Justified by Our Enemies. (1909)

Editorial from the July 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

The German Social Democrats are complaining that Messrs. Snowden, Barnes, MacDonald and other “Labour” members went to Germany and associated at dinners and upon the public platform with notorious enemies of Socialism. Of course, there is nothing new in this. It is merely extending to foreign countries their common practice at home—and there is nothing illogical or inconsistent in that. It is true that it has been the custom of these gentlemen when travelling on the Continent, at all events about the time of the recurrence of the International Socialist (!) Congress, to affirm the class struggle which they deny on this side of the Channel, but we here point out to our German comrades, and incidentally also to those compatriots whose “qualities of heart” so far outweigh their qualities of head as to render them at once the support and prey of these “Labour” cannibals, that the deduction to be drawn from this triennial acknowledgement of the class struggle and the acts complained of is that these so-called Labour leaders are conscious of the existence of the class struggle, and are deliberately fighting on the side of the master class. This is the view we tried in vain to convey to our German comrades when, just after the General Election of 1906, August Bebel wrote to Reynolds' Newspaper a letter congratulating the British electors upon having sent so many Liberals and Labour men to the House of Commons. Now that our British mumpers on the labour movement are taking to transferring their treacherous practices to German soil, the Social Democrats of that country would seem to have discovered that they were gambolling on an inclined plane when they in 1906 congratulated the British electors on sending these very men to Parliament.