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FOR REVOLUTION


FOR REVOLUTION



FOR
REVOLUTION
by
V. F. CALVERTON
New York
T H E J O H N D A Y C O M P ANY

Copyright, 1982, by V. F. CALVERTON
#
Printed in U. S. A.
by The Stratford Press, Inc.,
New York City
—º- HE American people are thinking seriously today, but in
the wrong direction. They are devoting their energies to the common
task of averting revolution, when what they should be doing is
thinking in terms of revolution, breaking the ground for it in prep-
aration for its arrival. Not a revolution tomorrow—but the day after
ſtomorrow, if you will, for in the end, whether we like it or not, it is
only a revolution which can solve the social problem at stake.
The American people as a whole are all thinking about the same
thing today—namely, how to get out of the present depression be-
fore society collapses into chaos. Everyone is concerned with that
same thought, the President, Congress, the bankers, the indus-
trialists, the workers—and the intellectuals. Each group, however,
has devised a different solution, a different method of escape. One
group believes that it will be through liquidating frozen assets and
starting more money into circulation; another that it will be through
inaugurating state projects which will employ millions of workers
and thus endow the nation with the renewed purchasing power
necessary to restore the economic equilibrium; others believe it will
be through endowing the president or some other official with dicta-
torial powers that a way out can be found; the majority of the
workers, who should believe the opposite, are convinced for the
time being at least that the election of a Democratic president and
the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment will provide the best
solution; and still others, in particular many of the intellectuals, are
convinced that it will be only by means of a planned economy that
any form of rescue can be achieved. However much these groups
differ in their respective plans and methods, they are all in agree-
(ment on one thing, and that is in their united opposition to revolution.
Revolution is their common béte noire. It is the common enemy of
President Hoover, Speaker Garner, J. P. Morgan, Jr., Owen D.
Young, Charles Schwab, William Green, Nicholas Murray Butler,
Charles Beard, Stuart Chase, Gerald Swope, and Gilbert Seldes.”
In short, they are all opposed to revolution because they believe,
each in his own way, that whatever is wrong with the present order
can be changed and repaired without destroying the order itself, or
Cf. Gilbert Seldes' pamphlet, Against Revolution, (No. 10) in the John
Day Pamphlet Series. . .

if, as in certain cases, they believe the order has to be scrapped,
they are convinced that the scrapping can be done bit by bit, by in-
finitesimal gradations, without resort to force or violence.
The aim of this pamphlet is to show that all such opposition is
dangerously misguided and futile; that the task which confronts us
is not to work to avert that revolution but to work to hasten it and in
such ways as will make it possible to bring it about with a minimum
of difficulty and disorganization. If we attempt to avert or delay
that revolution, we shall only be plunged into a worse state of chaos
when it comes. If, on the other hand, we endeavor to hasten it and
in so doing consciously prepare for it, we may manage to save our-
selves from much of that chaos which otherwise cannot be escaped.
To ally ourselves, therefore, with the forces that are attempting to
avert revolution is but to create more misery instead of less; to ally
ourselves, on the contrary, with the forces which are preparing for
revolution in order to give them more intelligent guidance, is to
create ultimately less misery instead of more. .
But what is it about our way of life which makes revolution so
imperative? .
To begin with, the capitalist order is no longer in a progressive,
expanding stage but has entered into its period of decay; its
colonies are no longer able to support its imperialistic needs; its
major foreign markets have been crippled by post-war dissension
and revolt. The British workers, for instance, can no longer live
upon the backs of the Indian workers and by sharing thus in the
plunder of another people be kept from experiencing the tragic
contradictions in their own internal economy; the American pro-
letariat, caught by those same contradictions, is becoming aware
today that it can no longer share, however infinitesimally, in the
profits of the American financiers and industrialists when those
profits have been destroyed by the collapse of the credit structure
of European economy. The artificial situation created by the war,
which made it possible for markets to be supplied upon the basis
of paper claims upon the future, only hastened the decay of the
financial superstructure of that whole economy. The only country
which temporarily escaped that crisis was the United States, which,
by virtue of becoming the great creditor nation of the world, was
able to achieve an ascending prosperity curve between 1922 and
1929. In 1929, caught by the same crisis, that prosperity collapsed
and panic followed. But the very fact that all that is true, Messrs.
Chase, Keynes, Salter, and Beard would answer, is all the more
reason why a planned economy, fiscally as well as industrially, is

necessary—in order to e the revolutionary implications i
herent in its absence. When all is said, however, what their pl
and programs really do is to complicate rather than clarify the
crisis. - - -
The basic fact which these “planners” neglect and the neglect
is most revealing—is that man is a “political animal,” and that all
the plans which they concoct can have no meaning without consid-
eration of that fact. Their plans are based upon the erroneous as-
sumption that society is a unit instead of a conflict of units or classes,
and consequently they do not realize that it is that very conflict
which cannot be reconciled within the system of society that they
advocate. In addition, they fail to see that the conflict of interests
which that discord of classes represents is rooted in the basic prob-
lem of economic power. Economic power in the modern democratic
state is not vested in the state itself, but in the groups which control
the action of the state; attempts to reorganize the economic set-up of
society can, therefore, have no meaning in terms of appeal to the
state—or to human reason as a supposed adjunct of state wisdom—
but only in terms of appeal to those who possess economic power,
the bankers and industrialists. It is one thing to devise plans
whereby the economic organization of society is recast in accordance
with the schemes of the social engineer, but quite another to get
control of the sources of power necessary to do the remolding in
uestion. -
As to the need for remolding there is little argument; the debate,
in these days of doubt and fear, is as to how the remolding can be
done, by evolution or by revolution. The evolutionists, believe that
the appeal can be addressed to the bankers and industrialists, who
by the persuasion of logic or the pressure of circumstance can be
made to agree to remold the system in keeping with a more socialized
form of production and distribution; the revolutionists believe that
the appeal must be made to the workers and farmers, the disin-
herited, who will provide the force necessary to overthrow the power
of the bankers and industrialists. 3: ... . . .3
Now, why won’t the evolutionary program work? Why won’t the
finespun logic of the “evolutionists,” the “planners,” work out in
practice? There are two fundamental reasons why it will not work:
first, because the bankers and industrialists who constitute the rul-
ing class in every advanced nation will not surrender their power
except by force, but will naturally use every means at their disposal
to perpetuate their power; and second, since the power of the
modern nation inheres in their hands, they will not agree to dispense
&














