Communism; Industrial Workers of the World; Socialism
Government raids in recent years, and the seizure of hundreds of tons of
inflammatory literature, from which extensive quotations were made in
the daily press, have furnished us with ample proofs that the I. W. W.'s
are national conspirators.
The reader will remember the vivid picture of the contemplated rebellion
in the mind of the "Wobbly" who wrote in "The Rebel Worker," April 15,
1919:
"The United States is in the grip of a bloody revolution! Thousands
of workers are slaughtered by machine guns in New York City!
Washington is on fire! Industry is at a standstill and thousands of
workers are starving! The government is using the most brutal and
repressive measures to put down the revolution! Disorganization,
crime, chaos, rape, murder and arson are the order of the day--the
inevitable results of social revolution!"
The I. W. W.'s are certainly conspirators, and seek the overthrow of our
Government by industrial violence, and we were told by "The Evolution of
Industrial Democracy," page 40, that "Government, as now understood,
will disappear--there being no servile class to be held in
subjection--but in its place will be an administration of affairs."
The spirit of armed rebellion against our Government was foremost in the
minds of the Left Wing members of the Socialist Party who afterwards
formed the Communist and the Communist Labor Parties. We shall recall
some of the words of Louis C. Fraina during the great struggle between
the Rights and Lefts:
"All propaganda, all electoral and parliamentary activity are
insufficient for the overthrow of Capitalism, impotent when the
ultimate test of the class struggle turns into a test of power. The
power for the social revolution issues out of the actual struggles
of the proletariat, out of its strikes, its industrial unions and
mass action."--"The Revolutionary Age," July 12, 1919.
"Socialism will come not through the peaceful, democratic
parliamentary conquest of the state, but through the determined and
revolutionary mass action of a proletarian minority."--"The
Revolutionary Age," July 12, 1919.
"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 proletariat, creates a Socialistic system. Revolutionary
Socialists do not believe that they can be voted into power. They
struggle for the conquest of power by the revolutionary
proletariat."--"The Revolutionary Age," March 22, 1919.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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