformism speaks for the privileged
position of proletarian bureaucracy and aristocracy within
the capitalist State. Centrism, as we have known it in the
past, did not have and could not have an independent
social foundation. Different layers of the proletariat develop
in the revolutionary direction in different ways and at
different times. In periods of prolonged industrial uplift or
in the periods of political ebb-tide, after defeats, different
layers of the proletariat shift politically from left to right,
clashing with other layers who are just beginning to evolve
to the Left. Different groups are delayed on separate stages
of their evolution; they find their temporary leaders and
they create their programs and organizations. Small
wonder then that such a diversity of trends is embraced in
the comprehension of 'Centrism'! Depending upon their
origin, their social composition, and the direction of their
evolution, different groupings may be engaged in the most
savage warfare with one another, without losing thereby
their character of being a variety of Centrism" (*26)
The victory of fascism had made reform impossible. Those

workers' organizations such as the Socialist Parties which
had been based on reform were now smashed to pieces.
The Second International was broken up. Some groups
capitulated to fascism, adopting a theory that the new social
order would come through fascism; others began to fight
against fascism and for the restoration of their old reforms.
Had there been a great revolutionary movement based
1675
upon the unskilled masses of the industrialized world,
these former bribed workers and skilled sections would
have followed it. But in the absence of such a movement to
carry them in its wake, all that the Socialist Parties of
reformist workers could do was to mouth militant phrases
against fascism and to talk of the necessity of fighting
physically against the fascist menace. Thus these Socialist
Parties, especially after the Austrian events of 1934, began
to drop their ideas of the peaceful and gradual
transformation of capitalism into socialism and to advocate
militant struggle. Such Parties began to take on the
appearance of being revolutionary and could be designated
as socialist-centrist groups.
At the same time, with the degeneration of the Third

International, the communists also moved from Marxism
and came closer to the socialists, forming another variety of
centrism. The basis of the communist centrism was the
peculiar equilibrium in which the Workers' State of the
Soviet Union had to compromise with the capitalist world,
leading to the situation whereby a bureaucracy of several
million, trained in communism and traditionally bound to
the revolution, was yet adopting nationalist and reformist
measures. So long as this situation could endure, so long
could the centrism of the Third International have a stable
basis and plenty of funds for support. Thus both from the
Right side and from the Left, centrism became the
dominant characteristic of the movement.
Naturally, efforts were now made for the fusion of these

groups into one body. Some of the Socialist Parties formally
broke from the Second International and joined the modern
variety of the Vienna Union, known as the London Bureau;
others retained their formal affiliation to the Socialist
International although also affiliating to this Bureau. Some
1676
communist groups which had broken from the Third
International also adhered to this Bureau, as did certain
Trotskyist elements who were in favor of the Fourth
International.
Thus, within the London Bureau and without, there were

efforts made to coalesce forces. Some advocated the unity of
the Second and Third Internationals; others urged the
fusion of the Socialist and Communist Parties within certain
countries, still others wanted all the groups to come
together into a new International which in effect would be
but another Vienna Union on a larger scale; a fourth
opinion insisted all must join the London Bureau, nor was
there any lack of adherents for a policy of all joining the
Second International to reform it, or of all becoming
members of the Third.
Only a small internationalist group denounced both

socialists and communists of the Third International as
bankrupt and demanded the formation of a Fourth
International, completely breaking from the old ones, with
especially sharp struggles against every variety of centrism.
The characteristics of centrism have been well summed up

as follows:
"(a) In the sphere of theory, centrism is imprecise and

eclectic. It shelters itself as much as possible from
obligations in the matter of theory and is inclined (in words)
to give preference to 'revolutionary practice' over theory;
without understanding that only Marxist theory can give to
practice a revolutionary direction.
"(b) In the sphere of ideology, centrism leads a parasitic

existence: against revolutionary Marxists it repeats the old
Menshevik arguments (those of Martov, Axelrod, and
1677
Plekanhov) generally without re-valuing them: on the other
hand it borrows its principal arguments against the 'rights'
from the Marxists, that is, above all, from the Bolshevik-
Leninists, suppressing, however, the point of the criticisms,
subtracting the practical conclusions and so robbing
criticism of all object. "(c) Centrism voluntarily proclaims its
hostility to reformism but it is silent about centrism: more
than that it thinks the very idea of centrism ‘obscure,'
'arbitrary,' etc.: in other words centrism dislikes being
called centrism.
"(d) The centrist never sure of his position and his methods,
regards with detestation the revolutionary principle: state
that which is; he inclines to substituting, in the place of
political principles, personal combinations and petty
organizational diplomacy.
"(e) The centrist always remains in spiritual dependence

upon right groupings, is induced to court the goodwill of
the most moderate, to keep silent about their opportunist
faults and to regild their actions before the workers.
(f) It is not a rare thing for the centrist to hide his own
hybrid nature by calling out about the dangers of
'sectarianism'; but by sectarianism he understands not a
passivity of abstract propaganda (as is the way with the
Bordiguists) but the anxious care for principle, the clarity of
position, political consistency, definiteness in organization.
"(g) Between the opportunist and the Marxists, the centrist

occupies a position which is, up to a certain point,
analogous to that occupied by the petty bourgeoisie
between the capitalist and the proletariat; he courts the
approbation of the first and despises the second.
1678
"(h) On the international field, the centrist distinguishes
himself, if not by his blindness, at least by his
shortsightedness. He does not understand that one cannot
build in the present period a national revolutionary party
save as part of an international party; in the choice of his
international allies the centrist is even less particular than in
his own country.
"(i) The centrist sees as outstanding in the policy of the C.I.

(Communist International) only the 'ultra left' deviation; the
adventurism, the putchism, and is in absolute ignorance of
the opportunist right zig-zags. (Kuomintang, Anglo-
Russian Committee, pacifist foreign policy, anti-fascist bloc,
etc.)
"(j) The centrist swears by the policy of the united front as

he empties it of its revolutionary content and transforms it
from a tactical method into a highest principle.
"(k) The centrist gladly appeals to pathetic moral lessons to

hide his ideological emptiness, but he does not understand
that revolutionary morals can rest only on the ground of
revolutionary doctrine and revolutionary policy.
"(1) Under the pressure of circumstances, the eclectic

centrist is capable of accepting even extreme conclusions
but only to repudiate them later in deed. Recognizing the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, he leaves plenty of room for
opportunist interpreters: proclaiming the need for a fourth
international, he works for the creation of the two-and-a-
half international." (*27)
The Left Opposition to the centrists had come principally

from the Trotskyists. Ever since 1928, when he had been
exiled and then deported to Turkey, Trotsky had made
efforts to organize his forces internationally. However, even
1679
Trotsky and the groups mobilized by him proved
inadequate to withstand the strain, and ultimately
capitulated to centrism.
Although sharply critical of Stalinist methods, Trotsky

made no effort to build his international grouping upon the
principal of democratic centralism. While he denounced
Stalin's refusal to call international congresses, Trotsky
himself repeatedly rejected the demand for an international
congress of those adhering to the Left Opposition, wherein
a collective program and responsibility could be worked
out. The adherents of Trotsky followed his innumerable
essays and articles, but they could work out little for
themselves. If ever there was a one-man movement, it was
the Left Opposition built up by Trotsky after 1928.
In this way, the Left Opposition never was prepared to

stand the strain of serious struggle. It could be negative and
critical, but could do very little constructive work. It could
rally to itself Jewish students from various countries, but
could not build up an international proletarian movement.
Wherever strong groups did rally to Trotsky's point of view,
sooner or later they were bound to break organizational
relations with him; repeatedly Trotsky had to denounce
those with whom he had worked the closest as
"intriguants," "disloyal phrasemongers," etc. In short, when
it came to questions of organization, Trotsky showed
clearly he was no Lenin.
Unable to stand on its own feet, the Left Opposition soon

collapsed. Under the direct guidance of Trotsky, the Left
Opposition groups entered the Socialist Parties. In France,
this was done with the argument that the Left Opposition
group was so weak and small that it could not do
independent work. In the United States, the group was told
that the Socialist Party was shaky and vacillating, while the
1680
Trotskyists were mature and strong and could easily
capture the organization for their point of view. In either
case, the conclusion was the same, liquidation of an
independent press, forms of organization, leadership, and
policy, and entrance into the Socialist Parties. The only
factor that could have possibly changed the correlation of
forces within the labor movement and built a new
international, gave up the ghost.
To promote his new policy, Trotsky declared that the

French situation was exceptional and that it was not
impossible for the French Socialist Party to have a new
Tours Congress. Thus he apparently believed that the
Socialist Party suddenly could be reformed and become
genuinely communist. To understand how much of a
utopian conception this amounted to, we may pause to
compare 1934 with the days when the Third International
was formed. Under Lenin, it took five years for the
Comintern to be organized, although aided by the
experiences of war and revolution. Even then, most of the
socialists could not qualify for the Communist International,
and those that did sooner or later fell back to centrism.
But, in 1934, both objective and subjective conditions made

it much harder to change Socialist Parties into genuine
revolutionary organizations. There was neither war nor
revolution, but fascism; there was neither a Lenin nor a
great revolutionary Communist Party anywhere. Besides,
the history of the movement itself must not be forgotten.
The formation of the Comintern and the mutual struggles
between the Socialist and the Communist Parties under
Lenin periodically had eradicated the best revolutionary
elements from the Socialist Parties. All that remained of the
Socialist organization in many countries was a petty
bourgeois shell. If workers followed the Socialist Party it
1681
was not in order to obtain socialism, but rather to secure
social reform. To imagine that now the Socialist Parties
could be conquered for revolutionary struggle was sheer
idealism.
Afterwards, when it became plain that the French Socialist

Party was as hopeless as a revolutionary force as any other
socialist group, the Trotskyists implied that they had
entered the Socialist Party in order to get close to the
masses and later to be able to split with a large number of
followers, instead of remaining the small sect that they
were. They failed to realize that, if they followed a correct
policy, revolutionary events in France would soon enough
give them a proletarian audience. The Trotskyists did not
want to believe that their entrance into the Socialist Party
was really a short cut by which they were trying to dodge
the hard and arduous tasks of revolutionary mass work and
that, precisely because they had done little mass work, they
would be totally unable to win over the best working class
elements, either in or around the Socialist Party. All that the
Trotskyists could do was further to cover up the policies of
the reformists with their own phrases.
It is true that Lenin had urged the British communists to

join the Labour Party, but that was precisely because the
Labour Party was no real party at the time, but an
integrated series of united fronts on the planks of its
platform. Moreover, the Communist Party was to retain its
independence. But the Trotskyists joined the socialists
without the right to publish their own paper and to present
their views to the workers. If they do present their policies,
they must at the same time work to build up the Socialist
Party, the majority of whose members are actively working
against the realization of those policies.
1682
In short, it is not enough to advocate abstractly correct ideas,
but the organizational means must also be found to move
the workers in the right direction. But the Trotskyist
minority has placed itself within the discipline and
framework of the Socialist Party to which they must
repeatedly pledge their loyalty, thereby making it
impossible for them to undertake any independent action
or to help the workers along a revolutionary path.
Thus, in France, the Trotskyists simply aided the cause of

Leon Blum. In Belgium they became part of a Socialist Party
in office, giving loyal service to the King. Everywhere they
gave up the opportunity to act in a revolutionary manner in
the light of the great events now stirring Western Europe.
The collapse of Trotsky's International Secretariat marked

the end of the last grouping of importance that could have
ended the centrist deformation of the revolutionary
movement. Looked at objectively, this collapse meant that a
whole generation of communists had either been killed or
had burnt itself out. It meant also that within Europe there
was now no force able to prevent fascism and world war.
The work would now have to be passed on to a new
generation working in other countries.
From a broad historical viewpoint it may be stated that,

even though the communist revolutionary movement
temporarily has resulted only in centrism, this is a great
advance from the stage before the War. Then, in spite of
Marxist teachings, all that the working class could reach
was the limited level of the skilled workers and the ideas of
the reformist Second International. At least the working
class of the world has now arrived at the plane of centrism.
In the further development of the twentieth century, when
the colonial peoples also rise to their full stature and when
the unskilled workers in the industrial countries begin to
1683
take the leadership and swing the skilled workers behind
them, the working class then will be able to move from
centrism to genuine communism.
If the degeneration of all the forces of communism that

showed such promise after the Russian Revolution is now
proving that Europe is in the process of being burned out as
a great historic factor leading the world, this only means
that the proletariat of America will be called upon to take
the lead. We do not agree with those European communists
of recent date who believe that because Europe is passing
up her leading role in world history, the end of the world
has come and we must revert to barbarism. (*28)
On the contrary, the set-back of proletarian communism is

only another illustration of the law of the uneven
development of capitalism, and an indication that the
proletarian revolution must operate, not as a process of a
day, but as an action covering a generation or more, and
that the course of the struggle is not in a straight line, but in
a zig-zag direction which, however, is always approaching
nearer to ultimate victory.
Footnotes
1. D. Z. Manuilsky: The Work of the Seventh Congress, p. 19.
2. See the same, p. 15.
3. The same, p. 23.
4. Report of speech of Koehler, Daily Worker, August 13,

1935.
1684
5. Speech of Wan Min, reported Daily Worker, August 10,
1935.
6. Recent newspaper accounts seem to indicate that again

the Communist Party of China is willing to join hands with
Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang.
7. In Spain the Communist Party of Catalonia has fused

with the Socialist Party.
8. Speech of Vaillant-Couturier given in L'Humanite, April

13, 1935.
9. Speech of M. Thorez of May 17, 1935, given

in L'Humanite of May 34, 1935.
10. Compare S. Z. Manuilsky: The Work of the Seventh

Congress, p. 27.
11. See L’Humanite of November 12, 1935.
12. Speech of M. Duclos given in L'Humanite, May 11, 1936.
13. Speech of M. Thorez: "L’Humaniti, May II, 1936.
14. A similar conclusion prevails for the People's Front

government in Spain.
15. See introduction.
16. L. D. Trotsky: The Soviet Union and the Fourth

International, pamphlet, pp. 9-10.
17. Compare L. D. Trotsky: The Kirov Assassination, p. 7.
18. According to the New York Times' full report of October

21, 1936, they were dragged through the toilet or wash
house and killed under most shocking conditions.
1685
19. Apparently another "trial" will soon be held involving
Radek and others.
20. V. I. Lenin: The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the

Renegade, p. 23. Compare also K. Marx: The Gotha
Program on this point.
21. See J. A. R. Marriott: Second Chambers (first edition), p. 40.
22. H. B. Lees-Smith: Second Chambers in Theory and

Practice, p. 44.
23. We learn, as this book goes to press, that this provision

has been changed. Under pressure of the masses, Stalinism
has graciously consented to have the Upper House also
elected.
24. V. I. Lenin: work cited, p. 58.
25. Before the war the upper houses of England, France and
Germany had more delegates singly than the one proposed
for Russia, although the population of the latter country is
greater than all the other three combined.
26. L. D. Trotsky: What Next? pp. 117-118.
27. Leon Trotsky: "Two Articles on Centrism," Class

Struggle, Vol. IV, No. 8, pp. 9-10 (August 1934).
28. We refer to such as John Strachey who can write: "The

essential use, then, of Marx's economic discoveries is to
enable us to see the alternatives which face us. And these
alternatives are, as he himself expressed it, barbarism or
communism." (See J. Strachey: The Nature of Capitalist
Crisis, p. 389.)
Marx never placed such alternatives before the workers, but

constantly maintained that the victory of the proletariat was
1686
inevitable, or to put it another way, that the increasing
contradictions of Capitalism and the growing burdens upon
the people would compel the proletariat sooner or later to
overthrow their masters and unleash the productive forces
which now stifle humanity.
XLVII. COMMUNISM IN THE UNITED STATES
THE first definite crystallization of a Communist Party in

the United States occurred in 1919 when the Left Wing split
away from the Socialist Party. (*1) Within socialist ranks,
the Left Wing had first appeared in 1905, supporting the
launching of the I.W.W. against the policy of the Right
Wing, which favored the officials of the American
Federation of Labor. Again, the Left Wing loomed large in
1912 when it fought against the adoption of Article II,
Section 6 of the Socialist Party Constitution, expelling
anyone who favored sabotage. In 1917 it compelled a strong
resolution to be drafted against the War. Finally, it rallied to
the support of the Soviet regime in Russia, and struggled
for the adherence of the Socialist Party to the Communist
International.
The Left Wing was not without its own publications. In the
winter of 1917-1918 was started the Class Struggle, a
magazine printed in New York City, the editors of which
were Eugene Victor Debs and Ludwig Lore. It was among
the first papers in America to publish the works of Lenin
and Trotsky on the Russian Revolution. At about the same
time, the Socialist Propaganda League began to issue
the New International, also printed in New York City, with
Louis C. Fraina (*2) as editor and J. S. Rutgers as associate
editor. It was published monthly in five-cent newspaper
form, and also printed articles by Lenin and Trotsky. A
1687
third periodical was the Revolutionary Age, the official organ
of the Boston Local of the Socialist Party, edited by Louis C.
Fraina and Eamon MacAlpine, and having a long list of
contributing editors, including John Reed and Scott
Nearing.
We must not consider this Left Wing as having a

completely continuous life or the same composition in the
whole period from 1905 to 1919. The old fighters were
Americans rooted among the masses and leading their
struggles. By 1919, on the contrary, the revolutionary group
was almost entirely foreign-born, with a few American
intellectuals giving the movement an American face. Quite
different from the old Left Wing leaders, such as Haywood
and Debs, the new leading lights like Hourwich, Cohen,
Fraina, Lovestone, (*3) Bedacht, and others had had nothing
to do with the real life of the American proletariat.
Haywood went to Russia; Larkin returned to Ireland; Debs
was in the Atlanta penitentiary. Of the recognized
revolutionary fighters in the Socialist Party, but a few were
active factors in the 1919 Left Wing, the most prominent
being Charles E. Ruthenberg, Benjamin Gitlow, and Joseph
Caldwell.
To this Left Wing of the Socialist Party there were added

other tendencies which the World War and Russian
Revolution had pushed towards communism. The mixture
of these various heterogeneous groupings strongly
militated against a stable Communist Party's being
organized that would really become rooted in the American
working class. Each group brought with it its own baggage
from the past and insisted that it and it alone represented
the kernel of true communism in the United States.
The second group to make up the communist forces was a

number of disappointed American Federation of Labor
1688
organizers headed by William Z. Foster, Jack Johnstone,
William F. Dunne, and others. The case of Foster is typical
of these leaders. Before the War, Foster was a member of
the I.W.W. but found the I.W.W. too conservative, and
espoused the theoretical doctrines of French syndicalism.
During the War, Foster changed his allegiance and became
an ardent patriot and one of the chief helpers of Gompers.
He did his bit by selling Liberty Bonds like the other social
chauvinists. So far to the Right did he swing that even the
Interchurch Report on the Steel Strike of 1919 had to declare
that it was the A. F. of L. policies that helped to break that
strike and that Foster was one of the principal agents
responsible for the bad tactics carried out. We cull the
following gems from this report:
"Racial differences among steel workers and an immigrant

tendency toward industrial unionism, which was combated
by the strike leadership, contributed to the disunity of the
strikers ." (*4) "Mr. Foster 'harmoniously' combated the
natural tendencies of sections of the rank and file towards
industrial unionism." (*5)
"It is possible that the workers throughout the whole steel

industry might much more easily have been organized on a
radical appeal. But the Strike Committee were opposed in
principle to any such appeal. After the first three months of
the strike, when the nerves of strikers and leaders were
worn by the struggle, Mr. Foster was constantly
complaining of fighting the 'radicals,' meaning those who
wanted to have a general strike called or the whole strike
called off in order to be called on again and again and
again." (*6)
"Not one new development of major importance was

discovered in this strike. That is, in the light of industrial
history, there was nothing in the strike which deserves to
1689
be called industrially new, or revolutionary." "It was an old-
fashioned strike, preceded by a slightly new mechanical
quirk in organizing. It ran on rather unusually old-
fashioned lines, especially in comparison with such
upheavals as the coal strike, the printers' strike, the clothing
strikes of recent years, and the recent aims of railroad labor
organizations. The steel strike had old style methods and
aims. . . . By the end of the year it was evident that the
strikers were getting an old-fashioned licking." (*7)
"We found: (a) That the strike was regularly conducted in

orthodox fashion according to the A. F. of L. rules and
principles. (b) That while radicals sympathized with the
strikers, as was natural, they were effectually debarred by
the strike leaders and that, far from having influence in it,
they often denounced and opposed those who conducted
the strike." (*8)
After the failure of the Steel Strike, Foster, greatly

disappointed, viciously struck back at the workmen for
having lost the battle. He wrote at the time "Nowhere is
there a more deplorable and contemptible spectacle than
that presented by unorganized workmen.... They are worse
than cowards and parasites; they are traitors --- traitors to
the working class and themselves. They bite the hand that
feeds them. . . . The worst enemy of labor is not the
employer but the unorganized workingmen. . . . Out of
their colossal ignorance and stupidity are forged fetters for
the whole working class. Were it not for their treason, the
exploiters would be helpless. . . . The unorganized are the
real enemy of labor; the true obstacle to liberty." (*9)
Foster had had great dreams of being the head of a vast

labor movement. With the general swing of the labor
movement to the left, taking with it considerable sections of
organized workers and their local leaders, Foster, after a
1690
visit to Russia, decided to enter the Communist Party. To
the skilled workers, Foster posed as a theorist; to the
college-boy and foreign-born intellectual leaders of the Left
Wing he posed as a plain worker. In reality he was neither.
He was merely a representative of the bewildered skilled
worker, blindly groping his way. Yet he was an American,
knowing the American labor movement and having many
contacts. Thus he was made welcome and, within a year,
this A. F. of L. organizer, thoroughly untested and
unrevolutionary, became the Chairman of the Communist
Party.
Not only Foster entered the ranks of the communists at the

time, but a whole group of trade unionists whom he had
rallied round his Trade Union Educational League. What
induced this group to join the Communist Party? The post-
War deflation, the smashing of many A. F. of L. unions, the
drastic cuts in wages, the leveling of the skilled workers
more and more to the plane of the unskilled, the
international revolutionary wave after the War, such factors
drove the skilled workers more to the left and brought
some of them, followed by these leaders, into the
communist camp. Nor must it by any means be overlooked
that they joined only after the Red International of Labor
Unions had been formed and the American movement had
become heavily subsidized by the center at Moscow. These
trade unionists joined the communists not during the
severe days of the Red Raids of 1919, but only after the
main danger had subsided and the coffers were full.
Added to these two groups was a certain small number of

former anarchists, New York Greenwich Village habitues,
free-thinking Bohemians, pianists, artists, writers, and such
who, seeking the new and unconventional, were attracted
to the Russian Revolution. This group published a monthly
1691
magazine known as The Masses which later became
the Liberator and still later was changed to the New
Masses. Typical of this group was the editor of The
Masses, Max Eastman, whose political history we trace for
the edification of the reader.
Mr. Eastman has been poet, politician, and philosopher.

