Formally, today’s revolution in Russia is the ultimate offshoot of the Great French Revolution of a hundred years ago. The entire past century essentially accomplished only the work bequeathed to it by the aforesaid great historical upheaval—the establishment of the class rule of the modern bourgeoisie, capitalism, in all countries.
In the first act of this century-long crisis, this truly authentic revolution undermined the feudal society of the Middle Ages, turned it upside down, shook it, carved it up roughly into the classes of modern society, illuminated to a significant extent the goals [of these new classes] along with their social and political programs, and in the end overturned feudalism in all of Europe—with the help of the Napoleonic wars.
In subsequent stages the internal class division of modern bourgeois society, which had begun with the Great French Revolution, was carried further—in class struggle and through class struggle. In the period of Restoration [1815–30], high finance took the helm of state into its own hands, but the July Revolution [of 1830] put an end to that. In the July Revolution, the big industrial bourgeoisie came to power, and then it fell thanks to the February Revolution [of 1848]. The February Revolution finally gave power to the broad masses of the medium and lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie in the form of today’s Third Republic. Here the modern class rule of the bourgeoisie achieved its final form and fullest development. But meanwhile, in the midst of all these internal struggles of the bourgeoisie, there arose a new cleavage—the deep divide between the entire bourgeois society and the modern working class. The birth and maturation of this class contradiction, in parallel with the internal class conflicts among the bourgeoisie, also extended through the history of the entire century.
The Great French Revolution already saw the first general shaking up of all the elements, and together with all the internal conflicts of bourgeois society, it also brought to the surface the proletariat and its ideal—communism. The brief reign of “the Mountain” [in 1792–1793], the highest point of the revolution, marked the first historical debut of the modern proletariat. However, this proletariat did not step onto the stage of history independently, but was wrapped in the folds of the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie and together with those strata constituted what was called “the people,” whose hostility toward bourgeois society found expression in the poorly understood form of the antagonism of the “people’s republic” toward constitutional monarchy.
In the February Revolution and in the terrible carnage of the June Days [of 1848] the proletariat as a class separated itself completely from the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie and for the first time became conscious that within bourgeois society it was an entirely distinct class, which had to rely on its own strength and which was the mortal enemy of the existing society. In this way modern bourgeois society took shape in France and the work begun by the Great Revolution was completed.
While these main acts of the historical drama of capitalist society were played out in France, the history of Germany, Austria, and Italy was reflected in those acts—as was the history of all modern countries in the capitalist world.
There is nothing more foolish and absurd than when modern revolutions are viewed as nationally limited occurrences, as events that, with all their power, have an effect only within the borders of the country concerned, and that, on the other hand, they exert only a more-or-less weak effect on “neighboring countries”—because of their status as “neighbors.” Bourgeois society, capitalism, is an international phenomenon, a worldwide form of human society. There are not a multitude of bourgeois societies, or kinds of capitalism, as there are modern states and nations. Rather, there is only one international society, one capitalism, and the seemingly separate and independent existence of particular countries behind state borders in the presence of this single, indivisible worldwide economy is only one of the contradictions of capitalism. And also, for this reason, all modern revolutions are, as a matter of fact, international. All of it is one and the same prolonged bourgeois revolution, which in various acts was played out across all of Europe from 1789 to 1848 and which established the modern class rule of the bourgeoisie on an international basis.
Seemingly, the Russian state itself was an exception to that worldwide revolution. Here it appeared that medieval absolutism was able to persist as a leftover monument of the precapitalist era. But now, even in Russia, absolutism has already been crushed by the revolution [of 1905]. What we are living through today is no longer a battle of the revolution against the ruling system of absolutism, but a struggle between the remnants of absolutism, which survive in a formal sense, a struggle between them and the modern form of political liberty, which has become a living reality. And along with that, there is a battle among classes and parties over the limits of, and constitutional arrangements for, that political liberty.
The Russian Revolution, from the formal standpoint, as we have seen, is an ultimate offshoot of the era of bourgeois revolutions in Europe. Its most immediate task, according to outward appearances, is the creation of a modern-capitalist society under the open class rule of the bourgeoisie. However, the fact that Russia seemed to be isolated and closed off for the duration of an entire century and did not take part in the general European upheaval means that the revolution in Russia, which from the formal standpoint is bourgeois, is actually not at all the work of the bourgeoisie but of the working class. This means that the working class is no longer just an appendage of the lower petty bourgeoisie, as in all the [modern] revolutions up to now, but is coming forward and taking action independently, fully aware of its own particular class interests and aims—that is, as a class of workers led by Social Democracy.
