"We Communists, representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of the different countries of Europe, America and Asia, a.s.sembled in Soviet Moscow, feel and consider ourselves followers and fulfillers of the program proclaimed seventy-two years ago. It is our task now to sum up the practical revolutionary experience of the working cla.s.s, to cleanse the movement of its admixtures of opportunism and social patriotism, and to gather together the forces of all the true revolutionary proletarian parties in order to further and hasten the complete victory of the Communist revolution.
"The opportunists who, before the war, exhorted the workers, in the name of the gradual transition into Socialism, to be temperate; who, during the war, asked for submission in the name of "civil peace" and defense of the Fatherland, now again demand of the workers self-abnegation to overcome the terrible consequences of the war. If this preaching were listened to by the workers, Capitalism would build out of the bones of several generations a new and still more formidable structure, leading to a new and inevitable world war. Fortunately for humanity, this is no longer possible....
"Only the Proletarian Dictatorship, which recognizes neither inherited privileges nor rights of property, but which arises from the needs of the hungering ma.s.ses, can shorten the period of the present crisis; and for this purpose it mobilizes all materials and forces, introduces the universal duty to labor, establish the regime of industrial discipline, thus to heal in the course of a few years the open wounds caused by the war and also to raise humanity to new undreamed-of heights.
"The whole bourgeois world accuses the Communists of destroying liberties and political democracy. This is not true. Having come into power the proletariat only a.s.serts the absolute impossibility of applying the methods of bourgeois democracy, and it creates the conditions and forms of a higher _working cla.s.s democracy_....
"The peasant of Bavaria and Baden who does not look beyond his church spire, the small French wine-grower who has been ruined by the adulterations practiced by the big capitalists, the small farmer of America plundered and betrayed by bankers and legislators--all these social ranks which have been shoved aside from the main road of development by Capitalism, are called on paper by the regime of political democracy to the administration of the State. In reality, however, the finance-oligarchy decides all important questions which determine the destinies of nations behind the back of parliamentary democracy....
"The proletarian State, like every State, is an organ of suppression, but it arrays itself against the enemies of the working cla.s.s. It aims to break the opposition of the despoilers of labor, who are using every means in a desperate effort to stifle the revolution in blood, and to make impossible further opposition.
The dictatorship of the proletariat, which gives it the favored position in the community, is only a provisional inst.i.tution. As the opposition of the Bourgeoisie is broken, as it is expropriated and gradually absorbed into the working groups, the proletarian dictatorship disappears, until finally the State dies and there are no more cla.s.s distinctions....
"In an empire of destruction where not only the means of production and transportation, but also the inst.i.tutions of political democracy have become b.l.o.o.d.y ruins, the proletariat must create its own forms, to serve above all as a bond of unity for the working cla.s.s and to enable it to accomplish a revolutionary intervention in the further development of mankind. Such apparatus is represented in the Workmen"s Councils. The old parties, the old unions, have proved incapable, in person of their leaders, to understand, much less to carry out the task which the new epoch presents to them. The proletariat has created a new inst.i.tution which embraces the entire working cla.s.s without distinction of vocation or political maturity, an elastic form of organization capable of continually renewing itself, expanding, and of drawing into itself ever new elements, ready to open its doors to the working groups of city and village which are near to the proletariat. This indispensable autonomous organization of the working cla.s.s in the present struggle and in the future conquests of different lands, tests the proletariat and const.i.tutes the greatest inspiration and the mightiest weapon of the proletariat of our time. Wherever the ma.s.ses are awakened to consciousness, Workers", Soldiers" and Peasants" Councils will be formed....
"The outcry of the bourgeois world against the civil war and the red terror is the most colossal hypocrisy of which the history of political struggles can boast. There would be no civil war if the exploiters who have carried mankind to the very brink of ruin had not prevented every forward step of the laboring ma.s.ses, if they had not instigated plots and murders and called to their aid armed help from outside to maintain or restore their predatory privileges. Civil war is _forced upon_ the laboring cla.s.ses by their arch-enemies. The working cla.s.s must answer blow for blow, if it will not renounce its own object and its own future which is, at the same time, the future of all humanity.
"The Communist parties, far from conjuring up civil war artificially, rather strive to shorten its duration as much as possible--in case it has become an iron necessity--to minimize the number of its victims, and, above all, to secure victory for the proletariat. This makes necessary the disarming of the bourgeoisie at the proper time, the arming of the laborer, and the formation of a communist army as the protector of the rule of the proletariat and the inviolability of the social structure. Such is the Red Army of Soviet Russia which arose to protect the achievements of the working cla.s.s against every a.s.sault from within or without. The Soviet Army is inseparable from the Soviet State.
"Seizure of political power by the proletariat means destruction of the political power of the bourgeoisie. The organized power of the bourgeoisie is in the civil State, with its capitalistic army under control of bourgeoisie-junker officers, its police and gendarmes, jailers and judges, its priests, government officials, etc.