Before the War, he occupied the position of Secretary of the
Men's League for Women's Suffrage. At that time he was
simply a bourgeois liberal, as the American flag proudly
flying on the cover of his first pamphlet (*10) and the
statements in his Value of the Vote amply testified. In his
poetry, written during the War, Max Eastman specialized in
such items as "To the Little Bed at Night," "To a Virgin," "To
a Prostitute," and such delicacies. (*11)
In the midst of this artistic playfulness, the War took its

grim toll; the time for gamboling was over. The government
of the United States began to take notice of the
magazine, The Masses, which was expressing itself rather
freely upon the terrible blood bath engulfing the world. The
police reminded themselves that Eastman had written "I
like to meddle and tinker. . . . I belong to that disreputable
class damned by Tacitus ... as 'desiring revolution for its
own sake,"' (*12) and began to call this meddler to a halt.
Articles had appeared in The Masses by John Reed and
others which the government felt were impeding the
conduct of the war. Max Eastman was arrested.
Eastman emerged from his first and only test a liberal

capitulator. (*13) He told the jury that there was no attempt
on his part to obstruct recruiting or enlistment or to
promote mutiny or refusal of duty in the army. He
emphasized his solidarity with such socialists as Albert
Thomas, Minister of Munitions in the French Cabinet,
Arthur Henderson, Emile Vendervelde, and other socialists
1692
actively conducting the War for their respective
governments. Passionately he declaimed: "We never
desired the defeat of this country or its failure in the War at
any time. We never --- most of us --- even desired a separate
peace." "Although I was not for the war, I was not for our
withdrawing from the War.... I was not for the defeat of this
country." When asked whether he, as editor, was
responsible for the articles appearing in his magazine, he
declared, "Our policy was to do as we pleased."
After the trial, Eastman took little active part in the

revolutionary movement, went back to poetry, wrote a
book on humor and, after taking the side of Trotsky against
Stalin, finally published a book against Marx (*14) in which
he came out for Hume, for Bertrand Russell, for Seligman,
for Einstein, for Bakunin, for Bernstein, for John Dewey,
and for the Technocrats (of the Left Wing).
So long as the communist movement was immature, the

intellectuals coming from the student section of the
propertied classes, played a leading role. However, as the
movement grew, these elements, in the natural course of
events, were pushed in the background. Some of the
intellectuals became proletarianized, some workers became
intellectualized, and jointly hammered out a revolutionary
theory for the masses. In America, however, the
revolutionary movement has experienced a great paucity of
genuine revolutionary intellectuals. Outside of Daniel De
Leon, there is hardly an intellectual leader of the movement
whose works are original or can endure even a few months
after they have been written. All this, of course, is part of
the difficulty of forming a genuine Communist Party in the
United States. For, after all, viewed socially, it is the Party
itself that serves the function of a social intellectual. The
very fact that there had existed a stunted Communist Party
1693
has stimulated the rise of all sorts of pretenders who pose
as communist intellectuals.
Much later, when the crisis of 1929 was in its deepest throes,
and when the success of the Soviet Union had begun to
make an impression, new layers of intellectuals gathered
round the American Communist Party. The old group,
headed by Eastman, Floyd Dell, and others, had been more
or less idealistic enthusiasts, impressed by the Russian
Revolution. Some of them had money. They were filled
with a spirit for the masses. Later, it is true, they began to
lose this idealism and to capitalize as much as possible on
the movement. The "Modern Monthly" group represented
this decadence wherein freedom to them meant heavy
stress on sex expression. (*15)
The new intellectuals clinging to the Communist Party

since the present depression, however, who have been busy
forming John Reed Clubs, Pen and Hammer Societies, and
the like, are of a different sort. They are hungrier than the
old type, and thus far more serious. The old group were
anti-organization men; the new style are top-sergeant
martinets: the old group stressed their intellectual
independence; the new variety hangs upon the words of the
Party bureaucracy. They are broken intellectuals, party
hacks who refuse the duty of dangerous concrete work
among the masses and substitute for it the obedience of the
cadet with his fingers on the seam of his trousers. These
layers are forming a thick crust around the Communist
Party today.
About them Trotsky has aptly written in one of his articles:

"These groups, sufficiently variegated in their composition,
busy themselves on the one side with the fringes of the
bourgeoisie, on the other with fringes of the proletariat, and
offer no guarantee whatever as to their own future. From
1694
the standpoint of time, their radicalism is chiefly directed
toward the past. From the standpoint of space, it is directly
proportional to the square of the distance from the scene of
action. In relation to their own country, these bold boys
always were and always will be infinitely more cautious
and evasive than in relation to other countries ... especially
those in the East. The essence of these people from the Left
Wing of the bourgeois Bohemia is that they are capable of
defending the revolution only after it is accomplished and
has demonstrated its permanence."
With such an agglomeration of heterogeneous groups, it

was very natural that the communist movement from the
very beginning should have been rent with factions and
splits. The isolation of the movement from the American
workers, the many foreign-language federations, the lack of
proletarian membership, and the low political ideological
level of both membership and leadership --- these defects
were bound to insure a hectic life for the communists. This
does not mean that the splits did not occur around
important issues. The history of the working class
movement shows that a constant struggle is necessary
before a genuine Communist Party can emerge, and this
struggle is internal as well as external. The factions and
splits inside the communist movement serve to mark its
stages of development.
The first big battle came even before the communists had
organized separately and while they were still a Left Wing
of the Socialist Party. The Left Wing in 1919 had grown so
strong that it threatened to win the entire Socialist Party
membership for the Bolsheviks. At once the Left Wingers
were met by wholesale expulsions. The entire state
memberships of Massachusetts and of Michigan found
themselves suddenly outside the official Socialist Party. The
1695
first question was, then, what was to be done? One group in
Michigan believed it was necessary to form a new party, a
Communist Party, at once; they issued a call for a National
Convention to be held in the fall of 1919.
During the summer, however, a convention of Left Wing

elements was held in New York City. There the fight waxed
hot as to whether they should split from the Socialist Party,
or whether those expelled should try to get back into the
Socialist Party. These and similar questions agitated and
split the Left Wing Convention; one section of the
Convention declared it would organize a Communist Party
forthwith in September; the other section declared it would
return to the Socialist Party Convention in Chicago and
fight to win the Socialist Party membership for its position.
The first of September came and, in Chicago, the

Communist Party of the United States was formed. Just
prior to the first session of this communist Convention, the
National Convention of the Socialist Party was held. The
Left Wingers who were trying to re-enter the Socialist Party
and to protest their expulsion were met at the door by
police, who ejected them from the hall. This group at once
held a Convention of its own and baptized themselves the
Communist Labor Party. Thus the Communist movement
began its existence with two sections, each of which began a
violent polemic against the other.
Both Communist Party and Communist Labor Party were

far removed from American life. Their invectives against
each other were sharp in proportion as their phrases
covered their lack of actions. For almost a year, a costly
fight was waged over such questions as, when workers are
mobilized, is it a case of mass action or action of the masses?
Soon after the first Communist Party Convention, one of
the groups, the Michigan group, broke away and formed
1696
another party --- the Proletarian Party, and thus there were
three.
The literature of these early communist groupings for the

most part continued former Left Wing publications. The
Communist Labor Party took over the Class Struggle as its
theoretical organ, with Carney and Weinstein as editors. It
also published Communist Labor. When the Communist
Labor Party went into hiding, the Class
Struggle disappeared, although the other paper continued
publication. In Ohio, the Communist Labor Party was able
to obtain control of a weekly socialist paper, the Ohio
Socialist and, under the editorship of Wagenknecht and
Allison, published it as a legal paper, known as The
Toiler, later changed to the Voice of Labor.
The Communist Party founded its official organ The

Communist, combining a weekly paper of that name which
had begun to appear a short time before in New York as the
official organ of the Left Wing Section of the National
Council of the Socialist Party (editor, John Reed) with
the Revolutionary Age of Boston. The Communist was
published in Chicago with L. C. Fraina and I. E. Ferguson as
editors. When, later, the communist movement became
illegal, J. J. Ballam became editor, one of a long series. This
paper endured until 1921, when again the movement
appeared above ground. During the existence of the
Communist Party, there was printed also a weekly
agitational paper called the Workers Challenge, and there
was issued as its legal organ another weekly paper
called The Toiler.
Both the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party

were gravely ill with what Lenin had called the "infantile
sickness of 'Leftism."' They were opposed to work in the
trade unions and to parliamentarism; they advocated the
1697
precipitate formation of soviets (by leaflets) and the
immediate transformation of every large strike into armed
insurrection. In their exaggerated actions, the communists
of this country were reflecting the revolutionary events
abroad without knowing how to win the confidence of the
workers at home, and were making a parody of
communism. The growth of the communist movement
could come about only if the Party understood thoroughly
American conditions and the relation of these conditions to
the international situation. However, the Communist Party
was not destined to have that normal growth.
Inside of the Socialist Party there had been organized many

foreign-language-speaking federations composed of
immigrants who had but recently come to America. With
the fall of Czarism, thousands of Russians, Jews, Ukrainians,
Finns, and others, mostly of those who had suffered under
the Czar, joined the movement in the United States, not
because of the battles that were being fought here, but
generally as a reaction to the world-shaking events in
Europe. When the split came in the Socialist Party, most of
these foreign language-speaking federations became
communist and soon were controlling the new-born
communist movement. Of the estimated fifty-five thousand
members in the Communist Parties of the time, only about
one thousand five hundred were rated as English-speaking,
and many of them were Americanized Jews.
These foreign federations that now dominated the

movement knew that they could not possibly attract the
American masses themselves; they therefore tried hard to
present an American face, and pushed forward any
intellectual who could speak American. Such intellectuals
were placed at the front of the Party, by no means would
the foreign federations allow them to control it. Behind the
1698
scenes stood the bureaus of the federations which dictated
the terms upon which their language groups would vote for
this or that intellectual leader. On their part, the
intellectuals were glad to take the easy way to leadership
and to make those compromises which were acceptable to
the foreign federations in order to win the votes. Indeed,
only such compromisers had any chance whatever of
becoming leaders of the party. Instead of entering into the
serious work of winning the great mass of unskilled
workers such as the poorest sections of the foreign- born,
the Negroes, the poor whites of the South, and so forth, the
American nominal leaders agreed not to disturb the Party
and to allow the foreign-language federations to continue
their isolated nationalist lives and yet remain the base of the
movement.
Thus, it was not until 1924 that the slightest beginning was
made in the reorganization of the Party on a shop nuclei
basis; and only in 1926 did the communist movement
undertake such independent action as leading strikes and
organizing the unorganized. In this period, the foreign-
born advanced worker had a great role to play in giving to
America a communist theory, but the American worker had
to pay a considerable price for this education. The result
was that, up to the very present, there has been no genuine
Communist Party organized. Before the communist
movement outgrew its periods of infancy and of
immaturity, already the world communist movement was
in decline and degeneration. Thus the Americans had to
suffer from a multiplication of evils, the faults of
childishness and the sins of senility.
Only the Proletarian Party group emphasized the evils of

foreign-language federation control. But they, on the other
hand, tended to the belief that what was needed was more
1699
abstract education, since the revolution was far away. The
foreign-born failed to realize that America was not on the
immediate verge of the proletarian insurrection; the
American skilled worker group failed sufficiently to
connect America with world affairs and to understand the
intimate relation of this country to the proletarian
revolution abroad. Thus the Proletarian Party could be
nothing but a sterile sect, eking out an existence of which
the chief activity was publication of its monthly organ The
Proletarian, which it continues to this day.
The Leftist exaggerations of the Communist Party and of

the Communist Labor Party were made plausible by the
terror which was soon launched against the entire
movement. In 1919-1920 there took place the Red Raids,
instigated by Attorney General Palmer, which had the
effect of driving these two organizations underground.
Thousands were now being arrested and deported. A
general campaign of terrorism was launched by the Klu
Klux Klan, the American Legion, and similar elements, and
above all by the United States Government. The blows of
reaction, however, did not destroy the communist forces.
On the contrary, in this period the chaff began to separate
itself from the wheat; the membership rapidly dwindled,
but those who remained were loyal. Under the blows of
reaction, and upon the insistence of the Communist
International, the Communist Parties were compelled to
join forces; they formed the United Communist Party in
1921.
The Party at that time was organized in small groups,

meeting secretly, each under the direction of a captain. In
spite of the vigilance of the police, leaflets calling upon the
workers to seize arms and to overturn the government were
widely distributed. An intense study of Lenin's
1700
work, "Left" Communism, was carried on by these circles;
soon its influence made itself felt. The United Communist
Party began to place itself on the track of Leninism.
By this time the world revolutionary wave had somewhat

subsided, the great strike period in America was closing,
the employers were no longer so frightened, and the United
States was making an effort to return to normal. A new
issue now began to divide the communists. Many felt that
being in hiding removed them from the American working
class. They therefore began to agitate for a legal party. This
position was encouraged by the Comintern. Soon they did
form a legal organization --- first the American Labor
Alliance, later, in 1921, the Workers Party of America. All
this did not occur, however, until another split had taken
place.
Some of the undergrounders refused to liquidate their

organization. They felt that the period of legality would be
but temporary; thus they formed their own organization,
the United Toilers. This little group also had its organ,
the Workers Challenge edited by Siskind, Lifschitz, and
Ballam. Not long afterwards, the United Toilers itself split,
most of the members joining the Workers Party. The United
Toilers, despite its sectarianism, did stress a factor that
American communists were later prone to overlook,
namely, that even in America, the communists must
prepare for the time when they will again be driven into
hiding.
Simultaneously with these events, the communists were

winning more recruits from other sources. Within the
Socialist Party a new split had occurred in the Jewish (*16)
and Finnish Socialist Federations. So long as the outcome of
the civil war in Russia had been in doubt, these people had
stood on the fence; now that the soviets were victorious,
1701
they could afford to affiliate. These groups, together with
the Workers Council group of New York, joined the
Workers Party. It was about this time, too, that the Trade
Union Educational League group also adhered to the
Workers Party.
The Workers Council had issued a bi-weekly paper called

the Workers Council, edited by J. Louis Engdahl, William
Kruse, and Alexander Trachtenberg. With the formation of
the Workers Party, a Weekly Worker was issued which later
combined with the Workers Council and The Toiler. Engdahl
was the first editor of the Weekly Worker. In January, 1924,
the Weekly Worker became the Daily Worker.
With the formation of the Workers Party and the

liquidation of the underground organization, the
communist movement entered into an entirely different
phase of its activity. Up to now the work had been mostly
propaganda; the works of Lenin were being translated, and
the broad distinctions between communism and socialism
had to be made clear. Even the artist group had some
justification for its leading participation in the movement at
a time when all that existed was discussion. To some extent
a sectarian life was inevitable in the beginning. But by 1922
it had become plain that the communist movement could
not remain a debating society. The big strikes then
occurring showed unmistakably the gap between the
working class and the communists.
Characteristically, the leaders who yesterday were so Left

and revolutionary now swung far to the Right. Perhaps this
process was accelerated by the government's raid on the
Bridgeman, Michigan, Convention, when the whole
leadership was arrested at a secret meeting in the woods.
1702
No doubt the influx of the new recruits also helped to make
the Party reformist. At any rate, as far back as 1922, the
Workers Party had taken to election campaigns in which its
demands included one upon the government that the
capitalist also obey the law. (*17) But no matter how many
times the Workers Party, to Americanize itself, quoted the
Declaration of Independence and contrasted it with reality,
the membership reports still showed that, in 1922, of the
12,400 members, only 318 were in English branches, and in
1923, of the 15,200 members, only 1,200 were in the English
Federation. (*18)
Prior to this time, the communist leaders had opposed

work in the A. F. of L. At first they had called for the
absolute abandonment of the unions and the formation of
soviets. Then they had concentrated their work in the I. W.
W. and other revolutionary unions. Now they enunciated
their policy as based mainly upon work within the
American Federation of Labor. The new tactics adopted, of
those boring from within, were carried out in a particularly
opportunist manner in which all sorts of maneuvers were
accomplished with those heads of the union movement
who would consent to work at all with the communists. At
this point no effort was made to organize the unorganized
workers; the work was limited to the skilled workers
already in the unions. The chief battle-cry was
"Amalgamation or Annihilation."
In the parliamentary field, also, the leaders of the

communist forces who yesterday had denounced all
electioneering were ready to make the most intricate deals
with the Farmer-Labor parties then being organized and to
coquette with LaFollette. The collapse of the Labor Party
movement in 1924-1925 brought about a serious crisis
within the Workers Party which almost caused a split in the
1703
ranks. The Foster group, which was opposed to those
communists who advocated a Labor Party, was pushed
aside by the Communist International, which declared that
this faction was less politically correct and loyal than the
faction headed by Ruthenberg. Both factions equally were
ridden with opportunism. The Foster group's withdrawal
from the Labor Party fight was part of its general tendency
to shrink from the struggle, and of its belief that American
capitalism was so strong as temporarily to prevent the
workers from reaching even the Labor Party level. On the
Ruthenberg side, already there were appearing tendencies
yearning to substitute a Labor Party for a revolutionary
communist organization. Lenin was dead and the whole
Comintern was moving rapidly to the Right; in this drift
both factions shared in their own way.
In the struggle between the two factions, the Ruthenberg-

Lovestone group was favored by the fact that it had been
the longest in the movement and was more experienced in
and familiar with political maneuvering. Their intellectuals
were more facile in the use of the communist phraseology
and could pose as the theoreticians of the Party. But most
important, this group was the first to support the
Comintern officials against Trotsky, and thus was
considered more dependable.
After the 1925 Convention of the Workers Party, the

factional fight became more bitter than ever, and gradually
the Foster group was pushed to the wall. One of the sub-
groups headed by James P. Cannon, in desperation at being
steadily driven out of the leadership, took the leap of going
with Trotsky; this group was expelled from the Party in
1928 and formed the Communist League of America.
Despite the fact that Cannon soon afterward wanted to quit
the hard struggle for Trotsky's views, he was kept in line by
1704
his own National Committee, and his group eked out an
existence until 1934, when they fused with the A. J. Muste
group, the former Conference for Progressive Labor Action,
to form the Workers Party of America, which speedily
liquidated into the Socialist Party.
As for the Foster group, it had been reduced to such a small

minority that Foster himself capitulated when the battle
opened on the Five-Year Plan in Russia and when Stalin
began his swing to isolation. Lovestone, however,
unfortunately had been too friendly with the Right Wing
(*19) at the time when the Foster group members in
Moscow were endorsing Stalin. With the 1929 Convention
came the order from Moscow that, although Lovestone
controlled the overwhelming majority of the delegates to
the Convention, he was to be removed from office as an
opportunist, and Foster was to become executive secretary.
The members of the Party were to have nothing to do with
this upheaval except to obey and to understand. The
Lovestone group now carried on a thoroughly unprincipled
fight. They declared they had never supported Bucharin,
but always had hailed Stalin as the real leader. While
Lovestone mobilized his forces and went to fight it out in
Moscow, his own lieutenants at home began to desert him.
When he was expelled to form his own "Communist Party
U. S. A. (Majority Group)" the most he could muster were a
few hundred adherents.
Stalin, in his inimitable way, described this unprincipled

fight as follows: "What are the main defects in the practice
of the leaders of the majority (Lovestone) and the minority
(Foster) ?
"First, that in their day to day work they, and particularly

the leaders of the majority, are guided by motives of
1705
unprincipled factionalism and place the interests of their
faction higher than the interests of the Party.
"Secondly, that both groups and particularly the leaders of

the majority are so infected with the disease of factionalism
that they base their relations with the C. I. not on the
principle of confidence but on a policy of rotten diplomacy,
a policy of diplomatic intrigue."
Here was a frank opinion of Russian officialdom on the

revolutionary idealism, honesty, integrity, and courage of
the entire American leadership. Many of the leaders abroad
at the time, though they themselves might be tarred with
the same stick, nevertheless shared this contempt for the
type of communists which America had developed.
From the very beginning, the communist movement in the

