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Persia's decadence and external perils were, however, appreciated by thinking Persians, and a series of reformist agitations took place, beginning with the religious movement of the Bab early in the nineteenth century and culminating with the revolution of 1908.
Berger has not merely been the Milwaukee organization's chief spokesman, organizer, and candidate throughout this period, but he has come to be the chief spokesman of the present reformist wing of the American Party.
The reformist "leaders," Jaurès and Turati, do all that is possible to lead the Socialist Parties of the two countries in the opposite direction from that in which these organizations are going. But though these "leaders" are turned in the direction of class conciliation, they are constantly being dragged backwards in the direction of class war.
All Socialists will agree that even the reformists, as a rule, represent the interests of the labor-union movement better than other parties; but the Socialist Party is vastly more than a mere reformist trade-union party, and most Socialists feel that to reduce it to this rôle would be to deprive it of the larger part of its power even to help the unions. In the statement of Mr.
Alike in its object, its ideals, and in the means employed, the Socialist party, though striving for the realization of immediate social reforms demanded by the working class, is not a reformist but a revolutionary party, which recognizes that social freedom and equality can only be won by fighting the class war through to the finish, and thus abolishing forever all class distinctions."
I was too much puzzled with the same difficulty to help him. Somewhat later I began to read the history of political theories. It was a less disinterested study than those sophomore speculations, for I had jumped into a profession which carried me through some of the underground passages of "practical politics" and reformist groups. The tangle of motives and facts and ideas was incredible.
So there arises again at this higher stage of capitalist domination, as was the case at its beginning, "a Social Democracy in battle against all the possessing classes, against the whole power of the organized state." Already the most prominent reformist Socialists outside of England claim that their position is revolutionary.
Only if the revolutionaries continue to grow more powerful, until Turati is obliged still further to moderate his "reformist" principles and to abandon some of his tactics permanently, instead of saying, as he does now, that he lays them aside only temporarily, will there be any real unity in the Italian Socialist Party.
The modern reformist, who calls the labourer from the plough, and the artizan from the loom, to make them statesmen or philosophers, and who has invaded the abodes of contented industry with the rights of man, that our fields may be cultivated, and our garments wove, by metaphysicians, will readily assent to this opinion.
Most of those of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, as well as a large majority in the United States, favor a Labour Party of the British type, and even the reformist Socialist leaders, Jaurès in France, Vandervelde in Belgium, and Turati in Italy, often take the British Party as model.
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