The Revolution has vanished; that is precisely what the Opportunists wanted.
Opposition and general political struggle is beside the point; we are concerned with the Revolution. And revolution is when the administrative apparatus and the whole machinery of government are destroyed, and a new proletarian power of the armed workers has filled their place.
Kautsky reveals a "superstitious respect" for the Ministries; but why cannot they be replaced, say, by committees of specialists working under sovereign all-powerful councils of workers' and soldiers' delegates? The essence of the matter is not at all whether the Ministries shall remain or be turned into committees of specialists or any other kind of institution; all this is quite unimportant. The main thing is whether we are still to have the old machinery of government saturated through and through with routine and inertia, and connected by thousands of threads with the capitalist class; or shall it be broken up andreplaced by something altogether new? The essence of revolution is not that a new class shall govern by means of the old governmental machinery, but that it shall smash up this machinery and govern by means of a new machine.
This is a fundamental idea of Marxism, which Kautsky either conceals or has not understood at all. This question of his about officials makes it plain how little he has understood the lessons of the Commune or the teachings of Marx. "We cannot do without officials even in our party and trade-union organizations"—we cannot do without officials under Capitalism; democracy is narrowed, crushed, curtailed, mutilated by Capitalism, wage-slavery, the poverty and misery of the masses. It is precisely the conditions of life under Capitalism, which are the cause, and there is no other, why the officials of our political parties and trade unions are corrupt—or, rather, have the tendency to become corrupt, to become bureaucrats, that is, privileged persons detached from the masses, and standing above it. This is just the essence of bureaucracy, and until the capitalists have been expropriated and the bourgeoisie overthrown, nothing can prevent even workers' officials from being to some extent "bureaucratized."
From what Kautsky says, one might think that a Socialism with elected employees would still tolerate bureaucrats and bureaucracy. That is the grand falsehood. Marx took the example of the Commune to show that under Socialism the workers' employees will cease to be "bureaucrats" and "officials"—especially when election is supplemented by the right of immediate recall;
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