United States was faced with severe obstacles, both
objective and subjective. Among the objective difficulties
we may place the fact that America was the result of a
double play of forces, each militating against communism.
On the one hand, due to the frontier, free land, and lack of
class relationships in large sections of the country for
considerable periods, the domination of capitalism was
retarded. It was not retarded, as in Europe, by the forces of
reaction and of feudalism; it was retarded by the fact that,
so vast were the continental dimensions of the United
States, capitalism could not maintain the rapid pace with
which new territory was opening up. Such a situation
meant that, in large areas of the country, there was no
exploitation of man by man; each worked for himself and
garnered the fruits of his toil.
On the other hand, there was the additional fact that

capitalism in this country had a relatively unhindered
development. America furnished the "purest" example of
1706
capitalism. Before the War, the exceptional opportunities
for advancement had led to a large petty bourgeoisie and to
comparatively better conditions for the proletariat. At the
same time, American prosperity brought to these shores a
vast wave of immigration which temporarily resulted in
disunity in the workers' ranks and a checking of the growth
of class consciousness and solidarity. After the War there
occurred a shift of the world's economic center of gravity in
favor of the United States. The result was a huge growth of
American imperialism, with the creation of
parasitic rentier classes, and the corruption of a section of
the upper layers of the working class.
The subjective difficulties militating against the growth of a

genuinely native powerful communist movement were
inherent in the ranks of the communists themselves. The
Communist Party had been formed from various
tendencies; there was not sufficient pressure from the
ruling class for each group to purge itself of its past and to
reach the level of revolutionary struggle. Those who had
come from the Socialist Party were filled with
parliamentarism, legalism, a shrinking from direct action,
pacifism, nationalism, democratic illusions, a contempt for
agrarian, colonial, anti-military and Negro work, and with
the traditions of a loosely organized party. The A. F. of L.
group retained its tendencies to bureaucracy, class
collaboration theories, and practices, orientation to skilled
workers only, and a contempt for the unorganized and
impoverished masses. The former anarchist elements
carried with them some of their individualism and
adventurism; the syndicalists who became communists had
their own ideas of the relations between party and union, a
scorn of parliamentary work, a biased attitude towards
other layers of the oppressed population outside of those
1707
working on the point of production, and a contempt for
leadership.
To all these obstacles had to be added the special ones that

arose from the poor social composition of the communist
movement. For the first five years, the Party remained
divided into foreign-language federations entirely isolated
from the American proletariat, each immigrant sect leading
its own separate nationalist existence. Even after these
federations formally were liquidated in 1925, it was still
difficult for the foreign-speaking members to reach the
American proletariat. Had the Communist Party from the
beginning engaged in serious struggles in this country, this
composition could have been changed and the divisions
obliterated. As it was, it was only during a few years from
1926 on that the Party undertook leadership of strikes and
of unemployed demonstrations, etc. All these factors,
coupled with the errors of the American and Comintern
leadership, prevented the communists of this country from
ever forming a revolutionary organization of any
importance.
The Communist Party of the United States never developed

into a really scientific theoretical center. The leaders have
developed no worth-while scientific literature. Nor have
they proved to be profound students of Marx. They have
taken upon themselves no initiative in translating the works
of Marx, such as his History of the Theories of Surplus
Value, which are still unavailable in the English language.
Nor have they translated the majority of the works of Lenin,
whom they are supposed to follow closely. There are no
broad cadres of seriously trained communist theoretical
leaders, even today.
In practice, too, the Communist Party never became a

vanguard organization. It never put serious tests to those
1708
applying for membership. The leaders themselves were
never tested in struggle before reaching their posts and, as a
result, the functionary staff has always been rotten with
careerism, factionalism, subsidy corruption, and
bureaucracy.
The new turn of the Communist Party in 1929 (*20)

operated in a most disastrous fashion to isolate the
communists. In 1925, the membership had stood at about
twelve thousand and had risen slowly to about twenty-four
thousand in 1928; by 1932 this had fallen to little more than
six thousand. The effects of the new policy were felt
particularly in the trade union field.
The convention held in 1925 had passed a platonic

resolution on the question of the organization of the
unorganized. "The main tasks of the Party in the trade
unions are: . . . The organization of the unorganized by
strengthening of the existing organizations, the creation of
new unions in industries where none exist, the building of
ship committees and the utilization of the shop nuclei as
points for inaugurating campaigns to organize the
unorganized."(*21) Very little was accomplished, however,
until permission was given a small handful of communists
to go into the textile industry for that purpose. The result
was the Passaic Strike of 1926 which gave the communists a
flying start in mass action. The Passaic Strike showed that
the communists were not only propagandists but agitators,
that they not only could theorize but could organize in an
extremely difficult field, that they were practical organizers
who could undertake tasks from which the old labor
leaders had shrunk. The Passaic Strike helped to change the
entire orientation of the Communist Party at the time,
inspiring the Party to move into mass work and to attempt
1709
to become rooted in the factories and in the industries of the
country.
This great change was not accomplished without bitter

internal fighting. The Foster group maintained that to
organize the unorganized, as was done in Passaic, was dual
unionism. All unions which the Communists formed had to
apply for entrance into the A. F. of L. immediately, even
though the A. F. of L. in turn expelled the communist
leaders as a condition of admission. (*22) By no means must
the communists form independent national union bodies in
unorganized fields. Another faction declared that it was
dangerous for communists to lead strikes, since the
employers would offer so much resistance that the strikes
invariably would be lost and the workers thus hate the
communists. (*23) A third group was willing to permit the
local communists to continue their work, though not to
engage in such work themselves.
The successful experience of the Passaic Strike prompted

the communists everywhere to strive for leadership in
strike action. In the needle trades in New York City, among
the miners, and above all in the textile industry, the
communists became active in strike struggles. Here was a
good beginning towards the Bolshevization of the Party
and the rooting of the organization among the unskilled
workers. After the textile strike in New Bedford in 1928, the
National Textile Workers Union was formed, with Albert
Weisbord as national secretary, and plans at once were laid
for entrance into the South. This was done through the loyal
work of Fred Beal, Vera Buch, and others who risked their
lives in the organization of the textile workers of the South
and the conduct of the strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina,
and elsewhere. With the Gastonia affair, the Communist
Party began to strike fear into the hearts of the Southern
1710
employers as a genuine force. During this period the
Communist Party came closest to being built as a
revolutionary organization on a solid basis. (*24)
The turn of 1929, however, killed all prospects of rooting

the party in struggle in the United States. The
representative of Moscow stated at the time: "The South has
received considerable discussion during the course of the
Convention. We have made a new discovery and found a
strange country which we must devote very much attention
to." (*25) Nevertheless, in the course of the factional fight
that opened up and the new line of isolation, (*26) nothing
was done about the South. In a short while, a good portion
of the work that had been achieved was completely
nullified.
Now a stifling bureaucracy was placed over the new unions

that had been formed by the Communist Party, killing all
initiative and enterprise. All those who did not agree with
the Stalinist line were isolated and ousted, not only from
the Party --- that went without saying --- but even from all
the unions under the Party's control. In short, the new
unions became only vulgarized editions of the Communist
Party and failed thereby to remain even unions.
The decisions of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in

1928, which had declared the world was entering a Third
Period wherein the workers would be in revolutionary
upsurge, found the American communist officials in full-
throated accord, since they had won their posts and had
ousted the Lovestone group only by complete agreement
with the Stalinist leadership. From now on, American
democracy was considered equivalent to fascism; the
American Federation of Labor was a company union fascist
organization; the Socialist Party was a social-fascist body;
no united fronts could be made except from below;
1711
entrance into the American Federation of Labor was
permitted only in order to destroy that body. Everywhere
the communists attempted to form their own unions, even
though they had but a handful of members and the
majority of the workers were organized in other
organizations. Heavily subsidized as they were, and thus
dependent for their livelihood, not upon the membership
they could win in America but upon close adherence to the
line of Stalin, the new bureaucracy outdid itself in
multiplying its inherent opportunism with all the crimes of
Leftist sectarianism. In the end, all their new unions were
destroyed, even those in fields where the good work done
in the past had given the communists some influence
among the workers. Thus the Third Period really paved the
way for the Fourth Period of collapse.
At this point it would be well to give a number of

statements by the communist leaders themselves to show
the policy which they then adopted. First, we hear William
Z. Foster, the leader of the Party at the time. "The policy of
the Social-Democracy is basically that of Fascism.... Thus in
the period of the decline of capitalism, Social-Reformism
becomes social- fascism." (*27) Then we turn to Jack
Johnstone, at that time head of the trade union department
of the Communist Party. Said this worthy. "There are two
trade union centers in the U. S. A., the T. U. U. L. (Trade
Union Unity League), the revolutionary trade union center,
the A. F. L., the company union center." (*28)
The American Federation of Labor's being considered

nothing but a fascist company union organization, it was
necessary to work within it only to destroy it. "With two
Trade Union Centers, the company union center --- A. F. of
L. --- and the revolutionary trade union center ---the Trade
Union Unity League --- there are many diversified
1712
problems. In this situation our most important task is to
broaden the base of the revolutionary unions among the
millions of unorganized workers, and to strengthen the
revolutionary minorities within the ranks of the A. F. of L.
and company unions and then to liquidate these
organizations by winning over the members to the program
of the T. U. U. L. and into membership." (*29) This point of
view was developed with various embellishments by a host
of writers scribbling for the communist press at the time.
Following the Seventh World Congress of the Stalintern in

June, 1935, the Communist Party of the United States held
its national convention in 1936 in which it completely
reversed its past policies. Naturally, the leaders steadfastly
refused to admit that they ever had been wrong. They had
been infallible before, they were infallible now. Only the
objective circumstances had changed, compelling a new
tactical line to be followed. Before, in 1928, when no crisis
existed, the Stalinists had believed that the revolution was
about to break out all over the world. Now that the crisis
had lasted for seven full years and had reached unheard of
proportions, it was time to postpone the proletarian
revolution and to make the principal fight one for
democracy against fascism. There could be no real analysis
as to how fascism was becoming victorious, since the
Stalinists always had been proven correct in their policies.
The 1936 convention knew only that it was time to retreat.
How far to the Right the Communist Party has moved in

recent months can be seen by comparing the declarations of
the Roosevelt Administration with the policies of the
Communist Party. In the field of unemployment, Roosevelt
has averred that the State is not the best of employers, and
that the healthiest thing to do is to try to place the workers
back into regular industry. This should have given the
1713
opportunity for the communists to have demanded that the
factories be opened to the unemployed and the warehouses
to the hungry. But all the Communist Party insisted on was
that the Works Projects be made permanent. Roosevelt had
intimated that, while the projects might be valuable, they
could not be substitutes for regular employment. To the
Communist Party, however, the projects were evidently
good enough; there should be more of them, and the
workers should become State pensioners for life. Thus it
was Roosevelt who indirectly hinted that the workers
should turn their attention to the main forces of production,
while the Communist Party would direct the energies of the
workers away from the factories which they had built to
some highway or park or relatively secondary work where
the unemployed do not compete with capitalism. It seems
evident that such a policy never can induce the workers to
strive to take over factories, or to overthrow the capitalist
government. Such a line, on the contrary, induces a passive
support of the regime which doles out relief and W. P. A.
jobs.
To continue the comparison, when the Italo-Ethiopian

conflict was at its height, Miss Frances Perkins, Secretary of
Labor, called for a general strike to stop all exports to Italy
from the United States; the Communist Party did not go so
far. And while Roosevelt was strenuously talking of the
need of peace and of keeping America out of the
embroilments of Europe, the Communist International was
demanding military sanctions.
Again, Mr. Roosevelt has taken pains to popularize the

term "revolution." His supporters have made it plain that
they consider the Constitution obsolete. The Communist
Party, however, has raised the cry "Back to 1776 and to the
spirit of our forefathers." The American Revolution, the
1714
American Constitution, American democracy now find no
more ardent supporters than the Stalinists. The friends of
the Administration have talked of the need of a new social
order and of better planning; Governor Earle of
Pennsylvania in a recent debate went so far as to affirm that
it was necessary to abolish wage-slavery in the United
States. The Communist Party, however, now states that the
matter of wage-slavery and the new social order is not
indicated for the present, that the struggle for the full
revolutionary program must be postponed; today, it is
merely the question of democracy versus fascism. Plainly
the Left Wing democrats are now to a considerable extent
more revolutionary in their phraseology than the Right
Wing Stalinists.
In its 1936 election platform, the Communist Party decided

to make the main issue "Put America back to work," (*30) a
motto which every reactionary capitalist in the United
States would be glad to indorse. It stated that the principal
object was the defeat of Landon, even though votes thereby
were increased for Roosevelt. It definitely committed itself
to the theory of the "lesser evil," a theory by which some
capitalists are to be supported in preference to others, in the
hope of staving off fascism in democratic countries, a
theory, too, by which the communists guarantee in advance
that they will not take the road of revolution.
How much the Communist Party idealized the capitalist

State could be seen in their support of the Lundeen-Frazier
Bill for Unemployment Insurance which they called the
Workers-Unemployment Insurance Bill. In the original Bill
(H.R-7598), it had been provided that the insurance should
be administered ". . . through unemployment insurance
commissions composed of the rank, and file members of
workers' and farmers' organizations." That is to say, the
1715
Secretary of Labor would have been given the authority to
go into every workers' organization for the purpose of
supervising the elections to these insurance commissions to
the end that only rank and file members be elected. Should
any officer or leader of any union be elected, the Secretary
of Labor would have had to disqualify him. Thus, through
the Lundeen Bill, the Communist Party actually wanted the
United States Government to intervene in the labor
movement to guarantee that labor officials be disbarred
from participation. (At this time, the Communist Party was
still calling for the smashing of the American Federation of
Labor and the united front from below.)
The revised Lundeen Bill (H.R. 2728) has removed that

obnoxious provision but still provides "Such
unemployment insurance shall be administered and
controlled and the minimum compensation shall be
adjusted by workers and farmers under rules and
regulations which shall be prescribed by the Secretary of
Labor in conformity with the purposes and provisions of
this Act, through unemployment insurance commissions
directly elected by members of workers' and farmers'
organizations." (*31)
As the bill now stands, the workers are to become

intimately harnessed to the State administration, (*32)
instead of being thrown against the capitalist State. Under
the bill, the representatives and detectives of the
Department of Labor would have the power to check up to
see whether the organizations are truly representative of
workers and farmers. All the members, undoubtedly,
would have to be registered and the books be open to the
Department of Labor. This Department also would have
under the Act the duty of determining whether the
commissions were directly elected, and thus could demand
1716
to be present at the elections in all workers' organizations.
The workers' commissions in their functioning would be
directly tied up with the State and be made responsible for
the State's actions. This is not the program of communism;
this is precisely the program of Fascism. (*33)
Since its last Convention, the Communist Party has made

increasing efforts to unite with the Socialist Party, which
but recently split, sloughing off its extreme Right Wing.
Further, the Communist Party is now bending every effort
to build a Labor Party, a Farmer-Labor Party and even a
People's Party. It has gone so far as to support the Non-
Partisan Labor Committee, made up of trade union officials,
which indorsed Roosevelt as President and the banker
Lehman for Governor of New York State, and to criticize
the Socialist Party for not doing likewise.
In the trade union field, the Communist Party now tries its
hardest to ingratiate itself with the officialdom. It had been
affirmed formerly that John L. Lewis deserved to rank "as
one of the most powerful and reactionary leaders in the
history of the Miners' Union." (*34) "Lewis' regime is a curse
to the miners.... Lewis has betrayed the miners in every
district." (*35) Now Lewis has suddenly become the
progressive whom the communists follow uncritically. The
Communist Party today has given up all idea of
independent organization of the unorganized.
The rapid sudden turns of the American Communist Party

would be unfathomable were we to lose sight of the key
fact that the leaders of the American Communist Party
serve solely the interests of Russian nationalism and soviet
diplomacy. At each turn they have expelled most of their
old members out of the Party and taken in new ones, a
matter of secondary importance to them so long as they are
supported from the top and not from the bottom. In 1928,
1717
when they began to clean out the Party, they had twenty-
four thousand members. By 1932 the total had fallen to six
thousand members. With the new line they have been able
to increase their membership so that they claim in 1936
close to fifty thousand members and are making a drive for
one hundred thousand members. Thus the overwhelming
majority of the members are entirely new. Only the
bureaucracy remains stable and secure; the others do not
matter.
Very little attention is now given to shop nuclei. The

fractions in the unions no longer have much function, since
the line is to support the trade union bureaucracy. The
membership need not be tested, since it does not count and
does not run the Party. Policy is decided before conventions,
and not during the sessions which only rubber stamp the
views of the top leadership. In a recent speech, Earl
Browder, present head of the Party, affirmed that the
workers need not be afraid to join the communists, since
their home life will no longer be interfered with. The Young
Communist League has practically dissolved as a
communist organization. The breakdown of Leninist
organization coincides with the collapse of communist
policy.
Thus, in America, we have the strange fact that, before

conditions will permit a genuine Communist Party to be
built up, already the movement is decayed and hopelessly
reformist, according to the standards of Lenin. To the forces
within America that bred an immaturity have been added
the forces of degeneration abroad which have led to
collapse. The breakdown of the movement in Europe has
helped to make infinitely more difficult the rise of America
as a world revolutionary force.
Footnotes
1718
1. Much of this chapter is based on personal knowledge or
contact rather than on material to be found in libraries. It is
possible that some minor details concerning the early
communist organizations may be inaccurate.
2. Now known as Lewis Corey.
3. Ne Jacob Liebstein.
4. Interchurch World Movement: Report on the Steel Strike of

1919, p. 16.
5. The same, p. 35.
6. The same, p. 39.
7. The same, p. 40.
9. W. Z. Foster: Trade Unionism --- The Road to Freedom, pp.

26-28.
10. Woman suffrage and sentiment.
11. See his Child of the Amazons, also his Kinds of Love.
12. M. Eastman: Journalism versus Art, p. 110.
13. See "Max Eastman's Address to, the jury in the Second
Masses Trial --- In Defense of the, Socialist Position and the
Right of Free Speech."
14. Marx and Lenin: the Science of Revolution.
15. One of the steady contributors to the Modern

Monthly was S. D. Schmalhausen who never tired of
expressing his belief that "The psychology of the orgasm is
an undeveloped theme deserving profoundest
1719
consideration on the part of psychoanalysts."
Schmalhausen's aim was to edit books about the "revolt of
the virgins." See his Our Neurotic Age --- Symposium.
16. A leading light of the Jewish Federation group was M.

Olgin.
17. See Program and Constitution, Workers Party of

America, December, 1921, p. 12.
18. See The Second Year of the Workers Party of America, pp.
29-30.
19. C. E. Ruthenberg died in 1927 and Jay Lovestone then

became the leader of the party.
20. The name of the party had been changed in 1928 to the
Workers (Communist) Party and in 1929 to the Communist
Party of the United States.
21. Workers (Communist) Party of America; The Fourth

National Convention, p. 101.
22. The Communist Party leadership terminated the Passaic

Strike in a disgraceful fashion, all the principal leaders of
the Party voting that the independent union formed enter
the A. F. of L., despite the fact that the communist union
leaders were to be expelled. Only two members of the
committee voted against, of whom the author is one. In less
than two years, the union of twelve thousand members was
reduced to less than one hundred, and finally disappeared.
23. This was the opinion of Cannon, Dunne, and their

associates.
24. The Gastonia Strike ended with the death of the chief of
police who had tried illegally to invade the union premises
1720
with a gang of hoodlums, and with the trial of the principal
union organizers for murder. Beal and six others were
sentenced up to twenty years in a dramatic trial that
focused the attention of the whole labor movement on the
dire conditions of the Southern workers. The convicted
decided to jump bail, and they fled to the Soviet Union. In
the Hearst press, Beal later described his bitter
disappointment in Russia.
25. Report of the Fifth National Convention of the Young

Communist League of U. S. A., p. 30. (1929.)
26. In the course of their struggle against the Party

bureaucracy, A. Weisbord and V. Buch were ousted from
the Party. They formed, in 1931, the small group called the
Communist League of Struggle, which fraternally adhered
to the International Left Opposition until Trotsky's
capitulation to the socialists. It is still in existence, with
headquarters in Chicago.
27. W. Z. Foster: Toward Soviet America, p. 177.
28. J. Johnstone: "Issues in the Needle Trades Convention"

in Daily Worker, June 3, 1930.
29. J. Johnstone: Strike Strategy, No. 7, in Daily

Worker, September 8, 1930.
30. Incidentally, this slogan was lifted bodily from

President Roosevelt's book, On Our Way, p. 98.
31. Note that the relation of farmers to workers is not

worked out, and farmers' representatives might have equal
or even larger share of the administration.
32. Compare with the views of John L. Lewis as to the trade

union.
1721
33. That the Communists in America have not been averse
to having the police register their members and
sympathizers can be seen from the fact that they register no
protest to the demands of the U. S. Postal authorities for the
names and addresses of all the subscribers of their papers in
order to obtain the second class mailing privileges. Thus the
United States Government undoubtedly has a full and
complete list of all the Reds in this country so as to facilitate
the next Red Raids when the time comes.
34. W. Z. Foster: Misleaders of Labor, p. 132.
35. The same, p. 133.
IV. THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
XLVIII. THE STRATEGY OF THE FOURTH

