as Germany and Austria, are members of the new International. The Socialist Party of Spain at the Congress which is about to meet, will undoubtedly go with the Third International, while a strong movement to have the Independent Labor Party of England and the French Socialist Party affiliate with the Third International is evidenced among those organizations.

"The Third International already comprises the greatest portion of the revolutionary Socialist elements in Europe. Any attempt to organize another International would naturally come in conflict with this already created and popularized International among the membership of the various parties.

"By its past record - the adoption of the Zimmerwald program in 1915, the support of the Kienthal Manifesto in 1916, the adoption of the St. Louis resolution in 1917, the general position of the party and the sentiment of the rank and file throughout the last five years the Socialist Party could not do anything else but ally itself with those Socialist groups, who have, like itself, remained steadfast to the revolutionary and internationalist spirit of the Socialist

movement.

"The various decisions of the Chicago convention, and especially the manifesto adopted at the convention, proved beyond a doubt the spiritual adherence of our party to the principles enunciated at the Moscow International Conference. Anyone who had read carefully both the Moscow and Chicago manifestoes, will note the similarity of ideas which underlie both of these documents. It is because of this that many of us who stood by the party during the recent controversy, had the right to brand the assault upon the party by some groups as criminal and as aiming to destroy an organization which remained true to the principles of the revolutionary class struggle.

"The minority report also urges our affiliation with the Third International, because of the moral support it would give to the Russian comrades who have initiated that International. Surely they, the Russian Socialists, who have for the past two years stood the brunt of the great struggle for Socialism, earned the right to sponsor the reconstitution of the Socialist International. Their auspices is a guarantee that the new International will not fail when the test will

come.

"The Russian Socialists do not intend to dictate the policies of the new International, and the minority report is perfectly right when it claims that our party, if affiliated with it, will have an equal right to share in the formulation of the principles and policies upon which it will be based. Our affiliation at this time can only mean a moral affiliation. When the blockade is lifted and free intercourse with Russia is secured the new International will assemble all its adherent parties and groups, and will then proceed to mould Socialist policies and tactics in the light of the old principles and new facts.

"The Socialist Party of America cannot afford to remain amorphous at the present stage of the building of the new International. It has refused to go with those elements who have either betrayed or were unwilling to remain true to their professions. It belongs among those parties which have remained true to International Socialism and who alone have the right to build the edifice of the new International.

By voting for the minority report the comrades will give expression to what they have professed and believed in during the past critical years in the life of the International Socialist movement.

"ALEXANDER TRACHTENBERG."

In a letter from Morris Hillquit, appearing in the "New York Call" of May 21, 1919, with regard to the "Socialist Task and Outlook," we find the following interesting statements:

"It is safe to assert that at no time since the formation of the First International has the Socialist movement of the world been in a state of such physical disunion, moral ferment and intellectual confusion as it is today. The World War, so sudden in its outbreak, so titanic in its dimensions and so disastrous in its effects, had placed the Socialist movement in Europe before a situation, which it had not foreseen as a concrete reality and, for which it was entirely unprepared, and it reacted to it in a most unexpected and disheartening manner. Far from proving the formidable bulwark against war which their friends and enemies alike had believed them to be, the powerful cohorts of European Socialism on the whole supported their capitalist governments in the capitalist war, almost as enthusiastically and

unreservedly as the most loyal Junker classes, and when, with the collapse of the war, the Socialist revolutions broke out in several countries, their forms of struggle were equally startling."

This is a frank criticism of the Socialist elements of Europe who supported their governments, and emphasizes the disloyal character of the Socialist Party of America which did not support this country in the war.

The letter continues:

"The bourgeoisie, against whom the revolutions were directed, made little or no effective resistance, and the fight, repressive and sanguinary at times, was principally among those, who before the war called each other Comrades in the Socialist movement.

"There is something radically wrong in a movement that could mature such sad paradoxes and that wrong must be discovered and eliminated, if the international Socialist movement is to survive as an effective instrument of the working-class revolution. What was wrong with the Second Socialist International, and how are its mistakes to be avoided in the future? This is the main question which agitates and divides the Socialist movement today, and upon the solution of which the future of our movement depends.

