Against this monster, people all over the world, and particularly ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention. Sometimes their struggles are on a small personal scale. More effectively, they are the actions of groups, formal or informal, but always unofficial, organized around their work and their place of work. Always the aim is to regain control over their own conditions of life and their relations with one another. Their strivings, their struggles, their methods have few chroniclers. They themselves are constantly attempting various forms of organization, uncertain of where the struggle is going to end. Nevertheless, they are imbued with one fundamental certainty, that they have to destroy the continuously mounting bureaucratic mass or be themselves destroyed by it.

The Marxist organization organizes itself to produce a paper which will recognize the existence of the new society and record the facts of its existence. We have outlined the practical method with which this must be approached. It is not everything, but it is enough.

Experience has shown that a single worker, a member of a Marxist organization, can gather around him a dozen workers, men and women, who meet regularly for the sole purpose of writing, discussing, and editing articles for immediate publication; and immediate publication means not a theoretical journal but a weekly or a fortnightly paper.

The break with the old type of Marxist journal is complete. The old type of journal consisted, and, where persisting, still consists of articles written by intellectuals and advanced workers, telling the workers what to think, what to do, how to make “the revolution,” and, the ultimate summit of understanding and wisdom, to join the small organization. The journal contemplated here will do not the opposite but something entirely different. It exists so that workers and other ordinary people will tell each other and people like themselves what they are thinking, what they are doing, and what they want to do. In the course of so doing, the intellectuals and advanced workers, both inside and outside the organization, will have their opportunity to learn. There is no other way.

To publish such a paper as we outline demands, besides deep theoretical understanding, technical knowledge, journalistic skill, a sense of values, flexibility and firmness, combined to an exceptional degree. Some of these can to some extent be studied in isolation, but today their full application and development can only be achieved in what we have shown are the vast implications contained in the formula: to recognize the existence and record the facts of the new society.

In one department of a certain plant in the United States, there is a worker who is physically incapable of carrying out his duties. But he is a man with a wife and children, and his condition is due to the previous strain of his work in the plant. The workers in that department have organized their work so that for nearly ten years he has had practically nothing to do. They have defied all efforts of the foreman and supervision to discharge him, threatening to throw the whole plant into disorder if any steps are taken to dismiss the invalid. That is the socialist society. Careful observation will show that such enormous problems as work for the old, the handicapped, the young, of both sexes, can be easily and competently handled without any bureaucratic apparatus whatever, by the good sense of workers as long as they have the power to arrange their labor as they wish. Workers tell such episodes by the dozen. No bourgeois nor trade union journal ever prints any.

In another plant in the United States the company tried by a maneuver to prevent a Negro driver being given the job of dispatcher to which his seniority entitled him. The Negro workers in the plant called a meeting and gave the company a certain deadline to upgrade this worker to the job which was his by right. Before their united determination the company capitulated. Thus these workers had struck a blow against common injustice, racial discrimination, and the disorder in production which management creates. That is the socialist society. It hasn’t to be organized in the future. It exists. It is organized. It has to get rid of what is stifling it, what is preventing it from expanding to the full, what is preventing it from tackling not only the immediate problem of production, but also the more general problems of society. But it exists.

In a British airport the security officers salute their superiors in accordance with the semi-military discipline that prevails in this type of public service. One of their representatives, on going to discuss union matters with management, refused to salute, claiming that in this relation he and the representative of management met as equals. The representative of management, quite obviously a man of semi-feudal mentality, demanded the right to be saluted. The whole section of workers went out on strike immediately, and in the end, management capitulated. That is the socialist society.

Workers refer to these struggles as attempts to correct “local grievances” and to “improve working conditions.” Yet to the terror of management and the perpetual astonishment of people who are not familiar with the working class, workers are ready to bring production to a stop and endure the greatest privations for weeks and months over what seems to the ordinary observer to be trifles. To workers it is precisely the power to carry all these ideas and wishes of theirs to completeness which constitutes the new society.

The Hungarian Workers Councils not only made appeals to the Russian troops to cease fire and go home. They entered into negotiations and made direct arrangements with Russian commanders to retire. At least one Council not only negotiated the removal of a garrison of Russian troops but arranged for it to be supplied with food. This was not just fraternization. It was the assumption of responsibility by the Workers Councils for foreign affairs. The simplicity with which the negotiations were carried out reflects the education which the post-war world has received in the futile bickering and cynical propagandizing of cease-fire conferences in Korea, Big Four meetings in London and Paris, and Big Two meetings in Geneva. Russian troops mutinied and deserted to fight under the command of the Hungarian Councils. When the hospital at Debrecen radioed its needs for iron lungs, the Workers Councils at Miskolc undertook to get these from West Germany and by radio organized the landing of the lung-bearing plane at the Debrecen airport. The Hungarian Revolution transcended that combination of threats, snarls lies, hypocrisy, and brutality which today appear under the headlines of foreign affairs.

…The Hungarian Revolution has uncovered, for the whole world to see, the goal to which the struggles against bureaucracy are moving. The Hungarian people have restored the belief of the Nineteenth Century in progress. They have restored to the revolutionary socialist movement the conviction that the future lies with the power of the working class and the great masses of the people.

The secret of the Workers Councils is this. From the very start of the Hungarian Revolution, these shop floor organizations of the workers demonstrated such conscious mastery of the needs, processes, and inter-relations of production, that they did not have to exercise any domination over people. That mastery is the only basis of political power against the bureaucratic state. It is the very essence of any government which is to be based upon general consent and not on force. The administration of things by the Workers Councils established a basic coherence in society and from this coherence they derived automatically their right to govern. Workers’ management of production, government from below, and government by consent have thus been shown to be one and the same thing.

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