## Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? [1]

## Foreword To The Second Edition

The present pamphlet, as is evident from the text, was written
at the end of September and was finished on October 1, 1917.

The October 25 Revolution has transferred the question raised in
this pamphlet from the sphere of theory to the sphere of
practice.

This question must now be answered by deeds, not words. The
theoretical arguments advanced against the Bolsheviks taking
power were feeble in the extreme. These arguments have been shot
to pieces.

The task now is for the advanced class—the proletariat—
to prove in practice the viability of the workers' and peasants'
government. All class-conscious workers, all the active and
honest peasants, all working and exploited people, will do
everything they can to solve the immense historic question in
practice.

To work, everybody to work, the cause of the world socialist
revolution must and will triumph.

St. Petersburg, November 9, 1917.

N. Lenin

O n what are all trends agreed, from Rech to
Novaya Zhizn inclusively, from the Kornilovite Cadets to the
semi-Bolsheviks, all, except the Bolsheviks?

They all agree that the Bolsheviks will either never dare take
over full state power alone, or, if they do dare, and do take
power, they will not be able to retain it even for the shortest
while.

If anybody asserts that the question of the Bolsheviks alone
taking over full state power is a totally unfeasible political
question, that only a swelled-headed "fanatic" of the worst kind
can regard it as feasible, we refute this assertion by quoting
the exact statements of the most responsible and most influential political parties and trends of various "hues".

But let me begin with a word or two about the first of the
questions mentioned—will the Bolsheviks dare take over full
state power alone? I have already had occasion, at the
All-Russia Congress of Soviets, to answer this question in the
affirmative in no uncertain manner by a remark that I shouted
from my seat during one of Tsereteli's [2] ministerial speeches. And I have not met in the press, or heard, any
statements by Bolsheviks to the effect that we ought not to take
power alone. I still maintain that a political party—and
the party of the advanced class in particular—would have no
right to exist, would be unworthy of the name of party, would be
a nonentity in any sense, if it refused to take power when
opportunity offers.

We shall now quote statements by the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and semi-Bolsheviks (I would prefer to
say quarter-Bolsheviks) on the question that interests us.

The leading article in Rech of September 16:

" Discord and confusion reigned in the Alexandrinsky Theatre, and
the socialist press reflects the same picture. Only the views of
the Bolsheviks are definite and straightforward At the
Conference, they are the views of the minority. In the Soviets,
they represent a constantly growing trend. But In spite of all
their verbal pugnacity, their boastful phrases and display of
self-confidence, the Bolsheviks, except for a few fanatics, are
brave only in words. They would not attempt to take 'full power'
on their own accord. Disorganisers and disrupters par excellence , they are really cowards who in their heart of
hearts are fully aware of both their own intrinsic ignorance and
the ephemeral nature of their present successes. They know as
well as we all do that the first day of their ultimate triumph
would also be the first day of their precipitous fall. Irresponsible by their very nature, anarchists in method
and practice, they should be regarded only as a trend of
political thought, or rather, as one of its aberrations. The
best way to get rid of Bolshevism for many a year, to banish it,
would be to place the country's fate in the hands of its
leaders. And if it were not for the awareness that experiments
of this kind are impermissible and fatal, one might in desperation decide on even this heroic measure. Happily, we
repeat, these dismal heroes of the day are not by any means
actually out to seize full power. Not under any circumstances
are they capable of constructive work. Thus, all their definite
and straight-forward views are confined to the political
rostrum, to soap-box oratory. For practical purposes their
position cannot be taken into consideration from any point of
view. In one respect, however, it has some practical consequence: it unites all other shades of 'socialist thought'
opposed to it. . . ."

This is the way the Cadets reason. Here, however, is the view of
the biggest, "ruling and governing", party in Russia, the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, also expressed in an unsigned, i.e.,
editorial, leading article in their official organ Dyelo Naroda of September 21:

..."If the bourgeoisie refuse, pending the convocation of the
Constituent Assembly, to work with the democracy on the basis of
the platform that was endorsed by the Conference, then the
coalition must arise from within the Conference itself . This would be a serious sacrifice on the part of
the supporters of the coalition, but even those campaigning for the idea of a 'pure line' of power will have to agree to it . We are afraid, however, that agreement may not be
reached here. In that case a third and final combination
remains, namely: the government must be organised by that half
of the Conference which on principle advocated the idea of a
homogeneous government.

" Let us put it definitely: the Bolsheviks will be obliged to form a Cabinet . With the
greatest energy, they imbued the revolutionary democrats with
hatred of the coalition, promising them all sorts of benefits as
soon as 'compromise' was abandoned, and attributing to the
latter all the country's misfortunes.

"If they were aware of what they were doing by their agitation,
if they were not deceiving the people, it is their duty
to redeem the promissory notes they have been handing out right
and left.

" The question is clear.

" Let them not make futile attempts to hide behind hastily concocted theory that it is
impossible for them to take power.

" The democracy will not accept these theories.

"At the same time, the advocates of coalition must guarantee them full support. These are the three
combinations, the three ways, open to us—there are no others!" (The italics are those of Dyelo Naroda .)

This is the way the Socialist-Revolutionaries reason. And here,
finally, is the "position" (if attempts to sit between two
stools can be called a position) of the Novaya Zhizn "quarter-Bolsheviks", taken from the editorial in Novaya Zhizn of September 23.

"If a coalition with Konovalov and Kishkin is formed again, it
will mean nothing but a new capitulation by the democracy and
the abrogation of the Conference resolution on the formation of
a responsible government on the platform of August 14. . . .

"A
homogeneous ministry of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries
will be able to feel its responsibility as little as the
responsible socialist ministers felt it in the coalition
cabinet. . . . This government would not only be incapable of
rallying the 'live forces' of the revolution around itself, but
would not even be able to count on any active support from its
vanguard—the proletariat.

" But the formation of another type of homogeneous cabinet, a government of the 'proletariat
and poor peasants', would be, not a better, but an even worse
way out of the situation, in fact it would not be a way out at
all, but sheer bankruptcy. True, nobody is advancing such a
slogan except in casual, timid and later systematically
'explained away' comments in Rabochy Put ."

(This glaring untruth is "boldly" written by responsible
journalists who have forgotten even the Dyelo Naroda editorial of September 21.)

" Formally, the Bolsheviks have now revived the slogan ' All Power
to the Soviets'. It was withdrawn after the July days, when the
Soviets, represented by the Central Executive Committee,
definitely adopted an active anti-Bolshevik policy. Now,
however, not only can the ' Soviet line' be regarded as
straightened out, but there is every ground to assume that at
the proposed Congress of Soviets the Bolsheviks will have a
majority. Under such circumstances the slogan ' All Power to the
Soviets', resurrected by the Bolsheviks, is a 'tactical line'
for achieving precisely the dictatorship of the proletariat and
the 'poor peasants' True, the Soviets also imply the Soviets of
Peasants' Deputies; the Bolshevik slogan therefore implies a
power resting on the overwhelmingly greater part of the entire
democracy of Russia. In that case, however, the slogan ' All
Power to the Soviets' loses all independent significance, for it
makes the Soviets almost identical in composition to the
Pre-parliament set up by the Conference. . . ."

( Novaya Zhizn 's assertion is a brazen lie, equivalent
to declaring that spurious and fraudulent democracy is "almost
identical" to democracy: the Pre-parliament is a sham which passes off the will of the minority of the people,
particularly of Kuskova, Berkenheim, Chaikovsky and Co., as the
will of the majority. This is the first point. The second point
is that at the Conference even the Peasants' Soviets that had
been packed by the Avksentyevs and Chaikovskys gave such a high
percentage opposed to the coalition that taken together with the
Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, they would have
brought about the absolute collapse of the coalition . And the third point is that " Power to the
Soviets" means that the power of the Peasants' Soviets would
embrace mainly the rural districts, and in the rural districts
the predominance of the poor peasants is assured.)

"If it is one and the same thing, then the Bolshevik slogan
should be immediately withdrawn. If, however, ' Power to the
Soviets' is only a disguise for the dictatorship of the
proletariat, then such a power would mean precisely the failure
and collapse of the revolution.

" Does it need proof that the proletariat, isolated not only from the other classes in the
country, but also from the real live forces of the democracy,
will not be able either technically to lay hold of the state
apparatus and set it in motion in an exceptionally complicated
situation, or politically to resist all the pressure by hostile
forces that will sweep away not only the proletarian dictatorship, but the entire revolution into the bargain?

" The only power that will answer the requirements of the present
situation is a really honest coalition within the democracy."

* * *

We apologise to the reader for quoting these lengthy extracts,
but they are absolutely necessary. It is necessary to present a
precise picture of the positions taken by the different parties
hostile to the Bolsheviks. It is necessary to prove in a
definite manner the extremely important fact-that all these parties have admitted that the question of the Bolsheviks
taking full state power alone is not only feasible, but also
urgent.

Let us now proceed to examine the arguments which convince
"everybody", from the Cadets to the Novaya Zhizn people, that the Bolsheviks will not be able to retain power.

The respectable Rech advances no arguments whatsoever. It merely pours out upon the Bolsheviks a flood of
the choicest and most irate abuse. The extract we quoted shows,
among other things, how utterly wrong it would be to say, " Watch
out, comrades, for what the enemy advises must certainly be
bad", thinking that Rech is "provoking" the Bolsheviks to take power. If, instead of weighing up the general and
concrete considerations in a practical way, we allow ourselves
to be "persuaded" by the plea that the bourgeoisie are "provoking" us to take power, we shall be fooled by the
bourgeoisie, for the latter will of course always maliciously
prophesy millions of disasters that will result from the
Bolsheviks taking power and will always maliciously shout, "It
would be better to get rid of the Bolsheviks at one blow and
'for many a year' by allowing them to take power and then
crushing them." These cries are also "provocation", if you will,
but from a different angle. The Cadets and the bourgeoisie do
not by any means "advise", and have never "advised", us to take
power; they are only trying to frighten us with the allegedly insoluble problems of government.

No. We must not allow ourselves to be frightened by the screams
of the frightened bourgeoisie. We must bear firmly in mind that
we have never set ourselves "insoluble" social problems, and as
for the perfectly soluble problem of taking immediate steps towards socialism, which is the only way out of the
exceedingly difficult situation, that will be solved only by the dictatorship of the proletariat and poor
peasants. Victory, and lasting victory, is now more than ever,
more than anywhere else, assured for the proletariat in Russia
if it takes power.

