s situation for nearly
two years--under the pretext that we are in a state of war. But that is
not all. The workers' and peasants' councils lose all their significance
unless the elections are preceded by a free electoral campaign and when
the elections are conducted under the pressure of the dictatorship of a
party. Naturally, the stock excuse is that the dictatorship is
inevitable as a method to fight the ancient regime. But such a
dictatorship evidently becomes a barrier from the moment when the
revolution undertakes the construction of a new society on a new
economic basis. The dictatorship condemns the new structure to death.

"The methods resorted to in overthrowing governments already tottering
are well known to history, ancient and modern. But when it is necessary
to create new forms of life--especially new forms of production and
exchange--without examples to follow, when everything must be
constructed from the ground up, when a government that undertakes to
supply even lamp chimneys to every inhabitant demonstrates that it is
absolutely unable to perform this function with all its employees,
however limitless their number may be, when this condition is reached
such a government becomes a nuisance. It develops a bureaucracy so
formidable that the French bureaucratic system, which imposes the
intervention of 40 functionaries to sell a tree blown across a national
road by a storm, becomes a bagatelle in comparison. This is what you,
the workers in the occidental countries, should and must avoid by all
possible means since you have at heart the success of a social
reconstruction. Send your delegates here to see how a social revolution
works in actual life.

"The prodigious amount of constructive labor necessary under a social
revolution cannot be accomplished by a central government, even though
it may be guided by something more substantial than a collection of
Socialist and anarchistic manuals. It requires all the brain power
available and the voluntary collaboration of specialized and local
forces, which alone can attack with success the diversity of the
economic problems in their local aspects. To reject this collaboration
and to rely on the genius of a party dictatorship is to destroy the
independent nucleus, such as the trade unions and the local co-operative
societies by changing them into party bureaucratic organs, as is
actually the case at present. It is the method not to accomplish the
revolution. It