Page:Boris Souvarine - The Third International.djvu/9

 in all these ways have they done more than merely sever their connexion with Socialism—they have passed over into the class camp of the enemy.

Many Socialists are not well informed on these points, and that is our reason for writing thus. We propose to study the causes of the death of the Second International and to deduce therefrom any lessons which are to be gained. We wish to combat the infection with which its carcass is surrounded; namely, the miasma of misconceptions, of spurious sophisms which have survived it, and which nothing can disinfect or purge.

Finally we propose to define the organisation and working of the Third International, which rejects those men and those ideas that war has poisoned, which calls to its councils all revolutionary workers and all Socialists whose creed was undamaged by the crisis of August 4th, 1914; the Third International is born of the war, baptised by trials and sufferings, sanctified by revolutions, and its young strength will be to-morrow irresistable.

If the downfall of the Second International and its leaders was rendered inevitable by the policy it adopted after August 4rh, 1914, its former policy had rendered that defeat inevitable.

Eaten out by an opportunism which was disseminated by a revolutionary Marxist interpretation, undermined by doubt in the presence of essential problems, content to delve in equivocal terms and in contradictory solutions which solved nothing, this organisation of International Labour crumbled at the first shock. We certainly recognise the merits of its work during the last twenty years, and in no way ignore either its considerable educational propaganda or the spiritual influence which it exercised on Europe and upon the world. None but the members of the bourgeois regime would deny its beneficial work for peace and for the liberation of Labour. But the salvation of the proletariat, to which cause Socialists have dedicated their lives, makes it necessary that we should sternly judge our faults. The future