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Updated: June 9, 2025
Because non-Socialist reforms tend to prolong the domination of the capitalist class, which no Socialist doubts, it is asserted that they are also comparatively barren of positive benefit.
The non-Socialist reformers, they say again, are gaining a valuable experience in government; the Socialists must go and do likewise. Reforms which were steps in capitalism thus become to them steps in Socialism.
Surely there could be no greater contrast than that between the swallowing up of the budding Socialist movement by non-Socialist labor unions in Great Britain and the support of the Socialist Party by the revolutionary unionist on the Continent. In America only a minority of the unions are definitely and clearly Socialist.
And if, from time to time and in contradiction to this view, changes are bought about by non-Socialist governments which undeniably do very much improve the condition of the working people, it is reasoned that this was done by the menace either of a Socialist revolution or of a Socialist electoral majority. "A Socialist reform must be in the nature of a working-class conquest," says Mr.
Kautsky similarly differentiates the Socialists by the totality of their demands; the individual reform, being, as he concedes, usually if not always supported by other parties also. Yet it is difficult to see how a program composed wholly of non-Socialist elements could in any combination become distinctly Socialist.
Only as more and more serious strikes occur will the Milwaukee movement be forced to emphasize its labor unionism rather than its reforms. It will then, in all probability, be forced to take up an aggressive labor-union attitude like that of the non-Socialist Labor Party in San Francisco.
No Socialist has expressed this view more clearly or forcefully than Mr. George R. Kirkpatrick, in his recent book, "War What For?" Addressed to the heart as well as to the head, and based upon all the most important of the previous attacks on militarism war, whether Socialist or not, it may be doubted whether any non-Socialist could have presented as powerful an argument. Mr.
For while "reformist" Socialists are taking a position nearly identical with that of the non-Socialist reformers, the latter are coming to adopt a political policy almost identical with that of the reformist Socialists. I have noted that one of America's leading economists advises all reformers, whether they are Socialists or not, to join the Socialist Party.
Such coöperative organizations, however, like the legislative proposals above mentioned, are already so widely in actual operation and are so generally supported by powerful non-Socialist organizations that Socialist support can be of comparatively little value.
President Gompers recognized that this was equivalent to an endorsement of Bryan, but pleaded that "in performing a solemn duty at this time in support of a political party, labor does not become partisan to a political party, but partisan to a principle." Substantially, all prominent non-Socialist trade-union officials followed Gompers' lead.
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