28 THE CLASS STRUGGLE PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN SOCIALISMI 29 American proletariat is not possessed of reserves for action, but because of the organizations of this proletariat. This is one aspect of our problems.
The American proletariat has an inspiring history of aggressive struggles. The grea Homestead strike, the American Railway Union strike in 1893, the implacable industrial struggles in Colorado, at Coeur Alene and Goldfield, the strikes at McKees Rocks, Lawrence, Paterson, Passaic, Ludlow, the Mesaba Range all these are expressions of an aggressive proletariat, of a proletariat capable of great things. The American radical Labor movement first clearly formulated the principles, forms and purposes of industrial unionism, yet industrial unionism has made infinitely larger strides in Great Britain, Australia and elsewhere than it has in the United States. The American Labor Union, twenty years ago, formulated the industrial union program, but it went the way of all flesh; the Western Federation of Miners adopted industrial unionism, waged inspiring struggles against Capitalism, and then was captured by the reaction; the Industrial Workers of the World started with great purposes and expectations, contributed a vital and aggressive spirit to our movement, in spite of all its.
faults; but the is incapable of rallying the revolutionary proletariat, and never builded definitely upon the basis of its achievements.
Why? There are a large number of reasons, material and ideologic; but one alone that can be considered here, and that.
is the petit bourgeois spirit that animates American Socialism the Socialist Party, even the Socialist Labor Party. All these great instinctive revolts of the proletariat, under the impact of which new forms of industrial organization and struggle, a new ideology, were being developed, met the open hostility or lack of understanding of Socialism. Instead of accepting these forces as the initial expression of new tactics.
and forms of action, the dominant Socialism tried to compress.
them within the stultifying limits of petit bourgeois and parliamentary Socialism make them serve the ends of the middle class and petty bourgeois, liberal democracy. The Socialist Labor Party, which was an active force in the initial development of the new unionism, savagely attacked it and the when they did not pursue the road charted an essentially petty bourgeois conception of the Revolution.
To attack the unskilled proletariat rallied by the as a lumpen proletariat that was a characteristic expression of the fundamental defect of the in action, its petit bourgeois ideology, which, while it rejected the gradual, peaceful conquest of power by the Socialist proletariat, accepted an equally fallacious policy, the gradual, peaceful conquest of power by the proletariat through organizing the majority of the working class into industrial unions. The Socialist Party majority was even worse it rejected the while serving the monstrous reaction of the American Federation of Labor, its attitude toward the new ideas compounded of hypocrisy and animosity. American Socialism has not yet developed a realistic, revolutionary policy a policy that is instinct in the struggles of the proletariat a policy able to arouse, integrate and direct the revolutionary energy of the proletariat.
The petit bourgeoisie is the slave of the illusions of democracy, avoids the implacable industrial struggle, rejects movements and struggles that refuse to proceed within the orbit of parliamentarism; the petit bourgeoisie pursues an anaemic policy, a routine activity, chained to the old and rejecting or camouflaging the new, refuses to consider the actual problems of the Revolution and the violent struggles necessary to realize the Revolution. What the American proletariat requires is a Socialism that has snapped asunder its petit bourgeois fetters, that issues to the proletariat the clear call to the revolutionary struggle and which the proletariat will yet answer.
The attitude of American Socialism toward the Bolsheviki