Conquest of the political power means not merely a change in the personnel of ministries, but annihilation of the enemy"s apparatus of government; disarmament of the bourgeoisie of the counter-revolutionary officers, of the White Guard; arming of the proletariat, the revolutionary soldiers, the Red Guard of workingmen; displacement of all bourgeois judges and organization of proletarian courts; elimination of control by reactionary government officials and subst.i.tution of new organs of management of the proletariat.... Not until the proletariat has achieved this victory and broken the resistance of the bourgeoisie can the former enemies of the new order be made useful, by bringing them under control of the Communist system and gradually bringing them into accord with its work....
"The Dictatorship of the Proletariat does not in any way call for part.i.tion of the means of production and exchange; rather, on the contrary, its aim is further to centralize the forces of production and to subject all of production to a systematic plan. As the first steps--socialization of the great banks which now control production; the taking over by the power of the proletariat of all government-controlled economic utilities; the transferring of all communal enterprises; the socializing of the syndicated and trustified units of production, as well as all other branches of production in which the degree of concentration and centralization of capital makes this technically practicable; the socializing of agricultural estates and their conversion into co-operative establishments....
"As far as smaller enterprises are concerned, the proletariat must gradually unite them, according to the degree of their importance.
It must be particularly emphasized that small properties will in no way be expropriated and that small property owners who are not exploiters of labor will not be forcibly dispossessed....
"The task of the Proletarian Dictatorship in the economic field can only be fulfilled to the extent that the proletariat is enabled to create centralized organs of management and to inst.i.tute workers"
control. To this end it must make use of its ma.s.s organizations which are in closest relation to the process of production....
"As in the field of production, so also in the field of distribution, all qualified technicians and specialists are to be made use of, provided their political resistance is broken and they are still capable of adapting themselves, not to the service of capital, but to the new system of production.... Besides expropriating the factories, mines, estates, etc., the proletariat must also abolish the exploitation of the people by capitalistic landlords, transfer the large mansions to the local workers"
councils, and move the working people into the bourgeois dwellings....
"The capitalistic criminals a.s.serted at the beginning of the World War that it was only in defense of the common Fatherland. But soon German Imperialism revealed its real brigand character by b.l.o.o.d.y deeds in Russia, in the Ukraine and Finland. Now the Entente States unmask themselves as world despoilers and murderers of the proletariat....
"Indescribable is the White Terror of the bourgeois cannibals.
Incalculable are the sacrifices of the working cla.s.s. Their best--Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg--they have lost. Against this the proletariat must defend itself, defend at any price. The Communist International calls the whole world proletariat to this final struggle.
"Down with the imperialistic conspiracy of capital!
"Long live the International Republic of the Proletarian Councils!"
As will be seen when we study the I. W. W., the above is the program of the world-wide conspiracy of a single cla.s.s, a minority of society, to carry out the cynical purpose of I. W. W."ism--to "take possession of the earth and the machinery of production."
Morris Hillquit, a Right Wing leader of the Socialist Party of America, declared that "The Communist Congress of Moscow made the mistake of attempting a sort of dictatorship of the Russian proletariat in the Socialist International and was conspicuously inept and unhappy in the choice of certain allies and in the exclusion of others."[E]
Quoting this, Max Eastman, in the article from which we have taken so much, makes the following reply:
"How can he expect them to be any more indefinite and generous in their invitation than they were? In every country where there was a doubt as to what groups had stood true to the revolutionary principle and the principle of Internationalism, they so indicated the alignment as to leave every Socialist free to consider himself their ally who seriously and courageously desired to. This was what they did in America. The S. L. P. (Socialist Labor Party), the Socialist Propaganda League, the I. W. W. and in the Socialist Party "the followers of Debs!" Could they in a brief word open the door wider to American Socialists, unless they wished to admit prominent members of the Socialist Party who were known to have repudiated them, as Berger did, declaring his solidarity with the Mensheviks who were waging war on them?"
CHAPTER V
BIRTH OF THE COMMUNIST AND COMMUNIST-LABOR PARTIES
On June 24, 1919, the Left Wing Conference a.s.sembled in New York City.
The purpose of the Conference was for the first time to unite the forces of the Left Wing throughout the country and to decide upon a common plan of action against the Right. For some time there had been a growing desire among the members of the Left for the formation of a new party to be known as the Communist Party. The Michigan State organization and the different Russian-speaking federations, which had either been expelled or suspended, were particularly anxious for a new party. Then, too, many members of the Left Wing throughout the country believed that, even though they were more numerous than those of the Right, it would be useless to try to control the National Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party, called for August 30, 1919, in Chicago. They feared that the credentials of the still unsuspended and unexpelled Left Wing delegates would not be recognized by the party machine in the hands of the Right Wing, and, moreover, that even if they were, these Left Wing delegates would not be in the majority because so many other Left Wing delegates had been expelled from the Party.
Almost at the beginning of the National Conference of the Left Wing the Michigan State delegates and the delegates of the foreign-language federations insisted on the immediate organization of a new party to be known as the Communist Party. The majority of the delegates, however, were opposed to immediate organization, claiming that it would be much more prudent to wait till the meeting of the National Emergency Convention, at the end of August, as many Left Wing Socialists would refuse to leave the mother party until it became evident that the Convention could not be captured by the Left Wing. The majority of the delegates decided to call a Communist Party Convention on September 1, 1919. The Michigan State delegates and the Russian-speaking federation delegates thereupon broke with the majority of the Left Wing, causing a serious split, which continued till about the end of July, 1919.
