still more, when their pay is brought down to the level of the pay of the average worker; and still more again, when parliamentary institutions are replaced by "working bodies which both make and apply the laws."
All Kautsky's argument against Pannekoek, and particularly his triumphant point that we cannot do without officials even in our parties and trade unions, show nothing so much as that Kautsky has adopted the old "arguments" of Bernstein against Marxism itself. Bernstein's renegade book, Socialist Fundamentals, is an attack on "primitive democracy"—"doctrinaire democracy," as he calls it—on imperative mandates, functionaries who receive no remuneration, impotent central representative bodies, and so on. British trade union experience, as interpreted by the Webbs, is Bernstein's proof of how untenable "primitive democracy" is. Seventy odd years of development "in absolute freedom" (p. 187, German edition), have, forsooth, convinced the trade unions that primitive democracy is useless, and led them to replace it by ordinary parliamentarism combined with bureaucracy.
But the "absolute freedom" in which the trade unions developed was in reality complete capitalist enslavement under which—what more natural?—"one cannot do without" concessions to the evil power of force and falsehood by which the "lower" orders are excluded from the affairs of the "higher" administration.
Under Socialism much of the primitive democracy will inevitably be revived. For the first time in the history of civilized nations the mass of the population will rise beyond voting and elections, to direct control of the every-day administration of the affairs of the nation. Under Socialism all will take a turn in management and will soon become accustomed to the idea of. no managers at all.
Marx's wonderful critico-analytical mind perceived that the practical measures of the Commune contained that revolutionary departure of which the Opportunists are afraid, and which they do not want to recognize, out of cowardice, out of reluctance, to break irrevocably with the bourgeoisie; and which the Anarchists do not want to perceive either through haste or a general want of comprehension of the conditions of great social transformations. "One must not even think of such a thing as the break-up of the old machinery of government, for how shall we do without Ministries and without officials?"—thus argues the Opportunist, saturated through and through with philistinism, and in reality not merely bereft of faith in revolution, in the creative power of revolution, but actually in deadly fear of it (like our Social Revolution-
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