Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/238

 and one truly democratic must be substituted,—the popular apparatus of the Soviet, an organized and armed majority of the people, workers, soldiers and peasants. The Soviet state would assure and deepen the initiative and independence of the people; the people would actually express their initiative, not only in the election of delegates, but in the management of the government and in the work of re-organization and reform.

To make this point of difference clearly evident, let us remind you of a very valuable confession made some time ago by Dyelo Naroda, the organ of the government party, the Social-Revolutionary Party. Even in those ministries, wrote that paper, which contain Socialist ministers, the whole apparatus of government remains antiquated and hinders all work. Quite right. The whole history of bourgeois parliamentary, and in more significant measure of bourgeois constitutional countries, proves that a change of ministers means very little, as the actual work of government is in the hands of a gigantic army of bureaucrats. And this, army is permeated through and through with an anti-democratic spirit, bound up by thousands and millions of threads with landowners and capitalists, and dependent upon them in all ways. This army is in an atmosphere of bourgeois relations and breathes this atmosphere; it has become rigid and has not the power to escape—it is unable to think, feel and act other than in the old manner. This bureaucratic army is enslaved by considerations of rank and precedence, of respect for the well-known privileges of "government" service. The upper layers of this army, by means of stocks and banks, are completely subservient to financial capital, and, moreover, themselves furnish to a certain extent agents and promoters of the interests and influence of financial capital.

To attempt, by means of this government apparatus, to introduce such reorganization as the abolition of private ownership of land, without re-purchase, or a state monopoly of bread, etc., is the greatest illusion, the greatest self-deception and deception of the masses. This apparatus can serve the republican bourgeoisie to create a republic in the sense of "a monarchy without a monarch," as the Third Republic of France; but it is absolutely unfit to introduce reforms, not to abolish, but simply to seriously repress and limit the rights of capital, the rights of "sacred private property."

The inevitable outcome of "coalition" ministries, therefore, participated in by Socialists, is that these Socialists, even under absolutely conscientious agreement of individual members of their class, become in fact empty ornaments or screens of the bourgeois