Page:Left-Wing Communism.djvu/22



The approach of the great storm is felt everywhere. There is a fermentation and preparation in all classes. Abroad, the emigrant press carries on a theoretical discussion of all questions pertaining to the Revolution. The representatives of the three main political currents, of the three principal classes—liberal-bourgeois, petit-bourgeois democratic (concealed under the guise of "Social Democrats" and "Socialist Revolutionaries") and proletarian-revolutionary—anticipate and prepare the approaching class-struggle in the open by their bitter and obdurate fight on questions of program and tactics. All the problems which the masses were solving in 1905–1906 and 1917–1920 by force of arms, can and should be traced in their embryonic form in the press of that time. Between these three main currents of thought, there are, of course, plenty of intermediary, transient, dwarfed forms. In other words, in the fight of press, parties, factions, groups, the political doctrines of the classes definitely crystalize themselves; there the classes forge the proper ideo-political weapons for the coming battles.

All classes come out into the open. All questions of program and tactics are tested by the action of the masses. A strike movement, unknown anywhere else in the world for its extent and acuteness, breaks out. The economic strike gives way to the political strike, which, in its turn, grows into a rising. The relations between the proletariat in the van and the vacillating, unstable peasantry