Revolutionary Wine and Parliamentary Bottles

There is another point to consider. The revolution had not arrested its progress at the goal of a bourgeois revolution. Transcending any such aim, it had revealed the titanic figure of a proletarian revolution, of one aiming at socialistic reorganisation. Had they accepted parliamentarism, the bolsheviks would have accepted an institution which, however important, is of very limited value; an institution which even in times of peaceful evolution has proved obviously inadequate to the needs of the proletarian struggle for emancipation; an institution which, adapted to the requirements of the capitalist order, must necessarily fail to meet the necessities of those whose purpose it is to subvert that order. It is undeniable that the proletariat must derive all the advantage that can be derived from parliamentary institutions. But parliament is one of those state institutions which a victorious proletariat cannot simply take over and use for its own purposes. The new revolutionary wine must not be poured into old bottles. From this outlook, “bolshevism” was assuredly justified in replacing the Constituent Assembly by the soviets, in replacing the activity of a determinative and legislative assembly, by the activity of organisations upon the broadest possible democratic basis, and simultaneously legislative, administrative, and executive.