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for instance, France, Switzerland, and the United States of America), notwithstanding universal suffrage, the power is completely concentrated in the hands of the leading bankers. And so we see why the right wing of the socialist revolutionaries and the mensheviks are striving to overthrow the power of the Soviets and to summon the "Constituent Assembly." In granting votes to the bourgeoisie they intend to prepare for a transition to a similar order of things as exists in France and America. They consider that the Bussian workers are not "ripe" to hold the government in their own hands. But the party of the communist-bolsheviks, on the contrary, holds that dictatorship of the workers is essential at the present moment, and that there can be no talk whatever of any transfer of government. The bourgeoisie must be deprived of every possibility of deceiving the people. The bourgeoisie must be set aside and firmly prevented from taking any part in the government of the country, because the present is a time of acute struggle. We must strengthen and widen the dictatorship of the workers and the poorer elements of the peasantry. That is why the State government of Soviets is indispensable. Here we have no bourgeoisie whatever, and no landowners. Here the state is governed by the organisations of workers and peasants which have grown up together with the revolution and have borne the whole burden of the great struggle on their own shoulders.
But this is not enough. An ordinary republic does not only represent the power of the bourgeoisie. A republic of this kind can never, by reason of its composition, become inspired with the spirit of the workers' party. In a parliamentary republic every citizen hands in his vote once in every four or five years, and there his part in the matter ends. All the rest is left to deputies, ministers and presidents, who manage everything. There is no connection whatever with the masses. The masses of the labouring people are only tools exploited by the officials of the bourgeoisie, taking no real part in the government.
Quite a different matter is a Soviet republic, corresponding to a dictatorship of the workers. Here the whole administration is based on an entirely different principle. A Soviet government is not an organisation of officials independent of the masses and dependent on the bourgeoisie. The Soviet government and its organs are supported by general organisations of the working class and the peasantry. Trade unions, works and factories committees, local Soviets of workmen and peasants, soldiers'