INTERNATIONAL
THE stirring events in France and Spain have done

positively what the collapse of the Third International
affirmed negatively; namely, they have brought forth the
urgent need for a new, a Fourth International. It is
inconceivable that the workers in Spain or in any other
Western European country can take power under the
banner of "Socialism in One Country." Nor would they be
willing to sacrifice their welfare for the transient diplomatic
ends of Russia. In self-preservation, they will have to
extend their struggle internationally. Unless the fascist
forces are powerful enough to crush the present movement
--- and, in that case, a new world war would be the result ---
the ferment in Spain and France must result in a new
international organization more truly representative of
communism.
1722
Such an international will have to work out a real strategy
for the world revolution. Today, what the workers of the
world lack is not so much a program of socialism or a
knowledge of how to fight the day-to-day tactical battles, as
a strategy of action that will link up the tactics to the
program and help to realize the goal in the quickest
possible time. In military terms, we have to deal not so
much with problems of the deployment of troops as with
questions of logistics and strategies.
The general program of communism has become

reasonably well known to large numbers of conscious
workers. The theories of Marx and Engels regarding
dialectical and historical materialism, value, surplus value,
the accumulation of capital, and, finally, the class struggle,
and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, all have become the
common property of the advanced representatives of the
proletariat the world over. Furthermore, these
programmatic views of the founders of scientific socialism,
especially adapted to the period of the nineteenth-century
competitive capitalism, found their supplementation in the
work of Lenin, who carried forward the work to meet the
new conditions of the twentieth century era of monopoly
capitalism. In economics, Lenin elaborated the theory of
super-profits which involved the relation of imperialist to
colonial countries, the uneven development of capitalism,
and the antagonisms between the skilled and the unskilled
workers, and between the working class and the peasantry.
The theory of super-profits elucidated the workings of the
permanent revolution. In politics, Lenin contributed the
analysis of the era of imperialism, with its wars and
revolutions.
Lenin's work marked a great turning point in scientific

socialism, since it brought the workers face to face with the
1723
actual achievement on a large scale of a Dictatorship of the
Proletariat in alliance with the poor peasantry in one
country alone. There had then to be developed the scientific
principles of the relation of such a country to the rest of the
capitalist world, as well as of the internal social laws of
such a country. The study of the concrete working of this
proletarian dictatorship, the examination of its effects upon
world capitalism, especially with the advent of fascism, all
such analysis must be made part of the communist program
of today and must be embraced within the general
principles of scientific socialism.
Leon Trotsky, more than anyone else up to the time of the

victory of fascism and the collapse of the Third
International, contributed to an advancement of
understanding of these problems and made the best
critique of the Third International. Trotsky, however, has
not been able to form the Fourth International. This task
will have to be completed by others who have obtained
their experience in the struggles of the masses since the
time of the Russian Revolution.
The communist programs as they have been laid out by

Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky also have had to consider
in general outline the social laws of the coming socialist
society. This phase of the program became richly
concreatized with the advent of the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat in the Soviet Union.
The program of communism generally had little to do with

the laws governing the actual mobilization of the masses
and the rules of revolutionary struggle. The program
merely represented the end, the goal, the objective of the
movement but hardly dealt with the means, the
instruments, the actual process by which the aim was to be
attained. Such laws are in the realm of strategy, tactics, and
1724
organization, rather than part of the program. Strategy, as
distinct from program, takes into intimate account and
presupposes an organization of men and a platform of
action. If the program represents the general principles of
socialism and the objective to be achieved, strategy and
tactics represent the totality of the rules of practice by
which this program is to be realized.
Of course, there is a great difference between strategy and

tactics. Tactical questions are those that have to do with
problems pertaining to the mobilization, deployment, and
maneuvering of men on any single part of the battle front.
They have to do with day-to-day, relatively petty, problems.
Strategy on the other hand, includes the general principles
underlying the whole system or series of tactical operations.
Strategy is the thread that ties up the tactical questions and
holds them together along some definite, purposeful line.
Without strategy, there is no alignment of the battle front,
there is no co-ordination of the various fields of battle, there
is no general direction given to the struggle. Strategy has to
do with the attaining of the victory in the least possible time
and with the smallest amount of energy. It deals with the
orientation and general direction of the line of march, and is
not concerned with the mass of details necessary to keep
the entire force in that direction. Strategy has to do with
collation of material, with evaluation and estimation of the
relative importance of various actions.
In short, the principles of strategy lie somewhat between

the rules of tactics and the standards and norms of the
program. Strategy ties up the every day practice with a
purpose and, on the other hand, is able to realize the
generalities of the program in life. It is concerned both with
the practical matters of every day affairs and with the
strategic objective striven for; strategy co-ordinates both
1725
and is the temporal link that connects the present with the
future.
Tactics are the means by which the strategical aim is

attained, just as strategy is the means by which the program
is realized. To the soldiers who are digging into a shell hole
in order to hold a hill, the strategical aim of keeping the hill
is the highest goal of their endeavor. To the general, who
has a clearer picture of the relation of each tactical part to
the strategical whole, the holding of the hill is but a means
to the end of smashing the enemy and winning the
programmatic objective. Tactics, therefore, represent
secondary actions, maneuvers, methods. The system of
strategy works out the primary means by which the
programmatic ends may be reached.
This does not at all mean that tactics is unimportant or less

vital than strategy or program, in accomplishing the
mission of the proletariat. On the contrary, program alone,
that is, a general body of ideas, can accomplish nothing
unless there is an army imbued with the ambition to make
this program a reality. Such an army functions only
according to the rules of tactics and strategy. To imagine
that the program will be realized of itself, and that all that is
necessary is to state the desirability of the goal, is pure
idealism. Behind every right is the might necessary to
establish it as a right.
Also, within the realm of practice, it is not true that tactics is

unimportant, or that questions of tactics are but secondary
matters. Unless the tactics are appropriate, unless the
proper means are used realistically, the whole strategy is
doomed to failure. Very often differences in tactics reveal
differences in strategy and in program as well. Again,
people willing to accept the phrases of the program may
secretly give them different interpretations, which
1726
differences come out, not in the debates on the program,
but only in the course of the concrete actions to realize the
programs. Then the differences first appear as differences in
tactics, when in reality, behind these differences on small
questions, there are revealed truly gigantic disagreements
that place the contestant parties on opposite sides of the
barricades.
Amateurs in the revolutionary movement often express an

opinion as follows: disagreements on matters of tactics are
always secondary disagreements and do not lead to splits
in the movement; splits are justified only when the
disagreements are programmatic. This is a typical student
formulation, having nothing to do with the real
revolutionary movement. Outside of the fact that all
differences, even in tactics, if pursued long enough, must
become differences in direction and in purpose, that is
differences in strategy and program, it is, of course,
ridiculous to assume that the only time men can disobey
their orders is when they have abstract differences
concerning the kind of society they want to build or in the
general principles of their movement.
The true situation is not that tactics are secondary to

strategy or that differences on tactics are picayune and
must not cause too great dissensions in the ranks of the
revolutionary proletariat, but rather that the workers must
fight about every question, whether program, strategy, or
tactics, which is really vital and which can lead to defeat or
to victory. Splits not only can occur but must occur on
questions of tactics and organization, wherever such
questions involve the life and death of the whole movement
at the given moment.
Let us pause to give various illustrations of this general

principle just enunciated. In the revolutionary movement it
1727
can be said that, ordinarily, tactics would include the
following type of questions:
1. Types of demonstrations --- Should the demonstrations

be indoors or outdoors? What should be its size, character,
and tone? What should be the slogans, etc.? These matters
pertain to tactics, and yet they can be absolutely vital to the
welfare of the movement at any given time.
2. Questions of dates --- What should be the date for a given

strike or insurrection? It might seem that the matter of date
is such a trifling circumstance in relation to the vast
problems of socialism that comrades could well disagree
with certain dates set for action and still remain comrades.
And yet, behind the question of dates might stand the
whole welfare and future of the revolution itself. Those
merely opposing a given date might be postponing the day
until it becomes too late for victory and leads to a terrible
blood bath for the workers. Here, again, behind the
question of the trifling matter of date might be a whole
analysis of the situation of the world and the relation of
forces. Certainly it might be correct for splits to occur in a
revolutionary party on the question of setting the date for
the insurrection, just as, under some circumstances, splits
could occur in unions on the question of setting the date for
a strike.
3. Demands --- A third matter of tactics is the question of

what demands to bring forward in the interests of the
workers and toilers. The formulation of these demands
truly belongs in the domain of tactics, and yet how many
times movements have failed completely because of
unrealistic demands which in turn exposed the false
strategy and orientation of the entire movement.
1728
Just as splits can occur on questions of tactics, so can they
occur on questions of organization as well. For the problem
of organization is only another method of presenting
problems of program, strategy, and tactics. The
organization must be the instrument to accomplish the goal
set, and those who build organizational structures
obviously unfit to accomplish the goal have in reality
changed the goal and the aim of the movement.
The program of communism was enunciated before there

existed a great body of proletarians in every important
country of Europe and America. Naturally, in the days of
the beginnings of the movement, the question of program
played the most important part. The Communist League of
Karl Marx has gone down in history primarily because of
the Marxist program enunciated by that organization.
This is not to say that strategy did not exist, even in those
early days. On the contrary, the Communist League
participated actively in all the revolutionary events of 1848,
undertook to organize unions, and, as an organization of
action, had to deal with problems of strategy, tactics, and
organization, as well as with the general questions of
program.
The strategy of the Communist League was not so much

concerned, however, with the question of the establishment
of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as it was with the
question of the overthrow of the ancien regime and the
clearing of the decks for action for the proletariat later. It
was not a matter of defeating the enemies of the workers,
the bourgeoisie, so much as defeating the enemy of their
enemies, the feudalists. The strategy of the Communist
League was the strategy of how the proletarian forces could
work with the democratic forces of capitalism to overthrow
the old order, winning as many concessions for the workers
1729
as possible, casting off the illusions among the proletarians,
and preparing them and strengthening them for future
struggles for socialism.
The strategy of the Communist League was primarily one

of permanent revolution, that is, how to start the revolution
forward and to keep it moving at the most rapid tempo
until the victory of the proletariat, when the revolution
should come to an end and become permanent. Together
with this strategy went all the principles of how to work
with those going along the same road as the proletariat up
to the time when the quondam allies would break apart and
face each other as mortal enemies.
The strategy of the Communist league, carried forward

later by the First International, then, involved the following
questions:
1. The matter of overthrowing reaction, the old order, the

absolute monarchies and the feudalistic landlords,
especially entrenched in Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Here
is the key to understanding the Marxists' reactions to the
Crimean War, to the American Civil War, to the
Revolutions of 1848, and similar events.
2. The question of pushing the bourgeois republic forward

to the adoption of the utmost democratic forms and social
reforms which would allow the proletariat free play to
organize and to mobilize its strength and to develop
generally.
3. The question of alliances of the proletariat with the

peasantry and other masses of toilers against the ruling
groups of the country. With this went the problem of the
separation of the petty bourgeoisie from the bourgeois
rulers, the problems of the united front with petty
1730
bourgeois elements to win them towards favorable action
with the working class.
Although, even from the earliest days, the Marxists insisted

on combining theory with practice and uniting their
program to whatever actions of the day promised to realize
it even in part, nevertheless, the Communist League is
known not so much for its practical action as for its
theoretical achievements in advancing scientific socialism.
The immature modern proletariat then was groping about
trying to find its way.
A similar situation existed with the First International

organized later, in 1864. The First International, too, is
known by its programmatic contributions, by its
propaganda rather than by its practice, even though it did
enter into revolutionary events. Indeed, the bourgeoisie
made the First International responsible for the actions of
the Paris Commune. But the action of the First International
was spasmodic and ephemeral. What was lasting, what was
the most important part of the First International's life, was
the programmatic line of action that it laid down for the
workers for all time to come in the struggle against capital.
By the time of the foundation of the Second International, in

1889, the situation had changed. The grandiose plans and
schemes had given way to prosaic day-to-day interests. The
labor movement was growing up and becoming realistic
and practical. It was winning various concessions for the
skilled and bribed imperialistic workers from the bosses,
and was quite content to avoid the abstract questions of
revolution and to pay attention to the immediate bread and
butter problems of the day.
The Second International was interested neither in the

program of socialism nor in the strategy of revolution, but
1731
concentrated almost entirely in its real life upon the tactics
of the moment. Viewing the period in question (1889-1914)
from the broad historical perspective, we can say truly that
the Second International in reality lived up to what the
workers could have achieved and no more. The workers
could win reform; they were too weak to accomplish the
revolution. The task then was to organize, to form mass
organizations, teaching the workers the rudiments of
discipline and organizational solidarity.
The mass organizations of the proletariat could be erected

then only on the most primitive base, and on questions of
immediate practical interest. This was the period of trade
union building, of co-operative formations, of all sorts of
associative effort among the workers to ameliorate their lot
concretely. It was not the period of revolutionary activity of
the masses throughout the important industrial countries of
Europe and America.
Not that the Second International did not carry on abstract

discussions on the program of socialism and did not help to
disseminate in its own fashion the revolutionary views of
Marx and Engels. But it did not understand these
revolutionary views which it was so diligently
disseminating and, in real life, it betrayed them again and
again. Program entirely was divorced from tactics, theory
from practice. While, abstractly, these people called
themselves socialists, they believed that socialism was far
away, and that many hundreds of years of education would
be necessary, perhaps, before the world would be ready for
the new social order.
Separating their practical activity from their general

socialist program as they did, the members of the Second
International became either crass opportunists and narrow
and provincial organizers living only from moment to
1732
moment, or they became Leftist sectarians, immersed in a
world of words and abstract ideas of Marxist terms. All that
one side could see was the matter of a few cents an hour
increase for a small number of workers; all for which the
other could call was the unconditional surrender of
capitalism, otherwise they would not participate. As the
practice of both sides became non-revolutionary, their
program became eclectic, vague, ambiguous, loose, and
non-revolutionary as well. One may sum up the matter
with the statement that the First International was an
International of Program; the Second International was an
International of Tactics.
With the Third International we find at last a definite effort

made to link up the day-to-day life of the masses and their
immediate problems with the general program of socialism.
By 1919, the world proletariat was faced with entirely
different problems. It was now a period of action, not of
molecular tiny action for a small handful of the workers in a
few exceptional countries, but molar action of large bodies.
Capitalism definitely was on the decline, bringing in its
wake mighty convulsions that shook all the nations of the
world, throwing them into one crisis after another.
Now that action was indicated, and the workers must fight
or perish, now that there was no other way out of the
concrete practical dilemmas facing the masses except
revolution and the overthrow of capitalism, there
developed a strategy of revolution. Under the guidance of
Lenin, the gap between theory and practice began to close,
tactics and program became tightly connected. It would be
totally wrong to say, as, for example, Max Eastman does (*1)
that Marx was the theoretician and Lenin the practitioner,
or rather that Marx was the abstruse dialectician and Lenin
the great revolutionary technician or engineer. Marx and
1733
Engels also engaged in the action of their time, but their
time did not permit much steady revolutionary street action,
and they were confined to working out the general laws of
socialism and spreading the propaganda of their science.
On the other hand, Lenin contributed much to political
science, but his life, to a very considerable extent, was
overwhelmed with the practical activity of the
revolutionary movements. As Lenin wrote in his State and
Revolution: "It is more pleasant and more useful to go
through the 'experience of a revolution' than to write about
it." (*2)
If the Second International could be said to have had a

strategy at all, then in fact it was a strategy of no
independent strategy, that is to say it was a strategy of
following the bourgeoisie and working for democratic and
social reforms. The strategy of the Second International
consisted in being the tail end of the bourgeois Liberals and
to carry out their wishes in the ranks of the proletariat.
The strategy of the Third International, in an era of wars

and revolutions, was an entirely different one; it was a
strategy of making a definite bid for power. To turn
imperialist war into civil war, to organize instruments of
struggle of the masses, such as soviets, by which workers
and peasants could unite for the conquest of power under
the leadership of the industrial workers, to connect the
revolutionary movement with the colonial uprisings and
agrarian problems of the oppressed sections of the
countryside, to conduct an organized uprising and
insurrection, and to defend the revolution on the battlefield
of world counter-revolutionary intervention, these were the
contributions of Leninism in the field of strategy.
Among the many strategical problems confronting the

Fourth International for solution, including the theory of
1734
the permanent revolution, the united front, the attitude
towards the Soviet Union, the policy on the war danger,
and others, we shall take up here in detail merely the
following: 1. Workers' control over production; 2. Direct
action; 3. Strategy of insurrection, and 4. Arming of the
proletariat.
The Fourth International will have to make the most careful

study of the question of workers' control over production.
Under some circumstances, where there is no revolutionary
situation, and the capitalist order is relatively stable, the
slogan "Workers' Control over Production" may be used in
an opportunist and reformist sense, providing a theoretical
basis for all sorts of schemes of collaboration with the
employers. Communists must beware that revolutionary
phrases do not in fact cover up counter-revolutionary
policies.
Even fascists have formed their organizations with the

specious plea that they are going to give the workers some
control over industry. Very often company unions are built
by employers with the slogan that they believe in industrial
democracy and the right of the workers to have a say in the
business. Again, it is possible for labor leaders, like Sydney
Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers,
demagogically to declare that "the industry has
responsibility to the workers" only in order to work out
some joint action with the manufacturers' association or to
help the employers "put order" into the industry by
collaborating with them in the introduction of machinery,
in speed-up and rationalization plans, etc. Most often, the
idea that the workers should control their jobs is used by
the trade union bureaucrats to obtain the check-off system,
whereby the dues to the union are taken out of the wage
1735
envelopes by the employers and handed over to the union
officials. On the surface, it seems that this measure compels
the capitalist to work for the union; in reality it results in
the employers' and union officials' working hand in hand,
while the union members have little to say about finances.
Also, the idea of workers' control can be interpreted to
mean that the union bureaucracy should control the right to
hire and to fire.
Similarly, the term "Workers' Control" has been abused by

the functionaries of the opportunist labor parties. When a
labor party secures government offices, at once the officials
begin to explain to the workers in industry that strikes
would embarrass the labor government, and that the
workers are really controlling the factories and industries
through their parliamentary labor party. The elections of
the labor party are run on the assumption that labor party
victories would mean workers' control over the resources of
the nation. As a matter of fact, everywhere we see these
labor parties defending capitalism and preventing the
workers from moving towards socialism through genuine
workers' control.
An interesting variation of the labor party use of the term

"Workers' Control" is the phrase "Industrial Democracy." In
the United States, the Railroad Brotherhoods in 1921
indorsed the Plumb Plan of operation of the railroads,
which plan had as its features the nationalization of the
railroads, with full compensation, and their operation by a
board composed of workers, management, and government.
This class-collaboration scheme was called "Industrial
Democracy" or "Workers' Control over Production." A
similar proposal was made by John L. Lewis and the United
Mine Workers after the War in reference to the coal mines.
Behind the phrases that sounded as though labor was
1736
advancing its interests was the attempt of the union officials
to link up the unions with the government in order to speed
up production and to prevent strikes.
It can be seen from the very terms that the idea of workers'
taking control over industrial production does not mean
that they dispossess the owners and take over the property
themselves. This is far from the case. The employer still
owns the factory; he is still nominally the possessor and the
proprietor. Only he now loses the right to close down the
plant, the right to hire and to fire workers as he pleases, the
right to dictate the working conditions. In his plant there is
now elected a committee of workers that goes over his
books, limits his profits, sets up its own control, prevents
sabotage or lock-down of the works. Naturally, then, we
have a situation of dual power that can be only temporary.
No employer is going to allow the intolerable situation of

workers taking control of his factory without putting up a
battle. On the other hand, the invasion of his plant by the
workers means that they are preparing to establish their
own ownership and rule, shortly, and that the control is
only a stepping stone on the way. Thus, when properly
used, the slogan "Workers' Control over Production" is
adopted by the proletariat, on the one hand, when the
capitalists are losing control of the situation or have
provoked the masses into action without having the
strength to stop them, and on the other hand, when the
workers are ready to establish the dictatorship and to take
full possession but are not as yet able to do so.
Every revolution has this sort of transition period and, since

the factual situation is inevitable, it is necessary for
revolutionists to examine it from all points of view. A
revolutionary organization cannot issue the slogan
"Workers' Control over Production" if it is meant to be
1737
carried out during periods of capitalist stability, when it can
only imply wholesale collaboration of the workers with the
employers, in which the workers consider the production
problems of the capitalists and introduce measures to
increase the latter's profits. A Communist Party can issue
the demand for workers' control only in periods which are
becoming revolutionary, when the masses are in action, and
the demand of workers' control will unleash the energy of
the toilers still farther, will bring matters to a head-on
collision, and will impel the proletariat to take the
necessary steps for the conquest of power.
The socialists have the idea that the workers must be

trained, not in destructive operations, but in constructive
work, and part of that constructive work is to learn how to
manage and to operate the factories so that, when socialism
comes, the working class already will be trained by the
bourgeoisie so that everything will work smoothly without
a hitch. The revolutionist, on the other hand, understands
very well that the slogan "Workers' Control" can be used
only in a revolutionary situation, when the destructive
factors of social evolution are reaching their highest level,
when the employer is trying to lock out the workers and to
throw them out on the street, so that pitched battles with
the military can be provoked, and the workers either can be
shot down or starved into submission. "Workers' Control
over Production" is used in a period when such control will
not be accomplished by more production, but by more
revolutionary activity of all sorts. It is to be accomplished,
not in order to teach the workers management, but in order
to build up the fighting forces, and to realize the objectives
of the revolutionary movement.
It is paradoxical, but true, that "Workers' Control" is

introduced precisely at a time when all social control is
1738
being lost; when society is in chaos, when civil war is
imminent. Herein ties also the difference between
"Workers' Control" and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Under the Dictatorship, there is internal cohesion, order,
discipline, there is a party with acknowledged authority;
the capitalists are out of the factories, completely ousted,
and the workers are running their own affairs. Under the
transition regime of workers' control, on the other hand,
everything is sporadic, confused, haphazard. The actions
are not planned or controlled; there can be no centralized
planned economy, no real utilization of the national
resources. It is fantastic to imagine that under such
circumstances production can be increased.
It is true that the workers undertake to control the plants

under the pressure of the lock-outs and sabotage of the
capitalists and the need for continued production. But it is
also true that, once they take over the factories, even though
ownership nominally is retained by the capitalists, they will
have to fight to maintain their control and must enter into
the destructive aspects of civil war.
In Hungary, in 1919, and in Italy, in 1921, the workers took

over the factories and ran them themselves, but they soon
found out that they had to confront the world subdivision
of labor; their raw materials ran out, they had to get into
communication with the outside capitalist world that
refused to aid them in any way. Thus, the workers' control
must have an extremely limited character until the
proletariat is able to conquer not only the power in its own
State, but to extend the proletarian revolution, in most cases,
beyond the boundaries of one nation.
An important question to be discussed is: what is the

relation of workers' control to the political movement and
to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat? In Russia there was
1739
no intensive workers' control until the proletariat took over
power through the soviets, and then they went through the
process of workers' control for almost a year before they
decided to go the whole way and to socialize industry
outright. Thus, in Russia, workers' control went hand in
hand with the period of the democratic-dictatorship of the
workers and peasants expressed through the soviets. Only
by taking over political power was the workers' control
made effective by the workers.
In Germany, the workers attempted to institute a workers'

control over production in 1918-1919 through their factory
Councils, but they did not seize power. The socialists in the
government were holding the power, not for the workers,
but for the bourgeoisie and, at the first opportunity,
crushed the workers. In the interim, while they were
stalling for time, the socialists established futile
"Commissions on Socialization" to study the question and
to report back to parliament. On their part, instead of taking
over the industries, the Workers Councils waited for the
Socialist Party to nationalize the industries.
Workers' control, as such, has absolutely nothing to do with

the nationalization of industries. The socialists like to
substitute one for the other. They are generally opposed to
workers' councils or soviets in the factories. The reformists
would like the workers to trust to the socialist politicians to
bring the factories under workers' influence. Workers'
control, to the socialists and opportunists of all stripes,
means simply workers' participation in a government that
controls the industries and runs them.
Nothing could be farther from the correct policy than this.

