In the name of those social democratic workers and soldiers who
attach themselves neither to the "governmental" socialists
party nor to the Independent Social Democrats, and who are
nevertheless numbered in thousands and thousands, in the name
of these men who demand the right to make this tribunal listen,
and to have their say in an important political and historical
situation, I want, very briefly, to give our point of view on
the problems which have been at the centre of the discussion
for the last few days.
We reject any peace which the bourgeois capitalist governments
intend to, and are on the point of concluding, on the backs of
the people who have been bled white. In the epoch of
imperialism a compromise peace which can be in the interests of
the people, in the interests of the working class, is something
purely and simply impossible. Such an agreement can only be
reached at the expense of the people. For the political,
historic and economic contradiction which opposes capital to
labour, the bourgeoisie to labour, has not been overcome; it
continues to exist and even the war has only served to deepen
and enlarge it.
This proposed peace, about which we are concerned, is only
designed to save from catastrophe, which is menacing it, the
system of exploitation and enslavement of the peoples,
practised until now with all that this implies on the level of
the State, law, legislation and the economy.
For the labouring class there cannot exist a peace of
compromise on the basis of a capitalist regime. They demand a
peace founded on force, that is to say that their mortal enemy,
the bourgeoisie, should be defeated, the bourgeois capitalist
government overthrown, militarism shattered. Thus will the
revolutionary proletariat impose its socialist peace on the
bourgeois regime which it will have defeated and overthrown.
In the second place we reject this supposed democracy, this
parliamentarism, which the bourgeois capitalist regime is
offering to the German people at the very moment when it is no
longer possible to deny that militarism, which till now was the
firmest supporter of the ruling class, is crumbling
irresistibly, and when the high command itself is convinced
that the war is lost. This pseudo democracy by the grace of
Hindenburg is nothing else but a fig leaf, an illusion to
mislead opinion: in agreeing to phony reforms, reforms on
paper, you shield the essential heart of the capitalist system,
you act as its saviour by ensuring that it is not prosecuted in
front of the tribunal of the masses. The social democrats are
called upon to takeupon themselves the role of saviour at the
last hour, to protect this bourgeois society which is visibly
cracking up: the masses look upon the attitude as a shameful
betrayal. They see themselves mocked by this social democracy,
which they are asked to take for a government of the people.
The masses, to feel themselves free, have need of something
else: democracy and socialism, the Republic founded on the
socialist revolution, and to this end, they demand in the first
place the abdication of the Emperor as the instigator of the
present war.
I call upon the entire working class, and in particular the
working class of Germany, to achieve this socialism by
Revolution. The time for action has come.
25th October 1918