BY JOSEPH HANSEN  
In 1914, for the first time in history, a world war broke out. Still worse, the international socialist movement, which had even anticipated the event and warned that it would be met with revolution, fell to pieces. The socialist parties on the two sides came out for defense of the fatherland, that is, in support of their own capitalist classes. For many socialists everything seemed lost. Even if socialist theory remained valid, it had broken down in practice.

In the United States, the right-wing leaders of the Socialist Party took the side of the Allies. When Woodrow Wilson, who had been reelected president on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” decided to join the bloody but profitable conflict and sent the doughboys to die on foreign battlefields, the right-wing socialists climbed onto the bandwagon, where they made spectacles of themselves selling war bonds.

The left wing of the Socialist Party, to which Jim naturally belonged, was incapable of working out an effective line of opposition to the war. The best it could come up with was resistance to the draft. It was left up to the young men in the Socialist Party to declare themselves as conscientious objectors on an individual basis.

This line did not arouse Jim’s enthusiasm. In fact, he found it distasteful. Nevertheless, because nothing better was proposed, he became a conscientious objector. Later he was to describe what a political blunder this course represented from the socialist point of view. Among other things, the party should have sought to place its members inside the armed forces where, day in and day out, they could have explained their opposition to the war to an audience that was bound to become more and more receptive to the message.

Jim’s judgment in this is quite correct. Nonetheless it is worth noting that in applying this line, Jim’s intent was clearly internationalist. Conscientious objection, while ineffective, represented opposition to imperialist war—opposition, moreover, to his own ruling class and its government during the war itself.  
 
Russian Revolution intervenes
Before 1917, like other militants in the left wing of the Socialist Party who were becoming known for their leadership capacities, Jim puzzled over what had happened to the socialist movement because of the war. Without really being aware of it, he was moving toward the question of the politics of the socialist movement.

The Russian revolution, culminating in the triumph of the Bolsheviks in November 1917, altered the entire situation. The debacle in the international socialist movement caused by the betrayals of the parties belonging to the Second International appeared to have been overcome at one stroke. The world revolution had scored a decisive advance. For the first time since the Paris Commune in 1871, revolutionary socialists had won governmental power. They had proved in practice the validity of socialist theory.

Today, almost sixty years after that great event, it is difficult to visualize the enthusiasm it created among the masses on a world scale including inside the United States. Here it opened up a completely new perspective. Figures like Cannon responded as if they had been given a new lease on life. They set themselves two main tasks. First, to support the Bolsheviks with every means at their command. Second, to learn how the Bolsheviks achieved their victory so as to be able to apply those lessons to the United States.

This work proceeded along factional lines inside the Socialist Party. The adherents of the Bolsheviks set out to organize a movement capable of applying the methods of the Russians in the United States. They did this even while they studied everything they could obtain elucidating those methods. This material was not abundant because of the language problem and the conditions of the times. Consequently gaps in knowledge, ill-digested concepts, and outright misunderstandings were rather widespread.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home