Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/64

 38 The official confession that the Communist Party rules may be seen in the resolution proposed by that Party at the 1920 Congress of the Communist Internationale and accepted unanimously by that body. We quote only a few of the most important expressions from this very interesting document. The meaning is so clear that comments are not called for.

The Communist Party is a part of the working class, precisely its most advanced, most conscious, and therefore most revolutionary part. The Communist Party springs into being through a natural selection of the best, the most conscious, the most self-sacrificing, and far-seeing workmen. The Communist Party has no interests different from the interests of the working class. …

The Communist Party is that lever of political organization by means of which the most advanced part of the working class directs the mass of the proletariat and semi-proletariat along the right road.

As long as the governmental authority has not been conquered by the proletariat, as long as the proletariat has not established its rule once for all and has not guaranteed the working class from the possibility of a bourgeois restoration, so long will the Communist Party by right have in its organized ranks only the minority of the workmen. Up to the time of the seizure of governmental authority and during the period of transition the Communist Party may, in favorable circumstances, exercise undivided ideological and political influence upon all the proletarian and semi-proletarian strata of a population, but it can not bring them together in its ranks in an organized manner. Only after the proletarian dictatorship will have deprived the bourgeois of such powerful weapons of effective influence as the press, the school, the parliament, the