Part 6 (1/2)

But did the Provisional Government have no other support but this equivocal one of the Soviet leaders? What had become of the possessing cla.s.ses? The question is a fundamental one. United by their past with the monarchy, the possessing cla.s.ses had hastened to group themselves around a new axis after the revolution. On the 2nd of March, the Council of Trade and Industry, representing the united capital of the whole country, saluted the act of the State Duma, and declared itself ”wholly at the disposition” of its Committee.

The zemstvos and the town dumas adopted the same course. On March 10, even the Council of the United n.o.bility, the mainstay of the throne, summoned all the people of Rus-sia a language of eloquent cowardice ”to unite around the Provisional Government as now the sole lawful power in Russia. Almost at the same time the inst.i.tutions and organs of the possessing cla.s.ses began to denounce the dual power, and to lay the blame for the disorders upon the Soviet-at .rst cautiously but then bolder and bolder. The employers were soon followed by the clerks, the united liberal professions, the government employees. From the army came telegrams, addresses and resolutions of the same character-manufactured in the staff. The liberal press opened a campaign ”for a single sovereignty,” which in the coming months acquired the character of a hurricane of .re around the heads of the So-viet. All these things together looked exceedingly impressive. The enormous number of inst.i.tutions, well-known names, resolutions, articles, the decisiveness of tone-it had an in-dubitable effect upon the suggestible heads of the Committee. And yet there was no serious force behind this threatening parade of the propertied cla.s.ses. How about the force of prop-erty? said the petty bourgeois socialists, answering the Bolsheviks. Property is a relation among people. It represents an enormous power so long as it is universally recognised and supported by that system of compulsion called Law and the State. But the very essence of the present situation was that the old state had suddenly collapsed, and the entire old sys-tem of rights had been called in question by the ma.s.ses. In the factories the workers were more and more regarding themselves as the proprietors, and the bosses as uninvited guests. Still less a.s.sured were the feelings of the landlords in the provinces, face to face with those surly vengeful muzhiks, and far from that governmental power in whose existence they did for a time, owing to their distance from the capital, believe. The property-holders, deprived of the possibility of using their property, or protecting it, ceased to be real property holders and became badly frightened Philistines who could not give any support to the government for the simple reason that they needed support themselves. They soon began to curse the government for its weakness, but they were only cursing their own fate In those days the joint activity of the Executive Committee and the ministry seemed to have for its goal to demonstrate that the art of government in time of revolution consists in a garrulous waste of time. With the liberals this was a consciously adopted plan. It was their .rm conviction that all measures demanded postponement except one: the oath of loyalty to the Entente.

Miliukov acquainted his colleagues with the secret treaties. Kerensky let them in one ear and out the other. Apparently only the Procuror of the Holy Synod, a certain Lvov, rich in surprises, a namesake of the Premier but not a prince, went into a storm of indignation and even called the treaties ”brigandage and swindle ”-which undoubtedly provoked a conde-scending smile from Miliukov (”The everyday man is a fool”) and a quiet proposal to return to the order of business. The of.cial Declaration of the government promised to summon a Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly at the earliest possible date-which date, however, was intentionally not stated. Nothing was said about the form of government: they still hoped to return to the lost paradise of monarchy. But the real meat of the Declaration' lay in its promise to carry the war through to victory, and ”unswervingly carry out the agreements made with our Allies.” So far as concerned the most threatening problems of the people's existence, the revolution had apparently been achieved only in order to make the announcement: ev-erything remains as before. Since the democrats attributed an almost mystic importance to recognition by the Entente-a small trader amounts to nothing until the bank recognises his credit-the Executive Committee swallowed in silence the imperialist declaration of March ”Not one of.cial organ of the democracy,” grieves Sukhanov a year later, ”publicly reacted to the Declaration of the Provisional Government, which disgraced our revolution at its very birth in the eyes of democratic Europe.”

