Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/172

 an incessant fight for the revolution, and it resorts to the lowest, super-Marxist dodges to get the difficulty.

The social-patriots are the enemies of our class, they are bourgeois in the midst of the labor movement. They represent layers or groups of the working class which have been practically bought by the bourgeois through better wages, positions of honor, etc., and which help their bourgeoisie to exploit and oppress smaller and weaker nations, and take part in the division of capitalistic spoils.

The members of the center group are routine worshipers, eaten up by the gangrene of legality, corrupted by the parliamentary comedy, bureaucrats accustomed to nice sinecures and steady jobs. Historically and economically, they do not represent any special stratum of society; they only represent the transition from the old-fashioned labor movement as it was from 1871 to 1914, which rendered inestimable services to the proletariat through its slow, continued, systematic work of organization in a large, very large field, to the new movement which was objectively necessary at the time of the first world-wide war of Imperialism, and which has inaugurated the social-revolutionary era.

The main leader and representative of the center is Karl Kautsky, who dominated the second International (from 1889 to 1914), who has been responsible for the complete downfall of Marxism, who has showed an unherd-of lack of principles and the most pitiful hesitancy and betrayed the cause since August, 1914.

Among these centrists are Kautsky,, , and the so-called labor group in the Reichstag; in France, , Pressman and the so-called minority; in England, Philip Snowden, Ramsay MacDonald and other leaders of the Independent Labor Party, and a part of the British Socialist Party; Morris Hillquit and many others in the United States; , , and others in Italy,  and others in Switzerland;  & Co. in Austria; the Mensheviki, Axelrod, Martov, Cheidse, Tseretelli and others in Russia.

It goes without saying that some individual members of these groups go unconsciously from social-patriotism to centerism, and vice versa. Every Marxist knows, however, that classes retain their character regardless of the free migration of people from one group to another, in spite of all the efforts which are made to blend class or harmonize tendencies.