We have tried to visualize the revolutionary situation as described in the classical revolutionary literature, a situation where the majority of the working population engage in independent creative work as makers of history, a situation where the old centralized government gives way to the self government of the producers. We have seen numerous confirmations of the classical insight that, in such a situation, the working people know that in order to work out their own emancipation they have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. We have seen that the precondition of any real people's revolution is the break-up, the shattering of the ready-made state machinery.
However, we have not seen that when the whole superincumbent strata of official society are sprung into the air the ground is prepared for the seizure of State power by any type of revolutionary organization. On the contrary, the siutation we have examined suggests precisely the opposite conclusion, namely that once the majority of the population itself suppresses its oppressors, a 'special force' for suppression is no longer necessary. Instead of creating the possibility for the seizure of State power, the revolutionary situation destroys this possibility. In fact, the revolutionary situation exposes the absurdity of combining the words 'freedom' and 'state.' So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom there is no state. Furthermore, the classical revolutionary situation does not even lay the ground for transitional or new forms of State power since, if labor is emancipated and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute, and consequently if the proletariat and the revolutionary democrats do not in fact need a new state apparatus, then the Workers' Councils lose their raison d'etre, lose their right to existence. In short, as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist and it becomes impossible to speak of the seizure of State power.
The revolutionary situation as described by the classical revolutionary theory does not create the necessary conditions for the seizure of State power by revolutionary leaders; on the contrary, we have seen that such a situation destroys the necessary conditions. This conclusion is drastic, but it should not cause undue alarm in the ranks of revolutionary leaders. The conclusion does not say that the project of revolutionary leaders is unrealizable, it merely says that the conditions described by classical revolutionary theory are not in fact the conditions for the realization of this project. It cannot in fact be stated that the project of revolutionary organizations is not historically realizable since such an assertion would fly in the face of hard historical evidence. The seizure of State power by revolutionary leaders is a proved historical possibility. The event which was classically considered to be the necessary condition for this seizure of power is also a historical possibility. All that has been shown so far is
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