28 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 29 there sinks a fighter of the future, a soldier of the revolution, a savior of humanity from the yoke of capitalism, into the grave.
This madness will not stop, and this bloody nightmare of hell will not cease until the workers of Germany, of France, of Russia and of England will wake up out of their drunken sleep; will clasp each other hands in brotherhood and will drown the bestial chorus of war agitators and the hoarse cry of capitalist hyenas with the mighty cry of labor, Proletarians of all countries, unite.
The Proletarian Revolution in Russia By Louis FRAINA The Russian Revolution is an incomparably mightier event than any previous revolution; larger in scope and deeper in ultimate meaning than the French Revolution. It is not, as yet, the Social Revolution; but it marks the start of the revolution of the proletariat against Capitalism. Internally, the Russian Revolution pursues a class policy in accord with the interests and requirements of the revolutionary proletariat; internationally, in the attitude toward war and peace, it pursues, in the words of Leon Trotzky, its independent class policy, a policy in accord with the requirements of the international proletariat.
In 1914, the Social Democratic Workers Party, the Bolsheviki, demanded the transformation of the imperialistic war into a civil war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and for Socialism. The imperialistic war in Russia has been transformed into a civil war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie; it may yet become the Social Revolution of the international proletariat; if not immediately, surely ultimately.
The prevailing historic situation, acting through the pressure of events and the existence of a class conscious proletariat, has made of the Russian Revolution a proletarian revolution, to the horror and indignation of the pseudo Marxists who dogmatically insist that Russia is ripe only for a bourgeois revolution. But life itself answers dogma.
The insistence upon Russia being ripe only for the bourgeois revolution ignores a number of factors that completely alter the problem, creating a new historic situation which alone is the determining consideration.
The central factor is the existence of Imperialism, which not only makes a national democratic revolution of the bourgeoisie in itself incompatible with the requirements of modern Capitalism, but which equally makes Europe as a whole ripe for the immediate revolutionary struggle for Socialism. Imperialism determines Capitalism in a reactionary policy; but, simultane