Dear Comrade!

Allow me to propose an amicable agreement?

I must confess that yesterday I did not pay sufficient attention to one very important point in your arguments 405. Namely, the idea that the distinctiveness of Switzerland, among other things, lies in its greater democracy (universal suffrage) and that this distinctiveness should also be utilized for propaganda.

* - Act this way, my friends! Ed.

** - responsibility. Ed.

*** - There. Ed.

**** - between us. Ed.

This idea is very important and, in my opinion, completely correct.

Would it not be possible to apply this idea in such a way that our disagreements (probably very minor) would disappear? For example:
If we pose the question for a referendum only in this way: for complete elimination or against? - then we will get a mixture of pacifist (bourgeois-pacifist, etc.) and socialist votes for this, i.e., not a clarification of socialist consciousness, but only its obscuring, not the application of the idea and policy of class struggle to this specific issue (precisely to the issue of militarism), but a refusal from the standpoint of class struggle on the issue of militarism.

But if we put the question to a referendum in this way: for the expropriation of large capitalist enterprises in industry and agriculture as the only path to the complete elimination of militarism, or against expropriation?

In this case, in our practical politics, we will say the same thing that we all recognize theoretically, namely, that the complete elimination of militarism is conceivable and achievable only in connection with the elimination of capitalism.

Therefore, the formulation should be approximately as follows: 1) We demand the immediate expropriation of large enterprises - perhaps in the form of a direct federal property and income tax with such high, revolutionarily high, rates for large fortunes that the capitalists will in fact be expropriated.

2) We declare that such a socialist transformation of Switzerland is economically possible even now, immediately, and due to the unbearable cost of living, it is urgently necessary, - and that for the political implementation of such a transformation, Switzerland needs not a bourgeois, but a proletarian government, which would rely not on the bourgeoisie, but on the broad masses of hired workers and petty people,

and that the revolutionary mass struggle, the beginning of which we see, for example, in the Zurich mass strikes and street demonstrations, and which is recognized by the Aarau resolution 406, aims precisely at putting an end to the unbearable situation of the masses in this way.

3) We declare that such a transformation of Switzerland will inevitably lead to imitation and the most resolute, enthusiastic support from the working class and the exploited masses in all civilized countries, and that only in connection with such a transformation will the complete elimination of militarism, to which we aspire and which the broad masses in Europe now instinctively yearn for, become not an empty phrase, not a pious wish, but a real, practically achievable, politically self-evident measure.

What do you think about this?

Do you not believe that with such a formulation of the question (both in practical agitation and in parliamentary speeches and in proposals for legislative initiatives and for a referendum) we will avoid the danger that bourgeois and "socialist" pacifists will falsely understand and misinterpret our antimilitarist slogan in the sense that we consider it possible to completely eliminate militarism in bourgeois Switzerland, with its imperialist surroundings, without a socialist revolution (which, of course, is nonsense that we all unanimously reject).

With party greetings. N. Lenin
Vl. Ulyanov.

Spiegelgasse 14II (at Kammerer). Zurich I.