100 THE CLASS STRUGGLE EDITORIALS 101 secure better conditions, in trying to use the conditions of the war precisely as they used the conditions of peace to organize the struggle against Capitalism. Men and women in Italy are arrested for insurrectionary fighting in the streets of Milan and other cities, and are not punished as severely as these s for organizing strikes to better conditions.
And all this savage repression, all this repudiation of democracy, proceeded simultaneously with the representatives of American Capitalism speaking of democracy in the loftiest strains of eloquence and poetry. good part of the world was hypnotized the United States are the great exemplars of democracy! And they are, since this democracy means bourgeois democracy, which is the authority of one class over another, the instrument for the repression of the proletariat. The more Capitalism develops, the more necessary becomes a deceptive development of the forms and words of democracy, that cloak the sinister interests of reaction.
Reparation being demanded of Germany for its crimes against the world: the Socialist proletariat demands reparation of the real criminal international Imperialism. The Socialist proletariat, moreover, demands reparation for the political criminals imprisoned or about to be imprisoned for their struggle to make America safe for democracy. The problem of the political criminals is an important one, since it means a hampering of the aggressive proletarian movement if our active and militant comrades are to be imprisoned and kept in prison. Socialism must adopt new forms of struggle, new means of agitation, as reaction conquers.
Immediately upon the conclusion of the armistice, there developed a movement to secure amnesty for political prisoners; there was even a rumor that amnesty would be granted political criminals by the President on New Year day. But Woodrow Wilson is apparently too occupied with making Europe safe for democracy to devote any time to democracy in our own country. And, while political amnesty was being agitated, it developed that the American Government had determined upon the policy of deporting every single agitator who was born in a foreign country, regardless of whether a citizen or how long he had been in this country, if this agitator was convicted of a political crime. This is a serious issue. The policy of deportation would enormously weaken our movement it is the most important issue in our campaign for political prisoners.
The problem of political criminals is part and parcel of the general problems of the proletarian movement. Political amnesty must be secured, not by grace of the master class, but through the militant action of the proletarian movement.
If, in Europe, political criminals are not dealt with as savagely as in this country, it is because the proletariat and Socialism are more conscious and aggressive more revolutionary.
The issue must be made a working class issue, it must be used to develop the class action of the proletariat. The struggle in the courts is necessary, but not enough; the propaganda must be one of developing the industrial action of the working class, of using the industrial might of the workers to secure our demands. In this sense, the struggle for our imprisoned comrades becomes one phase of the larger struggle the struggle for the Social Revolution.
Open the prison gates! On to Socialism!
Mexico and American Imperialism While President Wilson in Europe indulges his favorite sport of promoting democracy in words while preparing to accept fundamental Imperialism in fact the sinister interests that skulked behind the ideology of the war are actively preparing to make the world safe for American Imperialism.
The war has ended America splendid isolation ended it, not because of democracy and for purposes of democracy, but because of Imperialism and for purposes of Imperialism.