the working-class is impossible unless this evil is fought, unless the opportunist, social-traitor leaders are exposed, disgraced and expelled. The Third International pursues this policy.
To twist the subject so as to draw comparisons between dictatorship of the mass generally and dictatorship of the leaders is a laughable absurdity and piece of foolishness. It is especially comical that, instead of old leaders who have a commonsense viewpoint on ordinary matters, new leaders are put forth (concealed under the slogan of "down with leaders") who prattle supernatural nonsense and spread confusion. Such are Laufenberg, Wolfheim, Horner, Karl Schroeder, Friedrich Wendell, and Karl Erler in Germany.[1]
The attempt by the latter to make the question "more profound," and to proclaim that political parties altogether are unnecessary and "bourgeois," reaches such a Herculean pitch of absurdity that one is perplexed how to describe it in speech. Verily it may be said, that a small mistake persisted in, learnedly demonstrated, and "carried to its logical conclusion," will grow into a monstrosity.
The negation of party and party discipline—that is the result of the arguments of the Opposition. And this is equivalent to disarming the proletariat in favor of the bourgeoisie. It is akin to that petit-bourgeois looseness, instability, incapacity for steady, unified, and harmonious action, which, if given encouragement, must bring to nought every proletarian revolu-
- ↑ See the Commun. Arb. Zeitung, Hamburg, January 7, 1920, No. 32: "Auflösung der Partei" (The Dissolution of the Party), by Karl Erler: "The working-class cannot destroy the bourgeois state without destroying the bourgeois democracy, and it cannot destroy bourgeois democracy without the abolition of the party." ("Die Arbeiter Klasse kann den bürgerlichen Staat nicht zertrümmern ohne Vernichtung der bürgerlichen Demokratie, und sie kann die bürgerliche Demokratie nicht vernichten ohne die Zertrümmerung der Parteien.")The more muddle-headed among the syndicalists and anarchists of the Latin countries may enjoy a certain self satisfaction: serious Germans, who evidently consider themselves Marxists (K. Erler and K. Horner in their articles in the above-mentioned papers particularly solidly maintain that they are solid Marxists, all the more ludicrously revealing their ignorance of the A B C of Marxism by talking incredible nonsense) talk themselves into a point of view altogether inappropriate. Acceptance of Marxism does not save one from mistakes and the Russians especially know this well, because, in our country, Marxism was particularly frequently "in fashion."
