But while Moscow's "programs and methods" are "not so much" the concern of the American Socialist Party as the "federation of ... Socialist nations," yet these Moscow "programs and methods" are themselves also distinctly adopted and enthusiastically followed by the American Socialists.
The Moscow Manifesto ("New York Call," July 24, 1919) lays down two great principles of action, one of method, the other of means. Here is the method: "The revolutionary epoch demands that the proletariat should employ such fighting methods as will concentrate its entire energy, viz., the method of mass action, and lead to its logical consequence--the direct collision with the capitalist state machine in an open combat. All other methods, e.g., revolutionary use of bourgeois parliamentarism, will in the revolution have only a subordinate value."
Here is the means: "A coalition is necessary with those elements of the revolutionary workers' movement who, though they did not previously belong to the Socialist Party, now, on the whole, take up the standpoint of the proletarian dictatorship in the form of the power of Soviets, e.g., some of the sections among the Syndicalists." (Ibid.)
The American "Syndicalists" are the I. W. W.'s, and their methods are those of "industrial action" by means of industrial unionism. In other words, they are seeking to organize "One Big Union" in order, as the "Preamble" to their Constitution asserts, to "take possession of the earth
and the machinery of production." These are the methods and means recommended by the Moscow International to the rabid Socialists affiliated with it all over the world.
These methods and means, urged by the Moscow Manifesto, were evidently adopted in Hillquit's manifesto, which led, by the party's adoption of it, to the American Socialist Party's strong commitment of itself at Chicago to "strongly organize" on "industrial lines" the "bulk of