Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/295

 "I suppose you would like to have a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie?" asks Plekhanov, slyly, invoking the support of dialectics and of Engels.

"That's just it!" interposes Milyukov. "We Cadets would be ready to relinquish power, which the people evidently do not wish to give us. But we cannot fly in the face of science." And he refers to Plekhanov's "Marxism" as his authority.

Since our Revolution is a bourgeois revolution, explain Plekhanov, Dan, and Potressov, we must bring about a political coalition between the toilers and their exploiters. And in the light of this Sociology, the clownish handshake of Bublikov and Tseretelli is revealed in its full historical significance.

The trouble is merely this, that the same bourgeois character of the Revolution which is now taken as a justification of the coalition between the Socialists and the capitalists, has for a number of years been taken by these very Mensheviki as leading to diametrically opposite conclusions.

Since, in a bourgeois revolution, they were wont to say, the governing power can have no other function than to safeguard the domination of the bourgeoisie, it is clear that Socialism can have nothing to do with it, its place is not in the government, but in the opposition. Plekhanov considered that Socialists could not under any conditions take part in a bourgeois government, and he savagely attacked Kautsky, whose resolution admitted certain exceptions in this connection. "Tempora leagusque mutantur"—the gentlemen of the old regime so expressed it And that appears to be the case also with the "laws" of the Plekhanov Sociology.

No matter how contradictory may be the opinions of the Mensheviki and their leader, Plekhanov, when you compare their statements before the Revolution with their statements of today, one thought does dominate both expressions, and that is, that you cannot carry out a bourgeois revolution "without the bourgeoisie." At first blush this idea would appear to be axiomatic. But it is merely idiotic.

The history of mankind did not begin with the Moscow Conference. There were revolutions before. At the end of the 18th century there was a revolution in France, which is called, not without reason, the "Great Revolution." It was a bourgeois revolution. In one of its phases power fell into the hands of the Jacobins, who had the support of the "Sans-culottes," or semi-proletarian workers of the city population, and who set up between