Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/36

 national, which has always been consistently anti-revolutionary. The Centrist parties and the whole of the Centrist Two-and-a-Half International are now in a state of flux. The best part of the revolutionary workers which was temporally in the Centrist camp, is bound to come eventually into the Communist International. In some places it has already begun (Italy). On the other hand, the major part of the Centrist leaders, now in league with Noske, Mussolini, etc., are becoming the bitterest counter-revolutionaries.

Taken objectively, the amalgamation of the parties of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals can only benefit the revolutionary labour movement. The fiction of another revolutionary party outside of the Communist camp has now vanished. There will now be only two groups struggling for influence with the majority of the working class: the Second International which represents the influence of the bourgeoisie within the working class, and the Third International which holds aloft the banner of the Social Revolution and the Proletarian Dictatorship.

'''VIII. Splitting the Trade Unions and the Organisation of White Terror against the Communists.'''

The amalgamation of the parties of the Second and the Two-and-a-Half Internationals has the undoubted task of preparing a "favourable atmosphere" for a systematic campaign against the Communists. Part of this campaign is the systematic splitting of the trade unions by the leaders of the Amsterdam International. The Amsterdam leaders shrink from any fight against the capitalist offensive, and they continue in their policy of co-operation with the employers. To avoid being hindered by the Communists in their alliance with the employers, they endeavour systematically to banish the influence of the Communists from the trade unions. Nevertheless, the Communists in many countries have already won a majority, or are on the point of winning a majority, in the trade unions, in spite of these tactics, and the Amsterdam leaders do not shrink from mass expulsions nor from formally splitting the trade unions. Nothing so weakens the resistance of the proletariat against the capitalist offensive as the splitting of the trade unions. Of this the reformist leaders of the trade unions are well aware, but seeing the inevitable end of their influence, they hasten to disrupt the unions, the only instrument of the proletarian class struggle, in order to leave to the Communists a legacy of broken fragments of the old trade union organisations. No darker betrayal of the working class has been known since August, 1914.

'''IX. The Task of Winning the Majority.'''

Under such circumstances the guiding principle of the Third World Congress—"to obtain Communist influence within the majority of the working class, and to bring the most effective sections of this class into the struggle"—re-