The Red Conspiracy

by Joseph J. Mereto

THE FREE-FOR-ALL FIGHT BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND LEFT WINGS

Emanuel Blumstein, a member of the Right Wing, in a letter published in "The Call," April 9, 1919, bitterly complained against the tactics of the Left Wingers--in trying to wrest control of the Socialist Party from the "Old Guard" of Berger and Hillquit, which had acquired the habit of domination:

"The reason that the so-called Left Wingers are concentrating at meetings, making motions to recall delegates, and carry their motions through, is very simple. Anyone who attends the meetings can easily understand it. They shout down every honest thinking Socialist with slurs and abuse. They make it so intolerable that the meeting hall appears to be, instead of a Socialist meeting, a room frequented by rowdies of all types and descriptions. In this way they drive the most active Comrades out of the meeting hall, as these Comrades get disgusted with the tactics pursued and leave the meeting. Then they drag the meeting on to all hours of the night until those left, having no opposition, carry all their destructive actions through, and this they call democratic decision for the Comrades of the branch--deciding the policies for them."

Morris Zucker, a member of the Left Wing, defends his faction in a letter that appeared in "The Call," New York, April 11, 1919:

"In regard to Lee's objection that the Left Wing may bring about a premature revolt, the reply is that no real revolution, no social revolution, is ever manufactured. It must be spontaneous. It must be real. It must be an overwhelming, impulsive demonstration of the popular will. Revolutions may be manipulated but not manufactured. Trotzky shows in his 'From October to Brest-Litovsk' that the Bolshevist Revolution was not manufactured.

"The problem is to manipulate the revolution, to guide it, to counsel it. And herein lies the importance of proper Socialist education, of knowledge and understanding, and from these of proper Socialist tactics.

"The Left Wing believes it has the proper program. And it wants the Socialist Party to adopt its program. The Left Wing not only preaches revolutionary Socialism, it believes that the economic and social forces that have made half Europe Socialist, and threaten momentarily to engulf the other half are at work in America also. It believes that a revolutionary outbreak in America is not a matter of the far and distant future. And it desires to make that revolution as easy and as successful as it can possibly be. For that reason the Left Wing has evolved its manifesto and program, and now calls upon the Socialist Party to discuss it, perfect it, and adopt it."

In April, 1919, the New York State Committee of the Socialist Party, by a vote of 24 against 17, resolved that it was "definitely opposed to the organization calling itself the Left Wing section of the Socialist Party, and to any group within the party organized for the same or similar purpose;" and it instructed "its executive committee to revoke the charter of any local affiliated with any such organization or that permits its subdivision or members to be affiliated."

"The Call," April 23, 1919, publishes a long letter from F. Basky in which he defends the principles of the Left Wing and attacks the New York State Committee for the above resolutions. We quote a part:

"Aside of these arguments the Left Wing is not a counter-organization to the Socialist Party. On the contrary, it is the only active force to save the party from going into decay and finally to the scrap heap as a tool not adapted to the task. If the Left Wing is the party, then and only then can we answer the criticism of the syndicalist that a political party is nothing else but a vote-catching machinery for middle-class politicians. If the principles enunciated in the manifesto will be the principles of the party, then it will enjoy the confidence of those who, through their bitter experience realized the fallacies of the Second International, led and dominated by the social-patriots, reformists of the German Social Democratic Party. If we follow the line of uncompromising revolutionary activity indicated by the Left Wingers, then we can rest assured that the party will be cleared of the would-be Scheidemanns, Eberts, Kerenskys, Brantenburgs, and the rest of the traitors of our principles and our class.

"They will be eliminated anyway. The fight is on. And I welcome the attack of the state committee. We at least know some of those we would have to face in the critical hour. Might as well fight it out now; whether they or the Left Wing represents the party. Let us find out right now who is with us and who is against us."

"The Call," April 30, 1919, published a resolution then recently passed by the Socialist Party of Essex County, New Jersey, which had adopted the Left Wing program. Part of the resolution is hereby quoted:

"While the need for new orientation is clearly apparent, there is an element within the party which is either unwilling or unable to adjust itself to the new world conditions and the new tactics required by these conditions. Unfortunately, this element has controlled the party national executive committee and the party machinery, with the consequence that the national organization, in place of furnishing the leadership and urging the locals forward to take advantage of the present world crisis in building up the proletariat movement, has conspicuously lagged behind."