We shall in a purely practical manner discuss the concrete circumstances that make a certain moment
unfavourable; but we shall not for a moment allow ourselves to
be scared by the savage howls of the bourgeoisie; and we shall
not forget that the question of the Bolsheviks taking full power
is becoming really urgent . Our Party will now be threatened with an immeasurably greater danger if we forget this
than if we were to admit that taking power is "premature". In
this respect, there can be nothing "premature" now:
there is every chance in a million, except one or two perhaps,
in favour of this.

Concerning the irate abuse poured out by
Rech , we can and must, say:

In savage cries of irritation

We hear the voice of approbation, Not in dulcet sounds of praise. [3]

That the bourgeoisie hate us so passionately is one of the most
striking proofs that we are showing the people the right ways and means of overthrowing the rule of the
bourgeoisie.

* * *

This time, by way of rare exception, Dyelo Naroda did not deign to honour us with its abuse nor did it advance a ghost
of an argument. It merely tried, by indirect hints, to frighten us with the prospect that "the Bolsheviks will
be obliged to form a cabinet". I can quite believe that while
trying to frighten us, the Socialist-Revolutionaries are
themselves sincerely seared to death by the phantom of the
frightened liberal. I can equally believe that the
Socialist-Revolutionaries do succeed in certain exceptionally
high and exceptionally rotten institutions, such as the Central
Executive Committee and similar "contact" (i.e., contact with
the Cadets, in plain language, hobnobbing with the Cadets)
commissions, in scaring some Bolsheviks because, first, the
atmosphere in all those Central Executives, pre-parliaments,
etc., is abominable, putrid to the point of nausea, and harmful
for any man to breathe for any length of time; and secondly, sincerity is contagious, and a sincerely frightened
philistine is capable of converting even an individual revolutionary into a philistine for a time.

But however much we may, "humanly" speaking, understand the
sincere fright of a Socialist-Revolutionary who has had the
misfortune to be a minister in the company of the Cadets, or who
is eligible as a minister in the eyes of the Cadets, we would be
committing a political error that might only too easily border
on treachery to the proletariat if we allowed ourselves to be
scared. Let us have your practical arguments, gentlemen!
Cherish no hope that we shall allow ourselves to be scared by
your fright!

* * *

This time we find practical arguments only in Novaya Zhizn . On this occasion the paper comes out in the role of
counsel for the bourgeoisie, a role that suits it far better
than that of counsel for the defence of the Bolsheviks, which so
obviously "shocks" this lady with many good points. [4]

The counsel has advanced six pleas:

(1) the proletariat is "isolated from the other classes in the
country"; (2) it is "isolated from the real live forces of the democracy"; (3) it "will not be able technically to lay hold of the state
apparatus"; (4) it "will not be able to set this apparatus in motion"; (5) "the situation is exceptionally complicated"; (6) it "will be incapable of resisting all the pressure by
hostile forces that will sweep away not only the proletarian
dictatorship, but the entire revolution into the bargain".

Novaya Zhizn formulates the first plea in a ridiculously clumsy fashion, for in capitalist and
semi-capitalist society we know of only three classes: the
bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie (which consists mainly of the
peasantry), and the proletariat. What sense is there in talking
about the proletariat being isolated from the other classes when
the point at issue is the proletariat's struggle against the
bourgeoisie, revolution against the bourgeoisie?

Evidently, Novaya Zhizn wanted to say that the proletariat is isolated from the peasants, for it could not
possibly have meant the landowners. It could not, however, say
clearly and definitely that the proletariat is now isolated
from the peasants, for the utter incorrectness of this assertion
would be too obvious.

It is difficult to imagine that in a capitalist country the
proletariat should be so little isolated from the petty
bourgeoisie—and, mark you, in a revolution against the bourgeoisie —as the proletariat now is in Russia. The
latest returns of the voting by "curias" for and against coalition with the bourgeoisie in Tsereteli's
" Bulygin Duma", i.e., in the notorious " Democratic" Conference,
constitute one of the objective and incontrovertible proofs of
this. If we take the Soviets' curias we get:

| | For coalition | Against |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies
. . . . . . . . . . . Soviets of Peasant Deputies
. . . . . . | 83102 | 19270 |
| |
| All Soviets. . . . . | 185 | 262 |

So, the majority as a whole is on the side of the proletarian
slogan: against coalition with the bourgeoisie. We have
seen above that even the Cadets are obliged to admit the growth
of Bolshevik influence in the Soviets. And here we have the
Conference convened by yesterday's leaders in the
Soviets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who have an
assured majority in the central institutions! Obviously, the
actual degree to which the Bolsheviks predominate in the Soviets is here understated .

Both on the question of coalition with the bourgeoisie and on
the question of immediately transferring the landed estates to
peasant committees, the Bolsheviks already have a majority in
the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, a
majority of the people , a majority of the petty bourgeoisie. Rabochy Put No. 19, of September 24 quotes
from No. 25 of the organ of the Socialist-Revolutionaries
Znamya Truda [5] a report on a conference of local
Soviets of Peasants' Deputies held in Petrograd on September
18. At this conference the Executive Committees of four
Peasants' Soviets (Kostroma, Moscow, Samara and Taurida
gubernias) voted for an unrestricted coalition. The Executive
Committees of three gubernias and two armies (Vladimir, Ryazan and the Black Sea gubernias) voted in favour
of a coalition without the Cadets. The Executive Committees of
twenty-three gubernias and four armies voted against a coalition.

So , the majority of the peasants are against a coalition!

So much for the "isolation of the proletariat".

We should note, by the way, that the supporters of a coalition
were three outlying gubernias, Samara, Taurida and the Black
Sea, where there is a relatively very large number of rich
peasants and big landowners who employ hired labour, and also
four industrial gubernias (Vladimir, Ryazan, Kostroma and
Moscow) in which the peasant bourgeoisie are also stronger than
in the majority of the gubernias in Russia. It would be
interesting to collect more detailed figures on this question
and to ascertain whether information is available concerning the
poor peasants in the gubernias where there are larger numbers of " rich " peasants.

It is interesting, moreover, that the "non-Russian groups" revealed a considerable
predominance of opponents of a coalition, namely, 40 votes
against 15. The policy of annexation and open violence pursued
by the Bonapartist Kerensky and Co. towards the non-sovereign
nations of Russia has borne fruit. Wide sections of the people
of the oppressed nations (i.e., including the mass of the petty
bourgeoisie) trust the proletariat of Russia more than they do
the bourgeoisie, for here history has brought to the fore the
struggle for liberation of the oppressed nations against the
oppressing nations. The bourgeoisie has despicably betrayed the
cause of freedom of the oppressed nations; the proletariat is
faithful to the cause of freedom.

At the present time the national and agrarian questions are
fundamental questions for the petty-bourgeois sections of the
population of Russia. This is indisputable. And on both these
questions the proletariat is " not isolated"—farther from it than ever. It has the majority of
the people behind it. It alone is capable of pursuing such a determined, genuinely."revolutionary-democratic" policy
on both questions which would immediately ensure the proletarian
state power not only the support of the majority of the
population, but also a real outburst of revolutionary enthusiasm
among the people. This is because, for the first time, the
people would not see the ruthless oppression of peasants by
landowners and of Ukrainians by Great Russians on the part of
the government, as was the case under tsarism, nor the effort to
continue the same policy camouflaged in pompous phrases under
the republic, nor nagging, insult, chicanery, procrastination,
underhand dealing and evasions (all that with which Kerensky
rewards the peasants and the oppressed nations), but would
receive warm sympathy proved by deeds, immediate and revolutionary measures against the landowners, immediate
restitution of full freedom for Finland, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, for the Moslems, and so on.

The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik gentlemen know this
perfectly well, and are therefore dragging in the semi-Cadet
bosses of the co-operative societies to help them pursue their
reactionary -democratic policy against the people. That is why they will never dare canvass popular
opinion, take a popular referendum, or at least a vote of all
the local Soviets, of all the local organisations, concerning
definite points of practical policy, for example, whether all
the landed estates should at once be handed over to peasant
committees, whether certain demands of the Finns or the
Ukrainians should be conceded, etc.

Take the question of peace, the crucial issue of today. The
proletariat "is isolated from the other classes". . . . On this
issue the proletariat truly represents the whole nation, all live and honest people in all classes , the
vast majority of the petty bourgeoisie; because only the
proletariat, on achieving power, will immediately offer
a just peace to all the belligerent nations, because only the
proletariat will dare take genuinely revolutionary measures (publication of the secret treaties, and so forth) to
achieve the speediest and most just peace possible.

The proletariat is not isolated. The gentlemen of Novaya Zhizn who are shouting about the proletariat being isolated
are only betraying their subjective fear of the bourgeoisie. The
objective state of affairs in Russia is undoubtedly such that
the proletariat, precisely at the present time , is not
"isolated" from the majority of the petty bourgeoisie. Precisely
now, after the sad experience with the "coalition", the
proletariat enjoys the sympathy of the majority of the people. This condition for the retention of power by
the Bolsheviks does exist.

* * *

The second plea is that the proletariat "is isolated from the
real live forces of the democracy". What this means is incomprehensible. It is probably " Greek", as the French say in
such cases.

The writers of Novaya Zhizn would make good ministers. They would be quite suitable as ministers in a Cadet
cabinet because all these ministers need is the ability to spout
plausible, polished, but utterly meaningless phrases with which
to cover up the dirtiest work and which are therefore sure of
winning the applause of the imperialists and social-imperialists. The Novaya Zhizn writers are sure
to earn the applause of the Cadets, Breshkovskaya, Plekhanov and
Co. for asserting that the proletariat is isolated from the real
live forces of the democracy, because indirectly they imply—or will be understood to imply—that the Cadets,
Breshkovskaya, Plekhanov, Kerensky and Co. are the "live forces
of democracy".

This is not true. They are dead forces. The history of the
coalition has proved this.

Overawed by the bourgeoisie and by their bourgeois intellectual
environment, the Novaya Zhizn people regard as "live" the Right wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks
like Volya Naroda [6] , Yedinstvo , and others who in essentials do not differ from the Cadets. We, however,
regard as live only those who are connected with the people and
not with the kulaks, only those whom the lessons of the
coalition have repelled. The "active live forces" of the
petty-bourgeois democracy are represented by the Left wing of
the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. That this wing has
gained strength, particularly since the July counter-revolution,
is one of the surest objective signs that the proletariat is
not isolated.