with the essential incentive of our society—namely profit-seeking,
for it is through the profit drive that they have acquired and con-
tinue to maintain their power. It is the profit motivation which
makes the whole system revolve. Subtract the profit motif and
their power would be robbed of its efficacy and meaning. .
In short, the present ruling class, like every other ruling class in
the past, is caught in a contradiction which economically it cannot
escape—except by giving up its position of power and thus can-
celing itself out of existence. By retaining the profit drive it only
aggravates the economic chaos which its form of production in-
evitably creates, making it more and more impossible to bridge the
catastrophic hiatus between production and consumption, and in-
tensifying thus the antagonism between itself and those not in
power. No ruling class has ever or will ever give up its power save
by having it wrested from it; individual members of the class might
be willing enough to surrender power but the class as a whole can-
not. It is caught by the very mechanisms which it has created. An
individual banker, for example, might be a very kind, generous
person who would lend money to his various friends without security,
and even without interest; but a bank cannot function so. The bank
is an agency of a class; it operates by certain economic principles;
it is the inexorable product of a social system and it must function
in accordance with the necessities of that system. It may err but it
errs within the radius of those necessities. While an individual
banker or industrialist might be willing “to listen to reason,” then,
and surrender power without a struggle, bankers and industrialists
as a class cannot. As a class they are bound by the system of which
they are a product, and will defend it by force as long as they have
power. A class, defending class interests, does not function like an
individual; it functions like a social mechanism, forced to resort
to whatever devices are needed to salvage and perpetuate that
mechanism. .
To appeal to the bankers and industrialists, therefore, or even to
the lower middle class as many of the “evolutionists” and “plan-
ners” are wont to do, is futile. In the end such appeal, faced by an
emergency, is bound to lead to dictatorship, for when the situation
grows acute, and action becomes imperative, the bankers and in-
dustrialists in order to preserve their power will unhesitatingly dis-
card democracy and establish a financial dictatorship. In the event
that such power should be seized through a movement of the lower
middle class, as in Italy, an open fascist dictatorship would result.
In that connection, of course, it is the Father Coxes and not the

Owen D. Youngs who are most dangerous, for it is of such types
that the American fascist leadership will be born. It is important
that we bear that distinction in mind, for otherwise the word
fascism is robbed of its intrinsic meaning. In either event, we can be
sure of one thing, that power has always been maintained in human
society by virtue of force (“Der Staat ist Macht,” wrote Hegel
years ago, in his analysis of state power); when that power is not
threatened the force behind it remains invisible, but when it is
threatened the force becomes immediately visible and vicious. If
the planning necessary to comply with the logic of the “planners”
is to be undertaken, it will inevitably necessitate a dictatorship in
order to carry it out, for within the capitalist class itself are con-
tradictory elements which will have to be disciplined during the
crisis, and within the ranks of the disinherited there are elements
which will have to be subdued. This dictatorship would have to use
force as an open weapon. At the same time, however, it would not
be able to solve the difficulties inherent in our system of society; it
would not be able to reconcile any better than has fascism in Italy
the contradiction between production and consumption, for the con-
tinuance of the profit motif even among large units would deny that
possibility; moreover, it would not succeed in eliminating in any
way the class antagonisms which make it impossible for society to
function as a solid unit, in the sense that society does in Soviet
Russia today.
In order to create a society which will reconcile those contradic-
tions, eradicate the profit motif and eliminate class antagonisms,
nothing short of a social revolution will suffice. The present class in
power will not surrender its position of supremacy unless it is
wrested from it by force; it will use force to the utmost to defend
it, as it has already done this very year in Detroit, St. Louis, and
Washington, and it will only be by countering that force by a
greater force that it can be overthrown and a new society based
upon the elimination of profit-seeking and class antagonisms be
born. . .”
To talk in terms of avoiding that revolution, therefore, is but to
betray the cause of human progress, to dam up the creative energies
of the race which need to be released if they are not to be stifled by
the throttling devices of a ruling class which has already outlived
its function. It is only a revolution that can save us from being
plunged further and further into the abyss of social and economic
decay. .

II
Despite the revolutionary tradition upon which this country has
been founded, and by virtue of which it has advanced, an entirely
false idea of the historical rôle of revolution has been inculcated in
the country as a whole. The notion which prevails, and which as a
defense mechanism has been cultivated by the bourgeoisie through-
out the western world, is that revolution is an unmitigated evil, and
that all thought of social change should be conceived of in peace-
ful, evolutionary terms. No better form of social logic could be
devised by a class which wishes to retain power, for by persuading
the masses that force is unnecessary, since everything they wish to
gain through revolution can be acquired through evolution, it can
use the force which it possesses to perpetuate its power without
molestation. Beneath the guise of such logic, it can, functioning as
the state, use force to put down any resistance to it, and at the
same time deny the use of force to any group which might resist it.
Thus, the workers and farmers are first disarmed on the basis of
social theory, and then combated with arms whenever necessary on
the basis of social practice—as, for instance, in the recent Detroit
massacre or the routing of the veterans from Washington by the
militia. The contradiction involved therein can be fought only by
the realization of the futility of the evolutionary theory of social
change.
Revolution, in terms of the future as well as the past, must
undergo a process of revaluation. We must come to realize the
significance of revolution as a cleansing force. We must learn to
emphasize the virtues of revolution instead of its vices, and ap-
preciate what Engels described as “the spiritual uplift that is the
consequence of every successful revolution.” There are always two
ways of looking at any social revolution—from the point of view of
its tragedies or the point of view of its achievements. The class that
is victorious naturally exalts its accomplishments. The advantages
or disadvantages of a revolution depend, therefore, upon the class
point of view from which it is judged. The French Revolution was
a great achievement for the bourgeoisie who gained everything from
it, but a tragedy from the point of view of the feudal aristocracy
which lost everything in it. The Bolshevik Revolution was a mo-
mentous achievement for the proletariat and the peasantry which
gained everything from it, but a calamity for the aristocracy and
bourgeoisie who lost everything by it. .
While a social revolution is inevitably associated with an abundance

