When our Socialist press first formulated the idea of a _Permanent Revolution_ which should lead from the liquidation of absolutism and civic bondage to a Socialist order through a series of ever growing social conflicts, uprisings of ever new masses, unremitting attacks of the proletariat on the political and economic privileges of the governing classes, our "progressive" press started a unanimous indignant uproar. Oh, they had suffered enough, those gentlemen of the "progressive" press; this nuisance, however, was too much. Revolution, they said, is not a thing that can be made "legal!" Extraordinary measures are allowable only on extraordinary occasions. The aim of the revolutionary movement, they asserted, was not to make the revolution go on forever, but to bring it as soon as possible into the channels of _law_, etc., etc. The more radical representatives of the same democratic bourgeoisie do not attempt to oppose the revolution from the standpoint of completed constitutional "achievements": tame as they are, they understand how hopeless it is to fight the proletariat revolution with the weapon of parliamentary cretinism _in advance_ of the establishment of parliamentarism itself. They, therefore, choose another way. They forsake the standpoint of law, but take the standpoint of what they deem to be facts,--the standpoint of historic "possibilities," the standpoint of political "realism,"--even ... even the standpoint of "Marxism." It was Antonio, the pious Venetian bourgeois, who made the striking observation:
Mark you this, Bassanio, The devil can cite scriptures for his purpose.
Those gentlemen not only consider the idea of labor government in Russia fantastic, but they repudiate the very probability of a Social revolution in Europe in the near historic epoch. The necessary "prerequisites" are not yet in existence, is their assertion.
Is it so? It is, of course, not our purpose to set a time for a Social revolution. What we attempt here is to put the Social revolution into a proper historic perspective.
Marxism turned Socialism into a science. This does not prevent some "Marxians" from turning Marxism into a Utopia.
[Trotzky then proceeds to find logical flaws in the arguments of N. Roshkov, a Russian Marxist, who had made the assertion that Russia was not yet ripe for Socialism, as her level of industrial technique and the class-consciousness of her working masses were not yet high enough to make Socialist production and distribution possible. Then he goes back to what he calls "prerequisites to Socialism," which in his opinion are: (1) development of industrial technique; (2) concentration of production; (3) social consciousness of the masses. In order that Socialism become possible, he says, it is not necessary that each of these prerequisites be developed to its logically conceivable limit.]