Dear comrade!

Thank you very much for all your efforts and assistance, about which you write in your last letter.

Your articles in "Nashe Slovo" and for "Kommunist"97 on Scandinavian affairs have raised the following question in my mind:

Can one praise and find correct the position of the left Scandinavian social-democrats who deny the arming of the people? I disputed this with Höglund in 1910 and proved to him that this is not leftism, not revolutionariness, but simply the philistinism of backward small-town philistines98. These Scandinavian philistines have settled in their little states almost at the North Pole and pride themselves on the fact that it takes three years to ride there, you cannot ride it out! How can one allow a revolutionary class, on the eve of social revolution, to be against the arming of the people? This is not a struggle against militarism, but a cowardly striving to slip away from the great questions of the capitalist world. How can one "recognize" class struggle without understanding the inevitability of its transformation at certain moments into civil war?

It seems to me that one ought to gather material on this and come out decisively against it in "Kommunist," and for the instruction of the Scandinavians you could then publish this in Swedish, etc.

* — "Prussian Yearbook." Ed.