Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/151

 thing was due to a desire to avoid extremes etc., as all the philistine scribes are writing in their sheets.

In reality, the mere fact that opportunists formally belong to a labor party doesn't change that other fact, that they are obviously a section of the bourgeoisie, spreading its influence, acting as its agents in the labor movement. When the opportunist Sudekum started to demonstrate that social, class truth, some good people howled. The French Socialists and Plekhanov pointed an accusing finger at Sudekum. Now Vandervelde, Sembat and Plekhanov could stand in front of a mirror and they would see there the image of Sudekum. The German Vorstand, which sings Kautsky's praise and whose praise Kautsky sings, hastened to declare in guarded, modest and polite terms, that they did not agree with Sudekum, whom they did not designate by name.

This is ridiculous, for at the crucial moment, Sudekum showed himself a hundred times stronger than Haase and Kautsky, just as Nasha Zarya was stronger that the Brusselian bloc which was afraid of a split.

Why? Because back of Sudekum there stands the bourgeoisie, the government and the general staff of a great power. They back his policy in a thousand ways, while they oppose his adversaries in a thousand ways, too, including jail sentences and the firing squad. The voice of Sudekum is carried afar on the wings of the bourgeois papers, with their millions of copies (and so do the voices of Vandervelde Sembat and Plekhanov), while the voice of his opponents can never be heard in the "lawful" press, for there is a military censorship.

Opportunism is not a chance phenomenon, a crime, a low deed or an act of betrayal on the part of a few individuals, but the social product of a whole period of history. But not everybody tries to realize the meaning of this fact. The labor parties between 1889 and 1914 had to take advantage of what was declared permissible by the bourgeoisie. When the crisis came their only hope lay in "unlawful" activity. This could not be done without an enormous amount of energy and determination, besides resorting to a number of tricks of warfare. One Sudekum was enough to prevent that change of tactics, for back of that one man there was all the old system of society, historically and philosophically speaking, for that Sudekum had always betrayed and will always betray to the bourgeoisie the war plans of the bourgeoisie's enemy, to use practical and political parlance.