be organized with the trade unions as their foundation. This is because the trade unions are the basic institutions of the working class. The fact that they carry on the everyday struggle of the workers for better conditions gives them enormous prestige and numerical and financial strength, all of which labor parties must utilize in their political work. It may be accepted as an axiom that whoever controls the trade unions is able to dictate the general policies, economic, political and otherwise, of the whole working class. All over the world the strength of the workers' political parties is in direct ratio to the amount of control they exercise over the mass trade unions. Such a thing as a powerful labor party, whether conservative or radical, without strong trade union backing, is impossible. Therefore, one of the very first tasks of every working class political organization must be to establish its influence in the trade unions.
The Socialist Party has never understood these cardinal facts. Its working principle, real enough even though unexpressed, has always been a presumption that it could secure its membership and backing from the citizenry generally. It has not realized that all labor parties must have as their foundation not only the masses, but the masses organized in the trade unions. Because of the tendency of its predecessor, the Socialist Labor Party, to split away the rebels from the trade unions, the thing that the S. P. necessarily had to do in order to succeed was to carry on an intense campaign against dualism and to intrench its active workers in the strategic positions of the labor organizations, where they could educate the masses and utilize their industrial, financial, and other strength to further the cause of the whole Socialist movement. But because it did not clearly understand the importance of the unions as such it failed to map out such a positive industrial program, indispensable to its life and progress. It allowed all its industrial work to be thwarted by a dual unionism which infected the party deeply from its inception.
Although when the Socialist Party developed as a split-off from the old Socialist Labor Party one of the issues it dissented upon was the latter's policy of dual unionism, it was not long until it, too, was in the grip of the same disease. A powerful left-wing, bitter haters of the trade unions and ardent advocates of a dual labor movement, rapidly developed. The right-wing favored active participation in the trade unions, chiefly for vote-catching reasons, while the left-wing proposed the destruction of the trade unions. The party as a whole, seeking a false harmony, straddled this vital question. Its