By the early part of May, 1919, conditions in the Socialist Party became so serious that the Executive Committee of Local New York, according to "The Call," May 8, 1919, issued the following statement on the Left Wing:

"To the Members of Local New York:

"Comrades.--A critical situation has arisen within Local New York. Your executive committee is compelled to take unusual and vigorous measures to combat the disruptive efforts of an internal faction which seeks to dominate the party by undemocratic and unsocialistic methods. The executive committee addresses itself to you, the membership, to explain the gravity of the crisis and to urge your support in saving the organization which has been built up with so much sacrifice by thousands of Comrades.

"The very existence of the party is at stake--its existence as the democratically self-governed party of the working class, laboring to awaken and educate the proletarian masses and to express their class interests on the political field....

"This organization, i.e., the Left Wing, is not open to all party members, nor even to all who accept the ideas set forth in its manifesto and program. Only such persons are admitted as can be counted on to set the authority of the 'Left Wing Section' above that of the party itself. Its meetings are held in secret, and their business is that of a permanent closed caucus to lay plans for controlling the action of the party branches and committees, and of obstructing their activities when it cannot control them.

"Even within the 'Left Wing Section' itself democratic methods are not used. The admission of members, the choice of delegates to Left Wing conferences, and the framing of instructions to those delegates are intrusted to committees composing an inner circle. All members and adherents of the 'Left Wing Section' are called upon in their action as party members and as members of party committees, to give explicit obedience to orders issued by the inner circle. A sufficient sample of this is the appointment of a 'steering committee' for the Left Wingers in the central committee of the local, and the issuance of instructions to delegates affiliated with that section as follows:

"'In all matters involving Left Wing tactics vote as a unit with the steering committee. Do not make motions, ask for divisions, further divisions, roll call, and appeals from the chair. The steering committee will attend to that.'

"The Left Wing Section has not been able to command a majority in the central committee, notwithstanding the drastic methods used in their attempt to capture it. Unable to control they have practised systematic obstruction, and have openly declared that they will not permit the central committee to function so long as their group is in the minority there. Under the direction of their steering committee, the time is consumed with every species of parliamentary delay, with the aim and effect of preventing the central committee from transacting business and carrying on the normal work of the party. These dilatory tactics are supplemented by personal abuse directed against those who will not truckle to the 'Left Wing,' by insults and provocatory threats, and when necessary, by the creation of an uproar designed to attract the attention of the police and to break up the sessions....

"The Executive Committee has heretofore decided not to have a meeting of the central committee on May 13, and has appointed a committee to reorganize Local New York. This committee will begin with such branches as are affiliated with the 'Left Wing Section.' No one will be excluded because of his opinions, but no one can retain a double membership in the party and the so-called 'Left Wing Section.'"

By about the middle of May, 1919, the Left Wing program had been adopted by the Socialist Party in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Kings and Queens Counties, N. Y., and Essex County, N. J. In Hudson County, N. J., the county committee referred it favorably to all the branches, and at the end of the month the New Jersey Convention of the party adopted it. In Chicago, J. Louis Engdahl, sentenced^[C] to twenty years in Leavenworth prison, was reported to have been ousted from the organization, having been considered too conservative by the millionaire Socialist, William Bross Lloyd, and the latter's friends who controlled the Communist Propaganda League, the Left Wing faction of the local organization.

"The Call," May 8, 1919, publishes an interesting letter from one of its correspondents:

"It is not so much a question as to Left or Right Wing domination as it is a question of whether we are to have a united or divided party.

"I am not a Centrist, if that means to be in the center of the party as it is today. We must move to the Left--that is understood by all thinking, class-conscious Comrades, but we must move together, not, perhaps, as far as some of the hot-heads would like to have us--they fail to understand what an American Socialist Party should be, for they seem to think of New York City as the whole thing. If they could take a trip to Chicago and back they might find themselves moving toward the Right.

"No one wants to be where the stick-in-the-mud Rights are, either--that is, no one except them. The majority of us see the need for revolutionizing the party. What we don't see is any necessity of disrupting the party in the process. The master class would like to see that; in fact, they have been egging us on to fight among ourselves for the last two or three years, and we have blindly done the very thing that they want most we should do. They are laughing in their sleeves at us--poor boobs that we are."