This has been made even more strikingly evident by the very
recent swing to the left of the Socialist-Revolutionary
Centrists, as is proved by Chernov's statement on September 24
that his group cannot support the new coalition with Kishkin and
Co. This swing to the left of the Socialist-Revolutionary
Centre, which up to now had constituted the overwhelming
majority of the members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party,
the leading and dominant party from the point of view of the
number of votes it obtained in the urban and particularly in the
rural districts, proves that the statements we quoted from
Dyelo Naroda that the democracy must, under certain circumstances, "guarantee full support" for a purely Bolshevik
government are at any rate not mere empty phrases.

Facts like the refusal of the Socialist-Revolutionary Centre to
support the new coalition with Kishkin, or the predominance of
the opponents of the coalition among the
Menshevik- defencists in the provinces (Jordania in the
Caucasus, etc.), are objective proof that a certain section of
the people which has up to now followed the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries will support a purely
Bolshevik government.

It is precisely from the live forces of the democracy that the proletariat of Russia is now not isolated.

* * *

The third plea, that the proletariat "will not be able technically to lay hold of the state apparatus" is, perhaps, the
most common and most frequent. It deserves most attention for
this reason, and also because it indicates one of the most
serious and difficult tasks that will confront the victorious proletariat. There is no doubt that these tasks
will be very difficult, but if we, who call ourselves socialists, indicate this difficulty only to shirk
these tasks, in practice the distinction between us and the
lackeys of the bourgeoisie will be reduced to nought. The
difficulty of the tasks of the proletarian revolution should
prompt the proletariat's supporters to make a closer and more
definite study of the means of carrying out these tasks.

The state apparatus is primarily the standing army, the police
and the bureaucracy. By saying that the proletariat will not he
able technically to lay hold of this apparatus, the writers of
Novaya Zhizn reveal their utter ignorance and their reluctance to take into account either facts or the arguments
long ago cited in Bolshevik literature.

All the Novaya Zhizn writers regard themselves, if not as Marxists, then at least as being familiar with Marxism, as
educated socialists. But Marx, basing himself on the experience
of the Paris Commune, taught that the proletariat cannot simply
lay hold of the ready-made state machine and use it for its own
purposes, that the proletariat must smash this machine and
substitute a new one for it (I deal with this in greater detail
in a pamphlet, the first part of which is now finished and will
soon appear under the title

The State and Revolution . A Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution [*]). This new
type of state machinery was created by the Paris Commune, and
the Russian Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants'
Deputies are a "state apparatus" of the same type. I have
indicated this many times since April 4, 1917; it is dealt with
in the resolutions of Bolshevik conferences and also in
Bolshevik literature. Novaya Zhizn could, of course, have expressed its utter disagreement with Marx and with the
Bolsheviks, but for a paper that has so often, and so haughtily,
scolded the Bolsheviks for their allegedly frivolous attitude to
difficult problems to evade this question completely is
tantamount to issuing itself a certificate of mental poverty.

The proletariat cannot "lay hold of" the "state apparatus" and "set it in motion". But it can smash
everything that is oppressive, routine, incorrigibly bourgeois
in the old state apparatus and substitute its own , new
apparatus. The Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants'
Deputies. are exactly this apparatus.

That Novaya Zhizn has completely forgotten about this "state apparatus" can be called nothing but monstrous. Behaving
in this way in their theoretical reasoning, the Novaya Zhizn people are, in essence, doing in the sphere of
political theory what the Cadets are doing in political
practice. Because, if the proletariat and the revolutionary
democrats do not in fact need a new state apparatus, then the Soviets lose their raison d'être , lose their right to existence, and the
Kornilovite Cadets are right in trying to reduce the
Soviets to nought!

This monstrous theoretical blunder and political blindness on
the part of Novaya Zhizn is all the more monstrous because even the internationalist Mensheviks (with whom
Novaya Zhizn formed a bloc during the last City Council

* See present edition, Vol. 25.— Ed . elections in
Petrograd) have on this question shown some proximity to the
Bolsheviks. So, in the declaration of the Soviet majority made
by Comrade Martov at the Democratic Conference, we read:

" The Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, set
up in the first days of the revolution by a mighty burst of
creative enthusiasm that stems from the people themselves,
constitute the new fabric of the revolutionary state that has
replaced the outworn state fabric of the old regime. . . ."

This is a little too flowery; that is to say, rhetoric here
covers up lack of clear political thinking. The Soviets have
not yet replaced the old "fabric", and this old "fabric" is not the state fabric of the old regime, but
the state fabric of both tsarism and of the bourgeois republic. But at any rate, Martov here stands head and
shoulders above Novaya Zhizn .

The Soviets are a new state apparatus which, in the first place,
provides an armed force of workers and peasants; and this force
is not divorced from the people, as was the old standing army,
but is very closely bound up with the people. From the military
point of view this force is incomparably more powerful than
previous forces; from the revolutionary point of view, it cannot
be replaced by anything else. Secondly, this apparatus provides
a bond with the people, with the majority of the people, so
intimate, so indissoluble, so easily verifiable and renewable,
that nothing even remotely like it existed in the previous state
apparatus. Thirdly, this apparatus, by virtue of the fact that
its personnel is elected and subject to recall at the people's
will without any bureaucratic formalities, is far more democratic than any previous apparatus. Fourthly, it provides a
close contact with the most varied professions, thereby
facilitating the adoption of the most varied and most radical
reforms without red tape. Fifthly, it provides an organisational
form for the vanguard, i.e., for the most class-conscious, most
energetic and most progressive section of the oppressed classes,
the workers and peasants, and so constitutes an apparatus by
means of which the vanguard of the oppressed classes can elevate, train, educate, and lead the entire vast mass of these classes, which has up to now stood completely
outside of political life and history. Sixthly, it makes it
possible to combine the advantages of the parliamentary system with those of immediate and direct
democracy, i.e., to vest in the people's elected representatives
both legislative and executive functions. Compared with
the bourgeois parliamentary system, this is an advance in
democracy's development which is of world-wide, historic
significance.

In 1905, our Soviets existed only in embryo, so to speak, as
they lived altogether only a few weeks. Clearly, under the
conditions of that time, their comprehensive development was out
of the question. It is still out of the question in the 1917
Revolution, for a few months is an extremely short period
and—this is most important—the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders have prostituted the Soviets,
have reduced their role to that of a talking shop, of an
accomplice in the compromising policy of the leaders. The
Soviets have been rotting and decaying alive under the leadership of the Liebers, Dans, Tseretelis and Chernovs. The
Soviets will be able to develop properly, to display their
potentialities and capabilities to the full only by taking over
full state power; for otherwise they have nothing to do , otherwise they are either simply embryos (and to
remain an embryo too long is fatal), or playthings. " Dual power"
means paralysis for the Soviets.

If the creative enthusiasm of the revolutionary classes had not
given rise to the Soviets, the proletarian revolution in Russia
would have been a hopeless cause, for the proletariat could
certainly not retain power with the old state apparatus, and it
is impossible to create a new apparatus immediately. The sad
history of the prostitution of the Soviets by the Tseretelis and
Chernovs, the history of the "coalition", is also the history of
the liberation of the Soviets from petty-bourgeois illusions, of
their passage through the "purgatory" of the practical experience of the utter abomination and filth of all
and sundry bourgeois coalitions. Let us hope that this "purgatory" has steeled rather than weakened the Soviets.

* * *

The chief difficulty facing the proletarian revolution is the
establishment on a country-wide scale of the most precise and
most conscientious accounting and control, of workers' control of the production and distribution of goods.

When the writers of Novaya Zhizn argued that in advancing the slogan "workers' control" we were slipping into
syndicalism, this argument was an example of the stupid school
boy method of applying " Marxism" without studying it, just
learning it by rote in the Struve manner. Syndicalism either repudiates the revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat, or else relegates it, as it does political power in
general, to a back seat. We, however, put it in the forefront. If we simply say in unison with the Novaya Zhizn writers: not workers' control but
state control, it is simply a bourgeois-reformist phrase, it is,
in essence, a purely Cadet formula, because the Cadets have no
objection to the workers participating in "state" control. The Kornilovite Cadets know perfectly well that such
participation offers the bourgeoisie the best way of fooling the
workers, the most subtle way of politically bribing all
the Gvozdyovs, Nikitins, Prokopoviches, Tseretelis and the rest
of that gang.

When we say: "workers' control", always juxtaposing this slogan to dictatorship of the proletariat, always putting
it immediately after the latter, we thereby explain what kind of state we mean. The state is the organ of
class domination. Of which class? If of the bourgeoisie, then it is the Cadet-Kornilov-" Kerensky" state
which has been " Kornilovising" and " Kerenskyising" the working
people of Russia for more than six months. If it is of the
proletariat, if we are speaking of a proletarian state, that is , of the proletarian dictatorship, then workers' control
can become the country-wide, all-embracing, omnipresent, most precise and most conscientious
accounting of the production and distribution of goods.

This is the chief difficulty, the chief task that faces the
proletarian, i.e., socialist, revolution. Without the Soviets,
this task would be impracticable, at least in Russia. The
Soviets indicate to the proletariat the organisational work which can solve this historically important
problem.

This brings us to another aspect of the question of the state
apparatus. In addition to the chiefly "oppressive" apparatus—the standing army, the police and the
bureaucracy—the modern state possesses an apparatus which
has extremely close connections with the banks and syndicates,
an apparatus which performs an enormous amount of accounting and
registration work, if it may be expressed this way. This
apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be
wrested from the control of the capitalists; the capitalists and
the wires they pull must be cut off , lopped off , chopped away from this apparatus; it must be
subordinated to the proletarian Soviets; it must be expanded, made more comprehensive, and nation-wide. And this
can be done by utilising the achievements already made by large-scale capitalism (in the same way as the proletarian
revolution can, in general, reach its goal only by utilising
these achievements).

Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers'
societies, and office employees' unions. Without big banks socialism would be impossible .

The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop
off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger , even more
democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed into quality. A single State Bank, the biggest of
the big, with branches in every rural district, in every
factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus. This will be country wide
book-keeping , country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, this will be, so to speak,
some thing in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society.

We can "lay hold of" and "set in motion" this "state apparatus"
(which is not fully a state apparatus under capitalism, but
which will be so with us, under socialism) at one stroke, by a
single decree, because the actual work of book-keeping, control,
registering, accounting and counting is performed by employees , the majority of whom themselves lead a
proletarian or semi-proletarian existence.

