Or take the organization of the State. Kautsky seizes upon all manner of petty things, including the system of "indirect" elections under the Soviet constitution, but the essence of things wholly escapes him. He does not see the class nature of the State machinery. By a thousand-and-one tricks the capitalists, in a bourgeois democracy—and these tricks are the more skillful and the more effective, the further "pure" democracy has developed—keep the masses out of the administration and frustrate the freedom of the press, the right of meeting, etc. The Soviet régime, on the contrary, is the first in the world (or strictly speaking, the second, because the Commune of Paris attempted to do the same thing) to attract the masses, that is, the exploited, masses, to the work of administration. The laboring masses are kept away from bourgois parliament (which never decides the most important questions in a bourgeois democracy, as they are decided by the Stock Exchange and the banks) by a thousand-and-one barriers, in consequence of which the working-class perfectly well realizes that the bourgeois parliaments are institutions foreign to them, are an instrument of oppression, of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, are an institution of the hostile class, of the exploiting minority.
As against this, the Soviets are the direct organization of the laboring and exploited masses themselves, which enables them to organize and to administer the State by their own efforts in their own manner. The urban proletariat, the advance guard of the toiling and exploited, enjoys under this arrangement a position of advantage due to its being best organized by the large industrial concerns, which enables it best to hold elections and to control the elected. The Soviet system automatically facilitates the rallying of all those who work and are exploited around their advance guard, the proletariat. The old bourgeois apparatus, the bureaucracy, the privileges of wealth, of bourgeois education, of social connections,
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