The pursuance of a socially and historically impossible goal is at variance with the scientific view of the world. It is not the task of science to concoct systems and to chase after fantastic dreams of a ‘better future’, but solely to comprehend development as it really takes place, to recognize its contradictions, and to help those forces that are progressive and revolutionary to achieve victory, to solve difficulties and to make it possible for human society to become master of the conditions of its existence. The ‘better future’ can become a reality only when its social preconditions are present and the structure of the masses of people is capable of utilizing these conditions to its own best advantage, i.e., is capable of assuming social responsibility.
Let us begin by summarizing Marx’s and Engels’ views on the development of a ‘communist society’. In this we will follow the basic writings and expositions on Marxism that Lenin published in the period between March of 1917 and the October Revolution in State and Revolution.
Engels and Lenin on Self-government
In his most popular work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels destroyed the belief in the ‘absolute and eternal state’ - in our context, the belief in the indispensability of the authoritarian leadership of society. On the basis of investigations made by Lewis Morgan on the organization of the pagan society, Engels came to the conclusion: The state was not here from all eternity. There have been societies that functioned without it, that had no trace of state and state power. When society began to split up into classes, when the opposition between the emerging classes threatened to undermine the existence of the society as a whole, a state power developed of necessity. Society rapidly approached a stage of development in production at which the existence of classes not only ceased to be a necessity but, over and above this, became a direct hindrance to the development of production. ‘They [the classes] will disappear just as inevitably as they once appeared. With them, the state will also disappear inevitably. That society that reorganizes production on the basis of free and equal association of those who produce will relegate the entire machinery of the state to where it belongs: the museum of antiquity, beside the spinning wheel and the bronze axe [my italics, WR].’
Voluntary association and self-government of social life prevail in pagan society. The state came into being with the emergence of classes ‘to keep the opposition between classes in check’ and to safeguard the continuation of society. Soon and ‘as a rule’ the state entered the service of the ‘most powerful, economically superior class, which, owing to this, also became the ruling class politically’, and thereby acquired new means of dominating and exploiting the suppressed classes. What will take the place of state, authoritarian leadership from above and obedience from below, if the social revolution is victorious”?
Engels gives us a picture of the transition to a new social order. To begin with ‘the proletariat seizes state power’ and transforms the means of production into state property. In so doing, it annuls itself as a proletariat, annuls the opposition between classes and also the state as a state’. Until then the state was the official representative of the society as a whole, its condensation in a visible body; but it was this only insofar as it was the state of that class that acted as the representative of society as a whole for its time. In antiquity it was the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the state of the feudalists, and later that of the bourgeoisie. If the state should one day really become the representative of society as a whole, then it makes itself superfluous. Engels’ formulation is easily understood if the state is regarded as that which it had become. It was no longer a bond that held together the class society, but an instrument used by the economically superior class to dominate the economically weaker class. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in suppression and as soon as class rule and the struggle for individual existence - a struggle that originates in the anarchy of production -are eliminated along with the resulting excesses and clashes, there is no longer anything to
be suppressed that would necessitate a special suppressive power such as the state. The first act in which the state appears as the representative of the society as a whole, namely the take-over of the means of production in the name of the society, is also its last independent act as a ‘state’. From now on, ‘the intervention of a state power in social relations ... will become superfluous in one sphere after the other until it dies out by itself. The government over people is replaced by the administration of things and the management of production processes. The state is not ‘abolished’; it ‘withers away’.
Lenin elucidated this idea in State and Revolution and stressed it again and again: In the beginning the capitalist state (state apparatus) will not merely be taken over or only changed. It will be ‘annihilated’, and the capitalist state apparatus, the capitalist police, capitalist officialdom and bureaucracy, will be replaced by the ‘power apparatus of the proletariat’ and the peasants and workers allied with it. This apparatus is still a suppressive apparatus, but now a majority of producers will no longer be suppressed by a minority of those in possession of capital. Instead, the minority, those who had formerly wielded power, will be held in check by the majority, the working people. This is what is known as:’ dictatorship of the proletariat*.
