What happened to the soviets after October?
As indicated in the last question, the last thing which the Bolsheviks wanted was “all power to the soviets.” Rather they wanted the soviets to hand over that power to a Bolshevik government. As the people in liberal capitalist politics, the soviets were “sovereign” in name only. They were expected to delegate power to a government. Like the “sovereign people” of bourgeois republics, the soviets were much praised but in practice ignored by those with real power. In such a situation, we would expect the soviets to play no meaningful role in the new “workers’ state.” Under such a centralised system, we would expect the soviets to become little more than a fig-leaf for party power. Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what they did become. As we discuss in section 7 of the appendix on “How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?”, anarchists are not surprised by this as the centralisation so beloved by Marxists is designed to empower the few at the centre and margin
