Today *Novaya Zhizn* prints a resolution moved by Comrade Avilov at the conference of factory committees. Unfortunately, this resolution must be acknowledged as a model not of a Marxist, not of a socialist, but of a petty-bourgeois attitude to the question. And precisely because this resolution concentrates in itself with extraordinary vividness all the weak sides of the usual Menshevik and Narodnik Soviet resolutions, precisely because of this, the resolution is typical and deserves attention.

The resolution begins with a most splendid platitude, an excellent indictment of the capitalists: “the present economic disruption... is the consequence of the war and of the predatory, anarchic management of the capitalists and the government...” Correct! That capital is oppressive, that it is rapacious, that it is precisely capital that is the source of anarchy – in this the petty bourgeois is ready to agree with the proletarian. But the difference between the one and the other begins at once: the proletarian acknowledges the economic management of the capitalists as rapacity in order to wage a class struggle against it, in order to construct the whole of its policy on unconditional distrust of the capitalist class, in order, in the question of the state, to distinguish first and foremost which class the “state” serves, which class’s interests it pursues. The petty bourgeois sometimes becomes “furious” with capital, but after a fit of fury he returns at once to trust in the capitalists, to the hopes pinned on the “state”... of the capitalists!

So it is with Comrade Avilov.

After the fine, resolute, and menacing preamble accusing the capitalists of “rapacity”, and even not only the capitalists, but also the government of the capitalists, Comrade Avilov, in the whole resolution, in all its concrete content, in all its practical proposals, forgets the class standpoint and, like the Mensheviks and Narodniks, slides into phrases about the “state” in general, about “revolutionary democracy” in general.

Workers! Rapacious capital, by its rapacity, creates anarchy and disruption, with the government of the capitalists managing things in the same anarchic way. Salvation lies in control by the “state with the participation of the revolutionary democracy”. Such is the content of Avilov’s resolution.

Have some fear of God, Comrade Avilov! Is it really permissible for a Marxist to forget that the state is an organ of class rule? Is it not ridiculous to appeal to the state of the capitalists against the “rapacity of the capitalists”?

Is it permissible for a Marxist to forget that the capitalists, too, have repeatedly in the history of all countries – in England in 1649, in France in 1789, and in 1830, 1848, and 1870 in the same country, and in February 1917 in Russia – been “revolutionary democrats”?

Do you really forget that the revolutionary democracy of the capitalists, of the petty bourgeoisie, and of the proletariat must be distinguished from one another? Does not the entire history of all the revolutions I have just mentioned boil down to the distinction of classes within “revolutionary democracy”?

Whoever, after the experience of February, March, April, and May 1917, continues to speak in Russia of “revolutionary democracy” in general, is, voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously, deceiving the people. For the “moment” of the universal fusion of classes against tsarism was and has passed. The very first agreement between the first “Provisional Committee” of the State Duma and the Soviet already signified the end of the fusion of classes and the beginning of the class struggle.

The April crisis (April 20), then May 6, then May 27–29 (the elections), and so on and so forth, had already finally demarcated the classes in the Russian revolution within the Russian “revolutionary democracy”. To ignore this means sinking to the helplessness of the petty bourgeois.

To appeal now to the “state” and to “revolutionary democracy”, and precisely on the question of the rapacity of the capitalists, means dragging the working class back, means in practice preaching a complete halt of the revolution. For our state now, after April, after May, is the state of the (rapacious) capitalists, who, in the person of Chernov, Tsereteli and Co., have tamed a sizeable part of the “revolutionary (petty-bourgeois) democracy”.

This state is retarding the revolution everywhere, in all spheres of foreign and domestic policy.

To entrust the struggle against the “rapacity” of the capitalists to this state means throwing a pike into the river.

Written 31 May (13 June) 1917.  
Published 14 (1) June 1917 in *Pravda* No. 70.  
Printed from the newspaper text.