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OCTOBER 15, 1921 125 124 THE WORKERS COUNCIL OCTOBER 15, 1921 THE WORKERS COUNCIL The Socialist Party and Soviet Russia tho the welfare of thousands of other human beings tion. There is little historical or psychological basis is involved.
for this viewpoint.
Crimes of Capitalist Dictatorship In the first place, the mere fact that a man is a workman does not make him a revolutionist. If he The Russian Revolution encountered the full force of the capitalist dictatorship. The Russan bourgeoisie than the capitalists. An Ulster workman often sides is a Pole, he may quite possibly hate the Jews more first attempted to crush the workers revolt by resortwith the Protestant employer, rather than with his ing to sabotage, closing factories, disorganizing transCatholic fellow workers.
port, trying in every way to create a scarcity of goods which would discredit the Soviets in the eyes of the Now a revolution does not take place because a majority of the people are converted to some definite masses.
When these tactics failed they attempted to overscheme of social and political reorganization.
throw the Soviet government by armed insurrection, It comes because the government has broken down with the aid of Tsarist generals and adventurers like so completely that it has not only lost the power Alexiev, Krasnov and Kaledin.
to supply the most elementary necessities of life to After the native Russian brand of counter revothe masses, but also the control of the armed forces lution had broken down, the Allied capitalist governwhich ordinarily sustain it.
ments took a hand in the game. They revived the revolution is made by the unconscious majority moribund civil war by instigating the Czecho Slovaks which is primarily moved by a blind, fierce deterto make a treacherous and unprovoked attack upon mination to sweep away an intolerable existing order; the Soviets; they sent troops to Vladivostok, Archbut it is preserved and given form and direction by angel and Odessa; they supplied arms and other the efforts of the conscious minority which is morally materials to the various counter revolutionist leaders; and intellectually prepared to build up a new system and by imposing a ferocious blockade they sought to upon the ruins of the old.
break the Revolution by starvation.
This active, intelligent minority was represented by To reproach the Bolsheviki for adopting dictatorial the Puritans in Engiand, by the Jacobins in France, measures in such a crisis is as fatuous as it would be and by the Bolsheviki in Russia. In each case it was to reproach them for opposing. Kolchak and Denikin compelled by the pressure of events to assume dictawith the Red Army, and not with Tolstoyan tracts.
torial powers in order to save the revolution from the The creation of the Extraordinary Commission, attacks of external and internal enemies.
authorized to dispense with legal formalities in makThere is no reason to suppose that a period of proing arrests and conducting trials, was absolutely necesletarian dictatorship can be dispensed with in counsary in order to detect and suppress the plots of the tries where the city workers are a majority of the bourgeoisie and the activities of gentlemen like Mr.
population.
Paul Dukes, the selfconfessed British spy, who slipped For a numerous proletariat, in a capitalist state, into Soviet Russia for the amiable purpose of blowpresupposes a powerful, intelligent and comparatively ing up bridges, creating disorder in the rear of the numerous bourgeois ruling class.
Red armies and otherwise accentuating the misery numerically strong working classes of the western And it will certainly be fully as difficult for the which was caused by the Allied blockade.
Of course a dictatorship has its unpleasant features.
European countries to overthrow their capitalist rulers The senile Kautsky, the sentimental Mrs. Snowden, as it was for the numerically weak Russian proletariat and the philosophic Mr. Bertrand Russell all lift to overthrow the Russian bourgeoisie, which was not their voices in horror at the difference between the only weak in numbers but untrained and incompetent realities of Soviet Russia and the ideals of a perfect in the exercise of power as a result of Russia late communist state.
emergence from primitive feudal conditions.
The Bolsheviki, however, considered the obligation accident, or a hypocritical slogan devised by the BolThe dictatorship of the proletariat is not a Russian to preserve the conquests of the Revolution even more pressing than the obligation to satisfy the complaints just what Marx defined it: a historical necessity of sheviki to justify their retention of power. It is of such estimable critics as Herr Kautsky, Mrs.
Snowden, and Mr. Russell.
the social revolution everywhere.
The proletarian historians of the future will not fail to see in the success of the Russian Revolution the best possible vindication of the instrumentality GO TO THE MASSES!
by which it was preserved against all the attacks of the capitalist world: the proletarian dictatorship.
In response to the great demand, we have The Paris Conimune, the historical predecessor of issued in pamphlet form the Manifesto of the Executive Committee of the Communist InternaSoviet Russia, failed, among other reasons, because tional to the workers of all countries. This is the its leaders were divided and vacillating in their ends, proclamation of the Third Congress on the world situation.
because they were unable to guide its destinies with firmness and decision in the critical moments which This pamphlet also contains the historic withdrawal statement of the Committee for the Third mark the success or failure of any revolutionary International of the Socialist Party, in which the movement.
comrades now active in the WORKERS COUNDictatorship Is Historical Necessity CIL tell why they left the Socialist Party.
