Page:Raymond Augustine McGowan - Bolshevism in Russia and America (1920).pdf/34

 34 nothing certain is known. Other reports have it that the membership of both parties since then has shrunk very much. The men who dominated the organizations have been in Europe for several months; it is said that both parties are disintegrating.

The Socialist Party itself is not a Bolshevik organization. Separating from the Socialist Labor Party in 1901, it has consistently followed a policy in opposition to the theoretically quasi-Bolshevik parent organization. During 1919, it expelled many organizations for being, as it thought, Bolshevik. In so doing, it diminished its own membership by half.

There is one test which decides the question. The Bolshevik believes in the direct seizure of political power. He rejects the ballot and political elections as a method of accomplishing the Socialist revolution. A Socialist, who believes that the revolutionary seizure of political power is the first necessary step towards the common ownership and use of the means of production and distribution, is a Bolshevik. The Socialist Party, however, is committed to the use of the ballot to obtain legislation, reform Capitalism, and to obtain a Socialist majority in the government. It is, therefore, not a Bolshevik organization. This idea was frequently repeated during the recent trial of the Socialist Assemblymen in Albany. Last year, when the Slavic Federation and other Left Wing Socialists were expelled from the party, Seymour Stedman, a member of the Executive Committee, told a reporter that "the differences in the Socialist movement today are between those who believe the political method should be discarded in favor of the physical, and those who believe in political action alone."

Socialists talk much of the revolution. But their revolution does not mean the direct seizure of political power