On May 15, 1919, following the open fight against the Left Wing inaugurated by the New York State Committee and its Executive Committee, the Left Wing Locals of Boston, Cleveland and New York joined in a call for a National Conference of the Left Wing to convene in New York on June 21. This call opened with the following paragraph:

"The international situation and the crisis in the American Socialist Party; the sabotage the party bureaucracy has practised on the emergency national convention; the N. E. C. [National Executive Committee] aligning our party with the social-patriots at Berne, with the Congress of the Great Betrayal; the necessity of reconstructing our policy in accord with revolutionary events--all this and more, makes it necessary that the revolutionary forces in the Socialist Party get together for counsel and action."

Apparently so many bitter letters were sent to "The Call" that it found it expedient to publish the following notice in its edition of May 16, 1919:

"No letters dealing in personalities of any kind will be published in this column. All views and all arguments set forth must be confined strictly to the principles and tactics either defended or attacked. This ruling is by the unanimous vote of the Board of Managers of 'The Call.'"

Morris Hillquit, member of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party till September, 1919, and one of the principle leaders of the Right, published in his paper, "The Call," May 21, 1919, a long article in large type, covering half of the editorial page, under the caption, "The Socialist Task and Outlook." After speaking of the gloomy conditions in the Socialist Party abroad, he thus comments on conditions in the American branch of the international organization:

"All the more unfortunate is it that the energies of the Socialist Party should at this time be dissipated in acrimonious and fruitless controversies brought on by the self-styled Left Wing movement. I am one of the last men in the party to ignore or misunderstand the sound revolutionary impulse which animates the rank and file of this new movement, but the specific form and direction which it has assumed, its program and tactics, spell disaster to our movement. I am opposed to it, not because it is too radical, but because it is essentially reactionary and non-Socialistic; not because it would lead us too far, but because it would lead us nowhere. To prate about the dictatorship of the proletariat and of workers' Soviets in the United States at this time is to deflect the Socialist propaganda from its realistic basis, and to advocate the abolition of all social reform planks in the party platform means to abandon the concrete class struggle as it presents itself from day to day.

"The Left Wing movement, as I see it, is a purely emotional reflex of the situation in Russia. The cardinal vice of the movement is that it started as a wing, i.e., as a schismatic and disintegrating movement. Proceeding on the arbitrary assumption that they were the Left, the ingenuous leaders of the movement had to discover a Right, and since the European classification would not be fully reproduced without a Center, they also were bound to locate a center in the Socialist movement of America.^[D] What matters it to our imaginative Left Wing leaders that the Socialist Party of America as a whole has stood in the forefront of Socialist radicalism ever since the outbreak of the war, that many of its officers and leaders have exposed their lives and liberties to imminent peril in defense of the principles of international Socialism, they are Right Wingers and Centrists because the exigencies of the Left Wing require it. The Left Wing movement is a sort of burlesque on the Russian revolution. Its leaders do not want to convert their Comrades in the party. They must capture and establish a sort of dictatorship of the proletariat(?) within the party. Hence the creation of their dual organization as a kind of Soviet, and their refusal to cooperate with the aforesaid stage Centrists and Right Wingers.

"But the performance is too sad to be amusing. It seems perfectly clear that, so long as this movement persists in the party, the latter's activity will be wholly taken up by mutual quarrels and recriminations. Neither wing will have any time for the propaganda of Socialism. There is, as far as I can see, but one remedy. It would be futile to preach reconciliation and union where antagonism runs so high. Let the Comrades on both sides do the next best thing. Let them separate, honestly, freely and without rancor. Let each side organize and work in its own way, and make such contribution to the Socialist movement in America as it can. Better a hundred times to have two numerically small Socialist organizations, each homogeneous and harmonious within itself, than to have one big party torn by dissensions and squabbles, an impotent colossus on feet of clay. The time for action is near. Let us clear the decks."

By the end of May, 1919, the Left Wing fight had become so serious that the National Executive Committee revoked the charter of the Socialist Party in Michigan and suspended the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukranian, Lettish, Polish, South Slavic and Hungarian branches, expelling or suspending considerably over 25,000 members out of a total dues-paying membership of about 100,000.

