Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/27

 Naturally, this distortion of Marxism is extremely useful to those philistines who have brought Socialism to the unheard-of disgrace of trying to justify and gloss over an Imperalist war on the pretext of "defense of the fatherland"; but none the less it is an absolute distortion:

The development, perfection, strengthening of the bureaucratic and military apparatus has been going on during all those bourgeois revolutions of which Europe has seen so many since the decay of Feudalism.

In particular, the lower middle classes are attracted to the side of the capitalists and to their allegiance, largely by means of this very apparatus, which provides the upper sections of the peasantry, artisans and tradesmen with a number of comparalively comfortable, quiet and respectable posts, and thereby raises their holders above the general mass. Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following February 27 (March 12), 1917. The Government posts, which hitherto had been given by preference to members of the Black Hundred, now became the booty of Cadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Nobody really thought of any serious reforms. They were to be put off "till. the Constituent Assembly," which, in its turn, was gradually put off until the end of the war! But there was no delay, no waiting for a Constituent Assembly in the matter of dividing the spoils, of capturing snug places like Ministries, Under-Secretaryship, Governor-Generalships, ete., etc.! The game of permutations and combinations that went on in connection with the composition of the Provisional Government was, in reality, merely the expression of this division and re-division of the spoils, as it was going on high and low, up and down the country, in all departments of the central and local government. The concrete, practical result of the six months between February 27 (March 12), and August 27 (September 9), 1917, is beyond all dispute; reforms shelved, distribution of the official places accomplished, and "mistakes" in the distribution corrected by a few re-shufflings. But the longer the process of re-shuffling the posts goes on among the various capitalist and middle-class parties (among the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionists and Mensheviks, if we take the case of Russia), the more clearly the oppressed classes, with the proletariat at their head, begin to realize the irreconcilable opposition of their interests to the whole of capitalist society. Hence arises the need of the bourgeois parties, even of the most democratic and "revolutionary democratic" sections, to intensify their repressive measures against the revolutionary proletariat, to strengthen