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    The world bourgeoisie -- at first the German and then the Anglo-French (often both together) -- made war on the victorious proletariat of Russia. And then comes this man who calls himself a socialist, who has gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie and who advises the workers "to throw aside" "civil war methods". Is he not a Judas Golovlyov[89] of the latest capitalist type?

    I shall probably be told that Yushkevich is merely a rank-and-file bourgeois journalistic cooly, that he is not typical of any party and they do not accept responsibility for him. That, however, would not be true. In the first p]ace the entire staff and the trend followed by Obyedineniye show that this particular sort of servility is typical of the entire Menshevik-Socialist-Revolutionary brotherhood. In the second place there is the example of L. Martov. This character is a most prominent (and probably the most "Left") of the Mensheviks and also a highly-respected member of the Berne International who is in agreement with its ideological leader, Karl Kautsky.

    Take a look at Martov's arguments. In the April 1919 issue of Mysl he writes about "world Bolshevism". He has a thorough knowledge of the literature of Bolshevism and about Bolshevism. And this is what that author writes about civil war:

    "In the early days of the war I had occasion to write that the crisis it had called forth in the working-class movement was primarily a 'moral crisis', a crisis of the loss of mutual trust between different sections of the proletariat and loss of the faith of the proletarian masses in the old moral and political values. At that time I could not imagine that this loss of mutual trust, this destruction of ideological bonds that for the last decades had united not only reformists and revolutionaries but had, at certain moments, united socialists and anarchists and both of them with liberal and Christian workers -- I could not imagine that this destruction would lead to civil war between proletarians. . . ."

    The italics belong to Mr. Martov. He stresses that here he is appraising specifically civil war. It may even be that he is stressing his full agreement with Kautsky who, in any case, argues in the same way about civil war.

 
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    In this argument there is so much refined corruption, such an abyss of lies, deception of the workers, and despicable betrayal of their interests, such a hypocritical attitude to and defection from socialism that one is amazed at the amount of servility the Kautskys and Martovs have accumulated in the course of decades of "playing" with opportunism!

    Firstly, when Kautsky and Martov pharisaically shed tears over "civil war between proletarians " they are trying to hide their desertion to the side of the bourgeoisie. Actually, the civil war is between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. There never has been in history, nor can there be in a class society, a civil war of the exploited masses against the exploiting minority in which some of the exploited have not gone over to the side of the exploiters and fought with them against their own brothers. Any literate person will admit that a Frenchman who, at the time of the peasant uprising in Vendée in behalf of the monarchy and the landowners, had bewailed the "civil war between peasants" would be a lackey of the monarchy, disgusting in his hypocrisy. The Kautskys and Martovs are just such lackeys of the capitalists.

    The international bourgeoisie, powerful throughout the world, are crushing the victorious workers of one country for having defeated capital and have the following of some of the deceived, uninformed, downtrodden workers; and such scoundrels as the Kautskys and Martovs are shedding tears over "civil war between proletarians". These characters have to resort to such disgusting hypocrisy since they cannot openly admit that they are on the side of the bourgeoisie in the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie!

    In the second place, Martov, like Kautsky and the entire Berne International, knows full well that they enjoyed the sympathy of the workers as socialists because they preached the necessity for proletarian revolution. In 1902 Kautsky wrote about the possible connection between revolution and war and said that the future proletarian revolution would probably coincide with civil war to a greater extent than former revolutions. In 1912 the entire Second International solemnly declared in the Basle Manifesto that the coming war would be connected with the coming proletarian revolution. And when that war broke out the "revolutionaries" of

 
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the Second International turned out to be lackeys of the bourgeoisie!

    In November 1914 the Bolsheviks declared that the imperialist war was likely to he transformed into a civil war. This proved to be true. It is now a fact on a world scale. In speaking of world Bolshevism, Martov is compelled to admit this fact. But instead of honestly admitting his complete ideological failure, the collapse of the views on all those who, with the contemptuous grimace of the philistine rejected the idea of turning the imperialist war into a civil war -- instead of this Martov "points" hypocritically to the "proletarian masses" who are supposed to have "lost faith in the old moral and political values"!

    The renegades are blaming the masses for their own treachery, but the masses sympathise with the Bolsheviks and are everywhere taking the revolutionary path. According to the "theory" of those who all their lives have sworn loyalty to the revolution only to find themselves in the camp of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat when the revolution came, the masses are to blame for this.

    In the third place, the two different theories that existed before the war on the question of the internal struggle within socialism were the following. Kautsky and Martov, like most of the opportunists, regarded the reformists and the revolutionaries as two legitimate trends, essential wings of the movement of one class. The divergence of these two trends was condemned. Their rapprochement and merging at every grave moment in the proletarian class struggle was recognised as inevitable. Champions of a split were accused of short-sightedness.

    The Bolsheviks had a different view; they regarded the reformists as the vehicle of bourgeois influence among the proletariat, an alliance with them was sanctioned as a temporary evil in situations that were clearly not revolutionary, a break and a split with them was considered inevitable whenever the struggle took on a serious, sharpened form, especially at the beginning of the revolution.

    And who proved to be right?

    The Bolsheviks.

    Throughout the world the war caused a split in the working-class movement when the socialist-patriots went over to the

 
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bourgeoisie. After Russia this was to be seen most clearly in Germany, an advanced capitalist country. To defend tbe "ideological bonds" of the reformists and revolutionaries today is tantamount to giving support to such hangmen of working-class origin as Noske and Scheidemann, who helped the bourgeoisie murder Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and kill thousands of workers for their revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie.

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  [89] Judas Golovlyov -- nickname of Porfiry Golovlyov, a serf-owner, hypocrite and blood-sucker in The Golovlyov Family, a novel by M. Y. Saltykov-Shchedrin    [p. 543]