ties up to the time when war broke out. Here is the economic basis of the present day's social-chauvinism.[1]
Naturally, the force of habit, the routine of peaceful evolution, national prejudices, the fear of violent change and misgivings about them, all these things were the added factors which strengthened opportunism, and caused hypocrites and cowards to reconcile themselves to it, were it only for special reasons and motives. The war brought to the surface the opportunism which had been developing for years, raised it aloft, multiplied its degrees and varieties, increased the number of its partisans, added to its arguments a few sophisms, let many rivulets, so to speak, flow into the main stream of opportunism.
Social-patriotism is opportunism grown so ripe that the growth of that bourgeois abscess would have previously been impossible within the body of Socialism.
People who refuse to see the close and solid bonds which unite social-patriotism to opportunism, drag in "special cases"—an opportunist becoming internationalist or a radical becoming chauvinist. But this is not a serious way of discussing the evolution of
- ↑ Here are a few illustrations of the importance which imperialist and bourgeois attach to national and "great power" privileges as a means for dividing the workers among themselves and luring them away from Socialism. The English imperialist Lucas in his book Great Rome and Great Britain (Oxford 1912) admits the inequality between white and colored men in the British Empire. "In our Empire," he writes, "when colored laborers are working side by side with white laborers, they are not fellow workers, for the white man soon becomes the colored man's boss." (98.) Ervin Belger, former secretary of the Imperial union against Socialism, writing on "Social-Democracy after the war" (1915), praises the stand of the Social-Democrats, showing that they must remain a purely working class party, (43) the national German workingmen's party, (45) and give up all internationalist, Utopian, revolutionary ideas. (44) The German imperialist Sartorious von Waltershausen in his book on Foreign Investments (1907) berates the German Socialists for not realizing what is good for the country, (438) that is the conquest of colonies, and he praises the English workers for their "sense of realities," for instance, for their fight against immigration. The German diplomat Rudorfer in his book on The Basis of World Politics, emphasizes the well known fact that the internationalizatk>n of capital does not decrease the bitterness of the struggle between capitalists of the various nations for power, influence, stock majority, (161) and he mentions that the workingmen too, are getting entangled in that bitter fight. (175) The book was published in October 1913 and the author says very frankly that the interests of Capitalism are the motives of contemporary wars, that the question of "national tendencies" is a nail impaling Socialism, and that governments need not feel nervous about internationalist manifestations which will assume a more and more national character. (103, 110, 176) International Socialism will win if it draws the workingmen away from nationalism, for isolated efforts do not accomplish anything; it will go down in defeat if the national feeling gains the upper hand. (173–4.)