Thus, the withering away of the state described by Engels is preceded by the abolition of the capitalist state apparatus and the establishment of the ‘revolutionary-proletarian state apparatus’. Lenin also went into great detail to point out why this transition in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat is ‘necessary’ and ‘indispensable’, and why a direct realization of a non-authoritarian, free society and ‘true social democracy’ is not possible. The social democratic slogan ‘free republic’ was criticized as claptrap by both Engels and Lenin. The proletarian dictatorship serves as a transition from the previous social form to the desired ‘communist’ form. The character of the transitional phase can be comprehended only in terms of the final goals towards which the society aspires. These final goals are capable of being compassed only insofar as they have already become visibly developed in the womb of the old society. Examples of such final goals in the organization of a communist society are ‘voluntary respect’ for the rules of social cohabitation, the establishment of & free ‘community’ in place of the state (of the proletarian state also) as soon as the function of the latter has been fulfilled; in addition, efforts are made to achieve ‘self-administration’ in industries, schools, factories, transportation organizations, etc. In short, what is aimed at is the organization of a ‘new generation’ which, reared under new, free social conditions, will be capable of jettisoning the entire trumpery of the state ... ‘the democratic-republican included [Engels].’ To the extent to which the state ‘withers away’, a ‘free organization’ derives from it in which, as Marx postulated, ‘the free development of each individual’ becomes the basic condition of the ‘free development of everyone’.
In this connection two very important questions arose for the Soviet Union:
The ‘organization of a free generation in a free self-administrative community’ cannot be ‘created’. It has to ‘grow out’ of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (in the form of the ‘gradual withering away of the state’), must reach a state of development and ripeness in this transitional phase, in the same way that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ developed out of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie - the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie included - as a temporary form of state. Was there a ‘withering away of the
state’ and a gradual realisation of a free, self-administrative community in the Soviet Union between 1930 and 1934 - and how was this evident?
If so, what was the nature of this ‘withering away of the state’, and what were the concrete, tangible and guidable indications of the ‘development of the new generation’? If this was not the case: Why didn’t the state wither away? How were the forces that sustained the ‘proletarian state’ related to the other forces that represented the withering away of the state? What kept the state from withering away?
Neither in Marx’s nor in Engels’ and Lenin’s writings are these possible outcomes dealt with. In 1935 they were urgent questions. They demanded an immediate answer. Is the state in the Soviet Union in the process of withering away? If not, why not?
In contrast to the authoritarian order of the state, the essence of work-democracy can be described as social self-government. Quite obviously, a society that is to consist of free individuals’, to constitute a ‘free community’ and to administrate itself, i.e., ‘govern itself, cannot be suddenly created by decrees. It has to evolve organically. And it can create all the preconditions for the desired condition in an organic way only when it has succeeded in creating a freedom of movement, that is to say, when it has freed itself of those influences that are in opposition to such a condition. The first precondition towards this end is knowledge of the natural organisation of work, the biologic and sociologic preconditions of work-democracy. The founders of socialism were not aware of the biologic preconditions. The social preconditions were related to a period (1840 to around 1920) in which there was only capitalistic private enterprise on the one hand and masses of wage earners on the other hand. There was still no politically oriented middle class to speak of, no development towards j/a/s-capitalism, and there were no masses to be joined together in a reactionary way to carry National Socialism to victory. Hence, the picture that emerged was related more to 1850 than it was to 1940.
In Engels’ writing, the difference between the ‘seizure of power by the proletariat’, i.e., the establishment of the ‘proletarian state’, and the ‘cessation of the state altogether’, is not clearly worked out as it is in Lenin’s writings. This is understandable, for Engels, unlike Lenin, was not faced with the immediate task of making a sharp distinction between the two stages. In 1917, on the threshold of the seizure of power, Lenin had to attach a greater importance to the ‘period of transition’ than Engels had. Lenin determined the tasks of the period of transition more definitively.
