Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/75

 antry." This latter, which is "also a government," of its own accord has yielded power to the bourgeoisie and attached itself to the bourgeois government.

Is this reality included in the old-Bolshevist formula of Comrade Kamenev—"the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed"?

No. The formula has become old. It is good for nothing. It is dead. Vain will be all efforts to revive it.

Second: A practical question. It is uncertain whether there can be even now a particular "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" completely independent of the bourgeois government. It is impossible to base our Marxian tactics on the unknown.

But if it can happen, there is one road, and only one, that will lead to that accomplishment: the immediate, decisive, irrevocable separation of the proletarian, communistic elements of the movement from the petty bourgeois elements.

Why?

Because all the petit bourgeois, not accidentally but necessarily, turned toward chauvinism, toward a support of the bourgeoisie, toward dependence upon the bourgeoisie, toward a fear of trying to get along without the bourgeoisie, toward dependence upon the bourgeoisie, toward a fear of trying to get along without the bourgeoisie, etc.

How is it possible to "push" these petit bourgeois toward power, if this petit bourgeois element now could take power but does not want to?

Only by the separate and independent action of the proletarian, communistic party, only through the proletarian class struggle freed from the hesitancy and fears of the petite bourgeoisie, can we develop the necessary tactic. Only the unity of the proletariat, indeed, but a unity in action and not in words, is capable of "making it hot" for the petty bourgeois elements, so that under certain conditions they might be compelled to take over all power; and even then the possibility would not be eliminated that Guchkov and Milyukov—again under certain conditions—might strive for all power, or Cheidse, Tseretelli, Steklov, the Social-Revolutionists, who are all adherents of the petty bourgeois conception of "revolutionary defense."

He who immediately separates, and separates irrevocably, the proletarian elements in the Soviets (that is, the proletarian, com-