tariat represents not the majority, but the minority. And yet it can practise its dictatorship only in the event of its representing the majority. No serious Socialist will dispute this."[1]
Or take the opinion on this question of the already mentioned P. P. Maslov, who at the time was an orthodox Menshevik. He wrote"
"The working class of Russia cannot undertake the organisation of production because it represents a minority of the population of the country. Other classes predominate over it even numerically." (Maslov, op. cit. p. 143.)
Here is another passage:
"The revolution now taking place, being a bourgeois revolution, i.e., preserving all the principles of the capitalist system at the same time, may be—and inevitably will be—a Social Revolution, which will bring about a considerable change in economic relations, not in the sphere of the organisation of production but in the sphere of the distribution of the national income among the various classes" (i.e., the workers will receive a little more than they have been receiving and the peasants will be subject to a little less taxation, etc.). (Ibid: vol. 2, p. 246.)
This is what the pillars of Menshevism, the best Menshevik ideologists, wrote at the beginning of the revolution in describing that revolution as being necessarily and inevitably a bourgeois revolution.
From this it is clear that as events developed
- ↑ Ibid: vol. 2, p. 346.
