" No
wonder then that, when the revolution came, the industrial wage earners
had developed such self-confidence as a class that they were tempted to
disregard the dictum of their intellectual mentors that this was merely
to be a bourgeois revolution--with the social revolution still remote.
Instead they listened to the slogan "All power to the Soviets."
The idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" reached maturity in
the course of the abortive revolution of 1905-1906. After a victory for
the people in October, 1905, the bourgeoisie grew frightened over the
aggressiveness of the wage-earning class and sought safety in an
understanding with the autocracy. An order by the Soviet of Petrograd
workmen in November, 1905, decreeing the eight-hour day in all factories
sufficed to make the capitalists forego their historical role of
champions of popular liberty against autocracy. If the bourgeoisie
itself will not fight for a democracy, reasoned the revolutionary
socialists, why have such a democracy at all? Have we not seen the
democratic form of government lend itself to ill-concealed plutocracy in
Europe and America? Why run at all the risk of corruption of the
post-revolutionary government at the hands of the capitalists? Why first
admit the capitalists into the inner circle and then spend time and
effort in preventing them from coming to the top? Therefore, they
declined parliamentarism with thanks and would accept nothing less than
a government by the representative organ of the workers--the Soviets.
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