The capitalist world is one of fetishism, where interpersonal relationships tend to disappear behind relationships between things. But the very moment when the masses revolt against this state of affairs, they break through this smoke screen. They see through the taboo of "things" and come to grips with people, whom they had "respected" until then in the name of the all-holy fetish known as private property. From that moment on the specialist, manager or capitalist, whatever his technical or personal relationship to the enterprise, appears to the workers as the incarnation of exploitation, as the enemy, as the one with whom the only thing they want to do is to get him out of their lives. To ask the workers, at this stage, to have a more "balanced" attitude, to recognize in the old boss the new "technical director", the "indispensable specialist", is tantamount to asking the workers - at the very moment when they are becoming aware of their historical role and of their social power, at the very moment when at last confident in themselves they are asserting their autonomy - to confess their incompetence, their weakness, their insufficiency, and this in the area where they are most sensitive, the field encompassing their daily lives from childhood on: the field of production.
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The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is in reality the dictatorship over the proletariat by the Party and even by individual persons
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the militarization of labour ... is the indispensable basic method for the organization of our labour forces
...
Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? ... This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive.
Compulsory slave labour ... was in its time a progressive phenomenon.
Labour...obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism.
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Stressing the dangerous situation confronting both Party and State, [Karl] Radek concluded, "let the Central Committee at the moment of danger take the sternest measures against the best comrades, if it finds this necessary". This attitude, or rather this mentality - the Party can't be wrong in relation to the class, the Central Committee can't be wrong in relation to the Party - was to explain many subsequent events. It was literally to prove a noose around the necks of thousands of honest revolutionaries. It helps one understand both Trotsky's public denials of 1927 that Lenin had ever left a political testament, and the "confessions" of the Bolshevik Old Guard during the Moscow Trials of 1936-38. The Party, as an institution, had become reified. It now epitomized man's alienation in relation to revolutionary politics.
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Bolshevism's emphasis on the incapacity of the masses to achieve a socialist consciousness through their own experience of life under capitalism, its prescription of a hierarchically structured "vanguard party" and of "centralization to fight the centralized state power of the bourgeoisie", its proclamation of the "historical birthright" of those who have accepted a particular vision of society (and of its future) and the decreed right to dictate this vision to others - if necessary at the point of a gun - all these will be recognized for what they are: the last attempt of bourgeois society to reassert its ordained division into leaders and led, and to maintain authoritarian social relations in all aspects of human life.