Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/188

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OUT OF THEIR OWN MOUTHS

British Socialist Party into the Independent Labor Party of England. This Thesis is adopted by a majority of 48 to 34 with two abstaining.

This amazing act of coercion against the left wing of British labor, as the vote shows, was almost too much even for the hand-picked and thoroughly disciplined delegates of the Communist Internationale. Lenin's plan to capture the Independent Labor Party in this manner was, doubtless, not quite so wild as the plan of the British Communist delegates who were voted down. These latter wished to attack not only the British Labor Party, though it is pro-Soviet in its foreign policy, but also the revolutionary Independent Labor Party which expresses the warmest admiration for Sovietism—in Russia, but does not wish to have it in England and will not take orders from Moscow further than leaving the Second and Socialist Internationale at Moscow's suggestion. Lenin's tactics on the surface were somewhat less impractical. But they were futile in any event as the Independent Labor Party, at its succeeding congress, repudiated Communism by an overwhelming majority, leading to the secession of the small minority of Communists—as ordered by Lenin for all countries. Whether, from the Communist-revolutionary standpoint, this outcome in Great Britain justified Lenin's tactics or not, the British Communists were allowed little to say on the subject.

The autocratic control of Moscow is the key to the tactics of the Third Internationale. The Communists are unanimously agreed that if it is to succeed their revolution must be a world revolution. They are unanimously agreed that it must therefore have a highly