V. I.

Lenin

“ In a single night the aspect of the world has changed...
. Everyone puts the blame on his neighbour, everyone claims to be on the
defensive, to act only in a state of urgent defence. Everyone, don’t
you see, is defending only his most sacred values, the hearth, the
fatherland... . National vainglory and national aggressiveness
triumph... . Even the great international working class obeys national
orders, workers are killing one another on the battlefields... . Our
civilisation has proved bankrupt... . Writers of European fame are not
ashamed to come forth as ragingly blind chauvinists... . We had too
much faith in the possibility of imperialist madness being curbed by the
fear of economic ruin... . We are going through an undisguised
imperialist struggle for mastery of the world. There is no trace anywhere
of a struggle for great ideas, except perhaps the overthrow of the
Russian Minotaur ... the tsar and his grand dukes who have delivered
to the hangmen the noblest men of their country... . But do we not see
how noble France, the bearer of ideals of liberty, has become the ally of
the hangman tsar? How honest Germany ... is breaking its word and is
strangling unhappy neutral Belgium? ... How will it all end? If
poverty becomes too great, if despair gains the upper hand, if brother
recognises his brother in the uniform of an enemy, then perhaps something
very unexpected may still come, arms may perhaps be turned against those
who are urging people into the war and nations that have been made to hate
one another may perhaps forget that hatred, and suddenly unite. We do not
want to be prophets, but should the European war bring us one step closer
to a European social republic, then this war, after all, will not have
been as senseless as it seems at present.”

Whose voice is this? Perhaps one coming from a German Social-Democrat?

Far from it! Headed by Kautsky, the German Social Democrats have become
“wretched counter-revolutionary windbags”, [2] as Marx called
those Social-Democrats who, after the publication of the Anti-Socialist Law,
behaved “in accord with the circumstances”, in the manner of
Haase, Kautsky, Südekum and Co. today.

No, our quotation is from a magazine of petty-bourgeois Christian
democrats published by a group of kind-hearted little churchmen in Zurich
( Neue Wege , Blätter für religiöse Arbeit , [1]

September, 1914). That is the limit of humiliation we have come to: God-fearing philistines go as far as to say
that it would not be bad to turn weapons against those who “are
urging people into the war”, while “authoritative” Social-Democrats like Kautsky
“scientifically” defend the most despicable chauvinism, or,
like Plekhanov, declare the propaganda of civil war against the
bourgeoisie a harmful “utopia”!

Indeed, if such “Social-Democrats” wish to be in the majority
and to form the official “International”(= an alliance for
international justification of national chauvinism), then is it not better
to give up the name of “Social-Democrats”, which has been
besmirched and degraded by them, and return to the old Marxist name of
Communists? Kautsky once threatened to do that when the opportunist
Bernsteinians [3] seemed to be close to conquering the German
party officially. What was an idle threat from his lips will perhaps become
action to others.

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Notes:
[1]
New Ways, Pages for Religious Work .— Ed .

[2]
See
Marx’s letter to F. A. Sorge of September 19, 1879.

[3]
This refers to the followers of the revisionist Bernstein, leader of the opportunist
trend in German Social-Democracy, which arose at the end of the nineteenth
century.