Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

The Russian Revolution /297
revolutionary and progressive. Once the revolutionary force aspires to domination, it
becomes stagnant and repressive because it strives to hold on to its power, allowing
nothing and no one to limit it. As a result (and here a simple law of physics comes into
play: that every action has an equal and opposite reaction) there arises a new dissatisfaction,
from which emerges a new force of opposition, more alive, progressive and
revolutionary in that it aims to expand the victory where the victors aim only to consolidate
it then quiet things down.
This is why the Bolsheviks, before their victory over Menshevism [a rival socialist
party], defencism and opportunism, were a revolutionary force. But they have now
become, in keeping with the laws of progress, a force of stagnation, a force seeking
to restrain the revolutionary pressures of life, a force striving to squeeze life into the
artificial framework of their program, with the result that they have given rise to a
new force, progressive and revolutionary, that will seek to destroy this framework
and to widen the sphere of revolutionary activity. Such a force, at the present moment,
is anarchism.
Our aid to the Bolsheviks must end at the point where their victory begins. We
must open a new front, for we have fulfilled the demands of progress. We will leave
the present field of battle. We will go with the Bolsheviks no longer, for their "constructive"
work has begun, directed towards what we have always fought and what is
a brake on progress-the strengthening of the state. It is not our cause to strengthen
what we have resolved to destroy. We must go to the lower classes to organize the
work of the third-and perhaps the last-revolution. And just as we earlier took part
in the soviets, we must now, with the transfer of power to their hands, struggle
against them as law-making and statist organs. Therefore:
1. The Soviets are now organs of power, a legal apparatus on county, district
and provincial level.
2. Russia, having recognized a new form of social life, a Republic of (completely
autonomous) soviets, has not yet jettisoned as unnecessary baggage the principle
of statehood. The state remains, for the soviets are organizations of power,
a new type of (class) parliament, each a miniature half-free state at the county,
district and provincial levels.
3. The soviets are legal, state organs, organs of a modernized representative
system, and we know, as Kropotkin has said lin Words of a Rebel!. "representative
government, whether it is called a Parliament, a Convention or Council of
the Commune, or whether it gives itself any other more or less absurd title, and