This crux namely is: must the Soviets aspire to become State institutions (the Bolsheviks putt forward the demand, in April, 1917, that the whole power must belong to the Soviets, and at the party conference in the same month, they declared that they were no longer satisfied with a bourgeois parliamentary republic, but demanded a workers' and peasants' republic of the Commune or Soviet type); or must the Soviets not aspire to assume State authority and to become State institutions, and must they remain "militant organizations of one class" (as Martoff used to put it, discreetly concealing under this innocent wish the fact that the Soviets under Menshevik leadership were the instrument of subjection of the workers by the bourgeoisie)?
Kautsky, in a servile manner, has repeated Martoff's words, picking out fragments from a theoretical controversy between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and transplanting them, without rhyme or reason, on to the general theoretical and European field. The result is such a quid pro quo muddle as to provoke Homeric laughter in every intelligent Russian worker who hears of these arguments of Kautsky. No doubt, with the same laughter, Mr. Kautsky will be greeted by every worker in Europe (except a handful of inveterate Socialist Imperialists) who learns what the question at issue is. Indeed, Kautsky has rendered Martoff a bad service by reducing to an obvious absurdity Martoff's error. Let us, indeed, examine the result of Kautsky's argument.
The Soviets embrace all wage workers. As against financial capital all the previous methods of economic and political struggle of the proletariat are inadequate. The Soviets have a great future before them even outside Russia. They will play a decisive part in the great final battles between capital and labor in Europe. This is what Kautsky says.
Very well. But will not the "final battles between capital and labor” decide the question, which of the two
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