By a single decree of the proletarian government these employees
can and must be transferred to the status of state employees, in
the same way as the watchdogs of capitalism like Briand and
other bourgeois ministers, by a single decree, transfer
railwaymen on strike to the status of state employees. We shall
need many more state employees of this kind, and more can be obtained, because capitalism has simplified the
work of accounting and control, has reduced it to a comparatively simple system of book-keeping , which any
literate person can do.

The conversion of the bank, syndicate, commercial, etc., etc.,
rank-and-file employees into state employees is quite feasible
both technically (thanks to the preliminary work performed for
us by capitalism, including finance capitalism) and politically,
provided the Soviets exercise control and supervision.

As for the higher officials, of whom there are very few, but who
gravitate towards the capitalists, they will have to be dealt
with in the same way as the capitalists, i.e., "severely". Like
the capitalists, they will offer resistance . This resistance will have to be broken , and if the
immortally naïve Peshekhonov, as early as June 1917, lisped
like the infant that he was in state affairs, that "the
resistance of the capitalists has been broken", this childish
phrase, this childish boast, this childish swagger, will be converted by the proletariat into reality .

We can do this, for it is merely a question of breaking the
resistance of an insignificant minority of the population,
literally a handful of people, over each of whom the employees'
unions, the trade unions, the consumers' societies and the
Soviets will institute such supervision that every Tit
Titych will be surrounded as the French were at
Sedan. [7] We know these Tit Tityches by name: we only have to
consult the lists of directors, board members, large shareholders, etc. There are several hundred, at most several
thousand of them in the whole of Russia, and the proletarian state, with the apparatus of the Soviets, of the
employees' unions, etc., will be able to appoint ten or even a
hundred supervisers to each of them, so that instead of
"breaking resistance" it may even be possible, by means of
workers' control (over the capitalists), to make all resistance impossible .

The important thing will not be even the confiscation of the
capitalists' property, but country-wide, all-embracing workers'
control over the capitalists and their possible supporters. Confiscation alone leads nowhere, as it does not
contain the element of organisation, of accounting for proper
distribution. Instead of confiscation, we could easily impose a
fair tax (even on the Shingaryov [8] scale, for instance),
taking care, of course, to preclude the possibility of anyone
evading assessment, concealing the truth, evading the law. And
this possibility can be eliminated only by the workers'
control of the workers' state .

Compulsory syndication , i.e., compulsory amalgamation in associations under state control—this is what capitalism
has prepared the way for, this is what has been carried out in
Germany by the Junkers' state, this is what can be easily
carried out in Russia by the Soviets, by the proletarian
dictatorship, and this is what will provide us with a state apparatus that will be universal, up-to-date, and
non-bureaucratic.

* * *

The fourth plea of the counsels for the bourgeoisie is that the
proletariat will not be able "to set the state apparatus in
motion". There is nothing new in this plea compared with the
preceding one. We could not, of course, either lay hold of or
set in motion the old apparatus. The new apparatus, the Soviets,
has already been set in motion by "a mighty burst of creative enthusiasm that stems from the people themselves". We
only have to free it from the shackles put on it by the
domination of the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik
leaders. This apparatus is already in motion; we only have to free it from the monstrous, petty-bourgeois impediments
preventing it from going full speed ahead.

Two circumstances must be considered here to supplement what has
already been said. In the first place, the new means of control
have been created not by us, but by capitalism in its military-imperialist stage; and in the second place, it is
important to introduce more democracy into the administration of a proletarian state.

The grain monopoly and bread rationing were introduced not by
us, but by the capitalist state in war-time. It had

* For further details of the meaning of compulsory syndication
see my pamphlet: The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It . (See present edition, Vol. 25,
pp. 342-45.— Ed .) already introduced universal labour conscription within the framework of capitalism, which
is war-time penal servitude for the workers. But here too, as
in all its history-making activities, the proletariat takes
its weapons from capitalism and does not "invent" or "create
them out of nothing".

The grain monopoly, bread rationing and labour conscription in
the hands of the proletarian state, in the hands of sovereign
Soviets, will be the most powerful means of accounting and
control, means which, applied to the capitalists, and to the rich in general , applied to them by the workers ,
will provide a force unprecedented in history for "setting the
state apparatus in motion", for overcoming the resistance of the
capitalists, for subordinating them to the proletarian state. These means of control and of compelling people to work will be more potent than the laws of the Convention
and its guillotine. The guillotine only terrorised, only broke
active resistance. For us , this is not enough .

For us, this is not enough. We must not only "terrorise" the
capitalists, i.e., make them feel the omnipotence of the
proletarian state and give up all idea of actively resisting
it. We must also break passive resistance, which is undoubtedly more dangerous and harmful. We must not only break
resistance of every kind. We must also compel the capitalists to work within the framework of the new state
organisation. It is not enough to "remove" the capitalists; we
must (after removing the undesirable and incorrigible "resisters") employ them in the service of the new state . This applies both to the capitalists and to the
upper section of the bourgeois intellectuals, office employees,
etc.

And we have the means to do this. The means and instruments for
this have been placed in our hands by the capitalist state in
the war. These means are the grain monopoly, bread rationing and
labour conscription. "He who does not work, neither shall he
eat"—this is the fundamental, the first and most important
rule the Soviets of Workers' Deputies can and will introduce
when they become the ruling power.

Every worker has a work-book. This book does not degrade him,
although at present it is undoubtedly a document of capitalist wage-slavery, certifying that the workman belongs to
some parasite.

The Soviets will introduce work-books for the rich and then gradually for the whole population (in a peasant country
work-books will probably not be needed for a long time for the
overwhelming majority of the peasants). The work-book will cease
to be the badge of the "common herd", a document of the "lower"
orders, a certificate of wage-slavery. It will become a document
certifying that in the new society there are no longer any
"workmen", nor, on the other hand, are there any longer men
who do not work .

The rich will be obliged to get a work-book from the workers' or
office employees' union with which their occupation is most
closely connected, and every week, or other definite fixed
period, they will have to get from that union a certificate to
the effect that they are performing their work conscientiously;
without this they will not be able to receive bread ration cards
or provisions in general. The proletarian state will say: we
need good organisers of banking and the amalgamation of
enterprises (in this matter the capitalists have more experience, and it is easier to work with experienced people),
and we need far, far more engineers, agronomists, technicians
and scientifically trained specialists of every kind than were
needed before. We shall give all these specialists work to which
they are accustomed and which they can cope with; in all
probability we shall introduce complete wage equality only
gradually and shall pay these specialists higher salaries during
the transition period. We shall place them, however, under
comprehensive workers' control and we shall achieve the complete
and absolute operation of the rule "He who does not work,
neither shall he eat." We shall not invent the organisational
form of the work, but take it ready-made from capitalism—we
shall take over the banks, syndicates, the best factories,
experimental stations, academies, and so forth; all that we
shall have to do is to borrow the best models furnished by the
advanced countries.

Of course, we shall not in the least descend to a utopia, we are
not deserting the soil of most sober, practical reason when we
say that the entire capitalist class will offer the most
stubborn resistance, but this resistance will be broken by the
organisation of the entire population in Soviets. Those
capitalists who are exceptionally stubborn and recalcitrant
will, of course, have to be punished by the confiscation of
their whole property and by imprisonment. On the other hand,
however, the victory of the proletariat will bring about an
increase in the number of cases of the kind that I read
about in today's Izvestia for example:

"On September 26, two engineers came to the Central Council of
Factory Committees to report that a group of engineers had
decided to form a union of socialist engineers. The Union
believes that the present time is actually the beginning of the
social revolution and places itself at the disposal of the
working people, desiring, in defence of the workers' interests,
to work in complete unity with the workers' organisations. The
representatives of the Central Council of Factory Committees
answered that the Council will gladly set up in its organisation
an Engineers' Section which will embody in its programme the
main theses of the First Conference of Factory Committees on
workers' control over production. A joint meeting of delegates
of the Central Council of Factory Committees and of the
initiative group of socialist engineers will be held within the
next few days." ( Izvestia , September 27, 1917.)

* * *

The proletariat, we are told, will not be able to set the state
apparatus in motion.

Since the 1905 revolution, Russia has been governed by 130,000
landowners, who have perpetrated endless violence against
150,000,000 people, heaped unconstrained abuse upon them, and
condemned the vast majority to inhuman toil and semi-starvation.

Yet we are told that the 240,000 members of the Bolshevik Party
will not be able to govern Russia, govern her in the interests
of the poor and against the rich. These 240,000 are already
backed by no less than a million votes of the adult population,
for this is precisely the proportion between the number of Party
members and the number of votes cast for the Party that has been
established by the experience of Europe and the experience of
Russia as shown, for example, by the elections to the Petrograd
City Council last August. We therefore already have a "state
apparatus" of one million people devoted to the socialist state for the sake of high ideals and not for the sake
of a fat sum received on the 20th of every month.

In addition to that we have a "magic way" to enlarge our state
apparatus tenfold at once, at one stroke, a way which no
capitalist state ever possessed or could possess. This magic way
is to draw the working people, to draw the poor, into the daily
work of state administration.

To explain how easy it will be to employ this magic way and how
faultlessly it will operate, let us take the simplest and most
striking example possible.

The state is to forcibly evict a certain family from a flat and
move another in. This often happens in the capitalist state, and
it will also happen in our proletarian or socialist state.

The capitalist state evicts a working-class family which has
lost its breadwinner and cannot pay the rent. The bailiff
appears with police, or militia, a whole squad of them. To
effect an eviction in a working-class district a whole detachment of Cossacks is required. Why? Because the bailiff and
the militiaman refuse to go without a very strong military
guard. They know that the scene of an eviction arouses such fury
among the neighbours, among thousands and thousands of people
who have been driven to the verge of desperation, arouses such
hatred towards the capitalists and the capitalist state, that
the bailiff and the squad of militiamen run the risk of being
torn to pieces at any minute. Large military forces are
required, several regiments must be brought into a big city, and
the troops must come from some distant, outlying region so that
the soldiers will not be familiar with the life of the urban
poor, so that the soldiers will not be "infected" with socialism.

