72 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 73 George, and even Clemenceau, have underscored his statements; the people of Germany and Austria are forcing their rulers to recognize the same principles. The nations of the world are practically united upon the aim and end of the war and still the insane slaughter goes on.
The answer to this question depends alone and entirely upon the degree of passivity, upon the willingness to suffer and to obey, upon the willingness to be led to slaughter of the masses and of their Socialist and union leaders. If they are willing to let their governments bring excuse after excuse, if they are willing to wait until power in Russia is consoli dated, then they will, by their non resistance, sacrifice the cause of the Russian Revolution and with it the cause of world revolution and world peace. If the proletariat of the world refuses to help the Russian masses in their fateful struggle, then the prospects of a general and democratic peace are gone forever.
There is but one means toward the end an armistice on all fronts. Only when the armistice is declared, when the soldiers in the trenches realize, for the first time, what peace and safety will mean, when the peoples again will dare to breathe freely, to speak freely, to hope, when the horrible pressure of war upon body and mind will have been partly released, only then will the possibility of revolutionary development be given.
If the allied nations then, are honest in their desire for a democratic peace, if they come out openly and without reservation for the formula of the Russian people, no power on earth can prevent its realization. But if they should refuse, if they should still insist upon the accomplishment of imperialist annexationist demands, then an armistice alone can show to their peoples that they are fighting, not against a militaristic, imperialistic enemy abroad, but for militarism, for imperialism, for autocracy at home. And as the armistice in Germany has aroused the people to demand a general and a democratic peace, so will it force the governments of the allied nations to choose between a democratic international peace or revolt of their own awakened masses.
The Common Enemy By BOUDIN.
In a recent issue of the New Republic, Norman Angell, the well known English radical and pacifist, attempts to solve the riddle of the socialist pacifist in this war. To him the thing seems utterly inexplicable. Why, asks he, should the radical, the thoroughgoing social reformer, the protagonist of popular rights and democracy, be anti war at all? Why should these, of all people, be less alive than others to the danger of world domination by a power which is the most anti popular, anti radical, and autocratic in the world, and the triumph of which would render the success of the radical millennium impossible? On the face of it, it would seem that it is precisely the revolutionary Socialist who should be most concerned in the destruction of the most anti revolutionary force of Christendom.
And the thing must seem inexplicable to all those who take political radicalism for granted, so to say; to whom political radicalism and economic radicalism are quite inseparable. For after all allowances are made and there is no doubt many and large allowances must be made for misconceptions and misrepresentations of all kinds there is a certain residuum of indifference on the part of some Socialists to the fate of democracy in this war which almost amounts to hostility, at least in so far as it has found expression in the political institutions of the Western democracies.
The real explanation of this phenomenon seems to me to lie in one of the most fundamental difficulties of the Socialist and Labor Movement the common enemy problem. And the astonishment of such good radicals as Mr. Angell upon encountering this phenomenon is due to the fact that they take a certain solution of that problem for granted. It is therefore worth while to re examine this question at this time, as it may throw some light upon the attitude of some radicals and socialists toward the great war.