Page:The International Socialist Review (1900-1918), Vol. 1, Issue 1.pdf/54

 "voices crying in the wilderness" of American capitalism. The Yankee laughed them to scorn and sneered at their "foreign doctrines." At last there came a time when the prophecies of these early apostles of socialism were realized. The American laborer began to himself feel the suffering that has ever been the lot of the proletarian. Shut out from soil and factory he was made conscious of his enslaved condition.

Then it was that socialism began to grow. Unfortunately we were in the beginning too full of our own conceit to learn from the experience of others. Instead of accepting the doctrines which already had a literature of thousands of volumes, American socialists must perforce walk the whole way from the wildest Utopian nonsense to the developed science. So it has came about that American socialist literature has been a byword and a laughing stock among the socialists of other nations. The most ridiculous books, based upon long exploded errors, have been hailed here as the gospel of a new redemption and been circulated almost by the millions.

But economic development has already forced economic theory to develope beyond this stage and the socialists of America are now beginning to seriously and intelligently study industrial problems. The result has been that there has been a decided improvement in the character of the literature on socialist questions. There is less of the attitude of absolute certainty that whatever is American is prima facia better than anything imported. There is now a willingness to examine into what is going on in other countries and translations are rapidly being made of the leading socialist works of other languages.

Indeed so far has this now gone that there are some signs of what might be called a reaction, in so far that there is a feeling of the inadequacy of translated works for use among American laborers. Socialism is but the philosophy of capitalist development and since it is an undisputed fact that American capitalism is further advanced and more clearly developed than that of any other nation the American socialist may be pardoned if he believes that that capitalism should in time produce the most clear cut and developed socialism. At the very least he knows that illustrations drawn from American experience need be no less scientific and are much more effective for propaganda than those drawn from European experience.

Under these circumstances it is felt that the time is now here when the American socialist movement needs and is able to maintain a magazine of scientific socialism, and the International Socialist Review has been established to fill that need. It will at all times have three principal objects in view. In the first place we shall seek to counteract the sentimental Utopianism that has so long characterized the American movement and give it a dig-