24.09.1998

“Miserable hacks of the ruling class”

From ‘The Call’, paper of the British Socialist Party, September 26 1918

If anything were needed to justify the utter contempt in which all genuine socialists must hold the patriotic ‘leaders’ of Allied socialism and labour who assembled in London last week, from His Excellency Emile Vander-velde, ex-president of the International Socialist Bureau, downwards, it was surely provided by their callous indifference to the brutalities perpetrated upon those socialists who refuse to applaud the universal self-massacre of the working class.

In America WD Haywood and 114 other members of the IWW are serving terms of imprisonment ranging from 20 years downwards; in Britain John Maclean and in Italy comrades Lazzari, Serrati, Vella and others are paying in prison the penalty of adherence to the solemn declarations of the International Socialist Congress; in France arrest and imprisonment, often without charge or trial, is the lot of those who dare oppose the shameful ‘sacred truce’.

Whilst our patriotic ‘leaders’ gibbered their meaningless phrases about war for “democracy against autocracy”, American capitalist ‘justice’ was condemning Eugene Debs, one of the oldest and most venerated figures in the Socialist International, to 10 years’ imprisonment for declaring the war a capitalist war and extolling Bolshevism in Russia.

But never a word of protest from these knights errant in the cause of ‘democracy’ ... How true is Karl Liebknecht’s characterisation of their type - “miserable hacks of the ruling class”