a serious and sincere aim, and not a mere "election cry" for catching workingmen's votes—as it is with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Scheidemanns, the Legiens, the Sembats and the Vanderveldes.
It is most instructive to notice that, in speaking of the functions of what officials are still necessary both in the Commune and in the proletarian Democracy, Marx compares them with the workers of "any other employer," with the usual capitalist concern and its workers, foremen and clerks. There is no trace of Utopian thinking in Marx, in the sense of inventing or imagining a "new" society. No, he studies, as a scientific historical process, the birth of the new society from the old, and forms of transition from the latter to the former. He takes the actual experience of a mass proletarian movement and tries to draw from it practical lessons. He "learns" from the Commune, as all great revolutionary thinkers have not been afraid to learn from the experience of great movements of the oppressed classes; never preaching them pedantic "sermons" (such as Plekhanoff's "They Should Not Have Resorted to Arms," or Tseretelli's "A Class Must Know Where to Limit Itself").
To destroy officialism immediately, everywhere, completely—of this there can: be no question. That is a Utopia. But to break up at once the old bureaucratic machine and to start immediately the construction of a new one, enabling us gradually to abolish bureaucracy—this is not a Utopia, it is the experience of the Commune, it is the direct and necessary task of the revolutionary proletariat. Capitalism simplifies the functions of "the Government." It makes it possible to throw off autocratic methods and to bring it all down to a matter of the organization of the proletariat (as the ruling class) hiring "workers and clerks" in the name of the whole Society. We are not Utopians, we do not indulge in "dreams" of how best to do away immediately with all management, with all subordination; these are Anarchist dreams based upon a want of understanding of the tasks of a proletarian dictatorship. They are foreign in their essence to Marxism and, as a matter of fact, they serve but to put off the Socialist Revolution "until human nature is different." No, we want the Socialist Revolution with human nature as it is now; human nature itself cannot do without subordination, without control, without managers and clerks.
But there must be submission to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and laboring classes—to the proletariat. The spec-
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