Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/99

 Annexations are imposed by the bonds of capital: financial, banking, imperialistic capital,—that is the present economic foundation of annexations. From this angle, annexation means the political guarantee of profit on the millions of capital "invested" in thousands and thousands of enterprises in the annexed territories. It is impossible, even in one's wishes, to renounce annexations without taking decisive steps toward the overthrow of Capitalism.

Is it true, as the Social-Revolutionary Rabochaya Gazetta, Plekhanov's Yedinstvo, and the other Louis Blancs of our bourgeoisie are ready to infer, and actually do infer, that we must not take any decisive steps toward overthrowing capital? That we must be content, for the present, with reducing annexations to a minimum? No. We must energetically struggle for the overthrow of capital. The necessary measures must be introduced judiciously and gradually, and must be based on the support alone of the class consciousness and organized activity of the oppressed majority of the workers and of the poorest peasants. These steps must be taken. And the Soviets of Workers' Delegates in quite a number of Russian cities have already undertaken them.

There is now necessary in the order of the day a decisive, irrevocable formulation of the distinctions between us and the Louis Blancs, the Cheidses, Tseretellis, Stekloffs, the Mensheviki, the Social-Revolutionary Party, etc. We must point out to the masses that the policy of Louis Blanc will destroy and is destroying the onward success of the Revolution; that even the newly-won liberties will be lost, unless the masses understand the danger of petit bourgeois illusions and unite with the class conscious workers in their judicious, gradual, well-planned, yet firm and immediate, steps toward the realization of Socialism.

Outside of Socialism there is no deliverance of humanity from wars, from hunger, from the destruction of millions and millions of human beings.