The Class Struggle (magazine)
Even prior to the establishment of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in the summer of 1901, there had been a more or less conscious left wing movement, which looked with disdain upon advocacy of a "minimum program" of ameliorative reform, instead arguing for the wholesale revolutionary transformation of politics and society.
World War I intensified the feelings of alienation of the left wing from the moderate leadership of the SPA and their almost exclusive concentration upon electoral politics.
[2] The Left saw the failure of the parliamentary Socialists of Europe to avert the catastrophe of war as indicative of what one historian has aptly characterized as the "fatal dilution of revolutionary principles by the party.
The Bolshevik triumph seemed to validate the perspective of the radicals that socialist change would come through revolutionary upheaval rather than through piecemeal parliamentary reform.
Parallel revolutionary efforts in Germany, Finland, and Hungary seemed to signal a new historical moment to the often young and always enthusiastic Left Wing movement.
Historian Theodore Draper credits a successor to The New Review, called The New International, as the newspaper which played the "historic role as the first propaganda organ" of the proto-Communist Left Wing Section.
[4] Ten issues of the four-page newspaper were produced in New York, also edited by Louis Fraina and financed in large part by radical Dutch engineer S.J.
[4] While not properly a theoretical journal itself, The New International did clearly play a transitional role linking the earlier publications of the Left Wing with The Class Struggle.
[6] Also attending the gathering were several other top émigrés from the Russian empire, including feminist Alexandra Kollontay, theoretician Nikolai Bukharin, and orator V.
[7] While Bukharin called for a prompt split, Trotsky sought the Left Wing to remain in the party and won the debate on the question.
[8] Physical production of the magazine took place at the 15 Spruce Street address of the New Yorker Volkszeitung, the German-language socialist daily newspaper then edited by Ludwig Lore.
The Communist Labor Party was driven underground in the aftermath, its membership decimated, its sources of income disconnected, its legal expenses exponentially increased.
Throughout the course of its existence, a total of 13 issues of The Class Struggle were produced, along with approximately a dozen pamphlets reissuing selected articles from its pages.
The Class Struggle was reissued in book form in three bound volumes by the Greenwood Reprint Company in 1968, assuring its availability to research libraries around the world.
