Who is to seize power?”
“That is now of no importance,” argued Lenin. “Let the Military Revolutionary Committee take it, or ‘some other institution,’ which will declare that it will surrender the power only to the genuine representatives of the interests of the people.” Trotsky notes that “some other institution” was a “conspirative designation for the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks.” And who turned out to be the “genuine representatives of the interests of the people”? By amazing co-incidence the Bolsheviks, the members of whose Central Committee formed the first “soviet” government. [Op. Cit., vol. 3, p. 265, p. 259, p. 262, p. 263 and p. 267] As we discuss in section H.3.11, Trotsky was simply repeating the same instrumentalist arguments he had made earlier. Clearly, the support for the soviets was purely instrumental, simply a means of securing party power. For Bolshevism, the party was the key institution of proletarian revolution: “The party set the soviets in motion, the soviets set in motion the
