Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/147

 In order to answer the first question we must find out whether the essential political thought of social chauvinism is not bound up with some previous tendency observable in the Socialist movement. We must besides ask ourselves whether there is not some relation between the present day division of Socialists into partisans and opponents of chauvinism and the various schisms which have taken place in the history of the movement.

By social-patriotism we mean the willingness to defend one's country in this imperialistic war, to justify the alliance of the Socialists with the bourgeoisie and the governments of their own country, and the refusal to preach and support the revolt of the proletarians against their national bourgeoisie. It is obvious that in its essential traits, politically and intellectually, chauvinism is identical with opportunism. Both represent one and the same tendency. Opportunism placed in the special environment of the present war becomes social-chauvinism. The main idea of opportunism is that of the co-operation of all classes. The war enforces that idea to the limit, not only by the usual method of action, but by extraordinary methods as well, forcing, as it does, the disorganized masses of the population to co-operate with the bourgeoisie by threats and violence. This circumstance naturally increases the number of the partisans of opportunism, and explains why so many of the radicals of yesterday have gone over to the opposite camp.

Opportunism sacrifices the working class interests of the masses to the temporary interests of a small minority. In other words, it bands a part of the working class with the bourgeois as against the proletariat. Opportunism began to grow in the past decade, a period of capitalistic development, when the relatively peaceful and civilized existence enjoyed by privileged classes of workers, made bourgeois out of them, fed them crumbs from the profits made by their national capital, and rendered them indifferent to the sufferings and the revolutionary bitterness of the exploited and pauperized masses. This imperialistic war is the continuation and the climax of that process, for it is being waged to conquer privileges for certain great powers, to allow them to divide up colonial territories among themselves and to rule over the rest of the world.

When the upper middle class and the aristocracy and bureaucracy of the working class make a stand to strengthen their privileged position, we behold a furtherance of the little bourgeois-opportunists' aspirations, and of the corresponding political activi-