country or another the proletariat has been victorious and has taken the State authority into its own hands. What happens in this case? The proletariat has the organised State power at its service, it has the proletarian army, it has the entire apparatus of power. Then the proletariat has to fight with the bourgeoisie of its own land, which organises plots and risings against the proletarian authority. Furthermore, the proletariat organised as the State has to fight with bourgeois States. Here the civil war assumes a new form, for the class war becomes war in the ordinary sense when the proletarian State is fighting against bourgeois States; the workers are now not simply fighting against the bourgeoisie, but the workers’ State is engaged in formal warfare against the imperialist States of capital. This war is carried on, not for the seizure of others’ goods, but for the victory of communism, for the dictatorship of the working class.
This is what has actually occurred. After the Russian revolution of November, 1917, the Soviet Government was attacked upon all sides by the capitalists; by the British, the Germans, and the French, by the Americans and the Japanese, and so on. The more the workers of other lands became infected by the example of the Russian revolution, the more firmly did international capitalism close its ranks against the revolution, the more vigorously did it attempt to establish a robber alliance of capitalists against the proletariat.
Upon the initiative of the trickster Wilson, the leader of American capitalism, an attempt to form such an alliance was made at the so-called peace conference of Versailles. The robber alliance was christened the League of Nations, this being intended to signify that it was a “league of peoples.” In reality it is not a league of peoples, but a league of the capitalists of various countries and of their State authorities.
This league is in the nature of an attempt to form a world-wide trust of monstrous proportions which shall embrace the