that pool of misery, of bondage, and exploitation which the Dictatorship of the Proletariat has dried up. On command of French, English, and American capitalists and Czech and Roumanian nationalists, Czecho-Slovakian, French, colored peasants and workers are attempting to force the liberated Hungarian proletariat once more under the yoke of the capitalists and oppressors. The attack which they are directing against the rule of the Hungarian proletariat purposes to re-establish the private ownership of the means of production. They want to return the banks and hence the complete dominion over the economic life of the country to the money-kings. They want to return to the stockholders their dividends and their unearned income and to turn the hard labor of the miner and the industry of the factory worker once more into a source of prosperity and ease for the idlers. They want to give back all the means of production, the factory, the machine, the raw material, the transportation facilities, to the exploiters and once more set upon the workers' necks the boss, the director, the slave-driver. They want to force the workers to pay the interest on the war loans and surrender a tithe out of the return from their labor to the drones, the various rent-profiteers. They want to reinstate the landlords whom the country people have driven out and to thrust the poor peasants, the small landholder, the squatter, the agricultural workers back into the condition of serfdom. They want to put the confiscated money and jewels back into the hands of the rich so that they may be able to continue their luxurious, indolent, frivolous life which is a bane to society. The house-rent usurers and the usurious dealers who without any necessity or cause have raised the price of every commodity these they want to let loose once more upon the proletarian consumer, so that the value of his money may decrease still more. They want to reduce wages and increase the hours of labor, in short, whatever the revolution has built up in the way of Socialist institutions they want to tear down and distort. The international counter-revolution aims to force upon us once more with armed might the dominion of private property, the strength of the capitalists, and it aims to drown in the blood of the workers that mighty work of the Dictatorship of the Proetariat, a work which has carried us amid a thousand dangers and sufferings but with giant strides toward the world of Socialism. Under the protection of the international capitalistic counterrevolution preparations are being made to organize the Hungarian counter-revolution. Under the protection of the Roumanian and Czecho-Slovakian army of occupation the great Hungarian patriots have gathered to lay waste the Hungarian land with the force of arms. In Arad the landlords, the capitalists, and their beholden retinue of bourgeois politicians have established an opposing government. Like the Russian leaders of 1849, so to-day the representatives of the ruling classes are clearing the way for the present hostile invasion. They are trying to organize a white guard for the white government. The justices of the peace, the notaries, the little autocrats of the comitats, the former congressional representatives of privileges, the grafters, who have been deprived of their business, the bankrupt adventurers, all the derelicts of the worn-out and overthrown political parties, finding support in the Roumanian and French arms are preparing to revive the class government of tyranny and oppression, they are organizing to wrest the political power from the poor workers and peasants and to entrust it again to those mercenary oppressors and politicians, to those classes whom only the storm of two revolutions was able to shake out of their political seats of power. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat as transition stage of the state to Socialism that is the watchword of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The dictatorship of the oppressors and exploiters as a permanent form of government that is the emblem of the counter revolution. In the factories, in the fields, in the offices, all power to belong to the workers, the producers- that is the significance of our red banner. All authority vested in the landlord, the manufacturer, the banker, the bishop that is the motto which sullies the white flag of our opponents. The preparing and establishing of Socialism that is the purpose and the reason for existence of the Soviet Republic. The vain attempt to revive capitalism -that is the economic program of the counter-revolution. Hence it is not a war, whose furies are now being loosed upon us, even though it is being conducted by the force of arms, but an armed class struggle which Hungarian and International capital ism is carrying on against the proletariat of Hungary, the advance guard of the world revolution. This conflict is the struggle for the existence and development of the working class, a life and death struggle which will mean the realization or the overthrow of Socialism, and every proletarian is a traitor to himself, a traitor to his class, a traitor to the sacred cause of the social world revolution, a traitor to the world-redeeming idea