Page:The International Socialist Review (1900-1918), Vol. 1, Issue 1.pdf/17



Social Democrats of all countries will gladly welcome the establishment in the United States of an International Socialist Review specially designed to keep up an intellectual intercourse between the revolutionary Socialists of the new world and the old. I say "revolutionary Socialists" deliberately, because, although I understand the new periodical is to open its pages to all schools of Socialist thought, it is quite certain that they, in America as elsewhere, must eventually control the whole. The hatred and fear of the word revolution is always to me the evidence of a weak mind. Evolution in all departments of nature inevitably leads to revolution—often in a cataclysmal shape— and revolution does but confirm and realize the results of evolution. Whether this fresh period of growth, and of renewed evolution in its turn, is attained peaceably or forcibly at the last matters no doubt a good deal to the men of the time when the revolution occurs; but it concerns future generations very little indeed; and "the sanctity of human life," about which so much nonsense is talked by bourgeois sentimentalists, counts for nothing to those who recognize that the faculties and lives of millions of human beings are being relentlessly crushed out under the capitalist system of our day. For myself, then, I am a revolutionary and I write as such to the International Socialist Review. Nothing short of the complete control of all the powers of man over nature by the whole people in  accord, bound together by common consent in national and international solidarity, can finally relieve humanity from the last and in some ways the worst form of slavery. The is doomed as chattel slavery and serfdom were doomed. The capitalist class which, with its deems itself to be everything today, will be absorbed in the collective organization of  and highly educated democracy tomorrow. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the great Republic of the United States. Your Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, and Pierpont Morgans, who imagine themselves to be men of genius and financiers of wisdom, are nothing more than the commonplace and rather unseemly tools which the unconscious social development of mankind is using in order to prepare through their trusts and combines and monopolies the glorious commonwealth for which we as Socialists are consciously making ready. In this new stage of development America manifestly leads the world. It is high time that the