exclusively by the menace either of a
political overturn or of a Socialist revolution, and those who imagine
that the Socialist hosts are going to be strengthened by recruits
attracted by the role Socialists are playing in obtaining such immediate
reforms, make a triple error. They credit Socialism with a power it has
nowhere yet achieved and cannot expect until a revolutionary period is
immediately at hand; that is, they grossly exaggerate the present powers
of the Socialist movement and grossly underestimate the task that lies
before it. They are seemingly blind to the possibilities of
transformation and progress that still inhere in capitalism--the
increased unity and power it will gain through "State capitalism," and
the increased wealth that will come through a beneficent and scientific
policy of producing, through wholesale reforms and improvements, more
efficient and profitable laborers. They fail to see that the strength of
the enemy will lie henceforth more frequently in deception than in
repression. But even this is not their most fatal blunder. In attacking
individualistic and reactionary rather than collectivistic and
progressive capitalism, these Socialists are not only wasting their
energies by assaulting a moribund power, but are training their forces
to use weapons and to practice evolutions that will soon be obsolete and
useless. They are doing the work and filling the function of the small
capitalists. The large capitalists organized industry; the small
capitalists will nationalize it; in so far at least as it has been or
will have been organized. Socialists gain from both processes, approve
of both, and aid them in every way within their power. But their chief
function is to overthrow capitalism. And as the larger part of this task
lies off some distance in the future, it is the capitalism of the future
and not that of the past with which Socialists are primarily concerned.
Evidently but a few years will elapse before State capitalism will
everywhere dominate. In the meanwhile, to attribute its progress to the
_menace_ of the advance of Socialism, is to abandon the Socialist
standpoint just as completely as do the reformist Socialists in
regarding capitalist-collectivist reforms as installments of Socialism,
to be achieved only with Socialist _aid_.

For Socialists will be judged by what they are doing rather than by what
they promise to do. If political reformists and revolutionary reformists
are bo