Page:Nikolai Bukharin - Programme of the World Revolution (1920).djvu/34

 stance, the masses of the North American Republic should take matters into their own hands—that would mean the end of the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois State is based on the deception of the masses, keeping them half-awake, by the method of depriving them of any active part in the everyday work of the state, by summoning them once every few years "to vote," and by deceiving them with their own vote. It is an entirely different thing in a Soviet republic. The Soviet republic, embodying the dictatorship of the masses, cannot even for a minute tear itself away from these masses. Such a republic is the stronger in proportion to the greater activity and energy manifested by the masses and the more work accomplished at works and factories, in the towns and in the provinces. It is not a matter of mere chance, therefore, that the Soviet Government in issuing its decrees addresses the masses with the demand that the workers and poorest peasants themselves should carry these decrees into execution. That is why the significance of various workers' and peasants' organisations entirely changed after the October revolution. At first they were weapons of the class struggle against the governing capitalists and landowners. Take, for example, the professional unions and some small peasants' Soviets. At first they were compelled to carry on a struggle for higher pay and a shorter working day in the towns, and for depriving the landowners of the land in the rural districts. At the present time, when the government is in the hands of the workers and the peasants, these organisations are becoming wheels in the machine of state government. At present, the trade unions are not only fighting with the capitalists, but are taking an active part in the organisation of production, as organs of a labour government, as part of the Soviet State, in the administration of industry; and in the same way the village and peasants' Soviets not only have to carry on a war with village sharks or sweaters, with the capitalists and landowners, but are also working to establish a new land system; that is to say, they have the administration of the land in their hands as organs of a workers' and peasants' government; they are as screws and nuts in the huge machine of state administration, where the power is in the hands of the workmen and peasants.

In this way, through the workers' and peasants' organisations, the widest sections of the labouring masses have been gradually called to the work of government. There is nothing like this in