Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/302

 Internationalism in our eyes is not an abstract notion, existing only to be betrayed at every moment (that is for Tseretelli and Chernov), but an immediately dominant, profoundly practical principle. Permanent, decisive successes are not conceivable for us without a European Revolution. We cannot therefore purchase partial successes at the price of such procedures and combinations as may put obstacles in the path of the European proletarian movement. Just for this reason an uncompromising opposition to the social-patriots is for us the condition sine qua non of all our political work.

"International comrades!" cried one of the speakers at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, "postpone your Social Revolution for another fifty years!" Needless to say, this well meant advice was greeted with the self-complacent applause of the Mensheviki and Social-Revolutionists.

It is just at this point, in the matter of their relation to the Social Revolution, that the difference between the various forms of opportunistic petit bourgeois utopianism, on the one hand, and proletarian Socialism, on the other, becomes important. There are not a few "internationalists" who explain the crisis in the International as a temporary chauvinistic intoxication due to the war, and who believe that sooner or later the former condition will be restored, and the old political parties will again take up the old path of the class struggle, of which they have lost sight for the moment. Childish and petty hopes! The war is not an external catastrophe, destroying the equilibrium of capitalist society against the uprising of the expanding forces of production in this society, against the restrictions of the national boundaries and the forms of private ownership. Either we shall see continued convulsions of the forces of production, in the form of repeatedly recurring imperialistic wars, or we shall see a Socialistic organization of production: that is the question History is placing before us.

Similarly, the crisis in the International is not an external, irrelevant phenomenon.

The Socialist parties of Europe were formed at a time of comparative capitalist equilibrium and of a reformist adaptation of the proletariat to national parliamentarism and the national market. "Even in the Social-Democratic Party," wrote Engels in 1877, "petit bourgeois Socialism has its defenders. Even members of the Social-Democratic Party who recognize the fundamental concepts of scientific Socialism and the practical nature of the de-