Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

CAN THE BOLSHEVIKS RETAIN STATE POWER?105* **The chief difficulty facing the proletarian revolution isthe establishment on a country-wide scale of the most preciseand most conscientious accounting and control, ofworkers’ control of the production and distribution of goods.When the writers of Novaya Zhizn argued that in advancingthe slogan “workers’ control” we were slipping into syndicalism,this argument was an example of the stupid schoolboymethod of applying “Marxism” without studying it,just learning it by rote in the Struve manner. Syndicalismeither repudiates the revolutionary dictatorship of theproletariat, or else relegates it, as it does political power ingeneral, to a back seat. We, however, put it in the forefront.If we simply say in unison with the Novaya Zhizn writers: notworkers’ control but state control, it is simply a bourgeoisreformistphrase, it is, in essence, a purely Cadet formula,because the Cadets have no objection to the workersparticipating in “state” control. The Kornilovite Cadetsknow perfectly well that such participation offers the bourgeoisiethe best way of fooling the workers, the most subtleway of politically bribing all the Gvozdyovs, Nikitins, Prokopoviches,Tseretelis and the rest of that gang.When we say: “workers’ control”, always juxtaposingthis slogan to dictatorship of the proletariat, always puttingit immediately after the latter, we thereby explain whatkind of state we mean. The state is the organ of class domination.Of which class? If of the bourgeoisie, then it is theCadet-Kornilov-“Kerensky” state which has been “Kornilovising”and “Kerenskyising” the working people of Russiafor more than six months. If it is of the proletariat, if weare speaking of a proletarian state, that is, of the proletariandictatorship, then workers’ control can become the countrywide,all-embracing, omnipresent, most precise and mostconscientious accounting of the production and distributionof 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. TheSoviets indicate to the proletariat the organisational workwhich can solve this historically important problem.