Revolution, and Other Essays

Excerpt

REVOLUTION

“The present is enough for common souls,
Who, never looking forward, are indeed
Mere clay, wherein the footprints of their age
Are petrified for ever.”

I received a letter the other day.  It was from a man in Arizona.  It began, “Dear Comrade.”  It ended, “Yours for the Revolution.”  I replied to the letter, and my letter began, “Dear Comrade.”  It ended, “Yours for the Revolution.”  In the United States there are 400,000 men, of men and women nearly 1,000,000, who begin their letters “Dear Comrade,” and end them “Yours for the Revolution.”  In Germany there are 3,000,000 men who begin their letters “Dear Comrade” and end them “Yours for the Revolution”; in France, 1,000,000 men; in Austria, 800,000 men; in Belgium, 300,000 men; in Italy, 250,000 men; in England, 100,000 men; in Switzerland, 100,000 men; in Denmark, 55,000 men; in Sweden, 50,000 men; in Holland, 40,000 men; in Spain, 30,000 men—comrades all, and revolutionists.

These are numbers which dwarf the grand armies of Napoleon and Xerxes.  But they are numbers not of conquest and maintenance of the established order, but of conquest and revolution.  They compose, when the roll is called, an army of 7,000,000 men, who, in accordance with the conditions of to-day, are fighting with all their might for the conquest of the wealth of the world and for the complete overthrow of existing society.

There has never been anything like this revolution in the history of the world.  There is nothing analogous between it and the American Revolution or the French Revolution.  It is unique, colossal.  Other revolutions compare with it as asteroids compare with the sun.  It is alone of its kind, the first world-revolution in a world whose history is replete with revolutions.  And not only this, for it is the first organized movement of men to become a world movement, limited only by the limits of the planet.

This revolution is unlike all other revolutions in many respects.  It is not sporadic.  It is not a flame of popular discontent, arising in a day and dying down in a day.  It is older than the present generation.  It has a history and traditions, and a martyr-roll only less extensive possibly than the martyr-roll of Christianity.  It has also a literature a myriad times more imposing, scientific, and scholarly than the literature of any previous revolution.

They call themselves “comrades,” these men, comrades in the socialist revolution.  Nor is the word empty and meaningless, coined of mere lip service.  It knits men together as brothers, as men should be knit together who stand shoulder to shoulder under the red banner of revolt.  This red banner, by the way, symbolizes the brotherhood of man, and does not symbolize the incendiarism that instantly connects itself with the red banner in the affrighted bourgeois mind.  The comradeship of the revolutionists is alive and warm.  It passes over geographical lines, transcends race prejudice, and has even proved itself mightier than the Fourth of July, spread-eagle Americanism of our forefathers.  The French socialist working-men and the German socialist working-men forget Alsace and Lorraine, and, when war threatens, pass resolutions declaring that as working-men and comrades they have no quarrel with each other.  Only the other day, when Japan and Russia sprang at each other’s throats, the revolutionists of Japan addressed the following message to the revolutionists of Russia: “Dear Comrades—Your government and ours have recently plunged into war to carry out their imperialistic tendencies, but for us socialists there are no boundaries, race, country, or nationality.  We are comrades, brothers, and sisters, and have no reason to fight.  Your enemies are not the Japanese people, but our militarism and so-called patriotism.  Patriotism and militarism are our mutual enemies.”

In January 1905, throughout the United States the socialists held mass-meetings to express their sympathy for their struggling comrades, the revolutionists of Russia, and, more to the point, to furnish the sinews of war by collecting money and cabling it to the Russian leaders.  The fact of this call for money, and the ready response, and the very wording of the call, make a striking and practical demonstration of the international solidarity of this world-revolution:

“Whatever may be the immediate results of the present revolt in Russia, the socialist propaganda in that country has received from it an impetus unparalleled in the history of modern class wars.  The heroic battle for freedom is being fought almost exclusively by the Russian working-class under the intellectual leadership of Russian socialists, thus once more demonstrating the fact that the class-conscious working-men have become the vanguard of all liberating movements of modern times.”

Here are 7,000,000 comrades in an organized, international, world-wide, revolutionary movement.  Here is a tremendous human force.  It must be reckoned with.  Here is power.  And here is romance—romance so colossal that it seems to be beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.  These revolutionists are swayed by great passion.  They have a keen sense of personal right, much of reverence for humanity, but little reverence, if any at all, for the rule of the dead.  They refuse to be ruled by the dead.  To the bourgeois mind their unbelief in the dominant conventions of the established order is startling.  They laugh to scorn the sweet ideals and dear moralities of bourgeois society.  They intend to destroy bourgeois society with most of its sweet ideals and dear moralities, and chiefest among these are those that group themselves under such heads as private ownership of capital, survival of the fittest, and patriotism—even patriotism....