not fists and clubs, but armies.  To insert “disarmament” into our program is equivalent to saying, we are opposed to the use of arms.  But such a statement would contain not a grain of Marxism, any more than would the equivalent statement, we are opposed to the use of force.

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A suppressed class which has no desire to learn the use of arms, and to bear arms, deserves nothing else than to be treated as slaves.  We cannot, unless we wish to transform ourselves into mere bourgeois pacifists, forget that we are living in a society based on classes, and that there is no escape from such a society, except by the class struggle and the overthrow of the power of the ruling class.

In every class society, whether it be based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at the present moment, on wage-labor, the class of the oppressors is an armed class.  Not only the standing army of the present day, but also the present-day popular militia—­even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, as in Switzerland—­means an armament of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat....

How can you, in the face of this fact, ask the revolutionary Social Democracy to set up the “demand” of “disarmament”? To ask this is to renounce completely the standpoint of the class struggle, to give up the very thought of revolution.  Our watchword must be:  to arm the proletariat so that it may defeat, expropriate, and disarm the bourgeoisie.  This is the only possible policy of the revolutionary class, a policy arising directly from the actual evolution of capitalistic militarism, in fact, dictated by the evolution.  Only after having disarmed the bourgeoisie can the proletariat, without betraying its historic mission, cast all weapons to the scrap-heap; and there is no doubt that the proletariat will do this, but only then, and not by any possibility before then.

How is it possible for our extreme pacifists, with their relentless opposition to military force in all its forms to conscription, to universal military service, to armaments of all kinds, even for defensive purposes, and to voluntarily enlisted armies even, to embrace Bolshevism with enthusiasm, resting as it does upon the basis of the philosophy so frankly stated by Lenine, is a question for which no answer seems wholly adequate.  Of course, what Lenine advocates is class armament within the nation, for civil war—­the war of the classes.  But he is not opposed to national armaments, as such, nor willing to support disarmament as a national policy until the time comes when an entirely socialized humanity finds itself freed from the necessity of arming against anybody.  There is probably not a militarist in America to-day who, however bitterly opposed to disarmament as a present policy, would not agree that if, in some future time, mankind reaches the happy condition of universal Socialism, disarmament will then become practicable and logical.  It would not be difficult for General Wood to subscribe to that doctrine, I think.  It would not have been difficult for Mr. Roosevelt to subscribe to it.