If the workers wait for no government, if they take the
factories themselves and run them, these actions alone will
be guarantees that the government will begin to correspond
1740
to the needs of the workers, and not vice versa. In Germany,
the workers waited for the government to act; the result
was, they could not control industry at all. On the other
hand, workers' control should be the economic phase of the
movement of the proletariat, the political aspect of which is
the conquest of power.
In and of itself, nationalization of industry means simply

State capitalism. (*3) The workers have no control
whatsoever. This is true, even when a labor party or a
socialist party is in the government. The government is still
a government over the workers and in favor of the
bourgeoisie in all these cases. Where the workers take over
control of the factories, they must strive to take over power
and thus not so much to nationalize the factories as to
socialize them. In this way, the proletariat can legalize its
factual control and can go farther and dispossess the
capitalists.
In Italy, the masses took control over the factories, but

could not take political control. In the end, they lost the
economic control as well. In Germany, they waited to take
political control before they took economic control. They
lost both. In Russia, the movement for workers' control
went concomitant with the movement for power, and each
buttressed the other. It was successful. However, it is well
to point out that, if workers' control over the factories goes
hand in hand with the movement for Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, as we have remarked before, by no means are
they identical. Workers' control has existed without
proletarian dictatorship (though not for long) and the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat can exist without direct
workers' control. This we have seen in the discussion of the
present situation in Russia.
1741
Matters of wages, hours, and working conditions generally
are fought for by unions, craft, trade, and industrial.
Workers' control over production can be managed
generally only by shop committees, workers' councils, or
such bodies that sometimes cut across craft and even
industrial lines. Wherever the workers' councils or
committees have been set up, they have been conceived, not
as dual organizations to the industrial unions, but rather as
organs for sharper forms of struggle, for the taking over of
the factories. Of late, however, the industrial union is being
created on the basis of the shop council itself, and thus both
forms are combined. In the past, however, the industrial
union has been the instrument for fighting economic battles,
the workers' councils for workers' control, and the Soviets
for the conquest of power.
In Spain, at the present time, the syndicalists in control of

the National Confederation of Labor have refused to turn
over the factories to the control of the State or Soviets, even
though the State may be run by Soviets, and the Soviets run
by the workers. Here, the arguments of the Workers
Opposition in Russia of 1922 are being realized, and the
unions themselves are undertaking to run production, to
centralize it, and to work out any plan that will have to be
made. The workers refuse to lose control over their factories
directly, even though the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is
being established. Whether this duality between the trade
unions and the soviets which take in the broader masses of
toilers, including the agricultural laborers and the
peasantry, will remain practical, is yet to be seen.
The problem of direct action is another matter of strategy

which must engross the attention of the Fourth
International. The present period offers a different
1742
background than ever before for a consideration of this
problem. Previously, it was warmly debated whether there
was not a better way than physical action in the streets for a
solution of the contradictions facing the masses. The liberal
era offered the method of mutual tolerance, of rational
discussion, culminating in parliamentarism. Today, these
solutions are plainly inadequate. The contradictions of
capitalism have made the system one of violence and brutal
action in every phase of life. One must be prepared at every
turn to back up one's opinions with one's life. The question
whether to participate in parliament has faded in
importance in the light of the fact that parliament is now
fast becoming a lost and forgotten institution.
Incidentally, the present age reminds intellectuals that the

best method of pedagogy is the one in which practice is the
teacher. Today, opinions literally must be fought for. This
means that the days of hyperbolic polemics are over.
Opinions will be restricted to those which are important,
and over which the protagonist is deadly in earnest. This
alone will spell the death knell of the dilettante intellectual
from Hobohemia or Sexopathia who has inhabited the fringe
of the proletarian movement. Fascism has a way of driving
the chatterbox out of the movement and of allowing only
those who are sincere to remain. This is another guarantee
that the proletarian movement will be placed on the tracks
of direct action. Action and theory will tend to become
more united within the revolutionary movement;
democracy and free speech will be for the doers only.
Direct action in the past has taken either economic or

political forms, of a reformistic or revolutionary character.
Heretofore there has been ample room between the
rehearsal and the final act of the drama, between the period
of preparation and the actual insurrection. The present
1743
period, however, is distinguished by the fact that the
struggle for reform in many instances leads directly and
immediately to the struggle for power. Under fascism, even
the reform demonstration is not permitted, and one takes
his life in his hands when proposing even the most
moderate improvements for the masses. Since every action
of the masses becomes fraught with such serious
consequences, the organization of these actions must be
studied carefully in every instance.
If the present epoch is one of direct action, it is another sign

that the revolutionary movement must shift farther from
the idea that the gyration of the representative or of the
delegate can be substituted for the action of the mass itself.
Direct action places before every participant the full
consequences of his activity. He himself must fight out all
the doubtful questions that besiege him before entering into
the battle. In representative action, the masses remain
passive; the field is open for bureaucracy. In direct action,
the masses themselves live; the representative is merely the
leader, and that leader is best who knows how to train
others for leadership. In a period of direct action, the units
of the revolutionary party must be small, and each member
must be capable of standing on his own feet. Responsibility
and capability become tested and developed.
Direct action of an economic, secondary nature may occur

in the industries, among the unemployed and among the
mass of consumers. With the producers, it takes the form of
strikes which, in the present period, tend to lose their
simple economic character, even where the strikes have
purely economic aims, and to take on important political
consequences. In Germany today, any large strike would be
bound to have violent political repercussions. The
very raison d’etre of fascism is its ability to crush all
1744
organization and united action of the working class. The
mere fact of a united strike under fascism would be a
complete challenge to the entire regime, no matter what the
aims of the strike. Under fascism, every strike quickly
would have to turn into insurrection. For that reason, the
workers are slow to strike, knowing well the consequences
of their actions.
In all countries, of course, it is the strategy of the

communists to widen and to deepen every physical
demonstration of the workers, to raise its political level, to
connect the strike with the issue of workers' power. Where
the strike becomes a general strike, there the question of
power becomes a pressing one on the immediate order of
the day.
The question of strike intimately is connected with the

active boycott as a weapon of direct action. The boycott can
transform a local action to a widespread general struggle,
tying up both consumers and producers, and uniting the
working class as a whole. Connected with the boycott is the
question of mass retaliation for injuries and mass sabotage.
Revenge is not an inconsequential motive here, and the
communists will not generally restrain the spontaneity of
the mass, even though spontaneity is not enough for victory.
If it is true that we live in an anti-reform period, then every

struggle for reform must meet the sternest resistance. Thus,
even the organization of new trade unions embodying
layers of unskilled workers will meet the fiercest opposition.
For this reason, we can predict that the American
Federation of Labor, with its liberal hesitating policies,
never will be able to organize the mass of Negroes, or the
unskilled workers in the South. Those who go out to win
reforms today must be made of the hard fiber of
revolutionists' It is not peaceful persuasion that will
1745
accomplish the job, at a time when capitalism is on the
down-grade, but only hard struggle. The organization of
the unorganized and the building up of unions for struggle,
more and more belong to the revolutionary elements. Only
the revolutionist can be even a successful reformist.
In the unemployed field the genuine revolutionary

communist will tend to make the unemployed organization
rely entirely upon direct action to improve conditions.
Adequate unemployment insurance is impossible today,
when the armies of unemployed are so enormous. The
unemployed, therefore, must be taught to help themselves.
Communists and unemployed will not spend much time in
legislatures, petitioning, but rather will mobilize their
forces in militant demonstrations and will concentrate their
attention on the places where food is stored, where fuel and
clothing may be obtained. Whole neighborhoods can be
aroused over the question of evictions in order to make
every eviction as costly as possible for the landlords. The
general idea is that the wealthy must find it more costly to
make conditions worse than to maintain them to remain as
they are.
Today, direct action can be not only a weapon to remedy

conditions, but a preventative force. The proletariat,
knowing the menace of fascism, physically can annihilate
the fascist movement at the very start. After all, in some
countries the organized labor movement is well entrenched.
If it knows that the days of liberalism are numbered and
must give way to fascist violence, then it will be forewarned
enough to make it impossible for the fascist forces to appear
in workers' quarters.
The strategy of the communists in this period must be to

make the demonstrations as brutal and as powerful as
possible. In every case where the workers have been
1746
defeated sentimentality and liberal illusions have played far
too great a part. The more firm and positive the action, the
better the demonstration.
In the United States, the question of the fight against

lynching’s of the Negro, the labor organizer, and the poor
white toiler, furnishes a good illustration of the correct
method. The communist will not bewail the institution of
lynching, but will try to use that institution against the
instigators of lynching. The slogan "Lynch the lynchers of
the Negroes and poor toilers" will mark the adoption of
American methods to terminate the slaughter of innocent
workers. As part of this policy, everywhere the Negroes
should be induced to organize white and black physical
defense bodies to protect the poor masses and to build up
the power of the lowest strata of the population.
Direct action logically leads to insurrection. The strike, the

boycott, the demonstration, all have this as their ultimate
objective and goal.
On the road to insurrection for every class striving for

power lies the problem of disarming the rulers and of
arming their own cohorts. This question is not peculiar to
the proletariat alone, and it is interesting to note how the
bourgeoisie solved the problem of the disarming of
the ancien regime and of the arming of its own forces.
Generally speaking, the nascent capitalist class
accomplished its task, first by winning over the biggest
baron or prince to its side, and making him supreme
through its monetary and material support. The reliance of
the military upon gunpowder, cannon, and manufactured
instruments naturally gave the advantage to the
manufacturers of these articles or to those with the money
1747
to purchase them. As the capitalists' enemies, the feudal
lords and knights, became reduced in power, they
gradually disarmed; their old retainers were disbanded,
they themselves becoming bedroom courtiers, knights of
the bath or of the garter.
The next task of the bourgeoisie was to take command of

the apparatus of the State, and, in particular, of certain key
sections of the armed forces. Generally, the capitalists
managed to obtain important posts, such as Ministers of
Finance, so that at critical moments in the struggle they
could entirely disorganize their opponent in power. Then,
too, they managed in Britain to control the vital forces of
the navy. In America, they trained themselves through the
French and Indian wars. Everywhere they endeavored to
influence certain corps of the army, especially the artillery
department, where the needed engineers and scientists
were located. If the cavalry often belonged to the royalists,
the artillery frequently followed the capitalists. Once the
bourgeoisie found themselves with fetters unbound or in
control of the State, they quickly formed their own special
forces, such as the Garde Mobile in France. Sometimes they
used these special forces to crack the regular army of the
old regime and to win it over to their cause.
The proletariat has had a more difficult time than the

bourgeoisie in disarming the forces of the State and in
arming itself. Let us remember that the bourgeoisie seized
power in most cases long after it had become the
dominating factor in production; hence it had money and
other material means at its disposal. The proletariat, on the
other hand, must seize power in order to make certain its
possession of the means of production; it must make the
struggle for power as a dispossessed, oppressed class.
Hence the weapons it needs --- unless it is armed by the
1748
bourgeoisie for war purposes --- must be taken from the
bourgeoisie by force. This arming of itself is an inevitable
process, and the Fourth International will have to take
cognizance of the tasks to be performed. First of all there is
the fact that proletarian revolutions today do not need to
wait for world wars to break out. They can mature, as
China, Cuba, and Spain have shown, even where there is no
war to throw all antagonisms into sharp relief.
In considering the armed forces of the State, many

distinctions must be drawn. First, it must be determined
whether the army is a mercenary volunteer one or a
conscript army. Naturally the approach will be different
and the possibilities for work vary in each case. Then there
are the questions pertaining to each branch of the service. In
general, it will be found that the artillery and aviation corps
will be firmly under the control of the capitalists, the
cavalry in charge of the agrarian element, and the infantry
made up of both workers and farmers or peasants. Each
branch of the armed forces will offer special problems. This
does not mean that the proletariat will not be able to get a
foothold in all these divisions. In the aviation corps, for
example, much depends upon the aviation mechanic who is
closely bound to the working class and who can be
unionized and induced to strike in solidarity with his
brethren. As the armed forces become increasingly
motorized and mechanized, the number of plain workmen
attached to the army increases. The proletariat enters into
the heart of even the most mercenary armed force today.
Then there are the other divisions of the armed forces, such
special, super-loyal groups as the United States Marines,
who act as police over the army and navy, such groups as
the National Guard or State militia, which are in between
the regular army and the police and which offer diverse
1749
problems. In the United States, these groups are often filled
with working class and farmer elements who are
sympathetic to strikers. The National Guard and State
Militia, however, are intended to be particularly loyal to the
bourgeoisie and to be used for internal work, against the
enemy at home. Therefore, the effort to crack this particular
body of men becomes especially important to revolutionists
in ordinary times of strike, or where insurrection is not yet
imminent enough to warrant the use of the regular army. In
the European countries, special Mobile Guards, or National
Guards, are formed for this sole purpose of domestic action.
Besides this group, some countries have special

nationalized and centralized police forces, like the French
gendarmerie, who are highly paid and removed from the
local influence of the people. Further down the line there
are the specialized and permanent forces of the police, such
as the "Industrial squads," the detective force, etc. In all
countries, a sharp line has been drawn between the regular
army and the police, the proletariat abandoning all hope of
winning the police over to their side, but concentrating
instead upon the regular soldiers, with whom they have a
better chance. In America there is still another division, the
posse of the sheriff. This is made up of citizens, most often
of citizens completely controlled by the capitalists.
Around the armed forces are to be found large numbers of

proletarians who are part of the civilian population needed
to sustain the soldiers. As a general rule, the advance of
capitalism increasingly has intertwined the army with
industry, and while war has become the greatest industry
of modern times, tending completely to subordinate all
other branches to itself, simultaneously the military
machine has been forced to rely increasingly upon the
factories and the productive processes of the country. Thus
1750
strikes, boycotts, sabotage, can become increasingly
powerful weapons to demoralize and crack the armed
forces by removing material support from them at critical
moments. But beyond that, there are the armories and
arsenals filled with weapons, which these workers can take
over at the right time. This is highly important, since to
control the armory or arsenal means to secure the means of
arming the masses directly and to remove the guns and
other armament from the regular forces of the State. Besides
these depots, there are the camps and cantonments of all
sorts which have large numbers of workmen attached to
them, workmen who, if properly organized and directed,
could do inestimable damage in winning the soldiery to the
cause of the revolution. Finally, of course, there is the
method of direct and indirect fraternization between the
members of the army and the ordinary working population.
Wherever these soldiers go in the cities, during recreation
periods or otherwise, they are bound to come in contact
with the mass of people and to become infected with the
prevailing social views.
Extremely important, and often furnishing an invaluable

link in reaching the military ranks, are the social-military
reserves which the capitalist State is forced to maintain.
These reserves are of various sorts; conscripts who are
liable to be called back to the colors, officers who are on call,
veteran organizations, military training groups, and such
bodies as in America are represented by the Reserve
Officers Training Corps, the Citizens Military Training
Camps, the various rifle clubs authorized by the
government, military schools, and similar institutions.
The attitude of the communist must change according to

the specific character and purpose of each body. As much
as possible, these social organizations should be utilized to
1751
penetrate both into the regular armed forces and into the
ranks of the lines next in reserve.
Part of the strategy of the disarming of the bourgeoisie is

the dissolution of the capitalist armies in times of war. The
line of Lenin was the defeatist line, that is, the policy
whereby the communists worked for the defeat of their
own ruling class and did their best to win the workers and
conscripts in the army to their cause by denouncing the war
and organizing mutinies to subdue the officers and
transform imperialist war to civil war. Of course, the
communists have to work differently than the agents of
foreign governments at war with one another. Not every
form of defeatism is revolutionary defeatism; the mere fact
that the troops are defeated does not necessarily mean a
strengthening of the workers' forces. In times of war,
capitalists always try to make the communists into agents
provocateurs or spies for the enemy ruling class; this is a
great danger that must be avoided. The defeatism of the
Leninist takes the form of accentuating the class struggle in
all its ramifications; by no means can it take the form of
consciously favoring the capitalist class of the hostile
country. (*4) Naturally, these precautions do not hold so far
as contacting the workers of the other belligerent countries
are concerned, and every effort must be made at
fraternization with the workers and soldiers of the
opposing armies, so as to break down capitalist and
imperialist divisions.
The defeatism of the proletariat cannot take only the form

of strikes at home and of mutinies in the army, but also
must make use of the pacifistic tendencies in the ranks of
the petty bourgeoisie. Pacifism can be used to demoralize
the ranks of the supporters of the capitalist class just as it is
normally used to demoralize the ranks of the workers. The
1752
militant sections of the advanced workers certainly cannot
ignore the traditions and sentiments of pacifism which a
large number of the petty bourgeoisie hold as their own,
but must learn how to use these feelings for a revolutionary
purpose. After all, it is not generally the working class that
declares wars, but the rulers, and the opposition of pacifism
can assume a sincere note that will allow the pacifists to
work in alliance with the revolutionists. This was seen in
the conference of Zimmerwald, and elsewhere, in the early
period of the War.
The bourgeoisie internationally also can become disarmed

by divisions in its ranks as well as by exhaustion. Where the
workers actually are in charge of a State faced with the
possibility of a capitalist united front against it, it is
perfectly proper for that workers' State to try to prevent the
consolidation of the hostile capitalist world. It has the duty
of making alliances that will split up the opposing forces as
much as possible. Furthermore, if the war must break out, it
would be better for it to break out in the capitalist world
than against the country which temporarily is controlled by
the workers. But there must be no illusions that the
capitalist classes of the world also do not appreciate this
danger and will not ultimately unite their forces against the
country won by the workers. What is wrong with the
Franco-Soviet pact is not that the Soviet Union has tried to
make alliances with capitalist countries, but rather that, in
order to make that alliance, it has sacrificed the interests of
the world revolution, preventing the French Revolution
from breaking out, and thus further isolating the Soviet
Union itself.
Where colonial countries like Morocco, under Abd-El-Krim,

and Ethiopia, under Haile Selassie, revolt against
imperialism, it is the duty of the communists to support the
1753
colonial forces in revolt, even where there is no possibility
of introducing communism in those countries. The
storming of the main fortress of capitalism in Europe and
America can be accomplished only by making use of the
vast guerrilla fighting that breaks out in colonial countries,
from Asia to Latin America. Colonial warfare, if it does
nothing else, at least weakens the forces of imperialism, and
permits the workers better to attack in the industrial
countries.
Hand in hand with the question of disarming the

bourgeoisie goes the problem of the arming of the class that
is coming to power, the proletariat. The general tendency of
capitalism is to arm the entire people and to mobilize it for
war. It is clear that an oppressed class that has never used
arms cannot conquer power. Therefore, the strategy of the
communists must be to train as many of the working class
population as possible in fighting and in the use of arms. As
in the slogan, "Lynch the lynchers of the Negroes and of
poor toilers," it is not the action of fighting that is
condemned, but the direction that the fighting takes. In the
case of the armed forces, what the communists try to do is
to turn the army against its own officers and to throw the
armed people against the bourgeois state.
In the nineteenth century, when many States maintained

standing armies of mercenary soldiers, the Marxist
predicted that, following the French Revolution, the
inevitable tendency would be for universal military training
and conscription; to this change they were opposed. Today,
however, the attitude of the communists towards universal
military training cannot be confined to generalities, but
must be entirely concrete and specific. The world can be
divided into three principal sections, in this respect.
1754
In Europe, where universal military training has existed for
a long time, where the devastating World War brought
home the meaning of revolution to the entire population,
and where the mass of workers have been in the trenches
and already know the use of arms, here the communists no
longer can support the demand for universal military
training, although not necessarily must they be in
opposition to it. The demand in Europe today must be for a
People's or for a Workers' Militia. Especially appropriate is
this in countries where the "People's Front" rules. It can be
demonstrated that, only when the entire people are armed
is peace assured, as evidenced by the fact that the first
country to stop fighting in the World War, was precisely
that country that dissolved its regular army and armed the
people --- Russia.
In the colonial and semi-colonial countries, however, a

entirely different situation prevails. In such cases as China,
India, Nicaragua, or the Philippines, the imperialists rule
through mercenary armies separate and apart from the
people. In such countries the demand for universal military
training would arouse the masses to the highest pitch of
enthusiasm and would fill the rulers with dread. One of the
great signs of hope in China today is the fact that the old
traditions of Confucius, which looked askance at military
training, are rapidly disappearing. If the incessant fighting
in China has accomplished nothing else, it has at least been
a great training school for the masses to learn the use of
arms. This is the beginning of the end for imperialism.
In such countries as the United States, Canada, Australia,

and similar regions where the masses are not trained in the
use of arms and have never had conscription for any length
of time, universal military training can serve a decidedly
useful purpose for the communists. In such countries, then,
1755
it is the duty of the communists not to oppose universal
military training, but rather to favor it, although they may
not always be in the position openly to demand it, since
traditions of pacifism in a given country might make the
general labor movement misinterpret this demand. Yet
there is no other way in which to arm the masses. In this
category of countries, the time is not ripe to raise the slogan,
"Workers' Militia." It is significant that in the United States
the ruling class itself is not in a hurry to introduce universal
military training.
In the United States, the communists will have to take a

clear position in regard to the special militarist groups, such
as the Reserve Officers Training Corps, the Citizens
Military Training Camps, the National Guard, and so forth.
In regard to the first, the communists have advanced steady
opposition, since this body is for the training only of
bourgeois cadres. All work that communists do within this
body is work to destroy and nullify its activity. In regard to
the Citizens Military Training Camps, a different position
might be taken. On the one hand, these camps embrace
wide numbers of workers and train them in the use of arms.
On the other hand, the workers are partially selected and
given a thorough bourgeois patriotic training that puts
them in an entirely different environment than a
universally conscripted army would engender. Under such
circumstances, it would seem that the communists cannot
oppose nor raise the cry of boycott of the C.M.T.C.'s, nor yet
can they advocate such selected camps, but rather must
work within them to raise the political level of their
members and to win them for communism.
In regard to the National Guard, the workers must do

everything in their power to break up and to destroy this
specialized armed force of the bourgeoisie whose purpose
1756
is strike-breaking and the smashing of workers'
demonstrations. This does not, however, preclude work
within this guard, slogans to favor the rank and file against
the officers, agitation for the election of officers, and similar
measures.
Wherever other bodies exist, such as the Citizens