At last, on the 8th of March, there issued from the ministerial laboratory a Decree of Amnesty. By that time the doors of the prisons had been opened by the people throughout the whole country, political exiles were returning in a solid stream with meetings, hurrahs, military speeches, .owers. The decree sounded like a belated echo from the government buildings. On the twelfth they announced the abolition of the death penalty. Four months later it was restored in the army. Kerensky promised to elevate justice to unheard-of heights. In a moment of heat he actually did carry out a resolution of the Executive Committee intro-ducing representatives of the workers and soldiers as members of the courts of justice. That was the sole measure in which could be felt the heartbeat of the revolution, and it raised the hair on the heads of the eunuchs of justice. But the matter stopped right there. Lawyer Demianov, an important of.cer in the ministry under Kerensky, and also a ”socialist,” de-cided to adopt the principle of leaving all former of.cials at their posts. To quote his own words: ”The policies of a revolutionary government ought never to offend anybody unnec-essarily.” That was, at bottom, the guiding principle of the whole Provisional Government, which feared most of all to offend anybody from the circles of the possessing cla.s.ses, or even the czarist bureaucracy. Not only the judges, but even the prosecutors of the czarist rgime remained at their posts. To be sure, the ma.s.ses might be offended. But that was the Soviet's business; the ma.s.ses did not enter into the .eld of vision of the government.

The sole thing in the nature of a fresh stream was brought in by the above-mentioned temperamental Procuror, Lvov, who gave an of.cial report on the ”idiots and scoundrels” sitting in the Holy Synod. The ministers listened to his juicy characterisations with some alarm, but the synod continued a state inst.i.tution, and Greek Orthodoxy the state religion. Even the members.h.i.+p of the Synod remained unchanged. A revolution ought not to quarrel with anybody!

The members of the State Council-faithful servants of two or three emperors continued to sit, or at least to draw their salaries. And this fact soon acquired a symbolic signi.cance. Factories and barracks noisily protested. The Executive Committee worried about it. The government spent two sessions debating the question of the fate and salaries of the members of the State Council, and could not arrive at a decision. Why disturb these respectable people, among whom, by the way, we have many good friends?

The Rasputin ministers were still in prison, but the Provisional Government hastened to vote them a pension. This sounded like mockery, or a voice from another world. But the government did not want to offend its predecessors even though they were locked up in jail.

The senators continued to drowse in their embroidered jackets, and when a left senator, Sokolov, newly appointed by Kerensky, dared to appear in a black frock coat, they quietly removed him from the hall. These czarist legislators were not afraid to offend the February revolution, once convinced that its government had no teeth.

Karl Marx saw the cause of the failure of the March revolution in Germany in the fact that it ”reformed only the very highest political circles, leaving untouched all the layers beneath them-the old bureaucracy, the old army, the old judges, born and brought up and grown old in the service of absolutism.” Socialists of the type of Kerensky were seeking salvation exactly where Marx saw the cause of failure. And the Menshevik Marxists were with Kerensky, not Marx.

The sole sphere in which the government showed initiative and revolutionary tempo, was that of legislation on stock holdings. Hence the degree of reform was issued on the 17th of March. National and religious limitations were annulled only three days later. There were quite a few people on the staff of the government, you see, who had suffered under the old rgime, if at all, only from a lack of business in stocks.

The workers were impatiently demanding an eight-hour day. The government pretended to deaf in both ears. Besides it is war time, and all ought to sacri.ce themselves for the good of the Fatherland. Moreover that is the soviet's business: let them pacify the workers.

Still more threatening was the land question. Here it was really necessary to do some-thing. Spurred on by the prophets, the Minister of Agriculture, s.h.i.+ngarev, ordered the for-mation of local land committees-prudently refraining, however, from de.ning their tasks and functions. The peasants had an idea that these committees ought to give them the land. The landlords thought the committees ought to protect their property. From the very start the muzhik's noose, more ruthless than all others, was tightening round the neck of the February rgime.

Agreeably to the of.cial doctrine, all those problems which had caused the revolution were postponed to the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly. How could you expect these irreproach-able democrats to antic.i.p.ate the national will, when they had not even succeeded in seat-ing Mikhail Romanov astride of it? The preparation of a national representation was ap-proached in those days with such bureaucratic heaviness and deliberate procrastination that the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly itself became a mirage. Only on the 25th of March, almost a month after the insurrection-a month of revolution !-the government decided to call a lumbering Special Conference for the purpose of working out an election law. But the conference never opened. Miliukov in his History of the Revolution which is false from beginning to end confusedly states that as a result of various dif.culties ”the work of the Special Conference was not begun under the .rst government.” The dif.culties were inherent in the const.i.tution of the conference and in its function. The whole idea was to postpone the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly until better times: until victory, until peace or until the Calends of Kornilov.

