Our theses were written before this uprising, which should serve as material for testing our theoretical views.

The views of opponents of self-determination lead to the conclusion that the viability of small nations oppressed by imperialism is already exhausted, that they cannot play any role against imperialism, that support for their purely national aspirations will lead to nothing, and so on. The experience of the imperialist war of 1914–1916 provides factual refutation of such conclusions.

The war became an epoch of crisis for the Western European nations, for all imperialism. Every crisis sweeps away the conditional, tears off external shells, discards the obsolete, and uncovers deeper springs and forces. What did it uncover from the perspective of the movement of oppressed nations? In the colonies a series of attempted uprisings, which the oppressing nations, naturally, with the assistance of military censorship, tried in every way to conceal. It is known nevertheless that the British brutally suppressed in Singapore an uprising of their Indian troops; that there were attempted uprisings in French Annam (see "Notre Parole"{29}) and in German Cameroon (see the pamphlet by Junius[15]); that in Europe, on the one hand, Ireland rose up, which the "freedom-loving" British suppressed with executions, not daring to impose universal military service on the Irish; and on the other hand, the Austrian government sentenced deputies of the Czech diet to execution "for treason" and shot entire Czech regiments for the same "crime."

Of course, this enumeration is far from complete. And yet it proves that the sparks of national uprisings, in connection with the crisis of imperialism, flared up both in the colonies and in Europe, that national sympathies and antipathies manifested themselves despite draconian threats and repressive measures. And after all, the crisis of imperialism was still far from the highest point of its development: the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie was not yet undermined (war "to the point of exhaustion" could bring about this, but has not yet); proletarian movements within the imperialist powers are still very weak. What then will happen when war brings about complete exhaustion, or when in at least one state the power of the bourgeoisie shakes under the blows of proletarian struggle as did the power of tsarism in 1905?

In the newspaper "Berner Tagwacht," the organ of the Zimmerwald group and even of some of its left elements, there appeared on May 9, 1916, in connection with the Irish uprising an article under the initials K. R. with the title: "The Song is Sung." The Irish uprising was declared, nothing less, a "putsch," allegedly because "the Irish question was an agrarian question," the peasants had been pacified by reforms, and the nationalist movement was now "purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, behind which, despite all the noise it produced, socially there stood not much."

It is not surprising that this evaluation, monstrous in its doctrinarianism and pedantry, coincided with the evaluation of the Russian liberal-nationalist, Cadet Mr. A. Kulisher ("Rech'"{30} 1916, no. 102, April 15), who likewise called the uprising a "Dublin putsch."

It is permissible to hope that, according to the saying "every cloud has a silver lining," many comrades who did not understand into what swamp they were sliding by denying "self-determination" and treating with disdain the national movements of small nations, will now have their eyes opened by this "accidental" coincidence of the evaluation of a representative of imperialist bourgeoisie with the evaluation of a social-democrat!!

One can speak of a "putsch" in the scientific sense of the word only when an attempted uprising revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators or absurd madmen, aroused no sympathy among the masses. The Irish national movement, possessing centuries behind it, passing through various stages and combinations of class interests, expressed itself, among other things, in a mass Irish national congress in America ("Vorwärts," March 20, 1916), which declared itself in favor of Irish independence, – expressed itself in street battles of part of the urban petty bourgeoisie and part of the workers, after prolonged mass agitation, demonstrations, suppression of newspapers, and so forth. Whoever calls such an uprising a putsch is either a most vicious reactionary or a doctrinaire, hopelessly incapable of imagining social revolution as a living phenomenon.

For to think that a social revolution is conceivable without uprisings of small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary explosions of part of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without the movement of unconscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against landlord, church, monarchical, national and other oppression, – to think thus means renouncing social revolution. Presumably, one army would line up in one place and say: "we are for socialism," and another army in another place and say: "we are for imperialism," and that would be a social revolution! Only from such a pedantically-absurd point of view was it possible to revile the Irish uprising as a "putch."

