THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION 57 56 THE CLASS STRUGGLE The rapidity of events should not obscure their developmental character. As a revolutionary process, the proletarian revolution in Russia has developed through all the necessary historical stages. The overthrow of Czarism resulted in the establishment of the imperialistic bourgeois republic of the Milyukov Gutchkov government. But the frankly imperialistic character of this government was incompatible with the stage on which it operated.
Imperialism was undermined by the oncoming proletarian revolution, and Imperialism had to camouflage itself in the colors of radical democracy to promote its purposes and preserve Capitalism. This camouflage assumed the form of the radical Kerensky Menshevist government the final stage of the bourgeois republic. This is a significant development. That period comes in capitalism when, shaken by the oncoming proletarian revolution, it adopts as a last bulwark of defense the radical democracy of the moderate labor and Socialist movement, which is dominantly the movement of skilled labor and the petite bourgeoisie. This phenomena assumes the form of laborism in Australia, where the labor government became the centre of Imperialism and of bourgeois reaction against the oncoming revolution. It seems, apparently, that a similar development may occur in England, where the Labor Party, through its slogan of a democratic peace, promotes the war, and which, by now allowing all democratic social groups within its organization, is rapidly becoming the dominant party to which Lloyd George may yet relinquish power. The bourgeois intelligentsia of England is not only largely complacent about these developments, but actually approves of a potential labor government. Democracy serves to promote Imperialism, and democracy may serve to prevent, temporarily, the proletarian revolution. The radical bourgeois republic of the Menshevist Kerensky government was precisely of this character the final stage of the republic of Capitalism. Pluming itself as revolutionary, it acted against the proletarian revolution; it put pacifism in the service of Imperialism; it incorporated within itself the radical democracy of moderate Socialism to mislead the masses and provide Capitalism with a new lease of life. But this final stage of capitalism multiplies the inherent contradictions of Capitalism, and is temporary. The Socialism of a bourgeois government is in the nature of things mere camouflage, and being such it acts as a developer of class consciousness and revolutionary Socialism. The moderates of the Council represented in the government had to acquiesce in a bourgeois policy. The proletarian revolution, passing through a series of defeats which alternately weakened Capitalism and strengthened the Revolution, finally annihilated the Menshevist bourgeois republic. The proletarian revolution in Russia was not an arbitrary seizure of power, as was the Paris commune; it was the consequence of an historical development characteristic of the proletarian revolution as a process.
There are Socialists, for and against the Bolsheviki, who for motives of their own separate the Bolshevist policy into two phases, the internal and the international, agreeing with one and disagreeing with the other, in accordance with the peculiar considerations dominant in their purposes. This constitutes an absurdity, it is either a negation of Socialist policy or a result of unclear thinking. The policy of the Bolsheviki, internally and internationally, is equally determined by the requirements of the class struggle and of revolutionary Socialism; of the internal requirements of Russia and of the struggle for peace; of the necessity of the Social Revolution in Europe as the climax of the proletarian revolution in Russia. central feature of Bolshevist policy in practice is its emphasis on the mass action of the proletariat as the dynamic means of promoting the revolution. The revolution cannot operate within the orbit of legality: legality becomes the expression of the accomplished facts of the revolution, not the mechanics of the revolution. Legality is the ideology of the bourgeois; action the ideology of the proletariat. The first requirement is action that will produce accomplished facts, revolutionary action, and the seizure of revolutionary power. It is a process of action. Otherwise, the revolution withers and compromises. In a report concerning a unification meeting of Socialist groups, published in 1906, Lenine argued against the confiscation of lands as a demand in the party platform. Lenine favored the seizure of the lands