Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/296

 them and the Girondistes, the liberal party of the bourgeoisie, the Cadets of their day, the neat rectangle of the guillotine. It was only the dictatorship of the Jacobins that gave the French Revolution its present importance, that made it "the Great Revolution." And yet, this dictatorship was brought about, not only without the bourgeoisie, but against its very opposition. Robespierre, to whom it was not given to acquaint himself with the Plekhanov ideas, upset all the laws of Sociology, and, instead of shaking hands with the Girondistes, he cut of their heads. This was cruel, there is no denying it. But this cruelty did not prevent the French Revolution from becoming Great, within the limits of its bourgeois character. Marx, in whose name so many mal-practices are now perpetrated in our country, said that the "whole French terror was simply a plebeian effort to dispose of the enemies of the bourgeoisie." And as the same bourgeoisie was very much afraid of the same plebeian methods of disposing of the enemies of the people, the Jacobins not only deprived the bourgeoisie of power, but applied a rule of blood and iron with regard to the bourgeoisie, whenever the latter made any atempt to halt or to "moderate" the work of the Jacobins. It is apparent, therefore, that the Jacobins carried out a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie.

Referring to the English Revolution of 1648, Engels wrote: "In order that the bourgeoisie might pluck all the fruits that had matured, it was necessary that the revolution should go far beyond its original aims, as was again the case in France in 1793 and in Germany in 1848, This to be sure, is one of the laws of the evolution of bourgeois society." We see that Engels' Law is directly opposed to Plekhanov's ingenious structure, which the Mensheviki have been accepting and repeating as Marxism.

It may of course be objected that the Jacobins were themselves a bourgeoisie, a petite bourgeoisie. This is absolutely true. But is that not also the fact in the case of the so-called "revolutionary democracy" headed by the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki? Between the Cadets, the party of the larger and lesser propertied interests, on the one hand, and the Social-Revolutionists on the other hand, there was not, in any of the elections held in city or country, any intermediate party. It follows with mathematical certainty that the petite bourgeoisie must have found its political reperesentation in the ranks of the Social-Revolutionists. The Mensheviki, whose policy differs by not a hair's breadth from the policy of the Social-Revolutionists, reflect the same class