Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/273



Your little shopkeeper is a sober-minded man; his chief abhorrence is "taking a risk." Yet he has at the same time a gorgeous imagination: every little shopkeeper expects to become a Rothschild. This combination of an anaemic sobriety with an impotently riotous imagination is the very essesenceessence [sic] of the petit bourgeois policy. It would be erroneous to think, wrote Marx, that the representatives of the petite bourgeoisie are invariably grasping hagglers. Far from it, on their own mental level they are greatly superior to the wretched philistine. Yet, "they are made representatives of the ideas of the petit bourgeois by the fact that their thoughts do not transcend the sphere in which their lives are cast, and that, therefore, they arrive, in theory, at the same problems and the same solutions, to which the petit bourgeois arrives in practice."

Sancho Panza is the incarnation of .base cowardice. Yet romanticism is by no means foreign to his disposition: otherwise he would never have become the companion of Don Quixote. The cowardice of the petit bourgeois policy is expressed in its most offensive form, in the person of Dan. Tseretelli represents the fusion of this cowardice with romanticism. Tseretelli said to Martov: "Only a fool fears nothing!" The well-intentioned philistine policy, on the other hand, is afraid of everything: they are afraid of arousing the ire of their creditors; they are afraid. that the diplomats may take their "pacifism" seriously; but most of all they are afraid of power. Just as a "fool fears nothing," so the petit bourgeois policy deems it expedient to insure itself against folly by a game of cowardice on all fronts. Yet they do not relinquish their hopes of becoming Rothschilds: having stuck two or three words in Terechenko's diplomatic note, they think they have brought peace neare ; they hope to instill into Prince Lvov their own most loyal mediation against the civil war. But the great petit bourgeois peacemaker concludes by disarming the workers, without in any way disarming Polovtsev of Kaledin, the counter-revolution. And when