Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/74

 rule of the proletariat. Specifically and directly, eliminating every possibility of doubt, I start with the necessity of a government for this transition period; but, according to Marx and the experience of the Paris Commune, not the usual parliamentary-bourgeois form of government, but a government without a permanent army, without a police exposed to the people, without a bureaucracy imposed upon the people.

If Plekhanov shouts about "Anarchism" at the top of his voice in his Edinstvo, this again indicates his break with Marxism. To my challenge in Pravda (No. 26) that he explain the teachings on government of Marx and Engels, formulated in 1871, in 1872 and 1875, Plekhanov has had and will have nothing to say, evades the question and instead vituperates in the spirit of a petit bourgeois.

The teachings; of Marx on government are completely misunderstood by the former Marxist, Plekhanov. (By the way, the germs of this misunderstanding were apparent in his pamphlet on "Socialism and Anarchism.")

Let us see how Comrade Kamenev, in his article in No. 27 of Pravda, formulates his "disagreement" with my "theses" and my views expressed above. It will help us to understand them more clearly.

"As to the general plan of Comrade Lenin," writes Comrade Kamenev, "it seems to us unacceptable, as it assumes that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed, and is based upon an immediate transformation of this revolution into a Socialist revolution."

Two important errors are indicated in this formulation.

First: The question of the "completeness" of the bourgeois-democratic revolution is incorrectly put. This question is presented in that abstract, simple, one-colored form which does not correspond to objective reality. Whoever so puts the question, whoever now asks the question: "is the bourgeois-democratic revolution completed?"—and only that—deprives himself of the possibility of understanding an extremely complex, "two-colored" reality. This is in theory. But in practice, he surrenders helplessly to the petit bourgeois revolutionary spirit.

Indeed, reality shows us both the transition of power to the bourgeoisie ("completed" bourgeois-democratic revolution of an ordinary type) and the existence, together with the present bourgeois government, of an accessory government, which represents the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peas-