In that month, however, most of the members of the National Council of the Left Wing who had been leading the faction of the Left Wing which had refused the call for the immediate formation of the Communist Party, went over to the minority faction, which included the Michigan State organization and the Russian-speaking federations. A compromise had been reached whereby the aforesaid members of the National Council agreed not to insist upon attendance at the National Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party, while the Michigan organization, together with the federations, were willing to wait till September 1, 1919, for the convention of the Communist Party.
Even on these terms John Reed, Ben Gitlow and some other leading members of the Left Wing refused to go over to the Communist Party, having decided to fight for the rights of the Left Wingers in the National Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party. This group of Left Wingers later on, as will be seen, became the nucleus of a third party, the Communist Labor Party. Several statements from the joint call for the convention of the Communist Party, cited from "The Revolutionary Age,"
August 23, 1919, will interest the reader:
"The party will be founded upon the following principles:
"The present is the period of the dissolution and collapse of the whole capitalist world system, which will mean the collapse of world culture, if capitalism with its unsolvable contradictions is not replaced by Communism.
"The problem of the proletariat consists in organizing and training itself for the conquest of the powers of the state....
"This new proletarian state must embody the dictatorship of the proletariat, both industrial and agricultural, this dictatorship const.i.tuting the instrument for the taking over of property used for exploiting the workers, and for the reorganization of society on a Communist basis....
"The dictatorship of the proletariat shall carry out the abolition of private property in the means of production and distribution, by transfer to the proletarian state under Socialist administration of the working cla.s.s....
"The present world situation demands the closest relation between the revolutionary proletariat of all countries....
"We favor international alliance of the Communist Party of the United States only with the Communist groups of other countries, such as the Bolsheviki of Russia, Spartacans of Germany, etc....
"The party shall propagandize cla.s.s-conscious industrial unionism, and shall carry on party activity in cooperation with industrial disputes that take on a revolutionary character."
The national organ of the Communist Party was "The Communist" of Chicago. In its issue of August 23, 1919, it thus criticises the Socialist Party:
"The majority of the readers of "The Communist" are familiar with the form of organization of the old Socialist Party, with its state autonomy and its bureaucratic officialdom. Every state is practically organized as an Independent Socialist party. "Official socialism" of Milwaukee is entirely different from[6] "official socialism" in Ohio, both in regard to platforms and form of organization. Every state has a "Socialism" of its own brand, and even dues are not uniform throughout the country. "Official papers"
of the party are in most cases organs of independent a.s.sociations, not at all affiliated with the central party organizations. Such important weapons in the struggle of the proletariat are left in the hands of the petty bourgeois ideologists who, in reality, prost.i.tute the labor press. As examples, we have, for instance, "The Milwaukee Leader," the "New York Call," the Jewish "Daily Forward," the "Appeal to Reason," and many others scattered throughout the United States, and each contradicting not only the others, but containing in each issue glaring contradictions that an intelligent person who reads them becomes disgusted with the whole muddled mess."
The fight among the revolutionists was a fight to the finish. The leaders all wanted to become Trotzkys and Lenines, all wanted to be bosses. It seems reasonable to conclude that if Bolshevism were ever introduced into the United States, either by the mother Socialist Party or by its offspring, the Communist Party or the Communist Labor Party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, that wonderful piece of nonsense which we hear so much about, would be grasped at by an amazing number of compet.i.tors. In Russia Lenine and Trotzky seem to const.i.tute the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In the Socialist Party of the United States Berger and Hillquit, of the old National Executive Committee, const.i.tuted a first-cla.s.s dictatorship. In the Communist Party, Dennis Batt, lately jailed, and Alexander Stoklitsky would surely give the Communist rank and file plenty to do--everything of course being done according to their wills. John Reed and Ben Gitlow would make an ideal "dictatorship of the proletariat," if the Communist Labor Party ever made Bolshevism the law of the land.
"Truth," one of the organs of the Communist Labor Party, published in Duluth, Minn., in its issue of August 29, 1919, devotes nearly two of its eight pages to bitter attacks on the Communist Party. Two short quotations will suffice to show the spirit of envy that exists:
""Tis said that distance lends enchantment, and perhaps that is the reason why some of you in the East have responded to the cuckoo-call of Michigan-Federations. Frankly, we see nothing hopeful in the alignment presented by the Michigan-Federation combine. We are fearful of the consequence of such leadership. The so-called Communist Party, as it is now const.i.tuted and especially with the accretion of a part of the National Council, presents the prettiest bunch of "eligibles" that man ever laid eyes upon. And as I gaze upon this august array of talent, I wonder where the working cla.s.s is going to get off at. We of the left wing of Cook County are reluctant to join with an organization under the guidance of a few doctrinaires from Detroit and the would-be Lenine of the United States.[F] We do not consider that the welfare of the revolutionary movement would be zealously guarded in their hands."
From "Truth," of the same date, we also quote an open letter to Louis C.
Fraina, which reads in part as follows: