a bourgeois readiness to accept soft jobs in the Government, a glaring reformist corruption in parliamentary activity, despicable middle-class routine. But this capitalist and bourgeois atmosphere disappears but slowly even after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie (owing to the fact that the latter is constantly reborn from the peasantry), and the same atmosphere tends to permeate every sphere of activity and life, still reappearing in the form of place-hunting, national chauvinism and middle-classness of outlook and attitude, etc.
To yourselves, dear boycottists and anti-parliamentarians, you seem to be "terribly revolutionary," but in reality you are intimidated by comparatively small difficulties in the struggle against bourgeois influences within the labor movement, when actually your victory—i.e., the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the conquest of the political power by the proletariat, will create these very difficulties on an infinitely larger scale. Like children, you have become frightened of a difficulty which confronts you to-day, failing to understand that, to-morrow and the day after, you will have to learn to overcome the same kind of difficulties, but on a far larger scale.
Under the Soviet form of government, both our and your parties are invaded by an ever-growing number of bourgeois intellectuals. They will find their way into the Soviets, and into the courts of law, and into every sphere of administration, as it is impossible to build up Communism otherwise than out of the human material created by capitalism. Since it is impossible to expel and to destroy the bourgeois intelligentsia, it becomes indispensable to conquer this intelligentsia, to change, to re-train and to re-educate it, just as it is necessary to re-educate, in the process of a long struggle, the proletariat itself, on the basis of proletarian dictatorship. The proletariat cannot abolish its own petit-bourgeois prejudices at one miraculous stroke; this can be accomplished neither by the command of the Virgin Mary, nor by any slogan, resolution, or decree, but only by dint of a long and difficult mass struggle against petit-bourgeois influence. The same problems which at the present time the anti-parliamentarians brush aside with one hand so proudly, so loftily, so lightly, so childishly, will, under the Soviet system of government, arise within the very