To begin with, he demanded that the institution of the ‘bourgeois’ state be replaced by the proletarian state, i.e., a ‘fundamentally different kind’ of state leadership. What was fundamentally ‘different’ about the proletarian state? With the abolition of the bourgeois state, Lenin said, it will be necessary to convert the bourgeois form of democracy into a proletarian democracy with the ‘greatest conceivable completeness and consistency ‘, to convert the state as a special power for the purpose of suppressing a certain class into an institution ‘which is no longer a real state’. When the majority of the population suppresses its own suppressors, then a special repressive power is no longer necessary. In short, Lenin was not content with a sham, purely formal democracy. He wanted the people to determine production, distribution of products, social regulations, increase of population, education, sex, international relations, etc., in a living and concrete way. And this was the essence of that which Lenin, in accordance with Marx and Engels, so forcefully and repeatedly stressed as the ‘withering away of the state’.’ In place of special
institutions,’ Lenin wrote, ‘in place of a minority having special privileges (officials, staff of command of the standing army), the majority itself will take care of these things, and the greater the entire people’s share in the carrying out of the functions of the state power, the less it has need of this power.’
Lenin did not equate ‘state’ and ‘bourgeoisie rule’ in any way, otherwise he would not have been able to speak of a ‘state’ after the ‘defeat of the bourgeoisie’. Lenin conceived of the state as the sum of ‘institutions’, which had been in the service of the ruling class, the monied bourgeoisie, but now disappeared from their position ‘above the society’ to that extent to which the majority of th.& people themselves took care of the business of social administration (‘ self-administration’). Thus, the withering away of the state, the evolution towards social self-government, is to be measured by the extent to which those organizations that have become autonomous and stand above the society are gradually abolished, and the extent to which the masses, the majority of the population, are included in the administration, i.e., ‘self-government of the society’.
The Communes will replace the corrupt and rotten parliamentarianism of the bourgeois society by public bodies in which freedom of opinion and discussion do not degenerate into deception, for the members of parliament have to do their own work, implement their own laws, and check the results themselves. Representative bodies continue to exist, but parliamentarianism as a special system, as a division between legislative and executive activity, as a privileged position for members of parliament, does not exist here. Without representative bodies, we cannot conceive of a democracy [i.e., the phase preceding communism], not even proletarian democracy. We can and must conceive of it without parliamentarianism. If our criticism of bourgeois society is not to be a hollow phrase; if our efforts to overthrow the bourgeoisie ruler-ship is to be honest and serious - and not just an’ election’ slogan to catch the workers’ votes...
[State and Revolution]
Hence, we see that a sharp distinction is drawn between ‘representative bodies’ and ‘parliaments’. The former are affirmed and the latter are rejected. Nothing is said about what these bodies represent and how they represent. We will see that it was this crucial lacuna in Lenin’s theory of the state that enabled tatter-day ‘Stalinism’ to establish its state power.
