The Daily Worker Newspaper, May 3, 1924, Page 6

~-T Three Leaders of Men.--Wilson, Gandhi and Lenin By EVELYN ROY. Three figures appeared upon the world’s stage during the troubled pe- riod of the war and after, who will go down in history as three leaders of the greatest mass-movements of our times. They are Woodrow Wilson, the American; Mohandas Karamchand yandhi, the Indian, and Vladimir Ul- ianov (Nicolai Lenin), the Russian. The first reached the zenith of his glo- ry in 1918-19; the second caught the public ear as leader of the Indian movement for emancipation that reached its height from 1919-1922; the third retained .the center of the world’s stage from November, 1917 to the day of his death, January 21st, 1924. Wodrow Wilson died in an ob- security which a semi-state burial and public condolances were ineffectual to remedy. “Mahatma” Gandhi was re- leased from prison by odd coincidence, on the day of his American contem- porary’s death, a sudden illmess and operation which almost resulted in his own demise being responsible for his sudden release. The great Russian breathed his last week before Wilson. Thus the three names that had filled the press of the world in their heydey, again leaped into prominence and con- tiguity. A Striking Fact. It is a striking fact to arrest the at- tention of the observer, that the three largest countries of the warld pro- duced each a leader unique after its own kind, to point a solution to the catastrophic times thru which our generation is passing. India, the coun- try of an immeasurable past; América, the country of today, and Russia, the land of future promise, sent forth three prophets. Wilson has been most aptly Characterized as “the last pro- phet of the bourgeoisie; Gandhi may be epitomized as the apostle of the petty bourgeoisie, and Lenin will go down in history as the leader of the revolutionary proletariat. Men of such differing creeds must of necessity differ widely from each other, not in word alone but in deed. Such is the case. Wilson’s claim to immortality is based upon his war slo- gans, his “Fourteen Points,” and for- mulation of the idea of the “League of Nations.” Gandhi’s cry for “Swa- raj,” to be achieved by Non-violent Non-cooperation based upon suffering, sacrifice and soul-force, was meant to be applied not alone to India, but on an international scale as well. The goal of Nicolai Lenin was the Inter- national Social Revolution, which would overthrow the capitalist system with all its inherent evils, and replace it by a new society founded upon the rights of the working-class to the full product of its labor. The League. These three goals are as different as the men who forniulated them, and as the means which they proposed to bring them into being. The League of Nations, both in its original idea and in actuality, is grounded on the status quo of industrial civilization. Its modus operandi is arbitration and compromise with the existing order. Nothing to be fundamentally altered; classes and nations, free and subject, to remain in a perpetual state of sus- pended hospitality, subject to the final arbitrament of the League itself, so constructed as to prohibit any revo- lutionary change from below. The League of Nations has well been * called the “Holy Alliance of the 20th Century.” Like its predecessor, it is concerned mainly in perpetuating the existing system under the guise of humanitarianism and Christarianism and Christian brotherhood. It is the apotheosis of bourgeois culture and ‘bourgeois liberalism. If it has re- mained ineffective and deserving only of the epithet “organized impotence,” it is because the idea itself is incap- able of concrete realization in any better form, founded as it is upon in- herent competition, jealousies and ri- valries that arise inevitably out of the capitalist order of society. Wilson’s Fourteen Points and League of Na- tions were a bourgeois vision of a bourgeois Utopia which has not and can never materialize, from the very jing institutions until nature of the society and civilization it seeks to perpetuate. “Swarj.” The “Swarj” of Mr. Gandhi has never been clearly defined, but its im- plications can be gathered from the writings and speeches of its chief ex- ponent, as well as of his immediate disciples. It rests, not upon the status quo, but upon a reversion to a pre- vious state—-an imaginary “Golden Age”, when the horrors of capitalist civilization from which it seeks to escape, had not yet been born. Swaraj or “Self-Rule” as applied to India means reversion to the pre- British, even the pre-Musulman era. It aims to go “back to the Vedas”, to which history accords a respectable age varying from three thousand to fifteen hundred years. Its symbol is the wooden plough and the “Charka,” or spinning-Wheel. It deneunces mo- dern civilization and industrialism in round terms and prescribes for the entire humanity the remedy it would apply to India, But this complete re- versal of the existing order is not to be achieved by violence. Violence is the very negation of the doctrine of “Satyagraha,” (soul-force) which seeks to