Page:Boris Souvarine - The Third International.djvu/23

 Italy, and the United States, a responsibility which is amply proved by the Russian diplomatic archives.

The C.I. sees in the consequences of the war surprising revelations of the contradictions of the capitalist régime, the condemnation, without appeal, of the theory denoting "the progressive steps of Capitalism towards Socialism," upheld by the reformists. These latter contested the Marxist theory of the "pauperisation of the masses" as being the provocative cause of revolution; war amply demonstrates this pauperisation, this material impoverishment to which physiological poverty must be added.

Besides this, the state ownership of the economic life inevitably accomplishes its ends. It remains to be seen who will be master of state-owned production, the bourgeois or the proletarian State. If the working class does not wish to pay tribute to the capitalist clique, it must "seize hold of economic life, even though it be disorganised and destroyed, in order to ensure its being rebuilt on a Socialist basis."

In order to "shorten the time of crisis through which we are passing" we must establish "the dictatorship of the proletariat which does not look backward, nor does it take count of hereditary privilege or right of property, which, contemplating solely the salvation of starving masses, mobilises to that end by every means in its power, decrees the necessity of work for each individual, institutes discipline as an urgent need of the workers, in order not only to heal in a few years the horrible wounds made by the war, but finally to raise humanity to great and undreamed of heights."

The Communist International repudiates as a snare so-called bourgeois "democracy." Facts prove that in all fundamental questions on which the destiny of man depends, it is a financial oligarchy which rules, by virtue of "the weapons of falsehood, demagogy, persecution, calumny, corruption and terror, which centuries of slavery have placed at their disposal and which the privileges of capitalist technique have multiplied."

Bourgeois democracy has but one aim—to disarm the exploited by giving, them the illusion that they dispose of legal methods by which they can impose their claims.