functions of State; by the intervention of banks, the upper-grade bureaucrats become subservient to finance-capital, of which they are, to a certain degree, the agents, whose interests they defend and whose influence they propagate.
To believe that by means of this State machinery such social transformation as the suppression without compensation of the big property-holders in the cereal monopoly, &c., can be brought about is utterly to delude oneself, and is at the same time to fool the people. A republican bourgeoisie could use this machinery to create a republic of the type of "a monarchy without a monarch," like the Third French Republic, but it is absolutely incapable of achieving radical reform; I do not say of abolishing, but simply of limiting in a more or less effective way the rights of capital and the "sacred rights" of individual property. It is for this reason that, in all the coalition ministries in which "Socialists" participated, the latter, even if they were of good faith, were only a vain ornament or a screen for the bourgeois Government, a buffer against popular indignation, an instrument for duping the masses. That had been the rôle of Louis Blanc in 1848; that had been, since then, the rôle of innumerable coalition ministries in England and France; that had been the rôle of Tchernov and of Tseretelli in 1917[1] and so it will remain as long as the bourgeois regime lasts and the old bourgeois State apparatus based on bureaucracy exists in its integrity.
Now, one of the fundamental merits of the Soviets, of the workers', soldiers' and peasants' deputies, is that they represent a type of State machinery infinitely superior and incomparably more democratic. The Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks undertook the impossible in their endeavour to transform the Soviets (particularly that of Petrograd, as also the All-Russian Soviet, that is, the Central Executive Committee) into vague talking shops, occupied solely, under cover of "control," in voting impotent resolutions on what they desire, the realisation of which the Government, with the most exquisite urbanity, postpones to the Greek Kalends.[2] But it only needed the escapade of Kornilov, that fresh breeze, forerunner of a good storm, temporarily to purify
- ↑ Tchernov, Social Revolutionary leader, Minister of Agriculture; Tseretelli, Social Democrat, Minister of Posts and Telegraphs in the Coalition Cabinet of May 6.
- ↑ This is the opinion not only of Lenin, but also of the anti-Bolshevik Social Democrat Soukhanov given in his Memoirs of the Revolution.
