Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/15

Rh the bourgeoisie was willing to betray the revolution, it acted against the revolution, in order to crush the revolutionary masses, the proletariat of that epoch. The masses of the people instinctively acted independently, aggressively, under the impulse of its material conditions, tried to project the revolution beyond the political form imposed upon it by the bourgeoisie, into a new form—an economic revolution. The struggle between the masses and the bourgeoisie was determined not only by purposes, but by methods: the bourgeosiebourgeoisie [sic] tried to limit the revolution within parliamentary bounds, conciliation and understanding with the monarchy; while the masses insisted upon revolutionary mass action, placing the centre of the revolution among the people, instead of among the parliamentary "representatives of the people." The answer of the masses to the hesitation, intrigues and betrayals of the bourgeoisie was the Jacobin terror, which preserved the revolution. The French Revolution developed into the Great Revolution only because of the revolutionary courage and action of the masses of the people. But while the workers and the poorer peasants were able, by an unparalleled expression of revolutionary energy and initiative to push the revolution on to a point where it became Great because it accomplished fundamental changes, they did not possess the means to definitely wrest all power permanently from the bourgeoisie. The proletariat was conquered: it had not developed to the objective power of the Russian proletariat; the white terror crushed the masses; Babeuf's conspiracy was the final desperate expression of the economic revolution of the masses of the people; but while the proletariat did not accomplish the economic revolution, it accomplished one magnificent thing—it sapped monarchy and feudalism so completely that political democracy was inevitable, and made the bourgeois revolution.

In the ill-fated revolution of 1848 in Germany, the proletariat again emerged, as the left wing of the revolution, as the one aggressive force in the revolution, crushed by the betrayals and cowardice of the bourgeois liberals who united with the monarchic reaction. Again, in the French Revolution of 1848, in Paris, the proletariat emerged as the carrier of aggressive revolutionary action and a program of economic revolution, but crushed ruthlessly by the bourgeois reaction.

During the struggle against Czarism the proletarian class struggle against Capitalism emerged, becoming more definite and aggressive in the measure that the bourgeois liberals approached toward a conciliation with the monarchy and Capitalism developed