In recent times there has been an increasing number of cases in which pacifists have taken up a strongly sympathetic attitude towards the Communist Parties. Not only is this attempt at a new orientation to be perceived amongst the ordinary members of pacifist organisations, but the discussion of principles in the directing circles of peace societies has had to take the form of choosing between purely pacifist and more or less Communist methods of attaining the pacifist object.

The ultimate aim of pacifist endeavour is to bring about a state of affairs in which war will not exist.

It must be understood to begin with that the characteristic of the ultimate condition of humanity—the absence of war—which is desired by pacifists is likewise a characteristic of the ultimate condition of humanity which is desired by Communists.

The goal of pacifism is a warless society, but under exactly the same form of production, in the same social and juridical conditions as at present. The goal of Communism is the Communist society, that is, a society without exploitation, the society in which the demand for the complete abolition of private property in the means of production will be realised. This (Communist) condition of human society consummates the condition of permanent warlessness.

We Communists know that in the sight of history we are the true pacifists, because we know that it is not sufficient to prevent an isolated war to-day or to-morrow. (Here it may be emphasised that we, in individual cases, participate in and support, as a matter of course, any policy calculated to prevent war.) But we know that it is not sufficient—even from the standpoint of striving only for the pacifist goal, it is not sufficient—to make prevention of individual wars the sole or even the chief line of active policy. War must be made impossible by destroying its deepest and best hidden roots.

But what stands on the other side to the account of the social revolution and of Communism? At first blood, terror, oppression. This, of course, not the fault of the workers, but the fault of the capitalist class which opposes with violence the Socialist system of production. This obtains on a national as well as on a world scale. It is everywhere the same: the bourgeois possessing classes, do not voluntarily renounce one iota of their "rights" from any motive of rational perception (as a class they are not capable of this). The nobles, when they were the possessing class, treated the revolutionary bourgeoisie in exactly the same way. That belongs to the dynamic of history. Therefore the last page in the story of the old epoch which the revolution represents, is tike all its other pages, covered with blood. How could it be otherwise?

We Communists are not satisfied with destroying the poisonous: fruit—war—which has hitherto been the only aim, conscious or unconscious, of the great majority of pacifists: we consciously kill the deepest roots of legal, collective mass-murder—capitalism.

We therefore appeal to all honest pacifists to consider carefully this train of thought: we ask them to examine and discuss it. They should test out these ideas, and if they find that they agree with them (as many pacifists actually do), they should have the courage to draw the conclusions therefrom. They should then seek to prepare for pacifism where the struggle for it (and also for the immanent goal of Communism) will be waged in a thoroughgoing fashion, with gaze directed not only to the present but also to the future.

But whereas the dictatorship of the bourgeois minority perpetuated itself, because the dispossessed class was also the exploited class, the dictatorship of the proletarian majority does not perpetuate itself, for it does not exploit the dispossessed class, but is itself both owner and worker of the means of production. Thus, as the dispossessed class disappears, the dictatorship of the proletariat in all its forms withers away. The pacifist's dream is realised. Violence departs from the world of men. Man at last becomes free.

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