Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/220

 a fundamental defect, one which is characteristic of bourgeois democracy; its pointed criticisms addressed themselves to the surface of political phenomena, not daring to penetrate to their economic causes. At the hands of capitalist reality, the idea of eternal peace, on the basis of a "reasonable" agreement, has fared even more badly than the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity. For Capitalism, when it rationalized industrial conditions, did not rationalize the social organization of ownership, and thus prepared instruments of destruction such as even the "barbarous" middle ages never dreamed of.

The constant embitterment of international relations and the ceaseless growth of militarism completely undermined the basis of reality under the feet of pacifism. Yet it was from these very things that pacifism took a new lease of life, a life which differed from its earlier phase as the blood and purple sunset differs from the rosy-fingered dawn.

The decades preceding the present war have been well designated as a period of armed peace. During this whole period campaigns were in uninterrupted progress and battles were being fought, but they were in colonies.

Proceeding, as they did, in the territories of backward and powerless peoples, these wars led to a division of Africa, Polynesia and Asia, and prepared the way for the present world war. As, however, there were no wars in Europe after 1871—in spite of a long series of sharp conflicts—the general opinion in petit bourgeois circles began gradually to behold in the growth of armies a guarantee of peace, which was destined ultimately to be established by international law with every institutional sanction. Capitalist governments and munitions kings naturally had no objections to this "pacifist" interpretation of militarism. But the causes of world conflicts were accumulating and the present cataclysm was getting under way.

Theoretically and politically, pacifism stands on the same foundation as does the theory of the harmony of social interests. The antagonisms between capitalist nations have the same economic roots as the antagonisms between the classes. And if we admit the possibility of a progressive blunting of the edge of the class struggle, it requires but a single step further to accept a gradual softening and regulating of international relations.

The source of the ideology of democracy, with all its traditions and illusions, is the petite bourgeoisie. In the second half