Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/297

 interests. There is no contradiction to this condition in the fact that they are also supported by a part of the more backward or conservative-privileged workers. Why were the Social-Revolutionists unable to assume power? In what sense and why did the "bourgeois" character of the Russian Revolution (if we assume that such is its character) compel the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki to supplant the plebeian methods of the Jacobins with the gentlemanly device of an agreement with the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie? It is manifest that the explanation must be sought, not in the "bourgeois" character of our revolution, but in the miserable character of our petit bourgeois democracy. Instead of making the power in its hands the organ for the realization of the essential demands of History, our fraudulent democracy deferently passed on all real power to the counter-revolutionaiy, military-imperialistic clique, and Tseretelli, at the Moscow Conference, even boasted that the Soviets had not surrendered their power under pressure, not after a courageous fight and defeat, but voluntarily, as an evidence of political "self-effacement." The gentleness of the calf, holding out its neck for the butcher's knife, is not the quality which is going to conquer new worlds.

The difference between the terrorists of the Convention and the Moscow capitulaters is the difference between tigers and calves of one age,—a difference in courage. But this difference is not fundamental. It merely veils a decisive difference in the personnel of the democracy itself. The Jacobins were based on the classes of little or no property, including also what rudiments of a proletariat were then already in existence. In our case, the industrial working class has worked its way out of the ill-defined democracy into a position in History where it exerts an influence of primary importance. The petit bourgeois democracy was losing the most valuable revolutionary qualities to the extent to which these qualities were being developed by the proletariat which was outgrowing the tutelage of the petite bourgeoisie. This phenomenon in turn is due to the incomparably higher plan to which Capitalism had evolved in Russia as compared with the France of the closing 18th century. The revolutionary power of the Russian proletariat, which can by no means be estimated by its numerical strength, is based upon its immense productive power, which is most of all apparent in war time. The threat of a railroad 3trike again reminds us, in our day, of the dependence of the whole country on the concentrated labor of the proletariat. The petit bourgeois-peasant party, in the