1. International Relations After Versailles.
The bourgeoisie of the whole world is looking back wistfully upon the days just past. All the foundations of international and internal relations have been overthrown or shaken. Threatening clouds darken the future of the capitalist world. The old system of alliances and mutual insurance which formed the foundations of international equilibrium and of armed peace has been utterly destroyed by the Imperialist War. The Versailles Treaty has failed to establish any other adjustment in its stead.
Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany in succession have fallen out of the world race. Some of the powerful empires which had themselves previously played a prominent part in the world's plunder have now become the objects of plunder and dismemberment. A new and vast field for colonial exploitation, beginning from this side of the Rhine, embracing the whole of Central and Eastern Europe and stretching as far as the Pacific Ocean, opens itself before the victorious Imperialists of the Entente. How can the Congo, Syria, Egypt or Mexico be compared with the steppes, forests and mountain lands of Russia taken together with the skilled labor power of Germany? The new colonial policy of the victors has worked itself out: the overthrow of the Labor Republic in Russia, the plunder of Russian raw material, the compulsory application of German labor power to work this raw material with the aid of German coal, using the German employer as an armed overseer—and the assembling of the manufactured products and the profits that go with them. The victorious Allies have inherited the program of "organizing Europe", which had been advanced by German Imperialism in the heyday of its military success. Thus when the vanquished bandits of the German Empire are to be put on trial by the Entente rulers, they will certainly be tried by a jury of their peers.
But there are defeated parties even in the camp of the conquerors.
Stupefied by the fumes of a chauvinistic victory which it had won for the benefit of others the French bourgeoisie fancies that it has become the ruler of Europe. But in reality France has never been in such slavish dependence upon the more powerful governments of England and America than she is today. France is dictating Belgium's industrial and military policy, thus converting her weaker ally into a subject province. While she herself is nothing but a larger Belgium in relation to England. For the time
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