The Russian bourgeoisie, which appeared in the world too late, mortally hated the revo-lution. But its hatred had no strength. It had to bide its time and manoeuvre. Being unable to overthrow and strangle the revolution, the bourgeoisie counted on starving it out.

CHAPTER 11.

DUAL POWER.

What const.i.tutes the essence of a dual power? [1] We must pause upon this question, for an illumination of it has never appeared in historic literature. And yet this dual power is a distinct condition of social crisis, by no means peculiar to the Russian revolution of 1917although there most clearly marked out.

Antagonistic cla.s.ses exist in society everywhere, and a cla.s.s, deprived of power in-evitably strives to some extent to swerve the governmental course in its favour. This does not as yet mean, however, that two or more powers are ruling in society. The character of political structure is directly determined by the relation of the oppressed cla.s.ses to the ruling cla.s.s. A single, government, the necessary condition of stability in any rgime, is preserved so long as the ruling cla.s.s succeeds in putting over its economic and political forms upon the whole of society the only forms possible.

The simultaneous dominion of the German Junkers and the bourgeoisie-whether in the Hohenzollern form or the republic-is not a double government, no matter how sharp at times may be the con.ict between the two partic.i.p.ating powers. They have a common social basis, therefore their clash does not threaten to split the state apparatus. The two-power rgime arises only out of irreconcilable cla.s.s con.icts-is possible, therefore, only in a revolutionary epoch, and const.i.tutes one of its fundamental elements.

The political mechanism of revolution consists of the transfer of power from one cla.s.s to another. The forcible overturn is usually accomplished in a brief time. But no historic cla.s.s lifts itself from a subject position to a position of rulers.h.i.+p suddenly in one night, even though a night of revolution. It must already on the eve of the revolution have a.s.sumed a very independent att.i.tude towards the of.cial ruling cla.s.s; moreover, it must have focused upon itself the hopes of intermediate cla.s.ses and layers, dissatis.ed with the existing state of affairs, but not capable of playing an independent ro1e. The historic preparation of 148.

a revolution brings about, in the pre-revolutionary period, a situation in which the cla.s.s which is called to realise the new social system, although not yet master of the country, has actually concentrated in its hands a. signi.cant share of the state power, while the of.cial apparatus of the government is still in. the hands of the old lords. That is the initial dual power in every revolution.

But that is not its only form. If the new cla.s.s, placed in power by a revolution which it did not want, is in essence an already old, historically belated, cla.s.s; if it was already worn out before it was of.cially crowned; if on coming to power it encounters an antagonist already suf.ciently mature and reaching out its hand toward the helm of state; then instead of one unstable two-power equilibrium, the political revolution produces another, still less stable. To overcome the ”anarchy” of this twofold sovereignty becomes at every new step the task of the revolution-or the counter-revolution.

This double sovereignty does not presuppose-generally speaking, indeed, it excludes-the possibility of a division of the power into two equal halves, or indeed any formal equi-librium of forces whatever. It is not a const.i.tutional, but a revolutionary fact. It implies that a destruction of the social equilibrium has already split the state superstructure. It arises where the hostile cla.s.ses are already each relying upon essentially incompatible gov-ernmental organisations-the one outlived, the other in process of formation-which jostle against each other at every step in the sphere of government. The amount of power which falls to each of these struggling cla.s.ses in such a situation is determined by the correlation of forces in the course of the struggle.

By its very nature such a state of affairs cannot be stable. Society needs a concentration of power, and in the person of the ruling cla.s.s-or, in the situation we are discussing, the two half-ruling cla.s.ses-irresistibly strives to get it. The splitting of sovereignty foretells nothing less than civil war. But before the competing cla.s.ses and parties will go to that extreme-especially in case they dread the interference of third force-they may feel compelled for quite long time to endure, and even to sanction, a two-power system. This system will nevertheless inevitably explode. Civil war gives to this double sovereignty its most visible, because territorial, expression. Each of the powers, having created its own forti.ed drill ground, .ghts for possession of the rest of the territory, which often has to endure the double sovereignty in the form of successive invasions by the two .ghting powers, until one of them decisively installs itself.

