Page:Karl Radek - The Development of Socialism from Science to Action.djvu/32

 the Russian Revolution not only shows the European proletariat the battles which it must fight its way through, if it does not want to rot away in the trenches, but also the forms, '''the symbol, by which it will conquer. What form will the dictatorship of the proletariat take in Europe? The form of Soviets, that is, the representation of the workers in the factory, in the city, in the country, and in the nation.''' That is the form in which the workers of Europe will establish their rule. The idea of the Soviets is as simple as one can imagine it to be. Only history creates such splendid crystallizations. In the factory, the slaves of Capital worked. The factory is bound by a thousand threads with other factories, with the whole economic life of the locality. It is dependent on the transportation of the locality, on the factories which work up its semi-manufactured goods, or from which it receives them, it depends also on all the factories in the same branch of industry, and in the last analysis, on the economic life of the entire country. The representation of the factory, is, consequently, political and economic, the cell of the state mechanism. The representatives of the proletariat of the locality, are, simultaneously, the economic administrators of the locality. But just as the representatives of the workers of the whole country have their policy prescribed for them by the workers of the different localities, but generalize it and make it into laws for the local units of government, in this way having their roots in the local Soviets, but at the same time presenting to the local Soviets the general proletarian interests, just so the general Economic Council, formed from the representatives of the workers is a body which prevents the local Economic Councils from considering merely local interests, but to make them subsidiary to the interests of the whole country. The experiences of the Russian Revolution have shown what was strong and creative in Syndicalism and what was petty-bourgeois and sectarian.

The workers of a factory as masters of the factory might easily begin to work for their own particular interests, and in