Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/176

 do it are rare, but in them repose all the hopes of Socialism; they alone are the leaders of the masses, not the corrupters of the masses.

The differences between reformists and revolutionists in the ranks of the Social Democrats and of Socialists in general cannot but undergo a positive change in the midst of an imperialistic war. People, however, who simply present "demands" to bourgeois governments with a view to "the conclusion of peace" or "the manifestation of the nations desire for peace," are mere reformists. For the problem of war can only be solved by revolutionary means. Nothing will end the war, nothing usher in a really democratic peace, not a peace imposed by violence, nothing will free the nations from the conspiracy of greedy capitalists fattening on the war, nothing but a proletarian revolution.

We can and we must demand all those reforms from the bourgeois governments, but it is only a mere reformist who would expect that type of men, fettered by thousands of capitalistic ties, to break those ties; until those ties are broken all the talk of war against war will remain empty, deceitful prattle.

The Zimmerwald International assumed from the very first a hesitating, Kautsky-like "center" attitude which compelled the Left to stand by itself, to separate itself from the rest and to come forth with its own manifesto, which was published in Switzerland in Russian, in German and in French.

The fatal weakness of the Zimmerwald International and which brought about its fiasco (from a political and intellectual viewpoint it was already a fiasco), was its hesitancy, its lack of decision, when it came to the practical and all-important question of breaking completely with the social-patriots and with the social-patriot international headed by Vandervdde and Huysmans at The Hague.

We Russians do not as yet realize that the majority of the Zimmerwald International was dominated by Kautsky. But this is an absolute fact which can not be minimized and of which Western Europe is fully aware. A chauvinist, an extreme German chauvinist, Heilman, editor of the arch-chauvinist Chemnitz Gazette and contributor of the arch-chauvinist Bell (a Social Democrat, of course, and an ardent partisan of the Social Democratic unity) was compelled to acknowledge in writing that the "center" (or Kautski-