How can we answer the third question: How shall we fight social-chauvinism? Social-chauvinism is opportunism so developed and so strengthened in the course of a period of relatively peaceful capitalism, so settled in its ideas and its policies, so closely allied to the bourgeoisie and the government that its presence within a workers' party is absolutely intolerable.
One may wear thin soles while walking along the sidewalks of a town, but when you climb mountains you need strong hobnailed boots. European Socialism has grown beyond the narrow confines of peaceful activity and nationalism. The war has led it into the arena of revolutionary action, and it is time it should break entirely with opportunism and drive it out of the workers' party.
Merely to mention the duties which Socialism will have to fulfill at this new stage of its world evolution, is not to decide how soon or in what way the revolutionary Socialist parties of workers in every country are going to rid themselves of all the petty bourgeois opportunists within their ranks. But we realize clearly that henceforth that process of elimination is essential and that all the policies of the workers' party will have to be shaped from that point of view. The war of 1914 marks such a turning point in the history of the world that the relations of the party to opportunism cannot remain unchanged any longer. We cannot undo what was done, we cannot blot out of the consciousness of the workers, nor out of the memory of the bourgeois, nor out of the record of our times the fact that, in a crisis, the opportunists proved to be the group around which rallied all the elements from the working class who deserted into the bourgeois camp. As far as the whole of Europe is concerned, opportunism was only in its adolescence before the war broke out. When it did break out, opportunism reached its manhood state and it will be unable to regain its youth and its innocence. There has matured a whole group of parliamentarians, journalists, bureaucrats of the labor movement, privileged employes and even a few proletarians, who cast in their lot with the pourgeoisie, and whom the bourgeoisie knew how to appreciate and to make use of.
We cannot go back or turn backward the wheels of history, we must and we can go ahead fearlessly, away from artificial, lawful, slavish opportunism and toward the sort of labor organization which will be revolutionary, which will not confine itself to so-called lawful action and will know how to rid itself of the opportunist treachery, the sort of labor organization that will set out to conquer power and to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