The representative bodies, called ‘Soviets’ in the Soviet Union, which had evolved from the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils, were supposed, on the one hand, to take over the function of the bourgeois parliament by transforming it from a ‘chatter hovel’ (Marx’s term) into a working body. It is evident from Lenin’s train of thought that this very transformation of the character of the representative bodies implies a change in the representative himself. He ceases to be a ‘chatterbox’ and becomes a functionary who works out and carries out plans and is responsible to the people. On the other hand, they are not stagnant institutions. They are constantly growing. More and more members of the population are included in the functions of social administration. And this self-administration of the society, i.e., the performing of the social functions by the people themselves, will be that much more complete, the greater the number of people who participate in it. At the same time this means that the less the Soviets are elected ‘representatives’, the more the total population takes over those functions that determine and carry out social planning. For until then the Soviets themselves are still more or less
isolated from the society as a whole, notwithstanding the fact that they are organs and bodies that evolved from the society itself. It is also clear from Lenin’s conception that the proletarian representative bodies serve transitional functions. They are conceived of as mediators between the ‘proletarian state power’, which is still necessary, still in. operation, but already withering, and the self-government of society, which is not yet an accomplished fact, not yet fully capable of functioning by if self. It is a self-government which still has to be fully developed. The Soviets can either coincide more and more with the society as a whole, which is developing towards self-government, or they can become mere appendages and executive organs of the proletarian state power. They operate between two forces: one power that is still a state power and a new social system of self-government. What is it that determines whether the Soviets fulfil their progressive revolutionary function, or whether they deteriorate into hollow, purely formalistic fabrics of a state administrative body? Apparently, it is determined by the following:
Whether the proletarian state power remains true to its function of gradually eliminating itself;
Whether the Soviets regard themselves not only as the helpmates and executive organs of the proletarian state power, but also as its surveillant and as that institution, so heavily saddled with responsibility, that transfers the function of social leadership more and more from the proletarian state power to the society as a whole;
Whether the individual members of the masses increasingly measure up to their tasks of gradually and continually taking over the functions of the still operative state apparatus as well as those of the Soviets, insofar as the latter are only ‘representatives’ of the masses.
This third point is the decisive one, for upon its fulfilment depends the ‘withering away of the state’ in the Soviet Union, as well as the take-over of the functions of the Soviets by the working masses of people.
Hence, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not intended as a permanent condition but as a process, which is to begin with the destruction of the authoritarian state apparatus and the establishment of the proletarian state and to end with total self-administration, the self-government of the society.
To arrive at an accurate appraisal of the course of the social process, one has to study the function and development of the Soviets. The course of this process cannot be concealed by any illusions if one considers the following: It is not a question whether 90 per cent of the population participates in the elections of the Soviet bodies, as compared with 60 per cent formerly, but whether the Soviet voters (not the Soviet representatives) also assume more and more of an actual part in social leadership. A ’90 per cent election turnout’ is not proof of a progressive development towards social self-government, if only because it tells us nothing about the substance of the activity of the masses, and, moreover, is not solely characteristic of the Soviet system. The bourgeois democracies, indeed even the fascist ‘plebiscites’, showed ‘election turnouts of 90 per cent and more’. It is an essential part of work-democracy to assess the social maturity of a community, not in terms of quantity of votes but in terms of the actual, tangible substance of
its social activity.
Thus, we always come back to the cardinal question of every social order: What is taking place in the masses of the population? How do they experience the social process to which they are subject?
Will the war king population become capable, and how will it become capable of causing the withering away of the authoritarian state, which rises above and against the society, and taking over its functions, i.e., developing social self-government organically?
Apparently, this is the question Lenin had in mind when he made it clear that a complete elimination of bureaucracy in all spheres all at once was impossible, but that the old, bureaucratic apparatus would certainly have to be replaced by a new one, ‘which gradually makes every bureaucracy superfluous and abolishes it’. ‘This is not a Utopia,’ Lenin wrote, ‘this is borne out by the experience of the commune. It is the immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat.’ Lenin did not discuss why the ‘abolition of bureaucracy’ was not a Utopian aspiration, nor how life without bureaucracy, without leadership ‘from above’, was not only by all means possible and necessary but, what was more, was the ‘immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat’.
