Notes: After March 1, 1916

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And the government obeys the voice of the capitalists, <^and cannot but obey it: the government itself consists of capitalists and landowners, the government serves them, it protects their profits and plunder ^...

The capitalists, landowners, bankers, sit in their offices stuffing triple profits from army supplies into their pockets and await the outcome of the war. And the people fight, the people perish, the people sacrifice their very lives...

What is to be done?

[17] One must understand the true cause of the war, its aim, in order that another question should arise: what then is now to be done? How to put an end now to the bloody carnage? How to deliver the people from future clashes and quarrels between capitalists, from new wars?

Before finding an answer to these questions, one must clarify something for oneself: as long as capitalism exists, <^as long as private property in land, factories, plants, and so forth continues to exist, as long as citizens are divided into ^> the propertied and the propertyless, into capitalists who have seized power in the state and into rightless hired laborers, as long as capitalists struggle with one another over their profits on the world market — so long are wars inevitable...

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A SCHISM OR DECAY?

[After March 1, 1916. Zurich.]

Thus posed the question "Social-Democrat" already in No. [33], developing, in application to the German social-democratic party, the basic ideas of the manifesto on the war issued by the Central Committee of our party. And look how facts confirm this conclusion.¹

The German social-democratic party is openly decaying. In favor of a schism — not to mention the group of "International Socialist Germany" (I. S. D.),² which consistently wages war against the hypocritical Kautskyans, Karl Liebknecht's closest comrade Otto Rühle spoke out openly.³ In response to him, Vorwärts could not adduce a single serious nor a single honest argument. In reality there are two workers' parties in Germany.

In England even on the pages of the moderate, pacifist "Labour Leader" (central organ of the "Independent Labour Party") comrade Russell Williams spoke out and many voices of local workers supported him.⁴ In the conciliationist Paris "Our Word," comrade Ornatsky, who has earned great merit in internationalist work in England, spoke out for an immediate schism there.⁵ Needless to say, we fully agree with Ornatsky in his polemic against F. Rothstein, who adopted the Kautskyist position and is a contributor to "Communist."⁶

In France Bourderon — a fierce opponent of a schism — but... proposes to the party congress a resolution with a direct disavowal of both the Central Committee and the parliamentary fraction!⁷ The adoption of such a resolution would mean the immediate schism of the party.

In America — formal unity of the "Socialist Party." In reality some of its members, like Russell and others, preach "preparedness," stand for war, for army and navy. Others, like Eugene Debs, the party's candidate for the presidency, openly preach civil war "in case of" imperialist war, or more precisely, in connection with it.

Throughout the entire world there are in fact now two parties. The International is in fact already two. And if the Zimmerwald majority fears to recognize this, dreams of unity with the social-chauvinists, declares its readiness to go toward such unity, then these "good wishes" in fact remain merely wishes, an expression of inconsistency and timidity of thought. Consciousness lags behind being.