The proletariat in power cannot but adopt the most energetic measures to solve the question of unemployment, because it is quite obvious that the representatives of the workers in the government cannot reply to the demands of unemployed workers with arguments about the bourgeois character of the revolution. The capitalists, who in their oppression of the workers always relied upon the existence of a reserve army of labour, would feel themselves economically powerless while the revolutionary government, at the same time, doomed them to political impotence. In undertaking the maintenance of the unemployed, the government thereby undertakes the maintenance of strikers. If it does not do that , it immediately and irrevocably undermines the basis of its own existence. There is nothing left for the capitalists to do then but to resort to the lockout, that is, to close the factories.
Similar problems arise in agriculture by the mere fact of the expropriation of the land.
In no way must it be supposed that a proletarian government, on expropriating the privately-owned estates carrying on production on a large scale, would break these up and sell them for exploitation to small producers. The only path open to it in this sphere is the organization of co-operative production under communal control or organized directly by the State. But this is the path to Socialism. All this quite clearly shows that Social Democrats cannot enter a revolutionary government, giving the workers in advance an undertaking not to give way on the minimum programme, and at the same time promising the bourgeoisie not to go beyond it. Such a bilateral undertaking is absolutely impossible to realize.