VI

Even before the war I have laid down the premises on which the contentions in these articles are based, in many articles and in resolutions in which my signature is to be found with others. At the time there was no question of revolution in India and Asia, but it is now necessary to say that even in such countries the proletarian movement cannot join hands with the nationalist one and must by no means subject itself to it.

Lenin and the Third International have talked the proletariat into a combination with the capitalist nationalism of Asia. My reply is that we have never supported European capitalism. We have urged the rising of India against European capitalism; but you of the Third International support the rising capitalism of Asia; you urge the subjection of the Asiatic proletariat to their native capitalism. There is no wonder that you do it, for peasant-capitalist Russia desires also a capitalist Asia.

In China and India these tactics have turned proletarians into the enemies of the revolution and one reflects now that China and Siberia also follow the tactics of Moscow, and one may confidently say that of the entire proletariat of Asia.

One now reflects that the proletariat of the world; that is to say, of Europe, America, Australia, Africa and Asia is guided either by the Second or Third International. It is unnecessary to prove that the Second International is counter-revolutionary, and I have shown in these articles that the Third International is also counter-revolutionary. One may therefore safely say that the entire world proletariat has been turned against Communism.

All classes in all capitalist States are enemies of world revolution. The Third International has not explained this to the workers.

Many fake principles have penetrated from Moscow to Western Europe and North America. This has been largely through Lenin’s book called The Infantile Diseases of Left Wing Communism. See the ideas expressed in that book on Asquith and Lloyd George and on the splits in the bourgeois classes and parties in the capitalist States, of which, he declares, Communists may make use. Lenin contends there that Communists may take advantage of the differences between Monarchists and Republicans, democrats and reactionaries.

This has proved quite untrue. Against Communism all bourgeois parties in all countries, including the Social-Democrats and Independents of Germany, the Labour Party and the ILP of Britain, have formed an absolutely firm and united front.

Faith in such tactics has injured the cause of the proletariat, because, in Germany, for instance, instead of fighting both equally, it stood for the bourgeois republic against the monarchy in the case of the Kapp Putsch, and in the cases of the murder of Rathenau.

Communism is absolutely opposed to capitalism in principle and practice. In the revolution from capitalism to Communism there is not a single economic or political action on which capitalists and Communists agree. To make use of the split between bourgeois parties is to attach oneself to one of them and to combine with capitalists. Such tactics are utterly bad, for the bourgeois parties will at the decisive moment turn against the Communists and the result will be a terrible defeat for them or the total corruption of the Communist Party.

The same may be said of the much-vaunted hope of support for the Communists from the peasants and middle classes. The Russian C. P. has counted on these in Europe also and shaped its tactics accordingly. Yet, although the difficult conditions which the Bolshevists calculated would bring these classes over to the Communist revolution in many countries, these classes have not been won over.

Real revolutionaries know, nevertheless, that the victory of the proletariat is sure in the end. Sections of the bourgeois classes will eventually come over, but it is essential not to count upon their doing so in the beginning.

Even those tactics of combining with peasant bourgeois parties arose out of the peasant capitalist character of the Russian revolution, and the European workers only accepted them because they were still bourgeois in their opinions.

The Russians, because they were bourgeois revolutionists, wanted a compromise to be made in Western Europe. They feared a really proletarian revolution, and therefore they advised the Communists to compromise.

A genuine proletarian revolution will stand on its feet and will oppose equally Democrats, Social-Democrats, Monarchists and Republicans.