BourgeoisieDemocracySocialism

8 THE CLASS STRUGGLE PACIFISM IN THE SERVICE OF IMPERIALISM nomic roots as the antagonisms between the classes. And if we admit the possibility of a progressive blunting of the edge of the class struggle, it requires but a single further step to accept a gradual softening and regulating of international relations.
The source of the ideology of democracy, with all its traditions and illusions, is the petite bourgeoisie. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it suffered a complete internal transformation, but was by no means eliminated from political life. At the very moment that the development of capitalist technology was inexorably undermining its economic function, the general suffrage right and universal military service were still giving to the petite bourgeoisie, thanks to its numerical strength, an appearance of political importance. Big capital, in so far as it did not completely wipe out this class, subordinated it to its own ends by means of the applications of the credit system. All that remained for the political representatives of Big Capital to do was to subjugate the petite bourgeoisie, in the political arena, to their purposes, by opening a fictitious credit to the declared theories and prejudices of this class. It is for this reason that, in the decade preceding the war, we witnessed, side by side with the gigantic efforts of a reactionary imperialistic policy, a deceptive flowering of bourgeois democracy with its accompanying reformism and pacifism. Capital was making use of the petite bourgeoisie for the prosecution of Capital imperialistic purposes by exploiting the ideologic prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie.
devil if only for the reason that he has, in most cases, but one son, who is to inherit his business, together with his chattels.
This petit bourgeois sends to Parliament a radical who has promised him to preserve peace on the one hand, by means of a league of nations and compulsory international arbitration, on the other hand, with the co operation of Russian Cossacks, who are to hold the German Kaiser in check. This radical député, drawn from the provincial lawyer class, goes to Paris not only with the best intentions, but also without the slightest conception of the location of the Persian Gulf, and what is the use, and to whom, of the Bagdad Railway. This radical pacifistic bloc of deputies gives birth to a radical ministry, which at onoe finds itself bound hand and foot by all the diplomatic and military obligations and financial interests of the French bourse in Russia, Africa and Asia. Never ceasing to pronounce the proper pacifistic sentences, the ministry and the parliament automatically continue to carry on a world policy which involves France in war.
English and American pacifism, in spite of the differences in social and ideologic forms (or in the absence of such, as in America) is carrying on, at bottom, the same task; it offers to the petite and middle bourgeoisie an expression for their fears of world cataclysms in which they may lose their last remnants of independence; their pacifism chloroforms their consciences by means of impotent ideas of disarmament, international law and world courts only to deliver them up body and soul, at the decisive moment, to imperialistic Capital, which now mobilizes everything for its own purposes: industry, the church, art, bourgeois pacifism and patriotic socialism.
Probably there is no other country in which this double process was so unmistakably accomplishing itself as in France. France is the classic land of financial capital, which leans for its support on the petite bourgeoisie of the cities and towns, the most conservative class of the kind in the world, and numerically very strong. Thanks to foreign loans, to the colonies, to the alliance of France with Russia and England, the financial upper crust of the Third Republic found itself involved in all the interests and conflicts of world politics. And yet, the French petit bourgeois is an out and out provincial. He has always shown an instinctive aversion to Geography and all his life has feared war as the very We have always been opposed to war; our representatives, our ministry have been opposed to war, says the French citoyen, therefore the war must have been forced upon us, and in the name of our pacifist ideals we must fight it to a finish.
And the leader of the French pacifists, Baron Estournelles de Constant, indorses this pacifist philosophy of an imperialist war with a pompous jusqu au bout. to the end.