Party, the trade unions, the factory committees, and the cooperatives. These organisations comprise many millions of workers, who all combine to support the Soviet Power. Through the instrumentality of these organisations, the toiling masses take an active part in the State administration. The Communist Party and the trade unions appoint their most trusted members to fill all the posts and to carry out all the functions. In this way the best among the workers are delegated, not merely to talk, but actually to administer. In the so-called democratic republic, nothing of this kind happens. There the working-class elector drops his ballot paper into the box, and then his part in the affair ends. The bourgeoisie assures him that he has fulfilled his “duties as a citizen”; he need trouble himself no longer about affairs of State.
These arrangements conceal one of the fundamental frauds of the bourgeois system of government. The fraud is of the same nature as those previously explained. On paper it seems as if the workers were “participating” in some way. In actual fact they are altogether outside the current of affairs. Everything is administered and all the work is done by a special caste of bourgeois officials, quite distinct from the masses, and constituting what is known as the bureaucracy. The administrative apparatus is out of reach of the masses; the masses have no contact with it whatever.
Down to the sixteenth or seventeenth century the State officials were drawn only from the nobility. During the change to the capitalist system, a professional oflicialdom came into existence. Of late years, this professional officialdom has been mainly recruited from the ranks of the so-called intelligentsia or professional classes, but the higher posts have been filled by members of the wealthier bourgeoisie. Even the lesser officials, however, are trained in a spirit of devotion towards the robber State; the more talented among them look forward to a rise in rank, to orders and titles, to an “official career.” The result is that most of these gentlemen are full of profound disdain for the “common people.” The