The Old Guard and their Militant foes both hailed from the broad Marxist tradition, the former seeing democracy as a positive value in itself and emphasizing the efficacy of the electoral road to power while the latter tended to see democracy as a sort of chimera, a tactical expedient propagated by the bourgeois in its maintenance of class power.
Beyond this important analytical difference, the divide between these two factional groupings was largely generational, with the Old Guard dominated by middle aged party veterans of large standing while newcomers into the Socialist Party during the Depression years of the early 1930s tended to gravitate as a younger and more aggressive caucus.
In the American left of those days anything not 'revolutionary' was dismissed as beneath discussion; but that didn't bother the Old Guard, which gloried in its distance from the vulgar ferment of popular radicalism.
They have in recent years lived in eternal fear of offending labor leaders, and have therefore kept silent in the face of reaction and racketeering within the unions.
[2]SPA National Chairman Leo Krzycki sent the new publication his warm greetings at the time of its launch, although beseeching it to "steer clear of party controversy.