Communism; Industrial Workers of the World; Socialism
"The Red Army's victories against Kolchak, Yudenitch and Denikine
are in themselves paradoxical, in that they serve to increase the
Russian need for peace.... Every advance recorded in Siberia or the
Crimea brings the front line further from the base and complicates
the task of supplying munitions, food and equipment. Thus it
becomes increasingly evident to all Russians, whatever their
political leanings may be, that Russia must have peace in order to
survive economically. And yet--another paradox--all feel that any
peace established now between Soviet authority and Governments of
the bourgeois and democratics cannot be more than a brief truce
because Socialism and capitalism cannot abide side by side, and
because neither can be suppressed without warfare. The Bolshevik
faith in the ultimate appearance of a world revolution has not
waned, but their hope of its speedy coming has lessened
considerably."
Who but the long-suffering Russians would endure the hopeless fate
imposed by Socialism on Russian labor? The workingmen were conscripted
by Trotzky's armies. They won victories, but these have not freed them.
Returning from the front they are conscripted for labor armies, to work
as they fought, under military discipline, subject to court martial and
death if they rebel. Yet this military toil will not free them. They
slave under the pistols of the commissaries only to get themselves
economically equipped for a new war against their "capitalistic"
neighbors, and in this war the workingman, if he can still walk, will be
conscripted to go to the front again. Should he survive this, must he
begin the same round over again?
But why not strike against this slavery? Russian labor does not dare to
strike. Tender-hearted Socialism has made the labor strike a crime in
Russia. Says Lincoln Eyre, in a cable dated March 11, 1920, and printed
in the "New York World" of March 13, 1920:
"The unions, of course, lost their former principal weapon--the
strike. Today any body of workers that would venture out on strike
would be considered, to quote President Melnitchansky of the Moscow
unions, as traitors to their Socialist fatherland and as such would
doubtless be shot."
With this utter collapse of Socialist theories and professions in
Bolshevikiland, we need not wonder that, according to a cable in the
"New York Times" of March 2, 1920, the French National Socialist
Congress adjourned at Strasbourg, March 1, 1920, "after voting down by
more than 2 to 1 a motion to ally the Socialists of France with Lenine
and Trotzky." According to the same cable, "The pleaders for the Third
Internationale, formed at Moscow, were answered by the reply that the
beautiful doctrines enunciated there had been thrown aside by Lenine and
Trotzky and that any one who believed in real Socialism would be a fool
to get behind the leaders of Soviet Russia."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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