The greatest attempts in all history to effect a transition into a newer social form, the Russian Revolution of 1917-21, ahs made it possible actually to undertake the construction of state communism, and this example offers an opportunity of defining and analyzing the regime of authoritarian communism.

One of its typical features lies in production being based upon bureaucratic relationships. In other words, all instruments and means of production and distribution, as well as the people's labor and the human individual himself, are entirely vested in the state, which in its turn is the exclusive property of a scanty class of Bureaucracy. The rest of the people are proletarianized and forced to give their labor power to state trusts, thus creating by their toil the might of these trusts and providing a higer economic position for the ruling class.

The bureaucratic production relationships cover the whole of social life and place the working class in absolute dependence on the state, i.e. on the bureaucracy. The entire population is subdivided by the state into occupational groups and is subjected to the control of a class of officials under whom it is compelled to labor. Moreover, the state creates new grounds for economic inequality through the principle of a differentiated scale of waged in accordance with the differences in usefulness of various occupations; it grants privileges, and regards the human person as nothing more than a source of labor power. The state, moreover, shuffles the mass of labor power at will oever the length and breadth of the land, paying no attention to any other circumstances than its own interests, thus forcing men and women to toil under the strict and rigorous conditions of military discipline.

In this way, the state commune transforms the workers into soulless parts in the huge, centralized communist machine, parts who are obliged to be directed for their whole lives to a single purpose --- the maximum fulfillment of certain production tasks decreed by the state, and who are condemned to a minimum field of initiative, independent action and personal choice. Such a state of affairs postulates social inequality while, at the same time, it reinforces the class structure of society and the predominance of the bureaucracy.