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It should be clear to everyone that, during the transition period, the working class will have to (and must do so now) strain all its energy in order to emerge victorious in the battle with its numerous enemies, and that no other organisation can defeat the enemies of the working class except one that embraces the working class and the poorer peasantry of the whole country. How is it possible to ward off foreign imperialists unless one holds in one's hands government, power, and an army? How is it possible to fight against counter-revolution unless one holds in one's hands arms (a means of coercion), prisons for confining counter-revolutionaries (a means of coercion), and other means of force and subjection? How is it possible to make capitalists conform to the workers' control, requisitions, etc., if the working class possess no means for compelling others to obey? Of course some may say that a couple of "Unions of Five Oppressed" would be sufficient. That is nonsense.
The peculiarities of a transition period call for the necessity of a Workers' State. For even when the bourgeois will be defeated all over the world, accustomed as it is to idleness, and imbued with feelings of hostility towards the workers, it will do its best to avoid work, to try and injure the proletariat in every way. The bourgeois must be made to serve the people. Only an authorised government and compulsory measures can do that.
In backward countries like Russia there still exists a multitude of small and medium property-holders, sweaters, usurers and land-grabbers. All these are against the poorest elements of the rural population and still more against the town labourers. They follow in the wake of big capital and of the ex-estate owners. It is needless to say that the workers and the poorest of the peasants must crush them should they rise against the revolution. The workers have got to think how to organise a new plan of work, systematise the work of production taken out of the hands of the manufacturers, help the peasants to organise rural economy and a fair distribution of bread, manufactured goods, iron products, and so on. But the sweater-land-grabber, grown fat on the war, is stubborn; he does not intend to act in tho common interest. "I am my own master," he says. The workers and the poor elements of the peasantry must compel him to obey, just in the same way as they are compelling the big capitalists to obey, the ex-landlords and ex-generals and officers.