overcome hate by love, force by non-resistance, and whose only weapon is Non-cooperation with exist- these change themselves. Tho the outlines of Swaraj are vague, the implications are very clear. Capitalism would revert to landlord- ism and handicraft production, The wheels of time will turn not forward, but back. There will be no elimina- tion of classes; Mr. Gandhi believes that “the rich and the poor are al- ways with us.” He is_ positively against class-strife. But he would soften and ameliorate exploitation and injustice by the application of the principles of religion and human brotherhood. Philanthropy would tak: the place of social justice. y Leninism. Lenin's goal of the Social Revolu- tion, as its name indicates, implies the complete overthrow of capitalist so- ciety and its substitution by the Com- munist society, wherein the means of production, distribution and exchange pass to the hands of the producing class, which for the first time in his- tory would be freed from the yoke of exploitation. Social production for use would replace production for ex- change and profit. The laborer will receive the full value of his toil. Pri- vate ownership in the means of pro duction, including land, will cease to exist. Only he who performs socially useful labor shall be counted as a member of society and entitled to its rights and privileges. “He who would eat, must work.” Modern means of production, evolved by the capitalist order—machine production and all the conquests of science over nature—will be preserved and improved upon for the benefit of all mankind, not for a small class, as heretofore. By the overthrow of capitalism, im- Perialism, its highest and ultimate ex- pression, will also disappear. Sub- ject races and nationalities will for the first time receive the right to de- velop unhampered in their own way. The emancipation of the peoples en- slaved by imperialism is a necessary corollary of the eman¢ipation of the classes enslaved by capitalism. In- ternational rivalries, hatred and com- petition, leading to war, will disap- pear, and with them the need for war itself. Science and human life will no longer be prostituted to the serv- ice of destruction, but to the evolution of the human race. With the abolition of private prop- erty and the universalizing of the op- portunity for education _and useful service, classes will cease to exist, and a classless society, or rather a soci- ety com d of but one class, that of socially useful workers, will come into being. Humanity will progress and develop, not by competition with and exploitation of its fellow-men, but by emulation in the highest ideals of service to mankind which the society of the future will inculcate. _ The Need of Struggle. Such a goal, natural and inevitable come of the present breakdown of cap- italist civilization, will not come to pass of itself. The working class must acquire the state power and wield it during the transition period in the in- terests of its'own class—that of the overwhelming majority of the popula- tion—just as in the past the state power was held and wielded in the interests of the bourgeosie, and, be- fore them, of the feudal nobility. Much as the workers abhor blood- shed, much as they detest the de- struction of human life and of the wealth which they have produced by their labor, they cannot expect that the privileged classes now in posses- sion of the state power will yield it without a struggle. The first attempt to carry out in practice the principles of socialism, such as the nationalization of land and industry, will meet with the im- mediate opposition of the ruling class, which will call out all the forces of the state to defend its owm inter- ests. Therefore the workers must be prepared to meet force by force, and to wrest mastery from the hands of their opponents on the battlefield. During the transition period that must follow, the Dictatorship of the Prole- tariat will replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, now thinly veiled un- der the mask of bourgeois Democ- racy. This dictatorship will continue un- til society as a whole accepts the new state of affairs, and a new generation is brought up in the ideals of the proletarian Socialist State. Lenin the Only Realist. Such is the goal of Lenin. And of the three men who prophesied so dif- ferently, his was the only creed which has been carried into living and actual reality. The Fourteen Points have passed into oblivion since the framing of the infamous Treaty of Versailles; the League of Nations re- mains what .it must elways be, “or- ganized impotence.” Wilson, the last prophet of the bourgeoisie, died in ob- scurity after enjoying a dizzy adula- tion accorded by millions of human beings whose hearts turned to him in hope at his magnificent promises of “a war to end war”; “self-determina- tion of small and subject nationali- ties”; “peace without annexations and indemnities”; “open covenants openly arrived at,” and the promise of universal disarmament safeguard- ed by the League of Nations. The mockery of those promises need no longer be exposed. It