Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/371

 in national borders, it would be doomed to failure. Our social patriots point to the danger which threatens the Russian Revolution from the side of German militarism. English, French and Italian Imperialism is no less a dreadful enemy of the Russian Revolution than the war-machine of the Hohenzollerns. The salvation of the Russian Revolution lies in its propagation all over Europe. Should the revolutionary movement unroll itself in Germany, the German proletariat would look for and find a revolutionary echo in the "hostile" lands of the west, and if in one of the European countries the proletariat should snatch the power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, it would be bound, be it only to retain the power, to place it at once at the service of the revolutionary movement in other lands. In other words, the founding of a stable règime of proletarian dictatorship would only be conceivable throughout Europe in the form of a European Republican Federation. The unification of the States of Europe, to be achieved neither by force of arms nor by industrial and diplomatic agreements, would then be the next task of the triumphant revolutionary proletariat.

The United States of Europe is the motto of the revolutionary age into which we have emerged. Whatever turn the war operations may take later on, whatever facit diplomacy may draw out of the present war, and at whatever tempo the revolutionary movement will progress in the near future, the formula, the United States of Europe, will in all events retain a colossal meaning as the political formula of the fight of the European proletariat for power. In this program that fact finds its expression, that the national state has outlived itself—as a frame for the development of all creative forces, as a basis for the class struggle, and thereby also as a state form of proletarian dictatorship. Over against the conservative defence of the antiquated national fatherland we place the progressive task, namely the creation of a new, higher "fatherland" of the Revolution, of the republican Europe, whence the proletariat alone will be enabled to revolutionize and to re-organize the whole world.

Of course the United States of Europe will be only one of the two axes of the "World re-organization" of Industry. The United States of America will constitute the other.

To view the perspectives of the Social Revolution within national bounds means to succumb to the same national narrowness that forms the content of social-patriotism. Vaillant, until the close of his life, regarded France as the chosen country of the Social Revolution, and precisely in this sense he insisted upon its defence to the utmost. Lentsch and others, some hypocritically, others conscienti-