Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/38

 nevertheless of the essence of Socialism. Another truth is that there can be, in reality, no de facto equality, unless and until the possibility of exploitation of one class by another has been abolished.

It is possible, by means of a successful insurrection in the centre or of a mutiny in the army, to defeat the exploiters at one blow, but except in very rare and particular cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at once. It is impossible to expropriate at one blow all the landlords and capitalists of a large country. In addition, expropriation alone, as a legal or political act, does not by far settle the matter, since it is necessary practically to replace the landlords and capitalists, to substitute for theirs another, a working class, management of the factories and estates. There can be no equality between the exploiters, who, for many generations have enjoyed education and the advantages and habits of prosperity, and the exploited, the majority of whom, even in the most advanced and the most democratic bourgeois republics, are cowed, frightened, ignorant, unorganized. It is inevitable that the exploiters should still enjoy a large number of great practical advantages for a considerable period after the revolution. They still have money (since it is impossible to abolish money at once), some movable property (often of a considerable extent), social connections, habits of organization and management, knowledge of all the secrets (customs methods, means, and possibilties) of administration, higher education, closeness to the higher personnel of technical experts (who live and think after the bourgeois style), and incomparably higher knowledge and experience in military affairs (which is very important), and so forth ,and so forth. If the exploiters are defeated in one country only—and this, of course is the rule, since a simultaneous revolution in a number of countries is a rare exception—they still remain stronger than the exploited, because the international connections of the exploiters are enormous. And that a portion of the exploited