The Council of Workers and Soldiers represents new republic in the making, a republic other than the bourgeois republic, more in accord with the interest of the people. The revolutionary workers and soldiers of Petrograd dethroned the Czar and cleared the capital of the police. Having begun the Revolution, we must strengthen and completer it through the Council assuming all functions of the Mate. The police must not be restored. All the power of government, from the smallest villages up to Petrograd, must be vested in the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Delegates. Neither the police nor officials not responsible to the people and placed over the people,—but the people itself shall govern the country, the people fully armed and united by the Soviets. The Soviet alone shall establish the necessary order, its power alone be obeyed and rejected by the workers and peasants. Only by means of a Soviet government win Russia move forward firmly and surely to the liberation of our country and of all humanity from the horrors of this war and from the yoke of Capitalism.
Out of the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx shows that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the state, and wield it for its own purposes." The proletariat must break down this machinery. And this has been either concealed or denied by the opportunists. But it is the most valuable lesson of the Paris Commune and of the Russian Revolution of 1905. The difference between us and the Anarchists is, that we admit the state is a necessity in our revolution. Our difference with the opportunists and the disciples of Karl Kautsky is, that we claim we do not need the machinery of the bourgeois state as established in the "democratic" bourgeois republics, but the direct power of armed and organized workers. Such was the character of (the Commune of 1871 and of the Council of Workers and Soldiers of 1905 and 1917. On this basis we build.[1]
- ↑ Lenin uses Karl Kautsky, the intellectual leader of German Socialism and of the Second International that collapsed during the war, as typifying the attitude of moderate Socialism. Moderate Socialism in action conceives the present state as the starting point of the introduction of Socialism, through the extension of the industries functions of the state, which is to be captured by the workers through political action. The Bolsheviki, and revolutionary Socialists generally, maintain that the extension of the industrial functions of the state is not and never can become Socialism, simply strengthening Capitalism; that the proletariat must overthrow the bourgeois states with its parliamentary regime and territorial representation, and organize the new state of the organized producers functioning as a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the preliminary stage of the Social Revolution.—L. C. F.