The English revolution of the seventeenth century, exactly because it was a great revo-lution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this Alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war.

At .rst the royal power, resting upon the privileged cla.s.ses or the upper circles of these cla.s.ses-the aristocrats and bishops, -is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are close to it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London. The protracted con.ict between these two regimes is .nally settled in open civil war. The two governmental centres-London and Oxford-create their own armies. Here the dual power takes territorial form, although, as always in civil war, the boundaries are very s.h.i.+fting. Parliament conquers. The king is captured and awaits his fate.

It would seem that the conditions are now created for the single rule of the Presbyte-rian bourgeoisie. But before the royal power could be broken, the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the In-dependents, the pious and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully interferes in the social life, not merely as an armed force, but as a Praetorian Guard, and as the political representative of a new cla.s.s opposing the prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers' and of.cers' deputies (”agitators”). A new period of dou-ble sovereignty has thus arrived: that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents' army. This leads to open con.icts. The bourgeoisie proves Powerless to oppose with its own army the ”model army” of Cromwell-that is, the armed plebeians. The con.ict ends with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictators.h.i.+p of Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the army, under the leaders.h.i.+p of the Levellers the extreme left wing of the revolution-try to oppose to the rule of the upper military levels, the patricians of the army, their own veritably plebeian rgime. But this new two-power system does not succeed in developing: the Levellers, the lowest depths of the petty bourgeoisie, have not yet, nor can have, their own historic path. Cromwell soon settles accounts with his enemies. A new political equilibrium, and still by no means a stable one, is established for a period of years.

In the great French revolution, the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, the backbone of which was the upper levels of the Third Estate, concentrated the power in its hands-without however fully annulling the prerogatives of the king. The period of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly is a clearly-marked period of dual power, which ends with the .ight of the king to Varennes, and is formally liquidated with the founding of the Republic.

The .rst French const.i.tution (1791), based upon the .ction of a complete independence of the legislative and executive powers, in reality concealed from the people, or tried to conceal, a double sovereignty: that of the bourgeoisie, .rmly entrenched in the National a.s.sembly after the capture by the people of the Bastille, and that of the old monarchy still relying upon the upper circles of the priesthood, the clergy, the bureaucracy, and the mili-tary, to say nothing of their hopes of foreign intervention. In this self-contradictory rgime lay the germs of its inevitable destruction. A way out could be found only in the abolition of bourgeois representation by the powers of European reaction, or in the guillotine for the king and the monarchy. Paris and Coblenz must measure their forces.

But before it comes to war and the guillotine, the Paris Commune enters the scene-supported by the lowest city layers of the Third Estate-and with increasing boldness con-tests the power with the of.cial representatives of the national bourgeoisie. A new double sovereignty is thus inaugurated, the .rst manifestation of which we observe as early as 1790, when the big and medium bourgeoisie is still .rmly seated in the administration and in the munic.i.p.alities. How striking is the picture-and how vilely it has been slandered!-of the efforts of the plebeian levels to raise themselves up out of the social cellars and cata-combs, and stand forth in that forbidden arena where people in wigs and silk breeches are settling the fate of the nation. It seemed as though the very foundation of society, tramped underfoot by the cultured bourgeoisie, was stirring and coming to life. Human heads lifted themselves above the solid ma.s.s, h.o.r.n.y hands stretched aloft, hoa.r.s.e but courageous voices shouted! The districts of Paris, b.a.s.t.a.r.ds of the revolution, began to live a life of their own. They were recognised-it was impossible not to recognise them!-and transformed into sec-tions. But they kept continually breaking the boundaries of legality and receiving a current of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks in spite of the law to those with no rights, the dest.i.tute Sansculottes. At the same time the rural munic.i.p.alities were becoming a screen for a peasant uprising against that bourgeois legality which was defending the feudal prop-erty system. Thus from under the second nation arises a third.

