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danger and decision there will be no one in our midst who will spread panic and demoralise us, no one will go over to the enemy, no one will betray us at every step. Is this not a gain?
What can we expect in Germany now? We repeat—when we look closer at the present state of the German labour movement, when we see such gatherings as the Halle Congress, when we become familiar with the German trade union periodicals—we are more and more convinced that the chief and, may be, the only serious support of the German bourgeoisie at the present time is the labour bureaucracy and the labour aristocracy, which is ruling the German Trade Unions. There are about 100,000 officials in the free German Trade Unions. Herein lies the chief support, the chief White Guard of the bourgeoisie. They are the white army of German capitalism, the watchdogs of capital. Whenever the bourgeoisie wants some mean, dirty, murderous work to be done, it makes use of no others than these pseudo-labour "leaders." These reactionaries of labour extraction give the bourgeoisie everything that is most precious to the working man—his energies, his physical strength, all his knowledge of life, in a word, the most valuable gifts the worker possesses—these counter-revolutionary ex-workers enrol to serve the bourgeoisie everything. When we look closer at it, when we observe how this labour bureaucracy is strangling the working class, when we see how everything is made to serve the ends of capital—the very blood rushes to our head in an outburst of irrepressible indignation.
This is the chief weight on the feet of the working class? This is the last obstacle which we must remove in order to come to close quarters with the small handful of capitalists, and simply crush them by the weight of our numbers. The working class has no greater enemy than the handful of ex-working men who have sold themselves outright to the bourgeoisie, and are led in political matters by Scheidemann, Noske, Hilferding, Renaudel and Co., and the Trade Unions by Legien and Dissmann, Mot, Gompers, and the rest of the counter-revolutionary "labour" rabble.
What must be will be! Let the reptiles of opportunism hiss at us all over the world, let the big and small Dissmanns of all countries raise frenzied expostulation—this beastly thing must
