236 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 237 Documents for Future Socialist History is merely a means to an end the end being the realization of our several national objects. Your national objects may be of a different kind than mine. Your situation makes you disinterested in the acquisition of territory, at least on my continent. Your national objects may be served by a defeat of Germany anywhere of that you are the best judge. But you as well as serve nothing but national interests, which is the proper thing for good and respectable nations to do. Only people like those terrible Russian revolutionists internationalists can act for nonnational interests, out of non national motives, and for nonnational ideas. Neither you nor are ready for that. Not yet.
So it is useless to talk of subordinating national interests to common objects.
Such a rejoinder would be unanswerable. When the Russian Revolution asked for a revision of the treaties as a condition of its continuance in the war, it was this very thing that it was asking for: the giving up of national objects by the different countries of the anti German alliance and the adoption of a common object, that of defeating German militarism, thereby securing to the world a just and lasting peace. And it was not Italy alone that refused that demand.
The truth, the sad truth, is that it is sheer nonsense to talk of giving up national objects in a world in which national interests are recognized as the highest good and the striving for the attainment of national objects the highest duty.
And so we must go on blundering, suffering defeat after defeat, until the world will wake up to a realization of the fact that a revaluation of all fundamental values is in order. Weekly People)
The Bolsheviki Rising By Karl Kautsky Now, for the first time in history the proletariat has conquered the governmental powers in an entire great state. Every rising on the part of the proletariat has ever hitherto been acclaimed by the Socialists of all countries with stormy jubilation. Thus lately even the Russian revolution in March. Consequently one ought now expect that the Bolsheviki success should everywhere create in earnest an enthusiasm beyond all bounds, Instead we meet, as far es we now can see, in wide circles of the Socialist International, the uneasy question: How will this end? And this is easily understood in view of the peculiar circumstances under which the rising took place and which are a consequence of the enormous difficulties with which the Russian Social Democracy is struggling for the present.
The population of Russia is still three fourths tgricultural, a great number are illiterates, agriculture is technically little developed, the system of communication utterly poor.
In this backward agrarian country, however, in a few industrial centers, which at the same time are the centers of Russia political life, there have developed, on a large scale, entirely modern industrial enterprises, with a proletariat which, true enough, has not yet emancipated itself from the low cultural level of the peasant class from which it issued, yet at the same time is perfectly free from the bourgeois traditions with which the proletarians of Western Europe are afflicted, those who have already fought through so many bourgeois revolutions. The workingmen of France are today even dominated by the traditions of the great revolution; those of England are still in many respects enmeshed in the free trade radicalism methods of thinking. The leaders of the Russian proletariat, on the other hand, readily and thoroughly adopt the youngest and highest form of proletarian thought: Marxism; and through it the farthest advanced and most powerful strata of the Russian proletariat have been led forward on a road entirely Marxian.
It is these strata who carried to victory the revolution they still dominate.
Thus is explained the paradoxical in the situation; that a lution, which according to the whole structure of the country can be revo