alone in their march towards Socialism. If we were alone we would not reach the goal of our task, even peacefully, for it is properly speaking international. But we have a powerful reserve in the army of the most advanced workers of other countries. Russia's break-away from imperialism and the imperialistic war will accelerate everywhere the ripening of the Socialist—the workers'—revolution.
One talks of the "rivers of blood" that civil war would provoke. This phrase, which we have already cited in the resolution of the Cadet-Kornilovians, is repeated on all sides by the bourgeoisie and opportunists of every shade. After Kornilov's insurrection it does and can only excite laughter among all class-conscious workers.
But during the time of actual war the question of bloodshed must be regarded from this perspective: the approximate evaluation of the forces, the calculation of the consequences. It must be taken seriously, not just as an empty phrase, as a simple hypocrisy of the Cadets who did their best to allow Kornilov to flood Russia with blood in order to restore the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the power to the big landed proprietors and the monarchy. "Rivers of blood" they say to us. Let us also examine that side of the question.
Let us admit that the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks continue in their eternal falterings, that they do not give over the power to the Soviets, do not overthrow Kerensky; that they re-establish, in a scarcely different form, the old compromise with the bourgeoisie (discarding, for example, the Cadets for the Kornilovians "without party"), that they do not substitute the existing machinery of power for the Soviet machinery, that they make no peace proposals, that they do not break with imperialism or confiscate the estates of the big proprietors. Let us face all this as the result of the present shilly-shallying of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries.
The experience of our revolution shows with blinding evidence that such a state of affairs would bring the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks to an even feebler condition. They would become more and more separated from the masses, whose indignation and fury would retaliate and whose sympathies for the revolutionary party the Bolsheviks would considerably increase. The proletariat in the capital would be nearer related than at present to the Commune, to the workers' insurrection, the conquest of power, and to civil war in its most definite and decisive form.
