Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/169

 perialistic countries that ruthlessly exploit and discriminate against foreign workers), and, furthermore, the right for, every hundred inhabitants of a state to select freely its military instructors, to be paid by the state, etc. In this way the proletariat would acquire military knowledge for its own use and its own interest, and not in favor of the master class. And every result of the revolutionary movement, even when only partial, as, for example, victory in a town or an industrial centre or a part of the army, as has been demonstrated by the Russian Revolution, must naturally result in the adoption by the victorious proletariat of just this program.

After all, it is impossible to overcome opportunism simply with paper programs; only effective action will do it. The greatest and most disastrous mistake of the collapsed second International was the separation of words and deeds, the furtherance of hypocrisy and "revolutionary" phrases. Disarmament as a social expression, that is, an idea that is not simply a personal fancy but arises out of a social condition and influences a social environment, evidently springs from the petty and accidentally "quiet" conditions of some of the small nations that lie close to the bloody war and anxiously hope to continue vegetating. It is worthwhile to examine the arguments of the Norwegian advocates of disarmament: We are a small nation, our army is small, we cannot defend ourselves against the world powers nor being forced into an imperialistic alliance with one or another of these powers, we want to remain quietly in our corner and carry on a corner policy, we demand disarmament, courts of arbitration with binding decisions, permanent (perhaps as exhibited by Belgium) neutrality, etc. The wish of the small nations to stay outside of great world movements, the petty bourgeois conception of living outside of the gigantic world struggle, to use its special situation to remain inactive—this is the objective social condition that secures for the policy of disarmament a certain amount of influence and following in some of the smaller nations. Such an effort is, of course, an illusion and reactionary, because in some way or other Imperialism will sweep the small nations into the whirl-pool of social development and world policy.

Objectively, disarmament only benefits the opportunistic nationalist and narrow tendency in the labor movement. Disarmament is the most nationalistic and the special national program of the small nations, not an international program of revolutionary international Socialism.