Page:Nikolai Bukharin - Soviets or Parliament.djvu/5

 of owners, bankers, and capitalists, the representatives of all the capitalist class and their hangers-on.

Experience shows that wherever the bourgeoisie enjoys political rights, it uses those rights to dupe the workers and peasants. Because it has the press, both the daily newspapers and the periodicals, in its hands: because it has great wealth at its disposal, the bourgeoisie is able to corrupt public officials, to employ for its benefit the services of hundreds of thousands of agents; is always able to menace and to intimidate for its own advantage, its slaves; and, in fact; to organise things in such a way that not a scrap of the power shall escape from its clutches.

All the people apparently participate in the elections, but, under this pretence is hidden the domination of capitalism, which flatters itself that it has granted the people the right to vote and all "democratic" privileges, but which takes good care to preserve its own privileges. Thus in bourgeois republican countries, under the cloak of universal suffrage, the power is found to be entirely in the hands of the great forces of capitalism.

Under the parliamentary system each citizen casts his vote into the ballot box once in four or five years, and the field is then clear for the