This book appears at the moment of the Second Congress of the
Communist International. The revolutionary movement of the proletariat
has made, during the months that have passed since the First Congress,
a great step forward. The positions of the official, open
social-patriots have everywhere been undermined. The ideas of
Communism acquire an ever wider extension. Official dogmatized
Kautskianism has been gradually compromised. Kautsky himself, within
that "Independent" Party which he created, represents to-day a not
very authoritative and a fairly ridiculous figure.
None the less, the intellectual struggle in the ranks of the
international working class is only now blazing up as it should. If,
as we just said, dogmatized Kautskianism is breathing its last days,
and the leaders of the intermediate Socialist parties are hastening to
renounce it, still Kautskianism as a bourgeois attitude, as a
tradition of passivity, as political cowardice, still plays an
enormous part in the upper ranks of the working-class organizations of
the world, in no way excluding parties tending to the Third
International, and even formally adhering to it.
The Independent Party in Germany, which has written on its banner the
watchword of the dictatorship of the proletariat, tolerates in its
ranks the Kautsky group, all the efforts of which are devoted
theoretically to compromise and misrepresent the dictatorship of the
proletariat in the shape of its living expression--the Soviet regime.
In conditions of civil war, such a form of co-habitation is
conceivable only and to such an extent as far and as long as the
dictatorship of the proletariat represents for the leaders of the
"Independent" Social-Democracy a noble aspiration, a vague protest
against the open and disgraceful treachery of Noske, Ebert,
Scheidemann and others, and--last but not least--a weapon of electoral
and parliamentary demagogy.
The vitality of vague Kautskianism is most clearly seen in the example
of the French Longuetists. Jean Longuet himself has most sincerely
convinced himself, and has for long been attempting to convince
others, that he is marching in step with us, and that only
Clemenceau's censorship and the calumnies of our French friends
Loriot, Monatte, Rosmer, and others hinder our comradship in arms. Yet
is it sufficient to make oneself acquainted with any parliamentary
speech of Longuet's to realize that the gulf separating him from us at
the present moment is possibly still wider than at the first period of
the imperialist war? The revolutionary problems now arising before the
international proletariat have become more serious, more immediate,
more gigantic, more direct, more definite, than five or six years ago;
and the politically reactionary character of the Longuetists, the
parliamentary representatives of eternal passivity, has become more
impressive than ever before, in spite of the fact that formally they
have returned to the fold of parliamentary opposition.
The Italian Party, which is within the Third International, is not at
all free from Kautskianism. As far as the leaders are concerned, a
very considerable part of them bear their internationalist honors only
as a duty and as an imposition from below. In 1914-1915, the Italian
Socialist Party found it infinitely more easy than did the other
European parties to maintain an attitude of opposition to the war,
both because Italy entered the war nine months later than other
countries, and particularly because the international position of
Italy created in it even a powerful bourgeois group (Giolittians in
the widest sense of the word) which remained to the very last moment
hostile to Italian intervention in the war.
These conditions allowed the Italian Socialist Party, without the fear
of a very profound internal crisis to refuse war credits to the
Government, and generally to remain outside the interventionist block.
But by this very fact the process of internal cleansing of the party
proved to be unquestionably delayed. Although an integral part of the
Third International, the Italian Socialist Party to this very day can
put up with Turati and his supporters in its ranks. This very powerful
group--unfortunately we find it difficult to define to any extent of
accuracy its numerical significance in the parliamentary group, in the
press, in the party, and in the trade union organizations--represents
a less pedantic, not so demagogic, more declamatory and lyrical, but
none the less malignant opportunism--a form of romantic Kautskianism.
A passive attitude to the Kautskian, Longuetist, Turatist groups is
usually cloaked by the argument that the time for revolutionary
activity in the respective countries has not yet arrived. But such a
formulation of the question is absolutely false. Nobody demands from
Socialists striving for Communism that they should appoint a
revolutionary outbreak for a definite week or month in the near
future. What the Third International demands of its supporters is a
recognition, not in words but in deeds, that civilized humanity has
entered a revolutionary epoch; that all the capitalist countries are
speeding towards colossal disturbances and an open class war; and that
the task of the revolutionary representatives of the proletariat is to
prepare for that inevitable and approaching war the necessary
spiritual armory and buttress of organization. The internationalists
who consider it possible at the present time to collaborate with
Kautsky, Longuet and Turati, to appear side by side with them before
the working masses, by that very act renounce in practice the work of
preparing in ideas and organization for the revolutionary rising of
the proletariat, independently of whether it comes a month or a year
sooner or later. In order that the open rising of the proletarian
masses should not fritter itself away in belated searches for paths
and leadership, we must see to it to-day that wide circles of the
proletariat should even now learn to grasp all the immensity of the
tasks before them, and of their irreconcilability with all variations
of Kautskianism and opportunism.
A truly revolutionary, _i.e._, a Communist wing, must set itself
up in opposition, in face of the masses, to all the indecisive,
half-hearted groups of doctrinaires, advocates, and panegyrists of
passivity, strengthening its positions first of all spiritually and
then in the sphere of organization--open, half-open, and purely
conspirative. The moment of formal split with the open and disguised
Kautskians, or the moment of their expulsion from the ranks of the
working-class party, is, of course, to be determined by considerations
of usefulness from the point of view of circumstances; but all the
policy of real Communists must turn in that direction.
That is why it seems to me that this book is still not out of date--to
my great regret, if not as an author, at any rate as a Communist.
_June 17, 1920._