broken by a policeman's club, this time for once in history it will not be a striker's head; now that you are on strike demand something really worth getting, especially an increase of wages.' Instead of that the strike was settled amicably in the mayor's office; the two workers were reinstated, and the strikers had missed a good opportunity. The manager of the General Electric Company may well have retired to his private office and winked at himself in the glass.

The chief use of Socialist organizations is to distribute revolutionary literature and to support the workers in industrial battles. Some Socialists point with querulous pride to the fact that they have contributed money to strikes led by Industrial Workers of the World, and yet the Industrial Workers rather ungratefully attack them. It is even so, brothers. In an open fight the Socialists do drop their pennies with a generous hand into the war chest of the workers, whether the workers be industrial unionists or members of the American Federation of Labor. If the Socialists did not do that, they would have little excuse for existence. Many people, not hired workers and therefore disqualified for membership in labor unions of any kind, are, in any immediate contest, on the side of the workers as

against the capitalists. Such people can be organized by the Socialist party, and their resources, financial and intellectual, can be collected and directed to the uses of the workers. If in addition to that, as a supplementary interest to gain members and secure adhesion, the Socialists wish to conduct political campaigns, that is a fair and honorable ambition. Up to the present time the political campaigns of the Socialists have had few results visibly advantageous to the working class. They have not won and held even a small city long enough to show what they can do. In a three-party contest they sometimes get in for a term. Then at the next election the Republicans and the Democrats unite against them and defeat them. This serves to prove the Socialist contention that the old capitalist parties, though of two bodies, have but a single heart, and that from the point of view of the working class the difference between them is negligible. To prove such things, to challenge the old parties and reveal their faults, is a useful service for any minority party to perform. But it is open to question whether the Socialist party as at present organized is advancing the cause of Revolutionary Socialism.

CHAPTER VI

PROGRAM OF THE SOCIALIST PARTY

LET us now examine the program of the Socialist party, the ideas which it pretends to stand for. What Socialists have done depends on their power, on the extent to which society has permitted them to put thought into action. What they would like to do lies wholly in the region of unrealized ideals. What is the Socialist party avowedly driving at? I will quote its national platform of 1912 paragraph by paragraph with comments:

1. The Socialist party of the United States declares that the capitalist system has outgrown its historic function, and has become utterly incapable of meeting the problems now confronting society. We denounce this outgrown system as incompetent and corrupt and the source of unspeakable misery and suffering to the whole working class.

If the reader remembers the imperfect remarks in the second chapter of this book, he

will understand what is meant by "historic function." Much Socialist thought is an analysis of history; it discovers that one economic form of society follows another, and predicts that the Socialist form is the next one due to arrive. Socialists are sometimes a little confusing in their moods and tenses. Obviously the capitalist system has not outgrown its historical function so long as in point of historic fact it continues to function. And it is, beyond peradventure of a reasonable doubt, going full blast. The intention, put more colloquially, is something like this: "It is about time we had a better system than capitalism; the Socialist system is better and we'll back it to push capitalism off the earth, the sooner the better." is not true that the capitalist system causes misery and suffering to the "whole working class." The more prosperous of the skilled workmen are quite comfortable; that is why they are conservative, are vigorously assailed in the Socialist press as aristocrats of labor, are indifferent to the larger part of the workers, and inclined to play the capitalist's game.

It

2. Under this system the industrial equipment of the nation has passed into the absolute control of a plutocracy which exacts an annual tribute of

millions of dollars from the producers. Unafraid of any organized resistance, it stretches out its greedy hands over the still undeveloped resources of the nation-the land, the mines, the forests, and the water powers of every state in the Union.

As has been pointed out, the Socialist is not the only enemy of the controlling plutocracy. Another enemy, quite as indignant and at present more effectively organized, is the little business man, the ordinary decent citizen, expressing himself politically through progressivism and "new democracy." The Socialist believes that the best efforts of the democratic reformer, with his program of conservation and nationalization of undeveloped resources and his game of "trust busting," can result only in a partial limitation of the power of great capital. So far middle-class insurgency has not succeeded in staying those "greedy hands"; it has only slapped them on the wrist. Bourgeois insurgency rebels against obvious economic evils and does not get at the fundamental problem. The Socialist hopes to undermine the whole structure, not only the towering plutocracy, but the system on which the plutocracy rests. Though at present the plutocracy can afford to be "unafraid of any organized resistance," and