Communism; Industrial Workers of the World; Socialism
"The revolutionary epoch demands that the proletariat should employ
such fighting methods as will concentrate its entire energy, viz.,
the method of mass action, and lead to its logical consequence--the
direct collision with the capitalist state machine in an open
combat. All other methods, e.g., revolutionary use of bourgeois
parliamentarism will in the revolution have only a subordinate
value."
It is very significant, therefore, that the Socialist Party of America
definitely committed itself to these tactics in the manifesto it adopted
at the Chicago Emergency Convention on September 4, 1919. As given in
the "Call" of September 5, 1919, the manifesto of the Socialist Party of
the United States says on this point:
"The great purpose of the Socialist Party is to wrest the
industries and the control of the Government of the United States
from the capitalists and their retainers. It is our purpose to
place industry and government in the control of the workers with
hand and brain, to be administered for the benefit of the whole
community.
"To insure the triumph of Socialism in the United States the bulk
of the American workers must be strongly organized politically as
Socialists, in constant, clear-cut and aggressive opposition to all
parties of the possessing class. They must be strongly organized in
the economic field on broad industrial lines, as one powerful and
harmonious class organization, co-operating with the Socialist
Party, and ready in cases of emergency to reinforce the political
demands of the working class by industrial action.
"To win the American workers from their ineffective and
demoralizing leadership, to educate them to an enlightened
understanding of their own class interests, and to train and assist
them to organize politically and industrially on class lines, in
order to effect their emancipation, that is the supreme task
confronting the Socialist Party in America.
"To this great task, without deviation or compromise, we pledge all
our energies and resources. For its accomplishment we call for the
support and co-operation of the workers of America and of all other
persons desirous of ending the insane rule of capitalism before it
has had the opportunity to precipitate humanity into another
cataclysm of blood and ruin.
"Long live the International Socialist Revolution, the only hope of
the suffering world!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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