“’Gaol is the gateway of freedom, declared the imprisoned Debs, and from that gateway in America another sufferer for the workers’ cause, Arturo Giovannitti, some years ago, delivered a passionate appeal to the workers to think, to use their divine powers of brain for the world’s salvation, not its enslavement.
So the Bolshevik revolution thrilled me, and I never failed to, at all times, at every possible opportunity, point out its tremendous significance to the working class of all countries – the lessons to be learnt and the policy to be pursued.Įver urging the workers to do their own thinking – to refuse any longer to be fooled and hoodwinked by specious and false friends, I wrote at this time an impassioned appeal which contained the following: – No longer despised and rejected, the workers had brushed aside with scorn age-old traditions, to stand erect in defiance of all their enemies. The glorious victory of the Russian workers had brought to me, and many others, a gladness and hope for the cause of the workers that had been the supreme motive and desire of my life. I wrote many articles extolling the achievements of the Bolsheviks, and based many arguments and exhortations on that basis to the sadly lagging and doped workers of this country. On the other hand the militant section of the workers in Australia, long dissatisfied with the barren harvest of years of Labour parliamentarianism hailed with joy the Bolshevik revolution as the harbinger of light, showing to the suffering workers of all lands the pathway to economic freedom. The consolidation of the Soviets, their successful operation as an unassailable method of supplanting parliamentary capitalist democracy, with all its false ideology and ineffectiveness, was a scathing reflection on, and contrast to, the miserable failure of Labour Parties here and elsewhere. They saw in this manifestation of the workers will and power to victory a serious menace to their long unchallenged position as the infallible saviours and leaders of the masses. The amazing triumph of the Bolsheviks rudely shattering to atoms the smug theories of a peaceful evolutionary emergence of the workers out of the house of bondage into the promised land along a flower strewn path of parliamentarianism, was regarded with disfavour and alarm by national Socialists and Labour politicians alike. This was largely due to the shortsighted acceptance by the Australian workers of the impotent Labour Parties or Governments, with Arbitration Courts, wherewith to remedy all their ills and ultimately establish the Socialist State. The reactions of these events in Australia were less marked than elsewhere. The Bolshevik revolution in 1917, with the later revolution in Germany, Hungary, and the general revolt of the workers in other countries, following the end of the world war, opened up entirely new phases in international affairs.
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