Conservation Corps, the Boy Scouts, and various sports and
drill societies, the action of the communists depends upon
the composition and the function of the group. Where the
group is thoroughly selected and under careful bourgeois
guidance, but made up of plain working class elements,
there the policy will be similar to that of the C.M.T.C. On
the other hand, as much as possible the workers must build
up their own sports and drill clubs, their own defense corps.
This is the best answer that labor can make to the Ku Klux
Klan, the Black Legion, or similar organizations potentially
of great menace to the labor movement in the United States.
The arming of the proletariat has now reached a new stage

in the world's history, with the conquest of power by the
workers of one part of the world. For the first time, the
workers have a vast army and incalculable resources at
their disposal. Within the Soviet Union, everything that is
done to strengthen the armed might of the people
strengthens the entire working class. What is wrong with
Stalinism is that it has disarmed the people by replacing
their creative will by the initiative and power of a
bureaucracy. Stalinism cannot defend the Soviet Union
adequately and, in the course of the coming war, when this
becomes known, the proletariat soon enough will be forced
to take action to remove the bureaucracy and to reinstitute
its direct rule.
However, so long as the Soviet Union remains a Workers

State, then every advance that it wins in the form of
1757
recognition or credits and supplies from a capitalist world
goes to strengthen the world proletariat, provided, of
course, the price is not so great that the workers lose more
than they gain. And it is precisely the crime of Stalinism
that it pays much more than it gets in return; the advantage
to the Soviet Union is counterbalanced by the defeat of the
world revolution which the policies of the leaders help to
bring about.
The Soviet Union cannot be neutral in any war of a major

character that should break out. Even should the capitalists
not drag Russia into the war, it would be the duty of the
Soviet Union at critical moments to throw the vast weight
of its economic and military forces into the struggle, but
only in such a way as to further the emancipation of the
workers of the belligerent countries and to spread the
world revolution. It would be criminal for the Soviet Union
to take sides in any war so as to help one set of capitalists
against the other. This is exactly what Stalinism intends to
do. In this event, the Russian official will have to reckon
with the soldiers and workers in his own country, who also
will have something to say, and who, once the war breaks
out, will be in a better position to speak to the bureaucracy.
On the other hand, the proletariat of the world cannot be

neutral in any war against the Soviet Union. It is not only a
matter of aiding the Soviet Union, and cannot be done by
proving to the capitalists of other countries how much they
will gain by aiding the Soviet Union. Aid to the Soviet
Union can be given only by the workers of other countries'
overthrowing their capitalists and then bringing the full
force of their Workers State to help in the conflict. Stalinism,
however, would have the workers serve the interests of the
capitalists by inducing the rulers to take the side of the
Soviet Union as a perfectly safe one for capitalism. This
1758
policy would spell the doom of both the working class
movement of that country and of the Soviet Union as a
Workers State as well.
It is also a question of struggling against any capitalist

country at war with Soviet Russia. The workers of the
countries at war with Russia of course have to follow the
line of revolutionary defeatism, fraternization with the
Russian forces, and insurrection at home. The workers of
the still neutral countries have another task; they have the
task of mobilizing their nation for war against the enemies
of the Workers State, since a war against a country warring
against the Workers State is historically a progressive war.
War credits to the Workers State, complete embargo of
materials and trade to the opposing capitalist countries,
active proletarian demonstrations, are only part of the
preliminary tasks of the proletariat in this connection
throughout the world.
In almost all cases, the capitalists of the neutral countries

will oppose any declaration of war against the capitalist
opponents of Soviet Russia. But it may happen that, under
given conditions, the capitalists of a particular country may
find themselves impelled or compelled to declare war
against an active enemy of the Soviet Union. For example, it
might be that the United States would have to declare war
against Japan while the latter was fighting Russia. Or, it
might be that, Germany and Japan being on the verge of
crushing Russia and yet having about exhausted their
strength in the process, France and England might
intervene to prevent the victors from taking advantage of
their victory. Yet even in these cases, it cannot mean the
surcease of the civil war at home, in the given industrial
capitalist countries mentioned.
1759
Naturally, if the imperialism’s of America, England, and
France enter on the side of Russia, it can only be with their
own imperialist and capitalist aims in view --- namely to
increase their power and to add their pressure to the forces
tending to change the Russian regime into a capitalist one.
Thus, if the war is to be conducted on behalf of Russia
against world imperialism, it becomes imperative to
remove the imperialist government at home that is feigning
to be amicable to the cause of Russia and to place instead a
truly friendly regime --- a workers' regime, that will do
everywhere what the workers have attempted to do in
Russia.
Thus the line of the Fourth International on this question

can be summed up as follows. (*5) Under no circumstances,
whether the workers are for or against the war itself, can
they postpone for one moment the struggle against Wall
Street and the other capitalist governments that enter the
war for their own imperialist purposes and would use the
working class as their cannon fodder.
Where the war occurs between imperialist countries only,

for instance, where democratic United States is fighting
another imperialist nation, the main revolutionary tasks of
the American workers will be (a) to organize strikes and
physical demonstrations of every sort for the termination of
the war, the strikes to culminate in general strikes and
struggles of a nature that will paralyze entirely the
capitalist system; (b) to organize mutinies and rebellions in
the armed forces of the capitalist state to fraternize with the
workers and soldiers of the belligerent country and to
transform imperialist war to civil war; (c) to organize
struggles against conscription and mobilization for the
imperialist war; (d) to organize armed labor defense corps
1760
against the fascist or vigilante groups that would terrify the
working class into submission.
Where America is fighting a war historically progressive, as

where it is supporting the Soviet Union (still a Workers
State today, despite Stalinism), against such a country as
Japan, here the tasks of the revolutionary forces are
different. They will include: (a) the abolition of the standing
or conscript army, and the arming of the entire people into
a huge Workers' Militia or Army, with its own control and
elected officers; (b) the seizure of the factories under the
control of the workers, the complete abolition of the profits
of the capitalist class of the country, the entire industrial
machinery of the country to be put at the disposal of the
toilers and the Workers' Militia and Army formed; (c) the
organization of soviets as the best form for the mobilization
of the whole people for the carrying out of the war and to
insure that the war will be an anti-imperialist war in which
the workers will smash capitalism throughout the world; (d)
proletarian support for this war, but only when the war is
under its own control; never does it co-operate with the
bourgeoisie. Relentless struggle against the bourgeoisie,
whether this struggle interferes with the war or not, must
be waged.
In short, where America is conducting a war on the side of

the Soviet Union, a war which is historically progressive in
spite of the aims of the American capitalists, here it is the
duty of the workers not to oppose the war as such, but to
fight the method of conducting the war. The workers must
take control of the war and make it really their own.
Through strikes and physical demonstrations of every sort,
the working class must compel the turning over of the war
to the proletariat so as to make it a war for socialism and for
the abolition of the capitalist system throughout the world.
1761
In other words, the class struggle is in every case
paramount.
The strategy of the Fourth International will have to deal

extensively with the question of the strategy of insurrection.
And for this it will have to make a thorough examination of
all the revolutions that have taken place, from the time of
the Peasants Wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to
the present. So far as modern times are concerned, there
will have to be a distinction made between various stages of
the movement. There is first the period before the
revolutionary situation has arisen and when the fight is one
for preparation of the struggle through the battle for
secondary reforms. Secondly, there is the phase just prior to
the actual insurrection, where the situation has become
revolutionary and the proletarian vanguard is thoroughly
prepared and organized for the seizure of power. Finally,
there is the moment of insurrection itself.
That every social revolution will have to culminate in a

period of actual insurrection is now commonplace among
advanced workers. That this insurrection must not just
"happen" haphazardly, but can be planned by the vanguard,
is also a truism since the days of Lenin. What is not
sufficiently recognized, however, is the decisive character
of the subjective factor, the Party, in the present period, and
the possibilities of the communists themselves changing the
level of development from one plane to another. Especially
will this be true in highly industrialized regions, where the
very organization of the working class even for reforms
may lead at once to the question of power. While it is hard
to start the revolution in those countries, once the situation
is ripe, the revolutionary movement can run with
tremendous speed and directness through all its phases.
1762
The periods through which a people's revolution generally
has traveled in modern times are mainly the spontaneous
outburst, the "honeymoon" stage, the "July Days," the
counter-revolt, the further revolutionary advance leading to
the victory of the proletariat, the period of civil war, and
then retreat. Together with this is the study of the mutual
relationship of limited democracy, broad democracy,
democratic-dictatorship, and Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
both direct and indirect. The evolution of the Party from the
sectarian stage, to the mass stage, to the heroic period, and
to degeneration via the route of Thermidor, the Directorate,
the Consulate, and Bonapartism, all must be given careful
study.
Revolutions have their own evolution and laws of

development, but these laws are laws of social explosions.
The revolutionary movement often goes far beyond the
point where it can maintain itself; it then is driven
backward far beyond the point necessary. Thus it is only as
a resultant of the most violent swings in first one direction
and then the other that the revolution finally comes to rest
at the spot commensurate with the relationship of social
forces at the time. It is necessary to study not only the law
of the zig-zag, but also the laws by which the zig-zags
become exaggerated and extreme. The laws of revolutions
contain also within themselves the laws regulating the
tempo and form of mutation movements, of sympodial
developments.
Having studied the laws of social action and reaction, both

in their exaggerated and normal aspects, within the general
movement known as revolution, the revolutionists then can
be prepared to take up the various instruments which they
can use to test out in what moment of the social revolution
they find themselves. Here we find ourselves not in the
1763
realm of social statics but of social dynamics, and the
ordinary instruments and barometers are not sufficient. The
communists can use the barometer of parliamentary
elections in these periods, the amount of votes being a
rough indication of the stage of the movement; or he can
use the method of direct actions on a secondary scale. In all
cases, his demands must be timed to meet the actual
situation. But these mechanical instruments are not
sufficient. The Communist Party must use far more delicate
dials. It must be intimately bound up with the toilers, so
that there is a constant transfusion of blood between the
two. It must make use of those fine, electrical devices which
can measure the temper, the feelings, the electrical
irradiation of the masses from moment to moment. This can
be done only by a Party that truly springs from the bowels
of the class striving for power and that represents its very
soul. Feelings, passions, moods, psychological irradiations
of the mass, the Party so must be attuned to them by
intimate personal contact with the people that it can sway
the masses through the mechanism of politics to usher in
revolutionary results. A bureaucracy in the party is fatal to
such machinery of adjustment. If it is capable of
understanding the rough laws of gravitation, it can never
understand the laws of electro-dynamics.
The Fourth International will have to make a scientific

study of the proper organs of insurrection. There is no
parliament which can become an effective revolutionary
medium of the mass struggle, as Spain shows today, and as
the French, English, and American Revolutions showed
long ago. The modifications that parliament undergoes
during the struggle, and its limitation as an effective organ
of proletarian struggle, has to be understood in all its
aspects. Then there are the economic bodies of the workers,
the shop committees, the trade union councils and similar
1764
groups. Finally, there are the soviets, either in the shape
developed by the Russian Revolution or in some modified
form. Concrete circumstances may demand specific
adaptations of the organs of insurrection.
In regard to the insurrection itself, there is always to be

considered the dictum of Marx that insurrection is an art,
the essence of which lies in the audacious offensive and the
determination to carry through to the end what is once
started. Since the Party will have to form its Military-
Insurrectionary Committee, the experiences of such
committees as have been formed in the past thoroughly
must be digested. The question of the element of surprise in
the seizure of key places, such as radio stations, means of
communication and, transportation, public places, stores of
arms, factories, and so forth, becomes part of the problem.
Hand in hand with this problem is the one of the
organization of the armed forces responsible for the
insurrection.
Insurrectionary strategy will have to take into account the

lessons of barricade fighting of the past, the Paris
Commune, the 1905 experience, the fighting in Vienna, in
1934, and similar occasions. In such a country as the United
States, for example, where there are over twenty-five
million automobiles, the question of barricading streets
becomes of special importance, since these automobiles can
make mobile and easily constructed barricades even for the
broadest highways. It is no longer necessary to rip up the
streets or to throw down furniture from the houses to form
barricades in such a country.
Finally, it must be considered that the insurrection is not

the culmination of the social revolution, but its true
beginning. While the workers may seize power, they will
have to hold it against desperate resistance. Insurrection is
1765
followed by civil war. The Fourth International must draw
the military technical lessons from the civil wars fought by
the proletariat in the past. The question of the value of
airplanes, small arms, cannon, tanks, mines, grenades and
gas, in relation both to guerrilla warfare of the peasantry
dispersed over a large territory and to masses of workers
congested in large cities, must play an important role in this
respect.
From all this, it can be seen what an entirely different body

the Fourth International must be, compared with its
predecessors. It will be a body which will recognize that the
peaceful period of capitalism is over, that riots, bloodshed,
violence, insurrection, revolution, war, civil war, comprise
the normal atmosphere in which we must live and in which
we must work. It will also recognize that there has been a
tremendous gap between the general theoretical knowledge
of the workers and the strategy of what is to be done to
make communism a reality. The Fourth International will
concentrate entirely upon the strategy of the world
revolution.
Footnotes
1. See his Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution.
2. Postscript to State and Revolution.
3. There is a school of socialists which calls nationalization

of industries "State Socialism." If the capitalist system
remains, nationalization is a form of State capitalism. Under
socialism, the State withers away. The only form of State
Socialism known is the transition regime of the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat.
4. This was the form taken by the ill-fated Irish Rebellion of

1916.
1766
In many places the bourgeoisie has co-operated with the
ruling classes of opposing countries, but this cannot be the
policy of the working class.
5. Compare A. Weisbord: "What Will I Do When America

Goes to War?" Modern Monthly magazine, Vol. IX, No. 5.
(September, 1935.)
XLIX. COMMUNISM AND AMERICA
CONCOMITANT with the breakdown of the Third

International has been the disintegration of Europe as,
historically, the foremost creative force. With the shift of the
general center of gravity to the United States, the question
arises whether America is destined to receive the
revolutionary banner from the hands of Europe and carry it
forward. The question of whether America can lead the
proletarian revolution now becomes of more than
theoretical importance.
Were the United States to take the mantle of revolutionary

leadership from Europe, it would not be the first time that
the revolutionary center has shifted from one country to
another. In the early nineteenth century, the heart of the
revolutionary proletariat was in England; in the middle of
that century the center moved to France; later it shifted to
Germany, where it remained till the World War, after
which it fell to the Russians to lead the way. Incidentally, in
each case of change, the revolutionary organizations in the
abandoned center, bound in part by nationalist ideology,
refused to face the facts and protested the shift. The French,
with the glorious history of the Paris Commune behind
them, could not reconcile themselves to the leadership of
1767
the Germans; the Germans never fully admitted the loss of
their leadership to the Russians; the Russians will not easily
embrace the idea that the hub of revolution can shift from
Moscow to New York or Chicago. Yet the First
International was led by the French, the Second by the
Germans, the Third by the Russians; it may well be ---
should the European working class find itself unable to
defeat fascism --- that the Fourth International will be led
by the Americans.
The German leadership at the head of the Second

International stressed the point that the socialist revolution
must be led ultimately by the proletarians in the most
important industrial countries of the world. Culture
depended upon technique and, since Germany before the
War had the most advanced technique, the German
workers had the highest culture, and therefore were bound
to take leadership of the revolutionary movement. This was
their reply to the French, who always had mocked the
parliamentary opportunism of their Teutonic neighbors;
with these Marxist arguments, the Kaiser's agents were able
to rally the socialist workers to the War.
The victory of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union disclosed

the fact that the proletariat revolution must not inevitably
strike first in the most advanced countries, but, following
the law of uneven development, could break out in an
agrarian and semi-colonial country as well. Under Lenin,
the communists never envisioned the agrarian country as
leading the way forever or, having achieved socialist rule
for itself, as defeating the combined capitalist world. As
Leninism gave way to Stalinism, however, the impression
deepened that not the industrial countries were to lead the
way for the world revolution --- the workers of those
countries were too well bribed by imperialism --- but the
1768
agrarian countries like Hungary, Bavaria, China, and
Russia. Just as the Germans had covered their nationalism
with Marxist phrases to the effect that the industrial
country must lead, so the Russians began to use the phrases
of Leninism to prove that the leadership must fall to
agrarian nations.
The true situation can best be gathered by a synthesis of the

following sets of circumstances. First of all, the entire world
as a whole is ripe for the end of capitalism and the victory
of the proletarian revolution. Second, the struggles in the
agrarian countries, while important and inevitable, are yet
indecisive in the struggle for power the world over. The
toilers in the backward countries may start the struggle and
can carry on protracted guerrilla fighting, but they cannot
by themselves overthrow world capitalism. This can be
done only when the heavy battalions of the proletariat in
the industrial countries are brought into action.
The third factor is that the proletarian movement in Europe

is showing an incapacity further to lead the world. It may
well be that the enormous weight of America is too heavy
for the workers of Europe to remove from their necks.
Europe today, broadly generalizing, stands to the United
States as the small industry of the nineteenth century stands
to the large trust of the twentieth. It is not the workers of
scattered discrete industry of antiquated nature that can
assume the leadership for any length of time, but only the
masses mobilized in the most modern heavy industries.
These last are no longer to be found primarily or mainly in
Europe. The shift of the world's economic center of gravity
eventually must mean a shift of the revolutionary center of
gravity. Fundamentally, the Germans were right in their
insistence on the importance of the proletariat in the
industrial countries, although they were fatally in error in
1769
believing that the workers of the agrarian countries could
not initiate the world battle and win its first victories. The
Germans proved too simple, too mechanical, too
provincially European.
Marx himself had posed the problem eighty years before,

when he wrote: "The difficult question for us is this: On the
Continent the revolution is imminent and will also
immediately assume a socialist character. Is it not bound to
be crushed in this little corner, considering that in a far
greater territory the movement of bourgeois society is still
on the ascendant?" (*1)
It is of course too early as yet to state whether fascism will

be victorious in Western Europe, and the world united for
the downfall of the Soviet Union. Such an eventuality,
however, is quite within the range of possibility. This
would simply mean that European capitalism, supported
and overwhelmed by the capitalist reserves of the Western
Hemisphere, proved too powerful for the proletariat at this
time. But just as it is impossible to eradicate the working
class and exploitation under capitalism, so is it impossible
to extirpate communism and the class struggle. In the event
of the victory of fascism in Europe, the arena would then be
shifted to the more decisive portions of the world, and first
of all to the United States. In that case, from the capitalist
point of view, it will become the destiny of American
capitalism to organize the world, just as Germany tried to
organize Europe. From the proletarian point of view, it will
then be the mission of the American workers to organize
the Fourth International on a true world and
internationalist basis. If Europe, including its proletariat, is
broken up by the power of America and rendered helpless,
American capitalism itself will be made powerless in turn
1770
by the forces engendered within itself, namely, the
proletariat.
After all is said and done, the working class of the United
States is no mean one. In numbers it is gigantic, equaled by
no country in the world. Nor in quality is it deficient. Ever
since the Civil War, the workers of the United States have
demonstrated repeatedly their genius for direct action and
impetuous struggle. In the United States May Day was born;
in New York City the First International had its
headquarters for a time. A country that begins its
independence with revolution, that ushers its proletariat
into existence by a civil war, that compels violence to
become part of the very breath of life of the class struggle ---
such a country is well prepared for revolutionary outbursts
of its proletariat.
The struggles of the workers of the United States up to the

present have been mainly of an economic character. But
economics is becoming politics. The old individualism is
giving way to collectivism; there is becoming apparent in
the United States a tenseness of relationships, a restiveness
of the masses that proves that the workers have great
potentialities for radicalization, and that sudden and
violent political fluctuations are quite possible in this, the
strongest capitalist country in the world, the bulwark of
world reaction. It is true, the superior technique of
American imperialism imparts to the worker a superior
culture, but this culture, too, has an uneven development.
The American workman is unsurpassed in his general
knowledge of physical and natural science, but he remains
far more backward in social science. The question is, how
long can social science lag behind physical science?
Of one thing we may be sure. Once the American workers

are put on the road of social science, it will not be long
1771
before they pursue that science to the end, wringing from it
all the revolutionary conclusions possible. Up to now,
American workers have taken to the study of gasoline
engines, machinery, and similar mechanical objects,
because this was the way to advance. Now, however, that
they are being dispossessed from the process of production,
now that the army of unemployed hungering for relief can
at times become larger than those actually at work, now
that definite class formations are emerging, the study of
mechanics and of natural objects will give way to a study of
the modes of operation and of the role of the State. Then it
will be not unnatural to expect that, just as the American
proletariat caught up with and surpassed the Europeans in
natural science, so will it in the social sciences. Furthermore,
in no country in the world is there such a close reaction
time between theory and practice as in America. Now that
class formations openly are appearing in American life, it
cannot be long before class struggle theories will be the
property of the American masses; when this happens, the
whole Western Hemisphere will glow in the crucible of the
social revolution.
The problem of communizing America is in part the

problem of americanizing communism. To the average
American, communism always has been considered a
foreign product. The theoretical and practical leaders of the
movement, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Nikolai
Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and such, all were Europeans who
knew America only from afar. In this country, the Marxist
parties were composed mostly of foreign-born elements,
dominated in the beginning by Germans, later by Jews and
Russian nationals. The ideas of these parties and their
expressions seemed utterly alien to this country.
1772
Of course, the real barrier to the assimilation of the
communist movement with the social life of this country
which prevented its indigenous development lay in the fact
that the economic and social evolution of the United States
had not as yet warranted the open formation of classes
engaged in active civil war. A number of keen European
observers, such as Graf von Keyserling, have ventured the
opinion that America would never adopt Marxian socialism
because the country itself was a substitute for it. (*2)
Certainly America is unique, although not in the Herbert

