Lenin CW-Vol. 23.pdf - From Marx to Mao

A TURN IN WORLD POLITICS269tarians and to transfer them safely—under cover of a plausibleideology, and sprinkling them with the holy waterof sentimental pacifist phrases!—from the filthy, stinking,fetid trenches, where they were engaged in slaughter, tothe penal servitude of the capitalist factories, where bytheir “honest toil” they must repay the hundreds of millionsof national debt, it is precisely at this time that theslogan, which our Party issued to the people in the autumnof 1914,* viz., transform the imperialist war into a civilwar for socialism, acquires still greater significance thanit had at the beginning of the war. Karl Liebknecht, nowsentenced to hard labour, adopted that slogan when he saidfrom the Reichstag tribune: “Turn your weapons againstyour class enemies within the country!” The extent to whichpresent-day society has matured for the transition to socialismhas been demonstrated by this war, in which the exertionof national effort called for the direction of theeconomic life of over fifty million people from a singlecentre. If this is possible under the leadership of a handful ofJunker aristocrats in the interests of a handful of financialmagnates, it is certainly no less possible under the leadershipof class-conscious workers in the interests of nine-tenths ofthe population, exhausted by starvation and war.But to lead the masses, the class-conscious workers mustunderstand the utter corruption of such socialist leadersas Turati, Kautsky and Co. These gentlemen imaginethey are revolutionary Social-Democrats, and they are veryindignant when they are told that their place is in the partyof Messrs. Bissolati, Scheidemann, Legien and Co. ButTurati and Kautsky wholly fail to realise that only a revolutionof the masses can solve the great problems of the day.They have not a grain of faith in the revolution, they donot pay the slightest attention to, or display the slightestinterest in, the way it is maturing in the minds and moodsof the masses precisely in connection with the war. Theirattention is entirely absorbed in reforms, in pacts betweensections of the ruling classes; it is to them that they addressthemselves, it is them they seek to “persuade”, it is tothem they wish to adapt the labour movement.* See present edition, Vol. 21, pp. 25-34.—Ed.