Page:Nikolai Lenin - On the Road to Insurrection (1926).pdf/107

 It is possible, for we have on our side the experience of many countries. We have moral support from the growing opposition to the war throughout Europe, from the atmosphere of the workers' revolution which is approaching all over the world. We have on our side, an extremely rare thing during an imperialist war, the liberty of revolutionary democracy, which urges us and drags us on.

We must perish or go forward. Thus does history present the alternative.

The attitude of the proletariat towards the peasants at this moment confirms our old Bolshevik policy: to free the peasants from bourgeois influence. In that alone is there safety for the revolution.

Now, the peasants compose the greatest part of the petit-bourgeois class.

Our S.R.'s and our Mensheviks have taken up a reactionary position by keeping the peasants under bourgeois influence, by making them enter into an alliance with the bourgeoisie and by preventing them from uniting with the proletariat.

The experience of revolution rapidly teaches the masses. The reactionary policy of the S.R.'s and the Mensheviks is bankrupt: they have been beaten in the soviets of the two capitals. The opposition of the "Left" increases steadily within the two democratic, petit-bourgeois parties. On September 10, 1917, the S.R. Conference at Petrograd gave a two-thirds majority to the left wing, which wants union with the proletariat and repels the coalition with the bourgeoisie.

The S.R.'s and the Mensheviks are repeating their favourite contrast: the bourgeoisie and democracy. But this contrast is as idiotic as to compare yards and pounds.

It is possible to have a democratic bourgeoisie; it is possible to have a bourgeois democracy; he who denies it has not the slightest knowledge of history or political economy.

The S.R's and Mensheviks want to hide the existence of the petite bourgeoisie between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The petite bourgeoisie, because of its social position, wavers everlastingly between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The S.R.'s and the Mensheviks seek to bring the petite bourgeoisie into alliance with the bourgeoisie. This is the real cause of all their "coalitions," of all their participation in the ministries, of the