Hoover sense that America is outside the pale of capitalist
development and that the laws of the class struggle
prevailing in Europe would not be generated here, not in
the sense that its exceptional development has removed it
from the general decline of capitalism throughout the world;
America is unique simply in the sense that all concrete truth
is unique. America is an illustration of the law of combined
development which compels history never exactly to repeat
itself, but to enunciate eternally the basic law of
individuality in nature.
We already have stressed the peculiar character of

American development. It would be well, however, to
summarize some of the factors at this point, so as to provide
a background for the solution of the problem of
americanizing communism. In the first place, America was
a new world. To many it was an escape from the old social
order, from the old economic machine, from the old State.
Here one could turn over a new leaf. One could build
utopias. There was no limit to the possibilities of expansion.
Here one could stress the individual as against class, State,
nation, race. Secondly, America seemed to turn the
economic laws of Europe backward. Here every man could
aim to be a king in his own little domain, and there was
1773
plenty for all. Thirdly, there were no important feudal
classes with special privileges to hamper the development
of capitalism. If the propertyless could obtain a little
property, and the petty bourgeoisie could become
bourgeois, the bourgeoisie could become absolute masters
of the situation. Fourthly, wealth was to be attained without
devastating wars. Class struggles apparently were not
needed in order to win ease and security. In America, all
classes seemed to dissolve into one --- the small property
owners and the direct producers. As fast as upper and
lower classes were precipitated in one part of the country,
the vast and rapid expansion of the land created new fluid
conditions and broke up anew all rigid formations. The
domination of big capital was delayed by the speed of
expansion. Of course, classes existed from the very
beginning, but it was the private owner of the means of
production who tended to become the universal element
forming the mother class, from whose ranks there was later
to be differentiated both capitalist and laborer.
Throughout the entire nineteenth-century history of our

country, generally speaking, it was the petty bourgeoisie
who dominated the ideology of the country and, under the
impact of big capital, carried forward the nation's
development. Not as in England, where every "middle
body" aped his superior, in America, every capitalist tried
to appear as a man of the people, the people of course being
the petty owners of the means of production. Whatever
democracy existed in the United States was the democracy
of private property, extended to the little property owner in
an environment where many could easily become property
owners and enter the charmed circle. In all this period, the
propertyless proletariat never took the initiative in making
history in the United States. As a matter of fact, it has yet to
take this initiative as a class.
1774
The problem of americanizing communism always has
been a difficult one for communist leaders; up to now, this
question has not been solved, nor even adequately posed.
The traditional approach has been the one in which the
communist praises the Fathers of the country and declares
that communism will carry on the work of the American
Revolution, the American Constitution, and the deeds of
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and others. The trouble
with this approach is that it leads to a complete falsification
of American history and to an idealization of the bourgeois
leaders of the country.
An interesting exhibit of this type of approach to America is

to be found in Lenin's Letter to the American Workers. In this
letter, Lenin affirmed that the American Revolution was
one of the few great and really revolutionary wars of the
people against feudal subjection. Lenin, the European, did
not know that the American Revolution was not a people's
revolution at all (from the point of view of how much of a
"people's" character it had, we would place the American
Revolution somewhere between the Turkish Revolution of
Kemal Pasha and the English Civil Wars), that there was no
substantial extension of democracy to embrace the masses
of people after the Revolution, that the American
Constitution was more the product of counter-revolution
than revolution, that those who led the Revolutionary
forces were the enemies of the common people, that
America was not fighting feudalism, since England least of
all represented the feudal system at the time, that the
American Revolution was not in the main a glorious
revolution for ideals, but a sordid fight for control over the
resources and wealth of the New World.
Lenin's limited understanding of American history can be

seen in his expressed view that compares "the colonial
1775
slavery of America by the English robbers" with the colonial
slavery of British imperialism in India and Asia. In such a
comparison, a whole series of historical errors is committed.
In India, the British imperialists can keep their control only
by supporting the Nabobs, Rajahs, and all the trappings of
old India at the expense of the conquered masses whom
they drove deeper than ever into misery. Just the opposite
occurred in the New World. North America had to be
colonized by capitalist elements and English subjects
themselves. The American colonists robbed the indigenes.
They established the most widespread system of slavery
and indentured servitude, and most ruthlessly exploited
men, materials, and soil. Not a feudal system was preserved,
but a great development of capitalist private property was
inaugurated. It was because the American exploiters would
not share the wealth with the British imperialists in what
the latter considered the proper proportions that the two
groups fought it out. Taking Lenin's view that the
American Revolution was the revolt of colonial slaves, it
would be hard to explain the fact that after these so-called
slaves won their revolt, the real slaves, the Negroes,
redemptioners, and indentured servants, increased in
number. Lenin in fact here entirely ignored the Negro's
point of view. Certainly the American Negro had no
interest in the American Revolution.
This piece of writing by Lenin is an illustration that the very

best of European revolutionists were and are provincially
limited by their ignorance of America. Lenin was the
foremost leader of the world proletariat simply because he
was the leader of the European section, and Europe was
then leading the world. Today such a limited horizon is
fatal.
1776
There is a sophisticated example of this type of vulgar
approach to the question of americanizing communism in
the pamphlet by B. D. Wolfe: Our Heritage from 1776. Wolfe
writes: "One of the earliest articles of Lenin, written in 1897,
concerns itself with this very question. It is entitled: 'What
Inheritance Do We Reject?' It disputes step by step with the
populists the inheritance from past bourgeois
revolutionaries. 'We are definitely more consistent and
truer guardians of the inheritance than the Narodniki
(populists),' he declares, and then adds . . . 'To keep the
inheritance by no means signifies that one must limit
himself to what he has inherited.' This article by the
youthful Lenin was a definite declaration that the Russian
working class was coming of age and claiming the
inheritance that the Decembrists, the 'Enlighteners' and the
earlier generation of Populists had left to it.
"Judged by this test, the American working class is still

immature --- still infantile leftist. It does not claim its
heritage. It does not dispute with the bourgeoisie and
particularly the petty bourgeoisie (the 'Back to 1776'ers') for
its share of the inheritance of the first American
Revolution. . . ." (*3)
Now what were the ingredients of the Russian situation? 1.

The Decabrist revolt had been directed by a group of the
lower nobility and army officers against the tyranny of the
Czar. The revolt failed, but it marked the beginning of the
demand for the Europeanization of Russia, following upon
the Napoleonic wars. 2. The revolt was continued in the
middle of the nineteenth century by Russian students and
intellectuals who wanted to bring European enlightenment
into Russia. These students of advanced ideas were
harassed and persecuted by Czarism in a thousand ways,
and showed a high level of courage and devotion. The
1777
movement failed, and Czarist reaction prevailed. 3.
Following the Crimean War, Russian absolutism was forced
to free the serfs in 1861 and to develop capitalism. There
then arose a populist movement composed of students and
elements of the petty bourgeoisie who went to the people,
tried to educate the peasant, and, through their terrorist
arm, conducted a truly heroic war against Czarism. The
movement failed, thousands were persecuted, exiled,
imprisoned, killed by Czarism. These three early
movements already had entered into the traditions of all
liberation movements at the time when the proletariat
began to arise and to speak in its own name.
In all of this, the following is to be carefully noted: First,

there was in each case a struggle against the same power,
Czarism, which up to the victory of the Russian proletariat
was still the persecuter and murderer of the people. That is
to say, the enemy of the previous movements was the
enemy of the proletariat at the time that Lenin was writing.
This, of course, is not the case in the United States. The
American workers' enemy is not identical with the enemy
of the leaders of the American Revolution.
Second, the leaders of the movements prior to those of 1905

and 1917 had failed. In many cases they had paid for their
failure with their lives and had demonstrated that the
classes they represented could not overthrow the
oppressors of the Russian people, only the proletariat could
accomplish this task. They had turned over the banner of
revolution to the newly rising working class; this class
continued the work they had begun, but could not complete
it. The exact opposite was the case in the American
Revolution.
Lenin could praise the "Enlighteners" and the nihilists

because, in a backward agrarian country, the revolution
1778
against Czarism had to start as a democratic agrarian
revolution, to be pushed on and completed by the
proletariat only as the revolution itself unfolded. The
revolution in the United States need not undergo the
tortuous phases that occurred in Russia. There the leaders
of the early revolts against Czarism never exposed
themselves to the masses, never had the power or the
opportunity to oppress and to grind down the
revolutionary forces of the people. In America, the contrary
was the case. From the very beginning, the leaders of the
American Revolution, the Founding Fathers, became the
bitter enemies of the people. The leaders of the American
Revolution actually won the power, brazenly and
arrogantly seizing the fruits of the Revolution for
themselves, and refusing to grant the lower orders, who
had made up the bulk of the fighting force, the slightest
amelioration of their conditions. In other words, the
enemies of the American proletariat are the very bourgeois
who led the American Revolution.
Third, in Russia, the leaders of the previous movements,

especially the terrorist Narodniki, were social revolutionists;
they tried to organize the masses of peasants under their
own banner with their own demands, and to launch them
in violent struggle against the old absolutist order. On the
contrary, the leaders of the American Revolution never
went to the people; they did their utmost to prevent the
Revolution from being a people's revolution; they entered
the Revolution for their own selfish ends and emerged from
it enormously richer and more powerful. What they were
interested in was not a social revolution, but a political
change in government.
We do not deny that the American Revolution was a

progressive act, objectively unleashing the forces of
1779
production and of capitalist development. The American
Revolution began an act in the drama which the proletarian
revolution shall complete and finish. To speak of the
progressive character of the American Revolution is a good
approach in reaching the middle class. But this approach is
not suitable for the American workers.
The communists cannot enter into rivalry with the

bourgeoisie on the question: Whose is the Fourth of July?
Whose is the American Flag? Whose country is it? Whose
Constitution is it? etc., etc. In this sort of rivalry, the
bourgeoisie must emerge on the top; the workers will be
fighting within the framework of capitalist ideology and
tradition; the petty bourgeoisie will be confused and lost.
Nationalism will be rampant. All sorts of illusions about
reforming the Constitution by making amendments will be
thickly spread throughout the workers' ranks, demoralizing
them, preventing them from taking the historic initiative in
their own manner and breaking from the capitalist parties
that have traditionally used this lure. The whole line of
Wolfe plays into the hands of the American varieties of
budding fascism.
Can it be that the American workers have, therefore, no

tradition of revolution, no insurrectionary heritage from the
past? Far from it. The proletariat carries forward the
insurrectionary traditions of Bacon's rebellion, Leisler's
rebellion, Dorr's rebellion, the fierce struggles in the
Southern States between the planters and the poor whites,
and, most important of the time, Shay's rebellion. All of
them, especially the last, were rebellions of the poor
plebeian toiling masses against the wealthy monopolists
arising in the country. Here is a rich heritage of political
struggle that the American proletariat never can forget.
1780
The American proletariat has the heritage of the
underground railway of the days prior to the Civil War, of
the left abolitionist movement, culminating in John Brown's
raid. The American proletariat has the memorable tradition
of the insurrection against conscription under Lincoln. Then
there are, too, the traditions of May Day, of the First
International, whose seat was in New York City, of the
many violent strike struggles which in ferocity resembled
small insurrections by themselves. The workers of this
country can well carry forward the traditions of street
action which always have characterized the toilers of this
country. Lynching is not for the bourgeoisie alone. It is a
tradition of the American people for dealing with crooks
and bandits and outlaws and murderers as well.
Most important of all the insurrectionary traditions which

the American proletariat must cherish as its most precious
heritage are the wonderful insurrectionary attempts on the
part of the Negro slaves in this country. The war of the
Seminoles (really an insurrection by Negroes as well), the
insurrectionary movements of Turner, Cato, Vesey, and a
thousand others whose names have been buried by the
bourgeoisie --- these mark high lights in the struggles of the
terribly oppressed toilers of this country. Throwing aside
the illusions of the opportunists, we see the Negro as the
great insurrectionist, the foremost fighter for the liberation
of the toiling masses of this country. The history of the
proletariat in this country has its origin in the history of
Negro slavery. The insurrections of the Negro slaves are the
finest traditions of the American working class.
There is another and better approach to the question of

americanizing communists than has been elaborated up to
now by the working class organizations. This is to study the
1781
elements of americanism and to see where socialism and
americanism intertwine and work into each other. However,
even this method, far superior to the traditional, and one
which has not been comprehended by working class
leaders, only raises the problems without adequately
solving them. The attempt to achieve
socialism through americanism may bring some valuable
results but is insufficient and, at bottom, is defective in
mobilizing the workers for international revolution. The
fact of the matter is that a Marxist understanding of the soul
and spirit of American life, of its character and peculiar
interests has not been attempted by communist
theoreticians.
Socialism and americanism are not so far apart as one

might think at first sight. For communism begins where
capitalism ends, and America has been the highest
developed capitalist country. It is true that we cannot
evolve peacefully into communism from capitalism, that a
sharp break from the past is necessary, a break that takes
the form of civil war and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
However, it is also true that within the womb of capitalism
there matures the basis for communism; communism does
not destroy everything that has gone before it, but takes
over the best achievements that capitalism has been able to
develop, and uses them for its own purposes.
The fact that americanism and socialism may have certain

aspects in common does not at all mean that americanism
cannot be the root ideology for American fascism. We can
be sure that a native American fascist movement would be
bound to use "americanism" for its own purposes, and that
the class conscious American workers would be nationalist
fools were they to go into competition with the fascists or
bourgeois nationalists of any stripe as to which class the
1782
ideology of "100 per cent Americanism" belongs. On the
other hand, however, this does not mean that the
communists stand for the extirpation of any given
nationality, nor that they cannot use national traditions for
their own purposes; it does not mean that communists
cannot point out exactly in what places americanism and
socialism converge and how some of the best ideals of
americanism can be realized only under socialism. While
this is not the best approach to the American proletariat, it
is a fruitful approach to the American nationalist petty
bourgeoisie, because, in the guise of showing him
americanism through socialism, such a policy really
proceeds to make socialists out of Americans.
Americanism means direct action. Traditionally, the

American proceeded directly and with his own physical
forces to obtain control of the means of production for
himself. He did not rely upon representatives, delegates,
politicians, or legal action, but upon his own strength and
will. This initiative also led the American to lynching and to
taking justice into his own hands. This partly accounts for
the high crime rate in the United States and for the
instinctive rebelliousness to authority that is part of every
American's make-up.
This penchant for direct action can be utilized mightily by

the revolutionary proletarian forces, as the I.W.W. already
have shown. With these traditions at his disposal, the
communist easily can appeal over the heads of the legalists
and the parliamentarians for direct action of the masses for
the seizure of food by the hungry, for the taking over of the
land by the farmers and of the factories by the workers.
With such a background, the communist need have no fear
of such a slogan as "Lynch the lynchers of the Negroes and
poor toilers."
1783
It is thoroughly American to preach the inevitability of
violent struggle; the communist, in this respect, is only
"going native" with a vengeance. In no country in the world
are so many foremen's jaws punched by irate workers who
have been fired or who, disgruntled, have quit. Nor is the
concept of revolution un-American. President Roosevelt is
using the word to ingratiate his New Deal with the
American people. A country that began its independent life
with a successful revolution, one that has embodied its
Right of Revolution into its very Constitution, one that saw
its bloody Civil War, such a country certainly has plenty of
American traditions for the pursuit of the proletarian
revolution.
Americanism never has been a quiet, soothing program. For

the American, everything is in motion and flux. Change
and the necessity for change have become a permanent part
of this man's thinking. Always bigger and better, always
something new, always facing new worlds to conquer, this
is a typical American attitude that has been often remarked
upon by the bourgeois European content with the status
quo and the comfort that it brings. The restless energy that
is the American's forces him also into an empirical attitude
that has been emphasized in the American philosophy of
pragmatism. It will not require much persuasion, however,
to change pragmatism to materialism, once the class
struggle sharpens.
Another important aspect of Americanism is the concept of

classlessness. In this connection, even the individualist
traditions of America can be harnessed to the proletarian
revolution. All this regimentation, disciplining, and forced
labor that is taking place under the dominance of trust and
monopoly capital with the help of the State is something of
that Europeanism from which the American has tried hard
1784
to escape. It is now the communist who can show that the
social ownership of the means of production means the
greatest development of individuality and individual
liberty possible; thus communism is in this respect, too, a
continuation of the old liberty of the individual for which
America has become known.
With the American, individualism had been intimately

linked up with individual private ownership of the means
of production by the direct producer. Now it is the force of
capitalism, of Wall Street imperialism, that is depriving the
direct producer of his means of production; it is
communism that will allow each individual to regain
control over the gigantic means of production now at his
disposal. Similarly, it is communism that again spells
plenty and wealth for each individual. All to be owners and
each owner to have plenty can come about only when
capitalism has been abolished.
The concept of individual property was never divorced in

this country from the concept of labor. For a long time in
the history of this country the term "labor" meant the
farmer and the petty owner. No one attained property
except through labor; it was the one and only high road to
success. In Europe, riches could be gained by conquest, by
wars, by pillage. Here it was to be gained by husbandry, by
pioneering, by hard work. No true American shrank from
hard work, and to the worker in those days belonged the
fruits of his toil. Now this is exactly the goal of the
proletarian revolution. The idealization of labor, the union
of labor with the products of labor, these truly American
ideas are also the aims of the communists and can be
realized only through communism.
The American was not afraid to pioneer in new directions,

to risk his life for the discovery of the natural elements that
1785
surrounded him. With the same spirit he was willing to
pioneer in social life. The history of the Mormons is an
excellent example of this spirit. With the same pioneering
appeal, with the same call for social experimentation, the
revolutionary elements can approach the discontented and
rebellious native American nationalist-minded person for
the creation of communism.
This is all the more true since the American always has
conceived his role as bringing order out of chaos, as an
organizing role. Indeed, America has become the great
international organizer. Here has been the land of
rationalization and of audacious continental planning. This
stress on science, on statistics and planning generally, is
another aspect of americanism that communism may well
claim as its own. Communism brings purposeful planning
and scientific control of social forces to the highest level
ever attained by man.
The true American never has lived merely to eat, never has
produced merely to consume. On the contrary, precisely in
this respect young and virile American society has differed
from effete Europe. Here we have consumed to produce.
Work was a holy cause to which every man was attached;
to be separated from his work, his farm, his factory, his
occupation meant to the American, at least during the
nineteenth century, to be divorced from life. The process of
production, the process of making gain, rather than the
consumption of the gain actually obtained, lured the
American and held him fast. Now it is the communist who
develops this idea of living for a cause, for production, but
the communist's production is not of profit, but of a new
social order wherein the forces of nature become
increasingly controlled. Again there is the emphasis on
science and on control of productive forces; again there is
1786
the contempt for those who do not labor and who
parasitically merely consume; again there is the call for the
struggle against nature that energized the American
pioneer and made his hard and bitter life seem sweet and
rich. The communist today carries forward the idea that the
struggle of one human against another should be ended,
that the struggle for the development of the productive
forces should be pushed to its highest point.
The American scientist and engineer needs space for his

