138 THE CLASS STRUGGLE CURRENT AFFAIRS 139 But even the support of the Gompers machine would not alter the certainty that the firm Spargo, Russell Co. will take its place in the long list of American reform parties that are constantly springing up out of our fertile American soil, giving place, after a short period of luxuriant bloom, to the next in order. It can never become the permanent political expression, the representative of the American proletariat.
We have but one regret: that this split has come in the midst of the war, making a clear cut division practically impossible.
Owing to the war situation, many, who would otherwise have joined Spargo Co. will remain in the Socialist Party, although their sympathies in general incline them toward the new organization because for one reason or another they cannot adopt its war policy. Members who in St. Louis stood with Spargo in all questions but in that of the war will remain with us, though they belong to him and his following. The re orientation that the Spargo group proposes to undertake will only take place, all along the line, after the war is over and peace has been declared.
peared in the American press was printed in The New International of June 30, consisting of a lecture on The Russian Revolution that Lenin delivered in Switzerland shortly before his departure for Russia. One passage in this lecture completely annihilates the charge of Anarchist hurled at Lenin. As to the revolutionary organization and its task, the conquest of the power of the State and militarism: From the praxis of the French Commune of 1871, Marx shows that the working class cannot simply take over the governmental machinery as built by the bourgeoisie, and use this machinery for its own purposes.
The proletariat must break down this machinery, And this has been either concealed or denied by the opportunists. But it is the most valuable lesson of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Revolution in Russia of 1905. The difference between us and the anarchists is, that we admit the State is a necessity in the development of our Revolution.
The difference with the opportunists and the Kautsky disciples is that we claim we do not need the Bourgeois State machinery as completed in the democratic bourgeois republics, but the direct power of armed and organized workers. Such is the State we need. Such was the character of the Commune of 1871 and of the Council of Workmen and Soldiers of 1905 and 1917. On this basis we build.
Lenin programme was to initiate the second period of the Revolution, from the revolt against the Czarism into the revolt against the Bourgeoisie, against the Imperialistic war.
programme is the programme of the Central Committee of the in Russia. Democratic Republic; confiscation of the landed estates of the nobility in favor of the peasants; immediate preparations for peace negotiations: Peace negotiations should not be carried on by and with Bourgeois governments, but with the proletariat in each of the warring countries. He is absolutely opposed to the Social Patriot Kerensky, and he differs from Tscheidse and his group on the policy of immediate tactics. Tscheidse and his friends are drifting to and fro, which is reflected in the opinions of the Times and the Tenips: alternately The Attitude of Lenin His The American press has malignantly and persistently slandered the Russian Revolutionary democracy, but perhaps no other factor has been more slandered than our comrade Lenin and the group he represents.
Lenin has been accused of being in favor of a separate peace with Germany; he has been stigmatized as an anarchist; even his private life has been foully maligned. And, strange to say, the New York Call has itself indulged in slanders against Lenin. day or two after the recent elections in Petrograd the Call characterized Lenin and his group as Anarchistic, and generally indulged in the cheap sneers that are the Call editorial characteristic. This performance is all the more discreditable in that no authentic statement of Lenin position had up to that time been received in this country. It was a judgment based on prejudice, not on fact.
The first authentic statement of Lenin view that has ap