Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/134

 the world over, as far as Capitalism is concerned. But why should this bring about disarmament instead of more armaments, as it has done thus far? Let us consider any of the concerns which manufacture guns and other implements of warfare, such as the Armstrong firm. The English Economist stated, in a recent issue (Vol. 1, 1915), that the profits of that firm, which had been 606,000 pounds sterling for 1905–06, had grown to 856,000 pounds in 1913 and to 940,000 pounds in 1914. In this field of industry we observe closer and closer relations among financiers and capitalists. German capitalists are interested in English firms; English firms build submarines for Austria, etc. International combinations of capital derive a large amount of business from armaments and wars.

To conclude, from the gradual blending of the various national capitalist groups into a single international unit, that disarmament is coming is to encourage the good old bourgeois delusion that social antinomies may grow less instead of more acute.

Kautsky speaks of the lessons of the war in a perfectly philistine spirit, taking those lessons to be the moral horror inspired by the sufferings due to the war. This is what he has to say on the subject: "No evidence is needed to prove that certain classes of the population are vitally interested in peace and disarmament: little bourgeois, farmers and also many capitalists and professional men whose interest in Imperialism would be more than offset by the harm caused to them by war and armaments. (Page 21).

This was written in April, 1915. We have seen all the property-owning classes, including the little bourgeois and the professional classes, flocking over to the imperialist camp, but Kautsky simply dismisses actual acts with fatuous phraseology. He determines the interests of the bourgeoisie, not from the bourgeoisie's own actions, but from statements made by a few bourgeois, statements which stand in absolute disaccord with their actions. It is as though we should gauge the real interests of the bourgeoisie not by the bourgeoisie's actual deeds, but by the unctuous sermons of some bourgeois priests who swear to us that the modern world is pervaded by Christian ideals.

Kautsky edits Marxism in such a way that it loses all its substance, and only preserves some supra-real, spiritualistic interest, as it deals no longer with economic facts, but merely voices harmless wishes for the welfare of mankind.