Page:The Manifesto of the Moscow International - tr. Henry James Stenning (1919).djvu/2



Seventy-two years have gone by since the Communist Party of the world announced their programme in the form of a manifesto drawn up by the great teachers of the proletarian revolution, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Even at that time Communism, which had barely entered the arena of battle, was beset with the snares, lies, hatred and contempt of the possessing classes, who rightly judged it to be their deadly enemy. In the course of these seventy years the development of Communism has proceeded in a tortuous manner: there have been furious advances, but also epochs of depression; successes and severe defeats. At bottom the development has followed the lines laid down in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. The period of the last decisive struggle has come later than was expected and desired by the apostles of the Social Revolution. But it has set in. We Communists, the representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of the various countries of Europe, America and Asia, assembled in the Moscow Soviet, feel and regard ourselves as those who have inherited the Cause, the programme of which was announced 72 years ago, and who will bring it to fruition. Our tasks consist in the co-ordination of the revolutionary experience of the working class, the purging of the movement of the elements of opportunism and socialist-patriotism which have mingled in it, the gathering together of the strength of all really revolutionary parties of the world-proletariat, thereby facilitating and hastening the triumph of the Communist Revolution.

In the course of a long series of years Socialism has predicted the inevitability of the imperialist war, and, in particular, has descried the causes of this war in the insatiable ambition of the two chief groups of the possessing classes, as well as of those in all capitalist countries. Two years before the outbreak of war the responsible Socialist