of Socialism, who does not now with all his readiness to sacrifice, with all his energy, with all his courage, his life and limb, his work, his manhood, stand by the endangered revolution, the besieged Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the hard-pressed cause of Socialism! The organized workers of Budapest are at this moment at the front holding over the dominion of the proletariat a shield made of their own living bodies. The pick of the workers have taken up arms in order, even at the cost of their lives, to defend the great idea of the rule of the workers, to protect the cause of the social world revolution from any reverse. "We believe that the great energies of Socialism poured forth in an inexhaustible stream will render this Red Army, which is fighting the class struggle of the workers against the hordes of the exploiters and oppressors, invincible. But this struggle necessitates the work, the sacrifices of the workers and poor peasantry of the whole country! We, therefore, call all proletarians, the workers of city and village, all the adherents of outraged Poverty demanding power, to arms. We call upon the proletariat of the occupied districts to prevent with all lawful and unlawful means, with all methods of open and underground warfare, the organization of the white counter-revolution and to fight with every weapon of individual and mass action against all counter-revolutionary classes, groups, and individuals! We call upon every proletarian of the occupied districts to obstruct by means of sabotage the war which the international and Hungarian capitalists are waging against the Hungarian Revolutionary Soviet Republic, against the rule of the toiling masses of the poor. But let the capitalists and the counter-revolutionists heed the following: The cause of the Proletariat, of the social revolution cannot fall, in fact it is obviously making strides the world over. And the forces of the proletariat will advance to the points where at this moment the counter-revolutionists are hiding under cover of the arms of the imperialistic conquerors, and then our settlement with those who introduced armed civil war against the rule of the proletariat will be merciless and unsparing! But until we are able to extend the power of the proletariat to those districts which have been wrested from us, we owe it to our proletarian brothers fighting at the front, to our own principles, and the obligation which we have assumed toward the world revolution, to work with all our might to destroy root and branch the economic system of capitalism and the state based upon oppression and force, and out of the constructive forces of Socialism to rebuild and perfect it as much as possible in the triumphant, indomitable spirit of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! Long live the International Socialist World Revolution! Long live the Hungarian Soviet Republic! THE REVOLUTIONARY SOVIET GOVERNMENT. THE HUNGARIAN SOCIALIST PARTY. (The Class Struggle, August, 1919) CHAPTER XVI The Third Socialist International * The culminating and fundamental event in international Socialism of the present time has been the founding of the Third International of Moscow and it is very important to trace the steps which led up to this climax. The uncompromising Socialists who were in favor of peace at any price and who wished to destroy the division of peoples into nations with separate interests, found themselves in a minority at the opening of the war, as has already been noticed. There is no question that all Socialists, whether they were conservative and nationalists, or revolutionary and internationalists, were driven to almost despair by the divisions and divergences occasioned by the outbreak of the war. Many thought that this meant the downfall of Socialism as a power, because for years the Socialist parties had been advocating the abolition of armaments and the ending of war. And now the greatest war of all times had begun. The majority parties in the Socialist field, except in the case of Italy, having decided to side with their governments, it was only the neutrals and the minorities in Russia, Germany and France that could plan to carry on the anti-militarist campaign. This they attempted to do almost at once. These uncompromising anti-nationalists, peace-at-any-price Socialists, urged on by Swiss Socialists and by certain Russians then in Switzerland, but especially by the whole Italian Socialist Party and by Lenin himself, called a conference in September, 1915, at Zimmerwald, in Switzerland. This conference became the startingpoint of what has now culminated in the Third International, organized at Moscow in March, 1919. It has already been referred to in this Report. Meanwhile there had been in January 1915 a futile Conference at Copenhagen, attended only by sixteen delegates, representing only the neutrals of Scandinavia and Holland, calling for peace. Whereas in February a Conference of Socialists of the Allied Countries had expressed itself in favor of victory. The Zimmerwald Conference was attended by about forty Italian, Roumanian, Bulgarian, German, French, Swedish, Norwegian, Swiss, Polish, Dutch and Russian delegates. British See Addendum, Part I. |