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ism, and the specific peculiarities which this struggle inevitably assumes in each separate country, according to the idiosyncrasies of its politics, economics, culture, national compositions (e.g., Ireland), its colonies, religious divisions, etc. Everywhere is felt an ever-widening and increasing dissatisfaction with the Second International, a dissatisfaction due to its opportunism and its incapacity to create a real leading center, able to direct the international tactics of the revolutionary proletariat in the struggle for the world Soviet Republic. One must clearly realize that such a leading center can, under no circumstances, be built after a single model, by a mechanical adjustment and equalization of the tactical rules of the struggle. The national and State differences, now existing between peoples and countries, will continue to exist for a very long time, even after the realization of the proletarian dictatorship on a world scale. Unity of international tactics in the Communist Labor movement everywhere demands, not the elimination of variety, not the abolition of the national peculiarities (this at the present moment is a foolish dream), but such an application of the fundamental principles of Communism—Soviet power and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat—as will admit of the right modification of these principles, in their adaptation and application to national and national-State differences. The principal problem of the historical moment in which all advanced (and not only the advanced) countries now find themselves lies here; that specific national peculiarities must be studied, ascertained, and grasped before concrete attempts are made in any country to solve the aspects of the single international problem, to overcome opportunism and Left doctrinairism within the working-class movement, to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and to institute a Soviet Republic and proletarian dictatorship
The main thing—although far from everything—has already been achieved in winning over the vanguard of the working class, in winning it over to the side of Soviet power against parliamentarism, to the side of proletarian dictatorship against bourgeois democracy. Now all efforts, all attention, must be concentrated on the next step, which seems, and from a certain standpoint really is, less fundamental, but which is, in
