begin to decide on their own, to move independently, the anxiety disappears. Even entire communities are known to have panicked when important supervisors—Chiefs or Priests on whose presence the wellbeing of the community depended—suddenly disappeared, and the fact is that such communities are not known to have missed even one meal because of the absence of the indispensable personage. The moment is very brief.
If through social practice each individual became confident in his or her own self-powers, there would no longer be a field in which revolutionary leaders could grow and succeed. If social activity were allowed to become what each individual independently and creatively makes it, then each of society's individuals would define the aims and purposes of social life and these aims and purposes could not be the program of a revolutionary organization. If social tasks were defined by the desires and imaginations of each, and if they were realized by the self-powers of each, then the Party could not define social tasks nor the State realize them. If society's individuals appropriated their self-powers from the officials who represent these powers, if they snatched their decision-making powers from the personifications who embody and wield these powers in their name, then revolutionary leaders, i.e., the representatives of revolutionary proletarian internationalism, could not embody in their policy the idea that is motivating countless working people all over the world. —All this is elementary. All this is simple and clear. Why replace this by some rigmarole? —If we seize power today, we seize it not in opposition to the Councils but on their behalf. —If we seize power tomorrow, we might have to seize it on our own behalf, in opposition to the entire working population.
The independent practice that would put an end to the mass psychology of dependence cannot take place once the organization seizes power. The seizure of power by the revolutionary organization puts an end to the anxiety and desperation which gripped the population when dependence relations were disrupted. The seizure and restoration of the State saves people from having to discover and invent the power of community after thousands of years of alienated community, of law and order, of Civilization. Fear in the face of the unfamiliar, anxiety in the face of the unknown, hysteria in the face of the inexperienced, subside in the reassuring warmth of familiar, known, experienced social relations. Aims are restored to the aimless, direction to the directionless, order to the disarrayed. The shepherd returns to sheep gone astray. People who could not dispense with subordination, control and managers are given subordination, control and managers. Conditions of scarcity are re-established for those whose whole being had been shaped in response to such conditions, together with rewards for conformity and punishments for
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