Whoever expects a "pure" social revolution will never see it. Such a person is a revolutionary in words, not understanding actual revolution.

The Russian revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois-democratic revolution. It consisted of a series of battles of all discontented classes, groups, elements of the population. Among them were masses with the most savage prejudices, with the most unclear and fantastic aims of struggle, there were groups taking Japanese money, there were speculators and adventurers, and so forth. Objectively, the movement of the masses was breaking down tsarism and clearing the road for democracy, therefore conscious workers directed it.

The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an explosion of mass struggle of all and every kind of oppressed and discontented. Parts of the petty bourgeoisie and backward workers will inevitably participate in it – without such participation mass struggle is impossible, no revolution is possible – and will just as inevitably introduce into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors. But objectively they will attack capital, and the conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of the motley and cacophonous, variegated and externally fragmented mass struggle, will be able to unite and direct it, seize power, take hold of the banks, expropriate the hated monopolies (though for different reasons!) and carry out other dictatorial measures, which in aggregate give the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism, which will far from immediately be "cleansed" of petty-bourgeois dross.

Social-democracy – we read in the Polish theses (I, 4) – "must use the struggle directed against European imperialism by the young colonial bourgeoisie for the intensification of revolutionary crisis in Europe." (Emphasis by the authors.)

Is it not clear that in this respect it is least permissible to counterpose Europe to the colonies? The struggle of oppressed nations in Europe, capable of reaching uprisings and street battles, of breaking the iron discipline of the army and martial law, this struggle will immeasurably more "intensify the revolutionary crisis in Europe" than a far more developed uprising in a distant colony. A blow of equal force struck against the power of English imperialist bourgeoisie by the uprising in Ireland has a hundred times greater political significance than one in Asia or Africa.

Recently the French chauvinist press reported that the 80th issue of the underground journal "Free Belgium" appeared in Belgium. Of course, the chauvinist press of France lies very frequently, but this report seems like the truth. At a time when the chauvinist and Kautskian German social-democracy, throughout two years of war, has not created for itself a free press, slavishly enduring the yoke of military censorship (only the left-radical elements published, to their credit, brochures and proclamations without censorship), – at this time the oppressed civilized nation responds to unprecedented ferocity of military oppression with the creation of an organ of revolutionary protest! The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a role as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, helping the emergence onto the stage of the real force against imperialism, namely: the socialist proletariat.

General staffs in the present war carefully strive to use every possible national and revolutionary movement in the camp of their opponents, the Germans – the Irish uprising, the French – the Czech movement, and so forth. And from their point of view they act entirely correctly. One cannot take a serious war seriously without using every least weakness of the opponent, without seizing every chance, all the more because one cannot know in advance at what exact moment and with what exact force "an explosion" will occur here or there of one or another powder magazine. We would be very poor revolutionaries if in the great liberating war of the proletariat for socialism we could not use every popular movement against the individual evils of imperialism in the interests of intensifying and broadening the crisis. If we were, on the one hand, to declare and repeat in a thousand ways that we are "against" every national oppression, and on the other hand, call the heroic uprising of the most active and intelligent part of certain classes of the oppressed nation against their oppressors a "putsch," – we would lower ourselves to a level just as stupid as the Kautskyans.

The misfortune of the Irish is that they rose up at an inopportune moment, – when the European uprising of the proletariat had not yet matured. Capitalism is not arranged so harmoniously that various sources of uprising would naturally merge at once, without failures and defeats. On the contrary, it is precisely the untimeliness, heterogeneity, and different locations of uprisings that guarantee the breadth and depth of the general movement; only in the experience of revolutionary movements that are untimely, partial, fragmented and therefore unsuccessful will the masses acquire experience, learn, gather strength, see their true leaders, the socialist proletariat, and prepare thereby a general offensive, just as separate strikes, urban and national demonstrations, outbursts in the army, explosions among the peasantry, and so forth prepared a general offensive in 1905.