Page:Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920).pdf/38



1. No one but the city industrial proletariat, led by the Communist Party. can save the labouring masses in the country from the pressure of capital and landlordism, from dissolution and from imperialistic wars, ever inevitable as long as the capitalist régime endures. There is no salvation for the peasants except to join the Communist proletariat, to support with heart and soul its revolutionary struggle to throw off the yoke of the landlords and the bourgeoisie.

On the other hand the industrial workers will be unable to carry out their universal historic mission, and to liberate humanity from the bondage of capital and from war, if they shut them selves within their separate guilds, their narrow trade interests, and restrict themselves self-sufficiently to a desire for the improvement of their sometimes tolerable bourgeois conditions of life. That is what happens in most advanced countries possessing a "labour aristocracy", which forms the basis the would-be Parties of the