Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/246

 Revolutionists and Mensheviki, and more than that, all of their political activity, discloses a complete lack of understandngunderstanding [sic] of these conditions.

If the power of government is in the hands of a class whose interests coincide with the interests of the majority, the administration of the government can then be, in realtyreality [sic], identical with the will of the majority.

If, on the other hand, the government power is in the hands of a class whose interests diverge from the interests of the majority, then every attempt to govern inevitably becomes a fraud upon or a subjugation of that majority. Every bourgeois republic furnishes us with hundreds and thousands of examples of this.

In Russia the bourgeoisie reigns politically and economically. Its interests, especially during an imperialistic war, diverge most acutely from the interests of the majority. That is the reason why the key to this question, when stated from a materialistic Marxian point of view and not from a formalist-juridical one, lies in revealing that divergence, in fighting against the deception of the masses by the bourgeoisie.

But our Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki have completely proven and revealed their real role as instruments for the deception of the masses (majority) by the bourgeoisie, being leaders and assistants in this deception. No matter how sincere some individuals among the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki may be, their fundamental political principles—imagining that it is possible to proceed from an imperialistic war to "a peace without annexations and indemnities" without dictatorship of the proletariat and the victory of Socialism; imagining that it is possible to transfer the land to the people without compensation and to impose "control" over production m the interests of the people without proletarian dictatorship and Socialism—these fundamental political (and, naturally, economic) principles of the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki present objectively in themselves the self-deception of the petty bourgeois, or, what amounts to the same thing, the deception of the masses (majority) by the bourgeoisie.

Here is our first and primary "correction" of the phrasing of the question of majorities by the petty bourgeois democrats, Socialists of the Louis Blanc type, Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki: why discuss the question of majority when the majority itself is only a formal moment, a temporary condition, whereas materially