Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/62

 only then that the victorious countries resolved to render united assistance in this civil war to the Russian landlords and capitalists.

In addition to the natural development of the resistance of the overthrown class, it drew a new source of power from the attitude of the proletariat and the peasantry. All those who have made a study of Marxism, all those whose views of socialism are connected with its relation to the international movement of the working class as the only scientific basis of Marxism, all these know that socialism means the abolition of classes. But what does this mean? It does not stop at overthrowing the capitalists; its next step is to remove the difference between the social position of the workers and the peasants. The peasants who as a class are toilers, who have for scores and hundreds of years been oppressed by the landlord and capitalist class, cannot forget for long that their emancipation from this oppression has been effected by the working class. The endless disputes on this question and the mountains ot paper used in dealing with it, as well as the numerous political groupings to which this led, have ended in the fact that all these differences have paled into insignificance before the actual facts of life.

But on the other hand under the conditions of commodity production the peasants remain owners, property holders; every instance of the sale of bread in the open market, every sack of flour or other food carried from place to place by private traders, every speculative deal means the restitution of commodity production and therefore the restitution of capitalism. The overthrow of capitalism involved and brought about the emancipation of the peasantry, but against this overthrow there was the petty bourgeoisie—in old Russia undoubtedly a large class. The peasantry remain private owners as far as their production is concerned, and are establishing new capitalistic relations. These are the principal features of our economic position, and it is this that gives rise to those absurd speeches emanating from men who fail to understand the real position: speeches on liberty, equality and democracy. We are conducting a class struggle and our aim is to abolish classes; so long as there still exists two classes, those of peasants and workers, socialism cannot be realised, and an irreconcilable struggle goes on incessantly. The chief problem now is how under the conditions when one class is carrying on the struggle, to attract the labouring peasantry, to defeat or to neutralise it or crush its resistance with the aid of a strong; government apparatus involving all the measures of compulsion.

The class struggle is being continued and the significance of proletarian dictatorship appears before us in a new light. Here it appears not only as an application of the means of compulsion through the whole State apparatus, though this of course remains the principal idea of proletarian dictatorship. It is to some extent true that so far we have achieved little on this