454 THE CLASS STRUGGLE RECONSTRUCTION IN RUSSIA 455 Reconstruction in Russia resentative of the Finnish Workers Republic, am officially sending your Government a proposition of mediation between America and the Russian Soviets. Not that for a moment believe that such a proposition will be entertained, nor even acknowledged, but for the sake of historic record will put myself and our cause down as having done everything imaginable and consistent with our principles to avoid the calamity of a general war between the Russian people and the Alllies.
It may seem preposterous to some of your officials, and perhaps to you as well, that we, the unrecognized and uncouth representatives of the aspirations of the masses in the East, shall even expect a consideration of our propositions. But the history of what we are doing today, and of what you are doing or not doing, will be recorded a few decenniums from now by historians of a period when the idea we represent today will have become the basis of the structure of the world, and it will be our classless society of to morrow, which will pass judgment on your class of to day.
The central feature of reconstruction in Russia is that it proceeds upon the basis of a proletarian state, functioning through a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat. The policy of the Bolsheviki, in complete harmony with Marxism, is that the first requirement of Socialism in action is the conquest of power by the proletariat, after which accomplishment reconstruction becomes fundamental reconstruction and assumes the tendency of making for Socialism, instead of promoting Capitalism.
The dictatorship of the proletariat, the dynamic mechanism of the introduction of Socialism, may be described as having three functions. The annihilation of the political power of the bourgeoisie in all its ramifications. The assumption of state power by the revolutionary proletariat disposes of the bourgeoisie temporarily as a political force; the bourgeoisie must be disposed of permanently. This is accomplished in two ways: the economic expropriation of the bourgeoisie, and its complete exclusion from participation in politics and government. In the measure that the process of reconstruction absorbs the bourgeoisie into the ranks of the useful producers, will they again be allowed as workersto participate in politics and government. The introduction of measures of temporary reconstruction. The transition from Capitalism to Socialism is not accomplished in a day: it is a process. But while the moderate and the revolutionary Socialist agree that the transition to Socialism is a process, there is violent disagreement as to the character of the process. The moderate Socialist assumes that it is a process operating upon the basis of Capitalism and the bourgeois state; a gradual penetration of Socialism into Capitalism; but this is a process that cannot and never will emerge into Socialism, being the process of petit bourgeois collectivism, and making for State