sheviki did in Russia. The Left Wingers opposed
the "immediate demands" in the Socialist Party platform, preferring to
work for dictatorship rather than for social reforms. They despised the
politicians of the Right Wing, calling them yellow, reactionary,
hypocritical, capitalistic Socialists, and telling them that their place
was with the newly formed Labor Party, which had already praised the
Socialists and invited them to join its ranks. The Lefts expressed a
fear that the leaders of the Right would, if our Government were
overthrown, turn against them just as the Scheidemann-Ebert group turned
against the German Spartacides. The fight between the two factions
became severe about the beginning of the year 1919.

"The Revolutionary Age," Boston, February 15, 1919, speaking of the
disturbance in the Socialist Party, and explaining the fundamental
principles of the Left Wing said:

"The American Socialist Party is in a condition of feverish
theoretical activity. Pressing problems are being met in a spirit
of self-criticism. New forms of action in the social struggle are
being accepted. Old methods, old tactics, old ideas, which in the
test of war have proven incapable of furthering the revolutionary
struggle of the proletariat, are being seriously analyzed and
repudiated.

"The membership of the Socialist Party, the majority, is
instinctively class conscious and revolutionary. It was this
membership that compelled our officials to acquiesce in the
adoption of a radical declaration against war--which most of the
officials sabotaged or converted into an innocuous policy of
bourgeois pacificism. When the Bolsheviki conquered, the majority
of our officials were either hostile or silent; some weeks before,
the 'New York Call' had stigmatized the Bolsheviki as 'anarchists.'
But the membership responded; they forced the hands of the
officials, who became 'me too' Bolsheviki, but who did not draw the
revolutionary implications of the Bolshevik policy. These officials
and their machinery baffled the will of the membership; more, the
membership baffled itself because it did not clearly understand the
theory and the practice implied in its instinctive class
consciousness and revolutionary spirit.

"While our National Executive Committee accepts the Berne Congress
and refuses to call an emergency National Conv