Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers

Transcriber's Note:
Second Edition. PRICE TWOPENCE.
( Editor of Justice ; Author of The First of May: International Labour Day ; A Socialist View of the Unemployed Question ; Social-Democracy and the Zollverein ; The Triumph of the Trust under Free Trade ; The Great Strike Movement of 1911 ; and Why Starve? Britain's Food in War—and in Peace. ).
I have been asked to write a brief introduction to the pamphlet which my old friend and comrade H.W. Lee has written on the undercurrent of Bolshevist propaganda going on in this country, of which the recent unauthorised strike outbreaks are outward and visible signs. I do this gladly. Our comrade Lee, through being long associated with the Social-Democratic Federation as its Secretary, and his editorship of Justice during the last five years, has gained a knowledge of International Socialist movements in their many phases which renders his pamphlet both authoritative and reliable.
I hope the pamphlet will have a wide circulation in all the large industrial centres, because I feel convinced that the majority of the rank and file of the wage-earners do not and cannot know what it is that our Bolshevists are striving for. They have not the faintest idea in what direction some of them are being led. The Bolshevists in certain industrial centres want to impose their own authority on the rank and file of the workers, using catch-words for that purpose. If they succeed in this direction they will set to work to undermine the trade union movement of this country, and upset, instead of making use of, the means we at present possess for improving our economic conditions.
Our minds go back to the Leeds Convention, held in June, 1917. The delegates at that Conference declared that they were in favour of Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils being formed in all the large industrial centres of the country. Nothing whatever came of it. But the W.S.C.s then controlling the revolutionary undercurrent in Russia were totally different from the Bolshevist tyranny of to-day, and many of the delegates who formed the W.S.C.s in various parts of Russia after the Revolution have been imprisoned or shot because they opposed the domination of Lenin and Trotzky.