planning and development of science. He has been
accustomed to working with continents. He could not be
confined within the narrow limits of the average small
country of Europe. He will become enthusiastic over the
idea of planning for the whole world, of harnessing all the
continents together into a mighty purposeful plan of all
humanity.
Here we touch upon another important aspect of

americanism, one which also touches on communist
doctrine, its internationalism, or rather, its super-
nationalism. The American is nationalistic, but note, first,
that his country is as big as a continent, a large slice of the
world; such a nationalist embraces much territory, as much
as the European internationalist would were he to embrace
all Europe. Second, America always has been the great
melting pot wherein all nationalities could come together
and fuse. Thus, America has symbolized the amalgamation
of all races into one family; it has stood for a policy of
inclusion rather than exclusion. Here we can well bear in
mind Benjamin Franklin's statement that he hoped the day
would soon dawn when every nation would be represented
with a star in the field of blue that marked the flag of the
United States. The United States was conceived as the first
1787
brotherhood of nations, a sort of bourgeois Soviet Union,
with unlimited possibilities for expansion.
Following such an approach, the communists can remove

the obstacles in the way of defeating the capitalist
propaganda that communism is a foreign product. With a
mature and clever technique, a genuine revolutionary party
would be able to demonstrate that communism is a true
child of American life.
Finally, there is the pacifism of America. The American, in

his rapid expansion over the continent of North America
and elsewhere in the world, never has met with real
resistance necessitating the sort of wars to the death that
has characterized the older civilizations of Europe and Asia.
The wars against the Indians and the Mexicans, the
American Revolution and Spanish-American War, did not
consume much of the energies of the growing nation;
America entered the World War too late for the devastating
consequences of that war to be deeply felt by all. The fact
that America never has been defeated has given a sort of
super-confidence and boastfulness to the American that
enables him to believe that he will be able to accomplish
that which other nations have failed to do. At the same time,
it has bred in the American a lack of training for war, no
desire for war. This would be a most natural result in the
most bourgeoisified country, but this result has been
intensified by the fact that the country up to recently had
not engaged in major national wars. When America did
enter the World War it was to make it a "last war."
The natural pacifism of the American may well be utilized

by the communist who can point out that only communism
can end perpetual warfare on this earth, that the only "war
to end war" possible is the class war against the war-
mongering capitalists.
1788
Here then are some of the intersecting points at which
Americans can be said to cross communism and which the
communist may utilize to his advantage in his process of
americanizing communism, so as to communize America.
By no means do we want to give the impression that this
enumeration is exhaustive. But what must be pointed out
again, what must be emphatically underlined is that this
whole technique of socialism through americanism has its very
serious limitations and defects. The true communist must
guard against falling into the errors of the Browders and
others who try to ingratiate themselves among Americans
by idealizing American nationalism, by pampering the
petty bourgeoisie, by bringing nationalist ideology into the
ranks of the proletariat. Such a nationalist policy in France
led the French Communist Party to adopt the French
Revolution of 1789 as its own and to march, on July
fourteenth last, with the tri-color at the head of its
processions. On the contrary, the communists must do all in
their power to show the limitations and defects of
Americanism, to point out wherein it must fall down before
the superior weapons of criticism that internationalist
communism has to offer. The technique of communism
through americanism has some value in reaching petty
bourgeois elements, but it is a technique very inferior to
other methods of reaching the native American proletariat.
There are certain problems unique to American life which

no other proletariat has to solve in the same manner or in
the same degree. These the communists sooner or later
must begin to consider.
First and foremost is the Negro question. No other capitalist

country of any importance faces this complicated and
difficult question in exactly the manner of America. Yet
1789
there is no more genuine American than the Negro, and the
failure to give this matter its proper due, the failure to work
out a Marxist line for the thirteen million Negroes in the
United States, is the best sort of proof that the communist
movement is yet immature and unrooted in American life.
Negro life, Negro history, Negro problems practically have

been ignored or deliberately buried by the American
bourgeoisie. The communist movement must bring to life
the true history of the American Negro, must live in the
closest communion with Negro society, must become part
of the very heart of the struggles of the Negroes for their
emancipation. Here is an acid test of whether the
communist party is becoming americanized.
A genuine communist organization must demand that its

members live with the Negro people and intermingle their
activities with those of the oppressed Negro masses in
every possible way. An American Communist Party that
numbered more Negroes than whites would be far better
than a party with more foreign-born than natives in its
midst. We shall be able to judge the communism of an
organization, indeed, precisely by the yardstick of how
many Negroes are in its ranks, how many have been
developed as militant fighters.
The status of the Negro people in the United States most

accurately may be described as a national minority. While
they never have been in possession of any section of this
country, yet they all have a common home land, Africa, a
common tradition, slavery and persecution, and, to a
certain extent, a culture of their own which binds them
together as a homogeneous group. There is, furthermore,
one section of the United States, and a large section, indeed,
as great as any European country outside Russia, namely
1790
the Black Belt in the South, in which the Negroes are a
majority.
The Negro people have the right to govern themselves

independently and to set themselves up as a separate
nation, taking over part of the country for that purpose, if
they want to. This is the right of self-determination, and it
must be one of the principal slogans for Negro liberation.
From the working class point of view, it is not because the

Negroes are entitled to any given part of the United States
that the workers are willing to fight for the right of the
Negroes to have a separate territory and republic of their
own, if they so desire, but because this is the best way to
prove to the national minority composed of Negroes that
the working class fights for their liberation and against the
oppressive policy of the white ruling class. Every national
minority is entitled to territory where it can build up a
republic of its own and determine its own destiny,
regardless of whether it possesses any given piece of land
as its own or not.
Self-determination for the Negroes is not an end in itself. If

a Negro State were to be established with a colored
capitalist class grinding down the masses of Negroes, this
would not provide a solution. Or, if the Negroes managed
to set up a Workers' State in some part of the country, how
long could such a State endure in a capitalist country? It
could live peacefully only if the rest of the country
embraced sovietism. The fight for self-determination is
therefore only one of the steps to the goal. Such a fight
would rally the colored people together, would instill in
them confidence in themselves, and would win respect for
their struggle among other sections of the population. It
would greatly encourage the struggle of the Negroes in
1791
Africa, the West Indies, and elsewhere, where they actually
comprise a majority.
In the Black Belt, where the slogan of self-determination

would be carried out, the class struggle would be
sharpened in such a manner as to weaken capitalism. If the
Negro masses decide that there should be a separate Negro
Republic in the Black Belt, the Negro workers and poor
farmers accordingly must fight that this Republic become a
Soviet Republic in order to confiscate the land of the big
planters in favor of the poor tillers of the soil and to insure
workers' control over the government and industries.
Without such additional slogans, the cry for a separate
republic for the Negroes would have no real meaning; there
would be no means by which to put it into effect without
the struggles of the workers, both white and black. The
power of the bourgeois landlords must be broken before
there can be self-determination. The slogan "self-
determination" would cut straight through the classes in the
South, lining up the white planters on the one hand and the
oppressed Negroes on the other.
Self-determination for the Negroes does not mean

communism; it is only part of the struggle of the Negroes
for equality, and completes this struggle. But, as the
capitalists cannot grant real democracy, so capitalism never
can grant the right of the Negroes to determine for
themselves whether they want to remain a national
minority within the United States or whether they want to
set up a republic of their own, in the Black Belt or anywhere
else, wherein they can control their own destiny. Whether
the Negro people want to form a separate Negro Republic
for themselves in the South is not for the white people,
either workers or capitalists, to decide, but for the Negroes
themselves. While the choice is up to the Negro masses,
1792
nevertheless, the working class of this country, and
especially the communist section, must fight with every bit
of its power to support the choice of the Negro people.
Another unique problem that must be resolved in this

country is the relationship of the proletariat to the middle
classes. In no country in the world have the middle classes
played such an overwhelmingly predominant role in the
history of the country. All the other classes have emerged
from this basic class, the petty bourgeoisie. This class has
had the initiative and the chief importance in the political
life in this country. Up to now the proletariat, politically,
has been inarticulate.
However, there is another side to this matter. It is true that

nowhere has the proletariat become so bourgeoisified as in
this country; and nowhere has the line between middle
class and working class been so thin as it is here, in the
sense that in this country the proletariat has received
training that ordinarily only members of the middle class
would receive elsewhere. Thus, the gap between the
workers and the middle class intellectuals is far more
reduced in the United States than, let us say, it was in
Russia under the Czars.
In the technically backward agrarian countries of Europe,

where illiteracy prevailed, there was a certain recognition of
the importance of the intelligentsia by all groups in society.
The intelligentsia was naturally accorded leadership, even in
working class struggles. The problem in the United States is
entirely different, however, since nowhere else is the
cultural level of the workers so high and their
independence from the intelligentsia so possible. Thus the
paradox exists in this country, that, while the working class
so far never has displayed great historical initiative, it is
capable of accomplishing the greatest deeds when it has
1793
been pressed to do so and has gained the necessary
confidence in itself.
All of this not only has its tactical and strategic implications,
but its organizational significance as well. A communist
group that would americanize itself must understand the
American fusion of theory with practice, must place the
strictest limits upon purposeless talking within the
organization, must see that the intellectuals that come into
the movement are given the same sort of training that
American engineers and professional men traditionally
have received, namely, the training of starting from the
bottom and working up.
It is evidence of the prevailing foreignism that exists in the

present revolutionary organizations that all of them treat
their intellectuals as special, privileged characters, that a
regular division has been created between the brain and the
brawn. The intellectuals, of course, being the brain, train
themselves for jobs as editors, writers, etc., while the
workers, the brawn, carry on one struggle after another for
the organization, but never are brought into the general
leadership. Such special privileges can find their
justification far more readily in the caste-ridden society of
Europe than in the social life of the United States. To
intellectualize the proletarian and to proletarianize the
intellectual, this double process easily can find its way into
the practice of the American working-class movements.
Linked up with this process is the fact that the bourgeoisie

itself has arisen from the same petty-bourgeois class as the
proletariat. Thus the wealthy do not enjoy the same
standing and prestige in this country as in Europe, where
wealth is definitely intermarried with the aristocracy and
carries with it immense social standing.
1794
Given the transformation from classlessness to open class
formation now taking place in American society, the correct
method of approach must be to use those traditional
slogans and actions to which the American people have
become accustomed and which, at the same time, can move
them forward to take their place in the struggle against
capital. Everything must be done to stimulate the tendency
to direct action, the willingness of the American to take
matters directly into his own hands and to solve problems
in the open. Precisely at this time would it be incorrect to
develop parliamentary illusions concerning the formation
of a Farmer-Labor Party in order to tear the workers from
the bourgeoisie and to place them on the road to the
struggle for power. It is not via parliamentary action and
electioneering that the struggle for power will take place in
this country. Contrary to the propaganda spread by the
liberals, the socialists, and the Stalinists, there is little
tradition of parliamentarism among the mass of
proletarians in America. In fact, the best way to place the
workers under the control of the capitalists would be to
place their activities on a parliamentary basis. This does not
mean, of course, that communists, under certain
circumstances, cannot engage in election campaigns, but
the relative insignificance of these campaigns must be set
forth clearly in the present transitional period.
Now what are the forms of direct action to which the

masses of Americans are accustomed? They are the strike,
the boycott, the lynching. In the past, none of these
threatened the State nor showed the formation of class
against class. The task of the communists is to take such a
legal and traditional weapon as the strike and to make of it
a weapon that can change the struggle of the workers from
the defense to an offense against the entire system. This can
be done in the present critical situation in which the
1795
country and the workers find themselves by the
communists' raising the slogan of the "General Strike."
Certainly the conditions of the workers call emphatically
for such drastic action as the general strike. Certainly the
masses of workers are ready to listen to such a call. They
will not be hesitant, for the general strike appears as merely
a variation of a traditional weapon which they have always
used, although, when it is in the form of a general strike,
the strike changes its character from a reformist to a
revolutionary weapon.
It is unwise to attempt to base communist strategy in

reaching the American unemployed on lengthy
explanations that the capitalist system is at fault. Of course,
the Marxist laws of the workings of capitalism should be
explained thoroughly. But, in the present period, matters
can be simplified by showing the workers that
unemployment is similar to an employers' lock-out of the
workers from the factories, a situation with which they are
familiar. Thus the problem of solving unemployment is a
problem of smashing the lock-out of the employers against
the workers from factories which the latter have produced.
And the answer to the lock-out is the demand that the
factories be opened to the unemployed and the warehouses
opened to the hungry.
The present period, then, is pre-eminently one in which the

slogan "General Strike for adequate unemployment
insurance and to open the factories to the unemployed and
the warehouses to the hungry" can be raised with
maximum effect. Such a slogan will begin to raise the
question of workers' control over production and the end of
capitalism, or production for profit. The "General Strike" is
a slogan that more than anything else today can be used to
1796
line up the workers against the capitalists and the State, and
to make them class conscious.
A rapid growth of the State is taking place at the present

time, as part of the transition towards the open formation of
classes. This growth of the State has placed squarely before
the communists the question: What shall be our attitude
towards this extension, especially in such matters as
unemployment projects to provide work relief? The
Stalinists and, with them, the socialists have developed the
following line: 1. We want work on State jobs. 2. The
projects by the State are, on the whole, good and
constructive ones. We demand that the State continue these
projects permanently so long as there are unemployed to
take care of. 3. We are not particular if either the unskilled
or the professionals do not get the prevailing rate of pay . . .
so long as we are put back to work.
Such a policy is wholly at variance with the American

tradition of looking away from the State (a tradition totally
unlike that of the Germans). This State orientation of the
reformists and centrists will help only to pave the way for
fascism. The workers must advocate collectivism, but not
capitalist collectivism. It is not their job to build up the State
apparatus for the capitalist class and to demand to become
permanent hangers on of the State, through project work-
relief jobs or other ignominious occupations.
The communist is in fact negating his own principles when

he demands any jobs under capitalism, since all work under
the present system can tend only to weaken the proletariat
and to strengthen the bourgeoisie and with it, the capitalist
State. We can understand a communist's demanding
unemployment insurance, as a method for the workers to
receive again a portion of what they have produced and to
which they may feel themselves entitled. But to demand a
1797
job is for the wage-slave to demand a perpetuation of his
slavery. To demand a permanent extension of the project
system is to make the workers live as hangers-on of the
State. Actually, the A. F. of L. stated the traditional
American worker's position more nearly than the socialists
or Stalinists, when it declared the workers are not charity
cases to be rehabilitated, when it demanded regular pay for
work on the projects.
Another excellent slogan for the transition period between

American classlessness and open class struggle is the cry:
"Lynch the Lynchers of the Negroes and Poor Toilers!" The
ordinary European, such as the German, would look with
horror on such a slogan as one leading to anarchism, to
disorder and to chaos. The German wants "Ordnung und
Diziplin," even when he is a communist. But it is time the
communists broke from the Germanification of the
movement and learned to speak American.
Lynching is something for every American communist to

understand and not to scold. It has its roots in the
democratic traditions of the country. It is the action of the
mass itself which takes the law directly into its own hands.
It shows a contempt for the regular legal process. It is
something in which millions of Southerners and Westerners
have taken part. It is precisely in this period, when the
masses are discontented, that we must tell them to look, not
to the State or to the regular police or the courts or the law,
for remedies, but to look only to themselves, to take matters
into their own hands. In such a period communists must
point out, not that the process of vengeance or of direct
action of the masses in the street has been incorrect, but that
the lynching has generally been in the wrong direction, that
the masses must stop the lynching of the poor toilers and of
1798
the Negroes and must take action upon their real enemies,
the wealthy employers and financiers.
It may be objected that the victim of the lynching is an

individual and not a system. But the lynching of a judge
who forecloses mortgages or of a ruthless capitalist may
well lead to such clashes with law and order as to bring
home to the masses the necessity of smashing the entire
capitalist State machinery and taking over the power
directly themselves. At any rate, the communists must
come to the American workers, not with patented stock
European formulae, but with the methods and customs
which are native to the country and which are indeed their
own. Originally, in the West, lynching developed because
of the absence of a State apparatus and as a means by which
the settler defended his own against bandits. But what was
originally a classless instrument now easily can take on a
class character and become part of precisely that sort of
technique which will train the American workers to take to
the streets on the way to power.
In this period, too, when the workers are in a transitional

state, having not completely lost their old individualism of
the nineteenth century nor quite taken on the European
ideology of the class struggle, the process of maturing the
American workers must be accelerated by the organization
of the unorganized. It must be realized that the old liberal
methods are outmoded, that only revolutionary methods
will enable the workers to build militant industrial unions
of any sort. In this period fascist germs appear, so that the
period from classlessness to classfulness seems to be a
period also bridging liberalism and fascism. Yet for the
workers it must become a transition period from liberalism
to the struggle for power. In this period, the American
worker does not need to repeat all the parliamentary and
1799
opportunist errors of the worker of Europe. He need not go
through the "Comedy of Errors" of the socialists and
Stalinists. He is ready to follow the communists if they can
show that they understand his problems and can perform
the task of organization.
The organization of the unorganized, the building up of

independent militant industrial unions, this is the
transitional task of the moment in preparation for the
storming of the bastille and the seizing of power. And he
who does not engage to do the one will never be able to
accomplish the other. The present period must be one of
dress rehearsals for the future.
Let us sum up then: the strategy of the genuine communists

in America in the present period will be:
1. To develop the direct action of the masses through

raising the slogans: "General Strike," "Lynch the Lynchers of
the Negroes and Poor Toilers," "Open the Factories to the
Unemployed and the Warehouses to the Hungry,"
"Workers' Control over Production."
2. To build up the revolutionary mass organizations of the

proletariat, particularly their independent militant
industrial unions and mass defense groups.
3. To utilize every form possible by which to move the

workers from the old liberal classless ideology to the
communist ideology of class struggle.
4. To conduct a vigorous struggle against all the out-worn

forms of European socialism or communism, the lack of
initiative of the Germans, the lack of organization of the
French, the idealization of the peasantry of the Russians,
the parliamentarism of the English, and so forth.
1800
Here, then, is a program which a truly American
communist movement will not hesitate to adopt when the
American proletariat has come of age and is ready to take
its rightful place in the world struggle for power.
The victory of communism spells the end of all further

conquest of power. Once the working class has established
its firm control, the whole system of politics, of the rule of
one individual over another, will disappear forever. The
conquest of power, with all its laws, will be no more.
END OF THE BOOK
Footnotes
1. Marx-Engels: Correspondence, No. 42, p. 118.
2. This theme of Americanism as a substitute for socialism

is also developed in Leon Samson's book, Toward a United
Front.
3. To Wolfe the average American worker is "Leftist" while

the Russian working class was already reaching maturity
by 1897. Such romantic opinions go well with his general
point of view. This line of Wolfe is now followed by the
Communist Party to which Communism has now become
twentieth century Americanism, and which has issued
pamphlets praising the Founding Fathers, Abraham
Lincoln and other patriotic heroes.
1801

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Copyright, 1937, by Albert Weisbord

LIBERALISM, ANARCHISM, SYNDICALISM,

Loyal comrade who perished in the class struggle.

I. LIBERALISM'S ROAD TO POWER.................................... 18

II. LIBERALISM’S COMING OF AGE..................................172

III. THE WANE OF LIBERALISM.........................................252

BOOK II. ANARCHISM......................................................... 307

BOOK III: SYNDICALISM......................................................402

I. TRADE UNION REFORMISM...........................................403

BOOK IV: SOCIALISM........................................................... 502

II. THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL..................................629

BOOK V: FASCISM................................................................. 723

II. FASCISM ARRIVES............................................................ 854

BOOK IV: COMMUNISM.................................................... 1112

I. THE ZIG-ZAG CHARACTER OF THE PROLETARIAN

II. THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL UNDER LENIN......1374

The sign-posts of the nineteenth century are gone. At a

In this outline I propose to give an exposition and critique

Such political programs are essentially programs of action.

The present work has many defects of which I am all too

I must express my indebtedness to Vera Buch for her

POLITICS is the science dealing with the State;

At bottom, Democracy, as a type of State, far from being

The term "Dictatorship" may be used in two senses: to

Open or concealed, Class Dictatorship exists in every State.

This conception of the State renders irrelevant what kind of

The various political tendencies struggling for power have

However, it must be borne in mind always that the

Hence, even the conservative, who wants things to remain

Considering society as actually evolving, we may go even

For the purpose of the present analysis, we will say that a

Even here classification gets into difficulties. The most

Reformist movements can be subdivided into two principal

Fascism is considered a reformist movement because

Liberalism is termed a reformist movement of a progressive

Placing both Fascism and Liberalism under the heading of

In the category of revolutionary we place all those

The revolutionary camps, also, have been divided into two

If the State is defined as the instrument of the economically

Precisely such a middle grouping is Radicalism. The term

Radicalism may take the form of a "People's Party." This

Just as Liberalism and Fascism filter down from the

Thus the whole revolutionary movement is unavoidably

Liberalism, Anarchism, Syndicalism, Socialism, Fascism,

1 By classes we mean groups bound together, on the whole,

No classes, no State. The State has its origin in the class

2 .The Athenian City State in Ancient Greece was an anti-

3. The distinction that we make between Government and

4. Absolute Rent has been attacked many times in America.

I. THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS

PARADOXICALLY, throughout history, Liberals have

Liberalism is no eternal spirit generated by immaculate

Liberalism, coinciding with the rise and domination of

The Renaissance could not have been born in the rough,

There money-men first came into prominence. Entrenched

Art and science followed in the wake of the money-men of

This was the time of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and

In everything they did, the Renaissance artists bound

As the Mediterranean began to lose its importance because

The advent of increased trade to the Netherlands

However, by this time not merely commerce was being

With the rise of factories in the sixteenth and seventeenth

It must not be supposed that the Catholic Church had been