The Communist Party must utilise the privileges of the proletariat in order to influence the rural districts, in order to solidarise the more advanced workers with the peasants. Thus only will the revolutionary enlightenment of the poorer peasants be successfully achieved. The privileged position of the workers has not been given them that they may be exclusive or may separate themselves from the dwellers in the rural districts, but in order that they may make a good use of it, in order that, by their greater influence in the soviets and the administration, they may bring the working class into closer contact with village life, that they may inaugurate and sustain a comradely union of the proletariat with the middle peasants and the poor peasants. Thus the workers will be able to free the peasants from the influence of the rich peasants, the clergy, the sometime landlords, etc.
54. Bureaucracy and the Soviet Power.
The Soviet Power has been organised, as the power of a new class, the proletariat, upon the ruins of the old bourgeois power. Before the proletariat could organise its own power, it had to break the power of its adversaries. With the aid of the Soviet Power, the proletariat seized and destroyed the vestiges of the old State. It broke up the old police force, abolished the remnants of the secret service, abolished the gendarmerie and the tsarist bourgeois law courts with their public prosecutors and salaried defenders; it swept away many of the old government departments, annihilated the bourgeois ministries of State with their armies of officials, etc. What was the aim of all this? And what is now the general task of our party? We have referred to the matter already in Part One of the present work. The task is this, to replace the old officialdom by the masses themselves, to bring it to pass that the whole working population shall put its hand to the job of administration (working in some occupations by turns for brief spells, and in other occupations by turns for long spells). But we have had serious difficulties to encounter. The chief obstacles have been the following.