of misery and chaos, it is also accompanied by a release of energy
which can, if well directed, remake the entire structure of civiliza-
tion. In a word, the evils must be counterbalanced against the goods
if a sound historical judgment is to be made. It is only by a revolu-
tion that old, outworn social habits and psychological tendencies
can be discarded and destroyed. Without the Bolshevik Revolution,
for example, it would have been impossible for the Russian people to
have broken with the old ways of life and thought in Russia and
found the social release which has overwhelmed the nation in conse-
quence of that revolution. The same was true, in a different and a
less significant sense, of the French Revolution where the bour-
geoisie instead of the proletariat profited by the change. Wherever
a social class has outworn its economic function, it tends to hold
back instead of to stimulate the movement of progress—and to
thwart the advance of the human mind. . .
From that point of view alone a social revolution is a psy-
chological therapeutic.
Instead of emphasizing, therefore, the lives that are lost in social
revolutions, it would be historically more pertinent to estimate the
goods that are gained by such revolutions. In fact, it would have
been impossible for man to have advanced without them.
The bourgeoisie, advocates of revolutionary change in the early
stages of its career when it was an advancing creative class, has now
become a definitely anti-revolutionary class. It has only been since
it has acquired power that the middle class has adopted the evolu-
tionary outlook; when it was struggling for power it was revolution-
ary to the core. And yet by becoming anti-revolutionary, the
bourgeoisie has not by any means become a peace-loving class. On
the contrary, it was under the leadership of the middle class that
the nationalistic outlook of modern society was born and modern
warfare was made into the horrendous destroyer of millions. The
middle class thus has not eschewed violence on principle; rather it
has encouraged it wherever it has abetted its ends. War has been its
favorite technique of expansion. It has opposed violence only where
violence has become a threat against its power. Consequently it has
advocated patriotism, which has been a philosophy of violence as
applied to war, but opposed “proletarianism,” which is a philosophy
of violence as applied to revolution. .
As a result of that contradiction, the violence of revolution has
been condemned by bourgeois civilization, but the violence of war
has been defended. Insofar as the masses are concerned, however,
the violence of war is infinitely worse than the violence of revolution.

It is only with the ruling classes that the opposite is the case. In
simple quantitative form, war has always cost more lives than
revolution, and yet our civilization is ever quick to stress the
tragedy of the latter and to neglect the far greater tragedy of the
former, disregarding also the social wastefulness of war and the
social fruitfulness of revolution. “No doubt there were single hours
in the World War when more Russian lives were consumed than the
Red Terror ever took,” Professor Edward Allsworth Ross wrote in
his book, The Russian Soviet Republic, and then added with telling
significance, “but the world is so snobbish at heart that it is horri-
fied by the victims of the latter as it continues to be horrified by the
less than 17,000 victims of the Terror in the French Revolution. In
both cases persons of social standing were losing their lives.”
Therein lies the crux of the matter. In a successful revolution the
ruling class pays the price with its heads; in a war the masses pay
the major price with theirs. The ruling class of the vanquished side
in war is, of course, forced to pay a price for its defeat, but unless
there is a revolution within the state, as was the case in Russia and
Germany after the last war, it still manages to save its heads and
retain its power. ×
In its anxiety to exaggerate the miseries and horrors of revolu-
tion, middle class thought has endeavored to conceal or at least to
minimize the importance of the miseries and horrors of the daily
life of the proletariat. We over-emphasize the sudden deaths that a
revolution occasions but entirely neglect the slow living deaths that
large parts of the working class experience day by day. Historically
speaking, the few thousand physical deaths which might be oc-
casioned by a revolution would certainly be less important than the
millions of living deaths which have to be endured daily by the
masses in our cities. To weep over those few thousand and to
neglect those millions is vicious sentimentality. If in a war to make
the world safe for democracy, in which in reality the great mass of
men died to save other men's dividends, we could risk millions of
lives, there should be no reason for us to become unduly excited
over the prospect of hazarding a few thousand lives in a struggle
the whole aim of which would be to bring about that democracy for
the masses which the past war failed entirely to establish. Compare,
for example, the cost of life occasioned by the Civil War, and then
weigh it side by side with the gain made in the eradication of bond-
slavery, and it will be seen at once that the loss was far less signif-
icant than the gain. The removal of the suffering alone which the
Negroes had to endure under the system of bond-slavery was suf-
ficient in itself to compensate socially for the fifty thousand lives lost
in the war. Once the vast mass of the American people see wage
slavery as a menace scarcely less vicious in its effects than bond-
slavery, they will realize the necessity of preparing for a new
revolution, a revolution greater than the French Revolution, and
greater far in its consequences than the Civil War.
While the objectives of that new revolution—a socialized society,
collective instead of individualistic in its emphasis, and based upon
a use instead of a profit economy, with exploitation eliminated and
classes abolished—have been clearly enough defined in radical
literature, the full implications of it are only beginning to be ap-
preciated today. Such a revolution will release, for the first time in
man's history, the full potentialities and power of the human race.
In the past such release has been impossible. Vast energies which
the race might have used have been dammed up by class oppression
and dominance. The potentialities of the masses have never been
tapped by the forces of civilization. Even in the modern world the
intellectual potency of the masses has never been utilized; on the
contrary, the conditions of life which have been imposed upon the
masses have made it impossible to cultivate the mental powers they
possess. Only the intellectual power of the aristocracy and the
upper and lower middle class has been exploited by society in its
struggle for advance. The waste alone involved in that procedure
has been nothing short of criminal. There is not a shred of evidence
to prove that the masses are not potentially as creative as the middle
class or the aristocracy; on the contrary, with the new future which
will mark the next stage in civilization the masses will become the
productively creative element in society, with the middle class,
withered at the root, rendered sterile instead of creative in its
expression. - -
It is only when we realize how completely society in the past has
throttled the mind power of the masses that we can appreciate how
much civilization has lost in terms of its total creative energy. In
literature, for example, as is shown by Professor Nicholson's
synoptical tables, only two men of literary genius, Bunyan and
Burns, emerged from the masses in a period of six hundred years
(1265–1865). In the tables of Dr. Cooley, which appeared in his
essay “Genius, Fame, and the Comparison of the Races,” not one of
the most distinguished seventy-one men of letters, extending from
Bayle to Turgenev, was the product of the poverty-stricken masses.
Turning to science M. de Candolle shows that only 7 per cent of the
men of achievement elected to the French Academy of Sciences

