Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Twelve Days in Germany (1921).pdf/68

 feel ashamed for the men. Is everything here as before? How long will this capitalist "paradise" last?

We look out of the window upon the streets. The master of the situation is the well-fed, mediocre, shallow-minded bourgeois. Rich stores full of delicacies. Only a few weeks ago meat and various meat products began to appear on the market (up to now meat was rationed). The old familiar sight. A crowd of poor youngsters stand at these windows and strain their hungry eyes at everything that is exhibited there. Poor people stop there merely to look on with wistful eyes. There races up a thoroughbred; the carriage is occupied by a bourgeoisie who is leading a fast life. Here in the streets we notice the stolid faces of fat merchants, wearing bowler hats. They walk along and talk to each other with an air of dullness and apathy. One of them stops and draws out a huge gold watch the size of a cobble stone. Read through a dozen bourgeois papers, which spread their lies throughout Germany and poison the atmosphere with their putrid ideas. Listen to the conversations of merchants and profiteers in railway carriages. They talk only of "profits" and "business." Look at the bourgeois women. How stupid it all is. how vulgar, insipid, and humiliating to human dignity! …

When will it all end? When, oh when, will the giant, the German proletariat rouse up and shake off the bourgeois gang and their hirelings from the top of the social ladder? Thrice cursed be the so-called civilised capitalist world, a world that stifles the human soul, and turns millions of men into slaves!

Let us come back, however, to the labour movement in Germany. We must dwell somewhat more circumstantially on the German Communist Labour Party (K.A.P.D.). We knew before that in this party, at whose head there are many unstable people and nationalists, there are still many valuable workers. We were well aware that our comrades of the Spartacus League, in the heat of battle against the "left" leaders of the K.A.P.D. (i.e., the German Communist Labour Party), had to exaggerate things and show themselves uncompromising. But from the standpoint of the International we thought it our duty to do all in our power to win to our side all the best workers