in its early activity as a general organized movement
was compelled to emphasize the action of politics because of the
immaturity of the proletariat....

"All propaganda, all electoral and parliamentary activity are
insufficient for the overthrow of Capitalism, impotent when the
ultimate test of the class struggle turns into a test of power. The
power for the social revolution issues out of the actual struggles
of the proletariat, out of its strikes, its industrial unions and
mass action."

Industrial unions of course means the union system of the I. W. W., and
not the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor.

The article continues:

"The peaceful parliamentary conquest of the state is either sheer
utopia or reaction....

"The revolution is an act of a minority, at first; of the most
class conscious section of the industrial proletariat, which in a
test of electoral strength, would be a minority, but which, being a
solid, industrially indispensable class, can disperse and defeat
all other classes through the annihilation of the fraudulent
democracy of the parliamentary system implied in the dictatorship
of the proletariat, imposed upon society by means of revolutionary
mass action....

"Mass action is not a form of action as much as it is a process and
synthesis of action. It is the unity of all forms of proletarian
action, a means of throwing the proletariat, organized and
unorganized, in a general struggle against Capitalism and the
capitalist state....

"The great expressions of mass action in recent years, the New
Zealand general strike, the Lawrence strike, the great strike of
the British miners under which capitalist society reeled on the
verge of collapse--all were mass actions organized and carried
through in spite of the passive and active hostility of the
dominant Socialist and labor organization. Under the impulse of
mass action, the industrial proletariat senses its own power and
acquires the force to act equally against capitalism and the
conservatism of organizations. Indeed, a vital feature of mass
action is precisely that it places in the hands of the proletariat
the power to overcome the fetters of these organizations, to act in
spite of their conservatism, and through proletarian mass action
emphasize antag