292 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALISM 293 powder, the international proletariat will itself proudly wear in the near future. He who is frightened at this face or turns away from it, as from a Medusa head, will turn away from the proletarian revolution, and away from Socialism. But the Russian Revolution not only shows the European proletariat the battles which it must fight its way through, if it does not want to rot away in the trenches, but also the forms, the symbol, in which it will conquer. What form will the dictatorship of the proletariat take in Europe? The form of Soviets, that is, the representation of the workers in the factory, in the city, in the country, and in the nation. That is the form in which the workers of Europe will establish their rule.
The idea of the Soviets is as simple as one can imagine it to be.
Only history creates such splendid crystallizations. In the factory, the slaves of Capital worked. The factory is bound by a thousand threads with the other factories, with the whole economic life of the locality. It is dependent on the transportation of the locality, on the factories which work up its semi manufactured goods, or from which it receives them, it depends also on all the factories in the same branch of industry, and in the last analysis, on the economic life of the entire country. The representation of the factory is, consequently, political and economic, the cell of the state mechanism. The representatives of the proletariat of the locality, are, simultaneously, the economic administrators of the locality. But just as the representatives of the workers of the whole country have their policy prescribed for them by the workers of the different localities, but generalize it and make it into laws for the local units of government, in this way having their roots in the local Soviets, but at the same time presenting to the local Soviets the general proletarian interests, just so the general Economic Council, formed from the representatives of the workers, is a body which prevents the local Economic Councils from considering merely local interest, but to make them subsidiary to the interests of the whole country. The experiences of the Russian Revolution have shown what was strong and creative in Syndicalism and what was petty bourgeois and sectarian.
The workers of a factory as masters of the factory might easily begin to work for their own particular interests, and in this way might become petty bourgeois. The Economic Soviet of Industry represents in each factory the interests and the needs for expansion of every branch of industry. But it too, might favor the interests of a certain branch of industry as against the general interests of the working class. The general Economic Soviet, which designs the whole economic plan and carries it out, equalizes the interests of the workers, makes the general interest the law. In this manner the sectarian tendencies of Syndicalism are done away with, and simultaneously the problem is solved which Syndicalism disowned and on which it turned its back. The Congress of the Workers Soviets, the Executive Committee of the Workers Soviets, that is the proletarian governing power; not the means of capitalist oppression, but the fighting arm of the proletariat. The Soviet Government is not a democratic form of government, it is the form of government of the workers, it shows its class character clearly, does not veil it with democratic phrases, but it is at the same time the form of government in which the will of the revolutionary working class can express itself clearly, unmistakably and ruthlessly. In this way, the problem which was insoluble in bourgeois democracy, is solved: the problem of the bureaucracy.
Syndicalism turned away from this problem with disgust, it wanted to do away with bureaucracy and its organization but it could not do away with it; it negatived it only in words. In capitalist society the proletariat is doomed to catch only the crumbs which fall from the table of capitalistic science. In capitalist society there had to be even in the workers movement bureaucrats who alone had the time and leisure to learn the technique of the workers movement. After capitalism is shaken off, in the process of the Socialist Revolution, which rouses the proletariat to the very depths, which brings out all its capabilities, the possibility arises for the first time, for the proletariat to manage its own affairs.
The form of the Worker Delegate Councils, which can always be reelected, which always return to their native soil, the factory, this form will be the one with which the proletariat will conquer capitalism, and with which it will become capable of accomplishing Socialism. And it is more than significant that all the Marxists, who carp at the Russian Revolution, have not been able up to the present time to attack the idea of the Soviet Government.
In order to do that, they would be compelled to defend the secret chambers in which the bureaucracy, together with the representatives of financial capital, manages the affairs of the state. The parliament is a debating society, a club for gossip. Parliament does not manage any factories, nor build any railroads. The government machine, which is growing more and more from a police machine into a business office, could have become a bureaucratic, capitalist association, with Parliament as camouflage, otherwise bodies of workers had to be created, who together with professionals could set the economic life in motion and guide it. While