Page:Lenin's Speech at the First Session of the Second Congress of the Third International (1920).djvu/17

 The most useful, the most necessary thing for America and Europe today is to get all the thinking elements of the working class engaged in the struggle between international menshevism (of Macdonald, Otto Bauer and Co), against bolshevism.

Here we must ask ourselves the question why those opportunist tendencies persist in Europe, why opportunism is stronger in western Europe than in our country. It is because these advanced countries have created and are creating their culture by living at the expense of thousands of millions of oppressed peoples. It is because the capitalists of these countries are getting much above that which they receive from plundering their own workers.

The amount of profits on the export of capital abroad derived by the three richest countries—England, France and Germany—not counting other profits, equalled before the war from 8 to 10 milliards.

Of course, out of such a nice sum it is possible to throw away half a billion on gifts to labour leaders, to the labour aristocracy and for other kinds of bribery. Indeed, the whole affair reduces itself to bribery in thousands of various shapes and forms: The raising of culture in the more thickly inhabited centres, the setting up of educational institutions, the creation of thousands of sinecures for cooperative, trade union, and parliamentary leaders. This is being practised wherever modern civilised capitalist relationships prevail. These billions of surplus value form the economic basis on which opportunism in the labour movement rests. The persistence of opportunism in America, England and France among the leaders and the aristocracy of the working men is very great and its resistance to Communist ideas is very strong. We must therefore be prepared for the fact that the liberation of the American labour parties from this illness will be a much harder process than it has been in our country. We know that enormous strides in the way of curing this disease have been made since the creation of the Third International, but we have not yet reached the end. The process of clearing the working men's parties, the revolutionary parties of the proletariat all over the world from bourgeois influence, from the opportunists within their own ranks, has not been completed by far. I shall not dwell upon the concrete measures to be adopted in this matter. This forms the subject of the principles advanced by me which have been published. My business is only to point out the deep set economic roots of this phenomenon. The disease of