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its enemies. Not by the number or extent of its victories in the struggle for higher wages; all its strikes have been local and have not realized anything like nation-wide or tradewide organization; indeed they have come no nearer to catastrophic universality than many strikes of the old labor unions. Not because it has proposed an order of society which implies a subversion of the present order; the Socialists have done that all over the world years before the I. W. W. came into existence. The contribution of the I. W. W. to date is simply this: it has taught labor and capital and politics that the real power of labor must be exerted at the seat of production. It has compelled the old labor unions to consider the need of reorganization, the need of organizing women, children, wops, negroes, and bums. It has reminded political Socialism of what it is supposed to have known long ago and seems to have forgotten, that its only hope of winning is through a united working class, and that the natural place for the working class to unite is where it works. And with a corporal's guard of leaders and a rag-tag army it has forced from capitalism and all its agents a gratifying intensity of hatred which civic-federationized union

ism and vote-hunting Socialism have long since ceased to enjoy. Whether the I. W. W. increases in power or goes out of existence, the spirit which animates it is the spirit which must animate the labor movement if it is to have a revolutionary function. The I. W. W. possesses in simple and concentrated form all that is essential in Socialism and would call itself Socialist, as many of its members do in fact call themselves, were it not that the word has a political connotation irrelevant or hostile to revolutionary unionism.

CHAPTER X

INTERNATIONALISM AND MILITARISM

IT HAS been the boast of Socialists that they are part of a world organization which transcends the boundaries of nations. They maintain an International Socialist Bureau and send delegates to International Congresses. It is a common idea among them that the interests of the working people of one nation are not antagonistic to the interests of the working people of another nation, and that to meet the growth of international capitalism there must be a crescent solidarity between the Socialist parties of the world. The International Congresses have been the occasion of some fine speeches and stimulating debate about general tactics and policies, and they have had at least the sort of value which can be attributed to international congresses of physicians, scientists, or others associated in a common work. But International Socialism has so far remained a name and a form, an affair of speech and

printer's ink, rather than a working reality. The reason is that the Socialists of the various countries have never rid themselves of the nationalistic spirit; the components of the International represent divergent, even hostile, ideals. By making alliances with their several governments they have made almost impossible a true alliance between themselves as spokesmen for international labor. Long before the present war the so-called "principles of International Socialism" had ceased to be a standard, conformity to which determined the validity of a debatable Socialist idea. The war has exploded the fiction and opened our eyes suddenly to what we might have seen before, that participation in existing government, except for the purpose of weakening and thwarting it, is incompatible with world-wide solidarity. If a party gets a small share in government and seeks a larger share, it commits itself to the support of the governmental unit as an entity, no matter how antagonistic it may be to the current method of conducting the government. A Socialist parliamentarian becomes imbued with a sense of proprietorship in the very institution which he is trying to revolutionize, and he will, however reluctantly, rush to its defence

against a similar institution across the frontier. Moreover, many of the Socialist representatives are small property owners with an inevitable interest in special local possession, the value of which depends on the maintenance of the civil institution which surrounds and protects it. There may some time be a real Workingmen's International, but the Socialist International never has been that and never could be.

True Socialism is anti-governmental, “antistatist," anti-patriotic, anti-nationalist, and anti-militarist. At bottom these "antis" are one and the same thing; they cannot be separated from each other or from essential Socialism. The most eminent Socialists of the last century were avowed enemies of the state. This was partly because the state openly prosecuted them and made many of them wanderers without a country, and also because the form of state against which they rebelled was a monarchical tyranny like Prussia. Thus their purely socialistic distrust of government was blent with a republican animosity to crowned rulers-a distrust which the American bourgeois is supposed to share. Though Marx and Engels were both scornful of the alleged democracy of Great Britain and the United States, yet there was a

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