Description

RARE FIRST FRENCH EDITION.
This open letter was first published on 24 January 1919 in issue 16 of Pravda, then in the Izvestia (n°16) of the Russian Central Executive Committee, and finally appeared in French in March 1919 following the first congress of the Communist parties.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the success of the October Revolution led to the formation of numerous Communist parties in Europe. Lenin welcomed this Bolshevisation, while deploring the "betrayal" of the socialist parties, which had rallied to the bourgeoisie during the war in defence of the fatherland. He thus distinguished three "currents" of socialism: the real revolution represented by the Spartakist League was opposed by

the Scheidemanns, the Zudekums, and the whole gang of contemptible henchmen of the Kaiser and the bourgeoisie. They are the traitors of socialism, just like the Gompers and the Victor Berger, the Hendersons and the Webbs, the Renaudels and the Vanderveldes. It is this cream of workers sold out to the bourgeoisie that we called "the agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers' movement" (p. 6).

Kautski's disciples follow:

hesitant, spineless, independent in words, in fact totally dependent on everything, today on the bourgeoisie and the Scheidermans, tomorrow on the Spartans [...] supporters in words of the social revolution, in fact incapable of understanding it once it has begun, renegade defenders of 'democracy' in general, that is to say, basically defenders of bourgeois democracy (pp. 6-7).

In January 1919, when he was composing this text, Lenin was also galvanised by the repression of the Spartakist revolution in Germany:

The preceding lines were written at the time of the despicable and ferocious assassination of Charles Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg by the government of Ebert and Scheidemann. These executioners, grovelling before the bourgeoisie, allowed the German White Guards, the behemoths of holy capitalist property, to lynch Rosa Luxemburg, to shoot Charles Liebknecht in the back [?At the same time, these executioners covered the White Guards with the authority of a supposedly innocent Government, supposedly superior to class quarrels. Words cannot express the ignominy, the baseness of this vengeance committed by so-called socialists (p. 7).

He urged the workers to commit themselves to the cause of a proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie and the "social-chauvinists", "... and to the struggle against the bourgeoisie".socialists in word, chauvinists in action"(p. 2) and encouraged the formation of a communist Third International. On 4 March 1919, an international conference, which became the founding congress of the Third International, was held in Moscow.he founding of the Third Revolutionary and Communist International has become a reality"(p. 10), the delegate from the Communist Party of Germany chose to abstain. The Third International was not really founded until 1920. In France, however, the conference led to the founding of the Communist Party in May 1919 under the leadership of Raymond Péricat.