This is so, by the way, to a far greater extent since the war than previously.
Belated German parliamentarism—an abortion of the bourgeois revolution, in itself an abortion of history,—this parliamentarism suffers in its infancy from every illness peculiar to senile decay. "The most democratic" Reichstag of the Republic of Ebert is powerless, not only before the iron Marshal Foch, but even before the Stock Exchange machinations of their own Stinneses, as well as before the military conspiracies of their war clique. German parliamentary democracy is a void space between two dictatorships.
The composition of the bourgeoisie itself underwent a great change during the war. In the general atmosphere of the impoverishment of the entire world, the concentration of capital suddenly made a great step forward. Firms which were formerly in the background now become prominent. Solidity, stability, a tendency to "reasonable" compromise, the maintainance of a certain decorum, both in exploitation and in the utilization of this exploitation—all this was washed away me the waves of the Imperialist flood.
A new class of rich men has come to the foreground. It consists of military contractors, mean profiteers, parvenues, international adventurers, contrabandists, well-clad crooks—all the unbridled canaille hunting for luxury and ready to commit all kinds of atrocities against the Proletarian Revolution, from which they can expect nothing but the gallows.
The existing order, the rule of the rich, stands now fully exposed before the masses. The post bellum period in America, France and England has been marked by an indulgence in luxury which has assumed the nature of a mania. Paris, filled with international patriotic parasites, as admitted by the "Temps", resembles Babylon on the eve of its destruction.
This new bourgeoisie puts its stamp upon politics, courts, the press, art and the Church. All restraint has been thrown to the winds. Wilson, Clemenceau, Millerand, Lloyd George and Churchill do not shrink from the most brazen deceit, the most transparent falsehood, and when exposed they calmly go on to new criminal deeds. In comparison with the policies of the modern bourgeois statesmen, the classic rules of political cunning expounded by old Machiavelli become mere aphorisms of a provincial simpleton. The law courts, which formerly concealed their bourgeois essence under democratic finery, have now openly become the agency of class brutality and counter-revolutionary provocation. The judges of the Third Republic have passed a verdict of not guilty upon the murderer of Jaures without a quiver. The law courts of Germany, which has been proclaimed a Socialist Republic, are en-
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