"We have long predicted the revolutionary cyclone that is now sweeping over the world, even though few people cared to believe us. We asked them to prepare for it by building up the framework of the new society within the shell of the old, in other words to see to it that we had the new house ready to move into, before we dynamited the old one.... "Personally we are convinced that Russia will never again return to the old order. The workers have control and they will not let go of it. As the days go by, they will gradually organize production and distribution on the lines of industrial unionism, as Lenine assures us, and that will be their salvation. "The plight of the Russian people is a warning to other peoples to immediately start building the new society, by building industrial unions right now, before the structure of the old society topples over. Industrial unions are the only social apparatus that will make abolishment of wage slavery possible.... "The Bolshevik Revolution has emphasized this sad fact. Socialism in Russia, facing for the first time in Socialist history, the problem of inaugurating a working class state, found itself paralyzed by the existence of a parliamentary form of Democracy. The Revolution was at stake. In order to destroy capitalism it was necessary to destroy parliamentary Democracy, and Lenine destroyed it. In its place he reared a new form of Democracy--the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is Socialism. "And yet, so misled is the thinking of our European Socialists that in the very presence of a living, accomplished Socialist commonwealth, they hastened to repudiate it because it was not 'Democratic.' Plekhanov betrayed it. Kautsky reviled it. Albert Thomas called upon the capitalists of France to send their soldiers there and crush it. Mr. Walling, Mr. Spargo and Mr. Russell baptized themselves into a 'Socialist' crusade to destroy Socialism. Could idiocy be more abject? "The alternative is presented, to choose between Socialism or Democracy. Or perhaps it would be better to put it--between industrial Democracy and parliamentary Democracy. And our pitiable Spargos, duped by a stale phrase, abandon their Socialism because it is not 'Democratic.' "In America, it is this same issue of Democracy which has long been the dividing line between the Socialist Party and the I. W. W. Like the Bolshevists of Russia, the I. W. W. have championed Democracy but we have refused to allow the capitalist thinkers to define it for us. We have practiced Democracy in our organization and we have sublimated it into the most perfect of Democratic organizations. But always, it has been a Democracy only of proletarians. We have built the framework of a new society which says that those shall not vote who do not work. And this, indeed, is Socialism. "But the political Socialists have feared to draw this distinction. They have not built themselves upon the proletarian rock. Into their ranks they have admitted, not only the butcher, the baker and the candle-stick maker, but also the lawyer, the doctor, the merchant, the sky pilot, yes, and even the capitalists--known as millionaire Socialists. Out of such a medley, a medley philosophy was sprouted. Democracy, to the political Socialists, could not be rigidly proletarian, because the political Socialists, themselves, were not proletarians. And their ideals paled into evasion and compromise. "Again, the I. W. W. being proletarian, spurned a parliamentary action which would have drawn it together with the exploiting class. It realized, before Spargo took that fatal dodge, that, from parliamentary Socialism to parliamentary Democracy it was but a step. Hence we spurned politics and parliamentarism, and substituted a Democracy, grouped around unions, and not around parliaments. "But the political Socialists, immersed in parliamentary hack work, stifled the Socialist concept of Democracy by recognizing and participating in the capitalist form of Democracy. Entering the parliaments, they dreamed that they could transform these parliaments into Socialist republics. Only too soon they discovered that the parliaments had transformed them into 'Democratic' apologists. Like a poisoning strain, parliamentarism spread out over Socialism. And so, when Socialism came at last in Russia, without the aid of the foolish parliaments, deluded Socialists cried that Bolshevism was not Socialism."
The year 1919 witnessed a very marked drawing together, in the United States and throughout the world, of I. W. W.'ism, or Syndicalism, and all the bodies of radical, revolutionary Socialism. The Moscow Bolshevists gave a great "boost" to the I. W. W. principle of industrial unionism by endorsing it and declaring that Russia was being reorganized economically along similar lines. Bolshevism in Russia, in fact, has had the help and counsel of I. W. W. experts from the United States, and I. W. W. leaders in America have naturally been elated. John Sandgren wrote in "The New Solidarity," April 12, 1919: