Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/65

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THE POLITICAL FOUNDATION
39

church, the administrative apparatus, etc., only after the final defeat of the bourgeois social order will have become evident for everybody, only then will all or practically all the workmen begin to enter the ranks of the Communist Party. …

In Germany the Eight Independents, whenever they make their halfway steps, allege that they represent the desires of the masses, not realizing that a party exists precisely for the purpose of marching in front of the mass and of showing the mass the road it is to follow.

The Proletarian Revolution, in Russia, has brought to the foreground the basic form of labor dictatorship, viz., the Soviet. In the very near future the following division will establish itself: First, the party; second, the Soviets; and third, the productive unions. But the work both in the Soviets and in the revolutionized productive unions must be invariably and systematically directed by the party of the proletariat, i.e., the Communist Party. The organized vanguard of the labor class, the Communist Party, serves equally the interests of the economical, the political, and the cultural struggle of the working class as a whole. The Communist Party must be the soul of the productive unions, of the Soviets of Workmen's Deputies, and of all the other forms of proletarian organization.

The appearance of the Soviets as the chief form of the dictatorship of the proletariat furnished by the history does not in any way diminish the directing role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution.

Again the monopoly of all governmental functions, and of nearly all the most vital economic functions, by the Communist Party was briefly stated by Lenin on November 5th, 1920 (before the Political Education Conference—quoted by Soviet Russia, April 30th, 1921). In this speech Lenin referred to that party as necessarily controlling "the mighty state apparatus"