CHAPTER IV.
WHO WERE THE ENEMIES IN THE WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST WHOM BOLSHEVISM GREW, GAINED STRENGTH AND BECAME HARDENED?
First of all, and principally, in the struggle against opportunism, which, in 1914, grew definitely into social chauvinism, and finally deserted to the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. This was naturally the chief enemy of Bolshevism within the movement of the working class, and this remains the chief enemy also on an international scale. This enemy claimed, and claims, most of the attention of the Bolsheviks, whose work in this sphere is already well known abroad.
Something else, however, must be said of the other enemy of Bolshevism in the working-class movement. It is not sufficiently known abroad that Bolshevism grew up, formed, and hardened itself in long years of struggle against petit-bourgeois revolutionism, which resembles, or borrows something from, anarchism. It differs in one respect or another, in all essentials, from the conditions and requirements of a consistent proletarian class-struggle. For Marxians it is well-established theoretically—and the experience of all European revolutions and revolutionary movements fully confirms—that the small owner (the social type which in many European countries is very numerous and widespread), who, under capitalism, is constantly oppressed and suffering, and whose conditions of life often take a sharp and rapid turn for the worse, moves easily when faced with ruin to extreme revolutionism, but is incapable of displaying consistency, organization, discipline and firmness. The petit-bourgeois, "gone mad" from the horrors of capitalism, is a social phenomenon which,
