party of the "Independents"?—although this party never had any independent political idea of its own, no independent policy of its own, but only wavered between the Scheidemanns and the Communists.
Obviously, one of the causes was the erroneous tactics of the German Communists, who must fearlessly and honestly admit this mistake and learn to correct it. The mistake consisted in rejecting participation in the reactionary bourgeois parliament and in the reactionary Trade Unions; it consisted in the numerous manifestations of that "Left" infantile disorder which has now appeared on the surface. And the quicker it does so, the better; the more beneficial to the organism will be the cure.
The German "Independent Social-Democratic Party" is obviously not homogeneous. The old opportunist leaders (Kautsky, Hilferding, and, to a considerable extent it seems, Crispien, Ledebour and others), have proven their inability to understand Soviet power and dictatorship of the proletariat, their inability to lead the latter in its revolutionary struggle. Side by side with them, there has arisen in this party a Left proletarian wing which is growing with admirable rapidity. Hundreds of thousands of members of this party (and it has, it seems, up to three-quarters of a million members) are proletarians who have left Scheidemann and are marching rapidly towards Communism. This proletarian wing has already proposed (at the Liepzig, 1919, Conference of the Independents) an immediate and unconditonal affiliation with the Third International. To fear a "compromise" with this wing of the party is really laughable. On the contrary it is incumbent upon Communists to seek and to find an appropriate form of compromise with them; such a compromise, as, on the one hand, would facilitate and accelerate the necessary complete fusion with this wing and, on the other, would in no way tie the hands of the Communists in their ideo-political struggle against the opportunist Right wing of the Independents. Probably it will not be easy to work out the appropriate form of compromise, but only a charlatan could promise to the German workmen and Communists an easy way to victory.
Capitalism would not be capitalism if the proletariat "pure
