Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/332

 parliamentary republic, necessarily became the authority of the bourgeois republic, setting itself against the Revolution of November and the authority of the Soviet Government; the old bourgeois parliamentarism has had its day and is incompatible with the tasks before Socialism; hence it was unavoidable that the Constituent Assembly, necessarily counter-revolutionary, should be dissolved.

Any other attitude of the Soviet Government would have been self-stultification. The proletarian revolution is relentlessly logical. It is a denial of bourgeois democracy. It is openly a dictatorship. Its practice must be in accord with its theory—otherwise the proletarian revolution limps, degrades itself, and prepares the forces for its destruction. The Soviet Government was organized not as a representative of all classes, but as the representative of the revolutionary masses, the dictatorship of the proletariat. It had to act accordingly.

All democracy is relative, is class democracy. As an historical category, democracy is the instrument of a class: bourgeois democracy is the form of expression of the tyranny of Capitalism, the form of authority of the oppressing class over the oppressed class. The democracy of Socialism annhilates the democracy of Capitalism—relative, authoritarian democracy is superseded by the actuality of the full and free democracy of Communist Socialism. The proletarian revolution does not allow the "ethical concepts" of bourgeois democracy to interfere in its course; it ruthlessly casts aside bourgeois democracy in the process of establishing proletarian democracy. Capitalism hypocritically insisits upon a government of all the classes, which in reality is the government of one class, the capitalist class; the proletarian revolution frankly institutes the government of one class—the proletariat—which ultimately means the end of "government" as hitherto constituted. The state is an instrument of coercion; but where the bourgeois state considers itself as sacrosanct and eternal, the revolutionary proletarian state considers itself a temporary necessity that will gradually become superfluous in the measure that the process of reconstruction