Lenin’s emphasis can be understood only if one bears in mind man’s (and most of his leaders’) deeply ingrained, seemingly ineradicable belief in the infantilism of the masses, above all, the belief in the impossibility of getting along without authoritarian leadership. ‘Self-administration’, ‘self-government’, ‘non-authoritarian discipline’ - such new concepts, in view of fascism, only evoked an indulgent smile of contempt! The dreams of anarchists! Utopian! Chimerical! Indeed, these shouters and sneerers could even point to the Soviet Union, to Stalin’s statement that the abolition of the state was out of the question, that, on the contrary, the power of the proletarian state had to be strengthened and extended. Lenin had been wrong after all, then! Man is and remains a subservient being. Without authority and coercion he will not work, but merely ‘indulge his pleasures and be lazy’. Don’t waste your time and energy with empty chimera! But if this was so, then an official correction of Lenin’s ideas was to be demanded from the state leadership of the Soviet Union. It would have to show that Lenin had erred when he wrote the following:
We are not Utopians. We do not ‘dream’ about how we can get along without any administration, without any subordination all at once. These anarchistic dreams, which are based on a misunderstanding of the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat, are foreign to the nature of Marxism. In reality, they merely serve to put off the socialist revolution to a time when men will have become different. No, we have to carry out the socialist revolution with people as they are now, that is to say, with people who will not be able to get along without subordination, control, ‘managers and bookkeepers’ . . . But one has to subordinate oneself to the armed avant-garde of all those who have been exploited, to the workers, the proletariat. What is specifically ‘bureaucratic’ in government offices can and must be replaced by the simple functions of ‘managers and bookkeepers’? Work on this must begin immediately, from one day to the next. . . Workers, we ourselves shall organic the large industries; we shall organize them on the basis of our own experience; we shall take over where capitalism left off; we shall create a strict, iron discipline, which will be maintained by the state power of the armed workers; we shall convert the state officials into simple executors of our instructions; we shall convert them into responsible, replaceable, modestly paid ‘managers and
bookkeepers’ . . . that is our proletarian task. With this we can and must begin the implementation of the proletarian revolution. Such a beginning on the basis of large industries will automatically lead to a gradual withering away of every form of bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of a new order without quotation marks, an order which will have nothing to do with wage-slavery [my italics, WR]. We will create an order in which the functions of management and rendering of accounts will become more and more simplified and will be performed by the people themselves on a rotation basis. As time goes on, these functions will become a habit and finally disappear altogether as special functions of a special class of people.
[State and Revolution]
Lenin failed to see the dangers of the new state bureaucracy. Apparently, he believed that the proletarian bureaucrats would not abuse their power, would stick to the truth, would teach the working people to be independent. He failed to take into account the abysmal biopathy of the human structure. Indeed, he had no notion of it.
Sociologic literature has paid far too little regard to the fact that in his main work on the revolution, Lenin did not devote most of his attention to the ‘overthrow of the bourgeoisie’ but to the subsequent tasks: the replacement of the capitalistic state apparatus by a proletarian apparatus and the replacement of the proletarian dictatorship (social democracy = proletarian democracy) by the self-government of the society, which was supposed to be the outstanding characteristic of communism. If one paid special heed to Soviet literature from 1937 on, one saw that it was the strengthening (not the loosening) of the power of the proletarian state apparatus that took priority over all other efforts. There was no longer any talk of the necessity of its eventual replacement by self-administration. To understand the Soviet Union, however, it is precisely this point that is of decisive importance. Obviously, Lenin had good reason for discussing it in detail in his main work on the Revolution. It was, is, and will continue to be the living nerve system of every genuine social democracy. It was not and is not mentioned by any politician.
the programme of the communist party
of the soviet union (eighth party congress, 1919)
Under Lenin, Russian despotism was transformed into Russian ‘social democracy’. The programme of the Communist party of the Soviet Union of 1919, two years after the Revolution, is proof of the genuine democratic character of its efforts. It demands a state power, which is to ward off a return of despotism and is to guarantee the establishment of the free, self-administration of the masses of people. But it contains no hint of the nature of the incapacity for freedom of the masses ofpeoph. It has no knowledge of the biopathic degeneration of man’s sexual structure. The revolutionary sexual laws that were enacted between 1917 and 1920 were in the right direction, i.e., they were recognition of man’s biologic functions. But they got stuck in legal formalism. I made an effort to demonstrate this in Part II of my book Die Sexualitat im Kulturkatnpf^iyify. It was on this issue that the reconstruction of the human structure foundered, and with it the fulfilment of the democratic programme. This catastrophe of an enormous social effort should be a lesson to every new democratic revolutionary effort: No programme advocating freedom has any chance of success unless a basic change is also effected in man’s present biopathic sexual structure.
