430 431 THE CLASS STRUGGLE LABORISM AND SOCIALISM perialism means Capitalism on the verge of collapse, Capitalism being strangled by its own contradictions, History abounds with illustrations of a system apparently supreme at the moment when internal conditions and contradictions were about to destroy it.
The struggle of revolutionary Socialism against Imperialism is a necessary struggle and a struggle latent with rapid success. The struggle of revolutionary Socialism against Laborism and moderate Socialism is an equally necessary struggle; and as with Imperialism, Laborism and moderate Socialism appear most imposing, apparently impregnable, at the moment when their own contradictions and the awakening consciousness and action of the revolutionary proletariat are about to overwhelm them. Life itself is the supreme factor making for revolutionary Socialism.
Socialist struggle after the war. Imperialism is the expression of concentrated industry; the industrial proletariat of machine labor is the expression of concentrated industry; and mass action is the expression of this proletariat. Mass action, potentially and actually, immediately and ultimately, is the process of revolution, the animating factor in the action of the proletariat. The proletarian revolution has been objectively introduced by Imperialism, and subjectively initiated by the proletarian revolution in Russia.
The decisive factor in the Russian Revolution has been the appearance upon the stage of events of the distinctive proletariat, acting through mass action, determined in a struggle equally against Capitalism and moderate Socialism. As Laborism acted against the industrial proletariat in Australia, as Laborism in England assumed a policy against the class struggle, as moderate Socialism everywhere has become overtly or covertly the ally of State Capitalism and Imperialism so in Russia moderate, petit bourgeois Socialism and the ideology of Laborism were actively, directly counter revolutionary.
The epoch of Imperialism, its altering of class relations and the expression of class interests, forces the inescapable necessity for an irrevocable formulation of the fundamental differenoes between petit bourgeois Socialism and Laborism, and the fundamental, class struggle Socialism of the revolutionary proletariat.
Conditions after the war must be used for an uncompromising struggle against Imperialism as the unity of all the forces of Capitalism. The immediate objective must be the conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat, the establishment of the proletarian state upon the basis of which alone social reconstruction may emerge into the society of communist Socialism. The immediate task of Socialism, the irreducible minimum, is to adapt itself to the tendency of the industrial proletariat of average labor, to awaken the consciousness and action of the proletariat for the conquest of power. This is the immediate program of action of Socialism.
The epoch of Imperialism appears to strengthen Capitalism, but this appearance of strength is fictitious and deceptive. Im