tldr: Martov argues that, contrary to Lenin's interpretation, Marx and Engels saw the democratic republic—not soviets—as the essential and specific political form through which the proletariat could achieve and exercise its dictatorship, transforming the state into a truly democratic instrument of class rule.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/1921/xx/decomp.htm
>Psychologically the most characteristic thing about the rush of the “extreme leftists” toward “sovietism” is their desire to jump over the historic inertia of the masses. Dominating their logic, however, is the idea that soviets constitute a new, “finally discovered,” political mode. This, they say, is the specific instrument of the class rule of the proletariat, just as the democratic republic is according to them the specific instrument of the rule of the bourgeoisie.The Communist Manifesto declared: “We have already seen that the first step in the working-class revolution is raising the proletariat to the position of a ruling class, the conquest of democracy.”
In 1852, in Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx wrote:
Every previous revolution has brought the machinery of State to a greater perfection instead of breaking it up.On the 12th of April 1871, in a letter to Kugelmann, he formulated his viewpoint on the problem of revolution as follows:
If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will see that I declare the next attempt of the French Revolution to be not merely to hand over, from one set to another, the bureaucratic and military machine, as was the case up to now, but to shatter it. That is precisely the preliminary condition of any real people’s revolution on the Continent. It is exactly this that constitutes the attempt of our heroic Parisian comrades.It is not for any idle reason that Engels wrote in 1891, in his preface to Civil War in France:
<… the State is nothing more than a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy whose worse sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, will have at the earliest possible moment to lop off, until such time as a new generation, reared under new and free social conditions, will be able to throw on the scrap-heap all the useless lumber of the State.The proletariat lops off “the worst sides” of the democratic State (for example: the police, permanent army, the bureaucracy as an independent entity, exaggerated centralization, etc.) But it does not suppress the democratic State as such. On the contrary, it creates the democratic State in order to have it replace the “military and bureaucratic State,” which must be shattered.
<If there is anything about which there can be no doubt it is that our party and the working class can only gain supremacy under a political régime like the democratic republic. The latter is, indeed, the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as has been demonstrated by the French revolutionThat is how Engels expresses himself in his critique of the draft of the Erfurt program. He does not speak there of a “soviet” republic (the term was, of course, unknown), nor of a commune-republic, in contrast to the “State.” Neither does he speak of the “trade-union republic” imagined by Smith and Morrisson and by the French syndicalists. Clearly and explicitly, Engels speaks of the democratic republic, that is, of a State democratized from top to bottom, “an evil inherited by the proletariat.”
This is stated so dearly, so explicitly, that
when Lenin quotes these words, he finds it necessary to obscure their meaning.
<Engels – he says –repeats here in a particularly emphatic form the fundamental idea which, like a red thread, runs throughout all Marx’s work, viz., that the Democratic Republic comes nearest the dictatorship of the proletariat. For such a republic, without in the least setting aside the domination of capital, and, therefore, the oppression of the masses and the class struggle, inevitably leads to such an extension, intensification and development of that struggle that, as soon as the chance arises for satisfying the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses, this chance is realized inevitably and solely in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the guidance of these masses by the proletariat. (State and Revolution, Chapter IV.)
Engels does not speak of a political form that “comes nearest the dictatorship,” as is interpreted by Lenin in his commentaries. He speaks of the only “specific” political form in which the dictatorship can he realized. According to Engels, the dictatorship is forged in the democratic republic. Lenin, on the other hand, sees democracy merely as the means of sharpening the class struggle, thus confronting the proletariat with the problem of the dictatorship. For Lenin, the democratic republic finds its conclusion in the dictatorship of the proletariat, giving birth to The latter but destroying itself in the delivery. Engels, on the contrary, is of the opinion that when the proletariat has gained supremacy in the democratic republic and thus realized its dictatorship, within the democratic republic, it will consolidate the latter by that very, act and invest it, for the first time, with a character that is genuinely, fundamentally and completely democratic. That is why, in 1848, Engels and Marx identified the act of “raising the proletariat to a ruling class” with “the conquest of democracy.”