MANIFESTO AND PROGRAM 213 212 THE CLASS STRUGGLE the workers during a revolution. Moderate Socialism had a rigid formula. constructive social reform legislation within the capitalist state and to that formula it clung. It believed that bourgeois democracy could be used as a means of constructing the Socialist system; therefore, it must wait until the people, through a Constituent Assembly, should vote Socialism into existence. And in the meantime, it held that there must be established a Government of Coalition with the enemy, the bourgeoisie. As if, with all the means of controlling public opinion in the hands of the bourgeoisie, a Constituent Assembly could or would ever vote the Socialists into power!
Revolutionary Socialists hold, with the founders of scientific Socialism, that there are two dominant classes in society the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; that between these two classes a struggle must go on, until the working class, through the seizure of the instruments of production and distribution, the abolition of the capitalist state, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proietariat, creates a Socialist system. Revolutionary Socialists do not believe that they can be voted into power. They struggle for the conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat. Then comes the transition period from Capitalism to Socialism, of which Marx speaks in his Critique of the Gotha Program when he says. Between the capitalistic society and the communistic, lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. This corresponds to a political transition period, in which the state cannot be anything else but the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marx and Engels clearly explain the function of the Socialist movement. It is the moderate Socialists through intellectual gymnastics, evasions, misquotations and the tearing of sentences and phrases from their context, who make Marx and Engels sponsors for their perverted version of Socialism.
PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN SOCIALISM At the present moment, the Socialist Party of America is agitated by several cross currents, some local in their character, and some a reflex of cleavages within the European Socialist movements.
Many see in this internal dissension merely an unimportant difference of opinion, or at most, dissatisfaction with the control of the party, and the desire to replace those who have misused it with better men.
We, however, maintain that there is a fundamental distinction in views concerning party policies and tactics. And we believe that this difference is so vast that from our standpoint a radical change in party policies and tactics is necessary.
This essential task is being shirked by our party leaders and officials generally.
Already there is formidable industrial unrest, a seething ferment of discontent, evidenced by inarticulate rumblings which presage striking occurrences. The transformation of industry from a war to a peace basis has thoroughly disorganized the economic structure.
Thousands upon thousands of workers are being thrown out of work.
Demobilized sailors and soldiers fird themselves a drug upon the labor market, unless they act as scabs and strike breakers. Skilled mechanics, fighting desperately to maintain their war wage and their industrial status, are forced to strike. Women, who during the war have been welcomed into industries hitherto closed to them, are struggling to keep their jobs. And to cap the climax, the capitalists, through their Chambers of Commerce and their Merchants and Manufacturers Associations, have resolved to take advantage of the situation to break down even the inadequate organizations labor has built up through generations of painful struggle.
The temper of the workers and soldiers, after the sacrifices they have made in the war, is such that they will not endure the reactionary labor conditions so openly advocated by the master class. series of labor struggles is bound to follow indeed, is beginning now. Shall the Socialist Party continue to feed the workers with social reform legislation at this critical period? Shall it approach the whole question from the standpoint of votes and the election of representatives to the legislatures? Shall it emphasize the consumers point of view, when Socialist principles teach that the worker is robbed at the point of production? Shall it talk about the Cost of Living and Taxation when it should be explaining how the worker is robbed at his job?
There are many signs of the awakening of labor. Strikes are developing which verge on revolutionary action; the trade unions are organizing a Labor Party, in an effort to conserve what they have won and wrest new concessions from the master class. The organization of the Labor Party is an immature expression of a new spirit in the Labor movement; but a Labor Party is not the instrument for the emancipation of the working class; its policy would be in general what is now the official policy of the Socialist Party reforming Capitalism on the basis of the bourgeois state. Laborism is as much a danger to the revolutionary proletariat as moderate Socialism; neither is an instrument for the conquest of power, CAPITALIST IMPERIALISM Imperialism is the final stage of Capitalism, in which the accumulated capital or surplus of a nation is too great to be reinvested in the home market. The increased productivity of the working class, due to improved machinery and efficiency methods, and the mere subsistence wage which permits the worker to buy back only a small portion of what he produces, causes an ever increasing accumulation of commodities, which in turn become capital and must be invested in further production. When Capitalism has reached the stage in which it imports raw materials from undeveloped countries and exports them again in the shape of manufactured products, it has reached its highest development.
This process is universal. Foreign markets, spheres of influence and protectorates, under the intensive development of capitalist industry and finance in turn become highly developed. They, too, seek for markets. National capitalist control, to save itself from ruin, breaks its national bonds and emerges full grown as a capitalist League of Nations, with international armies and navies to maintain its supremacy.
The United States no longer holds itself aloof, isolated and provincial. It is reaching out for new markets, new zones of influence, new protectorates.
The capitalist class of America is using organized labor for its imperialistic purposes. We may soon expect the capitalist class, in true Bismarckian fashion, to grant factory laws, old age pensions, unemployment insurance, sick benefits, and the whole litter of bour