The proletarian state has to forcibly move a very poor family
into a rich man's flat. Let us suppose that our squad of
workers' militia is fifteen strong; two sailors, two soldiers,
two class-conscious workers (of whom, let us suppose, only one
is a member of our Party, or a sympathiser), one intellectual,
and eight from the poor working people, of whom at least five
must be women, domestic servants, unskilled labourers, and so
forth. The squad arrives at the rich man's flat, inspects it and
finds that it consists of five rooms occupied by two men and two
women—" You must squeeze up a bit into two rooms this winter, citizens, and prepare two rooms for two families now
living in cellars. Until the time, with the aid of engineers
(you are an engineer, aren't you?), we have built good dwellings
for everybody, you will have to squeeze up a little. Your
telephone will serve ten families. This will save a hundred
hours of work wasted on shopping, and so forth. Now in your
family there are two unemployed persons who can perform light
work: a citizeness fifty-five years of age and a citizen
fourteen years of age. They will be on duty for three hours a
day supervising the proper distribution of provisions for ten
families and keeping the necessary account of this. The student
citizen in our squad will now write out this state order in two
copies and you will be kind enough to give us a signed declaration that you will faithfully carry it out."

This, in my opinion, can illustrate how the distinction between
the old bourgeois and the new socialist state apparatus and
state administration could be illustrated.

We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled labourer or a
cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration. In this we agree with the Cadets, with
Breshkovskaya, and with Tsereteli. We differ, however, from
these citizens in that we demand an immediate break with the
prejudiced view that only the rich, or officials chosen from
rich families, are capable of administering the state, of performing the ordinary, everyday work of administration. We
demand that training in the work of state administration be conducted by class-conscious workers and
soldiers and that this training be begun at once, i.e., that a
beginning be made at once in training all the working people, all the poor, for this work.

We know that the Cadets are also willing to teach the people
democracy. Cadet ladies are willing to deliver lectures to
domestic servants on equal rights for women in accordance with
the best English and French sources. And also, at the very next
concert-meeting, before an audience of thousands, an exchange of
kisses will be arranged on the platform: the Cadet lady lecturer
will kiss Breshkovskaya, Breshkovskaya will kiss ex-Minister
Tsereteli, and the grateful people will therefore receive an
object-lesson in republican equality, liberty and fraternity. . . .

Yes, we agree that the Cadets, Breshkovskaya and Tsereteli are
in their own way devoted to democracy and are propagating it
among the people. But what is to be done if our conception of
democracy is somewhat different from theirs?

In our opinion, to ease the incredible burdens and miseries of
the war and also to heal the terrible wounds the war has
inflicted on the people, revolutionary democracy is needed, revolutionary measures of the kind described in
the example of the distribution of housing accommodation in the
interests of the poor. Exactly the same procedure must be adopted in both town and country for the distribution of
provisions, clothing, footwear, etc., in respect of the land in
the rural districts, and so forth. For the administration of the
state in this spirit we can at once set in motion a state apparatus consisting of ten if not twenty million
people, an apparatus such as no capitalist state has ever
known. We alone can create such an apparatus, for we are sure of
the fullest and devoted sympathy of the vast majority of the
population. We alone can create such an apparatus, because we
have class-conscious workers disciplined by long capitalist
"schooling" (it was not for nothing that we went to learn in the
school of capitalism), workers who are capable of forming a workers' militia and of gradually expanding
it (beginning to expand it at once) into a militia embracing the whole people . The class-conscious workers must lead,
but for the work of administration they can enlist the vast mass
of the working and oppressed people.

It goes without saying that this new apparatus is bound to make
mistakes in taking its first steps. But did not the peasants
make mistakes when they emerged from serfdom and began to manage
their own affairs? Is there any way other than practice by which
the people can learn to govern themselves and to avoid mistakes?
Is there any way other than by proceeding immediately to genuine
self-government by the people? The chief thing now is to abandon
the prejudiced bourgeois-intellectualist view that only special
officials, who by their very social position are entirely
dependent upon capital, can administer the state. The chief
thing is to put an end to the state of affairs in which
bourgeois officials and "socialist" ministers are trying to
govern in the old way, but are incapable of doing so and, after
seven months, are faced with a peasant revolt in a peasant
country! The chief thing is to imbue the oppressed and the
working people with confidence in their own strength, to prove
to them in practice that they can and must themselves ensure the
proper , most strictly regulated and organised distribution of bread, all kinds of food, milk, clothing,
housing, etc., in the interests of the poor . Unless this is done, Russia cannot be saved from collapse and
ruin. The conscientious, bold, universal move to hand over
administrative work to proletarians and semi-proletarians, will,
however, rouse such unprecedented revolutionary enthusiasm among
the people, will so multiply the people's forces in combating
distress, that much that seemed impossible to our narrow, old,
bureaucratic forces will become possible for the millions, who
will begin to work for themselves and not for the capitalists, the gentry, the bureaucrats, and not out of fear of
punishment.

* * *

Pertinent to the question of the state apparatus is also the
question of centralism raised with unusual vehemence and
ineptitude by Comrade Bazarov in Novaya Zhizn No. 138, of September 27, in an article entitled: " The Bolsheviks and the
Problem of Power".

Comrade Bazarov reasons as follows: " The Soviets are not an
apparatus suitable for all spheres of state life", for, he says,
seven months' experience has shown, and "scores and hundreds of
documents in the possession of the Economic Department of the
St. Petersburg Executive Committee" have confirmed, that the
Soviets, although actually enjoying "full power" in many places,
"have not been able to achieve anything like satisfactory
results in combating economic ruin". What is needed is an
apparatus "divided up according to branches of production, with
strict centralisation within each branch, and subordinated to
one, country-wide centre". "It is a matter", if you please, "not
of replacing the old apparatus, but merely of reforming it
. . . no matter how much the Bolsheviks may jeer at people with
a plan. . . ."

All these arguments of Comrade Bazarov's are positively amazing
for their helplessness, they echo the arguments of the bourgeoisie and reflect their class point of view.

In fact, to say that the Soviets have anywhere in Russia ever
enjoyed "full power" is simply ridiculous (if it is not a
repetition of the selfish class lie of the capitalists). Full
power means power over all the land, over all the banks, over
all the factories; a man who is at all familiar with the facts
of history and science on the connection between politics and
economics could not have "forgotten" this "trifling" circumstance.

The bourgeoisie's device is to withhold power from the
Soviets, sabotage every important step they take, while
at the same time retaining government in their own hands,
retaining power over the land, the banks, etc., and then
throwing the blame for the ruin upon the Soviets! This is
exactly what the whole sad experience of the coalition amounts
to.

The Soviets have never had full power, and the measures they
have taken could not result in anything but palliatives that
added to the confusion.

The effort to prove the necessity for centralism to the
Bolsheviks who are centralists by conviction, by their programme
and by the entire tactics of their Party, is really like forcing
an open door. The writers of Novaya Zhizn are wasting their time only because they have totally failed to understand
the meaning and significance of our jeers at their "country-wide" point of view. And the Novaya Zhizn
people have failed to understand this because they merely pay
lip-service to the doctrine of the class struggle, but do not accept it seriously. Repeating the words about the class
struggle they have learned by rote, they are constantly slipping
into the "above-class point of view", amusing in theory and
reactionary in practice, and are calling this fawning upon the
bourgeoisie a "country-wide" plan.

The state, dear people, is a class concept. The state is an
organ or instrument of violence exercised by one class against
another. So long as it is an instrument of violence exercised by
the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, the proletariat can
have only one slogan: destruction of this state. But when the state will be a proletarian state, when it will be an
instrument of violence exercised by the proletariat against the
bourgeoisie, we shall be fully and unreservedly in favour of a
strong state power and of centralism.

To put it in more popular language, we do not jeer at "plans",
but at Bazarov and Co.'s failure to understand that by repudiating "workers' control", by repudiating the "dictatorship
of the proletariat" they are for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. There is no middle course; a middle course is
the futile dream of the petty-bourgeois democrat.

Not a single central body, not a single Bolshevik has ever
argued against centralisation of the Soviets, against their amalgamation. None of us objects to having factory
committees in each branch of production, or to their centralisation. Bazarov is wide of the mark .

We laugh, have laughed, and will laugh not at "centralism", and
not at "plans", but at reformism , because, after the experience of the coalition, your reformism is utterly
ridiculous. And to say "not replace the apparatus but reform it"
means to be a reformist, means to become not a revolutionary but
a reformist democrat. Reformism means nothing more than
concessions on the part of the ruling class, but not its overthrow; it makes concessions, but power remains in
its hands .

This is precisely what has been tried during six months of the
coalition.

This is what we laugh at. Having failed to obtain a thorough
grasp of the doctrine of the class struggle, Bazarov allows
himself to be caught by the bourgeoisie who sing in chorus " Just
so, just so, we are by no means opposed to reform, we are in
favour of the workers participating in country-wide control, we
fully agree with that", and good Bazarov objectively sings the descant for the capitalists.

This has always been and always will be the case with people who
in the thick of intense class struggle want to take up a
"middle" position. And it is because-the writers of Novaya Zhizn are incapable of understanding the class struggle
that their policy is such a ridiculous and eternal oscillation
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Get busy on "plans", dear citizens, that is not politics, that
is not the class struggle; here you may be of use to the
people. You have many economists on your paper. Unite with those
engineers and others who are willing to work on problems of
regulating production and distribution; devote the centre page
of your big "apparatus" (your paper) to a practical study of
precise facts on the production and distribution of goods in
Russia, on banks, syndicates, etc., etc.—that is how you
will be of use to the people; that is how your sitting between
two stools will not be particularly harmful; such work on
"plans" will earn not the ridicule, but the gratitude of the
workers.

When the proletariat is victorious it will do the following, it
will set economists, engineers, agronomists, and so forth, to
work under the control of the workers' organisations on
drawing up a "plan", on verifying it, on devising labour-saving
methods of centralisation, on devising the simplest, cheapest,
most convenient and universal measures and methods of control. For this we shall pay the economists, statisticians and
technicians good money . . . but we shall not give them anything
to eat if they do not perform this work conscientiously and
entirely in the interests of the working people .

We are in favour of centralism and of a "plan", but of the
centralism and plan of the proletarian state, of proletarian regulation of production and distribution in the
interests of the poor, the working people, the exploited,
against the exploiters. We can agree to only one meaning of the
term "country-wide", namely, that which breaks the resistance of
the capitalists, which gives all power to the majority of the
people, i.e., the proletarians and semi-proletarians, the
workers and the poor peasants.

* * *

The fifth plea is that the Bolsheviks will not be able to retain
power because "the situation is exceptionally complicated". . . .

