proletariat, and thus in effect to buy them in peace time by giving them an advantageous petty-bourgeois status; at the same time the bourgeoisie takes into its service the leaders of this stratum. The opportunists and the jingo socialists, having become the servants of the bourgeoisie, are the direct class enemies of the proletariat, especially to-day, when in alliance with the capitalists they are endeavouring by force of arms to crush the revolutionary movement of the proletariat in their own and in other lands.[§36-38.]
On the other hand, concurrently with the growth of this bourgeois perversion of socialism, there appears the centrist trend, which manifests itself in like manner in all capitalist countries. The centre see-saws between the jingo socialists and the communists, maintaining its union with the former, and endeavouring to reconstruct the bankrupt Second International.[§39.] As leader in the struggle of the proletariat for emancipation, there is only the new, the Third, the Communist International, to the ranks of which belongs the Russian Communist Party. This International has in fact been created by the organisation of communist parties out of the genuinely proletarian elements among the socialist parties in various countries, and especially Germany; it was formally constituted in March, 1919, and its first session was held in Moscow. The Communist International, receiving more and more support from the proletarian masses in all lands, has returned to Marxism not merely in the name it has adopted, but also in its ideological and political tenets; and in all its activities it realises the revolutionary teaching of Marx, cleansed of bourgeois-opportunist perversions.[§40.]
Concretely realising the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship as applied to Russia, a land whose most notable peculiarity is the numerical predominance of the petty-bourgeois stratum of the population, the Russian Communist Party has defined these tasks in the following manner:[§41-45.]