Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/49

 Rh international reaction and against aggressive capitalism, the attitude toward Fascism, the fight against war, the attitude towards the Revolution and Soviet Russia, and the problem of the United Front.

These are the questions which define the differences between the international trade union organizations.

We will begin with the Versailles Treaty. We have shown above that the representatives of the trade unions from the Allied countries participated in the drafting of the Thirteenth Paragraph of the Versailles Treaty. Can these leaders of the labor movement take upon themselves the responsibility for everything contained in the Versailles Treaty, or only for that which they inserted in this Treaty? But this would be rather a legalistic than a political solution of the question. It would not be a correct approach to the problem. Because the Versailles Treaty represents somewhat of a unit, and the question is not who has written one or another part of it, but who is upholding this treaty and what are its contents?

It is composed, if we take it as a whole, of proclamations of guilt of the Central Powers, of territorial division of Austria and Germany, of confiscation of the German colonies, disarming Germany, seizing her economic resources, forcing upon Germany colossal economic payments and turning her in general into a second-rate state.

The breaking up of Central Europe and the hegemony of the Allies is the main object of the Versailles Treaty. And those representatives of the workers, who, in one form or another for certain motives upheld or are upholding, separate parts of the treaty, are in a general way upholding all parts of it. We will see this in the problem of reparations and the attitude toward that question of the Amsterdam International.

We can prove as a political fact that the Amsterdam International or separate parts of it, as its representatives, participated in the drafting of separate paragraphs of the Versailles Treaty, upheld the Versailles Treaty, and, more than that, are still upholding it at present. This is not only an historically proven fact, not a question of the past, but of the present.

It is true that the Versailles Treaty is not a child of the Amsterdam International. This International did not create it, but participated indirectly in its creation. It participated in the creation of that ideology which made it possible for the wide working masses to accept that treaty. The Amsterdam International was the great machine of mobilization by the bourgeoisie which was used to obscure the minds of the workers, which brought the wide masses of workers in the Allied countries right after the war to believe that the Versailles Treaty was in reality a victory of "culture, civilization, right," etc.