Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/304

 Within each country the task is not so much to support an organization that has outlived itself, as to bring together the genuinely aggressive revolutionary elements of the proletariat, who are already, in the struggle against Imperialism, gravitating into the front ranks. On the international field, the task is not to coalesce and "conciliate" government-Socialists at diplomatic conferences (as at Stockholm!), but to secure a union of the revolutionary internationalists of all countries and the pursuit of a common course of action in the Social Revolution within each country.

To be sure, the revolutionary internationalists at the head of the working class at present constitute, throughout Europe, an insignificant minority. But we Russians ought to be the last to take fright at such a state of affairs. We know how quickly, in revolutionary moments, the minority may become a majority. As soon as the accumulating resentment of the working class finally breaks through the crust of government discipline, the group of Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Mehring, and their adherents will immediately assume a leading position at the head of the German working class. Only a social-revolutionary policy can justify a division in the organization,—but at the same time, it makes such a division inevitable.

The Menshevik internationalists, those who are of like mind with Comrade Martov, in opposition to us, deny the social-revolutionary character of the political task. Russia, they declare in their platform, is not yet ready for Socialism, and our function is necessarily limited to the founding of a democratic bourgeois republic. This whole attitude is based on a complete rejection of the international problems of the proletariat. If Russia were alone in the world, Martov's reasoning would be correct. But we are engaged in carrying out a world revolution, in a struggle with world Imperialism, with the tasks of the world proletariat, which includes the Russian proletariat. Instead of explaining to the Russian workers that the destinies of Russia are at present inextricably bound up with the destinies of Europe, that the success of the European proletariat will assure us a swifter realization of a Socialist society, that on the other hand, a defeat of the European proletariat will hurl us back into a condition of imperialistic dictatorship and monarchy, and finally into the status of mere colonies of England and the United States, instead of subordinating all our tactics to the general aims and objects of the European proletariat. Comrade Martov looks upon the Russian Revolution from a narrow nationalistic standpoint and reduces the task of the Revolution to that of