III. Bourgeois Regime After the War.
The entire power of the privileged classes has been concentrated upon two questions: to maintain their place in the international struggle, and to prevent the proletariat from becoming the owner of the country. This has led to the fact that the former political groupings of the bourgeoisie have lost their power. Not only in Russia where the banner of the Constitutional Democratic Party, at the decisive moment of the struggle became the banner of all propertied classes against the Workers' and Peasants' Revolution, but even in countries with an older and deeper rooted political culture, the former programs which divided the different strata of the bourgeoisie had lost their sharp distinction before the proletarian revolution broke out.
Lloyd George is the spokesman for the amalgamation of the Conservatives, the Unionists and Liberals for a mutual struggle against the approaching domination of the working class. This old demagogue strives to establish the church as a central electric station which is to feed all the parties of the propertied classes.
In France the recent and notorious epoch of anti-clericalism has now become a mere phantom; the radicals, royalists and catholics have formed a bloc of a national character against the proletariat which is lifting its head. The French Government, being ready to assist every reactionary force, supports the reactionary blackhundred Wrangel and re-establishes diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
Giolitti, neutralist and pro-German, has taken the helm of the Italian Government as the general leader of the interventionists, the neutralists, the clericalist, Mazzinists, ready to manouvre with regard to the different questions of foreign and home policy, in order to offer a stiff resistance to the attack of the revolutionary proletarians of town, and country. The Government of Giolitti justly considers itself the last stake of the Italian bourgeoisie.
The policy of every German Government and all the government parties since the overthrow of the Hohenzollerns has been an attempt to establish in conjunction with the Entente ruling classes a general basis of hatred of Bolshevism, i. e., a united force against the Proletarian Revolution.
While the Anglo-French Shylock is making endeavors to garrote the German nation,—the German bourgeoisie, without distinction of parties, entreats its enemy to loosen the noose just enough to enable it to strangle the vanguard of the German pro-
14