"The Ohio Socialist," the party organ of Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and New Mexico, in its issue of June 4, 1919, comments as follows on the expulsions:

"Violating every principle of fair play and square dealing and disregarding every constitutional provision, the National Executive Committee at its session in Chicago, May 24 to 30, expelled without a trial the state organization of the Socialist Party of Michigan, constituting about 6,000 members, suspended the Russian, Lithuanian, Lettish, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian and South Slavic Federations of the party, constituting more than 30,000 members, and worst of all--and let it be said to their everlasting shame--are autocratically holding up the national membership referendum for the election of a new National Executive Committee, International Delegates, International Secretary, and the holding of a national convention.

"Never before in the party's history have Socialist Party officials been so lost to all sense of decency and square dealing. A wilful group of seven members of the National Executive Committee usurped power which the constitution does not grant them and which the Socialist Party membership never intended any servants of the party to have. This despotic group of seven did not act as the party's servants, but as dictators and tyrants to defeat the expressed will of the party membership and to perpetuate itself in office.

"Unbelievable as it may seem, seven officials of the party had the monumental effrontery to assume the right to expel and suspend 40,000 members. Think of it. That such a dastardly deed should ever be perpetrated upon the rank and file of our organization is almost beyond comprehension. And yet it was done--it was done by those whom you elected to serve you. Instead they are betraying you, disrupting the organization....

"The intention of these autocrats is plain as daylight. Like a tidal wave, the demand for a Socialism which stands true to the working class at all times has swept the party. The thousands of Comrades who are sincerely working to win the party to a more revolutionary position are known to the Left Wing. This Left Wing understands clearly that the Scheidemann brand of Socialism stands for the betrayal and defeat of the working class and that only the Socialism of Liebknecht and Lenine has within it the potentialities of victory and success....

"There was no trial, no opportunity for defense offered to the Michigan Comrades. A motion to allow Michigan a chance to interpret their action was voted down. The right to appear at a trial was denied....

"Expulsion meant throwing out over three thousand votes. On with the expulsion of Michigan....

"But the expulsion of Michigan was apparently not sufficient to decide the elections in favor of the reactionary moderates. At a subsequent session, accordingly, it was decided to destroy the whole election.

"The National Executive Committee instructed the secretary not to tabulate the vote or make it public. They nullified the referendum vote, destroyed the will of the membership in order to retain control. Most of these National Executive Committee members are out for re-election, are interested parties, knowing that the referendum defeated them for re-election, are now, by this action, perpetuating themselves in office....

"The National Executive Committee's action is equivalent to stealing the elections. The party must act sternly to rebuke this official chicanery.

"After this betrayal of the party the despotic seven seemed to fear the results of the National Convention, which has been called for August 30. A way had to be devised to control the convention. Happy thought: Suspend the federations that have endorsed the Left Wing, and we are safe. Another caucus held. Result: Suspension of the Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Lettish and South Slavic Federations from the Socialist Party--over thirty thousand members. A plain attempt to assure the election of reactionary delegates to the National Convention to approve the abominable actions of the National Executive Committee majority....

"In spite of all these dirty tactics the little group of reactionary autocrats did not feel themselves secure. They still fear that they will not be able to control the coming National Convention. So they formed a corporation, nearly all the directors of which are of the same stamp as the wilful seven, and into the hands of these directors is to be placed the entire property of the Socialist Party, including the new headquarters building upon which $10,000 has been paid. These directors cannot be recalled by the party membership as long as they retain membership in the party, and only four, a minority, can be removed in three years' time....

"They want the Left Wing to desert the party. They want us to leave the party machinery in their hands. They will be disappointed in this. We know their game. We shall not play into their hands. We will not quit. Every Left Winger will work night and day for the reinstatement of the nearly 40,000 members whom the reactionaries are trying to sever from the party in violation of the party's constitution. Every radical will work with might and main to get new members and build, build the Left Wing and the party. Every revolutionist will stick until victory is ours and the Socialist Party is completely won for revolutionary Socialism."

