per 200 and the workers one per 1,000.[1] In a democratic republic these departures from principles would not be tolerated.
Against the Soviets who would give the land to the peasants without compensation, and who would propose a just peace to all the peoples, no alliance of the Anglo-French and Russian bourgeoisie, or of the Kornilovs, the Buchanans, the Riabouchinskys and the Miliukovs with the Plekhanovs and the Potressovs could do anything. For such an alliance would be doomed to impotence.
Certainly the bourgeoisie would oppose giving up the land to the peasants without indemnity, similar rearrangements in other spheres, a just peace and the rupture with imperialism. But to carry this resistance as far as civil war there would need to be a mass capable of warring against the Soviets and conquering them. Now, the bourgeoisie does not possess these masses and can therefore take no action. Moreover, the Soviets will speedily and resolutely seize power; the "barbarian divisions" and Cossacks will be disintegrated; and fast enough the masses will divide themselves into a meagre minority of conscious Kornilovians and an immense majority of workers and peasants, partisans in the democratic and Socialist democracy (for it will then have to do with Socialism).
The bourgeois resistance, after the Soviets have seized power, will result in every capitalist being watched, inspected and controlled by tens and hundreds of workers and peasants whose interests it will be to prohibit the deception of the people by the capitalists. The forms and machinery of this registration and control have been invented and simplified by capitalism itself, by its very creations—the banks, large factories, trusts, railways, post office, consumers' associations and syndicates. It will be enough to break all resistance without bloodshed for the Soviets to punish by means of confiscation or a short-term imprisonment the capitalists who refuse to give an account of themselves or who continue to trick the people. For it is precisely by means of the banks, which will be nationalised, the associations of employers and civil servants, the post office, the consumers' societies and the syndicates that the control and registration will become universal, all-powerful and invincible.
The Soviets, the workers and poor peasants of Russia, are not
- ↑ A regulation which has been allowed since the formation of the Petrograd Soviet; one deputy for each company or thousand workers. The Social-Democrats and even the Mensheviks have tried scores of times, but always in vain, to do away with this anomaly.
