In agriculture, similar problems will present themselves through the very fact of land-expropriation. We cannot imagine a proletarian government expropriating large private estates with agricultural production on a large scale, cutting them into pieces and selling them to small owners. For it the only open way is to organize in such estates coöperative production under communal or state management. This, however, is the way of Socialism.
Social-Democracy can never assume power under a double obligation: to put the entire minimum program into operation for the sake of the proletariat, and to keep strictly within the limits of this program, for the sake of the bourgeoisie. Such a double obligation could never be fulfilled. Participating in the government, not as powerless hostages, but as a leading force, the representatives of labor eo ipso break the line between the minimum and maximum program. Collectivism becomes the order of the day. At which point the proletariat will be stopped on its march in this direction, depends upon the constellation of forces, not upon the original purpose of the proletarian Party.
It is, therefore, absurd to speak of a specific character of proletarian dictatorship (or a dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry) within a bourgeois revolution, viz., a purely democratic dictatorship. The working class can never secure the democratic character of its dictatorship without overstepping the limits of its democratic program. Illusions to the contrary may become a handicap. They would compromise Social-Democracy from the start.
Once the proletariat assumes power, it will fight for it to the end. One of the means to secure and solidify its power will be propaganda and organization, particularly in the village; another means will be a policy of Collectivism. Collectivism is not only dictated by the very position of the Social-Democratic Party as the party in power, but it becomes imperative as a means to secure this position through the active support of the working class.
When our Socialist press first formulated the idea of a Permanent Revolution which should lead from the liquidation of absolutism and civic bondage to a Socialist order through a series of ever growing social conflicts, uprisings of ever new masses, unremitting attacks of the proletariat on the political and economic privileges of the governing classes, our "progressive" press started a unanimous indignant uproar. Oh, they had suffered enough, those gentlemen of the "progressive" press; this nuisance, however, was too much. Revolution, they said, is not a thing that can be made "legal!" Extraordinary measures are allowable only on extraordinary occasions. The aim of the revolutionary movement, they asserted, was not to make the revolution go on forever, but to bring it as soon as possible into the channels of law, etc., etc. The more radical representatives of the same democratic bourgeoisie do not attempt to oppose the revolution from the standpoint of completed constitutional "achievements": tame as they are, they understand how hopeless it is to fight the proletariat revolution with the weapon of parliamentary cretinism in advance of the establishment of parliamentarism itself. They, therefore, choose another way. They forsake the standpoint of law, but take the standpoint of what they deem to be facts,—the standpoint of historic "possibilities," the standpoint of political "realism,"—even ... even the standpoint of "Marxism." It was Antonio, the pious Venetian bourgeois, who made the striking observation:
Mark you this, Bassanio,
The devil can cite scriptures for his purpose.
Those gentlemen not only consider the idea of labor government in Russia fantastic, but they repudiate the very probability of a Social revolution in Europe in the near historic epoch. The necessary "prerequisites" are not yet in existence, is their assertion.
Is it so? It is, of course, not our purpose to set a time for a Social revolution. What we attempt here is to put the Social revolution into a proper historic perspective.