130 THE CLASS STRUGGLE CHURCH AND SCHOOL IN THE SOVIET 131 tions the world over are striving for the six hour day, for the fiveday week. Universal suffrage is on the eve of its realization in every capitalist country: for the revolutionary proletariat it has been superceded by new political ideals. But the world is still in arms, and each day threatens to bring new outbreaks, new wars.
International armament under Capitalism has become a chimera, permanent peace an empty phrase, a dream that will not and cannot be fulfilled so long as Capitalism with its greed for territories, markets and spheres of influence continues to exist.
And yet the first of May looms big with promise. Arrayed against the harbingers of new wars that sit in Paris and in Washington, in London, aye and in Berlin, there will stand a workingclass that understands, better than it ever understood before the meaning of proletarian brotherhood, a working class that is ready, inore desperately ready than ever before, to give that last full measure of devotion to a course that has become to them a tremendous, living reality.
Let it be a first of May worthy of the greatness of the year that has passed, wortlıy of the future that lies before us.
something of the old hopefulness of spirit. In England there were impressive May Day demonstrations, and even in Germany, France and Austria the radical minorities arranged protestdemonstrations against the war that were disrupted by police and military forces. Karl Liebknecht delivered his famous address on the Potsdamer Platz. All over Europe hundreds of arrests attested to the fact that the international proletariat was alive, that the movement was recovering from the stunning blow it had received.
The first day of May, 1917, was a day of hope reborn. Only a few short weeks before the Czar had been driven from his throne. Russia, a new, free, glorious Russia was holding out its promise of peace to a war weary world. With anxious eyes the world looked toward Germany and Austria for an answer, Revolution in the Central Powers seemed inevitable. There were reports of a general strike in Germany, of uprisings and mutinies.
For us, here, not even the entry of the United States into the war could rob that first of May of its splendid promise. year later the romantic glamour that had surrounded the first period of the Russian revolution had disappeared. The war of the classes against each other had set in with a bitterness and an insistence such as the world had never seen before. Revolutionary Russia lay in the throes of Civil War. German troops were overrunning western Russia, cutting off the newly established Soviet government from its most fruitful source of supplies. Peace seemed further off than ever before. But the gloom that filled the hearts of the proletariat was no longer one of despair. Now they knew that even though peace might be years in coming, it would come, not at the expense of the working class.
Now they knew that every day of war was shaking at the very foundation of the capitalist class, that out of the wounds of the murdered proletariat was flowing the life blood of world capitalism. Now they knew that peace, when it did come, would find a working class, hoping, working, fighting, suffering and dying for the coming of a better day.
Another short year has passed. The world is aflame. Revolution is on the wing. From city to city, from nation to nation, from heart to heart it leaps, devastating and destroying, creating and achieving. And once more we are celebrating the first of May!
The old first of May! But with a new meaning. The working class demands that loomed so big five years ago, have become a matter of course. The hour day has become the standard of capitalist production; even conservative working class organizaChurch and School in the Soviet Republic By BUKHARIN The working class and its party the Communist Bolshevist Party aim not only at an economic liberation, but also at a spiritual liberation of the toiling masses. And the economic liberation itself will proceed all the more quickly, if the proletarians and day laborers will throw out of their heads all the crazy ideas that the feudal landholders and the bourgeoisie and manufacturers have knocked into them. We have already seen how easy it was for the former governing classes to hedge in the workers on all sides with their newspapers, their magazines, handbills, their priests, as well as with their schools, which they had succeeded in transforming from an instrument of enlightenment into an instrument for obscuring the popular consciousness.
THE BELIEF IN GOD AND IN THE DEVIL IS CONFUSION OF THE MIND OF THE WORKERS One of the instruments for the obscuring of the consciousness of the people is the belief in God and the devil, in good and evil