Jump to content

Page:The Capitalist World and The Communist International (1920).pdf/27

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

Minister, the confederate of Delacroix,—member of the clerical party,—the advocate of the Belgian catholic priests, and the defender of capitalist atrocities against the negroes in the Congo.

Henderson, who is aping the great men of the bourgeoisie, who appears on the scene now as Royal Minister and then again as a Labor opposition to his Royal Highness; Tom Shaw, who demands that the Soviet Government furnish documentary evidence of the fact that there are robbers, murderers and liars in the London Government,—who are all these gentlemen if not the sworn enemies of the working class!

Renner and Zeitz, Niemetz and Tuzar, Troelstra and Branting, Dasczinsky and Tchkheidze,—every one of them interprets the disgraceful collapse of the Second International in terms of their petty government trickery.

Finally Karl Kautsky, former theoretician of the Second International and ex-Marxist, has become the privy counsellor of inanities for the yellow press of all countries.

The more pliant elements of the old Socialism have changed their appearance and coloring under the pressure of the masses, without changing in essence. They break away, or are preparing to break away from the Second International, at the same time invariably shrinking from every revolutionary activity of the masses and from every serious preparation for action. The fact that the Polish Socialist Party, led by Dasczinsky and patronized by Pilsudsky, that party of petty bourgeois cynicism and chauvinistic treachery, has proclaimed its break with the Second International, is sufficient to characterize and brand this masquerade.

The leading parliamentary fraction of the French Socialist Party, voting now against the budget and against the Versailles Treaty, essentially remains one of the mainstays of the bourgeois republic. Its pose of opposition goes only so far as is necessary to regain the partial confidence of the more conservative elements of the proletariat.

Regarding the fundamental problems of the class struggle, French parliamentary Socialism continues as heretofore to demoralize the will of the working class, suggesting to it that the present moment is not favorable for the conquest of power, because France is too exhausted. Yesterday the reason was the war, while prior to the war it was the industrial revival that interfered, and still earlier it was the industrial crisis. Alongside with parliamentary Socialism and on the same level with it comes the garrulous and mendacious Syndicalism of Jouhaux and Co.

The creation of a strong, firmly welded and disciplined Communist Party in France is of vital importance to the French proletariat.

27