descended from the working people. In short, although as J. M.
Robertson states in his brilliant essay “Economics of Genius,”
“potential genius is probably about as frequent in one class as in
another,” the economic and educational opportunities which society
has denied the proletariat have made it impossible for it to develop
its intellectual proclivities and powers. “Individualistic society of the
past is seen rather to have fixed conditions,” to quote J. M. Robert-
son again, “which theoretically are almost the least favorable to a
maximum (numerical) development of potential mental faculty . . .
It has set us circumstances under which from a small minority only
of the total population at any given moment could its best intellectual
workers be drawn.” -
Only a revolution such as we have previously described, in which
the class divisions in society would be destroyed, will make it possi-
ble for the race as a whole to utilize all the energies and potential-
ities at its command. To achieve that end alone would mark the
beginning of a new page in history, for not only would it mean
releasing the energy of the masses, but it would also mean realizing
all those energies which in the past have been absorbed and con-
sumed by the process of economic competition and social struggle.
III
But one way of betraying the cause of progress is to advocate
making a revolution when the conditions are not ripe for it.
/ Are the conditions ripe for a revolution today in America? The
objective external conditions are, but the subjective psychological
ones are not. No other country in the world is so objectively pre-
pared for a social revolution. Our technological advance has ideally
equipped us for just such a revolution. Given the psychological
factors necessary to effect it, a revolution could be accomplished
here without any severe or drastic changes whatsoever. It is the
psychological elements which are unfitted for revolutionary action.
It was Lenin, who in his article on the Paris Commune, shrewdly
observed that two conditions were necessary for a successful social
revolution: “a high development of the productive forces and the
preparedness of the proletariat.” The first of those conditions—
namely, the objective, has already been realized in the United States,
as we pointed out above; the second, the subjective or psychological,
is further from realization in this country than in any other in-
dustrialized nation in the world. In brief, we are admirably prepared
physically for a revolution but miserably unprepared psychologically


for it; our technology is advanced but our ideology is backward;
we have built up an industrial structure which can easily be con-
verted from a competitive into a co-operative one, from an in-
dividualistic into a communistic one, but we have not built up
a working class which has learned as yet the advantage of co-
operation or the wisdom of communism. As a result of that contradic-
tion, America is faced today with an objective situation which is
potentially revolutionary, but with a working class which is ideolog-
ically unequipped to take revolutionary action.
But why should this contradiction exist in America? Why should
the working class be so ideologically backward and unrevolutionary *
The answer to this problem will help us understand an aspect of
American psychology which has been too often neglected.
. For over 275 years America has presented a unique environment
for the individual. If one were to explain that uniqueness in a
phrase one could best account for it in terms of the frontier force.
It was the presence of the frontier, which Carlyle described as “the
Door of Hope for distracted Europe,” that provided the h element
in the American equation. While in New England and the South,
class distinctions were established from the very beginning, and as
wealth grew those distinctions were accentuated instead of obscured,
on the frontier all such distinctions were absent. The western
frontiersmen advanced into the wilderness as equals, fought as
equals, and established their communities upon an equalitarian
basis. Class distinctions could have little meaning in an environ-
ment which demanded individual initiative, energy, strength, cour-
age, and a willingness to work rather than willingness to live on the
work of others. Society took on a fluidity which it has never expe-
rienced before and will never experience again. Individuals found
themselves for the first time in their lives unfettered by class or
rank, unencumbered by the cultural and economic vestiges of the
past. The air tingled with new possibilities, the promise of a petty
bourgeois millennium. It was only in such a state of economic flux,
where individual advance was comparatively unimpeded, that a
philosophy of individualism could drill itself so deeply into the lives
of a people. . ..
But this frontier force did not stop with the frontier. In a very
significant way, it affected all of America. Moving ever farther and
farther west, opening up new possibilities as it spread, the frontier
provided a psychological as well as an economic outlet for the
pent-up population of the cities. It not only supplied a means of
scape for the oppressed petty bourgeoisie in the East, but it also




held forth an ever-promising escape for the worker, who, by
virtue of its promise, adopted a petty bourgeois psychology instead
of developing a proletarian one. Although the workers in the East
felt the pressure of class subordination, the ever-stirring prospect of
the West prevented their minds from becoming proletarianized in
any lasting way. Even when they organized themselves into unions
in the nineteenth century, it was under the banner of petty bour-
geois political demands and not proletarian ones that they fought.
To this very day, as a matter of fact, the official labor movement in
America in its ideology is nothing more than a tail kite of the petty
bourgeois movement. .
It is impossible to understand the American mind, the mind of the
American masses, unless we can appreciate the verticalizing in-
fluence which the frontier factor exercised upon the general char-
acter of our life. The frontier, with the wide areas of territory
which it constantly opened up for new settlements, new towns, and
new cities, afforded a spur to individualistic enterprise which spread
from coast to coast. When we remember that in 1840, primarily as a
result of the frontier, almost one-quarter of the total population of
the United States was classified as land-owning, we can easily
enough realize why the petty bourgeois ideology rooted itself so
deeply into the mind of the nation. Moreover, because of the
tremendous sweep of territory on the frontier, congestion could not
swiftly occur, nor the individual be mowed down as readily by the
machine. As a result of those factors, individualism secured in
America a foothold that it never acquired in any other country—a
foothold in the mind of the nation, as it were, rooting itself like a
religion into the very essence of our culture.
In England, save for a brief period, individualism was primarily
the property of the middle classes. It did not mean enough to the
workers for them to adopt it as part of their philosophy. While
before 1870 the English workers dallied with middle-class ideas,
after 1870 that dalliance ceased. Before 1870, the frontier force had
even played a part in English life. The frontier prospects of South
Africa, and even of Australia and Canada, did not lose their appeal
until the seventies. But even at the height of their appeal they
never exercised the influence over the English masses which the
frontier force in America did over the American masses. Geographic
disparities alone prevented that possibility. Only in America, as
we have seen, and for the reasons which we have recounted, did
individualism become a propelling motivation with the working class
as well as with the middle class. It was that fact which made the

