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whip, just so do the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries now appeal for a return to the old army discipline, to serve under a Constituent Assembly on a basis of a return to capitalism and all its "attractions." But we Communists look ahead. We know that the past is dead, having become rotten as was inevitable, and that, failing thus, the workers and poor peasants could never take the Government into their hands: we know that in the place of the old army a new, more enlightened one, the Red Army of Socialism, has arisen.
As long as the bourgeoisie stand at the head of Government, and our country is a fatherland of bankers, traders, speculators, police, kings and presidents, so long will the working class have no personal interests in guarding this filthy profit-producing apparatus. A proletarian's duty is to rise against this institution. Only miserable lackies and hangers-on to money-bags can say that we must not strike and revolt against the plundering Imperialist Government at a time of war. Of course, such revolts stand in the way of the plundering war business. It is quite clear that agitation within the country, and more especially agitation in the army, aids disorganisation. But how is the domination of Wilhelm, for instance, to be broken without disorganising the Wilhelm discipline? Impossible. The German martyr sailors murdered by Wilhelm's executioners, certainly aided the disorganisation of the army organised after the highway robbery system. But if the robbers' army is inwardly strong, that would mean death to the revolution. If the revolution is strong, that means death to the robbers' army. The followers of Schiedemann, the German social betrayers, are persecuting Liebkneeht as a disorganiser of the army. They are persecuting all the German revolutionists, the German Bolsheviks, as people who are "dealing the valorous army a dastardly blow in the back," in other words, a blow to the cause of plunder. Let the Schiedemanns fraternise with our Mensheviks and such like individuals—they are all of a kidney.
Russia has passed through this period. The revolution of the workers is victorious. The period of decay has passed into the realm of memory. The period of construction of a new order of things is upon us. A Red Army is being built now not for plunder, but for the defence of Socialism: not to guard the fatherland of profit, where everything was in the hands of capital and the landowners, but to protect the Socialist fatherland, where everything has been transferred to the hands of workers;
