Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/180

 plained in 1875, and Engels, in a more popular form, in 1894. Mankind can only pass from Capitalism into Socialism, that is, public ownership of the means of production and the distribution of products according to individual work. Our party looks farther ahead than that: Socialism is bound sooner or later to ripen into Communism, whose banner bears the motto: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

That is the first reason. Here is my second: The second part of the term "Social Democracy" is scientifically wrong. Democracy is only a form of authority. We Marxists are opposed to every form of authority.

The leaders of the second International (1889–1914), Plekhanov, Kautsky and their ilk, perverted and debased Marxism. The difference between Marxism and Anarchism is that Marxism admits the necessity of some sort of authority during the transition from Capitalism to Socialism; not the kind of authority represented by a democratic, bourgeois republic and its parliamentary system, but the kind of authority represented by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Councils of Workers' Delegates of 1905 and 1917.

There is a third reason: Life and the Revolution have already established in a concrete way (although in a form which is still weak and embryonic) a new type of authority which does not seem to be authority in the proper sense of the word. It is a question of the masses taking action and no longer of leaders indulging in theories.

Authority in the usual sense of the word is the power exercised over the masses by a group of armed men distinct from the nation. The new authority, which is now in process of being born, is also a real authority, because we, too, need groups of armed men necessary to preserve order, necessary to crush out ruthlessly all attempts at a counter-revolution, all attempts at keeping in power a Czarist, bourgeois government. But our newly-born authority isn't authority in the proper sense of the word, because those groups of armed men found in many parts of Russia are the masses themselves, the whole nation, not simply groups allowed to rule above the nation, not groups distinct from the nation, privileged individuals practically immovable.

Let us look forward, not backward; let us look away from the democracy of the usual bourgeois type, which enforces the domination of the bourgeoisie by means of an antiquated, monarchistic machinery of government, the police, the army and the bureauc-