The preceding exposition can easily provoke the following objection in a reader educated on the commonplace opportunistic ideas of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks: the majority of the measures described here are, in essence, not democratic at all, but already socialist measures!

This commonplace objection, usual (in one form or another) in the press of the bourgeoisie, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks, is a reactionary defense of backward capitalism, a defense dressed up in Struvian fashion. They say, we are not ripe for socialism, it is too early to "introduce" socialism, our revolution is bourgeois – therefore we must be serfs to the bourgeoisie (although the great bourgeois revolutionaries of France, 125 years ago, made their revolution great by means of terror against all oppressors, both landowners and capitalists!).

The wretched Marxists who serve the bourgeoisie, to whom both the Socialist Revolutionaries have gone over, and who reason in this manner, do not understand (if we examine the theoretical foundations of their opinion) what imperialism is? what capitalist monopolies are? what the state is? what revolutionary democracy is? For if one understands this, one cannot fail to recognize that one cannot move forward without moving toward socialism.

Everyone talks about imperialism. But imperialism is nothing other than monopolistic capitalism.

That capitalism in Russia too has become monopolistic is testified to sufficiently clearly by "Produgol," "Prodamet," the sugar syndicate, and so forth. The very same sugar syndicate shows us before our eyes the transformation of monopolistic capitalism into state-monopolistic capitalism.

And what is the state? It is the organization of the ruling class – for example, in Germany the junkers and capitalists. Therefore, what the German Plekhanovs (Scheidemann, Lensch, and others) call "war socialism" is in reality war-state-monopolistic capitalism or, speaking more simply and clearly, military hard labor for workers, military protection of the profits of capitalists.

Well, try then to substitute for the junker-capitalist, for the landlord-capitalist state a state that is revolutionary-democratic, that is, one that revolutionarily destroys every privilege, that does not fear to revolutionarily implement the fullest democracy? You will see that state-monopolistic capitalism under a genuinely revolutionary-democratic state inevitably, necessarily means a step and steps toward socialism!

For if the largest capitalist enterprise becomes a monopoly, that means it serves the entire people. If it has become a state monopoly, that means the state (that is, the armed organization of the population, of workers and peasants, first and foremost, on condition of revolutionary democracy) – the state directs all the enterprise – in whose interests?

– either in the interests of landowners and capitalists; then we obtain not a revolutionary-democratic, but a reactionary-bureaucratic state, an imperialist republic, – or in the interests of revolutionary democracy; then this is already a step toward socialism.

For socialism is nothing other than the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or in other words: socialism is nothing other than state-capitalist monopoly turned to the benefit of the entire people and therefore ceasing to be a capitalist monopoly.

There is no middle ground here. The objective course of development is such that from monopolies (and war has increased their number, role, and significance tenfold) one cannot move forward without moving toward socialism.

Either be a revolutionary democrat in deed. Then one cannot fear steps toward socialism.

Or fear steps toward socialism, condemn them in Plekhanov fashion, in Danov fashion, in Chernov fashion with arguments that our revolution is bourgeois, that one cannot "introduce" socialism, and so forth – and then one will inevitably slide toward Kerensky, Milyukov, and Kornilov, that is, reactionary-bureaucratically suppress the "revolutionary-democratic" strivings of the workers' and peasants' masses.

There is no middle ground.

And in this lies the fundamental contradiction of our revolution.

One cannot stand still – in history generally, during war especially. One must move either forward or backward. To move forward, in twentieth-century Russia, which has conquered the republic and democracy by revolutionary means, one cannot without moving toward socialism, without taking steps toward it (steps conditioned and determined by the level of technique and culture: large-scale machine economy cannot be "introduced" in peasant agriculture, it cannot be abolished in sugar production).

And if one fears to move forward, that means moving backward, which is what Messrs. Kerensky and company, to the delight of Milyukovs and Plekhanovs, with the foolish complicity of Tsereteli and Chernovs, are doing.

The dialectic of history is precisely such that war, by extraordinarily hastening the transformation of monopolistic capitalism into state-monopolistic capitalism, has thereby extraordinarily brought humanity closer to socialism.

The imperialist war is the eve of the socialist revolution. And this is not only because war, with its horrors, engenders proletarian uprising – no uprising can create socialism if it has not matured economically – but because state-monopolistic capitalism is the most complete material preparation for socialism, it is its vestibule, it is that rung of history's ladder between which (rung) and the rung called socialism, there are no intermediate rungs whatsoever.

To the question of socialism our Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks approach doctrinairely, from the point of view of a doctrine they have learned by rote and poorly understood. They imagine socialism as something distant, unknown, a dark future.

But socialism now looks at us through every window of contemporary capitalism, socialism emerges directly, practically, from each major measure that constitutes a step forward on the basis of this newest capitalism.

What is universal labor conscription?

It is a step forward on the basis of the newest monopolistic capitalism, a step toward regulating economic life as a whole according to a known general plan, a step toward conservation of the people's labor, toward preventing its senseless waste by capitalism.

In Germany the junkers (landowners) and capitalists introduce universal labor conscription, and then it inevitably becomes military hard labor for workers.

But take that very same institution and think through its significance under a revolutionary-democratic state. Universal labor conscription, introduced, regulated, and directed by the Soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies – this is not yet socialism, but it is already not capitalism. This is an enormous step toward socialism, such a step that, on condition of preserving full democracy, from such a step one could not already go back, without unprecedented violence against the masses, to capitalism.