Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/181

 racy. Let us look forward to the advent of the newly-born democracy, which has already ceased to be a democracy, for democracy means, the people's authority and the armed masses of the nation could not exercise an authority over themselves.

The word democracy cannot be scientifically applied to the Communist Party. Since March, 1917, the word democracy is simply a shackle fastened upon the revolutionary nation and preventing it from establishing boldly, freely and regardless of all obstacles a new form of power: the Councils of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Delegates, harbinger of the abolition of every form of authority.

There is a fourth reason: the international position of Socialism. Its position is no longer what it was between the years 1871 and 1914, when Marx and Engels adopted as a makeshift the inaccurate, opportunistic word "Social Democracy."

In the days after the defeat of the Paris Commune what was mostly needed was slow work of organization and enlightenment. Nothing else was possible. Anarchists were then, as they are now, theoretically, economically and politically wrong. The Anarchists, who did not understand the world situation, selected the wrong moment: the workers of England had been perverted by imperialistic gains, the Commune had been beaten in Paris, the National bourgeois movement was victorious in Germany, and feudal Russia was still sleeping the sleep of centuries. Marx and Engels gauged the hour accurately; they understood the international situaitonsituation [sic]; they saw that the Social Revolution would have to go slowly at first.

We must in turn understand the peculiarities and the duties of our day. Let us not imitate the pseudo-Marxianists of whom Marx himself said: "I sowed dragons' teeth and I reaped fleas."

The natural development of Capitalism, evolving into Imperialism has brought forth an imperialistic war. This war has brought mankind to the brink of destruction, jeopardized all civilization, ruined and brutalized millions of human beings. There is no way out of it except through a proletarian revolution. And just when that revolution is beginning, when it is taking its first steps, awkward, weak, diffident, leaning too much as yet on the bourgeoisie, at that moment the majority of the Social Democratic leaders, of the Social Democratic parliamentarians, of the Social Democratic papers, in a word all those who could spur the masses