O wise men! They, perhaps, would be willing to reconcile
themselves to revolution if only the "situation" were not
"exceptionally complicated".

Such revolutions never occur, and sighs for such a revolution
amount to nothing more than the reactionary wails of a bourgeois
intellectual. Even if a revolution has started in a situation
that seemed to be not very complicated, the development of the
revolution itself always creates an exceptionally complicated situation. A revolution, a
real, profound, a "people's" revolution, to use Marx's expression, [9] is the incredibly complicated and painful
process of the death of the old and birth of the new social
order, of the mode of life of tens of millions of people. Revolution is a most intense, furious, desperate class
struggle and civil war. Not a single great revolution in
history has taken place without civil war. And only a "man in a
muffler" [10] can think that civil war is conceivable without an
"exceptionally complicated situation".

If the situation were not exceptionally complicated there would
be no revolution. If you are afraid of wolves don't go into the
forest.

There is nothing to discuss in the fifth plea, because there is
no economic, political, or any other meaning what ever in it. It
contains only the yearning of people who are distressed and
frightened by the revolution. To characterise this yearning I
shall take the liberty of mentioning two little things from my
personal experience.

I had a conversation with a wealthy engineer shortly before the
July days. This engineer had once been a revolutionary, had been
in the Social-Democratic movement and even a member of the
Bolshevik Party. Now he was full of fear and rage at the
turbulent and indomitable workers. "If they were at least like the German workers," he said (he is an
educated man and has been abroad), "of course, I understand that
the social revolution is, in general, inevitable, but here, when
the workers' level has been so reduced by the war . . . it is
not a revolution, it is an abyss."

He was willing to accept the social revolution if history were
to lead to it in the peaceful, calm, smooth and precise manner
of a German express train pulling into a station. A sedate
conductor would open the carriage door and announce: " Social
Revolution Station! Alle aussteigen! (All change!)" In that case he would have no objection to changing his position of
engineer under the Tit Tityches to that of engineer under the
workers' organisations.

That man has seen strikes. He knows what a storm of passion the
most ordinary strike arouses even in the most peaceful times. He, of course, understands how many million times more
furious this storm must be when the class struggle has aroused
all the working people of a vast country, when war and exploitation have driven almost to desperation millions of
people who for centuries have been tormented by the landowners,
for decades have been robbed and downtrodden by the capitalists
and the tsar's officials. He understands all this "theoretically", he only pays lip-service to this, he
is simply terrified by the "exceptionally complicated situation".

After the July days, thanks to the extremely solicitous
attention with which the Kerensky government honoured me, I was
obliged to go underground. Of course, it was the workers who
sheltered people like us. In a small working-class house in a
remote working-class suburb of Petrograd, dinner is being
served. The hostess puts bread on the table. The host says:
" Look what fine bread. ' They' dare not give us bad bread
now. And we had almost given up even thinking that we'd ever get
good bread in Petrograd again."

I was amazed at this class appraisal of the July days. My
thoughts had been revolving around the political significance of
those events, weighing the role they played in the general
course of events, analysing the situation that caused this
zigzag in history and the situation it would create, and how we
ought to change our slogans and alter our Party apparatus to
adapt it to the changed situation. As for bread, I, who had not
known want, did not give it a thought. I took bread for granted,
as a by-product of the writer's work, as it were. The mind
approaches the foundation of everything, the class struggle for
bread, through political analysis that follows an extremely
complicated and devious path.

This member of the oppressed class, however, even though one of
the well-paid and quite intelligent workers, takes the bull by
the horns with that astonishing simplicity and straightforwardness, with that firm determination and amazing
clarity of outlook from which we intellectuals are as remote as
the stars in the sky. The whole world is divided into two camps:
"us", the working people, and "them", the exploiters. Not a
shadow of embarrassment over what had taken place; it was just
one of the battles in the long struggle between labour and
capital. When you fell trees, chips fly.

" What a painful thing is this 'exceptionally complicated
situation' created by the revolution," that's how the bourgeois
intellectual thinks and feels.

"We squeezed 'them' a bit; 'they' won't dare to lord it over us
as they did before. We'll squeeze again—and chuck them out
altogether," that's how the worker thinks and feels.

* * *

The sixth and last plea: the proletariat "will be incapable of
resisting all the pressure by hostile forces that will sweep
away not only the proletarian dictatorship, but the entire
revolution into the bargain".

Don't try to scare us, gentlemen, you won't succeed. We saw
these hostile forces and their pressure in Kornilovism (from
which the Kerensky regime in no way differs). Everybody saw, and
the people remember, how the proletariat and the poor peasants
swept away the Kornilov gang, and how pitiful and helpless
proved to be the position of the supporters of the bourgeoisie
and of the few exception ally well-to-do local small landowners
who were exceptionally "hostile" to the revolution. Dyelo Naroda of September 30 urges the workers to "be patient and
put up with" Kerensky (i.e., Kornilov) and the fake Tsereteli
Bulygin Duma until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly
(convened under the protection of "military measures" against
insurgent peasants!) and, with great gusto, it repeats precisely
Novaya Zhizn 's sixth plea and shouts until it is hoarse: " The Kerensky government will under no circumstances
submit" (to the rule of the Soviets, the rule of the workers and
peasants, which Dyelo Naroda , not wishing to lag behind
the pogrom-mongers and anti-Semites, monarchists and Cadets,
calls the rule of " Trotsky and Lenin": these are the lengths to
which the Socialist-Revolutionaries go!).

But neither Novaya Zhizn nor Dyelo Naroda can scare the class-conscious workers. " The Kerensky government,"
you say, "will under no circumstances submit", i.e., it will
repeat the Kornilov revolt, to put it more simply, bluntly and
clearly. And the gentlemen of Dyelo Naroda dare to say that this will be "civil war", that this is a "horrible
prospect"!

No, gentlemen, you will not fool the workers. It will not be
civil war but a hopeless revolt of a handful of Kornilovites. If
they want to "refuse to submit" to the people and at all costs
provoke a repetition on a wide scale of what happened to the
Kornilov men in Vyborg— if that is what the
Socialist-Revolutionaries want , if that is what the member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party Kerensky wants, he
may drive the people to desperation. But you will not scare the
workers and soldiers with this, gentlemen.

What boundless insolence. They faked up a new Bulygin Duma; by
means of fraud they recruited a crowd of reactionary co-operators and village kulaks to help them, added to these the
capitalists and landowners (the so-called property owning
classes) and with the aid of this gang of Kornilovites they want
to thwart the will of the people , the will of the workers and peasants.

They have brought affairs in a peasant country to such a pass
that peasant revolt is spreading everywhere like a river in
flood! Think of it! In a democratic republic in which 80 per
cent of the population are peasants, the peasants have been
driven to revolt. . . . This same Dyelo Naroda , Chernov's newspaper, the organ of the " Socialist-Revolutionary"
Party, which on September 30 has the effrontery to advise the
workers and peasants to "be patient", was obliged to admit in a
leading article on September 29:

" So far practically nothing has been done to put an end
to those relations of bondage that still prevail in the
villages of central Russia."

This same Dyelo Naroda , in the same leading article of
September 29, says that "the dead hand of Stolypin is still
making itself strongly felt" in the methods employed by the
"revolutionary ministers"; in other words, putting it more
clearly and simply, it brands Kerensky, Nikitin, Kishkin and
Co. as Stolypins .

The " Stolypins" Kerensky and Co. have driven the peasants to
revolt, are now taking "military measures" against the peasants,
are trying to soothe the people with the convocation of the
Constituent Assembly (although Kerensky and Tsereteli have
already deceived the people once by solemnly proclaiming on July 8 that the Constituent Assembly would be
convened on the appointed date, September 17; they then
broke their promise and postponed the Constituent
Assembly even against the advice of the Menshevik Dan ,
postponed the Constituent Assembly not to the end of October as
the Menshevik Central Executive Committee of that time wished,
but to the end of November). The " Stolypins" Kerensky and
Co. are trying to soothe the people with the imminent convocation of the Constituent Assembly, as if the people can
believe those who have already lied in this matter, as if the
people can believe that the Constituent Assembly will be
properly convened by a government which has taken military measures in remote villages, that is to say,
is openly conniving at the arbitrary arrest of class-conscious
peasants and the rigging of the elections.

The government has driven the peasants to revolt and now has the
effrontery to say to them: " You must 'be patient', you must
wait, trust the government which is pacifying insurgent
peasants by 'military measures'!"

To bring matters to such a pitch that hundreds of thousands of
Russian soldiers perish in the offensive after June 19, the war
is being protracted, German sailors have mutinied and are
throwing their officers overboard, to bring matters to such a
pitch, all the time uttering phrases about peace but not offering a just peace to all the belligerents, and yet to
have the effrontery to tell the workers and peasants, to tell
the dying soldiers, "you must be patient", trust the government
of the " Stolypin man" Kerensky, trust the Kornilov generals for
another month, perhaps in that month they will send several tens
of thousands more soldiers to the slaughter. . . . " You must be
patient". . . .

Isn't that shameless?

But you won't fool the soldiers, gentlemen of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, Kerensky's fellow party members.

The workers and soldiers will not endure the Kerensky government
for a single day, for an extra hour, for they know that
the Soviet Government will immediately offer all the belligerents a just peace and therefore will in all probability achieve an immediate armistice and a speedy
peace.

Not for a single day, not for an extra hour will the soldiers of
our peasant army allow the Kerensky government—the government which is employing military measures to
suppress the peasant revolt—to remain in power against the
will of the Soviets.

No, gentlemen of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Kerensky's
fellow party members, you won't fool the workers and peasants
any more.

* * *

On the question of the pressure by hostile forces which the
mortally frightened Novaya Zhizn assures us will sweep away the proletarian dictatorship, still another monstrous
logical and political mistake is made, which only people who
have allowed themselves to be frightened out of their wits can
fail to see.

" Pressure by hostile forces will sweep away the proletarian
dictatorship," you say. Very well. But you are all economists
and educated people, dear fellow-citizens. You al] know that to
contrast democracy to the bourgeoisie is senseless and a sign of
ignorance; it is the same as contrasting pounds to yards, for
there is a democratic bourgeoisie and undemocratic groups of the
petty bourgeoisie (capable of raising a Vendée).

" Hostile forces" is merely an empty phrase. The class term is
bourgeoisie (backed by the landowners).

