Our stand on the question of reparations can be formulated in the following way: Of course it is necessary to reconstruct all destroyed areas, but such a reconstruction should be done at the expense of the bourgeoisie of all countries, the victors and the conquered. In practice it is quite clear that Germany alone can never compensate all the damages or, as the French say, "for all the broken pots."
When we talk of the great losses in the war, of the hundreds of billions spent in the war, these expenditures are composed of different parts. There are losses purely economic in character: Destroyed homes, factories, shops, fields. Then there come losses on account of destruction of the whole economic organism caused by the war, in exports, imports, etc. Then come losses in human lives. If, to estimate a human life at $50.—and the bourgeois economists are busy now with that—even from this purely commercial point of view, if we consider the ten million murdered men and figure out the loss in dollars, we will see what a gigantic loss it was to the public economy.
In the losses brought about by the war there are those which cannot be replaced. Human lives are lost forever. The loss of working capacity of invalids also cannot be replaced. The used-up guns, military equipment and powder cannot be collected again, etc. But part of the spent capital does remain somewhere. When the state ordered the guns, airplanes, tanks, automobiles, cars, food and guns for soldiers; all that was made by somebody at a profit which remains somewhere.
Where are these hundreds of billions? They are held by the ruling class, they are held by the munition makers and factory owners. The debts of the present governments are only partly external and a great majority of them are on internal loans (Liberty Loans in the U. S. A.). And who furnished the money for those loans? Those who made hundreds of millions.
Thus, if we take up the matter in a practical way, and force the bourgeoisie of the victorious countries to pay, the problem of reconstructing the destroyed areas may easily be solved. It is true it would be necessary to act in a somewhat indelicate way, it would be necessary to annul the mutual debts, to repudiate the internal and the external loans, to bring about a progressive income tax. The reparations question can be settled in such a way only if the proletariat takes over power into its own hands.
The Struggle Against War
One of the most important questions which arose before the workers in the last couple of years is the question of measures and means of fighting against war. We all know very well that there are no such workers or such labor organizations as want war. The question here is not of moral indignation against international slaughter and not of
