Page:The Manifesto of the Moscow International - tr. Henry James Stenning (1919).djvu/11

 mined the first International, although at the same time it gave an impetus to the development of the national Labour Parties. In the year 1889 these parties came together in the Congress of Paris, and created the organisation of the Second International. But at this period the centre of gravity of the Labour movement lay wholly on the ground of nationality, in the orbit of the national States, on the basis of national industry, and in the sphere of national Parliamentarism. Decades of work devoted to organisation and reform created a generation of leaders, the majority of whom gave lip service to the programme of the Social Revolution, but denied it in reality, and sunk in the morass of reformism and conformity with the bourgeois State. The opportunist character of the leading parties in the Second International finally threw off disguise and led to the greatest collapse in the history of the world, at a moment when the course of events demanded revolutionary methods of struggle from the Labour Parties. Whereas the war of 1870 dealt a blow to the First International, inasmuch as it revealed the fact that behind the social-revolutionary programme there was as yet little decisive energy on the part of the masses, the war of 1914 killed the Second International, inasmuch as it showed that above the massed ranks of Labour stood parties which had been transformed into subservient organs of the bourgeois State.

This refers not only to the social patriots, who have to-day passed over openly to the camp of the bourgeoisie, and have become its favoured confidential agents and reliable hangmen of the working class, but also to the vanishing and precarious Socialist centre, which is now striving to rejuvenate the Second International, that is, the weakness, the opportunism, and the revolutionary impotence of their leading figures. The Independent Party of Germany, the present majority of the French Socialist Party, the Russian Menshevist group, the Independent Labour Party of England and other similar groups are actually endeavouring to occupy the position which was filled before the war by the old, official parties of the Second International, while they are as busy as formerly with ideas of compromise and unity, by this means paralysing the energy of the proletariat, protracting the crisis, and increasing the misery of Europe. The struggle against the Socialist centre is the necessary condition for the successful struggle against Imperialism.

While we repudiate the inadequacy, falsehoods and corruption of the obsolete official Socialist parties, we united