Page:Boris Souvarine - The Third International.djvu/10

 commands us to sever the bonds which link us to the past, and the new International has torn us from that International which is a thing of the past.

If that great organisation of the past is dead, it has not been killed by the war, rather has it held within itself the festering germs of its own decomposition. The historico-political conditions wherein it was born and bred contaminated it with poisonous ferments. As Charles Rappoport has justly said of the Second International: "It possessed from the start a defeated soul."

The defeat of the Paris Commune, the implacable bourgeois repression and the discouragement which ensued, overshadowed it and became at last an obsession.

The First International was that of theorists and of dissolutions. The Second was that of recruiters and of unity. The desire for a large membership obsessed the Socialists during the eighties. To this task they especially applied themselves, endeavouring to increase the membership of the various parties, and were wholly preoccupied with the avoidance of a new proletarian disaster. The idea of the invincibility of numbers was their pole-star, and thus it was that they underestimated the importance of economic crises which might confer political supremacy on the revolutionary elite, nor did they value sufficiently the homogeneous doctrine enabling that elite to realise their programme and thus gain the support of the masses.

Keen in recruiting, eager to give their supporters a field of immediate satisfaction, the Second International gradually lost sight of the final aim of Socialism. They forgot the luminous doctrines of Marx and Engels which exhort their disciples at all times when the proletariat grows restless to emphasise the necessity of a radical change in the present laws of property.

Under the cloak of realism it repudiated "illegal" action as dangerous, and regarded a revolutionary seizing of power in catastrophic circumstances as a mere Utopia. Under the pretext of educational and preparatory activity it sacrificed the revolutionary training of the masses. It made the vote and parliamentarism the essential weapons of the proletariat, at the same time teaching that the action of the masses as a means of help-