Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/10

VIII proletariat] cannot draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past. Former revolutions required historic reminiscences in order to intoxicate themselves with their own issues. The revolution [of the proletariat] must let the dead bury their dead in order to reach its issue. With the former, the phrase surpasses die substance; with this one, the substance surpasses the phrase."

It is only in minor phases, accordingly, that the proletarian revolution in Russia is comparable with previous revolutions. In one stage alone is this comparison actual, and that is the first stage, when, the proletariat having made the revolution, the Russian bourgeoisie seized power for its own class purposes,—as in the Paris Revolution of 1848. But this stage was the initial one: the subsequent stages are stages of a proletarian revolution against Capitalism, creating its own modes of action and its own standards, developing the modus operandi of the oncoming international proletarian revolution. The Russian Revolution marks the entry of a new character upon the stage of history—the revolutionary proletariat in action; it means a new revolution, the Proletarian Revolution, the Social Revolution against Capitalism; it establishes a new reality, the imminence of the Social Revolution, the transformation of the aspiration for the Social Revolution into a fact of immediate importance to the world and the proletariat.

The proletarian revolution in Russia is comparable only with the Paris Commune. These two great events are similar and yet vitally dissimilar. The proletarian revolution in Russia acts in accord with a fundamental canon of the Revolution developed by the Commune,—that the proletariat cannot lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the bourgeois state and use it for its purposes: the proletariat must annihilate this state, conquer power and establish a new state upon the basis of which the proletariat introduces the measures of the coming Socialist society. The Commune had neither the numbers, the disciplined class consciousness, nor the traditions of proletarian revolutionary action of the Russian proletariat; nor did it break completely with the superstitions and ideology of the past. Industrial development in France at that period had not produced the mass of the typical industrial proletariat which constitutes the revolutionary class in Capitalism, and which is the bone and sinew of the revolution in Russia. In spite of Russia being still largely a peasant community, its industry is substantial; and, moreover, is large scale, concentrated industry,