Page:Otto Wilhelm Kuusinen - The Finnish Revolution (1919).pdf/31

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steel! The rust and scum float on the surface in Finland. The Socialist renegades under tho leadership of Tanner, a former senator, came upon the scene to barter openly their worn-out ideals for the greater joy of the bourgeois "Progressives." "Comrade." Tokoi, accompanied by the comedian Orjatsalo and others, shifted their stall to the Archangel market, there to play a tragic-comic farce to keep up the Finnish Legion, lured into the ranks of British imperialism. At the end of August we finally settled our accounts with the officials of the old organisation at the Moscow Congress, when the Communist Party of Finland was founded on the following fundamental principles:—

(1). The working class must energetically prepare for an armed revolution, and not hang back with the old system with its Parliaments and professional and co-operative societies.

(2). Only a working-class party working for the propagation of Communism and for the success of the future social revolution can be recognised or supported. All other action must be resolutely condemned, unmasked and combatted.

(3). By the revolution the working class must take all power into its hands, and set up an iron dictatorship. Therefore our efforts must lead to the suppression of the bourgeois state and not to the setting up of a democracy, neither before nor after the revolution.

(4). Through the dictatorship of the workers must be created a Communist society, by means of the expropriation of all land and capitalist property, and by the workers taking production and distribution into their own hands. Thus neither before nor by the revolution must anything he undertaken which aims merely at rendering more supportable the system of the expropriation of capital.

(5). The proletarian revolution must be propagated as energetically as possible, and the Russian People's Soviet Socialist Republic supported by every means in our power.

These are the lessons we have drawn from our struggle and from the great example of the Russian people. We now understand that the principal rule of Marxian tactics is as follows:—First of all a just appreciation of the historical