Page:The Red Dawn (George).pdf/14

12 worker making an appeal to them for radical action and allegiance.

The impulse for the general strike of 1905 was the result of "Bloody Sunday" and the Social Democratic Party absorbed most of the industrial workers who organized, and these workers, true to proletarian ideals, became members and supporters of the Bolsheviki faction of the S. D.

Unable to engage in political scrambles to elect mayors and control dog-catchers, as the American Socialist Party does, the Russian Bolsheviki Socialists concentrated upon organizing workers as workers,—not as "citizen voters"—and measured the advancing strength of the movement by strikes and not by votes. This all plainly shows that no political saviors are to be lauded for their acts as great men. Lenine and Trotsky, far from imposing conditions upon the proletariat as the dictation of "great men" to the weak-brained workers, are themselves only the spokesmen and articulate tools of Russia's fighting proletariat.

To resume the discussion with the other faction of the S. D.—the Mensheviki. This faction was more or less opposed to the "revolutionary romanticism of the Bolsheviki," as they called it, claiming that a revolution in Russia at the present will still be one characteristically bourgeois and, therefore, a revolution of the proletariat and under its leadership "must yet remain a dream." From this premise the Mensheviki concluded that the bourgeois elements will be the leading factor in the expected revolution, the proletariat being delegated to be only the motive power in it, as had been the case in the revolutions of Western Europe. Thus, the proletariat in assisting the bourgeoisie to power and shedding its blood for the "free trade democracy," of the bourgeois system would have to compromise its revolutionary aims with