What is a Soviet?

who wrote to him from Argentina. It answers 26 questions such as: What is

a Soviet? What links are there between the Trade Unions and the Soviets?

How do the Workers Parties intervene in the Soviets? What role for the

International?

This book is mainly a manual about method: Human dignity and equality will

not come from more production or improved technologies: It will come from

the triumph of the fraternal human relation, which means Party, Programme

and Proletarian Power – namely, the proletarian revolution.

This text remains valid today because it retakes the thread of the continuity

of Marxism which Stalinism broke when it eliminated the Soviets, the independence of the Trade Unions, the Bolshevik leadership and the Communist

International.

Though written in 1968, this text remains paramount; and not just for now,

but for after the taking of power. One of its main contributions is to retake

the revolutionary conclusions of Lenin and Trotsky. It shows to the revolutionary leaders of the future that they will control and prevent the rise of

bureaucracy by insisting on the independent functioning of the Trade Unions

vis-à-vis the new proletarian State.

Intellectuals, artists, technicians, civil servants and environmentalists, revolutionary soldiers and police as well as the political Left and the anti-war

movements will eventually join the working class in the planning of the

economy. But then, the need to distribute equitably the wealth of the new

society will mark the proper start of the anti-bureaucratic struggle.

Since distribution can never be wholly equitable in one country alone, the

fight against the bureaucratisation of every new revolutionary leadership is

going remain, for a period, a central preoccupation of humanity.