Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/110

 prepare the complete atrophy of all State machinery by enlisting the mass-organizations of the working-people in permanent and unconditioned participation in the state-administration.

The complete bankruptcy of the Socialists who assembled in Berne, the utter lack of comprehension of proletarian democracy which they revealed, is especially patent in the. following. On February 10, 1919, Branting dismissed the conference of the Yellow International at Berne. On February 11, 1919, their colleagues in Berlin published in "Die Freiheit" an appeal to the proletariat by the Independents. In this appeal the bourgeois character of the Scheidemann government is admitted, it is accused of the intention of abolishing the "Raete" (soviets) which it designates as the "defenders and the agents of the revolution," and the proposition is advanced that the "Raete" be legitimized, entrusted with certain rights in the State.

A proposal of this sort indicates the complete spiritual bankruptey of the theoreticians who defend democracy and do not understand its bourgeois character. The laughable attempt to combine the Raete-system, i. e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, with the National Assembly, i. e., the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, reveals conclusively the intellectual poverty of the yellow Socialists and Social-Democrats, and the reactionary policies of the petit bourgeois, as well as their cowardly concessions to the irresistibly increasing strength of the new proletarian democracy.

The majority of the Yellow International at Berne, which condemned Bolshevism, but did not dare enter a formal vote on a resolution condemning Bolshevism, since it feared the working masses, behaved quite. correctly from the class-viewpoint. The majority is completely in tune with the Russian Mensheviki and Social-Revolutionaries and with the Scheidemann-group in Germany. The Russian Mensheviki and Social-Revolutionaries who complain of Bolshevik persecution, take pains to conceal the fact that this persecution was the result of the participation of the Mensheviki and of the Social-Revolutionaries in the civil war on the side of the bourgeoisie and against the proletariat. Much as in Germany, the Scheidemann party revealed its sympathy in the civil war for the bourgeoisie as against the proletariat.

It is therefore quite natural that the majority at the Berne