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 The recent war, which was, in the last resort, a war on account of colonies, was at the same time a war waged with the help of colonies. To an extent never before equalled the population of the colonies were drawn into the European War. Indians, Negroes, Arabs, Madagascans fought on the European continent—why?—for the right to remain the serfs of England or France.

Never did capitalist domination show itself so shameless, never did the problem of African slavery present itself in such sharpness as now. In Europe itself, Ireland remembered in bloody street fights that it was still an enslaved land, and feels as such. In Madagascar, in Annam, and in other countries the troops of. the bourgeois republic have had, during the war, to suppress more than one revolt of colonial slaves. The revolutionary movement in India has not once come to a halt, and lately it developed into the biggest labour strike in Asia, which the Government of Great Britain answered with the work of the armoured cars.

In this way the colonial question in all its bearings is not only placed on the green table of the Congress of Diplomats in Paris, but is also part of the order of the day in the colonies themselves. The Wilson programme, at the most, only aims at an alteration of the name-plate of colonial slavery. The emancipation of the colonies is only possible in conjunction with the emancipation of the working class of the mother countries. The workers and peasants, not only of Annam, Algiers, and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will only reach the possibility of an independent existence when the workers of England and France have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau, and taken into their hands the power of the State. In the more developed colonies the present struggle no longer proceeds merely under the banner of national freedom, but takes on at the same time an openly expressed social character. If capitalist Europe has forcibly drawn into the capitalist whirlpool the backward parts of the world, Socialist Europe will come to the aid of the emancipated colonies, with its technical skill, its organisation, its intellectual influence, in order to facilitate their transition to a systematically organised Socialist economy.

Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will also be the hour of your emancipation.


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Author:Max Bedacht

Works

 * In Memoriam: To our comrades Karl Liebknecht, 1871–1919, Rosa Luxemburg, 1871–1919, Martyrs to the German Revolution (1919)
 * Principles of Communism (1925)
 * The Menace of Opportunism (1926)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Author:Max Bedacht


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The whole bourgeois world blames the Communists for the destruction of freedom and of political democracy. This is not true. On achieving sovereignty, the proletariat only makes it completely impossible to employ the methods of bourgeois democracy, and creates the conditions and forms of a higher democracy of labour. The whole course of capitalist development has undermined, especially in the recent imperialist epoch, political democracy, not only by dividing the nations into two irreconcilable classes, but also by condemning numerous sections of the small middle-class and semi-proletariat, as well as the lower strata of the proletariat, to permanent social misery and political impotence.

The working class of those countries in which the historical development has given them that possibility has made use of the system of political democracy for organisation against Capital. The same thing will further happen in those countries where the pre-requisites to a labour revolution are not yet ripened.

But Capitalism hampers the historical development of the large middle sections on the flat land and in the towns, and they remain a whole epoch behind. The Bavarian peasant, who cannot see beyond his village steeple; the small French vine grower, ruined by the wine adulteration practised by large capital; the American small farmer, plundered and swindled by bankers and representatives: all these social sections, which are diverted by Capitalism from the main stream of development, are called on paper to the government of the State, under the regime of political democracy. In reality, however, all important questions which settle the destinies of peoples are decided behind the back of Parliamentary democracy by the financial oligarchy. This was so above all in the question of the war. The same thing is now happening in the question of the peace.

If the financial oligarchy considers it to be useful to cover their violence by Parliamentary sanction, the bourgeois State has at its disposal, for the achievement of the required object, all the means which have been inherited from previous centuries of class domination, multiplied by technical skill—lies, demagogy, calumny, snares, bribery, and terror. To ask of the proletariat that, in the last struggle with Capitalism, when it is a matter of life and death, it should, lamb-like, comply with the requirements of bour-


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 THE STORY OF TECUMSEH

CHAPTER I. THE BIRTH OF TECUMSEH.

IN the latter part of the eighteenth century there stood on the banks of the Mad River (a tributary of the Ohio), about seven miles below the site of the present city of Springfield, a village of the Shawanoe Indians, called Piqua. This village had been built on the site of an ancient Indian town known as "Chilicothe." Near the river, the banks of which at this point were about twenty feet high, stood a rude fort, built of logs and surrounded by a stockade of cedar pickets. Outside the stockade were grouped the huts and wigwams of the inhabitants, and surrounding the village were the cornfields and orchards. Looking to the southward there met the eye a stretch of prairie-land hemmed in by the forest. On this prairie roamed occasional herds of buffalo, wanderers from the great plains of the West. Deer and antelope were to be seen in great numbers, feeding on the rich prairie grass. Beyond the village to the westward lay the unbroken forest. On the north the land was rough and broken, rising abruptly into rocky cliffs. Here and there a dwarfed cedar or pine clung to the face of the precipice with gnarled and twisted roots, or a hardy vine hung its 11

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 geois democracy is like demanding of a man who is defending his life and existence against robbers that he should follow the fencing rules of the French ring, which have been framed by his enemy, who does not himself follow them.

In this region of destruction, where not only the means of production and transport, but also the institutions of political democracy exhibit bloody ruins, the proletariat must create its own machinery, to serve, above all, as cement for the working class, and to assure for it the possibility of a revolutionary influence on the further development of mankind. This machinery is the worker's councils. The old parties, the old trade unions, have in the persons of their leaders proved incapable of understanding the tasks imposed by the new epoch, to say nothing of carrying them out. The proletariat created a new form of machinery, which comprised the whole of the working class, irrespective of calling and political intelligence, an elastic apparatus, which is capable of constantly renewing and extending itself, which is always attracting to its orbit new sections, and which opens its doors to the labouring sections of the town and country which stand close to the proletariat. This indispensable organisation for the self-government of the working class will be put to the test in its struggles and in the future conquest of various countries, and represents the greatest achievement and the most powerful weapon of the proletariat of our time.

