Page:Building Up Socialism - Nikolai Bukharin (1926).pdf/40

 32 cannot be regarded as the beginning of a Socialist revolution; the proletariat has not ripened for Socialism while the peasantry are in the majority. Consequently, the State which the Bolsheviks are establishing is not a proletarian State. It is the State of the technical-organising class, the intelligentsia, which has now assumed the character of a class, Even if the subjective intentions of the Bolsheviks did not include the establishment of such a State, the objective role they are playing is reducing itself to the construction of a peculiar State, at the head of which is a new class, which became finally consolidated in the flames of the revolution. Having undergone a process of bureaucratic degeneration, the men who have come from the proletariat are becoming a component part of the new class. The objective possibility of Socialism here, too, had its decisive effect, in spite of the subjective illusions of the agents of the revolutionary process themselves.

It deserves to be mentioned that Bazarov, who more than once came out as the literary twin of Bogdanov, could not agree to recognise the Socialist character of our revolution. According to him, our revolution is a Socialist revolution only in the declarations issued by the Bolsheviks. As a matter of fact, he argues, a deep chasm separates these declarations from reality; a chasm, to fill which the proletariat will have to spend more than one century.

This then is the general estimation of our revolution in the form in which it is presented by Russian opportunist Socialism and particularly by the Mensheviks. This estimation amounts to this, that capitalist relations in Russia have not matured; that the relation of forces is to a high degree unfavourable for the proletariat; that the character