Page:Lenin - The Collapse of the Second International - tr. Sirnis (1919).pdf/42

 all Socialists would have been bound to wish success to the Serbian bourgeoisie; this would have been a naturally correct and absolutely necessary inference to draw from the nationalist phase in the present war. But Kautsky, the sophist, who is at present in the service of the Austrian bourgeois, clerics and generals, fails to draw this inference!

More than that. Marx's dialectics, the last word as regards the scientific evolutionary method, forbids an isolated, that is to say, a one-sided and distorted examination of a subject. The national phase in the Austro-Serbian war has and can have no serious significance as compared with the general aspect of the European war. If Germany is victorious she will strangle Belgium, a portion of Poland, and perhaps a portion of France, etc. If Russia is victorious she wilt strangle Galicia, also a portion of Poland, and Armenia, etc. If the war ends in a draw the former oppression of nationalities will remain in force. To Serbia, which constitutes about one-hundredth of the participants in the present war, the war represents a "continuation of the policy" of a bourgeois liberation movement. But for the other 99% of the participants, the war represents a continuation of the imperialist policy; that is to say, the struggle of the decrepit bourgeoisie capable of depraving, not liberating, nations. The Triple Entente, in "freeing" Serbia, sold the interests of Serbian freedom to Italian imperialism for its help in plundering Austria.

Although these facts are known to everyone, Kautsky distorts them shamelessly so as to whitewash the opportunists. "Pure" phenomena cannot, and do not, exist either in nature or in society. This is precisely what Marx's dialectics teach whilst showing us that the very conception of purity implies that human investigation has been applied in a narrow, one-sided manner, and not with the object of thoroughly examining a given subject in all its complexity. "Pure" capitalism does not and cannot exist in this world; it always contains an admixture of feudal, lower middle class,and other elements. Hence, to say that the war is not a "purely" imperialist war—when it is a question of the masses being flagrantly deceived by the imperialists who purposely screen the objects of their naked robbery by "nationalist " phraseology—proves that one is either hopelessly dull and pedantic or a trickster.