The proletariat can never indorse a program of "equal distribution" which on one hand demands a useless, purely formal expropriation of small owners, and on the other hand it demands a very real parceling of large estates into small lots. This would be a wasteful undertaking, a pursuance of a reactionary and Utopian plan, and a political harm for the revolutionary party.
How far, however, can the Socialist policy of the working class advance in the economic environment of Russia? One thing we can say with perfect assurance: it will meet political obstacles long before it will be checked by the technical backwardness of the country. Without direct political aid from the European proletariat the working class of Russia will not be able to retain its power and to turn its temporary supremacy into a permanent Socialist dictatorship. We cannot doubt this for a moment. On the other hand, there is no doubt that a Socialist revolution in the West would allow us to turn the temporary supremacy of the working class directly into a Socialist dictatorship.
CHAPTER IX
EUROPE AND THE REVOLUTION
In June, 1905, we wrote:
"More than half a century passed since 1848. Half a century of unprecedented victories of capitalism all over the world. Half a century of "organic" mutual adaptation of the forces of the bourgeois and the forces of feudal reaction. Half a century in which the bourgeoisie has manifested its mad appetite for power and its readiness to fight for it madly!
"As a self-taught mechanic, in his search for perpetual motion, meets ever new obstacles and piles mechanism over mechanism to overcome them, so the bourgeoisie has changed and reconstructed the apparatus of its supremacy avoiding 'supra-legal' conflicts with hostile powers. And as the self-taught mechanic finally clashes against the ultimate insurmountable obstacle,—the law of conservation of energy,—so the bourgeoisie had to clash against the ultimate implacable barrier,—class antagonism, fraught with inevitable conflict.
"Capitalism, forcing its economic system and social relations on each and every country, has turned the entire world into one economic and political organism. As the effect of the modern credit system, with the invisible bonds it draws between thousands of enterprises, with the amazing mobility it lends to capital, has been to eliminate local and partial crises, but to give unusual momentum to general economic convulsions, so the entire economic and political work of capitalism, with its world commerce, with its system of monstrous foreign debts, with its political groupings of states, which have drawn all reactionary forces into one world-wide co-partnership, has prevented local political crises, but it has prepared a basis for a social crisis of unheard of magnitude. Driving unhealthy processes inside, evading difficulties, staving off the deep problems of national and international politics, glossing over all contradictions, the bourgeoisie has postponed the climax, yet it has prepared a radical world-wide liquidation of its power. It has clung to all reactionary forces no matter what their origin. It has made the Sultan not the last of its friends. It has not tied itself on the Chinese ruler only because he had no power: it was more profitable to rob his possessions than to keep him in the office of a world gendarme and to pay him from the treasury of the bourgeoisie. Thus the bourgeoisie made the stability of its political system wholly dependent upon the stability of the pre-capitalistic pillars of reaction.
"This gives events an international character and opens a magnificent perspective; political emancipation, headed by the working class of Russia, will elevate its leader to a height unparalleled in history, it will give Russian proletariat colossal power and make it the initiator of world-wide liquidation of capitalism, to which the objective prerequisites have been created by history."