Page:Building Up Socialism - Nikolai Bukharin (1926).pdf/73

 Rh come into conflict with the proletariat. As in China alone there are 400,000,000 peasants, then the revolution is "inevitably doomed." Where is the "State aid" from without to come from? This is where the theory of the opposition leads us. If such conclusions are not drawn, it is because the question is not argued to its logical conclusion, but is left unfinished: when they speak of England they have in mind only London and Manchester and forget about all the other parts of the world which at the present time are bound to England; they contemptuously ignore the enormous number of colonial and semi-colonial peoples and by that reveal their refined "European" "Marxism."

In the same manner we learn that the question of the character of our revolution, of its driving forces, etc., is of profound practical world significance.

What has been said above may be summarised as follows:

The ideological sources of the opposition undoubtedly are Social-Democratic tendencies. This should not be understood, in a crude and vulgar sense. The leaders of the opposition are not Mensheviks, of course. But they do reveal tendencies in the direction of Menshevism. They "give their finger" to the Menshevik devil; of this there is not the slightest doubt. Their intellectual make-up gives rise to an irrepressible desire to prophesy our doom. As is known, this doom was prophesied in the October days by the Kamenev-Zinoviev-Shliapnikov group, which now represents a section of the opposition bloc. Comrade Lenin described their attitude as "wailing pessimism." This doom was prophesied in the spring of 1921 (particularly by Trotsky). It was prophesied in the spring of 1923 (the famous Declaration of the "46."). This