Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/103

 sia has been going on for twenty years (if we count the great strikes of 1896). Throughout this period, passing through the two great revolutions, there runs, a veritable red thread of Russian political history, this great question: shall the working class lead the peasantry forward toward Socialism, or shall the liberal bourgeoisie drag the peasantry back into a conciliation with Capitalism?

The revolutionary Social Democratic Party has all this time been fighting to remove the peasants from the influence of the Cadets and has offered them, in place of the Utopian middle class view of Socialism, a revolutionary-proletarian path to Socialism.

"Conciliate yourself with the rule of capital, for 'we' are not yet ready for Socialism," that is what the Mensheviki say to the peasants. In other words, they misrepresent the abstract question of "Socialism" as being the concrete question of whether the wounds inflicted by the war may be healed without taking resolute steps toward Socialism.

The monarchy has been abolished. The bourgeois revolution was crowned with success, inasmuch as Russia became a democratic republic with a government consisting of Cadets, Mensheviki and Social-Revolutionists. But, in the course of three years the war has driven us thirty years ahead, has made compulsory military service universal in Europe, has led to a forced monopolization of industry and brought the most developed nations to hunger and unparalleled destruction, forcing them to take definite steps toward Socialism.

Only the proletariat and the peasantry can overthrow the monarchy—that has been the fundamental declaration of our class policy. And it was a correct position, as the months of March and April, 1917, have once more confirmed.

Only the proletariat, leading on the poorest peasants (the semi-proletariat) may terminate the war with a democratic peace, may heal its wounds, and may undertake the steps toward Socialism that have become absolutely unavoidable and non-postponable. That is the clear demand of our class policy at present.

The course of history, accelerated by the war, has made such huge strides forward that the ancient slogans have been filled with a new content For instance: "The prohibition of hired labor." Millions of impoverished peasants, in 242 instructions, declare that they want to attack the problems of abolishing hired labor, but do not know how to go about it. But we know how. We know it can