Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Russian Revolution (1921).pdf/44

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other social institutions. Even the purely working class bodies such as the trade unions, being made up of ignorant workers still thinking largely in terms of their capitalistic training, were in the same need for control. The initiative of the masses was not sufficient; it was the task of the revolutionary elements among them to take the lead and to blaze the way.

By the same token, if ignorance and general social backwardness was the cause of the dictatorship, education will be its cure. In the measure that the masses are progressively educated, through the reorganization of society, propaganda, etc., to the point where they function naturally along revolutionary lines so must the dictatorship gradually disappear. We see this working out in the Red Army, as well as everywhere else. To begin with its officers were counter-revolutionary and had to be watched; the Commissar system was a life and death necessity for the revolution. But now most of the officers are Communists and consequently the Commissar system is fast becoming obsolete: for there is no sense or utility in keeping one set of Communist officials to watch over another set. With similar "Communization" taking place in all the institutions the Party's watchfulness over them is bound to relax, whether it wills it or not. Little by little these institutions, as they begin to function automatically in a Communist sense, will take on more and more automony. By the tremendous campaign of social education and re-organization now being carried on in Russia, which will fit the masses for the new society, the dictatorship of the proletariat will be gradually dissolved and the ultimate Communist goal of a non-government society arrived at.

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