The following is an excerpt from the programme of the Eighth Party Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union.
A bourgeois republic, even the most democratic, sanctified by such watchwords as ‘will of the people’, ‘will of the nation’, ‘no class privilege’, remains in fact, owing to the existence of private property in land and other means of production, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, an instrument for exploitation and oppression of the broad masses of workers by a small group of capitalists. In opposition to this, proletarian or Soviet democracy transformed mass organi2ations precisely of the classes oppressed by capitalism, of proletarian and poorest peasantry or semi-proletarian, i.e., the vast majority of the population, into a single and permanent basis of the state apparatus, local and central. By this act, the Soviet State realised among other things local and regional autonomy without the appointment of authorities from above, on a much wider scale than is practised any where.M The aim of the Party is to exert the greatest efforts in order to realize fully this highest type of democracy, which to function accurately requires a continually rising standard of culture, organisation and activity on the part of the masses.
In contrast to bourgeois democracy, which concealed the class character of the state, the Soviet authority openly acknowledges that every state must inevitably bear a class character” until the division of society into classes has been abolished and all government authority disappears. By its very nature, the Soviet state directs itself to the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, and the Soviet constitution does not stop short of depriving the exploiters of their political rights, bearing in mind that any kind of freedom is a deception if it is opposed to the emancipation of labour from the yoke of capital. The aim of the Party of the proletariat consists in carrying on a determined suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, in struggling against the deeply rooted prejudices concerning the absolute character of bourgeois rights and freedom, and at the same time explaining that deprivation of political rights and any kind of limitation of freedom are necessary as temporary measures in order to defeat the attempts of the exploiters to retain or to re-establish their privileges. With the disappearance of the possibility of the exploitation of one human being by another, the necessity for these measures will also gradually disappear and the Party will aim to reduce and completely abolish them.
Bourgeois democracy has limited itself to formally extending political rights and freedom, such as the right of combination, freedom of speech, freedom of press, equality of citizenship. In practice, however, particularly in view of the economic slavery o£ the working masses, it was impossible for the workers to enjoy these rights and privileges to any great extent under bourgeois democracy.
Proletarian democracy on the contrary, instead of formally proclaiming those rights and freedoms, actually grants them first of all to those classes which have been oppressed by capitalism, i.e., to the proletariat and to the peasantry. For that purpose the Soviet state expropriates premises, printing offices, supplies of paper, etc., from the bourgeoisie, placing these at the disposal of the working masses and their organizations. The aim of the All-Russian Communist Party is to encourage the working masses to enjoy democratic rights and liberties, and to offer them every opportunity for doing so.
Bourgeois democracy through the ages proclaimed equality of persons, irrespective of religion, race or nationality and the equality of the sexes, but capitalism prevented the
realization of this equality and in its imperialist stage developed race and national suppression. The Soviet Government, by being the authority of the toilers, for the first time in history could in all spheres of life realize this equality, destroying the last traces of woman’s inequality in the sphere of marriage and the family. At the present moment the work of the Party is principally intellectual and educational with the aim of abolishing the last traces of former inequality and prejudices, especially among the backward sections of the proletariat and peasantry.
The Party’s aim is not to limit itself to the formal proclamation of woman’s equality, but to liberate woman from all the burdens of antiquated methods of housekeeping, by replacing them by house-communes, public kitchens, central laundries, nurseries, etc.
The Soviet Government, guaranteeing to the working masses incomparably more opportunities to vote and to recall their delegates, in the most easy and accessible manner, than they possessed under bourgeois democracy and parliamentarianism, at the same time abolishes all the negative features of parliamentarianism, especially the separation of legislative and executive powers, the isolation of the representative institutions from the masses, etc.
In the Soviet state not a territorial district, but a productive unit (factory, mill) forms the electoral unit and the unit of the state. The state apparatus is thus brought near to the masses.