Commenting on the referendum for a new National Executive Committee "The Revolutionary Age" in its May 24, 1919, issue says:

"The moderates claim that the Left Wing represents only a small clique in the party: why, then, not allow the membership to make its decision through the referendum? Why disfranchise the revolutionary Socialists? Why steal votes away from the Left Wing candidates? These desperate tactics are understandable only on the theory that the moderates feel that the revolutionary Socialists are a majority, that they will meet defeat in the referendum votes and revolutionary Socialism will conquer the party."

"The Revolutionary Age," July 12, 1919, informs us that the Massachusetts Comrades were also expelled and that others in other States were threatened:

"Another State gone. Massachusetts is expelled for adopting the Left Wing program at its State Convention and for refusing to recognize the National Executive Committee's act of suspending the Federations. For this latter offense, Pennsylvania is now threatened with excommunication, and very likely Ohio will meet the same sad fate.

"It is a race against time. Will there be anything left for the rump N. E. C. to expel by August 30th?"

Relative to the success of the Left Wing in electing its members to the new National Executive Committee of fifteen, and to the meeting of this new committee, "The Revolutionary Age," July 19, 1919, comments as follows:

"The election of Comrades Fraina, Hourwich, Harwood, Prevey, Ruthenberg, Lloyd, Keracher, Batt, Hogan, Millis, Nagle, Katterfeld, Wicks and Herman appears now to be certain, while there is still a question about the third choice in the First District, Comrade Lindgren leading without the New York vote.

"There is no question, but that the final tally of the party elections is available at the National Office, but according to the action of the National Executive Committee this tally will not be made known till August 30. Meanwhile the State secretaries have published enough of the votes to leave no question of the outcome, except as above indicated....

"According to the party law the new N. E. C. is entitled to control beginning July 1st....

"There can be no legality by which a defunct Executive Committee can keep the newly elected committee from taking office. By such 'constitutionality' the old body could perpetuate itself indefinitely, let the members vote as they like. Stopping referendums is the method chosen to make sure that the members consent."

Accusations and recriminations, charges and counter-charges, continued to fly back and forth between the two Wings, as the secretaries proceeded with the work of expulsion or suspension, carrying out the savage instructions of the Right Wing majority of the National Executive Committee, where Victor L. Berger, Morris Hillquit and Seymour Stedman were the dominating leaders. On the side of the Lefts little more could be done than to set up a howl against the "dictatorship of the proletariat" within the party which forced them to taste the medicine they would have preferred to prescribe for the rest of the country.

During the summer the Left Wing movement was hastened on, dragging the Right Wing after it, by the publication in the radical papers of America of the manifesto issued in Moscow in March, 1919, by the Third or Communistic International in session there. Max Eastman, a Left Wing leader, in an article on "The New International" in "The Liberator," July, 1919, a Left Wing magazine, thus describes the Bolshevik International:

"The Communist International, which met at Moscow on March 2d, 1919, comprised thirty-two delegates with full power to act, representing parties or groups in Germany, Russia, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, Bulgaria, Rumania, Finland, Ukrainia, Esthonia, Armenia, delegates from the 'Union of Socialists of Eastern Countries,' from the labor organizations of Germans in Russia, and from the Balkan 'Union of Revolutionary Socialists.'

"There were also present representatives with consultative powers from parties and groups in Switzerland, Holland, Bohemia, Jugo-Slavia, France, Great Britain, Turkey, Turkestan, Persia, Corea, China, and the United States (S. J. Rutgers, of the Socialist Propaganda League, now merged with the Left Wing section of the Socialist Party). A letter was read from Comrade Loriot, the leader of the Left Wing section of the French Party, repudiating the Berne Congress of the Second International.

"The Russian Communist Party was represented by Comrades Lenine, Trotzky, Zinoviev, Kukharin and Stalin. This party contains many millions of organized class-conscious Socialists, more, perhaps, than are to be found in all the rest of the world."

The Communist Manifesto of 1919, issued by this Moscow International, became the test of fellowship among the simon-pure "Reds" the world over, and since the campaign of the Left Wing grew into an attempt to force the Socialist Party of America to adopt this Bolshevik program, we here quote the salient parts of the Moscow Manifesto from the article by Eastman mentioned above:

"To the proletariat of all countries!

"Seventy-two years have gone by since the Communist Party of the World proclaimed its program in the form of the Manifesto written by the great teachers of the proletarian revolution, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels....