To a large extent, the present revolution in Russia is linked directly to the slaughter in Paris in June 1848—to the days when, for the first time, the division between the proletariat and the entire bourgeois society became a reality, when at a single blow that division was put into effect as an accomplished fact.
In this way, today’s Russian Revolution contains within itself a greater contradiction than any of the preceding revolutions. It was not the bourgeoisie in this case who won the modern political forms of class rule by capital; rather, it was the working class that obtained them in spite of the bourgeoisie. Although—or rather, because—the working class for the first time entered the arena as an independent, class-conscious social stratum, it did not have those utopian socialist illusions with which it had come forward in alliance with the lower elements of the petty bourgeoisie in the bourgeois revolutions of the past. In Russia, the proletariat does not now have as its goal the establishment of socialism—it wants only to establish the capitalist-bourgeois preconditions for socialism. But at the same time, the workers have left their distinctive mark on bourgeois society, because this society took its moment of origin directly from the hands of the class-conscious proletariat. In truth, the working class has not set itself the task of the immediate introduction of socialism, but even farther from its thoughts is the establishment of an inviolable and untroubled rule by capital of the kind that emerged from the bourgeois revolutions of the past century in the West.
Rather than that, the proletariat in Russia is waging a battle simultaneously against absolutism and against capitalism; it is demanding the forms of bourgeois democracy, but it wants them for itself, for the purposes of the proletarian class struggle. The proletariat is demanding the eight-hour day, a people’s militia, and a republic—propositions directed toward bourgeois society, not socialist [demands].
However, these demands [are] so subversive of the rule of capital that they can be regarded as forms that are transitional to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat in Russia is fighting for the implementation of the most elementary bourgeois constitutional rights—the rights of assembly and of association, the right to form coalitions, and freedom of the press. And even today in the whirlpool of revolution the proletariat is making use of these bourgeois freedoms with the aim of creating its own more powerful class organizations, both economic and political—unions in the plants and factories and Social Democratic organizations. Thus, while one class—the bourgeoisie—formally is permitted to rule, it comes out of this revolution in an unprecedentedly weak condition, and the class that has formally been suppressed—the proletariat—turns out to be unprecedentedly strong.
In this way today’s revolution in Russia, as far as its essential content is concerned, has gone far beyond the other revolutions before this time, and in its methods it has nothing in common either with the bourgeois revolutions of the past or with the struggles of the modern proletariat at present—parliamentary struggles. It has created a new method of struggle corresponding to its proletarian character—the revolutionary mass strike. First, in its essential content, and then in its method, it is a completely new type of revolution.
Formally it is bourgeois-democratic, [but] in its essence it is proletarian-socialist, and thus this revolution, from the standpoint of its content and method, has become a transitional form—in transition from the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of the past to the proletarian revolutions of the future, in which the question will already be posed of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the implementation of socialism.
Thus, it is a distinctly defined type of revolution, not only logically but also historically, a form resulting from the given balance of class and social forces. The society that has emerged from this revolution in Russia is so much of its own special kind that it cannot be the same as the societies that resulted from the earlier revolutions in the West in the year 1848.
The strength, organization, and class consciousness of the proletariat will be so strongly developed in Russia after the revolution that the framework of “normal” bourgeois society will be disrupted at every turn. At the same time, the weakness and downheartedness of the bourgeoisie, which senses its own coming downfall, completely devoid of any political and revolutionary past, produces a combination of forces in which a steady and stable class rule by the bourgeoisie will be constantly shaken. A new phase in the history of bourgeois society is therefore also beginning, and because of this disruption of the balance of class forces, it will constantly give way to troubled and stormy times; and those stormy times, with more or less lengthy pauses between them, times which may be more or less violent, can lead to no other outcome than social revolution—the dictatorship of the proletariat.
All of this applies most of all to Russia. However, just as the massacres on the pavements of Paris in the French revolutions also shaped the destinies of Russia and all of Europe, in the same way today on the streets of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw, the fate not only of Russian society but of the whole capitalist world is being decided.
The revolution in Russia and the unique social creation produced by it are also bound to shift the relationship of class forces at a single stroke in Germany and in the whole world.
The Russian Revolution has closed an approximately sixty-year period of peaceful parliamentary rule by the bourgeoisie. With the Russian Revolution, we enter a period of transition between capitalist and socialist society. How long this period will last is a matter of interest not only to political forecasters of the weather. For the class-conscious international proletariat, it is important only to keep an ever sharper, clarifying eye on the near future as this emancipatory era unfolds, and to understand that in the thunderstorms ahead it must grow with equal speed, in steadfastness, consciousness, and heroism as the Russian proletariat is growing today before our eyes with each passing day and hour.