Page:Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920).pdf/96

 fact that part of the old leaders and old parties of the Second International, partly half-unconsciously yielding to the wishes and pressure of the masses, partly consciously deceiving them in order to preserve their former rôle of agents and supporters of the bourgeoisie inside the Labour movement, are declaring their conditional or even unconditional joining of the Third International, while remaining in reality, in the whole practice of their party and political work, on the level of the Second International. Such a state of things is absolutely inadmissible, because it demoralises the masses, lowers their respect for the Third International by threatening a repetition of such betrayals as that of the Hungarian Social Democrats, who had rapidly assumed the disguise of Communists. The second much less important mistake, which is for the most part a malady inherent to the rapid growth of the movement, is the tendency to be extremely "left", which leads to an erroneous valuation of the rôle and duties of the Party in respect to the class and to the mass, and the obligation of the revolutionary Communists to work in the bourgeois parliaments and reactionary Labour unions.

The duty of the Communists is not to gloss over any of the weaknesses of their movement, but to criticise them openly, in order to get rid of them promptly and radically. To this end it is necessary, (1) to establish concretely,