THE POLITICS OF PERESTROIKA 61 What is the political significance of perestroika? Clearly, it involves a restructuring of the political sphere, a transformation of power relationships, more particularly in that domain where power is located in its purest and most concentrated form, namely the state. Perestroika aims to restructure the Soviet state. Its objective is to dismantle a political machinery which stands apart from and controls or represses the people. Power has hitherto resided in the hands of party officials, technocrats and bureaucrats and has often been used against the people. At the very least perestroika is an attempt at the partial restoration of this power to the people. Notice that this still does not entail the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. If it satisfies the orthodox Marxist, he may well take note of this. But he must recall that in principle even the transitional socialist state is meant to be dictatorial only for the bourgeoisie not for the proletariat. It is a dictatorship of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie not against the proletariat itself. It protects and advances the interests of the proletariat and its institutions are such that no matter what, it can never, unless completely revamped, turn against the fundamental interests of the working people. But quite simply, democracy is one of the fundamental interests of the workers. A bourgeios democracy, it is often claimed, is democratic for the bourgeoisie but dictatorial for the working people; likewise, the proletarian state is constitutively democratic for the proletariat while being dictatorial for the bourgeiosie. Lenin was clear on this point. A proletarian state is one which has no standing army, no police which is opposed to the people, no officialdom placed above them. It has a people's army, it is one where the people are directly in control of the organs of state power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a state which merely works for the people; it must also be worked by the people. Of course, the state must guard itself against a counter-revolution but a state which turns against its people has already gone over to the counter-revolutionaries. Clearly, the state which came into existence a little after the October revolution was not a dictatorship of the proletariat. Whatever the explanation or justification for the Soviet state, we need to be clear that it was a state widely divergent from the original conception of Marx and Lenin. The institutional structure that came into existence was coercive towards the proletariat and was manned by bureaucrats who, masquerading as guardians of proletarian interests, had in reality over time developed interests of their own. The new reforms in the Soviet Union are against this institutional leviathan—which for want of a better word we might call the Stalinist state. It is a restoration of the state which Lenin envisaged in State and Revolution, a state in which the parliament would cease to be a mere talking shop and would become a working body, where officials would be elected not appointed, where no official would have privileges denied to the people, where institutions would be fully accountable, power would be decentralised