Letters to Judd, an American Workingman

by Upton Sinclair

My dear Judd:

The social revolution has already happened over one-sixth of the earth’s surface, and 140,000,000 people are now living in a working class world. Whatever may be our point of view, we cannot afford to misunderstand what has happened in Russia, for capitalism has made the world one, and our efforts to shut ourselves up in our own country are bound to fail.

The Russian revolution came as the result of a breakdown in the midst of war. The great empire was rotten with graft, and after three years of fighting, had got to a state where it could no longer keep its railways going, or feed the people in its cities. With starvation actually upon them, the soldiers, sailors and workers formed unions, and in October, 1917, they overthrew the government of the Tsar, and formed a new government—and gave world capitalism the most painful shock of its career.

There have been slave revolts all through history, but always blind and futile, put down with hideous slaughter. But here in the Russian revolution appeared a new thing; the control was seized by a group of men who had been trained in Western ideas, and had a theory of revolutions, and of working-class mastery of society. These men knew what they wanted, and they tried their plan, and it worked—at least to the extent that they are still in power, in spite of two years of war waged upon them by the whole capitalist world, and six more years of financial blockade, plus the greatest campaign of falsehood in all history.

Who were these men? They call themselves Marxians, and apply the adjective “scientific” to themselves, because they think they have studied the capitalist system—the laws of its growth and decay, the forces which are destined to overthrow it, and the kind of society these new forces will establish. History, says Marx, is a series of class struggles, and the end is the victory of the working class, and the beginning of a society in which there are no classes, for the reason that nobody lives by exploiting anybody else. “Workers of all countries, unite,” runs the slogan. “You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to gain.”

The Marxian theory is, in brief, that the development of large-scale capitalism brings the workers into factories, where they toil for the benefit of absentee owners whom they never see; it subjects them to low wages, long hours and uncertainty of employment, and forces them to organize and fight for better conditions. In this fight they develop “class consciousness,” and in the end they are forced by capitalist breakdown to revolt, and take possession of the factories, and run them for the benefit of the workers and not of the masters.

They had a chance to try it in Russia, and they did so; the question of what they have accomplished is the most fiercely debated of all questions today. To help us get it straight, understand first, that they had to do what they did. In other countries—America, England, France, Germany, Austria—the middle class took charge of the revolutions; but in Russia there was practically no middle class, it was the workers or chaos. And second, they took over a busted machine, a country in collapse after three years of modern war, the most destructive of all things known this side of hell. And third, they had to face years of invasion from Europe, America and Japan, fighting on 26 fronts at once; and at the same time civil war, and a blockade, and financial boycott, and world propaganda, besides two successive years of famine, something which comes every so often in Russia—caused by drought, and not by revolutions.

In spite of all this, Soviet Russia confronts its world of enemies, eight years young, and proud and confident. It has restored its agriculture to the pre-war standard, and its industry to nearly 80 per cent of this standard, with the certainty of passing it in 1926 or 1927 if peace is maintained. It has turned one-sixth of the earth’s surface from a militarist empire into a federated group of commonwealths, governed under a new system, in which the voters are classified according to their occupations. It has trained a new generation of young workers, and taken some five hundred thousand of them into its governing party. It has taught millions of men and women to read and write, including everybody in its army, and nearly everybody in its industries. It would seem that all this entitles the new system to study, and to fair play in the field of thought.

But Russia is not democratic; so they tell you, Judd—and you are strong for democracy. Well, I also share that faith; but if, as time goes on, the workers of the world discover that democracy means inequality such as we have here in America, while the “dictatorship of the proletariat” means cultural freedom for the workers and a swiftly spreading plenty for all—well, Judd, we advocates of democracy will have a hard time in debates! But the truth is that we have in America political democracy alongside industrial autocracy; and these two are making a war upon each other, and we shall have to choose whether our country is to become a capitalist empire or an industrial republic.

Russia has never had democracy, nor even the ideal of it, except among a few dreamers. Less than seventy-five years ago its farm population were all serfs, bound to the soil. Many of its outlying peoples are semi-barbarous tribes. Its factories are few and at the time of the world war they were financed by foreign capital, and run by foreigners. There came this devastating war, and then a breakdown; and to expect those who took control to set up at once such a democratic system as we know in America, is to be absurd. Many who talk about it are dishonest, for they know that if their own parties get control, they will hold it by exactly the same means as the Bolsheviks—that is, by force.