The tendency toward internationalism was inaugurated by capital. In obedience to its own law of continuous growth, it has, more and more, substituted international commerce for national trade. It has created industries whose raw materials come from abroad and whose products require, for an outlet, the universal or world market. It has thus developed the reciprocal interdependence of nations, no one of which to-day can live without the aid of the others.
Capitalist internationalism, moreover, pursues its ends with stern remorselessness. In order to lower national wages and gain greater profits, the capitalist does not hesitate to deprive his fellow-countrymen of work, and to import, to compete with them on the labor market, foreigners wonted by greater poverty to a lower standard of living, and therefore able and willing to work for lower wages. To prohibit them, not from employing foreigners, but from paying them less than the national rate of wages is the only effective means of meeting this evil. On the other hand, provided he sees a goodly profit in the transaction, the capitalist never hesitates to loan money or sell military supplies to a foreign country, though he thus increases its power to wage war against his own.
This international character, assumed by capital in all its forms, is, in its effects, co-extensive with the domain of human affairs. And so, as M. Aulard declared in a lecture about which there has been too much talk: "There are no national boundaries for reason and science * * * They are neither French, nor English, nor German, but international and human." How, therefore, can the workingmen be justly reproached for taking the road on which everything and everybody has started, and along which the capitalists have preceded them? Face to face with the international domination of capital, they have come to understand, in all civilized nations, the common character, the oneness, of their own interests. They are everywhere the victims of the same kind of exploitation, due everywhere to the same cause. The same facts have suggested to them the same demands, the same means and tactics to attain the same goal. International exploitation has thus given birth to an ever growing international solidarity among the workers who resist its encroachments. And the international concurrence of the workers is publicly declared by the world-wide celebration of the First day of May.
Notwithstanding the most sincere sentiment of international solidarity on both sides, the workingmen of two countries may still have to fight against each other. This is one of the numerous contradictions—and one of the most horrible—inherent in the capitalist regime, which is condemned to aspire to peace and to unchain the horrid dogs of war. While, for example, commerce on the world market requires peace, the bitterness of competition on that market begets conflicts. * * * *
To safeguard the little independence left to them as laborers, the workers have been led by the state of affairs, by actual conditions, as were the business men before them, to be internationalists; but they are patriots, and must be patriots only whenever their country—be it France or America—is menaced by danger from abroad.
I hope you now see that the internationalism of the workers and the socialists cannot, by any possibility lead to anti-patriotism. These are two distinct ideas which cannot be legitimately confounded, no matter what the object of this confusion. Our internationalism and our patriotism spring from two wholly distinct categories of facts, and different facts logically necessitate different solutions, logic consisting, here and everywhere, in adapting the solution to the facts and not in applying the same solution indiscriminately to all sorts of facts.
To sum up, workingmen and socialists ought to be internationalists in their relations with their toiling comrades when the interests of labor are at stake in times of peace, patriots and Frenchmen before all when France, our country shall be, if it must be, in danger of war, conscious always of the duty to be performed, conscious, if need be, especially in victory, of the duty of respecting in the case of others, especially the conquered, the rights that they claim for themselves.
I have finished. That is all that socialism means. I have taken pains to set it forth in its entirety, free from both the attenuations and the exaggerations by which it is often mutilated or disfigured, but which seem to me to have no foundation in reality. Its goal is the socialization of the means of labor which have already manifested collective tendencies—either in their mode of ownership or in the mode of their employment as exploiting agencies—and the abolition of classes. Its means, the transference to the political battlefield of the Class Struggle, the existence of which it is compelled to acknowledge. It must, for the time being, be resolved to preserve legality at home and peace abroad, but equally energetically determined to tolerate no measure that will make the situation of the toilers more intolerable, to preserve republican institutions intact and to defend the national territory against all foreign foes.