specific form and direction which it has assumed, its program and tactics, spell disaster to our movement. I am opposed to it, not because it is too radical, but because it is essentially reactionary and non-Socialistic; not because it would lead us too far, but because it would lead us nowhere. To prate about the dictatorship of the proletariat and of workers' Soviets in the United States at this time is to deflect the Socialistic propaganda from its realistic basis, and to advocate the abolition of all social reform planks in the party platform means to abandon the concrete class struggle as it presents itself from day to day." (Italics mine.)
The wisdom of this crafty, go-slow policy is now apparent, with the "Left Wing" leaders in jail, and Hillquit's chameleons now posing as angels of light, the saviors of "representative government" in America. The fact that the Socialist Party of America "goes into politics" does not make it less dangerous than the other revolutionary bodies, but more dangerous, for