information"! When the masters exercise control over their servants and the capitalists over "their" workers, that is all in the natural order of things. The private life of the workers and of the exploited classes is not considered as "inviolable." The capitalist class has the right to demand that each worker should render an account; they have always a right to reveal to the public the income and expenditure of the workers. But the bourgeoisie will never allow the oppressed to control the oppressor, to investigate his income and expenditure; to reveal his state of luxury—even during the war when this very state of luxury is provoking famine in the country and the death of soldiers at the front. The bourgeoisie will not allow this kind of control, for it is "spying" and "illegal information."
The question always comes back to the same point—the domination of the bourgeoisie is incompatible with truly revolutionary democracy. In the twentieth century, in a capitalist country, it is impossible for us to be revolutionary democrats if we are afraid to go forward to Socialism.
11.—Is it Possible to make a Forward Step if we are afraid to Advance to Socialism?
The preceding argument may easily arouse in the mind of the reader impregnated with the current opportunist ideas of the S.R.'s and the Mensheviks the objection that most of the measures we have just described are not democratic, but socialist.
This objection, which is current (in one form or another) in the bourgeois, Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik Press, is a reactionary excuse of backward capitalism, a defence on the model of Struve. We are not yet ripe, they say, for Socialism. Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution-that's why we must bow down and give way to the bourgeoisie (although the great French bourgeois revolutionaries, 125 years ago, made sure of the greatness of their revolution by the use of the Terror against all oppressors, of any kind whatever; landed seigneurs as well as capitalists).
The pseudo-Marxists (including the S.R.'s) who have become the servants of the bourgeoisie and who argue in this way do not understand the nature of imperialist monopoly, the nature of the
