Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/109

 while certain gentlemen, Cadets and professors, elaborate nice little laws for a bourgeois republic of the parliamentary type, or while the pedants and routine worshippers of petty bourgeois Socialism, like Plekhanov and Kautsky, refuse to deviate from Marx' teachings in governmental matters.

The difference between Marxism and Anarchism is that Marxism admits the necessity of government and governmental power in revolutionary periods generally, and during the period of transition from Capitalism to Socialism in particular. The difference between Marxism and the petty bourgeois, opportunistic Socialism of the Plekhanov and Kautsky type is that Marxism admits the necessity during the revolutionary period of a government not of the usual bourgeois parliamentary, republican type, but one similar to the Paris Commune.

The main difference 'between the two types of government is this:

It is extremely easy to revert from a bourgeois republic to a monarchy (as history proves), as all the machinery of repression is left undisturbed: army, police, bureaucracy.

As in the Commune, the Councils of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Delegates destroy that machinery, abolish it entirely.

A republic of the parliamentary bourgeois type strangles and crushes the independent political life of the masses, prevents the Classes from taking a direct part in the democratic up-building of the governmental activity from below. The Councils of WorkesrWorkers [sic], Soldiers and Peasants do just the opposite. They reproduce the type of government established by the Paris Commune and which Marx called the "finally open form of government in which the liberation of the workers can really take place."

People often say that "the Russian nation is not prepared for the introduction of a Commune." This was a favorite argument with the feudal lords when they explained that the peasants were not ready for freedom. The Commune, that is the Councils of Workers' and Soldiers' delegates, would not introduce, does not intend to introduce and should not introduce any reorganization which is not absolutely ripe not only in the economic activity but in the consciousness of the majority of the people. The more terrible the economic bankruptcy and the crisis produced by the war, the more we will need a perfect political form which will facilitate the healing of the wounds inflicted by the war upon man-