Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/394

 capitalist or a Socialist character, dominantly; and these measures of the dictatorship of the proletariat are decisively of a Socialist character. This, accordingly, is the fundamental task of the proletarian dictatorship: to initiate the tendency towards the complete transformation of Capitalism into communist Socialism. The forms of this tendency assume a character that logically and inevitably emerge into the definite forms of a Socialist society.

The Soviet government annihilated the political power of the bourgeoisie by completely excluding it from participation in politics and government, by the abolition of the parliamentary state and bourgeois democracy. The Soviet state is a state of the organized producers, representing exclusively the interests of the proletariat and proletarian peasantry. The political expropriation of the bourgeoisie was complete; but its economic expropriation was not pushed to the final point. This temporary cessation of the economic expropriation of capital is based upon a number of factors, chief among them being the incomplete industrial development of Russia, but most important the necessity of emphasizing temporary measures in order to solve the pressing immediate problems of the resumption of economic activity.

These temporary measures assumed a much more important character in Russia than is typical of the transition toward Socialism upon the basis of a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet regime inherited chaos, a chaos produced by Czarism and intensified by the bourgeois republic of the Provisional Government, of Kerensky. The war, the cutting off of communications with the outside world (the Allies completely isolated the Soviet Republic), the pressing starvation, the encroachments of Germany and other nations, determined to crush the proletarian revolution—all these factors, and more, emphasized the importance of temporary measures out of all proportion to the general tendency of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

But the chief, the all-determining problem was met, and met adequately: the participation in the government, dominantly and dynamically, of the lowest section of the proletariat and proletarian peasantry, the emergence upon the stage of government of the masses of the people, the initiation definitely of the tendency toward the complete socialization of industry and society. The conscious activity of the masses, the development of its capacity for self-government and administrative control of industry and society, determine the rapidity of the measures toward complete Socialism introduced by the dictatorship of the proletariat—and these requirements were swiftly developed.

The unifying characteristic of all measures, temporary and permanent, introduced by the Soviet government, is that they started from the bottom, and not from the top; that the center of reconstruction was the activity of the organized producers, and not the activity of the state. The local initiative and self-government of the producers had to be developed as the only basis for the fundamental industrial democracy of communist Socialism. This initiative, this self-government, and not the bureaucratic state, is the dominant factor in the process of reconstruction. The proletarian state constituted a unifying expression and acceleration of the activity of the masses. The old state, equally the bourgeois parliamen-