Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/303

 mand that all means of production should pass over into social ownership, declare that the realization of this demand is a possiblity of the remote future, the precise time of which is practically impossible to determine." Thanks to the long-drawn out character of the "peaceful" period, this petit bourgeois Socialism actually became dominant in the old organization of the proletariat. Its limitations and its insolvency assumed the most offensive forms, as soon as the peaceful accumulation of contradictions gave way to a tremendous imperialistic cataclysm. Not only the old national governments, but also the bureaucratized Socialist parties that had grown up with them, showed that they were not equal to the demands of further progress. And all this might have been more or less foreseen.

"The task of the Socialist Party," we wrote twelve years ago, "consisted, and still consists, in revolutionizing the consciousness of the working class, as the development of Capitalism has revolutionized social relations. But this labor of agitation and organization has its internal difficulties. The European Socialist parties—particularly the most powerful of them, the German—have already attained a certain conservatism, which is all the stronger where the most numerous masses have embraced Socialism, and where the organization and discipline of these masses is the most advanced. In view of this, the Social-Democracy, as an organization expressive of the political experience of the proletariat, may, at a given moment prove to be an immediate obstacle on the path of an open struggle between the workers and the bourgeois reaction. In other words, the propagandist-Socialist conservatism of the proletarian party may, at a given moment prevent the straight fight of the proletariat for power (Nasha revolutsia, 1906, P. 285). But if the revolutionary Marxists were far from being fetishists with regard to the parties of the Second International, no one could foresee that the destruction of those giant organizations would be so cruel and so catastrophic.

New times demand new organizations. In the baptism of fire, the revolutionary parties are now *being everywhere created. The numerous ideologico-political offspring of the Second International have not, it appears, been in vain. But they are passing through an internal purification: whole generation of "realistic" philistmes are being cast aside, and the revolutionary tendencies of Marxism are for the first time being recognized in their full political significance.