The bourgeoisie and the landowners, the proletariat, and the
petty bourgeoisie, the small proprietors, primarily the
peasants—these are the three main "forces" into which
Russia, like every capitalist country, is divided. These are the three main "forces" that have long been
revealed in every capitalist country (including Russia) not only
by scientific economic analysis, but also by the political experience of the modern history of all countries,
by the experience of all European revolutions since the
eighteenth century, by the experience of the two Russian
revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

So, you threaten the proletariat with the prospect that its rule
will be swept away by the pressure of the bourgeoisie? That, and
that alone, is what your threat amounts to, it has no other
meaning.

Very well. If, for example, the bourgeoisie can sweep away the
rule of the workers and poor peasants, then the only alternative
is a "coalition", i.e., an alliance, or agreement, between the
petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie. Nothing else can be
contemplated!

But coalition has been tried for about six months and it has led
to bankruptcy, and you yourselves, my dear but dense citizens of
Novaya Zhizn , have renounced coalition.

So what do we get?

You have become so muddled, citizens of Novaya Zhizn , you have allowed yourselves to be so scared, that you cannot
think straight in the extremely simple matter of counting even up to three , let alone up to five .

Either all power to the bourgeoisie—the slogan you have
long ceased to advocate, and which the bourgeoisie themselves
dare not even hint at, for they know that the people overthrew
this power with one hitch of the shoulder at the time of the
April 20-21 events, and would overthrow it now with thrice that
determination and ruthlessness; or power to the petty bourgeoisie, i.e., a coalition (alliance, agreement) between
them and the bourgeoisie, for the petty bourgeoisie do not wish
to and cannot take power alone and independently, as has been proved by the experience of all revolutions, and as is
proved by economics, which explains that in a capitalist country
it is possible to stand for capital and it is possible to stand
for labour, but it is impossible to stand for long in between. In Russia this coalition has for six months tried
scores of ways and failed.

Or, finally, all power to the proletarians and the poor peasants
against the bourgeoisie in order to break their resistance. This
has not yet been tried, and you, gentlemen of Novaya Zhizn , are dissuading the people from this, you
are trying to frighten them with your own fear of the bourgeoisie.

No fourth way can be invented.

If Novaya Zhizn , therefore, is afraid of the proletarian dictatorship and rejects it because, as it claims,
the proletarian power may be defeated by the bourgeoisie, it is
tantamount to its surreptitiously reverting to the position of compromise with the capitalists! It is as
clear as daylight, that whoever is afraid of resistance, whoever
does not believe that it is possible to break this resistance,
whoever warns the people: "beware of the resistance of the
capitalists, you will not be able to cope with it", is thereby again calling for compromise with the
capitalists.

Novaya Zhizn is hopelessly and pitifully muddled, as are all the petty-bourgeois democrats who now realise that the
coalition is bankrupt, dare not defend it openly and, at the
same time, protected by the bourgeoisie, fear the transfer of
all power to the proletarians and poor peasants.

* * *

To fear the resistance of the capitalists and yet to call
oneself a revolutionary, to wish to be regarded as a socialist—isn't that disgraceful? How low must
international socialism, corrupted by opportunism, have fallen
ideologically if such voices could be raised?

We have already seen the strength of the capitalists' resistance; the entire people have seen it, for the capitalists
are more class-conscious than the other classes and at once
realised the significance of the Soviets, at once exerted
all their efforts to the utmost, resorted to everything, went to all lengths, resorted to the most incredible
lies and slander, to military plots in order to frustrate the Soviets , to reduce them to nought, to prostitute them
(with the aid of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries),
to transform them into talking-shops, to wear down the peasants
and workers by months and months of empty talk and playing at
revolution.

We have not yet seen , however, the strength of resistance of the proletarians and poor peasants, for this
strength will become fully apparent only when power is in the
hands of the proletariat, when tens of millions of people who
have been crushed by want and capitalist slavery see from
experience and feel that state power has passed into the hands of the oppressed classes, that the state is helping
the poor to fight the landowners and capitalists, is breaking their resistance. Only then shall we
see what untapped forces of resistance to the capitalists are
latent among the people; only then will what Engels called
"latent socialism" [11] manifest itself. Only then, for every
ten thousand overt and concealed enemies of working-class rule, manifesting themselves actively or by
passive resistance, there will arise a million new fighters who had been politically dormant, writhing in the
torments of poverty and despair, having ceased to believe that
they were human, that they had the right to live, that they too
could be served by the entire might of the modern centralised
state, that contingents of the proletarian militia could, with
the fullest confidence, also call upon them to take a direct, immediate, daily part in state administration.

The capitalists and landowners, with the kind help of Plekhanov,
Breshkovskaya, Tsereteli, Chernov and Co., have done everything in their power to defile the democratic
republic, to defile it by servility to wealth to such a
degree that the people are being overcome by apathy, indifference; it is all the same to them , because the
hungry man cannot see the difference between the republic and
the monarchy; the freezing, barefooted, worn-out soldier
sacrificing his life for alien interests is not inclined to love
the republic.

But when every labourer, every unemployed worker, every cook,
every ruined peasant sees, not from the newspapers, but with his
own eyes, that the proletarian state is not cringing to wealth
but is helping the poor, that this state does not hesitate to
adopt revolutionary measures, that it confiscates surplus stocks
of provisions from the parasites-and distributes them to the
hungry, that it forcibly installs the homeless in the houses of
the rich, that it compels the rich to pay for milk but does not
give them a drop until the children of all poor families are sufficiently supplied, that the land is being
transferred to the working people and the factories and banks
are being placed under the control of the workers, and that
immediate and severe punishment is meted out to the millionaires
who conceal their wealth—when the poor see and feel this,
no capitalist or kulak forces, no forces of world finance
capital which manipulates thousands of millions, will vanquish
the people's revolution; on the contrary, the socialist revolution will triumph all over the world for it is
maturing in all countries.

Our revolution will be invincible if it is not afraid of itself,
if it transfers all power to the proletariat, for behind us
stand the immeasurably larger, more developed, more organised
world forces of the proletariat which are temporarily held down
by the war but not destroyed; on the contrary, the war has
multiplied them.

* * *

How can one be afraid that the Bolshevik government, that is to
say, the proletarian government, which is assured of the devoted
support of the poor peasants, will be "swept away" by the
capitalist gentlemen! What short sightedness! What disgraceful fear of the people! What
hypocrisy! Those who show this fear belong to that "high" (by
capitalist standards, but actually rotten ) "society" which utters the word "justice" without believing in it, from
habit, as a trite phrase, attaching no meaning to it.

Here is an example.

Mr. Peshekhonov is a well-known semi-Cadet. A more moderate
Trudovik, one of the same mind as the Breshkovskayas and
Plekhanovs, will not be found. There has never been a minister
more servile to the bourgeoisie. The world had never seen a more
ardent advocate of "coalition", of compromise with the capitalists.

Here are the admissions this gentleman was forced to make in his speech at the " Democratic" (read: Bulygin)
Conference as reported by the defencist Izvestia :

" There are two programmes. One is the programme of group claims,
class and national claims. This programme is most frankly
advocated by the Bolsheviks. It is not easy, however, for the
other sections of the democracy to reject this programme. They
are the claims of the working people, the claims of the cheated
and oppressed nationalities. It is not so easy, therefore, for
the democracy to break with the Bolsheviks, to reject these
class demands, primarily because in essence these demands are
just. But this programme, for which we fought before the
revolution, for the sake of which we made the revolution, and
which we would all unanimously support under other circumstances, constitutes a very grave danger under present
conditions. The danger is all the greater now because these
demands have to be presented at a time when it is impossible for
the state to comply with them. We must first defend the
whole—the state, to save it from doom, and there is only
one way to do that, not the satisfaction of demands, however
just and cogent they may be, but, on the contrary, restriction
and sacrifice, which must be contributed from all quarters. ( Izvestia , September 17.)

Mr. Peshekhonov fails to understand that as long as the
capitalists are in power he is defending not the whole,
but the selfish interests of Russian and " Allied" imperialist
capital. Mr. Peshekhonov fails to understand that the war would
cease to be an imperialist, predatory war of annexation only
after a rupture with the capitalists, with their secret
treaties, with their annexations (seizure of alien territory), with their banking and financial
swindles. Mr. Peshekhonov fails to understand that only
after this would the war become—if the enemy rejected the formal offer of a just peace—a defensive war,
a just war. Mr. Peshekhonov fails to understand that the defence
potential of a country that has thrown off the yoke of capital,
that has given the peasants land and has placed the banks and
factories under workers' control, would be many times greater than the defence potential of a capitalist country.

The main thing that Mr. Peshekhonov fails to understand is that he surrenders his entire position,
the entire position of the entire petty-bourgeois democracy
when he is forced to admit the justice of Bolshevism, to admit
that its demands are the demands of the " working people ", i.e., of the majority of the people.

This is where our strength lies. This is why our government will
be invincible; because even our opponents are forced to admit
that the Bolshevik programme is that of the "working people" and
the "oppressed nationalities".

After all, Mr. Peshekhonov is the political friend of the
Cadets, of the Yedinstvo and Dyelo Naroda people, of the Breshkovskayas and Plekhanovs, he is the representative of
the kulaks and of the gentlemen whose wives and sisters would
come tomorrow to gouge out with their umbrellas the eyes of
wounded Bolsheviks if they were to be defeated by Kornilov's or
(which is the same thing) Kerensky's troops.

A gentleman like that is forced to admit the "justice" of the Bolshevik demands.

For him "justice" is merely an empty phrase. For the mass of
semi-proletarians, however, and for the majority of the urban
and rural petty bourgeoisie who have been ruined, tortured and
worn out by the war, it is not an empty phrase, but a most
acute, most burning and immense question of death from starvation, of a crust of bread. That is why no policy
can be based on a "coalition", on a "compromise" between the
interests of the starving and ruined and the interests of the exploiters. That is
why the Bolshevik government is assured of the support of the overwhelming majority of these people.

Justice is an empty word, say the intellectuals and those
rascals who are inclined to proclaim themselves Marxists on the
lofty grounds that they have "contemplated the hind parts " of economic materialism.

Ideas become a power when they grip the people. And precisely at
the present time the Bolsheviks, i.e., the representatives of
revolutionary proletarian internationalism, have embodied in
their policy the idea that is motivating countless working
people all over the world.

