234 THE CLASS STRUGGLE EDITORIALS 235 The Butte strike was equally important and dynamic; it was directed by an actual Soldiers and Workmen Council; it showed the to be a real industrial force; and again it was the conservative craft unions that broke the strike. In these two strikes there was manifest that primitive initial mass action which, when developing into the final revolutionary form, becomes the dynamic method of the proletariat for the conquest on this fundamental issue. Our comrades are languishing in prisons; amnesty cannot reach them, and we don want amnesty for them. We want them released by the industrial might of the proletariat, by class conscious action. If this political strike inaterializes, it will blazon a new trail in American labor history; it will set a precedent for the future; it will mean real class action by the proletariat, an appreciation of the political character of its struggle.
The political strike is new to American labor. But it is indispensable. It must come. It is the function of the left wing Socialist to develop an intense propaganda in favor of this method of struggle, to develop out of the strikes of the proletariat the concept and the action of the political mass strike.
of power.
The strikes are not over. There is still a mass strike in the textile mills of Lawrence, Mass. Strikes are breaking out all over the country, are multiplying. This is the peculiar characteristic of the period into which we have emerged; it is the attitude of the Socialist toward these strikes that will hasten or retard the coming of Socialism. Out of these strikes the Socialist must develop larger action, must marshal and direct the proletariat for ihe conquest of power; and our parliamentary action must be a means of serving the industrial proletariat in action, of develop ing mass action.
Out of these strikes, moreover, the Socialist must try to develop the political strike. The political strike is a strike in which the proletariat uses its industrial might to accomplish political purposes, to bring pressure to bear upon the bourgeois state. It is out of the political strike that develops the final mass action; and the political strike is a supreme form of political action.
There is, at this moment, an opportunity for a political strike of the first magnitude. Union after union has declared in favor of a strike to demand the release of Tom Mooney; some unions have gone further and insisted that this strike should include all political prisoners. But the movement is being sabotaged by the bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor; and even by men active in the Mooney defense. They decided to call a general strike on July 4a legal holiday, a day on which it is absurd to speak of a general strike; and, moreover, they decided that it should be a strike for Mooney alone, and not include other of labor prisoners. Moreover, this general strike itself is being sabotaged by the union conservatives; it is now in a sort of cataleptic state.
In this emergency, the whole forces of the Socialist Party should be concentrated on propaganda for a great mass demonstration on July 4, and for a general political strike on July 5, to demand the release of all class war prisoners. Large sections of American labor are prepared for such a strike, but they are being baffled by the bureaucracy, by reactionary union officials. It is the task of the Socialist to engage in this struggle, to concentrate Archangel, Hopeful Sign From Archangel there comes a bit of news that is full of fromise for the future. According to an official statement from Washington a company of soldiers who were ordered, after a period of leave, to return to the front, not only refused to comply with the commands of their superiors and insisted upon release of their imprisoned leader, but demanded an iminediate statement from Washington as to the intentions of the government regarding Russian occupation.
The capitalist press at first showed an evident desire to belittle the significance of this occurrence. It was made to appear as if the movement were confined to a single company whose natural reluctance to return to the front after a period of comparative freedom and safety, together with the conflicting reports as to the intentions of the Allied army leaders, had led them to take this step. But the fact that the officers of the refractory company were forced to accede to every demand, the fact that the company, when it did finally pack its supplies, were sent to an army post, but insisted on their refusal to go to the front, the fact that the authorities at Washington not only did give the desired assurance that American troops would be withdrawn on the first of June but admitted that the mutiny at Archangel has assumed dangerous proportions and threatens to spread out over the entire American Expeditionary force all of these things prove that the occurrence is by no means as incidental as we were at first led to imagine.