In all countries where the masses are mentally awake, Workers, Soldiers and Peasants' Councils will be formed. To strengthen and elevate the Councils, and to oppose them to the State machinery of the bourgeoisie—that is now the chief task of the class-conscious and honest workers of all countries. By means of the Councils the working class will be able to save itself from the decomposition set up in their midst by the hell-tortures of the war and of hunger, and by the violence of the possessing classes and the treason of their former leaders. By means of the Councils the working class will the most surely and easily attain to power in all countries where the Councils constitute the majority of the labouring population. By means of the Councils the working class which has attained to power will administer every sphere of economic and cultural life, as is already the case in Russia at this moment.

The collapse of the imperialist State, from the Czarist State to the most democratic ones, takes place simul-


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 taneously with the collapse of the imperialist military system. The armies of millions mobilised by Imperialism could only be maintained so long as the proletariat remained obediently under the yoke of the bourgeoisie. The falling to pieces of national unity signified also an inevitable falling to pieces oi the army. Thus it happened first in Russia, then in Austria-Hungary and Germany. The revolt of the peasants against the landlords, of the workers against the capitalists, of both against the monarchical or "democratic" bureaucracy, leads unerringly to the revolt of the soldiers against the commanders, and further to a sharp cleavage between the proletarian and the bourgeois elements of the army. The imperialist war, which pitted one nation against the other, passes into civil war, which pits one class against the other.

The wail of the bourgeois world against the civil war and the red terror is the most monstrous hypocrisy which the history of political struggles has hitherto revealed. There would have been no civil war if the exploiters who have brought mankind to the brink of destruction had not opposed every step forward of the labouring masses, if they had not plotted conspiracies and murders and summoned armed assistance from without, in order to maintain or re-establish their predatory privileges. The working class has been forced into civil war by its arch-enemy. The working class must answer blow with blow, if it is not to renounce itself and its future, which is equally the future of all mankind. While the Communist parties have never artificially conjured up the civil war, they endeavour to shorten its duration as far as possible, to decrease the number of sacrifices, and above all to assure victory to the proletariat. From this will be understood the necessity for the opportune disarming of the bourgeoisie, the arming of the workers, the formation of a Communist army to protect the power of the proletariat and the integrity of its social construction. Such a one is the Red Army of Soviet Russia, which arose to protect the achievements of the working class against any attack from within or without. The Soviet Army is inseparable from the Soviet State.

Conscious of the world-historical character of their tasks, the enlightened workers aimed at an international union even in the first stages of their organised Socialist movement. Its foundation stone was laid in London in 1864 with the first International. The Franco-German War, out of which arose the Germany of the Hohenzollerns, under-


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 mined the first International, although at the same time it gave an impetus to the development of the national Labour Parties. In the year 1889 these parties came together in the Congress of Paris, and created the organisation of the Second International. But at this period the centre of gravity of the Labour movement lay wholly on the ground of nationality, in the orbit of the national States, on the basis of national industry, and in the sphere of national Parliamentarism. Decades of work devoted to organisation and reform created a generation of leaders, the majority of whom gave lip service to the programme of the Social Revolution, but denied it in reality, and sunk in the morass of reformism and conformity with the bourgeois State. The opportunist character of the leading parties in the Second International finally threw off disguise and led to the greatest collapse in the history of the world, at a moment when the course of events demanded revolutionary methods of struggle from the Labour Parties. Whereas the war of 1870 dealt a blow to the First International, inasmuch as it revealed the fact that behind the social-revolutionary programme there was as yet little decisive energy on the part of the masses, the war of 1914 killed the Second International, inasmuch as it showed that above the massed ranks of Labour stood parties which had been transformed into subservient organs of the bourgeois State.

This refers not only to the social patriots, who have to-day passed over openly to the camp of the bourgeoisie, and have become its favoured confidential agents and reliable hangmen of the working class, but also to the vanishing and precarious Socialist centre, which is now striving to rejuvenate the Second International, that is, the weakness, the opportunism, and the revolutionary impotence of their leading figures. The Independent Party of Germany, the present majority of the French Socialist Party, the Russian Menshevist group, the Independent Labour Party of England and other similar groups are actually endeavouring to occupy the position which was filled before the war by the old, official parties of the Second International, while they are as busy as formerly with ideas of compromise and unity, by this means paralysing the energy of the proletariat, protracting the crisis, and increasing the misery of Europe. The struggle against the Socialist centre is the necessary condition for the successful struggle against Imperialism.

While we repudiate the inadequacy, falsehoods and corruption of the obsolete official Socialist parties, we united


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RV 43 (Rh)


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 Communists in the Third International feel ourselves to be the direct inheritors of the heroic endeavours and martyrdoms of a long line of revolutionary generations, from Babœuf to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. While the First International foresaw the future development and prescribed its course; while the Second International gathered together and organised millions of proletarians, so the Third International is the International of open mass action, of revolutionary realisation, the International of deed. Socialist critics have sufficiently branded the bourgeois world order. The task of the International Communist Party consists in overturning this order, to erect in its place the structure of the Socialist order. We summon the working men and women of all countries to unite under the Communist banner, under whose sign the first great victory has already been won.

Proletarians of all countries! Unite in the fight against Imperialist barbarity, against the monarchies, against the privileged orders, against the bourgeois State and bourgeois property, against all forms and kinds of social or national oppression.

Under the banner of the Workers' Councils, of the revolutionary struggle for power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the banner of the Third International, proletarians of all countries, unite!

Moscow,

2–6 March, 1919.


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RV 44 (Rh)


text: Amharic Basic Course/Volume 1/Unit 5

title: Amharic Basic Course/Volume 1/Unit 5