Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/161

 were only a struvist distortion of Marxism, references to the mass to justify opportunism, and all that phraseology of theirs reminds us of the degenerated form of Marxism propounded at present by Kautsky, Cunow, Plekhanov and others. It might be a good idea to remember the attitude assumed in those days by papers like the Rabotshy Mysl and the Rabotshy Dielo and to compare that attitude with the one assumed nowadays by Kautsky.

The Menshevism of the next period, 1903–1908, was not only in its theory but in its organization the heir of economism. At the time of the Russian revolution it introduced tactics which subjected the proletariat to the control of the liberal bourgeoisie and which reflect a purely bourgeois opportunist tendency.

When in the following periods the main current of Menshevism gave birth to the "Liquidation," that class bias of the party was so obvious that the best representatives of Menshevism always protested against the policy of the group centering around Nasha Zarya.

But that group, the only one which conducted among the masses a systematic agitation against the revolutionary Marxist party in the following five or six years, revealed itself when the war broke out as made up of Social chauvinists.

And in a nation where autocracy was in power, where the bourgeoisie had not as yet completed its revolution where 43 per cent of the population oppress the rest of the population made up of people from other racial stocks, Russia could not escape the "European" type of evolution which enables certain strata of the petit bourgeoisie, especially the professional classes, and an insignificant minority of the workers' aristocracy to enjoy the advantages of "greatpowerdom" pertaining to their own country.

The working class and the Socialist worekersworkers [sic]' party of Russia have been prepared by their entire history to assume an internationalistic, that is a really consistent revolutionary attitude.