LECTURE NO. 7
Politics and Tactics of the Profitern
The Attitude of Revolutionary Workers Toward the League of Nations
IN order clearly to understand the differences between the Profintern and the Amsterdam International we will dwell on the fundamental questions we touched upon when dealing with the latter.
Our attitude toward the Versailles Treaty, the League of Nations, the International Labor Bureau, may be stated in few words: The worst possible. Perhaps this is not enough to explain our attitude, but I think that there can be no question for a revolutionary international of collaborating with the League of Nations or institutions created by it.
Let us remember that Vandervelde, in one of his many speeches, tried to prove that the Versailles Treaty is not so bad after all, because it contains the Thirteenth Paragraph, which defends the rights of labor. Now, with this Thirteenth Paragraph or without it, we consider the Versailles Treaty the greatest robber treaty which human fancy ever created. We do not intend to make it better; instead of that we, from the beginning, adopted the slogan: "Down with the Versailles Treaty, which should be destroyed together with all created by it, as well as the Treaty of Sevres and other similar treaties."
The same holds true of the League of Nations and commissions created by it. One of them is the Commission on Disarmament. We already stated how beautifully the leaders of the Amsterdamers were talking in this Commission. If we are opposed to this Commission it is not because we consider it improper to make speeches in the presence of cabinet ministers: No, there may be such circumstances when it is proper and even necessary to make speeches in such surroundings. The question is only if we shall make wp our speeches and actions in such a way as to help the ministers to fool the laboring masses, or if we speak so as to destroy the illusions of the masses.
Only from this point of view do we consider our every strategic step. As long as the Commission on Disarmament has a collaborative character, as long as the representatives of the bourgeois governments in that Commission clearly are fooling these so-called representatives of the workers, so long for a real revolutionist, there can be no question of participating in all this international chicanery.
The International Labor Bureau, which is, according to the reformists, the "greatest attainment of the working class;" this International Labor Bureau, at the head of which stands Albert Thomas, recently
