Date: 1905
Source: ru:PSS/v47

Source: PSS vol 47

To Comrade August Bebel

On behalf of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, on behalf of all Russian workers who are waging a fierce struggle against the yoke imposed by the combined forces of tsarist autocracy and the bourgeoisie, we send you, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of your birth, a warm greeting as a vanguard fighter in the international movement and as the leader of German social democracy.

You began your involvement in the labor movement almost exactly half a century ago, as a young turner—first a patriot, then a democrat, diligently active in workers’ educational societies—and through your own development, you embodied the advance that the entire international proletariat had made over this period. At the outset of this era, the majority of conscious workers either followed bourgeois parties or, at best, sought their own class-based path to socialism, flitting from one socialist or anarchist sect to another. Today, the vast majority of conscious workers in the civilized world are social democrats—and it is in Germany that the theoretical foundations of Marxism have penetrated most deeply and most broadly into the ranks of the proletariat, illuminating with brilliant light their struggle for the complete overthrow of capitalism.

In you, we honor a worker leader who, by his own example, demonstrated that the liberation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves. Relying on the theory of Marxism, German conscious workers were able to safeguard their movement against the pitfalls of opportunism and anarchism more effectively than workers in other countries; they succeeded in building powerful mass organizations—both trade union and political—and in uniting themselves into a single, unified class force. And at every turn in history—whether when the waves of national chauvinism surged high, or when feudal-monarchist and clerical reaction grew ever more entrenched, declaring