Socialist Party in 1919 — forerunner of the American communist movement. In January 1918, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik victory in Russia and the establishment of a Revolutionary Socialist regime there, the SPLA issue a second manifesto of the organization. The manifesto denounced "bourgeois democracy" as a "fraud" by means of which "Imperialism promotes the most brutal interests," advocated for "the unity of industrial action and Socialist politics," argued that "the revolution of the proletariat annihilates the parliamentary regime and its state" and instead establishes a new form of government based upon workers' councils that combine legislative and executive authority. The SPLA stated in this manifesto that "the organization is formed to work in the Socialist Party as well as independently of the party" and for "the revolutionary reorganization of the American Socialist movement" both from within and without the SPA. The organization achieved a significant degree of public notice as leading exponents of the Bolshevik Revolution in the United States. On February 28, 1918, a mass meeting was held in a New York City hall at which Louis Fraina quixotically called for the establishment of a "Red Guard" of draft age men to be sent to Soviet Russia to fight for the Bolshevik government against the German army then invading the country. The meeting of about 2,000 people was also addressed by writer Andre Tridon as well as IWW poet Arturo Giovanitti. Invitation to join the Communist International The Socialist Propaganda League called for a new revolutionary socialist International and was invited by name to attend the founding Congress of the Communist International in 1919. The organization, however, was unable to send a representative in time to attend the gathering. Dissolution and legacy A total of 12 issues of The New International are known to have been produced through October 1918. The New International was directly succeeded by The Revolutionary Age, also edited by Fraina, with the first issue of that paper appearing in the middle of November. "The League is still in existence, but its paper is no longer published, since The Revolutionary Age expresses its policy," Fraina noted in March 1919. Prominent members of the SPL joined the new Communist Party of America, which eventually merged with the Communist Labor Party to form first the Workers Party of America and eventually the Communist Party USA. Key members C.W. Fitzgerald Louis C. Fraina John Jurgis Otto Huiswoud