Page:Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920).pdf/7

 for all and guaranteed the working classes from a return of the capitalist order, so long will the Communist Party as a rule have only a minority of the workmen in its ranks. Up to the time when the power will be in its grasp, and during the period of transition, the Communist Party may under favourable conditions enjoy an undisputed political influence over the working masses and the semi-proletarian class of the population; but it will not be able to organize and enroll them in its ranks. Only when the dictatorship of the workers has deprived the bourgeois elements of such powerful weapons as the press, the schools, parliament, church, the governing apparatus, etc., only when the final defeat of the capitalist order will become an evident fact—only after that will all or almost all the workers enter the ranks of the Communist Party.

3. A sharp distinction must be made between the conception of "party" and "class". The members of the "Christian" and the Liberal trade unions of Germany, England and other countries are undoubtedly part of the working class. More or less considerable circles of working people, followers of Scheidemann, Gompers & Co., are also part of the working class. Owing to certain historical conditions, the working class has numerous reactionary groups and strata. The task of Communism is not to adapt itself to such retrograde specimens of