"We Communists, representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of the different countries of Europe, America and Asia, assembled in Soviet Moscow, feel and consider ourselves followers and fulfillers of the program proclaimed seventy-two years ago. It is our task now to sum up the practical revolutionary experience of the working class, to cleanse the movement of its admixtures of opportunism and social patriotism, and to gather together the forces of all the true revolutionary proletarian parties in order to further and hasten the complete victory of the Communist revolution.

"The opportunists who, before the war, exhorted the workers, in the name of the gradual transition into Socialism, to be temperate; who, during the war, asked for submission in the name of 'civil peace' and defense of the Fatherland, now again demand of the workers self-abnegation to overcome the terrible consequences of the war. If this preaching were listened to by the workers, Capitalism would build out of the bones of several generations a new and still more formidable structure, leading to a new and inevitable world war. Fortunately for humanity, this is no longer possible....

"Only the Proletarian Dictatorship, which recognizes neither inherited privileges nor rights of property, but which arises from the needs of the hungering masses, can shorten the period of the present crisis; and for this purpose it mobilizes all materials and forces, introduces the universal duty to labor, establish the regime of industrial discipline, thus to heal in the course of a few years the open wounds caused by the war and also to raise humanity to new undreamed-of heights.

"The whole bourgeois world accuses the Communists of destroying liberties and political democracy. This is not true. Having come into power the proletariat only asserts the absolute impossibility of applying the methods of bourgeois democracy, and it creates the conditions and forms of a higher working class democracy....

"The peasant of Bavaria and Baden who does not look beyond his church spire, the small French wine-grower who has been ruined by the adulterations practiced by the big capitalists, the small farmer of America plundered and betrayed by bankers and legislators--all these social ranks which have been shoved aside from the main road of development by Capitalism, are called on paper by the regime of political democracy to the administration of the State. In reality, however, the finance-oligarchy decides all important questions which determine the destinies of nations behind the back of parliamentary democracy....

"The proletarian State, like every State, is an organ of suppression, but it arrays itself against the enemies of the working class. It aims to break the opposition of the despoilers of labor, who are using every means in a desperate effort to stifle the revolution in blood, and to make impossible further opposition. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which gives it the favored position in the community, is only a provisional institution. As the opposition of the Bourgeoisie is broken, as it is expropriated and gradually absorbed into the working groups, the proletarian dictatorship disappears, until finally the State dies and there are no more class distinctions....

"In an empire of destruction where not only the means of production and transportation, but also the institutions of political democracy have become bloody ruins, the proletariat must create its own forms, to serve above all as a bond of unity for the working class and to enable it to accomplish a revolutionary intervention in the further development of mankind. Such apparatus is represented in the Workmen's Councils. The old parties, the old unions, have proved incapable, in person of their leaders, to understand, much less to carry out the task which the new epoch presents to them. The proletariat has created a new institution which embraces the entire working class without distinction of vocation or political maturity, an elastic form of organization capable of continually renewing itself, expanding, and of drawing into itself ever new elements, ready to open its doors to the working groups of city and village which are near to the proletariat. This indispensable autonomous organization of the working class in the present struggle and in the future conquests of different lands, tests the proletariat and constitutes the greatest inspiration and the mightiest weapon of the proletariat of our time. Wherever the masses are awakened to consciousness, Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Councils will be formed....

"The outcry of the bourgeois world against the civil war and the red terror is the most colossal hypocrisy of which the history of political struggles can boast. There would be no civil war if the exploiters who have carried mankind to the very brink of ruin had not prevented every forward step of the laboring masses, if they had not instigated plots and murders and called to their aid armed help from outside to maintain or restore their predatory privileges. Civil war is forced upon the laboring classes by their arch-enemies. The working class must answer blow for blow, if it will not renounce its own object and its own future which is, at the same time, the future of all humanity.

"The Communist parties, far from conjuring up civil war artificially, rather strive to shorten its duration as much as possible--in case it has become an iron necessity--to minimize the number of its victims, and, above all, to secure victory for the proletariat. This makes necessary the disarming of the bourgeoisie at the proper time, the arming of the laborer, and the formation of a communist army as the protector of the rule of the proletariat and the inviolability of the social structure. Such is the Red Army of Soviet Russia which arose to protect the achievements of the working class against every assault from within or without. The Soviet Army is inseparable from the Soviet State.