is palpable to the whole world who lookéd to him for their fulfillment. Had the followers of Woodrow Wil- son looked less at the man and more at the system of which he was the spokesman, they would have been spared the great disillusionment and despair that weighs upon them to- day. Gandhi’s Impotent Programs. The retease of Mr. Gandhi by the British Government which impris- oned him sets the public seal upon the recognition of the utter defeat of his program. He, too, was at one period of his career a leader of masses of men; one-fifth of the hu- man race contained within the con- fines of India alone looked to him for their redemption, while an ever-grow- ing following of disappointed and dis- illusioned pacifists outside turned to- wards this new Messiah arising in the East to seek a solution for their war- weariness, “Swaraj within a year”; “non-co-op- eration with the existing government until it changes its heart”; “boycott of schools, law courts, government in- stitutions and titles”; “civil disobedi- encé, including non-payment of rent and taxes”; such were the slogans of Gandhism which carried the move- ment among the masses of the peo- ple and swept him to the supreme position of command of three hun- dred and twenty millions of human beings. There was a time when his rule was more real than that of the Goy- ernment of India—when a leader more realistic than he might have forced that government to its knees as it seems, taken logically as the out- and to make concessions, or contest- ed its supremacy in the battle of an entire nation against the bureauracy. But that moment: passed, thanks to the retreat at Bardoli, when the In- dian workers and..peasants were or- dered to pay rent and taxes to the landlords and government, and their attempts at mass action repudiated by the leader of the nation. Steady Decline. From that momenteto the arrest and imprisonment of Mr. Gandhi, his sentence to six years in jail and his release after serving two years, the Indian movement for freedom has suffered a constant decline until to- day the government is so sure of its strength and power that they can re- lease the Prophet of Non-violent Non-co-operation, based upon Soul- Force, with impunity. No derser commentary is needed upon the col- lapse of a great movement, What of Lenin, the Communist? Meanwhile, what of the Russian Revolution, whose leader lies cold be- neath the winter snows of Moscow, mourned by a hundred and sixty mil- lions of his fellow-citizens and by the milions of workers and peasants thruout the world who received, however remotely, his message of emancipation? Has this revolution, successfully made and maintained against the on- slaughts of its countless enemies dur- ing the past seven years, proved itself an illusion, a Utopia unrealized in actuality? Has Russia returned to capitalism, as alleged by its capitalist foes who can make no worse allegation? Has the Revolution of October, 1917, betrayed its declared ideal of being the precursor of the Interna- tional Socialist Revolution? By the answer to these questions must the life and work of Nicolai Lenin and his followers, the Russian Communist Party, be judged, and by the eventual working out of those problems which the Russian Revolu- tion has propounded to the world, will Lenin’s true greatness be revealed to posterity. Of Wilson and Gandhi we can say at once that they have failed; history awaits no verdict. But the work of Lenin remains un- finished, in a transition state as he himself predicted. Russian Revolution a Fact. — Meanwhile we can. know this much, that the Revolution is an aecom- Plished fact. The Russian autocracy and corrupt bureauracy are no more. The ok bourgeoisie has been over- thrown. War and revolution have given way to peace. Military Com? munism has made way for the New Economic Policy, which is an ex- pression of what Lenin termed “State Capitalism.” - The dictatorship of the, proletariat rules in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, which is the new name for the group of autonomous and inde- pendent federated states that once constituted the Empire of the Czar. Church has been separated from state. Land and great industries have been nationalized. Foreign trade remains in the hands of the state. The old secret treaties have been published and repudiated. Rus- sian imperialism has ceased to exist. Freedom to subject peoples has been granted. The old form of state based upon property and privilege has given way to the new form known as the Soviet, based upon occupation. The Russian Revolution has given birth to a new form of government as well as to a new social system based upon social instead of private ownership in the principal means of production, distribution and exchange. The slogans of the Bolsheviks in 1917-18: “Peace, land and bread”; “All power to the Soviets”; “The Dic- tatorship of the Proletariat”; “Free- dom of Subject Nationalities within the Russian Empire”; “Abolition of tion and the foundation of the World Communist State”—these are cither realized or in process of realization, \ “ontinued on page 7.)