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ingly any form of the class rule. Therefore, the proletariat as the class whose historical interests involve the interests and aspirations of all the oppressed classes and people does not have to face, having won political power, the problem of the bourgeoisie: how to free oneself from the role of the »general representative« (Marx) whom all the oppressed had trusted, how to get rid of the former allies and how to impose and ensure one’s special interest now, when power is gained. It is in that very endeavour of the class that led the revolution to get rid of its former allies that crapulent depression is deep-rooted. Dis-appointment or crapulent depression appears at the moment when other, »allied« social classes realize they had been deceived, cheated and tricked, when they become aware of the fact that their participa-tion in the revolution did not offer them the long-craved freedom and social justice but only a new, somewhat different form of slavery. However, although the proletariat as a class does not have to face the problem of the bourgeoisie after bourgeois revolutions, experience of the proletarian fights has indicated in the last century that the so-cialist revolution is also threatened by deceit, tricks and fraudulence, or morę preciselv. that danger has been threatening the proletariat itself. That valuable (in contemporary socialism, unfortunately, for-gotten) experience was gained by the proletariat during the first so-cialist revolution - the Paris Commune. The Commune showed that -apart from the danger of the restaurating endeavours of the abolished bourgeoisie, the proletarian revolution is greatly threatened by its own deputies and officials. The Commune was aware of the possibility of separation of its own deputies and officials from the people, and of the danger that these might »in pursuance of their own special inte-rests« (Engels) turn from its servants into its masters. As it has been known, the Commune had to undertake a series of extremely efficient steps in order to prevent that separation.

Unfortunately, except for a short period of the October Revolution (during Lenin’s lifetime) and the endeavours and some relatively modest results of the Yugoslav practice, the experience of the Paris Commune, that very part of it, is mainly dead for today’s socialism, in particular for the socialist countries. In these countries, except for a brief starting period of the revolution, the measures undertaken by the Commune with the aim to rectrict power of its deputies and officials have never attained the level at which the Commune had applied them in practice. On the contrary, the social and materiał privileges of the political bureaucracy have reached in the socialist countries of today the proprtions which have been seriously threatening the exist-ence of socialism. Today, just the critique itself, for instance, of the political bureaucrcy in these countries equals an almost straightfor-ward blasphemy.

It is the very fact that the experience of the Paris Commune is dead for a substantial part of the international socialism which reflects the crisis of contemporary socialism. Many marxists and revolutionaries seem to be aware of that crisis today, and this awareness of the crisis may possibly be the source of expectations of socialism’s triumph in spite of its »deviations«.

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