"It may be somewhat premature to pass conclusive judgment upon the contending views and methods of contemporary Socialism or to attempt to formulate a complete revision of the Socialist program. Socialist history is still in the making, and history has recently shown an almost provoking disregard for preconceived theories and rigid formulae. But enough has happened since August 1, 1914, to justify several definite conclusions, both as to the wrongs and remedies of the situation.

"Why did the Second International fail? Some of our neo-revolutionary ideologists conveniently account for it upon the theological theory of lapse from grace. The Socialists of the pre-war period had become too materialistic and constructive,' they paid too much attention to political office and reforms, they were corrupted by bourgeois parliamentarism'they forgot the teachings of the founders of scientific Socialism' (how reminiscent of the familiar ecclesiastic complaint they abandoned the faith of their fathers!').

"Marxian Socialists, accustomed to look to material causes for the explanation of political events and manifestations, can hardly accept this explanation, which after all only reiterates and describes, but does not explain, and furnishes no guide for correction. It asks sternly: What were the economic causes which deflected the Socialist movement of Europe from the path of revolutionary, proletarian internationalism? And the answer is as startling and paradoxical as the entire recent course of the Socialist movement. It was the economic organization of the European workers, and the pressure of their immediate economic interests (as understood by them) that broke the solidarity of the Socialist International.

"It was not parliamentarism which was primarily responsible for the mischief. Excessive parliamentarism in the Socialist movement of Europe had undoubtedly contributed substantially to the disaster, negatively as well as positively, but on the whole the Socialists in Parliament expressed the sentiments of their constituents pretty faithfully.

"The Social-Democratic Deputies of Italy, Russia, Serbia and Bulgaria knew how to use the Parliaments of their countries as revolutionary tribunals, and so did Liebknecht, Rueble and Ledebour in Germany.

"The Parliaments of Germany and France were the scenes of Socialist betrayal. Its mainsprings lay much deeper.

"The countries in which the Socialist movement failed most lamentably are precisely those in which the movement was most closely linked with organized labor, while the principles of international solidarity were upheld most rigorously in countries in which the economic labor movement was either very weak or quite detached from the Socialist movement. In the United States, where this detachment was more complete than in any other modern country, the American Federation of Labor, under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, outdid all jingoes in the orgy of profiteering, while the Socialist Party adopted the St. Louis platform. The bulk of the Social Democracy in Germany was made up of workers organized upon the same structure and looking to the same immediate ends as the American Federation of Labor. The German workers were more progressive than

their American brethren. They acted politically within the Social Democratic Party. They had their own representatives in Parliament, and their social patriotic stand found parliamentary expression, just as the social patriotic spirit of the non-political' American Federation of Labor vented itself in extra-parliamentary action. What is true of Germany applies also, though perhaps in varying degree, to Austria, Belgium, France and Great Britain. Conversely, in Russia, Italy and the Balkan countries, in all of which the element of organized labor was a negligible factor in the Socialist movement, the Socialists have on the whole successfully withstood the wave of nationalistic reaction, and when the first break came, it was Carl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring in Germany, Fritz Adler in Austria, Lenine and Trotsky in Russia, and Jean Longuet in France, all intellectuals, that led the Socialist revolts in their countries.

What, then, is the inference to be drawn from these facts? Shall revolutionary Socialism hereafter disassociate itself from organized labor? By no means. A Socialist movement without the support of the workers is a sort of disembodied spirit; in fact, a spook. Socialism must remain the political and spiritual guide of the working class, but it must reorganize and re-educate the working class.

"The fundamental weakness of the organized labor movement has been that it was a movement of a class within a class, a movement for the benefit of the better-situated strata of labor the skilled workers. As such semi-privileged class, the economic organizations of labor had attained large power in the leading countries of Europe and in the United States before the war. They enjoyed a sort of government recognition, and had accumulated considerable material wealth. They had certain vested interests' in the capitalist regimes of their respective countries. In addition to this basic shortcoming, and largely because of it, the workers were organized along the narrow lines of separate trades and crafts. This form of organization naturally limits the efforts and activities of the workers to the petty struggles and interests of their own special trades. It creates a psychology of craft solidarity, rather than class solidarity, and deflects the workers' attention from the ultimate goal to immediate bene