It is impossible not to agree with the moralists that history chooses grievous pathways. But what type of conclusion for practical activity is to be drawn from this? Leo Tolstoy recommended that we ignore the social conventions and perfect ourselves. Mahatma Gandhi advises that we drink goat’s milk. Alas, the ‘revolutionary’ moralists of Neuer Weg did not drift far from these recipes. “We should free ourselves,” they preach, “from those morals of the Kaffirs to whom only what the enemy does is wrong.” Excellent advice! “We should free ourselves, Tolstoy recommended, in addition, that we free ourselves from the sins of the flesh. However, statistics fail to confirm the success of his recommendation. Our centrist mannequins have succeeded in elevating themselves to supra-class morality in a class society. But almost 2,000 years have passed since it was stated: “Love your enemies”, “Offer also the other cheek… ” However, even the Holy Roman father so far has not “freed himself” from hatred against his enemies. Truly, Satan, the enemy of mankind, is powerful!
To apply different criteria to the actions of the exploiters and the exploited signifies, according to these pitiful mannequins, standing on the level of the “morals of the Kaffirs”. First of all, such a contemptuous reference to the Kaffirs is hardly proper from the pen of ‘socialists’. Are the morals of the Kaffirs really so bad? Here is what the Encyclopedia Britannica says upon the subject:
In their social and political relations they display great tact and intelligence; they are remarkably brave, warlike, and hospitable, and were honest and truthful until through contact with the whites they became suspicious, revengeful and thievish, besides acquiring most European vices.
It is impossible not to arrive at the conclusion that white missionaries, preachers of eternal morals, participated in the corruption of the Kaffirs.
If we should tell the toiler-Kaffir how the workers arose in a part of our planet and caught their exploiters unawares, he would be very pleased. On the other hand, he would be chagrined to discover that the oppressors had succeeded in deceiving the oppressed. A Kaffir who has not been demoralized by missionaries to the marrow of his bones will never apply one and the same abstract moral norms to the oppressors and the oppressed. Yet he will easily comprehend an explanation that it is the function of these abstract norms to prevent the oppressed from arising against their oppressors.
What an instructive coincidence: in order to slander the Bolsheviks, the missionaries of Neuer Weg were compelled at the same time to slander the Kaffirs; moreover, in both cases, the slander follows the line of the official bourgeois lie: against revolutionists and against the coloured races. No, we prefer the Kaffirs to all missionaries, both spiritual and secular!
It is not necessary in any case, however, to overestimate the conscientiousness of the moralists of Neuer Weg and other cul-de-sacs. The intentions of these people are not so bad. But despite these intentions, they serve as levers in the mechanics of reaction. In such a period as the present when the petty-bourgeois parties who cling to the liberal bourgeoisie or its shadow (the politics of the ‘Peoples’ Front’) paralyze the proletariat and pave the road for Fascism (Spain, France… ), the Bolsheviks, that is, revolutionary Marxists, become especially odious figures in the eyes of bourgeois public opinion. The fundamental political pressure of our time shifts from right to left. In the final analysis, the whole weight of reaction bears down upon the shoulders of a tiny revolutionary minority. This minority is called the Fourth International. Voila l’ennemi! There is the enemy!
In the mechanics of reaction Stalinism occupies many leading positions. All groupings of bourgeois society, including the anarchists, utilise its aid in the struggle against the proletarian revolution. At the same time, the petty-bourgeois democrats attempt, at least to the extent of fifty percent, to cast the repulsiveness of the crimes of its Moscow ally upon the indomitable revolutionary minority. Herein lies the sense of the now stylish dictum: ‘Trotskyism and Stalinism are one and the same.’ The adversaries of the Bolsheviks and the Kaffirs thus aid reaction in slandering the party of revolution.