However, it is a fact that, while remaining selfish as any of the lower middle class, while not exceeding the average representative of the bourgeois classes by the "human" value of his personality, the average workingman learns in the school of life's experience that his most primitive desires and most natural wants can be satisfied only on the debris of the capitalist order.
If Socialism should attempt to create a new human nature within the limits of the old world, it would be only a new edition of the old moralistic Utopias. The task of Socialism is not to create a Socialist psychology as a prerequisite to Socialism, but to create Socialist conditions of human life as a prerequisite to a Socialist psychology.
CHAPTER VIII
A LABOR GOVERNMENT IN RUSSIA AND SOCIALISM
The objective prerequisites of a Social revolution, as we have shown above, have been already created by the economic progress of advanced capitalist countries. But how about Russia? Is it possible to think that the seizure of power by the Russian proletariat would be the beginning of a Socialist reconstruction of our national economy?
A year ago we thus answered this question in an article which was mercilessly bombarded by the organs of both our factions. We wrote:
"The workingmen of Paris, says Marx, had not expected miracles from the Commune. We cannot expect miracles from a proletarian dictatorship now. Governmental power is not almighty. It is folly to think that once the proletariat has seized power, it would abolish capitalism and introduce socialism by a number of decrees. The economic system is not a product of state activity. What the proletariat will be able to do is to shorten economic evolution towards Collectivism through a series of energetic state measures.
"The starting point will be the reforms enumerated in our so-called minimum program. The very situation of the proletariat, however, will compel it to move along the way of collectivist practice.
"It will be comparatively easy to introduce the eight hour workday and progressive taxation, though even here the center of gravity is not the issuance of a 'decree,' but the organization of its practical application. It will be difficult, however,—and here we pass to Collectivism—to organize production under state management in such factories and plants as would be closed down by their owners in protest against the new law.
"It will be comparatively simple to issue a law abolishing the right of inheritance, and to put it into operation. Inheritances in the form of money capital will not embarrass the proletariat and not interfere with its economy. To be, however, the inheritor of capital invested in land and industry, would mean for a labor government to organize economic life on a public basis.