Pravda No. 190, August 28, 1921
Lenin
Every specific turn in history causes some change in the form of petty-bourgeois wavering, which always occurs alongside the proletariat, and which, in one degree or an other, always penetrates its midst.
This wavering flows in two "streams": petty-bourgeois reformism, i.e., servility to the bourgeoisie covered by a cloak of sentimental democratic and "Social"-Democratic phrases and fatuous wishes; and petty-bourgeois revolutionism -- menacing, blustering and boastful in words, but a mere bubble of disunity, disruption and brainlessness in deeds. This wavering will inevitably occur until the taproot of capitalism is cut. Its form is now changing owing to the change taking place in the economic policy of the Soviet government.
The leitmotif of the Mensheviks [1] is: "The Bolsheviks have reverted to capitalism; that is where they will meet their end. The revolution, including the October Revolution, has turned out to be a bourgeois revolution after all! Long live democracy! Long live reformism!" Whether this is said in the purely Menshevik spirit or in the spirit of the Socialist-Revolutionaries,[2] in the spirit of the Second International or in the spirit of the Two-and-a-Half International,[3] it amounts to the same thing.
The leitmotif of semi-anarchists like the German "Communist Workers' Party",[4] or of that section of our former Workers' Opposition[5] which has left or is becoming estranged from the Party, is: "The Bolsheviks have lost faith in the working class." The slogans they deduce from this are more or less akin to the "Kronstadt" slogans of the spring of 1921.[6]
