vailing in Russia, the point of view of general and European Social-Democracy, plus Bogdanov-Bazarov plus Trotsky plus Kamenev-Zinoviev. We have already dealt with this in passing, but now it is necessary to emphasise it more strongly. It turns out that if consistently applied, this point of view would lead to one of the following two possible situations: if no victorious international working class revolution takes place, then the Bolsheviks are doomed, either because they will be overthrown, or as a result of their own degeneration. There is no other alternative, because if no objective premises for the Socialist revolution exist, if the proletarian dictatorship, as a proletarian dictatorship, cannot exist for any length of time, it may at best preserve its form by changing its content, i.e. the proletarian State must become something "far from a proletarian State." If in the social class sphere the peasantry overwhelmingly predominate and if conflict with the peasantry is inevitable, then equally inevitably must our State degenerate (if we "preserve ourselves") because, owing to the increasing pressure of the peasantry led by the wealthy peasants, it must make more and more concessions to the peasantry. In this manner the degeneration of our State willl develop in a concrete form: it will become a "kulak State."[1] In other words, the opportunistic premises laid down already in the summer of 1917 wholly contain the ideology of the present-day opposition which, starting out from the fact that we exist, argues about the tendencies of our degeneration. The structure of the theory of the opposition inevitably leads to such conclusions. It is true that the Social-Democrats drew these conclusions before the oppo-
- ↑ Kulak—wealthy peasant, "gentleman farmer."
