Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/323



The proletarian state, brought into being by the revolution of November 7 and by the fiat of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, was a state representing exclusively the producing masses, a state of the federated Soviets. It was, in its fundamentals, the expression of proletarian state requirements as determined by the prevailing revolutionary tasks, and as projected by the Paris Commune. The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes… The Commune was formed of the various municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally workingmen, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen's wages. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of State disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the State was laid into die hands of the Commune. … The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centers of France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralized Government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers. In a rough sketch of national organization which the Commune had no time to develop, it is clearly stated that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communes of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send dmtties to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few important functions which still would remain, for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has intentionally been misstated, but were to be discharged by communal, and therefore strictly responsible, agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken; but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence. … The Communal Constitution brought the rural