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SOVIET GOVERNMENT

of the Soviets and Soviet rule. There is a petty bourgeois tendency to turn the members of the Soviets into "parliamentarians" or, on the other hand, into bureaucrats. This should be combated by attracting all members of the Soviet to practical participation in management. The departments of the Soviets are turning in many places into organs which gradually merge with the commissariats. Our aim is to attract every member of the poor classes to practical participation in the management, and the different steps leading toward this end (the more diverse the better), should be carefully registered, studied, systematized, verified on broader experiences and legalized. It is our object to obtain the free performance of state obligations by every toiler after he is through with his eight hour session of productive work. The transition toward this end is especially difficult, but only this transition will secure the definite realization of Socialism. The novelty and the difficulty of the change naturally cause an abundance of steps which are made, so to speak, in the dark, an abundance of mistakes and hesitations. Without this, no sudden movement forward is possible. The originality of the present situation consists, from the standpoint of many who consider themselves Socialists, in this—that people have been used theoretically to contrast capitalism and Socialism, and between one and the other they profoundly put the word "leap" (some, recalling Engels, quote more profoundly this: "A leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.") That the word "leap" was used by the Socialist teachers to denote the crisis of an historical transformation and that leaps of this kind comprise periods of ten or more years—this cannot be understood by most of the so-called Socialists who study Socialism from books, and who have never given serious thought to this matter. It is natural that the so-called "Intelligentzia" furnish during such times an infinite number of criers after the dead; one bewails the Constituent Assembly; another bourgeois discipline; a third, the capitalist order; a fourth, the cultured aristocrat; a fifth, imperialistic "greater Russia"; and so on and so forth.