The problem of an armed revolution in Russia becomes essentially a problem of the proletariat. National militia, this classic demand of the bourgeoisie of 1848, appears in Russia from the very beginning as a demand for arming the people, primarily the working class. Herein the fate of the Russian revolution manifests itself most clearly.
CHAPTER IV
THE REVOLUTION AND THE PROLETARIAT
A revolution is an open contest of social forces in their struggle for political power.
The state is not an end in itself. It is only a working machine in the hands of the social force in power. As every machine, the state has its motor, transmission, and its operator. Its motive power is the class interest; its motor are propaganda, the press, influences of school and church, political parties, open air meetings, petitions, insurrections; its transmission is made up of legislative bodies actuated by the interest of a caste, a dynasty, a guild or a class appearing under the guise of Divine or national will (absolutism or parliamentarism); its operator is the administration, with its police, judiciary, jails, and the army.
The state is not an end in itself. It is, however, the greatest means for organizing, disorganizing and reorganizing social relations.
According to who is directing the machinery of the State, it can be an instrument of profoundest transformations, or a means of organized stagnation.
Each political party worthy of its name strives to get hold of political power and thus to make the state serve the interests of the class represented by the party. Social-Democracy, as the party of the proletariat, naturally strives at political supremacy of the working class.
The proletariat grows and gains strength with the growth of capitalism. From this viewpoint, the development of capitalism is the development of the proletariat for dictatorship. The day and the hour, however, when political power should pass into the hands of the working class, is determined not directly by the degree of capitalistic development of economic forces, but by the relations of class struggle, by the international situation, by a number of subjective elements, such as tradition, initiative, readiness to fight....
It is, therefore, not excluded that in a backward country with a lesser degree of capitalistic development, the proletariat should sooner reach political supremacy than in a highly developed capitalist state. Thus, in middle-class Paris, the proletariat consciously took into its hands the administration of public affairs in 1871. True it is, that the reign of the proletariat lasted only for two months, it is remarkable, however, that in far more advanced capitalist centers of England and the United States, the proletariat never was in power even for the duration of one day. To imagine that there is an automatic dependence between a dictatorship of the proletariat and the technical and productive resources of a country, is to understand economic determinism in a very primitive way. Such a conception would have nothing to do with Marxism.