The price of this pamphlet is 10c. per copy; six Some Socialists profess to believe that the dictatorcents per copy in lots of 10 or more. Send all ship of the proleariat, while it may be necessary in orders to the WORKERS COUNCIL, 80 Russia, will prove superfluous in countries where the 11th St. New York City.
industrial workers constitute a majority of the populaMorris Hillquit, altho not a candidate this year, was was espousing when he spoke these words, as foes of the principal speaker at the ratification meeting that Soviet Russia who should be classed together with opened the municipal campaign of the Socialist Party such anti Bolshevik Socialists as Savinkov, Burtzev in New York.
and their ilk.
As becomes the leader of the party, Hillquit dealt Hillquit places proletarian dictatorship on the same with policies and principles rather than with imme plane with capitalist oppression and exploitation, and diate campaign issues.
the New York Call, of October 13, in an article by After assuring the assemblage that the vote for the its editor under the caption Where We Stand, havS. mayoralty candidate will have a world wide ef ing heard its master voice, expresses the same fect, Hillquit took up the attitude of the toward counter revolutionary sentiment.
Soviet Russia, for, as he declared, no political party By declaring that the does not propose to has a right to exist without defining its attitude to martyrize and sacrifice the present generation for the ward Russia.
assumed benefit of the generations to come, Hillquit But let us quote Hillquit formulation of the imputes that Soviet Russia does martyrize and delibposition on the Russian Revolution as reported ver erately sacrifice the present generation in a gamble for batim in the New York Call: alleged future benefits. We Socialists of America do not accept all the new What the implacable enemies of Soviet Russia have social doctrines that emanate from Moscow. We do not seck to establish a Soviet Government in the United States.
charged against the Russian Revolution in order to We strive to bring about the working class control of the justify their support of the various counter revolugovernment and industries based upon the principles of tions, Hillquit now states in a prepared speech as the democracy and majority rule.
position of the Socialist Party. We are bitterly opposed to terrorism and oppression exercised by the capitalist class: we do not propose to supAll that Hillquit and the others in the wrote plant them by working class terrorism and oppression.
and spoke about the Russian Revolution during the We hope to bring to all mankind a steadily increasing past four years seemed to have been intended to fool measure of freedom and happiness; we do not believe the workers, who were stirred to exaltation by the that our whole social ideal can or will be realized in one blow, and we do not propose to martyrize and sacrifice message of the Russian Revolution, and to make them the present generation for the assumed benefit of the genbelieve that the party was genuinely happy about the erations to come.
noble achievements of the Russian proletariat.
No, the Socialists do not accept all the ideas Now that the party has lost all of its revolutionary which the Russian Revolution brought to the fore. elements, it feels free to open its counter revolutionary In fact, we are not aware of any ideas emanating heart and give expression to all the hatred and venom from Soviet Russia to which the now offers its against the Russian Revolution which lay there accuhospitality.
mulated and subdued.
The does not propose to secure all powers to After thrusting his knife in the back of Soviet Rusthe workers, but intends to share these powers with sia, against which all forces of reaction have been bourgeois elements as well. It expects to gain control arrayed for the past four years and which are still of the government and the industries by the prevailing waiting like vultures for the opportunity to inflict democratic methods, rather than a social revolution, deady wounds upon its starved and weary body.
and intends to continue the present system of govern Hillquit chants the song of all the Socialist enemies ment after the workers have acquired control. of Russia, appealing for aid to the famine stricken The American workers have found bourgeois de districts and asking that Soviet Russia be allowed to mocracy so helpful in their present struggles in West work out its own problems.
Virginia and Kansas that the hates to part The New York Call carried for a few days an adverwith it.
tisement appealing for Russian relief, which was It places its hopes for the emancipation of the headed, The Russian Government Sinned Against workers from wage slavery on democracy and ma Capitalism, implying thereby that Russia present jority rule.
plight could be traced to its struggle against world At the Detroit Convention of the last summer, capitalism. Mr. Hillquit and the whose organ Hillquit spoke glibly about proletarian dictatorship the Call is, should demand a retraction from the and even offered a resolution favoring a modified paper. It is not against capitalism, but against reinterpretation of it, which was, however, defeated by vered democracy, the newly found Messiah of the disthe California Wisconsin brand of Socialists.
inherited proletariat, that Soviet Russia has sinned, Perhaps Hillquit thought that that resolution would and sinned most outragously, according to Hillquit.
satisfy the left elements, and the party would not face The Socialist Party has disintegrated, not only in another split which it could not very well afford. members, but in Socialist principles as well. It has According to Hillquit, the expects the workers bartered its Socialist soul for votes and offices.
to vote themselves into power. The ballot is the sacred It has become, not only an open enemy of instrument which will do the trick. Small wonder that the Russian Soviet Republic and its bravely strug.
the leadership is only interested in elections gling workers, but also a counter revolutionary and when reform proposals can be traded for votes and anti Socialist force in the labor movement of Ameroffices.
ica. As such it should be considered, and as such it The second paragraph of Hillquit speech quoted should be fought by all the militant and class conabove brands him and his party, whose principles he scious workers of this country.