The ways to be followed for overthrowing an already weakened Government and taking its place are well known from history, old and modern. But when it comes to building up quite new forms of life, especially new forms of production and exchange, without having any examples to imitate, when everything has to be worked out by men on the spot, then an all powerful centralised Government which undertakes to supply every inhabitant with every lamp glass and every match to light the lamp, proves absolutely incapable of doing that through its functionaries, no matter how countless they may be. It becomes a nuisance.
It develops such a formidable bureaucracy that the French bureaucratic system, which requires the intervention of 40 functionaries to sell a tree felled by a storm on a route nationale, becomes a trifle in comparison. This is what we now learn in Russia. And this is what you, the working men of the West, can and must avoid by all means, since you care for the success of social reconstruction, and sent here your delegates to see how a social revolution works in real life.
To sweep away that collaboration and to trust to the genius of party dictators is to destroy all the independent nuclei, such as "trade unions" and the local distributive co-operative organization, turning them into bureaucratic organs of the party—as is being done now.
A correspondent of a European socialist paper now living in Soviet Russia writes in a similar vein:
All the new organisations can do nothing with the general ruin. We possess enormous riches, but cannot raise them. We have no men, no tools, no transport, no dress, nor boots. But we have a Provincial Labour Committee, a Provincial Metallic Industry Committee, a Provincial Dress Committee (one suit for 10 years), a Provincial Leather Committee (only for the army; the civilians receive no leather), and so on.
