Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/395

 tary state and the Czarist state, has been completely overthrown, with all its machinery of repression of the masses, its bureaucracy, and its anti-proletarian character. The new state is the state of the organized producers; as the old state was an instrument for the coercion of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, so the new state is an instrument for the coercion of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat—with this fundamental difference: that where the old state considered itself sacrosanct and eternal, the new state considers itself a temporary necessity that will gradually become superfluous in the measure that the process of reconstruction emerges definitely into the Socialist communist society of the organized producers.

As an historical category, the Soviets are not peculiarly Russian products, but class organizations characteristic of the proletarian revolution. They constitute a dictatorship in relation to the bourgeoisie, but a democracy in relation to the workers and peasants—the real, the fundamental democracy of oncoming Socialism.

The agrarian problem in revolutionary Russia plays a much more important part than would obtain in a proletarian revolution in a nation where industrialization has proceeded further. The peasantry, the mass of agricultural workers and expropriated peasants as against the peasant bourgeoisie, has accepted, at least for the present, the tutelage of the proletarian dictatorship, is a phase of this dictatorship. Private ownership of land has been abolished, the land being nationalized and distributed to the peasants on the basis of agricultural comunism. Local land committees take charge of production and distribution of agricultural products, inventory the land in a particular district, allot land to the villages, regulate agricultural labor, control forests, etc, and receive the rental for the use of the land, which is turned over to the central government. The land committees of the rural districts are unified into the county committees, which in turn elect delegates to a provincial committee, the provincial land committees being organized into the Main Land Committee acting for all Russia. On this central agricultural body are represented the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasants and Workers, the Commissaire of Agriculture, etc. The abolition of private ownership in land includes city real estate and buildings, which are declared public property.

Industry has not been completely socialized, although a drastic workers' control has been established over all industry. Not all capitalists have been expropriated, the employer or owner in many cases being retained as a director, but his rights as owner have been abrogated and his "profits" rigidly limited. Workers' control of industry starts with factory and works committees, elected by the employees and the technical staffs, and having almost complete jurisdiction over internal questions, wages, hours, etc. In each important industrial district, town or province, is instituted a local workmen's organ of control, acting in accord with the local Soviet, and comprised of representatives of the factory and works committees, labor unions and workmen's co-operative societies. This control of industry is centralized in the All-Russian Workmen's Council of Control, acting for the whole of Russia.