If Socialism is to become positive, said Mr. Berger again, it must "conduct the everyday fight for the practical revolution of every day." Like the word "Socialism," Mr. Berger retains the word "revolution," but practically it comes to mean much the same as its antithesis, everyday reform. It has been Mr. Berger's declared purpose from the beginning to turn the Milwaukee Party aside from the tactics of the International movement to those of the "revisionist" minority that has been so thoroughly crushed at the German and International Congresses. (See Chapter VII.) "The tactics of the American Socialist Party," he wrote editorially in 1901, "if that party is to live and succeed--can only be the much abused and much misunderstood Bernstein doctrine." "In America for the first time in history," he added, "we find an oppressed class with the same fundamental rights as the ruling class--the right of universal suffrage...."[147] It was the impression of many of the earlier German Socialists in this country that political democracy already existed in America and that it was only necessary to make use of it to establish a new social order. The devices the framers of our Constitution employed to prevent such an outcome, the widespread distribution of property, especially of farms, disfranchisement in the South and elsewhere, etc., were all considered as small matters compared to the difficulties Socialists faced in Germany and other countries. Many have come more recently to recognize, with Mr. Louis Boudin, that the movement "will have to learn that in this country, as in Germany or other alien lands, the fight is on not only for the use of its power by the working class, but for the possession of real political power by the masses of the people." Neither in this country nor in any other does the oppressed class have "the same fundamental rights as the ruling class." In America the working class have not even an approximately equal right to the ballot, because of local property, literacy, residence, and other qualifications, as alluded to in an earlier chapter, and it is at least doubtful whether the workers are in a more favorable position here than elsewhere to gain final and effective control of the government without physical revolution (as Mr. Berger himself has admitted; see Chapter VI). In explanation of what he meant by the Bernstein doctrine, Mr. Berger wrote in 1902: "Others condemn every reform which is to precede the 'Great Revolution.' ... Nothing can be more absurd.... Progress is not attained by simply waiting for a majority of people, for the general reconstruction, for the promised hour of deliverance.... We wicked 'opportunists' want action.... We want to reconstruct society, and we must go to work without delay, and work ceaselessly for the cooeperative Commonwealth, the ideal of the future. But we want to change conditions now. We stand for scientific Socialism."[148]