Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/428

 places into organs which gradually merge with the commissariats. Our aim is to attract every member of the poorer classes to practical participation in management, and the different steps leading toward this end (the more diverse the better), should be carefully registered, studied, systematized, verified on broader experience and legalized. It is our object to obtain the free performance of state obligations by every toiler after he is through, with his eight hour "lesson" of productive work. The transition to this end is especially difficult, but only this transition will secure the definite realization of Socialism. The novelty and the difficulty of the change naturally causes an abundance of steps made, so to speak, in the dark, an abundance of mistakes and hesitation. Without this, no sudden forward movement is possible. The originality of the present situation consists, from the standpoint of many who consider themselves Socialists, in this—that people have been used theoretically to contrast Capitalism and Socialism, and between one and the other they profoundly put the word "leap" (some, recalling Engels, quote more profoundly this: "a leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom")- That the word "leap" was used by the Socialist teachers to denote the crisis of an historical transformation, and that leaps of this kind comprise periods of tens of years—this cannot be understood by most of the so-called Socialists who study Socialism "from books," but have never given serious thought to this matter. It is natural that the so-called intelligentsia furnishes during such times an infinite number of criers after the dead; one bewails the Constituent Assembly, another bourgeois discipline, a third the capitalist order, a fourth the cultured aristocrat, a fifth the imperialistic "greater Russia," and so on, and so forth.

The real interest of an epoch of great leaps consists in this: that the abundance of fragments of the old order, which sometimes accumulate more rapidly than the germs of tht [sic] new order (which are not always immediately discernible), requires ability to distinguish the most essential in the line or chain of development. There are historical periods when it is most important for the success of the revolution to pile up as many fragments as possible,—that is, to blow up as many old institutions as possible. But there are periods when enough has been blown up, and it becomes necessary to turn to the "prosaic" (to a petty bourgeois revolutionist, "uninteresting") work of clearing the ground of the fragments. And there are periods when it is most important carefully