Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/10

 sound Socialist education of these voters was being neglected.

Moreover, we saw impending disaster if the political party was marching onward to political victory, as the Social Democracy was marching onward, without an adequate organized force to back up the victory at the ballot box. Force, did we say? Yes, we did, and we did so deliberately. All force is not manifested in fighting; sometimes, to be sure, the fighting force is weakness itself. Organized working class force does not necessarily (in fact we should say under modern conditions, as a rule, and certainly not previous to the political victory), imply military force. The Socialist Labor Party continually warned the Social Democracy in the decade before its fall, warned all purely political Socialists, that a victory at the ballot box without the adequately organized power of the proletariat to back it up, would mean the defeat of the Revolution.

This organized force of the Proletariat can exist only in the Socialist Industrial Union, organized in shop and factory, mill and mine, on the railroads and other means of communication, every place where the economic power of the capitalist holds sway today and wherever the worker, by the fact that he is the producer, the wielder and operator of the tools of production, will and must become the only true source of power the moment he is organized in a classconscious Socialist Revolutionary Union.

The working out of this theory which, applied,