American working class adopt a petty bourgeois philosophy of
individualism instead of develop a proletarian philosophy of collec-
tivism. It was that fact which made the workers think of themselves
as potential capitalists rather than as inevitable proletarians. It was
that fact which made it possible for them to become wage-conscious
without becoming class-conscious. It was that fact which made it
possible for the capitalist ideal, interpreted often as rugged in-
dividualism, to become the embodiment of what is commonly de-
scribed as American idealism.
It was the nature of the country itself, then, which kept the
American workers and farmers from developing a radical proletarian
ideology, and has left them intellectually unequipped for revolution-
ary action today when nothing short of revolutionary action would
be of any avail. Due to the presence of the frontier, with its agrarian
emphasis and promise, the American workers and farmers developed
a radical, agrarian ideology, instead of a radical, proletarian one.
In fact, the development of this radical agrarian ideology definitely
thwarted the evolution of a radical proletarian one.
Ever ready for violence—and the American masses in that respect
have been perhaps the most violent masses of the world—they are
unready for revolutionary action which implies the necessity of
social intelligence and a collective, class-conscious program. Until
they acquire such intelligence and such a program, they will spend
their violence in unrewarding protest and self-defeating struggle.
Within the last few years, however, America has entered a new
and more critical stage in its history. In the past, whenever the
workers and farmers began to shed their lower middle class ideology,
a return of comparative prosperity would rob their rising class
consciousness of conviction, and turn the majority of them into self-
deluding petty bourgeois again in their psychology. That past,
however, is gone. The prosperity rise between 1922 and 1929 will
never be repeated again. Not that there will not be a recovery from
the present depression. There will. But it will not be a recovery to
prosperity, but merely to one of less depression. The economic
set-up of our society is so constituted today that, regardless of
whatever recovery we ever make, we shall never be able to restore
the vigor to the lower middle class psychology which it possessed
in the past. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
While the struggle between the big bourgeoisie (big business) and
the petty bourgeoisie had been settled insofar as fighting was con-
cerned even before the decade of the twenties, it was the develop-
ments of industrial enterprise in the twenties which put the final

quietus on the struggle, leaving the petty bourgeoisie in a state of
blind and helpless retreat. The Democratic party, which in 1912
still represented the interests of the lower middle class, had already
begun to ally itself with the interests of big business by the turn of
the twenties. The twenties furthered that alliance. A number of the
small industries, headed by individuals who were members of the
Democratic party, were transformed into large industries during
that decade, and it was those individuals whose interests had be-
come identified with those of big business who secured control of
the party. At the present time, for instance, the dominant controls
in the Democratic party, represented by such big business men as
Raskob, DuPont, Young and others, are more definitely allied to big
business than to small business. This change, reflecting the sur-
render of the lower middle class on the political field as well as on
the economic, predicates the beginning of a new epoch in the
political as well as economic life of the nation. The lower middle
class, becoming more and more absorbed into the maw of the in-
dustrial structure and shot off into the proletariat, can no longer
function as a decisive force in the country. Even in 1924, when
LaFollette arose as the political and economic defender of the
lower middle class, declaring himself in favor of a return of the days
of 1776 and an opponent of all forms of trusts and monopolies, the
lower middle class challenge had lost its sting. If the boom years
which preceded the crash of 1929 saved the lower middle class for a
time from appreciating the real nature of its status, the panic years
which followed taught it the truth about its situation. At this very
moment the remaining strength of the lower middle class is being
sapped at the root by the economic crisis which is upon us. Al-
though when this panic is over and the wheels of industry begin to
run once more, the lower middle class will not vanish as a class, it
will never be able to regain even the waning vigor which it possessed
before the crisis. The entire direction of our economic life will
prevent it.
It is the collapse of the lower middle class which is helping to
prepare the way for the rise of the proletariat. Along with the
breakdown of the petty bourgeois ideology will disappear, slowly
perhaps but steadily, the petty-bourgeois-minded outlook of the
American proletariat. As the conditions of economic life make it
impossible for the philosophy of the lower middle class to inspire
the masses any longer with its promise of individual opportunity and
advance, the American working class, in consonance with the
European working classes, will adopt a proletarian ideology in
keeping with the realization of its new status. The very structure
of industrial enterprise in America at the present time is inevitably
bound to increase the strength of the proletariat at the same time
that it weakens the position of the lower middle class. .
In the light of these facts, we can look forward in the next decade
to a greater harmony between the objective situation and the
psychological forces in our civilization. Big business will undoubt-
edly develop dictatorial tendencies in its control of the state," and
the working class will become ideologically conscious of its class
rôle, and thus learn to prepare itself for the revolutionary action
which in America today it is so unfit to undertake.
IV
In recent decades, there has been a definite attempt to inculcate
the idea that America has been a land in which force has played
little part in the determination of its destiny. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Force has functioned as conspicuously in
American history as in that of any European country. As a matter
of fact, the American people have resorted to force for every im-
portant progressive step they have made. The belief that progress
in America has been made by virtue of the ballot, or Congress, is
nothing more than a myth perpetuated by the ruling class as a
protection against its overthrow. In both the Revolutionary War,
out of which the American nation was conceived, and the Civil War,
as a result of which the American nation was united, force was a neces-
sary expedient. Without resort to force, America might have continued
a British colony, and without force, the North and South might have
remained divided with bond-slavery still a part of our economic fabric.
Shay's Rebellion was put down by Bowdoin's militia; Dorr's Re-
bellion in favor of equal suffrage for all Rhode Islanders was sup-
pressed by use of force on the part of President Tyler; Negro
revolts were ruthlessly suppressed by force; striking workers have
been suppressed by the military arm since 1828, resulting in wide-
spread murders and massacres, and recalcitrant farmers have fre-
a What we are moving toward at the present time is a modified form of
state capitalism, what with the state practically supporting and subsidizing
the industrial and financial set-up of the nation by means of the monies
afforded by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In time, if such sub-
sidies continue, and the railroads and industries which have accepted them
cannot meet the obligations that they necessitate, there will be no other
recourse than for the State to take them over.


