Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/78

 Socialism. Such steps are made today by the junker and the bourgeois in Germany against the people. They will be accomplished much more thoroughly to-morrow in the interest of the people by the Soviets, if the Soviets assume all government power.

And what makes necessary these steps?

Hunger. Disorganization of economic life. The horrors of war. The agony of the wounds inflicted upon humanity by the war.

Comrade Kamenev concludes his article with a statement that "in a broad discussion he hopes to defend his point of view as the only possible one for revolutionary Socialism, inasmuch as Socialism aims to, and must, remain to the end a party of the revolutionary masses of the proletariat, and not become transformed into a group of propagandist-Communists."

It seems to me that in these words is contained a deeply erroneous estimate of the moment. Comrade Kamenev likens the "party of the masses" to a "group of propagandists." But the "masses" have just now yielded to the "hysteria" of "revolutionary defense," of co-operation with the bourgeois government. Wouldn't it be more becoming for internationalists to be able to resist, at such a moment, the "mass" hysteria than "want to be with the masses," that is, to yield to the general epidemic? Haven't we seen in all the belligerent European countries how the social-patriots and betrayers of Socialism justified themselves by emphasizing their desire to "remain with the masses"? Is it not necessary for a certain time to be able to remain in a minority against the "mass" ? Is not the task of the propagandist, just at this moment, a central point in the struggle to liberate the proletarian cause from the "mass" defensive-bourgeois hysteria? The fusion of the masses, proletarian and non-proletarian, without distinctions of class differences within the masses, is one of the conditions producing the "defensive" epidemic. To speak contemptuously of the "group of propagandists" of the proletarian cause is, as a matter of fact, very unbecoming.

As I only arrived in Petrograd on the night of April 16, I could of course, on my own responsibility alone and without sufficient