BourgeoisieCapitalismDemocracySocialismSovietWorking Class

451 AN OPEN LETTER 450 THE CLASS STRUGGLE thing to your society, even when the greatest class issues are involved. have been trying to do a work of persuasion, employing all possible tactfulness and consideration of the pecularities of the situation and of your psychology. have been doing it in the face of sneers and suspicion among my perhaps less polite, but surely more experienced proletarian comrades, who over and over again told me that it is entirely out of the question to try to make a bourgeois understand the justice and the necessity of anything which means the lessening of the class supremacy of capitalism, and who for that reason regarded as useless on the part of the workers everything except the most merciless struggle in every possible manner against those who rule the world. You are doing, fear, all you can to encourage such views.
As the representative of the Finnish Workers Republic tried patiently, and using language as considerate as possible, to make your Government understand at least something about our situation over there. offered you cooperation in return for concrete helpfulness. proved to you that if the democratic professions of America count for anything in America, in the struggle of the workers in Finland, America has a cause worthy of unconditional support. We had there on our side not only the majority of the people, but we had that majority expressed in our favor by legal parliamentary proceedings, unequivocally proving that the cause of the Finnish workers is the cause of democracy.
We had a case where the Finnish workers not only were opposed to German autocracy, but were fighting it bitterly, directly aiding the cause of the Allies, in so far as that cause involves the crushing of German militarism. We have on the side of our enemies in Finland representatives not only of the minority of the people, but of a parliamentarian minority, openly hostile to even such democratic principles as are a matter of fact in America today, as equal suffrage, social legislation and theoretical equality of opportunity. In Finland there was not even a question of the dictatorship of the proletariat such as in Russia. The Finnish workers expressly wanted to call together a Constitutional Assembly on the basis of equal suffrage for all inhabitants of Finland. The other side not only temporarily allied itself with the Germans, but was for three years criminally plotting with the German imperialists and in every way was an accessory to the most abominable crimes of Prussianism. Yet that other side was the one which received all the encouragement and still is receiving it from you. was never given a fair and a serious hearing.
Some time ago made a formal proposition to the United States Government about cooperation between the Finnish Red Guard and the Allies on the Murman Coast, and never received even an acknowledgment of that proposition. And, please, do not tell me that the reason for this slighting attitude was that it is not proper to confer with the representatives of unrecognized factions. Three years ago the representatives of the State Department had all kinds of negotiations with all kinds of Mexican factions not excluding Villa.
You have had no scruples in officially dealing with and recognizing Professor Masaryk, representing the Bohemian National Council, although his status certainly is not as official even as mine, he being the self appointed President of some National Council, which some time may become the Government of Bohemia or may not, but nevertheless at this time represents only an aspiration. represent a de jure Government, supported by the Parliamentary majority of the people, a Government which, although it is driven out from its home land today, has not renounced its claims and never will renounce them, and with which you will have to deal bye and bye, as it surely will once more come into its right.
But there was really a difference between Professor Masaryk and me. made it a point, and still make a point of all our cooperation with the Allies, that they should recognize the Russian Soviets. Professor Masaryk offered to crush the Russian Soviet government with his Czechs and thus put an end to Socialist rule in Russia. There lies, perhaps, the reason for the difference in the treatment we have received.