Justice alone, the mere anger of the people against exploitation, would never have brought them on to the true path
of socialism. But now that, thanks to capitalism, the material
apparatus of the big banks, syndicates, railways, and so forth,
has grown, now that the immense experience of the advanced
countries has accumulated a stock of engineering marvels, the
employment of which is being hindered by capitalism, now that the class-conscious workers have built up a party of a
quarter of a million members to systematically lay hold of this
apparatus and set it in motion with the support of all the
working and exploited people—now that these conditions exist, no power on earth can prevent the Bolsheviks, if they do not allow themselves to be scared and if they succeed in
taking power, from retaining it until the triumph of the world
socialist revolution.

## AFTERWORD

The foregoing lines were already written when the leading
article in Novaya Zhizn of October 1 produced another gem of stupidity which is all the more dangerous because it
professes sympathy with the Bolsheviks and offers most sagacious
philistine admonitions "not to allow yourselves to be provoked"
(not to allow ourselves to be caught in the trap of screams
about provocation, the object of which is to frighten the
Bolsheviks and cause them to refrain from taking power).

Here is this gem:

" The lessons of movements, like that of July 3-5, on the one
hand, and of the Kornilov days, on the other, have shown quite
clearly that the democracy, having at its command organs that
exercise immense influence among the population, is invincible
when it takes a defensive position in civil war, and that it
suffers defeat, loses all the middle vacillating groups when it
takes the initiative and launches an offensive ."

If the Bolsheviks were to yield in any form and in the slightest
degree to the philistine stupidity of this argument they would
ruin their Party and the revolution.

For the author of this argument, taking it upon himself to talk
about civil war (just the subject for a lady with many good
points), has distorted the lessons of history on this question in an incredibly comical manner.

This is how these lessons, the lessons of history on this question, were treated by the representative and
founder of proletarian revolutionary tactics, Karl Marx:

" Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other
art, and is subject to certain procedural rules which, when neglected, will bring about the downfall of the
party neglecting them. These rules, logical deductions from the
nature of the parties and the circumstances you have to deal
with in such a case, are so plain and simple that the brief
experience of 1848 made the Germans fairly well acquainted with
them. Firstly, never play with insurrection unless you are fully
prepared to go the whole way " Insurrection is an equation with
very indefinite magnitudes, the value of which may change every
day; the forces opposed to you have all the advantage of
organisation, discipline and habitual authority [Marx has in
mind the most "difficult" case of insurrection: against the
"firmly established" old authority, against the army not yet
disintegrated by the influence of the revolution and the
vacillation of the government]; unless you bring strong odds
against them you are defeated and ruined. Secondly, once you
have entered upon the insurrectionary career, act with the
greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive is
the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures
itself with its enemies. Surprise your antagonists while their
forces are scattered, prepare the way for new successes, however
small, but prepare daily; keep up the moral superiority which
the first successful rising has given to you; rally in this way
those vacillating elements to your side which always follow the
strongest impulse and which always look out for the safer side;
force your enemies to retreat before they can collect their
strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest
master of revolutionary tactics yet known: de l'audace ,
de l'audace , encore de l'audace! " ( Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany , German
edition, 1907, p. 118.)

We have changed all that, the "would-be Marxists" of Novaya Zhizn may say about themselves; instead of triple audacity
they have two virtues: "We have two, sir: moderation and
accuracy." [12] For "us", the experience of world history, the
experience of the Great French Revolution, is

* Interpolations in square brackets (within passages quoted by
Lenin) have been introduced by Lenin unless otherwise indicated.— Ed . nothing. The important thing for
"us" is the experience of the two movements in 1917, distorted
by Molchalin spectacles.

Let us examine this experience without these charming spectacles.

You compare July 3-5 with "civil war", because you believed
Alexinsky, Pereverzev and Co. It is typical of the gentlemen of
Novaya Zhizn that they believe such people (and do absolutely nothing themselves to collect information about July 3-5, although they have the huge
apparatus of a big daily newspaper at their disposal).

Let us assume for a moment, however, that July 3-5 was not the
rudiment of civil war that was kept within the rudimentary stage
by the Bolsheviks, but actual civil war. Let us assume this.

In that case, then, what does this lesson prove?

First, the Bolsheviks did not take the offensive, for it is indisputable that on the night of July 3-4, and even on
July 4, they would have gained a great deal if they had taken
the offensive. Their defensive position was their weakness, if
we are to speak of civil war (as Novaya Zhizn does, and
not of converting a spontaneous outburst into a demonstration of
the type of April 20-21, as the facts show).

The "lesson" therefore proves that the wise men of Novaya Zhizn are wrong .

Secondly, if the Bolsheviks did not even set out to start an
insurrection on July 3 or 4, if not a single Bolshevik body even raised such a question, the reason for it
lies beyond the scope of our controversy with
Novaya Zhizn . For we are arguing about the lessons of "civil war", i.e., of insurrection, and not
about the point that obvious lack of a majority to support it
restrains the revolutionary party from thinking of insurrection.

Since everybody knows that the Bolsheviks received a majority in
the metropolitan Soviets and in the country (over 49 per cent of
the Moscow votes) much later than July 1917, it again follows that the "lessons" are far, far from what Novaya Zhizn , that lady with many good points, would like them to
be.

No, no, you had better not meddle with politics, citizens of
Novaya Zhizn !

If the revolutionary party has no majority in the advanced
contingents of the revolutionary classes and in the country,
insurrection is out of the question. Moreover, insurrection
requires: (1) growth of the revolution on a country-wide scale;
(2) the complete moral and political bankruptcy of the old
government, for example, the "coalition" government; (3) extreme
vacillation in the camp of all middle groups, i.e., those who do
not fully support the government, although they did fully
support it yesterday.

Why did Novaya Zhizn , when speaking of the "lessons" of
July 3-5, fail even to note this very important lesson? Because
a political question was not dealt with by politicians but by a
circle of intellectuals who had been terrified by the bourgeoisie.

To proceed. Thirdly, the facts show that it was after
July 3-4 that the rot set in among the Socialist-Revolutionaries
and Mensheviks, precisely because the Tseretelis had exposed themselves by their July policy,
precisely because the mass of the people realised that the Bolsheviks were their own front-rank fighters and
that the "social-bloc" advocates were traitors. Even before the Kornilov revolt this rot was fully revealed by
the Petrograd elections on August 20, which resulted in a
victory for the Bolsheviks and the rout of the "social-bloc"
advocates ( Dyelo Naroda recently tried to refute this by concealing the returns for all parties, but this was
both self-deception and deception of its readers; according to
the figures published in Dyen of August 24, covering only the city, the Cadets' share of the total vote increased
from 22 to 23 per cent, but the absolute number of votes cast
for the Cadets dropped 40 per cent; the Bolsheviks' share of the
total vote increased from 20 to 33 per cent, while the absolute
number of votes cast for the Bolsheviks dropped only 10 per
cent; the share of all "middle groups" dropped from 58 to 44 per
cent, but the absolute number of votes cast for them dropped 60
per cent!).

That a rot had set in among the Socialist-Revolutionaries and
Mensheviks after the July days and before the Kornilov days is
also proved by the growth of the Left wings in both parties,
reaching almost 40 per cent: this is "retribution" for the
persecution of the Bolsheviks by the Kerenskys.

In spite of the "loss" of a few hundred members, the proletarian
party gained enormously from July 3-4, for it was precisely during those stern days that the people
realised and saw its devotion and the treachery of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. So, the "lesson" is
far, very far from being of the Novaya Zhizn sort, it is one entirely different, namely: don't desert the seething
masses for the " Molchalins of democracy"; and if you launch an
insurrection, go over to the offensive while the enemy forces
are scattered, catch the enemy unawares.

Is that not so, gentlemen "would-be Marxists" of Novaya Zhizn ?

Or does " Marxism" mean not basing tactics on an exact appraisal
of the objective situation but senseless]y and uncritically lumping together "civil war" and "a Congress of
Soviets and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly"?

But this is simply ridiculous, gentlemen, this is a sheer
mockery of Marxism and of logic in general!

If there is nothing in the objective situation that warrants the intensification of the class struggle to the
point of "civil war", why did you speak of "civil war" in connection with "a Congress of Soviets and the Constituent
Assembly"? (For this is the title of the leading article in
Novaya Zhizn here under discussion.) In that case you should clearly have told the reader and proved to him that there
is no ground in the objective situation for civil war and that, therefore, peaceful, constitutionally-legal,
juridically and parliamentarily "simple" things like a Congress
of Soviets and a Constituent Assembly can and should be the
cornerstone of tactics. In that case it is possible to hold the opinion that such a congress and such an assembly are
really capable of making decisions .

If, however, the present objective conditions harbour the
inevitability or even only the probability of civil war, if you
did not "idly" speak about it, but did so clearly seeing,
feeling, sensing the existence of a situation of civil war, how
could you make a Congress of Soviets or a Constituent Assembly
the cornerstone? This is a sheer mockery of the starving and
tormented people! Do you think the starving will consent to
"wait" two months? Or that the ruin, about the increase of which
you yourselves write every day, will consent to "wait" for the Congress of Soviets or for the
Constituent Assembly? Or that the German offensive, in the
absence of serious steps on our part towards peace (i.e., in the
absence of a formal offer of a just peace to all belligerents),
will consent to "wait" for the Congress of Soviets or for the
Constituent Assembly? Or are you in possession of facts which
permit you to conclude that the history of the Russian revolution, which from February 28 to September 30 had proceeded
with extraordinary turbulence and unprecedented rapidity, will,
from October 1 to November 29, [13] proceed at a super-tranquil,
peaceful, legally balanced pace that will preclude upheavals,
spurts, military defeats and economic crises? Or will the army
at the front, concerning which the non -Bolshevik officer Dubasov said officially, in the name of the front, "it
will not fight", quietly starve and freeze until the "appointed"
date? Or will the peasant revolt cease to be a factor of civil
war because you call it "anarchy" and "pogrom", or because
Kerensky will send "military" forces against the peasants ? Or is it possible, conceivable , that the
government can work calmly, honestly, and without deception to convene the Constituent Assembly in a
peasant country when that same government is suppressing the peasant revolt?

Don't laugh at the "confusion in the Smolny Institute", [14]
gentlemen! There is no less confusion in your own ranks. You
answer the formidable questions of civil war with confused
phrases and pitiful constitutional illusions. That is why I say
that if the Bolsheviks were to give in to these moods they would
ruin both their Party and their revolution.

N. Lenin

October 1, 1917.