Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/9

Rh two revolutions opposed each other; the struggle was one of Socialism against Capitalism; and the proletarian revolution conquered, together with its program for the expropriation of Capitalism and the establishment of a Socialist Republic.

Much noise and capital has been made by the journalistic Praetorian Guard of Imperialism of the democratic character of some of the "Provisional Governments" organized during the counter-revolutionary campaign against the Soviet Republic. The personnel of these "governments," is the argument, consist of former enemies of Czarism and members of the dispersed Constituent Assembly, and accordingly represent democracy. But there are two forms of democracy in Russia struggling each against the other. The dispersed Constituent Assembly, these "democratic Provisional Governments," represent democracy, but it is the democracy of the bourgeois order,—simply a form of authority of the capitalists over the workers; that paltry democracy which depends upon an expropriated proletariat and impoverished peasantry. This democracy is counter-revolutionary, since it struggles against the fundamental democracy of Socialism. The term counter-revolutionary as used by the Soviets includes not alone the adherents of Czarism, who are unimportant, but equally the adherent of bourgeois democracy which is in reaction against the fundamental, oncoming communist democracy of Socialism,—industrial self-government of the workers.

The proletarian revolution in Russia marks a decisive break with the revolutionary traditions and ideology of the past To compare it with previous revolutions, fundamentally, is to miss its epochal significance and misrepresent its character and action. There are no real historic standards by which to measure the proletarian revolution in Russia; it is making its own history, creating the standards by which alone this revolution and subsequent proletarian revolutions may be measured. This circumstance is pivotal in interpreting the course of events in Russia and the meaning of the first general revolution of the proletariat.

In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx declares that bourgeois revolutions hark to the past for inspiration; the old figures and ideology appear as means to intoxicate people with their revolutionary task. Cromwell and the English drew from the Old Testament the figures and the ideology for their bourgeois revolution. At one moment, the French Revolution is cloaked in the forms of the Roman Republic; at another, in the forms of Roman Empire. But, says Marx, "the Social Revolution [of the