46 THE CLASS STRUGGLE PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN SOCIALISM 47 ization for the revolutionary conquest of the party by the party! The American Socialist Party needs a definite, organized, vocal left wing, a unified expression of revolutionary Socialism in theory and practice. Thus alone shall we prepare for the coming struggles; thus alone shall we become a decisive factor in the new the third International the international of revolutionary Socialism and the final struggle.
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg most appropriate means of accomplishing this task; but a general revolutionary attitude and activity are indispensable.
The constituent elements for a revolutionary union movement are here: unions of unskilled workers in the of who do not belong there and who are betrayed by the aristocracy of labor; a large number of independent unions, the radical character of which might develop into more revolutionary consciousness; the and the masses of the unorganized industrial proletariat.
This is an important problem. But it is not the decisive problem. The Revolution will not develop out of industrial unionism, but out of a crisis developing into revolutionary mass action and proletarian dictatorship. Not organizations, but revolutionary class consciousness that is the instrument of the Revolution. Industrial unionism must not become an end in itself; even the is becoming conservative.
The proletarian revolution annihilates the old bourgeois order and the old organizations. The Revolution is the act of the organized producers; but the producers are not organized before but during the Revolution by means of Soviets.
The revolutionary struggle by means of mass actionthat constitutes the process of the Revolution and the Revolution itself in action, By LUDWIG LORE am simply projecting some of the problems of American Socialism there are others, but these are fundamental. My purpose is to arouse discussion of these problems. The fatal defect of our party is that ther is no discussion of fundamentals, no controversy on tactics. The bureaucracy and representatives of the party discourage discussion and controversy: where the spirit of inquiry prevails, there is potential opposition. Let us, together and in fraternal spirit, discuss our problems and build the new Socialism of the final struggle, and victory!
Let us reconstruct the party. As a preliminary, let us integrate the revolutionary elements in the party, an organWe are all of us prone to judge men and women by their individual deeds and actions, without examining the motives and principles that stand behind them. The hero of to day is to morrow lunatic. We acclaim the man or the woman whose momentary attitude happens to agree with the position we ourselves have taken, only too often without investigating the causes that prompted their position, only to rail at them with equal enthusiasm when the same causes lead them to adopt a position of which we do not approve.
It was to be expected that the American capitalist press, with its extravagant praises of the German radical Socialist wing, would experience an immediate change of heart with the cessation of hostilities between the two nations. For there never was, nor could there be, the slightest bond of sympathy between the revolutionary Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and the servants of American imperialism, beyond a momentary opposition to the German government.
But the same holds true, though, of course, to a lesser degree, of some of our comrades in the Socialist movement.
Here, too, we found enthusiastic admiration for the courageous stand taken by the minority group, which has changed, in many individual cases, to bewilderment and opposition to the course this group has adopted since the revolution has put an end to the war. And yet, did these comrades know