...The intolerable old state of affairs could have been met with an additional dose of resignation. Or by a resurgence of religiosity. Or by demands for more or less moderate reforms. Instead, the movement short-circuited all other solutions, and people started fighting and dying for a wholesale reconstruction of society. [...] this is what the bureaucrat pseudo-theoretician hates the most: the workers organize themselves in Councils instead of waiting, with enthusiastic passivity, for him to come and organize them. And how does he organize them if given the chance? Like the dominant classes have always done, for centuries, in the factories and in the armies. Clearly, he does this if and when he takes power; but also before that—in large unions, for instance, or in a "Bolshevik party" —where structure, form and content of relations simply reproduce the relations of capitalist society: hierarchy, the division between a stratum of executive leaders and a mass of followers, the veil of pseudoknowledge cast over the power of a self-coopting and selfperpetuating bureaucracy. [...] What is involved here is the de-professionalization of politics —i.e., the abolition of politics as a special and separate sphere of activity— and, conversely, the universal politicization of society, which means just that: the business of society becomes, quite literally, everybody’s business[…] all decisions have to be taken —in principle, and whenever possible— by the whole collective; that is, by the General Assembly of the Council’s constituency (be it factory, administration, university or district)...