2 THE CLASS STRUGGLE LENIN VERSUS WILSON 25 ism and its subterranean alliances. And, just as the socialists in all countries, with the exception of small minorities, concluded a Burgfrieden, and aided capital in the universal clash, so did they also in free America.
The American socialists imagined the land of their dreams to be rising over the horizon, without the necesity of the dangerous and painful approach through the class struggle, as soon as President Wilson took over the American railways in order to give them a unified administration and thus realize a greater efficiency. If we can, they reasoned, in the course of the war, gain control of the railroads and pay their owners an annual income of over a billion dollars, we can surely, after the war, retain them as well as all other great industries into the bargain, without paying the aforesaid rent or annuity. But the American socialists and radicals will yet learn, perhaps too late, that they have been deceived, that after the war they will have even less opportunity than before to gradually penetrate and absorb capitalist society. Things will proceed as they did in 1914, in the state of Oklahoma, which had been so successful in the congressional elections that a capitalist paper said that all good citizens would do well to remove every socialist from their state. This may seem a hard measure, the yellow sheet continued, but we toust remember that for every socialist so removed, there will be a place for an honest worker.
This is class war as the capitalists would desire to have it.
Well, times have changed since then. The socialists have not, in general, made any great advances, but the people have instead been won over for revolutionary socialism. At the present moment, the Central autocracy lies crushed, not by American capital, although that accelerated the process, but by the inner enemy, e. the awakening popular will.
At this moment Burgfrieden is at the last gasp and half of Europe which did not conclude a Burgfrieden, is engaged in building up the new realm over the smoking ruins of feudal power, of Czarism.
At the present moment are not the hordes of capitalism sweeping over the smoking debris of medieval European Junker and Kaiser grace of God rulership, advancing against their only enemy, their great and glorious enemy: the Soviet Government?
But the course of these armies is like that of a comet approaching the sun. It fades away, as will also the capitalist armies when in brotherly international union they advance against the workers states in the East. As under Engelbrekt in Sweden, as in America in the days of the Revolution, not to mention other movements for human freedom, the struggle will be waged by those who fight for liberty, with all their might, as a lion just released from captivity. And so the socialist states will defend their new won freedom. Already we are witnessing the formation of armies of millions in revolutionary Russia, ready to meet the first onslaught of the cannons and machine guns of capital, convinced, as they are, that the great proletarian hosts will not have the heart to fight the battle of capital against the men of the red flag, who fight for their lives and for the new day.
To the cultured radicals, who, like the Sowers and others consider revolution to be equivalent to a slow crucifixion of the proletariat, it will seem absurd to suppose that justice, to attain its final victory, will make use of dynamite and Maxim guns; and yet they consider it perfectly natural that the Entente should attempt to crush the Junkertum of Germany by such means.
At the present hour the battle cries resound between Wilson and Lenin; between the dollar and freedom; between capital and labor. The struggle will certainly not be a process of peaceful penetration, whatever else it may be. Never before has the fight been so hot, the front so clearly drawn. As compared with the world war just ended, we find not a number of fronts, but one single front: the class struggle, along which the people, with weapons in their hands, must fight for their freedom, where boundaries are not designated by the red lines on the map, but by the line between all the workers of the world, as a class, and all the world capitalists, as a class.