There is only one way of being a genuine internationalist: to strain all our energies in an endeavor to develop the revolutionary movement and speed the revolutionary struggle in our own land, to support that struggle in every way, by propaganda, sympathy, material aid, and support only that struggle, in every country without exception. Everything else is a snare and a delusion.
The international Socialist and working class movements the world over have in the course of the war split into three groups. Whoever understands their tendencies, has analyzed them closely and still deserts the fight for real active internationalism, is a weakling and a fraud.
1.—Social-patriots, that is, Socialists in words and chauvinists in fact, who agree to defend their fatherland in an imperialistic war and particularly in this imperialistic war. These men are our class enemies. They have gone over to the bourgeois camp. They count among their numbers the majority of Socialist leaders in every nation. Plekhanov & Co in Russia, Scheidemann in Germany, Renaudel, Guesde and Sembat in France, Bissolati & Co. in Italy, Hyndman, the Fabians and the Laborites in England, Branting & Co. in Sweden, Troelstra and his party in Holland, Stauning and his party in Denmark, Victor Berger[1] and other defenders of the fatherland in America, etc.
2.—The second group, that might be called the center, is hesitating between social-patriotism and actual internationalism. These people swear by all that is holy that they are Marxists, that they are internationalists, that they are for peace, for exerting pressure upon the government, for presenting all sorts of demands that show the desire of the nation for peace, they are peace propagandists and want a peace without annexations and they want peace with the social-patriots. The center is for union and against any sort of shism. The center is the heaven of petty bourgeois phrases of lip internationalism, of cowardly opportunism, of compromise with the social-patriots. The fact is that the center is not convinced of the necessity of a revolution against the government of its own country; it does not preach that kind of revolution; it does not wage
- ↑ Victor Berger is against America's participation in the war, but he it still a social-patriot in the meaning of Lenin's term, having repeatedly justified the majority government Socialists of Germany, advocated three years ago the American invasion and conquest of Mexico and urged a larger navy for "national defence." His attitude against America's participation in the war is determined by peculiar motives of hit own, having nothing in common with revolutionary international Socialism.—L. C. F.
