Reds: A Revolutionary Timeline

[Jello_Biafra]

On February 1st, 1919, a book was published that would forever catapult its author into celebrity (or infamy, depending upon who you ask). That book was Ten Days that Shook the World, and its author was a young American radical journalist named John Reed. Reed, who had witnessed Red October first hand, helped to galvanize the resolve of an American left broken by state repression and threatening to fracture from internal dissension.

Copies of the book were distributed by Socialist Party and union locals all throughout the United States, and its first printing sold out immensely quickly. In a delicious bit of irony, a book about advancing the cause of socialism and revolution would become one of the more profitable books of the year for publishers.

Reed, previously an unknown in the Socialist Party, would find himself elected to the National Executive Committee. The NEC would soon vote to send delegates to the founding congress of the Communist International.

For leaders at home, a more pressing matter was at hand. The Progressive Socialist Party itself was an unwieldy organization. The war had radicalized many of its more moderate elements, but the leadership's hard left stance threatened to cause a mutiny among moderate members of the party, especially former Progressives. Morris Hilquit's timely defection to the left, and Congressman Berger's assassination at the hands of the Wisconsin state police had certainly helped stave off disaster, but there was still much work left to be done. Facing a choice between work in the Comintern, or healing the divisions at home, Reed ultimately chose to use his considerable celebrity even among non-socialists to fight for socialist unity among his own ranks.

In June of 1919, John Reed, along with his lover Louise Bryant, comrade and respected editor Max Eastman, Opposition Leader Upton Sinclair, and young party activist William Zebulon Foster, began a long speaking tour of the country leading up to the September emergency national convention. Their aim was to convince socialists and workers across the country, fresh from their relative victory at the polls, to not become complacent, and stick with the revolutionary enthusiasm necessary to sustain the PSP as a mass-based revolutionary organization, to avoid succumbing to reformism the same way that many of their international brothers had leading up to the First World War.

At the convention two major issues would be up for debate. First and foremost would be the party's central platform. The leadership was eager to supplant the German Social Democrats as the tip of the spear of the proletarian vanguard, and sought to adapt the party organization to follow a more Bolshevik model. Second, the leadership wanted the National Convention to vote to formally join the Comintern. A new international, they were convinced, was the only proper forum for cooperation among the Left.

It was during this campaign by Reed as well as dozens of other party activists that New Yorker and new found radical Morris Hilquit coined the terminology of New Left and Old Left. As he addressed a crowd after his safe release from prison and returned to public service, he told the crowd "Our sons, and our grandsons...and their grandsons too, will remember the formation of the Manhattan Commune, and speak of it in the same sentence as the illustrious Paris Commune that gave us our anthem, and our spirited resolve for a new world. And for that brave new world we must fight to build, a new Left, unfettered by the chains of our past, must be the tip of the bayonet in our charge. Our old Left will no longer do; we must remake ourselves before we remake the world."

This snippet, repeated over and over again by The New York Times and other publications, was but one of the many pieces of ammunition that were fired in this age of mutual militancy. For a time, it seemed like the inevitable final confrontation between the opposed camps of labor and capital would be at hand in America as well. So this situation would remain. For the next 14 years, the conflict would remain unresolved and undiminished.

Nevertheless, the Progressive Socialist Party achieved what almost none of its international brothers could. The National Convention voted strongly to align with the new Comintern, and to accept the hard left's analysis that little would be achieved through parliamentary reformism. The party platform still maintained that socialism could be won at the ballot box, at least in part, but fully accepted the general strike and the worker's council as alternative weapons. The platform made it clear that the party would accept nothing but the full enactment of its maximal program; there would be no negotiation for half-measures with either the Republicans or the Democrats. But most importantly, this would be achieved without a disastrous split in the party's ranks. The moderates agreed to stick with the party, and bide their time for now.

The split was patched over, but only time would tell if it would endure long enough. Reed, no less than anyone else, knew fully well that he sat on a ticking timebomb.