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74 THE CLASS STRUGGLE SOCIALISTS AND WAR 75 modify the environment to suit the race, rather than to trust to the race altering to suit the environment.
Under these conditions our race cannot but perish from the earth should we lose the one thing it possesses that responds to its deepest nature. That one thing is the political liberty enjoyed by the people of France, England and these United States. To support our government in the present war is something more than yielding to patriotism, vulgar or otherwise. It is to do one part in battling for the continued existence of our portion of the human race on the earth.
Never was there a worthier and nobler cause for which to battle. am proud to believe that the majority of those who have in the past voted for the Socialist party will not now be found wanting.
II By LOUIS FRAINA one single word of criticism or discussion. Subordination, obedience had become ingrained as Veblen said.
In holding as do that the Habsburgs and Hohenzollern must go to make the world safe for democracy, hold no brief for England or France. have no doubt that much of cruelty and injustice toward their colonies and toward som called backward races could be pointed out and exploited.
But do not forget that our racial trend toward kicking, toward insubordination, first found expression in the modern world in that great Mother of Parliaments that sits beside the Thames at Westminster. Nor do forget that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are vital words pregnant with meaning to the descendants of the heroes who overthrew the Bastile on July 14th, 1789. still see a vision of Communistic Equality to be reached, it may be, through painful years of State Socialism leading in time to Industrial Democracy. But no longer believe in a proletariat of Supermen who are going to bring this to pass by a revolution. no longer believe in tactics based on the existence of a race of economic marionettes. no longer believe it possible to make people with village minds think in world terms. do not believe our race of village anarchists can ever fully adapt itself to life under large scale production conducted under unbridled capitalism. believe the supreme question for the statesmen of to day and to morrow is so to harness and alter the machinery of our lives as to make it possible for our race to survive under conditions so unsuited to its permanent mental habits until we can evolve a system in which we shall be more at home.
This is not to say that forces are not at work modifying the race to suit the environment. am aware of the Machine Process and the effects of rapid transportation and electric communication. And, no doubt, the race has sufficient variability to be modified in time, but it takes much, very much time; while the industrial revolution has gone on and is going on with dizzying speed. Our hope must be in the main to The most striking single feature of La Monte article is its negative character. It is destructive, not constructive. You have a criticism of Marxism, or Marxists, a blast at German autocracy, an affirmation and a proof of the collapse of the Second International, and glittering generalizations incidentally. But what does La Monte substitute in the place of Socialism? If our attitude toward war in general, and this war in particular, is wrong, what is his attitude. Solemnly but carelessly wandering through the fields of history, ethnology, economics and philosophy does not in itself provide a constructive program of action. The acceptance of the concept that this is a war for democracy is not a sufficient substitute for the philosophy and movement that La Monte discards. Surely, La Monte declaration that the Socialist should accept this war for democracy and see it through, cannot stand by itself; it should be proven, it should be related to the events of our day in particular, and to history in general. may be unfair in my conclusion, but it strikes me that La Monte position is this: the international collapsed, the German Socialist movement contemptibly entered into a war of conquest,