Leon Trotsky

“ Or do they, in their crafty, evasive tongue, speak of the principles which do not as yet determine the intercourse between nations, but which ought to? If the latter, why then do they put them forward now as conditions for our being accepted into the respectable ‘family’ of the present imperialistic States? Or do they wish us to disarm today, and to evacuate territory before the imperialists, on the expectation of the relations that will exist tomorrow? ”

“ The first great theoretical battle which communism put up in defence of the revolutionary law of dictatorship and its methods has brought its fruits. Social democracy has finally parted company with the methods and even with the phraseology of Marxism. The German Independents, the Italian Socialists, and others like them, under the pressure of the workers, ‘recognized’ dictatorship, the more clearly to reveal their incapability to fight for it. The Communist Party grew up and became a force. But a great hitch occurred in the development of the proletarian revolution. ”

“ The labouring masses of the whole world immediately showed a readiness to regard the Russian Revolution as a whole, and in this their revolutionary instinct coincided, not for the first time, with high theoretical sense, which teaches that a revolution, with its heroism and cruelty, the struggle for individuality and the suppression of individuality, can only be understood in the material logic of its internal relations, and not by any valuation of its individual phases or separate episodes according to the price list of Right, Ethics, and Aesthetics. ”

“ The Second International least of all lays claim to the role of knight errant of democracy. It is only its Sancho Panza. It dare not put the question in its full scope. It hankers merely after small gains.
The banner of the struggle for small democratic gains is furnished just now by Georgia. The Soviet Revolution in Georgia took place but a year ago. At the helm in Georgia was a party of the Second International. The Menshevik Republic was manoeuvring all the time between imperialism and the proletarian revolution, going over to the side of the former in its struggle against the latter. ”

“ From monotonous and not very clever talk about the advantages of the Constituent Assembly over the Soviet system, bourgeois public opinion, as it were, came to realise that we do exist, and that the Constituent Assembly does not exist and never will. ”

“ The Georgian Mensheviks paid with their own downfall for their liaison with the counter-revolution. The same inevitable result is in store for the Second International itself. No wonder then if the struggle of the international social democracy for a ‘democratic’ Georgia has assumed a somewhat symbolic character. ”

“ The diplomatic contest around this Conference is very closely interwoven with the political agitation against Soviet Russia. Between the diplomacy of the bourgeoisie and its own social democracy, the principle of sub-division of labour is faithfully observed; diplomacy conducts its intrigues, while social democracy mobilizes public opinion against the workers’ and peasants’ republic. ”

“ In Georgia there ruled the petty bourgeois party of the Mensheviks. Today it is the Georgian Bolshevik Party that governs it. The Mensheviks depended upon the material assistance of the European and American imperialism, the Georgian Bolsheviks rely upon the support of Soviet Russia. Upon what logical grounds does the Social Democratic International desire to condition the conclusion of peace between the Soviet Federation and the capitalist countries by the return of Georgia to the Mensheviks? ”

“ An agreement which imposes obligations upon us ought at the same time to compel our enemies to give up their armed attacks upon us. Such is the sum total of four years’ open fighting, as far as it can be gauged for the moment. ”

“ We hope that just such a detailed and concrete exposition as this will bring the internal problems of the revolution, its requirements and difficulties, to the closer understanding of a reader who does not possess direct revolutionary experience, but who is interested in acquiring it. ”