quently met with treatment not less vicious; the Filipinos were sub-
dued by force as were also the natives of various South and Central
American countries who resisted the “peace and order” command of
the American marines. In fact, American history is replete with a
record of force and violence which completely belies the belief that
we are lovers of pacific government, preferring to debate in Con-
gress instead of fight in the actual field of conflict. A frontier peo-
ple, we have been hardened to the uses of violence, and just as we
exalt the prize-fighter into a national hero and make of the baseball
star a popular idol meriting front page recognition, we cannot deny
that the spirit of physical fight is in our blood. When the World
War was on, and America decided to partake in its butchery, the
whole country did not hesitate to boast of the American fighting
spirit, contending that doughboys were the best fighters in the
world, that a single American could lick a dozen Huns. The very
nature of such braggadocio, exalting physical prowess, is typical
of the spirit of the nation as a whole.
What is more, we have idealized our men of force. Both Wash-
ington and Lincoln, the one who used revolutionary force to defeat
the British and the other who employed it to preserve the Union,
have been haloed as the two greatest figures in American history.
Theodore Roosevelt has run them a good second mainly because he
was known as “fighting Teddy.” Even military men per se have
played a conspicuous rôle in our political history. Beginning with
Washington, the presidency has often been filled by men such as
Andrew Jackson, Tippecanoe Harrison, and Ulysses S. Grant, all
of whose main appeal to the public has been through the prestige
which they won on the field of battle. In short, the use and exalta-
tion of force is not a new thing in America. We are a people swift
to resort to force and quick to turn it into violence. What is neces-
sary, therefore, is not to educate the American people to be willing
to use force in a social emergency—they need little education in the
advantage and wisdom of force—but to teach them to use force in
the right direction—namely, to destroy the present capitalist order
of society and replace it by a collectivist one in which economic life
can be socialized and classes abolished. .
In the light of these facts it becomes nothing short of preposter-
ous for American leaders in political, economic, and educational life
to declare that America is a country in which ballots have always
prevailed over bullets, and in which the use of force has appeal only
to the foreign elements in our population and not to the native.
It has been the native elements which have been the most violent.

The trouble has been that their violence has had no ideological
direction. It was the violence of excited frontiersmen and not of
intelligent revolutionaries. .
Not only has American life been full of the presence of force, but
even the American tradition, expressed in records, speeches, state-
ments, and documents, is rich with the same revolutionary inspira-
tion. Few more revolutionary documents have ever been composed
than the American Declaration of Independence. “Whenever any
form of government becomes destructive of these ends” (life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness), the Declaration reads, “it is the right
of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new govern-
ment, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect
their safety and happiness.” In a later sentence, the Declaration
explicitly states that whenever a government tends to disregard the
people's rights, it is not only their right, but “it is their duty to
throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their
future security.” The Declaration of Independence was a revolution-
ary document; it was the Constitution which was a reactionary docu-
ment. It is the Declaration of Independence, therefore, which should
be cherished as part of our indefeasible revolutionary tradition—
and not the Constitution. (The only part of the Constitution which
retains any revolutionary significance is the Bill of Rights.)
Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were the men who did more
than any others to carry on that revolutionary tradition. It was
Jefferson in fact who, suspicious of the Constitution, endeavored to
keep alive the revolutionary state of mind out of which the Declara-
tion of Independence had been born. Shay's Rebellion, which so
frightened the bourgeoisie of the time, was welcomed by him in words
which have gained rather than lost their challenge in recent days:
“Can history produce an instance of rebellion so honorably
conducted? . . . God forbid that we should ever be twenty years
without such a rebellion . . . What signify a few lives lost in a
century or two? What country can preserve its liberties if its
rulers are not warned from time to time that the people preserve
the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms. The tree of liberty
must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants.
It is its natural manure.” *
As Jefferson's words definitely stated, he was always ready for
the oppressed to use arms to overthrow their oppressors. But not