The aim of the Party consists in endeavouring to bring the Government apparatusvinto still closer contact with the masses, for the purpose of realizing democracy more fully and strictly in practice, by making Government officials responsible to, and placing them under, the control of the masses.
The Soviet state includes in its organs - the Soviets - workmen and soldiers on a basis of complete equality and unity of interests, whereas bourgeois democracy, in spite of all its declarations, transformed the army into an instrument of the wealthy classes separated it from the masses, and set it against them, depriving the soldiers of any opportunity of exercising their political rights. The aim of the Party is to defend and develop this unity of the workmen and soldiers in the Soviets and to strengthen the indissoluble ties between the armed forces and the organizations of the proletariat and semi-proletariat.
The urban industrial proletariat, being the more concentrated, united and educated section of the toiling masses, hardened in battle, played the part of leader in the whole Revolution. This was evidenced while the Soviets were being created, as well as in the course of development of the Soviets into organs of authority. Our Soviet Constitution reflects this in certain privileges it confers upon the industrial proletariat, in comparison with the more scattered petty-bourgeois masses in the village.
The All-Russian Communist Party, explaining the temporary character of these privileges, which are historically connected with difficulties of socialist organisation of the village, must try un-deviatingly and systematically to use this position of the industrial proletariat in order closer to unite the backward and the scattered masses of the village proletarians and semi-proletarians, as well as the middle-class peasantry, as a counter-balance to narrow craft professional interests, which were fostered by capitalism among the workmen.
The proletarian revolution, owing to the Soviet organization of the state, was able at one stroke to destroy the old bourgeois, official and judicial state apparatus. The comparatively low standard of culture of the masses the absence of necessary experience in state administration on the part of responsible workers who are elected by the masses, the pressing necessity, owing to the critical situation of engaging specialists of the old school, and the calling up to military service of the more advanced section of city workmen, all this led to the partial revival of bureaucratic practices within the Soviet system.
The All-Russian Communist Party, carrying on a resolute struggle with bureaucratism, suggests the following measures for overcoming the evil:
Every member of the Soviet is obliged to perform a certain duty in state administration.
These duties must change in rotation, so as gradually to embrace all the branches of administrative work.
All the working masses without exception must be gradually induced to take part in the work of state administration.
The complete realisation of these measures will carry us in advance of the Paris Commune, and the simplification of the work of administration, together with the raising of the level of culture of the masses, will eventually lead to the abolition of state authority.
The following points of the programme are singled out as being characteristic of Soviet democracy:
Local and regional self-administration without the appointment of authorities from above.
Activity on the part of the masses.
Deprivation of political rights and limitation of freedom .as a temporary measure to defeat the exploiters.
Not a formal, but an actual granting of all rights and freedom to all non-capitalistic classes of the population.
Immediate, simple and direct franchise.
The right to elect and recall delegates.
Elections not according to districts but according to productive units.
The responsibility and obligation of those in office to render an account of their activities to the workers’ and peasants’ councils.
Rotation of members of the Soviet in the administrative branches.
Gradual inclusion of the entire working population in jthe work of the administration of the state.
Simplification of the administrative functions.
Abolition of the state power.
There is one thought that struggles to gain clarity among these historically decisive principles, namely: How can social life be simplified in actual practice? Struggle as it
may, however, it remains stuck in formal political thinking. The nature of the politics of state is not described. Admitted that the masses themselves are given the scope of freedom, yet they are still not set any practical social tasks. It is not stated that the masses of the people, as they are today, cannot take over state and (later) social functions. The present political thinking related to the state was derived from the first hierarchical representatives of the state and was always directed against the masses. Politically, we are still stuck in the systems of thought of the Greek and Roman slave states, no matter how much we rant about ‘democracy’. If social self-administration is to become a reality, it is not only the form of the state that has to be changed. Social existence and its management must be changed in accordance with the tasks and needs of the masses of people. Social self-administration must gradually replace the state apparatus or take over its rational function.
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