Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/137

 even proletarian functionaries will be inevitably 'bureaucratized.'

Thus despite its public importance, an already established revolutionary organization cannot validly serve as a test case for the classical assumption that a revolutionary situation is the preliminary condition for the rise of a revolutionary organization. Despite the fact that the established revolutionary organization is the official spokesman of revolution and stands ever-ready to seize the bureaucratic-military machine, the sparse explicit references to this type of organization in fact exclude it from the field. It is not with this aim in view that a mighty burst of creative enthusiasm stems from the people. The aim of the revolution is not, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it.

A revolutionary situation as described by classical revolutionary theory smashes the dominant social order along with all of its bureaucrats. Before turning to the case of revolutionary leaders who have not become functionaries under capitalism, the case of revolutionary organizations which have not already established power within the dominant social order, we might examine more fully the classical description of the revolutionary situation which is a preliminary condition for the seizure of power by a revolutionary organization. Such a situation ''is realized by the initiative of millions, who create a democracy on their own, in their own way. —The old centralized government gives way to the self government of the producers. This is the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor. Furthermore, according to the classics, the working people know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. —In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. —With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute. —The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. —What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all, is its own gravediggers.''

The classical theory of revolution assumes that a social situation which corresponds to the description given above is the preliminary condition for the growth of a revolutionary organization. First of all the initiative of millions is a preliminary condition because all