"Seizure of political power by the proletariat means destruction of the political power of the bourgeoisie. The organized power of the bourgeoisie is in the civil State, with its capitalistic army under control of bourgeoisie-junker officers, its police and gendarmes, jailers and judges, its priests, government officials, etc. Conquest of the political power means not merely a change in the personnel of ministries, but annihilation of the enemy's apparatus of government; disarmament of the bourgeoisie of the counter-revolutionary officers, of the White Guard; arming of the proletariat, the revolutionary soldiers, the Red Guard of workingmen; displacement of all bourgeois judges and organization of proletarian courts; elimination of control by reactionary government officials and substitution of new organs of management of the proletariat.... Not until the proletariat has achieved this victory and broken the resistance of the bourgeoisie can the former enemies of the new order be made useful, by bringing them under control of the Communist system and gradually bringing them into accord with its work....

"The Dictatorship of the Proletariat does not in any way call for partition of the means of production and exchange; rather, on the contrary, its aim is further to centralize the forces of production and to subject all of production to a systematic plan. As the first steps--socialization of the great banks which now control production; the taking over by the power of the proletariat of all government-controlled economic utilities; the transferring of all communal enterprises; the socializing of the syndicated and trustified units of production, as well as all other branches of production in which the degree of concentration and centralization of capital makes this technically practicable; the socializing of agricultural estates and their conversion into co-operative establishments....

"As far as smaller enterprises are concerned, the proletariat must gradually unite them, according to the degree of their importance. It must be particularly emphasized that small properties will in no way be expropriated and that small property owners who are not exploiters of labor will not be forcibly dispossessed....

"The task of the Proletarian Dictatorship in the economic field can only be fulfilled to the extent that the proletariat is enabled to create centralized organs of management and to institute workers' control. To this end it must make use of its mass organizations which are in closest relation to the process of production....

"As in the field of production, so also in the field of distribution, all qualified technicians and specialists are to be made use of, provided their political resistance is broken and they are still capable of adapting themselves, not to the service of capital, but to the new system of production.... Besides expropriating the factories, mines, estates, etc., the proletariat must also abolish the exploitation of the people by capitalistic landlords, transfer the large mansions to the local workers' councils, and move the working people into the bourgeois dwellings....

"The capitalistic criminals asserted at the beginning of the World War that it was only in defense of the common Fatherland. But soon German Imperialism revealed its real brigand character by bloody deeds in Russia, in the Ukraine and Finland. Now the Entente States unmask themselves as world despoilers and murderers of the proletariat....

"Indescribable is the White Terror of the bourgeois cannibals. Incalculable are the sacrifices of the working class. Their best--Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg--they have lost. Against this the proletariat must defend itself, defend at any price. The Communist International calls the whole world proletariat to this final struggle.

"Down with the imperialistic conspiracy of capital!

"Long live the International Republic of the Proletarian Councils!"

As will be seen when we study the I. W. W., the above is the program of the world-wide conspiracy of a single class, a minority of society, to carry out the cynical purpose of I. W. W.'ism--to "take possession of the earth and the machinery of production."

Morris Hillquit, a Right Wing leader of the Socialist Party of America, declared that "The Communist Congress of Moscow made the mistake of attempting a sort of dictatorship of the Russian proletariat in the Socialist International and was conspicuously inept and unhappy in the choice of certain allies and in the exclusion of others."^[E]

Quoting this, Max Eastman, in the article from which we have taken so much, makes the following reply:

"How can he expect them to be any more indefinite and generous in their invitation than they were? In every country where there was a doubt as to what groups had stood true to the revolutionary principle and the principle of Internationalism, they so indicated the alignment as to leave every Socialist free to consider himself their ally who seriously and courageously desired to. This was what they did in America. The S. L. P. (Socialist Labor Party), the Socialist Propaganda League, the I. W. W. and in the Socialist Party 'the followers of Debs!' Could they in a brief word open the door wider to American Socialists, unless they wished to admit prominent members of the Socialist Party who were known to have repudiated them, as Berger did, declaring his solidarity with the Mensheviks who were waging war on them?"