Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/305

 creating a bourgeois democratic republic. This formulation of the question is fundamentally false, for over it there hovers the curse of narrow-minded nationalism, which led to the downfall of the Second International.

By limiting himself, in practice, to a national outlook, Comrade Martov secures the possibility of living in the same camp with the social-patriots. He hopes, with Dan and Tseretelli, to pass through the "miasma" of nationalism unharmed, for the latter will disappear with the war, and then he intends to come back, together with them, into the "regular" channels of the class struggle. Martov is bound to the social-patriots, not by a mere empty party tradition, but by their profoundly opportunistic attitude on the Social Revolution, for they regard it as a remote goal, which should have no share in the formulation of the problems of today. And that is what separates them from us.

The struggle for obtaining power it not, for us, merely the next step of a national democratic revolution. No, it is the fulfillment of our international duty, the conquest of one of the most important positions on the whole front of the struggle against world Imperialism. And it is this standpoint that determines our relation to the so-called question of defending the fatherland. A temporary shifting of the front to one side or the other cannot halt and cannot turn aside our struggle, which is directed against the very foundations of Capitalism, which seems bent on the mutual imperialistic destruction of the peoples of all nations.

An unceasing revolution against this unceasing slaughter! That is our fight; and the stakes are the destinies of humanity.