only did Jefferson’s words vibrate with the spirit of revolution-
ary challenge. Even the state constitutions of the time carried over
something of their challenge. The constitution of Florida, for in-
stance, states that the people “have at all times an inalienable and
indefeasible right to alter or abolish their form of government in
such a manner as they may deem expedient.” A similar statement
can be found in most of the state constitutions of the period, includ-
ing those of Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky and Connecticut, and
later on in those of Kansas, Oregon, and many others. There is
nothing equivocal in themselves about the words “alter” or “abolish,”
except in the way they may be interpreted by those in power. It
was no less a leader than Abraham Lincoln who, in time of crisis,
gave their meaning explicit form when he avowed that whenever the
people of this country “grow weary of the existing government,
they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their
revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” [italics mine]
But we need not turn only to our political leaders to find evi-
dences of the American revolutionary tradition. American literature
is impregnated with much of the same spirit. The American literati,
contrary to the usual notion, have not been a passive, sterile type.
In times of crisis, they have often become explosively social-minded.
The Revolutionary War found in the personages of Freneau,
Hopkinson, Trumbull, and others, ardent advocates of force and
violence on the part of the colonies. The slavery issue again stirred
the literati to vigorous action. The spirit of fight burned through
the very core of their words. . r º: ...}}
“If there is a hell more unprincipled than our rulers and our
people,” Thoreau wrote in an attack upon the institution of slavery,
“I feel curious to visit it. If we should save our lives, we must fight
for them.” Bryant was just as eager for the fight as Thoreau, and
in words that were unmistakable in their advocacy apostrophized the
use of force as the necessity of the moment.
Lowell was not less emphatic in this insistence upon force as the
only way out: : .
§
“Not with words; they laugh them to scorn,
And tears they despise;
But with swords in your hands and death
In your eyes!
Strike home ! leave to God all the rest;
Strike! Men of the North and West.”
After the Civil War, Wendell Phillips, who had been one of the
most ardent of the Abolitionists, carried the fight still further into
the camp of the enemy, and declared that the eradication of wage-
slavery had to follow the destruction of bond-slavery in order to
make the disappearance of all forms of slavery complete:
“We affirm, as a fundamental principle, that labor, the creator
of wealth, is entitled to all it creates.
“Affirming this, we avow ourselves willing to accept the final
results of the operation of a principle so radical—such as the
overthrow of the whole profit-making system, the extinction of
all monopolies, the abolition of privileged classes, universal
education and fraternity, perfect freedom of exchange, and . . .
the final obliteration of that foul stigma upon our so-called
Christian civilization—the poverty of the masses . . . Resolved,
That we declare war with the wages system, which demoralizes
alike the hirer and the hired, cheats both, and enslaves the
workingman.”
Even Mark Twain was not silent on the social issue and the
necessity of action:
“You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country,
not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the
real thing, the substantial thing, the external thing; it is the
thing to watch over and care for, and be loyal to; institutions
are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear
out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect
the body from winter, disease, death. To be loyal to rags, to
shout for rags, to worship rags, that is loyalty to unreason, it
is pure animal . . . I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution
declares that all political power is inherent in the people,
and all free governments are founded on their authority and
instituted for their benefit; and that they have at all times an
undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of govern-
ment in such a manner as they may think expedient.’
“Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the
commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his
peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a
traitor.”
Or suppose we turn to Walt Whitman who spoke out, as Horace
Traubel has informed us, with even more forthrightness. The fol-


lowing conversation between the two men, recorded by Traubel,
testifies to Whitman's stand:
Traubel: Do you think that the class that has robbed the people will
hand their loot back? . .
Whitman: I'm afraid not. I'm afraid the people will have to fight
for what they get. .
Traubel: Why, Walt, you’re a damned good revolutionist after all.
Whitman: Didn't you always know it? What could I be if I wasn’t?
The American tradition, then, has not been founded upon any
theory of quiescence. On the contrary, it has been one inspired by
the realization of the importance and necessity of force in the social
process.
V
There remains still the final and all important question of how to
bring about that revolution.
Objectively speaking, the revolution will result from the con-
tradictions in the capitalist system itself which will make it im-
possible for it to sustain itself against the forces within, which will
tend to break it down, and the forces without, which will tend to
overthrow it. The contradictions within, represented by the inherent
conflicts of interest on the part of the capitalist class, the impossi-
bility of social co-operation within the framework of a profit
economy, the inability to find sufficient foreign markets to dispose of
the domestic surplus, the impossibility of solving the unemployment
problem intensified by technological advance, combined with the
inability to prevent the outbreak of war resulting therefrom—those
contradictions, it is obvious, are operative on a more catastrophic
scale today than ever before. The contradictions without, repre-
sented by the development of the forces of opposition to the capi-
talist class, the workers’ and farmers’ movement and all those move-
ments allied to that same base, are just as active and advanced in
many European industrial countries as the contradictions within.
It is only in America that the contradictions without have not
been paralleled by those within. The workers and farmers in Amer-
ica have not yet developed sufficient class consciousness to consti-
tute an opposition movement to the capitalist system as a whole.
In fact, in an important sense it can be said that the American workers
even at the present time are on the whole ideologically less advanced
than they were some decades ago. Yet it is only such a movement,

built about a workers' and farmers' base, that can effect such a
revolution as has been described. Any revolutionary movement which
does not make its fundamental appeal to the workers and farmers
is bound to fail. The dissatisfied bourgeois elements in the population,
the declassé intellectuals, may participate in such a movement, may
even in certain cases by identification with it become leaders within
it, but they cannot be depended upon to form its base. That base
must be formed by the disinherited who have nothing to lose by the
destruction of an economic system which has been their constant
enemy. r
The problem that faces us, therefore, is simple in outline but
difficult in execution. It is the problem of educating the American
workers and farmers to recognize the nature of their own interests,
of making them creatively class-conscious. Once that step has been
made it will be but one more step to make them revolutionary-
minded. It is absurd, however, for us to talk about making a revolu-
tion until those steps have been taken—at least by a considerable
vanguard of the workers. Indeed, it is absurd for us to talk about
taking the second step before we have made the first. The fact of
the matter is we have not yet learned how to make the first.
In an article entitled “The Road of Revolution” (New Republic,
July 6, 1932) Stuart Chase has described the terrible fate which is
in store for any technological nation which is forced to undergo
the experience of revolution. Without doubt there is a certain truth
in Mr. Chase's words if a revolution is undertaken by those who are
unequipped to carry it through to a swift success. Mr. Chase's error
lies in the fact that he exaggerates the difficulty of developing such
equipment. That we are not equipped to undertake such a revolution
now is obvious, as I have continuously stressed throughout this
pamphlet; the important thing, however, is to realize the necessity
of that revolution, and to devote our energies to equipping our-
selves for the task of carrying it out. Such equipment requires an
ideologically advanced working class, and a revolutionary organiza-
tion, expressing the spirit of that working class, disciplined for swift
and certain action. By the time such equipment has been developed,
however, enough technicians will have swung over to the radical
cause so that Mr. Chase's worries on that score need no longer con-
cern him. The important thing we should not do is to try to dodge
the necessity of that revolution, as Mr. Chase does, and cultivate the
idea that the same ends can be attained by social evolution.
The first part of the problem that confronts us, then, is how to get
the American workers and farmers to think in class-conscious terms.