The Parisian sections at .rst stood opposed to the Commune, which was still dominated by the respectable bourgeoisie. In the bold outbreak of August 10, 1792, the sections gained control of the Commune. From then on the revolutionary Commune opposed the Legislative a.s.sembly, and subsequently the Convention, which failed to keep up with the problems and progress of the revolution-registering its events, but not performing them-because it did not possess the energy, audacity and unanimity of that new cla.s.s which had raised itself up from the depths of the Parisian districts and found support in the most backward villages. As the sections gained control of the Commune, so the Commune, by way of a new insurrection, gained control of the Convention. Each of the stages was characterised by a sharply marked double sovereignty, each wing of which was trying to establish a single and strong government-the right by a defensive struggle, the left by an offensive. Thus, characteristically-for both revolutions and counter-revolutions-the demand for a dictators.h.i.+p results from the intolerable contradictions of the double sovereignty. The transition from one of its forms to the other is accomplished through civil war. The great stages of revolution-that is, the pa.s.sing of power to new cla.s.ses or layers-do not at all coincide in this process with the succession of representative inst.i.tutions, which march along after the dynamic of the revolution like a belated shadow. In the long run, to be sure, the revolutionary dictators.h.i.+p of the Sansculottes unites with the dictators.h.i.+p of the Convention. But with what Convention? A Convention purged of the Girondists, who yesterday ruled it with the hand of the Terror-a Convention abridged and adapted to the dominion of new social forces. Thus by the steps of the dual power the French revolution rises in the course of four years to its culmination. After the 9th Thermidor it begins-again by the steps of the dual power-to descend. And again civil war precedes every downward step, just as before it had accompanied every rise. In this way the new society seeks a new equilibrium of forces.

The Russian bourgeoisie, .ghting with and co-operating with the Rasputin bureaucracy, had enormously strengthened its political position during the war. Exploiting the defeat of czarism, it had concentrated in its hands, by means of the Country and Town unions and the Military-Industrial Committees, a great power. It had at its independent disposition enormous state resources, and was in the essence of the matter a parallel government. During the war the czar's ministers complained that Prince Lvov was furnis.h.i.+ng supplies to the army, feeding it, medicating it, even establis.h.i.+ng barber shops for the soldiers. ”We must either put an end to this, or give the whole power into his hands,” said Minister Krivoshein in 1915. He never imagined that a year and a half later Lvov would receive ”the whole power”-only not from the czar, but from the hands of Kerensky, Cheidze and Sukhanov. But on the second day after he received it, there began a new double sovereignty: alongside of yesterday's liberal half-government-to-day formally legalised-there arose an unof.cial, but so much the more actual government of the toiling ma.s.ses in the form of the soviets. From that moment the Russian revolution began to grow up into an event of world-historic signi.cance.

What, then, is the peculiarity of this dual power as it appeared in the February revolu-tion? In the events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dual power was in each case a natural stage in a struggle imposed upon its partic.i.p.ants by a temporary correlation of forces, and each side strove to replace the dual power with its own single power. In the revolution of 1917, we see the of.cial democracy consciously and intentionally creating a two-power system, dodging with all its might the transfer of power into its own hands. The double sovereignty is created, or so it seems at a glance, not as a result of a struggle of cla.s.ses for power, but as the result of a voluntary ”yielding” of power by one cla.s.s to another. In so far as the Russian ”democracy” sought for an escape from the two-power rgime, it could .nd one only in its own removal from power. It is just this that we have called the paradox of the February, revolution.

A certain a.n.a.logy can be found in 1848, in the conduct of the German bourgeoisie with relation to the monarchy. But the a.n.a.logy is not complete. The German bourgeoisie did try earnestly to divide the power with the monarchy on the basis of an agreement. But the bourgeoisie neither had the full power in its hands, nor by any means gave it over wholly to the monarchy. ”The Prussian bourgeoisie nominally possessed the power, it did not for a moment doubt that the forces of the old government would place themselves unreservedly at its disposition and convert themselves into loyal adherents of its own omnipotence” (Marx and Engels).

