412 THE CLASS STRUGGLE LABORISM AND SOCIALISM 413 the final, if finest, formulation of the moderate, petit bourgeois policy that has dominated the Labor and Socialist movement; the proletarian revolution in Russia is the initial, magnificent expression in action of revolutionary Socialism, of the new revolutionary epoch and requirements of Imperialism. The one is a policy for the preservation of Capitalism; the other a policy that means the end of Capitalism.
It is precisely the moderate Socialist who enthuses over the war and reconstruction programs of British Laborism: and they are an expression of the policy of moderate Socialism. This characterizes adequately and blisteringly the policy of moderate Socialism; and it determines the attitude of revolutionary Socialism.
II.
Of the two programs under consideration, the Inter Allied Labor and Socialist program on peace has made the most noise; although the British Labor Party program on reconstruction after the war is the most important, most adequately pictures the tendency and policy of the program on peace. As in considering the program on reconstruction the determining factor is the social significance of the tendency it expresses, so a determining factor in considering the Inter Allied program is the conditions under which it was adopted, and the groups that constituted the Conference.
The important fact is that the Labor and Socialist delegates constituting the Conference represented the pro war groups of France, Belgium, and Great Britain. Italy was represented, but its Socialist delegates agreed to the program, after disavowing its pro war declaration, on the ground that it marked progress for the other organizations which consider a tactical error. These organizations have accepted the war, and participated in the cabinets of capitalist governments; they have through four years of war abandoned the policy of international Socialism, the policy on war and peace formulated by the resolution of the Basel Congress in 1912. In other words, the very Socialist organizations and Socialist policy that were responsible for the calamitous collapse of Socialism under the impact of war, participated in the Inter Allied Conference and formulated its program, Upon the declaration of war, and during the war, these organizations unconditionally capitulated to the governments, justifying an imperialistic war and manufacturing its ideology. The Belgian party, the French party, the British Labor Party, accepted ministerial responsibility, and participated in the formulation of the governments policy on war and peace a reactionary policy. They acquiesced in the governments brutal acts of repression; they justified the arrest and imprisonment of Socialists and pacifists; they imposed fetters upon the proletariat, and delivered it to the mercy of the bourgeois governments; they abandoned the class struggle, abandoned fundamental Socialism in the period of a universal crisis, when Capitalism was on the verge of collapse, when Imperialism had issued a challenge to revolutionary Socialism and the proletariat. In this great, historic upheaval, the imperative necessity was an independent class policy, the inflexible adherence to Socialism; and these organizations accepted the government policy and repudiated Socialism.
The capitulation to the governments of French and Belgian Socialism, of British Laborism, was not a mere fortuitous circumstance: it was the inexorable consequence of their general attitude, of their petit bourgeois policy. The complex. character of the war might obscure this; it is clear, incontrovertibly apparent, from the attitude of these organizations toward the Russian Revolution. Arthur Henderson, Albert Thomas, Emile Vandervelde went to Russia, during the first period of the Revolution, to urge upon the revolutionary democracy a social patriotic policy, urge it to neglect the Revolution in favor of the war. They urged upon the Russian Revolution the prior claims of France the Capitalism of which assisted in strangling the Revolution of 1905 by means of the great loans; and the claims of Great Britain which favored Milyukov and Kornilov, and engineered a counterrevolutionary campaign against the Soviet Republic and the Revolution. These men, these organizations, seduced by the war and Imperialism, wished to degrade the Revolution to their own petty