Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/270

 portunism and the crude chauvinism of its leaders, was subject to an increasing pressure from below, where the confiscations of land was assuming a form that became all the more threatening, the more the government opposed them. To what extent the latter was playing the role of a representative of Big Capital is best of all illustrated by the fact that the last prohibitive police ordinance of Tseretelli differed in no respect from the ordinances of Prince Lvov. And wherever, in the provinces, the Soviets and Peasant Committees would attempt to install a new agrarian regime, they would find themselves involved in a bitter conflict with the "revolutionary" authority of the Provisional Government, which was turning more and more into a watchdog of private property.

The further development of the Revolution resolved itself into the necessity of all power passing into the hands of the Soviet, and the use of this power in the interests of the workers against the property-owners. And the deepening of the struggle against the capitalist classes makes it absolutely necessary to assign the leading role among the toiling masses to their most resolute section, namely, to the industrial proletariat. For the introduction of control over production and distribution the proletariat could appeal to very valuable precedents in Western Europe, particularly in the so-called "war Socialism" of Germany. But as, in Russia, this labor of organization could only be accomplished on the basis of an agrarian revolution and under the supervision of an actually revolutionary power, the control over production and the gradual organization of the latter would necessarily assume a direction that was hostile to the interests of capital. At a moment when the propertied classes were striving, through the Provisional Government, to establish the rule of a "strong" capitalistic republic, the full power of the Soviets, as yet by no means synonymous with "Socialism," would in any case have broken the opposition of the bourgeoisie, and in alliance with the existing productive forces and the situation in Western Europe, would have imposed a direction and a transformation upon economic organization, that would have been in the interests of the toiling masses. Casting aside the chains of capitalistic power, the Revolution would have become permanent, that is, continuous; it would have applied its state power, not to the perpetuation of the rule of capitalist exploitation, but, on the contrary, to its undoing. Its ultimate accomplishments on this field would have depended on the successes of the proletarian revolution in Europe. On the other hand, the Russian revolution might give an all the greater impetus to the revolution in Western Europe, the more resolutely and cour-