The Russian democracy of 1917, having captured the power from the very moment of insurrection tried not only to divide it with the bourgeoisie, but to give the state over to the bourgeoisie absolutely. This means, if you please, that in the .rst quarter of the twentieth century the of.cial Russian democracy had succeeded in decaying politically completely than the German liberal bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. And that is entirely according to the laws of history, for it is merely the reverse aspect of upgrowth in those same decades of the proletariat, which now occupied the place of the craftsmen of Cromwell and the Sansculottes of Robespierre.

If you look deeper, the twofold rule of the Provisional Government and the Executive Committee had the character of a mere re.ection. Only the proletariat could advance a claim to the new power. Relying distrustfully upon the workers and soldiers, the Compro-misers were compelled to continue the double bookkeeping-of the kings and the prophets. The twofold government of the liberals and the democrats only re.ected the still concealed double sovereignty of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. When the Bolsheviks displace the Compromisers at the head of the Soviet-and this will happen within a few months-then that concealed double sovereignty will come to the surface, and this will be the eve of the Octo-ber revolution. Until that moment the revolution will live in a world of political re.ections. Refracted through the rationalisations the socialist intelligentsia, the double sovereignty, from being a stage in the cla.s.s struggle, became a regulative principle. It was just for this reason that it occupied the centre of all theoretical discussions. Everything has its uses: the mirror-like character of the February double government has enabled us better to under-stand those epochs in history when the same thing appears as a full-blooded episode in a struggle between two regimes. The feeble and re.ected light of the moon makes possible important conclusions about the sunlight.

In the immeasurably greater maturity of the Russian proletariat in comparison with the town ma.s.ses of the older revolutions, lies the basic peculiarity of the Russian revolution. This led .rst to the paradox of a half-spectral double government, and afterwards prevented the real one from being resolved in favour of the bourgeoisie. For the question stood thus: Either the bourgeoisie will actually dominate the old state apparatus, altering it a little for its purposes, in which case the soviets will come to nothing; or the soviets will form the foundation of a new state, liquidating not only the old governmental apparatus but also the dominion of those cla.s.ses which it served. The Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries were steering toward the .rst solution, the Bolsheviks toward the second. The oppressed cla.s.ses, who, as Marat observed, did not possess in the past the knowledge, or skill, or leaders.h.i.+p to carry through what they had begun, were armed in the Russian revolution of the twentieth century with all three. The Bolsheviks were victorious.

A year after their victory the same situation was repeated in Germany, with a different correlation of forces. The social democracy was steering for the establishment of a demo-cratic government of the bourgeoisie and the liquidation of the soviets. Luxemburg and Liebknecht steered toward the dictators.h.i.+p of the soviets. The Social Democrats won. Hil-ferding and Kautsky in Germany, Max Adler in Austria, proposed that they should ”com-bine” democracy with the soviet system, including the workers' soviets in the const.i.tution. That would have meant making, potential or open civil war a const.i.tuent part of the state rgime. It would be impossible to imagine a more curious Utopia. Its sole justi.cation on German soil is perhaps an old tradition : the Wiirttemberg democrats of '48 wanted a republic with a duke at the head.

Does this Phenomenon of the dual power heretofore not suf.ciently appreciated contradict the Marxian theory of the ,state, which regards government as an executive com-mittee of the ruling cla.s.s? This is just the same as asking: Does the .uctuation of prices under the in.uence of supply and demand contradict the labour theory of value? Does the self-sacri.ce of a female protecting her offspring refute the theory of a struggle for exis-tence ? No, in these phenomena we have a more complicated combination of the same laws. If the state is an organisation of cla.s.s rule, and a revolution is the overthrow of the ruling cla.s.s, then the transfer of power from the one cla.s.s to the other must necessarily create self-contradictory state conditions, and .rst of all in the form of the dual power. The relation of cla.s.s forces is not a mathematical quant.i.ty permitting a priori computations. When the old rgime is thrown out of equilibrium, a new correlation of forces can be established only as the result of a trial by battle. That is revolution.

It may seem as though this theoretical inquiry has led us away from the events of 1917. In reality it leads right into the heart of them. It was precisely around this problem of twofold power that the dramatic struggle of parties and cla.s.ses turned. Only from a theo-retical height is it possible to observe it fully and correctly understand it.