In these circumstances the watchwords of pacifism, international disarmament under capitalism, the founding of courts of arbitration, etc., are something worse than reactionary utopism; they are a direct fraud upon the workers, aiming at the disarmament of the proletariat and at diverting it from the task of disarming the exploiters.
Nothing but the proletarian, the communist revolution can lead humanity out of the blind alley in which it has been placed by imperialism and imperialist wars. However great the difficulties in the way of the revolution, whatever temporary defeats it may sustain, however high the waves of the counter-revolution, the ultimate victory of the proletariat is assured.[The latter part of §37.]
To bring about the victory of the world-wide proletarian revolution it is essential that there should be absolute and mutual trust, the most intimate brotherly alliance, and the highest possible cohesion of the revolutionary activities of the working class in the more advanced lands.
These conditions cannot be realised without making it a matter of principle to break off relations with and to wage a pitiless struggle against that bourgeois perversion of socialism which is dominant in the leading official social democratic and socialist parties.[§35.]
In this perversion there is displayed, on the one hand, the trend of opportunism and jingo socialism, of that which calls itself socialism but is in fact jingoism, the mask of those who defend the predatory interests of their own national bourgeoisie under colour of the false watchword of the defence of the fatherland — a watchword applied both generally, and specifically to the imperialist war of 1914 to 1918. This trend originated because the seizure of colonies and the oppression of weak nations by the advanced capitalist States has enabled the bourgeoisies of these countries, out of the vast gains which have accrued from such plunderings, to offer a privileged position to the more highly skilled members of the