thanks to whom capitalism still succeeds in
keeping a considerable portion of the working class under its
influence.

"For the conquest of power by the workers let us carry on an
implacable struggle against those who are deceiving them--against
the pseudo-Socialist traitors."

At the end of May, 1919, the National Executive Committee of the
Socialist Party of the United States, probably on account of pressure
brought to bear on it by the "Left Wing," stated that the party
repudiated the Berne Conference, but, at the same time, was _not yet_
affiliated with the Communist Conference of the Bolshevists at Moscow.
The phraseology of this ambiguous announcement is here given:

"It recognizes the necessity of reorganizing the Socialist
International along more harmonious and radical lines. The
Socialist Party of the United States is not committed to the Berne
Conference, which has shown itself retrograde on many vital points,
and totally devoid of creative force. On account of the isolation
of Russia, and the misunderstanding arising therefrom, it also is
not affiliated with the Communist Congress of Moscow."

This awkward straddle is explained by the fact that the American
Socialist Party, under the pro-German leadership of Morris Hillquit of
New York and Victor L. Berger of Milwaukee, had in its Congressional
platform for 1918 expressly endorsed the Inter-Allied Socialist and
Labor Conference, held at London that year. This is the conference which
the Lenine government scoffs at in the manifesto quoted just above,
styling it the "so-called inter-allied conference," in which "America
was represented by Gompers, representing associations which never had
anything to do with the Socialists." That the American Socialist Party
had been led into the endorsement of the conference by Berger and
Hillquit because the conference had recommended a meeting with German
workingmen seems evident from the wording of the endorsement, taken from
the official publication of the Socialist Party's 1918 Congressional
Platform, pages 3-4:

"In all that concerns the settlement of this war, the American
Socialist Party is in general accord with the announced aims of the
Inter-Allied Conference. We re-affirm the principles announced by
the Socialist Party in the United States in 1915; adopted by the
Socialist Republic of Russia in 1917; proclaimed by the
In