372 THE CLASS STRUGGLE WORK, DISCIPLINE, AND ORDER 373 upon the working class in all of history, rise equal to its historical task?
The difficulties that face us can be divided into two great categories, difficulties of an objective nature and difficulties of a subjective nature.
The difficulties of an objective nature lie in external circumstances. They consist in the fact of general disorder itself, in the fact that the avenues of traffic are in confusion, that our railroad cars are used up and getting out of joint, that we have a tremendous percentage of invalid locomotives and that the healthy ones don move along the rails the way they should (the war has gotten everything off the track. in the fact that our factories and shops are disorganized first as a result of mobilization, then as a result of the partial and extremely imperfect demobilization, in the fact that we are having the greatest food difficulties partly because of our general impoverishment, partly because of the confusion in all our ways and means of bookkeeping and control and in all our means and avenues of transportation.
These are the difficulties, colossal in their significance, that confront us, which are waiting to be met, and which we must overcome. If we do not cope with them successfully, the ruin of the country in the next epoch is certain, for no one can replace us.
If (according to the words of Marx) we, as the working class, cannot simply appropriate the old apparatus of state power mechanically, this by no means signifies that we can get along without all the elements that comprised the old apparatus of state. The misfortune of the working class lies in the fact that it has always been in the position of an oppressed class. This fact has reflected itself everywhere not only in its educational level but also in the fact that it has not the experience and usage in administration that the ruling class possesses and transmits through its schools, universities, and the like. Nothing of all this does the working class possess, all this it must attain.
Once it has come into power, it must look upon the old apparatus of state as an apparatus of class oppression. But at the same time it must draw out of this apparatus all the valuable specialized elements which it needs for technical work, put them into the proper places, and use these elements to heighten its proletarian class power. This, Comrades, is the task that confronts us in all its vastness.
The first stage of the struggle against sabotage consisted in mercilessly suppressing the organizations of the saboteurs.
This was necessary and therefore correct. Now that the power of the Soviets is assured, the fight against sabotage must express itself in the conversion of the late saboteurs into servants, into executives and technical directors, wherever the new regime requires it. If we cannot manage it, if we do not avail ourselves of all the forces we need and place them in the service of the Soviets, then our late struggle against sabotage, the militaryrevolutionary struggle, would be condemned as entirely useless and fruitless. Just as in the lifeless machines, so also in these technicians, engineers, physicians, teachers, former officers, in all of them a certain capital of our national public wealth is invested that we are obliged to exploit, to make use of, if we are at all desirous of solving the fundamental questions which confront us.
Democratization does not consist (this is the A, B, for every Marxist) in abolishing the significance of the specialists.
the significance of persons possessing professional training, but in replacing them everywhere and continuously by elected staffs.
The elected staffs, consisting of the best representatives of the working class but not possessing the necessary technical knowledge cannot replace a single technician who has gone through a professional school and who knows just how a given specialized task is to be done. The overflowing of comradeship which may be observed among us in all fields appears as the entirely natural reaction of a young, revolutionary, but lately oppressed class which does away with the individual initiative of yesterday lords, masters, and commanders and puts in everywhere its own elected representatives. This is, say, an entirely natural and in its sources an entirely healthy revolutionary reaction. But this is not the last word in the economic political building up of the proletarian class. The next step mụst consist in the self restriction of comradely initiative, in the healthy and redeeming self restraint of the working class which knows when the elected representative of the workers can speak with decision and when it is necessary to give place to the technician, the specialist, who is equipped with definite knowledge, who must be given greater responsibility, and who must be kept under watchful political control. But it is necessary to allow the specialist free activity, the possibility of free creative work, for not a single specialist who is at all talented and capable can work in his field if in his special work he is subordinated to a staff of people who do not know this field. political Soviet control through an elected board or staff should exist under all circumstances, but for executive duties it is necessary to ap