Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Twelve Days in Germany (1921).pdf/74

 they did not appreciate the "learned" leaders, because they did not value those people, who for so many years have held back the German working class. A split was necessary and inevitable. And now that it has become a fact, we need only add better late than never.

This is the most important question bearing on the workers' revolution in the whole of Europe. We have seen in Russia both money grabbers and land grabbers. The former were bourgeois, the latter—rich, peasants. But we have hardly ever met any of them who were working men by origin. There was a time in Russia when the whole working class followed the Mensheviks; at the beginning of the revolution the whole working class made this big blunder. But as soon as its eyes were opened the whole class at once and unreservedly turned their backs on the Mensheviks—the moment the workers saw that they were traitors. In Germany the working class as a whole is also beginning to abandon Menshevism. But Germany possessed and still possesses a large section of what we may call the money grabbing workers. This is the labour aristocracy, which is numerically large in Germany.

When I charged the Right leaders at the Congress with being yellow leaders of Trade Unions, worse than the reactionary "Orgesch," they howled like whipped dogs, and continued to yell for three solid minutes, trying to shout me down. I had to say this however. This had to be said—for it is the absolute truth. There is not an inch of exaggeration. In Germany one sees with his own eyes that the chief enemy of the cause is the worker who has betrayed his class, the labour aristocracy, the Mensheviks who have set up the chief bulwark in defence of the bourgeoisie. These reactionary labour leaders are the principal enemies of the proletarian revolution. These tens of thousands of officials, who are bossing the Trade Unions, are born and bred of the working class. The workers sacrificed for them their earnings, their blood, and their sweat. Now they sit on the neck of the working class and betray it. They are well acquainted with the labour circles, they themselves once took part in them, they know our weak as well as our strong points, they know what ails us, for they are practical men, not idle theoreticians. It is precisely for that reason that they