Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/122

 fighting proletariat and when a number of battalions have gone over to the enemy they must be named and discredited as traitors, without any one being deceived by hypocritical phrases to the effect that not everybody comprehends Imperialism "in the same manner," that Chauvinist Cunow, and Chauvinist Kautsky are capable of writing volumes about it, that the question has not been efficiently discussed, etc., etc. Capitalism in all manifestations of its rapine; in all the smallest ramifications of its historical development and its national peculiarities, will never be learnt through and through. About details savants (and pedants especially) will never cease to dispute. "On this basis" to renounce the Socialist struggle against Imperialism and also the opposition to those who have been treasonable to this conflict would have been ridiculous. Yet what else do Kautsky, Cunow, Axelrod, etc., propose? No one has as yet attempted to dissect now, after the war, the Basel resolution, and prove its incorrectness!

But perhaps sincere Socialists favored the Basel resolution in the expectation that the war would create a revolutionary situation, but the events refuted their reasoning and the revolution became impossible.

Precisely with this sort of sophistry Cunow (in his pamphlet, "The Collapse of the Party," and in many articles) attempts to justify his entry into the bourgeois camp, and we meet hints of similar "conclusions" almost in all the Socialist Chauvinists, with Kautsky at the head. Hopes of a revolution turned out to be illusions and to defend illusions is not a function of a Marxist, reasons Cunow. At the same time he does not say a word about the Basel manifesto, but as a highyhighly [sic] honorable man he tries to shift the responsibility on those of the extreme left, such as Pannekoek and Radek.

Let us examine the substance of the argument that the authors of the Basel resolution sincerely expected the advent of the revolu-tion but that events refuted them. The Basel manifesto declares: (1) That the war will create an economic and political crisis; (2) that the workers will look upon their participation in it as a crime—as an iniquitous shooting at each other for the sake of Capitalist profits, the vanity of dynasties, the fulfilment of secret diplomatic agreements, that the war calls forth "indignation and revulsion" among the workers; (3) that the said crisis and the said psychological condition of the workers. Socialists should take advantage of "to rouse the people, and hasten the downfall of Capitalism";