Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/41

 "bossing" methods of the State officials can and must begin to be replaced—immediately within twenty-four hours—by the simple functions of managers and clerks, functions which are now already quite within the capacity of the average townsman and can well be performed for a workingman's wage.

We must organize production on a large scale, starting from what has already been done by Capitalism. By ourselves, we workers relying on our own experience as workers, must create an unshakable and iron discipline supported by the power of the armed workers; we must reduce the role of the State officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions; they must be responsible, revocable, moderately paid "managers and clerks" (of course, with technical knowledge of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task. With this we can and must begin when we have accomplished the proletarian Revolution. Such a beginning, on the basis of large scale industry, will of itself lead to the gradual decay of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of a new order, an order bearing no similarity with wage slavery, an order in which the constant simplification of the functions of inspection and registration will admit of their being performed by each in turn, will then become a habit, and will finally die out as special functions of a special class.

A witty German Social-Democrat of the 'seventies of last century called the post office an example of the Socialist system. This is very true. At present the postoffice is a business organized on the lines of a State capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type. Above the "common" workers, who are overloaded with work and yet starve, there stands the same bourgeois bureaucracy. But the mechanism of social management is here already to hand. We have but to overthrow the capitalists, to crush with the iron hand of the armed workers the resistance of these exploiters, to break the bureaucratic machine of the modern State—and we have before us a highly technically-fashioned machine freed of its parasites, which can quite well be set going by the united workers themselves, hiring their own technical advisers, their own inspectors, their own clerks, and paying them all, as, indeed every "State" official, with the usual worker's wage. Here is a concrete task immediately practicable and realizable as regards all trusts, which would rid the workers of exploitation and which would make practical use of the experience (especially in the task of reconstruction of the State), which the Commune has given us. To organize