The Class Struggle (journal)

The Class Struggle was a bi-monthly Marxist theoretical magazine published in New York City by the Socialist Publication Society. The SPS also published a series of pamphlets, mostly reprints from the magazine during the short period of its existence. Among the initial editors of the publication were Ludwig Lore, Marxist theoreticians Louis B. Boudin and Louis C. Fraina, the former of whom left the publication in 1918. In the third and final year of the periodical, The Class Struggle emerged as one of the primary English-language voices of the left wing factions within the American Socialist Party and its final issue was published in 1919 by the nascent Communist Labor Party of America.

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. 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 radicals, in ever more strident terms, objected to the "parliamentary cretinism" and "sausage socialism" of the moderate wing of the socialist movement, gradually coming to view its existence as an impediment on the achievement of socialist change.

Further impetus to the Left Wing was provided by the victory of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party, headed by V.I. Lenin in November 1917. 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. This movement sought to organize itself and to give voice to its ideas via the printed word. The magazine The Class Struggle, established late in the spring of 1917, was a particularly important vehicle for this emerging Left Wing.

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