264 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 265 What is Bolshevism?
By RosA LUXEMBURG delegations frustrated. With the same laudable purpose in view our National Executive Committee has suspended entire Language Federations and state organizations. The leaders of the party, state, local and national, have precipitated a breach in the party that might have been avoided.
For, as a matter of fact, the rank and file of the party is completely in sympathy with the purposes and aims of the LeftWing movement. Those who are more closely in touch with the American working class can sense the mental revolution it has undergone. The party membership, from the start, has shown an instinctive loyalty to and sympathy with the Bolshevist revolution and the Spartacan uprisings. Even the leaders of the Right Wing feel this and are setting all sails to catch the wind of popular opinion. They are preparing to adopt a declaration promising open support to the movement for industrial unionism. The recently sent Comrade Shiplacoff to the National Convention of the promising this offspring and ward of the the active support of the and confessing that the Party had seen the error of its ways.
At the national conv tion, which has been carefully expurgated of all uncomfortably revolutionary elements by these wholesale exclusions and suspensions, a revolutionary sounding program will be drawn up, full of promises of brotherhood and affection for our comrades in Russia, in Hungary and in Germany, But they will refuse to break with their old policy of purely political propaganda. They will continue to discourage everything that looks like mass action. They will refuse to support the program of revolutionary action based upon the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is the content and essence of these proletarian revolutionary movements. They will allow themselves to become enthusiastic over the achievements and the heroism of the Communist Parties in Europe without committing the Party in this country to a course that will enable us to emulate their example. And the methods which are the basis of communist activity in Europe will still be condemned by the same Socialist Party of America as anarchistic, syndicalistic and unsocialistic.
The revolution that has just begun can have but one outcome: the realization of Socialism! The working class, in order to accomplish its purpose, must, first of all, secure entire political control of the state. But to the Socialist political power is only a means to an end. It is the instrument with which labor will achieve the complete, fundamental reconstruction of our entire industrial system.
To day all wealth, the largest and most fruitful tracts of land, the mines, the mills and the factories belong to a small group of Junkers and private capitalists. From them the great masses of the laboring class receive a scanty wage in return for long hours of arduous toil, hardly enough for a decent livelihood. The enrichment of a small class of idlers is the purpose and end of present day society. To give to modern society and to modern production a new impulse and a new purpose. that is the foremost duty of the revolutionary working class.
To this end all social wealth, the land and all that it produces, the factories and the mills must be taken from their exploiting owners to become the common property of the entire people. It thus becomes the foremost duty of a. revolutionary government of the working class to issue a series of decrees making all important instruments of production national property and placing them under social control.
But this is only the first step. The most difficult task, the creation of an industrial state upon an entirely new foundation, has only just begun.
To day production in every manufacturing unit is conducted by the individual capitalist independently of all others. What and where commodities are to be produced, where, when and how the finished product is to be sold, is decided by the individual capitalist owner. Nowhere does labor have the slightest influence upon these questions. It is simply the living machine that has its work to do.
In a Socialist state of society all this will be changed. Private ownership of the means of production and subsistence must disappear. Production will be carried on not for the enrichment of the individual but solely for the creation of a supply of commodities sufficient to supply the wants and needs of the working class. Accordingly factories, mills and farms must be operated