In the past, as we have seen, they have thought largely in terms of
lower middle class aspirations. Today, as we have shown, with the
loss of economic stability on the part of the lower middle class, the
appeal of the lower middle class ideology has begun to lose its vigor.
Within the near future the American working class will undoubtedly
begin to disembarrass itself rapidly of its former lower middle class
mindedness and develop a radical outlook comparable to that of the
European working classes. The task which must be undertaken is
that of accelerating the development of that class consciousness, and
directing it into revolutionary instead of reformistic or reactionary
channels. To undertake that task with success, it is necessary to
keep in mind the American masses which have to be dealt with, so
as to learn to speak to them in terms of the American tradition
which they know. In the effort to radicalize those masses, the
revolutionary traditions upon which this country was founded must
not be neglected, but utilized in order to give unified and coherent
meaning to the struggle that is to be undertaken. Jefferson and
William Lloyd Garrison and the importance of what they stood for
in their day must not be forgotten; they must be used as symbols
of challenge and advance. The American masses must be addressed
in terms of that challenge and advance, for it is in such terms that
they can understand best the radical rights which are theirs by virtue
of their own revolutionary tradition. Revolutionaries must not isolate
themselves from the American tradition, but use it to their best
advantage, so rich is it in meaning and inspiration. It was no less a
revolutionist than Lenin who appreciated the significance of the
American revolutionary tradition. Lenin recognized the importance
of building upon that tradition. “The best representatives of the
American proletariat are those expressing the revolutionary tradi-
tion in the life of the American people,” he wrote. “This tradition
originated in the war of liberation against the English in the
eighteenth century and in the Civil War in the nineteenth century
. . . Where can you find an American so pedantic, so absolutely
idiotic as to deny the revolutionary and progressive significance of
the American Civil War of 1860–1865?” The American revolution-
ary tradition is a tradition which the American masses will quickest
understand, and which to neglect, as has been done in the past, is
to hinder rather than help the cause of the second American
revolution. .
While the conditions of the country have changed vastly since the
days of Jefferson and Lincoln, and the particular social philosophies
which they advocated have been outmoded in terms of their economic

applicability, the revolutionary spirit embodied in the challenge
which those men addressed to the American people, and which the
American masses responded to, constitutes part of the progressive
development of the American revolutionary tradition. The objective
should be to advance that tradition and not let it rest where it be-
gan. In other words, it should be directed into channels which are
revolutionary today. Its spirit should be utilized in terms of today
and not of yesterday. Few things are more absurd in these days
of finance-capitalism, when individualism has been crushed at the
root, than to listen to a defense of Jeffersonian individualism and
liberalism as applied to the contemporary scene. It is not Jefferso-
nian individualism and liberalism that must be preserved. They be-
long to the past; they constitute dead doctrine today. It is the
progressive spirit of revolt in the Jeffersonian philosophy which
must be salvaged and used. It is not the Lincoln who was the
politician who should be defended, but the Lincoln who defended
the revolutionary right of the masses; it is not the William Lloyd
Garrison who was an enemy of labor who should be extolled, but
the Garrison who as a heroic Abolitionist played such a progressive
rôle in the historical advance of this country. -: *- : : -
In brief, what must be learnt is not to scoff at the American
revolutionary heritage but to build upon it. If the American workers
can be taught to be proud of the revolutionary development
of their tradition, they can be inspired with renewed faith
in the revolutionary possibilities of the future. There, is no
reason for Americans to be ashamed of the revolutionary
aspects of their past. Parsons, Engel, Frank Little, Bill
Haywood, Eugene Debs, Sacco and Vanzetti, and a score of
other workers have laid the proletarian groundwork for that past.
There need be no fear of nationalistic dangers in building upon
such a base. “Are we enlightened Great-Russian proletarians im-
pervious to the feeling of national pride?” wrote Lenin in his
essay, “The National Pride of the Great Russians.” “Certainly not!
We love our language and our motherland; we, more than any
other group, are working to raise its laboring masses (i.e. nine-
tenths of its population) to the level of intelligent Democrats and
Socialists. We, more than anybody, are grieved to see and feel to
what violence, oppression, and mockery our beautiful motherland
is being subjected by the tsarist hangmen, the nobles, and the
capitalists . . . We, Great-Russian workers, filled with national
pride, wish by all means to have a free and independent, sovereign,
democratic, republican, proud Great Russia, which is to maintain in

relation to her neighbors the humane principle of equality, and not
the serf principles of privileges that humiliate a great nation.”
It is such “national pride,” if you will, that must be stirred up in
the American workers and farmers—a pride in their revolutionary
traditions. Such pride can help inspire them with the fight necessary
to overthrow the present ruling class of financiers and industrialists.
The American workers must learn to hate the “violence, oppression,
and mockery (which their) beautiful motherland is being subjected
to” by those financiers and industrialists. Hate and not love is the
emotion which they must nurture. The gospel of love belongs to the
ruling class; it is its best protection, for by its very preachment it
tends to prevent the misery it spreads from volatilizing into violence.
The gospel of hate belongs to the proletariat, for it is only by such
hate that the energy necessary for its struggle can be engendered.
More, it is only by virtue of that hate that a new social world can
be created in which the gospel of love can have either place or
meaning. & 2. 2. .
“Between communism with all its chances, and the present state of
society with all its sufferings and injustices,” John Stuart Mill
wrote, “all the difficulties great and small of communism would be
but as dust in the balance.” It is that realization which many Amer-
ican intellectuals have already reached; it is that realization which
many American workers will reach within this decade if their grow-
ing spirit of protest and revolt is not channeled off into futile
directions. .
It is only by revolution that that realization can be translated into
action. Society can be saved in no other way. Our task is to create
that revolution, to cultivate the forces that are necessary to its
success. It is no little task that confronts us, and it behooves us to
gather up all our energies and dedicate all our strength to its
achievement. To do less is but to fail. And to fail in that task is to
betray the cause of human progress, to sacrifice the future freedom
of the human race.

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