Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/362

 hands of the victorious party, which is armed to the teeth, the proletariat would naturally be in need of a revolutionary force, which it will have to be ready to use openly. In any case, it possesses no "economic" means to compel the victorious party to renounce the advantage of the victory gained.

The second possible issue of the war, on which those who seek to promote the narrow program "annexationless peace and nothing more" principally depend, presupposes that the war, exhausting as it does all the resources of the warring nations, will, without being interrupted by the third, the revolutionary, power, end in general exhaustion, without conquerors or conquered. To this very state, where militarism is too weak for effecting conquests, and the proletariat for making a revolution, the passive Internationalists of the Kautsky type adapted their abbreviated program of "annexationless peace," which they not seldom denote as a return to the status quo ante bellum. Here, however, the apparent realism lays bare its Achilles heel, for as a matter of fact an undecided issue of the war, as already shown, does not at all exclude annexations, but on the contrary presupposes them. That neither of the two powerful groups wins, does not mean that Serbia, Greece, Belgium, Poland, Persia, Syria, Armenia and others would be left uninjured. On the contrary, it is precisely for the account of these weakest that annexations will in this case be carried out. In order to prevent these reciprocal "compensations" the International Proletariat must needs set afoot a direct revolutionary uprising against the ruling classes. Newspaper articles, Congressional resolutions, Parliamentary protests and even public manifestations have never prevented the rulers from acquiring territories or from oppressing the weak peoples either by way of victory or by means of diplomatic agreements.

As regards the third possible issue of the war, it seems to be the clearest. It presupposes that while the war is still on, the international proletariat rises with a force sufficient to paralyze and finally to stop from the bottom up, the war. Obviously, in this most favorable case, the proletariat, having been powerful enough to stop the progress of the war, would not be likely to limit itself to that purely conservative program which goes no farther than the renunciation of annexations.

A powerful movement of the proletariat is thus a necessary prerequisite of the actual realization of an annexationless peace. But again, while presupposing such a movement, the foregoing program remains quite inadequate in that it acquiesces in the restora-