Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/118



The collapse of the International is sometimes looked upon purely from its formal side, as a rupture of the international, tie between the Socialist parties of the belligerent countries—the impossibility to convene either an International Socialist Conference or the International Socialist Bureau, etc. This point of view has been adopted by the Socialists of the small neutral countries, perhaps even by the majority of their official parties, also by opportunists and their defenders.

For class-conscious workingmen Socialism is an earnest conviction and not a convenient cover for bourgeois-conciliatory and nationally-conflicting aims. By the collapse of the International they understand the flagrant treason of the majority of the official Social-Democratic parties to their convictions, to their most solemn declarations expressed in the speeches at the Stuttgart and Basel International Congresses, and in the resolutions at said Congresses, etc. Only those will not see such treason as do not want to see it, those to whom it will be disadvantageous to see it. To formulate the matter in a scientific way, i. e., from the standpoint of the relations of classes in modern society, we must state that the majority of the Socialist parties, at the head of which was the largest and most influential party of the Second International—the German party—placed themselves at the side of their general staffs, their governments, and their bourgeoisie, against the proletariat. This was an event of world-historical significance and it is impossibles to pass it without a more exhaustive analysis. It has long ago been