Page:Nikolai Bukharin - Programme of the World Revolution (1920).djvu/31

 can easily answer this question. Although the mensheviks and the right wing of the socialist revolutionaries do, as a matter of fact, try to muddle things by inventing various pompous names such us, for instance, "Master of the Russian Land," still truth will out. The Constituent Assembly differs from the Convention of Soviets in as much as into the former are elected not only the labourers, but also the bourgeoisie and all the bourgeoisie hangers-on. It consequently differs from the Convention of Soviets in the fact that in the Constituent Assembly may sit not only workers and peasants, but also bankers, landowners find capitalists; not only the labour party (the communists), not only the left wing of socialist revolutionaries, and even not only the socialist traitors such as the right wing of the socialist revolutionaries, but also the constitutional democrats (the party of traitors to the people), the Black Hundred and the Octobrists. This is the crowd for whom these honourable compromisers are demanding enfranchisement. When they clamour for the necessity of a "popular," "all-national" Constituent Assembly, they do not consider the Soviets as all-national, because the Russian bourgeoisie is lacking to complete the full representation of the Russian people. To supplement working-class representation with this crowd of parasites, to give these enemies of the people all rights, to give them seats next to themselves in parliament, to transform the class government of workers and peasants into a class government of the bourgeoisie under the pretext of admitting all sections—this is the task of the right wing of the socialist revolutionaries, of the mensheviks, of the constitutional democrats, in a word of big capital and its petty bourgeois agents. The experience of all countries shows that where the bourgeoisie enjoys all the rights, it invariably deceives the working class and the poorest peasantry.

By holding the press, newspapers and magazines firmly in its grasp, possessing as it does vast riches, bribing officials, exploiting the services of hundreds of thousands of their agents, threatening and intimidating the more downtrodden of their slaves, the bourgeois succeeds in preventing power from slipping from its hands. At first sight it appears as if the whole nation were voting, but in reality this screen is used by domineering financial capital, which arranges matters to suit itself, and even boasts of "allowing the people to vote" and of preserving all kinds of "democratic liberties." This is the reason why, in all countries where there is a bourgeois republic (take,