New Martov translation

[Young Master Smeet]

this is interesting:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/1904/08/national.htm

This is an article around the debates about joining a government as a socialist minority minister that must have been on the minds of our founder comrades.

“In the time since those oracular words were spoken, Millerandism in its pure form has not spread beyond France; but ‘Jaurèsism’—the ‘anonymous’ participation, as Adler puts it, of the entire socialist party in the policy of a bourgeois ministry, participation that places the whole party in a position of solidarity with that ministry just as definitely as it was placed by one of its members entering the cabinet—has spread all the more virulently. And the moment has come when the picture prophetically sketched by Guesde may any day become a reality. The Russo-Japanese war could easily, unstoppably, draw in one or several of the ‘civilized’ powers. The peace of Europe is now hanging by a hair of diplomatic wisdom.

What would become of socialism, if in a country that was fatally drawn into a world conflict the workers’ party should prove to be a political captive of the ruling class, if its opportunist leaders, due to this captivity they were in, had to provide passive or active support to their government’s military campaign? This question should have occurred to the French opportunists when they voted for the resolution of protest against the coming war. And if they had thought carefully about the meaning of that protest, they would not have been surprised that the representatives of Russian and Japanese socialism—directly implicated in that protest—all went on to vote for the ‘Dresden’ resolution, that logical conclusion from the class solidarity of the world proletariat.”

(Translation by Edmund Griffiths)

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