Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party Pt. 3

V

The marxist conception, that of substituting parliamentary assemblies with working bodies, does not lead us back into “economic democracy” either, i.e. into a system which would adapt the State organs to the workplaces, to the productive or commercial units, etc., while excluding from any representative function the remaining employers and the economic individuals still owning property. The elimination of the employer and the proprietor only defines half of socialism; the other half, the most significant one, consists of the elimination of capitalist economic anarchy (Marx). As the new socialist organization emerges and develops with the party and the revolutionary State in the foreground, it will not limit itself to striking only the former employers and their flunkies but above all it will redistribute the social tasks and responsibilities of individuals in quite a new and original way.

Therefore the network of enterprises and services such as they have been inherited from capitalism will not be taken as the basis of an apparatus of so-called “sovereignty”, that is of the delegation of powers within the State and up to the level of its central bodies. It is precisely the presence of the single-class State and of the solidly and qualitatively unitary and homogeneous party which offers the maximum of favorable conditions for a reshaping of social machinery, which is to be driven as little as possible by the pressures of the limited interests of small groups and as much as possible by general data and by their scientific study applied to the interests of collective welfare. The changes in the productive mechanism will be enormous; let us only think of the program for reversing the relationships between town and country, on which Marx and Engels insisted so much and which is the exact antithesis to present trends in all known countries.

Therefore, the network modelled after the working place is an inadequate expression which repeats the old Proudhonist and Lassallean positions that Marxism long ago rejected and surpassed.

VI

The definition of the type of links between the organs of the class State and its base depends first of all upon the results of historical dialectics and cannot be deduced from “eternal principles”, from “natural law”, or from a sacred and inviolable constitutional charter. Any details in this regard would be mere utopia. There is not a grain of utopianism in Marx, Engels stated. The very idea of the famous delegation of power by the isolated individual (elector) thanks to a platonic act emanating from his free opinion must be left to the foggy realms of metaphysics; opinions in actuality are but a reflection of material conditions and social forms, and power consists of the intervention of physical force.

The negative characterisation of workers’ dictatorship is clearly defined: the bourgeois and semi-bourgeois will no longer have political rights, they will be prevented by force from gathering in groups of common interests or in associations for political agitation; they will never be allowed to publicly vote, elect, or delegate others to any “post” or function whatsoever. But even the relationship between the worker – a recognised and active member of the class in power – and the State apparatus will no longer retain that fictitious and deceitful characteristic of a delegation of power, of a representation through the intermediary of a deputy, an election ticket, or by a party. Delegation means in effect the renunciation to the possibility of direct action. The pretended “sovereignty” of the democratic right is but an abdication, and in most cases it is an abdication in favor of a scoundrel.

The working members of society will be grouped into local territorial organs according to their place of residence, and in certain cases according to the displacements imposed by their participation in a productive mechanism in full transformation. Thanks to their uninterrupted and continuous action, the participation of all active social elements in the mechanism of the State apparatus, and therefore in the management and exercise of class power, will be assured. To sketch these mechanisms is impossible before the class relationships from which they will spring have been concretely realized.

VII

The Paris Commune established as most important principles (see Marx, Engels, Lenin) that its members and officials would be subject to recall at any time, and that their salary would not exceed the wage of an average worker. Any separation between the producers on the periphery and the bureaucrats at the centre is thus eliminated by means of systematic rotations. Civil service will cease being a career and even a profession. No doubt, when put into practice, these controls will create tremendous difficulties, but it was long ago that Lenin expressed his contempt for all plans of revolutions to be carried out without difficulties! The inevitable conflicts will not be completely resolved by drawing up piles of rules and regulations: they will constitute a historical and political problem and will express a real relationship of forces. The Bolshevik revolution did not stop in front of the Constituent Assembly but dispersed it. The workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils had risen. This new type of State organs which burst forth in the blaze of the social war (and were already present in the revolution of 1905) extended from the village to the entire country through a network of different levels of territorial units; their formation did not answer to any of the prejudices about the “rights of man” or the “universal, free, direct and secret” suffrage!

The communist party unleashes and wins the civil war, it occupies the key positions in a military and social sense, it multiplies its means of propaganda and agitation a thousand-fold through seizing buildings and public establishments. And without losing time and without procedural whims, it establishes the “armed bodies of workers” of which Lenin spoke, the red guard, the revolutionary police. At the Soviet meetings it wins over a majority to the slogan: “All power to the Soviets!”. Is this majority a merely legal event, or a coldly and plainly numerical fact? Not at all! Should anyone – be he a spy or a well-intentioned but misled worker – vote for the Soviet to renounce or compromise the power conquered thanks to the blood of the proletarian fighters, he will be kicked out by his comrades’ rifle butts. And no one will waste time with counting him in the “legal minority”, that criminal hypocrisy which the revolution can do without and which the counterrevolution can only feed upon.

VIII

Historical facts different from those of Russia in 1917 (i.e. the recent collapse of feudal despotism, a disastrous war, the role played by opportunist leaders) could create, while remaining on the same fundamental line, different practical forms of the basic network of the State. From the time the proletarian movement left utopianism behind, it has found its way and assured its success thanks not only to the real experience of the present mode of production and the structure of the present State, but also to the experience of the strategical mistakes of the proletarian revolution, both on the battlefield of the “hot” civil war where the Communards of 1871 gloriously fell and on the “cold” one which was lost between 1917 and 1926 – this last was the great battle of Russia between Lenin’s International and world capitalism supported in the front lines by the miserable complicity of all the opportunists.

Communists have no codified constitutions to propose. They have a world of lies and constitutions – crystallized in the law and in the force of the dominant class – to crush. They know that only a revolutionary and totalitarian apparatus of force and power, which excludes no means, will be able to prevent the infamous relics of a barbarous epoch from rising again – only it will be able to prevent the monster of social privilege, craving for revenge and servitude, from raising its head again and hurling for the thousandth time its deceitful cry of freedom.